'Oh.' He gave me the tape recorder and took something else from the glove pocket and sat clutching it in his bare hands. 'What's that?' 'This? Handwarmer. Burns charcoal. I can't stand this bloody cold, look at these chilblains.' I began talking on to the tape. 2/2 12.09. 1 need all info on Natalya Fyodorova, senior clerk, Kremlin office, companion of subject before arrest. Also all info on Pyotr Ignatov, Party member, often in subject's company, no other details known. She'd told me I would find him at a meeting of the Izmajlovo chapter at ten o'clock tomorrow morning and I was going to be there if I could make it. This wasn't for the tape because Bracken might decide to send someone else in to watch Ignatov and I wanted to work solo: the man could be ultra sensitive about Schrenk's arrest and they could frighten him off. I need to know how the subject was arrested: in a street or where? What street, what place? Had he made a mistake? Bad security? Was he blown? Need to know why he applied for post as a-i-p: this is important. I'm finding inconsistencies in his behaviour prior to arrest. Condensation was forming on the windscreen and the crane swung its skeletonic arm through the floodlights insubstantially, like a back projection on frosted glass. The welder's torch flared with an acid radiance and I looked away from it to protect my night vision. Should I stress the importance of Natalya Fyodorova? She probably knew more about Schrenk than anyone else in Moscow, more than Bracken's team could find out in a month. But I was seeing her again tomorrow: leave it at that and don't risk over-surveillance. She could be frightened off as easily as Ignatov. I suggest messages by hand direct to base in digraphic square, key 5. When absent I'll report hourly at the hour plus 15, Extension 7, silent line. Signal ends. I sat thinking for another five minutes. There was a lot more I wanted to ask but I wasn't going to put it on tape because I didn't want to show my hand at this stage: I didn't know how Bracken normally worked but I knew he was the key man in a crisis and he might react differently; once he knew my line of enquiry he might throw in contacts and tags and shields and the whole bloody bazaar. I didn't want anyone in my way. 'Who does this go to?' I asked the man beside me. 'Winfield.' 'Who's he?' 'One of our a-i-ps.' 'Where's his base?' 'Didn't anybody tell you anything? We -' 'Where's his base?' Low threshold. 'The airport.' His head was turned to watch me now. `Oh come on, which one?' 'Sheremetyevo.It's -' 'For Christ's sake,' I said, 'you don't go all the way out there every time?' 'No. We use a drop.' 'Mobile?' 'Yes, the Aeroflot ferry bus.' Desperate times. Bracken was keeping himself strictly in the shadows while he tried to dig himself in and set up an untapped phone line and signals facilities somewhere outside the Embassy and it wouldn't be easy to do but he'd have to do it because all I'd wanted was a brief squawk on the tape and this man had taken twenty minutes to make the rendezvous and so had I. You'll receive every possible support, Croder had said, Bracken had said, both of them lying, this wasn't support, it was bloody musical chairs. Or was that what they'd meant by possible? Was this all they'd got for me? 'We're trying to put someone into your sector,' the cut-out was saying, rubbing his hands on the charcoal thing. 'I mean really close, you know, five minutes away. Make things a lot easier. Of course it's always getting a phone that's the trouble. I mean a clean one.' I dropped the tape recorder on to his lap and started the engine and wiped the stuff off the windscreen. 'Who's my director?' I asked him. `I don't know.'