mission being blown out from under him through none of his own fault; and I hated him because the fault was going to be mine and he'd taken pains to let me know it. All right then, not hate. Guilt. 5 . 43. G-George . . . I'm making west along Samotocnaja, just passing the circus building. Shortlidge. He was keeping station a mile behind Croder, who would now be moving south and west, somewhere near the planetarium. Calling G-George. Repeat signal. Radio reception was strengthening and fading as we circled the centre of the city, the new steel- braced constructions affecting the signal. We'd been told to mention a landmark when we could, as well as the street's name. We knew them by now: we'd spent two hours with the maps. Shortlidge was repeating. His voice sounded dead. He was the one who'd found Logan and Marshal; he'd known them for three years and had worked closely with Logan on the Yugoslavian spy-bust thing when half the foreign a-i-ps in Moscow were being smoked out of their holes. Logan had a wife, a young ice-skater working her way up through the city championship teams, and Shortlidge was going to have to tell her what had happened. I used the set again. A-Able . . . I'm going north, leaving Narodnaja with the Kotelniceskaja Hotel on my left. Where is F- Freddie now? No one came on the air for almost a minute; then Croder began asking for a signal. We didn't get one. Calling F-Freddie. Location Please. No answer. Croder went off the air. F-Freddie was Wilson and either his set was out or he'd skidded on the snow or the police had pulled him in for something. At 5.44 I saw a black limousine half a block ahead of me and the set was in my hand a couple of seconds later but I didn't signal yet: it could be a Chaika. I pulled out and got past some of the traffic in front of me with the front wheels shifting across the ruts of packed snow and the rear end breaking away and correcting and breaking away again until I had to start slowing for the lights, Chaika, finding a slot in the right-hand line of traffic and pulling over, it was a Chaika, not a Zil. B-Bertie . . . Proceeding south and west along Bolshaja just past the Gorkogo intersection, the Hotel Peking on my right. Did we lose F-Freddie? I checked the time at 5.45. A-Able to C-Charlie . . . This is the deadline. Croder came back straight away C-Charlie . . . We continue until further orders. The lights in front of me went green and I got going again. The deadline was 5.45 because Ignatov had said the Zil was to be handed over to the chief of state's personal chauffeur ten minutes before Brezhnev was to board the car outside the Grand Palace, and it was a five-minute run from the ring road to the Kremlin at this time of the evening. The pickup time was six o'clock. So this was zero and the seven of us were circling the target area and the radio was silent and I was beginning to sweat because Schrenk was a professional and had enough hate burning inside him to carry this thing through to the final blast and if he succeeded the headlines would carry the shock around the world. Because I had failed to carry out the instructions. 5.46. Zero plus one and too late. E-Edward . . . going north on Ckalova and just crossing Karl Marx. The snow drifted out of the dark sky, eddying in the slipstream of the car ahead of me. It was becoming mesmeric, and I wound the window down and let the freezing air come in, taking deep breaths of it. I'd slept for nearly four hours after I'd got back from the warehouse but the blood loss was still a problem. In less than a minute the left shoulder was numbed by the draught and I put the window up again but went on breathing consciously until the haze went out of my head. 5 . 47. If I'd been given this information I would have eliminated Schrenk the minute I found him. But the instructions were already there. The snow swirled against the windscreen. There was of course a chance that Schrenk had made a mistake or the stuff hadn't arrived in time or the Zil had come unstuck in the snow but he was highly talented and they'd crippled him and he knew what he wanted to do and it wasn't particularly difficult