I still can't believe you managed it, she'd said in her postcard. It means so much to me. Because when she'd gone through that doorway she was certain I was up for a life term in Siberia and so was I. But on the way to the railhead at Vaznesenkoe one of the guards had wrenched his ankle in a hole under the snow and there'd been a chance and I'd taken it and the best they could do was a bullet in the shoulder and a bit of scalp ripped off before I'd got some trees behind me and found a refuge and lain on my back for three days under a snowdrift until they gave it up and left me for dead.
'My instructions,' the driver said, 'are to wait for you, within sight. Is that right?'
'Yes. How far is it now?'
'We're nearly there.'
'I could be quite a time. Did you bring anything to eat?'
'Got some sandwiches and a flask. They told me.'
I didn't know who he was. Certainly not embassy; he'd been in the field, it was written all over him. I'd been told to ask no questions on this trip, give no answers, except at the rendezvous itself.
A crack of light had come into the sky ahead of us, above a mass of dark trees that rose on one side of the road. The driver pulled onto a patch of rough ground and cut the engine.
'It's here?'
'Yes, sir.' He hit his seat-belt release and got a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and opened it out and showed it to me. 'Just up there, in the trees.'
I looked through the tinted window. He'd switched off his lights and I couldn't see a thing so I pressed the button and got the window down as far as I needed. Cold air came in against my eyes. I still couldn't see more than a dark mass of rising ground, heavily wooded, with no light, no signal from anywhere. It was very quiet.
'Is he coming down here?' He'll be at the rendezvous alone, Shepley had said.
'No, sir. You're to walk into the trees.' He folded the little map and put it away.
'We're seven minutes early.'
'Yes, sir.'
I suppose he meant yes, we were seven minutes early but that didn't have to stop me getting out and walking up there into the wood, better early than late, but then it wasn't his bloody neck. Shepley had spelt it all out, the strict protocol of a diplomatic exchange of courtesies, so forth, and they'd got a Red Army general under house arrest in London and the head of the Bureau — the head of the Bureau — wasn't likely to send one of his top executives straight into a trap, but the paperwork was over now and this was where the action was and I was sitting in a car at dawn on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain and I was expected to get out and walk into those trees and not question anything, doubt anything, but listen, I don't like trees, standing as these were, deep as black water, with somewhere inside them a KGB officer waiting for me.
Alone?
What could I do if they were setting me up again, the Bureau, just as they'd set me up before, that time with a bomb, this time with something much more subtle? What if they were using me as bait in some kind of diabolical trap that Shepley had rigged, throwing me to the dogs in the sacred cause of expedience?
Nothing.
I could do nothing.
I'd want your guarantee, I'd told him, that you wouldn't cut me down, whatever the pressure on you. He'd looked at his shoes. That would be difficult, he'd said.
I watched the clock on the facia glowing, digital, marking off the last minutes of the night. Listen, suppose they'd set up this rendezvous to send me straight into a -
But this was nonsense because Shepley wouldn't have come out here personally just to kill off a bloody ferret; it was paranoia, that was all, so I got out of the car six minutes early and slammed the door and stumbled through the low scattered bushes and then climbed, moving into the trees with my hands dug into my coat pockets and my breath clouding on the cold air and my eyes on the trees, on the gaps in the trees, my feet tripping sometimes in the undergrowth because it was still too dark to see much, my mind confident on a conscious level that all was well, that Shepley was playing it straight this time, while in the subconscious my shadow creature came with me, shaking like a leaf.
Rough ground, difficult ground and the smell of damp earth after rain, the crack of dawn in the east casting yellow light among the trees and giving them substance, defining them, beginning to throw shadows as fine as grey gossamer and sending ghost figures moving through them, one of them halting and standing perfectly still.
'Good morning.'
Yasolev.
I stopped dead and he came towards me, a short man in a black overcoat and hat, his face pale, jaundiced with the creeping yellow light of the morning, his small eyes resting on mine with a steadiness that I believed was costing him an effort.
He was offering his hand. It was cold, dry, impersonal; he took it away too soon. He'd spoken in English; I spoke in Russian; from his thick accent I decided we were going to speak in his tongue, not mine, because I was fluent and I didn't want any misunderstandings.
'How are you, Yasolev?'
He inclined his head. It was rounded, balanced on his thick neck like a boulder; it looked heavy, like his body. But this was deceptive — I knew that his brain was capable of cool, incisive thought, accurate and assertive and uncluttered by emotion. He'd come up from the ranks and survived in an organisation that didn't suffer fools gladly.
'I am — ' in English, then a shrug as he slipped into the comfort of his own language '- I am well. And pleased you have come. I was not, as you can imagine, at all certain of it.'
He turned and led me to a clearing, and on our way I looked back down the hill and saw the two cars, the one that had brought me here and his own, half-hidden among the bushes and with two men standing by it. The light was brighter now, pouring below a ceiling of mist that hid the treetops, making it seem as if we'd wandered into a petrified forest.
'Not quite a banquet,' he said with a shrug, 'but — ' he left it. He'd draped a rough linen cloth across a tree stump and set out a couple of cardboard picnic plates and some canned caviar and what looked like a bowl of stuffed pirozhki. Two thick tumblers and a bottle of vodka: not a banquet, no, but a good enough effort, an acceptable gesture.
'Rather grand,' I said.
A deprecating tilt of his head. 'I chose this place for our meeting because I wanted you to be sure there weren't any little beetles around.'
He meant bugs; a joke, I supposed. There was a faint smell of tobacco smoke on the air, but I couldn't see any butt he might have thrown down. The trees were thick here; you couldn't see more than thirty yards.
'Civil of you,' I said.
'Of course — ' one of his little shrugs '- I could be wired. Do you wish to search me?'
This was major, a major point in our relationship, if there were going to be one, in the whole mission, if there were going to be a mission. I didn't answer right away because I wanted him to think I needed time. Then I said, 'I believe we're here on terms of mutual trust.'
He nodded gravely. 'Yes.'
'Then I don't want to search you.'
He opened his hands. He was busy with small gestures, Yasolev, and this one meant, I think, that I could indeed trust him, his hands being open, empty, with nothing to hide.
We ate some caviar on strips of thin dark bread, and he offered me some vodka but I said it was too early in the day; he drank some, almost half-filling a tumbler. The mist was slowly lightening above our heads, and somewhere a bird had started piping.
'And how is Margaret?' he asked.