We got into a battered black Audi outside the terminal and the chains began beating a tattoo as we moved off through the rutted ice of the street.

'Ex-Navy?' I asked Legge.

He didn't look at me. 'Crystal ball?'

Sometimes a man's walk can tell you more than his eyes, that was all, especially if he doesn't know you're watching him. After a couple of miles I took another look at the far right top corner of the outside mirror on the passenger's side and saw the dark grey Volga was still there, keeping station two cars behind.

'That a tail?'

Legge didn't glance up at his mirror. 'No. Escort.' He lost the rear end for a moment and let the curb kick him back straight, the chains jingling across the ice.

'And the man in front?' The Land-Rover had pulled out ahead of us from the terminal and was still there, in front of a Mercedes.

'Escort.'

The rear end thing had shifted my weight and I snapped the seat-belt tighter. Two escorts, call it a bloody motorcade; it worried me. All Hagen had told me over the phone at three o'clock in Paris this morning was that I had to make Aeroflot Flight 307 at 9:51 and that he'd have transport standing by for me and a man called Legge would meet me in the baggage claim at Sheremetyevo on arrival. I was on stand-by after two weeks' leave so I couldn't ask any immediate questions: they'd come later if I had any. But it didn't look like a mission per se: I would have been ordered to London first for briefing and clearance.

'Are we in a burned-out field?' I asked Legge. This was what worried me.