'All the time.'

'That is how I am feeling.'

The boy called from the desk, 'I can get you a taxi. You want one?'

'When can he get here?'

'Five minutes.'

'Yes, I want him.'

The boy was watching the cab outside, Nikki's, as he spoke on the phone, the obvious question in his mind: we already had a taxi, so why did we want another one? It was the sort of thing he'd remember, but there was nothing I could do about it: we were going to leave a trail, Tanya and I, wherever we went tonight until I could raise Ferris and tell him we needed shelter.

It was tempting of course to go there, to the Hotel Karasevo, and call him from the foyer and tell him to get us off the streets. But unless your director in the field actually asks you to visit him at his base you can't go there, because you can never be certain you' re not being surveilled, that you might not be leading the opposition or the host country's police or intelligence agents to your director's base, and that base is sacrosanct. The DIF can only run you from a position of total impregnability: he is the anchorman, the signals centre, your only link with London and with the support in the field. Expose your DIF to the opposition and you'll cut your lifeline, and even if you can manage to limp home from the wreckage of a crashed mission you'd be advised not to do that, because if you've blown your DIF they'll flay you alive at the Bureau before they throw you into the street.

'He's on his way,' the boy called from the desk, and I went outside and told Nikki we'd decided to stay here for the night and wouldn't need him anymore. He made a token gesture of getting me what change he had, but I sent him away.

Tanya had got up from the settee when I went in again, and was standing with her back to the boy at the desk. 'I want to phone my brother,' she said in an undertone.

I took her across to the far corner of the foyer. 'For his sake you've got to remember that for the moment you're a danger to him. How long had you planned to stay in Novosibirsk?'

'Only for a few days. I have to get back to my job.'

The lights of a vehicle swung across the windows. 'When had you planned to see your brother next?'

'He just said "when the smoke had cleared".'

She spoke as if she were drugged, or disinterested. Sooner or later she was going to break: there was too much going on inside her and she was keeping it under too much control. The vehicle stopped outside the hotel: I could hear the tyre -- chains grinding under locked wheels as it slid to a halt.

'There's your taxi,' the boy called from the desk. 'You were lucky to get it.'

I gave Tanya my arm as we went down the steps, the ice crackling under our boots. She held my arm lightly, without trust, still afraid of me, of what I could do to her, do to her brother, because I was a witness to what had happened tonight.

'You are safer with me,' I told her carefully,' than with anyone else in the city.' It wasn't saying much, God alone knew, but it was still true, for what it was worth.

She didn't answer, glanced at me as we got into the taxi, that was all, didn't believe me.

It was a diesel, this one, shaking and rattling across the ruts and the patches of ice, the driver working hard to keep the thing more or less straight. I'd given him the name of a hotel I'd seen on the way here, the Great iberian, a red -- brick hulk with no lights in the windows, only the sign hanging above the doors with its capital S missing, almost certainly closed at this hour, possibly derelict, it didn't make any difference, there was nowhere we could stay tonight until I could raise Ferris, nowhere in this whole bloody city. Taking these cabs was bad enough: they'd be canvassing every driver all through the night, giving them my name and the description they'd have got from Chief Investigator Gromov, also advising that I might be with a woman companion, one Tanya Rusakova. I didn't think our good friend Nikki would hold his peace because I'd been generous to him; it had been worth trying, that was all.

'It's closed for the night,' our driver said, 'I suppose you know that?'

The big wrought -- iron S was hanging from a railing; I suppose someone had picked it up and put it there, wonder it hadn't brained them. I looked at the meter and paid him.' I know the concierge,' I said. 'He's my brother -- in -- law.'

Chips of ice flew against our legs as he gunned the engine, spinning the wheels until they found traction; the night reeked of diesel gas. I got Tanya to hold on to me for a while as we started walking, partly to persuade her that I was all right to touch, to trust; but she let go as we turned a corner and the wind came against us, and walked with her gloves against her face. The sky was black, the starfields strewn across it, the three -- quarter moon casting stark shadows across the snow. The air was freezing.

She didn't ask me where we were going. She didn't speak.

There were snow -- ploughs still working, their din filling the night between the buildings, the drifts breaking into waves as the huge blades bit into them. We passed three abandoned cars and a truck, one of them skewed against a wall with its windows shattered and a wing torn away. Sometimes a taxi went by, but there was no other traffic until a militia patrol swung out of an intersection in the distance and I pulled Tanya into a doorway before its lights reached us. It was there, after the patrol had gone past us without slowing, that she finally broke, and I stood holding her as the sobbing began, her body shaking with it, her tears streaming, jewelling the fur collar of her coat in the moonlight, all the fear and the misery and the loneliness coming out of her over the minutes until at last the force of her anguish broke through the protective shell of my reserves and reached the heart.

10 PHANTOMS.

'Our father was shot.'

A siren had started up in the distance.

'Keep that door shut!' one of the women shouted from behind the admissions desk, and a thin boy in a tattered white coat went hurrying past the line of people and there was a slam that echoed around the dog -- kennel -- green walls, and another flake of paint floated to the floor, spinning like a leaf in the glare of the big tungsten lamps.

A young peasant woman came through the doors, holding a baby wrapped in a red shawl, only its face visible.

It was hot in here, airless. We'd been freezing out there in the streets only minutes ago; now we were baking. Tanya had taken off her sheepskin coat but still couldn't sit up straight on the bare wooden bench; she'd walked with her arms crossed in front of her on our way here, gathered into herself, and I'd thought it was against the cold, but now I realized it was to protect herself against the phantoms of the past that still came after her.

'He was taken to an underground room,' she said, 'and executed without trial.'

Her father.

'Why?'

'For his ideals.'

I listened to the siren. People were still coming in, and the thin boy -- an orderly -- was standing by the big entrance door, slamming it shut after them. A man went reeling to the end of the queue, blood caked at the side of his head, the neck of a bottle sticking out of his pocket. The woman with the baby kept her distance from him; the baby's face was pinched, colourless, a wax doll's face; its mother's was haunted, her hollowed eyes looking from the child to the women at the admissions desk as she thought about going straight past all the other people because this was urgent, her baby was ill.

'When was this?' I asked Tanya.

'Four years ago.'

'Four.'

'You needn't think,' she said with a look at me,' that everything like that stopped when Gorbachev took over. Even now there are secret executions. The worst of the Stalinists and hardliners have been sacked from the KGB, but they've gone underground, and there are still scores to settle.' she made an effort to sit up straight, pulling the hem of her white polo -- neck sweater down, leaning her head against the wall. 'It's always like that, when a new regime takes over.'

The siren was loud now, and lights coloured the windows.

'You're talking about the Podpolia?'

She looked at me again. 'Yes.'

I'd seen intelligence reports going through the fax machines in London for a year now, since the days of the coup. The Podpolia -- the new underground -- was thought to have thousands of members, possibly tens of thousands, a lot of them still in office, going through the motions of embracing democracy and being reinstated. 'Who the hell knows how many there are?' I'd heard Croder saying as he watched the signals coming in.' How can you count the heads in the cellars on foreign soil?'

'Was General Velichko in the Podpolia?' I asked Tanya.

'Yes.'

'But that isn't why your -- why he was killed tonight.'

'No. It was because he'd ordered our father shot. They were his orders.' she straightened her right leg, spread her hands across her thighs, looking down at them, and a shudder went through her. 'I thought it was going to -- to liberate me, seeing him die, helping to make it happen. I thought the act of revenge would give me relief -- I wanted to see it happen: my brother told me that all he wanted me to do was identify that man, make sure there wouldn't be any mistake, and then run away. But I wanted to stay there, and when the shots began I felt -- I felt just a flash of the most bitter satisfaction, but then when I went on watching --' she broke off and squeezed her eyes shut and her body began shaking again.

'It was your father you saw.'