Traitor's Kiss

…Chapter Thirteen

'I cannot speak for the State, Viktor. I am not responsible for it. What I see of the State, Viktor, makes me ashamed to be its servant: it is a cesspit of corruption. Criminality, organized and spontaneous, is out of control. The State, Viktor, is sick. Any man of sensitivity and of dignity has complete justification in rejecting it. I accept that. If I possessed your courage, I would have done what you have done. I am your supporter, Viktor.'

No tape-recorder's spools turned. No microphone carried Yuri Bikov's words. No note was taken.

'You may trust me, Viktor. I will protect you from the thugs with truncheons, electrodes, drugs, from all the shit people. They would not understand, to them pain is an end. I want to understand and then I want to help. Your friends have abandoned you — but you are fortunate because you have a new friend — you have me. I know so little of you, Viktor, but you will help me to know you better. I want to learn about you.'

The bright flame of the candle kept company with them. First Bikov would talk, then he would listen. He would create an atmosphere that he could tap into, then milk. When younger, when he had started to recognize his own skills, he had watched the work of other interrogators in Counterintelligence (Military). He had learned their style, then had pitched his own in a directly opposite fashion. Most regarded themselves as an elite and had showered themselves with superiority — most took an attitude that they were the chosen representatives of the highest power, and the suspect was barely worth the time and effort given him.

Imagine an empty bucket and a tap against a wall, and a day of stultifying heat. The need of the interrogator was to have the bucket filled, if he were to drink and cool himself. The tap must be turned, the water must flow and fill it. If the water does not lap at the top of the bucket the interrogator has failed. Hitting the tap with a pickaxe handle would not fill the bucket; the tap's handle must be turned, and gently. Once, in the dog-end days in Afghanistan, in the camp at Herat where the sand blew and the flies bit, when Bikov had been a junior lieutenant, he had watched a fellow officer, same rank, hammer the face of a mujahidin to a pulp with an iron bar. When the suspect was unconscious, incapable of giving information, Bikov had told the officer he should have been a plumber, not an officer: 'If you had chosen employment as a plumber, not as a soldier, and you had cut your finger with a knife you could have beaten your knife with a hammer, and been satisfied.' The officer had not understood him.

'You are a senior officer, Viktor, a man of stature, and I respect you. If a man of your intelligence, your insight, has a grievance then it should be listened to. But fools don't listen. How many times, Viktor, have you voiced concerns, anxieties, worries, and how many times have you been ignored because the system does not have the legitimacy or the confidence to allow itself to be criticized? Don't answer…the system is rotten. To me you can speak with freedom.'

In Chechnya, his first tour, the bandits had crossed a minefield to attack a camp south of Grozny, had planted explosives and had run back through the minefield, but in the attack's confusion one had been captured by the paratroops based at the camp. Their commander had tied a rope to the ankle of the prisoner and he had been prodded at bayonet point back into the minefield. The paratroops, in hot pursuit, had followed the rope's length behind him, believing he would take them through the mines. The prisoner had killed himself, and the two paratroops who held the end of the rope. Bikov had arrived at the camp two hours later, and had told the commander he was an 'idiot'.

By the candle's light he could see Viktor's face, and his prey could see his. But the light of the candle did not reach to the bare walls of the room, or to its ceiling. He denied his prey the chance to turn his head to a bookcase and memorize the titles on the shelves, to stare at the pattern on a chair or the scratches on a hard seat; there were no window bars for him to gaze at or a heap of files on a desk in which Viktor could escape the questions that would come. They were together, the two of them, alone. There was no evidence — Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Bikov worked towards a confession from Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko. He had time and he had patience, and the confession, when it came, would end the life of his prey.

'We are here to sort out your difficulties, Viktor, as friends do, true friends. I respect you, and I believe you will come to respect me. Together we break down the difficulties, you and I.'

He spoke quietly. If Viktor were to hear him he would have to strain and concentrate, and that was good. He saw Viktor's head tilt and twist, but there was nothing for his eyes to reach towards, only the darkness, and that was the best. The old shabby clothes, an artisan's, and the boots with the dried mud of Chechnya still on them, the stubble on his face and the tangle in his hair were the superficial signs that he was not superior, not in authority, to the man separated from him by the candle's sharp flame. Viktor, if Viktor looked at him and studied him, would read the openness and honesty of his face. Everything was planned, prepared. Bikov did not think it would be easy — the prey he stalked had lived a deception for many years and would have survived black-dog days of despair and also the days of elation when he would have believed himself untouchable. Only a man of steeled character could have come through the bad days and the good. He was ready to land the first blow: his soft-spoken words would hit harder than a crowbar, or a pickaxe handle, or a lead-tipped truncheon.

'We should start at the beginning, Viktor, with family. Myself, I have no family. My father divorced my mother twenty-two years ago, I was fourteen. I have not seen my father from that day. My mother is in Gorno-Altaysk, an awful place. I think she is still there, but I don't write, I don't know. I was married, and divorced, before I was twenty five; there is a daughter but I have no contact to know if she is the star at school or is indifferent or is poor with her books. Money goes from my bank to them, but you…you were the pride of your father, Viktor, and the joy of your mother. You had family.' He hit home. The candle's light showed Viktor jolted.

Back to the hole in the hull's lining.

The wind had turned, the clouds blackened, the swell lessened.

A launch had come out. Mowbray was entombed behind the sheet of metal plate. He heard the voices, a cocktail of accents in English the Russian from the launch, the Greek master and the German engineer. The dispute was over the position of the Princess Rose. Did they not realize they were anchored inside a prohibited-entry zone? But only by three nautical miles. Were they in need of assistance from a tug out of Kaliningrad? The problem of the engine would be fixed by midnight, and the cost of a tug was too great. What exactly was the problem with the engine? Age, and there had been laughter. The voices had gone. Mowbray knew that the harbour master's office in Kaliningrad would have contacted the authority in Gdansk and would have been told that the shitty little rust tub had left Polish waters with a recent history of engine problems.

Once more he was released from his prison — this time the rat hadn't visited. The signal was now in London: 'Havoc to VBX. In place, all ready. Out.' They'd be chewing on it, half frightened out of their wits at what they had unleashed, and that brought a limited sardonic smile to Mowbray's mouth. Through the porthole, misted now because of the thickening cloud, was the treeline where his Dogs were, where nothing moved.

'Your father was a hero.'

If he looked at the ceiling, which he could not see, or the walls that were beyond the candle's throw of light, if he stared down at his shoes that had no laces and counted the eyes, if he did not answer he admitted guilt.

'I hardly knew him.' Viktor's voice was as frail as the candle's flame.

'You were seventeen years old, Viktor, when he died — I think you would have known he was a hero. A fit, strong man, a pilot of the highest quality, then struck down in his prime, doing his duty — he gave his life for the shit, corrupt, criminal-ridden, rotten State. I doubt he ever complained — heroes don't. How do you remember your father?'

He hesitated and the voice mesmerized him. His friend, Rupert Mowbray, had told him he should never lie when questioned. A good interrogator — and if he were questioned it would be by the best stored facts given him in his memory and passed on from them, then returned to them an hour later, or a day later, when the lie's statement was forgotten. A lie confirmed guilt. The lies in his mind were for the matters of importance. What documents had he removed and taken to Poland? None. Had he left the hotel where the delegation stayed in Gdansk to go to meet his handlers? Never. Where were the dead drops or the brush contacts? They did not exist. Was he a spy, a traitor, who betrayed his country? No. Those were the lies of importance, but he was not asked those questions. He had expected to be on a cell's floor with the boots pounding him, then to be dragged to a room where a light dazzled him, then to be hustled to a plane for the flight to Moscow. Instead he had been told his father was a hero.

'I remember little of him.'

'I remember my father, Viktor — not with love because I hated him. Your father was an exceptional, extraordinary man. A good father, a good husband, and a respected test pilot at the experimental range at Totskoye. He flew into a nuclear cloud. Did you know that, Viktor?'

'My mother told me.'

'I think, Viktor — but it is difficult for a man to put himself in the mind of another — that I would have felt a bitterness if my father, if I had loved him, had been ordered to fly into a nuclear cloud, with all those risks, and had carried out his orders.'

'I do my duty as an officer as my father did his duty.'

'A good answer, Viktor…but I do not believe it. For some wasted experimentation your father flew through a nuclear cloud. It killed him. What was the value of it? Nil. His life was given away so that scientists could examine data. Was the data ever of real use? I doubt it…I would have felt bitter.'

'It hurt…yes, it hurt,' Viktor murmured.

No expression crossed the face of Bikov, across the flame from him. He felt a great tiredness and a hunger, and he knew he was lulled. If he looked past the shoulder of Bikov, or away from him, only the darkness bounced back at him. If there were pain, torture, shouting, he could have fought it. The man opposite gave him nothing to fight. He recognized the danger but did not know how to confront its sweet reasonableness…the switch.

'Are you German, Viktor?'

He was shaken. 'Why?'

'Am I impertinent? I don't wish to be. I don't stereotype, but you have German features. You are the image of your father, from the pictures I have seen, fair and tall…and I have seen also photographs of his parents. They were farmers who had settled in Kaliningrad, but they had come from the east, from the steppes of Kazakh, they were Asiatic. But their son is not sallow, he is blond. He is not short, as they were, he is tall. Explain it to me, Viktor, please.'

He should not lie, Rupert Mowbray had warned him of the risk of falsehoods, unless the questions involved his life and his death. He could not know if Bikov trawled with a net or knew of the hours that he had spent in the archive of the orphanage, and if Bikov had examined the old records of the nuns.

'Is it important?'

'I think so, if I am to know you.'

He saw the humanity…designed to win trust. He saw the warmth of the man. For four years he had trusted nobody, had confided in no man, and his loneliness had savaged him.

'My grandmother was German.'

'And your grandfather?' The lips barely moved but the question probed.

'My true grandfather was Russian.'

'Your father's birthplace, Viktor, is given as Kaliningrad. You have come home.'

'It is where my grandmother lived.'

'And your father was born, Viktor, in January 1946, and if your grandmother had gone full term then the conception would have been in April 1945, the month that the Red Army arrived in Kaliningrad. Was it love, Viktor?'

'What do you mean?'

The voice purred, the face bled sympathy. 'Love, you know — a young soldier and a young girl, from the different sides of the greatest conflict the world had seen, rejecting the politics and finding romance in the ruins of a wonderful city. Romeo and Juliet. Was it?'

'My grandmother was gang-raped. She was probably unconscious when my natural grandfather dropped his trousers.'

A frown of concern cut his forehead and the candle's light caught the sympathy. 'I'm so sorry…I didn't know.'

'She bore my father, whom she left on the step of the orphanage before hanging herself. She lies in an unmarked grave.' He could hear the shake in his own voice. Bikov leaned to hear him. 'It was not a love story.'

'I feel for you, Viktor. I lift a veil and I had no right to…'

The windsock had dropped.

Over the telephone from the concrete bunker below the targets, the messages came back. 'No hits' or 'Outer only'. Igor Vasiliev, the twenty-one-year-old conscript, had built a reputation on the range. The new inducted arrivals, 2 Platoon of the 4th company of the 81st regiment of naval infantry, had been firing for the first time with assault rifles, and when they had finished the instructors had held them back in the failing light, and had held up Vasiliev as an example they should strive towards. Boys, barely out of the schools' classrooms, were gathered in a half-circle behind him, and they had never seen a weapon as sleek and powerful as the NSV 12.7mm heavy machine-gun. Many times he had fired with spectators pressed close to him, but never before had he fired so poorly.

The fifth time that the calls had come back, 'No hits' and 'Outer only', the instructors called away the platoon, marched them to their lorries, and glowered back at him, as if he had wasted their time.

After they'd gone, and he was alone, he fired again. He lay behind the breech block, legs apart, and the belt was fed from the top of an ammunition box. It was the position he always took. The earmuffs were clamped tight over his scalp. He squeezed the trigger with the same rhythm as every time…but as he fired and felt the shudder of the stock against his shoulder, heard the deadened crack of the firing, he could not concentrate. What he loved, the heavy machine-gun, took second place in his mind.

He had seen Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko wrestled to submission, handcuffed, taken into custody. He was a simple young man, without education, and as he shot he struggled to look back on what he knew of his protector, and to find a reason for the arrest. His hold on the weapon wavered and he snatched at the trigger bar: he could not hold the crosshairs of the sight that was calibrated to the maximum effective range of 2000 metres. If there was a fault-line shown him, Vasiliev did not see it. All that remained in his mind, distracting him, was a vague feeling that the captain had been detached from the life of the base and was different from other officers. Five shots in the burst. Talking to the conscript about the beauty of the castle across the frontier. Five more shots. Never mentioning the politics of Putin and the new understandings with the old enemy. Five more. Nothing of the shortages of fuel and food, equipment and training days. Five. The captain was like no other officer: he had gone into the sea to save him and had brought him back his machine-gun.

The belt was finished. The message came back, laconic and bored, 'No hits.'

Vasiliev chewed gum.

They said on the telephone that it was five o'clock, that their duty of target-spotting was finished. He asked them to leave on the sunken lights that lit the targets after dark: he had 120 more rounds to shoot. He hoped in the dusk he would regain his concentration. He eased back from the weapon, did the discipline, slipped the catch to safety. His teeth ground on the gum. He heard the distant sound of the jeep coming. He did not know whether his failures were from his hold on the stock or from his calculations of the changed wind's deflection or from the bedding into the sand-mud of the tripod's legs.

The jeep reached him. The target-spotters laughed at him.

'You're shooting like shit, Vasiliev. You couldn't hit a barn door at a hundred metres. What's your officer going to say when he hears you're fucking crap?'

They drove away. His jaw was set as he threaded the next short belt. Away ahead of him, in the gathering gloom, he could see the faintly lit white targets.

'In Gomo-Altaysk, Viktor, where I was a child, there is not a single building of historic interest. Not one. It's a dump. You know, there is more that's interesting in Grozny, believe me. In Gorno-Altaysk there is a bus station, a post office near to Kommunistichesky Prospekt, a little museum, which is a reconstructed Pazyryk burial site, and one lousy hotel. There is nothing more in Gorno-Altaysk. It's a pile of dog shit.'

There had been tension in his prey's shoulders when he had led him through the deaths of his father and grandmother; now he saw the grin. Bikov smiled back, felt the lines crack his cheeks. The candle was more than a quarter burned down, and the windows must have been ill-fitting because a draught caught the flame. Other than their voices, and the rain's beat on the covered windows, there was no sound in the room. He had instructed that the rooms underneath and above should be cleared. Bikov laughed out loud.

'Maybe there is a cinema now, to show films of Putin leading heroic police charges against the mafiya…maybe. What is the main sport in Gorno-Altaysk? Planning how to leave, checking the bus timetables. There is nothing of substance there unless you go into the forests and shoot bears, nothing. You, Viktor, are lucky.'

A cautious hesitation. 'How?'

'Because of your interests, your hobbies. I have nothing. I live out of a bag. There is no room in the bag for such interests.'

'What do you mean?'

He laughed again. 'Medieval archaeology, the interest that takes you to Poland for visits to the castle at Malbork. How did that start?'

'When I was a cadet at the Frunze Naval College we sailed…'

'That is Leningrad?'

'Yes. We sailed on the fisheries research ship, the Ekvator, to Gydnia, and we were taken by bus to Malbork.'

'The castle captivated you?'

'It is magnificent.'

'Tell me.'

Bikov listened. His head was cocked as if he was fascinated by what he was told. The High Castle and the Middle Castle, the Amber Collection, the Grand Master's Palace and the Porcelain Collection, the Great Refectory, the Golden Gate, the Seven-pillared Hall and the Vestibule of the Infirmary. When he had heard enough, he interrupted.

'And I am told, Viktor, that the cathedral at Frombork, nearby, is a masterpiece of architecture from the same period — and the ruins of the Teutonic Knights' castle at Torun are a treasure chest for the archaeologist, and the Great Mill of Gdansk where the first bricks were laid in 1350. Your interests gave you much to see when you had the pass to travel to Poland. You were…'

'I only went to Malbork Castle.'

'…privileged. I'm sorry. You only went to the castle at Malbork?'

It was all in the eyes. The eyes led him. He looked for them but they evaded him.

'It's filthy. It's a disgrace. What are you, incompetent or idle? Which?' His visit was unannounced. At the end of the working day, Admiral Alexei Falkovsky had come without warning to the harbour. The commander of the minesweeper flotilla had been called back from his second drink in the senior officers' mess and was lashed by the admiral.

'Rodents, vermin wouldn't use those toilets — there're cockroaches in the galleys and the potatoes are rotten. Fucking incompetent or fucking idle, which do I choose? Pack, go — you are dismissed.'

The admiral left a stunned, quivering officer behind him as he strode away. He had no escort. On any other day, for any other inspection of the fleet, his chief of staff would have hovered at his shoulder. His car followed him at a discreet distance as he strode from Basin Number One to Basin Number Two. The submarine flotilla was his second target. He was betrayed, and he was frightened.

In Basin Number Two they had already been alerted. A reception line of officers and senior NCOs was waiting. The grapevine would have spread the news faster than he could walk with his pounding stride.

He was greeted. 'Good evening, Admiral, a pleasure to see—'

'I want to inspect every toilet, every galley, every torpedo tube, every weapons storage unit, every bunk in crew quarters. If I find dirt, you go,' he barked. Men cringed.

His anger was usually held in check by the calming presence of his chief of staff beside him, but he was not there and never would be again. He stamped over the gangway, then hauled himself up the conning tower's ladder. Few men, if any, frightened him, but the one who had come into his office had shrivelled him. It had been in the man's eyes. Merciless, piercing eyes. That man now held Viktor and interrogated him.

Blind fear consumed him as he began a search for dirt, inefficiency and idleness. The first toilet he inspected in the Vashavyanka-class vessel was blocked with a wedge of sodden paper and faeces. He rounded on the submarine flotilla's commander. 'You clean it yourself. With a bucket and a brush you fucking clean it yourself, then you get off my base.'

The men behind him in the cramped corridor, he knew it, had loved him, had boasted that they served the best fleet commander in the navy, and he saw them reel from his attack. He could not combat the fear.

The candle was burned down half its length, and the wax dribbled off it. It gave no heat. Viktor shivered.

'Heating's off,' Bikov said. 'That's how crap the system is here — no heat for serving officers, or for the NCOs, or for the conscripts. The money for the heating oil will have been pilfered by the likes of the weasel Piatkin. Heating oil and weapons stolen. Is the cold bad, Viktor?'

'They took my coat.'

He did not see the trap set for him. All the time, with each line of questioning — his family, the castle at Malbork, his daily work — he looked for the big traps: there were none. Opposite him, beyond the name, Bikov peeled off his sweater. Bikov wore only a singlet against his chest. The sweater was thrown over the candle and fell beside him.

'I don't need it.'

'Put it on, Viktor.'

'The cold does not affect me.'

'Wear it, Viktor.'

'I can stand cold. If you had been in Murmansk—' He threw the sweater back, fluttering the flame.

'If you are cold and won't wear my sweater, then I too will be cold.'

Bikov pushed the sweater away from him. Viktor saw his arms, the freshness of the scrapes and scars that covered them.

'What happened to you?' Again he was led and did not know it.

'Last week I was in Chechnya. There was a fire-fight — the war there is criminal and incompetent. We were ambushed and had to escape across a hill…rocks, diving for cover, any place to hide.'

'Why were you there?'

'To save a man's life.'

Viktor stared, big-eyed, at him. 'Did you? Save his life?'

'He is a decent man, worth respect. I saved an officer's life.'

He saw Bikov's scarred and welted arms close around the singlet. They would be cold together; they shared the cold.

'Christ knows if this is going to be readable.'

Ham broke the quiet in the basher, and his laughter tinkled. They'd been sombre when they'd started. The team had withdrawn inside personal corrals having wriggled for space. Lofty, who played quartermaster, had given each a sheet of paper and an envelope. Inside their lockers in the Ballykinler camp there had always been a sealed, addressed letter, and there had been the same at Poole when they had left the base for more dangerous exercises.

'Can't see the paper myself. God knows how anyone's going to read it.'

Billy shifted. 'Who you doing it for, Ham?'

'That's personal, nobody's business.' He was subdued again. 'My mum and dad — if they ever get to read it, if they don't bin it when they see the handwriting.'

The machine-gun's firing had finally stopped. It had unsettled them, made them nervy. It was a full ten minutes now since it had last fired.

'What about you, Lofty?'

'Don't care who knows. The place where I lodge in the village. Just to tell them to sell up what I left there, not that it's much, and buy some flowers and put them in the chapel. Even the children of the 282 veterans are pretty ancient — they sit in the chapel, rest up after they've gone to the graves. It's near to that time of the year, when they come. That's where mine's going. My bicycle, a few clothes, some books — should make a couple of bunches of flowers.'

When Lofty had brought out the paper, the envelopes, and the pencil, they'd all taken turns to bollock him. As quartermaster he should have done it on the boat, where they would have had light, space and time to think. They were crushed together in the basher and the rain was coming in in dribbled columns. What were they going to do with the letters? Who was going to have them? If they caught it — why they were writing the bloody letters — when would the letters be posted? He'd taken stick, but each of them had bothered to write something on the paper, a name and an address on the envelope.

'Shit,' Ham said.

The machine-gun had started up again.

They each licked the flaps, sealed their envelopes and gave them to Lofty.

'What do I do with them?'

Wickso grinned in the darkness. 'When we're all gone, Lofty, and you're lying there and blubbering for your mum, with your last breath, Lofty, as this big Spetznaz bastard's lifting his bayonet to finish you, ask him very nicely: "Sir, can you direct me to a postbox?"

Then Lofty gave them each a strip of adhesive tape. They groped at their throats for the amber pendants and wrapped the tape round the chain and the metal that held the stones so there would be no rattle. They did it because none of them would take off the pendants and dump them.

Billy said they should try to sleep. They would go forward in two hours.

A quarter of the candle remained. 'Admiral Falkovsky…'

'The fleet commander.'

'I know, Viktor, that Admiral Falkovsky is the fleet commander. A good man?'

'A very good man.'

'And fair?'

'Very fair. You would not find a single officer at Baltiysk who will not say that the fleet commander is a fair man.'

'Trusting?'

The time for Bikov to listen.

'For his best subordinates he has total trust. If he wishes to he can make you feel special and important. He is not a man of detail. He has the broad vision and he relies on trusted officers, I was one, to do the detail for him. We are very close.'

He saw his prey shiver, so he shivered as a response. 'Go on, Viktor.'

'Every time he has an important meeting to attend, we go through it together first. I tell him, as I see it, what matters will be raised that are detrimental to the navy's position and what matters are advantageous. He hears what I say. His door is open to me. What he reads, I read. I accept that I am junior to him, but we are colleagues.'

Bikov thought it was a combination of cold, arrogance, tiredness, conceit that led Archenko to condemn himself.

'I have a problem and I need your help, Viktor. Two years ago, when Admiral Falkovsky was already fleet commander, it was reported that American intelligence officers had identified the redeployment of the Tochka 22–21 missiles with nuclear warheads at Baltiysk. What was Admiral Falkovsky's reaction to those reports?'

'What could be his reaction? It was true.'

'How did Admiral Falkovsky think the Americans had learned of the redeployment?'

'We talked about it. It was a very serious matter — there was a strain on relations with the United States. I agreed with the admiral's response to Moscow when he was queried on it. I wrote the signal he sent. The Americans have spy satellites over the Kaliningrad oblast. They must have photographed the transfer of the missiles and the warheads from the ship that brought them, or the transfer to the storage bunkers where warheads are kept. It must have been spy satellites.'

Bikov did not allow himself to smile. His sincerity and concern were sculpted to his face. 'Of course, Viktor — what other explanation…?'

Locke sat in the kitchen, his shoes hitched up on to the pine table. Everything around him was German. The pictures on the walls were of views of the Rhine and the calendar on the page for August showed a sketch of the Harz forests.

Where his parents were was prime territory for 'second homes'. Professionals — solicitors, surgeons, surveyors — came from the West Midlands to the Welsh coast, bought up old cottages and made them into weekend boltholes. Their money bled the life out of the local community by driving up property prices. They made their new homes little sanctums of Sutton Coldfield, Solihull and Bromsgrove, and at the end of each summer they scrubbed the rooms clean, emptied the fridge-freezer and were gone for the winter months. They were despised and envied by the community. He hated the owners of the house into which he had broken, and hated himself.

All Locke could find in the kitchen units to eat was a solitary packet of sweet biscuits. To the crime of breaking and entering, he added that of theft. He had wolfed down five biscuits, scattering crumbs on the washed-down table, and they had not alleviated his hunger, or his hate. Beside his shoes, circled by the crumbs, was the radio equipment. The rain beat on the windows but the lights shone brightly on the console's dials. In little more than an hour and a half Mowbray's Dogs would be moving.

She came in, slowly circled him and the table. He'd heard her washing. She had changed into thicker trousers and a heavier sweater. There was a new freshness in Alice North's face, and he had made it. The mischief still sparkled in her as she rounded him and the table. His sneers had brought the light back to her: Did you sleep with him? You didn't think, did you, that he loved you? The light in her dazzled him and gave maturity and strength to her; he was unloved and it made him hate her.

'And just what sort of little romantic nest is it you're going to build?'

She stopped, turned, faced him.

'Has Mowbray told you what'll happen? You'll have to quit. You'll be out through the front door in double-quick time. Security risk and all that. Treachery is an infectious disease. He's a traitor, done it once and can do it again. You're out. They'll be grateful enough to buy him a semi-detached in Coulsdon or Croydon, pebble-dash and a bit of mock-Tudor, and there you'll vegetate. All of them, once they've come over, die for nostalgia of the Motherland. At first he'll be useful. You won't see him for three or four months while they gut him of what information he hasn't already passed. Then he's on his own. There's a cheque into the bank every month, not a big one. Does he want to be with you? Does he, hell. He wants to be with the other sad cases who've travelled the same route, wants to talk Russian with them and moan about the politics in Moscow. Nothing to do but complain. He'll get, after the first few months, an occasional trip to Portsmouth or Plymouth to talk about his navy to our navy, but pretty damn soon he's out of date. You'll be as safe, as bored and as pathetic as any other suburban couple. Get to learn tennis, Alice, you'll have plenty of time for it. Ignore what I say if you want to…I'm going for a walk.'

His feet swung from the table. Jealousy wounded him, envy cut him. He was at the kitchen door.

She said, 'I don't think you've ever loved, Gabriel, or been loved. I'm sorry for you.'

The first time. Alice going down the corridor, leading, taking his hand, feeling the tremor of it, and only loosing it to get her key from her bag, unlocking her door, taking him inside and kicking the door shut behind her. Standing in the centre of the room and the light filtering through the drawn curtains and knowing that time was precious, reaching out for him. He'd come slowly to her as if he did not believe what was offered. His jacket on the floor, and his tie, starting as unspoken duty for Rupert Mowbray, then changed, all changed. The light from the street had shown the desperation, and she had wanted to wipe it from his face. When she had unbuttoned his shirt then stripped it off him, she had taken his hands and brought them to her blouse. So frightened, fumbling with the buttons, and when he'd done it, an age later, she had shaken her blouse off her shoulders, and then she had brought his fingers to her bra clasp, and when that had fallen away she had seen the awe in his eyes. When they were naked, he had ducked down to his jacket and taken the little plastic sachet from his wallet. She'd thanked him and he'd grinned, and they had gone down on to the bed and she had peeled it on to him. Bad, desperate, frantic sex, the first time, but afterwards — as the little bedside clock had spun away the minutes and hours — he had lain with his head on her breast and she had held him, and had known that she had stilled his fear. He'd gone, she'd knotted the condom and flushed it down the toilet. She'd not slept. It was not for duty, she had found love.

'You are tired, Viktor?'

'Yes, I am tired.'

'I am enjoying our talk. Every day I work with idiots. It is rare and a pleasure for me to be with a man of integrity and intelligence. You can continue?'

'Yes.'

The tiredness came in waves, but each time his eyes closed and his head sagged the light of the candle burned them open, and the humanity of the man opposite held him. He should have feigned sleep, should have slumped.

'That's good, Viktor. Viktor…many of the papers that cross your desk, or the admiral's, are confidential…they are state secrets and military secrets. You see them because you are cleared to, have the highest vetting. You also see papers that have come from GRU sources or civilian agencies. Some are from electronic intelligence and some are from human intelligence. When you read them, Viktor — analysis of the American navy, NATO formations, whatever — which do you value more highly? The electronic intelligence from satellites and intercepts or the human intelligence from agents on the ground? Which?'

'HumInt, always HumInt.'

'Very interesting. You see, your insight fascinates me. Explain, please.'

'Look at the Americans in Afghanistan, the war against terror. They have no agents but the sophistication of the electronics they employ is their substitute — without success. The picture given by electronics is only bland, it is without substance. HumInt has depth, understanding…'

The voice murmured, 'Provided by brave men and women.'

'The bravest. A spy plane or intercepts gives you pictures and sounds, but it is only a fraction of the intelligence a human source can give. If the Americans had agents inside Taleban or al Qaeda, they would capture the principals.'

'Very dangerous work, the agents' work.'

Two mackerel and one plaice and they were now dead in the bucket beside the gasping cod. It was a poor return for a day on the beach with his hand-line, but the evenings always fished better, and the evenings after a storm fished best as the tide turned. He was baiting the hook again.

A new voice came softly from behind him.

'Would you mind if I fished?'

Roman turned. He understood a little Russian, and was about to spit, curse, and rid himself of strangers. The man was short, squat, heavy, and had sand sprayed over his shined shoes. Maybe the coat was mohair, maybe it was camel-hair, and Roman would not have known the difference, but he thought the cost of it would have kept him and his family through the winter. The rain ran off the man's forehead and onto a shirt collar of brilliant white. It was a request, 'Would you mind if I fished?', but the body, the physique, and the soft tone of the question did not brook argument. The man grinned and there was a boy's enthusiasm on his face. Roman thought the hands held out for the line could have broken every bone in his arms, his legs.

'I have not fished since I was a child — may I, please?'

Another shrimp was wedged down over the hook's barb. Roman handed the line to the man. His first cast barely reached the sea's edge, but by his fourth the weighted line was well out into the surf. He stood very still with the line tucked in his fingers, as Roman did. The rain fell on the three men now standing on the beach.

'When I was a child I loved to fish.' He turned and faced Jerry the Pole. 'At the café I saw the Mercedes car and they told me its driver had walked in this direction. It is my pleasure to meet you. I am Boris Chelbia…we have reason to meet. But, first, I wish to fish.'

Roman gave him the line.

His head bobbed, a little bow, as if the line was a valued gift. 'Thank you, I appreciate your generosity.'

'Would you like something to eat, Viktor?'

'I would, thank you.'

The claps of his hands, three of them, were the signal Bikov had agreed with his sergeant. They gusted the flame, small now, of the candle.

'I hope they can find us something to eat. Viktor, you were telling me about the meeting you went to at the headquarters of the missile unit. Please continue.'

Locke walked. The trees were close around him and the light fell.

He had gone towards the beach and seen the track over the dunes blocked by a sleek BMW 7-series, in which a man sat. Caution had taken him into the undergrowth bordering the dunes, away from where Alice had found the grave. He had seen Jerry the Pole with a fisherman and a man in a mohair overcoat on the beach; he had heard little guttural whoops of excitement, and had seen a fish pulled in. He had gone on a path to the east, towards the watchtower.

He walked and his loneliness bruised him. He followed a rough track. It was insignificant when he came to it, and it told him nothing. The forest was pine and birch and the grass was a lush carpet. The fence wound down from the higher ground at the centre of the peninsula and straddled the track. Not more than four feet high and of chain-link, it would have proved a hindrance only to rabbits. The fence dipped away between the trees and fell towards the shore. The rain dripped on him. There were no wheelmarks, but the fence was broken across the track by a single red- and white-painted bar and a sign prohibited him going further. It told him nothing because this was the Polish fence. The main fence, the barricade, would be five hundred metres deeper into the trees, where the watchtower was. He stopped, alone, by the barrier. He heard the spatter of the rain and the call of the songbirds. This was Mowbray's world, not his. Mowbray was a creature of the times when fences cut across Europe, made a curtain from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, but those bloody times were gone — except here. He shuddered. The quiet frightened him.

He began to run, away from the fence. His knees were up and his breath spurted.

Locke came back to the cottage where the roses grew. He burst into the kitchen. She sat beside the radio console and he could barely see her in the gloom. He panted, sweated, supported himself against the sink.

'Where've you been?'

'I went to the fence — the border. I went to the border.'

'What's there?'

'Just a fence.'

'The way you're looking, Gabriel, there might at least have been an infantry division and an armoured brigade.'

'You can't see anything at the fence — what's behind it.'

The mocking was in her voice. 'Would you go through it?'

Her face was turned away from him, but it filled Locke's mind, the prettiness of it on the dunes when the wind had blustered her hair. 'I'm not trained for… Why?'

'Would you go through the fence for a man's liberty?'

He snarled, 'For a bloody symbol, a tatty old symbol of yesterday, geriatric's games? No.'

'For a man's liberty?'

He thought of the computer codes in the console on the table, the procedures for transmission, the call-signs — any bloody thing. He could not escape her. 'So that Rupert Mowbray can swagger in London? No.'

'For liberty?'

'I'm not trained… No.'

The candle's flame hovered above the pool of wax.

A rap on the door. It opened, but the door was beyond the candle's light. He heard the scrape of something pushed inside, then the door closed.

Bikov crawled away.

Viktor could no longer remember what he had said, where he had been led.

Bikov placed a plate of soup and a spoon beside the candle.

'Is it for you or for me?'

'For both of us, Viktor. We are together, we share.'