19 CHRISTMAS.

Night and silence.

I stood in shadow, smelling the river smell.

Ice drifted on the water, breaking away upstream and floating down through the channels gouged by tugs and dredgers and coasters big enough to make headway. The ice made soft xylophone music as the floes touched and bumped together.

I had left the Skoda half a mile away, buried under an iron roof that had slid at an angle when the walls of a shed had collapsed some time ago, perhaps under the weight of snow, to lie like a broken box in the thickets of weeds. It was almost invisible, the Skoda, but I had no illusions. That was a hot car. It had been under extensive surveillance ever since Roach had blown his cover and got into it and picked up a tracker without knowing it. I'm not blaming him. Support people don't get the training they give the shadow executives at the Bureau, though some of them apply for the higher echelons and graduate.

Dark shapes moved as I watched: a small high -- decked freighter with coal smoke curling behind it on the motionless air, to lie in skeins along the water; a truck on the far bank, sliding among the wharves, its diesel rattling. Nearer to where I stood, nothing moved, but I had no illusions about that either. Watchers keep still. The motor -- vessel Natasha lay in her berth some sixty or seventy yards distant from the stack of rusted freight containers that I was using for cover. I needed to know if the Natasha were being watched.

The sensible thing to have done would have been to phone Ferris and ask him to send someone out with another car, leave the Skoda back there in the side street and take over whatever they brought me. But the time for doing the sensible thing had run out now because Meridian was compromised, and the new car they brought me could be hot too, the subject of undetected surveillance. I would think that Yermakov had been the only man tracking the Skoda, and that it was therefore safe to use for the moment. It was still hot, because it could be recognized later, but it could only be by chance, and that chance I was ready to take.

That was his name: Dmitri Alexandrovich Yermakov. His wallet was still in my pocket. I didn't think he'd been the rogue agent loose in the field. The surveillance of the Skoda had been the work of a cell, at least of a cell, possibly of an organization. It had needed at least two peeps to maintain the operation, because that car had been watched for more than twelve hours, from the time when Roach had picked it up to the time when I'd driven it away from the patch of waste ground at two minutes past eight tonight. A rogue agent would work alone; it is their nature.

A night bird screeched and a ring of light flashed inside my skull and died out like a firework. I'd seen cormorants, earlier, wheeling under the lights of a warehouse crane. I had been here for twenty minutes and hadn't moved; I too was a watcher, and kept still. There are good and bad among the ranks of the peeps; some can stay silent for hours on end, moving only by indiscernible degrees when they have to, flexing the leg muscles to keep the blood flowing and the brain supplied, turning their heads as slowly as the hands of a clock, sweeping the environment continuously. Others, less professionally trained, can't go for long without needing to release tension, and they'll shift their feet or yawn or cough or even stretch their arms, and they're blown.

Night and silence, who is here?

A rat ran squealing in the shadows and the light flashed again behind my eyes. It didn't worry me: it was reaction, that was all. I hadn't expected to get out of that place, out of Militia Headquarters, but I was only aware of that now: the heat was off and the blood was cooling, and looking back at the whole enterprise it seemed as if I must have been clean out of my gourd to have taken a risk that size.

I told you. I said you'd gone mad, but you wouldn't listen.

Nor will I ever, you little shit. You can get away with things in hot blood that'd never work if you thought about them. Ask any tightrope walker -- they never look down.

The broken ice rang like a peal of bells in the distance as a tug moved upstream, towing a barge, blacking out the lamps along the far shore and then relighting them. But nothing was moving, had moved, closer than that. I believed the Natasha was clear, and I broke cover and walked across the snow -- covered boards of the quay. The gangplank had been cleared by whatever support man had brought the provisions here for me, and he hadn't found it an easy choice: to leave evidence that the hulk was in some kind of use, or to leave me to make footprints on the snow and testify to the very same thing.

I dropped onto the deck and stood there, watching and listening again. The cabin had been wrecked and there was no door, just a hole through smashed timbers; I would have thought a crane had toppled or the boom had run its brake discs, coming down on the cabin. Snow had drifted inside the wreckage, its minuscule facets diamond -- blue under the light of the moon.

Something splashed into the water and I swung my head and saw ripples crossing the surface some distance away, near the third vessel downriver, a sailing boat with the mast lying like a dead tree across the quayside. Yellow light came from its dark hulk, burning steadily, and I turned my head away. Watchers do not burn lamps to mark their presence, nor throw garbage out.

The support man had dropped a rope mat over the snow where the lower part of the steps was still solid, and I went down into the smell of rotting timber and rope and lamp -- oil, ducking my head under abeam and seeing the glow of a night -- light showing the way to the stairs down to the lower berths. I stood listening again, hearing nothing but the slap of water against the vessel's beam. The light grew stronger as I went below: there was a brass hurricane lamp burning with a good flame on the table of the main cabin below deck, with supplies stacked around it: black bread, cheeses, canned milk, dried fruit, half a dozen military -- issue cans of self -- heating soup, a plum cake... and I felt a moment of warmth for Ferris: all he'd been able to scrounge in the way of a safe -- house for me was a rotting hulk among the ice floes, but he'd told the support man to raid the black market for what he could find to make it look like Christmas, on this unholy night.

I could still taste that man's blood in my mouth and I got the little black iron kettle and filled it and put it onto the butane stove for warm water to wash with and brush my teeth, we are not here to stint ourselves, my good friend, it's Christmas, remember, and have you ever tried to clean your teeth by biting on bloody icicles?

9:15 on my watch and I did only the necessary, getting out of the uniform and putting on warm sweaters and sheepskin boots. There were no rats here but they wouldn't be long in coming once they caught the scent of human habitation; I stowed all the vulnerable food packages in the cupboard with the torn poster on the door, girl in a fur hat and slacks and fur boots to the knee, I think it says a lot for a country where the women can look sexy in the depth of winter without a single bikini in sight.

I turned down the wick of the lamp and looked around for a bit of rope and took the militia uniform and boots on deck, burying the standard -- issue Malysh 'Little Boy' automatic pistol inside the clothes and weighting the whole bundle with a rock I'd marked down when I'd crossed from the Skoda to the ship. Then I crouched at the quayside watching the bubbles break surface under the light of the moon.

At 9:461 signalled Ferris.

'Location?'

'The Harbour Light.'

I'd taken fifteen minutes to check the environment when I'd arrived here, but it was simply an exercise in security: any danger would come from inside the bar.

'Have you met Rusakov?' Ferris asked me.

'Not yet. I've just got here.' then I said,' there's a man gone. Dmitri Alexandrovich Yermakov. He was tracking me.' I told him what had happened. 'He's down as a pipe -- fitter on his papers. He couldn't have been operating solo. I'd say he was in the Podpolia. 'Two men came from the quay, hands buried in the pockets of their padded coats, boots clumping across the snow. 'I'm surprised you're still there,' I told Ferris.

'I'm taking all precautions.'

The two men hit the door of the bar open and bundled in. This phone booth was outside, at the end of the wall where the door was. There weren't any windows on this side.

Taking all precautions, well, all right, but God knew where Roach had picked up that tracker -- it could have been outside the Hotel Karasevo, where Ferris was. I didn't want him blown from under me.

'We lost Roach,' I heard him saying.

Merde.

'I thought we might have,' I said.

'They trapped him and there was a shoot -- out.'

Those shifting eyes, yes, and the nervous fingers, trigger -- sensitive. We don't often get a shoot -- out because weaponry isn't normally part of our stock -- in -- trade; we prefer silence and shadow, the soft -- shoe retreat. But Roach would have carried a gun, yes, I could believe that, had spent his life looking over his shoulder, had found sleep difficult, until now.

'As long as you think you're safe there,' I told Ferris, meaning for Christ's sake don't blow the nerve -- centre for Meridian and wishing instantly I hadn't said it, because when the executive starts worrying about the safety of his director in the field it can only mean he's starting to feel mission -- pressure.

'Relax,' Ferris said quietly on the line.

'Did I say something?'

'Not really.'

Someone had used his finger across the grime on the glass panel of the booth, Fuck Yeltsin, 'Many kind thanks,' I said to Ferris, 'for the plum cake.'

'Nothing too good.'

I made the effort and asked, 'Where is Tanya Rusakova?' It had taken an effort because I was worried about her too, didn't want to hear him say we'd lost her again.

Relax, yes.

'I've put her in a room on the same floor here, only three doors along, two people on watch. 'He'd heard the effort I'd had to make.

He hears everything, Ferris, if the line's good enough; he can hear you taking too deep a breath to quiet the nerves; he can hear goose flesh rising under your sleeve.

'I need to talk to her,' I told him.

'I know. She's waiting here now.'

He'd known I'd have to debrief Tanya before I talked to her brother, to find out what she'd said in Militia Headquarters, what his situation was now, and Ferris had brought her into his room to wait for my call, saving a few minutes' delay as I stood here in a telephone booth with glass panels and no identification papers on me that I could show anyone, now that is direction in the field.

'Hello?'

Her voice soft, her green eyes shimmering behind the notice that said you didn't have to put coins into the receptacle when summoning the fire brigade, ambulance or militia.

'Are you comfortable?'