Northlight

'Can you give me any kind of picture?' I asked Ferris.

He wouldn't want to do that at this stage. At this stage there was the risk of getting caught and grilled.

'All right,' Ferris said. 'We've got Zhigalin safe for a few hours, but not much longer than that. The moment you can make contact with him we can get you both out, but that depends on how fast we can move.'

'How fast we can move from the time I meet him?'

'From that time, yes.' He paused for a few seconds and I think it was because he wanted to get the tone of his voice right. He had to warn me but he didn't want to scare me off. 'From that time you'll be in good hands, but until then — until you make contact with Zhigalin — we're working with diminishing chances.'

Ferris is as bad as Croder sometimes: it's like talking to a bloody schoolmaster. 'For Christ's sake spell it out, will you?'

He thought for a moment. 'I would say that unless you can reach Zhigalin within a couple of hours from now, we won't have any chance left at all. This is the final run.'

The final run, with Croder sitting in London nagging the guts out of the signals people at the console while the monitor sat in front of the board of Northlight with scum gathering on his cup of tea while he waited to know if the crooked cross was going to stay there much longer or if he could hit the switches and shift the status for the mission according to what Signals was giving him — executive has made contact with the objective or executive compromised or action ends here.

Compromised: caught, killed or capsule-terminated.

'Two hours?'

'Sorry,' Ferris said.

'But they've got me like a rat in a trap.'

'You'll have to get out.'

The whole bloody town was down in the Metro and I'd expected that because the streets were still under snow.

Boot full of blood and getting dangerous now: the wound was trying to heal but every time I walked it opened up again and I was worried that it was going to bring attention.

Two of them were on the same train with me, standing jammed in with everyone else and watching my reflection in the steamed-up windows. It had been the only thing to do: they would have run me through those streets for the rest of the day before I finally hit a checkpoint so I'd moved into this phase because it was the last chance and so far it was working all right — I'd broken their chain surveillance mode and forced them closer, close enough for me to recognize them whenever I saw them next, a critical advantage. I'd also lost three of them because I'd gone through a ticket barrier so fast that only these two had time to follow me onto the train. They couldn't cause any fuss; they couldn't do what the militia could do; they were as worried as I was about bringing attention to themselves.because their papers were probably check-proof but if they were asked to show them it would hold them up and give me time to get clear.

'Who are you shoving?'

'I'm going to be sick.' That got him out of the way very fast and I made some more progress, nudging through the packed bodies towards the end of the compartment. I estimated that we were halfway between stations and if I could reach the doors first I could hit the platform running and get clear.

'Get off my bloody foot!'

'Sorry, comrade.'

Stink of garlic, garlic and sweat and wet astrakhan, wet rabbitskin, soaked boots and bad breath and tobacco, the tobacco was a real help.

'What's the bloody rush?'

'I'm on the wrong train.'

Swaying together round the bends, lurching forward and lurching back with the flicker of the tube light casting a sickly glow across our faces, a small boy clutching a red plastic windmill and a huge Mongolian with fish-scales like sequins on his longshoreman's jacket fast asleep on his feet, a young woman pressed to the glass panel with no room to move away from the thin furtive-looking man until he went too far and she heaved herself back and brought her hand up and across his face in one beautiful swing, much rough merriment from our good fellow-passengers.

They were starting to move now, one of them looking directly at me instead of in the window, getting a little worried, shoving his way closer as the train began slowing and someone dropped a horde and the intercom speaker came alive and made some grating noises until the voice sounded: Proletarskaja… the next stop is at Proletarskaja… stand clear of the doors!

A man's weight came against me as the train went on slowing and I turned sideways and let the momentum carry him past me and felt the glass panel behind me and pushed past the upright stanchion and got a curse from a man trying to shield his little girl from the crush, we're getting off here too, damn it, a miniature gold Party emblem on his coat. I'm sorry, comrade, but I'm very late, and my need is more urgent than yours, my friend, you wouldn't believe.

The brakes came on harder now and I grabbed a rail and got to the doors and saw one of them shoving his way along the packed aisle with his eyes on me through the glass panel, the hard stare of the hunter in a square implacable face as the intercom sounded again and two other men started crowding me at the doors. I let them because I needed them — I needed cover, shields, obstacles, distractions, time and distance and I suppose luck but we never count on that, it can be fatal.

When the train jerked to a halt and the doors opened I forced my way through the widening gap and dropped onto the platform and shoved a path through the crowd, working so hard that someone swung a fist from behind me and sent nerve-light flashing through my head as I pressed on and reached a clear area, along the curved wall of the platform where two militiamen were standing so I had to slow, the last thing I wanted to do, but only to a fast walk because a lot of people are in a hurry at one o'clock on the Metro, it's the end of the lunch break, pulling the ticket out of my wallet to keep my head down and longing to run because the nearest of those bastards wouldn't be far behind me now, not far behind. A shout came but I didn't look round because I was now on the far side of that critical line that divides the two worlds of the executive during the final phase of a mission, the world where he can still claim a legitimate identity and behave as a lawful citizen and even without reliable papers turn back and somehow cheat his way out of a confrontation with two militiamen and the world where he must keep going and even break into a run and turn his hand to every available device to keep his freedom and survive and complete his mission.

Now I began running and people turned their heads to stare at me as I reached a break in the wall and ducked into the passageway between the platforms and ran harder, ran very hard now with one foot squelching in its boot and the. sharp pain of the wound flaring through the nerves — 'Stop!' — but this time fainter because I'd got it wrong: he'd been shouting at the man behind me because he must have panicked and started running too soon and the militia had noticed it and become interested. That was nice but I didn't slow down because I was still in the crowded warrens of a Metro station and those wouldn't be the only two militiamen on patrol and there's always the odd comrade around who's mindful of his civic responsibilities when you're doing some thing suspicious and once the fight starts they all pile in and this place would shut down on me like a bloody portcullis, keep running and think about something more pleasant, more pleasant than that.

Then I had to double back because there were two more militiamen at the ticket barrier and I managed to turn before they heard my running footsteps, managed to reach the cover of the tiled wall and slow to a walk, turning again and finding some stairs with people crowding down them with snow dropping off their boots, someone holding a huge bag of onions on his shoulder to keep them out of the way and a man carrying a toilet seat above his head like a halo and two militia — not militia, no, Metro staff — dragging a trolley down the stairs with a crate on it, bang bang bang, mind your backs there, mind your backs! Then a crowd of sailors coming down with their whooping laughter sending echoes along the curved ceiling, out of the barracks on a week-end pass with their boots clattering on the stairway and their blue canvas bags swinging above the heads of the crowd as they raced each other to the platform below, it was uphill work for me, I can tell you, uphill work, and when I turned to look down the stairs to see if the man had decided not to stop for the militia, had decided to follow me instead and at all costs, I didn't see him, I only saw the other man, the one who'd been with him on the train, the more professional one if you want to look at it that way who'd stayed at the other end of the compartment and gone through the doors and followed me more easily and without attracting attention — or that was perhaps the plan they'd agreed on, one of them setting out to follow me at close range while the other — this one — covered the possibility that I would go in the opposite direction past the stationary train — but in any event he was here now and only two or three stairs below me and since we were both hemmed in by the pack of people and I couldn't move any faster in the hope of getting away from him there was no real choice for me in this last hour of the mission when it was paramount, absolutely paramount that I should reach the objective and get him out, so I turned right round and let the weight of the crowd force me down against him and then I went for the one area that will kill without a cry and watched his eyes open very wide before I turned again and went on up the stairs, no excuses, this is the trade we're in and this is the way we ply it.