The whiteness coming in from the window, lighting half her face; the heat of the wood stove filling the air; the brass glow of the samovar in the mirror; the stillness.
“I can well imagine,” I said. “But of course you’ve got friends.” The quiet bubbling of the saucepan out there, with its sound of comfortable domesticity; the heaviness of the curtains; the weight of the minutes.
“Not many,” she said, and moved again, this time towards the samovar.
“Would you like some tea, Comrade Rashidov?”
“I wish I had time.” I touched the piece on the table, outlining the jade with one finger. “Perhaps I could come again, before tomorrow, to discuss the proposal I have for Alexei.”
She considered this, as she considered everything before she spoke. We stood within three feet of each other, across the low table; her back was to the windows now and her body was in silhouette.
“If you wish.”
“Thank you.”
“I shall be here this evening.”
“Very well.”
I bowed slightly and turned away, and she came with me to the door, opening it for me and waiting, perfectly still. This would have been the moment but I let it go and went into the passage and walked to the staircase without looking back. The door didn’t close until I was going down past the third floor.
The old dezhurnaya called something to me as I went out through the hall but I didn’t stop: there was a minimal risk I had to take care of as a matter of routine and time was running out.
The Mercedes started on the first go and I put the lever into drive and pulled out as the Wolga swung into the mirror and then slowed, giving me room.
Time check: it was four minutes fifteen seconds since I’d turned away and walked down the passage to the staircase because I’d looked at the time then: the minimal risk phase had begun running at that point.
The Wolga didn’t have a transmitter aerial of the conventional sort but it might have something more sophisticated slung underneath or built into the body work and I assumed it could send and receive at short range. There wasn’t anything stuck on top of the Union Building but it had a flat roof and there could be a deep enough parapet to conceal a whole array of antennae. Or of course she could simply have picked up the phone.
Traffic was light: they’d thrown sand along the main streets but everywhere else I was driving on snow and the snow was becoming ice as the traffic packed it down. The automatic gears were going to be a nuisance on this kind of surface because I wouldn’t have any control over the back end but I couldn’t just let them sit there because they’d got my licence number already and they could bring in a mobile police net as soon as they wanted to push the button. I started by using the truck just ahead of me and went into the first intersection with enough acceleration to give me steerage but they knew what they were doing and the Wolga was still in the mirror when I slewed out of the camber and straightened up along the street to the right of the square.
There wasn’t any point in pretending I hadn’t seen them or didn’t mind being followed because I minded very much indeed: I’d only just got into the target area and it was going to waste a lot of time if I let them do a snatch and put me into the KGB headquarters for grilling, strictly no go because there was also the risk that I might not be able to get out again.
Two trucks and I got between them by swinging deliberately wide and hitting some piled snow at the roadside and bouncing off and getting enough traction across the ruts to put on a little speed before I had to start slowing in time to stay clear of the truck still in front. At this point there weren’t any brakes because on this stuff you could go just as fast with the wheels locked and I had to keep turning across and across the ruts in a series of zigzags to break down the speed. One of the trucks had started hooting because I wasn’t making the conditions any easier for them and I saw their point but hoped to Christ they didn’t decide to take a swing at me.
Two skid turns and I hit something, part of a street island, but nothing burst.
I don’t think London had known I was going to walk straight into a trap when I called to see Kirinski, or if they’d known they’d had a good enough reason to let me do it my way: when you start investigating an unknown man on cold-war soil you take a lot of care and the only risk had been that the Union Building might be under permanent surveillance from one of those windows and that the observer cell had instructions to report on strangers. Apart from that consideration there’d been no hazard in calling at the flat because the woman Liova couldn’t make a move while I was with her: I’d watched her through the doorway to the kitchen when she’d gone in there and in any case she couldn’t have timed that stuff to boil over at any given effective moment — you can get terribly paranoiac about this kind of thing in the first few hours of work in the target area because everything’s new to you and you haven’t got any friends.
Crump.
I think the Wolga had crumped a wing on one of the trucks because it was hooting again and I could see the black saloon going into a slow spin across the street with some bare metal flapping up and down on the left front corner. I kicked at the throttle but there wasn’t any traction: the 220 was keeping a reasonably straight course at just below forty miles per hour but we were on ice and there wasn’t any useful degree of control. I was looking out for patrol cars now because it was essential to assume this was going to finish up in a concerted snatch with every department brought in to make sure they got it right. At any next second they could start coming in from somewhere ahead of me and then I’d have to do something different.
Much too fast and I took my foot off and touched the brakes and didn’t get anything. There were some deep ruts in the middle of the roadway and I managed to bring the 220 over there by turning the wheel a few degrees and waiting for some grip; then I did the zigzag thing again and got down to below twenty miles an hour and found some sand and made an immediate left turn into a side street because on principle you can get an advantage by changing the pattern though of course there’s the calculated risk of running into terrain you can’t handle, I mean a truck across the road or a cul-de-sac, so forth. This one was all right and I thought I’d lost them because in Russia you never make a left turn: you’re meant to go past the side street and do a U at the prescribed place and come back the other way, so they hadn’t been ready for it and it could have given me a couple of seconds or a couple of yards while they shifted their planning but it wasn’t a big success because the Wolga came into the mirror again and I said shit and speeded up as best I could and started using the kerb as a cush to keep me off the crown of the road: you could hit something head on without even trying and London is terribly fussy about that sort of thing, You will remember that on foreign soil you are a guest and your status is civilian, so forth, reference to the rights of citizens and the sanctity of private property and all very fine, we really do see the point about leaving innocent people alone and not scraping their paintwork but when it comes to the crunch and you’re running straight into your very own little private Armageddon with sirens and flashing lights all round you it’s not quite so easy to remember the Active Executive General Rules and Procedures thing and last year Fairchild dropped a grenade down a sewer outside the British Consulate in Costa Rica because some silly clown had pulled the pin out and he couldn’t see anywhere else to put it. There weren’t any casualties but Tewson said they’d had a signal through the Foreign Office complaining that someone had blown the ambassador off the pot, but Tewson’s always saying things like that.
Very nasty slide and the front end caught the post at the corner and the 220 swung right round and lost most of its speed and I had to throttle up in a series of jerks until the rear wheels found some rubbish in the gutter and pushed the whole thing forward to the point where I regained some of the steering. The Wolga was filling half the mirror now and I didn’t like it because we’d got into phase two a long time ago — it works like this: you can just drive off as if you haven’t noticed them and try to lose them somewhere in the traffic without it looking deliberate or you can let them tag along and stay with you long enough for them to know where you’re going, that’s all right, they won’t give you any trouble because all they want to do is get a fix on your travel pattern and find out where you’re based and you haven’t shown your hand.