Snow Falcon

One: The Falcon

The brief period of daylight had again passed, and the sky was hard with stars. A soughing wind flicked at the snow, wiping it in quick flurries from the ground and pattering it against the walls of the tent. Folley awoke refreshed, stiff with the cold and still with the image of the retreating helicopter in his imagination, the tail-light winking as if in valediction.

He opened his eyes, shook himself, and climbed out of the sleeping-bag.

He appreciated from the tiny rodent noises of the snow against the tent that the weather was holding, glanced at his watch, and then unstrapped the tent-flap. He knelt there, listening with his whole body, head cocked on one side.

Eventually he seemed satisfied, and went out into the air which seemed to grasp at the lungs from within. He stretched, easing the stiffness. The ski-ing of the previous night, after dropping from the helicopter which had come skimming in under the radar net into Finnish Lapland, had taken its toll — not of his strength, but of his youth, it seemed. He was aching in muscles he never considered. He rubbed at the backs of his thighs, easing them under the white camouflage over-trousers.

Then he seemed to decide that further delay was pointless, and there was an urgency about his repacking of the tiny white tent and even in the eating of his rations. He considered coffee, and at once rejected the delay it would involve.

He was a little less than thirty kilometres south-east of Ivalo, the Lapland town at the southern extremity of the sacred Lake Inari. He was well away from the single main highway from Rovaniemi in the south, and from the single airlane between the two towns. A light plane had passed overhead soon after he had been dropped, its lights winking as it made its approach to the airport.

He was in a country desolate with snow, a lunar landscape without real features, even so dose to the foothills of the Maanselka, the mountain chain crossing the body of Finnish Lapland. All the previous night he had passed through the ghostly landscape, heading south-east, and this night, too, it would be the same. Winter exercises inside the Arctic Circle had taught him what to expect in terms of terrain — but even then that had been northern Norway, where the slopes of the land were knife-cuts to draw the eye and hold it, where the fjords broke the snow like fingers spread on a white page.

He shook off the sense of deadness. Here, he was less than twenty miles from the Soviet border.

As he pushed off, digging in with the ski-sticks, putting his bulky, laden form in motion, he knew that this first mile might be the last one, just as every mile he had travelled might have been the mile of arriving.

The large-scale map of Finland that Waterford had pinned to the wall of his cramped hotel room in Hereford, remained clear in his mind. He could see Waterford clearly, four days previously, pinning up the map, then sweeping his hand down the Soviet-Finnish border. Waterford had stressed that the location could not be precise.

He sensed, suddenly, the isolation, the loneliness. Waterford's room had been as redolent of it as this landscape. The experience was emptying. At the same time, the hours on the long cross-country skis increased his awareness, like some drug. Emptiness almost tangible in the snowbound tundra, its tips of small trees jutting like the fingers of buried hands. Or the thin pine forest, always threatening to die or vanish — straggling away from him to expire on the distant slopes.

He passed deeper into the night, and the only sounds were the constant wind and the ceaseless and rhythmic hissing of the long skis.

Beneath the arctic camouflage of his winter combat clothing, he wore the uniform of a lieutenant, his own rank, but a Yliluutnantti of the Lapland Rifle Battalion. His uniform was Finnish, the Russian-style fur hat jammed on his fair hair under the camouflage hood. Badges of rank on his combat dress were accurate. Across his shoulders, free of the heavy pack, was lying a 7-62 mm M/62 assault rifle, the Finnish copy of the Russian Kalashnikov; in a hip-holster, a 9 mm Lathi pistol, regulation firearm for Finnish officers. And there were the papers, and their false identity. He was engaged in a crosscountry endurance and survival test, part of his final examination before acceptance into the exclusive and semi-secret Finnish Special Force — a body equivalent of Folley's own British SAS.

Eventually, deep in the night, he stopped to rest, his breathing laboured as if to impress him with the body's exertions and the distance he had travelled. He unslung the pack and the rifle in its canvas sleeve, and set up the tiny gas heater. He brewed coffee, hunched in the darkness behind a fold of the land. The burdened trees leaned over the lip of the dell, as if in some fish-eye lens. He felt enclosed by the trees from the flatness and the flowing white curtains of the forest.

He cupped gloved hands round the mug and swallowed the coffee, grateful for the pungent taste. It shocked the palate, unfroze the mind. He could hear Waterford talking in his steely, precise tones, suggestive of a masked or restrained power — even a deep and bitter fury.

He knew something of Waterford's cavalier and even brutal army record, his connections on more than one occasion with the SIS. He allowed himself to laugh, a sound sharp as cracking wood in the silence and cold air, as he recollected the small, childish excitement he had felt as the briefing had begun. He had understood the crude exploitation of information in his CPP (Complete Personality Profile) by the senior man, yet he had been unable to quench the sudden warmth of the belly or control the shallowness of his breathing as the words separated him from others, acknowledged that he was the only suitable selection for the Snow Falcon thing.

Ski-training in Scotland, the hours in the gym, the shooting practice with unfamiliar weapons, the hurried Finnish instruction from a professional type — for a long month he had lived with that. And it had all been unexplained until that last meeting in Waterford's room. Then transport by Hercules to the NATO base at Tromsø.

He had tumbled through the door of the Wessex even as snow billowed out and blinded him and the helicopter pulled up and away, banking severely and heading back into Norway.

'What we want,' Waterford had said, 'is evidence, and the harder the better. That's why you have the camera. And you are expendable, Folley, and so is the mission in this instance. There'll be as many Snow Falcons as we need to find the answer.' The hard blue eyes had stared into his at that point. 'This isn't just suspicion, or pissing about trying to resurrect old networks or anti-regime movements in Eastern Europe. This may be now, and tomorrow. So, don't be too easily convinced, and don't miss anything, either. Find out if there's more than reindeer and a few Lapps infancy dress in Finnish Lapland these days I' As if he heard the voice now, insistent in his ear, he woke himself from the narcosis of his rest and the coffee. He could be close now, and the empty landscape might not be as empty as it seemed. Soon it would be light again, the time of caution. He threw away the dregs of the coffee, and stood up. He had more miles to cover before he pitched camp.

Alexei Kyrilovich Vorontsyev pushed the files away from him, leaned back in his chair rubbing his eyes, and the persistent nightmare flashed against his lids almost in the instant that he closed his eyes. His wife — Natalia Grasnetskaya, mezzo-soprano with the Bolshoi, a rising operatic star. He could see her dearly, as if she were in his office on the Frunze Quay, above the book repository. He wanted to remove his long fingers from his eyes, but he did not. She still fascinated him, even after the years of her infidelity. He could not rid himself of the persistent obsession with her, even after her body passed into the possession of others, and she had rendered him, he believed, faintly ridiculous to the wide and privileged circle of their acquaintance.

He pulled his hands away with an effort, and blinked in the harsh strip-lighting. He got up from behind the desk, galvanised by some current of thought, and went to the window. He looked down from the third floor, along the almost deserted Frunze Quay, the cold Moscow evening kept out by the double glazing and central heating.

He was thirty-six. He jiggled the coins in his pocket, a small comfortable sound that seemed to interpose itself between his awareness and his recriminations. He held the rank of Major in the KGB. More than that, he had transferred from the 2nd Chief Directorate five years before, at the age of thirty. A meteoric performance to have become, so early, a member of the Special Investigations Department, to move out of the Centre of Dzerzhinsky Street into these more discreet offices.

A hollow success.

The department was the most exclusive and powerful in the security service. It investigated the Politburo, the armed forces, the KGB itself — if and when necessary.

He had avoided social occasions during the past few weeks. He could not explain why the pressure upon his ego, his self-confidence, had grown so acute and painful during that time. But it had happened. So that he expected his suits, expensive and non-Russian, not to fit him when he put them on in the mornings. There was this physical sense of being smaller, diminished. And he could not speak of it to anyone.

Only Mihail Pyotravich might understand — but even he would be without sympathy, would despise him. The lip would curl, and something like a cast or cataract possess the eye. He could not tell his step-father — though undoubtedly the Deputy Foreign Minister already knew the full extent of the estrangement.

His stomach twisted with the knowledge, and the body revolted again against the surge of thoughts and imaginings. He was truly powerless; the woman dominated him, humiliated him, treated him with contempt — lately lived apart from him, paraded her lovers in public; and he was powerless.

Sometimes, he thought he might go mad. It had been as if he could smell other men on her skin when she came home. And, should he taste her skin now, he would taste three other mouths that had explored her, teasing at each secret part of her he had once believed only he possessed.

The thought of her body tormented him — it was an accurate description; tormented. He still wanted her.

Impossible.

His own infidelities disgusted him. He was amazed that he still felt he was betraying her and the vows that he had made silently, though the Soviet ceremony did not require them. His mother had claimed that the father he had never known had made such vows. He could not have done otherwise.

He turned from the window. There was silence beyond the door of his office. His secretary would have already left, and perhaps the others on his floor would have abandoned their offices. He turned the files on his desk with his hand, flicked at the spools of tape. He had been transferring recorded reports to cassette prior to storage in the files. And then the assessment of that week's documentation for his superiors. An assessment that would go directly to the Deputy Chairman of the KGB responsible for the SID.

He would leave it until tomorrow. The reports of the agents seemed unpromising. The movements of a Red Army Colonel-General during four days' leave in Moscow seemed of little significance. And the man would be returning to his duties at HQ, Far East Military District the next morning. Deputy Kapustin had laid emphasis on its importance, but it seemed little more than routine.

He yawned, a nervous reaction. He could sense the details slipping from him even as he dwelt on the matter.

He went back briefly to the window. The sodium lamps along the quay were hazy globes of light. An icy fog was beginning on the river. The Moskya slid beneath it, flecked with lights from the Gorki Park on the opposite bank. Beyond its dark patch he could see the straight ranks of the lights along the Lenin Prospekt.

He sighed, bundled the tapes and files into his desk, and locked the drawer. Then he let himself cautiously out of the office, as if he had no honest business there, his body adopting involuntarily a humiliating posture — cowardly. As if it feared laughter in the shadowy corridor.

The Kremlin office of the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a large, somehow bare, room. It was screened from the apparatus of government by two outer offices. As he paused at the last door, his hand raised to supply a perfunctory knock — the night security staff had informed the First Secretary of his arrival — Chairman of the Committee for State Security Yuri Andropov could already envisage the room. It bore none of the terrible blankness of the office in the days of Stalin, when the room had a plasticity to its visitors that could make it cathedral or oven, depending on the Leader's mood and the force of the visitor's imagination. Now it was simply a large room, with a huge and ornate desk at the far end. Carpet now silenced the footsteps of those who approached the First Secretary, and there were armchairs, some occasional tables — a visible concession to the decade, and to the character of the man who waited for him.

He opened the door. First Secretary Khamovkhin turned from the huge carved fireplace where a pile of logs burned brightly, and Andropov noticed the drink in his hand. There was Scotch for him, too, in a heavy tumbler on one of the small tables. The two men shook hands warmly, and Khamovkhin gestured Andropov to a chair. He sat down heavily himself, his double-breasted jacket undone, flopping open to reveal the swell of the stomach beneath the striped shirt. Sensing the Chairman's eyes on him, Khamovkhin smiled tiredly, raising his glass and encouraging Andropov to drink.

There was a formality about the occasion inseparable from any meeting between them. As if their minds minced carefully round the obstacles in the room, flicked between the lumber that scattered their responsibilities and their public lives.

Khamovkhin suddenly focused his eyes, and rapped out, 'Am I — too suspicious, Yuri?'

Andropov was silent for a long time. If he gave the correct answer at that moment, the matter would recede, no one would be blamed, and the whole business would be forgotten.

'No,' he said finally. 'That would be the easy way out — for both of us. Would it not?'

Relief, and regret. The First Secretary rubbed his prow of a nose with thumb and forefinger. He stared into his glass, then looked up. 'I suppose not. No easy escapes, eh?' He laughed. The firelight flickered on the steel frames of the Chairman's spectacles; made the lenses two blank moons for a moment. Then Khamovkhin saw the determination of the eyes as the head adjusted slightly.

'We — have to take it seriously, don't we, Feodor? You sign a document in Helsinki in nine days' time whereby the Soviet Union agrees to significantly reduce its nuclear arsenal, strategic and tactical — and cuts the throat of its own conventional forces. We know it, the Politburo has agreed it, and the Army is beside itself with anger.'

Khamovkhin was puzzled by the tone. His brows drew together, and his eyes became lidded. Andropov thought him an animal retreating into cunning as its enemies surprised it.

'You are a member of the Politburo — you agreed to it.'

'Naturally. We have no choice. Two bad harvests in three years, crippled by the defence budget — China determined to supplant us bidding for the favours of the West… What else is to be done but follow President Wainwright's line of least opposition?'

'Secretly, you don't like it?'

'Do I have to? It's all right, Feodor, it's not my direction in which you need to look. The Army hates the KGB as much as it hates the Politburo.'

'We are agreed on that, at least — my friend.' He smiled, but almost immediately his face darkened once more. 'But — nothing? You still know nothing, with time so short?'

He stood up, and loomed over Andropov suddenly. Then he took their tumblers to the cabinet, filled them, then sat down again. He stared into his drink, into the fire, then into Andropov's eyes.

'We cannot show our hand, Feodor. How many of us are there? Even the whole of the KGB… Not sufficient, if we push them to some precipitate move.'

'When will they make their move — dammit, when? You should know!'

'The most appropriate time would seem to be, Feodor, while you are engaged upon your State visit to Finland, when you leave Moscow in three days' time!'

Khamovkhin was stung by the concealed accusation. His hands bunched on the material of his trousers, worked there for a few moments as if throttling something invisible. Then he forced himself to sit back in his chair, appear relaxed, certain.

'You may be right. I — have to go. Very well, Yuri, I shall be well out of it, if anything — happens. I admit that. But I am known to be going. I cannot alter my arrangements…' He tried to laugh. 'It might be considered braver to be skulking in Helsinki than in Moscow!'

'It might. But it is the excuse they may be looking for. The Army High Command…' Andropov continued, breaking the moment of false confidence like a stick in his hands '… will see it as an opportunity not to be lightly missed. At least, that is my opinion.'

'Then find them. Find the leaders — arrest them!'

'And provoke the very thing we wish to avoid? The High Command is edgy — I might almost say, desperate, about this Helsinki agreement. If it is signed, there will be no going back for us. The Army will be melted down — a missile become a shotgun. That is how they see it. And America is waiting to see us go through with what we promise. We're in the cleft stick, Feodor. At least, I will be when you have left for Helsinki.'

'Then find them. Find a way of proving who is involved what exactly they plan to do, and when. Then — finish them!'

'Easy to say,' was Andropov's reply as he sipped at his whisky. 'Easy to say.'

Alex Davenhill switched off the engine of the Porsche, and Aubrey was grateful for the silence. The swishing of the rain under the tyres, the throatiness of the engine — even the speed at which Davenhill drove — had all conspired during their journey to Hereford to irritate and depress him. He resented inhabiting the sleek, expensive shell of Davenhill's car, just as he resented the cheerful flamboyance of the man's conversation and behaviour. He had decided that he felt old tonight — and determined not to be roused from his irritated contempt for his companion.

'Right, Kenneth, shall we go up and see the sinister Major Waterford?'

'I see no other reason for having travelled for two hours in this wingless jet aircraft.'

'Don't be so crabby, Kenneth dear,' Davenhill laughed, opening the door and climbing out. The noise of the rain loudened, and Aubrey felt cold. Davenhill came round the car and opened his door. Aubrey made an old man's fuss about climbing out of the low, comfortable seat, Davenhill holding his arm. 'Come along, Auntie,' he said with a grin.

Aubrey straightened himself, and turned up the collar of his dark coat. Davenhill looked at the facade of the small hotel, across the street from the car park.

'I agree,' Aubrey said, as if mind-reading. 'Not a very prepossessing place. However, Major Waterford prefers it to SAS HQ just up the road.'

'He must have a penchant for the Gothic.'

'Bring those papers from the back seat, would you, Alex?' Aubrey replied, scuttling off at a surprising speed to the shelter of the hotel porch. Davenhill took out a briefcase, locked the car, and crossed the splash of wet-lit street after Aubrey.

They climbed the stairs, Aubrey still in the lead. Alex Davenhill, unbuttoning his leather coat, smiled behind him, pleased to feel himself Aubrey's messenger-boy as an alternative to the unnatural stuffiness of most of his professional life as Foreign Office Special Adviser to the SIS.

Aubrey paused before a door that was merely a dull veneered sheet of hardboard, and knocked. Davenhill could see the tic of interest at the corner of his mouth, and composed his own features into an intelligent superiority. Aubrey had warned him not to bicker with Waterford; Davenhill eased his animosity towards the soldier into the back of his mind.

Aubrey heard a muffled voice through the door, and pushed it open. Davenhill followed him through into the cramped room with the hideous wallpaper, purple trumpeting mouths of flowers and wreathed stems on a yellow ground. The sight of it made him shudder.

Waterford was sitting in an armchair with soiled and frayed loose covers. He did not get up when they entered. Davenhill noticed that the single-bar electric fire was less efficient than the heater in his car.

'Mr Aubrey — Davenhill.'

Aubrey took a chair opposite the SAS instructor. Alan Waterford was a big man, threatening the chair he sat in with his bulk. Davenhill decided once again that it was that fact that was most potent about the man — threat. A barely contained violence. His face, even now, was angry with a grimace that occupied mouth, eyes, jaw. The moustache seemed to jut at them, as if they had trespassed. Yet there was interest in the grey eyes, too. Davenhill perched himself on the edge of a rickety cabinet, the briefcase clutched, as if protectively, across his chest.

'What's the news?' He lit a cigarette, seeming indifferent to any reply.

'The Falcon is loose,' Aubrey said. Waterford nodded. 'No contact as yet.'

'Tonight's the night, then.'

'Possibly.'

Davenhill wondered why they had come. Aubrey seemed tense with doubt.

'Are you sure?' he blurted out.

'Of what?' Waterford asked, staring at a patch of damp on the ceiling. 'Bugger upstairs has just had a bath', he observed, suddenly glaring at Davenhill. 'Sure of what?'

'He'll get back,' Aubrey confessed reluctantly.

'No. What's the matter — lost your nerve?'

'Not at all. But — I must know. Things may become — more urgent than I supposed. I need definite proof, not speculation.'

'Then Folley will have to dig for it, won't he?'

Davenhill suddenly sensed the underlying mood possessing Aubrey. Almost as if he had seen the man's real age, highlighted by shadows from the standard lamp. Aubrey was old, and they had come from London because he felt at a loss — perhaps even felt he was making a complete idiot of himself. And he wanted to blame Waterford.

'I came to you and Pyott in StratAn,' Aubrey began with a bluster designed to conceal the lack of confidence Davenhill had perceived, 'to interpret infra-red photographs that ended up on my desk. You — both of you — placed a weighty interpretation upon them which caused me to act as I have done.'

Davenhill could see Waterford's rising anger, and wondered whether Aubrey was aware of it. He felt rather pityingly towards the old man, and disappointed.

'Not forgetting the gentleman you picked up on the road outside Kassel,' he said softly. Both men seemed to turn to him immediately, as if resenting his interference. 'You can't shuffle off—'

'I am not shuffling!' Aubrey snapped. 'I merely wish to confirm our suspicions in this matter. But now I will need proof of some kind — irrefutable proof. Both of you must understand that. It may be a case of the Pentagon, and therefore the White House, having to be convinced by hard evidence. There is no cause for alarm, ladies and gentlemen. Now — is there, or is there not?'

There was a silence, then Waterford said, 'There is — oh, yes, there is cause for alarm. Don't worry, Air Aubrey. Folley will find you something to wave under their noses.'

It was deep night now, and Folley was having to get up periodically, move about to ease warmth and feeling back into stiff, cold limbs and joints. He had established himself the previous dawn in the shelter of an outcrop just beyond, and overlooking, the village of Rontaluumi, half a mile from the Soviet border. Below him, one narrow road led through the village and away behind him towards Raja-Jooseppi and Ivalo.

He had watched the village for hours — eerie, he thought it, the way there was no movement, nothing down there. When night had come, no lights; in daylight, not a footprint, no sounds even of animals. He had stopped watching hours ago — now he had turned his attention to the border itself. Check that out, and make sure you're thorough, Waterford had said. And bugger all more revealing or useful than that! Normal normal normal — the Red Army's gone to bed, he thought, and almost laughed aloud because boredom made easy irreverence amusing and he wanted to hear a noise — other than those drifting from across the border.

In front of him, clear through the Star-tron night-vision glasses, he could see the watch-tower that overlooked the road. There was a fence, high and barbed but seemingly fragile; then, beyond that, the huge electrified fence that marked the Russian side of the border. Across the mere hundreds of yards separating him from the Russian tower he could hear a radio, tuned to some all-night European pop programme. Occasionally, shadows passed across the windows of the hut atop the spindly tower, and the searchlight swept across the snow in a hungry pattern on both sides of the border.

Quick look back at the village. Silent, deserted. In the morning, or before, he would have to go down there, and check it out — thoroughly. Not a bit like Goldsmith, he thought — comfortable Gothic. It was sinister — better watching the border. Where have all the reindeer gone — and the Lapps? And the chickens and the pigs and dogs?

He was bored. Now, with the USSR, once again in his night-glasses, the hard starlight gathered and magnified, he had lost the edge of danger. Nothing but the routine of border guards, the innocuousness of buried mines and the still wire. There was no watch-tower to guard the Finnish fence, only the fence itself pretending that Finland was defensible.

He heard someone cough, and his ears, adjusted to distance, knew that the noise came from the tower. Shadows bulked beyond the swing of light across the snow, but they were un-threatening. He yawned. The inevitability of routine had captured him.

He slid back over the lip of his outcrop, the snow slithering under him, and brewed coffee out of the small wind, out of sight. He sipped, tracing the warmth to his stomach. He began to wonder at the vacuousness of his own thoughts — to smile at the idea that he was being reduced in IQ with every hour he spent in that place. As if his brain were vaporising in the cold air.

When he finally slid back over the lip to take up his position again, it had already begun.

He picked up the night-vision glasses, focusing anew for something to do, and saw that the searchlight had ceased to slide across the snow. And the watch-tower was darkened, and silent. It was as if the glasses were not working. He could see nothing. He swept across the space of snow, ghostly now, for some sign of movement, a light.

Then he saw them. Tanks. He experienced a moment of total disbelief; then a moment of pure terror. Tanks. Even as everything in him rejected the information of the eye, he went through a trained process of identification — T-72 tanks, frontline, latest model. He identified them by the 115 mm cannon, the six road wheels, the turret similarity to the older T-62. '

Coming through the border wires that were no longer there — across a minefield he knew had to be there. He could not understand it; cold had invaded the brain, clogging it like thick oil.

Tanks, in single file down the one narrow road, were crossing the border into neutral Finland. He refused to believe it. He began to count them, his mind fumbling over instructions, cold fingers turning the huge, clumsy pages of some manual. He was shivering. The village below had been emptied — in preparation for this.

He could not use the transmitter, not now. He had to reduce himself to the role of spectator. The first of the tanks rolled beneath him, and he had somehow got the camera sighted, with its infra-red attachment like the barrel of a weapon. He began to photograph, the film winding on automatically, silently. He held his breath.

He watched the tanks pass away through Rontaluumi, and he knew the lights would not come on, doors would not open to the sound of engines, and the strange squeaking of the tracks on the iron-hard snow.

No lights; the tiny hamlet was deserted. It added to the quality of nightmare the scene possessed.

He counted a regiment of tanks, and after the first few he did not bother to reload the camera. A regiment. Then what was obviously a motor rifle battalion, a support for the armoured column. In Finland.

His thoughts circled the inadmissible. Invasion. And then perhaps, after an hour, two hours — he had not looked at his watch once, and did not do so now — the road was empty again. He saw the lights go on again in the tower, and the searchlight take up its pacing gleam. The wire on the Soviet side was closing, a great hinged section of gate which crossed the road — the Finnish fence was magically already reconstituted.

It was a massive effort to stand up, to move strange limbs as if under water, to strike camp. He went through the routine with leaden hands in thick gloves, fumbling over the tasks.

He had to follow. He had to find the destination. The column had passed out of sight and sound into the fir forest beyond the hamlet, still following the single narrow road. He had to follow.

He kept returning to one idea — it wasn't like an invasion. It was orderly, swift, silent — but it was… transport. Yes, that was it. He had been watching troop movements, and only he knew they were Red Army, and the terrain they crossed was that of Finland.

Otherwise it was normal. One hundred and twenty tanks, BMP combat vehicles, mortars — and the silent troops in winter combat clothing, riding the tanks and the transports. It was no attack formation, no indication of a front along which the column was advancing, deploying. A movement between two circled points on a map, along the single possible road. No one would attack Finland with a single regiment of tanks and one support battalion.

He pulled the pack to comfort on his back, felt the balance of the long skis strapped to his body, and then moved off cautiously. He picked out his trail with great care, down the slope of the outcrop. He had to follow the road, to overtake the armoured column; to discover its purpose.

Two: Evidence of Circumstances

It was a cold, bitter morning in Moscow, the Moskva like a sheet of opaque, slaty glass under a sky threatening more snow. Only the previous day had the Frunze Quay been cleared of the last snowfall. Vorontsyev had again taken up what threatened to become an habitual position at the window of his office. His back was to the two other men in the room as he listened to a tape-recording from the hotel suite of Colonel-General Ossipov, obtained by a bug and recorded in an adjoining room. The two SID officers with him were responsible for the recording. Ossipov had demanded, as was his right as commandant of a Military District, a suite free from bugs; only the SID was permitted to override such a demand.

There was something actively unpleasant, depressing, in listening to Ossipov's old-fashioned seduction of a high-class call-girl. It was out of place, and clashed with the vigour, and vulgarity, of his engagement in the physical act, Vorontsyev did not turn round as the girl, well coached, achieved her climax in a way most calculated to flatter the ageing General; he did not want to meet the eyes of the two young men, to know what they thought of the animal noises from the tape.

Glasses clinked, after a long silence which seemed still impregnated with sexual release — Vorontsyev could almost smell the semen; the girl had miscalculated, the General had suffered a premature ejaculation… Vorontsyev formed the pseudo-medical description of the old man's failure with a feline pleasure. The girl had been apologetic, the General gentlemanly in his reply. The scene, it appeared, had drawn to a satisfactory conclusion.

'That was two nights ago,' Vorontsyev said. 'Is there any more of it?'

'You don't think the General…' The words cut off.

One man had nudged the other, more sensitive to Vorontsyev's mood. 'No — he is alone for the rest of the night, and sleeps quite well.'

'OK.' Vorontsyev turned as he heard the tape switched off. 'Let's have a look at the pictures.'

Maxim, the younger of the two junior officers, switched off the light and drew down the blind. Pyotr, his partner, operated the small projector on Vorontsyev's desk, and a monochrome image of the Colonel-General appeared on the screen against one wall of the office, walking down the corridor of an hotel with a girl. Vorontsyev stared hard at the girl, then the slide-cartridge clicked. Entering the General's suite, then later, the girl coming out again.

'We took film through the two-way,' Pyotr offered. Vorontsyev shook his head.

'Offer it to Tretchikhin downstairs. He collects that sort of thing since his wife left him.' He winced, as if his tongue had returned to an abscessed tooth. He attempted to smile, and added, 'Send in the duty-team from yesterday — let's see if they have anything slightly more out of the ordinary.'

'I would have thought this was pretty…' Maxim began, but Pyotr dug him in the ribs with his elbow. They took with them the cartridge of slides and the recorder.

Vorontsyev knew the girl. She was often used for the amusement of high-ranking officials or officers like Ossipov. Strict medical and security checks — one of a small, exclusive coterie of professional tarts, unlike the enthusiastic amateurs such as Natalia Grasnetskaya.

The second duty-team was also young — Ilya and Alevtina; he called all his juniors by their first names. He had begun to suspect that his tone had changed, become slightly ingratiating, not preserving the distinction in rank.

'Well?' he snapped, at the young man and the girl, recent transfers and still much in awe of their new power. 'What have you two to report?'

Ilya, ostentatiously consulted a black notebook. 'Do you want the lot, Major — or just the edited highlights?'

'Thoroughly, whatever you do.' He turned again to the window.

'The general passed the morning at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts,' Ilya summarised. 'As you know, Major, he has a personal collection of ivory and jade statuettes — he spent a lot of time inspecting the Egyptian collection this time…' Vorontsyev nodded. 'He visited the Hermitage collection in Leningrad many times, before he was transferred to Far East District…'

'Yes. Go on.'

'He was alone throughout this time. Before lunch, he took a taxi to the Alexandrovski Gardens — he walked there, in the sunshine, until he lunched at the Metropole in Sverdlov Square. We…'. have an expenses claim…' he finished lamely.

'For both of you? Was that necessary?'

'Just for — one…'

Vorontsyev knew they were lying, but it did not matter. They would learn that expenses were come by the hard way, or not at all.

'And the afternoon? he asked.

'The Tretyakov Gallery — all afternoon.' The young man sounded bored.

'You must learn, Ilya, that not everyone is as much a Philistine as you are. I'm sure the tour of the gallery was good for you.'

'Yes, Major.'

Alevtina said, 'Sir — is all this getting us anywhere?'

Vorontsyev thought for a moment. He was not on the point of describing his conversation with the Deputy Chairman late the previous night. He said simply:

'It all may be of the utmost importance. Always understand that, both of you. We don't get called in unless it's already a serious matter.' He looked at them both in turn, until they signalled their understanding. 'Very well. Let's see the films.'

He twitched down the blind, shutting out the leaden view from the window. His interview with the Deputy had been urgent and short. He had to find something — apparently, there was something very nasty to find, and he had to find it — no, he could not be told what it was he was looking for — and he knew then that they did not know; but it did exist, and Ossipov was a possible suspect. So were the other officers they had been watching on their periodic leaves in the city. Men from every military district, none of them below the rank of regimental Colonel.

The light dimmed, and the cartridge case clicked. Pictures of Ossipov in swift succession passed across the screen. Bending to look at an oriental statue, the collector's greed dear on his smooth, heavy features. In the gallery, face lit by the glow from illumination above a huge canvas by Repin — then bending to an ikon, almost in worship.

Then the Gardens, the features pinched by the cold, bathed in the pale sunshine; his back to the camera as he paused to speak to a woman, to raise his dark hat…

Vorontsyev looked at Ilya, who shook his head. He waved his hand, and the monochrome procession continued. Even entering the male toilets at the Metropole, after lunch.

'You checked?'

'He left nothing but his urine,' Ilya replied softly. 'Do you want to see the rest, sir?'

'Not if they're all like this.'

The beam of light died, and Vorontsyev tugged up the bund. Ilya turned to face him.

'What official functions has he attended in the last four days?'

'None, sir. He's on leave.'

'What about the officers' dubs, that sort of thing?

'We could only get in their officially — you didn't want that.'

'No, not yet.'

'Sir?'

'Yes?'

'This operation, sir?'

'Yes, Ilya?'

'Is it — look, sir, are we looking for evidence to get rid of aim, or is there really some specific thing we have to discover?'

Vorontsyev glowered, then smiled and nodded.

'Very well. As far as I can see, it isn't just for the sake of it. Not one of those operations. He hasn't offended. No, it's for real. Something is going on, and it's probable centre is the army, and high up. We're supposed to find something — a clue might be enough, a few names. At the moment, we don't know who or what. Clear?'

Both seemed relieved, as if they preserved some vestige of private conscience which had to be appeased.

Ilya said, 'Thanks, sir.' Alevtina merely nodded her agreement.

'Good. But it would be useful to find out who he met, talked to, in the clubs. You got a list?'

Alevtina handed him a sheet of paper on which was scribbled in the hand of the KGB man who doubled as a waiter at the principal Moscow officers' club, the names of the men to whom Ossipov had spoken. For SID — even when the officer was an attractive young woman rather than a bully-boy — for the blue ID card, he would have watched, and noted, without question. Vorontsyev glanced down the list. One or two generals, old acquaintances being watched by other units of the SID, one or two junior now or previously under his command.

'Vrubel? KGB Border Guard — Finland border. Is that odd, or not?'

'Vrubel. We wondered that, sir. We checked. His father was an officer with General Ossipov during the war — killed near Berlin, in the last days.' The girl was concentrating on the conscientiousness of her tone. Vorontsyev thought she might not yet have lost her sense of herself as a woman in a male-dominated elite. To him, she was one of his junior officers.

'I see. Does Vrubel frequent army clubs very much?'

'Don't know, sir. I think he came by invitation this time — the General's invitation.'

'Mm. Leave it for the time being. What other contacts, of any kind?'

'A cousin, sir. Vladimir Ossipov, an official in the Foreign Ministry. Not very important. He called on him and his family, just before we came off duty yesterday. He's a fanatical Party member, is Vladimir.'

'Very well. Let us go back to the day before — and go through this process again. Just for a change, show me the pictures first.'

Once more the blind was dropped, and the slides flicked on the screen. He felt no irritation at the lack of substance emerging from the surveillance, and little responsibility other than that of the automation, checking and double-checking. The routine soothed, refreshed. Even in the SID there was the humming of obedient, unthinking machinery.

'Who's that?' he asked. The background was the Museum of the Revolution on Gorki Street. Ossipov was engaged in conversation with a man in a dark overcoat and hat.

The slides flicked on, the projector humming slightly with warmth. More pictures of the two old men, still in conversation.

'No one special. Ilya was able to listen. It was about politics.'

'Politics?'

'Nothing controversial. In praise of Soviet achievements — especially the Revolution itself, and the war.' The girl, too, seemed bored, answering for Ilya.

'Is that it?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Very well — go on.'

More slides — out of doors. Snow, caught on the shoulders of the General's dark overcoat, and curtaining the clarity of the picture. Vorontsyev squinted.

'What is this?'

'After he left the museum — it's Pushkin Square. I took one here because he waited a bit, as if to meet someone…'

'And?'

'Nothing. Caught a taxi — and we took another, to follow him.'

'Where?'

'Hotel — a couple of drinks.'

The scenes flicked, as if accompanying the narrative. Back of the man, then the taxi, back of the man outside the Moskva Hotel, entering the foyer… 'You followed him in?'

'Yes. He stayed in the bar, then went to the toilet, then caught another taxi…' Both of them were bored, it was evident now. Brushing aside a minor irritation, Vorontsyev watched the screen. Back of the man, entering a taxi. 'Where next?'

'The cinema. On the Marx Prospekt. Some epic extolling the usual virtues, school of Eisenstein. Wartime stuff, I think. I almost went to sleep.'

'But you watched him throughout?'

'Yes. He went to the toilet again — must have a bladder problem, or it was the cold — then took his seat, sat alone for two hours, came out, oh — went to the toilet again, then caught a taxi back to the Moskva for a light meal…'

Slides. Back of the man entering the cinema, grainy with snow, head bowed, hat held on head. Back of the man coming out of the cinema. Other people. 'Back!'

'What?'

'Back! The shot of him going in — then this shot again.'

'Sir.'

Vorontsyev watched, felt the tension close on his bowels, then ungrip again as he sensed an error. The two young officers had hardly risen from their langour, except that the girl whispered the time to Ilya. 'No—' Vorontsyev whispered. 'No.'

'Shall I go on, sir?'

'Yes. How close were you when he went into the cinema?'

'A bit back. Not many customers at that time.'

'And he went into the toilet?'

'Yes, sir.'

'You're sure? On the way in?'

Alevtina consulted her notes. 'On the way out…'

'You said on the way in!'

'I — no, only on the way out.'

'Quickly, go back to the Moskva — to the shot of him leaving the hotel, getting in the taxi. Quickly!'

Ilya fumbled with the cartridge; stuttering clicks, then the smoother sound as images flashed on the screen in quick succession.

Back of the man entering the taxi. It was inconclusive, Vorontsyev recognised, as if he had hoped for something clearer. Yet he sensed how it might have been done.

'What is it, sir?' Alevtina asked, craning forward in her chair, staring at the flecked expanse of overcoat. Snow, the flurried curtain.

'Where were you when he came out of the toilet — the hotel toilet?' Vorontsyev snapped.

'Recess in the foyer.'

'At the bar,' added Ilya.

'Where did he put on his coat?' Vorontsyev enunciated the words slowly, carefully. They sensed the importance of their answer. They screwed up their faces helpfully.

'In — the bar,' Ilya said finally.

The girl added eagerly, 'He was wearing it as he crossed the foyer.'

'And you were behind him all the time, from the moment he left the toilet until he got into the taxi?'

'Yes.' Her voice held an apprehension of failure, but puzzlement was more evident.

'Then that's it!'

'What is?'

'What's the next slide?' Vorontsyev calmed himself, afraid of his leap of insight, the certainty of suspicion. 'Before this one, I mean.'

'Entering the hotel — there.' The cartridge clicked like the bolt of a rifle, Vorontsyev thought, his imagination gleaming with effort.

'Back again… back again… back again. See it?' The two slides were swiftly interposed — back of the man, entertaining in a comic juxtaposition. In and out of the revolving doors of the foyer of the Moskva Hotel. A television trick, Alevtina reminded herself, stifling a smile.

'What — sir?'

Vorontsyev, an impatient parent, yet happy in his own secure knowledge, crossed to the wall, and his finger jabbed, mottled monochrome, at the back of the dark overcoat.

'See the tilt of the shoulders here?' The hand wiggled impatiently, and another back appeared, leaving the foyer. 'Now here… If you enlarged the hand…' He squinted at the hand holding the dark hat down on the head — the snowflakes were huge, like irritating butterflies on a specimen slide, obscuring some scientific data. 'If you enlarge the hand. I've no doubt you will find a different one — fatter, shorter fingers, or shorter nails.'

He turned to them, grinned, and dramatically crossed to the window and let up the blind. Strong morning light now, not so grey.

'It's not the same man. The man you sat behind in the cinema was not the Colonel-General! You spent two hours following the wrong man.' In the pleasure of confirmation, Vorontsyev was uncondemning. 'So — why and where did the General go?'

'How did they switch back, sir?'

'The cinema toilet. I'll bet you were given a good look at the face, coming out of the cinema…' Alevtina's face betrayed a childish sense of being made to appear stupid by an adult. 'Of course. Now, go back to the man in the Museum of the Revolution — the one with the dark coat and hat, about the General's age. And place your bets, my children — place your bets!'

Folley rumbled a new film into the camera, the cold stiffening, thickening his fingers in the few seconds since he had removed his mittens. Already he had six rolls of film — infra-red the first two, then a change when dawn came — in his pockets, but he seemed possessed now to record everything he could. He was overwhelmed by the evidence, and by a disbelief that made him collect every scrap of it he could; perhaps he already heard Waterford's mocking tones, or those of the superior, affected queer, Davenhill.

He closed the back of the camera, raised it to his eye, focused, checked the exposure, and pressed the stud. The camera began to photograph, silently and automatically, a group of soldiers erecting a camouflage net, beneath which rested, somnolently evil, three T-72 tanks, the gun of each seeming to point straight at him.

He had been there for three hours, and he knew he should have left long before. Whatever luck there was had to be disappearing rapidly. Twice already, patrols had almost stumbled upon him as he skirted the fringes of the camp beneath the forest roof, pointing his camera like a gawping eye wherever he could — a child in a huge military exhibition.

All the time, he felt an irrepressible urgency to continue taking photographs — snap, snap, snap, move on, snap, snap, move on — lie wondered whether he was acting out some caricatured parade-ground behaviour in order to avoid considering the reality of what he photographed.

Snap, snap, snap — tanks, two guards lighting cigarettes, erection of an HQ hut; snap, snap, snap, move on — a man peeing behind a tree, lifting lie skirts of his winter overcoat, head with its fur hat bent in solemn inspection, motor rifle transports; change lens to telephoto; snap, snap, snap — smoky distance brought nearer, the ranks of T-72s stretching away, giving a sense of the size of the area they occupied; he sensed he was even beginning to compose the shots.

Voices. He stumbled backwards, ducking behind a tree, straining to catch their direction, number. Three, four? Coming closer, moving from the left, calling so they were spread slightly apart, having to raise their voice. He felt nothing, nothing more than alertness to every tiny noise of movement, below the clear voices. He dropped the camera into a deep pocket of his combat clothing, the long lens hard against his thigh, and brought the rifle slowly round to a position where he could fire it through the canvas sleeve. He flexed the cold index finger.

Four of them. Sweep patrol, round the perimeter. One of a number of teams, perhaps as many as six. Coming with the dangerous morning. Twenty yards — he caught a flash of whiter whiteness, less smoky than the vague distances of snow-heavy trees. A guard, rifle held slackly but ready for use, wending through the tight-standing pines.

Another, away to his right. They would pass just beyond him, if he slipped round the tree, just a little…

Footprints. Deep holes in the thick snow. His footprints, coming to the tree, from the direction towards which they were moving. He couldn't hide them. He eased the rifle level with his waist, reached for the barrel with his left hand.

Something in one of the photographs — quickly, quickly, he urged his cold brain. A stream of urine, smoking in the freezing air…

He turned his back to the approaching men, fumbling in his overtrousers, bending his head, visualising the picture he had taken. He tried to urinate, concentrating, wanting to giggle with nerves and the urge to verisimilitude. The feeble stream splashed against the tree, washing the snow down the trunk.

'Don't let it hang out for too long, son,' the nearest man called. 'You might need it again!' Someone else laughed. He laughed too, and the sound was ridiculously thin and pretended to his ears.

'Thanks for the advice,' he called back in Russian, and stood there, all awareness now in his back, the great stretch of white between his shoulders — target.

Then he let himself look round. He had long finished urinating, and he was freezing cold, the iciness spreading through his loins, his thighs. The nearest man who had passed ten feet from him, was moving away again, into the trees. He heard him laughing, calling out some obscenity — not back in his direction, but to one of the others. A laugh like an animal's bark returned from someone hidden further in the trees.

Folley adjusted the rifle, slipped on the mittens, looked around him carefully. He had to go now, get out quickly before the next sweep-unit came upon him, following the last one round the perimeter in an anti-clockwise direction. He moved away from the tree, treading carefully, placing his feet in the deep snow as if he might have to move quickly, would need extra purchase, at any moment.

There was one thing left to do — check the village, Rontaluumi. He wanted photographic evidence that it was empty.

Away from the camp, near the road they had turned off to hide in the forest, he buckled on his skis. As he bent to do so, the reaction hit him, and it was a long time before he could even stand upright on limbs suddenly watery and without strength.

Eventually, he was able to move oft; gradually, pushing deeper with the ski sticks, he gathered strength and speed on the long skis, and headed for the village.

Alexei Vorontsyev felt tired, but satisfied. Replete, he considered, as if after a heavy meal and good liquor. The day's work had proved eminently satisfactory. Blow-ups of the slides proved that Colonel-General Ossipov had gone missing for more than two hours, without trace, and that a man he had met in the Museum of the Revolution had substituted for him. Vorontsyev still retained in his mind gigantic images of two hands, both curled to clutch the brim of a dark hat, pinned side by side on the wall of his office. As a photographic expert had confirmed for him — the hands were not the same. And the wrong hand belonged to the man in the museum.

Vorontsyev had informed Deputy Kapustin, who had commended his work. Other units of the SID, also assigned to the matter, had not proved so successful, checking back over their files. But, with his lead, they would recheck, and Kapustin was certain something of real significance would emerge.

Vorontsyev put the car into gear, and pulled away from the traffic lights before turning into Kalenin Street, where he had shared an apartment with his wife. One side of the wide street still contained the old houses, many of them turned into government offices. However, new luxury blocks of apartments had been built, unadorned slabs and facades of grey concrete, without aesthetic value yet possessing a degree of social elevation that attached to a few new developments in Moscow.

It was only as he tugged on the handbrake, as if the noise of ratchets awakened him, that he realised he had returned from old habit to a place where he no longer lived. There was a sharp, nauseous taste in his mouth. He had moved out months before, when the strain of living with Natalia's infidelities, all the time becoming more and more blatant, had proved too much for him. Because in the end she had not even bothered to lie. He closed the door of the car again, his mood evaporated.

His work appeared unsubstantial now, and the voice of the Deputy in his memory was tinny and unreal. All that he saw was the hard, assured face, carefully made-up, of his wife, smiling at him. And the crown of dark, groomed hair he had once possessed with the rest of her. He opened the door again, and got out into the noise of traffic travelling out of the centre of Moscow, towards the north-western suburbs; he had parked the car, unthinking, where he always parked it, opposite the foyer door to the apartment block.

He leaned against the car for a time, and lit a cigarette. He did not bother with his overcoat, despite the cold wind, and his hands shook as he cupped them round the flame of the lighter. When he drew in the first smoke, he leaned back and looked up towards the lighted windows. Fourth floor, fifth along — yes, she was there.

The mood of the day crept back into him — the power he had exercised in setting in motion the investigations he had ordered was too impregnated in his personality, like a scent in his clothing or his skin, to be got rid of by the betrayal of memory. He could still see the hands pinned to the wall, betraying the substitution of Ossipov by someone as yet unknown — but who had been photographed, and who would be found. The power of achieving secret knowledge of Ossipov made him bold now. He had a desire to confront his wife — and anyone else who might be there.

It was as if he were drinking from a flask, standing there in the cold, and his head had begun to spin, and he had deadened the defeated ego — recovered himself. When he finished the cigarette, he walked towards the foyer door.

There was a porter he did not recognise, a new man. To him he showed the blue ID card, which obviated explanation. The man was likely to be an informer to one of the departments inside the 2nd Chief Directorate, anyway. The man, impressed, seemed to shrink back into the uniform he wore, saluted, and disappeared back behind the glass partition that separated him from the residents. Vorontsyev crossed to the lift.

He rode to the fourth floor, stepped out, and walked slowly down the carpeted corridor. His principal fear at that moment was being seen by a neighbour who knew him and his circumstances.

He stood in front of the door, despising his weakness, and the involuntary wiping of his hands on his coat. Then he took out his key, which he had not returned to her, and inserted it in the latch. She had not bothered to have the lock changed.

His teeth gritted, and he pushed open the door, into the tiny hall. At the door of the lounge, which overlooked Kalenin Street, he could hear her voice inside — the laughter so like' music — but false, as opera falsifies words into beautiful sounds. She made her laughter attractive, enjoyable — but nothing more than a sound.

He pushed open the lounge door. There was a man in the room. Her head turned to him as he was taking in the KGB Border Guard uniform, the distinctive shoulder flashes. It was, he thought, vulgarly like his wife that she would want her uniformed lovers to wear their uniforms. The man appeared disconcerted. But not his wife. She was merely angry.

She said, 'Alexei — what the hell are you doing here?' Then she puffed dramatically at her cigarette, blowing the smoke audibly in his direction. He stood at the door. The KGB officer appeared distressed now — something officer-like and stupid had entered his face, Vorontsyev noticed, disliking the man. Natalia said, 'Alexei — allow me to introduce Captain Yevgeni Vrubel, on leave from border duties. Yevgeni, this is my husband, Alexei.' Natalia, Vorontsyev noticed in the moment before the name struck him fully, seemed suddenly amused by the confrontation.

The brief daylight was giving out again, and yet Folley remained in the empty village of Rontaluumi. In some inexplicable way, he had wasted the few hours of daylight, acting as if he was unable to deal with the tanks that had crossed the border during darkness, with the camp he had photographed, preferring the smaller mystery. What had been done with the villagers?

He had searched every house, every store and shed. Nothing, not so much as a cat or dog, no sign of life anywhere. It was as if some plague had swept through there, and the bodies had been afterwards removed. Empty rooms, empty chicken-runs — fodder untasted, tins still in the cupboards and on shelves. As the hours passed he became desperate to find some clue, as loneliness more suffocating than that of his journey overcame him.

Finally, he settled himself in a battered armchair in the living-room of the largest wooden, single-storey house. He kept his white winter combat dress on, and cradled the gun on his lap. He was tense and worn with waiting and searching. He had sufficient evidence — yet he wanted more, an answer to this empty village, and its pressing silence.

The whole idea of invasion had become ridiculous — forced to the back of his mind by the emptiness the village emitted like a gas. The implications of what he had seen were buried — he refused to consider any of them.

Empty.

This room — he had the sense of invading other lives, but no sense of the lives that had been lived there — and himself; he could catch sight of himself in a smoky mirror over the huge fireplace. Out of place; rudely forced upon this place, squatter or looter. He had touched nothing, acutely aware of his intrusion. What had happened to the people of Rontaluumi? There wasn't a single sign of violence.

Then he must have dozed — a false light sleep.

He woke to the sound of voices outside, the calling of orders; a tone of voice that reached down into him, pulling him awake. He was out of the chair in a moment, the taste of sleep still sticky in his mouth. He dribbled, wiped it away, blinking his eyes, straining to hear…

As he moved to the door, the door opened. He had forced the back door, next to the log store, but the man outside was using a heavy key to turn the lock.

The heavy door swung open.

A figure, in winter combat dress, hood thrown back to reveal the Russian fur cap on the dark hair. A face twisting with surprise, and the hand moving to the holster.

Folley shot the Red Army officer twice, the rifle still at his hip, the sudden noise of the gun bellowing in the low-ceilinged room, echoing back. The doorway was empty, wiped clean of the man's form as it fell into the snow outside.

For a single moment his body was frozen, the aftermath of unpremeditated violence. A boot stuck across the doorway, belonging to the dead man — the echoes of the two shots from the rifle dying away. Then he gathered up his pack, slung it over one shoulder, adjusting it on his back as he forced himself through the narrow door to the kitchen; he collected the skis from their propped position against the back door, and opened it silently.

Behind him there was a cry, orders barked in distant voices like the call of foxes. He stepped out into the darkening evening, alert for movement.

Beyond the initial rise, the ground sloped away from the back of the house, towards a narrow frozen river, and dense firs already looming and dark as the light faded rapidly. He clambered up the slope, then stopped to buckle on the heavy, long skis, then pushed off. Behind him, as the wind of his passage began to louden, he heard a shout, then the explosion of a gun. Something whined past his head, then again — a sharp, unreal cracking noise, as if he had crossed thin ice. Then he was shielded by the rise.

He jumped into a stop that spurted snow away from him — efficiently braking at the foot of the long slope. There were trees now between him and the pursuit, and the sheet of the river just below him, the banks heavy with icy grass. He unbuckled the skis, stepped away from them, hoisted them across his shoulder. He slithered down the bank, almost losing his rooting as his boots met the smoother ice of the river. He trod carefully, moving lightly and surely, the darkness comfortingly drawn around him, his passage silent. There was more shooting, then silence; he knew they would pursue him now.

He guessed that the armoured column had sent back some kind of patrol, for a reason that remained obscure. He could only think that they were to hold the village as some kind of crossing-point, that other columns were expected that night. And perhaps they had been intended to look for him. Ski-tracks, leading away from the camp. He spent no time, even as he clambered up the opposite dope, in considering his own death. They would not let him live, he believed; but the priority of his survival had become uppermost now. He had to make some report, present some evidence of what he had seen. He could not, except in extreme emergency, use the transmitter now. That had been impressed upon him. Violation of Finnish neutrality.

As he settled on the far bank, hunched into the hard snow at its edge, the rifle with its night-sight aimed across the already glimmering sheet of ice, his lips twisted in a smile. Waterford and Davenhill, and whoever was behind them — they would know something had gone wrong by his inability to report or return. But not the size of it!

A white-clothed figure, ghostly, appeared at the other side of the river. He fired. The figure dropped away, merging with the snow. In the wake of the single shot, he heard a moan, carrying distinctly across the space between them. Another figure ducked back behind a thin tree-trunk. He fired twice, could see through the sight the white chips appear on the trunk. He fired twice more, grazing the bole of another tree. Nothing moved.

But he had the pictures now, the rolls of film and his mental count. One hundred and twenty tanks. A motor rifle battalion in support. In Finland. Enormity of simple statistics. And his impression of the column merely at a transit camp for the moment. It had to be reported.

In a day's time, the helicopter would return to the dropping point, but would not wait for him. It would return only once more, the following night. Then he would be presumed dead, effectively out of the Snow Falcon operation.

He wondered whether Waterford had known what he had found, already. Known that it was Russian armour. He had proof the Russians were invading Finland.

He had proof. He fired again, and a man staggered back behind the trunk that had concealed him. Wounded, but nothing more than that. He fired again, twice, a warning pattern. Then he slid backwards, towards the skis. The lip of the bank hid him from them as he fitted the cross-country skis, and pushed away silently, the skis slithering on the firm snow, the wind beginning to sing in his ears as he gathered speed.

For a moment, he felt a sagging of his knees, a heaviness against his back, as if he had carried the pack for long hours without rest. Then he dug in with the sticks, beginning to stride as the land levelled and he wound through the denser fir trees, gliding like a ghost. He shook off the weariness and the image. He was vulnerable. Already, they would have crossed the river; and they would have called up reinforcements. He was the tail of the comet streaming away from them, but pulling their mass surely behind him. And leaving a clean, new set of tracks for them to follow.

He struck south-west, in an opposite arm of the forest to that which followed the road to Ivalo; he followed the course of the river, its southern tributary, keeping well within the firs. When the trees died as the land rose again, he would strike westwards, towards the main north-south highway. He tried to comfort himself, as the body laboured and the legs tired, with the thought that the deeper into Finland he moved, the safer he became. It was a difficult consolation.

Natalia had disappeared into her bedroom, complaining of boredom and a headache. The small clock on the wall-shelf showed the time to be almost seven-thirty. Vrubel's dark, handsome face appeared to Vorontsyev to be puckering with irritation — yet there was a frown of nervousness created by the knowledge of Vorontsyev's rank, and department. Vorontsyev had savoured the young man's discomfiture, his apprehension — not as something professional, but as a diet on which his sexual jealousy could feed. He believed that the KGB Border Guard officer had slept with his wife, and he used his professional weight to disturb him.

Vorontsyev smoked an American cigarette — ostentatiously, he had offered one to the uniformed Vrubel. He had refused, smoking instead a Russian cigarette in its cardboard holder. The cheap, dark tobacco was pungent in the room.

'Why did you meet Colonel-General Ossipov at the officers' dub, Captain?' A professional tone of voice, the interrogatory flatness, the absence of the man's name, as if he were already a cipher.

'Why? Because he invited me to, Major. He was a comrade in arms of my father — at Stalingrad. He has always — favoured me with his friendship, ever since my father was killed.' Vorontsyev noticed the cold tone, which was without fear. He was talking to someone who belonged to a special class, an elite; the clique that the army had always inspired. Yet he was struck by the likeness of their separate biographies — he, in Mihail Pyotravich, possessed a guardian, an influential substitute parent, as this young man did, apparently, in Ossipov.

He dismissed the thought. He did not wish to identify with Vrubel in any way.

'What did you talk about?'

'Old times — the future. The things friends talk about.'

Vrubel was smiling again, unafraid. Once again, Vorontsyev was struck by the assurance Vrubel displayed. It was unexpected, despite his rank in the KGB. SID officers were not met with confidence, with secret amusement.

He said, 'I understand what you mean by friends, Captain.' Vrubel's left eyelid twitched, as if a secret nerve had been struck. Vorontsyev became irritated by the smile on the other man's lips. Sexual dominance, which he had enjoyed over Natalia and her lover for the past hour was vanishing, evanescent as steam. He was being laughed at again.

'Of course, Major.' The tone was patronising.

'You met the General again?' he asked.

Vrubel shook his head. 'Our tastes do not coincide, Major. The General likes museums, art, sculpture. I prefer…' He spread his open hands on his knees, smiling. 'Other pleasures,' he added.

Vorontsyev became cold. He saw the man's intact ego, the sexual arrogance — and something more. Secrecy, the enjoyment of unimparted knowledge. He saw how the balance of their relationship had swung like a pendulum, in minutes. He used his insight.

'I see,' he said, looking down. 'You — where did you meet my wife?'

'We were introduced by — another friend of mine. A mutual friend.'

The amusement was evident.

'Who was that?'

'A member of the Bolshoi — a dancer.'

Vrubel was not lying — it was obvious that he was enjoying presenting himself as the stallion of the Bolshoi, and Natalia as a cheap tart.

'I see.' He looked up, snapping: 'When do you return to your duties, Captain?'

'Alas, tomorrow.' He stubbed out his cigarette, and looked markedly at his watch. Vorontsyev saw the confidence ooze, the skin of the face now smooth again, the look untroubled. 'I have tickets for a show — at eight,' he said pointedly.

Vorontsyev squeezed anger into his face.

'I see.' He stood up, robotically. 'I shouldn't waste your valuable time, then! I'll leave you.' He bunched his hands. Vrubel was unmoved, 'Tell my wile I'm sorry I interrupted you, won't you.'

'I will.'

Vorontsyev sat in the car, trying to recapture the professional mask that had slipped from his face in the lift; a moment of pure rage had smothered his coldness. Now, he regained something like composure. He picked up the microphone under the dashboard.

'Centre — go ahead Moscow Unit Nine-Six-Four,' he heard in reply to his call sign. 'Put me through to my office — night duty-staff.'

He waited, then he heard Ilya's tired voice.

'Yes, Major.' There was no amusement, only a peeved deference, and frustrated boredom. A broken date, probably.

'Don't sulk!' he snapped. Then he hesitated. 'I–I'm at my wife's apartment, on Kalenjin Street.'

'Yes, Major?'

'A — Captain Vrubel is being entertained there…' The words came out, dragged up, each with its separate soft explosion of breath. His chest seemed to hurt with exertion. 'I want a tail on them — on the man, understand?'

'Yes, Major — isn't he the—?'

'He is. I want a team out here, and another car for myself. My wife knows this one.'

'You're going to tail them yourself, Major?'

'Yes. Anything in the rules against it?'

'No — sir.'

'Right, then! Anything on that bastard in black, yet?' He let the accumulated venom into the question, as if expelling saliva that had filled his throat. He spat at Vrubel in the emphasis of the words.

'Nothing, sir. The computer doesn't know him. We're waiting for time on the central records computer now.'

'Get that time! I don't know what Vrubel knows, but he knows something. But he won't be easy to question, or to break.' He understood how he had chosen the word — the personal life leaping over the snake of professional procedures. 'We must have that man who imitated Ossipov. He must know why he did it.'

'Yes, Major.'

'Get those cars over here, on the double. They're leaving soon.'

'On their way, sir.'

He almost wanted to plead that Ilya send men who would not laugh at the humiliating prospect of Major Vorontsyev trailing around the city after his wife and her lover, using the Centre's vehicle and manpower resources to do so. Instead, he clipped the mike back under the dashboard.

He gripped the wheel, noticed that he was cold. He took one ragged breath, then started the car, and drove some way down the service road to the flats. There he parked with a view of the foyer, waiting for his wife and Captain Vrubel to come out.

Folley crouched, exhausted, behind a spindly fir, his ears straining to catch the sounds of his pursuers. Nothing. For a few moments, he was safe. He drew in the cold night air in great heaving sobs, and his body began to shake with reaction to the demands he had made upon it. There was no impression of loneliness, of fear or loss of hope. Only the body, pleading with him, already wanting to curl into some foetal rest.

He looked at his watch. He had been travelling, with only two short stops, for four hours. He was on the very edge of the fir forest, the trees tiny, misshapen, dwarfish. He had climbed steadily, wearily, up out of the bowl in which the taller trees grew, and were dense, into the higher country, the bare landscape on which he would move like a white fly towards the main Ivalo road.

He could not use the radio; it would pinpoint him, since the frequency available to him was that used for ordinary NATO traffic. The Russians would be monitoring that; and the chopper that was airborne in order to pick up his reports would not be airborne until the morning.

He had lost the brief, illusory comfort of moving further into Finland — he wasn't safe, could not be until the chopper made the first of its dashes across the Finnmark, bearing Finnish markings, the pilot in Finnish army uniform, to the pick-up point. And it would happen only once more after that; exactly twenty-four hours later. If he did not appear, he was to be presumed dead.

Or captured.

Folley wondered, weakly, whether he was the first Snow Falcon; or had there been others, as there would be others after him if he did not return? Had any of the others learned what he knew? Snap, snap — had the pictures been removed from their bodies?

It would not matter, his limbs and joints persisted, if he was caught; lie down. It wouldn't be long before they caught up…

He pushed with his hands, but his body refused to rise from the snow. It was as if everything except his mind was straw. Even the way his legs stretched out, comical, like a scarecrow; ridiculous.

He attended to the body, in a compromise — as if bribing it with the chocolate from his pack. And he pressed the canvas sleeve of the rifle to his face, as if as a reminder.

So far — so far… No airborne search. He didn't think it likely, not yet. But he knew they would have to risk it after dawn. Perhaps they would use Kamovs or MILs to hunt for him — drop troops ahead of his possible and predicted course. They must know he would head for the road, had to be going west.

His thoughts tailed off into a lysergic acid photography, fed by the adrenalin of weary fear, in which the tactical moves of the day to come were vivid with terror and exhaustion and capture.

He knew they would do it; they had to. They understood what he had seen. He had to be stopped.

His left leg was twitching. A feeble attempt at movement, be wondered, or a protest at thoughts of continued Sight.

He wasn't sure that he slept, but the taste of sleep was in his mouth; yet it might have been minutes only. He jerked awake because a cry to attention sounded within him. Something was imperative as a dream of falling…

The cry was outside himself, he realised with a bright, tearing pain of betrayal and fear in his chest. A voice had spoken, only a few Russian words after he recognised that it was not his dream speaking. Close.

He rolled on to his stomach. It was that close. As if the next step of the foot would place it on his chest, smother his face… He slid the canvas sleeve from the rifle, and aimed. Into the telescopic sight, gathering the feeble light of stars and snow, walked the Russian soldier. And he was that close, close as the body had recognised, moving instinctively as it had done.

The rifle boomed in his ear, twice, and the Russian collided with the tree-bole he was carefully skirting. Folley even saw the lips distort as the cheek was dragged down the rough bark — body sliding into a silly, ablutive crouch. He rolled away from the tree, then fired again on his back as he saw the second man turning towards him, surprised by the sudden noises. He fired again, and the aim was poor; two more shots, and the man was staggering, his own rifle, a stubby Kalashnikov, discharging into the snow. A bright spittle of flame. Then the dull concussion of the white-clothed body into the snow.

He stood up with no sense of weariness. He slung the skis over his shoulder, and, ducking into a crouched run, scuttled like a crab across the uneven ground, away from the trees. He heard again the cries of foxes behind him, but no shots. He had, he sensed, been caught in the middle of a file, grown ragged as it was sweeping the forest skirts, and now they could see one another as they re-grouped and they dared not fire in case it was one of their own. But they would sense his general direction.

Snow pucked from the tree branches, stinging his face wet. Trees no higher than himself. He felt as if he were wading out of deep water, into shallows that exposed him as a target. Snow — dusted up from dwarf trees by the brushing of his pack, the pumping of his heavy arms — splashed across his white clothing.

Few trees, a lip of bare rock almost without snow, then nothing except a land tumbled under the starlit sky, soft, illusory folds of country fading out of eyesight. Before him, a long, gentle slope. He stopped, out of sight behind the lip of rock, and fitted the skis. Then a single moment in which the body seemed to fail — and he dug in with the sticks, pushing away.

Shots behind him, but distant, not even the insect noises of bullets passing close to him — only the sighing wind, the cold stars, and the hiss of the skis as he wound down into a high valley.

He almost sensed, in some para-normal manner, when they too fitted skis, dug in, and began to pursue him. He did not look behind. Ahead of him in the darkness was the north-south load, like the border of another country.

For a moment, he thought he heard, distantly, the buzz-saw whine of a helicopter.

Three: Pursuits

'Can you be certain — certain of these names at least?'

Khamovkhin waved the list of names in front of him. He was sitting at his desk, away from the fireplace where they had sat the previous night, and Andropov had had to pull a chair to the other side of the desk. He understood the First Secretary's need to establish an aura of self-confidence, and did not resent the subordination forced upon him. He had played the same game with three of his Deputies that morning.

'I think we can — Politburo members who have consistently supported the moves towards greater detente, arms reductions — objected to the increases in defence spending…' Then something seemed to snap in him, letting the tight calm elude him. 'You know most of these men — have known them for years — Feodor. You can vouch for their loyalty!'

Khamovkhin appeared challenged for an instant, then he relaxed into his chair.

'Perhaps you're right. The last thing we need is paranoia. Yes, yes…' He put the list aside. 'These, at least, should give us no cause for concern.'

'Good.'

Khamovkhin seemed suddenly to relax. He got up, went to the cabinet, and brought back the bottle of whisky and two tumblers. He poured two generous measures, and passed a tumbler across the desk to Andropov. Andropov looked at the glass as if at something that vaguely threatened him.

'We must wait and see, then. My performance this morning should have stirred something up — I was right, eh, old friend?'

'On balance — yes. Though we conclude we are certain of those names on that list — there are others whose loyalty might be called suspect — who have links with the High Command, sympathies or records that tie them to the Army. Yes—' Andropov sipped his drink. 'You have worried them. One of them may make some move, give himself away.'

'Why does there have to be someone in the Politburo in league with those bastards in the High Command?'

Khamovkhin swallowed greedily at the whisky.

'You mean — why not a simple army take-over?' Andropov shook his head. 'No. Too simple. Group 1917 is inside the Party machine — it has to be. If anything like a complete coup is being organised — against the Committee for State Security as well as the Kremlin — then it could not be done, for example, without the assistance of GLAVPUR inside the army. The loyalty of the Political Directorate would have to be swayed or circumvented. Not to mention the GRU, and our other checks and balances.'

Khamovkhin nodded.

'I know you're right. It was the only way, smoking them out. But — what a farce. I thought I was going to laugh at some of the things I was saying — and the way they were taking them!'

'Indeed. Your style of leadership helped. They would not expect to be accused of treason by you. I wonder you didn't remove a shoe and bang the edge of the table.'

Light glinted coldly on the Chairman's spectacles. He appeared to be smiling. Khamovkhin, doubt still rankling like creases in his bedclothes, shifted in his chair.

'How much good will it do, Yuri? To say we have details, confessions that point to a huge plot against the Party leadership—'

'If they want to know what we know, then they must come more into the open. Especially if their effort is as close as we suppose it is. They must institute enquiries of their own.' Andropov spread his hands on his knees. 'Panic? No, perhaps not so violent a reaction. But something may emerge — something precipitate?'

'I suppose so. Can we trust the SID?'

'We can trust no one else. They, at least, have brought this sliver of hope — the substitute for General Ossipov. The Special Investigations Department is all we have.'

'Will they find this — substitute? Now that we have let Ossipov return to the safety of his hide-out in Khabarovsk, six thousand miles away!'

'We could not move against him. But he has helped us. We can begin to recheck every piece of documented evidence on senior officers — and their contacts with senior Party officials — during leave-periods in Moscow. It is something.'

'Not enough. Too little, and probably too late.'

'Calm yourself, Feodor. If the apparatus turns on us, we are finished. We have to accept that, before we begin. We also have to accept that the KGB is an investigative organ, not an army. They will move against us with the army — which part of it, or all of it, doesn't matter. We can only defend ourselves if we know who is behind it. How won't matter, if we can get hold of who — those who will give the orders. If they are silenced, then there will be no orders given. If they are not, then—' Andropov raised his hands. Whisky slopped from the tumbler onto the trousers of his grey suit. He looked irritated, mopped at it with his silk handkerchief.

'As fragile as that,' Khamovkhin observed. 'Your thesis can be spilled just as easily, with a shrug by the army. And lots of other liquid besides. Most of it ours.' The cynical superiority drained from his face as he gazed towards the fireplace. 'We have no more than days, Yuri. What the hell can we do just in days?'

Vorontsyev sat alone in the car they had brought for him. The second car was parked across the street. They had followed Vrubel and Natalia after the performance of some dreary comedy at the Mossoviet Theatre on the Bolshaya Sadovaya — the sort of play an officer would want to see on leave from the Finnish border, a weak satire on provincial life in the Soviet Union that everyone seemed to want to see, so that the tickets were at some kind of premium.

Now, the cars were parked in the Arbat, a short distance from the apartment in the Kalenin Street. Vrubel and Natalia were enjoying a late supper and drinks in the Praga Cafe. There were still people about to distract his thoughts as he watched their faces, lit like those of fish in a tank as they patrolled the narrow pavements, stared into darkened shops.

But his attention kept returning to the curtains across the windows of the Praga on the other side of the street, dimly lit from within. The sight possessed him because he and Natalia had often eaten or drunk there, in the early days, when he had waited for her to finish a performance in the chorus of the Bolshoi. A time before many things.

It was evident that Vrubel had chosen the Arbat because of its proximity to Natalia's apartment. He was to be forced to witness, from his car, the laughing, meaningful exit from the cafe, the summoning of a taxi, perhaps the heads leaning together through the rear window, even the grotesque cliche of merging shadows thrown on to the drawn curtains of a bedroom.

He had forgotten the surveillance purpose of what he was doing; so much so that he was on the point of ordering the other tail-car to go off-duty. He could not bear the thought that other men would sit outside the apartment-block on Kalenin Street, watching the same shadow-dance on the curtains. The thought left a vile taste in his mouth, and a creeping sensation in his genitals, as if they were threatened with pain or damage. He picked up the handset.

'Maxim,' he said.

'Yes, Major.'

'Forget it — go home.'

'Home, Major?'

'Yes, dammit! Go home. I'll take care of things here!'

There was a pause, then, with a tone in which he could sense the pity: 'Yes, sir.' Then, formally: 'Moscow Unit Seven-Oh-Four-Seven going off-duty in the Arbat. Returning to central garage. Good-night, Major.'

'Good-night.' He jammed the handset into its dip under the dash, rubbed his chin hard, a rasping sound in the car; it was as if he were rubbing something clean. Then he looked at his hand, to see if it trembled. It was steady, and he was thankful.

They came out of the Praga, laughing as he had anticipated — he could almost tell from the slant of her body, the way her fur coat was wrapped against her, the pressure of the sum form against Vrubel's uniform… she was inviting him without words. It was as if he had seen her fornicating in the harshly-lit street, so naked were her intentions. When the taxi moved away, he switched on the engine, and followed at a distance. There was no necessity to keep close. He knew their destination.

He parked quietly, with a view of her bedroom window, as the taxi drew away. Vrubel's tip, in anticipation, had no doubt been generous. Then they had gone inside — a part of his mind shared the lift with them. Then he picked up the handset, and called the Centre, requesting to be put through to the SID offices on Frunze Quay. All communications from mobile units were relayed through the central control room in Dzerzhinsky Street. Eventually, Ilya replied. His voice sounded more bored than before. Vorontsyev, as he waited, his mind on the Ossipov-substitute, had been unable to distract his eyes from the bedroom window. The light had gone on, the curtains tugged across. It was as if she knew he was down there…

'Vorontsyev,' he said, and his voice sounded thick and strange.

'Yes, Major.' There was some effort to attend, to sound interested.

He saw the figures moving in an old dance, against the lighted curtains. He could feel her body…

'Anything on that bastard yet?'

'Er — no, sir. Not yet.'

'Why not, for shit's sake? You must have something!' The bodies swayed — he could see the imperceptible movement towards the bed. 'Get your fucking finger out, Ilya! You're wasting time!' He wanted to go on shouting into the handset, shouting obscenities, berating his subordinate, purging him self. Orgasm of jealousy, hot in his dry throat.

'Yes, sir.' Ilya was abashed, shocked.

'Get — on with it, then. I want something by the morning. Something definite!'

'Sir.'

He pushed the handset down into the passenger-seat, leaning his weight on it unconsciously. He was shuddering, as Vrubel would be, soon. The heave of the final thrust…

He got out of the car. He could no longer watch the darkened window. He drew in the air, gratefully, and made himself walk. He walked up and down, a sentry to Natalia's infidelity, his hands thrust in the pockets of his overcoat, his face a set, grim mask.

Vrubel, as he left, almost bumped into him, paid no attention except to mumble an apology. Vorontsyev, looking up, saw the officer's back walking away from him — uniform purpled beneath the street lamp for a moment, then the form shadowed again. He watched, hating.

He had been surprised when Vrubel and Natalia had taken a taxi from the apartment to the theatre, and wondered why Vrubel had no hire car. He saw him now fishing for a key, opening the door of a Zil, looking back up at the window, then sorting the engine — a sudden loud cough that seemed to waken Vorontsyev. He looked at his watch. Twenty minutes — Vrubel had been with his wife only twenty minutes.

Even as the laughter began to bubble acidly in his throat — the image of temporary impotence sketched in his mind like a cartoon on a lavatory wall — he sensed that Vrubel was leaving with a purpose. He wasn't running away, but to…

He ran to his own car, seeing the Zil turn out of the service road, heading north up the wide thoroughfare. Towards Arbat Square, and perhaps the Sadovaya motorway ring. His own engine fired at the third hasty attempt, he flicked on the headlights, and screeched away. There was satisfaction now in action, for the first time that night. He roared across the Kalenin Street, in front of a taxi which sounded its horn at him — Vorontsyev recognised with a smile that the man was probably KGB; he would otherwise have shown caution in remonstrating with a car so obviously in pursuit of something or someone.

Vrubel's black car was well ahead of him, crossing the Arbat — he caught a glimpse of it as he weaved out of the stream of traffic for a moment, into the path of an oncoming lorry. He ducked back in, then surged out, overtaking three cars before having to squeeze back into the heavy flow across the square. The night-life of Moscow, flowing back out to the new suburbs.

He did not catch sight of Vrubel again until they had both turned left on to Tchaikovsky Street, part of the inner motorway ring; then right through the Smolenskaia, and suddenly out across the Borodino Bridge, the water sluggish, dark ice perhaps at its edges — he could not be sure; certainly it was much colder.

As he crossed the bridge, it was as if he left the apartment behind him. Now thought, accelerating with the car, focused ahead and he began to sense that he had inadvertently panicked Vrubel. Something about his visit to the apartment had made him suspicious; perhaps the man could not believe that it was entirely fortuitous. But where was he going? Out of the city altogether? Had he arranged, perhaps, some meeting because he sensed that the SID suspected him?

Vrubel's Zil swung west on to Kutuzov Prospekt, and Vorontsyev found himself only two cars behind. Flanking the wide avenue, the pink-bricked blocks of apartment were grubbily washed by the sodium flares. There was a frost in the air; Vorontsyev turned up the heater of the car. The railway bridge, then the glass and aluminium cylinder of the Kutuzovskaya metro station. Vorontsyev wondered whether, since they were in a quarter where many diplomats of foreign countries resided, Vrubel had a call to make along the Kutuzov Prospekt. He stayed two cars behind him, hidden from the rear-view mirror.

There appeared to be no deviation as they drove through the quieter suburbs. Cars dropped away from the file, a stream running dry; the street lighting less insistent. Vorontsyev, who rarely had cause or inclination to visit the outer suburbs of the city, felt himself in a strange country. Only one car separated him from Vrubel now. He did not think that Vrubel suspected his presence — the way he had left the apartment on Kalenin Street indicated that he had no suspicion that he was under surveillance — but he suspected that the KGB officer had indeed set up a meeting. Either he wished to pass on something he had received from Ossipov at the officer's club — or he wanted some kind of reassurance about Vorontsyev's apparent interest.

As the lights died behind them, Vorontsyev switched off his lights. He felt a sudden chill as the road disappeared, and the flat countryside winked out. The road was becoming icy, and the night was hard with stars. Gradually, he became accustomed to the pale gleam of light reflected from the snow still covering the fields. And he followed the lights of the car ahead of him, which still masked his presence from Vrubel.

As far as Vorontsyev could tell, they were heading for the excursion spot, Arkhangelskoe; they had taken the Minsk road, the continuation of the Kutuzov Prospekt, then turned right on to the Rublevo road. When they turned left again, it was towards Uspenskoe. And the car between the Zil and Vorontsyev turned right at the crossroads. Vorontsyev waited, then pulled out, lights still off. Moving away from him, he saw the red rear lamps of the Zil. Unsuspicious acceleration.

Gradually, they slid together into a country of sum trees fining the road, and shimmering, snowbound fields. There was something sufficiently beautiful about it to affect Vorontsyev. They crossed the Moskva, heading south-west, and then the Zil turned off the main road, into the trees. Vorontsyev stopped the car, saw the small sideroad, unmarked and unsurfaced, and slowly turned into it. Ahead of him, winking suddenly through the trees then lost again, were the rear lights of the Zil. He wondered for a moment whether he was being led into a trap — then he sensed that the meeting-place was to be one of the many wooden dachas built in the Arkhangelskoe district — summer and week-end homes for prominent members of the Party and the bureaucracy. He smiled. SID had investigated, in its time, a number of peculiar reports concerning social and personal behaviour in dachas like the ones dotted through the woods.

The dacha was appropriate to conspiracy, as well as to sexual perversion, he considered with satisfaction. Then he saw the brake-lights go on ahead of him, and he stopped the car immediately. He wound down the window, and listened. In the clear frosty air, he heard the door of the Zil slam shut like a rifle shot. Carefully, he got out of the car, taking the Makarov pistol from the glove compartment before he did so.

The ground was covered lightly with snow, masking sound but masking also any sticks that might betrayingly snap. He trod carefully, keeping to the deeper shadow of tree trunks, heading for the spot where the Zil had stopped.

His feet were cold through his thin shoes by the time he reached it. Its lights were off- and it was empty. He wondered for a moment whether it was indeed a trap as he looked around him swiftly, gun held in front of him — then he saw the dim light, from behind curtains, a little way ahead. As his night-vision improved, he saw that he was at the edge of a small, man-made clearing, on the other side of which was a low wooden dacha — a large one, he noted with a creeping excitement he could not altogether restrain or disapprove. He enjoyed the sensation of crouching against the Zil, watching the destination of his journey just fifty yards away. He did not notice the cold now, except as a sharp sensation in his nostrils.

He circled the clearing, watching for signs of movement at the lighted window or the almost invisible door set back beneath an over-hanging porch. Nothing.

The young trees grew close to the side of the dacha. He paused in their shelter for a moment, checked the Makarov, and slid a round into place. Then he moved swiftly across the strip of moonlit ground, his feet crunching on snow that had begun to freeze hard. He slipped over the rail, on to the wood of the porch. He steadied the rocking-chair that remained there from the summer, felt its material damp beneath his hand, then moved quietly towards the door, ducking beneath the curtained window.

He drew what seemed his first breath as he paused outside the door — and experienced a moment of doubt, the sense of traps laid and about to be sprung; how many were there inside the dacha? The door was open. He pushed it gently wider. A narrow wooden hall, a strip of dull carpet, the feel of rough wood under the hand he used to guide himself in the darkness. Ahead of him, and to the left, a glow of light from beneath a door. He listened for voices, but there was a deep silence about the house. Nothing, not even his own breathing.

He stepped back from the door, raised his foot, and kicked at it. The thin door swung open, the lock tearing, and then he held it open as it swung back towards him. Through the door, gun ready. There was no one behind it.

No one in the room. The dim light, he saw suddenly, had to be a decoy, and he turned swiftly, as if sensing someone behind him. Again, no one.

He moved cautiously out of the room, closing the door so that the light would not outline him, and began a search of the remaining room.

The body was in one of the bedrooms, at the rear of the dacha; it was still dressed in the formal black overcoat, and he almost expected to see the homburg hat resting on the bedside cabinet. Someone had folded the arms decently across his chest, and there was, he saw, a dark hole in the white forehead, near the hairline. White hair. The face, staring up at the ceiling, was reposed, still with lack of expression. Chiselled. He moved closer.

There was no one living in the house. Not now. He looked out of the window, saw nothing; listened for the noise of the Zil's engine starting up. Silence. He looked down at the body.

It was the Ossipov-substitute. He felt disappointed — even cheated in some obscure way. He leaned over the face, as if demanding an explanation. The dead face stared sightlessly up at him, seeming now irritated that he had come between the open eyes and their concentration on the ceiling.

The body was small, like that of Ossipov. The tight, drawn skin appeared unreal in the moonlight — the face of an actor. He looked nothing like Ossipov; if only the surveillance team had seen the face, they would have raised the alarm. But only the back — the black overcoat, the hat. They had made only one mistake — to be seen together at all; no, not even that — only the mistake of the substitute having his features recorded in the museum.

And that error had been corrected. Vorontsyev, with distaste, touched the hole of the wound. Dry blood, what there was of it. And cold skin. The man had been dead for some time. How long?

He raised an arm. Stiff. Dead perhaps more than twenty-four hours. A careful anticipation, the discarding of something soiled by wear or faded with exposure. A liability.

But, why was it here?

Because the sense of the trap returned at that precise moment, as he felt the delicate cold wire running from the hand up the sleeve of the black overcoat — he understood what it meant.

He turned and ran, out of the bedroom, crashing against the wooden wall so that it shook, cannoning off, seeing the patch of starlight from the open door at the end of the corridor…

And then the bomb that had been so carefully wired to the body, and which he had triggered when he moved the arm — exploded. Something shoved him in the back, through the frail wooden fence in front of the porch — he felt the rail bite into his thighs, and then he was tumbling over it, bringing it down after him. Snow — just the merest sensation of wetness as his face ground into it, and the horrific noises that deafened him, and the after-shock wrenching through his body. Then black silence, even as the pain began.

The restored house was on Kropotkin Street, and suitably spacious for a long-serving and respected member of the Politburo. Ilarion Vikentich Galakhov sat opposite the man he knew as Kutuzov, and from whom he took his orders. Galakhov, at thirty-three, was a Senior Lieutenant in the GRU, Military Intelligence. As such, there were many superior officers to whom he was, apparently, responsible. For two years now, however, he had covertly obeyed only this man, the leader of Group 1917. He and those deputed by him to issue orders. One of those, Yevgeni Vrubel, he had obeyed earlier that night, only to find that the order had come not from Kutuzov, but was a panic-measure by Vrubel himself.

Kutuzov was angry, the rage of flouted authority barely concealed; and also beneath the striven-for calm there was hatred of a man who had jeopardised a strategy the extent of which could only be guessed by Galakhov. He watched the old man carefully, studied the strong face with its deep lines of concentration and authority, and silently cursed Vrubel for tricking him into the killing of the Ossipov-substitute and rigging the bomb that had almost killed the SID Major. How Kutuzov had heard, how he knew Vorontsyev was still alive, he could not guess; but he had.

'Where is Vrubel now?'

'A safe house.'

'You know which one?' Galakhov nodded. 'Good. Ilarion Vikentich — we must cut our losses. Get rid of Vrubel tonight, before you leave Moscow.' It was said without emotion, as if the projected action had cleansed the old man of his feelings. Except for one final mutter, almost an aside: 'He tried to kill the SID man — to save his own skin. When there was no need. That is unforgiveable.'

'Yes, sir,' Galakhov acknowledged, and found himself the immediate subject of a keen stare from the old man. The heavily furnished lounge, lit only by the soft glow of one standard lamp in a corner, seemed to menace him.

'Very well. You were deceived, Ilarion Vikentich. I accept that.' Galakhov could not restrain the sense of relief he knew must show on his face. The old man smiled in satisfaction. 'As for your task — the arrangements are made. Your flight to London is booked, under your new cover-name. You know what you are to do at Heathrow — I need not reiterate it. However, understand me clearly. You must kill the traitor Khamovkhin in Helsinki. There can be no failure, no excuses. The present First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party must not — must not — be allowed to survive our operation. On the 24th, kill him.'

Galakhov nodded.

'Yes, sir. It will be done.'

'Good. Now find Vrubel, and dispose of him.'

The MIL helicopter beat overhead, low enough to shower him with snow disturbed from the pine-tops. They had used a helicopter after all — and in the bright moonlight followed his ski-tracks as easily as following motorway signs. There was nothing he could do, he realised, except wait for the helicopter to go away — and it would not do that because it knew his general location, and was acting as a spotter for a pursuit.

Folley was deadly weary; only as the helicopter moved away a few hundred yards to the west did he realise how ragged his breathing had become, and sense more clearly that the shivering of his body had nothing to do with the throb of the rotors over his head.

He was not going to get away. Not going to — no chance.

'Christ!' he muttered, his face lifted to the branches above him, dark now that the snow had been blown from them. There was nothing he could do, nothing.

Except go on, run until they ran him down, cornered him. He was in a forest of pines now, in a deep valley, and the helicopter was bund. His ski-tracks had entered the trees, then disappeared. It could only wait until he re-emerged. Soon it would begin to skirt the edges of the forest, anxious not to miss him, anxious to prevent his having a head-start on the pursuers.

The helicopter was useless now, he told himself. Useless, useless. It did not matter about the veracity of the idea, only its efficacy, a nostrum of power for the nagging body, the eroded will. Useless. He had the rest of the long night in which to run.

The helicopter's noise died away, and its threat diminished. It was searching — needle in haystack, spy in forest, it couldn't find him. Silence. He strained to catch a sound, any sound. Nothing. He could move again. He unzipped his combat suit, and pulled out a folded map protected by a polythene jacket. Then he flicked on a small torch, focusing its pencil of light on the map, nodding to himself as he understood the contours of the land lying ahead of him. He checked the compass on his wrist, then flicked off the light, stowing the torch and map quickly as if they had already betrayed his whereabouts.

All night to run.

He moved two paces from the tree, and the rifle rang out from away to his left. He felt a searing pain across his ribs, and groaned aloud, stifling the noise almost as it began, blundering head-down towards the nearest trees as two other shots bellowed after him. Night-sight, he thought, unslinging his own rifle, tugging at the canvas sleeve as he jolted his arm against the safety of a trunk, breathing shallowly with fear and the pain in his flesh-wound. Then he whipped round the trunk, and fired three shots in the general direction of the Russian who had found him.

How many? Care, care. He brought the rifle to his shoulder, and traversed the area, squinting into his own infra-red sight. Hollow dark spaces, lit as if by a dull fire. Nothing moving — and the growing, creeping sensation that someone was watching him, searching for him, through an identical night-sight. His finger curled on the trigger and he had to consciously stop himself loosing off any more betraying shots; whistling in the dark.

Then the voice. Finnish first, which he barely understood. Then, after a pause in which admission was decided, English.

'You can't go any further. Give up. It's impossible for you.' Distortion of a loud-hailer, metallic voice wearing him down with its magnified confidence. He had to stop himself firing. 'Give yourself up. We'll make sure your wound is treated.'

He winced at the reminder, dare not look at his side now. They had him. Traverse, traverse he told himself. This is a bluff, they're moving in. Shadow of a winter uniform, red-lit by the sight. He squeezed off two shots, pulled back behind the tree as fire was returned from at least half a dozen Kalashnikovs.

All from the same general direction. Perhaps a half-circle, only a crescent yet; move! He pushed away from the tree, crouching as if under the weight of the skis and pack, rifle banging against his thigh, left hand pressing for the first time against the burning side. Shots, ragged as they searched for a target. He began to weave and dodge, still hunched, breath labouring almost at once as he galloped awkwardly in the snow, great heaving steps like a wild, but tiring, horse.

He turned, shielded by a tree, and raised the rifle. He waited for the first ghost to shimmer in the red circle, until the crosshairs settled on the middle of the carefully moving bundle of winter uniform — then fired once, and immediately struck off to the left as fire was returned.

Breath ragged, side hurting like hell — noise of the helicopter returning from the north — strength running out, and the day still ahead of him. He itemised his hopelessness as he kept running, knowing that he would never tell anyone what he had seen, that he had failed already.

After Galakhov had left him, the old man took his dog for a walk in the small triangular park which had once been known as the 'Field of Virgins'. He passed on the east side of the park a bust of Frunze, hero of the civil war, one of the founders of the Red Army, and almost raised his hat to the stern face as he passed. An unhabitually comic notion; perhaps his decision regarding Vrubel had lightened his mood, he thought. He paused for a moment, while the big old hound capered like a pup on the frost-sparkling grass, and looked back at the Frunze Military Academy. He could even see the low-relief hammer-and-sickles decorating the stern concrete facade; not given to admitting, or indulging, moments of nostalgia, he allowed himself to remember his own training there, soon after it was built in 1936 — an over-age cadet who had temporarily rejected the political life. The war, too — that time came back in brief, flickering images.

Then the dog rubbed against his trousers, and his mood was disturbed. The lines in the face hardened again, became stern with anticipated business. He kept to the glinting path, his footsteps loud and clear, his stick tapping almost in a marching rhythm; the noises of the dog on the stiff grass were the only other sounds, as if all traffic had stopped outside the park. The park itself was empty of other people.

The eccentricities he had cultivated for years, the apparent harmlessness and geniality that age seemed to have lent him, now served him well; he had not been tailed from his house, as he was sure other, less apparently loyal, members of the Politburo had been that night, and on other nights.

There was a twist of contempt in the smile on his lips. A smile which vanished again as he stood before Merkurov's giant bronze statue of Tolstoy. Immediately, he felt the size of the statue as an expression of power — his own, or that of Tolstoy, he was uncertain, even indifferent. He shivered slightly, with anticipation rather than cold. The dog continued to scamper, and his thoughts were suddenly stronger, imitative of a younger man, not the respectable, waned figure he had chosen to become.

Party man. Peel away the layers. Party man. Yes, he was that; except that now the Party was in the hands of the sweepings of the Revolution. Non-Party men. Compromisers. Schoolmasters, economic experts, balance-sheet men — men interested only in personal power. Khamovkhin and his crew. The anger coursed through him, mesmerising his attention; his litany.

Khamovkhin the clown had tried to panic his unknown enemy by his vague denunciations in the meeting of the full Politburo. Khamovkhin and his hyena, Andropov, had caught some whiff of Group 1917 — nothing more. They were the ones dose to panic. And he was safe — on the safe list, no doubt; unsuspected.

When he had been silent, as if in homage, before the statue for perhaps ten minutes, he said, softly but dearly, 'Well, my friend. What have you to tell me?'

From the shadows beneath the statue, a voice full of disgruntled respect, and cold, said, 'Pnin's tanks have been seen, sir.'

'What?' He felt cold, at once recriminatory. 'How?'

'An agent, the General thinks. Probably not Finnish.'

'He's dead?'

'Not yet — they are in pursuit. I was told it was only a matter of hours.'

'Who sent him?'

'The Americans — the British?'

'Damn!'

'General Pnin considers that you were ill-advised to order a full-scale rehearsal of the border crossing.'

'Damn Pnin! His security is — non-existent. How did the man get close enough — what did he see?'

'Certainly the village — probably the crossing itself.'

'They must get him, then.'

'General Pnin sends his assurances as to—'

'Pnin is a fool.'

'Sir.'

The younger voice retreated into silence. Kutuzov stared up into the giant bronze face, aware of the frost that sparkled like eyes above the beard. He tried to draw strength from the statue, and calm rationality.

'The British sent a man before — the one who was killed before he could talk. Pnin should have been more alert. Vrubel is dead,' he added to the courier. 'He will have to be replaced by his second-in-command for next week. Tell Praporovich that.'

'Sir,' the courier replied.

'Are there arrangements for taking this agent alive?

'The General is aware of the importance—'

'He'd better be. Are there arrangements to keep me informed, as soon as a result is achieved?'

'Sir. By tomorrow night, there will be word.'

'Then that will have to do. Tell Praporovich that SID knows nothing — though Vrubel did his best to give them a lead. And give the order for Pnin to withdraw — at once. As soon as he has captured the agent.

'Yes, sir.'

'What of Attack Force One?'

'Ready to move up to the Norwegian border on D minus One, sir.'

'Good. Dolohov and the Navy?'

'All the ships required for Rabbit Punch are at sea, or refitting at Murmansk, ready to take troops aboard on D minus One.'

'All — at last?'

'All, sir.'

'Better news — better news. Very well. When is your flight?'

'Another two hours.'

'Very well. Tell Praporovich that the agent, when captured, must be transferred at once to the Leningrad house, and interrogated thoroughly. We must know what the British know — if anything. It must not upset the timetable.'

'Marshal Praporovich asked that the timetable be confirmed, as of now.'

'Assuming word comes from Ossipov not later than five days' time?' As if sensing the grandiloquence of the moment, the old man stood erect before the bronze statue, staring up into Tolstoy's blind face. 'Yes. One week from now. D-Day is the 24th.'

As he swung down into a great fold of the Maanselka, the central mountain range, he could see, to the north-west, the peak of Kaunispaa; he was only a mile, perhaps, from the main north-south road and the village of Lannila. If he could make the road, he might again have a choice — north towards Ivalo, south towards Vuotso — west along the road to Kuttura. Places that offered rest, and help, however illusory.

His side ached intolerably, his body pleaded for him to stop, ached with effort and hunger — even so, it was spurred by the proximity of the road, the destination he had travelled towards all night and into the first daylight.

The MIL helicopter, a squat, droning beetle, had hugged the slope of the land, then descended on him suddenly even as he first picked up the noise of its rotors. It was barely light; but the helicopter was black against the grey sky. It rushed upon him, flurrying snow in its downdraught as it hovered, then moved ahead of him, skimming the ground. He watched as white-clad soldiers dropped from its belly, laid like mines across his path. He tried to stop, jumping so that the snow surfed up. The nearest man was less than a hundred yards away, and the noise of the MIL, and its skirt of snow, were deadening, oppressive.

He looked round, and the pursuers, dog-weary as he was himself, topped the last slope, and fitted skis again or rested for a moment. One of them waved, and Folley could hear a thin cheering.

The helicopter lifted away again, swinging above him so that he could see the grinning face of the pilot. His wave was an insult, perhaps even a recognition. Then the shadow was gone, a paralysis deserting his limbs. He unslung the rifle.

The men in front of him had fitted snowshoes, and walked clumsily, inexorably, towards him, in slow-motion. Each of them carried a Kalashnikov. And behind him the first of the tired skiers was thrusting down the long slope, only hundreds of yards away.

He could have angled his flight, thrust off towards the left or right and outdistanced the men on snowshoes. It appeared that they wished to take him alive rather than kill him. But his body revolted at the idea, and his legs were finally and suddenly without strength so that he knew he was not going to move any more. Then a second MIL lifted above the slope that had masked it and its noise.

He pointed the gun uselessly at the ground. He swayed, felt he couldn't stand long enough for them to reach him. He kept turning his head as they closed on him. Kept turning it until they stood around him in a wary ring. Someone took away the rifle, examining it.

He kept looking not at their faces, but at the red stars on the fur caps they wore beneath their camouflage hoods.

Four: Beach Head

Kenneth de Vere Aubrey settled into the somnolent, contemplative mood that he usually enjoyed in the Public Gallery of the House of Commons. And he grew older, he was aware that the sounds that rose from the floor of the House, especially those made, as now, by a poorly attended Question Time, threw his awareness back upon himself. He had almost entirely lost an earlier, youthful sense of the business of the world being done there. The Chamber had become a club.

He had reported to the Foreign Secretary, after lunch, on the security procedures to be put into effect, by the SIS in cooperation with the CIA and the Finnish Intelligence Bureau, for the culminatory stages of the Helsinki Conference on Mutual Balanced Arms Reductions, one week hence. The Foreign Secretary himself would head the team of British observers at the treaty signing; the United States' partners in NATO would be signatories only to the second, and supplementary stage, of the conference, to be held in Belgrade in the autumn.

An Opposition speaker was on his feet, requiring a junior minister at the Foreign Office to explain what assurance the government, and the President of the United States, had been given as to the sincerity of the Soviet Union with regard to arms reductions — a late, and rather naive, attempt to stir doubt; or perhaps to draw attention to the speaker. There were a few half-hearted murmurs of derision from the government back benches. The Front Benches on both sides of the House were conspicuously bare.

Aubrey came to the House more often in these last days of his employment with the SIS than he had done in earlier years. It irked him that he could not precisely explain his motives; but it was tolerably warm. An obscure sense of desire for legitimacy nagged him, as it often did. Perhaps he was disillusioned after sitting below the salt for so long — enter Third Murderer, he thought. Here, at least, it was tolerably above board — at least, it gave that illusion. Perhaps that was also the reason he spent less and less time with the operational side of the service, and preferred administration and oversight of intelligence gathering.

Perhaps he was growing senile, and ought to begin attending the Upper House. He shifted in his seat, and cursed the ailing circulation that so swiftly made him cold and cramped when still. And, aware of the physical, he thought of other men of stronger sensual passions than himself; their horror at the growing inoperancy of limbs, their sense of desire unabated, but more futile and humiliating with the onset of age.

They had spoken no word of retirement to him as yet; for which he was grateful. If anything clouded his general self-possession, his satisfaction with his lot, it was the idea that one day the neat, uncluttered flat in Sussex Gardens would become a bare, unfurnished cupboard to be inhabited, with growing dissatisfaction, for the long hours of endless, successive days.

He wondered how cold it was in Finland, and whether to delegate the organisation to one of his senior assistants — perhaps even to Davenhill, whose standing with the Minister, though not immutable, was at that moment satisfactory. And it would do the young man good.

Then he saw Davenhill, still in his leather topcoat, looking around at the Gallery, and Aubrey sensed that he was looking for him. Snow had turned to gleaming wetness on his hair and shoulders in the lights of the Chamber. He did not feel irritation — perhaps something about the younger man's attitude, an eagerness of body and face, intrigued Aubrey. He felt a swift pluck like mild indigestion at his stomach, and smiled. Then Davenhill saw him, and waved the newspaper in his hand, stepping immediately down the aisle to him.

'… The facilities for mutual inspection, by satellite and by military delegations, written into the terms of the Treaty, are surely all the Honourable Member could require, even for his satisfaction…' — the junior minister droned, raising two languid supporting breaths, and a mutter of denigration. Davenhill, who was looking extremely serious as he sat down, could not forbear to smile.

'Dear, dear — standards down again, I see. I don't know why you come here, Kenneth.'

'And to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?' Aubrey asked drily. 'To answer your remarks — I come because I find it all so reassuring. Don't you?'

'No initiations of mortality, then?'

'None at all. An abiding somnolence — I'm sure the map is still mostly pink, you know.' He studied Davenhill carefully for a moment, then added: 'What is it?'

'Folley…'

'What about Folley?' Aubrey found it suddenly difficult to control his interest; perhaps even panic — and knew that he was getting old.

'No contact.'

'What?' Something had been disturbing his calm — now he knew what it was. There had been an edge of concern that Folley had not reported in by the time he left his office to come to the House. He should have done — should have been picked up. 'What does Waterford think?'

'I've got him waiting downstairs — will you speak to him?'

'Yes, I must. Come.'

Aubrey cast one swift glance down at the floor of the House, then turned and made his way out of the Public Gallery.

Waterford was waiting for them near the Members' Entrance. Again, Aubrey was struck by his bearing; despite the military officer's civilian overcoat and the trilby hat, he still appeared like a prizefighter masquerading as a retired soldier, so looming was his presence, so marked his features by extreme experiences. He was a rogue operator — which was why he and Davenhill had chosen him. Waterford merely nodded to Aubrey as the little man gestured them through the doors out into New Palace Yard. The commissionaire saluted Aubrey as they passed.

Aubrey put on his bowler hat, and turned up the collar of his dark overcoat. It was still snowing, and beginning to lie. Davenhill belted the leather topcoat. The lamps in the Yard were great, faded billows of light; their footsteps were muffled by the thin layer of settled snow.

They patrolled the Yard once. Aubrey became irritated with their silence, the sense of them as machines who would not speak with his command.

'Well? Waterford — what's happened to him?'

'He's dead — or caught.'

'How can you know that?' Aubrey felt himself protesting too strongly; but an obscure sense of danger, threat, which placed what might have happened against the polite remarks inside the Commons in a chilly perspective. 'Weather?'

'Nothing to kill him off.'

'Delay?'

'He was to report if he needed more time.'

'Unless it would endanger him to do so — the helicopter is going back again tonight, isn't it?'

'Yes, it is,' Davenhill said, speaking for the first time. 'But — shouldn't we have a contingency plan?'

Aubrey was suddenly reluctant. His mind kept placing what he was being told, and what was surmised, in the blackest contrasts with the report he had made to the Foreign Secretary that afternoon — even to his recent conversations with Buckholz, Deputy Director of the CIA, talks with the Finns — he realised he was shivering; not with cold, not for Folley, not for any specific thing. But at a vague, oppressive sense that he had, simply had, to consider the Helsinki Conference in direct relation to the possible disappearance of Folley, and the certain disappearance of Brunton, and one test roll of unproven infrared film.

'What's the matter, Kenneth? You look absolutely awful.'

Davenhill touched his elbow, and Aubrey straightened, and said:

'Contingency plan. Very well. There is only one — no time to brief anyone new, get them trained — you two will have to go.'

'What?' Davenhill was aghast; squinted nervously up at Waterford's bulk.

Waterford merely nodded, then said, 'With him? That's a risk.'

'Kenneth — I'm not a field-agent. How the devil can I go?'

'You can — and will. Don't you see — if Folley is lost to us, then we may be dealing with something very serious indeed — so serious that the protocol of sending a Foreign Office Special Adviser no longer applies! You will prepare yourselves to leave tonight — unless we receive a report from Folley after the helicopter's second trip across Finland.'

He stood looking at the two of them, then looked up at the facade of Westminster Hall. He could see only dimly through the slanting snow the statues of English kings ranged along the building. And the lights seemed distant, too. He shivered again. He looked at Waterford, and added:

'Very well. If Folley is missing, I will admit the feasibility of your hypothesis. The Russians are in Finland, and probably in force. It will be up to you to prove it!'

The car had left the road at the northern end of the Ustinsky Bridge, smashed through the thin layer of ice on the northern bank of the Moskva, and sunk beneath the dark water, early that morning. Only at noon was the lifting operation got under way, two bright red mobile cranes manoeuvred into position on the Kotelnicheskaia Quay, when Vorontsyev's office obtained a priority order signed by Deputy Chairman Kapustin. The frogmen could work only minimal shifts in the freezing dark below the surface, and the work proceeded with painful slowness under the titular direction of Police Inspector Tortyev, who was KGB, but who had been reluctantly forced to accept the authority of Alevtina, to the policeman a much too-young junior officer in the SID. But he was not prepared to argue with her signed authority; he satisfied his sense of inferiority and truculent envy of the girl's position with pleasure that she at least kept out of the way, mostly in her car, or near the tea-wagon that was also doling out generous measures of vodka to divers coming off shift.

The girl sensed Tortyev's sullen hostility, and the surprise of the other policemen, and enjoyed the reactions she created. She was aware of herself as a diminutive figure in fur coat and hat, and long boots, as if she were a fashion model posed against some unexpected industrial background. And, since she rarely doubted her abilities or her instincts, she knew that no mere drunk had crashed a black Zil saloon into the Moskva, despite the impressions of the only witness, a policeman on foot patrol along the quays, looking for dossers or black marketeers and the like. She knew that Vrubel was in that car, and that he had been put there dead. Even if the policeman who had seen it had seen only one man, being below the level of the bridge, on the Quay, he had heard the car start up, and accelerate. Alevtina knew they would find a jammed accelerator when they got the black saloon out of the river.

The late afternoon was bitterly cold. She wanted more strong tea, but sensed that Tortyev, briefing the crane operators near the tea-wagon, would misinterpret any movement on her part, and instead lit another cigarette. The car's ashtray was almost full of stubs. Long English filter-tips; she never smoked Russian tobacco. Major Vorontsyev was recovering in hospital, they said: if they got the car up soon, then she would report to him personally later in the evening. She did, she decided, believe the doctors, and her smirking colleagues who well knew her concern for their chief, when they said he was all right; but she would like to see for herself.

She was half-way through the cigarette when Tortyev came towards her car, opened the door, and slid into the passenger seat, rubbing his gloved hands together, and blowing ostentatiously with the cold.

'It's ready. The divers have rigged up the lifting gear, at last. They can't see a body inside…'

'What?' she said sharply. 'The doors are open?'

'No. Neither doors nor windows. He has to be in there — if there was anyone in there.'

Alevtina smiled in a superior way, exhaling smoke which rolled under the roof of the car. 'Just wait and see, Inspector. There's someone in there.'

'I hope you're fucking right — otherwise it'll have been a very expensive piece of salvage work, won't it?'

Alevtina continued to smile broadly, understanding the motive behind the obscenity. Doubtless Tortyev had already imagined what she would be like in bed, and come to the conclusion either that she was the same as any other tart with SID knickers off, or a cold fish who worshipped her work and was frightened of men. The conventional grooves in most of the male minds around her in the KGB amused her. Women were spy-bait, or secretaries; not much more to most of the officers she knew. She had been accepted by the rest of Vorontsyev's team, after an initial period of sexual innuendo and proposition, as a police officer. It was all she asked; she knew that Vorontsyev respected her abilities, and that was a bonus.

'Let's go and have a look, then, shall we?' she said, reclaiming the initiative and getting out of the car. Tortyev slammed his door when he, too, got out. Alevtina shivered, despite the coat and fur hat, and thrust her hands into her pockets. She walked down almost to the shelving stonework of the edge of the Quay, and looked up at the mobile crane, its head dipped out over the river like some African bird drinking. Tortyev, standing beside her but a few feet away, raised his hand, and shouted an order. The crane-driver raised his thumb, and then put the crane into gear. The second crane had withdrawn, as if ousted in some rivalry between the two machines.

The black saloon, roof first like the back of a whale, came up out of the water, swayed and hovered above the river, water streaming from panels and underbody, mud thick on the wheels and sills, then the crane traversed, and for a moment the dripping car hung over the girl, soaking her. Someone laughed — not Tortyev though it was doubtless his idea — as her coat was soaked. Then the car was lowered on to the Quay behind her. She stood furiously still, her back to the policemen and their sniggers and grins, not even taking her hands from her pockets. She dipped her head, and filthy river-water dripped from her hat into the pool around her feet.

'Get a torch, then!' she heard Tortyev snap at someone, and the sound satisfied her, she would wait — after all, she knew. She heard the blow-torch start up, sizzle for a little while, then a rending of metal as the door was heaved open. She listened to the sounds of men scrabbling with something in the interior of the car, waited still, then turned on her heel even as Tortyev was starting to come to her, strode up to the car, and looked once at the white dead face staring sightlessly through the windscreen of the car. The body had been reseated upright in the driver's seat. She recognised the face — it was still sufficiently similar to the one in the photographs in her car.

'It's him. Have him taken to the morgue, Inspector.'

The doctors told him almost as soon as he came round that he would not have frozen to death, wrapped in his topcoat as he was; he was told in the same neutral tones that they used to inform him that there were no broken bones; only a badly-sprained left wrist and multiple bruising. The deafness had worn off slowly, although they diagnosed one perforated eardrum, and the buzzing in his head and the dizzy sickness both left him during the afternoon. By the evening, he could sit up in bed in the private room of the small hospital in a rural suburb of Moscow — an aristocratic house in the old days — and consider his good fortune.

The bomber had not wired for instantaneous explosion presumably for his own safety when arranging the body on the bed. It was a ridiculous way to have avoided death; he could still feel as a sensation in his fingertips, the delicate cold wire, the strand that had linked him for a moment with death.

As the hours passed, he found his attention returning to the minutes of his occupancy of that cold, small bedroom at the dacha, and the face of the Ossipov-substitute. He had been found, face-down in the slush, by a senior member of the Central Committee Secretariat, who was cohabiting in his dacha with a woman not his wife. Vorontsyev retained a dim impression of a man in pyjamas and Wellingtons and a silk dressing-gown round his shivering form — before he had passed out again from the pain of being turned over.

Why? Why such — extreme measures? What was he so close to that a bomb had to be used to stop him? Vrubel — they would not see him again, unless he re-emerged in the last condition of the Ossipov-substitute. According to his wife's statement, Vrubel had made two telephone calls before leaving her flat. She had overheard neither call. How many men would it have taken to organise the operation that quickly? A lot — trained, expert men. The ruined dacha belonged to an unimpeachable member of the Council of Ministers. It was impossible that he should be involved. He was not even in Moscow at the time, but at a trade conference in Leipzig.

Vorontsyev lit one of the cigarettes at his bedside, coughing on the raw smoke. Then he lay staring up at the ceiling for a long time. Thought became, gradually, suspended; he almost dozed. Cigarette after cigarette disappeared from the packet, and the most conscious thing he seemed to do was to stub each butt in the metal ashtray advertising some awful beer.

It was late in the evening when he received a visitor — Deputy Chairman Kapustin. The bulky man with the broad, expressionless face settled himself on a chair at the bedside without enquiring after Vorontsyev's health. Vorontsyev tried to sit more upright; Kapustin seemed not to notice his efforts.

'I want to discuss your — accident, Major,' he said. Vorontsyev sensed the pressures of other voices, issued orders. Perhaps even from Andropov? He felt a quickening of thought, almost in the blood. 'I have to be completely frank with you,' he added as if he disliked the idea, and wished to disown it.

'Yes, Deputy?'

'From the report you dictated this morning, it is clear that you have stirred up something rather nasty, and far-reaching. Though you can have no idea what it is.' The final phrase was heavy with seniority. Vorontsyev could not like Kapustin, but was too intrigued by what he might learn to resent the man's proximity. Yes, he decided, he was nattered by the promise of revelations, of being fully informed.

'Your investigations,' Kapustin continued, his homburg hat still balanced on his knee, but the fur-collared coat now unbuttoned, 'were intended to add to our knowledge of the movements and contacts of senior army officers. This surveillance was ordered by…' He paused, as if forcing himself to overcome the habits of years, ingrained, then he managed to say: 'By the First Secretary and the Chairman, in joint consultation. Similar surveillance has, as you are aware, been carried out during the past year on a number of generals and military district commanders. What you in your section of SID do not know is that similar surveillance has been applied to senior members of the Politburo, the Praesidium, the Supreme Soviet, and the Central Committee Secretariat…'

Vorontsyev was shaken. He said, 'All with the same — suspicion in mind, Deputy?'

Kapustin nodded. Vorontsyev lit another cigarette, and saw that his hand was trembling with excitement. Whatever was going on, it was huge, out of all proportion to the small sliver of the totality that he had glimpsed, that had embedded itself in his flesh as surely as if it had been a splinter of wood from the ruined dacha. The compartmentalisation of all the security organs of the state extended even to the SID. He had had no idea that perhaps half the force was working on the same operation as himself and his team.

Kapustin said, 'You talked with Vrubel — what impression did you get of him? Did he know who you were?'

Vorontsyev, because his mind raced to the possibilities., ignored his private humiliation, so much so that he said immediately, 'He found me comical as a cuckolded husband…' Kapustin remained silent. 'But he was cocky, and not just with sex…' Vorontsyev concentrated, seeing the man's face, hearing his voice. 'He knew who I was, and that if I wished, I could make trouble just because he was having my wife. But he didn't seem to care. It seemed to make him more confident.'

'What do you conclude from this, Major?'

'I don't know. At the time I suspected something — some secret knowledge or power that made him — immune?' Kapustin's eyes lit up. He said. 'Exactly! that is what I suspected from your report. A great pity that you did not take other men with you…' He waved aside protest, and went on: 'Whoever is behind this, they are suitably ruthless. One must admire them for it, if for nothing else.'

'What do we know, Deputy? So far?

'Mm. I am permitted to tell you — ordered, in fact. The earliest clue was a tapped telephone call from the Bureau of Political Administration of the Army; a senior member of that department of the Secretariat who was about to retire, due to inoperable cancer. Perhaps he made a slip just because he was old, or ill — or confident. He used a phone that he would not know was tapped, but he might well have suspected it. His name was Fedakhin. He talked in what was obviously code, and he mentioned two strange things. He referred to Group 1917, and later in the conversation — that was his call-sign, we think — he referred to Finland Station. He was responsible for that area of the border, and the north-western military district. Apparently, this Finland Station was proceeding well, and he could look forward to retiring a happy man — to await the great day, as he put it.'

'Vrubel referred to nothing like that,' Vorontsyev murmured unhelpfully.

'I didn't suppose he had,' Kapustin observed. 'But what do you think the terms might mean, eh, Major?'

Vorontsyev wrinkled his brow, looked at the Deputy, and said, 'I can't think what they might mean — I know what they do mean, the date of the Revolution, and the destination of the train from Switzerland…' His mouth dropped open. 'You don't think…?

'I think nothing. Chairman Andropov's thoughts are what I convey to you.' There was a solemn emphasis in the words. 'Revolution? Seems hard to believe doesn't it?' There was a bright glint of perspiration on Kapustin's forehead, above the heavy creases of age and office. 'I would prefer not to think — but I have to, and so do you.'

'Very well, Comrade Deputy.' Vorontsyev felt that the situation required formality. 'What happened to the man Fedakhin?'

'He died. Apparently the disease was more advanced than was diagnosed. We put maximum surveillance on him, but to little or no effect. It appears that somebody was suspicious — no one went near him again.'

'But — his contacts before. How much do we know about them?'

Both men seemed to accept the collusion that the situation forced upon them. Both relaxed into the tense informality of their common business. Kapustin said, 'Not very much. Typical party background — kept his nose clean. Ready to change sides and loyalties when Kruschev was swept away, had never identified himself with that regime, except when he had to. A second world war soldier, political indoctrination — then returned to his duties in the Secretariat. Clean record — until this chance telephone intercept.' Kapustin shrugged.

'Family?'

'Know nothing.'

Vorontsyev persisted, as if he were interrogating the Deputy. Kapustin, hotter still it seemed in the airless room, aquiesced; as if it were easier for him to be questioned than to volunteer a briefing to a subordinate — and one in a hospital bed, at that.

'What else is there, Comrade Deputy?' Vorontsyev did not question his own eagerness — whether revenge, or in the burial of private worlds.

'Not very much. For the expenditure of so much effort, very little indeed. We have a dossier…' He patted the briefcase that rested by the chair, and to which he had not referred since his arrival. 'Of all movements and contacts of officers and bureaucrats under surveillance during the last year. All the teams are going through them, as you did with Ossipov, checking for some new lead, or some connection.'

'The — suspects? Are they confirmed, or not?'

'No. They are — everyone who might possess the power or the influence was put under surveillance. Automatically.'

'Power for what?' Vorontsyev asked after a while.

'Revolution. That is the broad picture. The assumption that a revolution is being planned…'

'Ridiculous!' was Vorontsyev's first reaction. Then he stopped short, abashed at his indiscretion.

Instead of anger, Kapustin said, 'I might agree with you, Major. If I knew as little as you do. But — fantastic as it is, I have to consider the possibility. So do you.'

'But — why? And how? With the Committee for State Security so effective. It would need cooperation — converts — in the Politburo, the High Command, the Praesidium, the Secretariat, the KGB itself.'

'I quite agree. As to why, I don't know. As to how — it could take ten years to plan, and execute. And it would need the army — and the navy, too, perhaps. Certainly elements in all the organs of government and control in the state. It would be — huge.'

'I can't believe it!'

'Perhaps not. But — something is going on. Generals don't have to have substitutes in order to visit prostitutes, of either sex. And the substitutes don't get killed on the merest suspicion that discovery may be just around the corner! Think of that when you're reading these files…' Again he tapped the briefcase with a hand that was backed with dark, curling hair — dark as the hair that curled from his wide nostrils. 'And think of this, too. If it would take say ten years — and it is happening — where are we in their timetable, at the present moment?'

Folley watched the guards carefully; it had become a habit so to do, as automatic as glancing in a driving-mirror at precise intervals. There was no possibility of escape connected with it.

The two young Red Army soldiers, a corporal and a senior private, seemed content with his company. During the hours of the short day, they seemed comfortable, even approachable — as if they had received no orders against fraternisation. Folley realised that it was an illusory state, and it was designed to make him less troublesome to his guards.

The small tent was cold, but he was still warmly clad in his winter combat clothing, boots and mittens — the Finnish uniform beneath it they had disbelieved, especially when his command of the language had been discovered to be rudimentary by a Senior Lieutenant who interrogated him in Finnish; but they had allowed him to keep it, and his supposed identity. Except for the papers, which had disappeared. They had spoken to him in English after that. His silence was a tacit admission. He had not answered their questions, but they knew his nationality. He had to ask for the toilet, for food and drink, in English, before they would respond. Yet still they had not beaten him.

The three of them sat round the oil-stove, feeling its warmth on their faces, the fronts of their legs. In the hours that he had been held in the camp, they had done little else. They had allowed him to exercise, of course.

They had interrogated him, but not physically. He had told them nothing; though he was evidence by his solitariness of the level of suspicion that had despatched him to Finnish Lapland.

They did not take him seriously. That was his impression of the regimental commanders, colonels both; and the impression given by the small, neat, precise man with the one large silver star of a major-general on his shoulder-boards. He had met the General only once, when he had been taken to be questioned in the wooden hut erected to serve as headquarters for senior officers.

During the night of his pursuit, another regiment had arrived; this time a Motor Rifle Regiment, comprising a tank battalion of forty older T-62 tanks, a battle recce company, three motor rifle battalions, whose vehicles were mainly BMP and BTR-60 armoured personnel carriers; field artillery and anti-aircraft batteries; the medics and technical support group. And a chemical platoon and its vehicles.

Folley had been unnerved by this latter more than the assembled firepower and personnel; it was the most real of the sights, the most vivid in imagination. For many hours afterwards, he was not sure that he had seen it. He tried to persuade himself that it was not the case; he had pieced together the skeleton of the major rifle regiment from the vehicles he had seen, and the men; and within that context, he knew he had caught a glimpse of the vivid yellow vehicles of the chemical platoon.

No one had explained the presence of the Russian armour in the forest south-east of Ivalo. And there was a comfort in ignorance — until what he knew of current war games, the conversation of a friend on the War Studies Team at Cranwell, and his own tactical sense, pressed upon him the conviction that he was amid only one spearhead. There had to be others, concealed on either or both sides of the Soviet border, along its length with Finland.

And the main armoured strike would be to the north, along the single main road to Kirkenes, into northern Norway. And that strike would be preceded by chemical attack; that much he could be certain of.

The Finnmark, therefore, was the target.

Russia was going to war in Scandinavia. It was a simple, brute fact.

Sitting there, watching the two guards, he sensed that he was still numbed by the fact; he had no urgent desire to return to Tromsø, then to MOD, with the knowledge of what he knew. He felt himself strangely identified with what was happening here, in this place. As if the events were those of a nightmare, and he could not quite believe in it; nor escape it. The nightmare was so real, but confined to these acres of forest and camouflaged vehicles and disciplined men, that he could not see beyond it. It was easier, much, simply to sit, to wait out the hours of daylight, sleep out the night; perform his bodily functions — exercise, urinate, defecate, and adopt the subdued, waiting tension of the camp.

He had heard how hijacked airline passengers identified with their captors, came to hate those outside who tried to help them. It had happened to him. He was almost one of these soldiers now — who questioned nothing, who simply followed orders, and left the niceties of Armageddon to their superior officers.

He guessed that this force was intended to take Ivalo, and its airfield, or perhaps to strike across the north of Finnish Lapland into Norway. All that he had ever understood of Soviet tactics was that some land of airborne assault would have to be made on selected targets — to hold them until armoured columns arrived. Perhaps, he wondered, these men were to hold Ivalo as a forward airfield for transports which would lift men into Norway.

Now, when he spoke to the guards, it was if no distinction of loyalties divided them. They were men in uniform; circumstances had thrown them together. He said. 'Can we walk for ' little?'

One of the two men spoke reasonable English — the corporal. He nodded, and replied, 'I think so. A little stroll, yes?'

'Yes.'

It was the end of the short afternoon; the weather was grey now, threatening snow. All around them, the scene had a smoky and indistinct quality. Men's breath smoked around their heads, like white scarves. Vehicles, dusted with snow, under camouflage netting, were still, unthreatening. Folley was pleased with the peace of the scene — its painted stillness. It accommodated him and it did not threaten his mood. Men Bill looked at him, between and slightly ahead of his guards; their stares disturbed him, but only a little. Already, it seemed, they were used to him.

He crunched through the deep snow, rutted with tracks and prints. There was little to explain, it seemed. He was merely there. A random thought of their initial anger at the deaths he had caused disturbed him now, as if he had been accused of some unkindness — or a different colour of skin pointed out.

He watched the Senior Sergeant approach almost with indifference. The man halted in front of him, his square face framed by the hood of the winter combat outfit, star just visible on the fur cap, and spoke in Russian to the two guards. Folley was able to distinguish only the military ranks referred to, and assumed that he was to be taken before the General again. The sergeant preceded them, his boots crunching heavily in the rutted snow over which heavy vehicles had crossed and recrossed.

They passed perhaps only fifteen or twenty of the hundred and sixty tanks, and a handful of the armoured personnel carriers before they mounted the steps to the wooden command hut, a low, single-storey barrack of a building erected by the crew of one of the workshop vehicles. There were command trailers, of course, just as in his own army — but this general had chosen something closer to a house. He struggled with the idea that this had a meaning, something to do with a lack of urgency. But he dismissed the idea as they passed into the outer office.

The guards snapped to attention in front of the lieutenant. Folley did so too; erect, face front, eyes above the officer's head, staring at the fugged window behind him, its rime of frost on the outside thickened by the closing circles of mist inside. There was an efficient stove in the room.

The lieutenant waved the guards away. After they had gone out, he stood up and offered Folley a cigarette.

'Lieutenant?' he asked, holding out the cigarette-case. Folley shook his head, and the young man added: 'They are not as bad as your propaganda makes out, you know.' Folley was forced to smile, hardly on his guard, hardly sensing that he was being deliberately put at his ease.

He stood there for some time, while the lieutenant walked round him, as if inspecting his kit. Folley had the sense of basic training again, or returning to that when he joined SAS. It was uncomfortable because it reminded him that they were on opposing sides. The atmosphere began to menace him in its silence.

'How much do they know, Lieutenant?' the Russian asked, his English accented but assured. There was something in the tone that made Folley take note. Looking at the man properly for the first time Folley saw that he was not wearing the motor rifle or armoured flashes on his shoulder boards or collar tabs. This was something new. The truth was slow in revealing itself, so retreated had his brain become from the realities of his situation.

'I — my name is…' He began it automatically, the eyes expressionless and the voice mechanical. The Russian officer hit him in the stomach, and as he fell against the wall of the office, it appeared that this was the signal to two other men, two NCOs, who came in from the inner office. Folley, surprised, looked up at them. The two men were looking at their officer, who was perched on the desk, smoking. As the truth seeped into the front of his mind, as from behind an almost watertight door, Folley began to laugh at the melodramatic posture of the officer. Like something out of an old film.

The taller of the two NCOs kicked him in the thigh as he sat there, and he rolled away, into the flying boot of the other man who had got on to his other side. The blow caught him in the side of the head, and the pain screamed in his temple and his neck.

The Lieutenant, who was from the GRU, Military Intelligence, like his two NCOs, watched dispassionately as the beating began.

Galakhov disliked botched or hurried work. The death of Vrubel, whom he had been forced to execute immediately upon Kutuzov's orders, had been such a performance. No difficulty — but too much haste. Just as in the case of the mirror above the washbasin into which he now stared; almost coming away from the wall because someone had not bothered to do the job of mounting it properly. The screws were pulling out of the plaster. His tongue clicked against the roof of his mouth in disapproval. He studied himself critically. Fur hat, sheepskin coat, English shoes, leather briefcase, battered suitcase behind him on the chequered floor. Yes, it would do. He signified acceptance as if to a tailor, nodding at his reflection. He glazed his stare — better. Something about his eyes — Vrubel had seen it, hadn't wanted to come with him, had had to be cajoled into not suspecting. The killing itself had been easy; and the dumping in the Moskva of Vrubel and his car — well, perhaps that was bravado, or irritation with Kutuzov for the way in which the old man presumed his services were acquired only by a nod, or a command, like turning on a tap. Let the KGB find the body, and start searching for the killer.

He turned, picked up his suitcase, and left the washroom in the principal Departure Lounge of Cheremetievo Airport. As he passed out into the fuggier warmth of the lounge, he heard his flight being called, as he had known he would. A charter flight to London, with the last of the winter season tourists to Moscow. On it, he would be unremarked. His English was excellent, his papers good.

He clicked his fingers — the duty-free shop. He should have a polythene bag, and some cartons of cigarettes or a bottle of spirits. Tourists' last roubles, which they could not export, disappeared satisfactorily in the duty-free shop.

As he passed the main stairs to the restaurants and the Diplomatic Lounge, he glanced up at the two heavy KGB men at the top of the flight. He smiled, not at them, but at the knowledge that First Secretary Khamovkhin was leaving from Cheremetievo later that evening in his Tupolev Tu- I44, for Helsinki.

Galakhov intended to arrive in Helsinki later the next day, as part of the drafted security staff surrounding the Soviet leader. Without pausing in his stride, he continued towards the duty-free shop.

Feodor Khamovkhin sat in a corner of the Diplomatic Lounge, and tried to arrange his limbs in a relaxed position. He felt nervous, and his arms and legs seemed to have some kind of cramp, so that it was difficult to sit still, not to be restless. He saw Andropov watching him as he chatted to some of the party that had assembled either to fly with Khamovkhin to Helsinki, or to be present at his departure. Most of the Politburo were there — one of them at least not sorry to see him go.

He tried to press down on the thoughts, as if replacing the lid on a foul-smelling dustbin. But there seemed to be no pressure in his mind, which could contain the suspicions. There they were, rings and lumps of dark coats, eddies of laughter or talk. All little men — no, some better than others — all part of the system, the same system as himself, all knowing the facts, none of them blind…

He stirred in his seat again, the restlessness of impotent fury irresistible. Andropov, as if recognising a danger signal, excused himself from his conversation with Gorochenko, the Deputy Foreign Minister, and crossed to him. He waved the two security men to further seats as he sat down.

'Relax, Feodor,' he murmured. 'You look far too nervous to be leaving for a State Visit which will culminate in your greatest political triumph.'

Khamovkhin looked at him suspiciously. 'Your humour is rather acid tonight, Yuri.'

'Perhaps my own nervous reaction to the situation?'

'Nothing will happen here…?' The thought had occupied the vocal chords almost before he was aware of it. He hadn't thought it before! 'Sorry.'

'Nothing, Feodor. I picked up these men, just as I have selected the security staff who will accompany you. I give you my word — as far as I can be sure, and I have been thorough — that the men who will guard you can be trusted. Wherever I have had to draft them in from.'

Khamovkhin patted Andropov's thigh, a gesture the Chairman seemed to dislike.

'Thank you, Yuri.' Then he looked up into Andropov's ascetic, emotionless face.' You are in effective charge now. It's your job — to find these people.'

'It always was, Feodor,' Andropov replied sharply. 'I know what is at stake here. But I can't move until I know!' Some in reserve broke in Andropov suddenly. For so many years he had been unconcerned with power; his power had been evident, and unchallenged. Now, he was impotent, and looking into a mirror of impotence in the face of Khamovkhin. It was a precise, but visionary, moment, which he loathed. 'I have to know,' he added more calmly. 'So, I have to keep my nerve, eh, Feodor. Perhaps it's a good thing that you won't be here — mm?'

Khamovkhin's face darkened, as if bruised by the stinging remark. Then, strangely, he nodded. 'Perhaps, perhaps. You play a better game of knife-edges than I do, Yuri. I admit that.'

Andropov bowed his head mockingly. 'I shall need to.'

'Let me know — anything, let me know.'

'Of course. My men will rig the transmitter for you. I will be available — either myself or Kapustin, at any time. Regular reports will be made to you. If it happens, you'll hear it on the news. If not, you'll hear it from me.'

Khamovkhin nodded. Restlessness again — yet some other movement than a cramped stirring seemed appropriate, even necessary. He stood up, and straightened his body. Like someone going out to execution, he thought, then smiled. No, someone bluffing his way across a border. Leaving his friend, but subordinate, to face the firing-squad. As everyone there knew, he had always played a good bluff.

He looked at the little groups of dark coats, and the white or bald heads — very few dark ones, a game of old men — and wondered which one of them it was.

'Which of those bastards is it?' he whispered, and Andropov touched his elbow in a warning gesture. Old men, he thought with contempt that did not entirely disguise self-disgust. Thinking aloud, dribbling while we sleep, creaking when we bend, snapping like old sticks when we break. A stupid, desperate game of old men — ancient, toothless figures who have to wear long underwear all year, and waistcoats and woollens — Politburo, High Command, Central Committee, Secretariat. Full of old men.

'Which of those bastards is it?' he asked again, bending slightly towards Andropov. 'Find him, and kill him — then kill the others.'

Andropov touched his forehead in a mocking salute.

Five: Schemes of Things

The underground OPCO-ORD (Operations Co-ordination) Room of Group of Soviet Forces North was surprisingly understaffed, or so it seemed to Admiral of the Red Banner Northern Fleet Dolohov, as Praporovich ushered him through the door, so that the two elderly men stood looking down from a gallery over the huge electronic map-table below. Only a few staff officers fussed around its perimeter, like billiard players assessing some future shot. He looked towards Praporovich as if for some explanation. Praporovich smiled.

'Bare, isn't it?' he said gruffly. 'With a purpose. And not just to demonstrate what things might be like if—' Marshal Grigory Ilyich Praporovich, commander, GSFN, cut off the sentence by an effort of will. A moment of silence in which calm reasserted itself in his features, then: 'We have moved normal strategic exercises and war-games to OPCO-ORD TWO at Murmansk. There have been various computer malfunctions here in the past weeks which made such a move imperative.'

Dolohov, the smaller, neater of the two men, smiled at the Marshal.

'And those officers down there — your Rabbit Punch team, I presume?'

Praporovich nodded. 'They are all entirely trustworthy, Admiral.'

'I don't doubt it.'

'Come,' Praporovich instructed, the arm he placed about Dolohov's shoulder oddly at variance with the inflexibility of command in the voice. 'Come and see what you came to see.'

He walked the Admiral along the gallery, their shoes ringing on the metal walkway, then ushered him into a control-booth, glass-fronted and empty except for two junior officers, which looked down over the huge map, its surface like opaque, slaty glass, devoid of features, reflecting only, and in a diffused manner, the lights in the ceiling of the high room.

The two junior officers sprang to attention from their chairs in front of a massive command console, and then Praporovich motioned them to sit. He guided Dolohov to the window, and then said:

'Very well — begin. Placements for dawn on the 24th. Set it up.'

Dolohov could see the lights winking on and off on the control board behind him, and noticed, too, that the staff officers below had donned headphones, picked up cues so that they were more like billiards players than ever. More lights reflected in the glass in front of him, and he heard the rapid clicking of instructions being typed into the computer. Winking lights.

'You have recalled Pnin, then?' he said, as if to make conversation with Praporovich, staring grimly down at the unlit table below.

'Yes. It is done. Tonight.'

'Tell me — you consider that Kutuzov made a mistake—?' He tailed off as Praporovich glared at him.

'No, I do not. It must be right. Kutuzov wished to ensure that nothing can go wrong. Pnin's timings had to be got right. Unknown territory for us — virtually. We don't rehearse the invasion of Scandinavia very much, even in GSFN!' Praporovich laughed deep in his chest, almost a threatening sound, and without humour. 'The timetable is vital — the North Cape installations have to be taken out, and the Allied Mobile Force has a timetable we must be certain we can beat. Kutuzov understands this—' There was an implied slight, but Dolohov ignored it. 'Now, the timings are right.'

Dolohov nodded. Below him, the table sprang to life — a huge map of the north of Russia and northern Scandinavia appeared, melting into sharp focus, having, through the thick glass of the table, the appearance of three dimensions — brown mountains, green forests, blue sea. It delighted him, and he did not despise the almost child-like pleasure, though he thought Praporovich would have disapproved. Praporovich considered him, he knew, a weak link, a prevaricator. Perhaps he was; but it was his head, once the Northern Fleet put to sea on its own initiative.

Dolohov, in the silence of the OPCO-ORD room's control booth, his sense of Praporovich's presence both disturbing and reassuring, was prepared to admit a certainty beneath his prevarication. But only to himself. The navy would suffer as acutely as the army in the wave of the new SALT agreement. He, as a vocal opponent of such arms reductions, would be put out to grass, and a yes-man brought in. Dolohov could already name the man who would succeed him.

But not that, he reminded himself. Not that. He had moved uncertainly, and with darting, uneasy self-consciousness through a political maze for much of his life. From practical sailor to flag rank to administration, to Fleet command — for thirty years he had ceaselessly wondered why he never heard the language of revolution, the tone of Leninism, except in public utterances. He had kept his thoughts private, so that people believed he had none to think and none to share — but there had been a secret. He had stood, for a generation — since the Great Patriotic War — on a rising mental ground, watching for the movement of armies, the spread of the creed to which he had given himself. Until now, it had never happened, or seemed likely to happen.

He could not speak for the army — even for the big man beside him — and its motives. And he clung, against suspicious, chilling moments of differing insight, to the idea that Kutuzov believed as he did.

Prevarication was, for him, a need to ensure that it would work. He was gambling his ideology, his secret self.

So, prevaricate — let them prove it, once again.

Lights on the map now. Dolohov recognised the colours which represented his own vessels — red for submarines, yellow for destroyers, green for cruisers, white for troop transports. On the map, the Northern Fleet had already set sail, and was in position. Along the northern coast of Norway, troops were to be landed from transports, each of them flanked by red lights, backed by yellow or green. Varangerfjord, Tanafjord, Laksefjord, Porsangenfjord, Altafjord — each deep inlet of the Barents Sea having a loop of the one main road from Kirkenes running at its edge. And that road had to be held, so that the massive armoured thrust, preceded by chemical attack, could move effectively across the border into Norway, and along that road. The armoured force was a vivid concentration of blue light on the border, seeping already, it seemed, into Norway.

'Your principal dispositions,' Praporovich said unnecessarily, Dolohov nodded.

'I can reasonably go no further down the coast than that — except with submarines,' he observed. 'That is what I wish to discuss with you. I think your targets ill-defined, in some cases wrong. I agree with the North Cape monitoring systems. I have to move units of the Fleet very carefully until they are disposed of. I accept the operation against the fjord targets, however, with much more reservation. I think we should move to close the Baltic, and the northern Atlantic shipping lanes—'

Praporovich seemed surprised, even irritated, as at a persistent but untenable request from a child. His voice was carefully modulated, however, as he said, 'Not yet — we threaten only Scandinavia directly. The rest is implicit. We have discussed this topic often before, Admiral. There is nothing new to say.'

Dolohov felt no reservation concerning Praporovich's anger. He had decided, in advance, that he would promote the sense of his importance to Group 1917 by this challenge. Praporovich was too careful, and too thorough, to steamroller his opinions, or dismiss them as the waverings of a weaker man.

'Very well. I want assurances that you can reach Tromsø and Bode and Bardufoss during the hours of daylight on the 24th. And you can't do it by road, and I can't do it for you.'

'I will have available — wait!' He turned to the two console operators, and snapped: 'Put up dispositions for 24:00, on the 24th.'

Dolohov turned back to the view through the window, watching the lights of his naval force wink out, wink on again in different locations.

'Sir — which variant?' he heard one of the two young men ask.

'Variant Four,' Praporovich replied. Then he said to Dolohov, 'Variant Four anticipates the strongest possible resistance, and the slowest build-up of forces on our side. It assumes the arrival of units of the Allied Mobile Force, to support the Norwegians, in strength. It is an extreme unlikelihood that they could stiffen resistance as much as we have posited here. Also, in this Variant, we have considered the worst kind of weather and road conditions along the entire length of the road system we persuaded the Finns to let us build.'

Dolohov masked his satisfaction behind a nod. This is what he had come for. After, months of more peripheral vision of the invasion — oh, yes, they had told him the details of the coup against Khamovkhin's gang, but treated himself, and the Fleet, as something dog-like to be given its orders, round up the sheep, and sit panting at their heels until they patted it on the head. He was at last being put fully in the picture now. Thus, he ignored the seaborne lights on the map-table as they winked out then came on, clustered around the seaward ends of fiords or threatening Tromsø and Hammerfest and Narvik and Bodo, and watched the landward lights. Like minor explosions of current, thick purple light bloomed around Kirkenes, Tromsø, and points between them — a chain of purple clouds — until the computer adjusted to the time-factor, and the purple became a dissipating fuzzy haze. Chemical attacks, taking place ahead of the main column, now being stabilised by the decontamination teams, rendered safe for the passage of armour.

'You have taken more than a hundred and fifty kilometres of the Kirkenes road?' Praporovich nodded. 'And the other targets — desant operations? Again, Praporovich nodded, but remained silent. Dolohov sensed that he disliked imparting the information. Perhaps GSFN had been secretive for too long.

As he watched, child-like at some celebration full of coloured lights, he began — even as he masked any satisfaction that might appear in his features — to believe that it would work. Work — yes, the great work. It was beginning, down there where the staff officers fussed around a chessboard of coloured lights.

Kirkenes was now distinguished on the map as an orange light; so was Bode, and Bardufoss — and Ivalo, Dolohov noticed as his glance strayed eastwards from Norway. Airfields, he presumed, taken as being used to accelerate the inflow of support troops. Or to launch other desant operations towards the south of Finland and Norway.

'Look—' Dolohov began, irritated by the Marshal's silence. Praporovich turned to him. 'I accept everything you've shown me — but my vessels are sitting in fjords all that day, and for days to come. What guarantees have you to offer?'

'None. We will be at war.'

'I want to know about response, dammit!'

'None. Not until we stop. Annexation of Finland, and the north of Norway. Then we consolidate, and then we talk to the Americans.'

'You're very sure of Wainwright.'

'We are. He has not time for flexible response, no time for a conventional force to encounter our forces. And he won't use the nuclear force. Nor shall we. That's your guarantee. When we are in power, he will deal with us, because he will have to. On our terms—'

Dolohov, studying his companion, sensed, in a peculiar way, the voice and person of Kutuzov himself — a quiet, deep fanaticism, an abiding self-assuredness insisting on reality only in the terms that the voice described. Praporovich ended: 'We shall succeed, because we must. It is the last throw. This—' He waved down at the map. 'This is our show of strength, just as much as the capture and trial of Khamovkhin and the others, and the stamping out of those shits in the KGB.' Suddenly, he seemed to relax, almost as if amused at the portentousness of his own words. 'Come down. Admiral, and have a closer look. And—' Dolohov saw that it was as if the soldier had read his mind, had been reading it over the past months. 'No secrets now, eh. Too late for secrets between us.'

Again, he put his arm around Dolohov's shoulder as he led him out on to the gallery. Admiral Dolohov felt no resentment, and no sense of pride to be reasserted. The long, high room, the echoing of the footsteps, most of all the map that glittered with a myriad lights, suggested a community that could not be broken, and of which he was an essential part.

The meaning of the display was success. Of that, he was at last convinced. He was among men who shared his secret dreams, and not amidst opportunists, lackeys, self-seekers, revisionists. The revolution was taking up arms. Jihad. He did not know why the Arabic had popped into his consciousness, but he smiled at its appropriateness. Jihad.

The biting wind chilled Khamovkhin immediately he stepped out of the comfortable warmth of the Tupolev; it seemed to have waited for him, for he saw the quick grabbing of fur hats, the sudden discomfort, of those waiting for him on the tarmac of Seutula Airport. Two security men went down the steps in front of him, and took up their positions — and he felt himself reluctant to follow. The flight had been a respite, almost a reprieve. The sense of crossing the border from a foreign country to somewhere safer. Now, nothing of that — just the wind buffeting him, shrinking his sense of safety until he was aware of every inch of his old flesh.

Behind him, Gromyko murmured something to an aide, and Khamovkhin stepped forward, one gloved hand holding the rail of the passenger gantry. Immediately, the Finnish army band began the Soviet anthem. Its strains sounded tinny and unsubstantial in the wind, and the little figures of the President and Prime Minister of Finland, and the official party, too far away from him and quite unimportant. It was as if the bulk of the Soviet Union pressed at his back like a palpable thing, and he had the sense of Andropov's last mocking glance and the idea that he had run away.

He shook hands — more old men, he thought. The President welcomed him, they embraced in the Russian style. He felt old, leathery skin against his cheek. Then stepping forward again, down the two rows of the guard of honour, the cold eating into him, the faces of the Finnish soldiers white and stiff like those of dolls, the slim rifles bisecting their chilly features. He wanted it to be over.

A strip of red carpet, its edges ruffled by the searching wind, leading towards the podium, and the microphones. The flash of cameras; he remembered to smile at them, facing the battery. The press of the West, of course, all of them booked into comfortable hotels in Helsinki and waiting for the 24th. He climbed the three steps to the podium in front of the Finnish President, and composed his features to listen to the speech of welcome. He looked at the airport buildings, and saw only a few watchers, and some security men, all unnaturally still. And the television cameras — pictures to Finland, America by satellite, and of course, Russia. Persistent flashes from the photographers below the podium, and the sense of others crowding behind him. Ridiculously squashing on to something much too small to accommodate them. He almost wanted to laugh.

The President remarked the historic nature of the visit, the fittingness of the time and place, the wished-for completion of the treaty in a week's time. Until that time, he was their honoured and welcome guest in Finland. His own reply was brief, memorised even though he held the notes in his hand — the extra-large type of the IBM machine, specially manufactured with the Cyrillic alphabet, required because of his weakening sight. He promised a successful signing of the Treaty, and looked forward to his visit. Two metaphors of a long journey occupied the central part of the text, which had already been distributed to the press.

Thankfully, he stepped down from the podium, where the wind seemed worse, and climbed into the official Presidential limousine which had drawn up alongside. More flashes of cameras in the strengthening morning light, and then they were lights and faces behind him, sliding past the windows. He was alone in the car with the President of Finland, and they both smelt of the cold, and of heavy overcoats. He sat back in his leather seat, and closed his eyes. The President stared straight ahead, as if he had been warned not to look in his basilisk direction. Khamovkhin was thankful for that. The chill, in this sense of every inch of himself began to dissipate. He began to feel comfortable.

Galakhov went directly through the nothing-to-declare corridor for UK citizens at Heathrow. An uneventful flight in company with a motley group of British tourists — half an hour's boring conversation with a Trade Unionist and his wife about the cosy picture of Russia they had seen, venturing as far as Novosibirsk on their round trip. And the restorations to Leningrad, and the hospitality they had been shown.

'At last we can begin to learn in Britain,' he remembered the man saying. 'When this Treaty's signed, nobody can go on pretending Russia's still something to be afraid of — eh?' He had smiled, and nodded, and agreed, and had himself, in his English persona as a bank clerk, been most impressed with everything he had seen, including the women. The presence of the Trade Unionist's wife had restrained her husband's replies, he felt.

Two men were waiting for him when he had passed through the customs barrier. He nodded to them, and then went into the coffee shop in the passenger lounge. He queued for coffee, then sat at a vacant table, and waited. He watched the business of Heathrow through the windows, idly sipping at the coffee. He looked often at his English shoes, and marvelled at the insipidity of the security both at Cheremtievo and Heathrow, and the fact that people believed what was written on pieces of paper pressed between cardboard covers.

When he looked up from staring at his feet, the two men had joined him. Both of them, to his eyes, appeared far more English than he did himself, expensive suits displayed beneath open top-coats.

Without looking at either of them, he said quietly, 'We are running to schedule, I take it?' His tone implied that it would be their fault if they were not.

'We are.' The taller of the two men, and the one appearing more distinguished, more moneyed, seemed undisturbed by the tone of command in Galakhov's voice. His voice implied that Galakhov was in their hands now, and that they knew their part — did he?

'Where is he now?'

'On his way here — the flight leaves in two hours. He left the Embassy a short while ago, driving himself here. There's a radio car downstairs, and he's being tailed.' Only in the exhaustive detail of the operation was the distinguished man betraying his subordinate role.

Galakhov nodded. 'Good. Where is the gun?'

'Concealed in the toilet — third cubicle along from the door. I still consider a gun the wrong method—'

'You consider? Just do as you're told.'

The tall man was silenced. Then his companion, who seemed to have observed the exchange with truculent boredom, said, 'The blood on the floor, Comrade.' And Galakhov realised that the squat, dark-haired, badly-shaven man was effectively in charge of this part of the operation. He bridled at the insulting tone, but held his tongue. 'We do not want to have to explain, or to clean up after you. You will be up and away, Comrade, but we will still be here.'

'What do you suggest?' Galakhov said quietly, restraining all feeling. 'And where?'

'That's better.' Galakhov winced inwardly at the reversal of roles now so evident, and enjoyed by the dark man. Another of those occasions when he was nothing but an executive, a tool to be used by little men with hair coming from their ears and nostrils, and the cunning of foxes. All of them taking a temporary royalty borrowed from Kutuzov. 'Stick to the original plan, Galakhov. You have an important message — trick him into the toilet, and kill him there — you've got two useful hands, if your file isn't out of date.'

Galakhov looked down at his hands, and looked up again, grinning.

'You're a pair of shits, you know that?' he remarked, still grinning. The tall man bridled, but he saw an element of new respect in the way in which the dark man looked at him. Then he nodded.

'Very well. But do it our way — mm?'

'Naturally. Where is the briefcase?'

The tall man handed it over. Galakhov looked inside. A couple of slim files, and a sealed envelope bearing the stamp of the Trade Mission at the Soviet Embassy in London. It would lure the man they wanted to somewhere quiet so he could open it.

'You tell him there's an answer required.'

'Yes. What's his cover — what we expect?'

'As far as we know, yes. You'll recognise him, anyway?' Galakhov nodded, placing the briefcase by his seat. 'He's still travelling as a Finn, returning to Helsinki, and his business. Export saunas, that's the line.'

'Good.' Galakhov looked at his watch, then said to the tall man, 'Get my change of clothes, and find out where he is as of this precise moment.'

There was no more than the hesitation of a moment before the tall man got up, and left them, heading out of the coffee shop with an admirably military bearing.

'Good front man,' Galakhov's companion murmured. 'Spent years in England. You should hear him in a pub.'

'Really?' Galakhov remarked. 'I wondered what it was he did to any useful purpose.' He looked at his hands, then picked up his coffee cup, cradling it. The dark man, too, looked at Galakhov's hands.

Vorontsyev had not shaved. He was uncertain as to whether he had shaved the previous day or when he had left the hospital and returned to his cold flat. It might originally have been lassitude, or boredom. Now, he prowled the bare room that he called his study, the walls of which seemed to have enclosed him further, pressing on him with a brightness of maps, diagrams and his scrawled handwriting. He had not had time to wash, or clean his teeth. He was unsure as to how much sleep he had had, or the time at that moment.

His mouth, he noticed as he ran his tongue over his teeth, tasted awful. He had smoked too much. The air of the cramped study was thick and blue, and smelled of ashtrays — there were two big ones, one on the arm of an easy chair, the other on his small bureau, full of ash and stubs; and there were deposits of ash on the worn carpet, like the droppings of some desiccated bird.

He was still dressed in his old woollen dressing-gown — but he had replaced the thick striped pyjamas they had given him in the hospital with his own silk ones.

He was, strangely, not tired. Even though his head was thick, and seemed at times close to seizing like a cold engine; he was too excited, a tangible feeling in his stomach. He was no longer aware that he was merely duplicating what must be happening in dozens of offices in Moscow and other towns. With better facilities, better sources of information more easy to tap. He was alone, on sick leave, denned in a situation where he had surrounded himself with the blueprint of a system — the Soviet Union reduced to a problem to be solved on paper.

It satisfied him. His study, which seemed dusty and airless when he had first opened the door — hours, days ago? — had become familiar again; almost a part of him. There was no private experience any more — no feelings at all except for the barometric effects on him of his deliberations. He was rid of self; he was merely a brain, a memory, an imagination — operating upon known facts, assumed realities.

One plain wall of the study was decorated with something that resembled a genealogical table. The power infra-structure of his country, his state. He had drawn it on a huge tablecloth of paper, held together with sticky tape, pinned high on the wall. It was carefully drawn in red felt pen — with touches of green and blue here and there.

Each box in the branching table was clearly labelled. It was partly for information; and part of its function was a treasure-map, a cipher.

Near the ceiling — he had had to climb painfully on to a hard chair, his bruises protesting, sweat breaking out because of the simple, repeated exercise — were four boxes, representing the Praesidium, the USSR Council of Ministers, the Politburo, and the Central Committee of the Party. The four organs of control. Around the Politburo and the Central Committee he had drawn blue boxes — the organs of decision making and real control.

The branches of the table that interested him, descending from these two boxes, were the Ministry of Defence, below it the main military council and the First Deputy Ministers; then, spreading like the fertility of some medieval king, the general staff, the High Command of the armed forces, and the various branches of the services, details describing their subdivisions more hurriedly scrawled beneath the boxes — because by that time he had become convinced that the military structure alone could not supply the answer to his problem.

From the Central Committee he had drawn a vertical line downwards to GLAVPUR, the Political Directorate of the armed forces, which was the Party's means of control over its huge war machine. An arrowed line descended from the GLAVPUR box, then slid leftwards beneath the sections of the services, dropping like seeds at each one, a symbol — the letters 'PS'. Each arm and branch of an arm of the Soviet armed forces possessed a Political Staff, responsible to GLAVPUR.

At that point, as he completed it, he left it; he did not need to add the GRU, Military Intelligence, which operated on the same infiltrated system as GLAVPUR; not the KGB, the Committee for State Security. He knew, too well, how that diagram would read, and he knew its intimate, unavoidable entanglement with the armed forces as with every aspect of Soviet Life. In the Politburo, the effective governing body, the KGB was represented by Andropov himself; on the Central Committee sat at least one KGB Deputy Chairman at any time; in the Praesidium and the Supreme Soviet, the titular government, the KGB was present. In the Secretariat, the Party's civil service and therefore present in every Ministry, there were KGB officers in civilian guise. And the GRU was operated by the KGB, subordinate to it.

He thought for a moment that he might have a clue, there and at that point. But it did not work. The whole of the GRU would have to have been suborned.

At that point, he had rested, sitting back in the armchair, staring at the system reduced to a chart — like the one that had been at the end of his hospital bed. This one measured the temperature of the state. He returned to the image of the king's genealogy. The fertile son was the KGB; his children were everywhere. And, because of that, nothing made sense. He had smoked, made a scrappy sandwich lunch, and drunk some beer.

The beer had grown warm and flat in the room, despite the temperature in the grey street outside the fugged window.

He tried to enter the matrix at a different point — went back to the files left with him by Deputy Kapustin. He had drawn the diagram, he admitted, out of arrogance. The brilliant candidate who requires no revision, no cribs supplied by an earnest, dim bookworm. But it had been stupid. He sorted the files, selected another wall, and pinned the photographs, one by one with a gallery's neat spacing, labelling each one with the name he found printed on the reverse.

It was as if Kapustin was an examiner at the training school, where Vorontsyev had first shrugged off the oppressive influence of Mihail Pyotravich Gorochenko, his adoptive father; where he had forgotten, for the first time, the privileged position that had made him envied, and disliked, at school and the Lenin University — which had paralysed his ability to decide his own future. Gorochenko had enlisted him in the KGB engineered it. The man, his real father's oldest and best friend, had made him safe. That had always been the strange feeling he had had — of being protected by Gorochenko, placed where he could inflict rather than be inflicted upon.

It was an examination, he thought, staring at the photographs later in the day, when the galleried neatness of rows of faces had become edited, and there were large gaps above scribbled names as the least suspect were removed, lying in a discarded, spread pile on the floor. And it had been as at first — when he had first revelled in the power of mind, of reasoning, and — yes, he admitted it, the secret nature of the work, the intrusive, spying quality of it. After the training school, he had found his identity, and could once more love his adoptive father, whose name he had never been forced to take. He was himself.

Until Natalia, and the way she rubbed off the acquired skin, wearing his identity away as she made him a cuckold, a jealous, suspicious, agonised fool whose work suffered, whose reputation began to decline.

He brushed aside the thought.

Ten photographs. Ten case-histories.

He had selected them carefully, only removing a face from the wall after much deliberation, cross-referencing in the files that had come from the cheap briefcase as from a cornucopia. Endless riches of detail; a ceaseless diet of collected observation. Six military men. Two members of the Politburo. Two members of the Secretariat. Not all the suspicious ones, just those best placed. Samples, really. If nothing transpired, then others…

Then that, too, seemed complete, and he blenched before the mass of documentation stretching back over twelve months. He sat in his chair, looking at a discarded photograph that had slipped from the arm. He picked it up, and smiled. A dead man; he had been the first to come off the wall, with a laugh at the hidebound attitude that included corpses in the ranks of the suspected.

Twelve months of detail — periods of leave, all journeys within the Soviet Union or countries of the Warsaw Pact; all committees, all social engagements, and contacts. Sexual indulgences. Digests of tape-recordings; contacts leading back to the old man who had spoken over the tapped phone of Group 1917. Private habits, reading material, exercise of the bowels, the dog, the digestion; holidays; second homes, financial records…

He had baulked at it, for the moment. Instead, he let his mind assume another tangent. The couriers.

For there had to be couriers. There could be no written or recorded messages or instructions. Word of mouth. Had it not been for Ossipov, then he would have concluded that the cell was tight-knit; after all, to achieve a coup, sudden and certain, would take only troops stationed in the Moscow Military District; no need to include Ossipov. Yet he was the one who had dodged his tail — been aware of it in the first place. Far East, based on HQ, Khabarovsk. Why was he necessary?

The local KGB Resident had been altered, but as yet there was no report. It was one-horse outfits, in the east. Like frontier lawmen in American films, he thought. Far East was a military business, altogether. And suitably masked from heavy surveillance, therefore.

Couriers?

Civil servants, GRU personnel — back to the problem of subversion. Not soldiers, no real freedom of movement there. Not the senior officers, too attractive to the magnet of surveillance, they. Someone, some group — able to move freely?

Which was why his soldiers on the wall all came from different military districts — in their grainy blow-ups which savoured of secrecy and the power of unseen watchers. Odessa, Kiev, Central Asian, Siberian…

They might tell him something about the methods of communication, if they had anything at all to tell.

Substitutes? Still no ident on the Ossipov-substitute, that infuriating figure whose dead hand he had held. He could still feel the thrill of the cold thin wire, running into the sleeve of the black overcoat with the fur collar. Were there others?

It meant going back to the photographs — he would need his team, and here in the flesh not at the other end of a telephone, to do the same thing as he had done with General Ossipov.

And why Finland? Why Vrubel, who was dead?

He wanted to go to Finland. For whole minutes, the idea possessed him with an impatience great as that of any child. He knew that someone would be checking; he wanted it to be himself, or one of his team. The egotism of the small room, the dusty light of it and the work there, was strong. Why Vrubel? Was he a courier?

The doorbell rang, startling him. Automatically, he looked at his watch. Four o'clock. In the afternoon? He had been staring at a picture of Marshal Praporovich, just about to step into a Moscow taxi. He had no idea how it came to be in his hand, nor the cigarette he had been absently smoking.

He got up as the bell summoned him again. Reluctant, he felt, then quickly aware of the dishevelled state of his appearance. He locked the door of the small study behind him, and went out into the narrow hallway.

Mihail Pyotravich Gorochenko stood on the doorstep, snow glistening as it melted on his shoulders. Vorontsyev's face immediately creased into a smile of welcome.

'Mihail Pyotravich — how wonderful to see you!' The two of them embraced, the younger man feeling the rough skin against his cheeks, the paternal fervency of the old man's kisses. Then he ushered him into the lounge — sparsely and unconcernedly furnished from some warehouse which stocked furniture of a standard kind for KGB apartments. Gorochenko sat himself near the electric fire, switching it on — then he glanced quizzically at Vorontsyev, sensing that his adopted son had not inhabited the frosty lounge that day.

'Busy, Alexei?' he asked as Vorontsyev poured vodka for them both, then set the bottle between them on a low table, scuffed with storage, nicked with wear. There were rings from wet glasses on it that he had not polished away.

Voronstyev glanced at the locked door, wanted to tell the old man, but said, 'A bit. There's no leave, you know!' He laughed. The old man nodded sagely, and downed the vodka. Vorontsyev refilled the glass.

The Deputy Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union watched his face carefully, as if for signs of pain or age.

'I'm sorry I have not been to see you earlier, Alexei, my boy,' he said. 'Politburo business — things are buzzing…' Vorontsyev felt a twinge of shame at his own reluctance to confide. It was a habit he automatically obeyed. And the old man expected it. 'You were badly hurt?'

'No — father.' Vorontsyev enjoyed the ease with which he used the word these days. Not so well, perhaps, when the old man periodically tried to patch things up between himself and Natalia — he wondered whether the old man would use the visit as an excuse to do so again — but today, with a lot of preliminary work done, he could relax into an older familiarity. He smiled, and the old man's bright blue eyes smiled back at him from the strong, square face.

He leaned over and patted his thigh. 'Good. Just bruises, the doctor told me. I rang the hospital yesterday. Comes of having a thick skull — like your father!' They laughed, recalling the same dead man. No hint of a gap between them because of their lack of propinquity.

Gorochenko lit a cigarette, and expelled a blue funnel of smoke towards he ceiling. Then he said, 'It's a pity you haven't a woman about the place, to help you get well…' He held up his hand as Vorontsyev's face puckered with displeasure. 'Oh, I know what you are going to say. I meant her.' As if his mind turned a hunched, protective shoulder towards the old man, Vorontsyev said. 'I don't want to discuss my wife — father!' This time the word was a plea.

'No, no. I have no wish to give you pain, my boy. But — you were once so happy, eh? And — Natalia has been to see me — yes. Little Natasha who went so far away from you. She came to me, and told me about — the other night.'

It was as if his ribs protested; Vorontsyev drew a sharp breath of pain.

'What?'

'Yes, my boy. Today. This morning, she called to see me at the Ministry. A private interview.'

'What for?' Vorontsyev winced with suspicion.

'She — asked me, to arrange an interview. She wants to talk to you.'

'About what? She's never needed my permission before for the things she does!'

Gorochenko's face darkened. He said, 'Don't sulk, Alexei! Listen to me. Your calling there the other night — it disturbed her. And I think she felt humiliated. And even sorry that it had to happen.' He spread his hands for silence. 'I'm not saying she's changed, or that she wants to begin again. Just that she wants to see you.' He patted Vorontsyev's thigh again. 'I want to help you — not her, but you, Alexei. You believe that, don't you?'

Vorontsyev fought back something akin to tears. He felt young, brittle as glass, foolish. And he did want her back. He had always known that, as Gorochenko knew it. He knew he would agree to it, agree that they meet. He nodded.

'I believe it.'

'Then I'll say no more. You can think it over. Then let me know. I said I would — let her know what you decide. A meeting with no promises, on either side.'

'Very well,' Vorontsyev said stiffly, sitting upright, starched by the emotion beginning to move in him. He poured two more vodkas with a perceptibly shaking hand, then said, 'You look tired, father. You are working too hard.'

'May be, my boy.' He played with the thick white moustache, his homage to Stalin as he called it, and smiled. He drew on the cigarette, coughed, and added, 'That cunning old bastard, Feodor, sniffs treason — as usual!' His eyes seemed suddenly to focus on Vorontsyev's face.

'Treason?'

'Don't worry. I'm not digging. Merely telling. The last meeting of the full Politburo. A performance of exceptional merit from our First Secretary. Plots against him, against all of us — inspired by the West, naturally. And he was hot on the trail! Quite like the old days.'

'You — discount the idea?'

'Not necessarily.' He barked with sharp laughter, and in the sound he was a powerful man, and unafraid. Wisely cynical, wordly-wise. 'But I have heard the whole thing before. I think it comes with age, like prostate trouble or sciatica.' He laughed again. Then he said suddenly, 'Who tried to kill you, Alexei?'

'I–I don't know,' Vorontsyev said, seeing the hard anger in his adoptive father's eyes. The old man looked at him for a long time, then, seemingly satisfied, he nodded and looked at his watch.

'I must go, Alexei. I have an important meeting.' He stood up. 'You — take good care of yourself,' he added gruffly. 'Understand?'

'Yes, father.' The words were so sombre, so charged with parental domination, that Vorontsyev felt as if the old man were rehearsing him in his school learning, or overlooking his mathematics. Or perhaps in the days of his student arrogance, arguing with him.

Gorochenko said, as if divining something, 'To try to kill an SID man means it is serious. Whatever it is — take care of yourself. You know what it would do to me if anything happened to you — eh?' Vorontsyev nodded again. 'And — think about that other matter. Natalia. I don't like things as they are…' A hint of inflexible command in the voice, then: 'Try to allow yourself to see her. Try to solve things, eh?'

'I–I'll try.'

When he had seen the old man out, he had no desire to return to the study. Faces on the wall or relegated to the frayed carpet. He wanted — yes, wanted, he admitted, to think about his wife.

Folley was in little condition to register tangible scenes. Only the sense of personal movement, the grip of mittened hands on his arms, and being bundled into the back of a small, cramped vehicle, roofed with tarpaulin; he registered the change of environment with painful concentration. The aching body adopted unsuccessfully the hard outlines of the cold metal. Lights. He could remember lights, and the din of tracked vehicles waiting to move. Moving.

He tried to notice, to absorb and retain impressions. A litmus imagination. But it was difficult, because of the gouts of pain from the broken ribs, the bruised flesh, still overwhelmed him. He slipped in and out of awareness, as if hiding from something. Yet someone might ask him to remember; so he tried.

It was snowing — the snow blowing into his hanging face, or flung as noisily as gravel against the tarpaulin. Two men in the seats in front.

The swollen tongue rasping thickly against the broken craters of teeth. Real, that.

The jolting of the journey — he raised himself to look out from the flap of the tarpaulin, once; saw a succession of tanks winding down a slope of the road behind him. And at the speed of his vehicle, they were not being left behind. Racing, almost, in that weather. A ridge in the road jolted him down again, and he passed out. After that, he did not attempt to look out again. Snow, bunding like a curtain — orange haloes of headlights, from somewhere behind. That was all.

He had no distinct awareness of time, or direction. And little idea of his context within the Russian column as it moved back towards the border. He believed he had told them nothing — but as the shocks of pain went on, all he wished was that the journey would end, or the vehicle stop for a little; he could not remember the interrogation clearly at all. Did not remember its object.

Only the movement, then; after an undetermined time, it was only the next jolt, the next protest of the body, that concerned him. The minute changes of position, finding un-bruised parts of himself that might cushion the shocks as the vehicle careered down the road to Rontaluumi; no longer just a vehicle, napping tarpaulin or screaming, chained wheels or plastic seating thrust against his cheek — his whole world, now.

He had, in fact, passed out once more when the column began to pass through the border wire east of the village; his own vehicle, driven by Lieutenant Shapkin of the GRU, was near the lead, behind the advance Motor Recce Company, because orders had been received from Leningrad that the Englishman be returned to Russian soil as soon as possible. Pnin, the General in command of the Ivalo strike force, 'Finland Station Six', had obeyed each of his instructions, relayed from Praporovich in Leningrad; even the one concerning Folley. By the morning, which would come late and dark with the convenient storm, the only Russians remaining on Finnish soil would be a covering party left in the deserted village.

Folley was unconscious for most of the helicopter journey to Leningrad. The brief and violent storm had abated sufficiently to allow a helicopter to set out from the deep forest that now concealed 'Finland Station Six' on their own side of the border. Folley had slept in stillness for a few hours, in a wooden hut, of which he had perceived little — shape of planking, and the heat from the stove. Then, when they hauled him to consciousness, in darkness still, the snow thick against the windows, he had cried out once, as if robbed, and passed out.

Galakhov waited until the Finnair flight to Helsinki was called, and his target had begun to stir in his seat in the Departure Lounge in the Queen's Terminal, before making his approach. He required the distraction of time slipping away to cover any suspicion by the target. He was dressed in the uniform of an Embassy chauffeur; a disguise which would excuse his unknown face but supplement the fiction that he was KGB. The tall man had taken away the suitcase and his travelling clothes, then returned. Both of his contacts were seated elsewhere in the lounge, waiting to follow him and the target.

Ozeroff, GRU Military Attache at the Soviet Embassy in London, drafted by special order of the Chairman of the KGB to security duties in Helsinki, was just gathering up his topcoat and suitcase when a chauffeur snapped to attention in front of him, and saluted.

'Sir—' the young man began, when Ozeroff snapped, 'You bloody young fool, what do you mean by drawing attention to me like that?'

'Sorry, sir,' the young man muttered, shuffling his feet, rigid stance collapsing into nerves. 'Urgent communique from Moscow Centre, sir — I was told to catch you before you left. There's a reply expected—'

'Dammit!' Ozeroff glanced in the direction of the overhead loudspeakers, then at the departure board. 'Important, you say?'

'Sir.'

'Very well, give it to me.' He motioned towards the briefcase in the chauffeur's grasp.

'Not here, sir—' the young man said respectfully.

'Very well — where?' He looked about him. 'Hell, the toilets, then. Follow me.'

Galakhov picked up, despite the movements of many passengers, the movement of the two contacts — the 'dustmen', as he had called them, much to their annoyance. Ozeroff, the whole operation, was in his hands at this moment, and he enjoyed that. He scuttled behind the striding Ozeroff, only a few years his senior but stiff with military service and self-importance. His appointment to the security staff surrounding Khamovkhin had been made because of his fanatical loyalty to the regime, and to the KGB, for whom he worked, despite his titular appointment to Military Intelligence. Galakhov watched his bearing carefully, on two levels — to imitate, and to overcome.

Easy to kill, even without the gun that had already been removed from the cubicle by the dark man.

Ozeroff swung open the door of the washroom, letting it swing back towards the ignored Galakhov. Galakhov stopped it gently, and pushed it open as if protecting the sensitivity of his hands. Then Ozeroff was facing him, ignoring the two men washing — one of them using an electric razor, its buzz like a warning — his hand held out for an envelope that Galakhov fished for inside the briefcase. One of the men moved to the roller towel, and began to rub at his face — an Arab, puffing with cold, humming as if nervous, as if picking up some hidden tension. The shaver, check shirt and well-tailored jeans, who might have been American, or European, ignored everything except his reflection in the mirror. Galakhov backed a little towards the door of one of the cubicles. None of them appeared to be occupied — yes, one near the Arab was closed. He motioned with the envelope, and Ozeroff, conscious only of delay, and of possible changes of plan, took the envelope and passed inside, beginning to close the door. Galakhov saw the Arab about to turn, saw the shaver pause to inspect the side of his jaw, rub at it — and pushed into the cubicle with Ozeroff.

The GRU officer leaned back against the cistern, even as his eyebrows raised in surprise. Galakhov put his finger to his lips, and proffered a notebook and pencil and mouthed the words: 'Your reply, sir.' Ozeroff nodded, and tried to move away from physical contact with the chauffeur. And, as Galakhov had known he would, he half-turned in the secrecy of childhood or examinations, away from the intruder upon his privacy. Galakhov listened. The humming Arab passed the door, which he reached behind him to lock silently, and the noise of the battery shaver started up again, long louder strokes as the man worked at the last rough places.

Galakhov raised his hands above his head, pulling at the strap of his watch, stretching out the thin wire until he clasped it with both gloved hands — the gloves were padded, to protect the fingers — and then Ozeroff was beginning to turn, having been puzzled by the forged letter. Loop, pull. He was slightly to one side of the man so that he could not exert the knee in the back, and would have to choke him. The letter fluttered to the floor, and slid under the door of the cubicle, and Ozeroff's hands were trying to scratch at the biting wire around his throat. Galakhov could see the eyes, the way they asked questions still even as they protruded more and more — the mottled skin turning a satisfactory purple, the hands scrabbling, tearing the skin on the neck, the body and legs doing nothing, nothing. They never did, never did, he thought. Too much concentration on the attacked area, no rationality when a man is being choked to death. Ozeroff reached out one hand to the wall, obscuring a scrawled bit of graffiti, as if steadying himself. Already Galakhov was taking the weight of the body as it began to slump, while tightening the wire still further. Feet of Ozeroff trying to maintain balance, instead of lashing out.

All the time, for every moment, Galakhov could hear the noise of the battery shaver. Ozeroff made no noise, pressed rigid between Galakhov and the wall, no scrabbling, no breath. When Galakhov released the wire — he felt Ozeroff's body slump further, and saw the eyes roll up under the lids — he began to whistle tunelessly, as if in embarrassment at being overheard by the man shaving. The shaver paused for a moment, then continued to buzz. Galakhov leaned forward, and guided Ozeroff's limp arm with his elbow.

The toilet flushed.

Galakhov released the body, caught it against the wall with his hip and stomach, and lowered it on to the seat. Then he leaned back against the wall, feeling hot, stifled. He did not look at Ozeroff's face, but listened. The buzz of the shaver had stopped. No one else had come into the washroom. He looked at his watch as he rewound the wire. In another two minutes, his two 'dustmen' would arrive to take away the remains.

'Hey — in there.' American!

'Y- yes? What is it?'

'You dropped a letter, or something?'

'Yes — yes I have.'

'In Russian?'

'Yes.' All the time, Galakhov had spoken with a more pronounced accent than he normally used when speaking English. 'Business — I am from Finland.' He looked into Ozeroff's dead face, and smiled.

'Sure. None of my business. Here—'

The letter appeared at his feet, pushed under the door. Next to the notebook and pencil that he had dropped — Galakhov realised he hadn't heard them fall.

'Thank you — thank you very much.'

The washroom door swung shut behind the American. Galakhov relaxed, staring at the high ceiling of the room, ignoring the body slumped on the seat. Then the door of the occupied toilet swung open. Water flushing, then hands being washed, then the click of the roller towel — the washroom door opening, sighing shut, then opening again, the footsteps of two men.

Water running.

'All clear,' he heard in the tall man's excellent English.

He opened the door, saw the man dressed in white overalls, and took the suitcase that was handed to him. He changed in the next cubicle, listening to the noises of Ozeroff's body being bundled into the linen basket on wheels, covered with dirty linen. The other man changed the roller towels.

The men were gone before he finished changing, taking the suitcase with the chauffeur's uniform when he passed it out to them, leaving another suitcase, Ozeroff's, for him to employ in his cover.

Galakhov made the final flight call for his Finnair jet to Helsinki. It was the evening of the 18th.