The Sixth Directorate

1

The comedian left the stage, the long applause died, and a balalaika ensemble took over, starting on a softly held high chord, a minute vivid fingering on all the dozen instruments, which rose gradually in volume into a long, trembling vibrato before the key was released suddenly, the tune emerged, and a sad and restless music spread over the hall.

In one of the boxes where two couples sat above the audience Mrs Andropov turned to her husband with an uncertain smile. ‘He’s good, Yuri, isn’t he?’

The two families had come that evening for the gala opening of Arkadi Raikin’s new show at the Rossiya Hotel in Moscow.

‘Yes, maybe.’ Her husband spoke without looking round at her. ‘The disguises certainly are good.’ Yuri Andropov was gazing intently at the stage where a few minutes before the comedian had undergone one of his instant character transformations and he seemed to be still trying to fathom the trick, the mechanics behind the comedian’s sudden and complete changes of identity.

‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘Arkadi Raikin — he’s not bad at all. But doesn’t he sometimes overdo it a bit? No? What the Americans would call an “old Vaudeville Ham”?’

Yuri Andropov took off his spectacles, blinked, rubbed the corners of his eyes vigorously between thumb and forefinger. He was a tall, heavily built man with a generous flow of lightly silvered hair going straight back from his forehead, an equally straight and forceful nose, a perfectly bowed upper lip matched by a lower one that turned outwards gently, invitingly, like a sensualist’s. Only his eyes betrayed his substantial bearing: they were very small, the lids narrowed together — almost a deformity in the generally expansive context. There was nothing generous here: care and suspicion were the only spectators at these windows of the soul.

‘What do you know about American Vaudeville, Tata?’ his daughter Yelena said. ‘Why should there be anything American about Arkadi Raikin?’ She laughed. Yet Yuri Andropov did know about such things. Long before he had hoped for a theatrical career and then something technical with Mosfilm. But neither idea had borne fruit. Instead, at 57, he had done well elsewhere.

He was head of the KGB.

He was therefore one of the very few people in Moscow who could afford to openly criticise Arkadi Raikin by comparing him to an ‘old Vaudeville Ham’. If Arkadi Raikin had put himself beyond reproach through laughter, so too had Yuri Andropov through fear.

‘What do you think?’ Yuri Andropov turned to his son-in-law. ‘Do you really think he’s as good as all that? You ought to know in your job. You were in America too last year. Of course you’re aware of his background, aren’t you?’

It was a leading question, among a million others that had come from the same source over the years. The wrong answer could mean nothing more than a delayed promotion, a drop in salary, a change of job, a smaller apartment, a move to a provincial town. But it could lead to worse: a labour camp, a hospital ward, an asylum for the sane; the wrong grammar here could make you a non-person overnight. All this change of fortune lay within Yuri Andropov’s gift, and he was a generous man. His son-in-law knew these things well and he was relieved in the end that he did not have to give any full reply for just then an aide came in behind them, reminding Yuri Andropov of some pressing business elsewhere in the huge hotel.

‘My appointment. You’ll forgive me.’ Andropov stood up and bowed round at his family as though he were a courtier and not a father. ‘I’ll probably be back late. Don’t wait up.’

Accompanied by two aides, his personal assistant and a bodyguard, Yuri Andropov walked briskly along a deserted corridor leading from the hall towards the central courtyard of the hotel. It was a few minutes to nine. For the moment everyone in the hotel was either trying to eat or watching Arkadi Raikin. There must have been more than 5000 people in the huge building. But here in this long corridor there was nobody and no sound.

At the end of the passageway one of the many KGB men permanently attached to the hotel opened the door out into the courtyard for them like a dumb waiter. The group passed through into the chilling April cold, the air lying brutally about their faces for a moment before they entered the Presidential Wing, the twenty-three storey tower that rose from the middle of the hotel. This building had been made to accommodate important state guests in a number of exclusively furnished suites. But even now, nearly twenty years after the construction of the Rossiya had begun, not all of these luxurious boltholes had been finally completed.

The suite on the 19th floor where they met that night was one such. It had never been completed at all. The rooms were nude: the walls and ceilings were completely bare; the central conference table was enclosed by a membrane of soundproofing material, like a huge barrage balloon. There were no telephones, light fixtures or power points — illumination being supplied by a series of freestanding battery lamps. The floor had never been laid and was raised up now, on open joists, in a series of wooden duckboards a foot above its true level. The furnishings were minimal and spartan, without drawers or any other appendages, and cast in solid steel. Nothing could be concealed here anywhere.

This suite — one of two in the tower (the other was for guests, when they had such) — was permanently reserved by the KGB as office space outside their various official headquarters where unacknowledged business might be conducted. And tonight was just such a case — a meeting between Andropov and the heads of his five Chief Directorates. They were the only two areas in the hotel where no electronic eavesdropping equipment had been installed and, just as importantly, where it could, literally, be seen that none ever was.

The reasons for this isolated choice were several. Here the five KGB Directorates, each intensely jealous of the others’ place and power in the overall hierarchy of the organisation, could meet secretly and speak openly; for there were no minutes kept, no records of any sort. The suite was a clearing-house for misunderstandings, budding antagonisms, bureaucratic rivalries — far from the centres of that bureaucracy in Dzerzhinsky Square and elsewhere. It was also a place to discuss future policy and for Andropov to try and glean some true measure of past mistakes from his five chiefs. It was a think-tank, completely isolated, lurking high in the freezing weather above Red Square, where the behaviour of more than 300,000 KGB employees could be studied in the long term, without any one of those people having an opportunity to study their masters in return.

And that was the most important point in the present circumstances. Yuri Andropov and his five directors had come to this place at the start of 1971 in order to discuss, and be able to continue to discuss in the utmost privacy, the most serious ideological threat to the Soviet Union since Trotsky’s deviations nearly fifty years before.

In November of the previous year, the KGB Resident at the Embassy in London had given Andropov a confidential report on the matter — mere outlines, but with some quite conclusive, though impersonal, evidence. The Resident had returned to London charged with pursuing the matter but the few trails had by then gone quite cold: a hotel porter had disappeared, the address on a piece of paper had become an empty apartment, the tenants so far untraced. The real trail, through which the whole thing had come to light, was impossible to resuscitate: crossed lines on the Resident’s home telephone one evening in Highgate when he had broken in on a long conversation in Russian. Through an astounding electronic and professional error, he had found himself listening to the technical staff of a British counter-espionage section, incarcerated in some basement telephone exchange, reflecting on the strange dialogue they had all of them just heard: the British had been monitoring the same mysterious source.

But the Resident had clearly established one fact, given actual foundation at last to rumours that had come and, thankfully, gone over the years. He had confirmed now, without question, one of the worst and oldest fears of the KGB, and before that the NKVD and GPU, something which went back, indeed, to the earliest days of the revolution in 1917: there was within their organisation another and far more secret group; the nucleus of an alternative KGB, and therefore, potentially, of alternative government in the Soviet Union — a clandestine Directorate as Yuri Andropov had come to see it, which must logically then be complete with its own Chief, deputies, foreign Residents, couriers, counter-intelligence and internal security operatives: its own impenetrable cells and communication arrangements, its own fanatical loyalties and carefully prepared objectives. And this was the worst thing to emerge from the evidence: although they had no precise knowledge of what its objectives were it was quite clear from the overheard telephone conversation in London that the group was politically orientated towards democratic rather than dictatorial socialism. Thus further supposition was not difficult: ‘Communism with a human face’, as the journalists had it. Yuri Andropov could almost exactly visualise Time magazine’s description of this counter-revolution if it ever came to light: ‘… It was a move in the direction of a more human brand of Marxism, towards one of its happier variants, that had in the past found favour among so many deviants in the movement, from Rosa Luxemburg to those who perished in the Prague Spring.’

There had been a hundred different interpretations of the true faith over the years, Andropov thought, and none of them had really mattered; they could be identified, isolated and crushed — as had happened so many times before: with Trotsky, with Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia twelve years later. But here was one Marxist deviation that mattered a great deal, for it had taken root in the heart of the Citadel; a flower that had bloomed ferociously in secret, a drug of liberal dissidence that had seeded itself who knew how far about the organisation: a belief that could not be identified and isolated, and therefore could not be crushed. It was a threat that could only, as yet, be smelt, elusive and frightening as the sweet smell of a ghost passing from room to room in a charnel house.

When and where would it rise up and take form?

Somewhere, hidden in the vast ramifications of the KGB, totally integrated in the huge secret machine, trained from youth, and now paid by the organisation, was a group of people — ten, a hundred or a thousand, who could say? — more dangerous to the Soviet Union than any outside threat. For what might come from east or west had for long been a known quantity; the KGB had been responsible for the information. But the nature of this force was quite unknown. It fed and had its being at the magnetic centre of the State and to look for it was to reverse the whole natural process of the KGB, to turn the organisation in upon itself, towards an unmapped territory of vast treason where they had no guides. Here the compasses, which before had led unerringly to secret dissension everywhere else, spun wildly. So it was that these men had set themselves and this suite aside to take new bearings, to identify this disease at the heart of their lives, isolate the canker and cut it out.

They were all there when Andropov arrived, the heads of the five Chief Directorates, some already seated at a table in the main room, two others who had been talking by the window quickly joining them: the old man Alexander Sakharovsky, Chief of the KGB’s foreign intelligence operation, the First Directorate; Alexei Flitlianov, the youngest of them, a bachelor of 49, head of the Second Directorate responsible for all security matters within the State; Vassily Chechulian, Third Directorate, counter-espionage, a muscular, hearty man; Grigori Rahv, impeccably dressed, the cartoon image of a capitalist banker, in charge of the KGB’s scientific arm — electronics, communications, laboratories; and the Chief of the Fifth Directorate — Management, Personnel and Finance — Viktor Savitsky, an anonymous figure, member of the party’s Central Committee, an accountant by early profession — whose only noticeable characteristic was that he still took immense pains to look and behave like one.

Andropov bowed quickly round the table, exchanged brief and formal greetings and then sat down. He lifted both hands to his face, shaped them as for prayer, brought them to either side of his nose and rubbed it for a second. Then, closing his eyes, he clasped his fingers beneath his chin and was quite silent. Finally, as though he had completed grace before a meal, he spoke.

‘I take it we have no further news.’ He didn’t bother to look round for confirmation, but instead let another silence grow on the air, allowing it unnecessary age, so that it became a herald of mysterious change. Then he continued suddenly and brightly: ‘Very well then. Since we’ve got nowhere with the facts, let’s try using our imagination. Put ourselves in the position of this group — or more precisely let one of us do that. There are five of you here. We will create a Sixth Directorate and thus try and establish its composition and purposes — and a head of that Directorate. And we’ll put him sitting in that chair — a man that has come here, just as each of you has, to discuss the problems of his section. Alexei, you start it off. You’re transferred from the Second to the Sixth Directorate as of now. Let me start by asking you a few questions. First of all, some background. What are your objectives?’

Alexei Flitlianov smiled and moved easily in his seat. He was a compact, intelligent-faced man, like an energetic academic, full but prematurely greying hair sweeping sideways across his head into white tufts above his ears, and front teeth just slightly out of true: his eyes were dark and set well back in his skull and in the winter pallor of his face they glittered, like candles inside a Hallowe’en turnip: an awkward face with several bad lapses in the design, but for all that — as so often in such cases — attractive in a way not immediately decipherable.

‘I’m honoured.’ Flitlianov’s smile ended and he leant forward earnestly, shoulders hunched, concentrating on a spot somewhere in the middle of the table. ‘Objectives. Well, to begin with, control of the KGB.’

‘You want my job.’

‘Yes. But not for reasons of mere power play. The motives are political.’

‘Do they originate from the Politburo, the Central Committee or the Army?’

‘No. My origins lie entirely within the KGB.’

‘Do you have contacts, support in government or the Army?’

‘Yes, I think I must have, after so long. Let’s say I have my men marked outside. I know who to approach when the moment is ripe.’

‘And these political objectives — they are towards “Open Socialism”, democratic alternatives?’

‘Yes. The provenance here would be Trotsky, Luxemburg, Dubcek — among others. Particularly Dubcek, I should say; “The Prague Spring”, that would be the line. Marxist, certainly, but without a dictatorial, monolithic structure.’ Flitlianov emerged briefly from his role and looked round the table: ‘In fact we know the nature of these inappropriate objectives very well indeed: we have successfully inhibited them for many years, within the Union and more particularly outside it.’

‘The counter-revolution then? At last …’ Andropov smiled.

‘Not in any overtly violent terms. A bloodless coup. It would depend on timing — on choosing the right moment to support and promote a group of people in the Central Committee and one or two others in the Politburo.’

‘The new leaders?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you must have the support, I think, of one or two of these political figures already. You would surely not have gone ahead for so long on your scheme without it.’

‘Yes, I must have such support. Thus there must be a political arm to this Sixth Directorate. It would have been quite unrealistic of me to have continued such a scheme without that.’

‘What would the “right moment” be in all this? What would induce you to move? What are you waiting for?’

‘Some moment of crucial dissent within the Central Committee or the Politburo.’

‘What might give rise to that?’

‘China, perhaps? If the proposed escalation of the present border war goes through, for example; if the Kosygin faction bows under current Army pressure, the Politburo could easily divide itself. As you know there is strong political opposition to any escalation. And that could be the moment for this Sixth Directorate to move. That’s one scenario. There are others.’

Andropov said nothing, thinking for half a minute. His expression, with that of the others round the table, had become more than serious, it was numb. ‘Could any of this really be so?’ they all seemed to be asking, ‘Have we taken this charade too far?’

‘Aren’t we taking this game a little too far?’ Vassily Chechulian said. ‘It seems to me we are presupposing something too clever by half.’ He turned to Flitlianov. ‘Much as I acknowledge and admire your skills, Alexei, I doubt if even you could pull such a scheme off. The profile you’re drawing here, the head of this Sixth Directorate — he must be either a fool or a superman: the vast hazards you’ve contrived for him in your projections could make him no less than one or the other. There’s too much — far too much — that could go wrong. I may believe in the existence of some sort of “Directorate” as you’ve outlined it, but I don’t believe for a second that it has a chance of ever getting to the starting gate. Principally because your own Directorate, Alexei — the real Second Directorate — would find out about it long before that. Your internal security hasn’t been exactly lax recently, Alexei. You’ve clearly marked out and curtailed every other dissident movement. Why should you fail with this one?’

No one spoke. Then Flitlianov said slowly and good-naturedly: ‘Those are all fair points, Vassily. I agree with you. I hope I do get this group. I’m sure I will. But for the moment I haven’t.’

Andropov nodded in agreement. ‘That’s why we’re making these projections, Vassily, to give us something to aim at. And we should always allow for the most unlikely targets.’

Grigori Rahv, the engineer, had been anxious to prove his worth for some time. Now he leant forward, settling the folds of his fine new suit. ‘I tend to agree with Vassily. I think we may be getting off the track. The centre of this clandestine operation may not be in the KGB — or in the Politburo. Let’s take a look at some likely targets.’ He turned to Andropov. ‘This typewritten newsletter that’s been causing so much trouble recently, the Chronicle of Current Events — surely someone connected with that is the man we want, someone you’ve not caught up with yet — head of an outside group that has contacts, merely, inside the KGB — the voices our man in London heard being some of them, or all of them. Shouldn’t we simply intensify our crackdown on these dissident movements, this newsletter?’

Andropov sighed quietly. But Alexei was brightly placatory. ‘I think you might be right, Grigori. But I have had no authorisation to raise the pressure on these dissident movements. My directive’ — he looked at Andropov — ‘has been to handle them very carefully during the current rapprochement with the US.’

‘Surely that can now be changed — if the security of the State is at risk — as I assume it is?’ Rahv asked quickly.

‘Yes, Grigori,’ Andropov replied. ‘That can be changed. We’re hoping to start just such a crackdown as you suggest. It’s with the Politburo now, waiting their final assent. Suslov will get that for us. Unfortunately I can’t agree that the centre of this group lies outside the KGB, in any dissident intellectual movement. The reason is simple: this clandestine group is obviously one of long standing, well entrenched, extremely carefully organised and run: it has all the marks, in fact, of a bona fide KGB operation. Now, no outside organisation could have successfully maintained such an operation for so long — they would have been discovered long ago. Yet as part of the KGB they could remain undetectable — as they have done. Our man has chosen well: he has chosen to infiltrate the KGB because we alone can offer him the unique lever which could bring about this political change. Tacitly, we hold the political direction of the country in our hands. Our man is in this organisation quite simply because he knows where the reins are. The actual power for political change behind the Chronicle of Current Events — for all that it may worry us in other ways — wouldn’t light a torch bulb. No, we have to imagine a man who is among us. Let’s continue with our profile of him. Right, Alexei, you want my job. You’re capable of doing it?’

‘Yes. I must assume so.’

‘At the moment therefore you hold some considerably senior rank?’

‘Yes.’

Andropov was much encouraged. ‘Good.’ He turned, looking round the table. ‘We are beginning to see something now, a senior man, bringing outsiders into the KGB — a careful difficult job, time-consuming. So I think we can assume — if they have men in London — that this directorate started some time ago: ten, more like twenty years ago. Or even before that. During the war perhaps. And this may give us the reasons which started it. We’re somewhere in the early forties or late thirties. We’re at the end of the Moscow trials, gentlemen; the Stalin — Hitler pact. Those events could well encourage dissension in the mind of some young NKVD recruit of the time. So what do we see? A dissenter, therefore an intellectual in his student days during the late thirties; good army career, almost certainly as an intelligence officer, joined us sometime between 1945 and 1950 — at the very latest. Well, we shall have the files on all such recruits — Savitsky? Will you make a note?’

The head of Management, Personnel and Finance nodded. ‘I had already thought along such lines, sir. The files reflecting such a profile are ready.’

Andropov made no acknowledgment of this initiative, continuing instead his enthusiastic chase with Flitlianov: ‘Now how many people do you have with you in your Sixth Directorate, Alexei?’

‘Well, if I’ve been recruiting for, say, twenty years — but having to be extremely careful over who I choose — I’d say I’d picked up someone about once a month. Say — around two hundred people now.’

‘What sort of people, Alexei? What jobs are you placing them in? Which Directorate would it be most to your advantage to control — when the “moment” came?’

‘Obviously my own, the Second Directorate — internal security throughout the Union, on the spot, ready — as you say — for the “moment”.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Andropov thought once more. ‘Except they’d lack mobility in the Second Directorate and be highly exposed to any investigation. And I don’t think you’d keep all your eggs in one basket, Alexei. You’d have some of your men overseas I think — as an alternative group, men who could start the whole thing again. That would be the normal procedure, wouldn’t it?’

‘Yes. The group would be in the usual cell form, each one self-contained, with complete cut-outs between them — no links, each one headed by a deputy.’

‘You’d use the block cut-out. You’d know each of your deputies — ’

‘No. I’d use the other process: the chain cut-out. I would know my first deputy; he would have recruited the next and so on. And each deputy would have recruited his own staff. Thus I would know, by name, only a very small proportion of the entire group: this would give us a chance to regroup in the event of myself or any deputy being caught.’

‘That first deputy is an important figure then, isn’t he, Alexei? If we took you — we’d have to be sure we could get him too. If he went to ground properly we’d be no further on at all in the affair. We’d have to be certain that he never had any warning that you’d been cracked for example, or that we were on to you.’

‘Yes. That first deputy would have to have his ear very much to the ground, ready to bury himself the moment anything started to give at the top. Ideally he would have direct access to all top policy movement in the KGB — to this committee here in fact.’

Flitlianov had at last voiced something which had gradually been forming in the minds of all present at the table. Vassily Chechulian was the first to speak — a harshness, almost an anger in his normally easy voice. ‘Look, what have we imagined? A very senior man in the Second Directorate, stationed in Moscow, ex-army intelligence officer, joined us immediately after the war, a particularly able man, an intellectual among other things — and quite a young man, in his late forties now perhaps. Well it must be clear to all of us here — and most of all to you, Alexei — that this background is very similar to your own.’ Vassily Chechulian turned to Andropov. ‘I’m curious to know why the Chief of the Second Directorate — in response to your queries — has almost exactly described himself in this role of counter-revolutionary. What are we meant to deduce from this?’

Chechulian lit a cigarette, the first man at the meeting to do so. Tilting his head, he blew a stream of smoke almost straight upwards where the burnt tobacco formed a small wispy cloud under the soundproofing membrane. There was a sudden smell of life in the arid room.

‘Ask him yourself, Vassily.’ Yuri Andropov said. ‘We’re all supposed to be asking questions here.’

‘Well, Alexei — what are you condemning yourself out of your own mouth for?’

‘Not at all, Vassily. I was asked to imagine myself as head of this mysterious Sixth Directorate. That’s how I would have gone about organising it. You would have done it differently I’m sure — yet not, I think, so very differently. There are constants in the formation of any clandestine group. You formed just such a group yourself in West Germany just after the war. We know that. I might also add that the background I’ve given this man could, at a stretch, fit you as well as me.’

‘Oh, I’m no intellectual, Alexei. You have a degree. You were even a professor once, as your cover overseas. Besides, I’m older than you.’

‘Yes, but the rest stands, or near enough. Indeed your counter-espionage directorate might be the expected place to look for this sort of conspiracy. Your Third Directorate — necessarily of course — is the most secretive part of our organisation. By comparison my Second Directorate is an open book, and I’m hardly more than a traffic policeman.’

Flitlianov smiled briefly. Chechulian said nothing. Andropov broke the moment’s unease that had suddenly sprung up.

‘Gentlemen, I didn’t come here — nor I hope did any of you — to conduct a purge. That was not the purpose of my questions to Alexei. I wanted a picture of the type of man we’re after. And I think Alexei has given us that. I think probably, too, the man is in Alexei’s Directorate. But that, as we’ve shown, is to be expected. His is by far the largest, more than 20,000 fully established staff, at least two hundred of whom occupy senior rank and some of these must share some or all of the characteristics we’ve established. We’ll go through all these men very carefully now, take them apart. And I’d like each of you to do the same within your own Directorates. We have a rough picture, a profile. It may be the wrong one, but for the moment we’ve nothing else to go on. Let’s see if we can find the body that fits it.’ He looked round at the five men. ‘And kill that body quickly.’

Andropov paused, consulting some notes in front of him. The others relaxed. Chechulian poured himself a glass of mineral water from a bottle in front of him, tasted some of it and then puckered his lips. He looked at the contents of the glass sadly and pushed it away. Andropov had found his place. ‘Gentlemen, our second consideration this evening, normally our first: next year’s budget. As you know our allocations are to be cut — by up to 18 % over three years, starting January 1972. We must continue to mark out areas of economy. However, we may be able to limit this to one area and Grigori Rahv will brief you on this in a moment. In outline, what it amounts to is this: I believe we may be able to make substantial reductions in our scientific budget, particularly in the area of communications and in future capital development in that field. You’ll remember our discussion at the last meeting: since then we’ve established beyond doubt that the British have now successfully developed their new code transmission system and will shortly be introducing it into all their diplomatic and intelligence traffic: as far as we can tell it’s a form of electronic one-time pad. There’s no doubt that if we can obtain the precise technical data on how this system operates — which we can only do at source, on site — this information alone should enable us to reduce our expenditure by the required 18 % over three years. Grigori, would you give us the present position in more detail?’

Grigori Rahv broached these electronic mysteries very carefully and clearly, like a teacher among witless, rascally children. Chechulian hunched his great farmer’s shoulders and let his head sink oft his chest. Andropov removed his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose. Flitlianov closed his eyes. Sakharovsky studied the label on the mineral-water bottle in front of him, massaging his old hands. Savitsky remained obviously alert: a saving of 18 % over three years would bring more credit to him than to anyone else in the room.

Technical data filled the air for the next fifteen minutes. Sakharovsky had to force himself to listen for he knew that his First Directorate would be made responsible for obtaining this information in England. And so it was later agreed. After ten minutes on other business, the meeting broke up.

‘Come, Alexander,’ Andropov turned to the old man, ‘we must welcome our guests. Alexei? — are you coming to meet our Czech colleagues? No? Well, see you on Sunday then. You too, Vassily: you’re with us on the hunt as well, aren’t you? Remember it’s a five o’clock start. Unless you want to sleep at the lodge overnight? No one else coming downstairs with us?’ Andropov looked round the room. ‘Very well then, I thank you for your attention. Gentlemen: I bid you a “happy weekend”.’

Andropov sometimes introduced odd, English phrases into his conversation: ‘Vaudeville Ham’, ‘Happy weekend’, ‘The more the merrier’. The archaisms were always there, waiting rudely to emerge, often in the most inappropriate circumstances. And this was one of them, Alexei Flitlianov thought. ‘Happy weekend’? Certainly Andropov’s professional outlook at that moment did not warrant any such jeux d’esprit — the weather around him seemed threatening indeed. There was some contradiction here — these happy words in a time of vast conspiracy. Flitlianov could not account for this good humour. It was as though he had stumbled for the first time on an untranslatable idiom in Andropov’s commonplace phrase book.

‘Good. I didn’t think he’d come with us. We can talk after we’ve seen our Czech friends.’ Andropov spoke to Sakharovsky quietly as they walked down one flight of stairs to the second KGB suite in the Presidential Tower on the 18th floor. There they welcomed their guests who had arrived earlier in the evening on the last flight of the day from Prague: the head of the Czech Internal Security police, Colonel Hartep, and Andropov’s Russian liaison officer in Prague, Chief of the KGB bureau there, together with assorted deputies, assistants and bodyguards. But the little social reunion between the two security organisations didn’t last long.

Andropov brought it quickly to a close. ‘Gentlemen, you’ve had a long day. Tomorrow — our first meeting. Comrade Sakharovsky will be in the chair. I will be with you for the afternoon session. On Sunday, as last year, our hunting party.’ He turned to the Colonel: ‘I trust your aim remains true, Colonel? The quarry, I gather, are as lively as ever. I believe we shall have some “good hunting”.’ But Colonel Hartep was not a linguist and Andropov’s sally died at once in the rigid atmosphere.

But for Andropov and Sakharovsky the meeting had served its purpose: it had delayed their departure from the Hotel, they had not had to leave with the others of the committee and could thus travel back home together, undetected in the same car.

‘Well?’ Andropov spoke as soon as the big Zil limousine began to gather speed through the freezing empty streets of the city, moving out of Red Square towards the northern suburbs. ‘What do you think?’

Sakharovsky rubbed his hands busily again, though the car was warm enough against the bitter night.

‘I don’t know. I’m not sure now. He handled it perfectly. A great actor — or else he’s nothing to do with it.’

‘Yes. I had the same feeling for a while. But I’m sure it’s him.’

‘I don’t know. It looks very possible, I agree,’ Sakharovsky went on. ‘But that’s my worry: it’s too obvious. What Flitlianov did in his imaginary profile of the Sixth Directorate was to outline almost exactly the real subsidiary group — which he controls, which your predecessor appointed him to, which you and I know about. The Sixth Directorate he suggested — almost everything about it, its formation, composition and so on — corresponds with our own internal security division which he heads: an equally “clandestine” directorate. Are we to suppose that this is the basis of the whole conspiracy — that the men Flitlianov has recruited over the years are there to ensure not the security of the KGB but its destruction?’

‘That seems to me very probable. You say it’s too obvious. But look at it another way: it was also a unique opportunity for anyone with this sort of long-term conspiracy in mind: Flitlianov has had the entire responsibility for forming this security division, with very little reference to the top. He had his own budget, which always included a large floating allocation, including hard currency overseas. He kept everything to himself. That was the whole point of the operation originally, which I don’t think I would ever have sanctioned: he was to recruit and train a special corps of men, here and abroad, quite outside the regular KGB channels, and to place these men among KGB operatives whose loyalty or performance we had doubts about. His division is an early-warning system throughout the KGB. And all right, I’ll admit it has worked extraordinarily well. We’ve suffered very few lapses. But you can see the unique lever it’s given him: none of the other Directorates know of the existence of this group. And how much do you and I really know of it? That again was part of the original plan: that the names of Flitlianov’s little army of agents provocateurs should be kept on a single file, with him. There was, of course, to be no general access to them — no possibility of crossed lines, of anyone in the official KGB ever knowing the names, or anything about the members of this unofficial group.’

‘You have access to those files, if you want it. You could open the whole thing up.’

‘Yes, I have. But the birds would fly before I got anywhere with an investigation. Besides, it is likely that most of the names he has on file in Moscow are bona fide members of his security group. And the rest — the real members of his conspiracy — won’t be on any list at all. No, when we move, we must hit everyone in this, not just the leader. That’s essential. Otherwise it is just killing part of a worm — the rest lives on, and reproduces itself. And remember this is not just one or two defectors, or double agents — or someone working for the CIA or the British SIS or the Germans, just out to get a few secrets from us. This is a group of men, a disciplined intelligence corps — there could be hundreds of them — dedicated to overthrowing the KGB and after that the Soviet State. Unless we get all the leaders of this group we might as well not bother at all.’

‘You’d have to track these people down almost simultaneously then — if you want them all. Flitlianov pointed that out. An almost impossible task.’

‘We’ll see. But whatever we have to do this is the time to keep Flitlianov in the dark, keep him guessing, undermine his confidence. That’s why I gave him the opportunity of describing his own security division at the meeting — I put the words into his mouth. He must have been surprised: he can have no idea what I’m up to — whether I know and if so what and how much I know. Prepare him psychologically. It’s the only way we can ever hope to get anything out of him when the time comes. Meanwhile, we keep the pressure on him. Sunday will give us another occasion for that. It’s an invitation, in the present circumstances, he can’t refuse.’

‘But what if he does refuse it?’ Sakharovsky asked. ‘What if Alexei is the leader of this group, realises he’s a marked man, and decides to break now — before Sunday? In his position, even under the closest possible surveillance, he mightn’t find it impossible to get out of the country.’

Andropov was suddenly happy in the warmth, looking out on the bitter, empty streets — happy as the man is who has the final ace up his sleeve.

‘Well that — as I see it — is the whole point of this psychological pressure: to make him run. That would be the beginning of the end of our troubles, I think — one sure way of getting a lead on the other ringleaders. Those are the people he’d make for. Or person. That’s the one thing he’d have to do at some point outside — make contact with his deputies — or deputy — and start re-activating his group from outside the Union.

‘You see, as you pointed out just now, the strange thing is that almost everything Alexei said about the formation of this imaginary Sixth Directorate is true of his own clandestine group. He went out of his way to make the point — an extraordinary risk which nearly came off — an immense double bluff: telling the truth about his own group in order to put us off his trail entirely. You remember what he said — what he insisted — that he would use the chain and not the block cut-out with his men? He would know the name of his first deputy, who in turn would have recruited the second and so on; each deputy recruiting his own men? Well, if that’s true, and I think it is, then his immediate contact overseas would be this first deputy. And that’s someone we want as much as Alexei himself. Through him we start to eat our way along the chain to all the others. So I’m hoping he will run.’

‘Good. Good.’ Sakharovsky nodded, following the line of thought ‘On the other hand if he does run in order to make this vital contact he’s going to be looking over his shoulder.’

‘Certainly. That’s why I have in mind two things: I want to make him think it’s time to run, yet without allowing him to think that we know for certain he’s our man. He’s given us an opening on this with Vassily Chechulian: he’s suggested him as an alternative suspect. Well, we’ll go along with that. We’ll take Vassily. And afterwards keep Alexei moving in his real job, take the heat off him, put him back on an even keel with some genuine priority business in his own Second Directorate. And that’s the moment I think he’ll choose to run. It was always catching people that mattered in our job,’ Andropov ruminated. ‘Now it’s just the opposite; making sure they get away.’

There was silence as the car glided along towards the slopes of the Moscow hills, approaching an exclusive suburb, a parkway with villas along either side and a guard post at one end of it.

‘You’re putting a lot of strain on my surveillance here,’ Sakharovsky thought aloud. ‘And most of it overseas. A small mistake by one of my men — a one-way street he doesn’t know about, a metro system which Alexei knows backwards — and you’ve lost him as well as all your leads. Why not just take Alexei in Moscow — and screw it out of him here. Keep it simple. Shouldn’t that be the essence of it all?’

Yuri Andropov leant across and put his hand on Sakharovsky’s knee. ‘Yes, Alexander, but remember something else: we’re almost certain it’s Flitlianov. Not absolutely. We could still be wrong. If he runs we’ll have conclusive proof. And we still need that. Look — what’s the use of cutting the wrong man’s leg off? Of course we could get a confession out of him — to anything we wanted. But what would be the point? This isn’t a show trial. We want the truth. And therefore we have to have the right man to begin with before we can think of extracting confessions. We can’t put every senior KGB officer who might be guilty into the wind-tunnel. No, if Alexei runs, then we’ll know who it is. And that’s half the battle. We can take him overseas and interrogate him there if necessary — or wait and see what contacts he makes. We can do any number of things. But we get nowhere by leaving things as they stand. We must make the running, induce the action — that is of the essence.’

‘Very well then. I’ll make the arrangements. Increase his surveillance. But remember, I’m stretched on that — using my own men in Moscow who are normally overseas operators. I can’t of course use anybody from Alexei’s own directorate.’

‘I know. But there won’t be long to wait, I think, before he goes over to your side of the fence. Not long.’

It was nearly midnight when he dropped Sakharovsky at his villa. Andropov wondered if his daughter, Yelena, might still be up when he got home himself. He hoped she would be. He wanted to see as much of her as possible before she went back to Leningrad after the weekend.

Yelena was in the kitchen, dressed for bed, making a hot drink, when Yuri Andropov arrived home at his villa further up the parkway.

‘For you, Tata?’ she asked. ‘It’s English cocoa from the dollar shop. Shall I make you a cup?’

‘Please. A half cup. I don’t know if I like it.’

He didn’t like it at all. But he wanted an excuse to be with her, any reason: to talk with her, just gossip — to look at her, this tall daughter of his with a round soft face like her mother’s, but with sharper eyes, blackberry dark and quick, and a mind far sharper still; her thin hair severely flat now over her head, and tied up at the back ready for the pillow — the single bed next the other in the spare room. Did she bring them close together for the night, he wondered, closer to that dull husband of hers? Did she make that kind of gesture with him? What sort of relationship did they have that way? How did they manage in bed?

He thought about these things now. For now he knew that she shared these things about and inside her body with another man, that she had not given herself up for good to the worthy jailer who lay upstairs. She lived in other secret ways. It had started a month before with a rumour which he had checked on, arranging for one of his personal assistants to carry out the surveillance. A report confirming it had been given to him that morning: for more than a year his daughter had been having an affair with Alexei Flitlianov

They had met ten years before, when Yelena had been at University in Moscow, almost a child. But the liaison had only begun recently, had flourished in Leningrad where Flitlianov, with his interest in painting, had gone to see exhibitions at the Hermitage Museum where she worked, and had continued intermittently and discreetly whenever she had come down to Moscow to see her old friends and family. He should, he knew, have been shocked by her behaviour, and vastly alarmed by the threat their association presented to him in the current circumstances. But he was not; rather the risks they had run, and his vision of those risks, appealed to him in a strange way, just as Arkadi Raikin’s many disguises had done.

Yuri Andropov had various official appointments in the Kremlin the next morning, a Saturday. But one in the late morning before he left was unofficial, unknown and unseen.

Andrei Suslov, First Deputy Premier, Senior Politburo member and intellectual conscience of all the hard-liners and Stalinists in the Party, met him in the empty conference room next to his office. He was a tall, emaciated figure, bald patches in his wispy, plucked-out hair, and a jaw that narrowed fearfully into a foreshortened chin in an egg-like skull.

He had the air of a mystic, of some old anchorite on a hill, bird-like above the storms, observing the turmoil which his teachings had brought out beneath him with distant relish.

‘Sakharovsky will take it,’ Andropov said as soon as they were alone. ‘But he’s no fool as you well know. He’ll report my plan for Flitlianov to your security committee. You can only try and ride it out with them.’

‘Leave that to me. To us. Your plans for rounding up Flitlianov’s aides can be made to seem perfectly appropriate to the Politburo. The important thing is that Flitlianov should be made to run. Is that going ahead?’

‘Halfway. There’s more to come. But I think he’ll run.’

‘He’d better. Because unless he does we really can’t move at all. We’ve no hard evidence. But once he’s out of the country — known to be in the clear — then we can hit all the soft-liners here, in the Politburo and Central Committee, crack down on the new men, put them through the hoop one by one. Kosygin will not be able to prevent it: the security of the State will be in obvious jeopardy.’

Suslov lit another cigarette, chain-smoking. ‘Remember, we want some real conspiracy to show its head clearly: that would be the supreme justification for the new regime. We need some real opposition to make a proper change, an end to the Ostpolitik and the US detente. Flitlianov must run; that is the first thing. We can’t take him here. Any confession extracted from him by us would be mistrusted completely: our faction would be at a disadvantage from the outset. We must, when we move, be seen to be working quite naturally in response to a genuine threat to the State, which this is. We shall have ample grounds for starting our operation by the very fact of his escape. After that, of course, you must make every effort to get the names of the others in his group. But the crux of our whole plan is that Flitlianov should get safely out of the country and that his escape should be confirmed without question. What will he do, do you think? Where will he go? How will he do it?’

‘London perhaps. Where the telephone call originated. But how? I’ve no idea. He’ll have thought up something pretty good. He’s had the time, the position, the contacts. We may lose him from the very beginning.’

But as he said this Andropov felt the nervous reaction of a lie that had moved deep within him. For he thought he knew how Flitlianov would leave the country: he would leave it with or through his daughter. And he felt completely paralysed by this intuition — unable to prevent it or even investigate it. For this was precisely his and Suslov’s intention: as long as Flitlianov left the country, it didn’t matter how he did it. And Yuri Andropov saw his daughter for a moment floating away in the air, as in a fairy tale, escaping to a happy kingdom in the arms of another man — who was himself.

2

They drove almost two hundred kilometres north-east of Moscow, to the village of Orlyoni, in the darkness of Sunday morning. Turning off the main road here, passing a police check-point, they travelled another ten kilometres due east along what had once been little more than a winding cart track but now was a narrow paved road, with huge banks of frozen snow pushed into both ditches by ploughs. The country here was heavily wooded, undulating, without habitation. The trees were fir, cut fifty yards back from either side of the road, but from then on rising steeply and thickly in long avenues over the many small hills that dotted the area. It was part of a huge forestry development covering thousands of acres of what had once been a great estate before the revolution. Now it had been sealed off and, with the lodge at its centre, made over to the KGB. It was their country seat, as it were, used, among other things, to entertain guests — for shooting in the winter, and for training seminars and conferences in the summer.

The sky had just started to lighten as the half dozen cars drew up in front of the hunting lodge. Set on a hill which sloped gently away over open parkland down a long valley towards the forest, its tall chimneys and decorated gables caught the first thin rays of the sun while the men beneath stamped their feet about in the half-light of the forecourt. In the folds of the valley itself, below them to the west, there were still pools of complete darkness, broken here and there with haloes of mist, the tops of a few trees just visible, sticking up through these ponds of milk. The weather was grey, indeterminate and the temperature well below freezing. But the message in this early dawn was clear: quite soon the sharpness would catch fire and the sun would explode all over the short day.

In the long hall of the lodge the men gathered round a huge mahogany table where breakfast had been prepared: there was vodka and two silver samovars of burbling tea. The service was solicitous, the fare more than ample. The house and all its period furnishings had been preserved meticulously. There was an air of old bounty and tradition everywhere. Indeed apart from the electric grill for the cutlets and other burning meats there was nothing in the hall, and no human activity at that moment, which might not have passed there at a hunting breakfast a hundred years before.

The men, numbed after their drive, spoke little at first. But soon, with plates in their hands, tentatively fingering the hot meat, gathering round the two log stoves at either side of the hall, they began to take on the lineaments of a mild humanity. And later they were further encouraged by small, quick draughts of vodka and burning tea. The smell of woodsmoke, warm leather, gun-oil, the effects of raw spirit and simmering tea, drew about and stirred within the men a mood of expectant euphoria they could not resist.

The atmosphere in the hall, which had at first gradually relaxed, now quickly tightened. And by the time cigarette smoke drifted upwards past the boars’ heads and other trophies which ringed the walls, there was a clear sense of impending, irresistible release over the whole party.

The big hall doors were opened. A wall of air moved in over the company, crisp and cold as broken ice. The stoves roared quickly in the sudden draught; the waiters shivered; the men moved out into the forecourt — putting on their greatcoats, fur helmets, and gathering up their guns — with happy fortitude. And the sun, for that moment, perched in the mists of the eastern horizon, an orange bird held briefly in a cage of hills and trees before flight.

They set off westwards in a group down across the open parkland towards the forest. Here, at the lowest part of the valley, where the line of trees began sloping upwards for miles ahead of them, they were briefed by the head gamekeeper. The hunting block they were taking for the wild boar, he explained, would follow the oldest part of the plantation in the shape of a huge inverted L: a four-kilometre long first leg, bordered on the left by the road and guard fence of the estate, and then a shorter leg, starting with a clearing of rough underbrush turning northwards. For the first part of the hunt they would spread out along the kilometre width of the block, in line abreast, each of the dozen or so hunters accompanied by a gamekeeper. Shortly after they started, beaters would gradually move towards them from the northern extremity of the block so that, ideally, in this pincer movement, their quarry would be pushed towards the junction of the two arms by both parties and trapped in the clearing of the woods four miles ahead of them.

Outside a gamekeeper’s hut at the edge of the trees, they drew lots for position in the line. The head keeper checked the slips of paper. Yuri Andropov found himself at the extreme right-hand end of the line; the Czech Colonel was in the middle, with Alexei Flitlianov and Vassily Chechulian at two points in between them. The group broke up and moved along the line of trees towards numbered posts which had been set up several hundred yards apart as starting markers.

It was just after eight o’clock when a whistle pierced the woods and the men left the trampled snow at the bottom of the valley and began to move upwards through the light clean white carpets that lay between the long avenues of fir.

Two grouse suddenly exploded just in front of Alexei Flitlianov before he’d gone many steps into the forest, their wings beating sharply in alarm, squawking as they skimmed along beneath the branches further into the woods. He stopped, shaken for a moment. His keeper joined him, a small, wizened-faced man in an old fur cap with earflaps, his hands rather dirty, oily. He looked more like a garage mechanic than a sportsman.

‘Those are easier shooting,’ he said, trying to establish too immediate a cameraderie, Flitlianov thought. ‘With shotguns. These boar are difficult animals. You were here last year weren’t you, sir? I remember you got a big tusker then.’

‘No. That was Comrade Chechulian.’

‘Oh yes, of course. You’re right. It’s hard sometimes to tell people apart — all in the same kind of hunting clothes.’

‘Yes, indeed.’ The man had put his finger on it at once, Flitlianov thought: everyone in more or less the same kind of clothes, this shooting while moving forward in a line, the chance of a stray boar running back between two positions, a rifle swinging round in a 90 degree arc. An accident in these circumstances could be made to seem the most natural thing in the world. He had realised this from the beginning, of course, two days before at their meeting in the Rossiya Hotel. But he had long before agreed to go on this hunting expedition — he went every year — and could not therefore have avoided the occasion today: in Andropov’s present surprising mood he might fall upon anything as evidence of guilt.

He had been puzzled by Andropov’s behaviour at the meeting: he’d said there had been no intention of conducting a purge among his deputies but this was exactly what seemed to be happening. Was he trying to raise Chechulian from some cover? Was Vassily, who shared some of his own background, the man he suspected of this conspiracy? He seemed an unlikely candidate. But anything was possible. And it was in this vague cloud of suspicion and invention which Andropov now held over his deputies, that Flitlianov saw the answer to the mystery: Andropov was not sure of anything. He was simply intent on creating a mood of alarm, of psychological unease, by suggesting that he had complete knowledge of the conspiracy — so that the man or men involved would become unnerved, make a mistake, break cover. Andropov was in the middle of an elaborate bluff and this day’s hunting, Flitlianov felt sure, was a potentially dangerous part of it. Anything might happen. And thus he had laid his plans accordingly: he would move himself, long before anything could happen. The garage mechanic was not to be trusted of course. He would have to be the first to go.

Flitlianov moved forward again into the tunnel of heavy branches, bright sunlight breaking through them here and there on the snow in front of him, speckling the dark arcade with small patches of brilliant tinsel. After ten minutes’ walk he saw a small clearing ahead with a pile of fir trunks stacked in a large pyramid waiting to be taken away.

Further along the line to the right, Vassily Chechulian checked his rifle. He removed the ammunition, shot the bolt back and forth quickly several times, depressed the magazine spring up and down violently with his huge thumb, and then re-loaded it again carefully with a different supply from an inner pocket. For him this gun was what would get him safely through the day. It was a Mauser.375 barrel mounted on a Winchester sporting stock and he was remarkably well able to use it. He too had been worried by Andropov’s recent behaviour, his untypical flights of fancy over this imaginary Sixth Directorate, and he had come up with no good answer for it. He only knew, with the sure intuition born of many years experience of cover in the field, that he was exposed, at risk. From what quarter he had no idea, no more than he knew when or where the boar would run. And so the nerve of action was sharp in him that morning, all his senses resting on a hair-trigger: if there were to be any untoward accidents in. the coming hours he was determined to be the cause and not the result of them. He lit a cigarette and watched where the breeze would take the smoke: it drifted southwards along the line. He threw the cigarette away, washed the oil from his hands in a fistful of snow, dried them carefully in a fresh chamois cloth, and then drew a long breath, drinking the keen air several times deeply into his lungs. He waited another minute with his keeper, listening intently all round him, trying to fathom the silences that ran away from him in every direction, peering intently down all the long green tunnels. He saw that there was only a properly clear field of fire directly ahead or behind him, if he stayed in the track between the long straight rows of trees. So he moved forward in a zig-zag pattern, changing the angle of his walk by 90 degrees every forty yards or so, always moving diagonally across the lines of trees and thus, from any distance away, almost completely covered by them.

Half a mile away, to Chechulian’s right, at the edge of the line, Yuri Andropov walked along between the head gamekeeper and another man. The line of trees ended fifty yards away. There was a loggers’ track along the side of the wood and beyond that 200 metres of open ground rising steeply to the brow of a hill where the forest began again in a younger plantation. Behind him, out of sight in the distance, a forester’s jeep followed them along the rough track. He could just hear the engine on the wind as it climbed the steeper gradients, turning back towards it every so often, as though he was being pursued and not protected by it. His fingers were numb on the weapon; he did not know really how to use it. The spectacles he wore bit into the bridge of his nose painfully. His eyes had begun to water in the sharp air, blurring his sight. He could feel the drops running down his cheek; warm at first, like blood, but icy pellets by the time they reached his chin. He stumbled over some dead branches, making heavy weather in the thicker drifts of snow that had blown in from the edge of the wood. He seemed generally ill at ease.

Alexei Flitlianov stopped by the large pile of fir trunks, leant his rifle against them and glanced up at the circle of brilliant blue morning sky above the small clearing. He took his gloves off, blew on his hands and rubbed them together vigorously. They had been walking for almost half an hour. His keeper joined him, keeping his rifle in his hand.

‘Just the weather, isn’t it?’

The man nodded. ‘We had such snow this winter. The road out was blocked for weeks.’

‘You’re from these parts, are you?’

‘No. From Leningrad. I’m stationed at the village. Two weeks duty up here, then four days off.’

‘I know. You’re under Rakovsky aren’t you — at Orlyoni? Second Directorate, Leningrad south-east division.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Flitlianov thought then that the man must have been a plant put on to him by Andropov. Hadn’t Rakovsky been moved from that Leningrad area command six months before? But he couldn’t remember precisely.

‘Married?’

‘Two boys. Twelve and fourteen.’

‘Are your family with you here?’

The man hesitated. ‘No, they’ve not joined me yet. They’re still in Leningrad.’

‘Pity. I expect they’d like the hunting.’

‘Yes, sir, the younger one, Pytor, is very keen. It’s more the guns than the animals, I’m afraid; he’s very keen on guns. Youngsters are!’ The man laughed quickly, easing the rifle strap on to his shoulder.

‘Indeed, I know.’ Flitlianov chuckled — and then belched hugely. ‘God, I ate too well this morning. I must get it out. Will you wait for me.’

Flitlianov walked round towards the other side of the stack of logs, unbuttoning his coat. But the moment he was out of sight, he climbed quickly up the slope of trunks and found himself a niche between two of them at the top. He squeezed down, lying out full length, and waited. He must have been at least fifteen feet off the ground so that unless the keeper went looking for him up the hill, and then turned round, he could not be seen. Besides, in his fur helmet, brown leather overcoat and tan boots, he knew he must look something like a log.

Several minutes passed in silence. The sun beat down thawing the frozen drops of moisture on his sleeves. Already it had warmed the resin that seeped from the gashed trunks, so that, with his face buried among the logs, he felt himself beginning to suffocate in the strong smell of rising pine. Then he heard a sound, like a knuckle cracking, a rifle bolt breaking and then the bullet being rammed home. The man had come round to the far side of the logs. Another minute passed.

‘Comrade Flitlianov — are you all right?’

From somewhere away to their left a branch cracked, the sound running clearly down the light wind. Flitlianov raised his head a fraction. The man was just below, his back towards him. He turned his head in the direction of the sound.

‘Comrade Flitlianov?’

The gamekeeper’s voice was thin this time as if he expected no response. The man looked at the confused footprints in the snow and then started to follow them backwards down the hill into the trees. After a hundred yards he turned back and re-traced his steps to the clearing. Then he started to climb the pyramid of logs. At the top he stood up and looked all around him, shading his eyes from the hard sun. There was nothing to see anywhere — nobody, no sound, an empty world.

Flitlianov by now was well away from the clearing and running hard up the hill between the thickly arched trees. Then he turned sharply, at right angles, moving northwards across the plantation lines. He would have to be careful; this path would cross that of two or three other hunters, including Chechulian, before he came to Andropov’s beat at the end of the line. He had suspected from the beginning that somehow Andropov might be the real target of the day. Now he needed confirmation of this and of the marksman, if possible.

He had crossed two sets of tracks and must have been close to Chechulian’s path. But there was no sign of him or of his footprints. Chechulian must have slowed or been delayed in his walk. Flitlianov would have to wait until he passed. He stood quite still for a moment, listening, his eyes probing the dark corridors. There were footsteps somewhere, faint, but coming towards him, rising up the hill to his right. Then, a stone’s throw in the same direction, the undergrowth crackled and a brown shape exploded from it. The boar stood an instant in its tracks, then came for him, head down, moving fast, kicking up a flurry of snow behind it.

Chechulian raised his rifle to the animal and fired in one movement. Then he fired again at the receding form. The second shot had winged him, he thought, somewhere in the shoulder. The beast’s head had reared violently, it had stumbled, but had then charged away across the line of trees to the right. Chechulian re-loaded and moved after it, running.

After the first shot the boar had veered away from Flitlianov just as he’d thrown himself to one side, finding cover among some brush at the base of a large fir trunk. The second shot had hit the animal, ripping through the top of his shoulder, and a moment later he saw Chechulian and his man hurrying after it not five yards away from him. Flitlianov waited until the two of them were out of sight before getting up and moving quietly on across the line of trees.

Yuri Andropov heard the two shots to his left, and thirty seconds later the sound of underbrush and dead branches splintering violently, this new noise approaching him like an arrow. He gripped his rifle, half raising it — an involuntary, useless gesture, he knew, for the ammunition it contained was blank. And then the boar was upon them through the nearest line of trees. The group had no time to scatter. The keepers fired almost simultaneously. But for the first of them it was too late: the animal rammed him viciously about the legs and then started to gore his midriff. The second keeper threw himself forward, trying to kick the beast away, unable to get another shot in.

A rifle had fallen to the ground. Andropov picked it up and ran. He was fifty yards away from the struggling keepers, zigzagging through the trees before a first shot followed him; then came a ragged volley — the bullets slapping into tree trunks, kicking up little gobbets of snow about his feet. But it was useless. Andropov was running southwards, against the grain of the wood, the trees masking him more and more completely at every step. The forester’s jeep drew up at the edge of the trees. Two men got out and, leaving the keeper to tend his wounded colleague, they set off in pursuit.

Alexei Flitlianov kept his head well down among the bushes while this new shooting raged invisibly in front of him. When it had stopped he raised his head an instant and then ducked again. A man was running wildly towards him — a tall, burly figure, with a light silver fox-fur helmet and rimless spectacles: Yuri Andropov. But as he passed a few yards away from him Flitlianov recognised something else about the man: it was not Yuri Andropov but someone dressed and made up to look very like him.

Vassily Chechulian had stopped in his pursuit of the wounded animal when he heard the shooting. It could only mean one thing: Andropov, or some other party to his right, had sighted the boar, missed it, and succeeded only in heading it back towards him. It was coming for him now, the undergrowth rattling fifty yards ahead. He raised his rifle but the noise suddenly stopped. Something moved in a patch of dark scrub beneath the trees. He would have to flush the animal out. He fired once, and then a second time, the shots ringing violently in the silence. Then he moved carefully towards the patch of scrub. Halfway there he stopped. Two men were facing him from the other side of the bushes, their rifles covering him. And in the bushes lay the body of a man: Yuri Andropov.

Flitlianov worked his way across the edge of the forest and paused, crouching down behind the last line of trees. A covered forester’s jeep was parked on a logger’s track, its back towards him. There was no one around. He walked up behind it slowly. The front seats were empty. He put his head in through the driver’s window. Yuri Andropov and Alexander Sakharovsky were sitting quietly in the back seat. They started forward in alarm.

Flitlianov looked at them easily. ‘I heard all the shooting. What’s happened?’

The two men said nothing, looking at him in dulled astonishment.

‘What’s going on?’ Flitlianov put his rifle on the bonnet of the jeep and opened the driver’s door.

‘We don’t know yet. The men have gone to see,’ Andropov said at last. And then the two-way radio started to crackle beneath the dashboard. Flitlianov picked up the receiver and handed it over to Andropov.

‘Yes?’ he said, listening. ‘Who? — what happened?’ His voice rose in genuine surprise. ‘Yes, all right. Get them all back here as soon as possible. Yes, we’ll carry on with the hunt’ He handed the receiver back. ‘An accident, Alexei. They’ve shot me.’ He looked at Sakharovsky, smiled, and began to clamber out of the jeep, brushing himself down, stretching and stamping his legs in the snow. ‘Yes, they got me in the end.’ He looked up at the marvellous sky, blinking, his face bright now, satisfied, enjoying the crisp air. ‘And I thought it might have been you, Alexei.’ He smiled again, breathing deeply.

‘I don’t quite follow.’

‘Well — it did look just possible, no? This conspiracy — your background. I had to take everyone into consideration, even my deputies. But it wasn’t you of course, Alexei. I did you an injustice. It was Vassily Chechulian — who would have thought it? Yes, Vassily has just shot me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Flitlianov said in real astonishment.

‘A tragedy, Alexei.’ Andropov came forward, wiping his spectacles, then pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘You were right at our last meeting. All we need do now is chase the rest of the group up. I think we have our conspirator. Our liberal, our counter-revolutionary.’ He put his hand on Flitlianov’s shoulder. ‘Thank you, Alexei.’

Andropov took his rifle from Sakharovsky, shot the bolt several times, loaded it, checked the safety catch, and finally made some imaginary passing shots in the air. Then he turned, and swung the rifle down towards Flitlianov. Sakharovsky, standing behind him, made an involuntary movement to one side.

‘Oh, and by the way, Alexei,’ Andropov checked his rifle again, crooked it under his arm like a shotgun and walked casually towards him, ‘now that we’re all three alone together, we can get on with some other important business that’s just come up: your internal security division. We need some work done in America. I’d like you to get one of your men to New York to check out one of our circles there. Do you have anyone you can send at once? You normally have some one in the pipe-line ready for these occasions — a completely fresh face.’

‘Yes, I have someone — due to go over to America quite soon in any case. Part of a routine replacement. He’s ready.’

‘A good man?’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean, you’re sure of him? He’s clear. No one has any tail on him?’

‘Absolutely. As you know, we keep these men completely clear of any contact at their base before sending them into a target area. He’s done some work before for us in Africa, years ago. But he’s completely unmarked now.’

‘Fine, I’ll give you the details tomorrow. Let’s get on with the hunting.’

The three men walked away from the jeep, up the hill, Andropov still brushing himself down, almost frisking about, as though he had been in a cardboard box all morning. His driver and his bodyguard emerged from the woods with the body of a man. The two groups stood together a moment in the dazzling light, Andropov giving directions like a stage producer, before they separated and the three hunters disappeared into the dark green tunnel of trees.

Alexei Flitlianov shot nothing at the hunt and on the drive back to Moscow that afternoon he looked out at the dull landscape, the bright day gone, remarking on the weather and the traffic to his Czech colleague who travelled back with him. But he disliked this flat countryside — a muddy April thaw edging the road, beginning to creep in over the immense fields — a landscape so drab and featureless by comparison with the sharp mountains and tangy springs of his own Georgian background in the south. And thus he politely lied about the beauties of the Moscow plain to the man beside him: he lied as he had done for most of his life, while thinking of other things that were true.

So they believed it was Chechulian, who had been quietly arrested midway through the hunt — or did they? Did Yuri Andropov really think that or was he pretending just as he’d had another man pretend to be him, and had Chechulian conveniently shoot the impostor? Or had the shooting been pure chance, an accident as Chechulian, he’d heard, had protested? Questions one could never ask. But whatever the reasons behind Andropov’s behaviour, whatever his real motive in arresting Chechulian, there was no doubt that Andropov, in his charade at the hunt, had been putting the pressure on him as well.

Chechulian’s arrest could have been a blind, so that he should feel himself in the clear — clear to make the one mistake which would completely convict him, which would be indisputable evidence of his guilt. And that mistake would be to run now.

Yet, on the other hand, if one took the arrest to be genuine, as it might well be, there was an inevitable progression to it: Chechulian, Flitlianov knew, was innocent; he himself was the man they wanted. And Andropov must soon discover Chechulian’s innocence: then the lamps would move brightly onto him. And then he would wish he’d run when there was the chance.

The English had a phrase for it — he could hear Andropov himself using it, happy in his sudden bizarre colloquialisms: ‘Six of one; half a dozen of the other.’ There was nothing in it. He had a few days. He had to run.

They had come to the outer suburbs of the capital now, an expanse of identical high-rise apartments that stretched away far beyond his vision. A People’s Park lay beside the roadway. And that too had been completely laid out in concrete. Yet Alexei looked now on these drab emblems of his nation’s progress with regret, and even spoke enthusiastically of the new development to his companion. He would have to go. And so this brutal urban sprawl took on a precious form. A time had come that he’d hoped would never come again, for he’d always imagined that he would have been able to see his work through without another exile like the first — his years as a KGB officer in Beirut, West Berlin, New York, London, preparing the way meticulously for his eventual return to Moscow and his present eminent position within the organisation.

It was Snakes and Ladders, and he had hit that square high up on 99 just before the end of the game that sent you tumbling right back to the beginning.

Yet not quite the beginning, he reflected. He wasn’t running away; he was running back into it all over again from the outside, fulfilling one of many contingency plans that had been arranged long before. He was leaving in order to build his group up again inside the citadel of Dzerzhinsky Square. There were men at this moment — he didn’t know their names or how many, some of them quite possibly colleagues of his, and other senior KGB officers in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia — who were members of his group, who had been recruited over the years by his various deputies overseas and at headquarters. And the only way he could make contact with these people, and re-activate the group at the centre, was to get out and contact his first deputy, and with him set the whole business in motion again. This man was his link with all the others, and thus with his whole political and personal future.

There was also the List, held in safety overseas by a person whose real name and whereabouts only he knew of, and which he might now familiarise himself with for the first time. This was a complete register of all the members in his clandestine group — their names, positions within the KGB, and elsewhere in the Soviet establishment, and all other relevant data: their ‘file’. One more reason for leaving — for this was the most crucial information of all — the identity of this person — and it was at risk now and would continue to be for as long as he remained in Russia.

There were as well more than a dozen key figures in Moscow — four in the army, two in both the navy and the air-force, three senior officers with the KGB, six on the Central Committee and two in the Politburo — with whom he had made common cause over the years. They were his ‘recruits’; and this had been his main activity during his years in Moscow — searching out these men of new government in the Union, these men of goodwill who, for the moment, were behaving just like all the others, as bureaucratic robots, who had for so long denied all the human values of Marxism. They had worked well at the mechanics of government, these people, at industrial, military, of course, and now even consumer development. But they had left Russia barren of individual spirit, of singular idiosyncrasy and choice, of all inventive and exuberant life. And these qualities, Flitlianov believed, had been among the essential purposes of the revolution. They had been consistently and intentionally betrayed by all but a very few in power over the years, and of those who had supported these ideals nearly all were now in exile or long dead — apart from Flitlianov’s contacts, the very few in government who were stall there, like cocoons buried deep in rotten wood, waiting for the spring.

But of course he could make no use of such people now. It was impossible to risk their cover simply in order to save his own skin. They would soon find out that he was gone, keep their heads down until the storm blew over, and await developments from abroad. All the more important that he should get out now, he knew, for these were names he might well disclose under torture.

How closely were they watching him, he wondered, when he got back to his apartment in the centre of the city that evening? He looked out at the dark street: a few people hurrying by, fewer cars, a thin snow falling. There was no one around, no stationary vehicles. One of his own personal security guards in the ground-floor apartment would probably have been made responsible for the surveillance. Very well, then, he would make use of him. It didn’t matter for the first part of the journey. It would only count when he made the switch. He telephoned downstairs, speaking to the duty officer of the guard.

‘My appointments in Leningrad this week — I’ll travel overnight on the sleeper. Reserve me a front compartment and whatever you need for yourself. No — tonight. Now. Yes, I’ll be going alone. Warn the Leningrad bureau. Have them pick me up first thing when I get there.’

He went through some papers on his desk, putting a few of them in a briefcase. There was nothing to destroy. There never had been. He had always kept himself ready for immediate retreat. His housekeeper, a silent Eskimo-faced woman from the north, busied herself about the place, making up a suitcase for him. There was nothing else he needed to take. Everything would be ready for him in Leningrad. There were only the photographs which he would have to leave: his mother not long before she died, so young-looking it seemed she had years of life in her, who had died so suddenly, and his father, the railway engineer, stout with moustaches in the Georgian manner, quite old, taken at a holiday camp for retired staff on the Caspian. And there were his younger brother and sister, their families, his nephews and nieces. Would they suffer? How would they suffer? Long experience of his own work so quickly led him to an actual vision of that possible suffering, the mechanics of it.

He had not married so that there should not be that tie to deal with if the occasion ever arose — as it had now. But there were all these others, suddenly frail and exposed with his leaving. He felt for a moment that he should stay in Russia — simply go to Leningrad, return and accept the consequences. But just as he had made every physical preparation for sudden departure so he had long before anticipated exactly this emotional hurdle and the attitude he would take to it: the answer, he knew, was that they might well suffer, be used as hostages to try and bring him back to Russia. And he would do nothing about it. It wasn’t selfishness. He had staked his life on his political beliefs. Once you did that there was nothing you could do about the others. You had condemned them, in a society such as his, from the first moment of deviation — a contrary thought thirty years before, a morning at the University when a professor had presented as fact something you knew to be a lie: and that sudden moment’s consciousness of truth and difference was as dangerous as a bullet, a gun pointing at you and your friends and family for ever afterwards.

The only object he took with him which he would not normally have taken on such a trip was a small bamboo cigarette pipe he’d used fifteen years before in Beirut. Originally, he’d bought two of them — one for her as well, and they’d smoked them together, only once, rather self-consciously, one afternoon driving round the hills behind the American University. They’d laughed at each other. And he remembered that cigarette and the laughter.

He didn’t look round the apartment. Yet he was suddenly aware of the deep silence of the rooms — a quality of abandoned space, a prefiguration of his departure. He said goodbye to the housekeeper, counting out her money for her, exactly.

Then he went.

But she called to him when he was half-way down the corridor, and came to him, the money in her hand. He knew what it was at once. She never spoke of these things in the apartment itself.

‘Would you?’ she said, handing him some of the money. ‘If you have the chance. From the dollar shop — lipstick, hair spray, toothpaste, anything like that. My daughter —’

‘Fine, I’ll see to it. Next time my secretary goes there. Keep the money.’

He turned away, and now for the first time his leaving became real to him.

There was a smell of burnt flint in the station — dead sparks from the overhead cables, the leaking discharge of dynamos, the peppery smell of recent fireworks. The big engine throbbed at the end of the shallow platform. Just beyond it, outside the canopy, the snow fell brightly in the light. But a yard beyond this glittering curtain there was a deep darkness and a silence, so that the noise and illumination inside made the terminus a stage for a huge party, the guests taking frenzied last drinks and saying goodbye before embarking for an uncertain destination. The heavy sleeper carriages waited for them, curtains drawn, like the vehicles of a cortège.

Flitlianov’s compartment was near the head of the train and as he walked towards it, his two security men behind him, he saw Yelena Andropov and her husband climbing up the steps of the same carriage. The three of them met in the corridor while the attendant was showing them to their separate quarters.

‘Hello!’ She shouted to him loudly, still half the length of the corridor away, so that his security men turned questioningly behind them. Even a greeting with her, he thought, had all the brazen quality of a revolutionary manifesto, a call from the beginning for the truth. He feared for her more than for himself. His world of deceit wasn’t hers, after all. And though she shared his beliefs he was amazed each time she publicly confirmed her association with him. When he left, what would happen to her, even with her father’s influence? — a woman whom some would so sharply remember had been a friend of his.

But she had always told him not to fear. So often she had said that when he’d spoken to her about the risks she took. ‘I’d rather die laughing than crying … what other way is there? … discretion is the worst means of concealment.’ And there were other phrases of the same sort, brisk affidavits of her faith which were a continual absolution for him — outspoken, serious words, but never given seriously. In her fearlessness and free intelligence she had the quality of some pre-revolutionary aristocrat, he thought. Yet she had been born after that time. And this brought him great warmth, for sometimes he felt his ambitions were unique, that individual spirit had disappeared completely in Russia. Yet now, in her greeting alone, he sensed the existence of irony, knowledge and laughter hidden everywhere in the land.

He had tea with them in their compartment, the three of them crowded slightly among the bunks, the train pulling out of the station and beginning to sway very slightly, a boat moving into the current of twisting rails, the drive of wind and snow. Her husband talked to him formally about nothing, drinking nervously, so that soon she took the conversation up herself.

‘We saw Arkadi Raikin’s new show at the Rossiya on Friday night. Did you go? It was fine.’

‘Not yet. I’ve been busy. An official visit — a Czech delegation.’

‘Yes, Father told me. You were hunting on Sunday. I suppose you never missed once.’

‘No — because I never fired once.’

‘What’s it like up there where you go? Near the Morivinian forests isn’t it? I’ve never been there.’

‘Very wild, isolated. Swamps, bogs — and of course forests.’ He smiled at her.

‘It’s where all the labour camps are, yes? “Prison Province”.’

The train lurched over points, going through a junction some miles north of Moscow, keeping left on the main Leningrad line.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This is the junction here. They go off that way.’ He pointed eastwards through the curtains.

‘“They”.’ Yelena considered the word carefully. ‘What do they do up there?’

‘Logging mostly. Timber felling and carting. And they make furniture. And television cabinets. They do fairly well. It’s not too bad. Short-term and first offenders.’

‘The others go further away?’

‘Yes. The serious cases. Persistent offenders. They go all the way. The Ukraine, Siberia, the Arctic Islands.’

‘Really to another country?’

‘Yes.’ He nodded, looking closely at Yelena now. ‘Another country altogether.’

The attendant came to the door. His compartment was ready. He stood up, wondering if she had understood anything of his plans, his predicament, from this exchange.

‘Oh, by the way.’ she said, returning his look just as carefully, ‘talking about other countries, you should take a look at the London exhibition we have at the Hermitage now: “Two Centuries of European Baroque”. Paintings, metalwork, porcelain, jewellery. Mostly from the Wallace Collection. It’s the last few days before we send them back — if you think you need to see them?’ She emphasised the word, questioningly.

‘Yes — if I have time.’ And then more urgently: ‘Yes, I’d like to,’ and then softly, as her husband was speaking to the attendant: ‘As soon as I can. Tomorrow.’

She nodded and looked quickly away and he thought now that she had understood everything, that his message had got through to her. For in their affair, publicly and alone, they had long become accustomed to just such unspoken communication, adept in transmitting their needs as well as their affection through parables or by an expressive silence.

Flitlianov went to his compartment, checking with his two security men in the adjoining one on the way. Then he locked the door, and, with a deal of bumping and clattering of shoes, went through the motions of settling down for the night.

At two o’clock in the morning the train pulled into Morivinia station, the half-way point on the journey. Here it would wait for the arrival of the Leningrad-Moscow sleeper, due at any moment on the down platform. The snow had stopped. Odd strong gusts of wind whipped a thin covering of white along the roofs and across the platforms. The sky was clear, all the stars perfectly ordered and visible. The huge train slept. A lone official walked past its curtained windows. The guard stepped down from his van at the end. Two militiamen, heavily clothed in fur coats and helmets, machine pistols slung from their shoulders, stood silently by the exit at the middle of the platform. Behind them, in the shadow of the station canopy, two plain-clothes men from Sakharovsky’s special task force looked on.

Inside the train, Flitlianov’s two security men were awake — looking and listening, plumbing the silence for the slightest sound or movement: one in the corridor standing next to Flitlianov’s locked compartment; the other scanning the deserted platform on the other side of the tracks.

A minute passed. The militiamen shifted their feet discreetly. The guard checked his watch with the official at the far end of the platform. At the opposite end, in the cabin of the leading engine, a man was talking easily to the driver.

‘Of course, Comrade,’ the driver said, ‘I knew your father. When I worked the Southern Region — the Yalta — Moscow line — he was Engineer-in-Charge: a very fine man, a great man.’

In front of them as they spoke, half a mile away, the engine lights of the Moscow sleeper appeared, two long brilliant beams, fanning out over a carpet of snow, rounding a curve. It glided towards them against the wind without a sound.

‘It’s an honour to meet you, Comrade,’ the driver went on as the express passed their cab, drawing into the station. ‘I’ve greatly enjoyed our talk. Though you know as much about the railways as I do myself, if I may say so.’

‘My father taught me everything — never stopped talking about it. I take no credit for it. He was the real railway man.’

‘Indeed, indeed.’ They shook hands firmly, warmly, full of old memory. Then Alexei Flitlianov took his briefcase and climbed down onto the tracks between the two trains. He rounded the last carriage of the Moscow-bound sleeper and confronted the guard who had just got down from it, showing him his identity card. The man saluted promptly.

‘My reservation please. For Moscow. It was booked last night — joining the train at Morivinia.’

‘This way, sir. I’ll get the attendant at once.’

Flitlianov climbed up into the last carriage where a compartment had been reserved for him. The attendant opened the door.

‘Some tea, sir. Or some coffee? We have some coffee.’

‘Something stronger, please. If you have any. It’s cold.’

‘Certainly, sir. At once. Do you have anyone travelling with you?’

‘No, no one.’

Flitlianov turned towards the curtained window. The wheels of the Leningrad sleeper moaned briefly as the brakes were released and the train drew out of the station. Two minutes later his own train left and the attendant arrived with a half bottle of export vodka and a glass on a little tray.

By eight o’clock he was back at the Moscow terminus — just in time to catch the morning express to Leningrad. And by five that afternoon he had crossed the bridge onto Nevsky Prospect and was walking towards the Hermitage Museum.

He met Yelena downstairs in her office of the Exhibition and Loans department in the basement of the building, posing as the curator of a distant museum come to the Hermitage to choose some paintings for a provincial exhibition.

They walked along the basement to the new storage room, a long, specially lit and heated chamber. Here they inspected various paintings from the several thousand available, stored in lines, each canvas suspended over the floor in sliding racks, marked alphabetically after the artist, so that any work could be reached almost immediately by pulling the open crates out on their runners into the wide central aisle. The room was empty, smelling slightly of warm turpentine, and there was the vague sound of machinery somewhere. But none the less, Yelena spoke briskly and officially.

‘All the same, it seems to me, for a proper balance, you need some of the moderns — even if you’re not going beyond 1900. You should perhaps acknowledge the beginnings of the movement…. The Impressionists, of course. But none of our major examples is available, I’m afraid. A Manet perhaps. We have a sequence of his “Seine at Marly” paintings — one of those we could spare.’

‘Yes,’ Flitlianov said uneasily. ‘And what about Modigliani?’

‘Really outside your period altogether. Though we have some exceptional examples.’

They moved half down the chamber to the racks of the middle letters: Manet, Matisse, Modigliani.

‘Let me show you some in any case.’

She pulled a rack out gently, the first open crate sliding forward, a canvas stored on either side. And then another one. And a third, so that the central aisle was now partly blocked and they were hidden from the doorway. They stood facing a large Modigliani nude.

‘Well?’ Yelena inquired in a true voice, turning away from the dark glamour of the picture, the rose thighs, the incisive outlines of body and crotch.

‘Yes,’ he said simply, suddenly tired, gazing at the nude, a weary business man in a strip club. ‘Yes, it’s now.’

‘Everything is ready. A few details, that’s all.’

‘Passports, exit visa, money?’

‘You prepared it all yourself, Alexei. It’s all here. All you have to do is sign and pre-date your own authority for this man.’

‘And the London paintings will be the first trip out of here — the Baroque exhibition?’

‘Yes, you’re lucky. Thursday morning. The exhibition ends today. There’ll be two days packing. Then they go direct to London, part of the weekly cargo flight, an Ilyushin 62.’

She pulled the Modigliani over to one side and replaced it with another canvas, an early Matisse.

‘Cubist. Not for you at all.’ She changed her tone again. It was formal, almost scolding. ‘But effective. I like his invention — and his restraint. They balance out. With Picasso the same thing gets out of hand — too wild and no control.’

‘Stop it, for God’s sake.’

They looked at each other, both suddenly angry: tongue-tied, so much to say, and no time now, or place, to say it — resenting their shared experience because they could no longer acknowledge it. So they felt guilty as if they had carelessly broken their affair themselves some time before and had met now with only the blame to apportion.

‘You’ll have two days to wait. The room is ready.’

Two men appeared at the far end of the aisle, a young man and someone much older, balding with glasses. The young man had a clip-board and pencil in his hand.

‘The deputy curator. They’re preparing an Old Master exhibition — Titian, Tiepolo, Vermeer, Velazquez: they’ll be coming past us. Let me do the talking if they stop.’

But they stopped some distance in front of them, pulling a rack out early in the alphabet.

‘Boucher, Botticelli,’ Yelena said brightly. ‘We’re all right. Yes, the room: you know it. The old varnishing-room. There’s food. And water from the sink. It’s kept locked, used as a paint and chemical store-room now. They have to come to my office for the key. And there’s still an internal telephone, so I can warn you. Everything is there, as we arranged: the suitcase on top of the cupboard on the left. The suit is inside, hanging with a lot of old overalls. And the papers are taped underneath the cupboard: two passports — the Russian and the Lebanese, your new KGB identity card and the money, twenty-five thousand dollars in travellers cheques. I have your exit visa here, stamped last week and dated for travel on Thursday. All you do is sign it.’

The two men had finished with Botticelli and had now begun to move down the aisle towards them.

‘Hello Vladimir.’ Yelena turned to the balding man.

‘Can’t wean you off the moderns, can we, Yelena? All that bourgeois decadence.’

With any encouragement he might have stopped and talked. But she looked at him quickly, a finger to her lips, gesturing over her shoulder at Alexei. The deputy curator moved away.

‘How many will there be?’ Alexei asked when they had gone.

‘Two porters and an assistant curator from the museum and a fourth man, one of our security staff. You’ll be the fifth in the party — the additional KGB security officer, as we arranged. Loading starts first thing Thursday; I’ll phone down, let yourself out and come up to the packing-room. Introduce yourself, hang around. The flight leaves at midday. There’ll be some of our Embassy staff in London to meet it. But you should get clear away at the cargo terminal before they know who you are. The cargo manifest which they’ll have beforehand only names the four museum staff as accompanying personnel. They won’t know anything about you. Come on.’ She pushed all the Ms — the Modiglianis and Matisses — gently back into position.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said as they moved towards the entrance of the sweetly humming chamber.

‘No, I’m not surprised. Once we started on this, put so much work into it, I was sure that one day you’d have to use it. The sorry was there from the beginning. Will it be all right in London?’ she went on in the same matter-of-fact voice. ‘You’ll have someone there?’

‘Yes, I’ll be contacting a colleague. A close friend. I’ll be all right.’

They looked at each other once, walking slowly up the aisle, but said nothing more.