On my way through the corridors tonight I stopped to talk to any of the staff who had the time, though not many did: one of them, a weary-eyed girl with calloused hands and stained overalls with the seam torn at the shoulder, told me that the coach attendants, security guards, waiters, cooks and cleaners worked for nine days at a stretch on the run from Moscow to Beijing, then took a week off in Moscow or Vladivostok, in turn.

'But the pay is good,' she said, pulling a lock of damp hair away from her eyes. 'I earn 150 roubles a month, with free keep.'

'That's quite good,' I said. It was terrible. 'But so you should.'

She dragged chips of wood from the rocking floor of the galley and pushed them into the furnace below the huge copper samovar. 'Yes, and then one day I shall be a provodnik, in a uniform.'

I spent more than an hour in the dining car, because of the three men there, and watched the waiters tussling with a pack of beatniks who were trying to hog a table for a game of cards, swigging their beer from the bottle and making up a dirty song about the revolution — I'd seen them before, along the corridors.

The three men were in their fifties, their faces sharp-boned and weathered, their dark woollen suits well-cut and their shoes polished. Four other men, younger and quiet-faced, observant, seemed to be in the same party, although they were sitting at different tables, two of them on each side of the table where the older men were. One of them, the quietest, with the totally expressionless eyes of a wolf, got out of his seat and moved slowly along the dining car and spoke to the party of youths. One of them talked back and there was a hoot of laughter, which died away as the man showed them something. Talk at the other tables had also broken off, and the whole dining car had gone quiet, so that I heard him saying, 'Now get out, and stay out.'

One of the beatniks began talking back again but his pals told him to shut up and hauled him with them down the aisle and through the glass-panelled door at the end. The man went back to his table and sat down.

I finished my boiled chicken and pirozhki and ordered some borscht to fill the time here; I wanted to see more of the three well-dressed men and their bodyguards, and also of the man who was sitting alone at the far end of the car, and of the young woman in the silver-grey fur hat, also alone, who was sitting nearer my own table.

I stayed in the dining car until almost eleven o'clock, and was one of the last to leave. Then I did some work and decided to turn in, but met the copper-haired Galina and talked to her for a while, not about the people I'd seen in the dining car. there was no hurry for anything on this trip: the Rossiya was now heading into the limitless wastes of Siberia and the winter snows, and there would be time for everything.

Across the gangway in our compartment, Slavsky had begun snoring a little in his bunk. the tumbler covering the massive water beaker on the little folding table was vibrating, sending out a thin and intermittent ringing in the night. There were no longer any voices along the corridor, but a dark figure moved across the narrow gaps in the curtains outside the compartment and stopped, and I watched its outline in the dimmed bluish light out there. I couldn't see whether its back was turned — some insomniac watching the night sky through the outside window — or whether it was facing in this direction.

An eye, applied to the gap in the curtains, would probably catch enough back-light from the glass on the window to show itself, glinting. I couldn't see anything like that, but couldn't be sure I wasn't being watched. This was why the interior of a night train comes at the bottom of the list of secure environments: you even have to sleep, virtually, in public. I could have rigged a makeshift screen out of spare sheets across the windows looking onto the corridor, but it would have attracted attention from the train crews outside and Slavsky would have needed an explanation, and I hadn't got one that would have sounded plausible. I was travelling under light cover, and had to blend in as a typical passenger.

The figure was still there, and I watched its outline, knowing that if someone was watching me he would pick up the glint from my own eyes quite clearly, since the only light-source was in the corridor. He would know I was watching him back.

I didn't know — nobody knew, except Zymyanin — what they'd done to Hornby before they took his head off. we don't always use stealth when we make a hit; silence isn't necessary on all occasions. And we don't always need to go close or make contact: I choose not to bears arms, but that's unusual in this trade, you could say unheard-of. It was night and most people were alseep, and the sound of the train was a constant background; the man out there would only need to fit a silencer and press it to the glass of the window and fire the gun and walk away. If Zymyanin had brought me into a trap, that was all he would have to do to spring it.

The glass on the beaker rang from the vibration of the train, making its thin night-music. Slavsky had stopped snoring, and turned in his bunk, and the rustle of the stiff linen sheet made a sound like the hiss of a drawn breath, and touched my nerves.

He could have been told to stay out of contact with London and draw me into a trap.

That is also possible.

Even though I had narrowed my eyes, he would catch the light on their conjunctivae, the man out there. The range was short and he could see the target: the point between my eyes, and behind it the brain. He would need only one shot, and couldn't miss.

I watched the outline through the gap in the curtains, waiting for it to move, for only a part of it to move: the gun-hand.

The man was standing near the lavatory at the end of the second carriage along, waiting to go in, I suppose, watching the first light of the morning on the snows. One of the cleaners passed us, lugging a box of rags, and then I went up to the man and stood behind him.

'Longshot,' I said close to his ear.

He wouldn't know Meridian, hadn't contacted London. But he'd known Longshot, had seen it crash.

He didn't turn his head. He was the man I'd been watching last night in the dining car, the one who was sitting alone. He was Zymyanin. I saw the reflection of his face in the window, sharp-boned, the mouth tight, as in his photographs.

'I need more,' he said in a moment, still not turning, watching my own reflection.

'Bureau.'

'More,' he said softly.

'Zymyanin.'

He turned his head now, and looked at me. His eyes were wary, but not afraid, even though he knew I'd caught up with him. I would think these eyes had never been afraid, only alert, wary like this, watching for a way out if he thought he needed one, wherever he was. I knew that look, had felt it in my own eyes. Here was a brother ferret.

'Are you replacing him?' he asked me. Hornby.

'No,' I said.' they've taken that one off the books. I'm just here to talk to you, that's all.'

He didn't say anything.

A bolt banged back and the door of the lavatory opened and a man came out, one of the bodyguards I'd seen in the dining car last night. I turned my head away until he was halfway along the corridor. 'Do you want to go in there?' I asked Zymyanin.

'What? No. It can wait.' the smell of urine and disinfectant came drifting across.

I touched his arm and we moved farther away, past the two cleaning women who were bent over a stain on the carpet, rubbing at it with a block of dark yellow soap.

'I've got nothing to tell you,' Zymyanin said, and I heard anger in his voice, though he kept it very soft.' You people have got a mole sniffing around, surely you know that. I — '