'What else?' 'Nothing else.' 'There's a hunt on,' I said, and looked through the grimy window to the lamps in the street below. 'They're looking for a man with a scar. If I run out of luck and someone follows me here, are you fully organized? I mean cover, background, instructions?' 'Yes.' She swung the bag over one shoulder like a knap-sack. 'But if that isn't enough, I have a sawn- off shotgun and some grenades.' London wouldn't know about that. 'And you'd like to use them, wouldn't you?' 'Yes,' she said slowly, 'I would like to use them.' As soon as she'd gone I got out the material Bracken had given me. The capsule was in the regulation tin box and the report was in a digraphic code, key 5, using AMBER LIGHT for the first two lines in the grid with x separating the double letters; it wasn't new and it wasn't fast but it was almost unbreakable Of ten Natalya Fyodorovas in M. one in personnel office Kremlin, 27, attractive, possible part-time swallow, still tracing. Of seventeen Pyotr Ignatovs none linked with intelligence field or police, none suspect, still tracing. No details of subject's arrest though probably in open. Reasons given for application for post of a-i-p his interest in dissident affairs and possibility of his proving useful in that area. No inconsistency seen, since subject is Jewish and has contacts in M. State what link Nat. Fyo. and Pyot. Ign. if any. Destruct. I opened the stove and watched it burn. It was about the least informative signal I'd ever received from a director in the field with the operation half blown and the subject probably dead. I think Bracken could have got me a lot more if London hadn't been standing on his hands: I didn't like the way he'd said we know what the risks are and we know what to do about them. They shouldn't know any more at this stage than that a Judas had started working through the Moscow cell and blowing the executives one by one, but Croder was running this thing and he wouldn't tell even Bracken any more than he had to know, and I had the feeling that something even bigger than the threat to Leningrad was involved or that in the last twenty-four hours the threat to Leningrad had developed into a threat of something bigger, something on a vaster scale than an inter-intelligence skirmish. It wasn't my business. A shadow executive for the Bureau is a ferret and they'd put me down the hole and I hadn't found Schrenk and now they wanted Ignatov so I'd have to go down the hole again and find him and bring him in for Bracken to look at, and it was a quarter past eight when I put the capsule away and got the second-hand astrakhan coat they'd dug up for me and put it on and went downstairs and through the deserted hallway and out into the lamplit snow.

D . 12-145. I could see the archway of Spassky Gate at one end of the driving-mirror. The lights on each side of it had gone from red to green as three cars and a plain van had driven into the Kremlin during the past ten minutes. I was waiting for a car to come through from the other direction: the mud-brown Syrena. She'd said he would come soon after five o'clock and it was now three minutes to the hour. 'Did you tell him my name?' I had asked her. At one stage she'd broken down and cried. That was last night. 'I've told you, I haven't seen him, I haven't seen him!' Shaking against the railings of the apartment block, her face wet and her thin shoulders hunched forward, her small gloved hands gripping the ironwork. 'It's all right,' I told her, 'but I thought you were lying.' 'Why should I lie?' She swung round to face me, furious. 'I want you to find him, don't you understand?' She meant Helmut Schrenk. He was all she could think about, and that was what I had to work on. There was no point in telling her I thought he was dead. Syrena, Spassky Gate. Not brown. Not D.12-145. There were thousands of them all over the city. The clock in the tower began chiming. 'Why should I give you away to Ignatov?' Blowing into her handkerchief, shaking her hair back, soot on her gloves from the railings. 'Somebody did.' It got her attention and she stared at me in the acid light of the lamps. 'What happened?' 'He tried to get me arrested.' 'But he's not in the police!'