Traitor's Kiss

…Chapter Twelve

The bow waves streamed back from the hull of the patrol-boat. The yellows and greens of the land's line, the high towers and the cranes of the harbour were clearly defined behind it. Mowbray had it in his binoculars. It headed for them, an arrow. The Princess Rose rolled viciously and Mowbray had to cling to the screwed-down table at the back of the bridge. Above him, on the mast, now hung two black balls — the daylight signature for Not Under Command. When they had been under control, and had had power, Mowbray had been able to cope well enough with the ship's pitch, fall and lift, but since they had drifted it had been worse than anything he'd known. He'd refused food and had huddled over the radio. The radio was an excuse. There would be communications silence until the zero hour, 20.00, but staying close to the radio focused a little of his mind away from the ship's motions. The patrol-boat ate up the distance, surged closer. 'Do you know what it is?'

'If it is important, Mr Mowbray, it is a Nanuchka III. It carries six tubes for launching the NATO-named Siren surface-to-surface missiles, range forty sea miles, and — yes, and—it has a single surface-to-air launcher, and one anti-aircraft gun, and if that is not enough it is also armed with a 30mm Gatling. I know because I used to sail Karachi to Bombay, and the Indians had them. It could put us out of the water, or under the water, in under two minutes.'

Mowbray growled defiantly, 'There's nothing to worry about. We're clean.'

'Forgive me to correct you — almost clean. We no longer have your Dogs with us, Mr Mowbray, and their kit — but we are inside their territorial waters, are subject to their laws, and we are only almost clean because we have you on board. If they were to find you, Mr Mowbray, we would not be clean.'

'You got paid,' he hissed.

'Better you go down, Mr Mowbray. The engineer, good Johannes, will help you.'

When he went below and down to the engine room, he wouldn't know what happened when the Princess Rose was boarded by men from the patrol-boat. He would be incarcerated in the space where the kit had been, sealed in against the hull and below the waterline, in darkness. Before the departure from Gdansk, he'd thought he could pose as the owners' representative, but the mate — the Croatian Zaklan — had spoken contemptuously of his complete lack of seafaring knowledge; he was consigned to the hiding-place, smaller and a deck below where the Dogs' gear, kit and weapons had been stowed.

He glanced a last time at the approaching boat. He no longer had control.

'If they come on board, what will you do?'

'Give them your whisky, Mr Mowbray, as much as they wish to drink — and show them the engine room. Go below.'

He struggled down the steep staircase to the accommodation floor, then gingerly lowered himself into the hatch and felt frantically for the steps of the narrow ladder, half falling to the oil-slicked floor of the engine room. The engineer, Richter, eyed him. In the dim light thrown by a single swaying, uncovered bulb, he tripped on the engine's cowling, his hip cannoned into a workbench, and he swore. Richter grinned at him, the same hidden laugh of the master, Yaxis. The sheet of metal plate was removed for him and he stepped into the cavity. There was room for him to stand or crouch, but not to lie down. He wouldn't have lain down anyway, because he could feel the cold of the bilge water seeping into his shoes. The metal sheet was replaced.

The darkness became blackness. He heard the screws being tightened, then the scrape as rubbish was piled back against the sheet.

The sea broke against the hull and threw shivers down his spine. Later, in his priest's hole, he heard the echoing impact, and felt it through every bone in his body, as the fenders hanging from the deck of the patrol-boat were crushed against the hull of the Princess Rose. And when he heard the muffled voices through the sheet of metal he barely dared to breathe. God, if he came through this, every bloody novice going down to Fort Monkton would know his story.

Boris Chelbia climbed the concrete stairs, followed by his driver. Ahead of him, a flight above, a woman struggled with three small children and her shopping. Every second flight she paused to recoup her strength. Chelbia stopped and waited for her to go on. He had no wish to be noticed.

From the landing windows there was a fine view out over the roofs and church spires of Gdansk and beyond to the docks. The high cranes of the shipyards were a part of his history. Twenty years earlier — not for Jaruzelski's secret police, nor for the Red Army based with their battle tanks at Braniewo, but for the KGB — Boris Chelbia had been an agent. When the yards and their workers had been in ferment, the time of strikes, riots and barricaded lock-ins, he had appeared to be a trusted courier for the Solidarity movement. He had represented — his story went, and it was believed — sympathizers from the docks at adjacent Kaliningrad. One month he would bring to the workers' committee a telex machine, and another it would be money. A third month it would be a lorryload of basic food supplies. It was all done quietly, but sufficient to create trust, and he had been able to provide a blueprint of the names and functions in the movement of the strikers' principal personalities. The cranes in the shipyards of Gdansk, which could be seen from these windows of the workers' block, had been his launch pad. Then the KGB had controlled him, and the influence they had given him had started Boris Chelbia on the road to fortune. He was the king of Kaliningrad. He understood, and had no squeamish qualms about it, that a king must dirty his hands, must go down in the gutter when necessary. The king could kill as easily now as on the day he had started out on his journey to power. The past had no hold on him. He did not look from the windows, down at the cranes, as he followed the woman up the flights of stairs.

He heard her gasp with exhaustion. Radios played in the block, blared out music. Graffiti, which he did not read, were daubed on the walls of the stairwell.

His finger closed on a doorbell.

He waited. He assumed that the wife would be at work or out, that any children would be at school or college or gone. It was a long wait before he heard the shuffling feet approach the door, and the faint mutters of impatience as he pressed continuously on the button. The night porter wore only underpants and a vest and stood in the doorway, wiping the sleep out of his face, puzzled to be confronted by a man of obvious wealth, who was smiling as if to greet an old friend.

Without explanation, other than Chelbia's smile, the driver took the night porter's bare arm, then reached with his other hand to pull the door to, and led him up the last two flights to the roof. Perhaps the night porter realized that his door was now shut to him, and that he had no key to re-enter his apartment, and perhaps he realized that to scream was futile, and that, against the grip on his arm, resistance was not possible. He did not struggle. Chelbia was strong. His muscles were tuned on the weights in his villa. He put his shoulder twice against the door to the roof, and it swung open.

The wind ripped at them. If the driver had not held his arm, the night porter would have collapsed into the puddles of rainwater.

Chelbia's cupped hands were against the night porter's ear as he whispered his questions, and after each question he put his own ear against the night porter's lips to hear better the answer — and the wind shrieked in the television aerials. The answers came in a messy confusion. A Russian had come to the hotel, money had passed, photographs were shown and one was identified, but that guest had moved out. The guest's colleague and a woman had stayed. The colleague, younger, had followed the Russian from the hotel, and he had not seen him again. The woman had stayed the night, had left early after breakfast, had paid up.

'Where did she go, the woman?'

The night porter would have known, because he was in his underpants and vest and his door was locked on him, that he faced the inevitability of death. He was beyond a point of return, but he answered the questions as best he was able, as if that were his duty. It was the experience of Boris Chelbia that the condemned were most often supine, cooperative.

'I carried her bags out. There was a Pole driving her, a big grey Mercedes, old model. She said, "How long does it take, Jerry, to Mierzeja Wislana, the far end?" It's what she said.'

He was thanked by Chelbia, as if courtesy were appropriate. On the rooftop, among the television aerials and dishes, was a hut of concrete blocks with a wooden door half rotted by rain, snow, gales and sunshine. Nailed to the door, with tacks, was a maintenance sheet of reinforced paper, on which the engineers were obliged to write their signatures confirming work had been carried out on the elevator that served the twenty-four floors of the block. Chelbia put his shoulder to it, but cautiously. The third time he battered it, the door opened, but his instant reaction was to cling to the jambs and prevent himself falling into the chasm. The FSB — once the KGB employed him because he left behind him no evidence, and dirtied his hands while theirs stayed clean. He stood aside.

The driver took the night porter to the top of the elevator shaft. At the last the man struggled. His shout was carried on the wind towards the idle cranes of the shipyard. Then he was gone, falling and twisting.

'There's a fucking rat in there,' was the first thing Mowbray said, when the last screw in the sheet of metal plate had been removed, and the rubbish hiding it had been manhandled away. 'A big bastard. I felt its fucking tail on my ankle.'

The master gave him his hand, the engineer grinned, and Mowbray lurched clear into the engine room. The lights, only faint, dazzled him. He had been in there more than an hour.

'They were good guys, very considerate of our problem,' the master said. 'It took time because we had to examine the charts to find where it was permitted to anchor. Then we hit your Scotch.'

From inside his hole, he'd heard the echoing drop of the anchor's chain. The roll of the Princess Rose was worse at anchor than it had been when she drifted.

'You didn't bloody finish it?'

'They wouldn't go till it was finished. At sea, Mr Mowbray, the hospitality of Scotch always creates trust. They were on their way out to sea but they were asked to check us, in spite of what I said to them by radio. Any vessel that is Not Under Command makes suspicion. In spite of the Scotch, Mr Mowbray, they will watch us closely, and I think other boats will be sent to visit us. You will see, I regret, your hiding-place again.'

'And that fucking rat,' Mowbray said dismally.

He was helped up the ladder and through the engine-room hatch. They steadied him as he climbed the stairs to the master's cabin. In it, he reached for his binoculars. He peered at the strip of land and the trees, the gold-white of the beach. Past the trees he saw a red windsock flying horizontally. Then he raked back over two kilometres of open ground until he reached the treeline. The edge was because he had measured it and the Dogs' leader, Billy, had confirmed it on the map — exactly eight kilometres from a village given the name of Rybacij. He was asked if he wanted lunch, but he shook his head. After he was left alone he stared a long time at the treeline and the distant windsock past which Viktor, his boy, would come as evening turned to night. The confidence drained from him. Without control, he was helpless. He could not take his eyes from the magnified vision of the treeline, where they waited for the sun to sink…but the sun had far to travel.

Locke stood on the dunes, and the wind caught his clothes, tugged them. As far as he could see, to the north-east and the south-west, the beach was empty save for one man and the cluster of bright-painted fishing-boats pulled up high on the sand. He gazed out over the rough swell of the sea.

Jerry the Pole had driven Alice and Locke into Krynica Morska and had gone off the road and into a car park. The town was a resort and, out of season, desolate. They had business ahead, at the grass binding it. He walked towards Alice. The wind and the air suited her. Her hair was ripped and the colour flushed into her cheeks. Before, he had barely noticed her: she was the woman who sat in the corner at meetings and never looked up from her shorthand pad; she arranged the transport and the accommodation; she was only General Service, not an officer. She had her hand up and against her forehead, shielding the sun from her eyes, and she stared away down the beach, past the watchtower, past the end of the tree line, past the open ground of the spit.

She looked for him. He knew it.

Back in the hotel, she had shown the Dogs her picture of Ferret. Locke hadn't seen it. He, Codename Ferret, was there, where the land and the skyline met.

When he reached her, she was still looking along the beach, her hand was still up, and he thought she kept a vigil, but she said, from the side of her mouth, 'There's a grave over there.'

'A what? A grave?'

'It's what I said, a grave.' With her free hand she pointed behind her.

He walked to where she pointed. Near to the path was a picnic bench in a half-moon of pines. In the third line of the trees, a break in the lush grass, was a bare square of ground with a raised mound in the centre of it. A wooden cross had a wreath of evergreen foliage fastened where the cross spars met; at its foot was a second wreath and some pottery jars, which held long-spent candles. A sheet of laminated paper was tacked to the lower part of the cross. The sun threw shafts on to the grass he walked over to reach the grave. It held eight men's decayed corpses. He saw the names of six of them, and their ages, typed on to the laminated paper, but two more were listed as 'Unknown', and the date against the eight was the same: 30 April 1945. They had died in the last hours of the war, been buried in a pit, and only recently had been found; they had been left by those who had discovered them in the resting-place beneath the trees; that April, fifty-seven years later, people had come with flowers and a wreath, and had lit little candles. It should have been a place for kids to play and for parents to bring food and beer — but it was a place for the dead. He was tricked. Everything Locke saw deceived him. He strode back to her. She gazed into that far distance.

Locke asked, with a harsh snap, 'You showed the men a photograph — not the file one. May I see it?'

She didn't turn to him but reached into the bag slung from her shoulder. She took out the small leather pouch, unfastened its clasp and gave it to him. It had been taken with a flash, delayed. It was a snapshot in the night. She stood in her coat, and pride, joy lit her face. He was beside her, his arm was around her shoulder and her head was tilted to rest on his chest; he was comforting her, protecting her, and the broad smile of happiness creased his features. He closed it, fastened it, gave it back to her. 'Right, let's go,' he said.

Jealousy cut him as he walked back up the track, away from the sea, towards where Jerry the Pole waited with the car.

The room was ready.

Before the flair for interrogation of Yuri Bikov had been recognized, when he was posted to the section of the Officer Cadet Training School that fed the Dzerzhinsky division, the lecturers had hammered at the cadets the value of preparation. Only, they said, on the rarest and most exceptional investigations — where time was critical — should preparation be less than thorough. Bikov had now read every file that was available to him on the professional career of his target, and he had had faxed to him the files on the career and death of his target's father. His major had been to an academic at the university for briefing on the importance of the castle at Malbork to archaeologists. Bank accounts had been gutted. Every place he had looked had told Bikov more about his target. The very clothes that he wore — dirty, smelling, mud-spattered — were a part of the preparation.

The room was the final brick in the block he built, and it was ready.

The lecturers had taught him the basic skills and had awakened an interest that he had not known existed. Every matter beyond the basics he had learned for himself — and they were little things, but each was weighed with importance. In the room, the windows were papered over and the blinds were drawn. Every picture, calendar, duty-roster chart, plan and map had been taken down, every hook and nail removed from the walls. The previous evening, under the supervision of his sergeant, the radiators had been switched off, and overnight the windows had been left open. Not until the morning had they been closed, then covered. The rug on the carpet had been taken out, and the carpet had been lifted from its adhesive fastenings, and the under-felt. All furniture, any trace of civilization, had been removed.

He had turned the room into a grey tomb without any focus point that might help his target. There would be nothing in the room but himself, the predator, and his prey, and a single candle. The candle, passed to him by his sergeant, was held upright on a plain plate by congealed wax. His eye roved for the exact centre of the room and when he had found that point he set the plate down on it.

Nothing was to chance.

'He is still at his workplace?'

'Yes.'

'No phone calls and no visitors?'

His sergeant was linked by radio to the admiral's suite. 'None.'

'And Falkovsky?'

'In his room, has cleared his diary, takes no calls.'

Bikov went to the side of the room, leaned against the wall and slid his back down it. When he sat on the concrete floor he drew up his knees and wrapped his arms around them.

'Then we wait another hour, or perhaps two hours — while the anxiety cripples him, until it is an agony for him. Until he would — almost — thank us for ending it. Yes…yes…thank us for taking away his pain.'

He rested his head on his knees and closed his eyes. The next day, or the day after, the electronics housed in the nose cone of an MI-24 attack helicopter, below the main machine-gun and forward of the rocket pods, would home in on the beacon that was hidden in the stock of an assault rifle, and his head filled with the crescendo of the general's laughter. In truth, he liked what he had seen of the man and thought him worthy of the preparations that were made. But it was not important to Yuri Bikov that he had liked what he had seen, or what would happen to the man once his job was done. He dozed.

The conscript, Igor Vasiliev, had boastfully told the corporal in the armoury everything of the difficulties of shooting that morning, the cross-wind's strength, and how he'd hacked it — then had told the corporal of his special permission from his platoon sergeant to return to the range in the late afternoon and shoot again. The corporal said he was 'shit' and 'crazy', if he wanted to go back to the range at dusk when any man of half sense would be getting his arse up close to a stove or a radiator. Anyway, did he know that the forecast was changing to north winds and rain? Vasiliev lodged the NSV heavy machine-gun back in the armoury, initialled the log, then said when he would return for it, and what time in the evening he would check it back in.

The excitement of the shooting still ran within him. He went for his navigation lecture. Afterwards, before going to the armoury, he would hang about outside the headquarters block in the hope that he would see his friend, who should know how well he had shot with the cross-wind so strong. He would tell him, if he saw Captain Archenko outside the headquarters.

They had waited now for more than twenty minutes. Bikov's major and his sergeant sat in the car at the bottom of the steps to the main door of the headquarters block, with the engine running and the doors half open.

The in-tray was empty, the out-tray filled. His computer was switched off. Viktor knew it would happen but did not know when. On any normal day he would have been summoned three times, or four, into the fleet commander's office to wrestle with a planning paper, or the diary, or to act as a sponge while the admiral talked. Since the men had come that day, he had not been called.

The trolley came again, as it always did, in mid-afternoon. The hot chocolate was put on his desk and the girl with the ponytail smiled warmth at him, then went to the guardian's table and put on it the tray with the china cup, saucer and plate. She poured the tea. She waved to them all, her day's work done, and backed her trolley out. None of the other officers or the secretariat would have known what had changed, but all would have known that for the greater part of a working day the chief of staff had not entered the inner office of the fleet commander. The silence clung. They waited for resolution. They would have heard Piatkin's refusal to allow Captain, second rank, Archenko into the admiral's office when strangers had come. In the 260 outer office, men and women made themselves small and unnoticed, and whispered into telephones. None caught his eye. The admiral's guardian took the tray to him. The door was open behind her. Viktor could see the admiral, side on, at his desk, his head down, his shoulders shrunken.

She put the tray on his desk and the admiral seemed not to see it, did not move.

He called out, 'Admiral, is there anything I can do — should we talk about your diary?'

Admiral Falkovsky's chair spun on its pivot, away. Viktor saw his back, the prickled cropped hairs on his neck.

A shout answered him, pebbles in a concrete mixer, 'Go to your quarters. Get out…go!'

The guardian came out, white-faced, and closed the door. Viktor stood. Every head was turned away. His desk was clear, as it had been the day before, when he had not run. He went to the stand by the outer door, lifted down his coat and slipped it loose to hang over his shoulders. He looked up at the clock on the wall. He was expected at the rendezvous on the eight-kilometre stone beyond Rybacij in five hours less twelve minutes. He would run. He straightened his tie, as if that were important, and brushed dust flecks off his epaulettes.

He went down the stairs from the second floor. When he was clear of the building he would cross the base, take the ferry — whether he was followed or not — commandeer the first wheels on the far side, run, and hide up. He stamped across the lobby area. The military policeman at the table beside the door stiffened, stood, and waited for him to pass, but did not salute. The military policeman at the door always saluted. Viktor pushed open the door. A car was up close to the steps, and two men jackknifed out of it. The sun was in his face.

The men came fast up the steps, one on each side of him and the car blocked escape. A flash of light on metal in the hand of the man on the left side of him. As he realized that the metal was handcuffs, his arms were grabbed. The click reverberated in his ear, and the pain was in his wrist. He lashed out with his shoe and caught a shin, then flailed with his free fist and hit a throat. One half down and one reeling away. He tried to run. His arm seemed to be wrenched from the socket at his shoulder, as though he dragged a hundred-kilo sack of sand. He stamped his feet to gain speed but could not loose the hold and the handcuff dug deeper into his wrist. The great broad arms of the military policeman encircled him from behind and suffocated his last attempt to run.

In the middle distance, Viktor saw the conscript.

He blustered once, 'What the fuck is…? Who the fuck do you think…? You know who I…?'

He could think of nothing more to yell in protest. The man he was handcuffed to had worn the suit and carried the briefcase into the admiral's office.

'Right, Captain Archenko. Unnecessary but understandable. I can put your teeth down your throat, or we can go with dignity. Which?'

He was led the last steps to the car. The man to whom he was handcuffed slid in through the open door, then tugged Viktor after him. The second man retrieved his coat and threw it in after him. The door was slammed shut, and the car eased away.

Viktor did not realize it, could not have analysed it, but a feeling of light-headed relief consumed him. It was over. At a stroke, the double life was gone. He sagged back in the seat. The car went past the slack-jawed conscript, past the senior officers' mess, the armoury, the non-commissioned officers' club and the workshop complex, past the landscape of his territory. He could see the upper outer walls of the fortress where his grandmother might have waited after the last boat had gone. He felt at that moment freer, more liberated, than at any moment since he had gone up the gangplank on to the trawler tied against the quay at Murmansk. A weight, which had lain there since his mother had told him how his father had been exposed to leukaemia, seemed lifted from his back, and with it went the burden of the last months of his grandmother's life. What price now, in the steadily driven car, his hate? When a man was in the waters of the Barents or on the glacier rocks of the Kola peninsula, above the Arctic Circle, they said all he wanted was to sleep, and if he slept he would die. He thought Alice North called him.

He jerked up in his seat, then, and wrenched the handcuff fastening him to the man. He would fight, would not sleep, he would give them nothing.

The car stopped outside the building that housed the office of the zampolit, Piatkin. He was led inside and up the stairs. Viktor tried to walk straight-backed, to set the pace, and made the chain taut between the handcuffs. He was taken through Piatkin's empty office, and in front of a closed door a key was used to unfasten the handcuffs. He rubbed at his wrist. His uniform jacket was pulled off him, his tie was taken, his pockets were emptied. His belt was dragged from his waist, the shoes off his feet, and his watch was snatched. The door was opened. He was pitched through it and it slammed shut behind him. He fell to the concrete floor and the darkness enveloped him.

'Heh, you! Yes, Vasiliev, you…'

Vasiliev stood rock still, in shock. He had seen his friend, Captain Archenko, step through the doors and he had taken a half-step towards him. From that moment he had been rooted. The platoon, on their way to the gymnasium, marked time, stamped out the rhythm.

'Vasiliev, what the fuck do you think you are doing?' the sergeant shouted.

Half a step forward and the excitement welling in him — having rehearsed what he would say about his morning's shooting — then frozen as two men had rushed his friend.

'Vasiliev, are you shooting or are you jerking off, or are you doing the gymnasium, like you're supposed to be?'

He had seen a short, bitter little fight. The handcuff had prevented his friend's escape. Then the military policeman had intervened and his arms had smothered the fight. His friend, the chief of staff to the admiral, had saved his life, had brought him back the machine-gun he loved beyond any other possession.

'Vasiliev — shoot, or the gymnasium? Which?'

His friend was arrested, like a criminal would be taken by the militsiya, a thief. Other officers had been crossing the parade-ground and had seen nothing, and had gone on. The platoon and the sergeant had not seen it. Only Igor Vasiliev had been the witness.

'Vasiliev, what's the matter with you? Are you an idiot? Do you shoot, or don't you shoot?'

The chief of staff to the fleet commander was his friend and protector, was almost a father to him. In his locker, hidden at the back, was a simple chart on which were listed the dates of each month, and every day he crossed out another. That morning, after crossing out the day in October, he had counted the dates remaining of his three years of conscripted service — ninety-six. The sergeant stared at him. If he disobeyed his sergeant, when Captain Archenko was in handcuffs and no longer his protector or friend, they could stick on him five more months, or six, in the military gaol. His voice was strangled, 'Going to shoot, Sergeant.'

'This is the sort of place that screws you up…know what I mean?' Billy was back. He had been gone a few minutes more than an hour. When he was close to the basher, he'd done the screech-owl and Lofty had answered him. He'd crawled into the dark space there'd been curses as his boots and body took space from them. He whispered, 'I went out west, about two hundred metres, and I've done a circle. You know what? This was a battlefield. In there there's trenches and bunkers — good trenches, in zigzags, and bunkers made with tree-trunks or concrete. They're everywhere. You find a bunker and go forward twenty-five metres and you find a trench, head on another fifty metres and there's another bunker, then another set of trenches — they're everywhere. There's old wire, I found ammunition cases, and a mortar but no bombs for it. It must have been fought over, yard on yard. And there's craters, bombs and artillery craters. And I found a skull…I suppose a fox had dug it up. There must have been poor bastards here with nowhere to go, blocked at each end, and no more ships coming to get them. I don't reckon, however hard you looked, you'd find ammunition. The sods would have used it up, each last round of it, maybe kept one back for themselves, or the last grenade. Don't mind admitting it, the skull spooked me. It was just stuck out of the leaves and the rest of him was covered. It still had the helmet on it, and two holes in it, straight through the eye sockets. He'd have been on his back and looking up at the night — or the day, doesn't matter — and last bloody thing he saw was a barrel aiming down on him. No more ammunition, no more medics, no more evacuation boats — it's a shit of a place.'

He'd quietened them, stilled them. He could hear their breathing.

'OK…OK. North is the shoreline. The beach is clear. There are signs on it forbidding access. She's way out, the Princess Rose, anchored. The tide's down, maybe on the ebb, but the dinghy's fine, you can't see it. I worked from the west side to start with. There's one track and I'd say it's used by patrol vehicles. It's hard-packed so the vehicles using it can go fast. It'll go right up to the border. The forestry's not managed. No bugger's been in it. I don't think they come this far up for exercises. There's bramble and thorn in there. You wouldn't try to run through it, snags and snags, it's slow going. What would worry me, if the place was a battlefield then there'd have been mines. If there were mines put down, it doesn't look as though anyone's ever cared to come back through and clear them, but there's fox tracks and I saw deer prints — not that a fox would set a mine off, but a deer might, so where the deer have gone is our best route. I'm not big on mines but I think they'd last from the time this place was a battlefield.'

Lofty murmured that if ordnance was still live from 1915 at Passchendaele, it would be live from 1945 here.

'Just so, Lofty…and you'd bloody know. Going south, there's the lagoon. The beach is different. Good ground for running on, but the lagoon side is a waste of time. Bog and reed beds. You wouldn't want to be in there, couldn't move fast or quiet and they've the track to get behind you, if it comes down to that. I'd write off the lagoon. Tell you what, though, you remember Braniewo? You can see Braniewo straight across the lagoon, only seven or eight kilometres. You can see the church, but I didn't see any boats on this side. The lagoon's a non-starter for us. It has to be the beach.'

It was just like the old times, with Billy as the team leader. Going up the anchor chains to board tankers for anti-terrorist exercises, getting flushed out of a submerged submarine, then paddling to the towering supports of oil-rigs in the North Sea for more exercises, stalking the foreshore of Carlingford Lough when it wasn't playtime, holding the team together in silence in the Crime Squad's interview rooms when it was for real. Like old times…

'So, I'm going east, and I can tell you what we didn't know. I have the GPS plot on Rybacij, and I can take myself to eight kilometres this side of it, down to the last five metres, the pickup point. It's marked on the map as forest. No, no, too easy. The map's out.'

His father, disabled by heart trouble, had sat in his chair to the right side of the shrine and blinked to hold back tears; his mother, who was the earner and who left the maisonette at four thirty a.m. each weekday to clean offices, had gone into the kitchen to make a pot of tea. He had told them that 'something in Ireland went wrong', that he was washed up, finished. The photographs were on a table and the cups were on shelves above it. He'd not stayed long, less than half an hour, and after he'd gone his father had been free to weep and his mother would have brought through the pot of tea from the kitchen. He knew they were alive still because on their birthdays and at Christmas he telephoned the neighbour across the landing and learned what little was new — and in each phone call he asked the same question. Were the photographs and cups still in place? They were, and each call hurt him worse.

He had seen the camera in the drawer by the wheel when the master had opened it to produce a chart. They would stand on the deck of the Princess Rose—Billy, Ham, Lofty and himself. They would be wearing their wetsuits or the camouflages, and Mr Mowbray would hold up the camera, and they'd josh him about his focus, his aim, and they would all be laughing, and the pride would be on their faces. Their arms would be round each other. The same photograph was in the shrine. They were on the upper superstructure of a rig, or forward on the deck of a tanker, or on a submarine ploughing the Clyde, or in the barracks hut at Ballykinler a month before the last patrol. Four photographs of the team were in the shrine, and there would be a fifth. He would take it back himself. He would collect the enlargement from the chemist, and a frame, and would go back to the dreary red-brick building under the flight path. He could not go back without the photograph. 'Just something we did for government, Dad — all a bit hush-hush, Mum. Good to see you're keeping well.' It was Wickso's dream.

From the doorway of the room she'd chosen, Locke watched Alice unpack. Her back was to him. She took out her wash bag and laid it on the bed.

In the village of Piaski there was a church, a café, the homes of fishermen and a caravan site. There had been an arrow pointing to the shore for the campers. Jerry the Pole had driven them through the village, then Locke had ordered him abruptly to stop. He and Alice had quit the car, taken the bags and the gear from the boot, and he had told Jerry the Pole that he should find himself a table in the café and stay there until they came for him; he should not leave the café. They'd walked up the street, on the tarmac of the one street in Piaski, past the turning to the new church, past dogs rearing and barking behind fences. They'd gone on till the street petered to a dry, sandy track, and kept walking. Where the track ended, became a footpath, there was a pink-painted bungalow, all the windows closed, no washing on the line, no dog throwing itself against the gate. No recent tyre tracks indented the turning up to the gate or the ground inside it. Spent honeysuckle climbed the bungalow walls, but a red rambler rose meandered in the boundary hedge. The bungalow would be dry, and the owners — from Germany or Warsaw — would not miss a few kilowatts of electricity. The gear always received and transmitted better when on mains power. They'd crept through birch trees and scrub on the far side of the bungalow to the village, then slipped over a low fence. A cat, on its stomach, had scowled at them, then fled. They'd taught property entry on the IONEC course at Fort Monkton, but Locke had never before put it into practice. It was a simple lock on the back door, and his credit card did for it. The living room was all closed down for the winter and dust-sheets covered the chairs. It had been a long day, would be a long night, and Locke had suggested Alice might catnap for an hour or two while he rigged the gear and ran the aerial into the kitchen, which had a flat roof. The first drops of rain pelted on to it.

Locke had played back the recorded message, transmitted thirty minutes before: 'Delta 2 to Havoc 1—in place, site recce completed. Out.' He had sent his own: 'Havoc 1 to Havoc 2—Delta in place and site recce completed. Out.' The signal from along the peninsula was strong, but the possibility of it being intercepted was minimal. His transmission out to the Princess Rose was adequate. Using the dogleg from the team to Mowbray reduced the interception potential. She'd shown him the picture, and in the picture Ferret's arm was round her.

'Did you sleep with him?'

She turned to face him.

'Slept with him, didn't you? Was it Mowbray's idea? Doing your bit for Rupert bloody Mowbray. Got the nod and wink from Mowbray, did you? "Our boy's stressed up, Alice dear, might crumple, needs a bit of comforting." Couldn't ring down from the room and tell the porter to send up a tart, could he? How did you feel about playing the whore, or was it just duty? "Don't think of him as a traitor, Alice dear, think of him as a colleague." But he's not a colleague, he's not one of us and never will be — am I right? He's a traitor, and he'll bring us all down. Christ, Alice, you didn't think, did you, that he loved you — you were just getting rid of his fucking stress. You didn't, did you? Alice?'

She no longer looked into his eyes. She took the picture from her handbag, opened its clasp and laid it on the bed beside the washbag. As she bent the pendant hung free from her throat. She smiled at him, a little grin of mischief. It was her answer. She was beyond his reach.

He blundered back to the kitchen.

The room was in Piatkin's palace.

There should have been a pile carpet and furniture. Without his watch, Viktor did not know how long he had been in the room before, at last, he sensed the movement. The darkness was too dense for him to see. It had been a long time, because his mind had throbbed, before he had known he shared the room. A man breathed somewhere. Somewhere in the room was another man. His knees scraped the concrete and the palms of his hand were gouged by its roughness. He thought the darkness was like the moment after death.

Viktor crawled towards where he thought he might find the man. His head hit the wall. He went right. There should have been chairs and bookcases, filing cabinets and table legs. They had made a cell for him of a room that had been a king's quarters. He came to the wall's end and twisted, felt a power socket but no flex led from it. He had told himself he would fight. He would not cry out. His fingers touched a boot. The fingers worked over its laces and a sock, then skin, then the material of rough jeans. A match was lit. It was cupped in hands and the palms took its light away from the face of the man. Viktor let go of the jeans. The match's light moved to the centre of the room. A candle was lit. Its flame grew in the still air. The man sat cross-legged on the far side of the candle. Viktor saw a face, younger than his own, and he thought it humble, that it showed him respect. 'It's the sort of shit they teach these days at the Lubyanka, Viktor. Disorientation, that sort of crap. I am Bikov, and now we can talk. I think we will grow to like each other…I sincerely hope so.'