19 : Scarecrow

5.41 The winter night had come down half an hour ago, and the sky was now starless. Snow had started falling again before noon, and was now beginning to settle as the evening temperature dropped below zero. C-Charlie . . . Heading west on Sucharevskaja ring road. I checked the time again. C-Charlie was Croder. There were seven of us out : four of the original cell with Croder, Bracken and myself making up the number. Logan and Marshal had died instantly in the shooting and an ambulance had picked up their bodies after an anonymous telephone call from Bracken. That had been at 6.39 this morning, nearly twelve hours ago. Since that time Croder had kept the whole cell working to locate Schrenk and had failed. Nothing had been seen of the Zil. I picked up the set. A-Able . . . Going east on Krasnocholmskaja, now crossing river bridge. The snow came out of a black sky, hazing across the taller buildings and covering the roofs of vehicles until they began blending with the background. Traffic was easing as the rush hour neared its end. A few trucks were using chains again, and sand crews had just appeared at the major intersections. Croder had said: 'If we haven't found either Schrenk or the Zil by five o'clock this evening we shall begin patrolling the outer ring road in the hope of sighting the Zil on its way to the Kremlin.' His face had been pale, and his head sunk into the collar of his overcoat. 'We shall maintain constant radio contact and A-Able will be prepared to go into action if we sight the Zil. What action he may take will depend on the circumstances and his own discretion, but whatever happens we have to realize that the Zil may explode without warning at any time. It may be triggered with a timing device, or Schrenk may choose to detonate the charge by radio beam, sacrificing the driver. We don't know. This is a last-ditch stand, and I expect every conceivable effort to be made to avert disaster. I've already pointed out to you that the disaster we have to avert does not simply concern the explosion of a motor-car in a crowded city, but concerns the explosion of a totally unpredictable situation on an international scale. Thank you, gentlemen, that is all.' I'd asked Bracken if they were going to reconsider the idea of warning the Guards Directorate by an anonymous phone call a few minutes before the four leading members of the Politburo got into their motorcades. He'd just said, 'God knows. That's up to London, not us.' We knew that Croder was in signals with London hourly through a timed system of public phone box calls to the Embassy. We also knew that Croder was personally against the risk of exposing a plan to assassinate the Soviet chief of state by warning his security forces in time, without making 'every conceivable effort' to block Schrenk on his run in and get control of the Zil. 'There is, of course, the other thing,' Bracken had told me privately. 'That Zil might already be inside the Kremlin. If it is, there's nothing we can do.' With the bridge behind me I watched the mirror for a few seconds longer than normal because a militia patrol was coming up fast and I started looking for an immediate right turn. The Volga stayed in the mirror for ten seconds and then overtook and left me behind. A minute later I caught up with it again at the Kamensciki street junction, slowing behind a mess of vehicles trying to make their way past some sort of accident by the Metro station: I saw a stove-in radiator with rusty water blowing out of it and a Moskvich draped halfway across the kerb. Sirens had started up from the opposite direction. The surface was tricky in places now because the ruts were getting lost under the new snowfall and you couldn't use them to steer with. I was keeping my speed down to a little below the limit and checking the mirror the whole time: there shouldn't be any tags but if I missed sighting the Zil ahead of me I might see it in the mirror and send out a fix on the radio. 'We shall expect it to be crossing the ring road,' Croder had told us at the briefing, 'towards the Kremlin. But that doesn't mean it might not have to make a right turn on to the ring road itself and follow it for a time until it can turn left. Watch for that.' I hated Croder and I pitied him. I pitied him because he'd run a reasonably effective mission up to the point where I'd failed to kill Schrenk, and in less than twenty minutes from now he looked like seeing the