'A dead dog,' Ferris said, 'probably.'

Another rat dropped from the shelf onto the piled garbage; they were coming in through a hole in the wall, a gap in the boards. The garbage had been dumped in here from trucks, I would imagine, half -- filled the place, it was a warehouse, though not quite that, too small, a bloody shed, then.

'Things don't look terribly good,' I said.

It was gone noon. I'd left Tanya sleeping.

'They're not,' Ferris said.

I'd meant that things couldn't be terribly good if this was the best he could do for a rendezvous, and he'd known that. He was squatting on a broken crate, thinning straw -- coloured hair and a pale face and amber eyes behind a pair of almost square -- tensed academic -- looking glasses, thin, bony, trussed in a surplus Red Army coat with the insignia torn off, you saw a lot of them now, he would like to be thought of, Ferris, as some kind of university professor, and that's more or less what he looks like, and you'd never believe he's got a reputation for strangling mice in the evening when there's nothing worth seeing at the Globe.

He was sitting there with his hands dug into the pockets of the coat, watching one of the rats. He wished he'd got a brick in his hand so that he could let fly with it and splash one of those little buggers all over the wall, and I knew this because I knew Ferris.

I found another crate and perched on it.

'It was meant for the markets,' he said, 'all this stuff, but it was already rotten when it finally arrived from the farms, so sayeth the sleeper who's in charge of this place; his adopted name is Vladimir Tchaikovsky, bom in Birmingham, a real tease, but totally reliable. When a dog gets in here to stuff itself on the garbage the rats form a pack and stuff themselves on the dog, food chain thing. How much sleep,' he asked me with a swing of his head, 'have you been getting?'

'I've just had five or six hours.'

'Ready for duty, then. Where is the woman?'

'At the safe -- house. Why aren't things terribly good?'

Ferris has what looks like the hint of a cynical smile on his pale face, the eyelids a fraction squeezed and the mouth a fraction compressed; I've never known whether it's just the set of his expression or whether there's a continual peal of hellish laughter going on inside his head as he surveys the human condition.

'Because Novosibirsk,' he said, 'has become a distinctly hot zone in the past few weeks. DI6 is here in force, working with local agents -- in -- place, and so is the CIA. All the government offices are under covert surveillance by plain -- clothes peeps and as soon as I got here I shut down the only two safe -- houses we had because they were no longer safe. Yours was established only two days ago, but as far as we know you can rely on it, at least for a while. As far as we know.'

One of the rats screamed as they fought among themselves. The only light in here came from a square of cracked glass set high in the wall. When I'd got here the noon sky had been a dirty grey sheet, the wintry sun staining it with sulphur as the smoke drifted upwards from the docks and factories.

'Should I move the woman?" I asked Ferris.

He looked at me with that stillness of his that can be unnerving. 'I've got surveillance on the place, of course.'

'What the hell's the good of surveillance, if the militia roll up in a bloody jeep and go in there?'

He waited until the slight echoes died, giving me time to listen to them and realize that I'd just thrown him a lot of information. 'How valuable to you,' he asked gently, 'is Tanya Rusakova?'

I said it slowly for him.' she is the key to Meridian.'

His narrow head tilted. 'You mean that, of course?'

I didn't answer. He knew I meant it; he was just absorbing the information.' then we must try,' he said in a moment, 'to find her somewhere a bit safer. But I need to know things first. Debrief?'

'All right,' I said, and got off the crate, moving around to keep the circulation going: it was freezing in this bloody place, in the whole of Novosibirsk, the whole of Siberia. I took it from Bucharest and he didn't interrupt because he would already have been called in on the debriefing of Turner, the director in the field forLongshot. Then I began filling him in on Zymyanin.

'He was tracking two former Red Army generals.' I gave him their names.' they were with a former KGB general on the train. I'd say they had him shot, just as they had Hornby put away in Bucharest. They --'

'Zymyanin didn't set the bomb?'

'He couldn't have. He was out for information.'

'The bomb was meant for the generals?'

'Yes.'

'Why didn't it kill them?'

I told him. I told him why the generals' aides had set me up for the killing of Zymyanin: because I'd been seen talking to him.

'That was enough?' Ferris asked me.

'The whole cell's very professional, and their security's first class.'

'They're in the Podpolia?'

The underground. 'Zymyanin said so.'

Ferris hadn't moved, was still perched on the edge of the broken crate. I don't think he needs to keep his circulation going in the cold; I think he's cold -- blooded. He said, 'Who placed the bomb?'

'I don't know. But I think there's a rogue agent in the field.'

He looked up sharply. 'Oh?'

'The bomb could have been set and timed when the train was in Moscow, or anywhere along the line where it stopped. But I've been sensing an agent on the loose.'

Ferris didn't ask me what I meant: he knew what I meant. There's a very great deal of tension in the air when a mission's running and you're close to the opposition, and your senses pick up things they'd normally miss, the shadows and the whispers and the faintest of scents in the labyrinth, the echoes and the wraiths of things gone by, warning of things to come.

'You sensed him on the train?' Ferris asked me.

'No, after the crash. I saw a man taking a lot of trouble to get past the checkpoint they'd set up and into one of the transports, just as I was doing.'

This bloody smell was getting on my nerves. If they'd killed that dog it must have been days ago. We support things like bad smells or too much noise with less tolerance, don't we, when the nerves are _ touchy, and mine were like that now because in any given mission the presence of a rogue agent in the field can burden our operations with the need to find out who he is and what he's doing, whether he's dangerous. It can sometimes crash the whole thing for us if he thinks we 're getting in his way and manages to put a bullet into the shadow executive's back. They're difficult to see, those people, difficult to catch, because they haven't got a cell running them -- hence the name we give them, 'rogue' -- and they flit from one sector to another like a bloody bat in the dark.

'So he must have been,' Ferris said, 'on the train. You just didn't sense him there.'

He got off the crate and walked about -- minced, almost, taking tiny steps, head down and hands behind his back, your archetypical professor on the lecture platform. It had got him worried, this rogue agent thing.

I said yes, he must have been one of the passengers.' I think I saw him later, in the town. He --'

'To recognize?' Ferris swung his head up.

'No. You don't see much of anyone's face in this weather. I think I recognized his walk, the way he moved. 'I'd seen him on the way to the hotel when I'd been tracking Tanya, but not after that, even though I'd started watching out for him.

In a moment Ferris looked at me and said: 'Paranoia?'

It was a legitimate question: paranoia becomes part of your psychological makeup as you go through the missions: you see shadows, hear footsteps. 'Possibly,' I said. 'But the man avoiding the checkpoint out there was real.'

'Could have been anyone.'