Kolymsky Heights

1

At ten to nine on a June morning, a shining and brilliant morning that promised a day of great heat, a lady of sixty-three cycled through the streets of Oxford.

She cycled slowly, corpulent and majestic as some former Queen of the Netherlands, sun hat bobbing, flowered dress billowing. Up and around churned the floral thighs until, turning into the High, they were arrested by a slowly changing traffic light. She swooped at once off her saddle and applied the brake — applied it a moment too late so that her broad-sandalled feet went pit-a-pat in small skittering hops as she wrestled with the machine.

Bad co-ordination. Oh, schrecklich, schrecklich. Everything today was frightful, not least her head. She took the opportunity to remove her hat and fan the head, also to pull at a clinging portion of skirt and shake that about too.

Her sister had advised her to stay in bed today. Out of the question. With retirement age three dangerous years behind her, she could not allow a cold in the head to keep her in bed. Her employer would not be staying in bed. And other people were after her job. Miss Sonntag’s colds did not, like other people’s, come in winter; hers came in summer, during heatwaves, with stupefying intensity. When the whole world was full of flowers and delight, she turned into an imbecile. She felt hot and cold by turn now, dazed, unnatural, a lump.

The lights changed and she ascended once more and pedalled regally on. In the city of bicycles there were not today many bicycles. The university was in its long vacation, but her professor was not yet on vacation. Until he went — which would not be before the River Spey showed more salmon — there would be no time off for her. Ach!

Brasenose passed, and Oriel and All Souls. She turned in at the close as the clocks all began chiming nine. The little forecourt was airless and deserted, no bicycles in the bicycle stand. She chained her own and went wearily inside. The caretaker had sorted the post and separated the professor’s with an elastic band. She took her hat off, and sneezed.

The air in her room was stale but chill. She tried to turn the air conditioner off but couldn’t, and opened the window instead. Then she switched the electric kettle on and looked for the post. She could not see any post. But she had somewhere seen some post. Her head was so thick she couldn’t remember where. In the hall, perhaps, where it had arrived? She went out and searched the hall. No post.

The kettle was whistling, so she went back in and made herself a cup of coffee and hung up her hat. Underneath the hat, on the chair, was the post. She gazed dully at it, and blew her nose. Then she drank some coffee and started work, and almost at once was interrupted by the telephone. She answered it, continuing to straighten out letters and toss the envelopes into the bin; and had completed them all before hanging Up. This was when she realised that something else was wrong with the post. There were six foreign envelopes. There were only five foreign letters.

She shuffled the letters blankly about, and then looked on the floor and in the bin. In the bin were the six foreign, envelopes, and ten British ones, all empty. She saw this was going to be a totally bad day. She also saw that her boss had arrived. His long stooping form had tramped past the glass panel of her door. She sat back on her heels and considered her sister’s advice. Then she pulled herself together and in an addled way began matching letters and envelopes to find out which was missing.

There were ten British envelopes and ten British letters; three American envelopes and three American letters; two German envelopes, two German letters; one Swedish envelope, no Swedish letter. She looked at this envelope again. It was a tatty one. The address was written on a slip of tissue paper and stuck on with Sellotape. Nothing was in it. After a while, unable to understand anything any more, she merely took everything in to the professor and told him they were a letter short.

The professor looked up at her, mystified.

‘A letter short, Miss Sonntag?’

This envelope has no letter.’

He had a look at the envelope.

‘Goteborg, Sverige,’ he said. ‘What is there at Goteborg, Sverige?’

‘The university, perhaps?’

‘With absent-minded professors, perhaps?’

This thought occurred to her just as he said it, and she cursed the cold in her head. At another time she would have had the thought first and left the envelope where it was (as, it was later thought, she had probably done at least once before). Thick-headedness had sent her hunting through the accursed bin.

Her head was no less thick but she said stolidly, ‘This does not seem to me a professor’s letter. I mean, naturally there is no letter, but —’

‘That’s all right, Miss Sonntag.’

The professor took his jacket off. His unusual head, large and knobbly and extending in various unexpected directions, was bald as an egg. It was glistening now. ‘It’s awfully hot in here,’ he said. ‘Is the air conditioning going?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Miss Sonntag sneezed defensively into a Kleenex. ‘It is keeping my cold going.’ She watched him wind his glasses round his ears and examine the envelope more closely.

The address was written in ballpoint in shaky block letters:

Professor Lazenby looked at the back of the envelope and then at the front again. Then he held it up to the light. It was a flimsy airmail envelope and he looked through it. Then he looked inside and after a moment withdrew a tiny strip of tissue paper partially stuck to the bottom.

‘Well! I did not see this,’ Miss Sonntag said.

‘Quite all right, Miss Sonntag.’

There was nothing on the paper. He upended the envelope and carefully tapped it.

‘You don’t think there was some powder in there and I have thrown it in the bin?’ Miss Sonntag said, alarmed.

‘We can go and look in the bin.’

‘Well, I will do it! Naturally. I am just so sorry. It has not occurred to me —’

They both went and looked in the bin. They removed the envelopes, carefully tapping each inside the bin. They removed all the envelopes, but there was no powder in the bin. There was just, at the bottom, another strip of tissue paper.

At that moment Miss Sonntag remembered that the phone had gone as she opened the first envelope, and that the first envelope had been the Swedish one, which naturally had been the first to go into the bin. She began explaining this to Lazenby but he only said, ‘Quite all right, Miss Sonntag,’ and they both went back to his glassed-in room off the main lab. A few graduate students were by this time at work in the lab; it was the department of microbiology.

Lazenby inserted himself into his chair and loosened his tie. Then he looked at the two bits of paper and smelt them. ‘These are cigarette papers,’ he said. He held one up to Miss Sonntag and looked at the envelope. ‘The address is also on a cigarette paper,’ he said.

‘Well! I don’t know about this. I don’t know what I am to do,’ Miss Sonntag said faintly. She couldn’t smell anything on the paper.

‘How about getting me a cup of coffee?’ Lazenby said. ‘Also … maybe … that fellow from Scientific Services. You’ve got his number.’ He was looking sideways along one of the papers. There was nothing on it but he had an idea something was in it. There was a suggestion of indentations on the surface.

‘Of course. At once, Professor. But I wish to say,’ Miss Sonntag said formally, ‘that without this cold in my head I could not have made this mistake. It is not something —’

‘What mistake? No mistake, Dora,’ the professor said kindly, and also accurately. ‘It was acute of you to spot this. Most thorough. I admire it.’

‘So? Ah. Thank you. Yes. Coffee,’ Miss Sonntag said, and fairly hurtled through to her own room, her cheeks pink. She couldn’t remember when he had last called her Dora. Her sense of smell had miraculously returned. She smelt flowers everywhere, also her own lavender water, and through the open window glorious Oxford, and beyond it the rest of this kindliest and most gentle of lands.

Miss Sonntag and her sister Sonya, some years older, had found a haven in England from Germany just before the war, ‘sponsored’ by a friend of their father’s, a fellow-doctor. The doctor had kept them with him in Oxford throughout the war and later taken an interest in their welfare. In Germany Sonya had had medical ambitions, and Dora academic ones — neither attainable for them in that land; and not easy in England either, since their education had been dislocated for years. In the end Sonya had gone into nursing, and Dora into the university’s administration, neither of them marrying, until Professor Lazenby had whisked Dora off to his own institute. That had been fifteen years ago and she had been with him ever since. Three sugars in his coffee. She spooned them in, still glowing at recollection of the tribute to her thoroughness. Then she recollected the other thing he wanted. The man from Scientific Services.

2

The man from Scientific Services was a former student of Lazenby’s who remembered him chiefly as rather a sketchy performer at his work but a useful bluffer when experiments went wrong. He had gone down with a disappointing Third and got a job with the old Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. From Ag & Fish he had gone somewhere else, and after that Lazenby had lost touch with him. He had surfaced again, urgently soliciting help and inviting the professor to lunch, a few days before Lazenby was due at a conference in Vienna. Although having much to attend to, Lazenby could not well resist a plea from an old student; but he had been greatly surprised at the opulence of the meal laid before him. During the meal the old student invited him, as Lazenby understood it, to become a spy.

‘Oh, nothing like that, Prof! Much too strong a word.’

‘You want me to report on what people say to me in private in Vienna?’

‘Not personal things, of course not. Programmes, costly budgeting things. There’s an immense amount of duplication going on. Cannot be good for science, Prof.’

‘I find that someone is duplicating my work and tell you?’

‘Someone else might find it and tell us. Then Scientific Service would tell you.’

‘Scientific Services is a government body?’

‘A sort of government body.’

‘I see.’ He had heard of this sort of government body in America. There they called it the CIA and many American scientists did indeed assist it, as he knew, in the ways mentioned. Lazenby hoped to God it wouldn’t catch on in England. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Thank you for the meal, Philpott. I have enjoyed it.’

‘Give us a try, Prof! Let me send you some stuff in your own field.’

‘By all means. Who gave you it?’

‘Oh, people you know. All top class.’

‘Why didn’t they give it to me?’

‘Didn’t spot the significance, I expect. It needs putting together, you know. Scraps here, scraps there.’

‘Yes.’ Scraps. Smelly. ‘Well, I shall be very interested,’ he said.

‘You will be, Prof. I promise you. Most useful stuff, particularly at budget time. All our contributors say so.’

‘And will I continue to receive the useful stuff,’ Lazenby asked, ‘should I decide not to be a contributor?’

‘Good of the country, Prof.’

‘The country?’

‘Science.’ Philpott blinked. ‘Knows no boundary. Taught me that yourself. Republic of Science. The fact is — stray items, of no use to the other chap, do turn out to be of the greatest use to one. Happens very frequently. Honestly, Prof, they all do it.’

‘Who do?’

‘Foreigners. They expect one to do it. Would be highly surprised to learn you weren’t in touch with someone like us already. I assure you!’

‘Well. I will accept your assurance. And the stuff,’ Lazenby gravely told him.

And to his surprise it did turn out to be useful. Scraps, as Philpott had said, but skilfully put together. And showing indeed possible duplication of some projected work. Not much, but enough to give him pause.

With only a small feeling of guilt he had acceded to Philpott’s request. Not grossly violating any confidences. Just scraps that might prove of interest to some other chap in the republic. And these scraps, too, had come back to him, interwoven with others, in the bulletins that periodically arrived from Scientific Services. They arrived not by post but by courier, accompanied by a note suggesting an early reading, and a request that the material should not be photocopied.

On one occasion, when a bulletin had been mislaid for some weeks, unread, Miss Sonntag had been astonished to find that all the words on it had disappeared. To prevent a recurrence of the mishap she had photocopied the next bulletin. The photocopy had come out blank, and the original itself had gone blank. It was the recollection of this — and the ways of foreigners — that had brought Philpott to mind when Lazenby gazed at the cigarette papers.

Lazenby met his old student for a drink at the Mitre. Philpott had urgently requested the meeting either at the institute or in London. Lazenby had no intention of running up to London and didn’t want him at the institute. The Mitre was a much more discreet venue — few tourists yet on the scene and all the students away. They sat quietly in a corner while Philpott produced, one after the other, various papers from his briefcase.

One was a photo of the envelope and the bits of cigarette paper; another an enlargement of the address; and some others showed treatments that had been applied.

‘The envelope and the sticky tape are Swedish,’ he said, ‘but the ballpoint isn’t. The cigarette papers are Russian. We believe a sailor posted them. We believe he was given the cigarettes and told to slit them and remove the tobacco, and then put the papers in an envelope and send them off. The address was written on this third paper. It was in faint pencil and you probably didn’t notice.’

‘I didn’t,’ Lazenby admitted.

‘Well, it was there. The pencil lead is Russian, too. What probably happened is that something was inscribed on one layer of paper in order to impress it on another underneath. The ones underneath were wrapped as cigarettes and given to the sailor — presumptive sailor — together with this other for the address. This one he had to tape to the envelope and then trace over the pencil with ballpoint.’

’Well now. Very clever.’

‘Yes. This is what came off the cigarette papers.’

Lazenby looked at the enlargement. The indentations had been enhanced in some way and revealed a string of figures:

There were several lines more.

‘What is it?’ he said.

‘You’ll see it breaks into segments, each starting with a group of three numbers. Forget the bits in brackets. The first lot is eighteen, five, twenty-two; then four, five, twenty-one; and ten, five, eighteen … It’s alphabetic code, English alphabet — that is, one stands for A, two for B. You’ll see how it works out.’

Lazenby tried for a minute and got lost.

‘The first group is R-E-V,’ Philpott said, ‘the second J-E-R, the third D-E-U, and so on. They’re books of the Bible. The bracketed groups give chapter and verse, and the hyphenated portions identify the words required. Here it is.’

Lazenby looked at a new sheet.

‘The Voice of America is in the Bible?’ Lazenby said, bemused.

‘Well, no it isn’t,’ Philpott confessed. ‘That group just came out as VOA and there was no book for it. It is quite plain in context, though.’

‘Ah. The same with science, is it?’

‘Science? No, that’s the Book of Daniel.’ Philpott consulted another sheet. ‘Yes, Daniel one, verse four.’

‘Good.’ Lazenby finished his drink. ‘That is a very good thing to know,’ he said.

‘Have you any idea what this is about, Prof?’

‘None at all. Tell me yours.’

‘Well.’ Philpott frowned. ‘We believe it’s from a Russian scientist, a biologist, someone in a life science, anyway. He evidently knows you, or of you. He has tried to reach you before. He’s come up with something he thinks a lot of. He wants you to let him know if you got it and understood it. He can get the Voice of America. That, more or less, is what we consider it means.’

Lazenby thought about this.

‘Have you considered the man might be a nut?’ he said.

‘He’s gone to rather a lot of trouble, Prof.’

‘Nuts do go to a lot of trouble.’

‘Quite. This one would be a Jewish nut, incidentally, or one of Jewish extraction.’

‘Because of the Bible?’

‘Because of his thumbs. He left two good prints on each of the papers.’

‘You can tell a Jew by his thumbs?’ Lazenby said, staring.

‘There is apparently something called a Jewish whorl. The Israelis are expert at it. Yes, Department of Criminology,’ Philpott said, checking. ‘Tel Aviv. Rather keen on spotting a Jew from an Arab out there. Genetically it’s a dominant, so even with a racial mix it tends to come through. The interest here being — you’ll see he seems to be stressing that he’s alive, as if you might suppose he isn’t. What we’re hoping is that you might recall a Jewish biologist who has dropped out of sight for some years. We think he has met you. He’s certainly addressing you very directly as if he thinks you will know him. Which would mean he’s travelled abroad to conferences and so forth, since you never yourself visited the old Soviet Union.’

Lazenby tried to think when he had told Philpott that he had never visited the old Soviet Union. He decided he had never told him this.

‘I’ll think about it,’ he said.

‘We’d be very grateful. Some preliminary work has been done, actually. I wonder what you know about these people.’ He handed over a list.

There were ten or so names on it, all distantly familiar to Lazenby; all in biological sciences.

‘A thing I know about Stolnik,’ he said, perusing it, ‘is that he’s dead. Some years ago, I believe.’

‘Yes. We have the obituaries. I shouldn’t worry too much about that. If the chap has had to go out of sight.’

‘Ah … Well, it’s all a long time ago, of course,’ Lazenby said. It was a very long time. He had thought most of the men on the list were dead. One of them had certainly had a serious motor accident. ‘I expect I met them all.’

‘Might they appear in your diaries?’

‘I don’t keep diaries.’

‘Miss Sonntag’s, perhaps — appointments diaries?’

‘When from?’

‘Upwards of five years? Maybe ten.’

‘Highly unlikely. What would you expect to find there, anyway?’

‘Meetings. Which we might be able to reconstruct. Perhaps some mention of the other chap.’

‘Which other chap?’

‘He wants you to send him one.’ Philpott found the place for him. ‘“Send me therefore the man understanding science — of every living thing” … Another drink, Prof?’

‘All right, very small. With a great deal of soda.’

Philpott got the drinks. ‘The feeling is,’ he said, settling himself, ‘that it must be some particular chap. Whom you have jointly met, or discussed. Feasible?’

‘Yes. I suppose it is.’

‘Might there be anything in your correspondence?’

‘In ten years of letters —’

‘Well, we could help there, of course,’ Philpott said.

Lazenby drank a little, musing.

Philpott, although not a big brain at science, had never struck him as a total idiot. It must surely be obvious to him that a prankster was at work here.

‘Philpott,’ he said, ‘why do you suppose anyone should choose to write to me on cigarette papers?’

‘As the only choice — if it was — it isn’t such a bad one. An advantage of a cigarette is that, if apprehended, you can smoke it.’

‘Yes. Why bother writing in code on it, then?’

‘In case you are apprehended, and can’t smoke it.’

‘The code didn’t seem to give your people much trouble, did it?’

‘Once they spotted it was the Bible, no. People not brought up on it aren’t so likely to do that, of course. Also the Russian Bible isn’t the English one — different book names, I believe, and some other kind of ordering for chapter and verse. In any case, belt and braces. He’s a careful fellow.’

‘Hmm.’ Lazenby mused again. ‘Send him a man,’ he said. ‘How send him a man?’

‘Well, the American view there —’

‘What American view?’

‘He wants answering on the Voice of America. Radio station. The Americans run it … Anyway, their view is, find the man and you have probably found the how. He will know how.’

‘You don’t think it would be more sensible for him to send some cigarette papers to that man?’

‘I do. Much more sensible,’ Philpott agreed. ‘It leads to a view either that he doesn’t know where that man is or doubts that he has your contacts.’

‘Nobody to show cigarette papers to?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Yes.’ Lazenby gazed again at the papers. It was plain that any question he cared to put would meet with a ready answer. There were some other questions but he decided not to put them. The River Spey awaited in a few days, and nothing — in particular nothing as crazy as this showed signs of being — was going to interfere with it.

‘Might I ask, Prof,’ asked Philpott, ‘if I could get at your archive right away? Spread the load — if you had no objection.’

‘I would have every objection. Of course you can’t, Philpott.’

‘Ah … Miss Sonntag, then?’

‘I’ll ask her. What is it you want exactly?’

‘Anything from the men on this list. We think he must be one of them.’

‘Why?’

‘They have all had some contact with you at one time or another. And they are now all out of circulation. They aren’t hospitalised, not over this period of time. They haven’t retired. Not drawing pension, at any rate. And they’re not dead, barring a couple of doubtful cases. Almost certainly they are working at something.’

‘Yes. Who says all this?’

‘The Americans. Far and away the best at it,’ Philpott said, nodding. ‘And with an outstanding biographical department — exceedingly detailed and current. For instance, they know the locations and the senior staff of all establishments in the business of — well, in various kinds of business. This man is not at any of them. He must be at some other, which they don’t know about. And that bothers them. It bothers them very much. They want to liaise on it urgently, the moment we have something to show.’

‘Yes. I see,’ Lazenby said, frowning. What he principally saw was a time-waster of prodigious proportions here, if allowed to develop.

‘Can Miss Sonntag get at it right away?’

‘I will certainly ask her.’

‘It’s a matter of the greatest urgency. There is another question. Has something like this ever happened before — that is, some other envelope that has turned up with apparently nothing in it? It probably wouldn’t have been from Gothenburg. More likely Rotterdam or Hamburg, Rotterdam the likeliest.’

‘I could ask that, too. Why?’

‘I can’t tell you that now. I will as soon as I am authorised — together with a great deal of other information. Of course, if you have any thoughts yourself, Prof, I hope you will contact me right away.’

‘Certainly, certainly, Philpott,’ Lazenby said, and allowed the subject to drift at once out of his mind. There would not be any other thoughts, he was quite clear on that. Secret codes, unknown establishments … All that, they could get on with very well by themselves.

And this, as a matter of fact, they were doing.

3

The unknown establishment was assumed to be biological and its work to do with military biology. This was the first point of interest for the CIA and at their headquarters in Langley, eight miles from Washington, a team of specialists was engaged in hunting it down.

They started by assuming that it must have independent sources of water and power; also chemical stores, animal pens, cleansing stations, and various kinds of security arrangements. All this needed people, and places for them to live, and some means of access, probably a landing strip. Above all, it needed isolation.

The ‘waste howling wilderness’ of the ‘north country’, evidently Siberia, remained even in modern times unmatched for isolation. Its forested area alone was one and a third times the size of the United States. Over the land lay deep snow and ice all winter, and quaking bogs in summer. This made for a road system so rudimentary that transport went mainly by air or river, with access to security areas available only on official permit.

This provided the first problem. If the place was so hard to get at, why should the unknown correspondent suppose anyone from outside could get at it? Just as important, how had he got anything out of it himself?

Specialists in global transportation put up a possible answer to this. The Siberian inland waterway system was very extensive. Two rivers in the north-west alone, the Ob and the Yenisei, had some dozens of ports with several others under construction. The reason for this was the extension of the huge natural gas deposit, the biggest in the world, which lay between the two rivers. As Russian oil production declined, the gas was due to replace it, both for internal energy and for external trade. For both purposes the product was urgently needed; and as satellite observation showed work was going on round the clock to get it.

To finance the project (which included a tunnel to west Europe 3000 miles long), massive foreign loans had been negotiated. The loans would be repaid in gas and were being supplied in the form of equipment. The amount of equipment was staggering. Apart from the rigs and drilling gear, there was all the piping to go inside the tunnel. There were giant compressors and pumping stations at intervals along it. There were thousands of earth-moving machines, tens of thousands of tractors.

In the lively scramble for orders, western shipping companies had not been backward. The equipment for the original field had been carried largely by ships of the old Soviet Union, but for the new deal the managing consortium had specified that new equipment, wherever possible, should be transported in vessels of the countries supplying it.

The countries supplying the new equipment were Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Holland. Ships from all of them were now ferrying loads along the Arctic sea route. Russian icebreakers were guaranteeing the route from early June to early October, the latter date varying with the ice pack: a fact that led the experts to a prediction.

It was now the first week of July, and the ice was building early. The prediction was that nothing could be expected from the unknown correspondent after the end of August. Western shippers, reluctant to hazard their vessels even in a ‘guaranteed’ September, were handing this slice of business to Russia’s own merchant fleet. It was not thought that a member of this fleet had posted the message. A foreign seaman, more familiar with foreign ports, and with greater privacy to fiddle with ambiguous cigarettes, had done it. He would not therefore be doing it after August.

But this raised other questions.

The ports opened to the foreign vessels were Dudinka and Igarka on the Yenisei, and Noviy Port and Salekhard on the Ob. Because they were guaranteeing a quick turnaround at these ports, the Russian authorities had provided no shore facilities for foreign crewmen. None of them was allowed ashore anyway.

If sailors were not allowed ashore, how had one of them got the message?

Tentative answers were provided for this, too. An intermediary had given the sailor the message. The intermediary must have had time to establish a relationship with the sailor. The sailor had to be a regular on the route. However regular he was, the only local citizens he could meet were those allowed on his ship — in the normal way port officials or dock workers. But the area was a security area, which neither port officials nor dock workers were free to move in and out of at will. The intermediary had to come from outside. He had to have access to the ship — and also to the research station. What kind of intermediary could this be?

The experts proposed a transport worker. The foreign ships were not leaving Russian ports unladen. Some carried specialist return cargoes, of a kind which might afford access to the ship of a specialist worker. A closer examination of the ports concerned showed Dudinka, on the Yenisei, as the likeliest to have specialist return cargoes. Dudinka was the port for Norilsk, a large mining and industrial centre, and its main business was nickel and precision nickel-alloy parts.

A report was called for on the handling of nickel-alloy parts, and meanwhile three working propositions were set out:

These propositions (every one of them accurate, as it turned out) were then addressed very vigorously.

Let me hear thy voice concerning this matter the first day at midnight, VOA, the unknown correspondent had asked. The Voice of America was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CIA, so there were no problems with this one. The first day, in biblical terms, was Sunday, and the VOA had a taped religious programme that went out then. A substitution was made and a man with a powerful voice preached a sermon on communication and identity. He used Exodus, 12.3: ‘I have heard thy voice’, and also Samuel, Joel and Esther: ‘Where art thou?’, ‘Who art thou?’ and ‘What is thy request?’ and he said these questions needed plain answers from everyone, particularly those in the waste howling wildernesses of life.

On the message itself were the prints of the man who had written it, and who had evidently rolled the cigarettes. They were on the address paper too, but not on the envelope or the tape. On all these appeared another set of prints, some very smudged and fragmentary, but similarly traceable to a single source: evidently the sailor.

For the reasons agreed, the sailor had to be a regular on the route. He was the postman. His regularity had to be relied on. From the internal evidence of the message — Wherefore do you not answer me? — he had been used before. It was not possible to say when he had been used before, or where he had posted the message before. But it was known where he had posted it this time.

The global list of ship movements showed three vessels from the Arctic as having been in Gothenburg around the date of the postmark. One of them, a Japanese tramp which had merely used the Arctic as a cheap delivery route for a random load to west Europe, could be discounted; but the other two, a Dutch ship and a German, were of greater interest. Both were in regular service on the Siberian run, and the Dutchman had returned with a cargo of nickel parts.

Gothenburg was not a regular stop for this ship but part of its nickel had been consigned there, and it had put in to the port for twenty-four hours: ample time for someone to slit cigarettes, buy an envelope and post the letter. This ship had then sailed for Rotterdam. The German had gone to Hamburg.

CIA officials in Holland and Germany were instructed to obtain, by any means possible, fingerprints of the crews of both these ships. But it was known already that the Dutchman had come from Dudinka. The origin of its cargo was not in doubt either.

Between Dudinka and the nickel mines of Norilsk was a road forty-five miles long, and the cartographic department had every inch of it mapped. Most of Siberia was similarly mapped. The maps came to them from the Defense Mapping Agency Aerospace Center at St Louis, and they were updated every few weeks. They showed not only geographical features and roads but the progress of all building works, both above and below ground.

The area around Norilsk was covered with a network of minor roads linking its industrial centre with outlying districts. The roads were well maintained, summer and winter, and heavily used.

Although the complex was large — the largest in the Arctic circle — it was still only a dot on the vast expanse of taiga surrounding it. Much of this area had been under regular surveillance for years, large numbers of ‘objectives’ being in it. The purpose of most of them was known but a few still remained in doubt. These were the ones that came under scrutiny now.

The major requirements for the secret establishment were still as specified; but in analysing satellite photographs a few other features were added. It had to have buildings whose precise function was still uncertain. It had to have barracks, probably with separate areas to accommodate scientific, maintenance and security staffs. And it had to have a road: to accommodate the transport worker.

Shortly afterwards, in a flurry of activity, St Louis was being urgently asked for further information: analytical material, to determine the mineral content of two lakes in the area, and gazeteer material to support the words ‘dark waters’ as a local name for them.

4

Miss Sonntag, while this work proceeded, was getting on with her own.

Something had come to mind after her cold. She had an idea that an envelope without a letter had appeared once before — she did not exactly remember when. But she didn’t associate it with Sweden. There was not much correspondence with Sweden. Her impression was that it was from Holland. In the same post, if she was not mistaken, there had been a number of circulars from there — academic book promotions from Amsterdam or The Hague or Rotterdam, most addressed with bits of stuck-on paper. Quite often these mailings were duplicated. She had thought that one was duplicated. Nothing in the envelope and she had shot it into the bin and thought no more about it. But after her cold she thought about it.

She had mentioned it to Lazenby, and seemed to catch him by surprise.

‘Holland, you say?’

‘I think Holland.’

‘Ah … Rotterdam, would you think?’

‘I can’t be certain Rotterdam. Perhaps Rotterdam.’

‘Well, I was supposed to … Hmm. I wonder,’ he said, and was thoughtful for a moment. ‘When are you off, Miss Sonntag?’

‘Off? On holiday? Next week,’ she said in surprise.

Next week was the middle of July, and every year she went off on holiday then; this year with Sonya to Florence. The flight was booked and the pensione was booked. ‘If it is quite convenient,’ she said, anxiously.

‘Oh, yes, rather. Still,’ he said, and produced a list. ‘I wonder if there’d be time for you to look out some letters. It shouldn’t take for ever.’

It didn’t take for ever, but it took four solid days, and it took place in the basement. And by the time she got down to it she had the building to herself, even Lazenby having gone off. He had left her his telephone number on the Spey.

He had not mentioned why the letters were needed, but evidently it was his work on cell structures at low temperature. The low-temperature aspect, which was the only subject of correspondence with the Russians, he had given up eight years ago. Everything before eight years ago was in the basement.

The basement was exceedingly dusty, and ill-lit and hideous. Hundreds of thousands of papers were there, in spring-lock boxes: lectures, reports, lab books, all mixed in with the correspondence. These days she kept an index of everything, but the only index for this heap of archive was what was on the box labels — dates and subject categories. That was what he had wanted when she had joined him fifteen years ago.

At that time his wife (his former secretary) had just died, and he had had the institute for only a year. And in the very earliest box Miss Sonntag had come, with a pang, on condolences from foreign colleagues. They had been written to the institute — he had not encouraged correspondence to his home, always a private man. With the years he had become, if anything, even more private — detached, sardonic. But never with her. With her he had always been warm, playful. In the early years indeed she had wondered … she had still been in her forties, he was not a young man, quite bald even then … But that was all nonsense. It was nonsense but yet she thought with a pang of this also.

And meanwhile read on, very diligently, abstracting a paper here, a paper there. These she read out to Lazenby every night at his hotel on the River Spey. She had read out twenty-four by the end.

‘I have gone through two years more, Professor, after the last,’ she told him, ‘and found nothing. Do you wish me to continue?’

‘No. That will be the lot. That fellow can have them now — the personal ones included. Tell him to send a courier. I suppose nothing of the — of the other kind has turned up in the post, has it?’

‘No, nothing.’

‘Hmm. You are going off when?’

‘In two days. Unless you want me,’ she said, with extreme caution, ‘to wait on until you come back?’

‘No, no. I’m coming now. Nothing doing here. No fish. But you’ve done a grand job, Dora. Really very good of you. Many, many thanks indeed, Dora.’

Dora, Dora! She put the phone down, with mild rejoicing, and forgave him the four days in the basement.

Then she took off to pack her sandals and other sensible Shoes; and for the rest of July walked about Florence with Sonya.

Nothing happened while they were away. No messages turned up in the post. Nothing of value had come from the basement.

By the end of July plenty of answers had turned up at Langley, and they were bad answers.

No vessel at Dudinka had been boarded by anyone but port workers. No special handling was needed for nickel-alloy parts. No fingerprints supplied by the station chiefs in Holland and Germany matched the ones on the envelope. And no name resembling ‘dark waters’ was known for the two lakes near Norilsk; which furthermore were bituminous and of no use as a water supply.

All this was discouraging and something obviously wasn’t right.

In England, Lazenby had come early to the conclusion that things were not right. He had come to it actually in Scotland, listening to Miss Sonntag on the phone. He had let her read everything out, but even after the first few boxes he had known that something was wrong. There wasn’t anything from Rogachev. Rogachev had been one of his earliest correspondents, and should have turned up early. But he hadn’t. And as the boxes continued he had not turned up at all.

Lazenby had only the sketchiest recollection of the man: a red-haired fellow, jokey, rather too personal, and a drinker. Most of the Russians were drinkers, and Lazenby was not — a small Scotch occasionally, a glass of sherry. And they had got him drunk. At a conference somewhere. At night. He had a confused recollection of lurching down a street with a number of them, Rogachev making jokes. There was something else in the scene that was disreputable, but he couldn’t place it.

This he did not manage to do until weeks later, back in Oxford, when he had to get up in the middle of the night. Advancing age made it necessary for him to get up in the night sometimes now. He was urinating away, half asleep, when the impression came back. Urinating against a wall. With Russians. All jabbering in Russian. Rogachev on one side of him and a young Asiatic on the other. The young Asiatic, when not talking Russian, had been talking a transatlantic kind of English. He had been talking about Siberia.

Lazenby knew this was important. A number of things seemed to come together here — of relevance both to the message and to the murky episode itself. He couldn’t recollect more of the episode, and in the morning still couldn’t. But it still seemed important, so he wrote it down. He didn’t write anything about urinating against walls. That was personal and of no importance to anybody. But Rogachev obviously was. And the young Asiatic might be.

This happened in September, when it was known that no further communication was possible, but he completed his statement and passed it on anyway.

5

By September, the inquiry had ground down at Langley. It didn’t stop but it settled where it had started: the biographical department.

In charge of it was a man called W. Murray Hendricks. He was an elderly lawyer who had been with the department since the mid-1960s when a series of chaotic upsets to do with faulty cross-referencing (which had cost the country some billions in an unnecessary arms race) had brought about his rapid transfer from the Library of Congress. There he had been in charge of Copyrights. Here he was in charge of Lives. He was an orderly man with a mild manner.

W. Murray Hendricks, now able to examine all the papers calmly and without pressure, had come to three conclusions.

The first was that the relationship between the unknown correspondent and Lazenby was likely to have been social rather than professional. His assessment of Lazenby was that he was a remote sort of fish: professional matters he might remember, social ones not. This one he didn’t remember. It was probably social.

To be social with Lazenby called for qualities of warmth and gregariousness in the other party. Hendricks looked through the candidates on the list and found three warm and gregarious ones. Two of them, he saw, had sent Lazenby condolence notes on his wife’s death — they had appeared in the twenty-four letters sent from London — but one of them had not. He looked this one up.

It was a Professor Rogachev — Professor Efraim Moisevich Rogachev — and the department held a useful file on him. It stopped abruptly. In examining where it stopped he saw why no condolences had been received; why there were, in fact, no letters at all from him. Lazenby’s archive covered a period of sixteen years. This man had gone missing seventeen years ago. He had had a motoring accident at Pitsunda on the Black Sea. His wife had been killed and he himself injured. He had returned to work briefly but had then had something resembling a nervous breakdown, after which — nothing.

Hendricks looked up the man’s activities before the accident. He found that the week before he had been at a conference in England, at Oxford. The department kept records of conferences, and Hendricks sent for this one. It contained a full delegate list and also reports on the conference activities. Leafing through, he saw that Lazenby and Rogachev had met there on at least three occasions: at a welcoming reception for the delegates; as fellow panellists on a seminar; and as members of a sub-committee.

Before this they hadn’t met for three years — far too long ago to be relevant now; which brought him to a second conclusion.

Efraim Moisevich Rogachev was the likeliest man to have sent the message to Lazenby, and he had done so as a result of the meeting at Oxford.

The relevant meeting was probably the social one, the reception. Something had happened at it. Whatever it was, another person had also been involved. The message asked for another person. The person might merely have been mentioned, but it was more likely that he was there. He would be a Russian-speaker; and most probably a Russian. He was being asked to go to Russia. Without a fair knowledge of the place he wouldn’t get far in it.

But if he was being asked to go there, he was evidently not there now.

Hendricks had a closer look at the Russian delegation. It was a strong one; twelve members. Three of them, he saw, had defected not so many years afterwards.

Third conclusion. The man required had been present at the Oxford conference and was likely to be a Russian not now in Russia.

Hendricks had copies made of the photographs of the Russian delegates, together with brief biographical details. But before despatching them to London he had second thoughts.

The mission that was being suggested was a hazardous one and needed a young man — at least not an old one. All the Russian delegates were now old. It couldn’t be any of them. Just possibly it might be some other Slav who was present, a Pole or a Czech, Russian-speaking. But further reflection showed this to be unlikely too.

Getting someone into Russia on clandestine business wasn’t a difficult matter, but this was not a matter of simply sending someone to Russia, but to Siberia. And not simply Siberia but a sealed area of Siberia. Quite a different proposition.

On the face of it, an impossible proposition.

Yet Rogachev thought it could be done. He thought he knew the person who could do it.

Several interdepartmental discussions produced a fourth and final conclusion.

A person who might get into a security area of Siberia was a Siberian person. More specifically a Siberian native person: non-caucasian, mongoloid, Asiatic.

There was nobody like that on any of the Slav delegations, or on the Russian either. It left open some other kinds of delegation; but there was no certainty that this man was a delegate at all.

Hendricks decided on a wider sweep.

He ordered a check on every academic who had been in Oxford at the time of the conference.

This assignment, a large one, was methodically broken down. The period in question had been a Long Vacation, which let out the students and their normal mentors. The academic had to be of a certain age and type. His age, not more than the twenties at the time, suggested a well-qualified graduate or a research fellow. His type, Asiatic, suggested certain characteristics, perhaps even a name, that ought to stand out in some way.

The inquiry was thoroughly handled, as thoroughly as all the others had been, and produced results that looked just as barren. Some colleges had records of guest scholars of seventeen years before, but most did not. Halls of residence and bursars’ accounts helped fill up gaps; but even when the name came up it attracted no attention and merely joined the others on the list that went to Hendricks.

From Hendricks it attracted immediate attention, and a series of howling and uncharacteristic curses.

He already had a stout file on this man.

He knew he should have thought of him long before; and he also knew that not much would be forthcoming from him.

He was brooding on the matter when Lazenby’s statement turned up, and he nodded wearily over it. It was a jumbled recollection of a jaunt Lazenby had shared, time and location unknown, with Rogachev and a young Russian of Asiatic appearance who spoke a transatlantic kind of English.

Hendricks was now in a position to supply both time and location, as well as the name of the young man, and a pretty ample biography into the bargain. But still he hesitated.

He could trace the wild young man himself. This would take time. But time was not something he was short of. Ships were now off the Siberian run and would not be back again before next June. Until then no message could come from Rogachev anyway.

He came to his decision, and on the following day set the new search in motion.

That was on 30 September, and two days later, on 2 October, another message arrived from Rogachev.

6

Miss Sonntag, at work with her paper knife, looked at the envelope, and her mouth fell open. Then she ran in to Lazenby.

He had a look at it, and at Miss Sonntag, and at the envelope again.

After this they looked at each other.

The new message was more robust in tone.

‘This one does ring a bell, Prof?’

‘Yes. Yes, it does,’ Lazenby said.

‘We thought that. But there are some points here of even more interest than the message.’

These points were the postmark and the address. The postmark had been stamped at Ijmuiden, Nederland, and the address had been written with a Japanese ballpoint — its ink Japanese; of a formulation used only in Japan; for Japanese script; not exported. The analysis had been made after discovery that the only ship in from the Arctic at Ijmuiden had been Japanese. In Gothenburg, at the time of the earlier message, there had also been a Japanese ship. On both messages the fingerprints were the same, and in both cases the ship was the same.

This ship had not been to Dudinka; or to Igarka; or Noviy Port, or Salekhard. It had sailed the Arctic from one end to the other, but it had not stopped at any of those places.

Wherever it had stopped, the ship was now moving again. It was steaming down the coast of Portugal and going home; where it would arrive in two months if unlucky, or nearer three if not. This was because it was tramping, and would put in wherever cargo offered — in general to ports not served by regular lines.

This was what it had done in the Arctic also. But between the Arctic and its present route there was a difference. Wherever it put in now a Lloyd’s agent was likely to report the fact. No Lloyd’s agents had reported facts in the Russian Arctic. There its only listed port had been Murmansk; which had been its listed port in June too. But it must also have called at some port other than Murmansk, for the secret establishment could not be anywhere near there. Murmansk was the base for the Russian Northern Fleet, with extensive yards and service facilities. No biological plant would be sited in that vicinity; which in any case was under constant surveillance, all its objectives known, in no way a waste howling wilderness.

This opened up the rest of the Arctic for consideration, several thousands of miles of it; and it also opened up the inquiries in Japan.

From Japan the answers were good and informative.

The ship was one of a line of six tramps, and the Arctic run was a summer perk of the masters’. Only one of them had been taking it on for the past couple of years. The only regular business on the route was with Murmansk, and any other picked up along the way was the perk: it could be accepted or not at the captain’s discretion. If he reported it, the owners took a share; if not, the crew did. The only sure information was the crew’s, and they were not likely to give it.

But the ship was being watched, and inquiries would continue.

Wonderful, said Hendricks, and got on with his own. These were not going so well either.

By Christmas — at Christmas — the next news arrived. The Japanese ship had crept back into Nagasaki unnoticed. All the crew had crept off it, and away on leave. When they came back they were being dispersed and the ship broken up. For its engines were clapped out and its equipment was clapped out, and the ship was finished.

Hendricks passed a hand over his face. He felt like that ship.

He had at last received a reply from the wild young man. His own previous letter, one of a series, had been dignified and discreet. He had had it mailed in an area where the young man was thought to be at present. It was on plain paper and gave a local postbox number for reply. It said that the old friend mentioned earlier, from Oxford, England, was making a last attempt to reach him. The matter was urgent and personal, and a kind acknowledgment was requested by return for the present letter.

The kind acknowledgment came back on the letter itself. It was in red felt-tip and said fuck off spook.

Hendricks thought he could give up then. Nothing more would come, he was certain. The crew of a Japanese tramp would show no zeal to help a friendly intelligence agency. The young man was not friendly to any intelligence agency, and had not been fooled by this one.

But still he postponed the decision. Not much money was being spent, and he decided to consider the matter again in April, when the new budgetary year came round.

April came round, and he considered it again. In particular he considered Rogachev.

Not a bad record, but not outstanding; nothing at all out of the ordinary. He had done time in a labour camp in the fifties, but so had many other Russian scientists — it was a respectable thing to have done. Respectable, in fact, was the description for him, and biology his field — a teamwork field. If anything remarkable was going on in it some whiff would surely have come from other teams by now. No other whiffs had come. Was it likely that an old man of eighty-one had come up with something on his own? It was not likely. Far more likely, the years of isolation had brought on childish delusions. There was something childishly gleeful in the tone of the messages.

Hendricks hesitated only briefly, then he closed the inquiry down: papers to be kept current for six months in case by chance something new did come up, although he didn’t expect anything to come up.

But something did then come up. By chance something quite new came up.

7

The satellite came up, over the Indian Ocean. And twenty minutes later it was over Siberia.

The satellite was one of a group of three delivered to the US military by Boeing, a development of the company’s Big Bird series. Each of the three had a telemetry package that allowed instantaneous relay, and each was in a slightly different orbit.

This one was in a polar orbit. Travelling north-south, it made a complete circuit of the earth once every ninety-four minutes. Its intelligence-gathering equipment was turned on only over the territory of the old Soviet Union, however. There it had to monitor upwards of 500 land objectives.

An hour before another satellite had overflown the site, and there had been no recordable activity. But when this one came round, 300 miles to the west of it, the fires were already burning.

At first the fact went unnoticed for the satellite’s current objective was a missile base. Of this it had to take four still photographs and ten seconds of video. All the stills were good, despite freckling along the right-hand edges, but the results showed no change and were merely saved for reference.

The video was different. Something was spotted moving in it. A loaded flat-bed truck was moving. This was unusual at three o’clock in the morning, and attention was diverted to it to find out what it might be carrying through deep snow at that hour. For this reason some time passed before it was noticed that the right-hand edge of the video was also freckled.

Optical enhancement brought up the freckles as flames and interest rapidly switched to the new development.

The location of the distant fire was soon established, as was its probable origin in an explosion: the flames were still shooting one hundred feet high. This was surprising, for the low-rated objective had not been known to house explosives. In earlier listings it had been marked as a weather station. Later analysis had shown the ground to be covered over a wide area with ventilators, indicating that work went on below ground, and too extensively for simple meteorology. The radio traffic and transport pattern showed no military significance, however, so the low rating was retained, but all visible structures were marked and thereafter updated. They consisted of a few concrete buildings, telegraph poles, generator housings, power pylons, and a fenced area of sheds, evidently used for storage, just off the landing strip.

The enhanced freckles were compared with earlier photographs, and some differences emerged. The largest concrete structure, apparently the dome of something below, had vanished, and so had the generator housings. Pylons and poles had been toppled, sheds blown down, and burning debris scattered over a wide area.

More optical work brought other images into definition. A thin thread-like line of beads, at first glance glowing debris, was detached from its background of flame and translated into a formation of men. They were standing in line, each with his hands on the shoulders of the man in front. They were bandaged about the eyes, and dressed only in underpants — their clothing evidently abandoned in flight from the burning buildings.

Slightly apart from this line was another man, also in underpants, but with no discernible bandage. This individual had something in his hands. It was not possible to see what it was, but a study of the video showed his head going up and down while those of the men in line turned towards him and away.

An anthropometrist was called in.

This expert’s field was body movement and measurement and he concluded that what was in the man’s hand was a list, and that a rollcall was going on; and from the ten seconds of action that it was a rapid one, not surprising for almost naked men in fifty degrees of frost. But some aspects of it puzzled him, and he asked for further imaging work to clarify the effects of flame and heat distortion. The imaging work was done but it did not solve the problem. He ran a few tests to prove that what he was beginning to suspect could not be true. But it seemed that it was true.

the men who stood in their underpants in the Siberian ice had arms that were too long. There was something not right about their femurs, too, and the whole shape of their legs. The man reading the list and calling out the names was built the same way. And however the anthropometrist juggled the results, the way did not turn out to be human.

April was the month of this observation.

8

In April Lazenby was into a fish, and it was a magnificent one.

The salmon had actually looked at him as it leapt. It was as big as a big dog and all the way through its long arc it had looked at him. Then it hit the water and went deep, into the Long Pool, taking Lazenby’s enormous Bloody Butcher with it.

Last year he had caught nothing at all, but already this season he had had several splendid touches. The river was in spate, red-brown with peat, and roaring like an engine. It was full of fish. The water boiled over the rocks, spray dashing high, and wherever he looked there were fish. The very air was full of them. He’d seen nothing like it! An incredible spring run!

He had tried all his normal flies, big sunk ones for the coloured water, Thunder and Lightning, Childers, Ackroyd. And they’d gone for them, oh yes; some heart-stopping tugs. Tugs only, but they couldn’t make out the flies in all the peat. For the fish to take it needed something flashier, a big old-fashioned Butcher, so he had tied one on, and right away had the rod nearly snatched out of his hands. He backed up the bank now and scrambled along it, letting out line. He could feel the fish on the end, very strong, twisting and turning.

It was snowing slightly and already getting dark. But what a wonderful brute — thirty pounds if it was an ounce, maybe even forty! He couldn’t leave it sulking in the pool, had to get it out of there and into fast water. But careful now. Getting dark. Beyond the deep pool he would have to clamber back into the river again. Racing water, slimy rocks. Careful. For now just keep pressure on him. Let him know he couldn’t stay there in the pool. Out now, come on, out. Yes, he was out! Coming over the lip into white water — a gorgeous brute, silver, tail flipping, very strong, not long in from the sea.

Lazenby let him take line, keeping on pressure, slithering down the bank. He entered the water carefully, feeling his way between the rocks, the current dizzying. The salmon had commenced a long dash upriver and the reel was whirring. Good, let him run, just a little pressure. He steadied himself against a rock, got both feet planted firmly, and started playing him, real pressure, the rod bending.

The fish zigged and zagged, trying to get free of the line. It leapt again, miles off, but he saw it through the spray, the line coming up with it, dripping. He pulled in line fast as it turned, and played it all the way back, too. And by God, he was a fast fellow, and lively, and educated, trying to snap the line on the rocks. Keep him under pressure, tire him.

Minute by minute he tired the salmon. For forty minutes.

He was as exhausted as the fish when he guided him gently into the shallows at last. He had the net there under water, the long rod crooked under his arm so he could get both hands to it He was so tired he nearly fell over the fish in the water, trembling as he awaited the final leap when the fish felt the mesh.

But there was no leap, just some threshing in the net and then he had hauled it out and up on to the bank and he collapsed himself. He pulled the Priest out of his pocket and despatched the salmon and sat a while longer, panting. His gear was some way back, and when he reached it the light was too bad for him to see the gauge on his weighing hook. He got the fish, and his gear, back up to the car and drove to the hotel, and went right to the fish room through the garage block at the rear.

There, to his slight disappointment, it went nineteen pounds.

‘But yon’s a beauty, Professor — fresh in! This here you can call a fash!’

‘Yes, not a bad chap, is he?’ Lazenby said modestly, and waited to see his prize sacked and labelled for the smoker’s at Aberdeen before going through to clean up and change. The passage led into the reception lounge and there, to his astonishment, he saw waiting for him Philpott and a grave fellow in a three-piece suit.

‘Hello, Prof. I don’t think you’ve met Mr Hendricks — Mr W. Murray Hendricks. He’s got something very interesting for you.’

9

Up in Lazenby’s room, after dinner, Hendricks opened his briefcase.

Twenty hours after the first satellite, another one had overflown the site, its cameras specially switched on. The first Bird had captured its images from 300 miles away at three o’clock in the morning; the second was directly overhead at eleven the same night. The fires were out, a gale was blowing, and masked figures in protective clothing were working under floodlights. They were working on the structure with the blown-off roof.

Military biology of some kind had been going on in the place, that was certain; despite the wind, a number of elements had been identified still escaping into the air. What had produced the explosion it was not possible to say, but the nature of the work in the establishment had certainly been very varied.

Lazenby was shown some shadowy prints: a jumble of wrecked equipment photographed through the hole in the dome. Transparent overlays with sketched-in lines helped to clarify the mess, but Lazenby still couldn’t make it out.

A ducting system, Hendricks explained. It had been identified as part of a layout internationally designated ‘P4’.

‘Ah, P4. Not my field,’ Lazenby said. ‘That’s rather a high security label, the highest actually. It’s a system for the containment of tricky bacteria — E-coli, I believe, normally. They use it to replicate cells, for gene-splicing.’

‘Yes, E-coli is what they were using, and it was for gene-splicing,’ Hendricks said. ‘This is the remains of a genetics lab — quite a large one.’

‘Is it, now? What would they want with that?’

Hendricks probed in his briefcase again and showed him the photographs of the individuals in line. There were over a dozen prints now, some sections having been detached and enlarged. These images were also muzzy but again overlays had been provided to outline the limbs.

Lazenby examined them. ‘Apes,’ he concluded.

‘No, they aren’t apes. Not now.’

Lazenby peered again. ‘Improved apes?’

‘Yes, these can talk and read. This one can, anyway. He is reading a list and calling out names, and the others are answering him. It’s clearer on the movie.’

Lazenby looked at him over his glasses for some moments.

‘You’re not supposing this is Rogachev’s work?’ he said.

‘Well, it’s his place. There’s no doubt about that. I can show you.’

He showed him a map. It was a section of a large-scale sheet of the Kolyma region — some thousands of miles, he said, from where they had previously been looking. Ringed on it was the spidery symbol for a weather station, and close by the weather station a lake. Blackpool had been handwritten over the lake.

He explained this, too. The name came from a book, one of a collection gathering dust in the department’s library; the cross-referencing system, though improved, had not caught it.

Lazenby looked at the sheet of paper handed to him.

‘Here’s Green Cape,’ Hendricks said, unfolding a further section of map. ‘It’s a port, on the Kolyma river, exactly thirty miles from the lake. That’s how Rogachev’s cigarettes came out.’

Lazenby looked from the map back to the prints.

‘You think this is what he’s trying to get out?’ he said.

‘No. I don’t. What would be so secret about it?’

‘This isn’t startling enough for you?’

‘Yes, it’s startling. But more startling is why they’ve kept quiet about it for so many years. Also where it’s going on. Would you experiment with apes in a place like this?’

‘Well, the Arctic isn’t their environment,’ Lazenby said.

‘Right. It isn’t. And this isn’t just the Arctic. It’s the most secret place they have — the remotest, the least accessible. There’s hardly any information on it. On this place itself there’s none. We knew nothing about it. Now that’s startling. It’s disturbing. We’re pretty well up on Russian science. People change jobs, news gets around. But nobody has changed jobs here. That is, if you get a job here you evidently don’t leave. And work has been going on in it for a long, long time, we can see that. Which raises another long-time question. What do you know of a fellow called Zhelikov?’

Lazenby looked at him. ‘Zhelikov the geneticist?’

‘That’s right. L. V. Zhelikov.’

‘Well, I knew of him. Who didn’t? He was the favoured student of Pavlov, the dog man. He’ll have been dead, what — thirty, forty years?’

‘Nobody knows when he did die. They didn’t tell anybody. We think because he died here. We think this was his place, and Rogachev took over from him. Which would make it about seventeen years ago. You’re right that Zhelikov went out of circulation some forty years ago. He was in a camp then, in the fifties. We think they let him out and offered him this, and he took it. Rogachev was in the same camp with him. Did you know that?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Well, he was. They knew each other. Anyway, this place was here when Zhelikov arrived. At least forty years ago, and probably established a lot longer. After all, they wouldn’t have sent a guy of his class up to Siberia to start something going there. Something must already have been going, probably involving animals, since that was his field. But not just animals. Animal work isn’t secret. This is secret. It’s very secret — they’ve put it in their most secret place. So yes, the pictures are startling. But more startling is what else is going on there. And why he’s trying so hard to tell us about it.’

They looked at each other for some moments.

Philpott discreetly collected the papers and returned them to the briefcase. He took another one out.

‘We need your help,’ Hendricks said.

‘Well, anything I can do, of course — although exactly what −’

‘Would you go on a trip for us?’

Lazenby stared at him, and his mouth dropped open.

‘No, not Siberia.’ Hendricks’s own small mouth curved wryly. ‘Somewhere else. We think we’ve traced the young man you mention.’ He held a hand out and Philpott placed an enlarged photo in it. ‘Would he look anything like this?’

Lazenby gazed at the photo. The young Asiatic of his nightmare evening stared sullenly back. Broad, high cheekbones, eyes glowering from under a heavy fringe of hair.

‘Well — that is him!’

‘Could you put a name to him now?’

‘Raven!’ Lazenby said. The name had swum suddenly into his mind. A number of other things had also swum there. Whisky after whisky. Staggering down a road, the whole bunch of them. Red-haired Rogachev joking away. Then round a corner, up against a wall — a familiar corner, a familiar wall … It was Oxford, damn it! It had been in Oxford.

He looked up to find Hendricks and Philpott gazing at each other.

‘Raven?’ Hendricks said. ‘You’re sure of that?’

‘Almost sure. Also a Goldilocks. There were several people … it was all very — confusing.’

‘Goldilocks?’ Hendricks and Philpott were again exchanging glances. ‘Look, Professor, if you were maybe into — nicknames — could Goldilocks have been Rogachev — a red-haired sort of fellow?’

‘Nicknames, ah. Yes, I suppose it could be.’

‘With the other fellow as Raven because he was dark, very dark, in fact black — his hair?’

‘Possible. Raven doesn’t sound too Russian, does it?’

‘No. This fellow isn’t Russian. He’s an Indian.’

‘An Indian?’

‘A Red Indian. Canadian. His name’s on the back there.’

Lazenby looked at the back. The caption read: J. B. Porter (Dr Johnny Porter).

‘Doesn’t the name mean anything to you?’

‘I can’t say it does, no.’

‘Riots in Quebec?’

‘Oh, him. Well, I Well, wouldn’t have connected —’

‘No. He doesn’t look like that now. That’s the way he looked at Oxford. We think that’s where you met him.’

‘Yes, I think so too.’

‘Can you remember how you met him?’

‘Well, during a conference. At a reception, I think. For the delegates.’

‘He wasn’t a delegate. What was he doing there?’

‘That I don’t know.’

‘Did he seem to know Rogachev already?’

‘I don’t know that, either. They were just talking away about Siberia.’

‘About what aspects of it — do you remember?’

‘Well.’ Lazenby thought. ‘Languages, people, physical impairment of some kind — blindness? Snow blindness, perhaps. Something of the sort. About Siberia, anyway. Rogachev had worked there, of course, and I thought this fellow some kind of native. They were talking Russian rather a lot, and he certainly seemed to know the place so I assumed —’

‘Yes, he knows Siberia. He’s been there. There isn’t any doubt this is who Rogachev wants. He won’t talk to us. We think he might talk to you. Will you talk to him now?’

Lazenby stared at him. ‘You don’t mean now, of course,’ he said.

‘We know where he is now. He’s a difficult man to pin down. Now we’ve pinned him down. He’ll be there for the next four days.’

‘Where?’

‘Montreal.’

‘Montreal.’ Lazenby thought of his fish on the way to the smoker’s. He thought of the whole river full of fish. ‘Well, damn it,’ he said, ‘I hardly know the fellow really.’

‘That’s right,’ Hendricks said. ‘Nobody does really.’