Run Around by Brian Freemantle

comfortable they felt as he started jogging towards the park, breathing easily, arms pumping steadily as he moved: personal fitness is naturally a priority for Balashikha graduates and Zenin had always enjoyed running. It was the exercise sessions there and the lectured awareness of the popularity of jogging in the West that had given him the idea in the first place.
    Zenin paced into the park near the top of the hill from which it gets its name, picking up the perimeter path furthest away from where the drop should have been made, wanting before he ventured anywhere near the marked place to make a far more thorough reconnaissance than he had on the previous occasion. There were actually three other joggers plodding around the lanes like he was, in shorts and singlet, and one was even wearing a Walkman. Zenin smiled, humming in time to the concerto, concentrating beyond them. It was emptier than he had expected from his earlier visit: a few people exercising their dogs, one or two sitting on benches and a couple lying prostrate upon the grass practically having sexual intercourse. Maybe, he thought, it heightened the pleasure to fuck in public. He turned left where the path veered to go parallel with Albert Terrace and past the sign from which he had learned bicycling was forbidden, finally with a frontal view, although slightly to his left, of the post and the bin. There was a man sitting on a bench about twenty feet away from the drop and a woman with a labrador actually at the spot: as he looked the animal cocked its leg against the lamp and Zenin’s face twisted in disgust at the thought that it might be fouling what he had to collect.
    Johnson’s concentration was entirely upon the dead-letter box and it was Zenin’s snatching down immediately after the dog had urinated there – an unthinkable action because the man would have seen the animal do it – that alerted the Watcher. He hadn’t thought the pick-up would be made by a jogger and had let Zenin merge into the background of his consciousness as the Russian went by. Johnson grabbed the camera from its concealment beneath his jacket and managed three panicked exposures and then a more sharply focused shot of Zenin spurting away before getting up himself, stumbling in pursuit. Zenin left the park through the same exit Koretsky had used, running hard now up Primrose Hill Road.
    Johnson hurried as fast as he considered he was safely able, slowing twice at Zenin’s obvious backward checks, gasping because of his weak chest by the time he got to the top of the hill. He did so just in time to see Zenin mount the bicycle in Elsworthy Road, jerking the camera up for one last attempt.
    â€˜Fuck it!’ said Johnson. He’d known it was going to go badly like this: just known it! ‘Oh fuck it!’ he said again.
    Elsworthy Road is a twisting, winding thoroughfare, so by the time Johnson reached it his quarry was completely out of sight. Expert that he was, the Watcher walked its entire length, wet with the perspiration of effort and annoyance by the time he reached the junction with Avenue Road. He saw the traffic jam backed up for several hundred yards and shook his head, in bitter awareness: the fact that he had been out-professionalized by a professional did bugger all to help.
    A combination of normal bureaucratic delay and top level irritation – and therefore face-satisfying obstructiveness – at what MI5 considered arrogant and high-handed surveillance demands meant it was the following day before Charlie Muffin received Johnson’s report and the developed photographs. It took him only an hour to arrange the meeting with the about-to-retire Watcher.
    â€˜I made a balls of it, Charlie. You don’t know how sorry I am,’ said Johnson, after they’d talked through in every way possible what had happened. They’d worked together before, always well. Knowing it was Charlie’s operation – which he