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tail - its distance, or persistence. He knew they would stay with him, and that some kind of general alert would go out the moment they lost him, and he would be hunted. Which was precisely what he did not want. These men had to stay close to him.
    Hence, he spent some time looking at the fashion displays, the often inadequate replicas of Western fashions that GUM offered, the grey monster that was the largest department store in the world, before he passed out of Red Square, again taking his time, strolling, staring across the windy space at the towers of the Kremlin.
    By the time he reached the Moskva river, and the Moskvoretski Bridge, he was thoroughly cold. His hat was jammed on his head, and his hands thrust in his pockets. He did not appear to be a man going anywhere in particular, but he could no longer be taken for a sightseer, enjoying Moscow by lamplight. The wind coming off the river seemed icy, and he now reluctantly held on to his hat, because it was a signpost, it informed the man tailing him where he was, even though he would have rather kept his numb, white hand in his overcoat pocket. He bent over the parapet of the road bridge, looking down into the black, lampflecked water, its surface rippled by the wind. Someone paused further back down the bridge, immediately highlighted by his lack of movement since all the other figures on the bridge moved swiftly, tugged and pushed by the wind. Gant smiled to himself.
    He turned his back to the river, and pulled his collar tight around his neck. Casually, he inspected the road across the bridge. The car had stopped, headlights switched off, seemingly empty, parked well away from the street lamps. And there was a second pedestrian, leaning with his back against the bridge, on the other side of the road, slightly ahead of him.
    Gant began to walk again. Despite what he had been told, despite the tail-spotting in which he had engaged in New York and Washington as part of his training under Buckholz, a small knot of tension had begun to form in his stomach. He did not know what would happen when he reached the Krasnoknlinski Bridge, downriver of where he was now, but he had been instructed not to lose his tail. Aubrey had made that clear in the smoke-filled room of his hotel in London the previous night. The KGB was to be kept with him.
    As he crossed the Drainage Canal that ran beside the Moskva and turned onto the Ozerkovskaia Quay, descending a flight of stone steps down to the embankment, he wanted to stop and be violently sick. He realised that the artificial calm he had felt until that moment had deserted him finally. He could no longer pretend to himself that this was only a tiresome preliminary, to be gone through before he came face-to-face with his part in the total proceedings. This was real.
    The cold and the wind had now been abated slightly by the level of the bridge; the men on his tail - he could hear them now, footsteps softly clattering, unhurried and assured, down the flight of steps to the embankment, forty or so yards behind him. He was frightened. One hand came out of his pocket and he gripped his coat where it sat across his stomach, twisting the material in his hand.
    He wondered about the car and its occupants. He could not turn round now, to count heads. He knew, with a sickening certainty, that there were three, perhaps four men behind him now, and that the car would be driving along the Ozerkovskaia Quay above him, waiting for him to regain the street.
    He passed the Oustinski Bridge, and glanced at his watch. Ten-twenty. It would take him no more than another ten minutes to reach the next bridge, where he was to make his rendezvous with … with whom? In the shadow of the bridge there was a strange silence.
    The Sadovisheskaya Embankment, where he stood, was empty except for one or two couples strolling towards him, arm-in-arm, idling by the canal as if miles from the centre of the city.
    He breathed deeply three or four times, in the way he