Strictly in the shadows. But that was all right; it was what a cut-out was for: to protect both ends of the signal. 'I'm going to put you back on the Metro at Proletarskaya,' I told him. `Is that closer?' 'No, but I don't like doubling on my tracks. The trains don't stop running till one o'clock, you've got enough time.' I got into gear and swung the headlight beams across the low relief of the wasteground. 'What's he done?' he asked me in a moment. 'Who?' 'Schrenk.' I got fed-up again: he hadn't been fully trained. The executive asks all the questions and it's strictly one-way conversation because otherwise it's dangerous: once in the field you don't look for nonbrief information any more than you look for a gas leak with a match and they ought to have told him that. 'He's disappeared,' I said. 'I know, but -' 'And it's all you need to know.'

It began snowing the next morning not long after first light, a few big flakes drifting down from a lead-grey sky. I'd slept for three hours, with the foot of the bed jammed against the door and the castors out and the window raised a few inches from the bottom with the lid of the samovar hanging from one edge of the frame, a fat lot of good against a full-scale raid but it'd give me five or six seconds to trigger the organism and I was here in this city now with the morning light in my eyes because more than once, somewhere along the line in Berlin or Bangkok or Hong Kong, there'd been five or six seconds to spare on my side instead of theirs. He took me right across the Jauza from the place in Izmajlovskij prospekt where they'd held the Party meeting, and it was difficult at first because he'd walked for two blocks to where he'd left his car, and his flat heavy features and his dark fur coat and hat made him look like most of the other men in the street. I'd had to tag him in the Pobeda, moving at a crawl and stopping when I could, in case he got on to a tram. I wasn't even certain he was the right man: at the meeting they'd addressed him as Comrade Ignatov but it was a common enough name and there might have been more than one of them. He was driving a small mud-coloured Syrena, taking his time and going westwards across the river into the Baumanskaja district. The snow was still falling steadily but the sky wasn't thick with it; this looked like the edge of a cloud formation that was moving in from the north at slow speed. The road surface wasn't affected yet and there were no sand trucks on the move. Along Baumanskaja the Syrena turned right and stopped just after the intersection, so that I had to drive past and pull up a hundred yards farther on, using a parked van for cover. I was out of the car and walking towards the apartment block just as Ignatov was going up the steps and I kept moving because if he lived here I could get his number from the upravdom and if he didn't live here there'd be no way of tagging him inside the building without the risk of a confrontation and I wasn't ready for that. All I wanted from him was information on Schrenk's movements before the arrest but I might learn more by watching him than by asking questions and it might be safer that way: Schrenk could have been blown by one of the people he'd been running with and it could have been Ignatov. The building was red brick with the single word Pavilion in corroded aluminium over the entrance: four storeys, eighteen windows along the front and no other doorway into the street. I made one circuit and found a yard with a dozen cars parked in it and room for a dozen more; Ignatov would have used this if he'd lived here. Then I went back and moved the Pobeda into deeper cover but left it facing the same direction and used the mirror and rear window, focusing on the Syrena. He was in the building for an hour and he came out alone. I'd got his walk now: he leaned backwards slightly and his feet were splayed, the walk of a heavy man with somewhere to go. Where was he going? His time and travel pattern might be repetitive and I noted 11-39 on my watch as he got into the Syrena and started up and drove past me without turning his head. He took me west again, this time along Karl Marx ulica and across the ring road. Traffic was light and I kept well back, leaving a truck and a VW between us and pulling ahead only when there was no street to the right at the lights to take up the slack if he went through close to the yellow: I didn't want to lose him.