'she's gone too.'

He watched me, hands in bus -- driver's gauntlets hanging at his sides, moisture glistening on his fur hat where he'd caught it, I suppose, when he'd ducked down through the hole in the timbers up there, bringing away snow.

'And all measures are being taken,' I said, a statement, not a question, something to say while I thought things out, of course all measures were being taken to find the DIF, at least find his tracks.

I felt like an astronaut -- this is the nearest I can get to the idea of what it's like -- losing one end of his life -- line when he's out there on a space walk, floating away.

'Did he leave anything in his room?' I asked Frome.

'I don't know.'

'What about her -- did she leave anything?'

'I don't know,' he said again.

'Then what the bloody hell do you know?'

Ice clinked out there on the river.

He watched me, Frome, the two pale flames in his eyes.

'Sorry,' I said.

'That's okay. I mean, there's not much to know, see. I tried phoning him several times and the switchboard said he couldn't be in his room, so I went round there and checked, found his door unlocked and the room empty, same as hers on the same floor.'

'No signs.'

'None I could see. I took a good --'

'Toilet things?'

'Still there. So were --'

'scrambler gone?'

'Yes. And the bug sniffer.'

It didn't mean much. If anyone had got in there and managed to take Ferris they'd have taken those things as well, they weren't cheap and you'd never find any more like that in Russia.

'Bitch, isn't it?' I heard Frome say.

'What? Yes.' He was still standing there. 'You want to sit down?'

'No. I don't like leaving the car out there too long, bit of a giveaway. Try the walkie?'

I picked up the unit and switched it on and moved the dial off the squelch and pressed CALL and said Meridian a couple of times and got a response from support base.

'Executive,' I said.'two numbers for you.' Rusakov's at the camp, and his woman friend's in the town. 'If Rusakov can't signal, a man named Bakatin might come through, replacing him. Any news?'

Of Ferris. He'd know that.

'No. I'll raise you if he calls. The minute he calls.' Remembering to hope, scratching around for straws, they all were, Frame was, I was, any straw of comfort we could find.

All right, yes, that's putting it a fraction too dramatically, about the astronaut thing, I mean that poor bastard's going to finish up somewhere on the far side of Pluto one day with his super -- trained athletic body shrivelled inside its metal -- alloy shell and his wife remarried and his kids middle -- aged, and when one of us poor bloody ferrets loses his DIF he loses his life -- line in a way, but it's not that bad, we can go on foraging for ourselves, get home with our heads still on if we're lucky, it's just that when the mission's running hot we tend to get a bit edgy and the last thing we want to hear is that we're cut off from our director and hence from London Control.

Make a note, we should perhaps make a note here, should we not, my good friend, to get it put into the training manuals at Norfolk: Do not learn to regard the director in the field as your bloody mother.

'I'll need your radio manned,' I said into the unit, 'round the clock.'

'Yes, sir, understood.'

I shut down the signal and looked at Frome. 'Mind your head when you go back up there.'

I should have got used to the broken bells by now, but as the dark body of the river moved under its scales of ice the sound kept sleep away for a time, and then I lay drifting at last, the current turning me and turning me back as I kept the fur of the dead cat close against my face, using it as camouflage to deceive the men who were waiting there along the bank with their guns swinging as they moved, watching for the target, for me, on the surface of the river, but that must be a dream, perhaps of an earlier mission, I'm always having them, they never leave us, I've talked about it to others in the Caff, and now the feeling of movement across the scalp, the delicate exploratory scratching and then the fust nibble, with the small sharp teeth rooting more boldly among the hair -- Oh Jesus Christ and I swung up an arm and felt the soft warm body before it vanished into the shadows, not a dream this time, no, and I got up and found a length of timber and lay down again with one end of it under my hand, waiting but drifting down again after a while, down into the lulling silence of the delta waves before I felt it again, this time on my foot and I hit out with the bit of timber and felt a splashing across my cheek and hit out again and then sat up and saw it lying there, big as a boot, its blood pooling across the boards in the candlelight, some of it on my face.

It was gone four o'clock in the morning when I woke next time, swathed in the extra blankets with a hole for breathing through. I hadn't felt them again; perhaps they'd recognized the scream that thing had given for what it was, had heard death in it and kept their distance. I impressed future time on the subconscious and it woke me accurately at seven, an hour before first light. For my breakfast, turtle soup from one of the self -- heating cans, with two hard -- boiled eggs and a slice of that Christmas cake, 'twas the season, if not to be jolly, to indulge the appetite, on the sound and ingrained principle that I didn't know when I would eat again.

Then I opened the map Frome had brought me and spread it out in the candlelight, walking my fingers around the wooded area where the army camp took up three -- quarters of a square kilometre. It was served by two minor roads that joined and made a fork three kilometres from the main gates of the camp. Then I folded the map and picked up the radio unit and left the hulk and put Meridian into extreme and imminent hazard, because I had no choice.

The crackle of gunfire came again, and the rooks took off from the poplars that laced the eastern horizon, wheeling and cawing. The rifle range was out of sight from here, below a fold in the ground, and the sound of the guns was muffled, echoing from the long corrugated iron huts that formed most of the camp.

The new day was frozen, as the days before had been, the earth invisible under the snow, the bare trees standing in a black iron frieze across the hill to the south. The air was motionless, its cold clamped to my face as I studied the landscape from beside the car.

Gunfire again, its echoes mimicking.

He could have been anyone, the man they'd seen watching the camp from his car, but I thought I knew who he was, and if he'd been there yesterday he would be there today; he'd driven away before he could be challenged, but he would have come back, must have come back, standing off at a greater distance now, finding cover in the trees. They'd nothing to fear from him, the soldiers in the camp; they were an armed battalion. They wouldn't have sent out scouts to hunt for him; they'd been curious, that was all.

He could have been anyone, but I thought he was the rogue agent in the field -- Talyzin, if Ferris were right.

There was a man in the Ministry of Defence called Talyzin who spoke out rather too loudly against the generals.. . From raw intelligence data going into London, he might be your agent.

I'd sensed his presence in the environment ever since the Rossiya had been blown up, had thought I'd seen him once, getting clear of the militia blocks at the scene of the wreck, as I had. I didn't think he'd had anything to do with the death of Roach: he'd had no motive; and I didn't think he'd had anything to do with the surveillance on the Skoda that had brought that man Yermakov on my track, may he rest in peace. But I thought he might have set that bomb, the rogue agent, and if so, his motive would obviously have been to wipe out the three generals and their entourage, because it doesn't take high explosive to destroy life force in a single human being -- Velichko, say -- you can do it with one bullet, as Rusakov had done. So if it was the rogue agent who had set that bomb, then he would still be locked onto his private -- personal? -- mission: the death of the two generals who were still pursuing their own operation in Novosibirsk, pursuing it just over there, in point of fact behind the wire fence of die camp.

So I would expect him to be here, the agent, somewhere in the immediate environment, observing the generals -- perhaps that mar. on the hill between the trees, sitting in the car.

He'd been there before I arrived, or I would have seen him drive up; he would have had to use the further road branching from the fork, and I could see its whole length, from the fork to the hill. The minor road didn't go up the hill, only around it, but he was nevertheless on higher ground there, with a good view of the camp. He was also in rather good cover, buried among the trees, and I wouldn't have known he was there if I hadn't been looking for him, hadn't caught the glint on the windows of the car as the strengthening light of the day came creeping across the land from the east.

A crackle of gunfire, stitching the silence.

I'd etched the configuration of his car by now on the visual memory, and if it changed I would detect it at once -- if, for instance, he opened one of its doors on this side. I would have put the distance between us at close to half a kilometre, but 1 could see that he was sitting in the front of the car, because his dark coat altered the reflective value of the window glass. The distance from his car to the nearest line of huts in the camp was more like a kilometre and a half, so that he'd have to be using at least a pair of 10 x 10s to pick up anything useful.

He could have been -- must have been -- there all night, unless he had anyone in support, which I didn't believe: a rogue is a rogue, and works solo. They 're a breed apart, often neurotic, occasionally psychopathological, you can't ever trust them. Even if you can persuade them into working with you, with your cell or your network, you can't turn your back on them, they'll slip a knife in if it suits them, sometimes for kicks, ask that bastard Loman, he'd been running Fairfax through Tigerfish in the South China Sea when that executive had been found floating among the off -- shore trash in Saigon, and it hadn't taken the Bureau five minutes to find out that Fairfax had been using a rogue agent who knew the area, and that the said rogue agent had decided to take a hundred per cent of the credit for the successful completion of the mission and the only way to do that was by putting a bullet into the executive's brain and dropping him off a pier.

A glint came from the trees on the hill, this time in motion, brightening and dimming out. I hadn't seen that before.

It was difficult at this distance to understand what that glint had meant. It wasn't the degree -- by -- degree passage of the morning light reflecting from the windows of the car up there: it was smaller, the glint, more focused -- and then I got it, because when it moved again I saw it had a twin.

I couldn't see his eyes, but I knew they were on me now, pressed to the 10 x 10s.