They'd made a detour, the only choice they'd had, moving faster than I could have done on the packed snow. They were waiting for me in the street, two of them in their smart white workout suits with the cougar in gold on the left side of the chest.

They would have guns on them but hadn't drawn them, hadn't seen any need, with these odds and their training. They stood bouncing on their feet, hands hanging loose, crowding me against the wall as I reached the pavement.

'The diamonds,' one of them said.

I used a shin-rake to double him forward and dropped him with a heel-palm under the jaw, feeling it break. The other man was very fast and already had his gun out but I had time to use a sword-hand to the wrist. It gave him a lot of pain but that wouldn't be enough so I used another one across his carotid nerve to stun him as the gun dropped from his hand and I caught it and emptied the chamber and sent it skittering along the pavement and into the gutter. Then I took the other man's gun from its holster and did the same thing with it before I dragged him into the alley and left him there, coming back for his partner and propping them side by side against the wall.

The one with-the broken jaw was whimpering a lot and I left him to it; he'd be pretty inarticulate if he tried to talk. I worked on his friend instead, slapping his face to bring him out of the stupor. He was taking his time, so I kicked some of the snow loose and packed it against his forehead, holding it there until he started moaning, I suppose because of the wrist.

'Where is the Cougar's base?' I asked him.

His eyes came open, glinting in the faint light. 'Fuck you,' he said weakly.

Centre-knuckle to the median nerve and he jerked to the pain. 'Where is Vishinsky's base?'

He tried to straighten up and get his eyes focused and I let him: I wanted him to be able to reason. But he didn't answer me so I pushed one finger into the trigeminal nerve and he choked off a scream.

'Vishinsky's base,' I said. 'Where is it?'

He began lolling his head but there was no reason for him to do that – he was just faking syncope – so I went for the trigeminal again and he screamed and I repeated the question and this time got an answer, and I didn't think he was lying because he was in too much pain to think about tricks.

'Hotel,' he said, or it sounded like that.

'What?'

'Stay at hotel -'

'Which one?'

'Stay at -'

'Which hotel? I'll give you five seconds – come on!'

One, two, three -

'Hotel Nikolas.'

'All right. Do you know Vasyl Sakkas?'

His eyes came open wider. 'Sakkas?'

'Yes. Have you ever met him?'

'No.'

'But you've heard of him?'

'Everyone has heard of Sakkas.'

'Where is his base?'

'I don't know. Nobody knows. He moves all over the place.'

I hadn't expected anything from the last question but I thought I'd have a try. Croder had told me the same thing, but Sakkas must have a centre of operations somewhere and it must be here in Moscow. I would be asking a thousand people in this city where it was, and one day someone would tell me.

'What's your name?' I asked the bodyguard.

'Rogov.'

'Listen, Rogov. If you ever see me again, keep your distance or I'll kill you with my bare hands. And that goes for your friend.'

I left them propped there against the wall, going into the street again and finding the Mercedes and getting in, Nikolas Hotel, 936 Tokmakov Prospekt, access of a sort and useful enough to consider the night not wasted.

I phoned the Hotel Romanov from the car and got Ferris on the line and asked him for a rendezvous.

Ferris had said 10:30 and it was only a twenty-minute run so I took my time, trying out the S420 as I drove it away, getting used to the controls and instrument panel and pushing some of the buttons and folding the outside mirrors back and dropping the head rests and activating the headlamp washer jets. I suppose most of this stuff had been put into the design to give the dealers something to sing about in the showrooms, but if I ever had to drive this car through an ambush or a blizzard or do any fancy footwork with it the extras would give me a distinct edge on the opposition.

Found the button for the traction control and gunned up and got normal wheelspin until the chains dug through the snow and we moved off, not a lot of acceleration with a car this heavy but you can't have everything – the thick storm windows and door panels would absorb or deflect oblique fire and that could raise the chances of survival if things began running hot.

I shut all the whistles and bells down and slowed to a steady pace and turned north towards the ring road, checking the time al 10:15. Dried blood inside one of the fingers of my right glove was sticking to the knuckle, the one I'd used on Rogov's nerve points, and I eased it clear, watching the BMW in the mirror and making a square circuit when it didn't go away, but this was just for practice because the Mercedes was completely clean: it hadn't been within sight of the two bodyguards when I'd driven away and there hadn't been enough action to draw attention to me personally.

By 10:29 I was making my first, pass through the rendezvous zone near the Borovickaja metro station under a clear night sky with less than full-contrast shadow from the first-quarter moon. The taxi moved in soon after 10:30, and I took up the tail along Vozdvizenka and when it made a right turn and stopped I left the Mercedes with the offside wheels on the pavement and locked it and watched the alarm flasher shut down and then walked through the dry snow to the taxi and got in.

'How was Beijing?' I asked Ferris.

'Terrible smog, horrible food.'

'It's not what I meant.'

'I know.' He told the driver, 'This is Berinov, the executive.' The man looked round, just enough to show some of his face underneath the big fur hat. 'Charlie Tolz,' Ferris said, 'one of our sleepers.' Tolz faced his front again. 'Let's just keep moving, Charlie, anywhere you like. And you can leave the radio on.'

Rachmaninov, the Prelude in G. 'How's Rickshaw?' Iasked Ferris, spelling it out this time. In the presence of a Bureau sleeper there's total security.

Ferris looked down at the folders on his lap, his thin, sensitive face catching light from a passing car. 'It could go either way.'

'Shit,' I said.

'Don't worry, they've sent a perfectly capable replacement in.

'Who?'

'That's not important. The important thing is to get you debriefed before the heating in this thing chokes us to death.' He switched on his tape recorder. 'We're running.'

I wanted to ask him about Tully – how did Tully feel about getting his DIF suddenly replaced in the end-phase of a mission that 'could go either way'? But Ferris wouldn't say any more than he had already even if I asked him, so I shifted round a bit on the seat and started debriefing. 'I've made contact,' I began, 'with a woman called Mitzi Piatilova who officially works for the RAOC branch office in my area. She also tries to make tentative connections with the mob, because she likes money. She could be useful.' I filled in the details, her night work at the club, her thoughts on Zhirinovsky as a potential dictator, so forth. 'I've also -'

'Spell her name.'

I spelled it for him. Debriefing always sounds stilted when we do it on a recorder: the tape's going to be reviewed and examined and picked apart by half a dozen Bureau analysts in London and then put into a computer that's going to leave our every word carved in stone, and we're aware of this. 'I've also made contact,' I went on, 'with a medium-weight mafiyosa named Vishinsky. I muscled my way in to talk to him – he was playing poker at the Baccarat Club – and pitched him the story that Ihad some sable for sale and told him the deal could make him half a million US dollars. He liked it, but when I showed him the diamonds to prove -'