Traitor's Kiss

…Chapter Three

Every morning when he did not have a breakfast meeting, Viktor Archenko ran on the beach north of the base. He left the harbour, the castle, the barracks blocks and office buildings behind him, and Lenin's statue, which dominated the complex in stature and past authority, and the guarded gates. He had been tense as he had jogged past the sentries…the moment when his freedom would end? Would he be turned back? But the conscripts with their rifles on the barrier had saluted him, and he had made himself acknowledge them. The black van and the silver saloon had been parked outside the gates and when he was a hundred metres beyond them he'd heard, against the drumming of his feet, their engines start up. He hadn't looked back.

In the night he had lain on his narrow bed and he had cursed himself for the mistake he had made on the road to the border and Braniewo. The U-turn into and out of the side road had been a major error of judgement, and it would not be repeated. The run along the beach was his final throw to save himself. He had talked about it with his friends in the late-evening and early-morning sessions in the Excelsior Hotel and it had been stressed to him that he must make a habit of the morning run. At his age it was entirely understandable that he should seek to maintain his athleticism, so he ran on the beach every morning that he was free to do so, and the sentries on the gate were familiar with it, and so was Piatkin, the zampolit, and so would be the men who sat in the black van and the silver saloon. His friends had told him to make the habit familiar to anyone who watched him so that, when and if it mattered, the run did not create suspicion.

He wore heavy trainer running shoes and thick socks so that his feet would not blister, and lightweight shorts and an athletics vest that had the emblem of the Baltic Fleet front and back, and a red bandanna was knotted tight on his forehead so that the sweat did not dribble into his eyes. In the pocket of his shorts was a small piece of white chalk, no bigger than his thumbnail. His friends had told him he must always have the chalk there, however long he had no need of it.

The only approach road to Baltiysk, and the base, was along the spit from the north. At the town of Primorsk, the land mass shrank to a narrow finger peninsula, and the road ran beside a railtrack that served the fleet. The canal at Baltiysk cut across the peninsula that stretched south across the firing range and the missile batteries, then the frontier, where high wire and watchtowers guard the approach to Poland.

His trainers stamped on the dry sand above the tideline, and the give in it made for hard running. His target, that dawn and every dawn that he ran on the beach, was a water tower built on the upper point of the peninsula, its foundations some thirty metres above the levels of the sea and the lagoon. Running fast, like an automaton, he was soon clear of the base with nothing ahead of him except the sea, the beach and the tall pine trees that hid the road and the railtrack. His stride kicked up little clouds of sand, and sometimes he crunched on the amber pebbles that were washed on to the beach by the fiercer storms. In his dulled mind, he wondered if his grandmother had walked on this beach, in panic, had tramped on the same brittle sand and had carried the suitcase in which were all of her possessions. If she had she would have gazed out over the sea, far beyond the waves breaking on the sand and the little pieces of amber, and she might have seen the disappearing outlines on the horizon of the low, overloaded Wilhelm Gustloff, the General Steuben and the Goya, and she might have wept because she was not on one of them.

Slowly, as he willed himself faster, the water tower grew closer. The road was now close to the beach, but the trees shielded it. Often he heard the thunder of the lorries coming to the base or leaving it, but that morning he could only hear the lesser purr of the black van and the silver saloon tracking him.

High on the sand, below the water tower, was the wreck of a fishing-boat. It would have been seven metres long and two wide, and half a century before it would have held thirty or forty escapers. It had been caught on the beach by a strafing aircraft, and cannon shells had holed it. Perhaps his grandmother had been close, hiding in the pine trees and pressed down on the needle-strewn ground when the aircraft had come over on its low pass and destroyed her final hope. Viktor always ran as far as the wreck on the sand, and never further. There he would rest for three minutes, timed on the stop-watch dial of his wristwatch, a routine set in stone.

It was his cry for help. In the face of the wind his back rested against the old plank timbers of the fishing-boat. From the dunes, as they smoked their cigarettes, his watchers might see the top of his head. If he had been in the lee of the wind, sheltered, they would have been able to see him, and what he did. He reached into the pocket of his shorts and took out the piece of chalk. Near to the bow, where once the name of the boat and its number would have been painted, close to a shell-hole, he made two short crosses, and underneath the crosses he wrote the letters Y and F. He did not know how his friends would answer his cry. He pushed himself up, his three minutes gone.

He was a traitor. He imagined the unpitying, feral eyes of the men on the dunes before they turned to scurry back to the van and the saloon car.

He was a traitor for two reasons. The learning of the life and death of his father and of his grandmother had tipped him into the chasm and down in freefall to treachery. If he had been told only of his father he might not have taken the big step, crossed that line. Within a few months of his mother telling him of his grandmother's life and death, Viktor had walked the trawler's gangplank in Murmansk. It was fitting he should now be posted to Kaliningrad.

His grandmother was Helga Schmidt, the daughter of Wilhelm and Anneliese, who had had a prosperous prewar grain-export business in the east Prussian city of Konigsberg. Wilhelm died in the air raids of August 1944 when the old town and his warehouses were bombed with incendiaries.

Helga and Anneliese had not believed until it was too late that the Reich could disintegrate. Then, daughter and mother had fled in a final crocodile of refugees from Konigsberg the day before the Red Army surrounded the city. They had reached Pillau, walked there, but the last ships had gone. The army garrison at Pillau had fought on for two weeks after the final surrender of Konigsberg by General Otto Lasch.

Pillau had fallen when no ammunition remained to defend it, and the women had stood behind white flags and faced the Red Army.

Anneliese had been bayoneted. She had not survived long enough to see what happened to her daughter — which was God's small mercy.

The victorious troops were from Central Asia, but their officers were ethnic Russians. The officers chose the prettiest, and Helga was among them. Helga Schmidt was raped by a battalion's officer, then by the NCOs, then by those of the troops still able to achieve erections — it was what happened in dark days at the end of a war of brutality. When they were all flaccid, spent, satiated, she was left.

The girl, impregnated, was shipped back to the city, now called Kaliningrad, and existed there as a gypsy waif. She kept herself alive through her love for an unborn child. Starved, half frozen, living in the bomb ruins, Helga survived her pregnancy, but was too weak to feed her boy baby, born on 25 January 1946.

Helga Schmidt wrote down what had happened to her, wrapped her son in the thickest rags she could find, with the paper that told her history, and left him on a snow-covered step at a side door to the city orphanage. The same day she had given up her baby, she hanged herself from a beam in the cathedral's ruins, having used the torn strips of her skirt as a noose.

The baby, adopted by a Russian family, was named Pyotr. The family, farmers from the east and resettled on formerly German property in Kaliningrad, had the name of Archenko.

Pyotr Archenko was only twenty years old when he married his childhood sweetheart, Irina, whose stomach bulged at the ceremony. Their only son was given the name of Viktor. On her deathbed, Irina's mother-in-law had shown her the faded, creased sheet of paper on which Helga Schmidt had written her testament. In turn, on her own deathbed, Irina had allowed Viktor to read it, then had taken it back from him and had held it over a candle until it had burned and her fingers had blistered.

The story, and that of the death of his father, had bred betrayal.

Viktor had done what his handlers had told him to, and he ran back along the beach. The gloom of the dawn had gone and the sun now edged over the tips of the pine trees. On the return leg he ran more loosely. He never looked at the dunes to see whether the men watched him. That he lived was because of his grandmother's strength and that was a small but solid comfort to him. Would they hear his cry, and would they answer it? He did not know.

In the night the battery on the alarm clock had failed. The bleeper hadn't sounded.

Locke woke, glanced at the clock's digital face, was turning over to go back to sleep when he saw the first glimmer of daylight through the thin curtains. He looked at his watch and surged out of his cold bed.

For a week now the bed had harboured an icy chill in Danuta's absence. He shaved in the shower and dressed while he was still wet. A best shirt and a best tie, his best suit and his best shoes were snatched from the wardrobe and from the drawers and he dripped pools of water on to the carpet. As he closed his front door for the charge down the stairwell, the lights were still blazing behind him, but he didn't have time to go back and switch them off.

He ran for his car. He had not filled the tank since yesterday's drive to and from Braniewo and the needle flickered in the red segment of the dial. He prayed he had enough petrol to get him to Okecie. If he was caught in the city's early rush-hour gridlocks he would miss the flight. He had the protection of diplomatic plates but that would not stop a policeman waving him down with a luminous baton, for amusement. He was still on the wide Al Jerozolimskie, had not yet reached the Zawisky roundabout, when he made his first clear-cut decision of the day. He would drive straight past any policeman who tried to stop him — and bugger the consequences.

An hour after sending the signal, and a quarter of an hour after he had come back to the apartment after sitting with a coffee for twenty minutes at the Sklep z Kawq Pozegnanie z Afrykq — she hadn't been there. His mobile had rung. Libby Weedon. He was summoned to London, first flight in the morning with LOT, the national carrier. 'Don't miss it, you're in with the big girls,' and she'd hung up. Libby Weedon, clever lady, had distanced herself from Ferret, and left him, the young man on his first Service posting abroad, to do the driving and the collection from the dead drops. What could he bloody well tell the 'big girls'? No detail was more telling than the three words of his signal: ferret: no show.

He broke most of Poland's traffic laws on the way to Okecie, and beat the early traffic. He was close to the airport when he remembered that he was due to meet a speech writer of the KPN party for lunch. He fumbled with his mobile and left a message on Libby Weedon's voicemail asking for the duty secretary to ring with apologies. The needle banged on the dial's 'empty' segment, but the tank held out and he made it to the airport. He was the last one onto the flight.

Gabriel Locke's upbringing had been on the southern tip of west Wales. His parents still ran a 150-acre dairy farm on fields that were edged by cliffs that fell to violent seas. It was a harsh place and made for a hard and uncertain existence. Their lives were dominated by the extremes of weather, the coldness of the impersonal banks, the milk quotas, the per-litre price, the ever-increasing callout fee charged by veterinary surgeons, and most recently by the scourge of foot-and mouth disease. They survived on the edge of poverty, reduced to hoarding pounds, squirrelling away the silver coins, putting the pence in jars before collecting enough to dump them on the counter of the village shop and the post office. He had wanted none of it. He was one of the few from his comprehensive-school class who had bettered himself and broken free. He had thought he would never suffer as he believed they did. He rarely phoned home, only sent anodyne messages on occasional postcards. He wanted structure and certainty to his life and it was ridiculous to him that — in this new millennium — a storm, or a Whitehall bureaucrat's decision, or a virus could tip the difference between minimal financial survival and bankruptcy. Yet for the first time in his adult life, going down the pier and seeing the force of the wind scudding across the tarmac, he felt unsure as to what the future held.

There was turbulence ahead. They lifted off and the aircraft shook as it gathered height. It would be a foul flight. The uncertainty festered in his mind. The cream of the Service's new intake, his contemporaries on the IONEC course, were now scattered round the Gulf, in Islamabad, Tashkent and Tehran, in Damascus and Tel Aviv, in Beirut, Cairo and Khartoum, and the prize bitch among them was in Kabul. They were at the sharp end of the Service's work, and Gabriel Locke was in Warsaw where less than fuck-all relevant work was done…and he was being summoned back to London because two dead-drop procedures — as antiquated and outdated as the plumbing of his parents' milking parlour — had failed. The sourness engulfed him as the plane ducked through the choppy air. His annoyance, for want of a better target, focused on the outmoded system that had produced Ferret in the first place.

Alice North was at the far end of the conference room where she would hardly have been noticed with her back to the window. The bright sunlight that was thrown over her shoulder cast a shadow on her face. Her legs were crossed and on her upper thigh was the notepad in which she wrote her shorthand, with sharpened pencil.

Before the meeting had settled, Alice had written at the top of the first page of the foolscap pad:

Alice's face, without makeup, was a mask. Of all of them in the room she knew the most of Codename Ferret, but she was not expected to speak…she was only there to take the record of the meeting, not to contribute.

She had met Gabriel Locke once, at Rupert Mowbray's retirement party, and from the first sight of him she had disliked the young man. Not tall, a nice head, fine dark hair, well-cut features, but humourless, cold and without humanity.

Peter Giles had always been a snake in the grass. And Alice had scant respect for Ponsford either, a time-server with a knapsack of pomposity since the last New Year Honours and his OBE award.

Alice glanced up from the notepad and saw the naval intelligence man wince. All the faces were turned towards him. She thought him not a man to put his head unnecessarily on the block. He coughed. The delay he put into the hack deep in his throat, then the shovelling in his pocket for a handkerchief seemed to her to be in the hope that someone else might speak up. There was no escape.

Again, Alice looked up and saw heads nod agreement. Others now took their cue from the navy's man. She scribbled busily.

Her face was down and close to the notepad, her pencil moved silently, but her coverage of the word 'drastic' was emphatic, and if she had pressed harder the lead might have snapped.

She heard the little ripple of laughter around the table.

He'd waited for his moment. In the past two years Alice had twice met William Courtney. He'd be a few years older than herself, might be thirty-eight, and she thought that the best years of his soldiering were behind him. His reward, for ageing, was a transfer from Hereford to liaison work with the Service. It was a part of the Service's glory legacy that a troop was permanently on standby down at Hereford for the rougher end of the Service's work. He wore his grey-flecked hair long on his shoulders, and she thought a ponytail would have been smarter, but it was apparent to her that smartness did not fit the hippie/traveller image he cultivated. No jacket, a thick sweater that looked to have been worn that week in a sheep-pen on the Brecons and had unravelling wool in the elbows and at the cuffs, and jeans that were clean but had not been pressed after an obligatory run through a launderette. He had on trainers that were faded but had probably shared space in the same wash as the jeans.

Alice knew Ferret's file backwards. She could turn up any page without going to the index. She had never seen an exfiltration plan, only an 'alert' procedure of chalk signs on a beach. Her pencil was poised. Her eyes rose and she saw Ponsford look away, and Giles stared down at the blank paper in front of him then reached for his glass of water. A smile, fading towards impertinence, wreathed the Special Air Service major's mouth.

Alice said softly, 'Bertie, your last remark, is that for the record?'

A flush of colour to the man's cheeks, blood running in the surface veins. 'No, I don't think anything of my last little contribution was made for posterity — just thinking aloud. Thank you, Alice.'

None of that speech would be erased with her India-rubber, however; none of it would be crossed out. When she typed up the record it would be there, and she'd make damn sure it went to the top-floor suite where the Director General held court. And then she had gone back into her corner shadow. It was to be Alice's only intervention. No one around the table would have seen it, but her eyes watered. They didn't know him, didn't want to, didn't care what he went through — stress, strain, pressure — to provide the damn detail on hull coating, diving depths, propeller noise. Alice knew. She flipped the page over and wrote on.

Alice knew her medieval Latin. 'Fac' was 'do', 'totus' (adj.) was 'all'. She looked at him and thought he was weighing up whether this was good for his career's future, or whether he might be damaged by it.

Alice put her notepad and pencils into her bag. As she walked to the door she heard Courtney, the Hereford officer, saying conversationally to Giles, 'Don't get me wrong — who dares wins and all that crap — but I meant what I said. We're hardly going to volunteer to go into that rat's nest, Kaliningrad. Don't even think about it — count us right out.'

Ponsford said, 'Like everything else in this life, it was good while it lasted. I have to say it, if an agent misses two dead drops, and has never missed before, then he's in trouble. Poor bastard…but that's the way it goes.'

As she went out through the door she heard the naval intelligence man ask Giles, 'What would be the form on their side?'

And she heard Giles say, 'They'd call up an interrogator, a very high-quality man…'

She closed the door, and thought none of them saw her leave.

Guided by a flare of red smoke, the helicopter put down in a field close to a burned-out farmhouse. The thrash of its rotors lifted up what was left of the farmhouse's roof and tossed aside the corrugated-iron sheets, like paper flaking over a bonfire.

A reception committee of men and officers stared at Bikov and his escort as they jumped down from the hatch. He looked around him. A half-dozen armoured personnel carriers were drawn up in a line surrounded by the treadmarks of their tyres where they had manoeuvred to make the line. They were blank and expressionless faces, the faces of men who fought a war they had realized long ago lacked the possibility of victory. He understood why the helicopter could not take him further forward — the cloud ceiling was low. Only the base of the hills was visible to the south. The snow fell lightly on his shoulders as he walked forward to meet the men who waited for him. If it had not been for the officer and the men who were captured and held in the high ground that was covered by the cloud's fall, and if it had not been for the patrol of Black Berets who were hidden in a cave with their prisoners and, most importantly, if it had not been for the reputation that travelled fast ahead of Yuri Bikov, then no man sane or lunatic — would have gone up into the killing ground around the Argun gorge.

He was briefed. He took a mug of lukewarm coffee, looked at the maps on which the snow fell, and said little. The four men charged with the immediate protection of his life were from the Vympel unit, controlled by Directorate V of the FSB's Special Operations Centre, and they said less. While he went over the maps and the pitifully small amount of recent intelligence, they checked their gear, weapons and medical equipment. Bikov had not been given their names, and if he'd asked for them he would not have been told. He couldn't read their faces because they had masks over them through which only their eyes were revealed, but their breath came through the cotton and he sensed that they, too, thought this an idiot place to be. But he trusted them, as he had to. He was put with his men in the third of the six carriers, and he fastened the studs of the bulletproof jacket, felt the warmth of its weight, and was given a helmet, which he wore.

They had driven for eighty-seven minutes, were already high in the dense clouds and on a hairpin track of slushy ice and snow, when the first RPG-7 shell hit the carrier in front.

An arm snatched him and threw him down on to the steel-plate floor. The second RPG-7 shell took off the forward wheel, right side, and his carrier lurched then slid into a ditch at the track's side.

One of the Vympel men was over his legs and another lay on Bikov's head. The two others crouched on the crazily angled floor at either side of him. He was deafened. The machine-gun blasts, with the anti-tank weapons firing over open sights, and the grenades were from the ambushed carriers. The incoming fire was from the RPG-7 launchers, and mortars, and machine-guns, and rifles, and the sound crashed around him, and men screamed — a soldier fell on the body covering his head and he felt the warmth of blood. The Vympel men never shouted, spoke, or fired their weapons. They protected him: his was a chosen life.

He heard the screams and the pounding of the gunfire. They were like vermin in a darkened pit, and Bikov was choking on the smoke of burned tyres, flesh and fuel. He had been in combat situations before in Chechnya, but nothing as terrifying as this contact. He had crouched at the corner of buildings in Grozny city when small-arms fire had come from an apartment block, and tanks and artillery had pounded the suspected firing position, and he had not felt endangered. The side of the carrier took the full weight of an RPG blast and the interior sang with the shrapnel. He did not know how it was possible that he had not been hit. He moved his toes, his fingers, opened his eyes in the acrid gloom, then ran his hands down his stomach and motioned his spine forward and down, as if he were fucking, and knew he had not been hit — it was hard to believe. But the smoke would kill them.

Who would care enough to come to his funeral if his body was n extracted and brought home? Not his parents because he hadn't listed them as next-of-kin on his file, and they wouldn't hear of his death unless it made a paragraph in a newspaper they might read before they lit the paper in the grates of their separate fires. Not his wife, because it was twelve years since the divorce. Not Natasha, who was now fifteen, because her mother had poisoned the child's mind against him. Maybe a few at the Lubyanka would come with flowers as an excuse to get away from their desks for a couple of hours…the brigadier would care. Yuri Bikov was the lifeline of the brigadier.

He shouted, 'Let's get the fuck out of here.'

Maybe there was a poorer chance outside, but better to die there than like rats in a darkening hole. The smoke fumes were choking him.

He couldn't read their eyes, expressionless in the slits. One moment he was on the floor of the carrier. The next, he was being dragged its length like a dead-weight sack of potatoes. He snagged against a body, had time to see that its left leg was severed free at the groin. As he was pulled out into the daylight, the loose leg came with him. They went into the ditch and their fall broke the ice covering. He went under, then was pulled up. He spat wet mud from his mouth. Among the rocks and scrub bushes, and in the trees above the track, men fought for survival. In the carriers the troops blasted into the murk of the cloud and prayed they might live.

The Vympel men took him down a slope, a rush between each rock then a stop and a murmur between them, then another rush. They used sign language to communicate, and never fired. The convoy of carriers, and its fate, was not their concern: he was. Only for a reputation such as Yuri Bikov's would such an operation, with the risk of such casualties, have been mounted.

They left the firefight and the killing behind them. Bikov knew enough of the war in Chechnya to understand that if the convoy's troops were overrun the men would have saved a last grenade or a last bullet for themselves. The brigadier and his escort had either not been able to, or not had that moment of courage, which was why he and the Vympel men were huddled between the rocks or bent and running.

They went down the slope for more than a kilometre, then took cover in trees. After checking him over to see that he was not hurt, they used their maps and a handheld GPS system to plot their position and work out their route.

For a long time they heard the shooting and the explosions, but Bikov could not tell whether the attack was being driven off or whether the men would need the last grenade or bullet.

The cloud's mist was tight around them as they climbed and Bikov struggled to keep the pace set for him.

He hadn't painted that afternoon but had been on the roof of his hut hammering in the nails left for him on the far side of the loch by the postwoman, beating down on their heads to secure the sheet-iron sections. There had been bad gales the previous winter and this was work Billy Smith should have accomplished in the spring or the summer, but he had left it, and now the autumn was with him and time was against him. All day he had been on the roof, not coming down for a sandwich or a mug of coffee, and it was his penance. When he'd started he'd believed that he'd finish in time to get in three hours of painting, not up the mountain behind the hut but down on the shore where the ducks were preparing restlessly to go south for the winter. His painting was abandoned for the day, and he regretted that. Other than when he used his full strength to thump down the six-inch nails, and the sounds echoed back from the cliff slopes and the gullies, there was a limitless quiet around him.

When the room had cleared, Albert Ponsford poured the dregs of the coffee into his cup and Locke's, and then said, 'I don't think, speaking frankly, it's going to go anywhere, but it's important we move by the form book. The last dead drop of course has to be visited, and we go through the motions of exfiltration. I'd like you to handle all that, Gabriel.'

'Be very pleased to, Bertie.' Gabriel Locke was well enough versed in the Service culture to appreciate that a request made by a senior man with elaborate politeness was in fact an instruction. Willing hands were always welcomed hands at headquarters.

'Rupert left so little for us…there's a rumour abroad that he spent his last morning here shredding material on Ferret. Extraordinary behaviour, and so insulting to colleagues. It's a minor miracle he deigned to provide us with the details of this last drop procedure. He did — and I don't think time is on our side…I noted your hostility to Ferret.'

Locke said abruptly, 'It's not personal, no…just that there's nothing to be done. I'd call it a pragmatic approach, the real world against a bygone age of sentiment and emotion.'

Ponsford smiled, always the enigma when one to one with juniors, and handed the young man a single sheet of typed paper. Locke thought he had said the right thing but could not be sure.

'You'll take care of it, send the signal, yes?'

'Consider it done — as you say, Bertie, that's the form book. By the way, I came without a bag. I'll need some clothes…'

'Can't have you wandering around like the great unwashed. Buy them and bill us.'

It took him a full fifteen minutes to find Alice North. Upstairs, down in the elevator, along corridors, and finally he located her, tucked away on the fourth floor, in East European Controllerate, tapping her keyboard, transcribing her shorthand. She was quite pretty, not beautiful like Danuta, not stylish, but she had good colour in her cheeks, and her dark auburn hair was cut short — he thought that was for convenience not effect. The only jewellery she wore was a half-hidden amber pendant hanging from a gold neck-chain- He hovered behind her. She went on typing. He read on her screen his own initials, then: 'Cut him adrift, forget him. Not worth the hassle. In our station we have excellent relations with the Russians, and…' Of course, she knew he was there. He coughed. She continued typing.

'Excuse me, Alice, but I've a signal to send, and I've got no clothes other than what I'm standing in. I've cleared it with Bertie. Could you, please, slip over to the Strand and get me two or three pairs of socks, for size-nine shoe, two Y-fronts and singlets for a medium fit, and a couple of shirts that are pretty neutral, fifteen-and-a-half collar, a pair of pyjamas, one of those little packs of plastic razors, and some soap? A hundred from petty cash should do it. Thank you.'

She gave no indication that it was not her job to do his shopping for him. She ignored him as she closed down her screen, went through the laid-down procedures for storage, then locked her notepad in her personal safe. She had her coat on and was gone Locke thought her sad. He grinned to himself. He liked the word he'd used—'pragmatic'—to Bertie Ponsford. It had set his stall out. He was of the new generation and unburdened by old baggage. When he had been on the IONEC course, the young probationer, the intake's lecture room had been visited by the Director General. On his entry they'd all stood until the man, close to retirement, had motioned them to sit. He'd said, 'Russia remains and will remain a potent military threat. Though their military intentions may no longer be belligerent, their capability remains. The unpredictability and instability of the regime could make them all the more dangerous. This Service will have an important role for many years to come in warning this country of danger signs on their long road to democracy.' Then, he'd turned on his heel and gone.

The students had discussed what had been said to them. Locke's contribution to the seminar had been, 'What we heard was the leaden weight of the old Service, all the stuff that should be consigned to history books. I, for one, intend to move on and fight the real battles that mean something to GB's security — organized crime, Mid-East terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the third world. We all know where the real threats lie.' The tutor had not contradicted him. That Director General was now out to grass and the old guard's message should have been dead, buried. Ferret was history.

He took the workstation next to Alice's and typed the signal into the automatic telegram handling system and pressed the 'send' code to move it on its way. Then he waited for her to return with his new clothes.

He sat in a small dank cell. The custody officer had taken his tie and belt but had left him with his shoelaces, and the detectives had kept hold of his wallet. Up to that afternoon Ham Protheroe had always been ahead, but he'd stayed the extra day: he'd reckoned there was one more killing to be made from the woman's credit cards, and that had been his last mistake. His bag was packed in the hotel room and he'd planned to slip out a little after midnight, having sent the night porter away from Reception to get him a drink from the closed bar. The detectives had been waiting for him when he'd come back from the cashpoint. She must have checked her accounts by phone, then rung the police. He wouldn't have targeted her if he'd thought there was the remotest chance that she'd have the face to turn him in. He sat in the cell and felt the harshness of the light burn down on him.

It was problematic but achievable for a general-service officer to be promoted on merit to the rank of officer in the Service. Those who beaver away at clerical and administration duties can, if dedicated, ambitious and able, win such promotion. Daphne Sullivan had the dedication, ambition and ability. Upon the arrival of Gabriel Locke's signal to the Service's quarters at the embassy in Berlin, after its deciphering, it was passed to her. She made no comment but took it to her desk and made three phone calls for guidance, then took from her safe a German passport that carried her photo, heaved on her coat, knotted her scarf round her throat and left the building on Wilhelmstrasse. One call had been to the local colleagues in the Office for the Protection of the State, a second had been to a particular named official in the Association of Travel Agents, a third was to a travel company in the far west of the city, close to its outer limits.

She drove herself to the Marzahn housing complex, where sixty thousand rat box apartments had been built in ten years under the Communist regime, the pride of Honecker's government. Among a mix of rectangular garden allotments with wood huts for summer weekends, and a moonscape of wasteground, she found a parking space by the S-bahn station, in the Allee der Kosmonauten.

The travel agency she sought had been brightly fitted, was warm, comfortable and had the reputation for extreme efficiency. Its prosperity was based on the owners' sharp appreciation of a growing market niche. Werner Weigel had been a middle-ranking officer in the formerly supreme secret police and his wife, Brigitte, had been a manager in the Ministry of the Interior before the Wall had come down. Their past had disappeared during the last days of Communist rule into the overworked shredders. They were now respected and reliable tour operators. They arranged visits by elder citizens to the old homelands of east Prussia, in particular to the city that had been Konigsberg and was now called Kaliningrad. A compelling whiff of nostalgia drew that dying generation back to the region of their childhood, a last visit to scratch in their memories of youth.

Daphne needed a visa to enter that Russian territory. Under normal circumstances it took the bureaucracy at the Russian embassy five working days to issue such a visa for a visit to Kaliningrad.

It would be about money. The one-time Stasi officer and his wife had done well after reunification in their business venture, and they intended to do better. Euros were passed discreetly over a table in the back room. Daphne Sullivan had been stationed in Berlin long enough to know that, in the new Germany, money had a loud voice. Every day of the week a Mercedes-built luxury coach took a party of elder citizens to Kaliningrad. One would leave the next afternoon. Money bought the cooperation of Herr and Frau Weigel. Fraulein Magda Krause, who had intended to travel to Kaliningrad to search for her grandparents' heritage, had planned to take the tour in November, but her holiday had been cancelled and she could only travel that week, in late September. Money ensured that her German passport would be taken by hand to the Russian embassy on Unter den Linden, and more money paid to a clerk would guarantee that the necessary visa was in place in time for the coach pickup the next day at the car park of the Am Zoo station. Daphne's fluency in German was sufficient for the Weigels, who did not question her story, and the palmed euro notes were slid with effortless ease into the drawer behind the desk. The couple might have wondered why this young woman, who gave an address in the northern district of Pankow, was so anxious to travel so quickly, but their curiosity was mitigated by the generosity of the payment in cash.

The Weigels' was the new world. They would not inform the Russian embassy of any suspicion they might harbour. They had received a telephone message an hour earlier from an official at the Association of Travel Agents. They floated in a sea of mutual favours. Frau Weigel herself would be at the Am Zoo pickup point with Fraulein Krause's passport and the stapled visa.

Daphne drove back to the embassy, reported on her visa application, then went in search of a historian at the Humboldt University who would provide her with background cover. She would spend the rest of the afternoon with him.

His papers called him Peter Flint but all of his teenage and adult life he had only answered to the name of Lofty. He raked the dry brown leaves from around the headstones in the Tyne Cot cemetery. They'd fallen thickly that day because there had been a bitter wind, and away in a far corner, near to the old German pillboxes, he had a good bonfire going for them. He picked up the leaves and barrowed them to the fire — he could not keep pace with the speed of their fall. It was the time of year he disliked most: impossible for him to keep the little squares of hoed earth in front of the stones and the short-cut grass corridors between them as neat as they should be. He would work that afternoon and evening as long as there was light for him to see the leaves. To Lofty it was a duty.

On his third whisky, and still nursing his temper, Rupert Mowbray heard the bell ring. Late that afternoon he had been ambushed. The ambush had ridiculed him. He assumed it had been planned the previous evening in the bar of the Students' Union. He had been made to look foolish, which hurt, and antiquated, which hurt more severely. He had come home, slammed the front door behind him, and it had taken him his third whisky before he could bring himself to explain to Felicity the wound he had suffered.

'I was well launched, on my feet for ten minutes, and had the total attention of the front row. I'd captured them all — well, all of them who were sat in front of my students. I was on to Putin and democracy and the premise that we're cosying too quickly with a demagogue…and I saw those bloody students move. It was concerted, planned. They held up a banner—"Mowbray is a Cold War warrior". They'd done cardboard sheets, "Mowbray the fossil from the Ice Age" and "Mowbray, fight your wars someplace else". One was on his feet, cupped his hands and shouted through them, "You're a disgrace, Mowbray, because all you preach is hatred." Then they were gone. Every row behind the front just emptied, out they went. It was humiliating, I went on, I finished, damned if I was going to be beaten by them. It was as if those kids didn't know, didn't care, what I've done with my life, where I've been, what I've achieved — all my experience and the bedrock of my knowledge, just pissed on it…'

Now Felicity murmured that she wasn't expecting anyone and went to answer the door.

Rupert Mowbray, his pride chastised, sat in his chair with both fists clamped around his crystal tumbler. He heard the murmur of voices in the hall, too indistinct to learn the identity of his visitor. He had served his country, from his desk in the Secret Intelligence Service, for close to forty years. That country, while breeding its ignorant, ungrateful youth, had posted him to Aden, Berlin, Bonn in western Germany, Berlin again, South Africa, Berlin once more, and Warsaw. In all, twelve Director Generals had overseen his work. He had survived the butchery of personnel numbers in '90, the Christmas massacre of '93, the staff cull of '98 Rupert Mowbray was, dammit, a man who should have been listened to, and into his mind leaped the image of the empty rows in the lecture room.

His wife was in the sitting-room's doorway: 'It's Alice, she's popped by to see you, Rupert.'

Then she stepped back, made space so that she could be passed, and Alice North was walking hesitantly across the carpet towards him. She still wore it, the amber pendant, as she had the last time he'd seen her. He struggled to stand.

'Don't get up, please. It's an awful intrusion, I know. It was just that I had to speak to somebody, somebody who…'

Her voice died. To Rupert Mowbray, his one-time clerical assistant, then secretary, then Girl Friday, looked washed out, exhausted. She was pale and the colour had gone from her cheeks. He thought she might have been crying earlier: her eyes were puffy, but dry, and a fierce fire burned in them. She had worked for him for ten years and one month, up to the day of his leaving party. Instinctively he looked at her ears, for the quiet flash of the studs, pearls in a diamond setting. They had been his present to her at the party where he had received the crystal decanter and glasses from the Director General. She wasn't wearing them, only the pendant. He hadn't bought the ear studs himself, Felicity had. He knew she lived in Docklands. She had travelled a long way to see him. He held out his arms, took her as he would have welcomed a favourite niece.

'…somebody who cared.'

Rupert Mowbray did not need to be told. It was about Ferret. Ferret had been his…and Alice North's. The verbatim transcript of a meeting chaired by Bertie Ponsford, of Russia Desk, was handed to him and he read it.

He was doing the late shift. The other porters queued to hang their heads and plead with him to swap duties, every one of them loathed the midnight start, and 'Wickso' Wicks seldom disappointed them. Ten minutes after he'd started, as he hung around with his trolley at the entrance to the hospital's A&E department, a man suffering the extremes of a heart-attack was rushed by his wife to the swing doors; she hadn't waited for an ambulance. He knew what to do, and that seconds were critical — a colleague ran inside to call the coronary team. The man had stopped breathing, and he had him out on the pavement, away from the car, and he was kneeling over him when the first nurse had sprinted through the doors. She elbowed him aside. 'For Christ's sake, get back. You're only a bloody porter. Leave him alone. Who do you think you are?' The nurse was young enough to be his daughter, and knew nothing of his past. He didn't fight his corner, never did, just waited till the rest of the team were there and the patient was on the trolley, then wheeled it at speed to the coronary unit.

Alone in his room, the darkness around him, sleep did not come easily to Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko. Dancing before his eyes was a thread — and he thought he hung from it, and below him was the abyss. When he could no longer endure the sight of the frayed thread he swung off the bed, which was sweat-soaked, and made himself a beaker of coffee.