Traitor's Kiss

…Chapter One

It wasn't there.

Gabriel Locke, twenty-eight years old and in the last year of his first overseas posting, straightened, pushed out his legs in front of him, eased back on the bench and looked around him.

Coming through the entry gate to the Middle Castle were the German tourists. He estimated there were more than a hundred. He'd seen their two coaches stop in the car park near the river and he'd studied them for a few moments, before walking ahead of them towards the gate of perfect arched symmetry with the wooden portcullis over it. His training was to observe. It had been dinned into him on the IONEC course that he should always approach a dead drop with extreme caution, and should never go close to it before guaranteeing to himself that he was not watched. The Germans were elderly, boisterous, wore bright clothes and were festooned with cameras. What was now Poland, and what had been East Prussia more than half a century before, was popular, these days, as a destination for a retired generation of Germans from the West: it was about heritage, and visiting a place where they had been born, or where their parents had lived, and it was about cost.

When he had scanned them he had seen nothing to make him wary. He had made his careful half-moon arc across the cobbled courtyard of the Middle Castle, had then waited for a party of schoolchildren to move on from the bench, and had sat down. He had chewed a peppermint, then leaned forward and run his right hand along the bottom of the bench's slats. There had been nothing there.

Had he made a mistake?

Locke — he was Daffyd to his parents, but had used his second name, Gabriel, from the time he'd left home — had been to the castle at Malbork twice before. He had come up from Warsaw in the third week of July and in the third week of May. On both days the courtyard had also been filled with Germans — with the same bright laughter, the same adoration of this medieval heap of redbrick-built Teutonic splendour. He had slipped his hand under the close-set slats and had felt the package fastened there with chewing-gum. After discreetly pocketing it, he had walked off, like any tourist, to resume his tour. At Malbork, on the Nogat river, to the south-east of Gdansk, the religious order of the Knights of the Cross had constructed the largest castle in Europe. Locke, always the careful man, did not believe in unnecessary risk-taking. His belief and care in preparation — the reason he had sailed through the induction tests laid in front of him by the Service — had dictated that he should read the abbreviated history of the castle, which he was tasked to visit every two months to collect from the dead drop. It was the first time there was nothing for him to retrieve.

The Germans, in their noisy phalanx, were advancing towards him, led by the siren calls of the guides, drawn to four larger-than-life statues fashioned in bronze. The statues were representations of four of the warlords who had ruled the surrounding countryside six hundred years before. He glanced up at the sheened faces of the armour-clad men. Hermann von Salza, Siegfried von Feuchtwangen, Winrich von Kniprode and Markgraf Albrecht stood on an extended plinth of marble, each with his own pedestal; they wore chainmail under long tunics, they had close-fitting helmets, and double-bladed swords hung from broad belts. Von Feuchtwangen — for all the sternness of the visage the sculptor had given him — suffered the handicap of having lost, to recent pillage, his right hand, sliced off at the wrist. They were all men of brutal appearance, and on his three visits Locke had reflected that they would have meted out brutal treatment to any spy who threatened them.

But Gabriel Locke had not made a mistake.

It was the correct day of the third week in September. It was the correct location, as laid down by the previous communication. It was the only bench. There was no margin of error. His eyes searched the four high walls of the courtyard as he looked for a watcher, a man or a woman, but there was none that he could identify. He steeled himself, bent forward and tried to make the movement seem casual. His right hand snaked under the slats to feel for the package. It wasn't there. He wriggled further along the bench and all the time his fingers probed for it. The tourists advanced. The guide had stopped her chatter and eyed him. He felt a flush on his face, and a bead of sweat, brought on by embarrassment. Then his fingers had reached the far end of the underneath of the bench seat. Two ladies, heavy and supported by medical sticks, lurched closer to him. Still nothing. They dropped down beside him and he was squeezed to the extremity of the bench. He smiled at them, and was ignored, then stood up. He had no more business on the bench. His instinct was to kneel, or lie down full length on the grit in front of it and peer under the slats, but that would have been ridiculous and unnecessary.

He could not escape the conclusion: the dead drop had not been serviced.

Locke stepped two paces forward and his place was immediately taken by an old man whose left trouser leg was folded up at the knee where the amputation had been made and who took the weight on a wooden crutch. He hesitated. In his short, bright career he had not before known failure. Debatable, of course, whether the failure was his…No reason for him to blame himself…He had done nothing wrong. This was, in his opinion, the stuff of dinosaurs. In the third year of the new millennium it was pathetic that he should be required to drive every two months from Warsaw to Malbork Castle and scuffle like an idiot under a bench to collect a package On the other occasions he had been here, after he had pocketed the package he had trailed round the treasures of the castle and visited the Amber Collection of caskets and wine cups, cutlery and jewellery made by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century craftsmen, and the Porcelain Collection from the workshops of Korzec and Baranowka, and the Weapons Collection. He had wandered through the Grand Master's Palace and the cloister corridors of the High Castle, and marvelled at the skill of the reconstruction of the castle after the Red Army's shelling at the end of the last war, and he'd treated himself to light lunches before hitting the road.

He walked away, and anger burned in him.

Locke had never met the agent, Codename Ferret. Too junior to be taken inside the loop, he did not know his name nor had he been shown a photograph. He was merely a courier. Being outside the need-to-know circle, he was expressly forbidden to open the package once he had made the pickup and was required to deliver it, still sealed, to his Station Chief at the embassy. It was a small consolation that his Station Chief — Ms Libby Weedon — was also denied access to the material that he had twice brought back. The papers, whatever they contained, went to London in the bag that was fastened by handcuff and chain to a messenger's wrist. He was a child of the computerized age and it was, to him, as obvious as the inevitability of night following day that material should be transmitted electronically having been suitably encoded. Only rarely in his six years as a member of the Service, which he had joined with such pride, had he been obliged to work the Neanderthal procedures of the few old warriors still existing at Vauxhall Bridge Cross. His day was wasted. He assumed that Codename Ferret was either in a meeting, had a head cold, or was in a warm apartment and had gotten his leg over. For a young man, when his Welsh temper was roused, Gabriel Locke was short of charity.

There was a fallback. The sparse file of papers available to him in the Service's quarters at the embassy dictated that if the Malbork Castle dead drop was not utilized another location should be checked seven days later.

As he drove out of the town, over the bridge above the Nogat river, he had no idea of the consequences to many people of his wasted journey.

There was little protection from the autumn cold when the wind knifed from Beinn Odhar Mhor and cut south along the small stream's gully that dropped down to Loch Shiel. The Highlands' mountain wind fell fiercely at that time of year, but the artist did not feel it. The autumn was the best time for Billy Smith because the wind and heavy rainclouds conjured the threatening skyscapes with their pillars of light. Dark, scudding cloud and shafts of low sun thrown down made the vistas that he sought out. Huddled between yellow lichen-coated boulders above the tree line, his view was of white caps on the loch, then the rock-scarred cliffs of Sgurr Ghiubhsachain and up to the black purple of the clouds above. He was not among the boulders for warmth but to protect himself from the wind's buffeting as he painted. His paper was held by steel chrome clips to a legless Formica table top, his paints were on a palette beside his left elbow, and at his right side was a jar once long ago filled with coffee but now holding the water he had taken from the loch before he had climbed to the vantage-point. He never worked from memory, always climbed as if it were important to him to experience the power of the elements that raked this wilderness. He worked methodically, would be there till dusk, or until he could no longer see the paper, and then he would come down the steep, precarious slope, easily and with confidence, and go to the little tin-roofed hut that was his home.

It was a good restaurant, as good as any in that south-coastal town. The season was over and the visitors remaining were eking out their pensions and would not have patronized the one he had chosen. With the summer gone, the town's traders and this restaurant's owner were able to evaluate their successes and failings of the last five months, and they had not been well treated by the weather. For that reason, each time Hamilton Protheroe raised his hand he was given immediate and undivided attention. Champagne had been drunk while they sat on stools at the bar and chose the Italian-style dishes, and a Chianti bottle was now nearly empty on the table. He was a con-man. He deceived older ladies, widows and divorced. He made them laugh and smile, and sometimes bedded them after lunch, and when he had had use of their credit cards and their cheque books, he slid away and out of their lives, and moved on to the next town with a new name but the same flattering, winning ways. He would lock away his wheelbarrow and tools, switch on the headlight of his bicycle, then pedal away down the road to the farmhouse and his room. He did not need company; he was content.

He wheeled the trolley back down the corridor along which, a few minutes earlier, it had been stampeded when en route from the ambulance reception bay to A&E. The hospital was less than a dozen miles from the M6 motorway and received more than its share of road accident victims. The casualty who had been on the trolley Colin Wicks now pushed — a young man in a good suit, what was left of it, and a white shirt made revolting with his blood — had looked, as he was wheeled in by the shouting, running team, to have little future. Wicks pushed the trolley down the corridor and out through swing doors into the dropping gloom, unravelled the hose, turned on the tap and drove the gore from the trolley's cradle. It was always him who did it, hosed down the trolleys, because the others on the shift were too squeamish for that work. It upset them, but not him. When the cradle was cleaned he would take disinfectant and a stiff brush and would scour its canvas surface; he would let it dry in the evening air, then wheel it back to the ambulance bay, and it would be there for the next victim who had been impatient or tired or had drunk too much or had simply been unlucky. The last of the water cascaded off the trolley and down to the drain at his feet. As he bent to turn off the tap, he saw the flash in the water and knelt to retrieve it, a cufflink. It would have been given to the casualty by a grandfather, a father, or a lover. He used his own handkerchief to dry it, and examined it to make certain that no blood was left staining it. He would take it back to A&E and give it to a nurse. He didn't feel good about finding it, or bad about the condition of the young man who had worn it in his cuff. In his life, he was long past feeling emotions.

None of them — Billy, Ham, Lofty or Wickso — knew of the consequences that would follow from the empty space under a faraway castle's bench.

Locke pressed the key. Electronically, the signal was sent — ferret: no show. His finger hovered, and in that macrosecond the signal, in cypher, travelled from the Service's suite of rooms in the embassy on Warsaw's Al Roz street, near to the Park Ujazdowski, and hurtled across the air space of western Europe until it was sucked down by the dishes and antennae on the roof of Vauxhall Bridge Cross overlooking the Thames.

He went through the procedure of shutting down the secure computer. A few years back, in the days before Gabriel Locke had been accepted into the Secret Intelligence Service, there would have been a technician to handle the transmission. In those days, those years, the officers of the Service would not have been trusted to write, encode, and transmit their messages from the field. He understood the way the computers worked and what they could do for him. He had even written a paper, passed on by his Station Chief for consideration by Administration, on how the computers could be upgraded at a minimal cost. To Locke it was pitiful that older inadequate men could not master the new technology.

The signal was sent. He closed the door to the cypher room behind him, checked the double lock was engaged, and went through to the outer room where the two girls, Amanda and Christine, had their desks.

Libby Weedon's door was open. He was sidling past it, hoping not to be noticed, but her voice, deep and with the clarity of a broadcaster, snatched at him. He was summoned inside. He was told he looked 'pissed off, and then she smiled in her prim, severe way and told him it was not his fault that Ferret hadn't travelled…of course it was not his fault…and she reminded him not to forget George, who would be waiting out in the second-floor lobby…of course he wouldn't…and she pointedly mentioned the ambassador's reception later that evening. She glanced up at him from her screen and a little of the severity was replaced by a tinge of coyness. He knew Libby Weedon was in her forty-third year, and that there was no sign of any romantic entanglement in her life. Well, she fancied him. Drunk, or across lit candles at dinner, or sweating after a workout in the embassy's basement gymnasium, he thought she might have pushed the 'fancying' further. He repeated that he wouldn't forget George, and had not forgotten that there was a three-line whip on the ambassador's drinks party. She was heavy in the hips and the chest, but she had good skin and her throat wasn't lined — she was as old as his aunts, who lived marooned lives on the west Wales coast. He thought she was lonely and had only her work for comfort. Outside, in the open-plan area, he grinned, winked, and gave a little wave to Amanda and Christine. He took his heavy coat and slipped out. In the corridor he pressed the code into the console on the wall and pushed open the door of inch-thick steel bars that separated the Service's quarters from the rest of the embassy offices, and with his heel slammed it shut after him.

Across the lobby, on a thinly-upholstered bench, George waited. A heavy-set man, balding and with the jowl to go with his fifty-nine years, George was the punctual one: a wristwatch could have been set by his movements. Long ago, and he'd told Locke most of his life story on the two previous occasions they'd met, he'd been a detective sergeant in the Metropolitan Police, but on retirement eleven years earlier he had decided to augment his pension with paid travel. He was a courier for the Service. Not a week went by when he wasn't in the air. Long-haul or short, it barely mattered to him. On the flights of the national carrier, George went business class; the front row of the section and the seat beside him were always unfilled, even if it meant turning away paying passengers. Libby Weedon had said that a hostile counterintelligence service would know from George's arrival and departure from their capital city that the Service were running an operation on their territory. For all his weight the courier would have been hard to spot in a crowd and he dressed down in street-market jeans, a well-used shirt with a quiet tie poking up above his pullover, and a faded green anorak. To Locke, he was another example of the old world still inhabited by a part of the Service. On his knee was a battered briefcase, scratched and well-used, like any businessman's, except that its fastening lock was reinforced with a discreet padlock and a fine chain hung between the handle and George's wrist, where it disappeared under the cuff of his anorak. At the sight of him, George flipped open the briefcase, making ready to receive the package, then withdrew a little pad of docket sheets from the inside pocket of the anorak.

Locke said curtly, 'Sorry, George, nothing for you.'

'Beg your pardon, Mr Locke?'

'As I said, George, I've nothing for you.'

That should have been simple enough, but a fog of puzzlement hazed the courier's forehead, and his eyes closed sharply, then opened again. 'Oh, I see, nothing — nothing for me.'

'That's right.'

George stood, and the frown gouged his brow deeper. 'Well, that's a turn-up…Every two months I've been coming, sixteen trips, and never gone away empty-handed.' His eyes screwed as if in suspicion. 'You absolutely sure, Mr Locke?'

The query annoyed Locke. Patronizingly, he rolled his eyes to the ceiling light. 'Yes, I am sure, George. I think I would know whether I had a package for you, or not. I have today driven halfway across this bloody country and back — so give me the credit for knowing whether or not I have anything for you.'

George murmured understated criticism, 'There was always something for me when Mr Mowbray was here.'

'Mr Mowbray is not here, and has not been here for many months,' Locke said evenly. 'I expect I'll see you in a week's time, but you'll have it confirmed.'

The handcuff was unlocked, taken off the wrist and, with the chain, was dropped into the briefcase. George scowled. 'Yes, maybe, in a week…if nothing's happened — or gone belly-up.'

'I'm sure it hasn't,' Locke said quickly.

He followed George down the flights of stairs, through the main doors, and waved desultorily to him as the courier climbed, still frowning, into the embassy car. He realized that he, too, was merely a courier. They were equally ignorant of Ferret. 'Gone belly-up'? What could have gone belly-up? Nothing ever went belly-up with Ferret.

Locke drove into the centre. Danuta would be waiting for him. Their favourite trysting place, at the end of his working day, was where they could get the best coffee in the city. The little bar had a daft long name, Sklep z Kawq Pozegnanie z Afrykq, but the coffee choice was unrivalled in the city, thirty different varieties, and better than any place he knew in London. With Danuta, sitting opposite her and holding her long and elegantly thin fingers, and sipping the caffè latte in the big bowl cups, he could lose the day's irritation. Danuta designed websites, was as in love with the new world as he was. They were together, a fact known only to Libby Weedon. They would drink coffee and discuss her day before he went to the chore of the ambassador's party. Then he would go back to his apartment where Danuta would be waiting for him — and the fact that an agent had not filled a dead drop would be erased from his mind.

She was tied up at the quayside. Heavy hawsers held her fast. Once she had offloaded her cargo of lemons, brought from Palermo on the Italian island of Sicily, she would sail again on the midnight tide from her costly moorings at the port of Bilbao. Out in the Bay of Biscay she would ride out the storms that were forecast and would wait for the agents to find her another cargo. She might wait, tossed and forgotten, for several days because she was a vessel with the mark of death on her, for whom the breaker's yard beckoned, as suitable work was hard to come by.

With her cargo taken off by the docks' cranes, and her holds empty, she was high in the water. The Princess Rose, call sign 9HAJ6, had been launched in 1983 from the Den Helder yard of the Netherlands, and in the nineteen years since she had slipped out from the Wadden See, through the Marsdiep channel, she had performed as an overladen but willing baggage mule for her Cyprus-based owners. She had flown the convenience flag of Malta as she had plied around the Mediterranean, the eastern Atlantic European coastline, the Bay of Biscay, the North Sea and the Baltic. She was now worth no more than a hundred thousand American dollars, and her future was uncertain.

With the lemons in lorries and heading for French fruit-juice and soft-drinks factories she towered in her rusting glory above the quay. No care, no tenderness, no love or respect had been wasted on her. She was doomed, a liability to her owners, and soon she would be gone, probably on the one great voyage of her life to the Indian Ocean beaches of Pakistan where the demolition teams would pick her apart and destroy the memory of her.

In the night or in the morning, tossed in the Biscay, or the following night or the following day, or in a week, the owners' orders would be given to the master and his crew by radio. None of them knew where those orders might take them, and none believed that the orders would lead to anything more than the dreary routine of sailing to a familiar port, loading a cargo, then sailing to another familiar port, then unloading. Such was the life of the Princess Rose in her dying days.

Rupert Mowbray had been born to take his place on a stage, to have a spotlight shining at his face, a microphone on the lectern his hands gripped, notes in front of him that he did not need to refer to because he was the master of his subject, and an audience hushed and hanging on his words.

'You may call me — should you wish to, and it will be your privilege — an old fart. I would not take offence. You might also call me — because this is a free country, and I value the liberty of speech and have spent my adult life attempting to ensure it — an unreconstructed warrior of the conflict between East and West, between dictatorship and democracy. I would be proud if you did. The Cold War lives. It is about us at all times, and should concern defence analysts, students such as yourselves of international relations, and the men and women tasked with protecting our society. Perhaps you do not believe me — then I quote for you the words of Colonel General Valery Mironov who, from his vantage-point as the Kremlin's deputy defence minister, remarked in a rare interview, "The Cold War still goes on. Only one definite period of it is over." Yes, cuts have been made, but I can assure you that the knife has only been taken to the flab of the body of the Russian military. Key armoured units, the most advanced squadrons of the airforce, and the fleet of nuclear-missile-carrying long-range submarines still have every devalued rouble thrown at them that the State can muster. Friendship, trust, cooperation do not exist. It would be folly to relax our guard.'

He sipped from his water glass. Rupert Mowbray, now professor of the newly formed Department of Strategic Studies, had returned in glory to University College, London, from which he had graduated thirty-six years before. A niche had been found him. The deputy provost had been lunched by the Service's director, and it had been arranged that a place be manufactured to support his retirement. He had a room, a secretary, a budget generous enough for research and travel, and a captive audience of postgraduate students. Behind his back, because rumour of his past employment had spread, his students called him by the unflattering name of Beria. They indeed regarded him as an old fart, but he flattered himself that they still found him amusing. There were seldom empty seats at his weekly lecture.

'President Putin takes tea from Her Majesty's best crockery at Buckingham Palace, dines with Chirac and Schroeder, and is a barbecue guest of Bush, but that does not mean friendship. Under the ageing and boozed-up Boris Yeltsin, the Russian intelligence gathering agencies were in free fall. No longer. Putin came to power on the back of a promise to resurrect Russia's status as a world power. He is a man of those agencies and dedicated to giving them a degree of authority in modern Russia, today, that might be greater than they have ever known — even in the horrendous days of the Purges. Nuclear missiles are deployed again in oblasts from which they had been withdrawn — the testing of those missiles, which are designed to carry warheads of mass destruction, has been resumed.

'The President has spoken publicly of the need to boost Russia's nuclear potential. Physical and verbal freedom for the mass of citizens is diminishing, as more and more positions of influence at the heart of power are doled out to his old chums in the FSB, the Federal Security Bureau, that is the successor to the Second Directorate of the KGB — different name, same mindset. Our own Security Service employs some two thousand personnel — the FSB has seventy-six thousand, and that excludes security and support staff. Our Secret Intelligence Service runs to some two thousand two hundred men and women — their SVR is twelve thousand strong. The FAPSI, electronic espionage and security, has a staff of fifty-four thousand, while our GCHQ has fewer than a tenth of that number. How many are thought necessary to guard the leaders of Putin's regime and strategic facilities? Another twenty-three thousand. Add to that the twelve thousand responsible for military intelligence, the GRU, and you are nudging close to two hundred thousand persons charged with the responsibility of protecting the Russian motherland…I ask, where do they think the threat will emanate from? From here? From you? From me? They seek to control — and Putin demands this of them — those free spirits that we regard as having an integral place in our society. Do not, in Russia today, seek to be an environmentalist, or an investigative journalist, or a powerful but independent-thinking industrialist, or a local-government officer with his own mind. In Putin's new fiefdom a man challenges the status quo at his peril.'

He paused and drank again, and when he had set down his glass he used his palm to sweep back his silver hair.

'Do we care? Is it our business how Russia is governed? If the brave and the few who have the courage to stand up to be counted go off to a new generation of camps, have their careers wrecked and their lives destroyed, who are we to shout? We can be Pharisees…But, but, there is, and it cannot be ignored, a kleptomaniac psychology about the new Russian government. They steal. They cannot keep their hands in their pockets. If we have it, they want it. They don't steal the know-how and blueprints in order to put more fridges and dishwashers in their people's ghastly, inadequate housing, or more cars on the road. They thieve so that they can make their submarines faster and more silent, their attack aircraft more efficient, their tanks more resilient to counter-measures. They are the jackdaws of espionage. Remember the names of Walker, Ames, Hanssen — all Americans, and I thank God for it — recruited to feed an insatiable appetite for military knowledge. You would be foolish if you believed that the handshakes and deals between our governments and the Russians over this current Afghanistan adventure were anything more than window-dressing. Everything in Putin's Russia is subservient to military power, before the World Trade Center and after it…

'Gentlemen, and ladies, thank you for offering your time to this old fart. May I leave you with this thought? If we were to drop our shield, our guard, then we will suffer.'

As he stepped back from the lectern there was a small, underwhelming stutter of applause, soon drowned by the scrape of the chairs. The spotlight beamed on him and he smiled…It was twenty eight weeks, half a year and a finger-count of days, since he had left the Service and, God, he missed it. The reason he smiled was that the good, faithful, loyal George would be on the final approach to Heathrow at this moment with a briefcase chained to his wrist, and there would be a package in it. The dead-drop collection was made on that day of each second month and that calendar pattern was always with him.

Ferret was his man, the crowning pride of Rupert Mowbray's life.

It had not been good.

Not good, not even indifferent: it had been lousy sex.

Locke lay on his back on his bed. He stared at the ceiling. They had had the ceiling light on above them. It was the baby oil that had made it lousy. The baby oil, for both of them, was as regular as having the light on. She'd had her shower when he was doing his duty and pressing the flesh at the ambassador's residence, then anointed herself with it, and he'd come in, rushed, stripped down and lain on the bed, and she'd crouched over him, shaken the bottle and he had been ready for a little rivulet of the oil to run on to his stomach, which she would have massaged into his skin. The oil had come in a gush, had splurged on to him and on to the bedspread, which was ruined. He'd cursed. In the middle of it, her on top of him and slithering over him, their bodies glistening under the ceiling light, he had actually asked her if she knew of a good laundry in the city, close and convenient, where he could take the bedspread. She'd tried, at first, to make it work, then gone into automatic mode with a few grunts that he'd known were pretence. Then she'd rolled off him, lain on her belly and turned her head away from him. It was another of their habits that the curtains of his bedroom were never drawn when they had sex, and usually that seemed to add keen tension to their loving. He'd looked at other windows across the street, seen people moving in them and the flickers of their televisions, the big tower blocks on the far side of the river, and he'd said sharply to her that if she didn't know of a laundry then could she, please, ring round in the morning and locate one. But she hadn't turned and hadn't spoken.

'Can you move, please? If you hadn't noticed, it's all over the sheets now.' Couldn't help himself, he was petulant and annoyed.

He had met Danuta in Warsaw two months earlier. Their first dates had taken place where they had met, in an Internet café, before they graduated to his bed or hers. Her English was fluent and his Polish was passable. She was from outside the cocoon of embassy life, and she had travelled. Her parents had emigrated from Poland to Australia nineteen years ago and she spoke with the accent of a town up the coast from Perth. She was one of the new generation of young Poles who had come home, and he'd found her warm, vibrant and fun, a blessed relief from the tedium of being the junior in an isolated corner of the embassy's second floor.

He knew he'd destroyed the relationship, and he knew that when she left that evening she would not return, but the anger in him made for his persistence. She rolled off the bed, didn't seem to care that the curtains weren't drawn, and moved slowly in front of him, bending from place to place to pick up her clothes. Then she stood, framed by the window, and began very slowly to dress.

Danuta was Locke's first girlfriend in the last thirty months. There had been no woman in his life while he was stationed in Zagreb, and none before Danuta after he had been abruptly transferred to Warsaw. There had been a girl from Library at Vauxhall Bridge Cross after he'd passed his probationer period, but she'd been looking for a ring and had wanted him to visit her parents. Before that there had been a girl from the physics department at Lancaster, but she'd slipped away from him at an end-of-term booze binge, and he'd found her on the floor with the hero of the university's lacrosse team. Everybody said he was good-looking and a catch, so the ambassador's wife had told him and Libby Weedon, but whatever it was he searched for had eluded him.

As she dressed, she paraded herself in front of the window.

Did the bloody bedspread, the bloody sheets and the bloody pillowcases matter? He had screwed up and didn't care enough to rescue himself. In the morning he would tell his Station Chief, trying to be casual and offhand, that his relationship with a Polish national was over.

Danuta never spoke. She looked around her, as if she had forgotten something, then went briskly to the dressing-table, picked up the small wood photograph frame, slid out the photograph of herself, tore it into small pieces and let them flutter on to the carpet. He heard her quietly close the apartment's front door. In any of those long moments after she'd risen from the bed he could have called her back and apologized. He could have said that he'd had a bloody awful day, but he hadn't. He was left alone in the silence of the room.

It was the fault of Ferret. A dead drop had not been serviced.

After he had showered and stripped the bed, he lay on it again and tried to sleep. He did not have the experience to know what older men and women in the Service could have told him, that crises rarely broke with a thunderclap demanding attention. The veterans would have said that crises dribbled into the consciousness of the officers of the Service, came hesitantly and without prior notice, then incubated at leisure like a tumour. He tossed but could not find sleep.

'I've come for the package — from Warsaw station.'

The older man behind the desk blinked, as if woken by her arrival. Behind him was a closed steel door and behind the door were the racks on which were laid the packages brought to the building by couriers from abroad.

She showed her ID card, the one she had used to swipe her way through the security check on the main door. Because she thought he had been asleep and needed it spelled out, she said, 'Alice North, 48 RD 21. There'll be a package for me, out of Warsaw.'

The clerk at this small unit off the wide atrium lobby area on the ground floor balefully shook his head. 'I've had nothing.'

'From Warsaw, George would have brought it in. It'll have my name on it.'

'George hasn't been…'

She interrupted, 'George would have brought it in two hours ago, could have been two and a half hours. Were you on supper break?'

'Just had sandwiches. I know George. I've been here all evening, not seen George, he's not called by. Fact is, I haven't seen George for five days. Can't help you, Miss North.'

'Look, I don't want to make a fuss, but George flew this morning to Warsaw where he will have collected a package addressed to me, and he will have delivered it, at least an hour and a half ago.'

'He's not been here.'

'George has to have been here, and left a package, addressed to me.'

The clerk grinned comfortingly. 'Perhaps, Miss North, George's flight's late. The new security, you know.'

'I checked on my mobile, the flight was on time. Could you, please, go and look? I'm sure you'll find it.'

First the clerk pushed his ledger book towards her, then turned it so that she could read the open page. There was no entry that was relevant to her. George's name was not listed. But the clerk pushed himself up heavily from his chair, sighed as if it were his fate to be the victim of bullying young women, and shuffled to the steel door. He opened it and disappeared inside.

Alice eased her weight from left foot to right foot, then reversed it. If this had not been a dead-drop date at Malbork Castle, she would still have been down at Fort Monkton: the rest of them on the refresher course had stayed the night and would not reappear until mid-morning the following day. On the three-day course, with eleven others, she had done sessions with the instructors to refresh her memory of the techniques of property entry, anti-terrorist ambush-driving tactics, and self defence — from which her hips and the bones at the base of her spine still ached. She had been on Ferret since the start, and had collected every dead-drop communication received since that day. She knew him…

The clerk emerged. 'Like I told you — but you wouldn't listen, Miss North — there's no package come in here from Warsaw tonight. I've nothing for you.'

She clattered away on her low shoes, and took a lift to the fourth floor. In a corner of East European Controllerate was her cubbyhole, adjacent to the ever-diminishing team doing Russia Desk. She'd been insinuated into that hole eight years earlier after the move from Century House to the magnificence of the present building, when Russia Desk was still the priority focus of the Service. She thought it was now little more than the equivalent of a once-patronized seaside resort where few with ambition wished to holiday. It was near to midnight. She sat in front of her computer for a full two minutes before switching it on.

Alice North was a gentle girl. In the thirty four years of her life she had never been confronted with the need to practise the violence of either the driving course or the self-defence training. She had a premonition and it frightened her. Rupert Mowbray was no longer in place to soothe the fear. She tapped in her password and entered the ATHS labyrinth. She was cleared for access to that part of the Automatic Telegram Handling System which covered the agent whose package she had come back to London to open. She rocked on her low swivel chair.

ferret: no show.

As she drove home across London, through the City and out into the Docklands developments, Alice told herself each of twenty reasons why the dead drop had not been met. Her maisonette overlooked the dark Thames waters but reflections played on the eddies. To Alice, it was normally secure, comfortable and warm. She thought of him, why he had not travelled to Malbork, and she felt a chill she could not escape. Her fingers found the pendant stone, polished amber, that hung at her neck from a light gold chain. She held it.

In his bed, hearing the chimes of the hours passing from the tower of the cathedral in the old town, unable to sleep, Gabriel Locke made a note in his mind that first thing at the embassy he must cancel his journey to Krakow for the conference of the security police. In a week's time he would not be in Krakow but on the road to the northeast again and going to Braniewo's street-market, which was the fall-back dead drop if Malbork Castle failed.

He lay alone and cold on the bare mattress of the bed.