I jerked a hand. Just get going.

The voices outside the car had stopped, and we moved on again, this time accelerating through barriers.

'Is that it?'

'Yes, sir.'

I looked at the clock on the facia. An hour, maybe a bit more, would bring us to the rendezvous just before dawn.

She lurched to the door of the hut, her legs cramped from the long night, the long waiting, and when she'd gone I asked the guard in Russian, On whose orders?

Comrade Colonel Yasolev's.

I put away the sunglasses, and the environment took on brightness, colour: a steady 3,500 rpm on the revolution-counter, the star mascot outlined against the wash of the headlights, a signpost sliding by: Bernau 22km, Eberswalde 47km.

He'd known, of course, Comrade Colonel Yasolev, that it wouldn't have been worth putting her under the light, wearing her down, she knew almost nothing; she'd been a contact for the frontier line pulled in at the last minute to cover a gap in communications; she hadn't even been briefed, just told to get there and wait for instructions. She'd only made contact with me as a matter of routine to establish liaison, and that was when they'd caught us, holed up under the floorboards of a rotting wharf with our hands and faces darkened with some soot I'd scraped from a boiler and one of her feet shoeless, which was how they'd got on to us: the other shoe had come off when she'd run headlong for cover.

And what would have been the point, anyway, in their putting her on trial and sending her to a penal settlement? Another mouth to feed, however many mailbags she sewed, however much wood she hauled. But that wasn't why he'd let her go. It had been a, gesture. I'd got to know Comrade Colonel Yasolev quite well during the three weeks of the mission and I'd picked up a few things about him from the KGB lieutenant I'd pinned down and grilled in a cellar in Klimovsk: Yasolev was the son of a Soviet Army general, and a graduate of the Moscow State University with a degree in Japanese and some post-graduate work put in at the Institute of Oriental Studies.