Or you can decide to get rid of them as fast as you can and that’s what I’d done and we’d gone straight into phase two and the next decision was up to them: they could bring in the traffic police to set up a block or put out a stop-and-arrest call and that would be that because the odds were stacked and in this particular case they could simply wait for me to hit a wall or another car and come and get me while I was picking the glass out of my hair.
It was a T-section and I turned right, looking for phase three. There was a tramway on this street and they’d thrown a lot of sand down and the moment I saw it I gave her the gun and whipped up to forty again and slid wide to get past a horse-drawn wagon and got it right and saw the police car coming across the intersection and touched the brakes and got some friction out of the sand but not nearly enough: we were still going too fast and the lights were at red and if I did anything wrong they’d want to pull me in for it.
Wolga close now. Close in the mirror.
They could have called for that patrol car. I didn’t know.
No sirens yet.
A lot of slewing because I was trying to bring the speed down and the surface was a mixture of sand and ice where the traffic had packed it down on the approach to the lights. Speed now below twenty, nothing like slow enough to be able to stop. Traffic going across at right-angles: pickup truck, two Moskwicz saloons, a man on a bicycle so I spun the wheel hard over and got into a slow spin that smashed the rear end across a parked van and sent pieces of glass and chrome scattering across the snow. Facing the wrong way and I put my right foot down on the floorboards and waited for traction while the black Wolga saloon came skating towards me, two men in it, I hadn’t been able to make out the details in the mirror but now I was facing them and there was a siren starting to wail but the thing was I’d missed the man on the bike and the rear tyres were getting through to the rough stuff underneath the ice and the front came round in a slow waltz and we got going again, snaking into the side street, two sirens, the other one fainter but Hearing.
Phase three is when you get out and run but it won’t work unless you can get into some kind of cover and there wasn’t any here or at least I couldn’t see any because the 220 was pulling straight now and I had to concentrate and put on all the speed I could with this bloody surface like a skating rink and sirens all over the place and the Wolga close suddenly and the shriek of metal on metal as it clouted a lamp standard and heeled half over, rocking a lot until I lost sight of it, klaxons beginning and a voice on a loud hailer no go, there isn’t a phase three because there’s no hope of any cover in a street like -
Hit something again, a parked truck, oblique-angle front impact with the seat belt biting across the shoulder and a cloud of steam as the radiator took the crunch and I hit the buckle and kept low and waited for the sickening force of the swing to lose its momentum, side to side, the sirens closing in and the klaxons barking, side to side and still slowing, watch it, watch it and wait, slowing, try now.
Hit the door open and got out very fast and went for the nearest oblong shadow, dark green gate but it was locked and I swung up and over, dropping and hitting a stack of crates with one foot smashing through the slats and having to tear it out, the whole stack lurching as I tugged the foot and fell back and flung a hand out in time, dogs somewhere I can’t stand the bloody things and someone shouting and hitting the gate you’d better run you’d better run like hell, a man’s face surprised with his mouth open run very hard with my shoes slipping on the snow where it had drifted into the corners of the yard, stop, they were shouting, stop.
There was some kind of basement and I went through it and out again, nobody in it, a stink of resin or some kind of industrial chemical keep running. Wide street with nobody near me, several doorways, a window grey with steam and some peeled lettering so I stopped dead and opened the door at the side and walked into the restaurant, taking my time, going through to the back and finding the lavatories, three small windows, two of them jammed by the ice, the third one swinging upwards and out.
It took me fifteen minutes to get clear, walking just fast enough to keep warm, the way everyone else was walking, head down against the light fall of the snow, eyes on the ground to avoid slipping. Two police cars went past me with their chains clinking over the snow and their lights flashing, and another siren started up somewhere north near the area they were still searching.
I used the map and worked my way east to the post office near the Museum of Folklore and Minerals and called up the hire firm and told them in a shaky voice that the Mercedes had been stolen from Union Square while I was in the reading room of the Civic Library in Gromyko Prospekt. Then I called Chechevitsin and asked if he’d got anything for me and he said yes, there was a courier coming through from Tashkent on the evening train arriving at 10:25, Central Station, Yelingrad. Name, description, rendezvous instructions, so forth. I said I’d be there.
04:56.
The snow had stopped.
I watched the Union Building.
I’d been here two hours and I was frozen stiff.
Every five minutes I had to wipe the inside of the windscreen because it kept misting up; there was ice on the outside and the wipers had seized up on the way here so I’d scraped the last of the snow away and left it like that. It was a fourteen horse-power Trabant with a stick shift and a defunct heater and a body like a foreshortened turd but Chechevitsin had said it was all he could get for me. It had been no good my trying another car-hire firm because the police would be on to that one: my call reporting the stolen Mercedes was just a routine action. On the principle that your survival in the target area can often depend on the narrowest margins of error you always take every possible step you can to cover yourself it was highly unlikely that the civil and secret police would miss the obvious but I couldn’t be certain. I only had the two sets of papers and I couldn’t use the Voronov cover because the whole of the Red Air Force knew by this time that his MiG-z8D had been shot down within fifty miles of this city and that he might have got out alive.
There was another risk factor coming into phase and it was the same wedge shape as the first one had been: Comrade Andreyev Rashidov and Colonel Nikolai Voronov were now the subject of a search from two directions and the more the opposition found out about them the nearer those two lines would get, until they came to a point. When it did, I wouldn’t have to be there.
04:59.
I’d counted more than thirty people entering or leaving the Union Building in the last two hours but she hadn’t been among them. She could be away from the place now, in which case I was wasting my time, but the train didn’t have to be met until 10.25 this evening and I could work on the target centre for the next five hours and maybe pick up some extra material for the courier to take away with the film.