Traitor's Kiss

…Chapter Seven

The team moved, but not quickly. Its speed was dictated by the number of nautical miles covered each hour by the coastal cargo ship, the Princess Rose. She cleared the Kiel canal, emerged from the lock gates separating it from the Baltic, and gathered what power she could muster for the initial journey between the German mainland and the Danish islands. She made good progress away from the canal's mouth and there was a south-westerly behind her that helped push her along.

When the industrial chimneys of Kiel were behind them they were some 279 nautical miles from their destination. If the engine did not play tricks with them they would be in the channel approaching that destination within twenty-four hours. The mate was on the bridge. The master had faith in the Croatian, though Timohir Zaklan was twenty-one years younger than himself. The master had more faith in his engineer, Johannes Richter, far down below in the sweat-making engine room. He fed his dog, Feliks, on the cabin floor. When the bowl was licked clean, the master called on the internal telephone down to the engine room and requested the presence of the engineer, in five minutes, on the bridge.

The master was Andreas Yaxis, fifty-two years old; he had been at sea for thirty-six of them. He had found time, on shore leave, to marry, but the union with Maria had not been blessed with children. She lived near to the home port from which he had first sailed as a teenage boy, Korinthos. In her letters and when he rang her from a faraway port, she didn't seem to miss him as he missed her. Only the dog seemed to pine when he was off the ship and it was left behind for a few hours. He was away from his wife for months at a time, and now he wanted an end to it. He wanted money in the bank and a grove of olive trees, and another of lemon trees, and occasional work skippering the inter-island ferries when a regular master was sick or on leave. He yearned to feel the warmth of the sun on his walnut tanned face as he sat on a lounger on a villa's terrace. He nearly had the money in the bank, in an interest-bearing deposit account, to fulfil his dream but he could not quite afford to make the break. In the safe was, perhaps, the difference between a dream and reality. Andreas Yaxis was a loner, a man who did not seek out friends, but those who did business with him — owners, agents and officers from the building in which Rupert Mowbray had worked would all have said that the taciturn Greek was a man of his word. For money, for the chance to fulfil his dream, he would take the risks that were asked of him. He allowed no moralities to interfere with his quest for cash. In his day he had ferried narcotics out of Palermo and cigarettes from Brindisi and had brought a host of refugees from Istanbul to Venezia. He also carried 'materials' for men such as Rupert Mowbray. He did not own a conscience, so the account at his investment bank was almost filled. Time was running short. The next year the Princess Rose would need to pass a rigorous test of seaworthiness, the Special Survey for Classification. If she failed she was dead and set for the breakers, and her owners would not find another command for him.

He took the brown envelope from his safe. It held ten thousand pounds in fifty- and twenty-pound notes. He counted out two thousand five hundred pounds, put that sum back into the safe, spat on the gum of the envelope and resealed it on the rest of the money.

They were waiting for him on the bridge.

He had a grating voice, as if it were rarely used and then only on a matter of importance. 'You, Johannes, are paid a monkey's wage by our owners. You, Tihomir, are treated worse. I am an old man who is not treated with the respect a lifetime at sea deserves. Occasionally a chance comes to make good our owners' parsimony. For a British agency we are carrying materials to Gdansk for offloading before we take on our fertilizer cargo and sail for Riga. When we leave Gdansk another man, perhaps two, will be on board. They will be described as representatives of the owners, and it may be necessary, off the coast of Kaliningrad and in Russian territorial waters, for the engine temporarily to fail. Such matters come with rewards.'

When the Princess Rose trafficked in narcotics, cigarettes or people, there were always similar rewards, but there had been none recently. Andreas Yaxis made the big gesture and ripped open the sealed envelope. He laid the bundle of banknotes on the ledge in front of the bridge window. He counted it into three piles, note for note, so that each had an equal share. The master saw their faces glow as the piles of banknotes grew.

'We are equal in the eyes of God, and in each other's eyes. I don't think what is asked of us is dangerous. We will be well offshore, if the engine problem is required of us, and safe. This is half what is offered us, the rest we receive in Riga when we offload the fertilizer.'

Tihomir Zaklan put his money into the breast pocket of his jacket, and the oil-grimed hands of Johannes Richter slid his into the hip pocket of his engineer's overalls. Andreas Yaxis asked his mate to send the radio signal from the Princess Rose, call sign 9HAJ6, to the port of Gdansk that would confirm their arrival in twenty-four hours, and to request the services of a pilot. He went below.

It was about the past, and the dignity of the past, and about the self esteem that he nurtured for himself. As a good meal could settle his stomach, so the view of the Glienicker bridge settled the mind of Rupert Mowbray. It spanned the narrow point of the Wannsee lakes and carried the main road from old western Berlin to Potsdam. It had two traffic lanes, two cycle lanes and a pavement for pedestrians on either side. Built on two sunken concrete sets of supports, the gently arched steel girders that took its weight were painted a pallid green.

He had slept well because he was, at last, back on familiar territory in the Charlottenberg pension where they knew his name and treated him as a guest of importance, one whose return was welcomed. He had showered, shaved, had eaten a good breakfast of fresh baked rolls, ham and fruit, and then he had set out from the Zoo station, taken the train to Wannsee, and then the bus to the bridge. At the bridge's head he lingered by the gardens of the hunting lodge, the Glienicker Schloss. The bridge was a part of his history: it was a small symbol that had fuelled his determination to see Viktor Archenko, his man, successfully exfiltrated and not left to die.

Already, though it was still early, the boys were out with their fishing-rods on the banks beside the lake. He barely noticed them. He stared at the bridge and the hump in the middle of the traffic lanes. The highest point in the hump had been, for half a century, the line dividing East from West, a crossing point between the American zone and Russian-controlled territory for the clandestine business of intelligence officers. He had not been at the Glienicker bridge in 1962, his first year with the Service, when the pilot, Gary Powers, had walked towards the hump in the centre and had passed without a glance the spy, Colonel Rudolph Abel. Nor had he been there when the dissident Anatol Scharansky had gone past Karl and Hana Koecher and into the care of their respective officers; he had been in South Africa. Other occasions, not documented and left unreported, had brought Rupert Mowbray to the bridge, at the invitation of Agency colleagues. The Americans liked to do it, for a favoured few Britons, as if it were corporate hospitality at a golf tournament — a good view from a crouched grandstand behind the bushes of the Glienicker Schloss park, then a good breakfast in a restaurant. He had never tired of watching small figures come at dawn towards the hump and walk at the same rehearsed speed as the man or woman released from the opposite end. He had never seen these early morning shadowed figures exchange a word or a grimace as they passed, each to their own version of freedom. There had been a crossing point, a footbridge, in the British sector where he had been more often but that place, to Rupert Mowbray, had never had the same spine-tingling emotion as the Glienicker bridge. The code of loyalty was built into the fabric of the bridge, loyalty for an agent who had been a good servant.

He soaked up the atmosphere and memories of the place, then stepped briskly on to the pavement, crossed the span, and didn't consider that the world had changed.

Rupert Mowbray went in search of Jerry the Pole.

He walked past the Custom House on the far side, now boarded up and decaying. In the days of his memories the exchanges had been watched from the upper windows behind the planks by East German troops and by Russians of the KGB, the enemy, the reason for his working life. Many of the villas on Konigstrasse, the road to Potsdam, had now been found, he noticed, by the present breed of property developers; they had been empty in his day, when he had stared down that road from the far side of the bridge. Children played in the gardens and washing hung in the backyards. He wondered if the recent owners of the properties knew of the history of that small corner of Europe; he doubted if they cared because that was the way of the modern world, and he despised it. The developments, the signs said, were "exclusif". He went past Timmerman's Cafe, a single-storey building, little more than a hut, and he thought it was where the Russian men, of the Third Directorate of the KGB — his opponents, his enemies — might have gathered for their own celebration while he and the Americans ate and drank at the restaurant in the Glienicker Schloss. He checked the numbers as he walked, and Alice North had done her work well.

The building was more than five hundred metres back from the bridge. The developers had not yet reached it. The small wrought iron balconies leading from the full-length windows were held up, on the first, second and third floors, by timber props, and the walls were daubed with spray-paint graffiti. The name at the bell was a scrawl, as if written by a hand from which hope had long gone…but he needed the man. Jerry the Pole was as much a part of his life as the Glienicker bridge and the pension in Charlottenberg. He rang the bell, pressed long and hard on it. Whether he wanted him there or not, Jerzy Kwasniewski was in Rupert Mowbray's life and in his blood.

The door creaked open. The man's eyes lit with a rheumy wetness. Perhaps he had not quite believed it when Alice North had telephoned him. He wore carpet slippers and shapeless trousers held up by braces, a vest with buttons to the neck, and a small blue scarf loosely knotted at his spare throat. No, he had not believed that Rupert Mowbray was coming. He straightened. Behind him, the hall was dark. A scrawny hand was extended. Mowbray smelt the sewers. When the hand was taken, Jerry the Pole's head ducked in respect.

It was the old world, one long gone, their world — master and man, employer and servant.

On the second floor was a single living and sleeping room that smelt of stale sweat, with a kitchen annexe, and a bathroom that Mowbray deduced was shared. It overlooked a back garden where the grass and the bushes were jungle high. The light was not on and only a single bar of the fire burned. Mowbray counted money from his wallet, enough for a week, and because he had seen the respect, he estimated the minimum that would be acceptable. He thought Jerry the Pole would have taken a bag of boiled sweets and been grateful. When the Wall had come down the Service officers had abandoned the Olympic stadium and the men who drove them, cleaned for them, translated for them, ran messages for them were discarded. In the days of the Wall, when the quarters at the Olympic stadium bulged with activity, Jerry the Pole had lived in a decent two-bedroomed apartment in Wannsee village. The last time they had met, eighteen months after the Wall's collapse, Jerry the Pole had moved to a cheaper block nearer the bridge. Now he had moved on again. Money would be harder, work scarcer — he had been forgotten and Alice had had to search in the files, hard and long, to trace him.

'I think that is better, Mr Mowbray…'

Jerry the Pole now wore a suit that was too large for his shrunken frame, a suit to be buried in. He had put on a nearly clean shirt and I had shaved. He was combing his thin pepper-coloured hair.

'If you come back to me, Mr Mowbray, search out someone you can depend upon, then I know it is going to be a big operation.'

'As big as the biggest,' Mowbray said. He told Jerry the Pole what would be required of him. The man's thin lips dribbled with pleasure. Mowbray paid him and saw a little flicker of disappointment as the money was counted. After it had been placed in a small empty tin under the bed, he asked Jerry the Pole to sign a receipt for it. Then he gave him more money, for the hire of a car, and asked him to sign for that also.

Mowbray beamed his smile of confidence. 'Bigger than the biggest.'

A commander, reading from his notes, said, 'I have to say, Admiral, that the position of the supply of potatoes is critical. We are down to three weeks of potatoes, which is a serious shortage. To buy potatoes on the open market is twenty-two per cent more expensive than using the contracted supplier, but the contractor does not have more potatoes to sell. In addition, at this time of year, the potatoes available on the open market are of poor quality, and I would estimate that a minimum of fifteen per cent would be unfit for consumption. It is difficult — we must have potatoes, but to buy them we must have further budgetary sources. Without potatoes, the fleet goes hungry.'

Viktor sat in on the meeting in Admiral Falkovsky's office. Half of his attention was in the smoke-filled room, and half was far away. He still shivered from his plunge into the dock water the previous night. He hadn't run that morning on the beach, not because of the cold in his body but because of the chill from knowing he would be watched from the moment he left his quarters. With care, and trying not to arouse further suspicion of guilt, he had now searched his sleeping quarters three times. He had not found a pinhead microphone or a fisheye lens, but he could not tear the room apart because that would give them a hint of the evidence they hunted for. It was about nerve: if his nerve broke he was beaten; and if he was beaten, he was dead. There were seven men around the table, the admiral at the head, his favoured chief of staff in the honoured position to his immediate right, and furthest to the left was Piatkin, the zampolit, who watched and did not contribute.

'Buy them — we cannot be without them,' the admiral growled, ground out a cigarette, coughed and lit another. 'Next item — what is next on the agenda?'

A second commander spoke up. 'It is early, but decisions have to be taken on the spring exercise. At the present time we plan an amphibious landing between Pionerskij and Zelonogradsk, with one regiment going ashore, that is agreed. Will we deploy a mine clearance capability? Can we reasonably predict we will have the resources to put mine-sweepers to sea along with the assault fleet? I remind you that the mine-sweepers have not exercised for two years, and their efficiency quotient is highly limited. But the crews cannot be taught mine-sweeping in the classroom or on a vessel that is permanently tied up. Do we have the resources?'

Admiral Falkovsky's head twisted to his right. 'Viktor, what do we do?'

His head jolted up. He blurted, 'We have no choice. We buy the potatoes.'

There was a moment of silence. Viktor saw the astonishment around the table, then Piatkin's keen gaze, and the commander to Viktor's right broke the silence with an involuntary titter. The laughter was taken up. It rolled around the table. He did not know what he had said that had provoked it. He was the admiral's chosen man, he was given deference because he had the admiral's ear — and they laughed at him. Viktor turned to his protector and saw Admiral Falkovsky's anger.

The admiral said, 'We have finished with discussing potatoes, we are now talking about mine-sweeping. If we don't interest you, Viktor, I suggest you leave us…now.'

He stood, gathering his papers together. He was dismissed. It had never happened before. He ducked his head to the admiral and walked round the table to the door. He had learned never to argue, plead, dispute with Admiral Falkovsky. He saw the sneering satisfaction creep on to Piatkin's mouth. He had dreamed, and the dream had cost him protection.

He closed the door behind him. From the dream came a sudden, surging impulse. He stamped to his desk in the outer office and threw down his papers. The staff looked away. He snatched up the telephone and dialled the number of the chief of police for the oblast of Kaliningrad.

'This is Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko, chief of staff to the fleet commander, Admiral Falkovsky. Please, the address of the residence of Boris Chelbia. It is a matter of security, I want it immediately.'

I When he had written it down, Viktor went to the armoury. He was light-headed, gripped with a rare recklessness. He did not care that he was followed, watched.

The Princess Rose sailed on. Twelve hours out from Gdansk, the master again radioed ahead to the harbour authorities, and again gave an estimated time of arrival. She was now using the main traffic lane that took her south of the Renne Bank and the Danish island of Bornholm. Even the engineer admitted that the diesel engine was performing to the best of its capability. Below the bridge, where the master kept watch and studied relentlessly the radar screen, was a storeroom. On a level below the principal cabins and behind the crews' quarters, it was above the forward section of the engine room. By unscrewing a section of plate metal lining the wall of the storeroom a dead area could be reached. Here, narcotics, cigarettes and people had been housed. Now four weighted black canvas bags and four large cardboard boxes were packed into that space. With galley supplies and pieces of machinery piled up in front of the section of plate metal, the covert hiding-place would survive any search not as determined as a full-scale Customs rummage. A sharp, brilliantly white bow wave peeled away from the progress of the Princess Rose.

'Did you know him?' The question had been a long time forming but, like an air pocket in the ocean, it had eventually burst to the surface.

'Of course I knew him,' Alice said.

'Did you meet him?'

'I knew him and I met him.' There was an intransigence in her voice, a challenge, as if he intruded.

Gabriel Locke persisted, didn't know where it would lead him. 'Why is he special?'

She seemed for a moment to ponder. She looked out through the car's windscreen. They were parked up on hard core at a farm gateway. Behind them was the main road to the town of Braniewo and ahead was the border crossing point. The second car was half hidden n a clump of hazel and birch in front of them. It was three hours since the team had gone, and while they'd waited Locke had said barely a word to Alice North. The questions had seeped into his mind until they filled it.

She shook her head, as if a fly irritated her. 'You wouldn't understand…'

'It would help if I understood. We're mounting an operation, something out of the history books, some sort of vanity trip for a has-been that's Mowbray — which ignores every paragraph in the rule book of the modern Service, and when I try to find out why I'm brushed off, like a piece of shit on a boot. What's so special?'

She climbed out of the car. They had left the hotel in Berlin before dawn, before that city had woken, and had been well into Poland before full daylight, hammering the old roads through forests and past flat, sodden fields and by reeded boglands. Buzzards and kites had been cruising over the pastures and the marshes, hunting, and twice they had seen grazing deer. They had driven through a great emptiness, and he'd thought they crossed the no man's land between the German civilization and the Russian wilderness. It was not what Gabriel Locke had joined for. He had pressed his recruitment in order to be a part of a modern, forward-looking organization, working at the sharp end of intellect, in defence of the realm.

They had stopped briefly at the castle, at Malbork — and she'd walked away from him and he'd hung back, and she'd sat for a half-minute, no more, on the bench by the knights' bronze statues. Now they were in a farm gateway, two miles from the Kaliningrad border. Gabriel Locke had been once to Hereford, and he'd been told there — often enough so that it itched in him — that reconnaissance was paramount. Time spent on reconnaissance was never wasted, they'd said. The car lurched as her weight settled on the bonnet.

Gabriel Locke's temper cracked. 'I've the bloody right to know what this is all about.'

She didn't turn. Her voice came faintly into the car. 'What I said, you wouldn't understand.'

He shouted, 'When this has fucked up, and it will, I'm going to put a report in — see if I don't. I've my career to think of.'

Her voice came to him, calm, as if he didn't trouble her. 'You wouldn't understand, Gabriel. Just enjoy the view.'

There was an old and dilapidated farmhouse at the end of a lane a quarter of a mile away, with barns without roofs, and clumps of ragged trees from which the wind had shredded the leaves, yellow fields, some cows with their calves, and a distant forest line. The sun threw long shadows. She was an attractive girl, but he hardly noticed it. When the operation went wrong, and it would, his career would be among the casualties, would be in the front line and a prime target. He'd fight, whatever it took, to save himself. He could not see into the forest line, and he waited.

Wickso heard the whistle, like a screech owl's, and then the engine. It was the same engine that he'd heard twice before in the last hour, and six times since he'd taken his position in the cavity made by the tree-trunk's roots, and he'd memorized how often the jeep came along the forest track. He made the return call, also the screech owl's, so that Billy and Lofty would hear him and be warned off. The jeep's engine was using poor fuel because each time it came by the smell of the diesel hung on the path between the close-set pines.

It was a good position he'd found. The tree had been toppled in a gale, could have been two years or more back, and he'd camouflaged the cavity with dead branches; there was no chance that he'd be seen from the track. The jeep went by. It was open, two men in it, and the soldier in the passenger seat, Wickso's side, had an automatic rifle across his legs. It was twelve years since Wickso had had to find a 'basher' and lie up in it. When the jeep had gone away down the track, he made the owl's call, and waited for them to reach him. The jeep had been regular but there had also been a foot patrol, six men and a dog. The dog had bothered him more than the jeep. It had been in the middle of the group, not out ahead where it would have had the chance of picking up the scent of Billy and Lofty, or of pointing to him in his basher. They came across the track fast. No talking, only hand signs. Wickso crawled out of the basher, and left it covered with old branches so that the chance of its discovery before it was needed next time, the real time, was minimal. It was three hundred metres to the wire, where Ham waited at the hole they'd cut. Wickso didn't look back and a few times he heard Billy's and Lofty's feet on the forest floor, but that was seldom. They moved well, like it wasn't twelve years since they'd crossed opposition ground. When he could see the hole, Wickso did the owl screech and Ham answered it.

A drainage ditch, six inches of water stagnant in it, was the route away from the forest and through the fields. Then it was a crawl on their stomachs through an I old beet-field. They were muddied damp urchins when they reached the cars.

They were peeling off the overalls. The girl didn't say anything, like she knew better than to talk, but the guy, Locke, piped, like he needed to piss and couldn't hold himself. 'How was it? Everything all right? What did you find?'

Billy said, 'Found a nice pub, doing real ale.'

'For Christ's sake, can you not be serious?'

Billy said, 'We went three kilometres in. There's a farm barn just outside the village of Lipovka, on the Vituska river. It's by a road. It's a good enough drop point. Right now I'm looking for a bath — you got a better idea, Mr Locke?'

The girl hadn't spoken. She helped Lofty and Ham out of their overalls and held a plastic bag for them. Wickso liked her. The best of the nurses at Wolverhampton kept their mouths shut when talking helped nobody.

He had been summoned.

A flurry of messages had alerted Yuri Bikov. Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko had left a meeting at fleet headquarters early, he I had gone to the armoury and had drawn a service pistol with two clips of ammunition and four hand grenades. Then he had driven out of the base and was headed for Kaliningrad.

The messages from Piatkin came by radio, were fielded by Bikov's major. Piatkin reported that additional patrols were on the frontier and that the crossing point was alerted. At first, as the messages were given him, Bikov felt a sense of nagging disappointment, as if he might be cheated. Was Archenko making a run for the border? It would fail…fail in blood and vulgar capture, and his journey to this dead shit-heap of a place would have been wasted. Then the tone of the messages had changed to a note of bewilderment from Piatkin, and an address was given on the north side of the city.

When he arrived at the pleasant street, different from anything else in the city he had seen, Bikov saw a staff car parked outside high gates that were flanked by high walls. A dog bayed. There were properties like that, with high gates and high walls, in Moscow. He knew the trade of men who were protected by gates, walls and dogs. Short of the staff car, half on the grass and under the trees, were a silver saloon and a black van with smoked windows. He went to the saloon and spoke sharply to Piatkin: 'Whose home is this?'

'It is the home of Boris Chelbia.'

'Who is Boris Chelbia?'

Piatkin flushed. 'A local businessman.'

'A mafiya businessman?'

'I would not know.'

'Does Archenko know him?'

Piatkin stumbled, 'I have no record they have ever met.'

'But you know Boris Chelbia?'

'I have met him, yes, socially…' Piatkin squirmed, and Bikov saw it.

'Would Boris Chelbia, mafiya businessman, wish to buy one service pistol with two clips of ammunition and four hand grenades, from your "social" knowledge of him?'

'I don't know why Archenko is here.'

Bikov walked back to his car, settled on the back seat, and waited.

Viktor was offered a chair but declined it.

The home of Boris Chelbia was in the old city, the part that had survived the bombing and had been outside the defensive perimeter line of strong points built by General Lasch. These streets had not been fought over: the hand-to-hand, building-to-building combat had bypassed them. The old merchants' houses had survived and had become the homes of the new elite. The largest home in this tree lined street, running off Borzova, north of the city, had high iron gates that were screened with plate metal, and there had been the barking of big dogs when he pulled up outside. Men, shaven-headed and leather-jacketed, had let him walk through the gates. Because he had been at the admiral's meeting he wore his best dress uniform with the bright gold braid at the shoulders and on the sleeves, his medal ribbons were on his chest, and he had carried his naval greatcoat over his arm. A man of such status, a man alone, was not searched by the minders at the gate. He had walked up the swept drive, the loaded service pistol under his tunic and the grenades in the pockets of his greatcoat. Nothing of what he was about to do had been thought through: it came from instinct bred by anger.

'You took delivery of weapons from the base at Baltiysk. The weapons were sold to you. Your purchase of the weapons is a theft from the State. Among the weapons were five NSV 12.7mm heavy machine-guns, and ammunition for them. One of those machine guns has on the shoulder stock the carved initials IV. The machine-gun is used by a conscript, Igor Vasiliev. I want it back, that machine-gun, and all the ammunition of that calibre.' He spoke in the short sharp sentences so beloved by his master, the admiral, when authority was to be built.

Chelbia lounged in a low, soft chair, and a minder watched from the door with tattooed arms folded over his chest. No response. Viktor thought his grandmother might have fled from such a house or such a street. The furniture was old, German and heavy, the pictures on the walls were lushly romantic and showed sea views with women in long muslin skirts paddling on the shore. The brocade wallpaper alone would have cost a half-year of a captain, second rank's salary.

In a quick movement, Viktor took two of the RGO fragmentation grenades from his greatcoat pocket, laid them on the tray in the middle of the walnut-veneered table and let them roll in their awkward, lurching pineapple shape as far as the tray's rim would permit. With his second quick movement — too fast for the minder at the door — he held a third grenade in his hand. He pulled out the pin, held the lever tight in his right hand, below his overcoat, then tossed the pin over the carpet and on to Chelbia's lap. The killing radius of the grenade was listed as twenty metres. Inside its casing were ninety grams of A-1X-1 explosive. If his hand released the lever, he would die — as would Chelbia. The pin lay across the fly of Chelbia's trousers.

'It is all I want. I will leave here with that one NSV machine-gun and its ammunition. Please, make whatever arrangements are necessary.'

He thought the man, Chelbia, was a street-fighter and from the gutter, and would have been hardened by time in the gulag camps. There was no flicker of fear on Chelbia's face, and his hands did not fidget. His voice was calm. 'Only that weapon?'

'The machine-gun with the initials IV cut with a knife on the shoulder stock, and the ammunition.'

'And the rest?'

'Not important to me — one day your friend Piatkin will tell you what is important to me.'

'And you have a steady hand?'

'You have to hope my hand is steady.'

The slightest gesture: Chelbia bobbed his head. His eyes were focused beyond Viktor, and the grenade in Viktor's hand, aimed at the minder by the door. The door opened and closed behind him.

'Your conscript's weapon is coming. We should do business, Captain Archenko, mutually profitable business. Whisky, gin, vodka, brandy, will you take a drink — one-handed?'

Viktor said, 'I would like to take two cartons of Camel cigarettes, if that were possible, if you have them.'

He walked across the carpet, bent over the low, soft chair and reached down to Chelbia's trousers. He lifted the pin and, holding the lever down tight, replaced the pin in its socket.

'Would you have done it, Captain Archenko?' Chelbia chuckled. 'Killed yourself and me for a conscript's machine-gun?'

'Can you not, Mr Mowbray, do something about my pension? Is that a big matter to ask? I…' the voice wheedled.

'Just keep your eyes on the road, Jerry, watch the traffic, and look for a parking place.'

For Rupert Mowbray it was a pilgrimage. But the voice bleated at him, 'I have no pension. There are German people, they have pensions, and they were not as useful to you, your colleagues, as I. I do not understand why I have no pension.'

'I think you can get in there.' Mowbray leaned forward in the back seat of the Mercedes, one hand resting on the shoulder of Jerry the Pole's suit jacket, the other pointing expansively to the slot between parked cars on Friedrichstrasse. He had never visited Berlin, before the Wall had come down or afterwards, without travelling as a pilgrim to this place. He was the true believer. The car came awkwardly to a halt.

Jerry the Pole turned to him. 'What I am asking, Mr Mowbray, is to be treated fairly, to be awarded a fair pension.'

'Just wait here, Jerry, just wait with the car.'

He slipped out, shut the door behind him and looked around, Checkpoint Charlie was a place of worship to Mowbray. His eyes raked the new scene and a little curl of disgust played at his mouth. There was a token sangar of sandbags in the centre of the street, a large, hanging colour photograph of an American GI, and a modern museum; scaffolding disguised the facade of the Cafe Adler. Mowbray, on his '69–73 tour in Berlin and on his '78-'82 posting to Bonn, when he'd often come to Berlin, had always preferred Checkpoint Charlie as an inner-city crossing-point for agents, rated it as better than anywhere in the British sector. The Americans of the Agency had been kind to him. He'd sat in the Cafe Adler so many hours with the Agency's Marty, Dwight and Alvin, had sipped coffee, drained beer bottles and waited. He'd waited, and all the time looked out of the café windows and down towards the floodlit empty street in front of the crossing-point. And further down the street, in another café, would have been the opponents, the enemy, with their coffee and their beer. God, it had been a world of certainties, and a place of brave men. He thought of himself as the flag-bearer for those agents coming in the dark to the checkpoint. Old Americans in veterans' caps were having their photographs taken by the sangar, and Japanese tourists were painting the place with their digital video cameras. Sometimes, on the bad nights and far back behind the floodlights, there would be a rasp of brittle gunfire, and sometimes on the worst nights they would see the agent walk to the final check and then the Volkspolizei would pounce. Many nights he had waited in the window seats of the Cafe Adler and had not left until dawn.

He told Jerry the Pole where he wanted to be driven.

'Can I rely on you, Mr Mowbray, to settle for me a pension — not a great sum, but what reflects my value?'

'I'll look into it, Jerry.'

'Times are very hard for me, Mr Mowbray. I have written to London six times…' It was the last stretch of the Wall to have been left by the city's authorities. He saw the street sign: Niederkirchnerstrasse. The Wall was painted with pop-art. Mowbray would have said it had been defaced. The Wall had been so precious to him. He had spent hours each day, each week and each month staring at it as if it had secrets that only constant observation might unlock. The length of this section was around two hundred metres. Well, the bloody authorities didn't want history, did they? History was uncomfortable. History made heroes and cowards. Without the weight of history, an agent could be abandoned, surplus to bloody requirements. Behind the wall, hidden from him as he sat upright on the back seat of the Mercedes, was the bombsite of what had been the Gestapo headquarters, and on the raised pile of rubble, where the offices and the torture chambers and the holding cells had been, was the old viewing platform where Rupert Mowbray had stood with binoculars. On the platform he had believed he communed with the agents he ran on the far side of the Wall. It was the least he could do, because he could not walk with them where they were, separated from his protection by the guards, automatic guns, dogs and mines. He had been obligated to stand there, as if that way he could share their danger. That day the danger lay as a shadow on Viktor Archenko.

They were at the last stop of his pilgrimage. He would have liked to bring flowers but that would have been ostentatious. He walked from the Mercedes through the wide entrance and into a wide cobbled courtyard. Around it were the windows of what had been, more than a half-century before, the war ministry of the Third Reich, its pulse point. In the exact centre of the courtyard was a statue in bronze, two metres high, of a naked man, commemorating the life and death of Count Klaus von Stauffenberg, who had laid the bomb in the briefing room of the Wolf's Lair. A plaque marked where he had stood and faced his firing squad. The man had given his life. Mowbray thought him noble and bowed his head in reverence in front of the statue. Nobody watched him. Germans rarely came here. A traitor confused the ignorant. Nothing, they parroted, was owed to a traitor. They were bloody wrong: Viktor Archenko was a traitor.

He walked out of the courtyard.

'I am very glad, Mr Mowbray, that you will look into the matter of my pension.'

'I think it better that we let the matter rest, Jerry.'

'Because with the winter coming, and the cold — you know the cold of a Berlin winter, Mr Mowbray — and the influenza and bronchitis, it is important to have heating. To heat myself I must have a pension…'

'As I've said, I'll see what I can do.'

'Heh, Mr Mowbray, you chose old Jerry the Pole for an operation that you say is "bigger than the biggest". I have that importance. Surely I am worth money each month, a pension?'

'Depend on me, Jerry.'

They called at the embassy. The building was heavily guarded by troops of the Bundesgrenzschutz, who carried machine-guns and peered officiously at the passenger from the Mercedes. Mowbray saw Daphne Sullivan, who relayed to him that his people had arrived safely in Gdansk and gave him the position of the Princess Rose. He dictated a short, bland, confident progress report for transmission to London. Dusk fell on the city.

Six and a half hours' driving time, Jerry the Pole said. The Mercedes was at least ten years old and it had in excess of two hundred thousand kilometres on the clock, but it was warm and comfortable, and he would doze in the back. And if he slept he would not have to listen to the wretch's drip-moan about his bloody pension. By the time Mowbray reached his bed he would be, fancifully, within spitting distance of Kaliningrad.

If he were not too late. For what he had done, he would be consigned to hell if he were too late.

The master had the charts of the approach spread out. He watched his instruments closely to be certain that the course he took bisected the areas marked on the chart as dumping grounds for explosives (disused) and minefields (cleared). Andreas Yaxis did not trust the Polish navy, under Communism or democracy, to have made safe the charted positions of mines or explosives dumps. When he was within a sea mile of the rocking light buoy at the head of the inshore traffic zone, he relaxed. He cleared away the chart, ordered the engine room to cut power, and felt the throb of the Princess Rose die, as if sleep took it. He strained to see through his binoculars, and was rewarded. The pilot's cutter powered towards him, and in the distance were the lights of Gdansk.

Viktor elbowed open the door to the darkened dormitory. The weight crushed him. He sagged against the wall, wriggled his back until he felt the light switch, and the dormitory flooded with light. He staggered down the aisle between the beds. White, staring faces watched him. The audience were upright, rubbing the sleep from their eyes. Viktor looked for the conscript's bed. At the bed, Vasiliev's, he dumped it. The machine-gun dropped to the floor, and the clap of noise reverberated through the dormitory. He straightened, arched, then peeled the belts of 12.7mm ammunition off his shoulders and let them fall, clanging, on to the concrete. In Vasiliev's face, he saw disbelief turn to gratitude. He gasped, then pointed down to the machine-gun's stock where the light caught the carved initials.

He said, 'Set it up. Load it.'

Wearing only a tatty singlet and pants, Vasiliev crawled off the bed, then crouched beside the weapon. With sure hands he extended the tripod's legs, locked them. He worked open the breech and used the singlet's hem to wipe the chamber. No one spoke. The clatter of the movements destroyed the silence. He loaded a belt, lowered the breech flap on to the bullets and looked up. He would have seen a trace of madness on Viktor's face. Above where Viktor stood was the single light that lit the dormitory, with a Bakelite shade over it.

Viktor pointed to the light, and ordered, 'Shoot it out.'

The safety lever rattled. Vasiliev squatted behind the weapon, then elevated the barrel aim, fired. The dormitory crashed into darkness and the fumes of the shots stank in the air. Viktor could no longer see the faces that had watched him. He imagined them pressed against their pillows, holding their hands over their ears.

He shouted, 'Now, go back to sleep.'

The last sound they would have heard of him was the beat of his feet as he strode towards the door. He threw it open, slammed it shut after him, and walked away into the night. It had been an insanity, but for a few minutes it had displaced the nightmare. He went towards his quarters, the insanity was blown out, and the nightmare once again settled on him.

A broad smile dragged across Yuri Bikov's mouth.

Before leaving his mother, his father had said that the teenaged Yuri did not smile enough. His wife had not contradicted him. A smile came rarely to him and was not to be witnessed. But in the dark he could smile.

When Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko had emerged from the gates, shown out by two thugs, his features had been hidden by the breech mounting of a heavy machine-gun. Bikov had not been able to see his prey's face. At the barracks, in darkness, Bikov had told the driver, his sergeant, to hold back as Archenko had laboured into the barracks building under the weight of the machine-gun. He had sensed that the man was bowed by the burden of his position and that the machine-gun was the focal point of a throw for self esteem. The gesture had been glorious. The roof of the building had exploded in gunfire, and then Archenko had emerged.

It was a strong face, it had purpose. Archenko could not have seen him. Bikov was back against a stores building; his sergeant stood in front of him and his major was beside him. He was hidden from Archenko, but he saw the resolution in the face. There were bears in the Gorno-Altaysk region that were tracked and hunted by marksmen who went deep into the mountains and forests after them. A hunter had told him that the best of the bears, as the marksman came close but was still hidden, seemed to sense the danger and would always turn to face it, even when they could not see it. Big animals, and proud, worthy quarries for a hunter. There was a light high above Archenko. Archenko seemed to face him. There was, Bikov thanked Archenko, stubborn, obstinate defiance. He could not ask for more.

Then the shadow was on Archenko's face and his body seemed to wilt. Archenko missed a step, tripped, lurched, then regained his stride. Bikov knew it went hard on him. The surveillance tightened, the pressure built. The matter of the machine-gun was to relieve the pressure, but there was no escape. Behind him the watchers kept company with him, from corner to corner, doorway to doorway, shadow to shadow.

No file, however detailed, could tell Yuri Bikov more than the shortened glimpse of a man's face. It was a good face. He gulped the air, scented by the sea, and felt the excitement.

Locke wanted to talk, Mowbray didn't.

Jerry the Pole had been waved away, sent to find a seaman's lodging-house, somewhere down by the Solidarity docks. The car stayed at the Excelsior Hotel.

The night lay heavy on Gdansk.

Locke wanted to talk about the reconnaissance by the team but Mowbray refused, left him in the bar, took his key and his bag, and climbed the stairs heavily. It was rare for him to feel his age, but he did that night. One more call…the most important of his day.

He knocked on the door, said his name, and heard the feet padding to it. The door was unlocked, then the chain was loosed.

She wore a simple cotton nightdress, white, with little flower patterns on it, and a wool dressing-gown lay around her shoulders. He saw the amber pendant at her throat.

'Forgive me, I just wanted to see you were all right.'

'I'm all right.'

'The room — did they offer it you? If I am not impertinent, did you ask for it?'

'It's the room they gave me. Don't worry, Rupert, that's all right.'

'Goodnight, Alice.'

'Goodnight.'

The room was as he remembered it: same curtains, same furniture, same bed as had been in it the first time he had come to Gdansk with Alice North. The first time they had come to Gdansk to meet face to face with the agent, codenamed Ferret, she had been given that room. The door closed on him and he heard the lock turn, the safety chain engage. He felt old and tired, weary…and the guilt sapped him.

In the calm waters of the dredged harbour channel, the master slept and the dog snored at the foot of his bunk. There was no need for Andreas Yaxis to be on the bridge. The pilot brought the Princess Rose to her berth by the fertilizer factory and loading beltways. Only when the engine had cut did he rise from his bunk, smooth the blankets, punch the pillow, then shrug into his jacket and slip on his boots. He climbed the steps to the bridge and thanked the pilot formally. When the pilot had gone, and ropes secured them to the quay, he began to prepare the master's declaration, the cargo manifest and the crew declaration for the Gdansk Customs men. It had been a good voyage and the engine had performed well. Over the internal telephone he thanked the engineer for his efforts. But it would not be difficult, if that were necessary, for the engineer with his skills to create 'difficulties' below. He expected Rupert Mowbray to come aboard in the morning.