Traitor's Kiss

…Chapter Ten

Three times Locke had said, with anger in his voice, that they must have fouled up, and that was why the communications had stayed silent, and three times Alice had stubbornly answered him: 'They could have been in a dead hole when they lifted him, and then they're on the road and too busy, and then it's cross-country and they've more to think about.'

Hope died for Alice, and confirmation came for Locke, when the headlights of the old Mercedes picked them out beside the road. They were two miles back from the border, and a mile and a half short of Braniewo. The lights caught them, blinded them, and Alice snapped out of their car and ran to the Mercedes. Locke had the engine running and the rear lights threw a dulled reddened glow on to the windscreen of the Mercedes when it pulled up behind them. He saw Alice at the driver's window and he saw the explanation from Jerry the Pole — and a helpless shrug. She didn't come back to the car where he sat but paced around him in a circle. Her head was I down as she walked at the edge of the darkness. He wasn't going to beg, wasn't going to call across to her: 'Excuse me, if it's not inconvenient, would you mind telling me exactly what has happened?' He didn't have to be told, because Jerry the Pole's shrug was enough to educate an imbecile. It was what Gabriel Locke could have told them a week before, and had done, and had not been listened to: 'There's nothing to be done. I'd call it a pragmatic approach, the real world against a bygone age of sentiment and emotion…' He'd said it. He could hear his own words. He remembered the calm appraisal of the Hereford major. They should have listened. If they hurried, stamped on the accelerator they could be back in Gdansk by mid-evening, across the German border by the small hours and into London by mid-morning. They came out of the ditch.

He counted. From their body shapes, and the slight light available, he counted the four of them. They were peeling off their overalls, the ditchwater running off them. Locke left his car. He had the right to be told, but would not beg. He looked into Billy's face, but the man turned away and worked at pulling the leggings of the overalls down his thighs and shins. Locke went to Ham. He remembered the man in his cell, his arrogance and his Russian: 'Yes, I'll do that. No problem, I'll go to Kaliningrad.'

Ham said, 'We did what we could, and what we were asked to do. It was slick, it might have worked. What happened? OK, I'll tell you. He came into the zoo and we were in place with enough time to do a good recce. We'd spotted this place where there was a gap in the fence and then a drop down on to a fastish main drag. We were there and could have made it away quick. We saw him, he was on time, there on the dot. That zoo is a dump. You'd have to be sad to want to go there. Maybe there are too many sad people in Kaliningrad, but not too many of them were in the zoo. Apart from a few kids it was near empty…I saw him, doing what he was told to do, and I saw the tail. You said he would be under "close surveillance", but that didn't tell the half of it. Before I went close for the brush approach, I reckoned there were six of them, with a back marker doing the radio control, and there were more men behind the back marker, but standing off. The ones standing off, I thought they were the head honchos, the big guys — you get to sniff them — especially one of them. Anyway, they moved in a box, classic stuff, except that they didn't seem to make any effort not to show out. It was like intimidation. Like they wanted to be seen, and wanted to pressure him. OK, so that's a tactic — build on him, break him. Any way he looked he would have seen the box. But it wasn't clever. The eyes were on him, not on me…I did a really good brush. I went past him, eleven words — that's a touch under four seconds of speech — and I told him what to do. We never had eye-contact, and I was moving all the time. I did it well, and I know that because the box didn't pick me up. I have to say, with that box round him, I'd have been justified in quitting before I brushed him. He was in uniform but with a coat covering his tunic, all smart, like he'd just left the office or wherever, just as he should have been, not carrying anything. I didn't see him again, not till I was at the car. I couldn't turn and watch him, not with the box around him. I should have been picked up, but I wasn't, and that was sloppy of them. They only had eyes for him. I went down through this hole, got across the road and to the car. We were all ready to go. From the car, door open, I saw him. He'd have had to fight through those bastards, and at least one had a weapon. We weren't shouting, of course not, we were willing him — for fuck's sake, go for it. All of us were. If he had, if he'd broken through, got across the road, if Billy had fired over them and kept their heads down for the necessary seconds, he'd have been in the back of the car, and Lofty would have been doing the business, and we'd have had not a hope in hell, not a snowball, of getting through. He looked, just a moment, at us, and then he turned away. It was sensible and realistic, and it saved us from some real shit. He walked off like we weren't there, like the tail wasn't. That's what happened.'

Locke said, 'It was futile, a waste of everybody's time. Let's get out of here.'

What surprised Gabriel Locke, they didn't hurry themselves. Billy was still bowed and shook the ditchwater out of his boots, and Lofty held tight to Alice. Ham rolled a cigarette and lit it. Wickso produced a metal thermos flask and poured coffee or tea from it into its cap and passed it round, but Locke wasn't offered any.

'Are we going to stay here all night?' Locke demanded. 'It fucked up as it was always going to. What do you want — a tent? Are you intending to bivouac here for the night? I said, let's go.'

But they waited until Billy had dried out his boots, Ham's cigarette was smoked, and Wickso's thermos was finished. Then they were ready. Lofty had his arm round Alice and they went in a tight group towards the old Mercedes. Billy took the front seat and the rest of them squashed into the back, with Alice perched on Lofty's lap.

Before he closed the door, Ham said, 'Mr Locke, one last thing. We came out clean because of him. He had the guts to walk away from us. If you'd seen his face, you wouldn't be talking like such a fucking prat.'

The door slammed.

Locke drove after them, alone, and Ham's venom played in his ears.

The cell had been warm and the mattress in it had been comfortable. If the woman had stood up in court, and he'd gone down, Ham Protheroe could have survived a year banged up in gaol. Not liked it, but survived it. She wouldn't have gone to court. She'd have cracked, pulled out, looked to keep her dignity intact. For fourteen years no one had ever come to him, asked something of him, wanted his help.

Not his parents in the Cheshire suburb after he'd 'borrowed' from them. The photographs of him, they'd promised, were out of the frames, shredded and bin-dumped — and he was out of their wills. And he was out of the 'Royals' and out of the Squadron. Russian linguist and communications expert, Ham was thirty-nine years old, and a little boy lost — an evacuee kid on a train going nowhere, but with the label identifying him torn off. There was no love in his life. When the body had been lifted from the water, when the bleak-faced bastards of the local Crime Squad had interrogated him, he had lied and had not broken, but when he had gone out of the interview room they had not hidden their contempt for him. For twelve years, without a family, he had lived off lies.

Why was he there?

Locke — the 'fucking prat'—had taken him out of the police station and given him back his family. It was like he was again in the snow and on the ice, or in the canoe, in the wastes and fjords of northern Norway — and like he was back on the exercises when they climbed the steel ladders of the oil rigs while the North Sea pounded below, and like he was back on the yomp treks on Exmoor and across the Brecons, like he was back with his pride. It was, for Ham, a purging, a cleansing, of the stench of that contempt. He had walked the Damascus road. He had allowed himself to be recruited to get the smell of it from his nose.

Locke parked by the marina, not in the lit yard available to the Excelsior Hotel's guests.

The Fiat was still there. A couple kissed on a bench near to it. Locke walked past the car, past the couple, and towards the pontoon bridge — against common sense and tradecraft's rules. He should not have gone near the car, should not have approached the bridge that led to the moorings. He looked down. There were low lights on the pontoon and on the piers, but brighter light from the high floodlit buildings of the old city on the far side of the river was thrown across the marina, and more light came from the cafés and restaurants. The reflection of the light helped him, and he knew where to look.

He could not see the trousered leg, or a flash of white skin that would have shown between the trouser turn-up and the sock, but he could see the shoe. It was between a bag of white plastic and a floating container that had held lubricating oil before being thrown overboard. All day the shoe had been there and had not been noticed. If he had walked out on to the pontoon bridge, stepped along the spaced planks, he might have peered down because he knew where to look and, through a gap in the planks, he might have seen the eyes of the man he had murdered.

Locke drove his car into the hotel's yard. He collected his key at Reception and was asked whether he would be dining in that night. He declined a table, and went to his room. For a full minute he leaned against the closed door, then went to the bathroom and sluiced his face with cold water. While it ran and splashed on his skin, he saw the shoe move in gentle motion beside the pontoon.

He drove to the meeting, and would be late.

'Ah, the estimable Mr Locke…we were almost starting to worry about you. It's never a good meeting without its conscience present. I'll recap in a moment, for your benefit, so's you're not in the dark. Please excuse me.' The smile, Locke thought, on Mowbray's face had the chill of a January storm blowing off the cliffs on to his father's farm. The team were packed into the cabin. A cat could not have been swung there. A map was spread over the bed and they were sitting, kneeling, squatting round it; Alice was beside the porthole window with her notebook. Mowbray had taken centre stage, and Jerry the Pole guarded the door in the narrow corridor, stood flush against it, but was the outsider, not on the inside. Jerry the Pole had to knock twice before it had been opened to Locke.

'We're all here, Gabriel, bar the master, who was present for the first half-hour of our meeting but has now left to prepare for sailing. It's been a good, productive meeting, but would, I'm sure, have been all the better for your usual valuable contributions. Again, excuse me. So, that's it, gentlemen. I've told London it can work. I never travel with only a single option in my backpack. I have always believed in the inevitability of the unexpected. Proof against the unexpected is a second option. I've told London that it can work if we have reasonable good fortune — which is a fair evaluation, wouldn't you say? But, and it is a huge but, it is not I who will be fulfilling this second option, it is you, gentlemen. Twenty years ago I would probably have been with you. I won't be there, you will. I've lost track of the days, happens with age, but however many days back it was, at that revolting place in Surrey, I said to you all and say again now, "If any of you wish to leave, now would be the correct moment." Are there any changes of heart?'

In the silence, Locke heard a slight scratching outside the cabin door, then a soft thud, then a dog's yelp, and the silence came again. Alice never looked up from her notepad. Billy's fingers still scratched the hair on his neck thoughtfully, and Lofty used a toothpick aimlessly in his mouth while gazing at Alice. Locke looked at the floor. He would speak when the room was cleared, not in front of them all when he would be ridiculed. He saw his scuffed right shoe where he had tripped as he had come on to the Princess Rose, taking the step down from the gangplank. When he looked up and his eyes roved over them, he was drawn to Ham's quiet, incessant tapping with his finger on the map. It was the map he had seen at Poole, the admiralty chart, number 2278, covering the navigational approach to Baltiysk where the Baltic Fleet was based. He saw the flecks of grey in Billy's hair, and Ham's little paunch, and wondered why none of them spoke up.

Mowbray's voice boomed into the void. 'All on board? Thank you, gentlemen. What the great man said: "I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, straining upon the start. The game's afoot." Well done.'

'I don't think we know that one, Mr Mowbray,' Wickso said.

'Henry the Fifth, Act Three, Scene One.'

They filed out. Ham held a slip of paper and seemed to read it. His lips moved and Locke caught the murmured words, Russian.

Alice lingered, her fingers loose on the pendant at her throat; Locke hadn't looked to see whether the men still wore their gifts. Her face was set, her lips tight, narrow, and a frown cut her forehead, like she carried a burden. Of course she had been upset when it had gone down, when Lofty had held her. It was as though she knew Gabriel Locke was spoiling for the fight. Mowbray glanced at her: he nodded momentarily and his finger pointed to the door. Their eyes met, Mowbray's and Alice's, like they held a mutual secret, and Mowbray smiled at her, as if he had no concerns and neither should she. As she went by him her hand brushed the tweed of his jacket. Locke was on the outside, as cut off as Jerry the Pole, who guarded the door from the corridor. He'd bloody well change that.

They were alone.

Mowbray said, 'A great shame you couldn't make the meeting, Gabriel. Anyway—'

'I think we've exhausted the sarcasm.'

'Anyway, where we are is…from the top. The Princess Rose sails tonight, but makes slow progress. Shortly after the pilot leaves us — that is the crew, myself and our Dogs of War — when we are off Russian territorial waters, we will again suffer recurring engine trouble. The weather forecast is a blessing, a most welcome bonus. We will drift on a roughening south-westerly towards Kaliningrad. Tomorrow evening, as soon as we have darkness, the Dogs will go ashore by inflatable dinghy, with a landfall on the Baltiskaya Kosa. As members — I correct myself — former members of an elite force they have been trained for this. They will meet Ferret, and will — with him — return to the inflatable and ferry him back to the Princess Rose. Our engine trouble will miraculously disappear — and we head off into the great blue yonder, like we're a porpoise with a killer whale up our tail. You, with Alice, will—'

'That's insane,' Locke spat. 'Utter madness.'

'If you had been here, Gabriel, instead of being wherever you were, you would have heard the Dogs' evaluation of acceptable risk. They're on board.'

'Because they're losers. Look at them.' Locke's voice rose, bounced off the cabin walls. 'You should be ashamed — you've manipulated them, you old fool. They're no-hopers. You've lied to London.'

'An "old fool" perhaps, Gabriel, but a bare-knuckle fighter for all that. The lesson of street-corner fighting, as I've learned it, is always get the retaliation in first. You understand me, Gabriel? London's with me. Want to find that out for yourself? Give Bertie Ponsford a call. Secure communications here. Try Peter Giles. Don't like the sound of that? Give the Director General a ring, have him pick up his blue phone. Got a job in the City lined up, have you? I wouldn't ring, if I were you, Ponsford or Giles or the DG, if I hadn't alternative employment arranged. They're so excited, all of them. Just marking your card, Gabriel, and meant kindly.'

'What I think—'

'Do I need to know what you think? You, barely off the training course…'

'I think you have deceived London.'

'They are adults, used to making up their own minds. Do you actually believe they will welcome doom and gloom from you, been nowhere and done nothing? Your choice — try it.' Mowbray waved expansively to the communications box that was wired to a laptop on the table across the cabin from the bed.

He could not. He was beaten, boxed as tight as Codename Ferret had been in the zoo park that afternoon. He could make a report, but afterwards. With the operation sanctioned, he could not take a negative tack. Mowbray beamed at him, as if recognizing victory.

Locke blistered him. 'You're on the shelf. You've wheedled your way back in, but at a cost. You're living off your ego glands — vanity's your food. You're too conceited to admit the failure of your preposterous plan, so you dig a deeper hole and will drag others down with you. All the bullshit you've peddled will spatter in the fan…'

'You disappoint me, Gabriel.'

'I want out. Damn you, don't you listen? Out.' But his head hung. He was beaten, could not tell his part of the story. 'And he's a traitor,' Locke finished sullenly. 'He's not worth it.'

For a moment Locke thought he was about to be struck. Mowbray's fist clenched, then caught at the material of his trousers. The voice was quiet, conversational. 'When you get back, Gabriel, to London, I would like you to ask your line manager for permission to take a day in Library. Read about Popov and Penkovsky, read about the agents betrayed by Blake, Ames and Hanssen, read about the men whose names had crossed Philby's desk before they were parachuted into Estonia or Lithuania or Latvia, or sent by fast boat to Albania. Read about the deaths of brave men who were beyond reach. Will you do that, Gabriel?'

He was surly: 'That was decades ago.'

'Always know your history, Gabriel, it's what I teach my students. Without the clothing of history on your back then you will walk naked. Now, where were we? Yes, you with Alice, and Jerry the Pole to drive you, will go up the Mierzeja Wislana, the Polish end of the sand spit — before it becomes the Baltiskaya Kosa — right up to the border, and that's where you will get the best communications from the Dogs when they're ashore. You'll be my half-way house, my relay point. You up for that, Gabriel?'

Locke nodded grimly.

'Why don't we have a drink, eh? A good, stiff Scotch, yes?'

Locke said, 'If this goes foul, which it will, I give you fair notice that I will report on every aspect of this piece of lunacy. Any reputation, under the Old Farts Act, which you may now enjoy will be in tatters. I will do what I have to, but I promise you I will not take a single step forward, not even half a step shuffle, beyond what is required of me…and I'll see you rot.'

'Don't tell Alice that, there's a good fellow. Scotch straight or with bottled water?'

Locke left him.

A policeman, given its description and its registration number, found the car. He circled the Fiat warily. He could see the briefcase in the back, between the children's seats, and the flap of it hanging open. He noted that the driver's door was unlocked. He called in, radioed his news. The radio waves were flooded. The consulate in Gdansk called the embassy in Warsaw. The resident at the embassy called the Lubyanka. The necessary officials at the Lubyanka, now alerted, called the consulate in Gdansk and demanded an immediate response: What had been found in the car? Were there indications of where the official had been? A further flurry on the radio waves between the consul and the Lubyanka: Was the briefcase empty? Was the car close to the Excelsior Hotel? The briefcase, as collected by the consul from the Gdansk police headquarters on Nowe Ogrody where the lights burned late, was empty except for the missing man's personal organizer — the car was parked two hundred metres from that hotel. The Lubyanka forbade, in the strongest and most direct language to the consul, that any reference to the man's employment in the ranks of the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti should be made to the local police. An unaccounted-for sheet of photographs of Britons working for the Secret Intelligence Service vexed the Lubyanka's section. More radio messages, coded or scrambled, passed.

Yuri Bikov was informed at the room in the Kaliningrad complex of the FSB where he worked late…and Vladdy Piatkin was woken from his bed: 'If we send our own people,' Piatkin was told, 'we admit our work in counterintelligence activities in Gdansk. In the climate of relations with Poland that is unacceptable.' It would be well after midnight that Piatkin called back with a solution to the delicacy of the problem, and the radio traffic could slow.

There were three policemen now guarding the car while two detectives painstakingly examined it. One of the policemen, bored and cold, reached into his pocket for his cigarette packet. He took out the last cigarette, lit it, saw that he was not watched and threw the empty packet over the quay edge. He dragged on his cigarette and the smoke was carried off by the wind. He shivered and stamped. When he had finished the cigarette and it was down to the filter, he flicked what remained of it into the water. He could still see his packet floating away…and then it snagged close to the pontoon. If he had not thrown away the packet after taking from it his last cigarette, the policeman would not have seen the shoe.

The brigadier, intoxicated from the many drinks thrust into his hand, was the star of the Ministry of Defence party thrown in an annexe of the Moscow building. Only favoured foreigners were invited, those who would be impressed that the power of the Russian military reached far enough to pluck a favoured officer from certain death. Again and again, the brigadier told his story to a select few who had been ushered into the inner room off the outer salon. He did not, of course, name the young lieutenant colonel who had saved his life but spoke of him with an almost childlike gratitude.

'And, what is worse, I never had a proper chance to thank him. We met at the helicopter pad after I had been released, after he had come down from the high ground above the Argun gorge, and we immediately took off. It was impossible to speak in the helicopter, with the noise. We landed. I thought then I would have the chance to talk with him, to learn more about him. He has the reputation of being the finest interrogator in the whole of FSB, and so young and calm. We landed at Grozny, and an airforce jet was waiting for him. He was gone — another assignment. A matter of national importance. The general told me what he said to the interrogator, my saviour, "I would almost feel sorry for the next wretch that faces you." He is unique, formidable, and because he already targets another "wretch", I could not thank him. He is remarkable.'

Among those taken into the inner room was an artillery colonel from the Ukrainian embassy. In the outer salon, as the hospitality flowed, the Ukrainian colonel repeated the story to a Belarus major, who in turn passed it verbatim to a Swedish military attaché, who happened to have a lunch appointment the next day, a long-term commitment in his diary, with the British attaché.

Good stories were rare in Moscow, and were always passed on as barter to lighten the boredom of the posting to the Russian capital. The story of the interrogator's achievement was launched.

Bikov worked in his room at the FSB headquarters. He prepared himself. Papers from Moscow and local files were strewn across his desk. The next day he would strike.

His sergeant brought him coffee. His major was away at the base, making the final necessary preparations. The message came through, decoded by his sergeant, that a missing FSB officer had been found; a body had been hauled from the river in Gdansk. The drowning of a junior officer in the Polish port city was a setback, but small in the scale of the interrogation for which he readied himself. The next day he would face Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko across a bare room.

Fast notes were scrawled on his pad as he gutted the files and papers. He consumed them. The challenge lifted him, excited him and drove away his tiredness. He would break his prey by the skill of his questioning, by finding the weak point and then by launching his attack through the crack in the man's defences. The next day the notes would be abandoned and his eyes would never leave those of his prey.

Bikov was calm. He believed he controlled his destiny, and the traitor's.

The window of his hotel room was open to the night, and the traffic was far below. The noise blown through it by the wind would distort his voice and hide his accent.

Billy, Wickso and Lofty sat near him, there to give support to Ham. He was always the confident one. None of them had ever seen Ham as nervous and hesitant, but what was asked of him was harder than anything else he had attempted. He had good linguist's skills, but they were old and untested. He was asked to speak as a native would. Their bags were packed and piled by the door, their bills were paid, and by now Jerry the Pole would be waiting at the front entrance with the old Mercedes. The slip of paper given him by Mowbray was on the bed beside him as he lifted the phone, and dialled.

It rang out. Ham took a deep breath. He waited an age.

'Fleet Headquarters. Yes?'

'Night duty officer, please.'

Another wait, another age.

'Mikoyan, night duty officer.'

'Please, this is airforce Headquarters, I am the exercise planning officer. I have a message for Captain Archenko, chief of staff to Admiral Falkovsky.' The air expired from Ham's lungs. He thought his accent was crap and his hand shook on the receiver. They were all looking at him, willing him to succeed, like they were family to him.

'Yes, the message?'

Ham breathed again. 'I wish to inform Captain Archenko that we I will conduct a low-flying exercise over the Baltiskaya Kosa at 20.00 hours tomorrow, that is Thursday, the fourth of October. The line of the air assault will be east-west at the eight-kilometre-mark point from Rybacij. We invite Captain Archenko to attend.'

Ham heard the distant voice, 'I don't have his diary. I don't know if he is free to attend at this notice.'

Ham had read what Rupert Mowbray had written for him. He was now alone, cut adrift. For an eternity, the words, vowels and consonants gagged in his throat.

'You are there?'

'We believe the exercise would be of exceptional interest to Captain Archenko. It is the general's invitation. Space is severely limited. The invitation is for Captain Archenko alone, not a subordinate. Do you have it written down?'

'I do, but…I can transfer you to the senior officers' mess, or to Captain Archenko's quarters.'

Ham grated, 'I am a busy man. Find Captain Archenko, deliver my general's message.'

'Yes, it will be done.'

The phone slipped from Ham's hand. He rocked and the sweat trickled down his neck and his stomach. 'God, don't just sit there. Get me a drink.'

Viktor sat in total darkness.

There was a light and respectful knock at his door.

He had returned from Kaliningrad and had spent an hour in the outer room beyond the admiral's office working methodically through the remaining memoranda and messages in his in-tray. When he had cleared them, he had gone to his room. He had eaten no lunch and had no hunger for dinner.

The quiet was broken by the rap at his door. He sat on the floor, his back against the foot of the bed. He didn't answer the knock.

He heard a slight scuffle at the base of his door, then the retreat of footsteps down the outside stairs. Although his curtains were drawn, an opaque, dulled light penetrated the room and he saw the folded sheet of paper on the carpet.

Viktor stared at it. Filling his mind was the snapshot image: the man approaching him, brushing against him, whispering the name of Alice, and the instructions. The words came again and again in his mind: I'm from Alice. Follow me in ten. Go where I go. And, still clear, the view of the car, the open door and the fence gap. Could he have run? Could he have burst through the line of watchers who blocked him? When he had been there, seen it and faced it, the answer to the moment of dilemma had been obvious. He would have been knocked down, they would have been taken at gunpoint from the car. Now, in his room, the doubt wormed in him. Then, he had been certain about everything; now he was certain about nothing. He crawled towards the door.

A ribbon of light, from the landing and the stairs, seeped under it. Viktor reached the folded sheet of paper. He opened it. He spread the paper on the floor, held it against the door and the light flooded it. A night-flying exercise. A location. A time. An invitation. He was confused. He crumpled the paper and tossed it into a black corner, where his bin would be. He was on his haunches, and the self-pity that was fuelled by fear. He yearned to be back in the zoo, to have again the chance to run.

He was jolted. He knew about drownings at sea. A man clung to a single straw if that was all he could reach. On his knees and elbows he crossed the carpet, groping for the crumpled paper. When he found it, Viktor stood, went to his bed and switched on the sidelight. He blinked in the brightness. He took his diary from the drawer of the chest beside the bed, flicked the pages until he saw the necessary number, and memorized it.

He left his room, the door wide open, and slipped quickly down the stairs. He went out into the night air and scented the tang of the sea. Crossing the parade-ground, he sensed that watchers observed him, but did not turn to look at them. He could not use his own telephone, the one beside his bed. He strode towards the repair workshops down by basin number two. Only the night-duty sailors and engineers were there. Without explanation, he strode past the table where they sat, smoked and ate sandwiches, to the back of the workshop. There was a wall-mounted telephone. He dialled the Kaliningrad code and the number.

'Good evening. This is Archenko, chief of staff to Admiral Falkovsky. You are NDO for airforce headquarters? You are, yes? Thank you. Some confusion here. Do you have a night-flying exercise, low-level simulated bombing across the Baltiskaya Kosa tomorrow evening?'

The voice in his ear was abrupt. 'No, we do not.'

A faint glimmer of hope was born, as if a candle were lit. 'To confirm: You do not have a night-flying exercise at 20.00 hours tomorrow evening?'

'Absolutely not. Good night, Captain.'

The light of the candle that had guttered, now flared brighter.

Locke left the hotel. He had knocked on Alice's door, woken her, called to her, had dropped his bag and laid his note on it. By the time she'd opened the door the corridor was empty but for the bag and the note, and he was on the last flight of stairs, carrying a blanket from his bed and shielding it from the reception desk.

He saw the fierceness of the lights ahead of him, brighter now than when he had come back to the Excelsior. Then there had been spotlights, now there were raised arc-lamps that brought unreal daylight to that part of the quay and the marina.

The note he had left for Alice asked her to pay his bill when she checked out in the morning, bring his bag, and meet him in the forecourt of the railway station after she'd been picked up by Jerry the Pole. He'd given no explanation.

To get to the stone road bridge over the Motlawa, he walked fast past the marina and kept clear of the lights. They were bringing the body from the pontoon. Four policemen laboured under the weight of the stretcher and water drained off it. He saw the scene-of-crime photographer and the flashes from his camera. Detectives stood in knots and watched. The back doors of a hearse were open. Locke had imagined men coming to his door, the same detectives that he now saw, and battering on it, him being confronted with the night porter, and being asked to explain what he had seen when he left the Excelsior Hotel because he had followed the Russian out. What had he seen? If he claimed diplomatic immunity then he identified himself as an intelligence officer, and by now they would know the Russian shared his trade. Two intelligence officers leaving the same hotel lobby within a minute of each other, and one dead, the other claiming he had seen nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing. He would not be believed. Libby Weedon, severe and remote, would be up from Warsaw before the first bloody cock crowed, and legal officers from London would be on the first flight. Would they protect him? Could he rely on them to play the diplomat's card for immunity? Do pigs fly? He had said, himself, with bravado: Anyway, if he's in difficulty, this Codename Ferret, I cannot see that anything can be done for him. Heads had nodded when he'd said it.

The body went into the hearse. Locke walked head down as the hearse surged past him.

He crossed the historic city, which had been restored with love from the ravage of the world war's firestorm. He was on Mariacka and the clatter of his shoes was the only sound around him. The amber-jewellery stalls and the shops were shuttered, the coffee bars were closed, as were the tourist restaurants; the boutiques were barred. A notice in his hotel had warned of the danger of walking at night, on one's own, through the streets of the old quarter, and had cited the dangers from pickpockets, muggers, addicts, thieves. It was for that danger that he had left behind the warmth of his room. The beat of his own footsteps echoed back at him from the high buildings with ornate gold-painted decoration on their pastel-painted walls.

Locke wanted to run but dared not.

He reached the station. The departures board was empty save for a long-distance train south to Katowice, the straggling passengers milling under it. It was years since Gabriel Locke had been in a mainline terminus so late, with the flotsam who travelled through the night in upright seats. He went into the subway tunnel.

There were little groups of kids in it, some sitting against the tiled walls where the shadows of the shut kiosks darkened them, some already laid out flat on cardboard beds. He looked for a space. Vacant eyes watched him. He went the length of the tunnel and found a corner where the ceiling lights barely reached, the roof dripped and the wind came down the staircase ahead of him. He settled into the grime and wrapped the blanket tight around him. He snuggled under it. Here he felt, at last, safe. His own words laughed at him: Cut him adrift, forget him. Not worth the hassle. The train for Katowice rumbled on the track over the tunnel.

He had trouble with the key at the front door. The bulb had gone in the porch and Bertie Ponsford swore because he could not find the keyhole. As he shifted, he dislodged a geranium pot from its metal stand. A light came on upstairs, and that was enough for him to find the keyhole. He righted the stand and put the pot back in place.

Inside his hall, he threw off his coat. She was at the top of the stairs. 'Are you drunk, Bertie?' It was not a criticism.

'No, more's the pity…'

Gail was coming down the stairs, tying the belt of her dressing gown.

'…utterly sober, sadly — just couldn't get the key in the bloody lock.'

She sat on the bottom step of the stairs. 'What happened? What's going on?'

Around him everything was familiar and safe. It was a home that he and his wife had built over nearly thirty years of marriage. Paintings, the bric-a-brac of antiques fairs, little ornamental mementoes of foreign and domestic holidays, the wallpaper that they'd hung together two years before. It was all, he believed, threatened. The comfort of the castle was breached.

'Nothing happened.' Ponsford cracked his fingers. His post was on the hall table and he pecked at it, examined the envelopes that would hold bills and circulars, but didn't open them. 'We couldn't do the pickup. Our man walked away, one direction. Our team drove away in the other.'

'So, it's all gone belly up?'

'No, no. Dear Rupert — never underestimate dear old Rupert. The second plan is now in place. Believe me, I am not sneering, but Rupert always had a second plan, and such a reasonable one. We're sending our team in by sea, can you believe that? We're sending armed men for a covert landing on Russian territory — and I've agreed to it. We all have.'

'You're not being serious, Bertie. What'll happen to us?'

He smiled sparkily. 'Early retirement, a carriage clock and a decanter, time for the garden — but the whiff of failure is banished by Rupert. He doesn't acknowledge the possibility of it. I agree to his preposterous idea because that way I show élan, and because I know that ultimately, Peter Giles is the one who has to rubber-stamp it. Peter agrees because I have, and anyway it'll go to the DG. The DG agrees because I have, and Peter has, and he will seem weak and fussy if he kills it. We're not the men of yesteryear, and we know it. We're not the glory boys of the past, but still we crave a little hidden limelight.'

'I can't believe you're saying this, Bertie — if you're not drunk.'

'Did you ever read any of those First World War books? You know, the mobilization, and railway timetables? The Austrians mobilized so the Russians did. Because the Russians mobilized, the Germans followed. With German mobilization, the French had to start the process, and we were sucked in so as not to be left behind. There was an inevitability, once Rupert mobilized. I suppose, then, in 1914, men all around the chancelleries of Europe wondered when they could have acted and stifled the chance of war, but by then it was too late — and it's too bloody late now. We had our chance when Rupert bloody Mowbray turned up, like a bad penny, on the doorstep in the night. I didn't have the balls to send him packing. Ah, well…'

'You're doing a whinge, Bertie. Let's go to bed.'

The Princess Rose slipped her moorings.

The pilot took her out and towards the lanes of the Inshore Traffic Separation Scheme. Already, Rupert Mowbray had laid the ground; he was a master of disinformation. On his instructions, as the engineer had started up the diesel engine, the master had muttered to the pilot that the engine was sick, the power was uncertain, but he hoped it would last long enough to get the ship across the eastern Baltic with its cargo.

In the master's cabin, now the operational centre for the team, his Dogs, Mowbray stood by the porthole window. They were quiet behind him as they prepared their gear, the kit they would take ashore. Clear of the mouth of the Motlawa river, the sea caught the Princess Rose and rocked it, and that, he had been told, was good.

They would be boxed up in the confines of the cabin until they were at the extremity of the Inshore Traffic Separation Scheme, until the pilot went down the rope-ladder and jumped for the deck of the boat that would collect him; and they must all be quiet. The pilot should not know more men were on board than was stated in the master's crew declaration. The pilot took them to port and they skirted the headland. Mowbray wiped the porthole window and stared out. On the headland the monument was lit, a gaunt pillar rising up. He turned.

Their eyes watched him, pierced him, and the Princess Rose rode the growing swell.

'I've given, to London, the mission you will undertake a name, a fine name. This is Operation Havoc. All of Locke's communications from the ground to me will include the word "havoc". "Cry Havoc, and let slip the Dogs of War." "Havoc" is yours, gentlemen, not mine. Forgive me if I show slight emotion — God speed.'

Mowbray stood at the porthole until he could no longer see the floodlit monument, and the Princess Rose dipped, fell, rose again and ploughed towards the open water.