I gave it some thought. 'Make it an hour from now. No later than that.'

'Five forty -- one.'

I checked my watch.

'Yes. I'm synchronized.'

Tentatively Ferris said, 'You know, don't you, that if you get stuck in Militia Headquarters there'll be absolutely nothing I can do.'

I translated that in my mind: was I prepared to push the mission right to the edge at this stage and risk sending it over? Because the director in the field for Meridian would be put through a rigorous debriefing when he got back to London, and Control would want straight answers. Yes, I warned the executive that there'd be nothing I could do for him if he placed the mission in final hazard.

'The thing is,' I told Ferris,' there are no options. We're working with a zero deadline and we can't slow up, we've just got to go for it'

The executive felt there was no choice but to proceed with the mission, despite the risks.

'I'm sure you'll do well,' Ferris said, and I didn't like the polite formality: it showed nerves.

I left it. 'Final thing,' I said, 'I'm going to call the peep off the safe -- house. It's going to get blown in any case, sometime before midnight.'

He took it cold, didn't ask why. 'But you still need a new one.'

'Yes. With spare clothes, provisions, the usual thing.'

'I've been working on it.'

"Then it's over and out,' I told him and put the phone back onto the hook.

In the crown of the night sky the stars were huge, fading as they sank into the smog that clouded the city. The snow was brittle under my boots as I finished circling the block and closed in on the safe -- house.

'You're free to go,' I told the man in the doorway. 'Report to the DIF by phone.'

He was huddled into his coat, his eyes peering from above the scarf he'd wrapped round his head. 'No one relieving?'

'No. Go and get some grog.'

He left a patch of bare wet concrete in the doorway where he'd cleared the snow with his heels. I walked on and checked the windows of the building and then went in.

The bedclothes were still rumpled and Tanya's bag was gone, but she'd left the toilet things in the bathroom and a message on the mirror scrawled with a lipstick.

Thankyou. Forgive me. Tanya.

I wiped it off with some toilet paper and flushed it and looked around; there were no other signs that a woman had been here.

The shower head in the bathroom was dripping, rhythmic as the ticking of a clock.

It was time to go.

You 're mad, you know that? You've gone mad.

Shuddup.

You 'II be walking straight into a trap.

Oh for Christ's sake shuddup and leave me alone.

I took a last look round and left the curtains almost closed and the light on and the door unlocked and went down the stairs and into the street and across to the Skoda and started it up, letting the engine warm while I scraped away the ice that had formed on the windscreen. Then I drove three miles east towards the suburbs and left the car on some waste ground and locked it and had to walk nearly five blocks before I saw a militia patrol car and stopped it and told the driver I was Viktor Shokin, the man they were looking for.

15 VIOLETS.

'You are giving yourself up?'

'No.'

The colonel looked at me, his head going down a degree and his eyes remaining on my own. The light wasn't too bad in here; this wasn't an interrogation room, just a holding cell by the look of it, with a small barred window and a steel door with a look -- through panel in it. The door wasn't closed; there was still quite a bit of bustle going on out there, militia tramping about, phones ringing; I heard my cover name several times: Viktor Shokin was quite a catch.

'Then why are you here?' the colonel asked me.

He had an intelligent face, unsurprisingly in terms of his rank, and didn't seem to think I was playing the fool when I'd told him I wasn't giving myself up. If he'd thought I was playing the fool he would have given immediate orders to have me beaten into a different frame of mind.

'You've got a woman here,' I told him, 'Tanya Rusakova. Is that correct?'

He went on watching me while he thought it over. He was a big man, bigger still in his greatcoat, and had the kind of eyes that would be able to watch a war -- trained Doberman tearing a fugitive to pieces, for instance, without showing anything, except possibly a hint of amusement.

'Yes,' he said at last. "That is correct'

'I want her released, Colonel.'

I left it at that for the moment. I wanted to feed information into him slowly, so that I could catch and weigh his reactions, because this was the man who was going to decide, at some hour of this long and perilous night, whether he was going to let me walk out of here or hand me over to Homicide Investigation and start the machinery of justice rolling over me.

Someone in the passage outside was asking where Colonel Belyak was, and in a moment a junior officer was standing in the doorway, glancing at me and away again.

'Telephone, Colonel. In your office.'

'Who is it?'

'OIC Catering, sir.'

'Take a message. Are you monitoring my telephones?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Then go on taking messages and don't come to me with anything unless it sounds urgent. Are those not the orders passed on to you?'

'Yes, sir. I'm --'

'Catering is not urgent, you clod. Get out.'