'We can't move too many people into this town because with all the frontier feuds going on across the whole of Eastern Europe there's been a drain on manpower -- executives, directors and support groups. You were lucky to get me for this one.'

'You were a bargaining chip, you know that.'

He left it.' the thing is, your chances aren't terribly good, are they?'

'Are you talking about timing?'

'Partly.'

He meant the zero -- deadline thing. 'What else?'

'You're being hunted actively by the police and the militia and there's a murder charge on your head. That alone means that you can't even show yourself on the street without very high risk. You've also come close enough to the opposition -- the generals -- to be recognized by their aides, who in fact engineered that murder charge against you, and if you go closer to them again -- which you'll have to if you're to pursue the mission -- you'll be up against a group of military professionals, and if --'

'Christ, I've been inside Lubyanka and got out again -- remember me?'

Ferris tilted his head. 'You're very competent, I know. I also know from experience that you possess a pathological fascination for the brink.'

'That's my problem.'

He turned it, instantly: 'I agree.' He gave it the weight of silence, then: 'Apart from the Russian police and militia and the generals' aides, you have a rogue agent in the field, if you're right about that -- and I suspect you are. And a rogue agent, difficult to track and difficult to trap, can be more dangerous to you than all those other adversaries put together.' A beat. 'You know this.'

I didn't say anything. It was perfectly true: he wasn't telling me anything I didn't know. He was just telling me things I didn't want to know.

Ferris waited, then gave the slightest shrug.'to make contact with Captain Rusakov,' he said, 'without even being able to show yourself on the street is I think close to impossible, without the extreme risk of getting caught or trapped or shot out of hand. If you --'

'Look, I can't work like that. If I stopped to think of the bloody risks I'd never leave London.'

Ferris took a turn and came back. He'd lost the stillness I'd seen in him earlier, and it worried me. For this man to get up and walk about was like anyone else climbing the walls with their teeth.

He sat down on the crate again, and I felt a frisson: he'd been reading me.

'Finally,' he said, 'your target for information -- Captain Rusakov -- is at risk himself, and he'd also be the subject of a manhunt if his sister got herself arrested and they put her into an interrogation cell. He couldn't go near you and you couldn't go near him, and I would have to get you both off the streets.'

A wind had got up, a light wind, and it was fretting at a bit of loose corrugated iron on the roof. It would also bring a chill factor across the city, and the air was going to skin us alive out there when we left this place. Extreme cold can work on your system in so many ways, numbing your hands and your thoughts and what's left of your ambitions, but it wasn't the cold, really, that worried me -- it was simply that the director in the field for Meridian was telling his executive to drop the mission and go home. That was the real chill factor.

I looked at Ferris and asked him: 'What are you going to tell London?'

He took his time. 'What do you think I should tell them?'

'Say that if you don't keep me running I'll go underground.'

I think he drew a deeper breath: his body straightened a degree as the lungs filled. Then he said: 'You'd do that to me?'

'I've no choice.'

But it had taken some saying. If I broke contact with him and got off the streets and went underground, found a foxhole somewhere and operated from there, they'd give him hell in London. The DIF is totally responsible for the man he's running in the field and if that man breaks off and goes solo it means his director hasn't done his job, hasn't protected him, hasn't kept him on track, hasn't even managed to bring him home.

'If you go underground,' Ferris said, 'you won't have a chance.'

'Then keep me running.'

Screaming broke out and slashed at the nerves.

'I'd have to tell London how things stand,' Ferris said. 'And you know Croder. He'll instruct me to pull you in.'

It wouldn't work.

'You'd never find me,' I said.

'He'll instruct me to convince you that you must break off the mission. You can still be useful to the Bureau. They're not ready to throw you out.'

That wouldn't work either.

'Why should they be?'

'You're not easy to control, you know that. They like discipline in the field. This time you could blow your credit.'

'That's a bloody shame.'

He got off the crate and stood there with the light slanting across his glasses, and I couldn't see his eyes. It didn't matter; they wouldn't have told me anything.

'I want you to report to me,' he said, 'as often as you can. If I decide to put support into the field I want you to accept it. And I want you to bear in mind that the minute you let yourself fall for the death -- or -- glory thing I 'm going to cut you loose and throw you to the dogs.'

'I'll toe the line.'

'No,' he said, 'you won't.'

The wind cut between the buildings and blew flotsam across the snow, bits of paper and a milk carton and a plastic bag. I left Roach's Skoda on some waste ground half a block away from the building where the safe -- house was, and approached it slowly, making a circle. The early afternoon sky pressed down on the city, leaving the pale orb of the sun sinking towards the west as if through dark water.

Ferris had come with me to the door of the shed, and it had taken both of us to wrench it open on the frozen runners. 'As soon as you've made contact with Rusakov, I'll get his sister out of Novosibirsk.' It was the last thing he'd said to me.

The wind brought the river smell from the east, foul water and coal -- smoke, tar and diesel gas. The Ob wasn't far from this part of the city, three or four miles; earlier I'd heard an ice -- breaker working, its engine roaring as the bows thrust and drew back and thrust again.

I moved in closer, completing the circle. Traffic was thin, most of it trucks; no one was walking in the streets: all I'd seen on my way back were a drunken militiaman throwing up in a doorway and a pack of stray dogs lurching from one garbage bin to the next, ravenous and out of luck -- it was winter and times were lean.

The peep was standing in a doorway; he'd seen me from a distance and hadn't moved out of shadow, but now he lit a cigarette and in a moment flicked it away, the glowing tip tracing an arc through the lowering light before it hit the snow and went out. I kept walking and crossed the street, stopping when I reached the doorway. I've got surveillance on the place, of course, Ferris had told me. The man took a few steps to meet me.

'Everything all right?' I asked him.

'No.'he said.' the woman's been arrested.'

13 WHORES.

What that man Roach hadn't known when he'd told me there was a telephone booth in the building was that the cord had been cut by hooligans, and I had to drive two miles before I found a booth that didn't have the glass smashed or the cord cut. I didn't expect to find a directory, took the phone off the hook and dialled for Information, the wind fluting through the gap in the door.

'Yes?'