Snow Falcon

Fifteen: The Twain Meet

Admiral Dolohov walked as quickly as caution would permit up the steps of the Murmansk Central Hospital. All the time, he watched his feet on the icy steps. And he kept his head bent because he was worried, and disturbed, and feeling small and vulnerable because of his fears for his wife, and did not wish anyone to see the look on his face.

He glanced up only once, as he reached the top of the steps. The glass doors of the main public entrance were directly ahead of him — and he could see a white-uniformed nurse crossing the well-lit reception lobby. A man bumped into him, and he lifted his head again, almost taking his hands from his coat pockets to right his balance. He did not catch even a glimpse of the man's face — noticed only the soft exhalation of the gas from whatever cylinder the Department 'V' operative carried, before his breath seemed snatched away as if by a wind, so that he gagged in surprise, then in fear, then terror as his breath would not come.

The operative was too far away by the time he staggered for him to fall against him, and he began to lean drunkenly backwards — glimpsed the lit corridor beyond the reception lobby, the imposing facade of the hospital which he had always thought more like a museum, then the starlit sky, then a street light — which had been behind him? — then he tumbled down the icy steps, his heels ringing in a distressed, irregular pattern.

The woman at whose feet he rolled to a halt, on the pavement at the bottom of the short flight of steps, dropped her little plain paper bag of fruit and clutched the collar of her fur coat round her throat before she began to scream.

Army General Sadunov, commanding Attack Force One at temporary headquarters near Pecenga, almost on the border with Norway, and less than fifty kilometres from Kirkenes, complained of indigestion almost as soon as his senior staff officers, with whom he had dined, began passing round the good Ukrainian vodka. Reluctant to miss the bout of drinking — at least so much of it as was concomitant with respect from his officers — he decided that a short walk outside would cure his complaint. He bantered and laughed with his staff while he was helped into his grey winter great-coat, and while he donned his fur hat.

Outside, the night was fine, starlit and cold. Immediately, and for a few moments, he felt better, attending to the chill of the air in his lungs, to the noises of his army — hum of generators, wind-up of helicopter engines, dicks of tested artillery like the snapping of iron twigs.

He was thinking that perhaps he should not have eaten the bliny after the beef Stroganov, certainly not after the krasnaya ikra, when the pain surged through him, starting in the pit of his stomach and reaching into his chest like a burning hand, spreading its fingers as it reached upwards. He had time to half-turn, as if to call back into the wooden building on the steps of which he stood, before he tumbled outwards, falling on his side in the snow. He rolled on his face for a moment, as if trying to put out the raging fire in his stomach by rubbing it in the snow, then lay still.

They were lined up to see him board the helicopter. General, Pnin, commanding Finland Station Six, already in position south-east of Ivalo, across the border with Finland, was pleased and gratified by the sight. He shook hands with each of his headquarters staff, who would join him only after Ivalo was taken and secured, and they snapped into salutes one by one — like a row of clockwork soldiers, he thought, then dismissed the unkindness. Good men.

He ducked under the rotors when the last man had been saluted, and climbed into the MIL helicopter. His aide saluted, and proceeded to strap him into his rear seat in the passenger-compartment of the command helicopter. Then Pnin nodded that he was secure, and comfortable, and the aide spoke into the microphone.

Immediately, the beat of the rotors increased, and Pnin, twisting his head to look out of one of the ports, saw his staff retreating to a distance where the downdraught would be less distressing. He raised his hand once more in salute. The noise of the rotors reached a whine, and there was that little fearful moment as the whole helicopter wobbled as it first left the ground. Then it rose slowly, its lights — he could see them reflected through the port — splashing redly on the snow of the take-off pad. He could see the upturned faces of his staff, caught by the light, hands holding on to fur hats Then the seat seemed to lift quicker than the rise of the whole machine, but he could not be sure because the scene in the MIL turned from shadow into orange into whiteness and he could see nothing. He could feel, just for an instant. He was being pulled apart, and scalded and deafened.

The staff officers below saw the MIL stagger, then rip like a tin can, belching flame, spit off bits of molten metal and chunks of rotor blade and fuselage — before they began running to escape the debris as it sagged then drove down towards them.

Marshal Praporovich had not heeded his own warning, nor that of Kutuzov. He was faintly amused, rather than disturbed, by the knowledge. And tickled at the idea that, while he had made love to the young lady whose apartment he had visited, two of his officers had stood guard outside the door — another two had been posted outside the entrances to the apartment block.

A risible occasion — but he could not help but be smug about his performance. Not that he had been impotent — no, never that. But — disinterested, certainly unenthusiastic. And he could not explain why the study of the map-table, the digestion of the innumerable movement and disposition reports, the smiles and confidence of his staff-officers — why those things had concentrated themselves in a genital itch which blossomed into lewd images, a vulgarity of mental language that had surprised him, gratified him.

And the girl's call — that had come at just the apposite moment. He had not thought it strange, only convenient — even mystically appropriate. And, laughing, he had collected his little team of bodyguards, and as if they had all been Suvorov cadets they had passed round a flask of vodka in the staff car, and there had even been jokes and vulgarities about occasion and performance and community of indulgence — which he had allowed, so satisfied had been his mood.

He studied himself in the long mirror in the bedroom, touched his fur hat with his gloves in mocking salute, glanced at the sleeping girl in the round bed under the mirror in the ceiling — that, too, an innovation he had submitted to, enjoyed — then turned on his heel, went out through the lounge where the empty glasses stood next to the champagne bottle, half-empty. He let himself out of the apartment. He acknowledged with a nod the evident interest in the eyes of the two young aides on duty outside the door. They followed him with undisguised smiles to the lift.

The house was on the island of Krestovski Ostrov, between the Bolchaia and Malaia Nevkas (The Great and Middle Nevas). It was in a tree-shrouded suburb off the Morskoy Prospekt, amid old and spacious houses. The nearby Maritime Park of Victory and the Kirov Stadium were both masked by the trees — gaunt though they were in the cold pre-dawn as Vorontsyev paced the pavement near the Volga saloon in which he had sat for most of the night.

The house was at least a century old, pre-Revolutionary, lavish, perhaps the retreat of a wealthy businessman or landowner. It had been taken over as a subordinate office and interrogation centre by the Leningrad KGB; just as many of the big houses in those quiet streets had become offices, clinics, kindergardens.

Vorontsyev ground out the cigarette with his foot, and looked at his watch. Five minutes before six. The sky was dark, but the stars were fading. He was cold with the hours of waiting. The pavements and the road were bright with rime, silver in the light of the few street lamps. Two other cars were parked in this quiet street — containing the team he had selected and briefed from the resources of the Novosibirsk office. The men were bored, yet eager. They had come through visa control at Leningrad airport at midnight, as a part but unconnected with Vorontsyev, ahead of them in the short queue. They were noisy, but apparently drunk. The local KGB man wished them a successful and drunken leave in the city.

The cars had come from Intourist — a waspish woman woken from sleep in her flat above the office who was immediately, ingratiatingly humbled by the ID card he showed her. If there was a connection between Leningrad KGB and the group of traitors — he thought about them consistently in that way now — then the Intourist woman would be unlikely to possess sufficient suspicion of SID to pass on the information that an alien KGB apparat was in the city.

He had a reasonable, though undetailed, impression of the interior of the house. If this one — three storied, double-fronted, deep with rooms — worked to the general pattern, then the Englishman would be in the cellar. The cellar would have been converted to interrogation rooms and cells.

He was still dog-tired, he admitted, yawning. He had slept deeply on the five-hour shuttle Aeroflot Tupolev from Novosibirsk, via Sverdlovsk, Perm, Kirov and Vologda — but a sleep interrupted when he was jerked out of unconsciousness each time the plane landed.

He would have felt more comfortable with his own men — he remembered that Ilya and Maxim were dead — but he had no special fear of these strangers. They would not fail. He had chosen young men, men who reminded him of his own team. Most of them were graduates of a university as well as one or other of the KGB training schools, and all of them were ambitious. He had chosen them partly because of their ambition. To work with SID was a privilege, something which would assist their careers. It mitigated the sense they must have of working against comrades. At least, he hoped it did.

He returned to the car, held out his hand, and the driver, trying to look wide-awake with bleary eyes and bleached cheeks, handed him the radio microphone. They had set up a HQ for radio or telephone traffic to be relayed to them from Moscow at another KGB safe house — one due for redecoration in a few weeks and therefore empty. One of their team had been left there with a radio and telephone link.

' "Father" to "Son" — are you receiving me, over?'

The voice was faint, tired and bored. 'Receiving you, "Father" — over.'

'Any more Moscow traffic?'

'Three reports for you, "Father", from Centre. Priority One.'

'Very well. Make them brief- over.' The young driver was looking at Vorontsyev with wide eyes. The highest priority for KGB radio traffic, for a young Major in the SID. He was impressed.

' "Sailor" is dead.' Admiral Dolohov. ' "Soldier Beta" also dead.' Sadunov, he thought, the Army General commanding Red Army units in the Kola sector of GSFN — part of any invasion; the most important part.' "Apostle Four" also dead.' Four — four, who was that in Andropov's little code? Pnin — yes, one of the Finland Stations. Vorontsyev squashed a half-formed image of an enraged and wounded animal lashing out blindly, murderously. It had to be done, had to, he told himself. No other way.

'Anything else?'

'Request for message concerning "Soldier Alpha" as soon as available. And good luck and instructions to take all alive, if possible.'

'Soldier Alpha' was Praporovich himself. The Department 'V' executioner would report to Vorontsyev, and his message relayed to the Centre.

'Very well. Over and out.'

He handed back the microphone. The driver clipped it beneath the dash, then said: 'Are we waiting for the mortician to show up, chief, or are we going in now?'

Five past six. Vorontsyev considered, rubbing his chin. He wanted sleepy, unresisting people. There would be fewer than a dozen people, perhaps only three or four, on the premises. But they had to be taken alive; and they all had immediate access to guns. And he knew Andropov would be waiting for the message concerning Praporovich.

He was a little man. It was almost six-forty when he arrived. The sky was perceptibly lighter now. There was no traffic and few lights in the quiet street, since there were few houses still occupied by tenants or owners. It was a daytime street. He came on foot, in overalls as if coming from a night-shift somewhere, wispy hair jammed under a fur cap, scarf hiding most of his face, dirty overcoat open in front. A totally anonymous man.

His face was pinched, mean-looking. Grubby with whatever mechanical job he did. He smiled at Vorontsyev, and his teeth were sparse in his mouth. Vorontsyev wondered how old he was. All he said was, 'I've taken care of your embarrassing little problem, Comrade Major. I'll be off home now. The wife will have breakfast for me.' He began to walk away, perhaps towards the metro, which must have been how he came there.

'How… ?' was all Vorontsyev could find to say in the face of such undemonstrative behaviour.

'How?' The little man rubbed his chin. 'A car accident. The Marshal was leaving the apartment of a young lady. A rather silly affair, I would have thought. He's practically impotent. A car mounted the pavement, skidding on the ice, I expect, and he was knocked down. He only had a hundred yards to walk to his staff car which was waiting for him. Two of his junior staff officers were injured too. One of them must be dead. I would have thought.'

'I — see.'

'Well, Major, I'll be off now.' He raised his hand in salute, turned, and walked off down the street. Vorontsyev watched him go, then bent to look in at the driver.

'Did you get that?'

'Sir.' The driver's eyes bulged comically.

'Send it, then. "Alpha" has met with an accident. Then we go in.'

The driver spoke into the mike, then listened while Vorontsyev, picking up a torch from the rear seat, flashed it in the direction of two cars parked well down the street. Doors opened, and overcoated figures got out, moved down the street towards him. The driver said, 'Sir — another message. "Apostles One, Two and Seven all eliminated."'

'Hell — is it really only the dream of a few old men — is that all we have to worry about?' He banged his hand absently on the window-ledge of the car. It seemed impossible. It could not be easy, not as easy as that. Kill some old men, and stop a war?

He thought about Kutuzov. The unknown face; the mystery man. Unless he was stopped, then the Kremlin regime, the entire Politburo perhaps — certainly the KGB — would be ousted.

One old man, with a dream of passion. If he wasn't found, then he would succeed. Again, he punched the side of the car with his fist.

'Let's go.' he said.

The other four men were opposite them now, crossing the frost-rimed road. Four heavy dark shapes. The driver shut his door quietly. Vorontsyev looked at them. The tiredness of being awake, or only fitfully dozing, all night was now only slight smudging beneath their eyes. Their faces were tight with tension.

'Right. You know what to do,' Vorontsyev said, 'You two to the back window you spotted earlier — break in if it doesn't give in ten seconds. Understand?' They nodded. 'The rest of you, the front with me. We'll have to break in, and quickly. You two take the first floor rooms, you downstairs…' He addressed the driver with this remark. 'Be careful. I don't know who, or what, is in there — except that you can bet a bloody alarm will go off as soon as we break in.' One of the men grinned. 'But we're experts. We know what to expect. You try to hold, not kill.' He paused for a moment, then: 'But you kill rather than be killed. Understood?'

He looked at each face in turn. Each man nodded. Then he walked ahead of them, briskly, towards the house. Their footsteps behind him seemed to clatter on the frosty pavement He watched the curtained, blind windows as carefully as he could.

Nothing seemed to be awake, or moving, in the house. There appeared to be no duty-staff. Which would be consistent with the house being only an occasional office for the KGB. And, he thought, perhaps consistent with the timing of the Group 1917 and Finland Station operations. If they were only a day away, then there was little need to secure a safe house like this one.

He suddenly wondered whether the Englishman was still alive. His interest, and importance, must surely have passed?

The house was surrounded by a high, dark hedge, behind which was a short gravel drive. They kept to the lawns that flanked it, their feet crunching through the stiff grass, their trouser-bottoms wetted by the frost. Still the house seemed empty, or dead. Vorontsyev pulled the Stechkin from his holster — he had exchanged the Makarov for the heavier gun with the larger clip in Novosibirsk.

They paused, of one mind, at the edge of the lawn. The gravel drive surrounded the house like a stony moat. Vorontsyev motioned the two men detailed to the back of the house to move off. They trod with comic stealth and lightness along the gravel drive as it curved to the rear of the house. Vorontsyev studied the windows at the front of the house, as he had done earlier in the night. The door was stout, but the downstairs windows were not barred. The Leningrad office must have decided not to draw attention to the house by such methods of increasing security. Fortunately.

They crossed the scuffling little space of the gravel, and gathered in a little knot by the window, a large bay whose sill was at the level of their heads.

Vorontsyev said; 'Office, or bedroom, or lounge?'

'Probably lounge or rest-room, sir,' one of them volunteered — the driver.

'Agreed. Up on the sill — have a look at the catch.' As he was helped up on to the sill, Vorontsyev inspected the window frame. Not the original, but a standard wooden frame; sash-cord. 'Well?' he said, looking up.

'It's wired, sir.'

'Can you open it quickly if you smash the window?'

'Yes, sir.'

Vorontsyev looked at his watch. Thirty seconds for them to reach the back window they had chosen, then ten seconds. He waited, then: 'Smash it!'

The driver punched his gloved fist through the pane of glass, just above the catch. The noise was horribly loud in the cold air. Then he said, 'Up and away, boys!' Two of them, Vorontsyev and another man, heaved at the window, and it slid up protestingly. The driver dropped into the room, gun out, and pulled back one curtain.

Vorontsyev clambered over the sill, then turned to help the last man in. There was sufficient light for them to see the door in the far wall. Only then, when they were all inside, did Vorontsyev notice the alarm ringing deep in the house somewhere. It galvanised him.

'Let's go!'

He ran across the room — a frail-looking chair with spindly, glossy legs spun out of his way as his overcoat caught it. He opened the door, and peered out. A big hallway, wide stairs leading up into the darkness. There was a gleam of light, probably coming from under a door, up on the first floor. He prodded the two detailed men, and they took the stairs in a run. The light increased, as if a door had been opened. A voice called out.

Vorontsyev heard 'Hold it, friend!' No more than that. No shooting, yet. The instruction 'Watch him!' then more footsteps.

The driver had crossed the hallway with its chequered tiles, and was opening the door of a room. His head ducked round the door, then he was back out.

'Nothing,' he called, and set off towards the rear of the house.

A shot from what must be the second floor — but towards the rear of the house. The back stairs, the old servants' stairs probably, which meant the two men had broken in and made for the second floor.

Where was the door to the cellars? For a moment, the size of the house defeated him. Then he realised he should have entered at the back of the house. Only the servants would have needed to enter the cellars — and the door would be in the kitchens. No — ground floor reception rooms here, left and right, that door to the kitchens, butler's pantry — and cellars. He followed the direction taken by the driver.

The body thudded on the lowest stairs, and rolled almost gently on to the tiled floor. Dark overcoat, fair hair, hidden, broken face. One of the two men from the second floor search. Someone had thrown him over. He heard faint shots, and a distant cry.

He was losing impetus, he realised. How many seconds had now passed? He burst through the door at the rear of the staircase, and stumbled down three steps, into the huge, gloomy kitchen. A door at the other end of the room was open — the kitchen was some kind of dining-room as well, it appeared. Scraps of food on a table, washing-up in an old sink. Dirty plates. There was no sign of the driver.

He opened two cupboards before he found the door to the cellars. He should have noticed the light beneath the door. It was on, showing the wooden steps leading down. He hesitated, then stepped on to the topmost stair.

A scuffle of footsteps, a muttered voice, sharp with feverish command. He went down the steps quickly. They twisted halfway, almost doubling back. A man in civilian clothes, but carrying an army rifle, was facing him in front of an open door. There was a narrow corridor behind him, and rows of metal doors. And the atmosphere of a prison where once there had been racks and bins of wine.

He fired before the man had time to challenge him. He had been asleep, was leadenly awakening still, for the alarm sounded only as a muffled buzz down there. He fell against the door, a stupid open-mouthed look on his face.

Vorontsyev was still at the bottom of the steps when he saw the other man, a thick dressing-gown tied with a cord, his greying hair ruffled from sleep. He was opening one of the doors, and there was a gun in his hand.

'Halt, or I fire!' Vorontsyev snapped, and the man's head lifted with a jerk, as if he had not noticed the gunshot that had killed the guard.

Somewhere in the house, two more shots. They seemed to startle the man in the dressing-gown as much as Vorontsyev's order. He had a bunch of heavy keys in his right hand, which he was using to open the door, and the gun was evidently awkward in his left hand. Vorontsyev watched the gun, and then the right hand turned the key in the lock, and the man's body began to disappear into the cell he had opened. Vorontsyev fired twice, but missed.

He ran. The pain in his toes came back. He had forgotten the frostbite, even when he patrolled the street outside during the night. A dull ache he gave none of his attention to. Now these few steps hurt. He cannoned off the wall, opposite the open cell door, and then saw the man in the dressing-gown lying by the wall, the gun waveringly pointed at something inside the cell.

Vorontsyev kicked out at the wrist, and the gun flew up and away. The man turned to look at him, evidently afraid now that his concentration on killing the Englishman had vanished. And the fear turned to pain. There was a dark stain spreading across his shoulder; he must have been hit by a lucky ricochet.

Vorontsyev dragged at the collar of the dressing-gown, and the man winced with pain. Novetlyn, having failed in his attempt to kill Folley, realising that it could only be a break-in to rescue him — somehow the Centre knew about Folley — was now desperate to sink into unconsciousness. His shoulder ached crazily, more than any wound had any right to, and he moaned aloud as he was pulled backwards out of the cell. The image of Folley heaped in a foetal plea on his filthy cot disappeared. As the man who had shot him tried to jerk him to his feet, Novetlyn passed out.

Vorontsyev let the body drop again to the floor. The man had passed out; and more, he'd given up trying. Vorontsyev knew the look. The wound would keep him out of the game. He stepped over the still form, into the cell.

Even though the door of the cell had been open for more than a minute, the stench of urine and body dirt assailed Vorontsyev almost tangibly. In a corner, perhaps ten feet from the door, something was crouched on a narrow cot, a blanket wrapped around it. Vorontsyev could hear the chatter of teeth. Cold or terror — or both.

He felt a lurch of what might have been pity, or disappointment. The man on the cot had evidently been broken. The body suggested it — abject, displayed almost as if it had been physically broken, and poorly reassembled. He had seen men, and women, crouching like this in the Lubyanka — before he went to SID. Since then, he had never visited the prison complex behind the Centre in Dzerzhinsky Street.

'Who is it — who is it?' A querulous voice, speaking English. Yes, he had been broken. No cover now, nothing but a pleading not to be hurt or questioned any more. Vorontsyev crossed to the cot.

The Englishman's shirt was filthy. He had urinated in his trousers more than once. Vorontsyev, in appalled fascination, lifted the thin blanket. The man's feet were bare and white — where they weren't filthy. A white globe of a face looked up at him with an idiot's stare. The fair hair was matted. A hand was held out to him; perhaps in supplication, or to ward off some unknown terror. Vorontsyev swallowed, gagging on the stench.

'I've told you everything!' the voice said, querulous, old, ashamed. The head was already hanging, admitting the failure, prepared to answer more questions.

'I've come to help you,' Vorontsyev said softly.

The head stayed still, but he heard the Englishman mutter, 'He said that.'

Vorontsyev understood. His interrogator; perhaps the man outside the door. He said, 'I shot him. Do you hear me — I shot him. I've come to help you.' Vorontsyev spoke in English, with a heavy accent, which he cursed silently as if it was the only barrier now between them. Folley looked up. His eyes tried to focus.

'Not English,' he said.

'No — I'm a Russian.' Folley cringed. 'But I have come to help!' His voice was earnest. He moved a step nearer, and the Englishman backed against the wall behind the cot, the blanket held under his chin in both hands, as if to protect nakedness; or to comfort, child-like.

Vorontsyev knew he was using the methods of a policeman. He could not be simply human, or humane, towards this man, because he needed information from him. Closing his mouth, breathing shallowly through his nostrils — the stench was vile — he sat on the edge of the cot, and put away the Stechkin. Then he touched the man's leg; the flesh seemed to crawl under the touch.

The Englishman tried to make himself as small on the cot as possible, shrinking from contact. Vorontsyev calculated that the moment was right, then said, 'I have come to take you to safety. It will have to be the United States Consulate, I am afraid, because your government maintains no official presence here — nor is there an SIS unit here, as far as I know.' He spoke conversationally, lightly. All the time his hand patted the Englishman's leg, stroking gently much as he would have done to a dog or a cat, to still its fear.

The Englishman was little better than an animal — worse, if the capacity to keep oneself clean was taken into account. Vorontsyev could see that he hadn't been beaten — if he had, then the beating was a time ago. This man had been broken by isolation — by the utter loneliness he had suffered.

Vorontsyev had seen it work before. The collapse of the will, crumbling like stale cake in the pressure of fingers. Because the fingers that held him were omnipotent, omnipresent — and no help would come. That was how it was done.

Just to find out what the West knew about Finland Station. Vorontsyev shrugged. The Englishman was having difficulty with what he had heard. Vorontsyev, easing as much gentleness as possible into his voice, repeated himself.

'The United States Consulate — I will take you there, as soon as you are ready to go.'

And then he wondered, as the man moved, seeming to release a more gagging odour from his armpits or crotch. Perhaps he had been unable to control his bowels, realising that he might be safe. Beyond hope, safe. Wondered.

What would he do with this Englishman?

'You — you… Why?' Folley found it difficult to speak, as if his voice had gone rusty; or he had not wanted to use it because of the things it had said, confessed, revealed. He tried to look at the Russian, read what was in his mind in the white mirror of the face. He couldn't tell — did not trust…

Vorontsyev saw the distrust, riddled deep in the man. Yet, thankfully, he saw the mounting hope; a quiver to the lips that was not cold. He could not help hoping — beyond shame, un-worthiness, despair. He would be feeling all those things, or felt them already. But he could not help hoping.

His interrogators had never offered him hope. They had used despair. Therefore, the weapon of hope was his.

'Yes, my friend. Frankly, you are an embarrassment to my government. You were captured on neutral territory — your government knows you are alive.' Disbelief was swept away by gratitude. Vorontsyev breathed a sigh of relief. The Englishman could not accept him as an ally — but now he could believe in him because he spoke of others knowing, his own government, the people who had sent him. He had not been abandoned, after all.

Vorontsyev had no idea whether the British knew this man was alive; it did not matter. It served. He said, 'I am to take you directly to the United States Consulate. I have a car outside. You will make yourself ready to go, just as soon as you have helped me a little.'

The flash of fear again, returning like a stain ineffectively erased; and cunning, a re-adoption of an earlier self, the early days of his interrogation. Vorontsyev guessed at the dazed, damaged mind of the Englishman. He was busily erasing his abject defeat, his failure. Now, he knew his friends were working for his release, he only had to hold out. He had told them nothing. He would tell them nothing.

Vorontsyev said, 'I know you told them nothing, my friend. What I want to know is who they were. That is all. Nothing about you. Only about who came here. They were traitors, you understand — understand? Traitors. That is why they hurt you.'

He stroked at the man's leg still, comforting, lulling him. Then, on an impulse, he lifted the hand, and held it out to Folley. There was a long moment, and then the Englishman grabbed at the hand, pressing it to his face, bending the head to do so. Vorontsyev felt the stubble, and the filthy hair on the back of his hand. He prevented himself from shuddering.

Then Folley looked up. 'Traitors?' he said suspiciously, as if he had been accused.

'Of course! Why else were they in Finland? My government does not wish a war at this time. A — conspiracy in the Army. That is why you were questioned by Army men — uh?' Folley nodded. Vorontsyev had guessed luckily — no, not so luckily. It was likely that GRU would handle Folley. 'What is your name — don't tell me if you don't want to!'

'Alan,' Folley said after a while. The hand was still against his cheek. No one had touched him, not since he was beaten. Perhaps even the guards had avoided any physical contact. Touch-deprivation. It was an accustomed technique, one of the devices of alienation. Perhaps this man, Alan, had begun to doubt he had a physical shape any more. Had begun pathetically touching his body in the dark, to be certain. And revolted by his own filthiness, become even more desperate.

'Alan. Mine is Alexei.' He gripped Folley's weak hand more tightly. He felt wetness on the back of his hand. Folley was crying silently. Stifling impatience, and distaste, he reached out with his other hand and stroked the matted, greasy hair. Folley moaned like a lover, and leant against Vorontsyev.

The driver came through the door, and stopped, mouth open, as he saw in the gathering light from the tiny high grille in the wall, Vorontsyev and the prisoner in each other's arms. Vorontsyev waved him out with a flip of his hand, and the driver, winking knowingly and irreverently, mouthed his satisfactory status report. Then he went out. Folley did not appear to have heard his approach.

'Tell me, Alan,' Vorontsyev said, rocking to and fro slightly, as if cradling a child. 'Tell me about the men who questioned you — all about them. Then we can catch them. Begin with the one I shot, outside the door…'

It was as if he had turned on some tap in the Englishman. At first a trickle of rusty water; then an increasing flow. Patiently, he listened, attending to only one thing, which did not come. Desperate not to hear it, yet knowing he had to ask.

Folley was still in his arms, and he was brushing the matted hair and patting the shaking shoulder, when he appeared to have finished his self-purgation, self-justification.

Then, in the sudden and unfamiliar quiet, Vorontsyev said, 'Wasn't there someone else, Alan? Perhaps he only came once, so you forgot him. I don't know when it was — but I know he came to see you. An — older man… ?' Folley was quiet, like a child thinking in the arms of a parent. Then, after a long while, he said, 'But he didn't — interrogate me.'

'No, he wouldn't,' Vorontsyev said. Or not seem to, he added to himself. 'Tell me what he looked like.'

'Is he a traitor too?' It was direct and unfeeling as the question of a child. Piercing.

'Yes — he is,' Vorontsyev said quietly.

And then he listened. He did not, he was sure, draw breath once until the Englishman had finished. His hands plucked nervously at the stuff of Folley's shirt, and he perceived a despair more real than he had ever felt before.'

He could envisage the features that were being described; the clothes, too, betrayed the picture. It was as if an outline that he had deliberately blurred were redrawn, etched then coloured and shaded.

Mihail Pyotravich Gorochenko, Deputy Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, and his own adoptive father — was Kutuzov. What he had suspected when Natalia had tried to betray him in Khabarovsk — the man had sent her with him to the Far East — and what he had seen in his mind as Vassiliev had talked, was now confirmed. There could be no mistake about the face these two words confirmed. Gorochenko was Kutuzov. The despair of acknowledgement welled up in him; he could not prevent the tears, though the tears now were slow in coming, an emotional condition already abandoned by the rushing brain.

He sensed Folley moving a little apart from him, but took no heed of it. His thought at that precise moment — of a moment before it had been to kill Folley, silence him — was that no one else must hear what he had just heard. For whatever reason he had come to the cellar room, whatever confirmation he had sought — now he must act. He must bury the truth, and find Mihail Pyotravich.

He would not kill Folley. He would do as he had promised, take him to the US Consulate on the Grodnensky. They would take him in, and he would be safe there; as Gorochenko might be.

He snapped at Folley: 'Are you ready to leave now?' The Englishman appeared confused, sullen even. He stared dumbly at Vorontsyev. 'Get up! Where are your shoes?'

Folley doubled over, peering under the cot. It would have been stupidly comical, had not Vorontsyev felt the insistent urgency of the passing moments.

'Quickly!' he snapped. Folley shrugged. There were no shoes. 'Come with me!'

He caught hold of Folley's arm, and hurried him out of the cell. Someone had dragged the man in the dressing-gown away from the doorway. He pushed Folley up the cellar stairs in front of him.

The small group of exhausted men were gathered in the kitchen. There were three men, in various states of undress, against the wall. Standing. Only the man in the dressing-gown appeared to be wounded. His face was grey with weakness and pain, and he slumped against the wall. Around the table were the driver, one of the men who had entered from the rear, and the two who had searched the first floor. One of them was wounded. He nodded to them. Only one dead.

'What do we do now, sir?' the driver asked, staring at Folley, who hovered behind Vorontsyev.

'Mm? Now?' Vorontsyev was ready to leave; this was a delay. He snapped, 'Use the radio — then take these men to the safe house. Keep them there until arrangements can be made.'

'What about him, sir? Shall I report him?' The driver was nodding in Folley's direction.

'What? Yes. Now, have you brought the cars round?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Very well. I shall be going. Don't waste time getting this little gang under cover!'

They all wished to question him, it was evident. He felt guilty, caught out. He hoped they would not ask. The driver said, 'Aren't you—?'

'Don't question me!' he snapped. 'Report in when you get to safety!'

They sat stiffly in their chairs as he turned his back on them. He had not congratulated them, thanked them. They had done well — it did not matter; was irrelevant. He had to get rid of the Englishman now, and get the first flight to Moscow.

How long did he have?

He had no idea. It might be only hours.

The thought pressed in his back, almost expunging breath. He opened the front door, and pushed Folley on to the steps. One of the Volgas was parked by the steps.

'Get in!' he snapped. Folley stared at him dumbly, as if retreated into some catatonic escape from his situation. 'Get in!'

Vorontsyev slammed the door, fitted the key in the ignition, and then looked at his watch. Six fifty-nine. Nineteen minutes. Was that all?

He stared at the dashboard in a blank moment, then switched on. The tyres squealed on the frosty gravel as he pulled out from the drive into the still empty street. Again, he looked at his watch. Seven.

Twenty minutes to get to the Consulate, bang on the door until a marine opened it, or perhaps the doorman in pyjamas — then allow another forty minutes to get to the airport and through the controls. What time was the early-morning flight to Moscow? Eight? Nine?

Eight-thirty.

He would be in Moscow by ten.

And by that time Andropov would be looking for him, just as he would be looking for Gorochenko.

'Gone — what do you mean, gone?'

Andropov's face darkened, and he held the telephone a little from his freshly-shaven cheek as if suspicious of it. He had felt comfortable, pleased with the initial report from Leningrad, having shaved and washed to rub away some of the sleepless night's grime, and the residue of his panic. Then this. Vorontsyev was not available. 'Where is the Englishman — not dead, I hope?'

'Comrade Chairman,' replied the voice with punctilious respect, 'we assumed he had orders from you. Major Vorontsyev left before us, with the Englishman.'

'Had he questioned him?'

A slight delay, then: 'He was alone with him for at least ten 'minutes, Comrade Chairman.'

'And he left hurriedly?'

'Very — sir.'

Andropov was silent in his bemusement for a moment, then remembering there were certain courtesies required, he said abruptly: 'Very well. Well done. I shall despatch a team to take over from you. You will all be commended for your work, and the commendations noted on your files. That is all.'

'Thank you, Comrade—' He put the receiver down quickly. His first action was to look at his watch. Nine twenty-five. The early flight from Leningrad would already have landed.

Why had that occurred to him?

The more proper enquiry was — why had Vorontsyev disappeared and where was he now?

A stupid return to logic — he already knew the answer. He had disappeared because he had discovered the identity of the ringleader. Kutuzov. Vorontsyev had found out who Kutuzov really was. Andropov watched his hand on the desk slowly opening and dosing, like a small, independent, grabbing animal. And he felt the excitement of knowledge.

Vorontsyev would do that because for only one member of the Politburo. One hitherto trusted, unsuspected, almost senile member of the Politburo. Andropov savoured not pronouncing the word in his thoughts, even the way in which he refused to countenance an image of the old man. Instead, he picked up one of his battery of telephones and dialled the duty-room on the ground floor of the Centre.

'Andropov. Alert the security team at Cheremetievo. If Major Alexei Vorontsyev lands, he is to be detained and brought to me here.' He broke the connection and pushed his glasses more firmly on to the bridge of his nose. Then he dialled a second extension. 'Records? Bring me Major Alexei Vorontsyev's personal file, at once. And the file on Mihail Pyotravich Gorochenko — yes, the Deputy Foreign Minister.'

He put down the phone and looked at his watch. Vorontsyev might have passed through visa control already. If he had done, where would he go?

The two personal files he had requested might tell.

He felt a twitch of fear. The night's fatalism had disappeared not so much with the dawn, but with this sudden knowledge, and the danger offered by the disappearance of Vorontsyev.

They could not have known, of course. He allowed himself to think that, quite clearly and precisely. Even now that he knew, it was hard to believe, hard to elevate the shambling has-been Gorochenko to the level of arch-plotter, overthrower of the state. A broken-winded nag who's toed every line ever pointed out to him, whoever owned the pointing finger. Army, yes — they'd spotted that right away, but that was during the war, and he'd gone straight back into government. A good man with paper, patient on committees, a good right-hand for Gromyko. Never any trouble. As Andropov rehearsed the innocuousness of the Deputy Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, the confidence that the KGB had been rightly and unavoidably fooled became the hollow laughter of the hoaxer. He could almost hear Gorochenko laughing at the manner in which they had been taken in for thirty years — by a caricature of the third-rate Party man!

He dosed hands into fists, one containing the other, and the knuckles whitened as he squeezed. He had played the booby, and taken them, Beria and himself. His very spotlessness should have been sufficient proof! He released his hands from the mind's grip, and nibbed them, as if washing.

Concentrate on Gorochenko. Think, think — forget Vorontsyev, concentrate on Gorochenko. Find him — stop a coup. He reached for the telephone. There would be time to tell Khamovkhin at Lahtilinna later, when he had given his instructions. Perhaps they had as much as twenty hours. A tyranny is sufficient, he thought. He is ours already.

Kutuzov sat in his study. He concentrated on each item of furniture, each painting and photograph, even the grandfather clock which told him it was almost nine-thirty, as if in valediction. He felt very tired. He had been unable to sleep — who would have done, in his situation?

Twenty hours to go. Only twenty.

He stared at the telephone. Praporovich dead, Dolohov dead, Pnin and other generals — dead, too. He put his head in his hands for a moment, then shrugged and made himself sit upright in his chair. He was angry, and would not accept, not for a moment, the image of defeat such a slumped posture would portray. An angry movement of his hand, as if brushing something aside, rattled the bone-china cup and saucer on the delicate little table with the leather surface at the side of the chair. He glanced at it, then replaced the base of the cup firmly in the centre of the saucer.

He was all will-power; a strong man. He had always known that. He had needed it, all of it, then, as he had listened to the report from Leningrad. Or, most of all perhaps, when he had been told that Vorontsyev had talked to the Englishman, and then disappeared.

He stood up. There, he could do it steadily, betraying no reaction from the news he had received. It was as if he were aware of some audience. He laughed, a deep, almost threatening noise. Yes, he did behave as if for an audience, a great deal of the time. He was his own audience now. Once, the audience had been Kyril Vorontsyev, Alexei's father. Then Alexei himself. Not usually his wife. She, though he had sometimes loved her, occasionally needed her, had borne with him as he was without make-up and a role to play.

Yes, Alexei would know by now — would have talked to the Englishman, primed by Vassiliev as to what to look for. And he would know about the stupid bitch, Natalia, and how she had been used against him. There was a moment of admiration for his adopted son. He was clever, and brave, and dogged.

And now, doubtless, would be coming for him. And, even if he had not told Andropov — he might not have — Andropov would have guessed.

He crossed to an escritoire, opened a drawer, and took out a Makarov automatic. He checked the mechanism, and inserted a full clip. Then he put two more clips in his coat pocket. He closed the drawer again.

The invasion — that may have been stopped. But the coup — that would proceed. Oh, yes, that would proceed. He swept his hand through the air in a slicing motion. That, and Fanny Kaplan. The Kremlin gang and their secret police would be swept away. Valenkov would obey him, as long as he was free to make the telephone call at six the next morning.

The traitors to the Revolution would be swept from power, from life. Andropov and his gang of thugs and leeches. The KGB — Beria's gift to Russia, descendant of the MVD, the NKVD, and OGPU, the Cheka — the Cheka alone might have been necessary. The others were sores and lice on the bear.

He went to fetch his overcoat, and a small bag he had packed. He would only come back after it was all over. He paused for a moment before a photograph on the wall, of a young man, which he had draped with black crepe. He shook his head, and left the study. He had the city of Moscow in which to hide, and only twenty more hours to hide.

'Alexei—!' he cried involuntarily, ashamed of the sound in the moment he uttered it. He tugged on his coat stiffly. Then he picked up his bag, heard the dog snuffle at the closed kitchen door, and went out into the below-zero temperature of Kropotkin Street. He stopped at the gate for a moment, and looked back at the restored house. Then he walked away, upright, his stick clicking on the icy pavement.

Galakhov looked up at the window of Khamovkhin's bedroom as if studying a target or an obstacle in his path. He was on the point of being relieved of duty. He would disappear until the following night, when his return to duty would provide him with the opportunity of killing Khamovkhin.

Kill him — for what? A part of him he did not wish to acknowledge asked the question in a precise, cool mental voice. Kill him, now that they knew who Kutuzov was? And the generals were all dead? It had been a long night, after he had heard the gossip of the radio traffic coming in from Moscow — a longer early morning after Andropov's last message, the one they had relayed direct to Washington and London — the ringleader, code-name Kutuzov, has been identified and is on the point of being arrested in Moscow. Subject identified as Mihail Pyotravich Gorochenko, Deputy Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union. Subject identified — Kill Khamovkhin, who had laughed like a bully-boy when he heard the news, so the rumour said? An American CIA agent had told Galakhov, had sounded relieved, and then spat into the snow cursing all Russians for bastards.

Security was relaxed — except that they still worried where 'Captain Ozeroff' was. He could kill — but why?

He saw a guard hurrying along the path to relieve him.

Kill him for revenge — do the worst you can. Kill him because it did not work, he told himself.

Sixteen: Anna Dostoyevna

Vorontsyev let himself into the empty house with the key that he had been given on his sixteenth birthday — an inordinate time to wait, he had thought as a youth, before Mihail Pyotravich Gorochenko had let him come and go as he pleased. But he had always kept the key, and now it enabled him to enter the house silently by the front door.

The dog barked from the back of the house as he pushed open the door. He knew the house was empty, and that Gorochenko had left the dog. Vorontsyev laughed — of course he had left the dog. He intended coming back — the next day, or the day after that.

He pushed open the kitchen door, and the big, overweight bundle of red fur was planted against his chest, the pink tongue slobbering for his face. He lowered his head and let himself be licked, ruffling the fur, bunching it in his hands as memory assailed him, making the small incident perilous with allusion.

'Down, boy,' he said softly, pushing the dog away. The great paws left his chest, and the dog ambled beneath the kitchen table, curling in its huge basket which was still too small. Brown eyes stared up at him, tongue lolling out, breaths wheezing. It was always hard to realise the dog was old.

Like Gorochenko.

He looked at the sink-unit. A cup filled with water, a single saucer and plate. A slight smell of the breakfast that had been cooked remained. Gorochenko was not long gone, and he had left in no particular hurry.

Swiftly, after closing the kitchen door behind him, he searched the rest of the house. He did not go near the room he had once occupied himself, nor the room that had confined his adoptive mother in the months before her death. It was evident that no one else had yet searched the place, and he became anxious, having frequently to shrug off the slow-motion that memory imposed, to complete the task before he was surprised.

He found that the gun was missing from the drawer of the escritoire. And that it was nowhere else in the house. It was a realisation that filled him with foreboding. He was sustained by a certainty that he would find Gorochenko, sometime that day or night, and to know the old man had a gun depressed, worried him. Apart from the gun, there was little missing. The dog had been given only one meal, and he had already guzzled half of it.

It was certain, then. Twenty-four hours. No more than that. The old man had perhaps one fresh shirt, his shaving tackle, his heavy overcoat, galoshes. All in the small bag he had had since the war. The bag had belonged to Kyril Vorontsyev. He had been told that the first time he had asked Gorochenko why such an important man used such a shabby old bag. A soldier's luggage, had been the unsmiling reply.

Talismans to ward him off — the old bag, the old dog—?

He had not asked himself what he would do when he and Gorochenko came face to face — had not asked on the plane, that sleepless hour, nor as he showed his papers at Cheremetievo, his palms tacky and his forehead beating as he waited for them to arrest him. But he had been too quick, just a little too quick, and the word to bring him in had not then been issued, he realised.

What would he do? The answer, of course, was simple. Why else was he on his own, the decision to dump Folley at the Consulate and catch the first plane to Moscow already made before he had consciously analysed the matter? He wanted to find Gorochenko by himself. Stupid knight-in-shining-armour idea. No — an idea prompted by the weight of the past on him, which he could not ignore or overcome. If he could find Gorochenko, he could stop the coup — that would be his duty.

Find Gorochenko. Find, like an order to the dog. Find, but not kill. Gorochenko must not be put on trial, and executed, no matter that he had used Natalia against him, ordered Ossipov to kill him; ordered the deaths of Ilya and Maxim. Tried to kill him in the dacha, with the booby-trapped corpse. He must not be caught.

The telephone, suddenly ringing next to him as he stood indecisively in the study, caused him to jump. His hand came away from the blotter on the desk as if it were electrified. With simple reflex, before his thoughts could interfere, he picked it up.

'Yes?' he asked, caution catching in his throat like phlegm.

'Is that the Gorochenko house? Who is that speaking?' Masked, official tones.

He slammed down the telephone. He glanced round the study once, realising that it oppressed him with a weight of obligation. He moved to the door, and noticed for the first time the portrait of his father, dressed in uniform, a photograph taken in the last year of the war, perhaps just after the patriotic army had entered Germany. It was the picture of his father he had liked best as a child — slim, youthful, laughing, a tank and its crew behind him. The picture was surrounded, carefully, by black crepe.

Which made Vorontsyev run cold for a reason he could not understand. His father — the anniversary of his death had been six months before. He touched the black crepe gingerly, as if he half-expected a seaweed sliminess, then shook his head.

He ignored the dog in the kitchen, and let himself out of the house. There were a few parked cars, but none of them suspiciously occupied. He closed the gate behind him, and heard the faint barking of the dog from the kitchen. Its tone seemed plaintive. He shuddered as if cold and hurried away from the house where he had once lived.

Aubrey was, reluctantly, becoming adept at conversation with Khamovkhin. Now that the Soviet First Secretary was no more than a problem in security, he had lost a great deal of his interest in the Snow Falcon operation, as he still termed it — which meant he should have been bored. The fact that he was not was yet another indication that he was getting old.

They were walking on one of the terraces of the Lahtilinna, overlooking the slaty-grey expanse of the lake. The sky was a pale blue, with little cloud, a spring day without the temperature to sustain the illusion. Buckholz was on one side of the Russian leader, Aubrey on the other. They walked with the slow pace of statesmen or pensioners.

Khamovkhin was relieved, it was evident — and confident in Andropov's security machine. Aubrey thought it the over-confidence of a man driving a car that has never broken down before. The knocking in the engine — not possibly something wrong, the car never goes wrong. Any fear he had was a personal one, that assailed him at moments, for his own safety. Which was smaller, more agreeable, than the emotions aroused by the potential cataclysm the Soviet Leader now considered impossible.

'I do think you should spend only the minimum of time out of doors,' Aubrey said stiffly, and disliked the old-maid manner of his solicitation.

Khamovkhin's eyes sparkled. 'Your concern for me is very touching, Mr Aubrey.' He enjoyed the pursing of Aubrey's lips. 'You have much of the manner of our own security service.' Aubrey's face went suddenly like a chalky mask, and Khamovkhin realised that his joke had touched some secret nerve of loyalty or righteousness in the small old man beside him.

They came to the end of the terrace walk. Buckholz placed one foot up on the low wall, leaned an elbow on his knee.

'Tell me about this Gorochenko, Mr First Secretary. Our files seem to be as bare-assed as yours as far as he's concerned.'

'Perfect for the role of leader of a military take-over,' Khamovkhin observed, rubbing his mittened hands together, and nodding. 'Yes — war hero, immensely loyal throughout the Stalin period — or so it appeared to Beria and Stalin. You had to be loyal to survive the periodic — changes? — in the Politburo in those days. And even more loyal to survive in the Army. But he did it. I suppose that was cleverness.' Khamovkhin was speaking to both, and neither, of them now. He stared out over the lake, but observed an internal landscape. Then anger suffused his face, colouring it despite the cold. 'I should have had him watched more closely!' It was the anger of a man outwitted by a sharper mind. 'He played the semi-senile old goat too well!'

Aubrey smiled. 'So it would seem. However, you appear very confident, sir, that his arrest is imminent.'

'Yes — he won't get away.'

'And we have nothing to worry about—?'

Khamovkhin looked at him sharply, as if the Englishman had unsuspected knowledge that Moscow Garrison was off the air and primed to begin the coup. He could not know that.

'No, we have not. Chairman Andropov will order the Chief of the General Staff and the Defence Minister to begin the stand-down of border units this afternoon. You will have confirmation as soon as it has been done.'

'As soon as our satellites can see it happening,' Buckholz commented drily.

'As you say,' Khamovkhin observed frostily, aware that the honours were now firmly with the two foreigners.

'Unless you are killed,' Aubrey said. 'If that happens, then everything could escalate again—' He raised his hands, as if to imitate some explosion. 'I think, for that reason alone, we should not prolong our exercise further. Shall we go inside?'

'Very well'

Galakhov lay on the narrow bunk, smoking a cigarette. On the bedside table was a plate with a few crumbs and a smear of grease. It had been easy to collect a late breakfast from the kitchens and bring it to one of the unoccupied security team bedrooms in the east wing of the Lahtiliana. He had not quite possessed the bravado to occupy the room he had been given as Ozeroff, but it was on the same floor and corridor. The Finns doing the cooking had taken little notice of him, nor had the few off-duty Englishmen and Americans still eating. It was unlikely that anyone would disturb him before nightfall, when he could act as if on-duty again.

It was ridiculous, and ridiculously simple. Everyone assumed he should be there. As with Ozeroff, drafting in a security team whose members were strangers to each other had a fatal flaw — who could tell who should not be there? He had dyed his hair so that it was lighter in colour, combed it another way — he had been wearing the hood of his parka all his duty-spell anyway — slipped in contact lenses that changed his eye colour, padded his cheeks slightly, and made sure that he walked with much more of a shuffle. He was certain that, in anything but the best light, he could walk past someone holding his picture — that passport picture they had issued, the one from his Heathrow disguise — and not be recognised.

He blew a contemptuous funnel of smoke towards the high, cream-painted ceiling. If they searched, he would be asleep, or reading. He was one of them, and they opened the door of the bedside cabinet. He took out a sketch plan made from his own observations of the castle, and a large-scale map of the surroundings of the Lahtilinna. The problem of making his escape had begun to concern him in an immediate, pressing way, so that when he thought of it, as he seemed to do with increasing frequency, his palms seemed to grow damp, his whole body just that infinitesimal amount of his control.

He began to recite to himself, using the sketch-plan, the litany of moves that would end with the assassination of Khamovkhin.

The mere presence of Defence Minister Druzhinin and Chief of the General Staff Pavoletskii in his spacious office gave Yuri Andropov a renewed sense of authority, command. He perceived that his worst moments during the past days had come while he was alone — without the challenge of possible enemies or the satisfying obedience of subordinates. The two men before him now, both elderly and in uniform, might be enemies — though he did not think so — but since they were tangible and present, they could give no more sense of threat than their bulk, or medals or features.

And they looked old, and rather ordinary, with turkey-necks of loose skin just above the collars of their green uniforms, just above the V-shapes of their rows of medals, and framed by the heavy square shoulder-boards. Gold rank, green cloth, and the bronze and gold of medals. There they were, he thought — his reaction was tinged with contempt — the old stories — both of them wearing the medal commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the Soviet Army, both of them the medal for Heroic Work during the Great War of the Motherland; both with the medal for the Liberation of Berlin. Pavoletskii with the Medal for Valour, and the Medal for the Defence of Leningrad — Druzhinin with the Medal for Battle Merit, and the Defence of the Caucasus.

Parade uniforms, parade minds, parade behaviour. Old soldiers. He weighed his words carefully.

'It is necessary, at this time, to stand down certain of the border units — especially those that have undertaken unauthorised movements and dispositions during the past week.' He watched their faces, just as Kapustin, standing a little way behind the two soldiers, watched him. Andropov was already assessing future loyalties. His remarks had challenged the two visitors to take sides, declare themselves.

It was Pavoletskii who spoke first. He cleared his throat as if the words stuck there.

1 speak personally, Chairman Andropov,' he began, glancing at his companion, 'When I say that I learn with surprise, even horror, of the charges you have levelled against certain senior officers in the Soviet Army—'

'And I—' Druzhinin interrupted, but as if on cue, 'I am saddened to hear of the — accidents — that have befallen those same officers who have fallen under suspicion from the security. Then there was a silence. Andropov felt an unexpected anger welling in him, and pressed his palms on his thighs, as if to restrain the emotion. But he was unable to prevent his outburst. The anger forced his body forward, made his face thin with rage.

'He is one of you! Gorochenko is one of you — an army man! Don't pretend you didn't know—' He saw Kapustin's face darken with warning.

'You have no proof that the Deputy Foreign Minister is involved in a conspiracy against the state involving sections of the armed forces,' Druzhinin remarked levelly, his stare seeming to read Andropov's thoughts.

'Proof?' Andropov asked mockingly. 'We have all the proof we require to arrest him for questioning—' Each of the two soldiers flinched in contempt. 'Now I ask you again — will you issue the necessary orders to units in GSFN and the Red Banner Northern Fleet?'

After an interminable silence, Druzhinin said, 'I will request Marshal Pavoletskii to draw up new dispositions for the units who may have adopted provocative frontier positions.'

'And the Moscow Garrison? Something must be done.'

Pavoletskii's eyes gleamed, and Andropov realised that the dialogue had been rehearsed, that he had been led, rather than been leader, thus far.

'When you have taken Deputy Foreign Minister Gorochenko into custody, then I will order the stand-down of the Garrison and the arrest of Valenkov.'

Suddenly, the furniture of the room, gloomily heavy to eye and hand, seemed unsubstantial to Andropov.

'You refuse?'

'No. There is nothing to accept or refuse. I will comply with your request when I am presented with proof that the Moscow Garrison is involved with Comrade Gorochenko in a conspiracy against the state.'

'Where is Major Vorontsyev, who you say has such proof?' Pavoletskii asked silkily, unsurprised even when Andropov stood up, leaning his weight on white-knuckled hands on the edge of his desk.

'Get out! Get out!' was all he managed to say. The two soldiers, as if the years had lightened, stood up together, put on their caps and saluted like junior officers. Then, as one, they turned to the door, and went out.

Kapustin watched Andropov for a moment. 'You handled that very badly,' he observed.

'Don't tell me that — what are you, a bloody theatre critic?' Andropov screamed, Kapustin took one step towards the desk, then halted as Andropov succumbed completely to his fury. 'They're all in league! Those two, they're just standing back to see who will be the winner! They will watch as you and I are swept away like dirt, or flushed down the lavatory. Don't you understand — they know what's going on! And they will do nothing about it!'

'They will order the invasion troops to stand down from frontier positions. What else did you expect?'

'Valenkov is all that's required for the whole thing to succeed!'

'And I know that. We have to find Gorochenko before tomorrow. And Vorontsyev.'

'Find them, then — find them!' Andropov raged, the sweat bright on his forehead, the light from the window catching his spectacles so that he had no eyes for a moment and looked hollow and incomplete. 'Find them — find them!'

Vorontsyev dialled the unlisted number of the telephone on his own desk in the Frunze Quay office. The glass of the public telephone on Gogol Boulevard fogged swiftly, so that he could no longer see the people waiting at the bus stop, staring up at the public TV screen at the head of the bus queue. The opaque glass of the booth became a mirror of the tension which had built with every step from Gorochenko's house. So far, he had not been followed.

He listened to the ringing of the telephone, his other hand tugging compulsively at the cord as he waited. Then, thankfully, Alevtina answered.

'Office of Major Vorontsyev.'

'Alevtina, can you talk freely? It's me.' The anonymous admission sounded coy and unreal from an SID officer. The girl gasped audibly.

'Major — they've been here,' she stammered. 'Kapustin himself is looking for you. We're supposed to report if—'

'Alevtina, will you help me?' It was a plea. His isolation, his dependence on this single telephone call, assailed him. He was naked before what threatened him, and he could not assume the strength to order or impress. Alevtina was silent for a long time.

'What can I do, Major?' It was not a bluff, or a delay while they put on a trace. Vorontsyev knew it was something more than obedience — and for the first time he was grateful for the girl's romantic feelings towards him, which he had studiously ignored. He was greedy for affection, suddenly.

'I have to have the file — on my father.'

'Your — the Deputy Foreign Minister? I heard there was a panic on, and he was part of it—'

'He is it,' Vorontsyev said slowly. 'Didn't they tell you? He's the ringleader of Group 1917.'

'Oh-my-God,' the girl breathed softly. Vorontsyev envied her the simplicity of the shock.

'Yes. And I have to find him — me, no one else. You understand, Alevtina? I need that file. Is it still there?'

'What — oh, yes. A copy taken by the Deputy Chairman, but there's still our office copy—' She had retreated into a secretarial neutrality.

'Bring it to me. Can you do that?'

'Er — yes. My lunch-hour is due in a few minutes. Where?'

Cautiously, Vorontsyev said, 'The cafe — where we used to meet my wife after rehearsals. Yes?'

A pause then: 'Yes. Give me half an hour.'

Vorontsyev put down the clammy bakelite of the receiver. The air outside the opaque of the booth seemed colder, a sudden shock of water flung in his face. He had to have that file. The fact that the girl would help him, at least sufficiently to bring him the file, was a small warm place in his chest.

The TV screen at the head of the bus queue was showing a repeat of Khamovkhin's address to the Finnish Parliament. Vorontsyev ignored it.

The cafe was in a small street off Sverdlov Square, which contained the Bolshoi Theatre, and it specialised fairly cheaply, in Georgian cooking. Vorontsyev had not been there for some time, and most of the waiters were unfamiliar. He sat in a dim corner towards the back of the cafe, knowing that one avenue of escape via the urinal at the back was quickly available. It was risky, moving as openly as he must round the centre of the city — he was the KGB's best means of finding Gorochenko.

He combated his tiredness with dark coffee, and stilled hunger by devouring heavily spiced chicken satsivi with brine-pickled cabbage and red peppers. The overpowering flavour of the food refreshed him, gave him a sense of normality; it did not evoke memories of any personal life.

While he was drinking more coffee after the meal, he saw the girl framed in the square of light at the doorway. He raised his hand, and she joined him.

'Were you followed?'

'I don't think so. I tried to be clever—' There was a pleasure in conspiracy about Alevtina, and a deeper concern for him in her green eyes. She was concerned for him, wanted to help him — and something was pleased with his isolation and helplessness. 'At least no one saw me removing this, sir.'

Vorontsyev nodded, and pushed his coffee cup aside. Then he took the file from its envelope and opened it. He leafed through the entries, uncertain now that he had it what use it would be. Then he looked up, putting it back in the envelope.

'Now I have to go.' He placed a ten-rouble note on the table.

'Sir — can I help?' Vorontsyev saw the eager, brave look in the girl's eyes, and shook his head. He was refreshed by her concern, but wanted no more of it at that moment.

'No, Alevtina. You may be in trouble already. I have to find my father. If anyone questions you, say I tricked you into this—' The girl shook her head.

'Don't worry about me, sir.'

Vorontsyev took his overcoat from a chair, put it on. Then scarf and gloves.

'Leave first, will you? Just in case.'

'Sir. And good luck, whatever that means.'

'Thanks, Alevtina. Don't worry about me—' He motioned the girl towards the door. She stared at him, as if to remember, then went out, turned to the left, and was out of sight. Vorontsyev gave her a few moments, then turned up his collar because the cafe was more crowded now with office workers and shoppers, and he could not be certain of the faces that bent over food or were masked behind newspapers and clouds of cigarette smoke.

He stood in the doorway of the cafe, watching the street, and the few parked cars, and the turning into Sverdlov Square. Then be headed for the nearest Metro station.

From where he stood, sipping coffee he had poured from a flask into the plastic beaker that was its screw-top, Mihail Pyotravich Gorochenko could see, at the other end of Red Square, the hideous bulk of St Basil's Cathedral. A slight shift in his stance at the tiny, dirt-coated window and he was able to see the towers and pinnacles of the Kremlin. Should he care to, to alleviate the tense, wearing boredom that must at some time assail him, he could recite the names of each tower. For the moment, he stared over the high walls, seeing some distant parts of the gardens. The bare trees, the ordered borders of now bare earth, the patches of thawing snow on the grass, the straight, rulered walks.

What was it Ivan the Terrible had done to the architects of St Basil's he wondered as he shifted his gaze. Blinded them so they couldn't build another? Something of the sort.

He sipped noisily, the coffee wetting the upper lip and the thick moustache. Far below him, the lunchtime crowds huddled along the square, the trolleys sparked and flashed, and shoppers hurried in and out of GUM. The serpentine queue outside the Lenin Mausoleum, all of whom appeared to be dressed in black, or dark-brown, waited patiently for admission.

A few people sat on the benches in that corner of the Alexandrovski Gardens that he could see from his high window.

The waiting was, he admitted, taking its toll. His eyes wandered over Red Square endlessly, like those of a drunken man lying on his back, not daring to focus for too long in case the room began to spin. Yes, like that. As if he could not look at any one thing out there for too long, in case his moral surroundings began to lurch sideways. He could not even look over the walls of the Kremlin for very long — he could not see Khamovkhin's office from where he stood — despite the hatred that it caused in his breast, hot, fiery like a cardiac pain.

Yet he had to go on looking out over the square, down at the tiny figures bustling — seeming to be blown by the wind that whistled at the grimy window. If he did not, then the megalomania assailed him — that or the fury of rage at still waiting, at the distant threat of Dzerzhinsky Street and his adopted son.

It was strange, he thought, that megalomania, a word in history books or psychologists' reports, was palpable like this. A mounting feeling like phlegm in the back of the throat, or extra air filling the lungs so that the chest strained out. A lightness in the loins. No mirrors, but the eyes seeing from just behind the head, shaping the figure consciously from that angle. He did not enjoy the feeling. In fact, he was ashamed of it, and feared it. If anything, he wished for the purer megalomania that might have been more readily available to a religious man. He was not. His purity of motive had to do with ideology, with politics — and they were not visionary like a religious faith, however desperately he had dung to them over the years.

But the megalomania — the strange sensations, the brimming — no, swelling of the brain in its case of bone — did not come when he looked down at the tiny, insignificant people, or even at St Basil's, or the Kremlin. It came when he did not look at them. When all he had was the perspective of the small, bare dusty room full of unopened crates and a small table on which resided a dust-free telephone whose wire ran across the bare boards to the wall-socket that had been fined for him — when that was his only perspective, then it was no bigger than himself. He inflated, weirdly, to fill the room, like a balloon.

The people, the buildings, in the street, gave him scale, perspective. And he had to have scale — otherwise he had no sense of anything outside himself, nothing but ambition, greed, love of cold power.

He had never thought himself like that, having those qualities. Only in a little way. He had tried, and succeeded, to think of himself as a servant, a conscience-keeper, an acolyte of his own ideology.

Was that a more dangerous megalomania, masked in humility? That would be a religious megalomania, perhaps? Sainthood, willed and purposed. Was that what he was?

He shuddered, and concentrated his gaze downwards, watching one old — man or woman? He couldn't tell from that angle, in those swaddling lumps of clothing. One old being, walking slowly and with difficulty, the wind plucking at coat-tails. He tried, very hard, to say — for you. For you. It did not work.

He looked, instead, at the serpent before the gates of bronze — he smiled at the vivid rhetoric. The queue of the faithful waiting to look on the mummified remains of V. I. Lenin in their glass box; too luridly lit, he had always considered. There were hundreds of them, even in winter. Nearly sixty years on.

For you, he said to himself. For you. There were more of them, a bulk of people, representative.

For you.

It seemed to ease the constriction in his chest, to free his breathing. He inhaled the dusty, prickling air and almost sneezed. He swallowed the last of his coffee, and looked over his shoulder at the telephone. There was a renewal of purpose. The destructive sense of his own motives had gone like a bout of nausea. But he felt stronger now, not weaker.

One telephone call. He could do it with one telephone call, at six the next morning. Valenkov, who had been a close friend of Kyril Vorontsyev — and who had been with him, as a junior officer, from Stalingrad to the outskirts of Berlin — he would answer the telephone, and receive the command, and in his turn issue the commands to the Moscow Garrison…

One telephone call and — he looked across the Kremlin walls — he would start again. It would start again. The new beginning.

He closed his eyes in satisfaction, and was alarmed when an image jumped at him out of the red-spotted darkness behind his lids. Of Alexei Vorontsyev, as a child, holding his hand. The boy had bright red plastic boots, and was kicking up gouts of snow, and laughing.

He shook his head to dear it, and opened his eyes. The image retreated obediently.

Where was he? Where was Alexei now?

The apartment was in a block of Vosstaniya flats on the Kutuzovsky Prospekt, near the Ukraina Hotel, an elaborate wedding-cake, and the Comecon building a modern grey slab, hard-edged against the pale blue of the sky. The apartments had been built during the time of Stalin, when Anna Dostoyevna had been Minister of Culture and had had much to do with the design of the new city centre. She had chosen to live in one of the apartments in the Vosstaniya because her ministry had been connected with their design. When she had been allowed to resign quietly from the Politburo after losing Stalin's favour, she had remained in the apartment.

Vorontsyev remembered her from his childhood — a big, powerful woman with a deep voice, who frightened him. And he disliked her, too, because she seemed to occupy a place in Mihail Pyotravich's private world that should have belonged to his adoptive mother. He sensed, rather than knew, that Anna Dostoyevna was not Gorochenko's mistress in the conventional sense. Rather, she possessed an ideological bond with him, shared an intellectual community from which Gorochenko's wife was excluded.

Vorontsyev had found her name in the files, and remembered the intellectual intimacy that had once bound the two of them. And he had felt he might have found the answer.

He had digested the information in the files, as well as he could, in the washroom at the Komsomolskaia Metro Station, locked in a chilly cubicle, hearing the footsteps across the chequered riles outside, the whistling, the splashing of water.

When he had reduced the file to a list of possibilities, he had torn each sheet into shreds, then the file itself into scraps of blue card, and flushed them away. It had been a setting free of Gorochenko rather than a dismissal.

He had travelled on the Metro all afternoon, moving from station to station, making only one, or at most two, calls from any one place. Slowly, he had crossed through all the names on the list, all the places Gorochenko might be, until he had come to the apartment on the Kutuzovsky Prospekt.

Because it was the last name, and he was dog-tired now, and crazed with futility, he was certain that Gorochenko would be there; yet knowing that he would not be with anyone whose name was in the file under 'Known Associates'. Yet, caught as he now was in the pattern of this action, from file to contacts to the elimination of possibilities — he was unable to envisage other possibilities, other patterns.

He did not even know, he realised, what Gorochenko was any more. He was a collection of facts and observations that led nowhere. His Surveillance Log was impeccable — he simply could not be, without additional information, the man Kutuzov. Further back, in the thirties and forties, he was a natural survivor, along with Molotov and Gromyko, in a Politburo periodically purged and decimated by Stalin's psychotic suspicions. When had he changed, when achieved another, and radical, view of the Revolution?

Vorontsyev had abandoned the attempt to understand Gorochenko.

He pressed the doorbell of the apartment. Would she explain his father to him? Would she know where he was?

Vorontsyev realised that the former question had become more pressing — that the afternoon had left him barren of investigatory technique or desire. He only wanted to understand.

He was dangerously in sympathy with Gorochenko now, he perceived; it might prevent him ever finding the man.

She was shrunken, but perhaps he had expected the child's perspective, to have to look up into the strong face. She was perhaps five feet ten, dressed in a sweater and cardigan and a drab start of thick wool. Her stockings were thick and dark, and her shoes stout. She looked like a schoolteacher. Her eyes behind the wire-framed spectacles were sharp with a glistening suspicion.

He showed her the ID card, and she involuntarily backed half a step, and her hand gripped the edge of the door so that the ringers whitened. He said, 'Comrade Dostoyevna — might I speak with you?' She was suspicious of the careful neutrality of tone, the implication that she possessed choice.

'What is it, Comrade Major?' An old inflection, one she must have used many times during the years when Stalin let her live on in anonymity. 'What do you want?'

Involuntarily, as if without will, she had opened the door a little more. He stepped forward, and she seemed to retreat silently from the door, spectrally backing towards the lounge. He closed the door behind him, looking at her all the while as at an old film. Cheka, NKVD, MVD, KGB — they were all the same, her posture informed him.

The lounge was sparse yet comfortable. A great many books, one or two blunt, square pieces of statuary and furniture that was old but which had been carefully repaired and recovered. She had never married, he knew. On one low table near the sagging sofa there was a big metal ashtray such as might have come from a bar or restaurant, full of stubs and ash. And one smoking cigarette she picked up with a quick, swooping gesture as if he might have appropriated it.

'What is it?' she said, standing in front of a packed bookcase of dog-eared Russian paperbacks. It lent her solidity, and he suspected that she knew it. Her mind had always been for midable; the books were an assurance of her personality and her past. She was nervous, but seemed calmed to some degree by his quiescence.

'May I sit down?'

She gestured to an armchair recently recovered in a floral pattern of browns and golds. A threadbare patch of carpet seemed to have slid out from beneath it. He said, 'I want to talk to you about — my father…' It was the only way to inject a sincerity, a lack of officialdom which would cause her to close like a shell, into the room. 'Not Kyril — Mihail Pyotravich.'

'What is the matter with him?' It was a selfish question, he saw. Her hands brushed her body, as if admitting its age, as if only illness and infirmity could involve someone she had known a long time ago.

'He is not ill,' he said. She seemed to resent it, and puffed at her cigarette. He noticed that the cardboard tube of the cigarette had been flattened by the pressure of anxiety. 'No — I have to find him, Anna Ilyevna.' He recalled patronymic from the files. 'I have to find him very urgently.'

'To do with your job? You're SID.' Suddenly, the idea seemed to seize her. 'Your own father?'

'Please understand,' he began, realising he was being rushed, was losing control of the conversation. 'It is not official. Yes, they are looking for him. I — want to help him.' He hated the cliches. She was evidently suspicious now.

'Help?' She was younger, an old habitual scorn came back to her face and voice.

'Yes!' he blurted out, feeling himself younger also — too young. He had, suddenly, to commit himself. 'Look, I don't know how often you see him, or speak with him, but he — he's into something very dangerous. And they know he is, and they want him very badly! I have to get to him before they do!' There was a plaintive note in his voice, and he was sure his habitual identification with Gorochenko, used with emphasis in that way, had damaged his argument. It would appear to her, little other than a transparent deceit.

She looked at his face, then lifted her stretched, dry skin in a look of scorn. She puffed at the cigarette again, and he noticed that now it was held delicately in her fingers.

'He was always fond of you,' she said, staring at the ceiling. Then the face seemed to subside into its stiff, wrinkled lines again, and the eyes were dark points.

'And I of him!' he said. 'You must know that if you know anything.'

'Perhaps.'

He realised she had taken control of the situation; he thought she must believe him to some degree, otherwise she would not have had the temerity to seize the initiative.

'Do you know where he is?'

She was silent. She paced the worn carpet, circling the furniture, as if she had ambushed the room and its occupant. He saw the power of the mind and will in the frame, and sensed the kind of magnetism such a complementary nature must have had for Gorochenko. Then she looked at him, emphasising her words with little stabs of the cardboard tube.

'I have not seen Mihail Pyotravich for almost two years.' His stomach seemed heavy and his breath constricted. He knew she was telling the truth.

'What has happened to him?'

'In what way?' Interrogative, sharp.

'He — he's organised a coup!' Her eyes sharpened, gleamed with some inner knowledge. 'He's on the point of success or failure. I have to find him before — before…' Weakly: 'Before they do.'

'But will they find him?' She was amused now, and allied with Gorochenko. He wondered how much she had been his mentor.

'Yes, they will!'

'I wonder.'

He saw the mind shut like a handbag, almost heard the metallic dick of the clasp. She had retreated from him again. He was a stupid policeman and his quarry was Gorochenko. The muddle of his own motives, no doubt plain to her, did not justify answers. She would not help him.

'Don't you see,' he said. 'I have to stop him. He has to be stopped.'

'Why?' The challenge was almost sexual, and she might have been a young woman; but even as he looked at her she became ancient and decayed, and delighting merely in the strength of impotence. Someone she knew, her age and experience — not put out to grass as she had been. Affecting things. Breaking things.

'Because it will not work any more. Everyone who has helped him has been put aside. There's only him.'

'No. You would not be worried if he was alone.'

He admitted the truth by dropping his eyes.

'Yes.' He felt stupid and childish now. And futile.

'Then he will do it!' she whispered.

'You — you persuaded him!' he cried.

She looked at him with contempt, moving a step closer to his chair, her presence more powerful now. Sitting, she loomed over him in the perspective he had anticipated when she opened the door.

'I did nothing, you stupid adolescent. Once I quarrelled with him — quarrelled all the time because he seemed to accept Stalin and Beria and the NKVD and all the filth that went with it!' Her eyes gleamed fiercely. He saw a dab of spittle at one corner of the mouth. The dentures moved in an approximation of speech, but seemed not to diminish the force of her words.

'But he did not accept!' She clasped her hands to her heavy bosom like a young girl. 'All the time — all the time…' She seemed unable to make her feelings coherent.

'But you — you fell from favour with Stalin. He didn't. He was loyal to Stalin, until his death. Then to Kruschev, and to Brezhnev.' He couldn't understand anything, he decided. He was in the KGB — Mihail Pyotravich had made sure of that, even getting him transferred to SID. Now this old woman was talking as if all the time Gorochenko was a traitor to the Soviet Union, had always been.

'All the time it was a game,' she said. 'It must have been a game to him! Waiting his chance.' Then, with regret, she added: 'I had little or nothing to do with it—' Finally, shame. 'I accused him of toadying to save his skin. Long ago I did that. I didn't understand him, I suppose.'

She sat down, and seemed to resolve everything into silence, as if her mind was dying away like her words. It was as if she had indulged in some physical exercise belonging to her youth, and it had tired her to the extent that now she felt very old. She had relived some of her political life, some of the intellectual passion with which she had loved Gorochenko, and now it had passed, and she was spent.

'Tell me where he is?' Vorontsyev asked quietly. When she looked up at him, her eyes were vague. She had retreated almost as if he had interrogated her. She shook her head like a stubborn child. He did not know whether she was refusing, or admitting ignorance. Suddenly, he was tired of this cat-and-mouse game with an untidy old woman. He was bone-weary, at the end of his patience.

'Tell me where he is!' he ordered, and her eyes snapped shut, then opened attentively. A voice had spoken from thirty years before — the voice of command and terror.

'I don't know where he is.' Her voice almost whined as it pleaded with him.

'But you can guess — you know him better than I do. Where would he go? To whom would he turn? Where would he hide?' She mistrusted him again. 'I have to help him — I have to be with him — don't you understand that?' Now, she was confused by the smeared emotions, the apparent contradictions, as if he had taken on a multiple personality. 'I want to be with him, Anna. I'm his son,' He saw intolerable pressure in her eyes. She was lonely, she was guilty towards Gorochenko, wanted to do something for him, make some gesture of atonement for the years in which she had despised him.

'He wants to change the history of Russia — just as Lenin did,' she said, concentrating.

'Is that a clue to help me?' he asked, forcing himself to smile, stifling impatience. He had broken through, had only to sustain the artificiality — and ignore the cold part of his head that mocked his anxiety to learn the ignorant guess of a half-senile old woman who lived alone. 'Give me another due, Anna?' She had adopted that almost foetal position of consciousness that prisoners under interrogation often discovered and utilised. A child knows nothing. The interrogators call it 'Hide-and-Seek'. He would have to continue with the game.

'He would want to watch it — whatever is going to happen, he would want to watch it.' She was staring at the carpet just in front of her feet as she spoke. Of course! So bloody obvious! She did know Gorochenko better than he did.

Red — Square — his mind spelt out carefully.

'You think so?

'Oh, yes.'

A room with a view of Red Square. Vorontsyev closed his eyes, tried to be a rooftop camera, and to sense the best perch a camera might adopt. Where best—? Then he had it.

The History Museum.

He was in the History Museum! 'To change the history of Russia,' the old woman murmured again. Vorontsyev trembled with understanding. Gorochenko would have chosen his vantage-point cleverly, and with fitting, appropriate irony. A room at the top of the History Museum, watching Valenkov's tanks make history.

He was about to pat her hand with his own, as if to wake her from some light hypnotic trance, about to speak, when the doorbell damaged, broke the silence. Anna Dostoyevna's eyes went bright with immediacy, then her face collapsed into a look fossilised from thirty years ago. Terror. She glanced at him, then at the door of the lounge, then back to him, her eyes wide with guilt and fear.

'It is them,' he said, dropping the words like pebbles into the distressed water of her awareness. 'Hide me. Quickly!'

Seventeen: Young and Old

The doorbell rang again, longer this time.

'Where can I hide?' he asked.

'What?

'Hide!'

'The bedroom — please don't make a sound. Yes, I'll hide you…' She started for the bedroom, eager to propitiate him, as if by so doing she was pleasing the people at the door.

He entered the dim room, banging his shin against the leg of the bed as he took his third step. She opened a cheap fitted wardrobe, a thin sheet of plywood poorly stained — he could perceive its quality as he flicked on the light, then switched it off again almost immediately. The doorbell rang again — three separate summonses.

'Quick, quick!'

He stepped into the wardrobe, his face brushing against an out-of-fashion dress that reeked of tobacco, and the rough material of three skirts on the same hanger. The door squeaked to behind him.

'Pull yourself together or you'll kill us both!' he barked. He heard the sob of fear in her throat. Then he reached into his jacket and unholstered the Stechkin. He pumped a round into the breech, and slipped off the safety.

He heard her open the door, and a man's voice. He leaned against the cheap, thin plywood, listening to the voice as it moved nearer, down the corridor until its quality changed, un-confined in the lounge. It was Kapustin himself.

His mouth was dry, and he sucked spit from his cheeks. He found it difficult to distinguish what was being said, but he could sense the different voices, even apprehend the changes in tone that coloured each voice.

Kapustin had another man with him — there was a murmur of introduction — but only two voices continued the conversation. Kapustin was looking for Gorochenko. There was no mention of himself at the outset, at least.

Strangely, he experienced little fear beyond imagining the physical sensations of a light being switched on, the thin door being pulled back noisily, a man with a gun motioning him out — or opening his eyes and mouth with bleak fear as he saw Vorontsyev's own gun, before it deafened him. Perhaps some residue of office clung to him — he knew the man in the next room, and was a trusted subordinate. It was difficult to consider such familiar concepts in the past tense. Moscow Centre was his place of work; he was not an ordinary Soviet citizen.

The face of his watch glowed as he moved his wrist to inspect the time. Perhaps five minutes had passed. An interrogative colour to Kapustin's voice, and Vorontsyev strained to catch the tone in the woman's reply. It seemed satisfactorily neutral, and he hoped the question had been about himself.

Another ten minutes passed. Filled with awareness of an itch in his left calf, the texture of clothes against the skin of his hands and face, the smell of moth-balls, and the dry mustiness of old flesh; and the reek of stale tobacco in the clothes. He was appalled, gradually, and felt revulsion that he should be confined in the woman's wardrobe. It was as if he had seen her naked, or made love to her, the proximity of scents and odours that were hers.

'Come out.'

He heard the woman's voice, whispering like the rustle of paper, and incautiously he slid back the door. She had not switched on the light, and he said, 'They've gone?'

'Yes.'

'What did they want?1 As he joined her in the lounge, he saw how drained she appeared, the skin taut as stretched hide, grey with wasted health. She seemed unsteady on her feet, and he took her elbow and guided her to the sofa. It sagged as she sat, as if in imitation of the bonelessness of her posture. He thought she might fall sideways at any moment, like a small baby.

'Thank you,' he said. She looked at him vehemently.

'Leave me alone!' she breathed venomously, her hand fiddling with the stuff of her woollen jumper, clutching it into a third breast, releasing it again in creases. She was badly frightened. Kapustin had a quality of quiet menace, and authority to make the threat real 'What did he say to you?'

'I told him nothing!' she cried desperately.

'I know that, Anna.' But, whether Kapustin had believed her or not, he would have posted at least one man somewhere in the foyer of the building, or outside in a car.

Vorontsyev got up and went to the door. Then he looked back at the old woman. She seemed quiet and self-possessed, and only the movement of her lips indicated the furious mental activity as she tried to rid herself of her recent experiences. He knew it would not be long before she was able to do it. He looked at his watch. Almost five. The Museum dosed at five-thirty. He would have to hurry.

He opened the front door of the apartment carefully, and looked out. No one in the corridor. He slipped out. The narrow hall of each floor of the block, much like an hotel corridor, was uncarpeted. Lino squeaked softly under his shoes as he crossed to the window at the nearer end of the ill-lit corridor.

As he had guessed, there was a fire-escape passing the window. Ugly ironwork already frosty in the light of a street lamp a little further down the Kutuzovsky Prospekt. He unlatched the window, and slid it up. It protested, and his head spun round as if he had been shouted at. The corridor was still empty.

He heard a child coughing behind a nearby door. And, even as the cold air flowed on his face, he smelt cabbage cooking. He had not noticed before. He swung one leg over the sill, touching his toe gently on the platform of the fire-escape. Then he stepped out, shutting the window behind him, He paused for a moment, looking down. One or two cars, and a lot of traffic on the Prospekt, already heading out of the city; trolleys and buses mainly, some cars. Congealing on the road which was shining with frost. He could see no one in wait for him, and he clattered down the first flight of steps. Three floors down was the street. Three minutes, if he ran, to the Metro. His feet slipped, and he clutched the icy rail of the fire-escape to steady himself. The clutter of sound rang above the noise of the traffic. He paused, then hurried on, the few moments of swift movement down the steps becoming an imperative, a surge of action like flight.

'Identify yourself!' The order came from below him — a dark shadow, the light behind it, seen through the trellis-work of the last twist of the fire-escape. 'Come down slowly!'

Vorontsyev could not see the gun, but he knew it would be there. It had been too easy. Kapustin had left a man in the foyer, and a man near the fire-escape. He prayed it was no one he knew; not one of his team…

He knelt, firing through the gap between two steps, into the centre of the dark shape. The gun was very loud in the cold air, seeming to halt the traffic. Something plucked away from the rail beside his head in the same moment as there was a little spit of flame from the shadow of the man's coat. Then a purpled face as it caught the light of the street lamp, and the body falling backwards, something metallic skittering away across the frosty concrete of the path. He clattered down the last flight, the Stechkin making separate flat concussions as he held it and the rail in one gloved hand, steadying himself.

He did not bother to inspect the form on the ground, but ran away from it, his feet uncertain, the momentum threatening to spill him on the ground at any moment. He skidded round the side of the flats into the wall of lights and noise of the Kutuzovsky Prospekt. He thought he had heard a summons behind him, but could not be certain. He slipped the gun into the pocket of his coat where he could reach it easily, and weaved his way through the thick flow of traffic. In front of a bus, the lights glaring in his face, then a car screeching as the brakes were applied — suddenly the traffic coming from the opposite direction, and a moment of disorientation. Then three lanes of halted traffic, and he was a minute from the Kievskaia Metro station.

He began to walk, head bowed, fur hat settled firmly on his head, hands in the pockets of his thick overcoat. He was on his way home, an ordinary citizen.

Behind him, the dark stain of the overcoat lumped on the path had decided everything. Now, he was irrevocably determined upon a course of action. He was an outlaw now, a murderer. The single act gleamed in his confusion like a beacon. It did not matter, his moral assessment of the act. This had moulded his mental proportions like the hands of a potter; he had to find Gorochenko, and stop him, and help him escape.

He passed through the barrier, a marble bust of Lenin in a small alcove just beyond it, and descended the escalator to the platform. The station was crowded with home-going workers, and he saw the KGB men, two of them, eyes swivelling hopelessly as they tried to identify and assimilate each face that passed them. They would know that now, for perhaps an hour and a half, they had very little chance of sighting him and making a positive ID.

He stood against the wall on the platform, the crowd washing in front of him, bunching like seaweed moved by a gentle sea, keeping warm, staring at the map of the metro on the opposite wall, reading the paper, talking. They were only, in his eyes, camouflage. Only he was real in the scene.

The train sighed into the station, strips of bright light from the crowded, fuggy carriages elongating, separating as the carriages slowed. The doors slid open. He glanced swiftly along the platform in both directions. He was so far ahead of them, there was no disturbance. Even though, by the time he reached Revolution Square station, they might have sealed the exits.

He had no time to worry about it. The doors slid shut behind him.

A woman, against whom his side pressed as the train jogged, sensed the imprint of the gun for what it was, and looked up at him. His face was set, his eyes staring, and she knew that he must be KGB. She never looked at him again. Rather, she tried to edge a little from him in the packed compartment.

Darkness — Arbatskaia — darkness.

No evidence of special, concentrated activity. They were slow, too slow. The violent death of the man on watch had caught them unprepared. Anna Dostoyevna was a name on a long list, and they were looking for Gorochenko there. Instead, they had found him, and he had killed one of them. Orders were needed. Kapustin was in a car somewhere, being fed the information that a KGB man at the Vosstaniya flats was dead, and had undoubtedly been killed by Vorontsyev. Units all over the centre of the city would have to be alerted.

He bent his knees slightly, as if urging the train to greater speed, his body suddenly possessed by his race against the unwieldy net dosing round him.

A bright glare of platform lights, and the name sliding as if in oil past the window — Revolution Square. He grimaced at the appropriateness of his destination. He pushed to the door, panicking momentarily as his arms were jammed into his pockets by the pressure of bodies. Someone glanced round at the pressure of the Stechkin's ugly shape, then looked ahead as they saw his eyes. He stumbled on to the platform, hemmed in by the crowd, a bobbing mass of fur caps and hats and woollen scarves ahead and alongside him.

He turned left with the crowd's momentum, then broke from them as they passed through to another platform, for another train. He looked up. A few individuals, strung loosely like irregular beads on the necklace of the escalator. He stepped on, watched his feet as the stairway froze into steps, and then kept his eyes ahead of him, up the long steep flight towards the exit. He could feel the colder air of the street above, and the gun was hard in his hand.

He walked up perhaps a dozen steps, until he was close behind a middle-aged man with a battered briefcase and wool len mittens, and a woman in a shapeless brown coat. Then the stairs smoothed to a run, and he was on the tiles of the foyer. Slowly, it seemed to him, he moved behind the man and the woman towards the exit, a narrow space between two glass booths. The occupants of the booths wore Metro staff uniforms. There was no policeman at the foot of the steps to the street.

Perhaps, moving back into the centre of the hive, he had wrong-footed his pursuers. They would expect him to flee outwards on the metro, flung off from the hub by the centrifugal violence of his action.

Then, as he passed his ticket to the unseeing man in the booth, he saw Alevtina's face in front of him, as if the girl had stepped out from behind some screen or appeared like a camera trick. She was with another man from the Frunze Quay whose name Vorontsyev could not recall. Her mouth opened in a greeting that changed to sudden despair as she remembered her quarry and her duty. Her hand went to her waist, and Vorontsyev saw the holster, and Alevtina reaching for a gun. Someone bumped Vorontsyev in the back, and he turned as if attacked, seeing the bent-headed individual slip past him, a curse on his mouth, rubbing his arm from the collision. By then it was too late.

Alevtina had the Makarov out of the holster, and the other man, moving to one side, was drawing his automatic.

'Please, Major—!' The girl said, her eyes wide with desperation. It was a selfless plea. Vorontsyev, his own gun still buried in his clothing, caught on the lip of the pocket, hurled himself against her, easily knocking her off balance. In the same moment, the gun came free and he fired from behind Alevtina at the man. Someone screamed as the gun went off, and went on screaming as he fired twice more. The man was flung over the barrier near the glass booth, somersaulting backwards into an untidy, graceless heap on the other side.

He heard Alevtina say, 'Put down the gun — put down the gun!' It was a high-pitched voice, shocked and appalled. Vorontsyev looked at her, half-up from the tiles, the gun levelled at him. And he knew he could kill her.

Instead, he ran for the exit, leaping the few steps. Behind him, and distinct from what followed, he heard the explosion of the gun above the screams that were coming from bystanders.

Then his leg went, and he lurched against the wall, gripping the iron gate folded back from the station entrance to support his sudden weakness. He looked down. Nothing. Yet his sock felt wet, and he was certain the shoe squelched as he tried to walk. Pain shot through his leg, burning into thigh and groin. Alevtina had shot him. He whirled round, stumbled, and a man stared at him uncomprehendingly as he passed. She was standing at the foot of the steps.

Vorontsyev shot her twice. The girl seemed surprised rather than hurt. Then she was unmistakably dead. He turned away, stifling the sob in his throat, the extended gun warding off pedestrians. He limped badly almost at once, and the numbness of the bullet's passage had already gone. His nerves shrieked with the pain of his own weight on his left leg.

Across the street, the lights of the Moskva Hotel reached into the darkening sky. He put the gun away. It was as if he had donned a disguise. Now, only the fact that he lurched against people unsteadily attracted their notice. Forty yards from the entrance to the Metro, he was anonymous again.

Even when the siren of the police car seemed to point him out as it wailed past, heading for the scene of the incident. Somewhere in him, he felt a part of him sliding into emptiness, as if he had received a physical blow to the head, and his consciousness lurched sickeningly; but more insistent was the pain in his calf, and the icy wetness in his shoe — the strange sensation of the trouser leg clinging wetly — and more imperative was the lighted bulk of the Historical Museum across the square from him.

It was five-twenty. He was too late, they would already have closed the entrance and be shunting out the last visitors — perhaps another five minutes for a respected academician or historian. But no one would be going in now.

At the traffic-lights of the pedestrian crossing from the Lenin Museum corner to the History Museum, he felt chilled and weak and purposeless. And then he remembered it was a Wednesday. The museum closed at seven, Wednesdays and Fridays. He leaned gratefully against someone's back as relief flooded him. The woman turned her head, and he touched his fur hat in apology, trying to smile and realising how unwell he looked; as if his face had been mirrored in hers.

A green silhouette on the pedestrian lights, fuzzily unclear to his eyes. He stepped out, then was bundled back again as another siren screamed up the scale and a police Zil tore past them, round into Revolution Square. Then the crowd moved forward again, warily watching the stationary traffic.

He leant against the wall of the museum for a moment, as if recovering his breath. He inspected his shoe and ankle. A tiny pool of darkness seemed to well round the sole of his shoe as he watched, and he looked stupidly back to the gutter and the pedestrian crossing, convinced he could see the betraying spots. He shook his head. No, nothing. Moving the injured leg with both hands, as if it were a wooden limb, he smeared the little pool, and stepped forward. No one seemed to notice him. Probably they would think him drunk, or ill, if they did.

He moved swiftly — at least the pain seemed to come in quick gouts now, suggesting speed of movement — his limp comically exaggerated. The main facade of the museum overlooked Red Square, a long flight of grandiose steps up to the pillared entrance. A mock-Russian style, designed by an Englishman. He saw the steps before him with pain rather than relief. They were almost bare of people — one or two loungers, near the bottom, a few students passing in or out of the doors, some figures bent with study and the very weight of history. And the glass, revolving doors in the shadows under the pillars of the porch.

Slowly, careful of the treacherous early frost, looking back every few seconds, he mounted the steps. He was leaving only the occasional blood-spot. He had left two or three footprints clear in his blood after he had paused in the street, but not now. His leg ached more familiarly, as if with cold — except when he placed his weight on it. He kept close to the balustrade, using the handrail to assist him, swinging the wounded leg before him. He concentrated on the immediate task, narrowing his awareness; that way, he did not think of Alevtina, dead like Ilya and Maxim, but killed by her own superior. Yet he did have a vague sense of living beyond the immediate future, living beyond a new expansion of consciousness in which he would perceive, in a pitiless clear light, the moral nature of what he had done, what he was doing. The puritan in him was poised to reassert itself.

It would have to wait, he told himself, gritting his teeth — I have to get to the fucking toilet and bandage my bloody leg!

The coarse, blunt language, the simple demands from the time and place, eased aside the looming shadows at the back of his mind. He straightened up, walking slowly so that his gait might have a little normality, he pushed through the revolving doors, seeing a man's wizened, clever face moving past him on the other side, nodding in greeting. Vorontsyev did not know him. It was a gesture without suspicion. He stepped away from the doors, heading swiftly through the turnstile, hardly pausing to pick up his twenty-five kopeck ticket. The door of the male lavatory was near the entrance to the museum, he remembered.

At the door of the lavatory, he turned his head. The chequered pattern of the floor seemed unstained, but if he looked carefully he could see one or two faint smears, perhaps a spot or two. Even as he looked, he saw the shoe of an attendant smear one spot out of recognition, and nodded in satisfaction. He dosed the door of the washroom behind him, then locked himself in one of the three cubicles. He slumped wearily on the seat, his strength seemingly drained entirely.

The thought kept hammering in his head like a migraine. He had killed Alevtina — killed her. He hardly envisaged the flung corpse, arms wide, or felt the initial pain in his leg. Merely the moral position, a whirl of abstracts in his mind. Killed Alevtina, a member of my team.

He was dizzy, too, with the lost blood. Carefully, he bent over, his awareness spinning like a drunk's, and rolled up the sodden trouser leg. The bullet from the Makarov had passed through the flesh and muscle of the calf, a neat hole at one side, a darker, cratered wound on the other. His sock was soaked with blood, and he decided not to remove his shoe.

Clumsily, he fished the leather-bound flask of vodka from his hip pocket, and wetted his handkerchief with the spirit. Then he washed around the area of the wound, which seemed to have eased its bleeding since he had begun to rest it. Then he welted the handkerchief until it was soaked, and dabbed it against the wound.

He cried out once, then clenched his teeth in quivering weakness to still the further cries the pain prompted. Then he pulled his shirt from his waistband, and tore off a strip of it. This he knotted over the wound, waiting without breathing to see if the material became dyed. A spot bloomed, but did not spread far. He leaned back against the cistern, grateful, his trouser leg still rolled above his knee, his fur hat askew on his head.

Almost at once, inattentive to the world beyond the cubicle as he was, the mental landscape asserted itself. The brief future — where was Gorochenko? Had he made a mistake in coming? If he was locked in, and the old man wasn't there, hadn't he wasted the last night before the coup? Where would he hide until the museum closed?

And the past — the dead sprawled overcoat on the frosty path near the flats; the dead Alevtina with her face twisted into the dust coating the tiles of the Revolution Square Metro station. The man, whose face he barely knew, did not figure in the flash of images.

And his own death; inescapable, boiling certitude of ideas, raging as soon as he touched on them, an opened box of his world's ills. For he was committed now, irrevocably. Not in the eyes of others, of the organisation or the state he would be judged to have betrayed, but in his own eyes. The death of Alevtina had revoked all extenuation in his own severe judgement.

He had to be strong — he looked at the gloved hands before his face, and he could see them quivering — if he was to finish it now. Nothing definite formed in his mind concerning the final encounter, but he believed that there had to be one. He needed safe darkness for a while. He could not let the whirl of imagery, its mad dance, control him.

He longed for unconsciousness as he might have longed for sleep before a difficult task.

He stood on the leg, rolling down the damp trouser leg, testing his weight. Pain shot through his thigh and side. He sagged against the wall of the cubicle, then unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped out. He limped to the single washbasin, and cleaned his hands.

As he left the toilet, idling his way as unsuspiciously as he could towards the stairs to the level below ground, and the boiler-room where he would hide, he wondered how large the night-duty team would be. Two or three, perhaps. He did not know whether or not they were armed. He thought not. But they would have an alarm system rigged direct to the nearest police station, perhaps even to the Centre in nearby Dzerzhinsky Street.

But he would need a plan of the building, or a guide.

He eased himself down the steps, treading softly and nursing the aching leg. He hoped the boilerman had gone off duty. He did not want to kill him.

He noticed a returning calm, as if his severely limited view of circumstances and needs forced other considerations aside. He was glad of that.

Physical acts. Through a door marked 'Private', then along a dusty corridor roofed and walled, it seemed, with lagged pipes. A hollow but muffled click of footsteps, tangible irregularity of movement. He limped on, quicker. Take the gun from the pocket, hold it in both hands for a moment of steadying, left hand clutched round the stub of barrel, right hand on the moulded butt. Then left hand to turn the doorknob. Unlocked. He pushed open the heavy door, and the boiler-room was in darkness. He flicked on the light, glanced swiftly round the low-roofed, dusty room with its landscape of huge pipes and the squat old boilers. He switched off the light.

He stepped fully into the room and dosed the door behind him. He did not think the night staff would lock the boiler-room, rather use it for warming themselves, since it was likely that the regulations disallowed the whole building to be heated overnight.

He tried to picture the room. A faint radiance from windows high up near the ceiling aided him. He limped cautiously across the open space he had registered, turned left, left again. His hand reaching forward all the time, then connecting with the rough surface of a wooden crate. A stack of them, against the wall beneath the small high windows. Careful not to bang against them with his left leg, he eased himself behind them, and lowered himself, like an invalid might do into a bath, to the dusty floor. The concrete was warm, the wall against his back also warm.

He settled himself, the Stechkin on the ground immediately by his hand. The luminous dial of his watch indicated five fifty-five. An hour, or a little more.

But he would have to find a plan. The History Museum contained forty-seven halls and rooms and who knew how many store-rooms, cellars repositories. Gorochenko could be anywhere. The dry, dusty heat insisted that he would be found. Vorontsyev found his head nodding forward, as he was relaxed by the safety of his hiding place, eased by its silent warmth. A gurgle of pipes, the muted roar of the boilers, but no noises.

He knew he would find Gorochenko. He would find him. Find him.

His tiredness was too imperative. There was no real need for him to be awake before say eight or nine at the earliest. The KGB would not make a thorough search, his ruddled senses reasoned. And he was tired — drained.

He slept.

Kenneth Aubrey had decided on a Folley of genial attentiveness to detail as a method of auto-suggestion. He had tired of conversation with Khamovkhin, even of badinage or recollection with Buckholz. Bored with the world of diplomacy, he wished to re-create a sense of the secret world, his own covert life. Thus, armed with the files and reports of the duty-team drafted to Lahtilinna, previously in the care of Anders, he retired to his room, took off his jacket — the central-heating was more than adequate — poured himself a large whisky, and began to read.

Slowly his mind seemed to unstick — perhaps a more appropriate image, he thought, might have been of an oil-calmed sea through which now thrust the spars and wreckage of his secret life. He did not feel quite so old, hardly felt useless at all — and enjoyed the jagged, broken bits of reality jostling on the calm waters of diplomacy. After all, he was not employed by his masters to baby-sit the Soviet leader while everyone waited on the KGB, nor form a human wall through which no bullet might reach Khamovkhin. Since the crisis seemed to have passed, he had felt diminished by his occupation, just as he had felt enlarged in importance perhaps five or six days before. But this, this — his hand waved over the apparently untidy heap of papers as if to indicate something to an audience — was what still, apparently, satisfied him most, and most consistently.

There, he thought, turning back a page. What a scratchy account! A boat had been discovered four miles up the lake from the castle. Some attempt, it seemed, had been made to hide it. Aubrey picked up the form, as if checking for some watermark of authenticity. It was a Duty Report Form DRF/22B, which he had issued to Anders for the purpose of collating all duty-team reports. This one was more than a day old — part of an initial wide-sweep search for the missing Ozeroff. At the bottom of the report, the column for 'Diagnosis' and that for 'Prognosis' both remained blank. Aubrey clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The boat was still there — it had been disabled by the report-maker, and left. Obviously not important because it was still there.

Aubrey continued reading. It was two hours before he came across another report on the boat, then another. All of them with the same indifference to speculation. It irritated him that the duty-teams should have been so unused to search operations that they had covered the same ground three times in a space of hours. By that time, anyway, several other items in the reports had irritated him, then began to disappoint him, then turn his mood slowly to dissatisfaction.

Meal times were slack times, agreed. Sleep or rest periods were undisturbed. Patrols seemed efficiently organised — he picked up a series of duty-change items, and saw Anders's bold hand scoring through names — on three different sheets — because he had forgotten the names, or had been wrongly informed who was going on or coming off duty. And the individual reports — he reached further across the desk for a handful of them, the light from the standard lamp catching the shiny baldness of the top of his head — these were sloppy in the extreme. He began to read one aloud in a stage-Cockney accent, to ridicule it.

'Ah took owver from this geezer a' ayt-uh-clock. Tall blowke, pahka on. Don' know 'is nayme.' He snorted, then added: 'What use is this sort of thing? None whatsoever!'

Once he began to look — there was some sense of anti-Americanism in the exercise — he saw signs of it everywhere. Then he had the justice to admit that the substitute duty-team, drafted in from half a dozen countries and belonging to two or three different security services, had been his idea. He mentally apologised to Buckholz, leaned back in his chair because he had suddenly lost interest in mockery which had turned to self-mockery, rubbed his eyes so that he pushed his half-glasses up on to his forehead, and stared at the ceiling.

His mouth opened like that of a fish, as if he could not catch his breath. Immediately, he sat upright, fiddling his hands across the sheafs of papers as if playing a piano or uncertain of what he wanted. Then he pressed both palms down Sat and hard on the paper, as if a wind might disturb them. It was in there — it was in there!

He looked at his watch — almost three. Three? Three in the morning, and the date was the twenty-fourth.

He picked up the telephone, dialling Anders's extension. The voice, when it came, was drowsy but unruffled.

'Yeah?'

'Aubrey here.'

'Sir — anything wrong?'

'I'm not sure. I've just been reading over your collated reports and roster stuff here—'

'Yeah?' Now the voice was that of a civil servant and anticipating some ministerial displeasure.

'No, not a rocket for you, dear boy — just a thing that struck me, looking at the thing overall, as it were.'

'Something wrong?'

'Possibly. Tell me one thing — how many of the names can you recollect, just off-hand?'

Silence, then: 'Maybe seventeen, eighteen — why?'

'I can't recall all SIS personnel here, either. To me, they were names Shelley supplied from London, or Philipson here, or other Station Heads. All we worried about was getting sufficient bodies here. Our little friend, "Captain Ozeroff-Houdini" — he relied on a similar situation, didn't he?'

'He had papers, and records must have been altered—'

'Yes, dear boy — but, they didn't know his face, did they? As long as they expected the face that turned up, no one there would recognise him as someone else, would they? Now, if you take that a stage further—?'

Anders digested the idea in a moment.

'I'd better wake Mr Buckholz!'

'I think you'd better wake everybody — and we'll do a spot-check of everyone who is inside Lahtlinna at the moment — then those outside can come in and be recognised!'

Galakhov looked at his watch — three-o-two. He was standing in the darkened kitchen of the castle, the moonlight slicing through tall narrow windows. He had stayed long enough to make himself a cup of coffee, even turning on the lights while he did so. But, assailed by a sense of approaching crisis, he had switched them off as soon as the mug was in his hands, the coffee on his lips. He had been on patrol round the castle grounds, only occasionally meeting other duty personnel, exchanging a word or two with them, they leaving amused by something he said, he secretly revelling in the ease with which he was able to remain at Lahtilinna while the hunt for him went on.

He finished the last of the coffee, put the mug in one of the huge enamel sinks. He paused for a moment, a shaft of moonlight weirdly illuminating his narrow young face, as he visualised the sketch-plan of the route to Khamovkhin's room. Softly, softly, he told himself, a smile on his lips. In and out, and then back on patrol, to slip off when he was alone in the grounds. So simple.

He let himself out of the kitchens, and took the stairs to the main hall. From the furthest point of the corridor, he could see that there were lights on in the hall — off-duty men at the billiard table? Hardly likely they were watching Finnish TV — especially at that time? Cautiously, he approached the archway into the hall.

There were perhaps a dozen men already there, and he could see others coming along the galleries above, or down the staircase. Most of them were in dressing-gowns, some with coats over the pyjamas all of them were wearing. He saw Aubrey, in shirt-sleeves, and Buckholz in dressing-gown and pyjamas, fur boots on his feet. Anders was dressed, and looking extremely wide-awake and efficient. He listened to his opening remarks and then, as if by reflex, he visualised again the sketch-plan of Lahtilinna. Anders's words about a complete head-count, and the men staying where they were until everyone was accounted for, went a long way away because he had understood their intention at once. What he wanted was an alternative route to Khamovkhin's bedroom.

Anders's voice faded behind him as he returned down the corridor, fur-lined boots silent on the stone floor. At the end of the corridor was a flight of stairs — servants' route to the master bedrooms on the floor above. He listened — a distant, muffled burst of laughter cut short in the hall, but nothing closer than that. Galakhov felt the urgency press him, and he ascended the stairs as quickly as he dared.

He paused on the landing, feeling time running ahead of him. He had to move swiftly now — the job was nothing in itself, occupying no more than a minute. He looked up the next flight of stairs from the landing. Shadow, but lights from a corridor beyond and to the left.

He was almost at the top of the stairs when the sleepy man with disarranged hair and silent slippers bumped into him — and recoiled at the still-cold touch of his parka and the barrel of the rifle. A Finnish copy of the Kalashnikov, issued by Anders.

'Sorry,' he murmured.

'What the hell's going on?' the other man muttered, rubbing his arm where he had bumped the gun, yawning. Galakhov could have driven the rifle butt into his face — but he would only waste precious moments.

'Some sort of identity check, I think'

'What? Jesus — what a waste of good sleeping time!'

He tossed his head, rubbed his hair more into place, and began to descend the stairs. Then he paused, and looked up quizzically, taking in Galakhov's outdoor clothing and the gun. And perhaps the face he had not seen before. Galakhov cursed that he had not killed the man — now, he could not reach him, and dare not fire a shot. Then the man seemed satisfied, nodded, and went on down the stairs.

Galakhov ran along the corridor, his footsteps thumping on the strip of carpet. Up one more short flight, stopping just before the turn into another corridor, well-lit, and a man on guard at the door of Khamovkhin's room. The man in the dressing-gown, going now perhaps into the ball. If Anders or one of the others was still speaking, he might wait before he mentioned the man in outdoor clothing, armed, too, that he had passed on the stairs. But he might have thought about it He looked once. The guard was sitting on a chair, alert but comfortable. Then he took the last step, two strides to the middle of the corridor — fifteen yards. He fired twice, and the guard, only then looking at the intruder, hand hardly moved at all where the gun rested on his lap, was flung off the chair and slid across the corridor, a piece of carpet rucking up beneath him, a vase tumbling with a hideous noise from a delicate table whose legs were snapped by the impact of the body.

Fifteen yards — his hearing was coming back now as he ran to Khamovkhin's door. He fired another two shots at the lock, then kicked in the door. The bedroom was dark, but Khamovkhin had left one lamp on in the sitting-room. Galakhov saw his quarry, impotent and foolish in striped pyjamas in the bedroom doorway, and pointed the rifle at the middle of the figure. Khamovkhin was frozen with terror.

And Galakhov cursed. Shots, shots. The guard had been despatched noisily, now he was going to kill Khamovkhin with more noise. Because he had passed one sleepy-eyed, half-awake Englishman on the flight of stairs, and the adrenalin had worked, time seeming to escape him, and he had bludgeoned his way to this moment. He listened.

Nothing, but his hearing was still ringing from the explosions of the rifle.

'Get dressed — get dressed, or I'll kill you now!'

Khamovkhin, as if slapped by the voice, went back into the bedroom. Galakhov crossed to the door as Khamovkhin switched on the light in order to dress. He pushed it wide, and leaned against the door-frame, his eyes flickering from the figure of the Soviet leader as he dressed to the outer doorway which yet remained free of shadows.

'Hurry up — hurry up!' Adrenalin running away again, and panic-thinking. He wasn't going to kill Khamovkhin now, he was going to use him as a hostage to get out. Something had decided that — the same stupid animal in himself that had used the gun because time seemed about to run out. 'Hurry.'

Khamovkhin looked up at that. Galakhov saw the flicker of ginning hope in his eyes. Then the man pulled on his jacket.

'That'll do!'

'My jacket — my topcoat. You don't want your hostage to freeze to death, do you?' He turned to the wardrobe, and reached in for his coat.

What was that — noise on the stairs? Someone must have heard! Then Khamovkhin, tidying the collar of his topcoat, donning his fur hat, as if on his way to some public appointment in Helsinki, was standing next to him — a look of amusement in his eyes. Galakhov jabbed the rifle into his ribs, making the old man's breath exhale in a gasp. But the look in the eyes did not change from their damned superiority, their amusement. Galakhov was baffled.

'Go to the door,' he ordered. Khamovkhin did so, then waited, pausing as if for some stage entrance. Enter the statesman — Galakhov placed the rifle against the old man's spine, then he called out.

'You're there, of course — Mr Aubrey and Mr Buckholz?'

Silence.

'Galakhov?' They knew his real name, then. 'Mr First Secretary — are you unharmed?' Aubrey, the Englishman.

"Yes, Mr Aubrey. I am afraid that — who did you say, Comrade Galakhov? — I am his hostage, shall we say?'

'Shit!' Buckholz or Anders.

'I'm taking him out now! If you listen very carefully, you'll hear me switch to automatic. Kill me, and he dies anyway.'

'I know how rifles work, Galakhov!' he heard Buckholz say.

Then don't take any chances.' He jabbed Khamovkhin in the back. 'He's coming out first — and the rifle is placed against his spine. Clear a path for us. Right — move!'

Eighteen: The 24th

Vorontsyev awoke with a start, his head jerking upwards so that he banged it against the wall. He had opened his eyes, but there was a deep blackness in the room, deeper than he remembered. Frantically nigging back the cuff of his coat, he stared at his watch, the luminous figures slowly swimming to an approximation of a circle of numbers. His mind tried to reject the information, but the body groaned with realisation. Three-twenty — no, three-twenty-five. He had slept, undisturbed, for nine hours.

His back ached, and his neck was stiff. He moved his left leg, and the pain shot through him, seeming to erase the restorative sleep in a moment. He rubbed the back of his neck, groaning softly to himself. It was too ridiculous to contemplate, the unforgivable slide into sleep when he needed to be strong, alert.

He climbed upright, hands pressed against the wall behind him, until his left leg stuck out awkwardly, and his frame was shaking with the effort. He banged his palms against the wall in impotent fury. Gorochenko — he had perhaps two hours, no more than that.

Forty-seven halls, countless store-rooms and cellars. He could be anywhere! He dared not consider that he might not be in the building at all.

He bent clumsily and picked up the gun, gripping it tight as if in an affirmation of purpose. He hurried now, banging against the edges of crates, then slurring his foot across the concrete. Despite the remaining warmth of the boiler-room, he was cold, and shivered. It was dark because the street lights in Red Square were out. He groped along the wall until he found the doorknob, cool under his hand. He turned it, holding his breath.

Still unlocked.

He went down the passage, rubbing the sleeve of his coat against the lagging of the pipes, tasting the dust he disturbed as he breathed in. Then the outer door, open, closed behind him. The flight of steps, lit by a frosty moonlight, chill and ghostly, the imitation marble glinting in flecks, as if frost-covered. He leaned against the wall, and pushed himself up each step, hurrying, oblivious to the pain — perhaps encouraging it as a punishment for his dereliction of purpose, the weakness of the physical organism — swinging the leg forward, leaning the body-weight on it, then upright, back to swing the leg again.

He was breathing raggedly, and there was a chill sweat across his back, and his brow was damp. The shoe seemed to squelch loudly again, noises like the slapping of a wet rag against a dirty windowpane. He waited until the panic of his blood died, then he looked up, and studied the high, pillared hall which contained great lumps of statuary, the rows of glass cases containing the earliest history of Russia — ivory, stone, pottery. High windows let in the deceptive frosty moonlight, seeming to render the hall into monochrome and chill him.

He shuffled as quietly as he could across the hall, towards two doors in the far wall, near the stairs ascending to the first floor of the museum. When he reached them, he ran his fingers over the little brass plates as if reading braille. 'Private'. The gun pressed against his chest, his body close to the door from beneath which came a strip of yellow light, he turned the handle, and pushed.

He almost fell into the room, gripped tight to the door handle, and stood upright. A small room, fuggy with the warmth of an electric fire and a samovar. Slightly hazed with cigarette smoke he was sure it wasn't his eyes because the tobacco smell was pungent. Two faces looking up from steaming mugs. He must have caught them just after a security patrol. He closed the door behind him, and leaned back against it. Neither of the two men had moved more than to half-turn to face him. After the slight, surprised scraping of chairs, there was silence, except for the faint noise of the samovar in the corner.

Two men, both in their late fifties or sixties. They seemed two aspects of one personality — medium height, he suspected, medium build, greying hair, thin. For all they interested him, they might have been twins. They were simply hands, reaction-times, and a lack of guns. He said, because somehow it seemed an inevitable remark, 'Where is he?'

Because that was what he had seen in the moment when they were real, and separate, before his dogged mind and furious purpose dissolved their identities; he had seen them glance at one another, as if in knowledge.

There was a silence. He thought he had imagined it, was wrong. Then one of the men — he distinguished him, with difficulty, as the one with the broader face, and thicker grey hair — said quietly, 'He said — if you came, we were to take you to him.'

Vorontsyev sagged visibly against the door, the gun dropping to his side. Ridiculous. He had only to ask for an interview with his father. Crazy. They had been waiting for him. Without consciously considering the action, he reached into his coat and holstered the gun.

One of the men nodded.

'Where is he?' Vorontsyev asked in a thick voice, still leaning against the door.

The smaller of the two men, his wispy hair stranded across his head, said, 'Above us. He's safe.' He looked at the trouser leg, and the smudge of dirty red around the heel of the shoe. 'You're wounded,' he observed dispassionately. He spoke like a policeman. Vorontsyev did not bother to consider how they had been suborned by Gorochenko. Now, all he wanted to do was to come face to face.

The man who had answered him first stood up. Surprisingly, he was taller than Vorontsyev.

'Come with me.' He turned to his companion. 'Check he has left no traces — just in case.' He turned to Vorontsyev. 'Where have you been in the museum?' It was off-hand, yet meticulous.

'The toilet…' The man still seated nodded.

'I told you,' he said. Then they had expected him. The remark about his wound was confirmation of a previous theory.

'And the boiler-room.'

'We deliberately did not search,' the big man said, standing now only a foot or so from Vorontsyev's face. His breath smelt of some spicy sausage. 'Why has it taken you so long?'

'I — fell asleep.' Vorontsyev felt ashamed as he made his confession. He watched the big man's face, but there was no sign of amusement.

'Shall we go?' he said. Vorontsyev nodded, and backed out of his way.

The big man opened the door, and walked ahead of Vorontsyev.

'The lift?' Vorontsyev asked, struggling to keep up, his leg hurting with each impact with the tiled floor. Their footsteps echoed now, it seemed.

'Shut off— the power.' Vorontsyev did not believe him, but felt unable to demand. He was to be made to use the painful flights of stairs. He found himself accepting it as some kind of retribution — for his reckless sleep in the boiler-room or the death of Alevtina, he was uncertain.

The attendant who was, effectively, Gorochenko's bodyguard, unarmed though he was, went steadily ahead of him; a taskmaster who proceeded at what seemed the exact pace to wear and pain him without ever being more than half a flight ahead of him.

First floor — the moonlight opening spaces of glass cases, long dusky corridors hardly coloured by the pale light. He knew from somewhere in his memory that the exhibits concerned the popular uprisings through history, and he grimaced with the irony as much as the nagging, reiterated pain in his calf — he noticed that the pain was becoming localised, though a more intense stabbing sort of hurt.

The footsteps strange and intrusive in the silence. Then the next flight of stairs, and Peter the Great's minutiae. Vorontsyev felt like an old man, and coughed as if with asthma. The attendant stopped, looked back and waited patiently until he was only a few steps behind. Then he moved on again.

French standard from 1812. And, almost at the head of the flight of stairs, a life-size dressmaker's dummy in the uniform of Kutuzov as general commanding the Russian forces in the war against Napoleon. It was so sudden, turning at the head of the stairs, lifting his head from his study of each careful step, and the irony was so obvious, his breath was expelled in a noisy rush, as if he had come unexpectedly face to face with Gorochenko.

It was not a lucky guess, it was inevitable that he should be here — in this building of all buildings in Moscow. He said, his words echoing hollowly, 'I wonder my father hasn't borrowed the uniform.'

The guide's footsteps went on without pause, then clicked more heavily as he began to mount other stairs. Vorontsyev groaned at the thought of the continued effort demanded of him, and gripped the stone of the balustrade more urgently.

Captured French colours from the awful, icy retreat from Moscow, scraps of partisan unit flags, swords, carbines. Moonlight glinted from metal, sombrely outlined the stripes and shapes in flags and colours. He felt heavy with effort and the weight of history, which had come alive for him as never before. His journey was allegorical, he could feel that palpably. Perhaps Gorochenko had intended it — a kind of first interrogation was the only parallel he could conceive. A softening-up. Gorochenko saying — he could almost hear the voice — this is what we are going to talk about. This is what is at stake.

He shook his head as if to rid it of the buzzing of a fly. He would not listen. Siren-song. The first bite of the drill on tooth's enamel. He had to steel himself.

At the top of the next flight — pause — stiff clutter of foot steps, his own — then another flight. He began not to attend, to attend rather only to the feet he placed carefully one after the other.

So he came to the last hall, the inevitable last one. 1917. Arms, banners, clothing, like 1812. And, in glass cases, the writings of Lenin and others — just as his corpse was under glass in the Mausoleum. The storming of the Winter Palace — great indistinguishable portraits and crowdscapes on the walls.

Gorochenko had brought him here often, as a boy. He remembered now. And the memory completed some circuit, fulfilled a pattern. Gorochenko was consistent, credible throughout his life — no strange dislocation here. This always had been the shrine.

He sobbed quietly, knowing that the guide would take it as an expression of effort or pain.

The guide unlocked a small door — they were at the end of the last hall, and switched on a light. Another flight of stairs, narrower. He motioned Vorontsyev inside, and now lent him his arm for support. Squeezed together, they mounted the stairs to a narrow wooden corridor, uncarpeted. Here, the guide knocked on another door, one of many set in the long, dim corridor that smelt of must and unseen, stored things. Vorontsyev heard the voice and, as if at the study door of a feared pedagogue, blenched.

'Come in!'

'He panicked,' Aubrey whispered as he crouched next to Buckholz at the head of the stairs, both of them peering round the corner at the open doorway of Khamovkhin's suite — and the heaped-up tangle of flesh and wood where the guard had collided with the table. The pieces of the broken vase looked like stiff petals surrounding the still form. 'I don't know why, but he went at it hammer-and-tongs, when no doubt he expected to kill quickly and quietly, and get out again. In this mood, self-preservation will be high, but he won't be entirely rational. He might kill just because someone's breath smells.'

'So — we line up in a fuckin' parade and wave him to the door?' Buckholz was in a mood to blame everyone, principally himself, and the mood was one he hated.

Khamovkhin appeared in the doorway, then stepped boldly into the corridor. Aubrey heard behind him the rustle of a rifle placed to a shoulder. Acute angle, he thought, almost raising his hand in warning — but Galakhov was already behind the Soviet leader, gun jammed into the spine. Aubrey stood up, and moved slowly out into the corridor. Galakhov saw a rather dishevelled old man in a shirt with its stiff collar detached. Aubrey looked like a plucked bird, except that the eyes were bright and alive, seeking an opportunity.

'Get back!' Galakhov ordered, making Khamovkhin twitch involuntarily as he jabbed him with the rifle.

Aubrey raised his hands innocently. 'Very well, Comrade Galakhov. I saw some evidence of your efficiency as an assassin just outside Oxford—'

Galakhov was puzzled, but he knew what Aubrey was doing with his relaxed, studied, almost hypnotic words. Delay.

'Never mind the talk. Get the stairs cleared. My guest and I are leaving.'

'I am sorry, Mr Aubrey,' Khamovkhin remarked. 'I hope we shall meet again—'

'Get moving!'

Aubrey stood to one side, and Buckholz retreated from the head of the stairs. Galakhov realised that urgency alone would serve him now. He had to increase the tempo, disturb any arrangements and dispositions being made. They were slowing the whole thing down. Again, he futilely cursed the tempo imposed on him by the scene in the hall and the man on the stairs.

He looked down at knots of upturned faces, trellised by gun barrels, as armed men jostled each other on the narrow staircase. None of the guns was pointed at him. Increase the tempo, he told himself again. Whatever they're setting up, you can outrun it.

'Should I say that you won't get away with it?' Aubrey remarked at his side.

'I have a ticket to anywhere in the world,' Galakhov replied, and saw the discomfiture of the Englishman. 'You,' he added to Buckholz, 'can you drive?' Buckholz was silent. The rifle dug into Khamovkhin's spine. Aubrey suddenly felt the atmosphere rise in temperature, until the four of them were standing in the heavy heat of a greenhouse — just the four players, surrounded by silent extras, or an audience. 'Can — you — drive?' Galakhov said precisely, emphasising each word with the gun in Khamovkhin's back.

'Yes,' Buckholz replied sullenly.

'Good. You will drive us away from here.' Galakhov looked from the American's face to that of Aubrey. The Englishman had made his features bland, inexpressive. Galakhov wondered whether he had not made a mistake, leaving behind to organise some counter-measure the more brilliant and ruthless of the two intelligence men. He had no time for second thoughts — he opted for bulk, and physical menace, which meant that Buckholz would be neutralised by having to drive the car. 'Come!'

He pushed Khamovkhin down the first step, and the men fell back in front of them. Turn at the stairs, and the long corridor down which he had sprinted — that might have been the moment when the mental pulse had outrun him — and the security men, silly and innocuous, despite the guns, in their pyjamas and dressing-gowns, or coats thrown on over pyjamas. One in his vest and pants, even less dangerous. Buckholz was two paces behind him, and he did not know where Aubrey was. Not that it mattered. Every face he passed was distraught, angry, frustrated. He had them beaten, and he was going to make it.

A moment of shame — an image of Kutuzov, looking in disapproval, as he had done when ordering the death of Vrubel. But they had Kutuzov, and it was all over, and he had been stupid and found himself trapped, and there was no other way he could act — he couldn't squeeze the trigger and kill Khamovkhin, because he could feel the bullets of their reply he could feel his skin crawling and wincing with the impact of their bullets. The imperative of survival had established itself like a disease.

Stairs again, then the corridor to the hall — everything done in silence, until Buckholz said, 'I have to have a coat, man.'

They stopped, like toy men whose mechanism has run down. Galakhov half-turned, and snapped, 'Someone give him a coat.' Then he pushed Khamovkhin on, through the kitchen, out into the cold night. As if the other men were party-givers seeing off last guests, they came no further than the door. Their footsteps were loud after all the silence, and their breathing suddenly visible in the moonlight — breathing had been almost the only sound they had heard all the way from Khamovkhin's bedroom. Galakhov let Buckholz walk ahead, so that his gun covered both of them, until they came to the garages.

'Something powerful,' Galakhov said as Buckholz dragged open the doors. He peered into the darkness. Buckholz switched on the lights, and Galakhov flinched as if a searchlight had suddenly been turned on him.

What was he doing here? Where were they going? He suddenly wanted to call back at Aubrey that they must supply an aircraft, in Helsinki — where was he to go? Anywhere — literally anywhere, with such a passport. He quailed inwardly. Nowhere, nowhere. The moment he let Khamovkhin from his grasp, he was dead. He would have to spend the rest of his life with a rifle against the Soviet leader's spine if he wanted to stay alive. Anywhere — New York, London, Moscow, Cairo, Tunis, Rome, Rio — somewhere, a man with a gun would remove him, as soon as there was sufficient daylight between himself and the Soviet leader — Siamese twins.

'Get in — get in.'

Buckholz seemed surprised at the tone of his voice, then smiled grimly in satisfaction. 'Beginning to understand, uh, kid?'

'Get in, get in!' The gun waved in Buckholz's direction.

'OK. You're the boss.' The irony was a slap across the face.

Galakhov pushed Khamovkhin before him into the rear seat, made him slide across, got in himself. Buckholz turned round.

'Where to, bud?' He was almost laughing!

'North — follow the lake, north!' Galakhov tried to snarl, but the words came out as the utterance of someone without direction. Buckholz turned away, and switched on the ignition.

The guide opened the door, then stood aside. Gorochenko was seated at a rough table, his overcoat and fur hat on, his hands gloved. He was smiling in welcome. Vorontsyev lurched into the room, dizzy with weariness, and the old man rose anxiously from the chair, a spasm of pain on his strong face. The guide caught him, lowered Vorontsyev into another hard chair. Then he saw Gorochenko shake his head, and the door closed, leaving them alone in the room with its blacked-out window and small, shadowy lamp.

The silence seemed interminable. Vorontsyev stared at the edge of the rough table, feeling the aching in his left leg dying to discomfort. He did not move the leg. His sock was stiff with dried blood. All the time, he sensed Gorochenko studying him.

Then the old man said, 'You're hurt, boy. Do you want it looked at?' Vorontsyev waved his hand on the table in a small, impatient gesture. Then he looked up, his eyes burning.

'You betrayed me!' It was intended to recriminate, to express hatred. Instead, uncontrollably, it was a wail of anguish, even though he did little more than whisper.

'I never did that,' Gorochenko replied.

'Natalia — Ossipov in Khabarovsk — the dead man wired with a bomb — Vassiliev on the plane — each time you were trying to kill me!' Vorontsyev, in the presence of the old man for minutes now, was unable to react in any other way. He realised that he did not know, any longer, why he was there, what imperatives had driven him to this meeting. Perhaps only some sense of dramatic climax. He had no policeman's motives left to voice.

'I — ordered none of those, Alexei.' There was little softness in the voice, no apology. Yet there was a desire to be judged innocent. Your wife is a whore, I agree I used her.' The judgement was almost prim rather than patriarchal. Vorontsyev ground his teeth together. 'She was intended to watch you, and report to me. I — blackmailed her…' The sense of authority that was natural to him was clear in the neutrality with which he confided his actions. 'I would ruin her career, even have her arrested if she did not go with you, and report to me, via Ossipov. It was Ossipov who used her.'

'No, it was you. And you who killed Ilya and Maxim. They are dead.' The scorn fell dully in the room, as if something in its cramped, ill-lit confinement deadened sound. Vorontsyev had the unnerving sense that, whatever had driven him here, whatever humanity he had brought, it had been stilled in him. They were two almost disembodied voices discussing distant matters.

'Yes, they are dead. But — you sent them to Finland Station. What they witnessed left my— colleagues, no alternative.' A sudden spurt of emotion, violent as the cutting of an artery. 'They were KGB! What do you think they would have done to me if their report had been made?'

The contempt now evident in the voice was like a hand which had been shading the light, suddenly taken away. It stung Vorontsyev, but before he could respond, the room's deadness seemed to settle on him once more. He said, almost sullenly, 'They were just pawns in your game. Of no value. Like Vrubel.'

'No. But Vrubel wanted to get rid of you. He could not believe he was safe from a jealous husband in SID…' A flicker of hard amusement on the lips, then: 'He killed the substitute — an actor, by the way — and tried to kill you.'

Implacability. Vorontsyev had seen it before, but confined by the minor problems of a parent's unheeded authority. Now his father disposed of lives much as he might have upbraided him for poor marks at school.

'Ingratiating act — father,' Vorontsyev observed, and was pleased as the old man's face winced as from the taste of lemons, hollow-cheeked suddenly. 'I'm only grateful.'

'Only natural in a son,' Gorochenko remarked coldly. Then something in his eyes seemed to decline, a light or a fire. He said, seeming ill at ease with a softer voice, 'I always knew that you would find me. If anyone were to do it, it would be you.'

'You had me transferred to SID — what did you expect?'

'Don't be ungracious, boy. I agree, however. I created my own Nemesis when I did that.' The powerful shoulders sloped forward, the head stretching to him in emphasis. 'I did it to protect you.'

'Protect me? How?' The room seemed to have lightened as a force on his frame and voice. Or perhaps it was only that Mihail Pyotravich was less oppressive as a presence.

'The safest place in this police-ridden state of ours is — in the police. Especially in the SID. How else could I be certain that you would never have to suffer?'

'Why? What would I have suffered?'

A pain seemed to glance across Gorochenko's face, and he said, 'It does not matter. I wanted to protect you, and that is the way I chose to do it.'

'Why did you do all the other things?' Vorontsyev asked, responding to some contact re-established between them. 'Why? You, of all people!'

It was as if Gorochenko could no longer control himself. Even muscular control of his features seemed to lapse, and his mouth worked silently. One side of his face, as if he had suffered a stroke, was still, but there was a tic near the right eye. His strong, veined hands curled and uncurled on the table. When he spoke it was in a sudden shout like an exhalation of all the rage of his life.

'Me! Why me? Boy, you are a cretin, an imbecile! Who else would it be but me?' He got up, as if obeying a summons, and paced back and forth on his side of the table. 'How many times did I bring you here — how many times? Didn't you listen to anything I said?'

He was a pedagogue, and Vorontsyev had shrunk in his own perspective. He had seen imitations, pale substitutes, for this anger before in Gorochenko. He had never been patient with weakness, with intellectual failure, '1917! It was all for nothing! Stalin was something from the Middle Ages, with a savage dog he let off a chain. Beria. Even now I can smell that man and what he did; like a stench in my nose! Do you know that, eh? A stench! Everything came to nothing. One prison, from one end of the Soviet Union to the other. A bloody, dark, infested prison!'

He paused. Vorontsyev saw him venting the rage he had never expressed, not as wildly. All the years of silence, of compromise, of acceptance, had burst like a boil.

'And I'm a policeman!' Vorontsyev said. 'You made me belong to something you hated so much. Why?'

Gorochenko was calmer, passing from fire to ice in a moment, it seemed.

'I have explained that to you already. Didn't you understand? I never sought political sophistication in you, Alexei. But I never expected stupidity.' The tone was hard-edged, gleaming like a blade. The very exercise of contempt seemed to calm Gorochenko. An anodyne drawn from his own superiority. Vorontsyev saw the cold, aloof ego of the man, and he understood that he had always feared Gorochenko in some way. Perhaps this was why. Some secret sense of the qualities in him that had made him into Kutuzov. 'Never mind. It doesn't matter — not that part. But, you wanted to start a war!'

'I agree,' Gorochenko said frostily.

'Right was on your side, of course?'

'Naturally.'

Vorontsyev searched the face as if seeking some other, deeper confirmation. As if his gaze was a blow, he saw the face crumple into softer outlines. The deep lines at the side of the mouth, habitually cast in an ironic frame, became shallower.

'Just listen to me, Alexei.' His hands were flat on the table, as if in declaration. 'I — became Kutuzov. All the years I worked for it, using my standing with the Army, with old friends who had risen high — I knew what the price would be.' Again the rasp of certainty. 'And I was prepared to pay the price of a change of leadership. I knew that the Army wanted, needed, a limited war in Europe. Scandinavia was their prize for assisting me.'

'And it would end there?'

Gorochenko shook his head.

'Of course not! Nor should it. Stalin is the one who decided the revolution should end at the borders of Russia!' Again the contempt for political ignorance or incertitude.

'How can I be here, debating with you?'

'Because you have to know why I am the man you have searched for, why I have done the things I have done.'

'Is that all?'

'Of course. You will not stop me.'

'I — have to…' Vorontsyev, as if threatened, let his hand move from the table.

Gorochenko smiled. 'No you won't, Alexei.' His eyes hardened their gaze. 'Look at yourself. You have spent the last ten years working your way up in an organisation you have not questioned, whose nature you have largely ignored. That, and being an emotional spendthrift at the expense of a tart. You have no capacity to stop me — because you have no perception of any concerns larger than me. You came to save me. Admit it. Perhaps from my own foolishness, perhaps from your organisation. The one thing about which you are certain is that I must go on living…'

It was the experience of being told of your contemptibility by a beloved, the revelation of despite where he thought there was love. Like Natalia's flaunted lovers. Perhaps deeper.

He flinched away from it. Get back to the debate. He said, 'You are beaten, Mihail Pyotravich. Praporovich and Dolohov have been eliminated. How can you do anything?'

Gorochenko looked at the telephone, the only object, other than his big hands, on the table. He said, 'There is all the power I need. One telephone call — and the change of leadership occurs today, the conquest of Scandinavia is only a matter of time.'

'You mean to go on, then?' Vorontsyev was appalled, despite the fact that he knew Gorochenko was unyielding, determined.

'Of course. As I said — it is a simple matter of a telephone call.'

'I won't let you make it!'

'How will you stop me, Alexei? You have no moral or political reason for doing so. Have you? What is it? Loyalty to the state? To the KGB?'

'Perhaps.'

'Foolish. You have no loyalties. Your work has been an anodyne, an escape from your personal life. You are just a bureaucrat disguised as a policeman. A clerk.'

'Are you so certain?' He was pleading. Gorochenko despised him, and he could not bear it.

'Yes, Alexei. I love you, you are my son. But you are not a man of vision or faith. Which is why you cannot stop me. You have nothing to outweigh the love you have for me, the debt you owe me. I don't say this in contempt, but in understanding.' He reached his hand forward across the table, but Vorontsyev snatched his own hand away from the gesture like a sulking child, shaking his head as he did so. He was near to tears, and hated the truths he had been told, the hollowness his own father had exposed; hated the way in which his ego had been assaulted, and the superiority his father had displayed. He could not admit all those things, could not.

'Why are you doing it — why?'

It was a distraction, and he saw that Gorochenko knew it.

'I believe. Do you understand that? I believe in the old dream of revolution. That is why.'

'You want power — that's all. Just greedy for power they never gave you!'

'Stupid,' Gorochenko murmured, but two spots of colour appeared on his cheeks. 'You do not understand. To have been alive in the twenties, and to see the whole country turned into a shit-pile by Stalin and Beria and the NKVD! Terror as the normal experience for millions! Can't you see any of it, Alexei?' He half-rose, then sat down heavily, as if winded. But his voice was dear as he went on. 'I swore, every time I saw an empty chair at a Politburo meeting — every time I heard of another purge, every time a new, subservient face appeared on a committee or in the Secretariat — I swore I would survive, and I swore I would do what I could, when I could. I have waited a very long time. But now it will be done, for all those who died.' He clenched his fist. 'The people were at his throat when the Fascists invaded Russia! He was almost finished!' His voice cracked, then, more calmly: 'It has taken me another thirty years. A long time.'

'Stalin died thirty years ago.'

'What he did to weaken the Soviet Union did not die, Alexei. Now we have detente, another way of dying slowly.'

Vorontsyev was appalled. He seemed unable to absorb the successive shocks of his father's obsessive determination. None of the previous revelations immunised him against those which followed. It was a drill breaking through to the living nerve each time.

'You're mad.' Gorochenko smiled. Vorontsyev felt rage boil in him at the continuing superiority that smile symbolised. He drew his gun, and it lay heavy and black on the edge of the table. Gorochenko looked at it unflinchingly. 'I'm going to stop you. I'm arresting you.' Then he added, lashing out like a child: 'And you're not my father!'

Gorochenko rubbed at his cheek, as if the blow had been a physical one. He looked at his watch.

'I have only a little time left to wait. And you are not going to arrest me.' He seemed so certain, of everything.

'I am! I am! You're a traitor! My father — my real father — would have hated you for this!'

Gorochenko groaned, and passed a hand across his face. But it was as if he was afraid of something in himself, rather than of the rejection Vorontsyev proffered.

'No, he would not, Alexei.'

'He would, he would!' Vorontsyev was no longer conscious of his grotesque approximation to the voice and manner of a child. He crowed: 'My father was a hero! He would have despised you for what you're doing. You're a traitor!' The cliches comforted and strengthened him. They gave him a sense of existence to some purpose. An armour against Gorochenko's words.

'Alexei!' It was a command. Vorontsyev watched him, shamefaced. Gorochenko seemed engaged in some silent debate, then to relent to some inner decision. 'Very well,' he said. 'Very well. I swore — perhaps an oath as the one I took every day of the Stalin years — never to tell you this. But I will.'

'What? More bogeymen?' Vorontsyev sneered.

'If you like.' The old man's face was ancient now, filled with bitter wisdom. He reached into a breast pocket. Vorontsyev watched the hand carefully. It came out holding a letter — an old, stained letter with fluff in the creases where it had been folded for years.

'Read this,' Gorochenko said carefully. 'It's from your father.'

'Where is he now?' Aubrey flipped the transmitter's switch, and heard the crackle of the radio in the spotter helicopter.

'A couple of miles outside Heinola, still moving fast.'

'You're experiencing no difficulty in keeping track of him?'

'None at all, sir.' Philipson was up in the Finnish Police helicopter which had picked up the fleeing Volvo less than ten miles north-east of Lahti only minutes before. The helicopter had been based in Lahti — a piece of good fortune for which Aubrey was grateful. He glanced at his own map.

'Where can he go when he gets there?'

'North again.'

'Very well. Alert ground units — talk direct to the Police Chief via their channel. No interference.' Aubrey switched the set to receive, and turned round in the operator's swivel chair to face Anders. He appeared like an abandoned, betrayed child, or a worried parent. Aubrey could not decide which, but his concern for Buckholz was evident.

Anders was staring at the set. 'You want to try Moscow again, sir?'

'Not after the last little snub, thank you, Anders. If Chairman Andropov is unavailable, he will remain so. He'll tell us soon enough if he's succeeded in finding Gorochenko.'

'He hasn't succeeded, has he?'

'No Anders, — I'm afraid he hasn't. All we can do is hope the coup will fizzle out — or he's got Druzhinin or somebody to order other units into defensive positions—' Anders was scowling. 'I agree, Anders. It does seem unlikely.'

'So — what the hell does Khamovkhin matter?'

'He is the elected head of the government of the USSR,' Aubrey said with no trace of irony. 'He must be kept alive. We simply cannot afford to let him be killed. Your President has made that more than dear.' He looked at his watch. Four-forty.

'The more he runs, the more that guy is going to realise he has nowhere to go,' Anders observed.

'I know that, Anders!' Aubrey snapped. He studied the map. 'Now, where can he go? Get my driver in here.'

The smile on the driver's face was inappropriate, but Aubrey recognised it not as self-importance or amusement, but derived from the experience they had shared escaping from the ambush in Helsinki — when Waterford had been killed.

'Quickly, Fisher — tell me where they could go. They're here at the moment.'

Fisher bent over the map, studied it briefly, then said, 'If you let him get beyond Heinola, to here—' His finger traced a minor road. 'This cross-roads gives him choice again — and if you let him go either left or right, then he's into deeper forest, and you might lose him.'

'Are you sure?'

'I spent a holiday up there, fishing and walking. Very private country.' Fisher grinned with memory. 'It would take hours, maybe days, to root him out. And who's going to be alive by then, I wonder!'

'Yes — thank you, Fisher. One other thing — is Philipson anything of a shot?'

'Handgun, not bad. Never fired it in anger, I don't think. Rifle—?' Aubrey nodded. 'Nowhere near good enough, sir.'

When Fisher had been dismissed, Aubrey looked directly at Anders, his hand raised to signal the police helicopter.

'I have little or no choice in the matter.'

'I realise that, sir. I just hope that helicopter has a marksman in it.'

Aubrey flipped the switch.

'He might stop in Heinola. We must hope that he does.' He bent to the microphone. 'Philipson, come in, Philipson.'

'Sir.' The voice seemed very far away, and unreal. And it was hot again in the radio room, just as it had been in the corridor, earlier. Just hot flushes, he thought.

'Is there a trained marksman among the helicopter crew?'

'Pardon, sir?'

'Have you a trained marksman on board?'

A protracted silence, then: 'Yes, sir. Just the one, and he's out of practice—'

Aubrey looked at the map, measuring distances with his finger and thumb, shaking his head.

'No car could get far enough ahead of them — do we know what's out there, Anders?' He stabbed his finger north of Heinola.

'Some cars, but keeping out of sight — local police from Heinola. We haven't got anything out that far by chopper, and nothing from Helsinki.'

'Then he will have to do,' Aubrey commented. His finger went on tapping the map, as if he were trying to influence something in the place to which he was pointing, trying to cast some spell over it by mental suggestion. Then he said into the transmitter, 'Very well — fly ahead of the car. Warn local units in Heinola to keep clear of it, but to keep an eye on it. You find a good vantage point for the marksman. Then set down.'

'What — do you want him to do, sir?'

The usual — engine-block, tyres—' He glanced at Anders.

'And the car must be stopped dead — understand? You must place police near the road, and they must get to the car in time to prevent any retaliation whatsoever. Is that clear?'

'Jesus Christ,' Anders breathed.

'You do not need to be told that the driver must not, repeat not, be killed. Understand?' Anders appeared relieved. 'You use Vehicle Arrest, Method D, Philipson — understand?'

'But—'

'Understand, Philipson?'

'Sir.'

'Leave this channel open from now on.'

'Sir.'

Aubrey stared at Anders. The man was evidently concerned, but Aubrey had checked the anger and disgust that had been welling in him when he thought Aubrey intended killing Buckholz. Aubrey smiled slightly. Method D of Vehicle Arrest called for the wounding of the driver — death if the quality of marksmanship was not sufficiently high — in stopping of any fleeing vehicle. But Anders, not privy to the Marksmanship Manual of SIS, did not know it.

'Let's hope this policeman spends a lot of time hunting, shall we?'

He looked at the crackling radio.

It was simply an old letter. There was no dramatic dried and faded blood, it seemed stained by time rather than tears or despair. It was almost falling apart, of course, Vorontsyev saw as he tried to consider it forensically, detached from its words. Heavy creases full of pocket-fluff, the writing faded — done in pencil that must have been licked a hundred times before the short account was complete. Perhaps the dirty fingers that had held the rough paper — it was writing-paper, not packing-paper or toilet paper, so God knew where it had been obtained. Those hands had pressed the paper down on some wooden table, gripped the pencil stub stiffly because the mittens didn't really keep out the cold. The letter is simply old, he tried to tell himself forensically.

Then Gorochenko was speaking, and he listened, even while he turned the letter in his hands. He heard every word, even though he did not want to listen.

'Your father was a hero in the war against the Fascists. He was — arrested by the NKVD twelve miles from Berlin, when he was part of Zhukov's army group. It was for letters he had written home to your mother, describing the conditions at the front, and expressing sympathy for the refugees he saw every hour of every day. And criticising the way the war had been run from Moscow.'

Vorontsyev suddenly glanced up from the letter. His eyes were wide, but he could say nothing. 'He was tried, and sentenced to hard labour. He went into the camps — one near Moscow, at first. Later, he was transferred to Siberia, to the Kolyma region in the north-east. When he was arrested, your mother was pregnant, carrying you. She bore you, weaned you, then killed herself because she knew she would never see your father again. She knew by then that he would not take even his freedom from them. I was to be your guardian, your adoptive father.'

There was no question of denial, even though the hot rejections rushed to his throat. He knew Gorochenko had spoken the truth. He was dumb, while his mind whirled crazily out of its accustomed orbit. He felt, with a sense of literal truth, that he was going mad.

'It is not that she did not care for you,' Gorochenko said softly, 'but his arrest and imprisonment destroyed her. She lived for him. He, once he knew that she was dead, became ever more reckless with his life. He smuggled out accounts of their treatment — the filth, the cold, the starvation diet, the beatings, everything. Each time they caught him, he was punished. And his sentence was lengthened. And then he died in 1952, the year before the Beast himself — still righting them.' He looked at Vorontsyev, saw the dull eyes and sensed the mind retreating behind their opaque surfaces. He bellowed, 'Don't you understand? Your father wasn't killed in the war — he was alive until you were eight years of age — a zek, one of the inhabitants of the Gulag archipelago! Stalin had him imprisoned just for what he thought and felt and said!' There was a spittle of foam on his lower lip. He grabbed Vorontsyev's hands across the table, clutching them as if to squeeze truth through the pores of the younger man's skin. 'I loved your father — loved him!'

'And they killed him — the NKVD, the MVD, the KGB. They're all the same — filth! Scum! Pigs who wallow in the dirt they make of life! Can't you see that? I tried to save you from them by hiding you inside the organisation!' He paused, wringing Vorontsyev's hands, his face distorted with pain. Yet Vorontsyev still failed to respond. Gorochenko wanted nothing but to see him weep for the death of his father; it was a moment without calculation. He said, 'Believe me. It happened to millions — and it's still happening, I want revenge for your father, for Kyril Mihailovich Vorontsyev, and for all the others who are dead or dying. That is what I want.'

Vorontsyev looked at him, and what Gorochenko saw made him afraid. There was something like hatred in his eyes for a moment, then the returning blankness. Gorochenko had the sense that he had failed in some inexplicable way. He had not persuaded, perhaps not even immobilised Vorontsyev. He reached out and pulled the telephone towards him, watching Vorontsyev's gun all the time.

'No,' Vorontsyev said, looking up at him.

Gorochenko lifted the receiver, and began to dial the number. He was too early, but Valenkov would act. He had to act, just as Gorochenko had to telephone, now in the next few minutes, before Vorontsyev. He dialled the third digit of Valenkov's number.

'No,' Vorontsyev said again.

'It's crazy! One dumb Finnish cop with a rifle — you got the Soviet First Secretary out there, and the Deputy Director of the CIA! You can't mean to go through with it!'

'Be quiet, Anders!' Aubrey turned his back on the American, and spoke into the transmitter. 'Your man has a dear field of fire, Philipson?'

'Sir. We're just back in the trees, on a slight rise. He'll see the car about a hundred yards before it draws level with him, then another hundred and fifty after that. It's the best we could do.'

'Early warning?'

'A spotter with an R/T, quarter of a mile down the road.'

'Where are the others?'

Thirty — forty, fifty yards beyond me.'

'Move two of them closer.'

'Sir.'

Philipson's voice could be heard faintly as he spoke into a handset. Otherwise, Aubrey was aware only of Anders's eyes staring into his back. Aubrey concentrated on the face of the transmitter, because there was nothing else to be done. He was shuffling pieces on the board, but he knew as well as Anders his practical impotence. He was relying on one policeman whose name he did not know, on a moonlit road thirty miles away from him.

There was no sense of satisfaction — something he had felt on past occasions when he moved the wheels of the political world a fraction by his own hand. Nothing except the dreadful possibilities of what he was attempting.

Anders loomed behind him like the keeper of his conscience, or an arresting officer.

'In position, sir. We're ready.' Philispon did not sound confident, not at all.

'How much time do we—?'

'Sir, he's in sight. Spotter has him picked up now.'

Tell me everything, Philipson — you have no orders to give. Tell me.'

'Sir. Passing spotter — now, travelling at approximately fifty mph — spotter has him on the bend — now.' Philipson's voice was mounting like mercury in a thermometer. The end-play was going critical. 'We have him in sight, sir — here he comes—'

Aubrey glanced up at Anders, who had moved closer to the transmitter, as if threatening it. Aubrey could see the clenched white hand at the man's side as he turned back to the micro phone. But he could say nothing. Spectator — radio commentary, as if he might be listening to a horse race.

'Drawing level — now!' Aubrey strained — he heard the noise of Anders's other hand rub his stubbly jaw, tried to hear the shots — two, three, four tinny, unsubstantial clicks — static or gunfire?

'What's happening, dammit?' His voice was squeaky.

'The — car's stopped. Two shots through the engine-block, no fire — car swung off the road—'

'The driver?' Anders bellowed.

'The passengers — where are your policemen, Philipson?'

'Two more shots, sir, into the car—'

'Jesus living, get down there, you dumb bastard!' Anders roared, flipping the switch to transmit. Aubrey took the microphone from his white hand.

'Find out what has happened, and report back, Philipson.'

He flicked the switch, and there was nothing but static. And the static went on, and on, until it was like white noise being used to empty their minds, reduce their will. Aubrey felt himself crumbling inside, so that he was spent and empty and wanted to sleep. The static went on and on.

'You bastard — oh, Kenneth, you're a bastard!'

It was Buckholz.

'Khamovkhin?' Aubrey snapped, as if coming out of deep hypnosis. Then he flipped the switch, remembering. 'Khamovkhin?'

'Alive — you lucky son of a bitch! Shaking like a leaf, but alive.'

'Galakhov?'

'Got his from the cops who rushed the car. Banged his head on the head-rest behind me, and Khamovkhin wrestled with the gun until someone blew his head off. Khamovkhin will bill you for a new coat and a bath. Galakhov's brains are all over him.'

Aubrey shuddered, as was intended.

'You're not hurt?'

'Of course I am. You knew I would be — isn't that the way it works. Only the arm — your man aimed as far away from my body as be could, I guess — at the wheel.' A silence, then: 'You bastard, Kenneth — you ass-hole!' Finally: 'Thanks.'

Aubrey held out the microphone to Anders, and saw that his hand was shaking. But then, so was Anders's big hand, and he was a much younger man. Much younger.

Gorochenko stopped dialling. There was a strange light in Vorontsyev's eyes, and he was afraid of it. It looked like madness, and he silently cursed himself for what he had done. The miscalculation of arrogance, or desperation — or even anger. Break Alexei, then rebuild him. Perhaps he had overloaded him — buried him in truths?

How would he dig himself out? He dialled two more digits swiftly. His eyes flickered to the gun, once, just as he paused before the final digit.

Vorontsyev saw the old man resume dialling, and understood only that the truth about his father was just another ploy — like Natalia, like Vrubel, like Ossipov. Gorochenko had used everything — everything sacred — against him. Especially his father. He had used his father's memory to stop him.

He lifted the gun, and heard Gorochenko say, 'Stay calm, Alexei.' The dial of the telephone purred back to rest. He focused his gaze on Gorochenko's free hand — tapping on the edge of the table, the drumming muffled by the glove, the anxiety dear in the movement. He attended to the face. It was dear in his strangely foggy vision, and seemed wizened, shrunk. The cunning eyes were transfixed by the levelled gun. It was a hateful, arrogant face.

'Put down the phone,' Vorontsyev said, the gun pointing at Gorochenko's forehead. 'Put it down. You're under arrest.'

Gorochenko appeared surprised. Then he said into the telephone, 'Valenkov? Where is he — get him to the phone, at once!'

The telephone was a little way from Gorochenko's ear, and Vorontsyev could hear a distant, tinny voice referring to the caller as Kutuzov. Obeying the order. That name, though. The traitor. The man who had tried to kill him. Kutuzov, the conspirator.

A long moment of silence, in which Gorochenko seemed to concentrate utterly on the telephone. Until he looked up at the gun, and at Vorontsyev's face, and whatever he saw there caused a spasm of fear to cross his features. Vorontsyev felt himself inside a dream or a concussion, and he was simply doing his duty. He concentrated on the hand, the telephone, the shape of the jaw, the dark coat. Only physical things.

He could not kill his stepfather — but he would stop him. He was afraid that there would be an answer from Valenkov — an aide scurrying through corridors, ringing out on another line — just as Gorochenko, he could see, was beginning to fear that Valenkov would ignore the call.

Vorontsyev had buried his appalling misery for a moment. He felt clear-headed in a kind of delayed shock.

It was an endless moment for Gorochenko. He sensed that Vorontsyev was trying to excise areas of reality, concentrate only on the stupid inadequacy of his duty. He stared at his son for a long time, then he heard the receiver at the other end being lifted from a desk or table. He pressed the mouthpiece close, made as if to speak.

Before he uttered a sound, Vorontsyev did his duty. There was no time for thought or passion or memory. He shot Gorochenko through the head, twice, neatly. The body flew backwards out of the chair under the impact of the heavy 9 mm bullets, and the telephone clattered on to the floor squeaking tinnily.

As he sat there, the gun now resting on the table, he appeared from his angle of vision to be alone in the room. So he sat quietly, without moving his head. Not even slightly.

He had done his duty.

Because there was nothing else. Gorochenko had taken away everything else, except his duty, his loyalty to the state.

He grasped the heroic fiction of the moment. He had prevented the coup. Then he abandoned speculation for a dreamlike emptiness. Perhaps he would go and look at the body in a little while. But not yet, not just yet. At the moment, it was sufficient just to sit quietly in the silence of the dusty, cold little room. The telephone, its connection broken, buzzed like a distant insect. Everything else was quiet. It was five forty-six on the 24th.