Moskwicz.
Its number was half covered in slush but there was a small triangular dent on the rear wing and that was good enough. It went past at the same pace as the traffic; it wasn’t observing me: it was standing by in case I decided to find a taxi or get on a bus. If that happened they -
Ferris had gone.
I kept walking.
Clothing store. Warehouse. Three unidentified offices in a row. Bus station.
The Inter-Kazakh State Lines, a vast roofed area with water puddling below the mud flaps of three long-distance buses that had just come in, one of them still discharging passengers in the blue-grey artificial light. No sign of Ferris: he was too good for that.
I walked steadily for three blocks and checked everything twice: every doorway, every parked vehicle, every wall, basement and side entrance to every building, and drew blank all the time. I didn’t want to alter the basic pattern but the time factor was now taking over: Ferris couldn’t wait for me indefinitely at the bus station and I had to get back there and locate him as soon as I could. His own timing might be criticaclass="underline" he was in this city to rendezvous with the executive but there could be other things he had to do here, involving Chechevitsin or a mobile Bureau cell or Kirinski himself through any one of a dozen Central Asian channels. I didn’t know the background and I wasn’t going to assume anything at this stage. The one thing I had to do was to get back to that bus station and if I couldn’t find a chance then I’d have to make one and risk blowing Slingshot.
This was normal. In any given mission you’re operating right on the very edge.
Three doorways, two deep, one shallow. A line of Red Army vehicles, one of them an armoured car with a gunner perched on the roof struggling with the antenna. I stopped and called up to him.
“Comrade! Is this the way to Central Station?”
He looked down, his eyes dark with frustration: it looked as if they’d hit the antenna on something hard enough to bend it at the base, and his hands were too cold to straighten it. “Where?”
“The station. The main station.”
“Straight on.”
I nodded and walked away, checking my watch and looking around for a taxi. The station was three miles from here and the first of the street lights were coming on and it was logical for me to hurry. They knew I’d abandoned the Trabant because of me windscreen and the railway station was a plausible destination and in any case they wouldn’t question it because they would go wherever I took them.
The nearest tag would now be questioning the soldier: what had I asked him, so forth. I’d done it to reassure them, and if I’d only succeeded by one degree my chances were by that one degree improved.
Doors, windows, railings, a parked truck, blank, drawing blank.
Three blocks and I was walking through the night, with the streetlamps taking over the evening sky. Three taxis had gone past and I’d tried to stop them because sharing was an established custom but they were obviously full.
Moskwicz.
This time it turned at one of the prescribed U-junctions and went back the other way, a blurred face checking me before it turned right and began working its way back to Lenin Prospekt.
One of the tags was quite close behind me: I’d seen his reflection twice in the past few minutes. The light was less reliable now and they were tightening their distances. I was getting a better look at them now because whenever I heard a car I turned round to see if it was a taxi and they knew what I was doing because I’d shown them.
Two more went past but I got the third and it was empty.
“Where to?”
“Central Station.”
One of them had broken into a short run but the Moskwicz had made its circuit and come back into the Prospekt and he left it for them to take up the tag in its mobile phase and we moved off with the black saloon a reasonable distance behind and with one small Syrena between us.
It was no use relying on the traffic lights: the Moskwicz would cross on the red if it had to, even in snow conditions. Unless I did something to change the pattern we’d head slowly for the station and with every yard we’d be heading away from the bus depot where Ferris was waiting and I couldn’t let it go on for too long because the Moskwicz had a radio and they’d bring in mobile support: they’d have to.
I didn’t want to wait for them to do that.
“Are we going to get more snow?” I asked the driver.
“What was that, comrade?”
There was a glass division, grimed and cracked and repaired with adhesive tape, and he cocked his head towards the opening.
“Is there more snow on the way?”
“It says so, on the radio. From the south-west. But I can tell you, we don’t need it!”
Checking, checking. Blank.
Of course if you wait for a chance you may never get it but if you decide to make one for yourself you can often use the environment even if it presents only one positive feature. The alley was on the right as he braked for the lights and when I looked round I saw there was still another car between the taxi and the Moskwicz so I waited another two seconds for the speed to go down to a crawl and then I hit the door open and got out and swung it shut and the driver didn’t start shouting before I was across the pavement and into the alley, running some of the way and sliding the rest. A flare of headlights came and my own shadow flew ahead of me: they’d slung the Moskwicz across the pavement and lit up the scene and I heard a door snap open and then another one and there were three shadows now, two of them enormous and flitting like giant bats across the face of the building as I got half-way and tripped on something frozen under the snow and went headlong, sliding head-first and hitting the wall with my hands and bouncing away, get up, sliding across to the other side while the bats hovered in the dazzle of the lamps and I hit out with one hand to stop the momentum, get upthey’re coming, another door banging and a shadow bigger than the others and the sound of running feet.
Got up and got going and found sand near the end of the alley but the shadows were smaller now and therefore closer and I knew I’d blown it because the terrain was the biggest hazard and there wasn’t anything I could do about it, their footsteps very close in the confines, thudding behind me, no go, it was no go.
Ferris. They didn’t get Ferris. I’d kept him clean.
Feet flying and the street empty when I got to the corner and turned to the right, slithering and fetching up against a lamp standard and using it to change direction, empty except for a car moving towards the intersection and a bus starting off within a few yards of the alley, its doors shut against the cold and its windows steaming and not a hope in hell of jumping on, but the rear wheels were spinning on the snow in spite of the chains and I let my own momentum take me across the kerb and then I had to be careful because if I got it wrong it was going to be nasty: the rear end of the bus was sliding into the gutter and the wheels were churning for grip in the piled snow and I had to throw myself flat on my back and kick at the kerb and slide underneath the thing before it got under way, hooking my hands upwards and hitting the muffler and burning them, hooking again and finding a strut running sideways across the chassis, a strut and a brake rod that flexed under my weight but held me until I could find a purchase on one of the cross-members, my feet dragging now as the wheels got a grip and the bus moved faster, swinging out from the kerb and getting into second gear and accelerating again, the heat of the exhaust pipe against my face and its sound throbbing, beginning to deafen me.
I didn’t know what the chances were: either they’d seen me or they hadn’t. They might have shouted to the driver but I wouldn’t have heard them because of the exhaust and the driver wouldn’t have heard them because the doors were shut and his window would be up; in any case it was academic: if they’d seen me they’d go back to the Moskwicz and head off the bus and I couldn’t drop off now because I could hear traffic coming up from the rear and it sounded like a truck or an army transport with heavy-duty tyres and no chains, keeping pace and sending a flush of light reflecting upwards from the snow against the mud caked chassis just above my head.