I put a few questions and got the answers and shut down the signal and left the scrambler on. Turner was sunk into himself and I couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't sound like a trumped-up sop to his misery, so I just told him I was using the Honda and his people could pick it up at the airport, keys in the usual place. Then I shut the door quietly.

By 1:30 in the morning I was in Moscow.

There was a girl in a navy blue windcheater and fur gloves and zippered ski boots in the transport area and I went through one of the doors and walked with a slight limp as far as the comer of the terminal building and she caught up with me there and gave me Meridian in a soft clear voice and said her name was Mitchell.

'Viktor Shokin,' I said, and we got into a dirty brown Trabant and drove through the deserted streets under light flurries of snow.

'There's been a change of plan,' the girl said, taking a fur glove off the wheel and wiping her nose on it. 'They decided they didn't want you seen going into the embassy.' She had a small pale face with intent and intelligent blue eyes; sometimes I thought her teeth were chattering — there was no heating in the Trabant and the snowflakes weren't melting on the windscreen, just clogging the wiper blades. She stopped twice on our way through the city and I got out and unstuck them and scraped the glass a bit clearer with the edge of a notebook she had in the glove pocket.

She drove me to a decrepit three-storey building in Basovskaja ulica and parked the car on a patch of waste ground, burying its nose under a hedge and bringing a small snowstorm down from the leaves — 'It helps keep the engine warm.' She took me into the building and up two flights of rickety stairs under the light of a naked bulb hanging from the floor above. The reek of cooked cabbage was sharp enough to clear the sinuses. "They wanted to put me into one of those ghastly rectangular brown-brick workers' complexes, a bit nearer the embassy, but I said I'd prefer a bit of old-world charm, thank you, even if it was falling apart at the seams.'