Traitor's Kiss

…Chapter Four

The mist merged with the sea and painted grey walls that blocked off the beach on either side of Daphne Sullivan.

She had used her time well. On the coach from Berlin she had been at her cheerful and chatty best. In the twelve hours of the journey, including the comfort stops at Szczecin and Elblag, she had sifted through the histories of her forty-one fellow passengers on the coach. All of them had welcomed the kindly, interested conversation of this younger woman, and she had made them laugh and had listened to their stories.

Effortlessly she had become an integral part of the visit to Kaliningrad. It had been near to two in the morning when they had pulled up outside the hotel and surly porters had offloaded the suitcases. Even when the coach juddered to a halt Dieter Stangl's frail head still slept noisily on her shoulder. He had been sitting alone after the coach left Elblag, and a moment after she had made a quiet request to sit beside him she had realized why. His breath stank of his pipe and his tobacco, and the ham sandwiches his daughters in Frankfurt had made for him, laced with garlic and gherkins. From Elblag to the border, she had sucked the tale of Dieter's life from him and had decided before he sagged into sleep with his head lolled on her shoulder that his company was what she needed. On arrival at the hotel he had tottered into the hotel lobby and she had seen that his bags were brought to Reception, where she had made it her personal business to ensure that they were quickly taken upstairs as soon as his key was issued to him. In the morning, at breakfast, he had been looking for her as she had come through the glass doors: he had stood for her at his table with old-world courtesy and dragged back a chair for her to join him.

She stood on the dunes close to a place where there were the imprints of two men's shoes and beside a couple of recently ground out cigarette filters.

She had learned that Dieter Stangl was seventy-one years old, that his father had been a crane-operator manager in the Kaliningrad docks, that the family had lived at what was now Primorsk on the lagoon to the west of the city, and that they had fled on the last train from Konigsberg to Berlin four months before the ultimate catastrophe. It was a pilgrimage for the old man: there would be a house at Primorsk which he hoped to be able to visit, and a cemetery, perhaps even access to the docks where new cranes would have replaced those his father had managed. If she had been bored by him on the coach and was bored by him at breakfast, she showed no sign of it. She told Dieter Stangl that her own family were from Povarovka, which was north up the coast from the coach destination that morning, but a great-aunt had lived further south along the beach and her late mother had often talked of that place. The coach wouldn't have time for such a detour, she'd said, but she'd hired a driver and she insisted that Herr Stangl, Dieter, should accompany her in the car and they could share the opportunity for mutual convenience and memory-making. He had jumped at the opportunity of her company and her transport.

Behind her was the water tower. In front of her, down on the beach, was a wrecked ribbed carcass of a fishing-boat.

She'd told the driver, a scowling, shaven-headed brute with a special-forces emblem tattooed on his throat between his earlobe and his windpipe, where she wanted to go and had warbled conversation about her family and about Dieter Stangl's. It was good cover, perfect, if eyes watched the place.

'I don't remember it here,' the old German muttered.

'Oh, yes, you do,' Daphne Sullivan said crisply. She gave the old man from Frankfurt a sharp push and propelled him down towards the beach and the wrecked boat. As her driver had turned off the road she had seen fresh wheel marks, and then she had found the footprints and the cigarette ends. The driver was behind them, puffing on a cheroot. She took Dieter's arm to be certain he would not fall and their shoes slipped on the gentle incline of the dunes. She could not see the base down the beach to the south and the fog had closed in on them, but she knew from the maps in Berlin that she was four kilometres to the north of the exclusion zone around Baltiysk. She held tight to his arm and gave an impersonation of those tourists who came to bathe in nostalgia for the past, often seen meandering on the beach to suck up images of childhood: the professor of history at the Humboldt had briefed her well. He shivered and told her again that he could not remember being at this place, but she told him that he should light his pipe. The fumes from his tobacco wafted to her nostrils. She left him on the upper beach — she had done enough to avoid attention. She came to the wreck.

'Do we have to be here long?' Dieter Stangl's voice was guttural behind her.

A metre above the sand, where the boat's name might once have been painted, were two crosses in white chalk and the letters Y and F. The signal sent to Berlin had been most specific. From her coat pocket she took an inch-long length of orange chalk and bent as if a particular shell had attracted her attention. Her own shoes had settled into the indentations left by a man's trainers. She did not know the significance of the chalk crosses and the letters, but she understood the importance of what she had been asked to do. She made two fresh crosses with her orange chalk under the white crosses — then picked up a nothing-special shell and called loudly back to him, 'Do you remember this place now?'

Through the smoke pall of his pipe, Dieter Stangl shook his head. She went quickly to him. She needed to be away from the beach, the wreck and the chalk marks, and took a firm grip on his arm to lead him back up the slope and on to the dunes. They walked together I back to the car. The driver eyed them. She told the driver that it was where her grandparents would have taken her parents to swim, and that it was where Herr Stangl had played as a child. The driver pulled away. They would catch up with the tour party in time for the afternoon concert of the Kaliningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, but they would still have time to visit Primorsk. She anticipated that Dieter Stangl would stand rheumy-eyed in front of an old brick house and prattle on about his Fascist, Hitler Jugend childhood, and after the concert the schedule dictated they would go to the bunker from which the German surrender had been given and then the Oceanography Museum.

On the road, Dieter Stangl complained, 'I do not remember that place.'

Smiling sweetly, Daphne Sullivan said, 'It'll all come back to you. Terrible thing, memory loss.'

She'd ditch him, of course, with his foul breath and awful pipe, before the concert. It had gone well. She'd take credit from it.

The torch beam edged to the rear of the cave.

The roof, back from the entrance, was too low for Yuri Bikov to stand. The beam flickered on the stones of the fissure down which water dripped and icicles hung. On his hands and knees, behind the narrow throw of the light, he crawled forward. At the entrance were the Black Berets, who had taken the prisoner and his son, and his own team of the Vympel men. He and they had struggled for two days to cross the high ground above the gorge on their journey to the cave. No fires for warmth or hot food. No tents to shelter in, no sleeping-bags to wriggle into. On the last afternoon a blizzard had come on but they had not had to worry about leaving tracks because the wind-whipped drive of the snow had obliterated their footprints within moments. Without the GPS to guide them they would never have found the cave and the men who guarded the prisoner and his child.

They had been within ten metres of the cave's entrance and as near as two metres from the nearest Black Beret when the challenge had been made. Bikov's heart had pounded — rifles and submachine guns, on hair triggers, were aimed at him. A swig of vodka was the only refreshment offered him and he'd listened to the story of the prisoner's capture with his son. The Black Berets had their prisoner and the sullen-faced, defiant child — and they could not extricate themselves. First the cloud and rain had blocked the helicopter flights, now it was the snow. The six Black Beret men were marooned, and the forecast was that the weather would not change for five days. It was not thought likely that the brigadier and his escorts, held in a similar cave, farm byre or woodcutter's shelter, would survive five more days. It was a war, Yuri Bikov knew, of excessive brutality.

His journey might be wasted effort. If the decision were taken by the 'bandits' to kill the brigadier then it would be with a knife, eyes out, stomach disembowelled, penis and testicles off, throat slit at the end of life. But the work of an interrogator was not fast work, not in a police cell, not in a forward army command post and not in a mountain cave. The work was for a patient man. He had told them at the cave's entrance that he was not to be disturbed, not to be interrupted, however long he was at the back of the cave, and they would have seen his torch beam slip away from them and go deep into the crack between the great boulders. His stomach growled with hunger, his clothes were soaked wet from the snow, and the cold seemed to gnaw into his bones. He had left his personal weapon with the Black Berets and the Vympel men.

The torch found little specks of white on the cave's floor as he crawled forward.

He took his damp rag handkerchief from his trouser pocket and his cold fingers were numb as he picked up the teeth and laid them in the handkerchief. He raised the torch. If it had not been for the eyes, a man's and a child's, he might not have seen them. Ibn ul Attab, scion of a family of wealth and influence in Riyadh, had inserted his body into the furthest recess at the back of the cave. Bikov shone the torch full into the man's face and saw the black mat of the beard, the blood at the nose and mouth, and the hate. The Saudi man, wiry thin, was on his side and, peeping over his hip, was the head of the child, whose smooth skin was cracked by the same lines of hatred. Ibn ul Attab's hands were hidden, manacled or trussed behind his back, and his ankles were fastened with plastic stays. Bikov smelt him, faeces and urine.

Bikov said, a gentle voice in the Arabic taught him at the training college, 'I am going to ask you, Ibn ul Attab, to roll on to your stomach and then I am going to unfasten your arms. Then I shall free your legs, because it is not right that your son should see his father in such condition. I have no gun and no knife. Should you overpower me and try to reach the cave entrance the Black Berets have orders to kill you — but not to kill your son. You will be dead and your son will be at their mercy, and it will go badly for him. Not only are you a fighter for freedom but you are also a man of intelligence. I don't ask for your word, I ask only that you conduct yourself with good sense.'

The eyes of the warlord flashed with loathing and did not blink in the brightness of the torch beam. He did not roll on to his stomach, and through the gaps where his teeth had been he spat phlegm at Bikov.

The length of the flight from Moscow and far into the night he had spent in Grozny, Bikov had studied the fat file on Ibn ul Attab. The man killed with cruelty but was also rated by the few staff officers bold enough to write unvarnished reports as a commander of outstanding ability, and fearless. The child was the way to him. It was the skill of an interrogator to recognize the smallest signs of weakness. The child cowered behind his father's hip. Bikov was a well-read man, but he had never been as far as Greece. He knew the story of Achilles, the hero who was the son of Peleus and the sea goddess known as Thetis. If the Black Berets had been allowed to they would have taken Ibn ul Attab down the mountain to the vehicle track in the gorge and would have lashed a leg to the back of a personnel carrier and dragged him down to the command post. His body would have been split on the rocks, and the death of the brigadier would have been inevitable.

He moved very close to the prone man and opened his handkerchief to show the teeth lying in its folds. 'That should not have been done. I regret it. I am returning your teeth to you.'

Ibn ul Attab's boots lashed at him. Bikov took the force of them on his shoulder. The sudden movement dislodged the child, who cried out in fear. Bikov did not think Ibn ul Attab would care again to frighten his child. He rode the blow of the boots. A full minute they stared at each other, prisoner and captor, then Bikov turned and shouted towards the entrance of the cave that he wanted a bar of chocolate and that it should not be brought but thrown to him. He knew that the Vympel men had chocolate with them, that its possession would be important to them, and they would curse him for asking it of them. The chocolate was heaved down the length of the cave. It was a small bar, two hundred grams, but for Bikov its value was greater than if it had been a gold ingot. He unwrapped it so that the chocolate was exposed and the child could see it, then laid it on the stone of the cave floor. For two minutes they watched each other and the man made no move, but the child whimpered and stared at the chocolate.

Bikov broke the silence. 'Because I respect you as a freedom fighter, Ibn ul Attab, I apologize to you. The war my government wages against the Chechen people and their faith is indefensible. My apology is sincere and from my heart.'

No other Russian officer that Bikov had ever met would have apologized to Ibn ul Attab. After his teeth had been beaten from his mouth, after he had been kicked with steel-shod boots — if he had still not talked — every other Russian officer would have sent for a length of fuse cord and a detonator, would have tied the cord around Ibn ul Attab's penis, with the detonator, laid out the cord's length and lit it so that he saw the sparking fire come close to the detonator, and they would have shouted their questions. And what would they have done when the detonator had fired and the blood had spattered? They would have done it to the child and made Ibn ul Attab watch the child's terror. And there would be two more martyrs and no answers to the questions. It was not the way of Yuri Bikov. He talked for two hours and was never rewarded with a response, but the chocolate was in front of the child. He spoke of Saudi Arabia and its food, of his daughter whom he missed and who did not write to him, of sunsets over the Black Sea and the dawn light spreading on the Siberian tundra, of the majesty of nature, and the glory of God…and the child's eyes never left the chocolate. He had an inexhaustible reservoir of patience, and it was only the beginning.

Wages were not paid, the military did not have the fuel to mount exercises, privation in Kaliningrad was widespread, the hospitals were not supplied with sufficient quantities of drugs, the water in the city was not drinkable, but the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti had not gone short. On the flat roof of their headquarters in the city, backing on to the Pregel river, was a mass of aerials and dishes. The listeners in the FSB complex would not have been able to decipher a scrambled signal from Daphne Sullivan, but they would have picked up the high speed and encoded transmission had she made it, and that would have alerted them to the fact that an intelligence operative was loose in the territory. The instructions she had received in Berlin had been explicit — that she was to carry nothing sophisticated on her person.

A sudden and violent stomach pain crippled her as she left the concert. The courier was sympathetic. Nobody in their right mind would volunteer for Russian medical attention in Kaliningrad, the courier opined. Was the lady well enough to get to Poland or, better, to Germany? Her face apparently creased in pain, and her back bent from the spasms, Daphne Sullivan said she was. She was booked a single cabin on the night sleeper train from the southern station. She carried onto the train, with her a note in the Russian language that would explain to the border authorities why she was breaking away from her tour. When the train rumbled, late at night, into Braniewo she was sufficiently recovered to make a guarded telephone call to Berlin.

Deep into the night, in the cave, Yuri Bikov kept the torch beam on the chocolate bar.

The child, Ibn ul Attab's son, peered at it with longing and tears ran down the smooth cheeks. He was not a soldier. He yearned for the sweetness of the chocolate, but could not reach forward for it because his father's body blocked him. Everything Yuri Bikov did was planned ahead. He did not know where the child's mother, Ibn ul Attab's wife was. She might have been in one of the remote farming villages on the level ground below the gorge. Perhaps she had fought her man when he had taken her son to the mountains, perhaps the child had been torn from her grip. He did not think the wife would have been in Saudi Arabia with her family, or left in a safe village in the Yemeni valleys. She would be close, and Ibn ul Attab would be thinking of her.

The torch beam was failing and the chocolate bar was harder to see; the light was dying on the silver tin foil that wrapped it. Bikov talked in his soft and measured voice — not about the war and not about Islam — of the beauty of the mountains, the majesty of the deer and the wild goats, the bears and the eagles that soared above the gorge. He won no response, but that did not concern him because his greatest virtue was his patience, and in his mind the strategy of his attack was mapped.

As the light slipped from the torch, Bikov eased his weight forward, picked up the chocolate and broke it into small pieces, then laid it back on the cave's floor exactly where it had been before, within the child's reach.

'I said, Ibn ul Attab, you are a fighter I respect. I also want to respect you as a father. Whatever the differences between you and me, two men thrown against each other by your God and my government, your son is not a part of that. I ask you to allow him to eat. And it is not right that your son should see you trussed, a chicken waiting for its throat to be slit. Your son should see you free. I don't know his name, but he looks to me a fine boy and proud of you. I request that you give me the chance to remove what is round your wrists — and to let your son eat.'

He switched off the torch and the darkness cloaked them.

The luminous dial of his watch told him that half an hour had passed. Then the weight of Ibn ul Attab's body shifted slightly, and he heard the rustle of the tin foil, then a small mouth chewing, and then there was more movement. Bikov knew that the father had rolled from his side to his stomach. He groped forward and crawled closer to the stinking shape of the man he could not see. His hands clawed over Ibn ul Attab's shoulders and reached down to the pit of his spine. The previous evening, this man would have killed him and thought nothing of it. He found the wrists and the damp cord that bound them, and with his fingernails he began to unpick the knots.

He ran on the beach. The fog of the previous day had lifted in the night.

At a distance everything seemed the same, unchanged. He knew every stride he made across the dry sand. The buoys rocked on their anchorages, where there were minefields, sunken ships and explosives dumps, the water tower dominated the dunes, and ahead of him was the wrecked fishing-boat. Nothing was different. For two days he had stayed away from the beach because that was what his friends had told him he should do. Now he pounded on the beach towards the wreck. And in the distance, against the wind and the rumble of the sea breaking on the shoreline, was the murmur of vehicles driven slowly on the road in the trees.

Viktor came to the fishing-boat.

As he slumped down he saw the neat footprints of a woman's shoe close to the resting place in the sand of the keel. He could see the rubber tread left in the sand made moist under the shelter of the planks. For a moment his eyes were closed and his back was against the coarse wood of the boat's hull. His heart was a drumbeat. He saw them, two orange chalk crosses. He reached up and used the heel of his hand to erase the chalk marks. They had come.

He took the full three minutes then levered himself up and began to run back. He had been heard.

At first, as he ran into the wind, he believed himself saved.

Later, as he became tired and his legs hurt and his lungs ached, and he was nearing the base, the elation and the relief seeped from him. What could they do? The vehicles were on the road that was hidden in the pines, shadowing him. He still saw the distant figures on the dunes, and the whiff of their cigarette smoke curled over their heads. His legs might as well have been in the teeth of a mantrap. The border fence was guarded, he was followed, the sea stretching to the far horizon was raked by the beams of radar and patrolled by fast ships; he was watched inside the base and outside it. He could not see what his friends could do for him. They had heard his cry, but they had given him no answer. Their fine words echoed in his mind: We'd go to our graves rather than hang you out to dry, Viktor. You're the best we have. It would be shameful for us to abandon you. You're one of us. Words were easy…he knew what would happen to him if his treachery were proven, if his friends could not answer his cry.

The grey light crept into the cave's entrance. Bikov sat with his legs crossed and his arms around his chest, watching Ibn ul Attab, who held his son tight against his body. The interrogator, the child and the warlord shivered together and their bodies shook in unison. Bikov talked.

'I don't have a name for him, you know that — I will call him Sayyed. I think you will allow "Sayyed" to grow up to be a man. A child, such as he is, can only promise fulfilment. It is why we have children, yes? I think you will ensure that he has a chance, not to be only a statistic of death but to become a hero in his own right. I can feel your child's breath on me and I know he had his father's love and his father's protection. Am I right? "Sayyed" is not a soldier — that does not make him a lesser child. He could go to the university in Cairo, Damascus or Sana'a, and I think he could become a teacher. Not a warrior like his father, but a teacher of science, or of music, or of the great heritage of Islamic architecture. On all his family, long after this war is finished, "Sayyed" could bring distinction. There are too many soldiers and not enough teachers. It is in your hands, Ibn ul Attab, what future you give to "Sayyed".'

'He is called Ahmed. My son's name is Ahmed.'

Bikov heard the thin voice, weak from hunger and thirst, and knew that success was close.

It was after their second debrief at the Excelsior Hotel. Mowbray had left in the small hours of the morning, before dawn, gone back to his hotel where the others in the delegation stayed. Later, he would have another meeting at the dry dock then return over the border.

The airliner rolled at increasing speed down the runway at Gdansk on the short-haul flight back to Warsaw.

'What would they do to him?' Alice had leaned across to Rupert Mowbray and had whispered her question.

'I think, Alice, that you already know the answer to that.'

'Already know but need to have it confirmed.'

'On the chin?'

'I don't want cosmetics — yes, on the chin.'

The plane had lifted off and Rupert Mowbray had stared straight ahead at the cockpit door and spoken so softly that she had had to strain to hear him.

'Colonel Pyotr Popov was fed, alive, into the central-heating furnace in the Lubyanka basement in front of all of his colleagues, and his agony was filmed.'

'That was a long time ago.'

'Perhaps, but the mentality will not have changed. Penkovsky was taken out at dawn and shot in the yard of the Butyrki gaol.'

'Again, Rupert, a long time ago/

'The men betrayed by Aldrich Ames — that's only yesterday in this game — were tried in secret and executed.'

'Today — what would they do today?'

'Today is Robert Hanssen, another American arrested fourteen months ago — is that recent enough? You don't have to be told, Alice.'

'Tell me.'

'Named by Hanssen, in camera court, shot in the back of the neck. They're the same men, different uniforms and names, but the history is in their bloodstreams. There's only one penalty, Alice, for a man of such importance. It's a dirty business, but it's what keeps the roof over our heads.'

'But we'd help him…?'

'What I said to Ferret, Alice, was "We'd go to our graves rather than hang you out to dry." I meant it, my dear. But from the moment he walked in he placed himself under sentence of death. Why don't you try to doze?'

She hadn't slept on that flight. The whole length of it, she had fidgeted and fiddled with the new gift of the amber pendant. Her fingers had never been away from it. She had promised herself then that she would wear it always.

It was wet in London that morning as Alice North laid out the places for the meeting in the fifth-floor conference room. Half a dozen sheets of paper for each of those attending and two sharpened pencils, cups and saucers. She plugged in the percolator, filled a little bowl with sugar cubes and laid a silver spoon on them. Last she moved a chair to the corner, where she would sit, where she would not be noticed.

She'd read the signal, sent from Braniewo and relayed on by Berlin.

Clattering his cup down on to his saucer, for emphasis, Locke said, 'We now have a truer picture but that doesn't take us an inch further forward. One cross would have been "surveillance", right? Two crosses is "close surveillance", correct? Codename Ferret is under close surveillance. I'm not a rocket scientist but I can see that means he is beyond reach. Surely it's bring-down-the-curtain time.'

Never lifting his head, Bertie Ponsford remarked quietly, 'Thank you, Gabriel, most concise. Peter, what would be the position of Covert Ops? How does this run past you?'

Sighing as if the weight of the world rested on him, Peter Giles launched in: 'Well, we have to make a decision, don't we? Do we recommend exfiltration, with all that such a course of action entails, or don't we? I mean, thank God, ultimately it's not our call, but masters and ministers will expect guidance from us. The difficulty I'm in is that, put simply, we don't do this sort of thing any more — it went out with the Ark. We've not attempted it since the Wall came down. And reading the files that Rupert left us — and they're thin, so thin — I can't find a specific guarantee that was given by us to Ferret. That's important. We're not under a formal debt of honour, or any such nonsense. I can't see what we can do, not if it's "close surveillance"…'

His fingers running up and down the length of his pencil, Bertie Ponsford turned in his chair. 'Succinct, Peter, and I'm grateful. Geoff, if we were to go for broke and successfully lift out Ferret, what would be our rewards?'

The officer of Naval Intelligence shrugged. 'Hardly a sack of Christmas presents. I'd say we'd sit down with him for a month, but by the second week we'd be struggling. His value has been in the paperwork he's sent over and most of it is not the material that a man holds in his head. It's been very precise blueprints — submarines' speed, depth, counter-radar, hull specifications and so on. We need detail. Take the pressure hulls' outer coating — what is the mix of glass, ceramics and plastics? Generalizations don't help us. We need the paperwork and then we can develop the necessary radar counter-measures. It's exact work — I can't imagine he'd have it in his head.'

Laying down his pencil and reaching for the coffee, Bertie Ponsford smiled, then grimaced. 'I'm hearing a profound lack of excitement. You were downbeat at our last session, Bill — has anything changed Hereford's mind?'

The Special Forces officer shook his head. He wore the same sweater and jeans as before. 'No enthusiasm from our crowd. The guidance I have can't go as far as refusal, but we'd lay trip-wires and difficulties in the way. Bluntly, we could start talking about planning time, recce time, up-to-speed time, we could spin it out, and then we could say, after we've wasted a couple of weeks, there's the good old ocean involved, miles of Baltic coastline, and it's probably better handled by the "Boaters". I wouldn't recommend that you rely on us.'

The scratch of a pencil on a notepad was behind him. It never entered Ponsford's mind that he should ask Alice North's opinion. 'Well, I don't want anyone to gain the impression that I'm about to wash my hands of Ferret, but I have noted the positions taken by colleagues. My assessment: at the moment the FSB will be engaged rather frantically in collecting what evidence they can, and they will then make it available to a most skilled interrogator. They like things clear-cut over there, a detailed confession with ribbons on it will be what they seek, and it will be the interrogator's job to get it. Right now, the agent is boxed in by "close surveillance", stressed and close to panic, but were he to make a run for it he would merely play into their hands, give them the evidence that would kill him. We may have a few days to play with, but only a few. I note Hereford's hesitations and their suggestion that a possible, not probable, exfiltration of Ferret would be best tasked to the Special Boat Squadron. I'm going to ask Gabriel to go directly to Poole and sound them out. Then, I hope, we will be in a position to recommend to the DG a future course of action. I have to say, and I hope fervently I am wrong, that I see no light at the end of this particular tunnel. Of course, it's Rupert's baby but he's not here to rock the cradle.'

The meeting was concluded. Gabriel Locke hurried down to the car pool.

His voice had found a decisive strength. Bikov fought the tiredness as he told the warlord what he wanted and what would be given in return.

In the late afternoon, Bikov crawled on his hands and knees to the cave's entrance and asked the Black Berets and the Vympel men what food they could spare for himself, the prisoner and the prisoner's child. A collection was made of dried, frozen lentils, one apple, some rice and what remained of a Meal Ready to Eat. There was so little food between all of them and they gave it grudgingly. If it had not been for Yuri Bikov's reputation, and his authority, they would have given nothing. They could light no fire, they would have been more cold and more soaked at the entrance to the cave than he was in its interior. He had been in the depths of the cave for more than twenty-four hours and they would have heard the murmur of his voice as they had dozed between watches. They knew that Ibn ul Attab's men would be searching for them. When they had given him the food they could spare, he passed to the senior sergeant a small piece of bright metal, rounded to the shape of a screw's head and four millimetres in diameter and said what he wanted done with it. Then, with the food, he disappeared back into the depths of the cave.

Outside the barracks' gates, as the light failed, Gabriel Locke sat in his car, wired in the secure system, and pressed the digits of his mobile phone. Behind the gates and the fences topped with razor wire he had been treated as a piece of junior garbage. They'd had fun with him. A sentry strolled with the arrogance of a Royal Marine towards him. The number rang. The sentry slipped a hand from his rifle stock and rapped on the window. Locke lowered it.

'Excuse me, sir, but this is a place for parking cars, not for sitting in them. If you want to sit in your car, please, sir, go do it someplace else.'

Locke, audibly, told him to go piss himself. The moment of astonishment on the sentry's face was his one small victory from the visit to the Special Boat Squadron's barracks at Poole. He hated this Dorset town and all who sailed in her. But a rifle was a rifle, and a Marine was a Marine, and there were more of them in the guardhouse. He turned on the ignition, put the car into reverse and backed away. He saw the smirk on the sentry's face.

He couldn't raise Bertie Ponsford. He tried Peter Giles, deputy director of Covert Operations, but the assistant said her man was out of the building and she didn't know when, if, he was returning. Was it important? Locke rang Alice North's number.

'Yes?'

'Alice, it's Gabriel…'

'Who?'

'Gabriel Locke.'

'Oh, right. How can I help?'

'I can't get Bertie, and Peter's gone walkabout. I—'

'Mr Ponsford's granddaughter is in the school concert, that's where he is — in Holland Park. Mr Giles is at his club with Mr Dandridge of Personnel.'

'I need to report on my session at SBS.'

The distant voice, a tinny resonance to it from the scrambler, replied, 'Well, you'd better tell me, then, hadn't you?'

'Yes, yes…' Locke had expected that Bertie and Peter would be beside their telephones, waiting for him to call. The scrambler seemed to him to give her voice a mocking tinkle.

'I'm waiting.'

'I suppose it's all right. You'll see they get it? Look, knock this into shape: I wouldn't say my welcome was overwhelming — anyway, the place was like a ghost town. They raked up the squadron's adjutant, a lieutenant and two sergeants. I don't know where the proper people were, swarming about in the Hindu Kush or writing synopses for their Afghan memoirs, I suppose. I told them it was Kaliningrad and they found a chart, then they all started falling about, like I was doing a comic turn. It's the chart for the naval base, the navigational approach to Baltiysk, and the Kaliningradsky Moskoy Kanal. Then they patched up on the computer the military force based on Kaliningrad — how many tanks, how many APCs, how many artillery regiments, how many naval infantry were there, and what airforce squadrons. I was supposed to be quizzing them…fat chance. The lieutenant said, quote, "We always ask three questions. One, where is he? Two, what's he doing? Three, will it work? Three answers. Answer one, he's in the middle of a protected Russian naval base. Answer two, he's mooching about under close surveillance. Answer three, can pigs fly?" A sergeant said, quote, "Fourth question, is he worth it?" I didn't see any point in taking it further. They didn't want to know. Are we up to it — what is basically an act of war? The fat lady's singing, isn't she? I mean, it's over, isn't it? I took on board everything they said, and agreed with it, but they didn't have to be so bloody superior. Is he worth it? That's what it boils down to. We're intelligence people, aren't we, not bloody cowboys? You'll see that Bertie and Peter get that?'

'I'll let them know.'

He cut the call. In his mirror, he saw a ministry policeman advancing on him reaching into a breast pocket for a notebook. Locke thought he was about to be booked for parking on the double yellow line. He identified the rainwater puddle nearest the policeman, swerved into it as he passed the man and saw that he'd splattered the uniformed legs. What annoyed him most was that the SBS men had thought the idiotic proposal to go starting wars was his idea. That annoyed Gabriel Locke badly.

Bikov led them out of the cave. The deal was made, freedom for freedom — the freedom of a warlord and his son for the freedom of a Brigadier and his escort.

There had been no symbolic handshake. Between two such men as Bikov and Ibn ul Attab the gesture was not necessary.

At the cave's entrance he offered his arm for the other man to use as a crutch to lift himself upright. The blood had drained from Ibn ul Attab's legs and feet, such had been the tightness of the thongs on his ankles, and the warlord staggered when he first stood. Then his weight went on to the low shoulder of his son and that was sufficient a prop to steady him. Bikov asked for the rifle to be given him. There would have been savagery in the eyes behind the ski-masks that the Black Berets and the Vympel men wore. He could not see them in the darkness but one of the men gathered spittle in his mouth and spat it noisily towards the warlord's boots. The barrel of the weapon brushed his sleeve and Bikov took it. He did not have to make a speech about the nakedness of a warrior without his weapon: it was implicit. Bikov heard Ibn ul Attab check the weapon's magazine, then cock the rifle, driving a bullet into the breech. And they were gone.

Bikov remembered the days he had fished as a child in the reservoir on the edge of the city of Gorno-Altaysk when he and his friends had caught large carp by the reservoir's dam, on worm baits. If they had not needed to take a carp home for a family's meal, they would release it. For a moment they would see the fish heading for the depths, then lose sight of it.

He told them they would stay at the cave for the night then make their descent in the morning.

His voice was hoarse, little more than a murmur. 'You can judge me, and it is your right to do so. All I can ask of you is that you suspend your final judgement until the end of this business. When it is over you will be entitled to make whatever judgement of me you wish.'

He crawled back into the cave. He was so tired, so cold, and the hunger lit a fire in his stomach. Only the child had eaten. He found his handkerchief but the teeth were not in it. Then he curled in a corner, and slept. He slept without a dream.

There was not another interrogator in the ranks of the military counterintelligence officers of the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti who could have achieved what he had. His quiet snoring filled the cave.

Like an owl in the night, watching and waiting, Rupert Mowbray hovered for four full minutes at the outer gate of Vauxhall Bridge Cross. It was never right to be early. Precisely at the moment he was due in the building, as Parliament's clock chimed the late hour, he presented himself at the security check.

'Hello, Mr Mowbray, funny old time to come visiting. How are you keeping, sir?'

'Not too bad, Clarence, mustn't complain. And you're looking well, very ship-shape. The Director General's expecting me.'