Archangel

'Either we head back to Archangel, or we go on and try to find some place to stay the night.'

'Oh, what? You mean a Holiday Inn?' 'Fluke, Fluke -'

'Listen, if we try to stay the night here, we'll end up staying the winter.'

'Oh, come on, man, they have to send a snow plough, don't they? Surely? At some point?'

'At some point?' repeated Kelso. He shook his head. And there would have been another row if, just then, they hadn't rounded a curve and seen, above the snow-topped trees, a smudge of smoke.

O'Brien stood in the doorway of the Toyota, leaning on the roof, staring ahead through his binoculars. It looked as if there might be a settlement of some sort, he said, about half a mile off the road, along a rough track.

He slipped back behind the wheel. 'Let's take a look.' The passage through the trees was like a tunnel, barely wide enough for a single vehicle, and O'Brian drove down it slowly. The branches clawed at them, slapping the windscreen, raking the sides of the car. The track worsened. They rocked sharply - hard left, hard right - and suddenly the Toyota plunged forwards and Kelso was thrown at the windscreen; only the seat belt saved him. The engine revved helplessly for a second, then stalled.

O'Brian turned the ignition, put the car into reverse and cautiously pressed the accelerator. The back wheels whined in the loose snow. He tried it again, harder. A howl like an animal trapped.

'Get out, could you, Fluke? Take a look.' He couldn't quite keep the edge of panic out of his voice.

Kelso had to push hard even to open the door. He jumped out and immediately sank up to his knees. The drift was axle-deep.

He banged on the back door and gestured to O'Brian to switch off the engine.

In the silence he could hear the snowflakes pattering in the trees. His knees were wet and cold. He trod awkwardly, bowlegged, through the deep drift round to the driver's door and had to dig away the snow with his gloved hands before he could drag it open. The Toyota was tilted forwards at an angle of at least twenty degrees. O'Brian struggled out.

'What'd we hit?' he demanded. He waded round to the front of the car. 'Jesus, it's like someone's dug a tank-trap. Will you look at this?'

It was indeed as if a trench had been laid across the track. A few paces further on the snow became more solid again.

'Maybe they were laying a cable or something,' said Kelso. But a cable for what? He cupped his hands above his eyes and stared through the snow towards the huddle of wooden huts about three hundred yards ahead. They didn't look as though they were connected to electricity, or to anything else. He noticed that the smoke had disappeared.

'Someone's put that fire out.

'We're gonna need a tow.' O'Brian gave the side of the Toyota a gloomy kick. 'Heap of junk.'

He held on to the car for support and edged round to the back, opened it up and pulled out a couple of pairs of boots, one of green rubber, the other of leather, high-sided, army-issue. He threw the rubber boots to Kelso. 'Get these on,' he said. 'Let's go parley with the natives.

Five minutes later, their hoods up, the car locked, and each with a pair of binoculars hung round his neck, they set off down the track.

The settlement had been abandoned for at least a couple of years. The handful of wooden shacks had been ransacked. Rubbish poked through the snow - rusting sheets of corrugated tin roofing, shattered window frames, rotting planks, a torn fishing net, bottles, tin cans, a holed rowing boat, bits of machinery, ripped sacking and, bizarrely, a row of cinema seats. A timber-framed greenhouse fitted with polythene instead of glass had blown over on to its side.

Kelso ducked his head into one of the derelict buildings. It was roofless, freezing. It stank of animal excreta.

As he came out O'Brian caught his eye and shrugged.

Kelso stared towards the edge of the clearing. 'What's that over there?'

Both men raised their binoculars and trained them on what appeared to be a row of wooden crosses, half-hidden by the trees - Russian crosses, with three pairs of arms: short at the top, longer in the centre, and slanted downwards, left to right, at the bottom.

'Oh, that's marvellous,' said Kelso, trying to laugh. 'A cemetery. That's bloody perfect.'

'Let's take a look,' said O'Brian.

He set off eagerly with long, determined strides. Kelso, more reluctant, followed as best he could. Twenty years of cigarettes and Scotch seemed to have convened a protest meeting in his heart and lungs. He was sweating with the effort of moving through the snow. He had a pain in his side.

It was a cemetery right enough, sheltered by the trees, and as they came closer he could see six - or was it eight? - graves, arranged in twos, with a little wooden fence around each pair. The crosses were home-made but well done, with white enamel name-plates and small photographs covered in glass, in the traditional Russian manner. A. I. Sumbatov, read the first one, 22.1.20 - 9.8.81. The picture showed a man, in middle age, in uniform. Next to him was P J. Sumbatova, 61.2.26 - 14.11.92. She, too, was in uniform: a heavy-faced woman with a severe central parting. Next to them were tk~e Yezhovs. And next to the Yezhovs, the Golubs. They were married couples, all about the same age. They were all in uniform. T. Y Golub had been the first to die, in 1961. It was impossible to see his face. It had been scratched out.

'This must be the place,' said O'Brian, quietly. 'No question. This is it. Who are they all, Fluke? Army?'

'No.' Kelso shook his head slowly. 'The uniform is NKVD, I think. And here, look. Look at this.'

It was the final pair of graves, the ones furthest from the clearing, set slightly apart from the others. They had been the last survivors. B. D. Chizhikov - a major, by the look of his insignia - 19.2.19 - 9.3.96 And next to him M G. C'hizhikova, 16.4.24 – 16.3.96 She had outlasted her husband by exactly one week. Her face was also obliterated.

They stood like mourners for a while: silent, their heads bowed.

'And then there were none,' murmured O'Brian.

'Or one.’

'I don't think so. No way. This place has been empty quite a while. Shit,' he said suddenly, and took a kick at the snow, 'would you believe it, after all that? We missed him?'

The trees were thick here. It was impossible to see beyond a few dozen yards.

O'Brian said, 'I'd better get a shot of this while it's light. You wait here. I'll go back to the car.'

'Oh, great,' said Kelso. 'Thank you.'

'Scared, Fluke?'

'What do you think?'

'Whoo,' said O'Brian. He raised his arms and fluttered his fingers above his head.

'If you try playing any jokes, O'Brian, I'm warning you, I'll kill you.

'Ho ho ho,' said O'Brian, moving away towards the track. 'Ho ho ho.' He disappeared beyond the trees. Kelso heard his stupid laugh for a few more seconds and then there was silence -just the rustle of the snow and the sound of his own breathing.

My God, what a set-up this was, just look at these dates: they were a story in themselves. He walked back to the first grave, pulled off his gloves, took out his notebook. Then he went down on one knee and began to copy the details from the crosses. An entire troop of bodyguards had been dispatched into the forest more than forty years earlier to protect one solitary baby boy, and all of them had stuck it out, had stayed at their posts, out of loyalty or habit or fear, until eventually they had dropped down dead, one after another. They were like those Japanese soldiers who stayed hidden in the jungle, unaware that the war was over.

He began to wonder how close Mikhail Safanov might have managed to get in the spring of 1953, and then he consciously abandoned this line of thought. It didn't bear contemplating - not yet; not here.

It was hard to hold the pencil between his cold fingers, and difficult to write as the snowflakes settled across the page. Still, he worked his way along to the final crosses.

'B. D. Chizhikov,' he wrote. 'Tough-looking, brutal/ace. Dark-skinned A Georgian?? Died aged 77...'

He wondered what Comrades Golub and Chizhikova might have looked like, and who had blacked out their faces, and why. There was something infinitely sinister about their featureless silhouettes. He found himself writing, 'Could they have been purged?'

Oh, where the hell was O'Brian?

His back was aching. His knees were wet. He stood an4 another thought occurred to him. He brushed the page clear of snow again and licked the end of his pencil.

'The graves are all well kept,' he wrote, 'plots appear to be weeded. If this p/ace is abandoned, like the buildings, shouldn't they have grown over?'

'O'Brian?' he called. 'R. J.?'

The snow deadened his shout.

He put away the notebook and began walking quickly away from the cemetery, pulling on his gloves. The wind stirred in the abandoned buildings ahead of him, catching the snow and lifting it here and there like the corner of a curtain. He picked his way across the ground, following O'Brian's large footprints until he came to the start of the track. The prints led off clearly in the direction of the Toyota. He raised the binoculars to his eyes and twisted the focus. The stricken car filled his vision, so still and distant it seemed unreal. There was no sign of anyone around it.

Odd.

He turned round very slowly, a complete 360 degrees, scanning through the binoculars. Forest. Tumbled walls and wreckage. Forest. Graves. Forest. Track. Toyota. Forest again.

He lowered the binoculars, frowning, then began walking towards the car, still following O'Brian's trail. It took him a couple of minutes. Nobody else had been this way in the snow, that much was obvious: there were two pairs of tracks heading up to the clearing and one pair heading back. He approached the car and, by lengthening his stride and planting his feet in the prints of the bigger man, he was able to retrace O'Brian's movements exactly: so and so.. . and... so...

Kelso stopped, arms outstretched, wobbling. The American had definitely come this way, round to the back of the Toyota, had taken out the metal camera case - it was missing, he could see - and then it looked as though something had distracted him, because instead of heading back up the track to the settlement his footprints turned sharply and led directly away from the vehicle, at a right angle, straight into the forest.

He called O'Brian's name, softly. And then, in a spasm of panic, he cupped his hands and bellowed it as loud as he could.

Again, that same curious deadening effect, as if the trees were swallowing his words.

Cautiously, he stepped into the undergrowth.

Oh, but he had always hated forests, hadn't he? Hated even the woodland around Oxford, with its poetic shafts of dusty bloody sunlight, and its mossy vegetation, and the way things suddenly flew up at you or rustled away! And branches slapping back into your face.. . Sorry, so~... Oh yes, give him a wide open space any day. Give him a hill. Give him a cliff-top. Give him the sparkling sea!

'R. J.?' What a damned silly name to have to yell, but he yelled it louder anyway: 'R. J.!'

There were no footprints visible here. The ground was rough. He could smell the decay of a swamp somewhere, as rank as dog's breath, and it was dark, too. He would have to watch himself, he thought, keep his back firmly to the road, because if he went too far, he would lose his bearings, and maybe end up walking further and further away from the car, until there would be nothing left to do but lie down in the darkness and freeze.

There was a sudden heavy crash off to his left, and then a succession of smaller bursts, like echoes. It sounded at first like someone running but then he realised it was only snow-dislodging from the tops of some branches and plunging to the earth.

He cupped his hands.

And then he heard a human sound. A moan, was that it? A sob?

He tried to place where it was coming from. And then he heard it again. Nearer, and behind him now, it seemed to be. He pushed through a gap between a couple of close-growing trees into a tiny clearing, and there was O'Brian's camera case lying open on the ground and there, beyond it, was O'Brian himself, upside down and swinging gently, his fingertips barely brushing the surface of the snow, suspended by his left leg from a length of oily rope.

THE ROPE WAS attached to the top of a tall birch sapling, bent almost double by O'Brian's weight. The reporter was groaning. He was barely conscious.

Kelso knelt by his head. At the sight of him, O'Brian began struggling feebly. He didn't seem able to form a sentence.

'It's all right,' said Kelso. He tried to sound calm. 'Don't worry. I'll get you down.'

Get him down. Kelso took off his gloves. Get him down. Right. Using what? He had a knife for sharpening pencils, but it was in the car. He patted his pockets and found his lighter. He flicked it on, showed the flame to O'Brian.

'We'll get you down. Look. You'll be all right.'

He stood and reached up, grabbing O'Brian by his booted ankle. A noose of thin rope had dug deep into the leather. It took all Kelso's weight to drag him down far enough for him to apply the flame to the taut rope just above his sole. O'Brian's shoulders rested in the snow.

'Asornim,' he was saying. 'Asornim.'

The rope was wet. It seemed to take an age for the lighter to have any effect. Kelso had to stop and shake it. The flame was beginning to turn blue and die before the first strands started to smoulder. But then under the strain they parted fast. The last of them snapped and the sapling whipped back and Kelso tried to support the legs with his free hand but he couldn't manage it and O'Brian's body crashed heavily into the snow.

The reporter struggled to sit up, managed to prop himself on his elbows, then slumped back again. He was still mumbling something. Kelso knelt beside him.

'You're okay. You'll be fine. We'll get you out of here.'

'Asornim.'

I saw him? I saw him.

'Saw who? Who did you see?'

'Oh, Jesus. Oh, fuck.'

'Can you bend your leg? Is it broken?' Kelso shuffled on his knees through the snow and began digging with his fingernails at the knot of the noose, embedded in the side of O'Brian's boot.

'Fluke -' O'Brian held up his arm, desperately flexing his fingers. 'Give me a lift here, will you?'

Kelso took his hand and pulled until O'Brian was sitting upright. Then he put his arm round the reporter's broad chest and together they managed to get him up on to his feet. O'Brian stood, leaning heavily against Kelso, putting his weight on his right leg.

'Can you walk?'

'Not sure. Think so.' He hobbled a few steps. 'Just give me a minute.'

He stayed where he was, with his back to Kelso, staring into the trees. When he seemed to be breathing more normally, Kelso said, 'Saw who?'

SAW him, said O'Brian, turning round. His eyes were wild and fearful now, searching the forest behind Kelso's head. Saw the man. Saw him staring out of the fucking trees next to the car. Jesus. Just about jumped out of my fucking skin.

'What do you mean? What man?'

Took one step towards him - hands up, let's be friends, white man he come in peace - and presto! he was gone. I mean, he vanished Never saw him properly again after that.

Heard him, though, and kind of glimpsed him once -moving fast through the forest up ahead, away to the right -sort of a sawn-off figure, like a quarterback, built low to the ground. And quick. So quick you wouldn't believe it. Man, he seemed to move like an ape. Next thing I know, the world's turned upside down.

'He led me on, Fluke, you know that, don't you? Led me right into his fucking trap. He's probably out there now, watching us.'

He was getting his strength back, his recovery speeded by fear.

He hobbled a few steps. When he tried to put his left leg down properly he winced. But he could move it, that was something. It definitely wasn't broken.

'We gotta go. We gotta get out of here.' He bent awkwardly and closed the catches on the camera case.

Kelso needed no persuading. But they would have to go carefully, he said. They had to think. They had blundered into two of his traps already - one on the track and one here - and who could guess how many more there might be. In this snow it was so damned hard to see.

'Maybe,' said Kelso, 'if we try to follow my footprints -'But his tracks were already beginning to be lost beneath the ceaseless soft downpour.

'Who is he, Fluke?' whispered O'Brian, as they went back into the trees. 'I mean, what is he? What is he so goddamned scared of?'

He's his father's son, thought Kelso, that's who he is. He's a forty~fiveyearold paranoid psychopath, if such a thing is possible.

'Oh man,' said O'Brian, 'what was that?'

Kelso stopped.

It wasn't another avalanche of snow from the treetops, that was for sure. It went on too long. A heavy, sustained rustling, somewhere in front of them.

'It's him,' said O'Brian. 'He's moving again. He's trying to head us off.' The noise stopped abruptly and they stood, listening. 'Now what's he doing?'

'Watching us, at a guess.

Again, Kelso strained his eyes into the gloom, but it was hopeless. Dense undergrowth, great patches of shadow, occasionally broken by torrents of snow - he couldn't get a fix on anything, it was so unlike any place he had ever seen. He was really sweating now, despite the cold. His skin was prickling.

That was when the howling started - a deafening, inhuman wail. It took Kelso a couple of seconds to realise it was the car alarm.

Then came two loud gunshots in rapid succession, a pause, and then a third.

Then silence.

AFTERWARDS, Kelso was never sure how long they stood there. He remembered only the immobilising sense of terror:

the paralysis of thought and action that came from the realisation there was nothing they could do. He - whoever he was - knew where they were. He had shot up their car. He had booby-trapped the forest. He could come for them whenever he wanted. Or he could leave them where they were. There was no prospect of rescue from the outside world. He was their absolute master. Unseen. All-seeing. Omnipotent. Mad After a minute or two they risked a whispered conference. The telephone~ said O'Brian, what if he had damaged the Inmarsat telephone? It was their only hope and it was in the back of the Toyota.

Maybe he wouldn't know what a satellite telephone looked like, said Kelso. Maybe if they stayed where they were until dark and then went to retrieve it -Suddenly O'Brian grabbed him hard by the elbow.

A face was looking at them through the trees. Kelso didn't see it at first, it was so perfectly still – so unnaturally, perfectly immobile, it took a moment for his mind to register it, to separate the pieces from the shapes of the forest, to assemble them and declare the composite human: Dark impassive eyes that didn't blink. Black, arched brows. Coarse black hair hanging loose across a leathery forehead. A beard.

There was also a hood made of some kind of brown animal fur.

The apparition coughed. It grunted.

'Com-rades,' it said. The word was slurred, the voice harsh, like a tape being played at too slow a speed.

Kelso could feel the hair stirring on his scalp. 'Aw, Jesus,' said O'Brian, 'Jesusiesusiesus -'

There was another cough and a great gathering of phlegm. A gobbet of yellow spit was ejected into the undergrowth.

'Com-rades, I am a rude fell-ow. I cannot deny it. And I have been out of the way of hu-man com-pany. But there it is. Well then? D'yer want me to shoot yer? Yes?'

He stepped out in front of them - quickly, sharply: he barely disturbed a twig. He was wearing an old army greatcoat - patched, hacked off above the knees and belted with a length of rope - and cavalry boots into which his baggy trousers were stuffed. His hands were bare and huge. In one he carried an old rifle. In the other was the satchel with Anna Safanova's notebook and the papers.

Kelso felt O'Brian's grip tighten on his arm.

'This is the book of which it is spok-en? Yes? And the papers prove i!' The figure leaned towards them, rocking his head this way and that, studying them intently. 'You are the ones, then? You are truly the ones?'

He came closer, peering at them with his dark eyes, and Kelso could smell the stench of his body, sour with stale sweat.

'Or are you, perhaps, spiders?'

He took a pace back and swiftly raised the rifle, aiming it from his waist, his finger on the trigger.

'We are the ones,' said Kelso, quickly.

The man cocked an eyebrow in surprise. 'Imperialists?'

'I am an English comrade. The comrade here is American.'

'Well, well! England and America! And Engels was a Jew!' He laughed, showing black teeth, then spat. 'And yet you have not asked me for proof Why so?'

'We trust you.

"'We trust you."' He laughed again. 'Imperialists! Always sweet words. Sweet words and then they kill you for a kopek. For a kopek! If you were the ones, you would demand proof.'

'We demand proof.'

'I have proof' he said defiantly. He glanced from one man to the other, then lowered the rifle, turned and began moving quickly back towards the trees.

'Now what?' whispered O'Brian.

'God knows.'

'Can we get that rifle off him? Two of us, one of him?'

Kelso stared at him in astonishment. 'Don't even think it.

'Boy, but he's quick, though, isn't he? And completely flicking crazy.' O'Brian gave a nervous giggle. 'Look at him. Now what's he doing?'

But he was doing nothing, merely standing impassively at the edge of the trees, waiting.

THERE didn't seem to be much else for them to do except follow him, which wasn't easy, given his speed across the grounds the roughness of the forest floor, the handicap of O'Brian's injured leg. Kelso carried the camera case. Once or twice they seemed to lose him, but never for long. He must have kept stopping to let them catch up.

After a few minutes they came back out on to the track, but further up, roughly midway between the abandoned Toyota and the empty settlement.

He didn't pause. He led them straight across the snowy track and into the trees on the other side.

This was not good, thought Kelso, as they passed out of the grey light and back into the shadows. Surreptitiously, without slackening pace, he put his hand into his pocket and tore a page out of his yellow notebook, screwed it into a ball and dropped it behind him. He did this every fifty yards or so - hare and hounds: an old school game - only now he was hare and hound.

O'Brian, panting at his back, whispered, 'Nice work.'

They emerged into a small clearing, with a wooden cabin in the centre. He had built this well - and recently, by the look of it - cannibalising the old encampment for his materials. Why he had done this, Kelso never discovered. Perhaps the other place was too full of ghosts. Or, maybe he wanted a spot even more secluded, and more easily defensible. In the silence, Kelso thought he could hear running water and he guessed they must be near the river.

The cabin was made of the familiar grey timber, with one small window and a door to suit his height, set a yard above the ground and approached by four wooden steps. At the base of these he picked up a branch and prodded deep into the snow There was a spurt of white powder as something jumped and snapped. He withdrew the branch. Clamped around the end was a large animal trap, the rusty metal teeth stuck deep into the wood.

He laid this carefully to one side, climbed the steps to his door, unfastened the padlock and went inside. After a brief exchange of looks with O'Brian, Kelso followed, ducking his head to pass through the low entrance, emerging into the one small room. It was dark and cold and he could smell the insanity - he inhaled the lonely madness, as sharp and sour as the lingering stink of unwashed flesh. He put his hand to his mouth. Behind him he heard O'Brian suck in his breath.

Their host had lit a kerosene lamp. The whitened skulls of a bear and a wolf shone from the shadows. He put the notebook on the table, next to a half-eaten plate of some dark and bony fish, put a pot of water on the hob and bent to rekindle the old iron stove, keeping his rifle close to hand.

Kelso could imagine him an hour ago: hearing the distant sound of their car on the track, abandoning his meal, grabbing his gun and heading for the forest, his fire doused, his trap set -There wasn't a bed, merely a thin mattress, leaking stuffing, rolled and tied with string. Beside it was an ancient Soviet-made transistor radio, the size of a packing case, and next to that a wind-up gramophone with a tarnished brass horn.

The Russian unfastened the satchel and took out the notebook. He opened it at the picture of the girl gymnasts in Red Square and held it up for them: there, you see? They nodded. He set it down on the table. Then he pulled on a length of greasy leather hanging round his neck and kept on pulling until he hauled from somewhere deep in the fetid fluids of his clothes a small piece of clear plastic. He offered it to Kelso. It was warm from the heat of his body: the same picrure~ but folded very small, so that only Anna Safanova's face was visible.

'You are the ones,' he said. 'I am the one you seek. And now: the proof.'

He kissed the home-made locket and lowered it back into his clothes. Then, from the belt of his greatcoat, he drew out a short, wide-bladed knife with a leather hilt. He turned it, showing them the sharpness of the edge. He grinned at them. He kicked back the bit of carpet at his feet, dropped to his knees and prised up a crude trapdoor.

He reached down and pulled out a large and shabby suitcase.

HE unpacked his reliquary like a priest, reverently placing each object on the crude wooden table as if it were an altar.

The holy texts came out first: the thirteen volumes of Stalin’s collected works and thoughts, the Sochineniya, published in Moscow after the war. He showed the title page of each book to Kelso and then to O'Brian. All of them were signed in the same way - 'To the future, J. V. Stalin' - and all, clearly, had been read and re-read endlessly. On some of the volumes, the spines were badly cracked or hanging off. The pages were swollen by markers and bent corners.

Then came the uniform, each part carefully wrapped in yellowing tissue paper. A pressed grey tunic with red epaulets. A pair of black trousers, also pressed. A greatcoat. A pair of black leather boots, gleaming like polished anthracite. A marshal's cap. A gold star in a crimson leather case embossed with the hammer and sickle, which Kelso recognised as the Order of Hero of the Soviet Union.

And then came the mementoes. A photograph (in a wooden frame, glazed) of Stalin standing behind a desk:

signed, like the books, 'To the future, J. V. Stalin'. A Dunhill pipe. An envelope containing a lock of coarse grey hair. And finally a stack of gramophone records, old 78s, as thick as dinner plates, each still in its original paper sleeve: 'Mother, the Fields are Dusty', 'I'm Waiting For You', 'Nightingale ~f the Taiga,' 'J. V. Stalin: Speech to the First All-Union Congress of Collective Farm Shock Workers, February 19 1933', 'J. V. Stalin: Report to the Eighteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, March 10 1939'...

Kelso couldn't move. He couldn't speak. It was O'Brian who took the first step. He glanced at the Russian, touched himself on his chest, gestured at the table, and received in return a nod of approval. Tentatively, he reached out to pick up the photograph. Kelso could see what he was thinking:

the likeness was indeed striking. Not exact, of course - no man ever looks exactly like his father - but there was something there, no doubt about it, even with the younger man's beard and straggling hair. Something in the cast of the eyes and the bone structure, perhaps, or in the play of the expression: a kind of ponderous agility, a genetic shadow that was beyond the skills of any actor.

The Russian grinned again at O'Brian. He picked up his knife and pointed at the photograph, then mimed hacking at his beard. Yes?

For a moment, Kelso wasn't sure what he meant, but O'Brian did. O'Brian knew at once.

Yes. He nodded vigorously. Oh, yes. Yes, please. The Russian promptly scythed away a great swathe of coarse black facial hair and held it out, with childish pleasure, for their inspection. He repeated the stroke, again and again, and there was something shocking about the way he did this, in the casual manipulation of the razor-edged knife - this side, that, and then the throat - in the careless self-mutilation of it. There is nothing, thought Kelso, with a flash of certainty, there is no act of violence this man is not capable of The Russian reached behind his head and grabbed his hair into a thick ponytail and sliced it off as close to the roots as he could. Then he crossed the cabin in a couple of strides, opened the door of the iron stove, and flung the mass of hair on to the burning wood where it flared for an instant before shriveling to dust and smoke.

'Bloody hell,' whispered Kelso. He watched, disbelieving, as O'Brian began opening the camera case. 'Oh no. Not that. You can't be serious.'

'I can.'

'But he's mad.'

'So are half the people we put on television.' O'Brian pushed a new cassette into the side of the camera and smiled as it clicked home. 'Showtime.'

Behind him, the Russian had his head bent over the bowl of hot water steaming on the stove. He had stripped to a dirty yellow vest and had lathered his face with something. The rasp of the knife-blade on his bristle made Kelso's own flesh ache.

'Look at him,' said Kelso. 'He probably doesn't even know what television is.'

'Fine by me.

'God.' Kelso closed his eyes.

The Russian turned towards them, wiping himself on his' shirt. His face was blotchy, beaded with pinheads of blood, but he had left himself a heavy moustache, as black and oily as a crow's wings, and the transformation was stunning. Here stood the Stalin of the 1 920s: Stalin in his prime, an animal force. What was it Lenin had predicted? 'This Georgian will serve us a peppery stew.'

He tucked his hair under the marshal's cap. He slipped on the tunic. A little loose around the front, perhaps, but otherwise a perfect fit. He buttoned it and strutted up and down the room a couple of times, his right hand cirnling modestly in an imperial wave.

He picked up a volume of the Collected Works, opened it at random, glanced at the page and handed it to Kelso.

Then he smiled, held up a finger, coughed into his hand, cleared his throat and began to speak. And he was good. Kelso could tell that straight away. He was not merely word perfect. He was better than that. He must have studied the recordings, hour after hour, year after year since childhood. He had the familiar, flat, remorseless delivery; the brutal, incantatory beat. He had the expression of heavy sarcasm, the dark humour, the strength, the hate.

'This Trotsky-Bultharin bunch of spies, murderers and wreckers,' he began slowly, 'who kow-towed to the foreign world, who were possessed by a slavish instinct to grovel before every foreign bigwig, and who were ready to enter his employ as a spy -' his voice began to rise '- this handful of people who did not understand that the humblest Soviet citizen, being free from the fetters of capital, stands head and shoulders above any high-placed foreign bzgwz~ whose neck

the yoke of capitalist slavery -, and now he was shouting - who needs this miserable band of venal slaves, of what value can they be to the people, and whom can they demoralise?

He glared around, defying any of them - Kelso with the open book, O'Brian with the camera to his eye, the table, the stove, the skulls - any one of them to dare to answer him back.

He straightened~ thrusting out his chin.

'In 1937 Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Uborevich and other fiends were sentenced to be shot. After that, the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. were held. In these elections, 98.6 per cent of the total vote was cast for the Soviet power!

'At the beginning of 1938 Rosengoltz, Rykov, Bukharin and other fiends were sentenced to be shot. After that, the elections to the Supreme Soviets of the Union Republics were held. In these elections 99.4 per cent of the total vote was cast for the Soviet power! Where are the symptoms of demoralisation, we would like to know?'

He placed his fist on his heart.

'Such was the inglorious end of the opponents of the line of our Party, who finished up as enemies of the people!'

'Stormy applause,' read Kelso. 'All the delegates rise and cheer the speaker. Shouts of 'Hurrahfor Comrade Stalin!" "Long live Comrade Stalin!" 'Hurrah for the Central Committee of our Party!"'

The Russian swayed before the rhythm of the dead crowd. He could hear the roars, the stamping feet, the cheers. He nodded modestly. He smiled. He applauded in return. The Imaginary tumult rang around the narrow cabin and rolled out across the snowy clearing to split the silent trees.

FELIKS SUVORIN'S AIRCRAFT dropped through the base of low cloud and banked to starboard, following the line of the White Sea coast.

A stain of rust appeared in the snowy wilderness and spread, and he began to make out details. Drooping cranes, empty submarine pens, derelict construction sheds Severodvinsk, it must be - Brezhnev's big nuclear junkyard, just along the coast from Archangel, where they built the subs in the 1 970s that were supposed to bring ,,-the imperialists to their knees.

He stared down at it as he fastened his seatbelt. Some mafia middlemen had been sniffing around up here, about a year ago, trying to buy a warhead for the Iraqis. He remembered the case. Chechens in the taiga! Unbelievable! And yet they would manage it one day, he thought. There was too much spare hardware, too little supervision, too much money chasing it. The law of supply and demand would mate with the law of averages and they would get something, sometime.

The wingflaps shuddered. There was a whine of cables. They descended further, yawing and pitching through the snowstorm. Severodvinsk slid away. He could see grey discs of freezing water, flat blank swampland, white-capped trees and more trees, running away forever. What could live down there? Nothing, surely? No one. They were at the edge of the earth.

The old plane trundled on for another ten minutes, barely fifty yards above the forest ceiling, and then ahead Suvorin saw a pattern of lights in the snow.

It was a military airfield, secluded in the trees, with a snow plough parked at the edge of the apron. The runway had just been cleared but already a thin white skin was beginning to form again. They came in low to take a look then lifted once more, the engine straining, and turned to make a final approach. As they did so~ Suvorin had a tilting glimpse of Archangel - of distant, shadowy tower blocks and filthy chimneys - and then in they came, bouncing off the runway, once, twice, before settling, turning, the propellers conjuring miniature blizzards from the snow.

When the pilot switched off the engine there was a quality of silence that Suvorin had never experienced before. Always in Moscow there was something to hear, even in the so-called still of night - a bit of traffic, maybe, a neighbour's quarrel. But not here. Here the quiet was absolute, and he loathed it. He found himself talking just to fill it.

'Good work,' he called up to the pilot. 'We made it.'

'You're welcome. By the way, there's a message for you from Moscow. You're to call the colonel before you go. Make any sense.

'Before I go?'

'That's it.

Before I go where?

There wasn't enough room to stand upright. Suvorin had to crouch. Drawn up beside a big hangar he could see a line of bi-planes painted in arctic camouflage.

The door at the back of the plane swung open. The temperature dropped about five degrees. Snowflakes billowed up the fuselage. Suvorin grabbed his attache case and jumped down to the concrete. A technician in a fur hat pointed him towards the hangar. Its heavy sliding door was pulled a quarter open. Waiting in the shadows, next to a couple of jeeps, sheltering from the snow, was a reception committee: three men in MVD uniforms with AK-74 assault rifles, a guy from the militia and, most bizarrely, an elderly lady in thick male clothing, hunched like a vulture, leaning on a stick.

SOMETHING had happened, Suvorin could tell that right away, and whatever it was, it was not good. He knew it when he offered his hand to the senior Interior Ministry soldier -a surly-lipped, bull-necked young man named Major Kretov - and received in reply a salute of just sufficient idleness to imply an insult. And as for Kretov's two men, they never even bothered to acknowledge his arrival. They were too busy unloading a small armoury from the back of one of the jeeps - extra magazines for their AK-74s, pistols, flares and a big old RP46 machine gun with cannisters of belt-fed ammunition and a metal bipod.

'So, what are we expecting here, major?' Suvorin said, in an effort to be friendly. 'A small war?'

'We can discuss it on the way.'

'I'd prefer to discuss it now.

Kretov hesitated. Clearly he would have liked to tell Suvorin to go to hell, but they had the same rank, and besides he hadn't quite got the measure yet of this civilian-soldier in his expensive western clothes. 'Well, quickly then.' He clicked his fingers irritably in the direction of the gangly young militia man. 'Tell him what's happened.'

'And you are?' said Suvorin.

The militia man came to attention. 'Lieutenant Korf, major.'

'So, Korf-'

Lieutenant delivered his report quickly, nervously. Shortly after midday, the Archangel militia had been

notified by Moscow central headquarters that two foreigners were believed tobe in the vicinity of the city, possibly seeking to make contact with a person or persons named Safanov or Safiuiova. He had undertaken the inquiry himself. Only one such citizen had been located: the witness Vavara Safanova -he indicated the old woman - who had been picked up within ninety minutes of receipt of the telex from Moscow. She had confirmed that two foreigners had been to see her and had left her barely an hour earlier.

Suvorin smiled in a kindly way at Vavara Safanova. 'And what were you able to tell them, Comrade Safanova?'

She looked at the ground.

'She told them her daughter was dead,' cut in Kretov, impatiently. 'Died in childbirth, forty-five years ago, having a kid. A boy. Now: can we go? I've got all this out of her already.'

A boy, thought Suvorin. It had to be. A girl wouldn't have mattered. But a boy. An heir -'And the boy lives?'

'Reared in the forest, she says. Like a wolf.' Suvorin turned reluctantly from the silent old woman to the major. 'And Kelso and O'Brian have gone into the forest to find this "wolf", presumably?'

'The/re about three hours ahead of us.' Kretov had a large-scale map spread over the hood of the nearest jeep.

'This is the road,' he said. 'There's no way out except back the way they went, and the snow will hold them up. Don't worry. We'll have them by nightfall.'

'And how do we reach them? Can we use a helicopter?' Kretov winked at one of his men. 'I fear the major from Moscow has not adequately studied our terrain. The taiga is not well supplied with helicopter pads.'

Suvorin tried to stay calm. 'Then we reach them how?'

'By snow plough,' said Kretov, as if it was obvious. 'Four of us can just fit in the cab. Or three, if you prefer not to wet your fancy footwear.'

Again, and with difficulty, Suvorin controlled his temper. 'So what's the plan? We clear a way for them to drive back into town behind us, is that it?'

'If that proves necessary.'

'If that proves necessary,' repeated Suvorin, slowly. Now he was beginning to understand. He gazed into the major's cold grey eyes, then looked at the two MVD men who had finished unloading the jeep. 'So what are you people running nowadays? Death squads, is that it? It's a little bit of South America you've got going up here?'

Kretov began folding up the map. 'We must move out immediately.'

'I need to speak to Moscow.'

'We've already spoken to Moscow.'

'Ineed to speak to Moscow, major, and if you attempt to leave without me, I can assure you that you will spend the next few years building helicopter pads.'

'I don't think so.'

'If it comes to a trial of strength between the SVR and the MVD, be aware of this: the SVR will win every time. Suvorin turned and bowed to Vavara Safanova. 'Thank you for your assistance.' And then, to Korf, who was watching all this, goggle-eyed: 'Take her home, please. You did well.'

'I told them,' said the old woman suddenly. 'I told them nothing good could come of it.'

'That may be true,' said Suvorin. 'All right, lieutenant, off you go. Now,' he said to Kretov, 'where's that fucking telephone?'

O'BRIAN had insisted on shooting another twenty minutes of footage. By sign language he had persuaded the Russian to pack up his relics and then to unpack them again, holding each object up to the camera and explaining what it was. ('His book.' 'His picture. His hair.' Each was dutifully

kissed and arranged on the altar.) Then O'Brian showed him how he wanted him to sit at the table smoking his pipe and to read from Anna Safanova's journal. ('Remember Comrade Stalin's historic words to Gorky: "It is the task of the proletarian state to produce the engineers of human souls..

'Great,' said O'Brian, moving around him with the camera. 'Fantastic. Isn't this fantastic, Fluke?'

'No,' said Kelso, 'it's a bloody circus.'

Ask him a couple of questions, Fluke.'

'I shall not.

'Go on. Just a couple. Ask him what he thinks of the new Russia.'

'No.'

'Two questions and we're out of here. I promise.'

Kelso hesitated. The Russian stared at him, stroking his moustache with the stem of his pipe. His teeth were yellowish and stumpy. The underside of his moustache was wet with saliva.

'My colleague would like to know,' Kelso said, 'if you have heard of the great changes that have taken place in Russia and what you think of them.'

For a moment, he was silent. Then he turned from Kelso and stared directly into the lens.

'One feature of the history of the old Russia,' he began, was the continual beatings she suffered. All beat her for her backwardness. She was beaten because to do sowas profitable' and could be done with impunity. Such is the law of the exploiters - to beat the backward and the weak. It is the jungle law of capitalism. You are backward, you are weak -therefore you are wrong; hence, you can be beaten and enslaved.'

He sat back, sucking on his pipe, his eyes half closed. O'Brian was standing directly behind Kelso, holding the camera, and Kelso felt the pressure of his hand on his shoulder, urging him to ask another question.

'I don't understand,' Kelso said. 'What are you saying? That the new Russia is beaten and enslaved? But surely most people would say the opposite: that however hard life might be, at least they now have freedom?'

A slow smile, directly into the camera. The Russian removed his pipe from his mouth and leaned forwards, jabbing it at Kelso's chest.

'That is very good. But, unfortunately, freedom alone is not enough, by far. If there is a shortage of bread, a shortage of butter and fats, a shortage of textiles, and if housing conditions are bad, freedom will not carry you very far. It is very difficult, comrades, to live on freedom alone.'

O'Brian whispered, 'What's he saying? Does it make sense.

'It makes a kind of sense. But it's odd.'

O'Brian persuaded Kelso to ask a couple more questions, each of which drew similar, stilted replies, and then, when Kelso refused to translate any more, he insisted on taking the Russian outside for a final shot.

Kelso watched them for a minute through the narrow, dirty window: O'Brian making a mark in the snow and then walking towards the cabin, returning, pointing to the line, trying to make the Russian understand what he wanted him to do. It was almost as if he had been expecting them, Kelso thought. 'You are the ones,' he had said. 'You are truly the ones’.

'This is the book of which it is spoken...'

He had been educated, obviously - indoctrinated, perhaps~ a better word. He could read. He seemed to have been brought up with a sense of destiny: a messianic certainty that one day strangers would appear in the forest, bearing a book, and that they, whoever they were - even if they were a couple of imperialists - they would be the ones...

The Russian was apparently in a great good humour, bringing his index finger up close to his eye and wiggling it at the camera, grinning, stooping and making a snowball, tossing it playfully at O'Brian's back.

Homo Sovieticus, thought Kelso. Soviet man.

He tried to remember something, a passage in Volkogonov's biography, quoting Sverdlov, who had been exiled with Stalin to Siberia in 1914. Stalin wouldn't associate with the other Bolsheviks, that was what had struck Sverdlov. Here he was: unknown, almost forty, had never done a day's work in his life, had no skills, no profession, yet he would simply go off on his own to hunt or fish, and 'gave the impression that he was waiting for something to happen'.

Hunting. Fishing. Waiting Kelso turned from the window and quickly slipped the notebook back into the satchel, stuffed the satchel into his jacket. He checked the window again, then stepped over to the table and began leafing through Stalin's Collected Works.

It took him a couple of minutes to find what he was looking for: a pair of dog-eared pages in different volumes, both passages heavily underlined with black pencil. And it was as he thought: the Russian's first answer was a direct quotation from a Stalin speech - to the All-Union Conference of Managers of Socialist Industry, February 4 1931, to be exact - while the second was lifted from an address to three thousand Stakhanovites, November 17 1935.

The son was speaking the words of the Father.

He heard the sound of Stalin's boots on the wooden steps and hastily replaced the books.

SUVORIN followed one of the MVD men out of the hangar and across the runway towards a single-storey block next,-to the control tower. The wind tore through his coat. Snow leaked through the tops of his shoes. By the time they reached the office he was freezing. A young corporal looked up as they came in, without interest. Suvorin was beginning to feel thoroughly sick of this tin pot, backwoods town, this . He slammed the door.

'Salute, man, damn you, when an officer comes into the room!'

The corporal leapt up so quickly he knocked over his chair.

'Get me a line to Moscow. Now. Then wait outside. Both of you wait outside.'

Suvorin didn't start to dial until they had gone. He picked up the chair and righted it and sat down heavily. The corporal had been reading a German pornographic magazine. A stockinged foot poked out glossily from beneath a pile of flight logs. He could hear the number ringing faintly. There was heavy static on the line.

'Sergo? It's Suvorin. Give me the chief.'

A moment later, Arsenyev came through. 'Feliks, listen.' His tone was strained. 'I've been trying to reach you. You've heard the news?'

'I've heard the news.

'Unbelievable! You've talked to the others? You must move quickly.

'Yes, I've talked to them, and I mean to say, what is this, colonel?' Suvorin had to put his finger into his other ear and shout into the receiver. 'What's going on? I've landed in the middle of nowhere and I'm looking out of the window here at three cut-throats loading a snow plough with enough firepower to take out a battalion of NATO -'

'Feliks,' said Arsenyev, 'it's out of our hands.'

'So what is this? Now we are supposed to take our orders from the MVD?'

'They're not MVD,' said Arsenyev quietly. 'They're Special Forces in MVD uniforms.'

'Spetsnaz?' Suvorin put his hand to his head. Spetsnaz. Commandos. Alpha Brigade. Killers. 'Who decided to turn them loose?'

As if he didn't know.

Arsenyev said, 'Guess.'

'And was His Excellency drunk as usual? Or was this a rare interlude of sobriety?'

'Have a care, major!' Arsenyev's voice was sharp.

The snow plough's heavy diesel cracked into life. The revving engine shook the double glass, briefly obliterating Arsenyev's voice. Big yellow headlights turned and flashed through the snow then began moving ponderously across the runway towards Suvorin.

'So what are my orders exactly?'

'To proceed as you think fit, using all force necessary.

'All force necessary to achieve what?'

'Whatever you think fit.'

'Which is what?'

'That's for you to decide. I'm relying on you, major. I'm allowing you complete operational freedom -'

Oh but he was a wily one, wasn't he? The wiliest. A real survivor. Suvorin lost his temper.

'So how many are we supposed to kill then, colonel? One man is it? Two? Three?'

Arsenyev was shocked. He was profoundly disturbed. If the tape of the call was ever played back - which it would be; the following day - his expression would be obvious for all to hear. 'Nobody said anything about killing, major! Has anyone there said such a thing? Have I?'

'No, you haven't,' said Suvorin, finding within himself a depth of sarcasm and bitterness he didn't know he possessed, 'so obviously whatever happens is my responsibility alone. I haven't been guided by my superior officers in any way. And neither, I am sure, has the exemplary Major Kretov!'

Arsenyev started to say something but his voice was drowned out by the roar of the engine being revved again. The snow plough was nearly up against the window now. Its blade rose and fell like a guillotine. Suvorin could see Kretov in the driver's seat, passing his finger across his throat. The horn sounded. Suvorin waved at him irritably and turned his back.

'Say again, colonel.'

But the line was dead and all attempts to reconnect it failed. And that was the sound that Suvorin afterwards could never quite get out of his ears, as he sat squashed in the jumpseat of the snow plough, bouncing into the forest: the cold, implacable buzz of a number unobtainable.

THE SNOW HAD eased and it was much colder - it must have been minus three or four. Kelso pulled up his hood and set off as fast as he could towards the edge of the clearing. Ahead of him through the trees his paper trail of yellow markers blossomed every fifty yards in the snowy undergrowth like winter flowers.

Getting out of the cabin had not been easy. When he had told the Russian they needed to go back to their car - 'only to collect some more equipment, comrade,' he had added, quickly - he had received a look of such glinting suspicion he had almost quailed. But somehow he held the other man's gaze and eventually, after a final, searching glance, he was given a brief nod of permission. And even then O'Brian had lingered - 'you know, we could do with one more shot from over here ...' - until Kelso had grabbed him hard by the elbow and steered him towards the door. The Russian watched them go, puffing on his pipe.

Kelso could hear O'Brian, breathing hard, stumbling after him, but he didn't stop to let him catch up until they were out of sight of the hut.

O'Brian said, 'You got the notebook?'

Kelso patted the front of his jacket. 'In here.'

'Oh, nice work,' said O'Brian. He performed a little victory shuffle in the snow. 'Jesus, this is a story, isn't it? This is a hell of a story.'

'A hell of a story,' repeated Kelso, but all he wanted was to get away. He resumed his walk, but more urgently now, his legs aching with the effort of pushing through the snow.

They came out on to the track and there was the Toyota, a hundred yards away, wrapped in a wet, white layer more than an inch deep, thicker towards the rear where the wind was blowing from, and as they came closer they could see that the surface was beginning to crystalise to ice. It was still tilting forwards, its back tyres almost clear of the snow, and it took them a while to locate all the damage. The Russian had fired three bullets into the car. One had blown off the lock on the back door. Another had opened up the driver's side. A third had gone through the hood into the engine, presumably to silence the alarm.

'That crazy sonofabitch,' said O'Brian, staring at the ugly holes. 'This is a forty-thousand-dollar vehicle -'

He squeezed behind the steering wheel, put the key in the ignition and turned it. Nothing. Not even a click.

'No wonder he didn't mind if we came back to the car,' said Kelso, quietly. 'He knew we weren't going anywhere.'

O'Brian had started looking worried again. He struggled out of the front seat and sank deep into the drift. He waded round to the back, lifted the rear door and blew out a long sigh of relief, his breath condensing in the cold air.

'Well, it doesn't look as though he's damaged the Inmarsat, thank Christ. That's something.' He glanced around, frowning.

Kelso said, 'Now what?'

O'Brian muttered, 'Trees.'

'Trees?'

'Yeah. The satellite's not straight above our heads, remember? She's over the equator. This far north, that means you need to keep the dish at a real low angle to send a signal. Trees, if they're close up - they, ah, well, they kind of get in the way.' He turned to Kelso, and Kelso could have murdered us then: killed him just for the nervous, sheepish grin on his big handsome, stupid face. 'We're gonna need a space, Fluke. Sorry.'

A space?

Yeah. A space. They would have to return to the clearing.

O'BRIAN insisted they took the rest of the equipment back with them. That, after all, was what Kelso had told the Russian they were going to do, and they didn't want to make him suspicious, did they? Besides, no way was O'Brian going to leave over a hundred-grand's-worth of electronic gear sitting in a shot-up Toyota in the middle of nowhere. He wasn't going to let it out of his sight.

And so they struggled back along the track, O'Brian in the lead carrying the Inmarsat and the heavier of the big cases, with the Toyota's battery, wrapped in a black plastic sheet, jammed under his arm. Kelso had the camera case and the lap-top editing machine and he did his best to keep up, but it was heavy going. His arms ached. The snow sucked at him. Soon, O'Brian had turned into the forest and was out of sight, while Kelso had to keep stopping to transfer the damned bloody swine of an edit case from one hand to the other. He sweated and cursed. On his way back through the trees he stumbled over a hidden root and dropped to his knees.

By the time he reached the clearing, O'Brian already had the satellite dish connected to the battery and was trying to twist it into the right direction. The trajectory of the antenna pointed directly at the snowy tops of some big firs, about fifty yards away, and he was hunched over it, his jaw working with anxiety, holding the compass in one hand, pressing switches with the other. The snow had almost stopped and there was faint blueness to the freezing air. Behind him, framed against the shadows of the trees, was the grey wooden cabin utterly still, deserted apparently, apart from the thread of smoke rising from its narrow iron chimney.

Kelso let the cases drop and leaned forwards, his hands on his knees, trying to recover his breath.

'Anything?' he said. 'Nope.

Kelso groaned. A bloody circus -'If that thing doesn't work,' he said, 'we're here for the

duration, you realise that? We'll be stuck here till next April with nothing to do except listen to extracts from Stalin's Complete Works.'

It was such an appalling prospect, he actually found himself laughing, and for the second time that day, O'Brian joined in.

'Oh man,' he said, 'the things we do for glory.'

But he didn't laugh for long, and the machine stayed silent.

AND it was in this silence, about thirty seconds later, that Kelso thought he heard again the faint sound of rushing water.

He held up his hand.

'What?' said O'Brian.

'The river.' He closed his eyes and raised his face to the sky, straining to hear. 'The river, I think-'

It was hard to separate it from the noise of the wind in the trees. But it was more sustained than wind, and deeper, and it seemed to be coming from somewhere on the other side of the cabin. Let's go for its' said O'Brian. He snatched the pair of crocodile clips off the battery terminals and began rapidly rolling up the cable. 'Makes sense, if you think of it. Must be how he gets about. A boat.'

Kelso hoisted the two cases and O'Brian called out, 'Watch yourself, Fluke.'

'What?'

'Traps. Remember? He's got this whole wood wired.'

Kelso stood, looking at the ground, uncertain, remembering the spurt of snow, the snap of the metal jaws. But it was hopeless to worry about that, he thought, just as there was no way they could avoid passing directly by the door of the cabin. He waited for O'Brian to finish packing up the Inmarsat, and then they started walking together, treading warily. And Kelso could sense the Russian everywhere now: at the window of his squalid hut, in the crawlspace underneath it, behind the stack of cordwood piled against the back wall, in the dank and mossy water barrel and in the darkness of the nearby trees. He could imagine the rifle trained on his back and he was acutely aware of the softness of his own skin, of its babyish vulnerability.

They reached the edge of the clearing and followed the perimeter of the forest. Dense undergrowth. Fallen, rotted logs. Strange white fungoid growths like melted faces. And occasionally, in the distance, crashes, as the wind shifted and brought down falls of frozen snow. It was impossible to see much further than a hand's reach. They couldn't find a path. There was nothing to do but plunge between the trees.

O'Brian went first and had the worst of it, lugging the two heavy cases and the big battery, having to twist his bulky body sideways to edge through the narrow gaps, sometimes left, sometimes right, ducking abruptly, no free hand to protect his face from the low branches. Kelso tried to follow in his footsteps and after half a dozen paces he was conscious of the forest swinging shut behind them like a solid door.

They stumbled on for a few minutes in the semi-darkness. Kelso wanted to stop and transfer the edit machine to his other hand but he didn't dare lose sight of O'Brian's back and soon he had forgotten about everything except the pain in his right shoulder and the acid in his lungs. Trickles of sweat and melted snow were running into his eyes, blurring his vision, and he was trying to bring his arm up to wipe his forehead on his wet sleeve when O'Brian gave a shout and lurched forwards, and suddenly - it was like passing through a wall -the trees parted and they were in the light again, standing on the ridge of a steep bank that fell away at their feet to a tumbling plain of yellowish-grey water a clear quarter-mile across.

IT was an awesome sight - God's work, truly - like finding a cathedral in the middle of a jungle - and for a while neither man spoke. Then O'Brian set down his cases and the battery and took out his compass. He showed it to Kelso. They were on the northern bank of the Dvina facing almost exactly due south.

Ten yards below them, and a hundred yards to their left, dragged clear of the water and covered in a dark green tarpaulin, was a small boat. It looked as though it had been taken out for the winter, and that would make sense, thought Kelso, because already ice was beginning to extend out into the river - a shelf maybe ten or fifteen yards across that seemed to be widening even as he watched.

On the opposite bank there was a similar strip of whiteness, and then the dark line of the trees began again. Kelso raised his binoculars and inspected the far shore for signs of habitation but there was none. It looked utterly forbidding and gloomy. A wilderness.

He lowered the binoculars. 'Who're you going to call?'

'America. Get them to call the bureau in Moscow.' O'Brian already had the case of the Inmarsat open and was slotting together the plastic dish. He had taken off his gloves. In the extreme cold his hands looked raw. 'When's it gonna be dark?'

Kelso looked at his watch. 'It's nearly five now,' he said. 'An hour perhaps.'

'Okay, let's face it, even if the battery holds on this thing and I get through to the States and they fix us a rescue party

- we're stuck here for the night. Unless we take some pretty dramatic action.

'Meaning?'

'We take his boat.'

'You'd steal his boat?'

'I'd borrow it, sure.' He sat on his haunches, unwrapping the battery, refusing to meet Kelso's eyes. 'Oh, come on, man, don't look at me like that. Where's the harm? He's not going to need it till the spring anyhow - not if the temperature keeps on dropping like this - that river'll be iced over in a day or two. Besides, he shot up our car, didn't he? We'll use his boat - that's fair.'

'And you can work a boat, can you?'

'I can work a boat, I can work a camera, I can make pictures fly through the air - I'm fucking superman. Yeah, I can sail. Let's do it.'

'And what about him? He'll just stand there, will he, while we do it? He'll wave us of' Kelso glanced back the way they had come. 'You realise he's probably watching us right now?'

'Okay. So you go keep him talking while I get everything ready.'

'Oh, thank you,' said Kelso. 'Thank you very much indeed.'

'Well, at least I've had a fucking idea. What's yours?'

A fair point, Kelso had to concede.

He hesitated, then focused his binoculars on the boat.

So this was how the Russian survived - how he made his occasional forays into the outside world. This was how he acquired the fuel for his lamp, the tobacco for his pipe, the ammunition for his guns, the battery for his transistor radio. What did he use for money? Did he barter what he caught or trapped. Or had the encampment been set up in the 1 950s-with a treasury of some sort - NKVD gold - which they had been eking out ever since?

The boat was concealed in a small depression, protected from the river by a low screen of trees: to anyone drifting by, she would be invisible. She was resting on her keel, propped up to port and starboard by logs - a sturdy-looking vessel, not big, room for four people, at a pinch. A bulge at her stern suggested an outboard motor, and if that was the case, and if O'Brian could make it work, they might reach Archangel in a couple of hours - less, probably, with the current flowing so fast through its narrowing channel.

He thought of the crosses in the cemetery, the dates, the

obliterated faces.

It did not look as though many people had ever left this place.

It was worth a try.

'All right,' he said, reluctantly, 'let's do it.'

'That's my boy.'

When he stepped back into the trees, he left O'Brian aiming the antenna across the river, and he had not gone far when he heard behind him the blissful, rising note of the Inmarsat locking on to the satellite.

THE snow plough was coming on fast now, thirty, forty miles an hour, rushing down the track, throwing up a great white bow wave of freezing surf that went smashing into the trees on either side. Kretov was driving. His men were jammed together next to him, nursing their guns. Suvorin was hanging on to the metal moorings of the jump seat at the back of the cab, the barrel of the RP46 poking into his thigh, feeling sick from the vibration and the diesel fumes. He marvelled at the complexities that had overwhelmed his life in so short a time, and pondered nervously the wisdom of the old Russian proverb: 'We are born in a clear field and die in a dark forest.

He had plenty of time for his thoughts because none of the other three had addressed a word to him since they left the airfield. They passed chewing gum to one another and TU144 cigarettes and talked quietly so he couldn't hear what they were saying above the racket of the engine. An intimate trio, he thought: clearly a partnership with some history. Where had they been last? Grozny, maybe, taking Moscow's peace to the Chechen rebels? ('The terrorist gunmen all died at the scene...') In which case this would be a holiday for them. A picnic in the woods. And who was giving them their orders? Guess. .

Arsenyev's joke.

It was hot in the cab. The single windscreen wiper batted away the pawprints of snow with a soporific beat.

He tried to shift his leg away from the machine gun.

Serafima had been on at him for months to get out of the service and make some money - her father knew a man on the board of a big privatised energy consortium and, well, let's just say, my dear Feliks, that - how should we put this?

- a number of favours are owed. So what would that be worth, papa, exactly? Ten times his official salary and a tenth of the work? To hell with Yasenevo. Perhaps it was time.

A heavy male voice started grunting from the radio. Suvorin leaned forwards. He couldn't make out exactly what was being said. It sounded like co-ordinates. Kretov was holding the microphone in one hand, steering with the other, craning his neck to study the map on the knee of the man sitting next to him, watching the road. 'Sure, sure. No problem.' He hung up.

Suvorin said, 'What was that?'

Ah,' said Kretov, in mock-surprise, 'you're still here? You got it, Aleksey?' This was to the man with the map, and then, to Suvorin, 'That was the listening post at Onega. They just intercepted a satellite transmission.'

'Fifteen miles, major. It's right on the river.'

'You see?' said Kretov, grinning at Suvorin in the mirror. 'What did I tell you? Home by nightfall.'

KELSO CAME OUT of the trees and walked towards the wooden cabin. The surface of the snow had frozen to a thin crust and the wind had picked up slightly, sending little twisters of powder dancing across the clearing. Rising from the iron chimney the thin brown coil of smoke jerked and snagged in the breeze.

'When one approaches Him, do so openly. 'That was the advice of the maidservant, Valechka. 'He hates it when people creep up on Him. Ifa door has to be knocked upon, knock upon it loudly...'

Kelso tried his best to make his rubber boots thump on the wooden steps, and he hammered on the door with his gloved fist. There was no reply.

Now what?

He knocked again, waited, then raised the latch and pushed open the door, and immediately, the now-familiar smell - cold, close, anim4 with an underlay of stale pipe tobacco - rose to overwhelm him.

The cabin was empty. The rifle was gone. It looked as though the Russian had been working at his table: papers were laid out, and a couple of stubby pencils.

Kelso stood just inside the doorway, eyeing the papers, trying to decide what to do. He checked over his shoulder. There was no sign of movement in the clearing. The Russian was probably down at the river's edge, spying on O'Brian. This was their only tactical advantage, he thought: the fact that there were two of them and only one of him and he couldn't watch them both at once. Hesitantly, he stepped

over to the table.

He only meant to look for a minute, and. probably that was all he did - just long enough to run his fingers through it all: A pair of passports - red, stiff-backed, six inches by four, lion-crested, marked 'PASS' and 'NORGE', issued in Bergen, 1968 - a young couple, identical-looking: long hair, blond, hippyish, the girl quite pretty in a washed-out kind of way; he didn't register their names; entered the USSR via Leningrad, June 1969 -Identity papers - old-style, Soviet Union, three different men: the first, a youngish, jug-eared fellow in spectacles, a student by the look of him; the second, old, in his sixties, weathered, self-reliant, a sailor perhaps; the third, bug-eyed, unkempt, a gypsy or a drifter; the names a blur -And, finally, a stack of sheets, which, as he fanned them out, he saw were six sets of documents, of five or six pages each, pinned together and written in pencil or ink, in various hands - this one neat, that one hesitant, another a wild and desperate scrawl - but always, at the top of the first sheet, in neat Cyrillic capitals, the same word: 'Confession'

Kelso could feel the freezing draught from the open door shifting the hairs on the back of his scalp.

He replaced the pages carefully and backed away from them, his hands raised slightly as if to ward them off, and at the doorway he turned and stumbled out on to the steps. He ( sat down on the weathered planking and when he raised the binoculars and scanned the rim of the clearing he found that. he was shaking.

He stayed there for a couple of minutes, recovering his nerve. It occurred to him that what he ought to do - the calm, rational, sensible thing: the not leaping to any hysterical conclusions kind of thing, that a serious scholar would do - was to return and briefly make a note of the names for checking later.

So when he had satisfied himself for the twentieth time that not a soul was moving in the trees, he stood and ducked back through the low door, and the first thing he saw on re-entry was the rifle propped against the wall, and the second was the Russian, sitting at the table, perfectly still, watching him.

'He possessed in a high degree the gift for silence, 'according to his secretary and in this respect he was unique in a country where everybody talks far too much...'

He was still in full uniform, still in his greatcoat and cap. The gold star of the Order of Hero of the Soviet Union was pinned to his lapel and shone in the dull light of the kerosene lamp.

How had he done that?

Kelso started gabbling into the silence. 'Comrade - you -I'm startled - I - came to find you - I wanted -, He fumbled with the zipper on the front of his jacket and held out the satchel. 'I wanted to return to you the papers of your mother, Anna Mikhailovna Safanova -'

Time stretched. Half a minute passed, a minute, and then the Russian said, softly, 'Good, comrade,' and made a note on the sheet of paper beside him. He indicated the table and Kelso took a pace towards it and laid the satchel down, like an offering placed to appease some unreliable and vengeful god.

Another endless silence followed.

'Capitalism,' said the Russian eventually, putting down his stub of pencil and reaching for his pipe, 'is thievery, and imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Thus it follows that the imperialist is the greatest thief of all mankind. Steal a man's papers, he will. Oh, easily! Pick the last kopek from' yer pocket! Or steal a man's boat, eh, comrade?'

He winked at Kelso and continued staring at him as he struck a match, sucking the fire into the bowl of his pipe, producing great spurts of smoke and flame.

'Close the door would you, comrade?'

It was beginning to get dark.

If we have to stay here the night, thought Kelso, we shall never leave.

Where the hell was O'Brian?

'Now,' the Russian continued, 'and this is the decisive question, comrade: how do we protect ourselves from these capitalists, these imperialists, these thieves? And we say the answer to this decisive question must be equally decisive.' He extinguished the match with one shake and leaned forwards. 'We protect ourselves from these capitalists, these imperialists, and these stinking, crawling thieves of all mankind only by the most ferocious vigilance. Take, for example, the Norway couple, with their serpenty smiles - crawling on their maggoty bellies through the undergrowth to ask for "directions, comrade," if you please! On a "walking holiday" if you please!'

He waved their open passports in Kelso's face and Kelso had a second glimpse of the two young people, the man in a psychedelic headband -'Are we such fools,' he demanded, 'such backward prim:tives, not to recognise the capitalist-imperialist thief- spy when it worms its way among us? No, comrade, we are not such backward primitives! To such people we administer a hard lesson in socialist realities - I have their confessions here before me, they denied it at first but they admitted it all in the end - and we need say no more of them. They are as Lenin predicted they would be: dust on the dunghill of history. Nor need we say anything of him!' He waved a set of identity papers - the older man. 'And nor of him! Nor him!' The faces of the victims flashed briefly. 'That,' said the Russian, 'is our decisive answer to the decisive question posed by all capitalist5~ imperialists and stinking thieves!'

He sat back with his arms folded, smiling grimly.

The rifle was almost within Kelso's reach but he didn't move. It might not be loaded. And even if it was loaded he wouldn't know how to fire it. And even if he fired it he knew he could never injure the Russian: he was a supernatural force. One minute he was ahead of you, one minute behind; now he was in the trees and now he was here, sitting at his table, poring over his collection of confessions, making the occasional note.

'Worse by far however,' said the Russian after a while, is the canker of the right-deviationism.' He relit his pipe, sucking noisily on the stem. 'And here Golub was the first.'

'Golub was the first,' repeated Kelso, numbly.

He was remembering the row of crosses: T Y Golub, his face blacked out, died November-the-something, 1961.

The essence of Stalin's success was really very simple, he thought, built around an insight that could be reduced to a mere three words: people fear death.

'Golub was the first to succumb to the classic conciliationist tendencies of the right-deviationism. Of course, I was merely a child at the time, but his whining still clamours in my ears: "Oh, comrades, they are saying in the villages that Comrade Stalin's body has been removed from his rightful place next to Lenin! Oh, comrades, what are we going to do? It is hopeless, comrades! They will come and they will kill us all! It's time for us to give up!"

'Have you ever seen fishermen when a storm is brewing on a great river? I have seen them many a time. In the face of a storm one group of fishermen will muster all their forces, encourage their fellows and boldly put out to meet the storm:

"Cheer up, lads, hold tight to the tiller, cut the waves, we'll pull her through!" But there is another type of fishermen -those who, on sensing a storm, lose heart, begin to snivel and demoralise their own ranks: "What a misfortune, a storm is brewing; lie down, boys, in the bottom of the boat, shut your eyes; let's hope she'll make the shore somehow."'

The Russian spat on the floor.

'Chizhikov took him out into the dark part of the forest that very night and in the morning there was a cross and that was the end of Golub and that put an end to the beatings of the right-deviationists - even that old hag his widow put a sock in her mouth after that. And for a few years more, the steady work went on, under our four-fold slogans: the slogan of the fight against defeatism and complacency, the slogan of the struggle for self-sufficiency, the slogan of constructive self-criticism is the foundation of our Party, and the slogan of out of the fire comes steeL And then the sabotage began.'

'Ah,' said Kelso. 'The sabotage. Of course.'

'It began with the poisoning of the sturgeon. This was soon after the trial of the foreign spies. Late in the summer this was. We came out one morning and there they were -white bellies floating in the river. And time without number we discovered that food had been taken from the traps and yet no animals were caught. The mushrooms were shrivelled, useless things - scarcely any to be had all year - and that had never happened before, either. Even the berries on the two-verst track were gone before we could pick them. I discussed the crisis confidentially with Comrade Chizhikov - I was older now, you understand, and able to take a hand - and his analysis was identical to mine: that this was a classic outbreak of Trotskyite wreckerism. And when Yezhov was discovered with a flashlight - out walking, after curfew: the swine- the case was made. And this,' he held up a thick pile of barely legible scrawl and slapped it against the table, 'this is his confession - you can see it, here, in his own hand - how he received his signals by torch-transmission from some spiderish associates he had made contact with while out fishing.'

'And Yezhov -?'

'His widow hanged herself. They had a child.' He looked away. 'I don't know what became of it. They're all dead now, of course. Even Chizhikov.'

More silence. Kelso felt like Scheherazade: as long as he could keep talking, there was a chance. Death lay in the silences.

'Comrade Chizhikov,' he said. 'He must have been a -' he nearly said 'a monster" - a formidable man?'

'A shock-worker,' said the Russian, 'a Stakhanovite, a soldier and a hunter, a red expert and a theoretician of the highest calibre.' His eyes were almost closed. His voice fell to a whisper. 'Oh, and he beat me, comrade. He beat me and he beat me, until I was weeping blood! On instructions that were given to him, as to the manner of my upbringing, by the highest organs: "You are to give him a good shaking every now and again!" All that I am, he made me.'

'When did Comrade Chizhikov die?'

'Two winters ago. He was clumsy and half-blind by then. He stepped into one of his own traps. The wound turned black. His leg turned black and stank like maggoty meat.

There was delirium. He raged. In the end, he begged us to leave him outside overnight, in the snow. A dog's death.'

'And his wife - she died soon afterwards?'

'Within the week.'

'She must have been like a mother to you?'

'She was. But she was old. She couldn't work. It was a hard thing to have to do - but it was for the best.'

'He never ever loved a human being, 'said his schoolfriend, Iremashvili. 'He was incapable of feeling pity for man or beast, and I never knew him cry...'

A hard thing- For the best- He opened one yellow eye.

'You are shifty, comrade. I can tell.'

Kelso's throat was dry. He looked at his watch. 'I was wondering what had become of my colleague -'

It was now more than half an hour since he had left O'Brian by the river.

'The Yankee? Take my tip there, comrade. Don't trust him. You'll see.'

He winked again, put his finger to his lips and stood. And then he moved across the cabin with an extraordinary speed and agility - it was grace, really: one, two, three steps, yet the soles of his boots barely seemed to connect with the boards -and he flung open the door and there was O'Brian.

And later Kelso was to wonder what might have happened (I~ next. Would it all have been treated as some terrific joke? ('Your ears must be flapping like boards in this cold, comrade!') Or would O'Brian have been the next interloper in the miniature Stalinist state required to sign a confession?

But it was impossible to say what might have happened, because what did happen was that the Russian suddenly shoved O'Brian roughly into the cabin. Then he stood alone at the open door, his head tilted to one side, nostrils dilated, sniffing the air, listening.

SUVORIN never even saw the smoke. It was Major Kretov who spotted it.

He braked and pointed to it, put the snow plough into first gear, and they crawled forwards for a couple of hundred yards until they drew level with the entrance to the track. Halfway along it, the sharp white outline of the Toyota's roof showed up clear against the shadows of the trees.

Kretov stopped, reversed a short distance, and left the engine idling as he scanned the way ahead. Then he swung the wheel hard and the big vehicle lurched forwards again, off the road and down the track, clearing a path to within a few paces of the empty car. He turned the engine off and for a few moments Suvorin heard again that unnatural silence.

He said, 'Major, what are your orders, exactly?'

Kretov was opening the door. 'My orders are plain Russian good sense. "To stuff the cork back in to the bottle at the narrowest point."' He jumped down easily into the snow and reached back for his AK-74. He stuffed an extra magazine into his jacket. He checked his pistol.

'And this is the narrowest point?'

'Stay here and keep your backside warm, why don't you? This won't take us long.'

'I won't be a party to anything illegal,' said Suvorin. The words sounded absurdly prim and official, even to his ears, and Kretov took no notice. He was already beginning to move off with his men. 'The westerners, at least,' Suvorin called after them, 'are not to be harmed!'

He sat there for a few more seconds, watching the backs of the soldiers as they fanned out across the track. Then, cursing, he shoved the front seat forwards and squeezed ~ himself into the open door. The cab was unexpectedly high off the ground. He leapt and felt himself jerked backwards, ~ heard a tearing sound. The lining of his coat had snagged on a bit of metal. He swore again and detached himself. It was hard to keep up with the other three. They were fit and he was not. They had army boots and he had leather-soled brogues. It was difficult to maintain his footing in the snow and he wouldn't have caught them at all if they hadn't stopped to inspect something on the ground beside the track.

Kretov smoothed out the screwed-up yellow paper and turned it this way and that. It was blank. He balled it up again and dropped it. He inserted a small, flesh-coloured miniature receiver, like a hearing-aid, into his right ear. From his pocket he took out a black ski-mask and pulled it over his head. The others did the same. Kretov made a chopping motion with his gloved hand towards the forest and they set off again: Kretov first with his assault rifle held before him, turning as he walked, ducking this way and that, ready to rake the trees with bullets; then one soldier, then another, both keeping up the same wary surveillance, their faces like skulls in the masks; and finally Suvorin in his civilian clothes - stumbling, slipping, in every way absurd.

CALMLY the Russian closed the door and collected his rifle. He pulled out a wooden box from beneath the table and filled his pockets with bullets. In the same unhurried manner, he rolled back the carpet, lifted the trapdoor and leapt, cat-like, into the space.

'We stand for peace and champion the cause of peace,' he said. 'But we are not afraid of threats and are prepared to match the instigators of war blow for blow. Those who try attack us will receive a crushing repulse to teach them not poke their pig snouts into our Soviet garden. Replace the carpct~ comrade.'

He disappeared, closing the trapdoor after him.

O'Brian gaped at the floorboards and then at Kelso.

'What the fuck?'

'And where the hell have you been?' Kelso grabbed the satchel and quickly stuffed it back into his jacket. 'Never mind him,' he said, rolling back the carpet. 'Let's just get out of here.’

But before either of them could move a skull appeared at the cabin windows - two round eyes and a slit for a mouth. A boot kicked wood. The door splintered.

THEY were made to stand against the wall - shoved against the rough planked wall - and Kelso felt cold metal jabbed into the nape of his neck. O'Brian was a bit too slow on the uptake so he had his forehead banged against the planking, just to mend his manners and teach him a little Russian.

Their wrists were trussed tightly behind their backs with thin plastic.

A man said roughly, "Where's the other?' He raised the butt of his rifle.

'Under the floorboards!' shouted O'Brian. 'Tell 'em, Fluke, he's under the fucking floorboards!'

'He's under the floorboards,' said a well-educated voice in Russian that Kelso thought he recognised.

Heavy boots clumped on the wooden floor. Turning his head, Kelso saw one of the masked men walk to the end of the cabin, point his gun at the ground and casually begin firing. He flinched at the deafening noise in the confined space and when he looked again the man was walking backwards, spraying bullets into the floor in neat rows, his weapon leaping in his hands like a pneumatic drill. Wood chips sprouted, ricocheted, and Kelso felt something strike the side of his head, just below his ear. Blood started trickling down his neck. He turned the other way and pressed his cheek to the wall. The noise stopped, there was a rattle of a fresh magazine being fitted, then it started again, then stopped. Something crashed to the floor. There was a stink of cordite. Acrid smoke made him clench his eyes and when he opened them again he could see the blond-headed spy from Moscow. The spy shook his head in disgust.

The man who had been firing kicked aside the shredded carpet and lifted the trapdoor. He shone a flashlight down through the rising dust, then clambered into the hole and disappeared. They could hear him moving around beneath their feet. After thirty seconds he reappeared at the door of the cabin, pulling off his mask.

'There's a tunnel. He's got out.

He produced a pistol and gave it to the blond man.

'Watch them.'

Then he gestured to the other two and they clattered out into the snow

SUVORIN FELT WET. He glanced down and saw that he was standing in a puddle of melted snow. His trousers were sodden. So was the bottom of his overcoat. A piece of frayed silk lining trailed on the floor. And his shoes - his shoes were leaking and scuffed - they were ruined. One of the two bound men - the reporter: O'Brian, wasn't that his name? - started to turn and say something.

'Shut up!' said Suvorin, furiously. He clicked off the safety catch and waved the gun. 'Shut up and face the wall!'

He sat down at the table and wiped his damp sleeve across his face.

Absolutely ruined. He noticed Stalin glowering at him. He picked up the framed photograph with his free hand and tilted it to the light. It was signed. And what was all this other stuffl Passports, identity papers, a pipe, old gramophone records, an envelope with a piece of hair in it... It looked as though someone had been trying to perform a conjuring trick. He sprinkled the hair into his palm and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. The fibres were dry, grey, coarse, like a clump of bristles. He let them fall and wiped his hands on his coat. Then he laid the pistol on the table and massaged his eyes.

'Sit down,' he said, wearily, 'why don't you?'

Outside in the forest there was a long jabbering burst of gunfire.

'You know, he said sadly to Kelso, 'you really should have caught that plane.'

'WHAT happens next?' said the Englishman. It was obviously difficult for them to sit properly. They were on their knees, next to the wall. The stove had gone out. It was getting very cold. Suvorin had slid one of the records out of its paper sleeve and put it on the turntable of the ancient gramophone.

'It's a surprise,' he said.

'I am an accredited member of the foreign press corps -, began O'Brian.

The crack-crack of a high velocity rifle was answered by a heavier bang.

'The American ambassador -, said O'Brian.

Suvorin wound the handle of the gramophone very fast -anything to block out the noise from outside - and placed the needle on the record. Through a hailstorm of crackles, a tinny orchestra struck up a wavering tune.

More gunfire. Someone was screaming, far away, through the trees. Two shots followed in rapid succession. The screaming stopped and O'Brian started whining, 'The/re going to shoot us. They'll shoot us, too!' He struggled against the plastic wire and tried to rise, but Suvorin put his wet shoe on O'Brian's chest and gently pushed him down again.

'Let us,' he said, in English, 'at least try to act like civilised men.

This was not what I dreamed for myself, either, he wanted to say. It formed no part of my life's dreams, I do assure you, to arrive in some stinking madman's hovel and hunt him down like an animal. Honestly, I believe you would find me an amusing fellow, if only circumstances were different.

He made an effort to follow the beat of the music, conducting with his forefinger, but he couldn't find any rhythm, there seemed to be no sense to it.

'You'd better have brought an army,' said the Englishman, because if it's just three against one out there, they don't stand a chance.'

'Nonsense,' said Suvorin, patriotically. 'They're our special forces. They'll get him. And yes, if necessary, they will send an army.

'Why?'

'Because I work for frightened men, Dr Kelso, some of whom are just about old enough to have been touched by Comrade Stalin.' He frowned at the gramophone. What a racket. It sounded like howling dogs. 'Do you know what Lenin called the Tsarovich, when the Bolsheviks were deciding the fate of the Imperial Family? He called the boy "the living banner". And there's only one way, Lenin said, to deal with a living banner.'

Kelso shook his head. 'You don't understand this man. Believe me - you should see him - he is criminally insane. He's probably killed half a dozen people over the past thirty years. He's nobody's banner. He's crazy.

'Everyone said Zhirinovsky was crazy, remember? His foreign policy towards the Baltic States was to bury nuclear waste along the Lithuanian border and blow it into Vilnius every night using giant fans. He still got twenty-three per cent of the vote in the ninety-three election.'

Suvorin couldn't stand this unearthly, bestial music a moment more. He lifted the needle.

They heard a solitary shot.

Suvorin held his breath for an answering salvo.

'Perhaps,' he said doubtfully, after waiting a long while, 'I should think about calling up that army -,

'THERE are traps,' said Kelso.

'What?'

Suvorin was at the doorway, peering tentatively into the twilight. He looked back into the cabin. He had looped some rope around their wrists and attached it to the cold stove.

'He's put down traps. Be careful where you tread.'

'Thank you.' Suvorin planted his foot on the top step. 'I'll be back.'

His plan - and that was a good word, he thought, that had a certain ring to it: his plan - was to get back to the snow plough and use the radio to summon reinforcements. So he headed towards the entrance to the clearing, the only fixed point he had. There were good footprints to follow here, although it was getting dark, and he must have been midway along the rough path when he felt the explosion and a second later he heard it, a great rush of snow marking the passage of the shock wave as it travelled through the forest. Cascades of crystal pattered down from the higher branches and bounced off into space, leaving tiny clouds of particles hanging in the air like puffs of breath.

He spun around, the gun held out in a double grip, pointing uselessly in the direction of the blast.

He panicked then and began to run - a comic figure, a jerking marionette - trying to bring his knees up as high as they would go to avoid the sucking, clinging snow His breath was coming in sobs.

He was so intent on keeping going he almost tripped over the first body.

It was one of the soldiers. He had been caught in a trap -a huge trap: a bear trap, maybe - so big and powerfully sprung, the jaws of it had actually clamped into the bone above his knee. There was a lot of blood smeared around in the flattened snow, blood from the shattered leg and blood from a big head wound that gaped through the back of the ski-mask like a second mouth.

The corpse of the other soldier was a few paces further on. Unlike the first man, he was lying on his back, his arms outstretched, his legs arranged in a perfect figure 4. There was a puddle of blood on his chest.

Suvorin put down his gun, took off his gloves and checked the pulses of both men - although he knew it was useless -pulling aside the layers of clothing to feel their warm, dead wrists.

How had he ambushed them both?

He looked around.

Like this, probably: he had laid the trap on the path, buried in the snow, and had lured them over it; the man in the lead had missed it, somehow, the man in the rear had been caught - that was the screaming - and the lead man had turned to help only to find their quarry behind them - that was what was cunning: they wouldn't have expected that. And so he had been shot full in the front, and then the second man had been taken out at leisure, executioner-style, with a bullet at point-blank range in the back of the head.

And then he had taken their AK-74s.

What kind of creature was this?

Suvorin knelt by the head of the first soldier and pulled off his ski-mask. He took out his ear-piece and pressed it to his own ear. He thought he could hear something. A rushing sound. He found the little microphone attached to the inside cuff of the dead man's left hand.

'Kretov?' he whispered. 'Kretov?' But the only voice he could hear was his own.

Then the gunfire started up again.

THE fire was like a red dawn through the trees, and when Suvorin stepped out on to the track he could feel the heat of the burning snow plough, even at a range of a hundred yards. The fuel tank must have exploded and the inferno had melted the winter all around it. The vehicle stood blazing in the centre of its own scorched spring.

The gunfire was continuing sporadically, but that wasn't Kretov returning fire. That was boxes of ammunition, exploding in the cab. Kretov himself was sitting down, doubled over in the centre of the track, beside the RP46, as dead as his comrades. He looked as though he had been shot while trying to set up the machine gun. He had got as far as mounting it on to the bipod but he hadn't had time to open the cannister of ammunition.

Suvorin went up to him and touched his arm and Kretov toppled over, his grey eyes open, a look of astonishment on his broad, pink face. Suvorin couldn't see a wound, not at first, anyway. Perhaps the heroic major of the Spetsnaz had simply died of fright?

Another loud bang from the direction of the fire made him look up, to find himself being watched by Comrade Stalin, in his generalissimo's uniform and cap.

The GenSec was some way up the track, standing before the fire, his left hand on his hip, his right holding a rifle almost casually across his shoulder. His shadow was long in proportion '~ to his squat torso. It danced and flickered on the churned snow.

Suvorin thought he would choke on his own heart. They looked at one another. Then Stalin started marching towards him. And marching - that was the word for the way he walked: quickly, but without hurrying, swinging his arms up across his barrel chest, left-right, left-right: look lively there, comrade, here I come! Suvorin fumbled in his pocket for his pistol and realised he had left it in the trees, beside the first two corpses.

Left-right, left-right - the living banner, kicking up the snow -Suvorin didn't dare look at him an instant longer. He knew that if he did he would never move.

'Why is your face so shifty, comrade?' called the advancing figure. 'Why can't you look Comrade Stalin directly in the eyes?'

Suvorin swung the barrel of the RP46, his memory toiling back twenty years, to his compulsory army training, shivering on some godforsaken range on the outskirts of Vitebsk. 'Cock gun by pulling operating handle to the rear. Pull rear sight base to the rear and lift cover. Lay belt, open side up, on the feed plate so that the leading round contacts the cartridge stop and close cover. Pull trigger and gun willfire. .

He closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger and the machine gun jumped in his hands, sending a couple of dozen bullets sawing into a birch tree at a range of twenty yards.

When he dared to check the track again Comrade Stalin had disappeared.

IF Suvorin's memory served him right, the ammunition belt of the RP46 carried 250 rounds, which the gun would dispatch at a rate of, say, 600 rounds per minute. So, given he'd already used a few, he probably had something less than thirty seconds of firepower with which to cover 360 degrees of track and forest, with night coming on and the temperature plunging to a level that would kill him in a couple of hours.

He had to get out of the open, that was for sure. He couldn't keep on like this, scrambling round and round like tethered goat in a tiger shoot, trying to see through the gloom of the trees.

He seemed to remember some abandoned wooden huts at the far end of the track. They might provide a bit of cover. He needed to get his back against a wall somewhere, needed time to think.

A wolf howled in the forest.

He disconnected the machine gun from the bipod and hoisted the long barrel up on to his shoulder, the ammunition belt heavy on his arm, his knees almost buckling under the weight, his feet sinking deeper into the snow.

The full-throated howling came again. It was not a wolf’s all, he thought. It was a man - a man's exultant shout: a blood cry.

He started wading up the track, away from the burning snow plough, and he sensed that there was someone walking parallel with him through the trees, keeping an easy pace, laughing at his ponderous attempt at flight. He was being played with, that was all. He would be allowed to get within a few paces of his destination, then he would be shot.

He came out of the neck of the track and into the abandoned settlement and headed for the nearest wooden building. The windows were out, the door had gone, half the roof was missing, it stank. He put down the gun and crawled into the corner, then turned and dragged the weapon after him. He wedged himself against the wall and pointed the barrel at the door, his finger on the trigger.

KELSO heard the big explosion, gunfire, a long pause, and then the short and heavy clatter of a much bigger weapon opening up. He and O'Brian were on their feet by now, frantically trying to find some way of cutting the rope that bound them to the stove chimney. Each sound from the forest drove them to more desperate efforts. The thin plastic was digging into his wrists, his fingers were slippery with blood.

There was blood on the Russian, too, when he appeared in the doorway. Kelso saw it as he came towards them, unsheathing his knife - smeared across his face, on his forehead and on either cheek, like a hunter who had dipped himself in his kill.

'Comrades,' he reported, 'we are dizzy with success. Three are dead. Only one still lives. Are there more?'

'More coming.

'How many more?'

'Fifty,' said Kelso. 'A hundred.' He tugged against the rope. 'Comrade, we must get clear of this place, or they will kill us all. Even you cannot stop so many. They are going to send an army.

ACCORDING to Suvorin's watch, about fifteen minutes had elapsed.

The temperature was plunging as the light faded. His body began to vibrate with the cold - a steady, violent shaking he couldn't stop.

'Come on,' he whispered. 'Come on and finish the job.' But nobody came.

Comrade Stalin's capacity for springing surprises was truly endless.

THE next thing Suvorin heard was a distant click, followed by a whirr.

Click-whirr. Click-whirr.

Now what was he doing?

Suvorin found it hard to move at first. The frost had locked his joints and starched his wet clothes to board. Still, he was on his feet in time to hear the mysterious click-whirr turn suddenly into a cough and then a roar as an engine started.

No, no, not an engine exactly: a motor - an outboard motor- He was baffled for a moment, but then he realised. Fifteen miles, major. It's right on the river. .

WELL, the RP46 didn't get any lighter, nor the snow any easier, and now he had the oncoming darkness to contend with, but he tried. He made a valiant effort.

'Bastard, bastard, bastard,' he chanted as he ran, following the pulse of the revving outboard as it led him through the fifty yards or so of trees that screened the deserted fishing settlement from the river.

He crashed through the last barrier of undergrowth and came out on to the crest of a bank that sloped down steeply to the water's edge. He stumbled along the ridge, heading upstream. Some pieces of electronic equipment lay spread out in the snow. Grey ice extended for a little distance and the black water rushed beyond his reach - an immensity of it: he couldn't see the trees on the opposite shore. And already the little boat was heading towards the centre, and turning now, carving a great white sickle of spray in the darkness. He could just make out three crouched figures. One seemed to be trying to struggle to his feet, but another pulled him down.

Suvorin dropped to his knees and unshouldered the machine gun, fumbling to close the cover on the ammunition belt, which promptly jammed. By the time he had it free and ready to fire the boat had rounded the curve of the river - and then he couldn't see it any more, he could only hear it.

He put down the gun and bent his head.

Beside him, like a space probe landed on some hostile p1anet~ the antenna of a satellite dish pointed low across the Dvina to the dissolving horizon. One set of cables connected the dish to a car battery. Another was linked to a small grey box labelled 'Transportable Video & Audio Transmission Terminal'. Even as he watched, a row of ten red zeros in a digital display winked at him briefly, faded and died.

He had an overwhelming sense of emptiness, squatting there, as if some malevolent force had erupted from this place and escaped for ever, a comet trailing darkness.

For perhaps half a minute he listened to the sound of the outboard motor and then that too was gone and he was left alone in the utter silence.

THE FIGURE SUVORIN had seen trying to rise in the boat was O'Brian - my gear!, he shouted, the tapes! - and the figure who had pulled him down was Kelso -forget the bloody gear, forget the tapes. For a moment the boat rocked dangerously, and the Russian cursed them both, and then O'Brian moaned and sat down quickly and put his head in his hands.

Kelso couldn't make out anyone on the shore as they roared away from it. All he could see was the sky pulsing red above the tips of the darkening firs where something big wa~ burning fiercely, and then very quickly a bend in the river obliterated even that and he was conscious only of speed - of the racket of the outboard motor and the rushing current hurtling them downstream through the forest.

He was thinking with great clarity now, everything else in his life irrelevant, everything narrowed to this one single point: survival. And it seemed to him that all that counted was to put as much distance as possible between themselves and this spot. He didn't know how many men were left alive behind them, but the best he reckoned they could hope for was that a search party wouldn't set out till the morning. The worst scenario was that the blond-headed man had radioed for help and Archangel would already be sealed.

There was no food or water in the boat, just a couple of oars, a boathook, the Russian's suitcase, his rifle, and a small tank that smelled as though it was leaking cheap fuel. In the darkness he had to hold his watch up very close to his eyes. It was just after half-past six. He leaned over and said to O'Brian, 'What time did you say the Moscow train left Archangel?'

O'Brian lifted his head long enough from his despair to mutter, 'Ten past eight.'

Kelso twisted round and shouted above the engine and the wind, 'Comrade, could we get to Archangel?' There was no reply. He tapped his watch. 'Could we get to the centre of Archangel in an hour?'

The Russian didn't seem to have heard. His hand was on the tiller and he was staring straight ahead. With his collar turned up and his cap pulled down, it was impossible to make out his expression. Kelso tried shouting again and then gave up. It was a new kind of horror, he thought, to realise that they probably owed their lives to him - that he was now their ally - and that their futures were at the mercy of his unfathomable mind.

THEY were heading roughly north-west and the cold was being hammered into them from all sides - a Siberian wind at their backs, the freezing water beneath their feet, the rushing air on their faces. O'Brian remained monosyllabic, inconsolable. There was a light in the prow, and Kelso found himself concentrating on that - on the shifting yellow path and the roiling water, black and viscous as it began to solidify.

After half an hour the snow resumed, the flakes huge and luminous in the dark, like falling ash. Occasionally something knocked against the hull and Kelso spotted lumps of ice drifting in the current. It was as if winter was clutching at them, determined not to let them go, and Kelso wondered if fear was the reason for the Russian's silence. Killers could be frightened, like anyone else, perhaps more than anyone else. Stalin lived half his life in a state of terror - scared of aeroplanes, scared of visiting the front, never eating food unless it had been tasted for poison, changing his guards, his routes, his beds - when you had murdered so many, you knew how easily death could come. And it could come for them here very easily, he thought. They would run into an ice barrier, the water would freeze behind them, they would be trapped; the ice-crust would be too thin to risk crawling across, and here they would die, covered for decency under a shroud of snow.

He wondered what people would make of it. Margaret -what would she say when she learned her ex-husband's body had been found in a forest nearly a thousand miles from Moscow. And his boys? He cared what they would think: he wouldn't miss much, but he would miss his sons. Perhaps he should try to scrawl them a heroic final note, like Captain Scott in Antarctica: 'These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale -'

He thought that perhaps he didn't fear dying as much as he had expected he would, which surprised him as he had little physical courage and no religious faith. But a man would have to be a rare fool - wouldn't he? - to spend a lifetime studying history without acquiring at least some sense of perspective on his own mortality. Perhaps that was why he'd done it - devoted so many years to writing about the dead. He'd never thought of it that way.

He tried to imagine his obituaries: 'never quite fulfilled his early promise... never published the major work of scholarship of which he was once judged capable ... the bizarre circumstances of his premature death may never be fully explained 'The memorialising articles would all be the same and he would know every one of their grudging, timeserving authors. The Russian opened the throttle wider and Kelso could hear him, muttering to himself.

OTHER half hour passed.

Kelso had his eyes closed and it was O'Brian who saw the lights first. He nudged Kelso and pointed, and after a second or two, Kelso saw them as well - high gantry lights on the chimneys and cranes of the big wood pulp factory on the headland outside the city. Presently more lights began to appear in the darkness on either bank and the night sky ahead became fractionally paler. Perhaps they would make it after all?

His face was frozen. It was hard to speak. He said, 'Got the Archangel map?'

O'Brian turned stiffly. He looked like a white marble statue coming to life and as he moved small slabs of frozen snow cracked and slid off his jacket into the bottom of the boat. He dragged the city plan out of his inside pocket and Kelso shifted forwards off the thin plank that served as a seat, fell on to his hands and knees, and crawled awkwardly to the prow. He held the map to the light. The Dvina bulged as it came into the city, and a pair of islands split it into three channels. They needed to keep to the northern one.

It was a quarter to eight.

He moved back to the stern and managed to shout, 'Comrade!' He made a chopping motion with his hand to starboard. The Russian gave no sign of having understood but a minute later, as the dark mass of the island emerged out of the snow, he steered to the north of it and soon afterwards Kelso made out a rusty buoy and beyond that a line of lights in the sky He cupped his hand to O'Brian's ear. 'The bridge,' he said. O'Brian pulled down his hood and squinted at him. 'The bridge,' repeated Kelso. 'The one we came over this morning.'

He pointed and very quickly they were passing beneath it - a double-bridge, half-rail, half-road: heavy ironwork dangling stalactites of ice, a strong smell of sewage and chemicals, the drumming of vehicles overhead - and when he looked back he could see the headlights of traffic moving slowly through the snow.

The familiar shape of the Harbour Master's building appeared ahead of them on the starboard side, with a jetty stretching out and boats moored to it. They hit an invisible sheet of thick ice and Kelso and O'Brian were bounced forwards. The engine cut out. The Russian restarted it and reversed, then found a channel which must have been cut by a bigger boat earlier in the evening. There was still ice but it was thinner and it splintered as their prow sliced into it. Kelso looked back at the Russian. He was standing now, peering intently at the dark corridor, his hand on the tiller, taking them in. They came alongside the jetty and he put the outboard into reverse again, slowing them, stopping. He cut the motor and leapt nimbly on to the wooden planking, holding a length of rope.

O'BRIAN was out of the boat first, with Kelso after him. They stamped and brushed the snow off themselves and tried to stretch some life back into their frozen limbs. O'Brian started to say something about finding a hotel, maybe, calling the office, but Kelso cut him off.

'No hotel. Are you listening to me? No office. And no bloody story. We're getting out of here.'

They had thirteen minutes to catch the train.

'And him?'

O'Brian nodded to the Russian who was standing quietly, holding his suitcase, watching them. He looked oddly forlorn - vulnerable, even, now that he was out of his home territory. He was obviously expecting to come with them.

'Christ almighty,' muttered Kelso. He had the map open. He didn’t know what to do. 'Let's just go.' He set off along the jetty towards the shore. O'Brian hurried after him.

'You still got the notebook?'

Kelso patted the front of his jacket.

'D'you think he's got a gun?' said O'Brian. He glanced back. 'Shit. He's following us.'

The Russian was trotting about a dozen paces behind them, wary and fearful, like a stray dog. It looked as though he had left his rifle behind in the boat. So what would he be armed with, wondered Kelso? His knife? He pushed his stiff legs forwards as hard as he could.

'But we can't just leave him -'

'Oh yes we bloody can,' said Kelso. He realised O'Brian didn't know about the Norwegian couple, or any of the others. 'I'll explain later. Just believe me - we don't want him anywhere near us.

They almost ran off the jetty and came into the big bus park in front of the Harbour Master's building - a bleak expanse of snow, a few sorrowful orange sodium lights catching the whirling flakes, nobody else about. Kelso struck north, slithering on the ice, holding on to the map. The station was at least a mile away and they were never going to make it in time, not on foot. He looked around. A ubiquitous, boxy, sand-coloured Lada, spattered with mud and grit, was emerging slowly from the street to their right, and Kelso ran towards it, flapping his arms.

In the Russian provinces, every car is a potential taxi, most drivers willing to hire themselves out on the spur of the moment, and this one was no exception. He swerved towards them, throwing up a fountain of dirty snow, and even as he pulled up he was winding down his window. He looked respectable enough, muffled against the cold - a schoolteacher, maybe, a clerk. Weak eyes blinked at them through thick-framed spectacles. 'Going to the concert hall?'

'Do us a favour, citizen, and take us to the railway station,' said Kelso. 'Ten dollars US if we catch the Moscow train.' He opened the passenger door without waiting for an answer and tipped forward the seat, shoving O'Brian into the back, and suddenly he saw that this was their chance, because the Russian, caught by surprise, had fallen behind slightly, and was making heavy progress through the snow with his case.

'Comrade!' he shouted.

Kelso didn't hesitate. He rammed back the seat and got in, slamming the door.

'Don't you want -' began the driver, looking in his mirror.

'No,' said Kelso. 'Go.'

The Lada skidded away and he turned to look back. The Russian had set down his case and was staring after them, seemingly bewildered, a lost figure in the widening vista of the alien city. He dwindled and disappeared into the night and snow.

'Can't help but feel sorry for the poor bastard,' said O'Brian, but Kelso's only emotion was relief.

"'Gratitude,"' he said, quoting Stalin, "'is a dog's disease."'

THE Archangel railway station was at the northern edge of a big square, directly opposite a huddle of apartment blocks and wind-blasted birch trees. O'Brian threw a $10 bill in the direction of the driver and they sprinted into the gloomy terminal. Seven wood-fronted ticket kiosks with net curtains, five of them closed, a long queue outside the two that were open, a baby crying. Students, backpackers, soldiers, people of all ages and races, families with their homemade luggage - huge cardboard boxes trussed with string - children running everywhere, sliding on the dirty, melted snow.

O'Brian pushed his way to the front of the nearest line, spraying dollars, playing the westerner: 'Sorry, lady. Excuse me. There you go. Sorry. Gotta catch this train -'

Kelso had an impression of a fortune changing hands -three hundred, four hundred dollars, murmurs from the people standing round - and then, a minute later, O'Brian was striding back through the crowd, waving a pair of tickets, and they ran up the stairs to the platform.

If they were going to be stopped then this would be the place. At least a dozen militia men were standing around, all of them young, all with their caps pushed back like Imperial Army privates off to war in 1914. They stared at Kelso and O'Brian as they hurried through the terminal, but it was no more than the frank stare that all foreigners received up here. They made no move to detain them.

No alert had been issued. Whoever is running this show, thought Kelso, as they came back out into the open air, must be convinced we're already dead -Doors were being closed all the way along the great train; it must have been a quarter of a mile long. Low yellow lighting, snow falling, lovers embracing, army officers hurrying up and down with their cheap briefcases - he felt they had stepped back seventy years into some revolutionary tableau. Even the giant locomotive still had the hammer and sickle welded to its side. They found their carriage, three cars back from the engine, and Kelso held the door open while O'Brian darted across the platform to one of the babushkas selling food for the journey. She had a wart on her cheek the size of a walnut. He was still stuffing his pockets as the whistle blew.

The train pulled away so slowly it was hard at first to tell it was moving. People walked alongside it down the platform, heads bent into the snow, waving handkerchiefs. Others were holding hands through the open windows. Kelso had a sudden image of Anna Safanova here, almost fifty years ago - 'I kiss mamas dear cheeks, farewell to her, farewell to childhood'- and the full sadness and the pity of it came home to him for the first time. The people ambling along the platform began to jog and then to run. He stretched out his hand and pulled O'Brian aboard. The train lurched forwards. The station disappeared.

THEY SWAYED ALONG the narrow, blue-carpeted corridor until they found their compartment - one of eight, about halfway down the carriage. O'Brian pulled back the sliding wooden door and they lurched inside.

It was not too bad. A thousand roubles per head in 'soft' class bought two dusty, crimson banquettes facing one another, a white nylon sheet, a rolled mattress and a pillow neatly folded on each; a lot of laminated, imitation-wood panelling; green-shaded reading lamps; a little fold-up table; privacy.

Through the window they could see the spars of the iron bridge clicking past but once they were across the river there was nothing visible in the snowstorm except their own reflections staring back at them - haggard, soaking, unshaven. O'Brian drew the yellow curtains, unfastened the table and laid out their food - a grubby loaf, some kind of dried fish, a sausage, tea-bags - while Kelso went in search of hot water.

A blackened samovar stood at the far end of the corridor, opposite the cubicle of the carriage's female attendant, their provodnik~ a hefty, unsmiling woman, like a camp guard in her grey-blue uniform. She had rigged up a little mirror so she could keep an eye on everyone without stirring from her stool. He could see her watching him as he stopped to study the timetable that was fixed to the wall. They had a journey of more than twenty hours ahead of them, and thirteen stops, not counting Moscow, which they would reach just after four in the afternoon.

Twenty hours.

What were their chances of lasting that long? He tried to calculate. By mid-morning at the latest, Moscow would' know that the operation in the forest had been bungled. Then they would be bound to stop the only train out of Archangel and search it. Perhaps he and O'Brian would be wiser to get off at one of these earlier stops - Sokol, maybe, which they would reach at 7 a.m., or, better still, Vologda (Vologda was a big town) - get off the train at Vologda, get to a hotel, call the American Embassy -He heard a sliding door open behind him and a businessman in a smartly cut blue suit came out of his compartment and went in to the lavatory. His neatness made Kelso aware of his own bizarre appearance - heavy waterproof jacket, rubber boots - and he hurried on down the corridor. It would be best to stay out of sight as much as possible. He begged a couple of plastic cups off the grim-faced guard, filled them with scalding water, and made his way unsteadily back to their sleeping-berth.

THEY sat opposite one another, chewing steadily on the dry, stale food.

Kelso said he thought they should get off the train early.

'Why?'

'Because I don't think we should risk being picked up. Not before people know where we are.

O'Brian bit off a piece of bread and considered this.

'So you really think - back there in the forest - they'd've shot us?'

'Yes I do.'

O'Brian had apparently forgotten his earlier panic. He began to argue but Kelso cut him off impatiently. 'Think about it for a minute. Think how easy it could have been. All the Russians would have had to say is that some maniac took us hostage in the woods and they sent in the special forces to rescue us. They could have made it look as though he'd murdered us.

'But nobody would've believed that -'

'Of course they would. He was a psychopath.'

'A psychopath. This is why I didn't want to bring him with us. Half the people in that cemetery, he put there. And there were others.'

'Others?' O'Brian had stopped eating.

'At least five. A young Norwegian couple, and three other poor bastards, Russians who just happened to take a wrong turning. I found their papers while you were down at the river. They'd all been made to confess to spying, and then they were shot. I tell you, he's a sick piece of work. I only hope to God I never have to see him again. So should you.'

O'Brian seemed to be having difficulty swallowing. There were bits of fish stuck between his teeth. He said quietly, 'What d'you think's going to happen to him?'

'They'll get him in the end, I imagine. They'll close down Archangel until they find him. And I don't blame them, to be honest. Can you imagine what Mamantov and his people would do if they got hold of a man who looks like Stalin, talks like Stalin and comes with a written guarantee that he's Stalin's son? Wouldn't they have had some fun with that?'

O'Brian had slumped back in his seat, his eyes shut, his face stricken, and Kelso, watching him, felt a sudden twinge of unease. In the rush of events he had entirely forgotten Mamantov. His gaze shifted from O'Brian to the wire luggage rack where the satchel was still carefully wrapped inside his jacket.

He tried to think, but he couldn't. His mind was shutting down on him. It was three days since he'd had a proper sleep

- the first night he'd sat up with Rapava, the second he'd ended in the cells beneath Moscow militia HQ, the third had been spent on the road travelling north to Archangel. He ached with exhaustion. It was all he could do to kick off his boots and begin making up his meagre bed.

'I'm all in,' he said. 'Let's work something out in the morning.'

O'Brian didn't answer.

As a flimsy precaution, Kelso locked the door.

IT must have been another twenty minutes before O'Brian finally moved. Kelso had his face to the wall by then and was drifting in the hinterland between sleep and wakefulness. He heard him unlace his boots, sigh and stretch out on the banquette. His reading lamp clicked off and the compartment was in darkness save for the blue neon night light that fizzed above the door.

The immense train rocked slowly southwards through the snow and Kelso slept, but not well. Hours passed and the sounds of the journey mingled with his uneasy dreams - the urgent whisperings from the compartments on either side; the slop slop slop of some babushka's slippers as she shuffled past in the corridor; the distant, tinny sound of a woman's voice over a loudspeaker as they stopped at the remote stations throughout the night - Nyandoma, Konosha, Yertsevo, Vozhega, Kharovsk - and people clumping on and off the train; the harsh white arc lights of the platforms shining through the thin curtains; O'Brian restless at some point, moving around.

He didn't hear the door open. All he knew was that something rustled in the compartment for a fraction of a second, and then a hard pad of flesh clamped down over his mouth. His eyes jerked open as the point of a knife began to be inserted into his throat, at that point where the flesh of the under-jaw meets the ridged tube of the windpipe. He struggled to sit up but the hand pressed him down. His arms were somehow pinned beneath the twisted sheet. He couldn't see anyone but a voice whispered close to his ear - so close he could feel the hot wetness of the man's breath - 'A comrade who deserts a comrade is a cowardly dog, and all such dogs should die a dog's death, comrade-'

The knife slid deeper.

KELSO was awake in an instant - a cry rising in his throat, his eyes wide, the thin sheet balled and clenched between his sweating hands. The gently swaying compartment was empty above him, the blue-edged darkness faintly tinged by grey. For a moment he didn't move. He could hear O'Brian breathing heavily and when eventually he turned he could see him - head lolling, mouth open, one arm flung down almost to the floor, the other crooked across his forehead. It took another couple of minutes for his panic to subside. He reached over his shoulder and lifted a corner of the curtain to check his watch. He thought it must be still the middle of the night, but to his surprise it was just after seven. He had slept for the best part of nine hours.

He raised himself up on to his elbow and pushed the curtain a fraction higher and saw at once the head of Stalin floating towards him, disconnected in the pale dawn beside the railway track. It drew level with the window and passed away very quickly.

He stayed at the window but saw nobody else, just the scrubby land beyond the rails and the faint gleam of the electricity lines strung between the pylons seeming to swoop and rise, swoop and rise as the, train trundled on. It wasn't snowing here, but there was a cold, bleached emptiness to the emerging sky.

Someone must have been holding up a picture, he realised. Holding up a picture of Stalin. He let the curtain drop and swung his legs to the floor. Quietly, so as not to wake O'Brian, he tugged on his rubber boots and cautiously opened the door to the empty corridor. He peered both ways. Nobody about. He closed the latch behind him and began walking towards the rear of the train.

He passed through an empty carriage identical to the 6ne he had just left, all the while glancing at the passing landscape, and then 'soft' class gave way to 'hard'. The accommodation here was much more crowded - two tiers of berths in open compartments down one side of the corridor, a single row arranged lengthwise on the other. Sixty people to a car. Luggage crammed everywhere. Some passengers sitting up, yawning, raw-eyed. Others still snoring, impervious to the waking carriage. People queuing for the stinking toilet. A mother changing a baby's filthy nappy (he caught the sour reek of milky faeces as he pushed past). The smokers huddled at the open windows at the far end of the carriage. The scent of their untipped tobacco. The sweet coldness of the rushing air.

He went through four 'hard' carriages and was on the threshold of the fifth, and had decided this would be the last - had concluded he was worrying about nothing: he must have dreamt it, the countryside was empty - when he saw another picture. Or, rather, he realised it was a pair of pictures coming towards him, one of Stalin, the other of Lenin, being held aloft by an elderly couple, the man wearing medals, standing on a slight embankment. The train was slowing for a station and he could see them clearly as he passed - creased and leathery faces, almost brown, exhausted. And a couple of seconds later he saw them turn, suddenly years younger~ smiling and waving at someone they had just seen in the carriage Kelso was about to enter.

Time seemed to decelerate, dreamily, along with the train. A line of railway workers in quilted jackets, leaning on their pick-axes and shovels, raised their gloved fists in salute. The carriage darkened as it drew alongside a platform. He could hear music, faintly, above the metallic scrape of the brakes -the old Soviet national anthem again -Party of Lenin!

Party of Stalin!

- and a small band in pale blue uniforms slid past the window.

The train stopped with a sigh of pneumatics and he saw a sign: VOLOGDA. People were cheering on the platform. People were running. He opened the door to the carriage and there facing him was the Russian, still in his father's uniform, asleep, sitting no more than a dozen paces away, his suitcase wedged in the rack above his head, a clear space all around him, passengers standing back, respectful, watching.

The Russian was beginning to wake. His head stirred. He batted something away from his face with his hand and his eyes flickered open. He saw diat he was being observed and carefully, warily, he straightened his back. Someone in the carriage started to clap and the applause was taken up by the others, spreading outside to the platform where people had crammed up against the window to watch. The Russian stared around him, the fear in his eyes giving way to bewilderment. A man nodded encouragingly at him, smiling, clapping, and he slowly nodded back, as if gradually beginning to understand some foreign ritual, and then he started to applaud softly in return, which only increased the volume of adulation. He nodded modestly and Kelso imagined he must have spent thirty years dreaming of this moment. Really, comrades, his expression seemed to say, I am only one of you - a plain man, rough in my ways - but if venerating me in some way gives you pleasure - He wasn't aware of Kelso watching him - the historian was just another face in the crowd - and after a few seconds Kelso turned and began fighting his way back through the jostling throng.

His mind was in a turmoil.

The Russian must have got on board the train in Archangel, a minute or so after them - that was conceivable, if he had copied what they'd done and flagged down a car. That he could understand.

But this?

He knocked into a woman who was pushing her way roughly along the corridor, struggling with a pair of carrier bags, a red flag and an old camera.

He said to her, 'What's happening?'

'Haven't you heard? Stalin's son is with us! It's a miracle!' She couldn't stop smiling. Some of her teeth were metal.

'But how do you know?'

'It's been on the television,' she said, as if this settled matters. 'All night! And when I woke, his picture was still there and they were saying he'd been seen on the Moscow train!'

Someone pushed into her from behind and she was pitched into him. His face was very close to hers. He tried to disentangle himself but she clutched on to him, staring hard into his eyes.

'But you,' she said, 'you know all this! You were on the television, saying it was true!' She threw her heavy arms around him. Her bags jabbed into his back. 'Thank you. Thank you. It's a miracle!'

He could see a bright, white light moving along the platform behind her head and he scrambled past her. A television light. Television cameras. Big grey microphones. Technicians walking backwards, stumbling over one another. And in the middle of this meke, striding ahead towards his destiny, talking confidently, surrounded by a phalanx of black-jacketed bodyguards, was Vladimir Mamantov.

IT took Kelso several minutes to claw and squeeze his way back through the crowds. When he opened the door to their compartment O'Brian had his back to him and was staring through the window. At the sound of Kelso entering, he wheeled round quickly, his hands up, his palms outwards -pre-emptive, guilty, apologetic.

'Now, I didn't know this was going to happen, Fluke, I swear to you -'What have you done?'

'Nothing -''What have you done?'

O'Brian flinched and muttered, 'I filed the story.

'You what?'

'I filed the story,' he said, sounding more defiant now. 'Yesterday, from the river bank, while you were talking to him in the hut. I cut the pictures to three minutes forty, laid a commentary, converted them to digital and sent them over the satellite. I nearly told you last night, but I didn't want to upset you -'Upset me?'

'Come on, Fluke, for all I knew the story might not have gone through. Battery could've failed or something. Gear could've been shot up -'

Kelso was struggling to keep pace with all that was happening - the Russian on the train, the excitement, Mamantov. They still hadn't left Vologda, he noticed.

'These pictures - what time would they have been seen here?'

'Maybe nine o'clock last night.'

'And they would have run - what? Often? "On the h6ur, every hour"?'

'I guess so.'

'For eleven hours?And on other channels, too? Would they have sold them to the Russian networks?'

'They'd've given them to the Russians, as long as they were credited. It's good advertising, you know? CNN probably took them. Sky. BBC World -,

He couldn't help looking pleased.

'And you also used the interview with me, about the notebook?'

The hands came back up, defensively.

'Now, I don't know anything about that. I mean, okay, they had it, sure. I cut that and sent it back from Moscow before we left.'

'You irresponsible bastard,' said Kelso, slowly. 'You do know Mamantov's on the train?'

'Yeah. I saw him just now.' He glanced nervously at the window. 'Wonder what he's doing here?'

And there was something in the way he said this - a slight falseness of tone: a pretence at being offhand - that made Kelso freeze. After a long pause he said, quietly, 'Did Mamantov put you up to this?'

O'Brian hesitated and Kelso was conscious of swaying slightly~ like a boxer about to go down for the final time, or a drunk.

'Christ almighty, you've set me up -'

'No,' said O'Brian, 'that's not true. Okay, I admit Mamantov called me up once - I told you we'd met a few times. But all of this - finding the notebook, coming up here

- no: that was all us, I swear. You and me. I knew nothing about what we'd find.'

Kelso closed his eyes. It was a nightmare.

'When did he call?'

'At the very beginning. It was just a tip. He didn't mention Stalin or anything else.'

'The very beginning?'

'The night before I showed up at the symposium. He said:

"Go to the Institute of Marxism-Leninism with your camera, Mr O'Brian" - you know the way he talks - "find Dr Kelso, ask him if there is an announcement he wants to make." That was all he said. He put the phone down on me. Anyway, his tips are always good, so I went. Jesus -' he laughed ' - why else d'you think I was there? To film a bunch of historians talking about the archives? Do me a favour!'

'You irresponsible, duplicitous bloQ4y bastard-'

Kelso took a step across the compartment and O'Brian backed away. But Kelso ignored him. He'd had a better idea. He dragged down his jacket from the luggage rack.

O'Brian said, 'What're you doing?'

'What I would have done at the beginnings if I'd known the truth. I'm going to destroy that bloody notebook.'

He pulled the satchel out of the inside pocket.

'But then you'll ruin the whole thing,' protested O'Brian. 'No notebook - no proof- no story. We'll look like complete assholes.'

'Good.'

'I'm not sure I can let you do that -'

'Just try and bloody stop me -'

It was the shock of the blow as much as the force of it that felled him. The compartment turned upside down and he was lying on his back.

'Don't make me hit you again,' begged O'Brian, looming over him. 'Please, Fluke. I like you too much for that.'

He held out his hand, but Kelso rolled away. He couldn't get his breath. His face was in the dust. Beneath his hands he could feel the heavy vibrations of the locomotive. He brought his fingers up to his mouth and touched his lip. It was bleeding slightly. He could taste salt. The big engine revved again, as if the driver was bored of waiting, but still the train didn't move.

IN MOSCOW, COLONEL Yuri Arsenyev, clumsily juggling technologies, had a telephone receiver wedged between his shoulder and his ear, and a television remote control in his plump hands. He pointed it at the big television screen in the corner of his office and tried hopelessly to raise the volume, boosting first the brightness and then the contrast before he was at last able to hear what Mamantov was saying.

.... flew up here from Moscow the moment I heard the news. I am therefore boarding this train to offer my protection, and that of the Aurora movement, to this historic figure, and we deft the great fascist usurper in the Kremlin to try to prevent us from reaching together the once and fi4ture seat of Soviet power .

The past twelve hours had already delivered a succession of unpleasant shocks to the chief of the RT Directorate, but this was the greatest. First, at eight o'clock the previous evening, there had been the anxious call reporting that Spetsnaz HQ had lost all communication with Suvorin and his unit in the forest. Then, an hour later, the first television pictures of the lunatic raving in his hut had begun to be broadcast ('Such is the law ofcapitalism - to beat the backward and the weak. It is the jungle law of capitalism...) Reports that the man had been seen on ~lie Moscow sleeper had reached Yasenevo just before dawn and a scratch force of militia units and MVD had been assembled at Vologda to stop the train. And now this!

Well, to take a man off under cover of darkness in some piddling little halt like Konosha or Yertsevo - that was one thing. But to storm a train in daylight, in full view of the media, in a city as big as Vologda, with V. P. Mamantov an~1 his Aurora thugs on hand to put up a fight - that was something else entirely.

Arsenyev had called the Kremlin.

He was therefore hearing Mamantov's ponderous tones twice - once via the television in his own office and then again, a fraction later, coming down the telephone, filtered through the sound of an ailing man's laboured breathing. In the background at the other end of the line someone was shouting, there were general sounds of panic and commotion. He heard the clink of a glass and a liquid being poured.

Oh, please, he thought. Not vodka, surely. Please. Not even him. Not this early in the morning -On the screen, Mamantov had turned and was boarding the train. He waved at the cameras. The band was playing. People were applauding.

Holy mother -Arsenyev could feel the lurching of his heart, the clenching

of his bronchial tubes. Getting air into his lungs was like sucking mud through a straw.

He took a couple of squirts on his inhaler.

'No,' grunted the familiar voice in Arsenyev's ear, and the line went dead.

'No,' wheezed Arsenyev, quickly, pointing at Vissari Netto.

'No,' said Netto, who was sitting on the sofa, also holding a telephone, patched through on a secure military circuit to the MVD commander in Vologda. 'I repeat: no move to be made. Stand your men down. Let the train go.

'The right decision,' said Arsenyev, replacing the receiver. 'There could have been shooting. It wouldn't have looked good.' Looking good was all that mattered now.

For a while Arsenyev said nothing as he contemplated, with increasing unease, this final fork in his life's road. One route, it seemed to him, took him to retirement, pension and a dacha; the other to almost certain dismissal, an official inquiry into illegal assassination attempts and, quite possibly, jail.

'Abandon the whole operation,' he said.

Netto's pen began to move across his pad. Deep in their fleshy sockets, like a pair of berries in dough, Arsenyev's little eyes blinked in alarm.

'No, no, no, man! Don't write any of this down! Just do it. Pull the surveillance off Mamantov's apartment. Remove the protection from the girl. Abort the whole thing.'

'And Archangel, colonel? We've still got a plane waiting up there for Major Suvorin.'

Arsenyev tugged at his thick neck for a few seconds. In his perennially fertile mind, the form of an unattributable briefing for the foreign media was already beginning to take shape: 'reports of shooting in the forest. . . regrettable incident.., rogue officer took matters into his own han~... disobeyed strict orders ... tragic outcome ... profound apologies...'

Poor Feliks, he thought.

'Order it back to Moscow.'

IT was as if the train had been held in check too long, so that when the brakes were finally released it lunged forwards and then stopped abruptly, and O'Brian, like the clapper of a beli, was slammed into the front and back of the compartment. The satchel flew out of his hands.

Very slowly, creaking and protesting~ and with the same infinitesimal speed as when they left Archangel, the locomotive began to haul them out of Vologda.

Kelso was still on the floor.

No notebook - no proof- no story-'

He dived for the satchel and scooped it in one hand, got the fingertips of his other up on to the door handle, and was attempting to rise when he felt O'Brian grab his legs and try to drag him back. The handle tipped, the door slid open and he flopped out on to the carpeted corridor, kicking backwards frantically with his heels at O'Brian's head. He felt a satisfying contact of hard rubber on flesh and bone. There was a howl of pain. The boot came off and he left it behind like a lizard losing the tip of its tail. He limped away down the corridor on his stockinged foot.

The narrow passage was clogged with anxious 'soft' class passengers - 'Did you hear?' 'Is it true?'- and it was impossible to make quick progress. O'Brian was coming after him. He could hear his shouts. At the end of the carriage the window of the door was open and he briefly considered hurling the satchel out on to the tracks. But the train hadn't cleared Vologda, was travelling much too slowly - the notebook was bound to land intact, he thought: was certain to be found -'Fluke!'

He ran into the next carriage and realised too late that he was heading back towards 'hard' again, which was a mistake because 'hard' was where Mamantov and his thugs had boarded - and here, indeed was one of Mamantov's men, hastening down the corridor towards him, pushing people out of his way.

Kelso grabbed the door handle nearest him. It was locked. But the second handle turned and he almost fell into the empty compartment, locking the door after him. Inside it was shaded, the curtains closed, the berths unmade, a stale smell of cold, male sweat - whoever had occupied it must have got off at Vologda. He tried to open the window but it was stuck. The Aurora man was battering at the door, shouting at him to open up. The handle rattled furiously. Kelso unfastened the satchel and tipped out the contents and had his lighter in his hand as the lock gave way.

THE blinds of Zinaida Rapava's apartment were drawn. The lights were off. The television screen flickered in the corner of her tiny flat like a cold blue hearth.

There had been a plainclothes guard outside on the landing all night - Bunin to start with, and then a different man - and a militia car parked ostentatiously opposite the entrance to the apartment block. It was Bunin who had told her to keep the blinds closed and not to go out. She didn't like Bunin and she could tell he didn't like her. When she asked him how long she would have to stay like this, he had shrugged. Was she a prisoner, then? He had shrugged again.

She had lain in a foetal curl on her bed for the best part of twenty hours, listening to her neighbours coming home from work, then some of them going out for the evening. Later, she heard them preparing for bed. And she had discovered, lying in the darkness, that as long as something occupied her eye, she could prevent herself seeing her father:

she could block out the images of the broken figure on the trolley. So she had watched television all night. And at one point, hopping between a game show and a black-and-white American movie, she had lighted on the pictures from the forest. Freedom alone is not enough, by far ... It is very difficult, comrades, to live on freedom alone...'

She had watched, hypnotised, as the night went on, how the story had spread like a stain across the networks, until she could recite it by heart. There was her father's lock-up, and the notebook, and Kelso turning the pages ('it's genuine - I'd stake my life on it'). There was the old woman pointing at a map. There was the strange man walking across the forest clearing and staring into the camera as he spoke. He ranted part of a hate-filled speech and that had nagged at her memory for a while in the early hours, until she remembered that her father had sometimes played a record of it when she was a child.

('You should listen to this, girl -you might learn something.)

He was frightening, this man, comic and sinister -Aike Zhirinovsky, or Hitler - and when it was reported that he had been seen on the Moscow train, heading south, she felt almost as if he were coming for her. She could imagine him stamping down the halls of the big hotels, his boots hammering on the marble, his coat flying behind him, smashing the windows of the expensive boutiques, hurling the foreigners out on to the pavements, looking for her. She could see him in Robotnik, overturning the bar, calling the girls whores and shouting at them to cover themselves. He would paint out the western signs, shatter the neon, empty the streets, shut down the airport -She knew they should have burned that notebook.

It was later, when she was in the bathroom, naked from the waist up, splashing cold water into her red eyes, that she heard from the television the name of Mamantov. And her first thought was, naively, that he had been arrested. After all, that was what Suvorin had promised her, wasn't it?

'We're going to find the man who did this terrible thing to your father. and we're going to lock him up.'

She grabbed a towel and darted back to the screen, hastily drying her face, and scrutinised him, and, oh yes, she knew it was him right enough, she could believe it of him - he looked a pitiless, cold bastard, with his wire-framed glasses and his thin, hard lips, and his Soviet-style hat and coat. He looked capable of anything.

He was saying something about 'the fascist usurper in the Kremlin' and it took her a minute to realise that actually he wasn't being arrested. On the contrary: he was being treated with respect. He was moving towards the train. He was boarding it. Nobody was stopping him. She could even see a couple of militia men, watching him. He turned on the step to the carriage and raised his hand. Lights flickered. He flashed his hangman's smile and disappeared inside.

Zinaida stared at the screen.

She searched through the pockets of her jacket until she found the telephone number Suvorin had given her.

It rang, unanswered.

She replaced the receiver calmly enough, wrapped the towel around her torso and unlocked her door.

Nobody was on the landing.

She went back into the flat and lifted the blind.

No sign of any militia car. Just the normal Saturday morning traffic beginning to build for the Izmaylovo market.

Afterwards, several witnesses came forward who claimed to have heard the sound of her cry, even above the noises of the busy street.

KELSO was overpowered with humiliating ease. He was pushed back on to the banquette, the satchel and the papers were taken from him, the door was wedged shut, and the young man in the black leather jacket took the seat opposite him, stretching one leg across the narrow aisle to prevent his prisoner from moving.

He unzipped the jacket just .far enough to show Kelso a shoulder holster, and Kelso recognised him then:

Mamantov's personal bodyguard from the Moscow apartment. He was a big, baby-faced lad, with a drooping left eyelid and a blubbery lower lip, and there was something about the way he let his boot rest against Kelso's thigh, cramming him against the window, that suggested hurting people might be his pleasure in life: that he needed violence as a swimmer requires water.

Kelso remembered Papu Rapav&s slowly twisting body and began to sweat.

'It's Viktor, isn't it?'

No reply.

'How long am I supposed to stay here, Viktor?'

Again, no answer, and after a couple more half-hearted attempts to demand his release, Kelso gave up. He could hear the sound of boots in the corridor and he had the impression that the whole of the train was being secured.

After that, not much happened for several hours.

At 10.20 they stopped as scheduled at Danilov and more of Mamantov's people poured aboard.

Kelso asked if he could at least go to the lavatory.

No answer.

Later, outside the city of Yaroslavl, they passed a derelict factory with a rusting Order of Lenin pinned to its windowless side. On its roof, a line of youths was silhouetted, their arms raised high in a fascist salute.

Viktor looked at Kelso and smiled, and Kelso looked away.

IN Moscow, Zinaida Rapava's apartment was empty.

The Klims who lived in the flat beneath afterwards swore they had heard her go out soon after eleven. But old man Amosov, who was fixing his car in the street directly across from the block, insisted it was some time after that: more like noon, he thought. She went straight by him without uttering a word, which wasn't unusual for her - she had her head down, he said, and was wearing dark glasses, a leather jacket, jeans and boots - and she was heading in the direction of the Semyonovskaya metro station.

She didn't have her car: that was still parked outside her father's apartment.

The next authenticated sighting came an hour later, at one o'clock, when she turned up at the back of Robotnik. A cleaner, Vera Yanukova, recognised her and let her in and she went directly to the cloakroom where she retrieved a leather shoulder bag (she showed her ticket; there was no mistake). The cleaner opened up the front entrance for her to leave, but she preferred to go out the way she had come, thus avoiding the metal detectors which were switched on automatically whenever the door was unlocked.

According to the cleaner, she was nervous when she arrived, but once she had the bag she seemed in good spirits, calm and self-possessed.

DID KELSO FALL asleep? He afterwards wondered if he might have done, for he had no real recollection of that long afternoon until he heard footsteps in the corridor and the sound of someone knocking softly on the door. And by then they were into the northern fringes of Moscow and the flat October light was already falling on the endless iron and concrete of the city.

Viktor idly swung his foot off the banquette and stood, hitching up his trousers. He removed his knife from

He was all false smiles and apologies: so sorry if Kelso had been inconvenienced in any way, such a pity they had not been able to meet much earlier in the journey, but he had had other, more pressing matters to attend to. He was sure that Kelso understood.

His overcoat was unbuttoned. His face was sheened with sweat. He tossed his hat on to the banquette opposite Kelso and sat down next to it, grabbing the satchel, removing the documents, gesturing to Viktor to take the seat next to Kelso, calling to the second bodyguard he had left in the corridor to close the door and not to let anyone in.

This was not the Mamantov Kelso had met seven years ago on his release from prison. This was not even the Mamantov from earlier in the week. This was Mamantov in his prime again. Mamantov rejuvenated. Mamantov redux.

Kelso watched him as his thick fingers checked through the notebook and the NKVD reports.

'Good,' he said, briskly, 'excellent. Everything is here, I think. Tell me: were you really were planning to destroy all this?'

'Yes.'

All of it?'

'Yes.'

He looked at Kelso in wonderment and shook his head.

'And yet you are the one who is always bleating about the need to open every historical document for inspection!'

'Even so, I'd still have destroyed it. In the interests of stopping you.

Kelso felt the increasing pressure of Viktor's elbow in his ribs, and he knew that the young man was longing for an opportunity to hurt him.

Ah! So history is only to be permitted where it suits the subjective interests of those who hold the records?' Mamantov smiled again. 'Has the myth of so-called western "objectivity" ever been more completely exposed? I can see I shall have to take these documents back into my possession for safe-keeping.'

'Take them back?' said Kelso. He couldn't keep the incredulity out of his voi~e-'You mean you had them before?'

Mamantov inclined his head graciously. Indeed.

MAMANTOV had replaced the papers in the satchel and had fastened the straps. But he couldn't quite bring himself to leave. Not yet. After all, he had waited so long for this moment. He wanted Kelso know. It was fifteen years since Yepishev had first told him about this 'black oilskin notebook' and he had never lost faith that one day he would find it. And then, like a miracle, in the very darkest hours of the cause, who should turn up on the membership lists of Aurora but the very same Papu Rapava whose name had cropped up so often in the KG B's files? Mamantov had summoned him. And at long last - hesitantly, reluctantly at first, but eventually out of loyalty to his new chief - Rapava had told him the story of the night of Stalin's stroke.

Mamantov had been the first to hear it.

That had been a year ago. It had taken him a whole nine months to get into the garden of Beria's mansion on Vspolnyi Street. And do you know what he had had to do? No? He had had to set up a property company - Moskprop - and buy the goddamn place off its owners, the former KGB, although that hadn't been too hard because Mamantov had plenty of friends at the Lubyanka who, in return for a percentage, were happy to sell state assets for a fraction of their true value. Some might call it corruption, or even robbery. He preferred the western term: privatisation.

The Tunisians had been kicked out, finally, under the terms of their lease, in August, and Rapava had led him to the exact spot in the garden. The toolbox had been retrieved. Mamantov had read the notebook, had flown to Archangel, had followed exactly the same trail as Kelso and O'Brian into the heart of the forest. And he had seen the potential at once. But he also had the sense - the genius, he would almost call it, but he would leave that judgement to others - the wit, let's say, to recognise what Kelso had just so aptly proved: that history, in the end, is a matter of subjectivity not objectivity.

'Suppose I had returned to Moscow with our mutual friend, convened a press conference and announced he was Stalin's son. What would have happened? I'll tell you. Nothing. I would have been ignored. Derided. Accused of forgery. And why?' He jabbed his finger at Kelso. 'Because the media is in the grip of cosmopolitan forces that loathe Vladimir Mamantov and all he stands for. Oh, but if Dr Kelso, the darling of the cosmopolitans - ah, yes, if Kelso says to the world, "Behold, I give you Stalin's son," then that is a different matter.

So the son had been prevailed upon to wait a few weeks longer, until some other strangers would appear bearing the notebook.

(And that explained a lot, thought Kelso: the odd sense he had experienced in Archangel that people had been somehow waiting for them - the communist official, Vavara Safanova, the man himself. 'You are the ones, you are truly the ones; and lam the one you seek.. .')

'And why me?' he asked.

'Because I remembered you. Remembered you wheedling your way in to see me when I was fresh from Lefortovo after the coup - your fucking arrogance, your certainty that you and your kind had won and I was finished. The shit you wrote about me. . . What was it Stalin said? "To choose one's victims, to prepare one's plans minutely, to stake an implacable vengeance, 'good than to go to bed ... there is nothing sweeter in the world." Sweet. That's it. Nothing sweeter in the world.'

ZINAIDA Rapava arrived at Moscow's Yaroslavl Station a few minutes after four o'clock. (What exactly she had been doing in the three hours since leaving Robotnik the authorities were never able to determine, although there were unconfirmed reports of a woman matching her description being seen at the Troekurovo cemetery, where her mother and brother were buried.)

At any rate, at five past four, she approached an employee of the Russian railway network. Afterwards he couldn't say why she stuck in his mind when so many others were milling around that day: perhaps it was the dark glasses she was wearing, despite the perpetual sunken gloom beneath the hooded arches of the railway terminus.

Like the rest, she wanted to know which platform the Archangel train would be arriving at.

The crowds were already beginning to build, and Aurora stewards were doing their best to keep them in order. A gangway had been roped off A platform had been erected for the cameras. Flags were being distributed - the Tsarist eagle, the hammer and sickle, the Aurora emblem. Zinaida took a little red flag, and maybe it was that, or maybe it was the leather jacket that made her look like a typical Aurora activist, but whatever it was she secured a prime position, at the edge of the rope, and nobody bothered her.

She can be glimpsed, occasionally, on some of the videotape of the crowd, taken before the train arrived - cool, solitary, waiting.

THE train was trundling past the suburban stations. Curious Saturday afternoon shoppers looked to see what all the fuss was about. A man held up a child to wave but Mamantov was too busy talking to notice.

He was describing the way he had lured Kelso to Russia -and that, he said, was the touch he was proudest of: that was a ruse worthy of Josef Vissarionovich himself.

He had arranged for a front company he owned in Switzerland - respectable, a family firm: it had been exploiting the workers for centuries - to contact Rosarkhiv and offer to sponsor a symposium on the opening up of the Soviet archives!

Mamantov slapped his own knee with mirth.

At first, Rosarkhiv hadn't wanted to invite Kelso - imagine that! they thought he was no longer of 'sufficient standing in the academic community' - but Mamantov, through the sponsors, had insisted, and two months later, sure enough, there he was, back in town, in his free hotel room, all expenses paid, like a pig in shit, come to wallow in our past, feeling superior to us, telling us to feel guilty, when all the time the only reason he was there was to bring the past back to life!

And Papu Rapava, asked Kelso, what had he thought of this plan?

For the first time, Mamantov's face darkened.

Rapava had claimed to like the plan. That was what he'd said. To spit in the capitalists' soup and then to watch them drink it? Oh yes please, comrade colonel: that had appealed to Rapava very much! He was supposed to tell Kelso his story overnight, then take him directly to Beria's old mansion, where they would retrieve the toolbox together. Mamantov had tipped off O'Brian who promised to turn up with his cameras at the Institu~e of Marxism-Leninism the next morning. The symposium was to provide the perfect launch pad. What a story! There would have been a feeding frenzy. Mamantov had the whole thing worked out.

But then: nothing. Kelso had called the following afternoon and that was when Mamantov had learned that Rapava had failed in his mission: that he had told his story right enough, but then had run away.

'Why?' Mamantov frowned. 'You mentioned money to him, presumably?'

Kelso nodded. 'I offered him a share in the profits.'

A look of contempt spread across Mamantov's face. 'That you should seek to enrich yourself - that I'd expected: that was another reason I selected you. But that he should?' He shook his head in disgust. 'Human beings,' he murmured. 'They always let you down.'

'He might have felt the same about you,' said Kelso. 'Given what you did to him.'

Mamantov glanced at Viktor and something passed between the older man and the younger in that instant - a look of almost sexual intimacy - and Kelso knew at once that the pair of them had worked on Papu Rapava together. There must have been others but these two were at the centre of it:

the craftsman and his apprentice.

He felt himself beginning to sweat again.

'But he never told you where he'd hidden it,' he said.

Mamantov frowned, as if trying to remember something. 'No,' he said, softly. 'No. He came of strong stock. I'll grant him that. Not that it matters. We followed you and the girl the next morning, saw you collect the material. In the end, Rapava's death changed nothing. I have it all now.'

Silence.

The train had slowed almost to walking pace. Beyond the flat roofs, Kelso could see the mast of the Television Tower.

'Time presses,' said Mamantov suddenly, 'and the world is waiting.'

He picked up the satchel and his hat. 'I've given some thought to you,' he said to Kelso, as he stood and began buttoning his coat. 'But really I can't see that you can harm us. You can withdraw your authentication of the papers, of course, but that won't make much difference now, except to make you look a fool - they're genuine: that will be established by independent experts in a day or two. You can also make certain wild allegations about the death of Papu Rapava, but no proof exists.' He bent to examine himself in the small mirror above Kelso's head, straightening the brim of his hat in readiness for the cameras. 'No. I think the best thing I can do is simply leave you to watch what happens next.

'Nothing's going to happen next,' said Kelso. 'Don't forget I've talked to this creature of yours - the moment he opens his mouth, people will laugh.'

'You want to bet on it?' Mamantov offered his hand. 'No? You're wise. Lenin said: "The most important thing in any endeavour is to get involved in the fight, and in that way learn what to do next." And that's what we're going to do now. For the first time in nearly ten years we re going to be able to start a fight. And such a fight. Viktor.'

Reluctantly, and with a final, wistful glance at Kelso, the young man got to his feet.

The corridor was crowded with figures in black leather jackets.

'It was love,' said Kelso, when Mamantov was halfway out of the door.

'What?' Mamantov turned to stare at him.

'Rapava. That was the reasotrI~ he didn't take me to the papers. You said he did it for the money, but I donk think he wanted the money for himself. He wanted it for his daughter. To make it up to her. It was love.'

'Love?' repeated Mamantov incredulously. He tested the word in his mouth as if it was unfamiliar to him - the name of some sinister new weapon, perhaps, or a freshly discovered world capitalist-zionist conspiracy. 'Love?' No. It was no use. He shook his head and shrugged.

The door slid shut and Kelso collapsed back in his seat. A minute or two later he heard a noise like a high wind roaring through a forest and he pressed his face to the window. Up ahead, across an expanse of track, he could see a shifting mass of colour that gradually became more defined as they drew alongside the platform - faces, placards, waving flags, a podium, a red carpet, cameras, people waiting behind ropes, Zinaida -SHE spotted him at the same instant and for a few long seconds their eyes locked. She saw him start to rise, mouthing something, gesturing at her, but then he was borne away and out of sight. The procession of dull green carriages, spattered with mud from the long journey, clanked slowly past then juddered to a halt, and the crowd, which had been festively noisy for the past half hour, was suddenly quiet.

Youths in leather jackets leapt from the train immediately in front of her. She saw the shadow of a marshal's cap move behind one of the windows.

The gun was out of her bag by now and hidden inside her jacket and she could feel the cold comfort of its shape against her palm. There was a ball of something very tight within her chest but it wasn't fear. It was a tension longing to be released.

In her mind she could see him very clearly, each mark upon his body a mark of his love for her.

'Who is your only friend, girl?'

There was a movement in the doorway of the carriage. The two men were coming out together.

'Yourself papa.'

They stood together on the top step, waving, close enough for her to touch. People were cheering. The crowd surged at her back. She couldn't miss.

And who else?'

She pulled out the gun very quickly and aimed. 'You, papa. You -,