Opening paragraphs.................

The Russian colonel stepped out of the shadows slowly and carefully, even though he had seen and recognized the signal.  All meetings with his British controller were dangerous and had to be avoided if possible.  But this one he had asked for himself.  He had things to say, to demand, that could not be put in a message in a dead-letter box.  A loose sheet of metal on the roof of a shed down the railway line flapped and creaked in a puff of predawn May wind of that year, 1983.  He turned, established the source of the noise, and stared again at the patch of darkness near the locomotive turntable.


-Frederick Forsyth,  The Deceiver