Across from where I was standing was the little waiting-room at the end of platform 4 where I'd met Tanya Kiselev. I'd phoned her from the post office on my way back from the church. She'd picked up the phone on the second ring.
'He's alive and safe,' I told her.
There was a sudden breath on the line and then she said, 'Where is he?'
'Not far. I'll tell him you were worried.'
'Yes. Please tell him I-' It sounded as if she was crying, or just trying not to. 'But where is he, please? I want to see him.'
'That wouldn't be wise.'
'I want to be near him, don't you understand?'
'Of course. But if anyone questions you, the less you know about him the better.'
'I wouldn't tell anyone, ever.'
'For his sake, it's better. I'll ask him to phone you.' Then I'd just rung off because she would have gone on being insistent and it would only have wasted time. At least she didn't have to go on thinking he might be dead.
A green light had begun winking beyond the end of the platform and the public address speakers came on, announcing the departure of the train in five minutes. They were running it close because the locomotive was only just rolling in from the yards. I began another slow search of the environment, noting changes and new elements, walking to the end of the platform to check the shadows and coming back, passing the man with the shapeless leather bag who'd come from the booking office five minutes ago, and the other man who'd arrived earlier, no bag, but a briefcase under his arm. So far they'd avoided looking in each other's direction but that could mean nothing: I simply noted it. But they interested me more than the KGB. The people I was looking for — and the people who might at this moment be looking for me — would belong to the Rinker cell.
They'd put me under specific and close-focused surveillance and Rinker's death wouldn't have given them any reason to call off their operation: if a professional agent with instructions to use a capsule to protect his network had been given the job of surveilling me then it was important to them — it was that important. They had the same objective as the Bureau had: the sleeper, Karasov. And since Rinker's death I'd remained at the hotel for another six hours — ample time for his cell to replace him with a fully covert operator.
He could be the Lithuanian with the shapeless leather bag or the man with the briefcase or any one of the people who were inside the booking office or one of the waiting-rooms, and even if I could check all of them there'd be nothing to tell me who they were. I'd made three attempts to flush any surveillance since I'd got here, going into the main waiting-room and out through the emergency exit at the rear, moving into the deep shadow alongside the freight office and taking a turn round the building, going into the subway between the platforms and waiting for ten minutes on the far side of the station, but no one had followed, no one had provided any kind of image with partial cover concealment.
I'd drawn blank but it didn't mean they weren't simply sure of me, sure that I'd board the train. Once on the train it would be too late to do anything and in the normal way you don't let that happen: you don't move into a confined environment like a train or an aeroplane without making absolutely certain you're clean, and above all — above all — you don't start out to keep a rendezvous with a key contact until you're certain you won't expose him. But today we were going to throw the book away and take the risks as they came. Control wants the objective aver the frontier just as soon as you can get him there.
So when I went aboard the train I looked for a compartment at the end of a carriage in the «soft-seat» second class section and chose a place alongside the corridor. Nobody else came in before the train started; at this hour there weren't many people in spite of the fact that the roads were snowed under. I suppose that only a bloody fool would want to travel anywhere inside the Arctic Circle in midwinter and I was one of them.
They'd done their best to clean the windows but there were streaks of grime on the glass. Beyond the lights of the signal box I could see flares burning, silhouetting the huge shapes of the tractors and snow ploughs trying to clear the main road from the city, with a line of trucks crawling in their wake.
'Your coupon, comrade.'
I gave it to him and he clipped it.
We were getting up a fair speed: a train this size with a plough scoop on the front would go through a mountain. The sky was clearing in the east, the thin crack of light broadening and spreading an expanse of flat slate-grey across the sky in the wake of the snow clouds — the false dawn of an Arctic day. I turned my face away from it; on this trip I'd have preferred the dark.
'KGB.'
I showed him my papers while his colleague stood in the corridor. I'd seen them get into the train earlier, and presumably there'd be more. They were looking for Karasov.
'What's taking you to Kandalaksha?'
'There's a job going at the steel foundry.'
'You've got no work in Murmansk?' He was looking at me with that expressionless stare that will turn your blood cold if you can't trust papers or if you're carrying product or if you're not sure you can get through the act without his finding something to pick on, something to develop into a full-scale interrogation. These weren't the papers I'd shown at their headquarters; these hadn't been tested yet.
'Yes,' I told him. 'But the pay's better at the foundry — they can't get engineers of my grade.'
He studied the papers again under the yellow light from the ceiling bulbs. 'You didn't care for Moscow?'
He'd noted my Muscovite accent. 'Anyone who can find a job in that place has got a cousin in the Komitet.' A bit risky because it carried a hint of corruption, but it was also a compliment, flattering his authority.
His eyes glanced up from the papers and stared into mine for three seconds: I measured the time for something to do, to take my mind off the trickle of cold that had started along the spine. It's not the thought of what they'll do to you later that chills the blood. It's the thought of getting trapped, of feeling the sudden shock as the thing closes on you with a single wrong word, cutting you off from the world you knew a minute ago where you ate and slept and moved freely along your way through the labyrinth, and shutting you into the new world of black vans and doors and bars and keys and dangerous, questions, dangerous answers, and finally the bright light and the brute force and the long journey through the long nights until they're forced to go beyond the point when they can get anything out of you, when the aminazin or the sulfazin or the reserpine has blunted the intellect and destroyed the emotions and wiped out the memory and left them with nothing but a husk to throw onto the trash heap where once there had been a man.
'What about your family?'
'They'll follow me, if I can get the job.'
He was taking more trouble than usual, listening for that single wrong word, looking for it on my papers, matching what I was saying with what he was reading. The other man was watching me the whole time; I could see him in my peripheral vision. The trickle along my spine grew colder.
The greatest weapon in the initial interrogation is persistence. This hadn't been written by those snivelling bureaucrats upstairs: it was in the manual they give us on refresher courses in Norfolk — Techniques in Interrogation. This is the reverse of the coin, though we don't do much of it ourselves; it's to teach us what to expect and how to deal with it.