Traitor's Kiss

…Chapter Eight

She hugged the dressing-gown around her, and the draught of the dawn came in through the opened kitchen door. If Gail Ponsford heard her husband moving downstairs when it was still dark she always left her bed, went to the kitchen and made an early pot of tea. She knew when he was disturbed, fretted. She watched him, out in the garden, fill the songbirds' peanut cage. That was a waste of time: the squirrels would have emptied it before he was off the train, well before he'd walked into Vauxhall Bridge Cross. She waited till he saw her.

'Tea?'

'Be blissful.'

'Couldn't sleep?'

'Bit of a bad one — sorry.'

'Going to talk about it — or "need to know"?'

Bertie, her husband of twenty-eight years, grinned ruefully. Gail Ponsford had been a General Service girl in Century House. The then head of Russia Desk had been their best man and her matron-of-honour had been a dragon from Personnel. She was steeped in the Service, knew the people and the procedures.

'You remember Rupert Mowbray?'

She could play the comedienne. 'Rupert the Professor, Rupert the Pompous, Rupert the Patriarch, Rupert the Principled…but he's Rupert the Pensioned now, isn't he?'

She'd put the kettle on the ring, and he'd slumped at the table.

'He came back, did a Lazarus, and preached to the DG. Doesn't matter who he is, where he is — out beyond our back fence, where civilization stops, there's an asset in trouble. Likely to be arrested, might already have been arrested. Rupert used to handle him. Remember Alice North? Of course you do — the little grey spinster. She tipped Rupert off. He's at the outside gate. What do I do? Turn him away? I can't…he charmed me, enthused me, made me feel big and tall — he'd sell whale blubber to the Greenlanders — then did the same to the DG…and he repeated the dose for a minister. We're going to exfiltrate the asset. He had us all in the palm of his hand — talked about loyalty and integrity, and making the Service great — you know, admired. He made it seem so easy, and we swallowed it. You know what? It would have sounded wimpish to put the old hand up and query: "What if it all goes wrong?" Nothing ever went wrong in Rupert's day.'

She poured the boiling water into the teapot.

'A few hours ago a ship docked in Gdansk — that means it's all in place.'

'Are we talking, Bertie, about Kaliningrad?'

'Not a fair question.'

'But isn't that a closed military zone?'

'And don't arch your eyebrows like that, please. It's all in place. I won't survive if it goes wrong, and I doubt the DG will. We'll go quietly, in a couple of months, but go we will. Only Rupert is ring-fenced. He's retired and we've rubber-stamped him. If it goes right, and we bring our man home, to clarion calls of applause, then the people on their side are on the train to the salt mines. Who's going to be left standing? Someone has to lose. Me, our crowd — them, their Service — who's going to be left standing?'

'Is it today?'

'Tomorrow we are going into Kaliningrad, to lift out our dubious asset, with guns. Jesus Christ…and I sanctioned it, and the DG did, and the minister.'

Gail Ponsford poured the tea, strong.

'Please, would you pass me the marmalade?'

The dining room of the Excelsior Hotel overlooked the junction of the waterways, the Stara Motlawa and the Nowa Motlawa that sliced through Gdansk. From the window, across the water, was the old town of the Hanseatic port. On his previous visits, Rupert Mowbray had always taken the seat with the panoramic view. He was able to share the majesty of the historic buildings, but was protected from a sight of the harshness of another East European city that struggled to make a living from the post-Communist times. The cranes of the docks — Solidarity territory, where the rotten apple had infected the barrel that was the Communists' territory of satellite regimes were beyond his vision. What had happened here, the strikes, the lock-outs, the police baton charges and the bloody-minded obstinacy of the dockyard workers, had brought down the whole damned pack of cards…and had destroyed the certainties in Rupert Mowbray's life.

Gabriel Locke passed him the marmalade, and returned to his Herald Tribune.

'Thank you so much.'

Locke had eaten yoghurt and fruit, Rupert had eaten a full cooked breakfast and was now on toast. Locke, behind his paper, and Rupert, his back to the door, did not see her entry into the dining room. He was smearing butter on to the toast when Alice eased into the chair beside him…as she had that first time, after the first long night.

Rupert Mowbray remembered it with the clarity of crystal.

The evening:

Rupert Mowbray had been with Alice in his hotel room, waiting. The messages had been passed; there was nothing to do but wait. Dead drops before that in Murmansk and Malbork, but never a meeting until that first evening in the hotel in Gdansk. The hesitant knock on the room door and the moment's meeting of his eyes and hers, then she had been on her feet and at the door, unlocking it. He had stared at the door, then seen him. Calling him 'Ferret', him not understanding, Rupert had hugged him, Alice had gravely shaken his hand, and the tension had dripped off Ferret.

Such a handsome young man, such dignity, and such painfully obvious stress. Like a blind date, he'd written in his report for London. For a quarter of an hour, not more than fifteen minutes because time did not allow it, they had sparred and made small-talk about the weather, the journey to Gdansk from Kaliningrad and the business of the delegation at the dry dock, then to work. Bundles of papers, blueprints and manuals, work procedures and diagrams outlining chains of command. Then the talking. A tape-recorder turning, and Alice doing the backup shorthand, her eyes never off him. Intense and exciting, as Ferret had bolted the sandwiches they'd provided and had never stopped talking, as if each minute with them was the last available. Rupert never interrupting the flow…it was the best source material, raw and clean, that he had ever handled. Ferret sweating, driblets coming down his forehead, shoulders knotted tense and the hands always moving, tie pulled down, jacket slung on the floor. Four hours of it, and Ferret starting to ramble when asked why. His father and his grandmother…and the thread lost because of his tiredness. The first time they had put a face to the agent they called Ferret.

The night:

He hadn't wanted to finish, but the coherence had gone. They had moved past the point of useful communication. Ferret was losing concentration. Rupert had done a few minutes on trade craft, because this man was an innocent. They'd talked personal security, and he'd reached forward from the chair where he sat to the bed where Ferret was propped and held the man's hand, tried to squeeze the shaking from it, as he would have gripped his children's if they had been in crisis. Ferret was his new family, Ferret craved to be admitted to the circle. Easy enough for him, for Rupert Mowbray, in a room at the Excelsior Hotel, with a diplomatic passport in his room safe, to lecture on personal security. He hadn't wanted to go, to walk out into the night and slip away back to the hotel where the rest of his delegation stayed.

Rupert had watched the way Ferret gazed, awestruck, at Alice North, little sweet Alice. He'd said, 'I'm a bit tired, not as young as I used to be,' had grimaced, and then had spoken so softly and with such innocence: 'Alice, you've a bottle in your room. What about a nightcap for our friend, a little drink for him — yes, Alice?' The complete performer, he'd yawned wide and rubbed his eyes, then blinked — so natural — and he'd loosed Ferret's hand, and stood.

'Yes, I've a bottle,' Alice had said.

He'd hugged Ferret, wished him well and muttered about the next dead drop, how much he looked forward to the next visit of the delegation to sort out the negotiation for the use of the dry dock. He'd yawned again and seen them out through the door, then moved with a cat's speed to gather up the papers brought for him and whip the spool off the tape-recorder.

The morning:

He'd been at breakfast when she'd come in and sat down beside him. He'd murmured, 'Good morning', to her. There had been on her face, at her mouth and in her eyes, a meld of defiance and shyness — what he called 'the first-time look'. No cosmetics on the eyes, mouth or cheeks, no little splash of perfume or toilet water at her neck. She'd kept her head down, toyed with a single piece of toast, and hadn't spoken to the waitress who brought her coffee. It was how Rupert Mowbray had hoped she'd be. It was what Ferret had needed. To Rupert Mowbray, the worst that could have come from the first meeting, face to face, in a hotel room was the request by an agent for a defection package, when they caved and wanted out. Then they were useless…but the best, the best of all, was when the agent left the meeting and walked tall, was enthused, went willingly back behind the fences, the guards, the guns, and dug, stole and eavesdropped for more, went strengthened. He hadn't supposed that Alice North was a virgin — who was at that age? No woman he knew with a pleasing face was a virgin, certainly neither of his own daughters. She had looked like a deflowered virgin that morning at breakfast. Not sex for the first time, but love. Emotion, romance, lust — for the first time — he hadn't cared which Alice North had found. He'd said something about the time he'd booked the taxi for, and she'd nodded, distant.

Over the weeks and months that had followed he'd watched Alice in Warsaw at the Station, and in London and, he was prepared to bet his shirt on it, no other man had been welcomed where the Ferret had been. He'd seen men try and had seen them summarily dismissed. The second time, and the third, that they had come to the Excelsior Hotel to debrief Ferret he had, each time, slyly, called a halt to the talk of submarines and missile warheads and the biographies of military commanders, and left them to slip away to her room. And each time, in the morning, she had come to breakfast with the defiance and shyness highlighting her prettiness. He had used her, as he had used Ferret, and the glory that had come to him from it shamed him.

She wore no makeup now, but her eyes were reddened and he thought she had cried in the night. He passed her a sheet of paper from his leather-cased notepad. 'It's the number, the extension and the message. I suggest you use a handkerchief. Right, it's going to be a busy morning, so let's get on with it.'

The ship, predictably, had engine trouble. The engineer of the Princess Rose, Johannes Richter, told the officials of Customs, the harbour master's office and Immigration who trooped on board that it might be in the engine's main drive shaft or perhaps the piston heads. Any who cared to listen were given a full diatribe on the age of the engine and the work it had put in during its nineteen years at sea — but, and Richter emphasized the point by hammering his oil stained fists together, he was confident that the Princess Rose would be able to sail when the cargo of fertilizer was in the holds, on schedule. To back his story, in addition to the master and mate's protestations that the engine would soon be serviceable, a representative of the Cyprus-based owners was on board, and an additional engineer.

Through the morning, parts of the diesel engine were taken off the Princess Rose and replacements were carried on board.

There was no reason for the officials of Customs, the harbour master's office and Immigration to be suspicious. The necessary passes were issued for entrance and exit of the dock area on the Motlawa river, and the movement of vessels from Hamburg, Toulouse, Piraeus, Tallinn and Stettin demanded their presence elsewhere.

Rupert Mowbray, the owner's man, was on the bridge with the master, and Jerry the Pole played the part of the additional engineer. While Mowbray stayed deep in conversation with the master and worked through the charts of the coast off the oblast of Kaliningrad, Jerry the Pole was the courier. By the evening, the time the Princess Rose was due to sail on a full tide, she would be laden with nine hundred tonnes of fertilizer in fifty-kilo sacks. Four handguns, three stun-grenades, six smoke-grenades and a field medic's kit would have been taken off, and a state-of-the-art communications system would have been brought on board.

At midday, the official from the harbour master's office came down the ladder into the engine room for final reassurance. He was confronted with a frightening puzzle of pieces laid out on oily newspaper. Was it definite that the ship would be ready to vacate its berth on the fertilizer dock?

'If I am left alone to work, then it is definite,' Richter growled. A rider was added by the master: even if the work was not completed to his own satisfaction and that of the owner's representative, the ship would have power enough to leave the berth and would tie up further down the Motlawa river — it was a guarantee.

Buried in a bag under grease-coated engine parts, the pistols and grenades were taken out of the docks and driven by Jerry the Pole to the hotel. Then he went to the Excelsior, where he collected from Gabriel Locke the scrambled radio equipment that could receive and transmit encodes and 'burst' high-speed messages, and returned to the Princess Rose.

The Immigration men were told that, in order to facilitate the departure on schedule, the representative of the owners would stay on board for the sailing.

'Where am I going to be?' Mowbray asked.

'I promise nothing,' the master said. 'We do not usually carry passengers.'

'You'd better find somewhere…and remember it's a full-fare paying bloody passenger.'

As a young Service officer, Mowbray had been posted to the high commission in the protectorate of Aden and once a month, before the danger had become too great, he had gone up-country and stayed with tribal chiefs. He had acted out the part of the young Lawrence, sleeping on mud floors, cursing the discomfort and the smell. He thought this experience would tax his tolerance.

The Princess Rose was foul, filthy and uncomfortable, and he had only seen the deck area, the cramped bridge, the engine room, where he had stepped in an oil pool and damn near fallen and could have broken his neck, and the storeroom from which the handguns and grenades had been retrieved. It would be his base, his command n and control centre, for a day and a half if his planning played to the optimum. The coffee brought him by the Filipino cook-boy was disgusting. He had seen a leviathan cockroach appear in a corner of the bridge as the mate had eaten a sandwich…but it was the nearest he would come again in his lifetime to running an operation across a hostile frontier.

The Princess Rose, his new home, rolled on her moorings and he heard the banging down below, a heavy wrench on metal, for the benefit of the man from the harbour master's office.

It was a regret that he would not be there when Ferret and Alice were reunited. He would be incarcerated on this heap of rusting scrap when they met again, by his hand. He, the magician who conjured with their lives, was sorry he would not be close to Braniewo the next evening to see it.

The message on the notepad given her by Rupert Mowbray was in front of her.

Alice sat on the bed, legs tucked up, her back against the headboard, and reached into her handbag for a handkerchief. Then she picked up the mobile phone.

Jerry the Pole had bought it early that morning in the street-market behind the flower shops on Podwale Staromiejskie. Under the counters there, for sale, were mobile phones from Poland, Germany, Sweden and Kaliningrad. If records existed, and that was doubtful, the number would be registered as from Kaliningrad, and the report of its theft buried.

The second time they'd met, Viktor had given them all the numbers and extensions for the outer office in the admiral's suite. She tapped out the digits for the international code, then the general switchboard of Fleet Headquarters.

A woman answered, sharp and superior.

She held her handkerchief over the mobile's mouthpiece, as Rupert had suggested, spoke in Russian, and gave the extension she wanted, for the clerk who sat at a small desk beside the larger desk of the fleet's armaments officer. By now the number of Viktor's direct line and his extension would be bugged, but there were nine other lines into the outer office.

It was curtly answered. She asked if that was the extension.

'I know what was the matter with me — it will not happen again.'

'They were like wolves round you. You saw how they sneered at you. I do not like my man to be sneered at, to be shown to be asleep.'

Viktor said evenly, 'I can apologize again, if that is required.'

'You want leave, or a woman? You are unwell? What the fuck is the problem, Viktor?'

He could have said that for four years his life had been a deceit and that he was now under close surveillance. He could have taken the admiral to the wide, polished window and shown him the watchers hovering by the front door of the headquarters building and across the parade area. 'Just a bit tired — and I am grateful, sincerely, for your concern.'

He organized Admiral Falkovsky's in-tray, what must be read, what must be signed, and slipped out.

In the outer office, Viktor settled at his desk, picked up his pencil and began to sift the documents and memoranda in front of him. A clerk came to him and handed him a slip of folded paper.

He read. 'We should meet at the zoo, by the hippopotamus pen, at 4 p.m. tomorrow, Wednesday, love, Alicija.'

For a moment Viktor thought he might faint. To steady himself he bit on the end of the pencil, filled his mouth with little wood splinters. He thought of her, Alice, and the touch of her. He crumpled the paper in his hand, and began to read, vacantly, his work for the day. At the first chance he flicked the switch on the shredder beside his desk and fed into it a document on training programmes for two frigate crews, the sheet of notepaper, and a memorandum on the meteorological forecast for the coastal waters of the eastern Baltic for the next week, then turned off the machine. He thought of her smile and her love, and he trembled.

An officer, a captain lieutenant, stood in front of him and said there was a deterioration problem in one of the torpedo tubes of a Vashavyanka-class submarine moored in basin number two. Could he come personally and inspect it before a report was written for Admiral Falkovsky's attention? He went with the captain lieutenant to the naval dockyard. He was often used as a filter before reports were written and submitted. He did not recognize the trick.

'You have an hour,' Piatkin said. 'A clear hour.'

He waved Piatkin away. An hour was sufficient. Yuri Bikov walked to the front entrance of the officers' accommodation block, paused to wipe his feet hard on the outer mat, then checked his boots to see they were free of mud and dirt. The three-storey building was for single men, not officers with families who would have larger units. The doorway was empty, the staircase deserted. Single officers were at their desks or at the training lecture halls — no one saw him enter with his major and his sergeant. He wore the same clothes as those in which he had travelled; had he been seen he would have appeared to be a plumber or an engineer sent to repair one of the quarters' heating systems.

The files were gutted and could tell him nothing more. He waited on news from Gdansk, but that was a long throw. He had seen the face of Archenko, his prey. The room would tell him more of the man than he could find elsewhere: the secrets of a room were always paramount in an investigation. The deterioration of a submarine's torpedo tube would give him the time he needed. His sergeant inserted a master key. The door creaked open and the silence swam in the block.

He knelt in the doorway. He searched the floor for a cotton thread, a blond hair or a sliver of see-through adhesive tape. He did not find them. He stepped into the room. His major followed him, his sergeant closed the door and relocked it.

Bikov went to the centre of the room, and his major and his sergeant stayed back by the door. They would not distract him. He had an hour, he did not need to hurry. A man's room gave insight to his soul. In front of him was a Spartan iron bed, carefully made up, with the sheets and blankets uncreased, the corners exactly folded and the pillow had been punched as if it were new. There was a bedside table on which were a telephone, a notepad and a pencil laid geometrically alongside it, a small alarm clock and a battery radio. Beyond the bedside table was a window with the curtains opened, but the ledge was bare. In front of the window was a bare desk top, with empty drawers, and a small swivel chair.

Bikov made a quarter-turn. On his left was an easy chair covered with frayed material facing a television set. Beside the chair was a low table on which lay a naval magazine, not dropped down but placed exactly against two of the table's corners. Screwed to the wall, above the television set, was a double-shelved bookcase. From where he stood, Bikov could read the titles: naval manuals in Russian, medieval archaeological history in German. Midway between the bookcase and the end of the wall a single framed photograph hung. It was an enlargement and showed a river in the foreground and a castle of red brick whose outer defensive walls, set with battle towers, dominated a riverbank.

He turned again.

The wardrobe's two doors were closed. Next to it was the open entrance to the shower room and toilet, and past it was a hard, upright chair. There were no clothes, uniform or civilian, on the chair, no discarded shoes on the floor. Bikov's own room, wherever he was, was carpeted with dropped clothes, trousers and shirts, underwear and socks. Where there was wall space, beside the wardrobe and the door and above the chair, there was a year's planner chart, a traditional reproduction of a painting of a destroyer flotilla at sea, and nothing else.

He looked into a corner of the room, where the sink unit was. Across the wall was a work surface that reached to a small electric cooker. Under the sink and the work area were cupboards. Above them were hooks for saucepans and racks for plates, bowls and cups. His lips pursed and his tongue ran against his teeth. Every item was washed up and stowed. No used saucepans in the sink, no rinsed plates or cups left to dry on the draining-board.

Now Bikov faced the door.

A greatcoat and a waterproof hung from the hooks on it. There was no furniture against the walls on either side, no more pictures hanging. Bikov spoke. His major and his sergeant knew better than to think he addressed them. He spoke to himself.

'What is remarkable is that the man, Archenko, hides himself. This is his room, where he is alone and in privacy, and it is clean. Not clean with a broom, a pan and disinfectant, but clean of character. This is not some sudden gesture, the cleansing has not happened overnight because he believes himself to be under surveillance. All the time that he has been watched, which would have first alerted him, he has not worked through this room and taken from it anything that could betray him. It would have been seen. If he had come down the stairs and out through the back or the front and had carried a bag with materials to be disposed of, it would have been seen. The room, I think, has been like this for months or for years, perhaps from the day he arrived here. It would be a clear decision on his part to minimize the property he owns that sends a message of him. The state of the room is an indication — not evidence — of guilt. It is the room of a man who covers himself, who does not wish anything of himself to be observed. This is not a mania for tidiness, it is beyond that. Where are the photographs? There is no picture of any significant person: a grandmother or a mother or a girl, no pictures of friends and fellow officers, of him today or of him in his youth. Even here, in his own room, he guards against outsiders. The room has been sanitized, and I believe that happened from the start of his occupancy. He is not an emotional eunuch. I consider that everything he does is plotted with care. He goes to Malbork Castle inside eastern Poland three or four times a year, and that is permitted because he makes a great play of his near-obsessional interest in medieval castle-building. It is the one interest that his fellow officers and his commander, and the zampolit Piatkin, need to know of. So, he has a photograph that I assume is of Malbork Castle, and books to verify the interest — nothing more. He would know that I, or anyone such as I, whom he will inevitably face in interrogation, would look for family as the first point to talk of. There is no family. He tries not to make it easy for me…for an interrogator. I do not intend to go through the drawers. This is the room of an intelligent man. If we were to dislodge one hair from a drawer top, or from the wardrobe, or the drawers at the kitchen unit, then we arm him, and I do not wish, yet, for him to be alerted. I said that he was intelligent, but I think Viktor Archenko may be, could possibly be, under the delusion that he is clever, cunning, and that would be an error. The room tells me much of him, enough of him.'

On the way out, Bikov knelt and examined the mat and the carpet again. He heard the footsteps coming up the stairs, iron-shod boots on the concrete. He stood and stepped back, and his sergeant pulled the door shut. The footsteps came on up the stairs. His sergeant fumbled with the master key. Bikov faced the door, that his face should not be seen, as did his major and his sergeant. The footsteps went on by, crossed the landing, going easily, and climbed the next flight.

Yuri Bikov did not know of the mistake he had made.

When he had heard them go, the conscript came down from the top landing. He breathed hard. He waited until he heard the snap of the ground-level main entrance door, then followed. Igor Vasiliev thought himself the chosen friend of Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko. He had been saved from drowning. His machine-gun had been returned to him. He had come to tell his friend, the chief of staff to the fleet commander, when there was next a firing exercise on the range for his platoon, because he hoped his friend would come to see him shoot. Men had been at his friend's door, had been closing it and locking it, and had turned away from him as if to preserve the secrecy of their identity. He did not know the importance of what he had seen, but it frightened him.

Deep in the water from the weight of her nine hundred tonnes of cargo, the Princess Rose edged up the river in an aisle of cranes and moored ships. They were almost level with the Westerplatte monument on the starboard side, and the new ferry wharves were on the port side.

Mowbray caught the tang of the sea, close to open water, and clung to a rail as the ship nudged into the river's mouth. He climbed the last set of steps to the bridge and worked his way through the narrow door. He wore a clean shirt, the tie of the Parachute Regiment, not that he had ever jumped but it had been presented to him at a mess thrash in Aldershot, his tweed suit, the brogue shoes that had good tread, which Jerry the Pole had polished for him, and a life-jacket. He had insisted upon the life-jacket. In an hour, when they were clear of the harbour and out to sea, and the risks of interception were least, he would send the signal to London, tell Vauxhall Bridge Cross that the operation would run in the morning. He came to the bridge to find the master, whose cabin he had purloined, and vent his annoyance.

'There's a dog in there.'

'Where, Mr Mowbray?'

'In your, my, cabin. There's a bloody dog in there. It scratched the door.'

'It is our dog; it is Feliks.'

'I opened the door, it ran in. Looks flea-infested. It's underneath the bed.'

'The bunk, Mr Mowbray.'

'Underneath the bed, and it growls.'

'We love that dog, it brings us luck.'

'It smells, and we don't need luck. We don't rely on luck, Captain Yaxis, because we are professionals. Get rid of it, please.'

They were now past the Westerplatte monument. He lingered on the bridge to give time for the master to call the mate, and for the mate to remove the dog from the cabin. He looked back at the monument, a hideous, angular mess of carved granite blocks with a thin square column topping the plinth. It had no beauty, but a savage strength, and it marked a point of history. Mowbray was a man of history: it governed him.

She would be there at dawn. He could predict it. Alice would be there, on the high promontory dividing the Motlawa river from the sea, by the monument as the light came. She had history there.

The Princess Rose chugged into the channel and the swell caught her, but then the ship veered to starboard, slowed and approached a disused quay.

The master told him the dog had been taken from the cabin, that he had informed the harbour master's office that he was still dissatisfied with the engine's performance, and the pilot had been stood down.

Rupert Mowbray went below to prepare the signal he would send to London.

She had taken charge. Locke could see that the men enjoyed her authority. She gave them each a sheet of paper and a pencil. They were in Billy's room high in the Mercure Hotel and Billy had the easy chair, Wickso and Lofty were squatted on the carpet, and Ham had the straight chair at the desk. He thought it childish.

She read out the questions. 'One: Who was the German commander defending Kaliningrad from the bunker? Two: In what street is the Kosmonaut memorial remembering Leonov and Patzayei, both from Kaliningrad?'

Locke had done the detailed briefing, as he had been taught to, with the maps, had seen the barely stifled yawns, and had known that he had not carried his audience. She had usurped him. Alice had used the same brief and had chatted through it as if she were a tourist guide. Now he thought she pandered to them.

'Got those, boys? Moving on…three: What year did Peter the Great visit what is now Kaliningrad? And four: What was the last church dynamited in Kaliningrad, in 1976, to remove the final traces of German culture? Keep scribbling, boys.'

He had talked to them for an hour, then she had intervened, gone over the same ground in thirty five minutes, and held them. He hadn't. Locke was ignored.

'Five: What is the name of the restaurant on Sovietsky 19? That's a good easy one.'

It was effortless and made them laugh. She held them in her hand, as he could not.

'Six: The cobbles in the streets round Kaliningrad's cathedral were dug up by the Russians — where were they relaid? Didn't you listen to me?'

He sat on the bed and thought he had no part to play. She diminished him.

He understood what she did: she bonded with them and relaxed them, made interesting the papers, maps, books they had searched through to learn of Kaliningrad. She made them scratch in their minds for what Locke and she had lectured. They had all been passed over, disgraced, and she wound them back into the family, did not take them for granted, made them feel they were players of importance, and calmed them.

'Keep going, boys…only another fourteen to do. Seven: Name the ship now moored at the Oceanography Museum that successfully evacuated twenty thousand Germans from Kaliningrad, in several sailings to Denmark? That's the lucky buggers — most weren't. Eight: When Brezhnev wanted to destroy the cathedral, whose tomb saved it? Are we doing all right, boys?'

Locke pushed himself up from the bed. He wanted out, fast, could not accept more of the humiliation. They fed from her fingers and had yawned at him. Then, she reached into her handbag and pulled out a boutique's little gift bag. She was smiling at them. From it she took out four small boxes. Her smile switched to mock solemn and she gave a box to each of them. 'Go on, yes, open it.'

Locke realized that none of them knew what they would find. The lids of the boxes were lifted. In each was a pendant of amber stone and a fine gold chain. She blushed. Her fingers were on her own pendant.

'Wear them when you go across — I'd appreciate that.'

Billy came to her. 'I wouldn't let all those slobbering blighters do this, ma'am, but this is from all of us — thanks.'

His coarse hands held her face and he kissed each of her cheeks, and the blush was brighter.

The clasps were too delicate for them. She moved from Billy to Lofty, then to Ham, unfastened the clasps, hooked the chains, then let the pendants swing on their chests. She got to Wickso, and reached behind his neck.

'Don't strangle me, ma'am. Oh, and I've a problem,' Wickso said.

'What is it, Wickso?'

'It's the photo we've been shown of him. It's not good enough. It's not sharp and the flash has washed the life out of him. What I'm saying, we could walk past him.' Billy was holding up the picture. Ferret lounged in a chair in a room of the Excelsior Hotel, shirtsleeves and tired. Mowbray had taken it. It was the only picture of Ferret in the file.

'I'm saying the same, ma'am,' Ham said, and Lofty nodded. 'It doesn't do the business.'

Well, that wasn't the fault of Gabriel Locke. None of it was his fault. Better if the photograph had stayed in the file, and the file had stayed in the archive. He was drifting to the door. She reached again into her handbag, took out a small leatherbound clip-over picture holder, and tossed it towards Billy. He caught it, and prised open the catch. Locke couldn't see the picture. Billy looked at it. Ham shuffled to him; Wickso and Lofty crawled across the carpet. They stared at the picture-holder, soaked it, then returned to their places.

Billy said, as he closed the catch and passed it back to Alice, 'That'll do nicely, ma'am. Nice picture — and we'll be glad to wear them. Keep firing, ma'am.'

Locke was at the door. 'I'll see you all in the morning.'

Alice was saying, 'OK, back to work. Where were we? Yes. Nine…'

He closed the door, padded off down the corridor, and took the lift, then walked out into the night. They didn't value him. He was not valued because he, alone, stood against the cowboy culture of the operation.

Past midnight, and the hotel slept. The man leaned across the reception desk, took the card sheet from his attaché case and showed it to the night porter. He was married to the cousin of the zampolit, Piatkin, a rank lower in the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti than him, but he knew he was spoken well of, and he had commendations. His life in the consulate was dull, his office overlooking Batorego was an empire of tedium, and then, from a clear blue sky, had come the matter of the book of matches and the queries as to who had stayed on three relevant dates at the Excelsior Hotel by the river and the marina. The task entrusted to him was the most sensitive yet given him. He had come the previous evening, late, but a fresh-faced young night porter had been on duty, and the one he trusted had been away from work, out of Gdansk, visiting a sick relative in Torun.

The last time he had visited the hotel in the dead of night with senior men from the Warsaw embassy, and had greased the night porter's palm, he had been given the names of Roderick Walton and Elizabeth Beresford, resident when it was relevant, and they had taken away a vague description of the elderly Walton. The card paper he took from his attaché case carried a montage of twenty-four covert photographs of older men. They came from the Lubyanka, had been flown to Warsaw, then couriered to Gdansk. Underneath each photograph was a number. Each one had been taken, long lens, of officers in the British intelligence-gathering service. 'Was Roderick Walton among them?' Had a senior and experienced man of the Service of Great Britain stayed at the Excelsior Hotel each time that Archenko had travelled to the city to negotiate dry-dock facilities? It was why he had joined. They said at the Lubyanka that the war was not finished, was dormant but not over. This was the battleground that mattered, they said in the Lubyanka, not the fucking about in Afghanistan, Chechnya and in the Islamic satellites in the south. The old discipline of ideology might have gone but the suspicion had survived and the lack of trust for those who now came from the West and patronized, slapped backs, stank of talc and lotion and who believed they had ground the Motherland to defeat He showed the photographs; a wad of zlotys lay across them. He had been told in the signal sent to him by courier that if a photograph was identified then evidence was found.

Locke came into the hotel. In front of him a man in a long raincoat was bent across the reception desk and the night porter was squinting down at something between them. The porter looked up, saw Locke, made an ingratiating smile, recognized him and reached for a key.

A low light lit the desk but the rest of the hall was in darkness. Locke took the key. The man's face was away from him. He took a step towards the stairs, then hesitated. Did he want a morning paper? In Gdansk there were the Gazeta Morska and the Dziennik Ballycki. Ahead of him was a day of hanging around, waiting; he had no book. Should he order a paper? He turned. Both their heads were down as they studied what was between them. He saw a sheet of photographs, on the desk, and the night porter's finger wavered over one, in the left column, and he heard a little scratched gasp of excitement from Raincoat Man. Then his finger, too, tapped the picture. Locke saw the photograph, saw the swept-back silver hair, the hawk's eyes and the proud chin of Rupert Mowbray, and their fingers. He turned away and padded to the dark corner of the lobby.

In Polish, 'Him, each of those dates?'

In Russian, 'Certain?'

The night porter's Polish, 'And here last night and checked out this morning?'

Raincoat Man's Russian, 'Again, last night?'

Raincoat Man pushed the banknotes off the sheet of photographs and the night porter slid them into his hip pocket. His hand was gripped, squeezed. Raincoat Man spun and strode quickly to the door.

This was not a training exercise, he was not at Fort Monkton. He was far from his instructors, far from the tradecraft lectures on the hill beside the golf course used by the members of the Gosport and Stokes Bay club, far from having his hand held and orders given him. The sweat ran cold on his neck and his back. He followed blindly. The door swung in his face and he careered through it. He had seen a Russian intelligence officer identify a photograph of Rupert Mowbray. The cold of the air hit him. Raincoat Man was fifty metres in front, going towards a car parked under a light by the marina's pontoon bridge. Nothing moved, only him and Raincoat Man — no cars, no pedestrians. They were alone in the night. Locke started to run.

Raincoat Man's pace quickened. Locke closed the gap, started to sprint, his shoes stamping for speed. Why? His mind was blurred. What did he intend? He was dazed by what he had seen.

Raincoat Man reached a family Fiat saloon car. Locke saw the bright material of kids' seats in the back. The door was opened, the attaché case was thrown into the back, on to the kids' seats. The shape ducked inside and was reaching out to drag the door shut after him. Locke was beside the car.

What would the instructors have said?

The scenario had never been played out for Locke at Fort Monkton on the IONEC course. Never, on the Intelligence Officers New Entry Course, had they told the rookie recruits what to do when confronting Raincoat Man — of Russian counterintelligence — beside the marina on the Motlawa river in old Gdansk. They taught the trade craft of surveillance and anti-surveillance procedures and dead drops and brush contacts and the techniques of short-range agent communication and evasion-driving and self-defence. Nothing that Gabriel Locke had been taught in the lecture rooms and the courtyard of the Fort would help him at that moment. A special-forces man, there for the day, had preached a clear mind and a clear head: Piss Poor Planning makes Pathetic Performance. He had no plan. Unarmed-combat training at the fort was gentle, well inside the rules laid down by the Health and Safety Executive, just a few rolls on to the mat off the instructors' shoulders, no pain.

Locke grabbed him. He dragged him up and out of the car. His fist was locked in a crumpled mass of Raincoat Man's coat. He saw the fear, heard the gibbered entreaties. Raincoat Man was terrified, too frightened to scream. So ordinary, like the Russians, the bright young ones, that Locke met on the cocktail circuit in Warsaw, the sort of guy he'd have buttonholed at a party. He did not know what he intended, what was the end of the game. He threw the man back against the wall of the Fiat saloon's side and saw him crumple, go down.

The eyes pleaded. Perhaps it was the names of the kids that sat in the back seats, but Locke only heard little squirts of sound. He swung back his foot and kicked him in the gut, low. And because he had kicked once, he kicked again. He was past his limit of control.

The instructors at the Fort, on self-defence, always yelled for 'control'. He had lost it. No scream, only a whimper below him. Locke pulled at the flabby weight of the Raincoat Man, lifted him. Held him up. There was no resistance, and pain had dulled the fear in the eyes that stared at him, cried to him. He threw the man away from him, as careless as the dropping of a sack of coal by the back door of the farmhouse in west Wales. The man left his grip and slumped, staggered once, then collapsed. Piss Poor Planning makes Pathetic Performance. Raincoat Man's fall took an age. The goal replayed in grinding slow motion. The head going down. The stagger had taken him away from Locke. A bollard of old black metal was set in the quay's edge, half a metre high. The head hit the bollard's rim and jerked as if rubber held it to the body.

Locke knelt beside him. He took the head in his hands and shook it and seemed to cry to the man to react, to speak, but the head lolled in his hands. He laid it down, left it to lie at its strange angle. His hands shook but he felt Raincoat Man's neck, tried to find a pulse and failed. He heard the wind in the riggings in the marina, whistling and rippling, and the creaking heave of the pontoon bridges. He looked around and saw nobody, nothing that moved. Across the city, on the junction of Nowe Ogrody and Third Maja, was the police headquarters of Gdansk. Locke had seen the building that morning, tall, austere, formidable. He had also seen that behind the police headquarters was the city's gaol, bleak, dirty and secure with razor-wire topping the walls. He had killed a man, had murdered him with his own hands. If he cried in the night for an ambulance, for help, he would be taken to the police cells, then to a court, and then to those prison cells whose small barred windows he had seen. He stood.

His father had taken him out once from the house and into the right near corner of the five-acre field and had shot a dog that could no longer work. His father had said it was good for the ten-year-old's character to watch life and death. Together, father and child had dug a grave for the dog. Father had told him to put the animal into the bottom of the pit, but the child could not touch it. His father, with his boot, had pushed the dog in. The child had run, streaming tears, back to the farmhouse, leaving his father to fill the pit. He had often walked close to that corner of the five-acre field, where only nettles grew, had thought of the dog and put primroses there in spring. He had gone there the day he had left home while his mother called for him that his father was in the car and waiting for him.

With the end of his shoe, Locke prodded Raincoat Man past the bollard and over the edge of the quay. There was a sluggish splash, then the marina's debris and the oily water closed on the body. He took the sheet of photographs from the attaché case, closed the car door and went back to the hotel.

In his bathroom, bent over the pan, Gabriel Locke was sick, sick again, and again. Each time he flushed it he vomited another time. When his stomach had no more to throw up he tore the photographs to small pieces, waited for the water to fill the cistern, dropped them into the pan and flushed it finally.

He knew what he had done, not why. He lay on the floor, dressed, curled up like a baby.

Alice was at the memorial. They had been there together on a summer's morning, the sun rising away to the west and breaking the mist. Behind them the taxi engine was purring, the clock still running. It was where they had been together the last time they had met, after they had made love and before he had gone back to the hotel where the delegation was lodged. He had understood her camera, had set the delay action, propped it on the plinth of the monument, run back to her and put his arm around her, his hand against her hip. She had dropped her head against his shoulder, and they had laughed and heard the shutter's click. He had pointed towards the sun, where it broke the mist, and had said that that was where he would be — Kaliningrad.

'You don't have to go,' Alice had said.

He'd kissed her, then smiled rakishly. 'But I'm not finished. I have work to do. There is no danger, I am very clever. I will come over, when it is the right time, when…'

He'd run. The taxi had driven away. She'd taken the first bus of the day back to the hotel, and as she had packed her bag before joining Rupert for breakfast she had found a little gift-wrapped package, had torn it apart, and found the pendant of amber stone and its gold chain.

It was dark still. Then it had been light. Now the summer was gone and the autumn was settling. Another taxi waited for her and there was the glow of the interior light as the driver read a magazine. She only heard the wind in the tall trees and the beat of the sea on the beach below the promontory. Alice had asked them to wear a talisman for her, and she had shown the men her photograph so that they would better recognize him at the zoo. Billy, the team leader among them, would have seen a trickle of emotion on her mouth and the flash of wetness in her eyes. He'd spoken for all of them when the meeting had broken, when she'd marked the quiz and given Ham the prize, out of petty cash, fifty zlotys, spoken quietly. 'You don't want to lose your beauty sleep, ma'am. We'll bring him out.'