I suppose London had waited until I was down on Soviet soil and still alive before they’d pulled Ferris out of Furstenfeldbruck and shot him into Moscow with instructions to come down here; it’s relatively easy for the field directors to cross frontiers because they’re never in action and their cover is conservative: most of them double as cultural attache’s or commercial first secretaries as the major embassies and at least half of them are permanently down on the Intourist waiting lists for educational travel-group tours through Russia and the slave states: it’s infinitely easier to get out of a country if you can prove how you came in.
The Moskwicz was turning right.
Ferris was a good fifty yards ahead of me and I lost him sometimes because he was using the environment and doing it well, staying with a chance group of people and finding another before they split up, keeping to the right-hand side of the pavement and pacing his way steadily, sometimes looking at his watch to express purpose and a sense of destination: it was a model performance and it kept my nerves off the limit as we hauled the five men and the Moskwicz westwards along Lenin Prospekt and past the square.
It was now twelve minutes since we’d left the airport and there had been no chance of shaking off these people and I was getting worried because the longer Ferris and I remained in the same street within sight of each other the sooner they’d see the connection and start working on him too. At the moment he was perfectly clear and they weren’t taking the slightest interest in him, any more than they were taking an interest in the other twenty or thirty people moving with us along the Prospekt.
Moskwicz.
Its number was half covered in slush but there was a small triangular dent on the rear wing and that was good enough. It went past at the same pace as the traffic; it wasn’t observing me: it was standing by in case I decided to find a taxi or get on a bus. If that happened they -
Ferris had gone.
I kept walking.
Clothing store. Warehouse. Three unidentified offices in a row. Bus station.
The Inter-Kazakh State Lines, a vast roofed area with water puddling below the mud flaps of three long-distance buses that had just come in, one of them still discharging passengers in the blue-grey artificial light. No sign of Ferris: he was too good for that.
I walked steadily for three blocks and checked everything twice: every doorway, every parked vehicle, every wall, basement and side entrance to every building, and drew blank all the time. I didn’t want to alter the basic pattern but the time factor was now taking over: Ferris couldn’t wait for me indefinitely at the bus station and I had to get back there and locate him as soon as I could. His own timing might be criticaclass="underline" he was in this city to rendezvous with the executive but there could be other things he had to do here, involving Chechevitsin or a mobile Bureau cell or Kirinski himself through any one of a dozen Central Asian channels. I didn’t know the background and I wasn’t going to assume anything at this stage. The one thing I had to do was to get back to that bus station and if I couldn’t find a chance then I’d have to make one and risk blowing Slingshot.
This was normal. In any given mission you’re operating right on the very edge.
Three doorways, two deep, one shallow. A line of Red Army vehicles, one of them an armoured car with a gunner perched on the roof struggling with the antenna. I stopped and called up to him.
“Comrade! Is this the way to Central Station?”
He looked down, his eyes dark with frustration: it looked as if they’d hit the antenna on something hard enough to bend it at the base, and his hands were too cold to straighten it. “Where?”
“The station. The main station.”
“Straight on.”
I nodded and walked away, checking my watch and looking around for a taxi. The station was three miles from here and the first of the street lights were coming on and it was logical for me to hurry. They knew I’d abandoned the Trabant because of me windscreen and the railway station was a plausible destination and in any case they wouldn’t question it because they would go wherever I took them.
The nearest tag would now be questioning the soldier: what had I asked him, so forth. I’d done it to reassure them, and if I’d only succeeded by one degree my chances were by that one degree improved.
Doors, windows, railings, a parked truck, blank, drawing blank.
Three blocks and I was walking through the night, with the streetlamps taking over the evening sky. Three taxis had gone past and I’d tried to stop them because sharing was an established custom but they were obviously full.
Moskwicz.
This time it turned at one of the prescribed U-junctions and went back the other way, a blurred face checking me before it turned right and began working its way back to Lenin Prospekt.
One of the tags was quite close behind me: I’d seen his reflection twice in the past few minutes. The light was less reliable now and they were tightening their distances. I was getting a better look at them now because whenever I heard a car I turned round to see if it was a taxi and they knew what I was doing because I’d shown them.
Two more went past but I got the third and it was empty.
“Where to?”
“Central Station.”
One of them had broken into a short run but the Moskwicz had made its circuit and come back into the Prospekt and he left it for them to take up the tag in its mobile phase and we moved off with the black saloon a reasonable distance behind and with one small Syrena between us.
It was no use relying on the traffic lights: the Moskwicz would cross on the red if it had to, even in snow conditions. Unless I did something to change the pattern we’d head slowly for the station and with every yard we’d be heading away from the bus depot where Ferris was waiting and I couldn’t let it go on for too long because the Moskwicz had a radio and they’d bring in mobile support: they’d have to.
I didn’t want to wait for them to do that.
“Are we going to get more snow?” I asked the driver.
“What was that, comrade?”
There was a glass division, grimed and cracked and repaired with adhesive tape, and he cocked his head towards the opening.
“Is there more snow on the way?”
“It says so, on the radio. From the south-west. But I can tell you, we don’t need it!”
Checking, checking. Blank.
Of course if you wait for a chance you may never get it but if you decide to make one for yourself you can often use the environment even if it presents only one positive feature. The alley was on the right as he braked for the lights and when I looked round I saw there was still another car between the taxi and the Moskwicz so I waited another two seconds for the speed to go down to a crawl and then I hit the door open and got out and swung it shut and the driver didn’t start shouting before I was across the pavement and into the alley, running some of the way and sliding the rest. A flare of headlights came and my own shadow flew ahead of me: they’d slung the Moskwicz across the pavement and lit up the scene and I heard a door snap open and then another one and there were three shadows now, two of them enormous and flitting like giant bats across the face of the building as I got half-way and tripped on something frozen under the snow and went headlong, sliding head-first and hitting the wall with my hands and bouncing away, get up, sliding across to the other side while the bats hovered in the dazzle of the lamps and I hit out with one hand to stop the momentum, get upthey’re coming, another door banging and a shadow bigger than the others and the sound of running feet.