'We nearly missed each other. They had to get back to me through Interpol.' It was a reprimand. 'Where's Shapiro?' I asked him. He didn't answer for a moment. There was a lot of noise from a bunch of people over by the doors, and Croder gazed at them steadily. 'East Germans,' he said. 'They were going into Schoenefeld but an engine was out, so they came into Tempelhof instead.' His small teeth made a token smile. 'Half of them are demanding asylum. Wouldn't you? We don't know where Shapiro is,' he said without looking away from the group. 'His cover name is Schrenk. Forget Shapiro. Schrenk.' He spelt it for me. 'He was in Moscow for two months, working very well, then they uncovered him and put him through interrogation in Lubyanka. Then he escaped.' For the first time he turned and looked at me with his black contemplative eyes and I thought, Christ Almighty, only Shapiro could have got out of Lubyanka by the midnight express. Only Schrenk. 'He got as far as West Germany,' Croder said, 'and we had him put straight into a clinic. I don't think he would have made it as far as London - he was in a pretty bad way.' 'Were you running him?' I didn't think he'd answer that. He looked back at the group of East Germans. 'It doesn't matter who was running him. He was in the clinic for nearly three months, and recovering steadily. They were going to discharge him before long, as soon as he was fit enough to stand up to debriefing. But the K got him again, and one report says he's back in Lubyanka.' There was a chill coming into the air; I felt it against my skin: possibly the sweat was starting to creep, setting up refrigeration. I have never been inside Lubyanka, but I've talked to people who have. There aren't many of them at liberty. North had got back from there, the night he blew his brains out at Connie's place. Croder was gazing across the hall in silence, and I asked him: 'What's our timing on this?' 'There's a flight for Hanover in forty minutes, and there's a seat booked for you.' 'In case I want one.' He ignored that. 'Schrenk carried a capsule. It was part of the contract, on that particular mission. Obviously he didn't use it.' He turned away from the group of people and stood facing me, hunched into his big coat and saying with muted force: 'He would have saved us an immense amount of trouble if he had used it. An immense amount of trouble.' He waited for the message to sink in. 'Because what we have on our hands now is a potential disaster - unless we can somehow prevent it. Schrenk prided himself on his ability to survive the most gruelling interrogation by the use of practised and convincing disinformation; he had three or four different scenarios worked out and he rehearsed them every day of his life, in series. We know that. We had him tested at Norfolk, a year ago, and even hypnosis couldn't break him down, because he'd used autohypnosis himself, to move his scenarios down into the subconscious. That is the kind of man he is.' The heavy lids were lowered for a moment. 'But Norfolk isn't Lubyanka. We do not know, you see, how bad the position is, because we don't know how much he gave away.' He withdrew into himself again, staring at nothing, or maybe at Schrenk's insubstantial image, lost somewhere in the wastes of Soviet Russia. The sleet outside was turning to water on the window, and the light from the tall gooseneck lamps threw its translucent delineations against his face, so that his skin crept with rivulets. 'What has he got,' I asked him, 'to give away?' 'I'm sorry?' He swung to look at me. 'You said you don't know how much he gave away. You mean something specific?' His sharp teeth bit at the air again. 'Yes. The Leningrad cell.' Mother of God. This was why Norton had been showing his nerves today, and why Tilson had looked scared behind the eyes. The Leningrad cell had taken eleven years to build up, and once established and running it had given us the Sholokof Project and the submarine dispersal pattern and the tactical analysis for the buried- weapons system for transmission to NATO and the CIA, plus satellite scanning, plus laser progress in the military-application laboratories, plus the whole of the missile-testing programme including the ultra- classified global-range ICBMs from X-9 to the city-heat guidance Marathon 1000. That was the Leningrad cell. 'But he couldn't have known,' I said hopelessly, 'much about it: