He was getting cold. He felt colder than even his London-hardened flesh was accustomed to. What was worse, he was beginning to think that the afternoon had been wasted. All he had heard since he tuned in to the bug was trivial chatter about sports, women, whip-cracking bosses, crowbars ripping up crates, and the comings and goings of people working on the TV facility. Not exactly the kind of surveillance that made the pulses race back at DI6.

He looked out across the river, then gazed back toward the Hermitage. The museum was striking, its dozens of white columns now ruddy with sunset and the ribbed dome gleaming. The tour buses were beginning to carry their groups away. The day shift started to leave. The night shift was just arriving. The local citizens who had spent their Sunday at the museum were filing out to meet trolleybuses or to take the fifteen-minute walk to the nearest Metro stop, the Nevsky Prospekt Station. Soon, like the streets themselves, even the great museum would be deserted.

Fields-Hutton hoped that Leon had been able to get him a hotel room: he was going to have to come back in the morning and continue his surveillance. He was convinced that if anything untoward was going on here, the TV studio was the place.

The Englishman decided to go back inside and stake out the room for a few minutes, to watch and see if someone other than the work crew used the room near closing time. Someone he might be able to describe to the photo division at DI6-- a military person in civvies, a government official, a foreign agent. What's more, there was always confusion and pressure in the days before and immediately after the start of any new operation. Moreover, a worker leaving the place might say or do something that would tell him what was really happening here.

Closing up his computer and rising on bones that an American agent once described as belonging to Arthur Fiedler-- he stood with a symphony of pops-- Fields-Hutton brushed off his pants and left the Walkinan on as he walked briskly toward the museum.

To the right, he saw a couple that had just left the museum strolling hand in hand along the river. He thought of Peggy, not of the first fateful walk they took, the one where she brought him into the spy business, but of the walk just five days before along the banks of the Thames. They had talked about marriage for the first time, and Peggy admitted that she was leaning toward it. Of course, Peggy had the constitution of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and it might take her an eternity to fall-- but he was willing to run the risk. She wasn't quite the demure creature he had always envisioned himself ending up with, but he enjoyed her pluck. She had the face of an angel. And, most important, she was well worth waiting for.