background. There's usually something a bit touched about the field directors: look at Ferris, always strangling mice. 'What sort of problems?' Bracken wanted to know. 'Access. Croder's not as good as they say.' His blunt head turned quickly. 'Croder is very good. It couldn't have been his fault.' 'He took a hell of a risk.' 'Quite possibly. He takes on things that other people won't touch. So do you. That's why he wanted you for this one. Did you fly in?' 'Yes.' 'Where did you land?' 'Domodedovo.' 'What hotel?' 'The Aeroflot.' 'Are we still in the clear?' 'Yes.' I'd been using the mirror at five-second intervals. He stopped shuffling his feet. 'Did you leave your passport with Immigration?' 'Yes.' 'I want you to ask for it back in the prescribed two days and then go to ground and come up as a Soviet citizen.' He took an envelope from his coat and put it into the glove compartment. 'Everything's there.' He talked for ten minutes without stopping except to answer questions; we covered liaison, contacts, signals, the safe-house and possible exit procedures. 'I want you to know that you'll receive every support from the people here in the field and of course from London. I'm not trying to boost your morale. We want Schrenk, badly, and we think you can pull him out for us.' 'Where is he?' 'We don't know. We've -' 'You don't know?' He waited three seconds. 'We are looking for him very hard. We have a contact inside Lubyanka, watching for Schrenk to come in. At the moment we can't understand why he wasn't taken straight there from Hanover. We're therefore watching a lot of other places: the Serbsky Institute here in Moscow and the facilities they run in the Urals, the Komi Republic, Murmansk, the Potma complex, and of course -' with the slightest pause- 'in Leningrad.' 'They might have gone to Hanover to kill him.' I made another turn and got on to the ring road going south. The mirror was clear except for a trolleybus in the distance. 'Not without trying again to break him, and they couldn't do that in Hanover. It's going to take time, and a lot of personnel. We know that.' 'What about Leningrad?' His speech became slightly faster, pushed by his nerves. 'The cell is still intact. Obviously Schrenk hasn't been broken yet. Of course they might have gone too far: he might be dead. But we've got to know.' 'What are their plans, if he breaks?' He said in a moment, 'Some of them will try making a run for it, but they won't get across any of the frontiers because the guard posts will be alerted, and so will the airports. They can't quietly leave their jobs before the balloon goes up because most of them are entrenched very deeply in official positions and they'd expose the whole network. One or two have elected to take capsules if they have to, rather than face interrogation and the labour camps.' He took some kind of inhaler from his pocket and started using it: it smelt like Vick's. 'How many people are there?' 'Fifteen.' Headlights came into the mirror and I watched them. 'Can't any of them get clear?' Comstock was in Leningrad, and so was Whitman. I'd worked with both of them. 'Not without putting everyone else at risk.' He'd begun shuffling his feet again. 'Incidentally the CIA is furious with us about Schrenk. They know Leningrad could blow.' 'They've done all right for eleven years.' 'That's why they're furious.' He inhaled again and then screwed the cap on. The whole car was reeking of menthol. 'The papers for this car,' I asked him, 'are for which cover?'