Traitor's Kiss

…Chapter Two

From the window of his office, on a clear day, it was possible to see the spire of the Holy Cross cathedral across the lagoon at Braniewo. The window was in the highest office building of the naval base, once German, once Soviet, now Russian, outside Kaliningrad. The Soviets and Russians had erased the German name, Pillau, and called the base Baltiysk, and it was home to the Baltic Fleet. The buildings had been reconstructed in old German style after being flattened by artillery and air attack. They were spaciously laid out, and that window overlooked a wide parade-ground. Beyond the building were the quays, dry docks and moorings of the fleet's warships. Standing at the window with his binoculars, made in Leipzig and with 10x42 power, he could close that gap of thirty-seven kilometres and note the brick texture of the spire. But the thirty-seven kilometres from his office to the spire that dominated the street-market in Braniewo was a delusion, a distance that mocked him. Only a gull could have travelled there directly from his office in the naval base at Baltiysk in the Kaliningrad oblast. He could not. The shallow lagoon was covered by military radar, patrolled by fast craft, under constant and vigorous observation.

His journey, from his office to Braniewo, would cover 121 kilometres. Between him and the street-market under the cathedral's spire was the border post, and at the border post, on his side, were fences, dogs, guns and suspicion.

He had seen the tower from his office window, and had made his apologies to the fleet commander, Admiral Falkovsky, whose man he was, and said what time he would be returning, and had been reminded to bring tobacco. He had driven out from the base and had started the detour demanded by the lagoon. It was a long drive on a rutted road from the base to Kaliningrad, then south-east on the secondary route with the lagoon to the west of him. The city behind him, the Pregel river crossed, he drove his small Lada through the fishing village of Usakovo and the camping resort of Laduskin, then the road was clear ahead to Pjatidoroznoe and on to Mamonovo where life was suckled by the border. It was flat ground, leading on his right side to the reed banks of the lagoon; on his left were the wet, harvested, lifeless fields. A kilometre short of the village of Pjatidoroznoe, where there was a school, a shop and a church built a century before by the Germans that was now used as a community centre.

He slowed to confirm what he knew, what he had seen a week earlier.

A Polish lorry hooted at him, then swung out to overtake. His mirrors were clear and showed the view back down the poplar lined road. A hundred metres behind him was a red saloon, behind that was a dirty silver one, and behind that a black van. He had fine eyesight, and he had cleaned the mirrors before leaving the base. The black van had a smoked dark windscreen. The red saloon, the silver one and the black van had slowed. He eased his weight on to the brake pedal and lightly turned the wheel. His nearside wheels slid off the tarmac and onto the soft mud of the verge. It was what he had done a week earlier. The red saloon had stopped. The silver vehicle seemed about to ram the bumper in front of it, then also stopped, but the black van powered past the cars, covered the empty road at speed and came alongside him. The passenger window, too, was darkened. He saw the dull flicker of a lit cigarette, but could not make out the faces hidden in the interior cab.

He was not an innocent. He had a working knowledge of surveillance. His friends, in the three face-to-face meetings, had told him what to look for but that had been hurried and there had been so much else to talk of — no more than an hour's tuition to save his life. His safety, the talk of it, always came at the end of the meetings, when he'd been leached dry of tactical and technical detail. But they had talked of it, and sheets of hotel notepaper had been used to scrawl the evasion procedures he should utilize…And in the last four years since he had walked into the skipper's cabin of a trawler tied up to the quay at Murmansk, he had never lost an opportunity to make conversation with the security men at the Northern Fleet headquarters and now at the Baltic Fleet headquarters. Gently and carefully, he had pumped, probed and joked, over vodka and beer, at picnics and receptions, with those men so that he might learn how they worked. Alone in his quarters, in his chair with the radio playing, in his bed in the darkness, the images of the surveillance teams and what he knew of them had played in his mind. They never left him.

A week ago it had only been a suspicion, but that suspicion had been sufficient for him to turn back. A bead of sweat ran down his neck and into the small of his back. A week ago, when he had known the first rise of the sweat through his pores, and the trembling in his hands, he had not been certain. His handlers had told him that it was always better to use the quiet road beside the lagoon than the main highway that was away to the east of his route. It was a rarely used road, with little traffic on it, which gave him a better chance to identify surveillance. His mind raced. He had the radio on in the Lada, but he seemed not to hear the shrieking announcer and the American music on the speakers. The black van had now stopped a hundred or so metres ahead of him. A tractor coming from behind him filled his interior and wing mirrors. Mud flew from its wheels and exhaust fumes from its stack.

A week before it had seemed sensible to turn back, although the risk was not confirmed. The tractor pulled a trailer of high-heaped beet past him and spattered the side windows and the body of the Lada, and a man waved to him. He did not wave back because his attention was now on the red and silver cars stationary 150 metres behind him. Gold autumn leaves wafted down on them. There was no doubt of it. He could not wriggle away from it, as he had last week, and tell himself that this was only a sensible precaution to take. The message from what he saw beat hammer blows in his skull. If they stopped ahead and behind him, they did not care whether or not he was aware of them. Perhaps they wanted him to run, drive at speed towards Mamonovo, and then the border post, wanted to shepherd him towards the fences, the dogs and the guns. There they would spill him out of the car, the handcuffs would go on his wrists and they would smile broadly because his running had confirmed the guilt. Or they would radio ahead, and there would be men waiting for him, men of the Federalnaya Pogranichnaya Sluzhba, with guns and dogs to track and hunt him down long before he reached the fence. He was trapped.

He eased the Lada into gear and drove forward. The package was wedged under his seat and in his jacket pocket was the unused, unopened strip of chewing-gum. He passed the black van and saw the red saloon and the silver car pull out. Then, in his mirror, he saw the black van pull off the verge and join the little convoy behind him. He thought, on this day and on the day a week before, that they did not have evidence of his treachery but suspicion of it. If he ran, if the package were found, their suspicion would turn to certainty. On his right side was a turning to Veseloe, and he swung into it. But he did not travel down that road to the small fishing village where the men caught trout, carp and pike in the lagoon for sale in Kaliningrad's fish market. He stopped, turned his wheel and reversed, then eased the Lada into the direction of Pjatidoroznoe, Laduskin and Usakovo. A gull might reach Braniewo, but he could not. If the package were found his reward would be a dawn shuffle into a prison yard and death. It would take him a little more than two and a half hours to drive back to the base at Baltiysk and his office. He should not panic. It was panic that they wanted from him. He should not help them. He did not look at the two cars as he went by them. He drove carefully and slowly, and it was only the thought of his friends that enabled him to keep steady hands on the wheel.

For the second week he had aborted his journey to the dead drop. He was a captain, second rank, of the Russian navy, Viktor Alexander Archenko.

The sentries on the main gate saluted him if they only carried sidearms on their webbing belts but came to attention and the present if they had rifles. He received the salutes and the rigid 'present arms' because his photograph was in the guardhouse, and all of the conscript sentries knew that he was a man of influence and power. The barrier was raised for him, then dropped behind his Lada.

Viktor was young for his rank.

Aged thirty-six, his power and influence were guaranteed because he served as chief of staff to Admiral Alexei Falkovsky, commander of the Baltic Fleet. It was said, in the guardhouse, that the admiral did not take a shit unless he had first consulted Viktor Archenko, and did not wipe his backside unless he had first asked Viktor Archenko which hand to use. But for all his authority and his closeness to the admiral's ear, he was well liked by the young men far from home who manned the guardhouse. They said he was fair, and there were few officers of whom that was believed.

He acknowledged the salutes with a brief, shallow wave and drove on.

In his mirrors he noted that his trio of watchers had parked up back from the gate and saw men climb out of the vehicles and light their cigarettes. One of them, from the black van, spoke into the sleeve of his padded coat.

With the package secured under his coat he walked away from his car and towards the block where senior officers without families were housed. If his heart pumped and his legs were weak, and if the package held tight under his coat seemed to be a lead weight gouging into his belly, he did not show it. He walked with a good stride. He was 1.85 metres tall, with fine blond hair that blew to a tangle in the wind off the sea, blue-grey eyes, and his nose was prominent. His cheekbones were strong, and his chin stronger. His skin was pale, as if he was used to spending his days in closed rooms and behind desks, not exposed to the Baltic weather. The impression his features gave was of a Germanic origin, something far from the ethnic Russian background listed on his file — his parents, on the file, were Pyotr and Irina Archenko. Only he and his friends, far away, knew the secret of the nationality of his grandmother and the story of his heritage. He was an impressive man, one who in a crowd would be immediately noticed, and there seemed an authority and decisiveness about him. Among the conscripts at the gate, and the fellow officers on the admiral's staff, it would be hard to believe of him that he lived a lie. A captain, third rank, who organized fleet exercises, was in the doorway he approached and laughed a greeting to him, then held out his hand for shaking, but Viktor could not reciprocate because the hand he would have used held the evidence of his betrayal. He smiled and hurried past.

When he went into his room, the warnings that had been given him by his friends at the meetings — when they had snatched the minutes for talk about his security — governed his movements. If he were under surveillance he must also assume that his room had been entered, that microphones and cameras had been installed. All of the previous week, since he had turned back from the journey to Malbork Castle, he had made the point of laying single hairs across the tops of the drawers in his desk, which fronted on to the window, and had always done it when he lifted from the drawers a clean shirt, underwear or socks. If his room had been searched, if they had gone through the room of a favoured officer on the admiral's staff, he would know they were confident of proving his guilt. When he took a handkerchief from the middle drawer he saw the hair that fell to his carpet. From that one hair, not more than two centimetres in length, he knew that his arrest was not imminent.

Was that a comfort?

His father had said, when the leukaemia rotted him, after there was no hope, it was better to finish life quickly and rush towards death. He had been dead a week later, had not fought the inevitable.

For Viktor Archenko, it would be long, slow, because the investigation would be thorough and patient. He stripped off and went into the small bathroom annexe, taking the package in its waterproof bag with him. He ran the shower and closed the opaque curtain round him. He removed a tile at the level of his ankles and laid the package in the cavity behind it, then replaced the tile, which was fastened at the corners with gum. It was the best place he knew of in his quarters.

When he dressed again it was in his formal uniform — what he wore in the outer office at his desk that faced the door to the admiral's suite. He felt calm now, but he knew that was a fraud. It would be bad in the night — it had been bad in the night for a week. He thought of his handlers and that helped to calm him, but when night came he would be tossed into the company of the men in the cars and the van, and he would see a pistol, hear it cocked, and feel the cold of the barrel against the skin of his neck.

Outside his block, a platoon of conscripts from Naval Infantry doubled towards him. In the second rank was the spindly wan-cheeked youth with the cavern chest and the concave belly from which his camouflage trousers sagged; wisps of almost silver hair curled from under his askew beret. He was bent under the weight of an NSV heavy machine-gun and was swathed in belts of ammunition that seemed to drag him further down. The conscript, burdened with the weapon, could not salute as the others did and their NCO, but grinned at him and Viktor nodded to him with friendship and correctness. In a few hours his handlers would know and that would be the test of their promises. There was a spit of rain in the air, and the wind carrying it was from the west and came off the sea. He smelt the tang of oil, debris and, seaweed, and headed for the dock area where he could walk undisturbed, where he could think how to save himself, because he did not know if the promises were true.

Behind him, the NCO shouted for the platoon of conscripts to hold their formation. The machine-gun was the dearest thing in Igor Vasiliev's life. Until he had been given the 12.7mm heavy machine-gun, nothing in his life had been kind to him.

His father, in Volgograd, had been a skilled sheet-metal worker in the steel factory, but it was now closed, and he drove a taxi. His mother had worked in the secretariat of the factory, and now sold flowers on the street. As old Russia, familiar and safe, crumbled, the family's fortunes had plummeted. They did not have the resources to be a part of the new Russia that the leaders said was vibrant and exciting. Poverty now stalked the family, and with it came a sense of shame and diffidence that was passed down to their son. He had been conscripted into the Naval Infantry. His thin body, girlish hair, long, delicate fingers and shyness had made him a regular target for the bullies — other conscripts and non-commissioned officers. He was a victim of the cult of dedovshchina. He did not know that the practice of brutality by conscripts and their fellows, by noncommissioned officers on their juniors, was encouraged by some senior officers: it was an escape valve, those officers considered, for the privations of the men, the irregular payment of their wages, their hunger through lack of food, their cold in winter because the military could not afford heating oil. He had not been hospitalized and he had not been subject to homosexual rape. But because his appearance was thought effeminate his kit had been trashed, he had been beaten and kicked, the skin on his back and below his stark ribcage had been burned with cigarettes.

At the time when the last spring had come hesitantly to Kaliningrad, and the ice on the lagoon had melted, his life had changed.

The base is built on the peninsula of sand that runs southwest from the mainland. Entry to the naval docks from the Baltic Sea is by a canal, 200 metres wide and regularly dredged to allow merchant shipping access to the port section of Kaliningrad city, via the Pregel river. West of the canal the sand spit runs on to the Polish border fifteen kilometres away. Those fifteen kilometres are the regular training ground for the naval infantry who share the 1000-metre wide spit with the artillery and the missile units. There was once a Luftwaffe field there, but the buildings are now used for close-quarters infantry combat firing and the land beyond is a scrubby waste cratered by shells and mortar bombs. Rising above the yellowed moonscape are the gaunt batteries of the air defence and ground-to ground tactical missiles, and beyond are the pine forests, the fence with the watchtowers, and Poland. Past the old airfield and the ground used by the artillery and for the missile launchings is a firing range for infantry weapons. The furthest point on the range between the target butts and the firing ditches is 2000 metres — the maximum distance at which the 12.7mm heavy machine-gun is effective. 43

On an April day of that year, the platoon had been on the range. The bullies had fired first, and Igor Vasiliev had huddled down in the depths of the trench with his hands over his ears. He had not been able to see the two-metre-high targets and had not known that each of the bullies had failed to register a hit. An officer had appeared and stood tall, erect, with his hands authoritatively clasped behind his back. He had watched for a few minutes as the messages came back from those below the targets that the firing was high, wide or short. Igor Vasiliev, the target of the bullies, had not been ordered forward by the senior NCO in charge of the platoon. Then the officer had asked if each man in the platoon had fired, whether they were all equally as incompetent as those he had seen shoot. The NCO, who was under the withering gaze of the captain, second rank, had called forward the twenty-one-year-old. Has he been instructed on the use of the weapon? the captain, second rank, had asked. And the NCO had stammered that this particular conscript had not yet fired the heavy machine-gun but would have heard the instructions given to others. The NCO had pushed the conscript into position, on his haunches with his knees raised, behind the weapon, and had gabbled through the theory of wind deflection and bullet drop. From the officer's dominating stature, it had been clear to every youth in the platoon, and to the NCOs, that if Igor Vasiliev failed all of them would shoot until their shoulders were bruised and until their uniforms stank from the cordite emissions.

He had settled behind the heavy machine-gun, ground his haunches into the wet and cold of the sandy ground. A corporal lay on his stomach beside him to feed the belt, and the senior NCO had reached forward to check the sight and see it had not been moved. Let him do it, the captain, second rank, had said, let him make any adjustments that are necessary. It was late morning in spring, and the wind came from the east and flew the cone at full stretch from the mast. The wind strength would have been at a minimum of thirty kilometres. The conscript had looked at the cone, at the wave of the grasses, at a distant plastic rubbish bag that careered across the range…and he had fired.

Thunder blasted in his unprotected ears. He had to use his full strength to hold the machine-gun steady on its low tripod. Ten rounds in three bursts, then quiet had rested over the trench. They had all waited for the screech of the radio from the distant target butts. Five hits in a target that was two metres high and 1.5 metres wide.

'The boy has a natural talent,' the captain, second rank, had said. 'See that it is encouraged.'

After the officer had walked to his jeep and been driven away, the NCO had allowed him to fire again, another belt of ten shots. In those few minutes the wind had dropped, and he needed to allow for the reduction in its strength. He had fired, and the watchers had reported six hits out of ten shots.

That spring morning Igor Vasiliev had insisted that he should carry the heavy machine-gun back to the lorry. The body of the weapon was 25 kilos, plus 9.2 kilos for the barrel, the tripod was 16 kilos, and the ammunition was 7.7 kilos. As he had struggled to lift 57.9 kilos, the full weight of the assembled weapon and its ammunition, on to the lorry's tail, he had asked one panted question of the senior NCO: 'Who was that officer?'

'The chief of staff to the fleet admiral,' the NCO had answered sourly. 'Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko.'

From that day on, Igor Vasiliev always fired the heavy machine gun on the range. He had shot in the summer for his platoon in the inter-brigade championships, and had won, and next year — the last of his conscripted service — it was expected that he would shoot in the inter-divisional championships for a silver cup awarded by the general of Naval Infantry. And when Captain Archenko needed a driver to take him to military headquarters in Kaliningrad city, it was Igor Vasiliev who was sometimes assigned, and they talked of the science of target shooting.

After twenty-one wasted years, his life had started that April day on the firing range. Everything that made him proud, and the purpose of his life, was due to that day's intervention by Captain Archenko. The time spent with him and the knowledge gained from it provided the keenest pleasure he knew. And the heavy machine gun was his.

Doubling away from the officer, hemmed in by the ranks of the platoon, and with the weight of the heavy machine-gun across his shoulders, Igor Vasiliev wondered if Captain Archenko had a head cold, a bad one…perhaps even an attack of the influenza virus. He had not seen him, before, so pale and so distracted.

Every building, with one exception, in the naval base had been destroyed in 1945. Because it had offered the final escape chance for the tens of thousands of German civilians and military, the bombing by the Soviet airforce, and the artillery barrage, had been merciless and effective.

The one building that had survived had been the two-centuries old castle fortress built by Gustav Adolph von Schweden. Viktor walked there now. The ramparts were faced with heavy stone and topped by uncut grass, and they had withstood the rain of high explosive. It was where his grandmother might have come for final shelter. She had not found a place on the boats making the last evacuations. The town that surrounded the castle, and was flanked by the canal and the dockyards, had held out for a full two weeks after the surrender of the city of Kaliningrad, after the last boat had gone. His grandmother would have been the luckier if she had found a place on the liner Wilhelm Gustloff because then her fate would have been fast and she would have drowned with seven thousand others when the torpedo struck, and luckier also if she had been on the general Steuben or the Goya when eleven thousand more souls had gone, struggling against death, into the Baltic when the submarines attacked. His grandmother might have been here, cowering, when the resistance had finally collapsed and the Red Army had probed over the bridge that crossed the moat and into the castle. Her death had been slow, humiliating, filled with shame…and that was the prospect beckoning to him.

If he turned away from the sea, where patterns of buoys marked the approach channel to the canal and more buoys and lights gave warning of the wrecks, the extremities of old minefields and the probable location of long-ago dumped explosives, if he turned away from the limitless, white-capped sheet of water, his view would be over the canal, the shooting range and the lagoon. Viktor did not turn, did not look behind him. Had he done so, on this crisp afternoon with good visibility, he would have seen the wheeling gulls above the lagoon, and his eyeline would have drifted towards its far shore and to the needlepoint spire of the Holy Cross at Braniewo. By now the courier would be there, searching and failing to find the reason for his journey in the staking toilets beside the street market.

Viktor Archenko did not know how the suspicion had settled on him. Had he made the mistake or had it been made in London, or on the Polish side of the border fence? He remembered what his friends had said to him: 'You must be constantly on your guard. It is difficult for us to determine what is dangerous to you and what is not.' At another meeting, his friends had said, 'God has protected you this far, but there is a limit to the chances you can take. Be careful, because God does not protect fools.' However hard he scratched in his mind he could not think of a conversation in which he had betrayed himself. At the third meeting, his friends had said, 'We want you to realize that the most basic consideration we have for you is humanitarian, irrespective of how important you are as an information source.' At each meeting it had been stressed to him that he should exercise the utmost care and not try to send out too much too quickly. He was, his friends always said, an asset for the long-term. Fine words, but not for a man who could not run.

The castle, with its five angled bastions projecting out into the moat, had been repaired from the devastation of the bombing, not lovingly and in the way the Poles had rebuilt Malbork Castle, but crudely sufficient to make the interior a home for naval cadets. There were prefabricated huts in the courtyard and flat-roofed brick blocks, but he could see the old archways and the narrow windows that Gustav Adolph von Schweden had designed, and it was in one of those that his grandmother might have sheltered when the enemy came.

The story of his grandmother, her life and death, had been one of the two reasons that had driven him towards betrayal. On the rampart of the castle, he thought that he walked with his grandmother. She gave him strength.

He did not look back to Braniewo's skyline, where the courier would have been, would have searched, would have left.

With a brisk stride he walked out of the castle and back in the direction of his office. He saw Piatkin near to the Sailors' Club, and walked by him as if the political officer did not exist. They were on opposite sides of the street, and neither seemed to notice the other. But on that day, Piatkin, the zampolit, was the most important person in Viktor Archenko's life.

Every waking hour of Vladdy Piatkin's life was taken now by concern at the movements of Captain, second rank, Archenko. It ranked high enough for him to have used his mobile early that morning to cancel the visit to the base, through a back entrance, of the import-export dealer, Boris Chelbia. Chelbia imported new Mercedes cars, exported heroin from Turkestan and weapons from Kaliningrad. Through his contacts across the oblast, Piatkin could offer the full protection of the counterintelligence spider's web that was the FSB, the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, and in return he was paid, cash, five thousand American dollars a month. The weapons came out of the armoury, a few at a time, and the paperwork was doctored to account for the missing automatic rifles. Only a matter of the gravest importance would have led Piatkin to cancel a visit from the prime organized crime racketeer in the city.

And this was a matter of the gravest importance.

A little thing had started it, a trifle.

Trying to light a cigarette, a month back, on the naval harbour quay, failing and using the last match, then turning to the officer next to him, and being given a pretty, decorated book of matches with a hotel's name on them, lighting his cigarette at the second attempt, seeing the hotel's name and the city, passing them back to the officer who was responsible for fleet-munitions storage. Asking, with a smile, how the officer had obtained the matches. Being told, 'From Archenko — I think he stayed there when he was last in Poland, the visit to the shipyard, the dry-dock contract. Archenko gave them to me.'

Being suspicious because it was his job, knowing that Archenko and the delegation had been booked rooms in the Mercure Hotel, not the Excelsior, which was on the other side of the old town district of Gdansk, and wondering. His cousin was married to the FSB officer stationed in the consulate in Gdansk but came over the border and into Kaliningrad every two weeks to report, and it was natural that his cousin's husband should be given the spare room in Piatkin's apartment. The last visit had been twelve days earlier. Over beer and sliced peaches from the fridge, Piatkin had asked, 'The visits of the fleet delegation to Gdansk, the matter of the dry dock's availability, I am correct, they stayed at the Mercure Hotel?' That had been confirmed. Piatkin had then asked, 'Did the delegation visit the Excelsior Hotel on ul. Szafarnia?' They had not. 'Could any of the delegation have gone to the Excelsior Hotel for a meal, a drink or a meeting?' None of the four-man delegation, of two naval officers and two civilians from the defence ministry, had visited the hotel. His cousin's husband had escorted the delegation from early morning until late evening, he could vouch that the hotel had not been visited, and Piatkin was told that the prices charged at the Excelsior Hotel put it beyond the reach of the delegation's per diem expenses. He had asked, 'Who uses that hotel?' Foreigners — Germans, Swedes, Americans. A worm had crawled into Piatkin's mind, and after his cousin's husband had gone back to Gdansk the next morning, he had spent the whole day drafting a report for his seniors. He had agonized over it because of the extreme sensitivity of his naming a captain, second rank, who enjoyed the patronage and protection of the fleet commander.

Four days later, eight days ago, the signal had come back from the Lubyanka in Moscow that discreet surveillance should be mounted on Viktor Archenko, chief of staff to Admiral Falkovsky. The next day, a week back, with full authorization for his journey to Malbork Castle, Archenko had driven towards the border but had unaccountably turned back fifteen kilometres short of the checkpoint. And that day the same team in two different cars but using the command vehicle had reported Archenko's second abort. Piatkin could not know where the worm's tracks would lead, and it was inconceivable that an officer of such seniority should be under suspicion.

The response from Headquarters to his report on that morning's abort came as a moment of great relief to Piatkin. It was now out of his hands, a matter for Moscow. By the Sailors' Club, as he had passed Archenko, he could not bring himself to shout a warm greeting to him, but he had noticed what seemed severe strain on Archenko's features. It was now for Moscow to take it further.

Viktor passed the towering statue of Lenin, fashioned in grey stone. There were few enough of them left, but in the naval base in Kaliningrad oblast, one had survived. The great man was sombre and his eyes, gouged forward in the granite stone, seemed to peer at Viktor and strip him of the lie he lived. His friends were far from him. He went up the steps to the fleet headquarters building. In the hallway the sentries saluted him and the clerks snapped to stand behind their desks as he passed. His friends were beyond reach. He did not know how to counter the suspicion arraigned against him, or who would be thrown against him to turn suspicion into proof.

He was a man of little stature, but his reputation went before him. His shoulders were slight, his body was lightweight, his dark hair was tousled into untidy curls, and his walk was without the loose, flowing stride of an athlete. The smoothness of his cheeks under a two-day stubble made him seem too young for the rank displayed by the faded cloth insignia on his shoulders. It was his eyes that upheld his reputation. They were slate grey and the light seemed to burn keenly from them. They had a peace about them that came only from his supreme confidence in his ability: they were those of a hawk, a predator.

He had many homes, but none was important because he had laid down no roots. His upbringing had been in the city of GornoAltaysk, capital of the Altay region far to the south, his postings had been to Moscow, Novosibirsk and Kursk, where he had left the family he never saw, never wrote to and never heard from. There was a desk in Moscow, in the Lubyanka, that was nominally his, and a one-roomed apartment four streets away where two suitcases of clothes lay under the bed, but home now was the principal barracks in Grozny, some 1450 kilometres to the south-east of his few possessions.

He had flown in from Moscow the day before, had been briefed through the night, and now the helicopter awaited him. He ambled across the tarmac, a general beside him and four men laden with weapons behind. The engine of the MI-8 transport helicopter whined towards full power and the rotors made a sweet, clear-cut circle above it. He walked easily and there was a calm about him, but the general's face was puckered with anxiety and the four men, whose eyes shone through the slits in their face masks, betrayed a hint of fear in their gait.

He wore heavy boots of brown leather, not military, and the laces were only loosely tied. His thick hiking socks were around the ankles of his heavy jeans, and protecting his chest from the weather was a grey T-shirt, a maroon wool jersey, a blue fleece coat and the military tunic. At his waist was a belt from which hung a holster and an automatic pistol and in the small of his back, on the belt, a personal first-aid kit.

The general fussed beside him as the engine whine grew. 'You'll do what you can.'

'Of course I will.' The voice was soft, almost gentle.

'He's one of my oldest colleagues, valued.'

'They're all equally important, to someone.'

The general persisted, raising his voice against the engine. 'We were in Afghanistan together, two tours — Jalalabad and Herat. We were in the last brigade out. It's the third time we've been here, this shit-hole.'

He paused, a little frown cut his brow, then he reached up to his shoulders and peeled off his colonel's rank insignia and gave them to the general. A fast grin opened his face. 'I doubt they'll help me.'

'That bastard,' the general spat. 'Take his balls off.'

'I'll do what I think necessary.'

It was complicated. It would be a business of delicacy and danger. The general's colleague was a brigadier in mechanized infantry and had been captured with three escorts, the rest dead, near the Argun gorge. The bastard was Ibn ul Attab, the warlord who held the eastern sector of the gorge. In the follow-up search for the brigadier, by good fortune, a six-man patrol of the special forces Black Berets had taken Attab and his son and had them trussed in a cave high over the gorge, but the location where the brigadier and his escort were held was not known, and the weather had changed. A blanket of cloud had settled on the forested rock faces, and the helicopters were grounded. If the brigadier was to be saved, and his escorts, then the warlord must tell where he was, in which cleft of rocks, in which fissure. Yuri Bikov, thirty-eight years old, no longer wearing his colonel's badges, was the interrogator with the reputation.

'We depend on you,' the general said hoarsely.

He shrugged, laid his hand lightly on the general's arm, then turned towards the helicopter's hatch. From a low-altitude landing strip, they would go forward in armoured vehicles, before trekking towards the location beacon of the Black Beret patrol, then. There were conscripts and grizzled ground crew all around him. He saw it in their faces: he was their icon, they had faith in him because his reputation as an interrogator went ahead of him. His briefings had told him that the Black Berets had already beaten Ibn ul Attab half senseless and that he had said nothing. Time was now critical if the lives of the brigadier and his escorts were to be preserved.

He climbed up to the hatch and one of the air crew helped him heave through.

Bikov settled into a canvas cot seat against the cockpit bulkhead, and when his four men were in with him, machine-gunners took their places at the hatches and armed the weapons. As they lifted off, and he looked around him, he saw the bloodstains on the cabin's floor. There was a piece of white bone near his feet. On the interior of the fuselage were plastic adhesive strips that covered incoming bullet strikes. His reputation said that he alone among the counterintelligence interrogators of the FSB was, perhaps, capable of extracting the information required to save a brigadier and his escort.

Soon, inside the rattling hulk of the helicopter, he dozed. He had no time for the porthole views of artillery-ravaged villages, or for the mountains ahead where the clouds shrouded the slopes. He did not open his eyes as the machine-gunners loosed off a few rounds to check the efficiency of their weapons. If the responsibility given him was a burden he showed no sign of it as his head lolled forward, his chin settled on his chest.

Viktor Archenko had never been to Chechnya and had never heard of Colonel Yuri Bikov.

'What is there that it would be impolite to talk of? What is their disaster area now?' Viktor was settled in the back of the car, the admiral beside him.

'Cheeky boy…' The admiral growled his trademark low chuckle. 'You gossip too much.'

Viktor was the admiral's man. He was his eyes and ears. He was expected to prise confidences from fellow trusted men of the other fleets, the army and the airforce. What he learned went not only to the dead drop at Malbork Castle for collection by the courier, but also was whispered to the Baltic Fleet commander. Knowledge was power. If Admiral Alexei Falkovsky knew the detail of another commander's problems, or what further funds and resources had been made available to others, then he had the native cunning to turn the knowledge to his own advantage. If the Northern Fleet was short of fuel for operational sailing then Falkovsky would feed into the high echelons of the ministry that he, at Kaliningrad, had managed to conserve sufficient diesel, and his star would shine. He thrived on the gossip that Viktor brought him.

'And how was your day among the ruins, Viko?'

'I didn't go,' Viktor said calmly.

A peremptory question. 'Didn't go? Missed out?'

'Actually I didn't go. Idiotic of me, I was on my way and then I remembered that Stanislaw — that is, the curator of works — was going to be on leave. I turned back.'

He looked sharply at his admiral in the car's interior gloom. He had learned over many years that this bluff, powerful, boisterous man had the innate cunning of a she-cat. But the admiral had his eyes barely open and his head was back against the seat. The questions had not been barbed probes but had been fashioned out of politeness. Viktor told himself that here, with his protector beside him, he was safe. If this physically huge and mentally muscled man had known that suspicion now rested on his protégé he would not have carried him in his car. They still searched for evidence, and without evidence they would not dare to approach a man of the authority of the commander of the Baltic Fleet and make their denunciation. But he did not know how much time he had, how fast the sand would run through the funnelled shape of the glass.

Except when he was ill, and the doctors had summoned the courage to issue an order to him, Admiral Alexei Falkovsky never took a day away from his work. All of his career, and more particularly now that he commanded a fleet of warships, he had been obsessed with the levels of control of the navy his adult life had given him. He had no holidays and he took no leave. His wife enjoyed vacations alone or with her female friends. If they took a week in a Black Sea resort, his wife was abandoned while he spent his days visiting other commands, and in the evenings they went to service dinners. But he accepted, with wry amusement, that his chief of staff should be allowed, under humorous and grudging sufferance, an occasional away-day to visit and study Malbork Castle, over the border in Poland. Why a naval officer of seniority should embark on a love affair with a medieval castle, and become an expert in its history and construction, get to the point of obsession, was to Admiral Falkovsky — as Viktor knew — strange to the limit of eccentricity. Viktor talked of the castle to him, lectured him on its magnificence till his eyes turned away and he feigned boredom. He would cry to be spared. Yet the dockets Viktor needed to cross the frontier and visit Malbork were always signed with a gruff snort but they were signed.

'So you have not brought back my cigarettes — how may I survive without my cigarettes?' The admiral struck Viktor's arm. The blow hurt. 'I will die without my cigarettes.'

The admiral smoked up to two packets of Camel, no filter, a day. Each time Viktor travelled to Malbork he brought back ten cartons or more, a minimum of two thousand Camel cigarettes. There was always tension in the admiral's office when supplies were dwindling and the next visit to Malbork was more than a week away. In Kaliningrad, at a price, it was always possible to buy Marlboro, Lucky Strike or Winston off the street stalls, but packets of Camel were hard to find.

'As soon as I can "escape", Admiral, I will go and work for a day with the archaeological team, scrape old stones, excavate decaying bones, and buy your cigarettes.'

'If I am not dead…' Falkovsky's voice softened. In the front of the car that flew the fleet banner on the bonnet was the driver and the admiral's personal uniformed bodyguard. He murmured, 'Tonight there will be present all of the airforce people. Are they going to get the new aircraft, MFI, or are they not? Are they, the pigs, ahead of us at the trough? I would hate to think so. I need to know. Also present tonight is that buffoon, Gorin, from Missile Defence, and I hear they spend every day and half of every night lobbying for money, money, money, and what they get is not available to me. I don't want you talking to them about fucking castles.'

They grinned together, like old friends, and then the interior of the car was filled with the admiral's low chuckle.

Admiral Falkovsky and his wife had produced two daughters. One taught small children in Moscow and the other sat at a reception desk in a St Petersburg hospital. They were both, equally, a disappointment to him. Both were frightened of water, turned pale at the sight of a good sea freshening, and each in her own way had made it clear to their father that his adoration of all things nautical made him a sad, remote and distant figure. They had no sympathy for his life, and he none for theirs, and they came to see him at Kaliningrad only once a year. He would have said, to himself but not to his wife, that the absence of a son in his life was negated when he had first cast his hard and experienced eye on the young Viktor Archenko. He was now aged fifty-six, but then he had been forty-two, and the young man who had caught that eye was twenty-two years old. At that time he commanded the destroyer and frigate flotillas sailing out of Severomorsk. His reputation for brutal commitment to the navy had been made thirteen years before their first meeting and came from suppression of mutiny. In 1975, as a part of the celebrations for the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, the Krivak-class destroyer, the Storozhevoy, was in the Baltic port of Riga, capital city of the satellite state of Latvia, when the political officer and the second officer recognized that the proximity of Swedish territorial waters represented a once-in-a-lifetime chance of escape from the Soviet camp. With most of the crew and the captain locked below decks, the political officer and the second officer, with the bare minimum of the crew who were co-conspirators to help them, sailed from Riga. The flight was not at first noticed, but a member of the crew who either doubted the wisdom of what they attempted or had chickened out, radioed the shore and alerted the command.

Chaos would have reigned, and confusion, when the message came in. The then captain lieutenant, Falkovsky, had pushed aside superiors who dithered and had given the orders. None had dared disobey him. The airforce had bombed and strafed the defenceless vessel and had stopped it in the water a mere forty-eight kilometres from the Swedish sanctuary. Falkovsky had led the boarding party that had brought back the political officer, the second officer and the crewmen. The political officer had been summarily executed. Falkovsky had said, to any who would listen to him, that he was proud of what he had done, and he had further explained that his motive was not to protect the sanctity of the revolution's celebration, but to safeguard the good name of the navy. None had dared doubt his argument. He would show short shrift, no sympathy, for traitors. The message of Riga and the Storozhevoy was known wherever Alexei Falkovsky's name was spoken, and the reasoning behind his actions.

Thirteen years later he had met the junior lieutenant. The day they had first set eyes on each other had sealed their relationship. The Kanin-class guided missile destroyer, Gnevnyy, had been due to sail on a day in early July 1988 from Severomorsk to join a Northern Fleet anti-submarine exercise, and had not left harbour. The crew had been paraded, and Captain, first rank, Falkovsky had stamped on board and delivered a peroration of ferocious bile at the inefficiency of the Gnevnyy''s officers, NCOs and able seamen, and of Junior Lieutenant Archenko. They were a 'disgrace', their 'under-preparedness shamed the navy', they were not fit to clean 'the latrines of the fleet's dry docks', and all their shore leave for twelve months was cancelled.

In the face of Falkovsky's tirade, the Gnevnyy's captain had hung his head and studied his boots and had known that his navy life was ended. As Captain, first rank, Falkovsky had stared at the crew, stabbing at them with the glower of his eyes, Archenko had spoken up. He had been in the fourth rank and there had been — Falkovsky could still remember the detail of it — a forward thrust of his chin, his eyes had stared directly forward, and his voice had been firm and without fear. He spoke when no one else had the courage to do so: 'Sir, the Gnevnyy did not sail because it had no fuel. Although the crew have not been paid for three months, although there was only enough food stored on board for one week's basic meals and the exercise is due to last for nineteen days, those were not the reasons we did not put to sea. The fuel should have been loaded the day before we should have sailed. It was not. It had been sold on the black-market. Our captain was told this by an officer in Administration at Northern Fleet when he went ashore to plead for the diesel. He was told the storage tanks were empty because the last of the fuel had been corruptly sold to mafiya criminals living in Leningrad. When the captain, first rank, provides us with fuel we will be ready to sail and will strive to fulfil our mission.' He had been the only one with the bravery to speak.

In the morning fuel had been found, and rations, and the ship had sailed, and three officers in Administration had gone to the camps, and a mafiya king from Leningrad had died in a road accident. Two years later, when Archenko's duty — closely monitored to see whether he was a barrack lawyer or a duty-driven officer — on the Gnevnyy was completed, Falkovsky had sent him a terse two-line note inviting him on to his personal staff. Two years later, Falkovsky had been posted to the defence ministry in Moscow and had pulled the strings to obtain a place for the young man at the Grechko Academy for Staff Officers in the capital.

In 1997, Falkovsky had achieved admiral's rank and left the ministry to take over command of the entire surface complement of the Northern Fleet, and young Archenko had been posted with him. There was a fondness for Viktor, but also an admiration for the workload the man took on his shoulders. Total reliability, the honesty he yearned for from subordinates, and trust were the bricks on which their relationship was built. Viktor was his proxy son. Two years later, May 1999, they had gone to Kaliningrad together: Admiral of the Fleet and chief of staff. In the last twelve months, many young officers had jacked in the navy and retreated into civilian life, so few of those who remained were reliable. This man was a jewel. It was Falkovsky's opinion that he could not have fulfilled his duty without the ever-present and ever-dependable Viktor Archenko. And it was Falkovsky's hope that he would inherit the position of top dog, Admiral of the Fleet of the Russian Federation, when he had finished at Kaliningrad, and that Viktor would be with him, securing his outer office.

They arrived at airforce headquarters. Falkovsky said, 'Don't take any shit from them.'

'Would I ever?' the quiet voice replied.

Again, he punched the younger man's arm. He thought Viktor subdued, distant…and then he was out of his car and marching past a small honour guard and hearing the reassuring bite of Viktor's shoes on the gravel behind him.

It was the sort of evening that Viktor fed from.

His admiral and the generals were at the far end of the room, circling each other for advantage like rutting boars, playing with words and seeking to disguise their mutual jealousies. Viktor was at the bar with those who made up the second echelon of authority, where the food was. Although at the bar and close to the steward, it was his skill that he drank little on such occasions — the visit from Moscow of an airforce general in charge of design and development — while making certain that others around him consumed copiously and dangerously. He was inside the web of a network where total trust existed, where men spoke freely.

The chief of staff to the visiting general told Viktor, 'If we don't have it soon we might as well go home and grow potatoes. Without it we're fucked. At a ratio of two to one we need the lightweight fighter and the heavy bomber, must have them. What we're going to get is different, the compromise — one aircraft, with NTOW of seventeen tonnes — but the range, it's promised us, will exceed four thousand five hundred kilometres, and they'll go for the two engines, the AL-41F turbofan, which is thrust of 175kN. It's not what we want but it's what we're going to get. MFI is what they guarantee us. "What's the manoeuvrability?" we ask. They say it's better than the American next generation, and they tell us the radar will be better, the NOW system that has a +/-130-150 azimuth, with tail radar for the rest, and they say the payload will be all the current air-to-air and air-to-ground payload. But, but, where is it, the prototype? The 1-44 is stuck in a Zhukovsky hangar, undergoing what they call "ground adjustments", which means it's crap — the word is "high degree static instability". They're waiting on the test pilot having the balls to go up in it, poor bastard. It's what we're going to get, and the money's there, from last week, if it ever flies. And, how are things with the navy?'

Viktor talked for a few moments about the condition of the Baltic Fleet, but his concentration was on memorizing what had been said. MFI was the Mikoyan Multifunction Tactical Fighter. NTOW was Normal Take-off Weight…it would be the successor to the SU-27 and MiG-29 fourth-generation fighters, and was designed to confront the Americans' Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor. Viktor gestured discreetly at his admiral across the length of the room and muttered that 'the fat man' would appreciate an up-to-date paper on MFI and where the programme was going, for 'his eyes only', and was told such a paper would be sent.

Viktor moved on.

At that time, across the border, away to the south-west in the Polish city of Warsaw, on the embassy's second floor, behind a steel door, a signal was being enciphered.

Viktor reached his second target of the evening, a colonel in Early Warning Defence, who with his general was on a three-day assessment-of-capability visit to the Kaliningrad base. Viktor had noted that the colonel's glass was empty and brought a double replacement.

'It's hopeless, worse than ever. I've been in EWD for nineteen years. It's like our knickers have dropped to our ankles, the elastic's gone. You don't believe me? You should. The big word is deterioration. We follow the principle of "hair-trigger" reaction to threat, but that is based on comprehensive satellite surveillance of where the launch might come from, and we haven't replaced the satellites. They've passed their useful lifespan. And not only are my knickers down, I'm blindfolded. There should be nine satellites up if we're to follow "hair trigger", but we have only three. Three. We cannot monitor firings from the Tridents out in the Pacific, where they'd launch from. Because it's a high elliptical satellite system there are times when we have no cover for an eight-hour period. Eight. And we've lost ground radar — like the one in Latvia. They could shoot from Alaska and we wouldn't know we were under attack until the air burst. We have no shield, not any more. We scream for more satellites, and they are deaf to us. It's bloody freezing with your knickers at your ankles, I tell you.'

Viktor drifted away. He estimated that his admiral would be bored by now with the occasion. He left behind him two men who had each poured out a cupful of heartache about a new airforce programme and an early-warning shield that was a myth.

An enciphered signal would now be in London.

In the staff car he told the admiral what he had learned and won a steady succession of grunted expletives in return. He had not noticed them on the outward journey, but on the return leg there were vehicle lights behind them that kept pace with the admiral's driver.

By now the signal would have been read. Were his friends true to him? Was there anything his friends could do for him? Did they care?

The signal his friends would read would say: ferret: no show.