only hope we had left. He would want to say that there was a red lamp burning at the top left corner of the board for Scorpion in London and that the lamp must go out when the mission had succeeded, not because it had failed. A taxi was pulling away from the kerb and doing it too wide and I touched the brakes and got nothing so I used the wheel and angled the front end out of the ruts and straightened again, overcorrecting and hooking the rear bumper of the taxi: I watched it in the mirror, sliding against the kerb and bouncing and coming to a stop with the front wheels locked hard over. Location . . . Passing Ivanovskij on my right and approaching the fork at Solanka. Acknowledged. C-Charlie to all other stations. Keep heading for A-Able at the Solanka fork as fast as you can. If necessary ignore traffic lights. The nearest to me would be E-Edward, last locating south of me on the ring road at Uljanovskaja, and he would have made an illegal U-turn and come back to the intersection and turned right to follow the Zil. D-Donald had been farther to the north and would have turned west and south and would reach the Solanka fork soon after E-Edward. Bracken had last signalled from the other side of the ring road and would be coming east and rounding the walls of the Kremlin, but he had more distance to cover. In five minutes from now the Zil could be in the centre of three or four converging cars and it wouldn't be heading for the Kremlin at this time unless it had the explosive on board and that could be dangerous: Composition C-3 was relatively insensitive to impact but if the Zil crashed it could false-trigger the detonation device. If I sighted the Zil I'd need to make a signal. Location . . . Solanka fork, approaching fast, lights at red. I could hear a siren somewhere. I'd run the red at the boulevard intersection and hit the taxi soon afterwards and the policeman who'd blown the whistle could have radioed the network to put a car on me; or it could be F-Freddie in trouble after his failure to acknowledge or it could be just an accident somewhere in the icy streets and nothing to do with us. The lights were still at red and I took the Solanka fork on the low side of fifty kph with the front end stable enough in the ruts to take me close along the nearside kerb with a chance of bringing the wheel over hard if I had to, putting the Pobeda into a front-wheel skid and breaking the ruts to slow the momentum if anything came through on the green from the main fork road to my left. I wasn't risking a broadside collision because the fork road had the only right of way and the traffic would merge at forty- five degrees, but I flicked the headlights to full again and started watching the left-hand outside mirror. Crossing Solanka, lights at red. The Zil wasn't there. We began hitting the cross-ruts and the front end lost its line and cocked over and wouldn't come back but the wheels had some resistance left and I waited and then hit the brakes as we ploughed into the loose sand alongside the kerb and the Pobeda shook itself straight as the nearside rear wheel hit and bounced and got traction as I gunned up and settled down again with a number 55 bus a hundred yards ahead of me and nothing this side of it but a taxi. It was no go. No sign of the Zil. I'm across the - Mirror. Zil. Correction, I've got the Zil now, I've got the Zil. It was behind me, crossing the fork on the green with its headlights full on and coming up fast. Croder's voice came faintly through bad static but with a lot of control. Repeat, Please. Repeat signal. I hit the button again. I've got the Zil behind me at fifty yards and closing up on me fast. Listen, I want the others to hold off, tell them to hold off, we can't risk crashing the Zil - it's a live bomb. I switched to listen and heard him acknowledge and then start telling all stations to support the scene but keep clear of the Zil. He repeated and asked for acknowledgement and the others began coming in as the siren started up again from somewhere in the immediate area, another one joining it: the network had been alerted to something and the patrols were closing in. The bus was moving slowly in the nearside lane and I checked the mirror and pulled out in the path of the limousine behind me. In this city the Zils and Chaikas normally drive on full headlights for the police to let them through the intersections but this one began using the horns when it saw me pull out. According to Ignatov it would have the Politburo chauffeur Morosov at the wheel and he wasn't used to