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kerb.
    It was probably the fresh fall of snow which caused it to happen. The leather-jacketed youth must have been frozen and the snow broke up the argument. He climbed in behind the wheel of his car and the red-haired girl got into the front passenger seat beside him. The youth switched on the ig nition, gunned the motor, pulled away from the kerb with an exhaust burst like a bomb detonating, accelerated, then remembered to switch on his lights.
    Even then Winthrop might have jumped clear had he been faking the limp, but the car was screaming towards him as the lights flashed on, blinding him. In the headlight glare Winthrop's limping figure hurtled towards the car, filled the windscreen, then the radiator lifted him and hurled him a dozen yards. He crashed down on the kerb with the impact of a man falling from a great height. He was dead before the car swept away round a corner as a woman on the sidewalk began screaming.
    A hundred yards further down Nevsky Prospekt the sea man, Gorov, had stopped to cross the avenue. He saw Winthrop limping over the highway, saw the car strike him, saw the body curving through the air before it dropped and he knew that the American was dead. He crossed the avenue and went on towards the docks where the trawler Girolog was waiting to depart in three hours.
    Gorov walked like a man in a dream, hardly able to grasp what had just happened. It was a total disaster: the message would never get through to Washington and now there was no way of warning his brother. Michael would start out across the ice and the Americans wouldn't know he was coming. Crushed, Gorov walked on through the snow, his feet leading him along the familiar route. God, what could he do?

    Saturday, 19 February

    It was eight o'clock on Saturday morning inside the Lenin grad headquarters of the Special Security Service.
    'This American, Winthrop, who was killed on the Nevsky yesterday - I smell something funny about him ...'
    The Locomotive - this was the nickname they used in Leningrad for Colonel Igor Papanin, chief of Special Security for the Arctic Military Zone. The dictionary definition of the word is'... having power... not stationary ... constantly travelling ...' It is as good a description as any of Col Papanin. For many the word suggests a huge engine dragging hundreds of people behind it at speed - and this also is a good description of the Siberian.
    'Get me a full report, Kramer! Bring in that damned Intourist nursemaid, Vollin, or whatever her name is! Bring in the policeman who saw it happen. Find any other witnesses and parade them here by noon. I'll question them myself!'
    Strictly speaking, the headquarters of the Special Security Service for the Arctic should have been at the port of Murmansk, but when Leonid Brezhnev, First Secretary, appointed Papanin to the post he ordered that the head quarters must be in Leningrad. And this was a matter of power, too.
    Like Hamburg in Germany, like Quebec in Canada, Leningrad is a maverick city. It was in Leningrad that Communism was born when the cruiser Aurora fired the gun which signalled revolution. It was to Leningrad that Stalin, fearing the city's independence, sent his most trusted op pressor, Kirov - and Kirov died from an assassin's bullet. So Brezhnev sent Papanin to Leningrad.
    'And, Kramer, contact the airport where Winthrop came in. They will have made a note of this man's arrival. Did he come in alone - that's what I want to know. By noon!'
    Unlike Kirov, the bloody-minded citizens of Leningrad didn't try to shoot Papanin - they nicknamed him the Locomotive instead. A familiar figure striding down the Nevsky Prospekt, no Russian could miss him in the densest crowd - Papanin towered above the crowd. Six foot four tall, wide-shouldered, heavily-built, his large Siberian head was shaved almost bald and he had a mouth as wide as a carp's. And when he raised his drill-sergeant's voice they swore you could hear him in Murmansk.
    'Get down to police