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'Let me have what you can.'

'I'm being picked up,' Roach said, 'so you can use my car, dark green Skoda out there.' He gave me the number and dropped the keys into my hand. 'You want to debrief?'

'Yes.'

'He said you probably would. Make a rendezvous?'

A woman in a bright red headscarf came out of one of the apartments and went through the main entrance, shouldering the spring door open.

'Yes,' I told Roach. 'For 12:00.' I needed sleep.

'That's in, what — 'he checked his watch — 'six hours' time, okay. How far d'you want it from here?'

'Give it a couple of miles.'

He stood bouncing gently on his toes, tapping the tips of his middle fingers together as he stared through a window. 'Okay, make it at Perovski Street and Volnaja, south-west corner — there's a pull-in for deliveries. You got a map?'

'Yes.'

'He'll be in a black Peugeot, front offside wing bent in a bit — he'll lead the way, all right? 12:00.'

We synchronized watches and I went back upstairs and heard Tanya in the bathroom, the water running, and got out the map and checked the rendezvous point and folded the map again and put it away as Tanya came into the room. She'd taken off her coat and boots and looked slender in her sweater and black leather skirt, would have seemed younger if it hadn't been for the fatigue in her face, the ravages of the long night's ordeal.

'Sleep,' I said.

She didn't move, stood watching me. There was a narrow vinyl-covered settee with a soiled cushion on it against the wall, and I got the spare blankets from the cupboard and caught a whiff of camphor and thought briefly of Jane in Moscow and dropped them onto the settee, going over to the window and pulling the heavy velour curtains across to shut out the leaden sky.

'Turn off the light when you want to,' I told Tanya. 'I shan't need it'

I went into the bathroom and picked over the toilet things. The toothbrush had a wooden handle and real bristles and the plastic cups were in a bag from the Hotel Mokba and the soap was a dirty yellow, the same colour as the stuff I'd seen the women washing the floor with on the Rossiya. The water was numbing and the copper shower head, rimed white with calcium, gave a kick when I turned on the tap, as Roach had warned; the blood from my leg pooled rust- red, diluted, on the chipped ceramic tiles.

The light was off when I came back into the room and in the gloom I saw that Tanya was lying on the bed with her legs drawn up in the foetal position, hadn't felt able to get between the sheets with a stranger here, so I took the spare blankets off the settee and laid them over her.

Her head moved. 'You'll be cold,' she said.

'I'll be all right.'

'No. You must share the blankets with me.'

So I lay down with her back curved against me and eased my arms around her and felt her shivering; then after a while the warmth came into us and the shivering stopped, but later I felt her hands giving sudden little jerks as sleep came to her at last and she was dragged out of my reach and beyond my help into the first of the nightmares that would be lying in wait for her in the years to come.

Chapter 12: DEBRIEFING

'Christ, what is it?'

I meant the smell.

'A dead dog,' Ferris said, 'probably.'

Another rat dropped from the shelf onto the piled garbage; they were coming in through a hole in the wall, a gap in the boards. The garbage had been dumped in here from trucks, I would imagine, half-filled the place, it was a warehouse, though not quite that, too small, a bloody shed, then.

'Things don't look terribly good,' I said.

It was gone noon. I'd left Tanya sleeping.

'They're not,' Ferris said.

I'd meant that things couldn't be terribly good if this was the best he could do for a rendezvous, and he'd known that. He was squatting on a broken crate, thinning straw-coloured hair and a pale face and amber eyes behind a pair of almost square-tensed academic-looking glasses, thin, bony, trussed in a surplus Red Army coat with the insignia torn off, you saw a lot of them now, he would like to be thought of, Ferris, as some kind of university professor, and that's more or less what he looks like, and you'd never believe he's got a reputation for strangling mice in the evening when there's nothing worth seeing at the Globe.

He was sitting there with his hands dug into the pockets of the coat, watching one of the rats. He wished he'd got a brick in his hand so that he could let fly with it and splash one of those little buggers all over the wall, and I knew this because I knew Ferris.

I found another crate and perched on it.

'It was meant for the markets,' he said, 'all this stuff, but it was already rotten when it finally arrived from the farms, so sayeth the sleeper who's in charge of this place; his adopted name is Vladimir Tchaikovsky, born in Birmingham, a real tease, but totally reliable. When a dog gets in here to stuff itself on the garbage the rats form a pack and stuff themselves on the dog, food chain thing. How much sleep,' he asked me with a swing of his head, 'have you been getting?'

'I've just had five or six hours.'

'Ready for duty, then. Where is the woman?'

'At the safe-house. Why aren't things terribly good?'

Ferris has what looks like the hint of a cynical smile on his pale face, the eyelids a fraction squeezed and the mouth a fraction compressed; I've never known whether it's just the set of his expression or whether there's a continual peal of hellish laughter going on inside his head as he surveys the human condition.

'Because Novosibirsk,' he said, 'has become a distinctly hot zone in the past few weeks. DI6 is here in force, working with local agents-in-place, and so is the CIA. All the government offices are under covert surveillance by plain-clothes peeps and as soon as I got here I shut down the only two safe-houses we had because they were no longer safe. Yours was established only two days ago, but as far as we know you can rely on it, at least for a while. As far as we know.'

One of the rats screamed as they fought among themselves. The only light in here came from a square of cracked glass set high in the wall. When I'd got here the noon sky had been a dirty grey sheet, the wintry sun staining it with sulphur as the smoke drifted upwards from the docks and factories.

'Should I move the woman?" I asked Ferris.

He looked at me with that stillness of his that can be unnerving. 'I've got surveillance on the place, of course.'

'What the hell's the good of surveillance, if the militia roll up in a bloody jeep and go in there?'

He waited until the slight echoes died, giving me time to listen to them and realize that I'd just thrown him a lot of information. 'How valuable to you,' he asked gently, 'is Tanya Rusakova?'

I said it slowly for him.' she is the key to Meridian.'

His narrow head tilted. 'You mean that, of course?'

I didn't answer. He knew I meant it; he was just absorbing the information.'Then we must try,' he said in a moment, 'to find her somewhere a bit safer. But I need to know things first. Debrief?'

'All right,' I said, and got off the crate, moving around to keep the circulation going: it was freezing in this bloody place, in the whole of Novosibirsk, the whole of Siberia. I took it from Bucharest and he didn't interrupt because he would already have been called in on the debriefing of Turner, the director in the field for Longshot. Then I began filling him in on Zymyanin.

'He was tracking two former Red Army generals.' I gave him their names.'They were with a former KGB general on the train. I'd say they had him shot, just as they had Hornby put away in Bucharest. They — '

'Zymyanin didn't set the bomb?'