Traitor's Kiss

…Chapter Nine

The plan, as dictated by Rupert Mowbray, was simple, straightforward to the point of banality.

Jerry the Pole led the team past Braniewo until they turned off at the farm gateway and parked up to leg it cross-country. He had the papers to go through the frontier post in his old Mercedes. The team would go through the fence where they had holed it, then move on foot to the barn outside the village of Lipovka, by the Vituska river, where Jerry the Pole would pick up three of them, drive for the city of Kaliningrad, the zoo, and the rendezvous point at the hippopotamus pen. The Mercedes, with Ferret aboard, would drive back to the barn.ad Ferret would be taken over the fields into the forest line, and through the fence, while Jerry the Pole negotiated the frontier post. A simple plan, Rupert Mowbray maintained, was always the best plan.

Locke hadn't slept, had risen at dawn plagued by the notion that what was done could not be undone. He had met Alice at breakfast, they had driven to Braniewo — now they walked the streets.

'So, what the hell's the problem?' Alice was at his shoulder and gripped his coat sleeve. He shook her off. 'If there's a problem, it's better talked through.'

Ahead was the open street-market, the stalls laid out with vegetables and cheap clothes. Among them were older men and their women, and housewives with small children, peering at the produce, tugging at the clothes and looking wistfully at the price tags. Past the open street-market was the concrete block, graffiti-scrawled, of the public lavatories.

'For God's sake, Gabriel, it's the big day — what's the bloody problem?'

When he had risen, and gone out of the hotel — while Alice was at breakfast — he had seen the local men, who hadn't work to go to, sitting, smoking, on the benches overlooking the marina. Others had promenaded past the yachts and launches, had gone by the pontoon bridge to the piers. One had stood close to the bollard, unwrapped a sticky sweet and dropped the paper beside it. Cars hemmed in the Fiat saloon. Everything was as he had remembered it in the night. The man chewing his sweet, cracking it in his teeth, would not have seen the slight blood smear on the bollard, level with his knee, but it was there. Locke had moved on past the benches and had gone near to the car; the men lounging nearby would not have seen that the Fiat was unlocked, the button on the door clearly in the 'up' position, and the open briefcase lying between the kids' seats. He had edged towards the pontoon and the water lapping it. The leg floated under the pontoon's planks among plastic bags, drifting cans and wood spars — Locke had seen it. The sodden dark trouser turn-up, the grey sock and the laced black shoe. He had seen them, then hurried away.

'You want out, don't you?' Alice accused. 'You think this is all beneath you?'

Beyond the lavatory building, above the flapping canvas stall roofs, was the high spire of the church. Two young men — shaven heads, T-shirts, genuine leather jackets — were emptying the boot of a shining Audi 6-series of cartons of American cigarettes and stacking them on a stall.

'It's in your mind that he's a traitor…'

He snapped, 'Do me a favour, Alice, don't presume to know what's in my mind.'

'Obvious to a blind deaf mute — he's a traitor, he's not worth bothering with. You have a big, big attitude problem. You know that? How did you get through IONEC? They're supposed to weed out the misfits. A traitor. A hundred years ago, army officers wouldn't touch agent intelligence unless they'd gloves on—"Mustn't get our lily-white hands dirty, must we?" When he first walked in there were idiots at VBX who couldn't believe he was genuine, wanted him to do a polygraph. Rupert gave them a good kicking. Our Service is nothing — got me? nothing — without agents. Viktor—'

Locke spun, faced her. 'Oh, thank you. Viktor — I've never been trusted with his name.'

For a moment he'd stopped her. She gagged. 'Ferret…Ferret has more bravery, more than you'll ever know, more in his fingernail than in your whole bloody body.'

His face was set, cold. 'If you say so, Alice.'

Alice softened. 'Sorry — tell me about the problem.'

Locke said grimly, 'Did I say there was a problem? Did I? Fine, you want a problem. Try this. We are asked to take risks. People get hurt when risks are taken. We are sanctioned to hurt people — for a flawed bloody daydream, a lunatic policy. We play as if we are above the law, like morality doesn't count for us. We—'

'Not we, Gabriel. We are here, not in Kaliningrad. The people who are trained for it, they're going to Kaliningrad. We're cosseted here leaving the sharp end to people who know what they're doing. Get real.'

He could not tell her. He wondered how long it would be before the body was fished from the marina.

It was like the time between life and death, or the hours when darkness turned to light.

Viktor did not know about religion, and few of his fellow officers were churchgoers because that was still a hindrance to career advancement, but his mother had turned to the Orthodox faith after his father's death. His mother had said that death was not darkness.

Time had to be spent, exhausted, used up. He had barely looked round the room that might be contaminated by the presence of a radio microphone or a fisheye lens. He must struggle, for the remaining hours, to follow a routine of total predictability. The first decision: whether to run on the beach. He had not. He had dressed in his best, as he would on any day that he went to work in the admiral's outer office, and he had taken breakfast in the senior officers' mess. He had left the cache of papers behind the tile in the shower unit. When he was gone, and his flight was confirmed, that night or the next morning, his quarters would be taken apart with crowbars and sledgehammers. By then his new life would have begun. Viktor would have liked to take the picture of Malbork Castle down from the wall and put it into his briefcase, but it was left, as was everything else. Before he had locked the door behind him, he had looked a last time around the room. He had eaten sparingly, because that was his way, and an officer from Personnel — a decent man — had come to his table to talk leave charts; another, from Armaments, had come to mutter of a difficulty with munitions' shelf life. He had dealt with them the way he always did, curtly but not unpleasantly. The route between life and death was the zoo in Kaliningrad. He'd felt a strange peace as he'd sipped coffee and eaten a roll.

He walked from the senior officers' mess across the parade ground. In front of him were the low dormitories of the conscripts and beyond was the complex of the fleet commander where he would spend those hours.

Viktor Archenko had been seventeen years old when his father had died at Totskoye. Outside that town, 225 kilometres west of Orenburg, hidden from outsiders by a forest, guarded by fences and patrols, was a closed community of the airforce. His father, Pyotr, was a major, a test pilot. The base was dedicated to the preparation of air-launched nuclear weapons. His father's illness had come quickly. As the leukaemia had gripped him, as plans were made for his retirement from the airforce, Viktor had watched, in his own unspoken agony, the deterioration. A month before the family were due to move out of the base, already avoided by the neighbouring families living beside them, his father had died. At the funeral, an airforce general had suggested that the young Viktor, with his athleticism and parentage, would easily find a berth as a pilot when he left high school. There was in him — well hidden a streak of rebellion. He had seen the way his father's colleagues shunned him in illness, and he had volunteered for the navy. Fourteen years later, when the same leukaemia had taken his mother — when he had learned on her deathbed of his grandmother — he had been told also the cause of the disease that had taken his father's life. A test pilot had been ordered up in a veteran MiG-17 fighter that was loaded with measuring instrumentation. He was Major Pyotr Archenko, and he had told his wife of his fear. The fighter aircraft was aged, at the end of its working life, as was the pilot. His father had said that the order could not be refused, or the charge at a court martial would be that of treason. A nuclear device was exploded, on stilts and a few metres above ground level. A test pilot was instructed to fly through the spreading mushroom cloud. The generals had cowered in the safety of radiation-proof bunkers. His father had flown through the pitching storm of the explosion. The instrumentation's information had been downloaded, the test pilot had been checked over by doctors cocooned in radiation-protective suits.

Viktor had heard the story, and the story of his grandmother. He had taken the first opportunity. An earlier chance, five weeks before, had been a visit of Archangel convoy veterans from Great Britain who had come to the city to celebrate the bringing of war munitions to the Soviet Union, but he had not been able to get close to them. The first opportunity had been the arrival of a Hull-based trawler to Murmansk. It was in memory of his father and his grandmother, and the hate had burned in him, with the demand for revenge.

He walked briskly, the way he always walked. His name was called, softly and with respect. Workmen were on the top of the second-nearest dormitory building where they were replacing a section of metal roofing, through which machine-gun bullets, 12.7mm calibre, had been fired. He turned, and saw the conscript, Vasiliev.

'May I speak to you?'

'Speak,' Viktor said sharply. It broke the pattern of his everyday life that he should stop for conversation with a conscript. He had not seen the watchers, but assumed they were around him. It was his discipline that he did not look for them.

'I am going to shoot on the range tomorrow.'

'That is good.' Viktor took a part of cruel indifference: it was necessary. He walked on, indicated he did not wish to linger.

But the conscript followed him. 'Because of you — to thank you for saving me, for bringing back the NSV machine-gun, Captain, I went to your room yesterday.'

'It was not necessary.' Viktor was brusque, as if he sought to brush away an irritation.

'You should know…' Vasiliev blurted, '…I went to your room yesterday. Men were coming out, they had been in your room. They hid their faces from me. Three men. They had a key to your room.'

From the side of his mouth, without turning his head, 'Was Piatkin with them? Was the zampolit one of them?'

'No, no…I had not seen them before. I had never seen them before, with Major Piatkin or not. The one who seemed in charge, controlled them, he was the youngest…but he dressed like a derelict, not like an officer…I had to tell you.'

'Thank you. I hope you shoot well tomorrow. Go back to your duties.'

He walked on, leaving the conscript behind. The very action of talking to him endangered Vasiliev. A watcher would not have known the bond between a captain, second rank, and a young soldier of Naval Infantry. There would be many who would face danger by association when his flight, and his guilt, were discovered. They had come, the new men. They would have come from Moscow. Time ran, sand slipped in the glass. Did he have enough time, now that the new men were on the base? The sentries saluted at the entrance to the fleet commander's headquarters building.

Viktor found Admiral Alexei Falkovsky in a mood of noisy good humour.

Jerry the Pole was late.

The frontier checks had been slow, but that was predictable. First the Polish formalities, with a long, stretched queue of cars and lorries: he had allowed for that. Five hundred metres beyond the Polish border post was the first Russian block, and more delays as his papers were examined by the stolid-faced military. Then a further half-kilometre on was Russian Customs and more questions to be answered. Beyond the border, Jerry the Pole had accelerated. Then he had heard the siren. The speed limit in the Kaliningrad oblast was seventy kilometres per hour. Jerry the Pole was used to Germany, where there was no limit on a motorist's speed on an open road.

The siren was behind him, and the police car filled his mirror. He slowed, then pulled over. He sat bolt upright in his seat, and wound down the window as the policeman advanced on him. A fat sloth of a man in dull blue uniform, shapeless and ill-fitting, sauntered to him and, with studied contempt, pulled out a notebook.

What to do? Jerry the Pole asked what was the fine for speeding. He was told that for being guilty of speeding it was forty roubles. He paid the fine with a 100-rouble note and gestured that he did not expect change and a receipt. He wondered when the traffic policeman had last been paid, and whether he would have a pension when he retired. There was a large pistol holstered at the traffic policeman's belt. If it were the return journey from the city across the oblast, if he had had the three men inside the Mercedes, and the one they had gone to lift, and if a traffic policeman had stopped them, what would they have done? He smiled ingratiatingly and stumbled his apologies. On the road again, he made certain that the speed limit was not exceeded.

When he reached the village of Lipovka he reached into the glove box for the map drawn by Billy. He took a wrong turning because he was not expert in reading a map, and that delayed him further. He'd lost fifteen more minutes before he came to the rendezvous point at the barn. As he turned the car, they emerged from the undergrowth — three of them.

Billy rapped on the window. 'You are fucking late.'

Lofty opened the back door, snatched at it. 'Don't you carry a bloody wristwatch?'

None of them had asked why he was late, had queried if he had had a difficulty and how he had overcome it. When the doors slammed shut on them, the wheels spun in the mud near the barn and he drove away. Beside and behind him they were silent. Jerry the Pole drove towards the main road and at the junction was the signpost to Kaliningrad. Inside the speed limit they would be in the city, and the zoo, in an hour. Billy was in the front, hunched over the map spread across his thighs, and his coat was thrown open. Jerry the Pole could see the pistol butt jutting from his waistband.

Billy Smith was the team leader — why was he there?

He had left behind the tin-roofed, plank-walled hut on the shores of the loch, and his paints and his paper, and the panoramic views that were his inspiration. The owner of the gallery in Glasgow that handled his work had told him that his was a rare talent. He went to Glasgow to deliver his work twice a year; the larger watercolours were priced by the gallery at 3250 pounds and the smaller ones fetched 1195 pounds apiece. They were hung in the boardrooms of Glasgow banks, in the waiting rooms of investment brokers, the lobbies of medical consultants, and they were in the homes of the elite of the city. The gallery owner had introduced him to a money man. His takings from his work were in gilts, blue chips and government bonds. He could have lived in a smart apartment in Glasgow, in a warehouse conversion. He had no financial need to be bent into an old Mercedes, with a pistol handle gouging his stomach, heading into Kaliningrad. The money man sent a monthly cash package to his wife, Josie, for the upkeep of the children, Tracey and Leanne; he was long divorced and had not seen his children for fourteen years, but he kept them in food and clothes, and paid for the roof over their heads.

Why?

Life, for Billy Smith, was a slow dribble of failure. The refuge on Loch Shiel, under Beinn Odhar Mhor, was an escape, a bolthole. His work, his watercolours, were a flight from the consequences of what he had done. He had taken the life, on the foreshore of Carlingford Lough, of a young man who had gone to lift his pots for lobsters and crabs, and had protected himself and his patrol from prosecution by brazen lies. He had failed himself and, as their sergeant, had failed Ham, Wickso and Lofty. He had failed the Marines and the inner family of the Squadron. He was like a vessel that was dry, like a tube of paint squeezed empty.

He blessed the moment that the big naval helicopter had fluttered down on to the shingle beside the loch and the young man, so fucking supercilious, had dropped from the hatch. There was no mirror beside the sink in the hut. He did not look at himself when he shaved or snipped his beard: he did it by touch. He rode towards Kaliningrad and felt it was a chance, the last one that would be offered, of redemption. He could still see, would always harbour the image, of the young man's eyes — staring, drowned, lifeless.

Billy Smith knew redemption did not come easy, came harder than brushing paint on paper. They were driving into the city, going past the tower blocks, towards the bridge.

Because the Princess Rose was clear of the wharf, her cargo of fertilizer loaded, the port authorities had lost interest in the movement of the ship, and the problems of its engine. They were tied to the quay under the towering Westerplatte monument. The dog scratched at the door of the master's cabin, but Rupert Mowbray ignored it. The communications were in place, although it was an hour since Locke had come through. What Mowbray knew: it was launched, Jerry the Pole was across the border and had made the rendezvous, the team was heading for Kaliningrad. The last message had come, relayed on, from Locke. He did not believe in unnecessary radio talk. They were now as helpless, useless, as any ground-control team monitoring one of those old moon-shot spacecraft from thirty years before when orbit had taken the astronauts to the far side. He must wait…as they must wait at Vauxhall Bridge Cross. It would be vindication, a moment of saccharine sweetness, a wonderful ecstasy for Rupert Mowbray when he could send the signal: ferret: onside. He would bask in glory. He sat by the communications equipment, but hurled a shoe at the door to frighten away the mongrel outside.

The wife of the FSB officer, attached to the consulate in Gdansk, had telephoned four times. Her husband had gone out the previous evening in the family car, and had not returned.

The consul had no knowledge of the work practices of his FSB man. He did not have access to his room, to his diary, and knew nothing of the content of the signals from the Lubyanka.

Initially he had done nothing. Although the woman was verging on hysterical, he was loath to interfere in what might be an operation of sensitivity — or a matter of domestic infidelity — so he had sat on what little he knew of a counterintelligence's officer's disappearance.

After her fourth call, the consul sent an urgent signal to the embassy in Warsaw and asked for guidance. A return signal had come from the senior officer of the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti stationed in the Polish capital ordering him to check around Gdansk's police and hospitals. By the early afternoon the missing man's description was in the hands of the police, but hospitals reported he had not been admitted, and the plates of the Fiat car had been circulated.

The complication was that only the section in the Lubyanka dealing with the probable treachery of Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko knew of the mission undertaken the previous evening by the officer in the Gdansk consulate. Those dealing with the report of the missing man were outside that loop of information.

There was confusion. The wife sat by the phone, held her tearful children, and waited for it to ring, but it did not…and the police in the city did not know where to search.

Viktor slipped away from his desk. The last memorandum he initialled concerned the programme for the visit of the fleet commander to the cadet school to watch athletics and present prizes, and he left, uninitialled and unread, at the top of the in-tray a note requesting the fleet commander's inspection of a frigate back from recommissioning in the Far East. Viktor Archenko told the outer office staff that he was going for an early lunch in the senior officers' mess. He had not informed his secretary, his personal assistant or Admiral Falkovsky that he would be driving off-base that afternoon.

As he walked to the parking area, Viktor saw a man in civilian clothes throw down a cigarette and start to follow him. There were many civilian workers on the base, so there was nothing peculiar in a man strolling after him in jeans and a windcheater; another lounged on a car bonnet close to where his own vehicle was parked and read a pocket magazine. He knew he was watched, did not have to turn to confirm it. As he drove out of the base, he was followed by the black van with the smoked windows and the red saloon. If his room had been searched, he thought that his arrest would follow within a day, two days at the most.

He did not look back at the base. He did not see, in his mirror or by twisting his shoulders, the flags of the Federation and the fleet flying from tall poles; nor did he look a last time at the Lenin statue, or the headquarters building, or the facade of the Sailors' Club, or at the castle where his grandmother might have been, or at the high radar scanners perched on the upper masts of the fleet in the dockyard. It was all behind, him, and he did not see the van and the car tucked in and close.

He wondered where he would sleep that night…where they would sleep. He would be with Alice. He drove slowly. The needle of the speedometer was within the legal limit, not because of any respect he held for the law, or from a fear of being intercepted by the traffic police, but he knew that to go fast to the zoo would weaken him. Speed demonstrated the intensity of his flight. He went slowly, and that gave him the sense of control. The lights were against him. He braked. Instinct made him glance at the interior mirror.

Immediately behind him, as if joined by a tow-rope, was the black van, which shared his traffic lane. In the outer lane, level with it, was the red saloon.

Viktor eased away from the lights. His fists clamped on the wheel. Within an hour he would be in the hands of trained men sent by his friends; until then his control and discipline were of paramount importance. He was breathing hard.

Bikov was called. He worked on his notes in the room at the back of the FSB's city block, prepared himself for interrogation, and waited for the information to be serviced from Gdansk. Archenko was on the move. With his major and his sergeant he hurried down the back fire-escape staircase.

The autumn sunlight settled on the city, fell low over the river.

It was on the big concrete apartment blocks and on the addicts who lay slumped in doorways, and on the abandoned monstrosity of the House of Soviets and on the infected HIV victims who staggered gaunt on the streets, and on the old cathedral where slow renovation had started with German money, and on the whores who guarded their pavement pitches, and on the polluted rubbish-filled canals and on the mafiya men who strutted to their BMW vehicles. The low sunlight could not brighten the city, even the zoo park where the shadows lengthened.

The paint on the letters was chipped and had flaked: it was hard for Viktor to read the sign. He had to brake sharply or he would have missed the turn. He gave no warning of the braking and the turning, and when he looked in his mirror he saw the windscreen of the van was almost against his boot and back bumper. Two men were in the van, vague shapes behind the tinted glass, and they would have known that he saw them, recognized them. He remembered what Rupert Mowbray had said to him, the second of the fast fifteen minute sessions tacked on after the principal debrief, before he and Alice had sidled from Mowbray's room: 'Russians are Pavlovian. They instil psychosis and nervousness to render you inoperative.' He realized that they wanted to be seen, it was the route to psychosis. If he followed it, the nerves would shred him. If he were 'inoperative' the pickup at the zoo would fail.

He parked the car. Kids on a school tour of the city were peeling out of their bus, their last stop of the day's tour of the oblast capital. He saw their teachers, pale and tired, threadbare men and women, struggling to marshal them. The kids were alive, noisy, and surged from the bus as their teachers shouted at them. When he looked at the kids, and past them,Viktor saw the watchers from the black van and the red saloon and they didn't turn away. There was nothing to take from the car other than his coat and he shrugged into it, buttoned it so that the sight of his uniform, with the gold on the sleeves and the medal ribbons on the chest, was hidden. He bought his entry ticket from the babushka crone, who scowled at him from the depths of her kiosk, and walked to the gates, a heaviness weighting his legs.

'Has he been here before?'

Bikov stood at the zoo's gate. His office had been alerted by Piatkin, the zampolit, and they had careered round corners, tyres screaming, as the directions given by the tail cars had zeroed them on to the target's vehicle. They had jolted to a halt in the parking area and Piatkin had strode to Bikov.

'Not that I know of,' Piatkin said.

'What's here?'

'Very little.'

'Why would he come to see "very little"?'

'I have no idea.' Piatkin shrugged.

'Stay close.' The instruction was quietly spoken. 'He does not come here without a reason…'

He waved Piatkin away, let him speak softly into the microphone that protruded from the buttonhole of his coat's lapel. Archenko was a hundred metres in front, going past the zoo's closed café. Bikov watched his man, the target. It was not possible that the target came to this decayed, soulless place without good reason. The target walked behind the flurry of shouting, whooping children. As if he were armed with an antenna, Bikov watched and the suspicion flowed in him, but he could not see the 'good reason' why the target had come here. He could identify each of Piatkin's six watchers, all blended to the surroundings of the pens and cages. Two were behind the target and two were wide but level with him and two had gone ahead and would be controlled, from their moulded earpieces, by Piatkin's button microphone.

He watched the target moving behind the children, saw him glance down at his wristwatch. He looked at his own watch. Five minutes to four o'clock. The best pleasure Yuri Bikov knew was the final minutes of a chase, closing on a prey.

'Delta One from Delta Two…I have an eyeball. He's doing dry cleaning. I have eyeball on Target One. Present speed he's two minutes from the RV. I'm in position to brush him. Wait out, wait out…I think he has bandits. Will confirm on bandits. Delta Two out.'

Billy said, 'Get over, Jerry. Get the wheel, Lofty.'

Jerry the Pole was wriggling over the gear-stick, vacating the driver's seat. He snagged the stick and Lofty's fist thumped into his back, pushed him, then Lofty was behind the wheel and rolling his shoulders as if to loosen himself. They were on the far lane of the road from the retaining wall that flanked the side of the zoo. There was a seven-foot drop from the top of the wall to the pavement. Above the wall was a sagging chain-link perimeter fence in which rubbish — paper, wrappings, plastic — was caught.

Billy said to Lofty, 'Ham's got him in sight. He's acting natural, doing it well, less than two minutes till Ham's with him…'

'That's great.' The breath sighed between Lofty's teeth.

'…and Ham thinks he's got a tail.'

'Oh, shit.' Lofty gunned the engine once, tested its power, then let it fade to idle. Billy took his pistol from his belt, armed it, slipped the safety with his thumb, and laid it down between his thighs, half covered but close to hand.

Viktor followed the children and listened, half aware, to the commentary given them by the eldest of the teachers, a dour woman. She was by a pen where the low concrete wall had crumbled, and the wire above it was holed. Inside was a concrete cave entrance in which weeds grew. A crazily angled sign showed a lion's head.

'There are no lions now. Once this was a very famous zoo, but these are difficult times. It is expensive to keep animals, and it is difficult to justify spending money on animals' food when many people do not have enough to eat. But soon there will be monkeys here, chimpanzees and all the apes. There is going to be a programme of development to return the zoo to its former status, one of the best in Europe. The zoo was opened in 1896, and by 1910 there were 2126 animals in residence, including two Siberian tigers that had been donated by the zoo in Moscow. Look, children, there are deer…'

If they'd had the strength, if their ribcages had not been so prominent and the muscles on their hind legs so withered, the five deer in the pen could have leaped out because the wire enclosing them had collapsed. They grazed on mud, not a blade of grass available to them, and they sniffed at old sandwiches and orange peel thrown for them. The television showed antelope and gazelle feeding on the African plains, and Viktor liked those programmes, but these deer were unrecognizable. There was a bear in a concrete pit, pacing as if demented, and the children gathered above it and shouted for its attention.

He crossed a canal of stagnant filth, walked over the footbridge, the children tripping and dancing in front of him. He saw the cause of their excitement. Near to the side fence of the zoo park, was another concrete bunker. The old sign said it was the home of the hippopotamus. But the teacher dashed the enthusiasm.

'No, children, I am sorry. There are two hyenas from Africa that we are going to see. There are no elephant and no rhinoceros, and no hippopotamus — soon they will be here, but they have not arrived. Listen to me, children. Before the great Patriotic War the zoo was filled with animals, but most were killed and eaten by the German Fascists then living in Kaliningrad before the city was conquered by the Red Army of heroes. Only four animals survived the war — one deer, one fox, one badger and one hippopotamus. When the zoo was taken, our soldiers found the hippopotamus and loved it and tried to save it. It would not eat. It was dying, it had been traumatized by the fighting and by neglect. After many days, as it starved, and the soldiers despaired, the decision was taken to try vodka…yes, vodka…for two weeks, four times a day, the hippopotamus was given vodka, and it is remarkable but the hippopotamus regained its health. Until it died, it was the best-loved animal in the zoo, and the symbol of the zoo is that great creature. It is promised that soon there will be another here. Now, come on, keep together, and we will find the hyenas.'

He could no longer hear her. She led the children away. He looked again at his watch. Four o'clock and two minutes. He had to stop. It would be hard to be natural. If he had had a cigarette to smoke it would have been easier, but he had no cigarettes, and no guidebook to look at. He saw the man on the far side of the hippopotamus pit, and caught his eye. The man stared back at him. He turned, breaking the rule of dry-cleaning, and there were two more men who stood and watched him, not caring that he had identified them. Far at the back, his hair receding and the wind lifting the wisps of it, was Piatkin. They were all around him, within three or four seconds' running of him.

He could only wait: it was where he had been told by Alice that he should be. A stocky man, with a little stomach paunch disguised under artisan's overalls, came into his eyeline, and carried with him two rilled plastic bags, as if he had been to do shopping. The man was on course to collide with Viktor or to brush against him. The man's head seemed to bob down and for the briefest moment it rested on his collar-bone, and Viktor saw that his lips moved.

'Delta One from Delta Two. Going in for the brush on Target One. I confirm there are bandits. Stand by, stand by. Delta Two out.'

Billy Smith knew that brush contacts were the hardest, were to be avoided like the plague. In a brush, a message was passed, verbal, or a scrap of paper was palmed. It was bloody difficult. His hand rested on the pistol butt between his legs. The man came on, sauntered towards Viktor.

Viktor looked away from him. He looked to the right, for the contact's approach, and then to the left. It was bad tradecraft but he could not help himself. Where were they? Why did they not come? Around him were the watchers. The man who looked like an artisan came closer, slow and relaxed, and Viktor thought he had taken time from work to shop and now took a shortcut across the zoo park to go back to whatever he did — builder, plumber, engineer, fitter — and Viktor could not see the contact and it was now four minutes after |

Four o'clock. He felt the beat of his heart. He could not see the contact, only the watchers who were twenty, thirty metres from him. He was not trained in counter-surveillance, nor in evasion. Those were not the arts of a chief of staff to a fleet commander. The man, the artisan, came past him, close. He heard the words, at first hardly registered them, in Russian.

'I'm from Alice. Follow me in ten. Go where I go.'

Viktor rocked. The man was past him and walked away, whistled a tune to himself and had no care. His Russian had been flawless, but in the idiom of a classroom, and the accent foreign. He began to count. One and two and three…what should he think of as he counted? Four and five and six. He thought of the sun sinking on the city and its bright warmth flooding his face, and the early sun of the dawn the last time he had been with Alice. Seven and eight and nine. He thought of where the sun never reached, at dawn or dusk or in the middle of the day, and his mind had a picture of a prison yard with a heavy mesh grille over it, and the handcuffs cutting his wrists and the men who held his arms on the walk from the barred door to the yard's centre, where the drain was, and ahead of him, already uncoiled and ready, was the water-pipe leading from the tap. Ten. His legs were knocked from under him, and he knelt. The man was walking away from him, and the speed of his stride quickened.

Viktor followed. He had to kick his feet forward to move. There were no children now to watch, no teacher to listen to. He had spotted the watchers ahead of him, and when he went to the right of the bear pit and could see the demented beast pacing the concrete and scratching at its own shit, another watcher was on the far side of it. They hemmed him in. Another was separated from him by the pen for Arctic foxes. And they would be behind him, tracking him, and at the back — he did not need to turn for the evidence of it — would be Piatkin with his radio. Even with the weight of his legs slowing him, and the shudder of his heart's pulse, he wanted to break and run, to chase the man in front of him. That was what they wanted. Then they would close on him. When Viktor stopped, the watchers on either side of him stopped. He started off again, and they did. He veered away from the direct route, the way the lone man in front of him had gone, and went to the left of a solitary caged elk that had a broken horn. It was a choreographed dance, the steps coordinated. He could not break the tempo of it.

His eyes misted with tears. The back of the man ahead was blurred. He could see four watchers, beside and in front, as they moved in the dance towards the perimeter fence around the zoo's park, but there could have been ten, or fifty, or an army. They trapped him. Viktor walked in an avenue of overgrown, rubbish strewn flower-beds, with the watchers. The fence was in front of the man. It was hard for Viktor to see clearly. At the fence, behind a clump of birch trees, off the path, the man hesitated, stopped but did not look back. Viktor stopped. They all watched him, faced him. Viktor realized the skill of the man who had made the contact; they had not seen him, had not noticed him. Viktor blinked to clear the wet from his eyes. The man ducked down, and was gone.

Viktor saw the hole in the fence, half masked by the trunks of the birches.

Through the hole was freedom. The point of escape, little more than a hundred metres ahead, beckoned him. He could hear the rumble of traffic behind the hole and the trees, and he saw the upper part of a lorry's cab speed past. He forced himself to step out, punching his feet forward. The pace of the watchers quickened. He started to trot, and they matched him. He sucked the air down into his lungs a few more seconds, a few more metres, and the hole gaped wider. He went faster, a longer stride than when he was on the beach. The watchers ahead, as if marionettes and controlled, as if they had long rehearsed the steps, turned, faced him, and the two watchers on either side of him each cut across the mud and weeds of the flowerbeds and a line of them formed and blocked the way to the birch trees and the hole in the fence. Viktor slowed, the sprint to the jog, the jog to the walk. He was a few short metres from them. They gazed back at him; no mercy in their eyes. He heard the clatter of heavy feet behind him.

Viktor looked through the trees, and through the hole gaping in the fence. An old Mercedes was parked against the far kerb. He was blocked.

The watchers stood in his path. The fists of one were clenched in black-leather gloves. The hands of another were buried menacingly in the coat pockets as if they concealed a weapon. One held a Makharov pistol close against his body, poised to raise it and aim. Viktor had no hidden weapon, no protection.

The back door of the Mercedes was held open. The man who had brushed against him, whispered the message, who had given him Alice's name, was framed in the door. Another man was in the back, hardly visible. Two more were in the front. He could see, through the trees and the fence, across the road and into the open door, that the man who had brushed him now jerked his head. Come…come…for fuck's sake, come. They waited for him. In a moment, Viktor knew it, if he gazed any longer at the open door of the car he could not reach, one of the watchers would turn to follow his sight line. So slowly, imperceptibly, Viktor shook his head.

He turned on his heel. He heard behind him a door slam and a car drive away at speed. He walked briskly back towards the hippopotamus pen, the caged elk, the bear's pit and the concrete den of the Arctic foxes. He dropped his entry ticket into an overfilled rubbish bin, went out through the gates, and unlocked his car.

Viktor would be back in Fleet Headquarters in an hour, back with his telephone and the filled in-tray. The next day or the day after, he thought he would be arrested.

He had cried for help…been heard. They had come. It had failed. He sat in his car and his head rested on his arms. The wheel took the weight of them, and Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko wept. It had been the one chance and the last chance.

As he lurched in the speeding car, Billy sent the message on the communications gear half out of the glove box in front of him: FERRET ABORTED. 'Don't know whether it'll get through,' Billy said. 'Not with us being down here and all the crap around us. You saw his face? Fucking haunted, poor bastard, poor wretched…'

Ham mimicked the grate of Billy Smith's East London accent. '"You don't want to lose your beauty sleep, ma'am. We'll bring him out." Oh, yes.'

Eyes never off the road, taking the turns called by Jerry the Pole, Lofty said, 'Not our fault — we did what we could.'

'But it wasn't good enough,' Billy said, and the bitterness rang through the car.