4 : Moscow

I sat waiting. The night was perfectly quiet, with no movement in the air. The moon neared its zenith, towards the south. I shifted my position again and the nerves in my right thigh reacted; the tissues had only just begun healing. I didn't know if I could run yet, if I had to. There was nothing else wrong with me, except for the lingering effects of the shock: unexpected sounds made my head jerk, as if they were shots. It was freezing cold. 'What held you up?' Another trolleybus went past the end of the street, along Ckalova ulica, a No.10. It was the seventh I'd counted. There had been a dozen cars during the same period; it was eleven o'clock and traffic was light. 'We crashed the truck,' I told him. He started the engine again to blow some more air through the heater. It was a Pobeda, stinking of oil and stale cigarette smoke. We couldn't run the engine all the time because it'd be noticed: we parked by the river, close to the intersection, and four militia patrols had gone past in the last fifty minutes, one of them slowing to look at us. I didn't like it, any of it; my scalp crept too easily, and I was breathing too fast. I'd got close to being wiped out in that truck and the organism remembered. 'We thought we'd lost you,' the contact said. His speech was indistinct, as if his mouth were bruised. 'There was a complete blackout on you after Floderus signalled from Hanover.' 'It was close.' 'What happened to the driver?' 'The truck went up.' I didn't want to talk about it. He turned the engine off and the cold began creeping through the cracks again from outside the car. 'What else?' he asked me. It was his job to find out. This was Moscow and in Moscow you live from one minute to the next because there's no building that isn't bugged and no street that isn't surveyed and no hope of getting away with sloppy security or a doubtful drop or inadequate cover. They could stop, the next time around, and poke their torches in here and ask for our papers and pull us in if everything wasn't exactly right. Or even if it was. So he had to find out what I'd been doing, because in five minutes from now I might not be able to tell anyone. I said: 'I got as far as Ashersleben in a shepherd's Volkswagen and asked for some medical attention and bought a new coat. That was this morning. There wasn't a plane till 13:20 Leipzig time. Then -' 'What medical attention?' He turned to look at me, and the oblique light shadowed the scar that ran from one ear along the jawline. A lot of them look a bit creased in one way or another when they've come in from the field. 'Torn leg,' I said. 'Is that all?' 'And screw you too.' He laughed without any sound at all, laying his head back and giving a little shake. 'As long as you're fit for work.' 'I'm as fit as I'll ever be. Where the hell is Bracken?' He began watching the intersection again. Through a gap in the buildings I could see a curve of floodlit gold, one of the domes of the Kremlin. 'It's difficult,' he said in that soft-slipper voice of his. 'Since the trial started we can't make a move without drawing a tag. There's a lot of foreign journalists in town and the K don't like it.' 'How did Bracken get in?' 'Diplomatic cover. It was last-minute stuff: they had to fake a case of hepatitis in the Embassy and send a man home, with Bracken to replace him.' My nerves reacted again, shrinking the scalp. Most of the field directors come in like that, but not so fast: London would prepare the ground a month ahead to avoid any fuss. But this wasn't a planned operation; it was a last-ditch emergency job, and the man they'd thrown me as director in the field was trying to shake off the ticks before he got close to me and blew me sky-high at the first rendezvous. I began taking slow breaths, working on the nerves.