'I tried to explain that in George's terms she wasn't a valuable asset.'

'Why not?' When Susan didn't answer, he asked, 'What did you mean when you said she wouldn't have wanted to leave an American boat?'

'She wanted to defect.'

He rested his hand on her shoulder. This was the most quiet, he thought, like a pillow on the moon.

'Do you want to get off the Polar Star?' she asked.

'Yes.'

He heard her hold her breath before she said, 'I can help.'

He held a cigarette in one hand and a match in the other, but he didn't light it. He concentrated on the soft tremor of her breast against his cheek. 'How?'

'You need protection. I can ask Marchuk to make you a translator. You're wasted on the slime line. That way we can spend more time together.'

'But how can you help me get off the Polar Star?

'We can work on it.'

'What would I have to do?'

'Nothing. Who is Hess?'

Now he struck the match, a yellow flare in the hand, and let the first sulphurous haze burn off. 'Should we stop smoking?'

'No.'

He inhaled. Raw tobacco fumes, Soviet again. 'He's our Morgan, another fisherman.'

'You saw the cable, didn't you?'

'A cover over it. There wasn't much to see.'

'But you were there.'

Before he blew the flame out he reached down to the floor for the glass. It was half-full, the last of the Scotch. 'Should we stop drinking?'

'No. Go back and take another look.'

'Hess won't let me in again.' He killed the flame and drank half of what was left.

'Get in. You seem to be able to go wherever you want to on this ship.'

He passed the glass. 'Until Karp catches me.'

'Until then, yes.' She swallowed what was left and turned her head away. 'Then we can get you off or out.'

He rose on an elbow as if he could see her. Her hair was still damp to the touch. He turned her chin towards him. 'Off or out? What does that mean?'

'Just what I said.'

The bottle was empty and the Winstons had all gone up into a floating blanket of smoke. As if he and Susan had gone up in smoke.

'I want you in, not out,' she said.

The bunk lamp was more glow than light, but he could see her eyes looking up, and himself in her eyes. Inside of her and out.

'Did Hess mention length?' Susan asked. 'Number of hydrophones? Range? He has computers and software. It would be good if you could bring me a disk, even better if you can get a hydrophone.'

Arkady lit a Belomor. 'Don't you find it boring?' he asked. 'Doesn't spying ever seem like an endless game of cards?'

'George checked your bonafides while we were in Dutch Harbor. He has a secure line there. He wanted to know if you were for real.' She took the cigarette. 'The FBI says you can't be trusted.'

'The KGB says so too. At least they agree on something.'

'Don't you have a good reason for wanting to get out?' Her eyes were wide, trying to see into him by the sparks of the papirosi, the bonfire of Russian conspirators.

'At Dutch Harbor you suggested that Morgan and I might have murdered Zina together. You're attracted to murderers?' Arkady asked.

'No.'

'Then why did you say it? That's the man you want me to trust?'

'It wasn't George's fault.'

'Whose, then?' When she didn't answer, he said, 'You and Zina were on the stern deck. The dance was still going on. The ship was bobbing in the dark, the Eagle tied up alongside. At the rail you told her she was asking for too much. What did she say to you?'

'She said I couldn't stop her.'

'Someone stopped her. Did she show you a plastic bag?'

'A bag?'

'With a towel and clothes inside. She borrowed a bathing cap from one of her cabinmates. She never returned it.'

'No. Besides, you're different, Arkady. You're a known quantity, and if you can bring something from Hess to me, we really can help you. There's nothing for you at home, is there? Why would you want to go back?'

'Can you really help me? Can you really make us disappear from here and find ourselves walking on a street, sitting in a cafe, lying in bed on the other side of the world?'

'You have to hope.'

'If you want to help, tell me what Zina was doing at the rail all those other times. Before she knew anything about Morgan or a radioman or a cable, why was she at the rail?'

She turned the lamp switch off. 'Funny, the whole night has been like holding hands over a flame.'

'Tell me.'

Susan fell silent in the dark for a minute, and then said, 'I didn't know. Not for sure. At first I thought she was simply being friendly, or sent by Volovoi. Sometimes you become aware of a pattern around you, but you can't tell quite what it is. After we became friends, I stopped noticing, because I liked having her there. It wasn't until you came around that I started asking questions again, and not until Dutch Harbor that I knew for sure, when I was told that I had to come back to the Polar Star and help keep things quiet. We had to keep the team together and cope with problems as they came up. Adjust and resolve. That's the problem with working in the private sector. There's no back-up and nobody pulls you out. Instead, you compromise and the hands you hire for dirty work are that much dirtier. George is a control freak who's lost control. He'll clean it up. He's indestructible, not like us. He caught on before I did what Zina was doing at the rail and if he says he'll deal with his side, he will. He didn't kill her, I can promise you that.'

'Why did you ever think I killed her?'

'Because you were so unlikely. An investigator from the factory? And because that night she said she was coming back.'

'Coming back?' Arkady thought of the girl swimming out into Vladivostok bay, borrowing a shower cap, taping up a bag. Again and again, it made no sense. There were two Zinas: the Zina who mooned over Mike and listened to the Rolling Stones, and the Zina with her secret tapes. If Zina had been defecting to the Eagle she would have taken the tapes and left one false suicide note, not pages of practice notes. And she knew better than to stage a suicide when any American boat was close. 'From where?'

When Susan spoke again she sounded exhausted. 'George said he needed more than fishermen, and that's what he got. He just needs some time to get the crew under control. He didn't know about Zina. He couldn't do anything about Mike and Volovoi; he was only surprised he didn't find you there too.'

Arkady thought of Karp. 'Tell Marchuk.'

'I can't say any of this again. I'll deny every word and you know it.'

'Yes,' Arkady had to admit.

'It was just a game,' she said. 'A "What If" game.'

'Like, "What if morning doesn't come"?' he asked.

Her hand sought his. 'Now you answer a question: if you could run right now, disappear from the Polar Star and go to America, would you do it?'

Arkady listened to his answer, interested if it was simply a game. 'No.'

On the narrow space of her bunk their sleeping bodies folded together as the Polar Star slowly rose on the angle of its plated bow and fell, crushing the ice ahead. The sound was subdued, not much more than a wind cooling the skin, or distant thunder moving farther away.

Arkady pulled the curtain from a porthole of luminous grey. Not the glitter of snow, but denser and softer. Dawn, a new day in the Bering Sea. 'We've stopped,' he said.

The grating of steel on ice was gone, though through his feet he felt the engines running. He flicked the bunk lamp on and off; there didn't seem to be an electrical problem. The Polar Star seemed poised in a vacuum, not silent itself but still and surrounded by silence.

'What about the Eagle?' Susan asked.

'If we're not going anywhere, they're not going anywhere.' He picked his pants arid shirt off the deck.

'It's follow the leader, and finally you people are the leader?' Susan asked.

'That's right.'

'So much for joint ventures. The Eagle isn't built for ice, and Marchuk knows it.'

Arkady buttoned his shirt. 'Go to the radio shack,' he said. 'Try to raise Dutch Harbor or try the emergency channel.'

'And where are you going?'

Arkady pulled on his socks. 'Into hiding. The Polar Star is a big ship.'

'How long can you do that?'

'I'll think of it as a form of socialist competition.'

He stepped into his boots and took his jacket from a chair. In the gun-slit haze of the porthole she was motionless, all but her eyes, which followed Arkady to the door.

'You're not hiding,' she decided. 'Where are you going?'

He lifted and dropped his hand from the knob. 'I think I know where Zina died.'

'This whole night was just about Zina?'

'No.' Arkady turned to face her.

'Why do you look so happy?'

He was almost ashamed. 'Because I'm alive. We're both alive. I guess we're not moths.'

'OK.' As she leaned forward the light covered her like dust. 'I'll tell you what I told Zina. I said, "Don't go." '

But he was gone.

Chapter Twenty-nine.

The Polar Star lay at the bottom of a white well. Fog bounded the factory ship on every side, and the sunlight reflected by the ice sheet and trapped by arms of fog produced an illumination that was both indistinct and overwhelming.

The ship itself glowed; ice had formed on every surface. The deck was a milky skating rink. The net around the volleyball court glittered like a house that had been built crystal upon crystal; the antennas overhead hung heavy as glass. Ice lay on the portholes in opaque, extra lenses, and glazed the wood stacked on the superstructure. The ship looked as if it had surfaced like a fish from the Arctic Sea.

'It's the cable that could not snag which is, of course, thoroughly fouled on the sea floor,' Marchuk said. He had taken Arkady to a corner of the bridge away from the helmsman. The captain hadn't slept during the night. His beard was overgrown, and when he removed his dark glasses his eyes looked scoured. 'We have to sit at dead stop while Hess is below, winding and unwinding the cable, trying to pull out his dick.'

'What about the Eagle? Arkady asked the question Susan had asked him.

Wipers were doing an effective job of smearing ice in arcs across the windshield. On the other hand, the ship was going nowhere, and there was nothing to see except blinding fog. At a squint, Arkady estimated visibility at a hundred metres.

'Be thankful you're on the right boat, Renko.'

'There's been no call?'

'Their radio is dead,' Marchuk said.

'Three different kinds of radio and backups, and they're all dead?'

'Maybe their mast is down. We know they iced up and that there was a lot of rolling. It's possible.'

'Send someone back.'

Marchuk felt his pockets for a pack, then leaned against the windshield counter and coughed, which was almost the same as having a cigarette. He cleared his throat. 'You know what I'm going to do when we get back? Take a rest cure. No drinking, no smoking. Go someplace near Sochi where they clean you out, steam you in sulphur and pack you in hot mud. I want to stay in that mud for at least six months until I stink like a Chinese egg; that's how you know you're cured. I'll come out pink as a babe. Then they can shoot me.' He glanced at the helmsman and then through the door to the navigation room, where the second mate was soberly working charts. The Polar Star was locked in ice but the ship had not stopped moving because, slowly and inexorably, the ice sheet itself moved. 'When you get this far north, curious things happen to equipment. There are illusions not just to our eyes. A radio signal goes up and bounces right back. The magnetism is so strong that radio-direction signals are absorbed. You don't have to go to outer space to find a black hole - it's right here.'