VI

We walked up to the entrance and I looked out at the grounds.

‘Staff still in the sheds?’ I asked, as he rang the bell.

He gave a curt nod. The original embassy in Via XX Settembre had been bombed by Zionists in ’46 as part of their terror campaign against the British. Twenty-three years later, work had finally begun on rebuilding it on the original site, but most of the staff were still based here at Villa Wolkonsky, the ‘temporary’ embassy that had been set up after the attack. Although the ambassador’s quarters were rather grand, when I’d been here most of the staff had worked out of prefabricated shacks and outhouses in the grounds of the building – and apparently still did.

‘Sarah’s found you a room,’ Severn said. ‘Not terribly opulent, but I hope it will do.’

‘Sarah?’

‘The Station’s radio officer. We married last year.’

I remembered. I’d even been asked to sign off on it by Personnel, which I had done, naturally. ‘Keeping things in the family’ was approved of: it tended to make life easier. From past knowledge of Severn’s girlfriends, I imagined she would be very pretty and very pliant.

A butler in tails came to the door and led us inside. There was no lighting: there had been a power cut. ‘You see?’ Severn muttered to me under his breath. ‘Africa’. The butler gave us each a torch, and we walked past the copy of Annigoni’s portrait of the Queen to the reception desk, where a young man asked for our passports. Severn handed over his, and I remembered that Barnes had mine. Severn vouched for me, and the guard produced a form for him to sign to that effect. As well as having worked out of temporary quarters for over two decades, the embassy had a giant chip on its shoulder about security that dated back to the Twenties, when one of the local employees had passed hundreds of documents to the Soviets because he’d been trusted with keys to all the safes. As a result, the security precautions were often insufferable. They had annoyed me intensely in ’64, but right now I was delighted they were still in place: I couldn’t have picked a safer place to stay.

We climbed the staircase to the top floor, where Severn led me to a room roughly the size of the broom cupboard I should have strangled Toadski in.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘here we are.’

An iron bedstead had been made up with linen, and someone had sprayed cologne about, presumably to banish whatever unpleasant smell had previously occupied it. A rust-stained mirror and a washstand faced the bed, beside which sat my hold-all.

‘Where will Barnes sleep?’ I asked.

‘His room’s further down this corridor. Shall we go down now, or would you like a shave and a shower first?’

I walked over to the window and peered out. The street was largely protected from view, but I could just make out one corner of it. A tiny bubble of whitish grey stood out against the darkness: the Fiat.

I turned back to Severn. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

*

Downstairs again, members of the household were scurrying around lighting candles. From what I could make out, the place hadn’t changed much: the same candelabra and carpeting, the same paintings of dead dignitaries and the same smell of varnish.

We walked through to the dining room, where twenty or so people were seated, their faces quivering in the candlelight and their voices merging into a low babble. Lennox, the ambassador, was at the head of the table, talking to an elderly woman I vaguely recalled was married to the French cultural attaché. On seeing us, he touched her lightly on the arm and stood, placing his napkin on the table. The room hushed, and he slowly began clapping his hands. A few moments later, the others followed suit, scraping back their chairs and facing me.

‘Bravo!’ Lennox called out. ‘Bravo!’

It took me a moment, and then I realized that they were giving me a standing ovation for chasing down Farraday’s sniper. I wished I were the man they thought they were applauding – but I wasn’t. A wave of shame swept over me and I gestured for them to stop, but it only encouraged them to applaud with greater gusto. I quickly stepped over to Lennox and he shook me by the hand and, slowly, the circus died down.

‘Welcome, Paul,’ he said. ‘It’s a pleasure to see you again, although I wish it wasn’t under such tragic circumstances.’

The last time we’d met had been at a particularly unpleasant meeting in London three years earlier, at which he had complained that my Section was interfering in his affairs – but no mind. ‘We wanted to have something a little grander,’ he was saying, ‘but what with the dreadful news about John, not to mention all the demonstrations taking place in town today, it wouldn’t really have sent the right message.’

I told him I quite understood and thanked him profusely both for the honour and for putting me up, and then let Severn lead me around the table. I shook hands with Cornell-Smith and Miller, two of the old hands at the Station. Then we came to Barnes, who looked up at me with evident relief that I hadn’t been kidnapped on the way from the airport. It seemed that everyone was ahead of me: his taxi driver must have been luckier than us with the lights, or known a short cut. He was seated next to a good-looking man with brilliantined grey hair, to whom Severn now introduced me: Marco Zimotti. I shook his hand.

‘A pleasure.’

‘The pleasure is mine,’ he said. He was wearing a crisp black suit accompanied by a white shirt that heightened a very dark tan, the whole outfit worn with a sort of studied nonchalance: he looked more like a film star than a director of military intelligence.

‘I’ve been hearing about you from Reginald here,’ he said with a disarming smile. His English was faultless, with just the faintest tinge of a Neapolitan accent. ‘He tells me you went to the same school as Charles. Who, may I ask, was whose “fag”?’

I glared at Barnes. Severn was blushing to the roots of his hair – I wondered whether it was because he knew the American expression or because it wasn’t the sort of thing one talked about in polite company.

‘Charles was mine, in fact,’ I said. ‘Although we didn’t call them that. He was my “jun man” – “jun” meaning junior. He had to make me tea and toast in the morning and that sort of thing.’

Zimotti raised an eyebrow meaningfully. ‘And now? I imagine you could say he is still your “jun man” . . . no?’

Severn laughed rather too loudly and Zimotti joined in, and somehow we moved past it and everyone pretended it hadn’t been said. Severn took me by the arm and indicated a woman seated to Zimotti’s right.

‘And this is my wife, Sarah.’ She stood, and he leaned over to kiss her on the cheek.

Well, she was more than pretty. The few women I’d encountered in the Service who had escaped the typing pool had either been buck-toothed bluestockings or had done their best to appear so in order to be taken seriously. Not this one, though. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, tall and slim, with a sheet of honey-blonde hair that looked like it had been lifted from an advertisement for Sunsilk. She wore a white evening gown that had holes cut into it, discreetly revealing segments of golden-brown skin. It looked very expensive: the Gucci, Pucci, Cucci brigade. She had a high-boned face, with deep blue eyes heavily accented by kohl and a wide jawline leading into a perfectly shaped chin. Her lips were a little thinner than the fashionable Bardot pout, but otherwise she had the instantly recognizable look of the international jet set: one of the beautiful people for whom life was an endless round of cocktails and fun, fun, fun.

She offered me a hand sparkling with diamonds. ‘You must be Paul,’ she said. Her voice was low and cool, the accent Home Counties. ‘Charlie’s been telling me all about you.’

‘You’ve got a head-start on me, then,’ I said. ‘He only mentioned you ten minutes ago.’

She tilted her head to one side and smiled. It was the sort of smile that managed to say a lot of things at once, and I imagined she used it often, and found it very useful. I took a seat between her and Zimotti, and Severn pecked her on the cheek again and squeezed past to make his way to the far end of the table.

A white-jacketed steward brought round some wine and bowls of cold asparagus soup, and I turned to talk to Zimotti. He threw out a few questions about my previous experience of Rome, and I answered some of them and parried a few more.

‘I was sorry to hear about John Farraday,’ he said after we’d exhausted the preliminaries. ‘It is truly a tragedy, and I am deeply ashamed that one of my countrymen appears to have been responsible for it.’ His jaw clenched, marking the bones in his cheek. ‘But you have my assurance that we will discover who was behind this – and these Communist filth will be made to pay for what they have done.’

I thanked him for his support. ‘Charles told me you may have more information about Arte come Terrore. Do you have anything that specifically links them to this?’

We paused as the waiting staff came round with the main course: over-cooked venison, by the look of it. Zimotti sawed into his meat, his eyebrows knitting at the toughness.

‘We haven’t heard from our colleagues in Milan yet,’ he said, ‘but there is no question in my mind that these people were behind it. We have been watching this group for some time. They spend a lot of time here, as well as in Sardinia.’

‘Sardinia?’

‘Yes, they have some kind of a base there, we think. We are working on discovering more about it.’

That was something, at least. I asked him who he thought was sponsoring the group.

‘Moscow,’ he replied without hesitating, ‘although only the leaders of the group would be aware of that, of course.’ He nibbled off another chunk of meat.

‘Of course. But what makes you so sure it’s not Peking?’

‘All our evidence points to Moscow,’ he said. I was about to ask him what that evidence consisted of when one of the stewards walked over and told him he was required on the telephone. He excused himself with a smile and left the room.

So much for his briefing me. Dessert was served: a rice pudding, of all things. I had a spoonful, then pushed it to one side. I called back the steward and asked him for a grappa. He brought it to me a couple of minutes later, in a rather large glass. I leaned across and told Barnes I was going to grab some fresh air, and then headed onto one of the balconies overlooking the garden.

*

There was a faint breeze, and I could smell the mimosa and magnolia trees. I looked down, trying to catch another glimpse of the street, but I wasn’t high enough. Perhaps he’d gone home. Perhaps it hadn’t even been him.

No. It had been him, all right.

I took a sip of the drink, welcoming the fiery sensation it caused in my chest, and gazed out at the lights of the Eternal City: the Alban hills were just visible in the distance. Somewhere not too far away teachers were striking, students were staging sit-ins and factory workers were planting explosives. Rome itself, so Severn claimed, was on the verge of burning. And here we were, watching and waiting . . .

My thoughts were interrupted as I became aware of someone behind me. I turned to see Sarah Severn standing in the doorway.

‘Mind if I join you?’ she asked.

‘It’s a free country.’

She stepped onto the balcony and flashed her Mona Lisa smile again. ‘Is it?’

She took a pack of cigarettes from her purse: Nazionali, one of the more popular local brands, rather rough on the throat as I remembered. You could buy British tobacco everywhere here, so I took it she wasn’t overly attached to home-grown products, as expatriates sometimes were. She shook a cigarette into her fingers in one graceful movement, and I leaned over with my lighter. She looked up, and as our eyes met I felt the familiar flicker of interest. I stopped the thought dead. No more women.

‘Zimotti’s back,’ she said, and exhaled a stream of smoke in the direction of the Colosseum.

So that was why she had come out here – to shepherd me along. I didn’t say anything and she glanced downward, showing off her long, dark lashes. ‘Sorry,’ she said with a hint of sarcasm. ‘I just thought you might want to know.’

I placed my glass on a balustrade and lit one of my own cigarettes. ‘Thanks.’

She looked up again. ‘The head of the Service has just been murdered. Don’t you want to find who was responsible?’

‘I know he was murdered,’ I said. ‘He was standing a couple of inches in front of me when it happened. Perhaps you could let me decide how to do my job.’

She turned away and I immediately regretted my tone: my promotion was turning me into a pompous arse.

‘Do you treat everyone this way?’ she said. She paused for a moment. ‘Perhaps the bullet hit the wrong man.’

She was looking at me calmly, brazenly, as though daring me to slap her, and I realized I was being a fool and smiled.

‘Perhaps it did,’ I said, reaching for my drink again.

The tension eased away. We finished our cigarettes in companionable silence and headed back indoors. But instead of returning to the dining room, she grabbed me by the arm and led me through a door and into a long corridor.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘For a walk!’ she laughed gaily, and I followed her, a hazy configuration of white silk and brown skin moving down the unlit hallway. I wondered if she might be drunk.

‘I heard you were very brave,’ she called out, ‘chasing the sniper across London.’

‘Not really,’ I replied, dragging my eyes away from her figure. ‘It was just instinct. I didn’t find out much.’

We were heading into the heart of the embassy now. Candles had been placed in sconces along the walls, and I could make out the gatepost for the entrance to the Station at the far end of the corridor.

‘Still,’ she said, ‘not many people would have risked their own skins like that.’ She had slowed down and turned back to face me. ‘And you found out something, or you wouldn’t be here.’

What was she getting at? I didn’t get the chance to ask her because there was a loud humming sound in my ears, and lights were flickering on.

‘Finally!’ she said. ‘Now we’ll be able to see where we’re going.’ She took my arm in hers and gestured ahead of us. ‘Do you fancy a tour of the Station? It’s changed a bit since your day, I think.’

‘It’s rather late,’ I said, ‘and I’m sure I’ll see it tomorrow. What did you mean—’

I looked up to see Charles Severn standing a few yards ahead of us, a drink in his hand.

‘Hello, lovebirds,’ he said, stepping forward and placing a hand on Sarah’s shoulder. ‘Can I join, or is it a private party?’

*

I found Barnes hovering anxiously outside my room. Severn had said he’d become worried and gone looking for me. It was still early – not yet nine o’clock – but I was shattered, so I had asked Severn to make my excuses to Lennox and he had headed back down to the dining room for coffee, his arm around Sarah’s waist. He had seemed to believe her story that we had simply been stretching our legs, but I didn’t. She had wanted to take me into the Station: why? She wasn’t that forward, surely.

I told Barnes I was going to call it a night, and he nodded and headed for his room down the corridor. I walked into my broom cupboard and threw my jacket onto the bed. On an impulse I looked out of the window and down at the street, searching for the grey bubble. It was still there. Christ. Was he planning to stay there all bloody night?

I made a decision – sleep could come later. I drained the rest of the grappa from the glass and caught Barnes up in the corridor, making a show of patting my pockets. ‘Damn it, I seem to have lost my cigarettes. They must have dropped out in the car on the way over. I’ll just go and get them.’

‘Yes, sir.’

I walked downstairs and headed outside to confront Toadski. This time, I’d make sure I got some proper answers.

 

VII

The street was quiet and deserted, and I ran down it looking for the Fiat. Yes, there it was. As I approached it, I smashed my glass against a wall, then yanked open the front door and pressed the jagged edge to Toadski’s throat.

‘Move over!’

He glared at me with a mixture of fear and fury and jerked his head desperately towards the back of the car. I looked: there was someone sitting there, hidden in the shadows.

I glanced down the street, then up at the windows of the embassy. No one. I pulled the glass away from Toadski’s throat, opened the rear door and climbed in. There was a strong smell of cheap Russian tobacco, and something sweet I couldn’t place.

‘You’ve got two minutes,’ I said, thrusting the glass forward. ‘Why are you trying to kill me?’

I didn’t know who he was, but I knew what he was: the head of Rome’s illegal GRU station. Toadski would have called him on landing at Fiumicino and this, no doubt, was his car. He spoke to Toadski in Russian now, calling him Grigori Mikhailovich and telling him to take a walk and come back in five minutes. His voice was high-pitched – reedy and fluting, with a slight lisp. Without a word, Toadski opened his door and climbed out.

As the echo of his footsteps faded, the man in the shadows leaned forward, bringing his face into the orbit of the nearest streetlight. It was long and slender, with bloodless lips and watery eyes hidden behind large lids: it reminded me of the husband in the Arnolfini portrait. He was young, early or mid-thirties – one of the new generation coming out of Moscow’s training schools – and he seemed to be chewing or sucking on something. I looked down and saw a small blue and silver box in his lap: Baci Perugina.

‘Good evening, Mister Dark,’ he said, inclining his head a little. ‘My name is Pyotr Yurevich, and I currently have a pistol aimed at your heart. However, I assure you I have no intention of using it.’

There was no trace of a Russian accent except for when he’d said his name: I’d have guessed he was French or Swiss. Pedantic sort of tone, but that seemed to come with the manual. A black-gloved hand appeared in the small pool of light available in the car, and enclosed within its grip was the gun, a nine-millimetre Makarov by the look of it. Another hand appeared and swiftly unloaded it, and then the voice continued: ‘Now, kindly remove that glass from my face and tell me why you think someone is trying to kill you.’

I considered for a moment, then opened the door, leaned down and placed the glass on the pavement.

‘A bullet,’ I said, closing the door again. ‘About an inch from my face.’

There was silence for several seconds.

‘How do you feel?’ he said, eventually. ‘I understand you recently suffered an ordeal in Africa.’

I stared into the darkness. I recognized the question from having run agents in the field myself. They sometimes lost it, either through fear or injury or simply fatigue. He thought I was still suffering from the fever I’d caught in Nigeria – and that it had made me delusional!

‘You don’t know what happened in London?’ I asked.

He chewed his chocolate treat and waited for me to continue.

‘At eleven o’clock this morning the new head of the Service was shot in the chest by a sniper in St Paul’s Cathedral. The bullet was meant for me. The sniper was an Italian.’

He stopped chewing. ‘No, I did not know this.’

His surprise sounded genuine, but then it would. Spying is acting, and acting of the hardest kind: you’re never allowed off-stage to remove your make-up, never get to re-take a fluffed line, and your life depends on your performance. I’d been acting for over twenty years, and had become so good at it that I even managed to convince myself some of the time. Perhaps he did, too. Because if he were acting, he’d given a very good line reading, inflected with just the right degree of innocent surprise.

‘What did Grigori Mikhailovich tell you?’ I asked, jerking my head towards the empty driving seat. ‘He must have given you a message from Sasha.’

‘He did not tell me anything about this. Do you really think I would have come to meet you in front of the British embassy if I had just ordered your death?’

He had a point. As a deep-cover agent, he was taking an enormous risk just being here at all. Then again, so was I. Was it possible Toadski didn’t know about St Paul’s, either? He was a bit player, admittedly, an errand-boy, but surely Sasha would have briefed him nevertheless? Unless the GRU hadn’t been responsible, of course . . .

‘What about the KGB?’ I asked. ‘How are your relations with your colleagues there?’ The infighting between the KGB and the GRU made the Service and Five look like something out of a Mills and Boon.

He hesitated for a moment. ‘As far as I know, neither we nor any of our colleagues had anything to do with the incident you mention.’

As far as he knew – very reassuring. It was a legalistic sort of answer, and the hesitation didn’t help make it any more convincing.

‘Why don’t you tell me what you do know,’ I said, ‘because I’m starting to wonder if I’ve stepped into the wrong car.’

He looked aggrieved, then sighed deeply, an Atlas of the spy world. ‘I am a mere cog in the machine, Mister Dark. You cannot expect me to be privy to every operation we undertake.’

‘We have a saying for that,’ I said. ‘The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.’ But, again, he had a point. The sniper had been Italian, but that didn’t mean he had just flown in from Italy. I remembered how surely he had run into the tunnel at Barbican. Local knowledge? Pyotr here might not have been informed about a plan to kill a British double agent in London – especially if it were by another agency. Then again, if the KGB were out for me, he wouldn’t want me to know that either. I glanced down at my wristwatch. I’d already been gone three minutes, and Barnes would soon be wondering where I was.

‘I think we should start again,’ he said. ‘You are my agent now, and I would—’

‘Your agent?’ I laughed, and turned to open the door.

‘If you leave this car,’ he said, his voice immediately hardening, ‘I will expose you.’ His eyes glinted beneath puffy lids. ‘Without hesitation.’

He reached inside his jacket, and for a moment I thought he was about to pull a second gun on me. He smiled at my panic and immediately opened his hand so I could see what it was he had reached for: the negatives. So it was that again.

‘These are copies,’ he said. ‘The originals are in a safe in Moscow. If you do not do precisely as I say, my superiors will send them to your colleagues indoors. If I don’t like the way you behave, they will send them. And if anything happens to me, they will send them. Is that clear enough for you?’

I let my hand drop from the door handle. He gave me a smug little smile and replaced the negatives in his jacket.

‘Why are you in Rome?’ he said. ‘Is it because of Edoardo Barchetti?’

Another surprise. There were only two ways he could have known I was here to investigate Barchetti: either through a leak at the very highest level of Five, the Service or the Cabinet, or . . .

‘He’s been blown,’ said Pyotr. ‘He is a British agent, and he has infiltrated a little group of ours that operates here.’ He unwrapped another chocolate and popped it in his mouth. ‘We need you to kill him at once.’

*

There was a sudden sound from the street, but it was just Grigori coming back from his stroll and Pyotr sent him away again. I should have heeded his advice in Heathrow – this was hardly low profile. Had Sasha known this assassination scheme was waiting for me in Rome and tried to warn me off?

‘Kill him?’ I said, to buy some thinking time. Part of me noted that hidden in the absurdity of it all had been the admission that Arte come Terrore was a Moscow front: so Zimotti had been right about that. ‘I think you’ve got the wrong man,’ I said, finally. ‘You’re looking for an assassin.’

Pyotr pursed his lips. ‘You had no such qualms in Nigeria.’

A lot of people seemed to have got the wrong end of the stick about what had happened in Nigeria. I suddenly missed Sasha. Oh, I hated him – his tweed suits and his stamp collection and his patronizing manner – but I missed him nevertheless. This chap was too smooth by half, and he was giving me the bloody creeps.

‘Why me?’ I said. ‘Why don’t you get someone in the group to do it?’

‘That is our concern, not yours. But, as you ask, the group is not aware of our sponsorship, and we would prefer it remains that way. We also do not trust them to perform a job of this delicacy.’

So they were not just running Arte come Terrore, but they were doing so as a false-flag operation. Again, Zimotti had been right, although it was fairly standard procedure. Interesting that Pyotr felt they couldn’t handle a hit, though.

‘It doesn’t add up,’ I said, staring him straight in the face. ‘You didn’t know I was coming.’

He shrugged. ‘That is true. But the man who was to have done the job is no longer available, and you are here in Rome to meet Barchetti – it is providential.’

I could think of other words for it. The man who was to have done the job was no longer available . . . because he had recently died in Smithfield Market? Was I being targeted by the GRU after all? And if so, why did this man not seem to know about it?

‘Why do you want Barchetti dead?’ I asked. ‘You just said he’d been blown—’

‘He was carelessly given some very important information, after which he immediately contacted London. Which is why they’ve sent you, I suppose – to find out what it is he knows?’

‘Among other things,’ I said. ‘What was the information?’

He looked down at the box in his lap and started rummaging around in it. He wasn’t in any sort of a rush, this fellow, and that was unfortunate because I was. I’d find it rather difficult to explain to Barnes what I was doing in this car. He was armed, but he’d put his gun away and I wondered whether I should rush him, try to strangle the information out of him. Dangerous: he didn’t look like he could put up much of a fight, but there would be Grigori to contend with, too. And so far I didn’t seem to be having much luck getting information out of people by force.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Could you just forget the fucking chocolates for a minute and tell me what’s going on? I don’t have a lot of time.’

He winced at the obscenity. ‘It is information that could expose you,’ he said.

‘Then it’s no dice. He’ll run a mile the second he sees me – we used to work together.’

‘He doesn’t know it exposes you. But I will tell you no more. It is better for your sake.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that.’ He didn’t reply, so I tried another tack. ‘Severn is scheduled to meet Barchetti tomorrow morning. If I insist on taking his place and Barchetti winds up dead, how do you propose I avert suspicion?

‘Tomorrow morning will be fine,’ he said, though I hadn’t been asking for his approval on that score. ‘As for the other matter, you will find a way: the consequences of him remaining alive are much worse. Kill Barchetti, and you will be helping both yourself and us. Everybody wins.’ He smiled.

‘Except Barchetti,’ I said.

He leaned forward. ‘I understand your reaction,’ he said, in what I think he meant to be a confidential tone. ‘Believe me. I have only survived in this game myself through my ability to find opportunities where none seemed to exist, and for repeatedly turning the most hopeless-seeming situations into victories. I have studied your file, and I think the same could be said of you.’ His tone turned cold. ‘We have a saying in Russian: “Among wolves, howl like a wolf.” Do not mistake us for puppy dogs, Mister Dark. We expect you to howl with us, all the way. This time it really is the end of the road: there are no exits, and we have the winning hand. If you do not do as I say, I will expose you. I am afraid it is checkmate. Kill Barchetti tomorrow morning,’ – he patted his jacket pocket – ‘or I will make sure Charles Severn receives these by lunch.’

*

Barnes was waiting for me at the top of the staircase, wearing a dressing gown.

‘Everything all right, sir?’

‘Fine,’ I said, taking the pack of cigarettes from my pocket. ‘They were in the glove compartment.’

I threw him a couple of sticks and he grinned. He went back into his room to smoke them, and I went into mine. I undressed and climbed into bed.

 

VIII

Friday, 2 May 1969, Rome, Italy

I woke with a start. Something had touched me. I opened my eyes and saw Barnes seated on the bed, his hand shaking my shoulder.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said, looking embarrassed. ‘But it’s time.’

I thanked him gruffly and rubbed my eyes. He left, and I went over to the basin and washed my face. Slowly, the nightmare of the previous evening returned. Curiosity killed the bloody cat, I thought: if I hadn’t left the building, I wouldn’t have found myself blackmailed into an assassination job I couldn’t see any way of completing. But I had left the building, and complete it I must. Pyotr had mixed a few metaphors but I didn’t think he was bluffing, and deep down I knew he was right: I could rattle my cage all I wanted, but there was no way out. I’d read plenty of reports about blackmailed agents, but until now had never really appreciated what it meant, I suppose because I’d never believed it might apply to me.

I went through my fitness regimen, then bathed, dressed in a light linen suit, and collected Barnes from his room. Downstairs at the Station, Severn came to the barrier and told the man on duty to let us through.

‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘Sleep well?’

‘Yes, thanks,’ I said.

I said hello to Cornell-Smith and Miller, and a couple of others who I’d glimpsed but not been introduced to at dinner the evening before. Sarah was seated at a desk in the middle of the main area smoking a cigarette, wearing a crisp white blouse and a dark skirt that showed off her long golden legs. She caught me looking at them and smiled, pushing a wisp of hair away from her eyes.

I looked around. She had been right: it had changed since I’d last been here. There was significantly more radio equipment, some fancy Scandinavian-style furniture – her doing? – and even a cafetière, from which Severn was currently pouring himself a cup. But the layout of the place was basically the same, with the heavy wooden doors to the offices. Severn was in my old one, I saw.

‘There’s been a change of plan,’ I told him. ‘I’m going to meet Barchetti.’

The cup clattered in its saucer as he looked up to see if I were serious. ‘But you can’t,’ he said when he realized I was. ‘You’re under diplomatic cover.’

‘So are you.’

He placed the cup on the table and wiped his hands against his trousers. ‘Well, yes. But I’ve been running him . . .’

‘I’ve run him, too,’ I said. ‘It’s set for the modern art museum, isn’t it? That’s just by the Borghese Gardens, if I remember rightly.’

He started stammering about unorthodox procedures and prior notice, so I pushed a little harder, reminding him that I was Deputy Chief and claiming for good measure that the Home Secretary had instructed me personally to report ‘from the spot’. It took me a few minutes to make him understand that he had no choice in the matter – the fact that I hadn’t either made it easier to do.

‘I also want you to send a telex to London,’ I said. ‘Message to read as follows: “Rivera and di Angelo in custody in Milan. Italians claim Moscow backing group, possible base on Sardinia, but as yet no evidence. Await further instructions. Dark.”’

‘Did Zimotti give you that bit about Sardinia?’

I nodded. ‘But that’s all I got, unfortunately. He disappeared to make a phone call just as we started talking.’

Severn pursed his lips. ‘I see. Shame. Sarah, did you get all that, darling?’

‘I’ll send it at once,’ she said, standing and walking over to the coding machine. I headed for the door.

‘You won’t be needing me, then, sir?’ asked Barnes, and I shook my head. Slowly but surely, he was catching on.

*

I walked down Via Appia Nuova and found a small bar. The street was emptier than I expected for this time of the day, but then I remembered it was the Friday after a holiday. Many people would have fatto il ponte: made the bridge to the weekend. Half the city would be at the beach, or enjoying a picnic in one of the city’s parks.

I felt for my money clip: ten pounds at the bureau de change in Heathrow had got me just shy of fifteen thousand lire. I went inside and bought a couple of bread rolls and a double espresso, then took one of the outside tables. It hadn’t yet gone nine o’clock, but the sun was already blasting down and my eyes started to throb from the glare. I hoped it was a result of chasing snipers about rather than my Nigerian fever returning. I reached into my jacket pocket for a pair of ancient sunglasses I’d brought along, and as I did my hand brushed against the packet of capsules Urquhart had given me in London. I wondered for a moment if I should crack it open and take one, but decided against it.

I put the glasses on and looked around, just in case Severn had decided to be clever and send someone after me. I also scanned the roofs of the buildings opposite, checking for the glint of a telescopic sight. Whatever Pyotr said, the bullet in St Paul’s had been meant for me, and I had no doubt that whoever had ordered it fired meant to try again.

But, at least for the moment, the coast looked clear.

I had my breakfast, savouring the rich flavour of the coffee and vowing never to have another one in a British airport. Then I left a few coins as a tip and walked over to a kiosk across the road, where I bought a copy of the International Herald Tribune. I rolled it under my arm and hailed a taxi.

As the driver manoeuvred through the morning traffic, I considered my old friend and informant ‘Bassetto’ Barchetti. Pyotr had been lying through his teeth about him, of course: whatever information he had managed to pick up, it didn’t have anything to do with me. They’d already been planning to kill him before I arrived, and they couldn’t care less whether I was in danger of being exposed; someone or other was intent on killing me, in fact. No, Pyotr had thrown in that bit about the information as bait to grab my attention. It must be something else, something big that they didn’t want the Service to know, and it had got them into an almighty flap and desperate to get him out of the way for good, and sharpish. So sharpish that they had reached for their stash of negatives and tried to force me into doing the job for them.

I had agreed to report to Pyotr in the Borghese Gardens at noon, but I decided I would have to fob him off somehow, tell him it had been impossible to set up at such short notice. It was a plausible enough excuse, I reckoned. Assassination takes planning, and planning takes time. A museum was not a location I’d have picked, for example. I was not an assassin, but I had assassinated before, and I had studied my targets for weeks – in the case of Cheng in Hong Kong, months. If I had been doing the job I would have needed a weapon, preferably one that was completely untraceable. Thallium, for example, as the French had used with Moumié in Geneva, or a poisoned dart, like the Red Hand had done with Léopold in ’57. Neither was readily available in the centre of Rome on two hours’ notice.

The taxi arrived at the museum, and I paid the driver. As I was walking up to the entrance, a better way out flashed into my mind: discover what Barchetti knew, then use it to blackmail Pyotr! It was an unlikely scenario, but a possibility nonetheless, and I skipped up the steps with a little more gaiety at the thought.

*

From the outside, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna looks like most other temples of great art around the world: a neoclassical façade with grand pillars and a general aura of solemnity and depth. Inside, however, the museum is largely taken over by the imaginings of the deranged fringe of the modern art world. I could understand why Barchetti had picked it. If he were being watched by his Arte come Terrore chums, they wouldn’t be in the least surprised that he would visit this place. And it would be much harder to follow him through than a café or park.

I took off my sunglasses and checked for signs of surveillance. The immediate area looked to be clean, but no doubt Severn or one of the Station staff would be here shortly. Severn had arranged to meet Barchetti in the twentieth-century section of the museum, so I paid for a ticket at the front desk and followed the signs until I came to it.

I spotted him right away. He was standing between a sculpture that resembled a segment of a dinosaur fossil and a painting in which arrows from a large black ‘Z’ pointed towards the number 44 and an ‘X’. Dressed in a dark suit and porkpie hat, he was peering at the canvas as though trying to figure out the solution to the equation – he looked more like a bank clerk on his day off than the infiltrator of a terrorist cell.

As I approached him, he turned and gave me a twitchy grin. His forehead was coated in sweat and his eyes were darting about to an unsettling degree. I recognized the signs at once: he was in far too deep.

‘Hello, Edoardo,’ I said, holding up my copy of the Herald Tribune. ‘Long time no see. Charles couldn’t make it today, so they sent me instead.’

‘Not here,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

No greeting, no memories of old times. All right. We walked through to one of the other halls, and he hovered by a velvet-covered bench before finally seating himself on it.

‘I thought you worked in London now,’ he said.

‘So did I. What is it you’ve discovered?’

He looked around again.

‘They know,’ he whispered. And then, more urgently: ‘They know!’

‘You’re blown?’ I didn’t follow – why agree a meet, then?

He shook his head furiously. ‘About the attack in the dome.’

‘They know we suspect them, you mean? Or you have proof they were involved?’

His head swivelled and he looked up at me, his expression one of undisguised shock. There was a strange moment when our eyes met, and then I realized what he was going to do. He stood up from the bench and began walking away from me, fast but not so fast that he would attract attention. I had no choice: a shout would have ruined everything, and he wouldn’t have turned back anyway. I walked after him.

*

He headed into the next room and then took a right through a curtained archway into another one. As I got closer I realized that it was a dark room – some sort of installation. A few people were straggling by the entrance, either waiting for companions to emerge or contemplating going in themselves. Barchetti had already gone through, so I plunged into the darkness.

An old jazz number was being piped through the space, but it sounded like it was being played through several amplifiers at the wrong speed, giving everything a woozy, underwater feel. After a few seconds, my eyes adjusted and I began to get my bearings. There were objects descending from the ceiling, coloured shapes. They looked like pieces from a child’s mobile, sparkling as they turned through the air.

As I moved deeper into the room I started to make out the far end of it: there was a line of strip lighting running across the middle of the wall, half-obscured by some artificial fog spraying up every few seconds from the floor. I suddenly had the impression of being in a shower facility in a concentration camp, and had an urge to run back out into the main gallery. But I had to find Barchetti first. Did his information relate to me after all? Had he somehow realized who I was?

The floor started to shift gently, like a conveyor belt, adding a layer of nausea to the claustrophobic air: the artist was evidently some sort of sadist. A man wearing a hat moved past me, and I stepped forward to grab him. But he’d already gone.

The music was getting louder and louder, throbbing strangely, and I felt completely lost. I came across several treelike sculptures, their thin branches glowing and twisting around me. I reached into my pocket, hastily unwrapped one of Urquhart’s pills and swallowed it whole. I immediately regretted it, as the thing tasted foul, bitter and chalky.

The music intensified, turning atonal: the sound of clocks ticking, crashing cymbals and a bass cello seemingly scraped at random. And then I saw him, just a foot in front of me, his face clearly lit for a moment by one of the fluorescent branches: Barchetti. I lunged forward and grabbed him by the arm.

‘Vattene, idiota! Sciò!’ he snarled, lashing out at me with his arms. There was a flash of light and I realized he had a knife. I leapt away and sensed the blade pierce the cloth of my jacket, but he’d missed me and I leaned forward again, kicking out towards his legs. I made contact with bone and he fell to the ground, cursing. The knife fell from his hands and I watched it skitter across the floor, the blade catching the light from the mobiles hanging from the ceiling. I immediately knelt down and grabbed it. He managed to get a foot under me and aimed it at my solar plexus and I was pushed back against a wall, winded.

But I had the knife.

There was more movement around us now: people were starting to become restless, perhaps wondering what the disturbance was. Through the speakers, a gospel choir had begun competing with the underwater whale music, and it was becoming louder by the moment. Barchetti leapt on top of me and started trying to scratch at my eyes and throat. My instinct was to use the knife on him, but I needed to get him away from here, alive. I tried to fend him away, but he was surprisingly heavy for such a small man. He was now sitting on my upper chest, restricting my breathing. The music was almost deafening, and I willed my mind to block it out. I reached out and managed to grab hold of Barchetti’s shirt, and then pulled him towards me with all the force I could muster. It shifted him forward a little, but it wasn’t enough and I could feel my lungs reaching their limit, so in desperation I threw my other arm up to his throat and squeezed it. He let out a scream and tried to bite me, but my chest was burning up and he didn’t seem to be aware that I needed him to get off me, until there was no choice and I squeezed and squeezed and then his head jerked forward and his muscles slackened and I could roll him off me and, finally, breathe. I felt for his carotid and checked his pulse: nothing. The music took another unexpected turn, the woozy whale sounds switching to a jumpy jive, and I stood and reeled towards a sliver of light, my throat dry and my chest thumping and my hands wet.

I pushed the curtain aside and came into the adjoining room. I had to stop for a moment to gather myself, and someone came out right behind me, knocking my shoulder.

‘Esilarante, no?’

I nodded dumbly, and then moved away, heading towards the exit.

 

IX

I walked down the stairs and onto the street, gulping fresh air into my lungs. Behind me I heard the muffled sound of screaming – someone must have stumbled over Barchetti’s body. I looked down and my heart froze. The pavement was covered in spots of blood. I glanced back toward the entrance of the museum and saw a trail of it leading from the doors straight to my feet.

Panicking, I started running, but when I looked down again the blood had vanished: there were just a few small brown stones on the pavement. Was it a return of my Nigerian hallucinations? I slowed down again and reached into my pocket for another of Urquhart’s pills. No. Leave them.

I picked up the pace again, and as I did I caught sight of a tall, slender figure striding up a flight of steps into a park on the opposite side of the road. Something about the way he was moving made me look at him again. He was wearing a dove-grey three-piece suit and pointed suede shoes, also grey – all rather well made. And he was taking something from his pocket and placing it in his mouth.

I hadn’t seen Pyotr in daylight, but I knew instantly that it was him. My body felt as if it had been given a gigantic jolt. Had he seen me kill Barchetti? No, I thought. More than likely he had hung back in one of the adjoining rooms, watching, just to make sure I turned up for the meet. And when he had seen me coming out of the dark room, the installation or whatever the hell it had been, he had quickly made his escape. Not quite quickly enough, though . . .

I stopped for a few seconds to take some deep breaths and to let him get ahead: I didn’t want him to see me. Interesting that he had come, I thought, rather than sending a lackey. Either it really was important or he didn’t trust anyone in his team enough to handle it, or both. My God, I wished it had been his neck I’d wrung instead of Barchetti’s. If it hadn’t been for him I wouldn’t be here at all – and what a damn fool I’d been for turning up on his say-so. I’d bought into the idea that he was some sort of master-spy pulling all the strings, but he was just a pathetic bloody amateur. Something I’d said back there had spooked Barchetti out of his skull, so much so that he had fled from me.

Well, enough was enough. I checked my watch. It was quarter past ten: I was due to debrief with him in the Borghese Gardens in an hour and three-quarters. So where was the bastard going now, then? I decided to find out.

It was time to rattle the cage.

*

I doubled back and made to cross the street, but the traffic seemed particularly chaotic on this stretch, and with a start I realized why – several police cars were trying to make their way down it, but were struggling against the flow. As their sirens grew louder, I started crossing and made it to the foot of the stairs I had seen Pyotr take – he had now disappeared over the top. I had to get as far away from the museum as possible, and I didn’t want to lose him.

I walked briskly up the stairs, passed between a couple of fountains and finally saw Pyotr twenty or thirty yards ahead, his hands thrust into the pockets of his trousers. I breathed out and fixed my eyes on the top of his head as he wove among the pedestrians enjoying a stroll in the Borghese Gardens. He suddenly decided to cross the street, and as he did he glanced over his shoulder, and I ducked into the midst of a group of American tourists, frightening an elderly lady with a blue rinse.

‘Scusi,’ I said, and her anger softened at the manners of the charming local.

I manoeuvred my way through the group in order to catch sight of Pyotr again. He was striding ahead, more confidently now: he hadn’t seen me. I began walking a little faster, making sure to keep several pedestrians between us in case he made any more sudden movements. But I didn’t think he was going to. He’d forgotten his training, and had arrogantly presumed he wasn’t being followed. The thought stung me, and I suddenly remembered Severn – could he have been at the museum as well? I stopped and looked around me, more carefully than Pyotr had done. Tourists, businessmen, students . . . I couldn’t see Severn or anyone else who looked like a potential tail, but that didn’t mean a lot.

I had started sweating again, because I realized I was stumbling into traps without thinking first, letting my anger guide me. I wanted to follow Pyotr – but only if I was not being followed myself. There are several ways to spot a tail, but I didn’t have the time for them: if I loitered somewhere and waited to see who came looking, for example, I’d risk losing Pyotr.

I decided to take the chance that I was alone. If Severn were following me, I could always tell him I had seen Pyotr in the museum and felt that he might have been responsible for . . . Yes. Of course! Pin Barchetti’s death on Pyotr. It was perfect. I started after Pyotr again.

He was still walking straight ahead, down Viale Folke Bernadotte. I had to pray he was headed somewhere nearby, because if he got on a bus or tram I was done for. There was no way I would be able to hide from him in such a small space. And if he hailed a cab, the whole thing was off. Luckily, so far it looked like it was going to be a walk away – he was still striding along purposefully.

He reached a roundabout at a grotto and I squinted to see which turning he would take. A bus tore past me just as he rounded the grotto and I lost sight of him for a moment. But then the bus was gone and I saw that he had taken a right into Viale Giorgio Washington and my pulse quickened – he was heading for Piazzale Flaminio, where there was a tram stop.

I walked a little faster, down a cobbled footpath shaded by overhanging trees, past wooden benches on which young lovers were draped over one another. As I came into the crowded square, I saw that a couple of trams were already waiting at the stop. But Pyotr didn’t even glance at them. It seemed he was walking to the end of the street, and I wondered if he was looking for a bar to find a telephone.

A tram at the front of the queue moved off, blocking my view of him again, and I leapt into the street and in front of a taxi so I could take up position on the pavement behind him on the other side of the road. But he had gone. I looked around frantically, but as I made it to the pavement I saw the outline of the back of his head and shoulders in the rear of the tram pulling out.

Damn. Damn, damn, damn.

I raced up to the next tram waiting, which was on the same line, and climbed aboard, paying the driver the fare and asking him when he was going to leave. Not for a few minutes, signore. I tried to calm myself and looked at the situation again. On the plus side, I knew where Pyotr was, and he could only go at a certain pace, on certain tracks. And I was still following him, from a vantage he couldn’t see. But unless we left very soon, I wouldn’t be able to see where he got off. What were my options: bribe the conductor to depart earlier? I dismissed it: he would be more likely to kick up a fuss or report me, and we’d probably end up leaving even later and I’d have lost Pyotr. I’d just have to hope I’d be able to see him when he got off.

I took a seat up front and kept my eyes glued to the tram ahead. After a couple of minutes, it slowed for a stop. An elderly lady disembarked, helped by a younger man. No Pyotr. It started back up again, veering in the direction of the river.

The driver of my tram started her up and we began following in leisurely pursuit. Soon we swerved around the corner, skirting the parked cars, and came to the same stop. A young mother tried to bring her baby carriage down the aisle, and berated a long-haired boy in jeans and an embroidered shirt who was standing in the way. Their argument became more heated, and the young man called the woman ‘Fascista’. I moved out of the way to avoid them, but they were blocking my view of Pyotr’s tram, which was now slowing for the next stop.

There! He was getting off. I pulled the cord.

‘Scusi!’ I cried, and leapt out of the doors as they were closing.

He was walking at a normal pace down the street, and I followed him through a cluster of parked motorbikes and Vespas, past fruit stalls and newspaper stands and shuttered restaurants. A gattara glared at me as I passed her feeding crumbs to an emaciated tabby. We were now on the outskirts of Trastevere, a once very down-at-heel neighbourhood that was becoming increasingly visited by tourists. A man in a leather jacket and a cap approached me. ‘Tabacchi,’ he said, as though it were a greeting. Black-market cigarettes sold for about two-thirds of the usual price here, and I was running low – but now wasn’t the time. I shook my head and carried on walking. Where the hell had Pyotr gone? I looked around frantically, and finally spied him. He was at the far end of the street: he had stopped at the entrance to a restored medieval house. A block of flats now, it seemed. And he was letting himself in with a key. So he had gone home – perhaps to signal Moscow that I had completed the job?

It was approaching eleven now, so he would have to leave again reasonably soon if he wanted to make our appointment in the Borghese Gardens at noon. There was a bar across the street and I walked into it. Roy Orbison was wailing from a jukebox in the corner, and two old men in cardigans and twill trousers sipped cloudy aperitifs as they studied a wooden chessboard with great solemnity. The owner, moustachioed and stout, stood behind a long mahogany-effect bar polishing glasses with a cloth. Posters advertised Cinzano and proclaimed support for a local football team. There was no sign of Severn or anyone else.

I ordered a sandwich and an orange juice. I could have done with a cold beer, but this was no time for alcohol, and the sugar in the juice would give me energy. I found a table from which I could watch the front door of the block of flats through the reflection of a mirror, and waited for my quarry to reappear.

He emerged, looking a little flustered, twenty-three minutes later. He was wearing a different suit and his hair was wet – had he just gone home for a clean-up then? Perhaps the proximity to murder had made him squeamish.

He walked back up the street in the direction of the tram stop, presumably to head off to his appointment with me. I waited a few minutes to make sure he wouldn’t double back, and then headed into the building.

*

I rang the doorbell and waited. Through an iron grate I watched as a stout old woman in black shuffled out of a back room towards me. She pressed her face to the grate and glared at me with undisguised suspicion.

‘I am a plain-clothes officer of the Servizio Informazioni Difesa,’ I said. ‘We are currently engaged in an important investigation into a man who has just left this building.’

I spoke with a pronounced Milanese accent, because it is much harder to convince someone you come from the same part of the country as they. She asked me for my papers, and I patiently explained that it was not customary for plain-clothes officers to carry identification, for obvious reasons, but if she chose to call Marco Zimotti, the chief of the SID, at headquarters, he would be able to vouch for me. I gave her an invented number and smiled sweetly, praying she wouldn’t call the bluff.

She looked me over for a few moments more, and then reached into the folds of her capacious dress and took out some keys. ‘That will not be necessary,’ she said, unlocking the door and letting me into the cool, dark vestibule. ‘How can I help you, signore?’

I described Pyotr and she nodded. The Swiss gentleman, Pierre Valougny. I told her that was an alias and that he was, in fact, a Communist agent, and after her eyes had widened and she had howled a bit, she spat over her shoulder and said she had known there was something wrong with him all along. I nodded soberly and asked her to show me his rooms, and she took me up a very creaky lift and along a dank corridor.

There was a large, well-furnished living room, with a window looking out onto the street and a telephone – he must have lived here a while to have arranged the connection, especially in this neighbourhood.

‘Three years,’ said the landlady. ‘Always paid the rent on time, and kept to himself. But I never liked him. I should have known. Please don’t tell anyone of our misfortune here. Was he planning a coup?’

I told her that was state business and asked her to leave. Once she’d gone, I got to work: I wouldn’t have too long before he realized I wasn’t coming to the meet and started heading back.

I began by just walking around the place, trying to get a feel for who I was dealing with. He’d done well, either through Moscow’s funding or his own business acumen, or a combination of the two. There were some hideous modern art paintings on the wall, but they were originals, and a few of the names were familiar. A desk by the window was home to an Olivetti typewriter and stacks of books – these were mostly hardbacks and, again, the subject was modern art. What was his cover, I wondered. Art dealer? That would bring him into contact with Arte come Terrore.

After rummaging around for a couple of minutes, I spotted a ladder next to one of the bookcases. Looking at the ceiling, I saw there was an attic. I pulled out the ladder and climbed up, pushing open the door.

I tugged a piece of string, and a naked bulb lit a small room containing a wing-backed leather chair and a rusty-looking filing cabinet. There was a mousetrap by the wall, loaded with a small triangle of cheese.

The filing cabinet was unlocked. The top drawer was filled with magazines, and I picked out a few. The first that came to hand was called La Classe and was dated today: the headline read ‘LOTTA DI CLASSE PER LA RIVOLUZIONE’: ‘Class struggle for the revolution’. The rest of the pile contained other underground magazines, with names like Carte Segrete. Interesting. And slightly odd. Pyotr didn’t strike me as a flower child, in or out of cover, so what the hell was he doing with these in his flat? I opened the next drawer down. More papers, but these were mostly invitations to showings at local art galleries: La Salita, Dell’Ariete. But there were also magazines here, and one of them, I saw, was called Transizione. Even more interesting – but not really enough to hang anyone for.

I turned to the bottom drawer and jerked it open. The radio transmitter stared up at me.

Bingo.

It was a simple short-wave set with a high-speed transmission converter, the kind you could buy from most electronics outfitters. He was presumably using it to communicate with the Station in the embassy here – they, in turn, would send out messages based on his information via telegraph or diplomatic bag to Moscow. Hidden behind the set was a Praktina camera and several neatly bundled wads of money: lire and dollars. I considered pocketing the lot – it would certainly be satisfying – but decided I would need all the evidence I could get.

As head of Soviet Section, I’d read the reports from Five on the Lonsdale Ring, which they had rounded up in ’61. This wasn’t quite as damning as the material they had found in the Krogers’ flat in Ruislip – everything from cellophane sheets tucked away in a Bible to a microdot reader in a tin of talcum powder – but it was close. A radio transmitter, a camera and significant sums of money all spelled out ‘foreign agent’ in capital letters. He’d been caught red-handed – or he soon would be . . .

I stopped. There had been a noise. Was that him returning already? I stood very still for a moment, breathing as shallowly as possible, wondering what the hell to do. I wasn’t armed, and he’d have his Makarov . . .

Then I saw the mouse, scuttling across the floorboards – the noise had merely been its nails scratching against the wood. The tiny creature paused for a moment, looking up on its hind legs with its snout twitching, before dropping back onto all fours and scurrying forward again.

Snap!

The trap sprung with brutal velocity, catching the mouse at the base of its neck. There was a tiny, almost inaudible squeak and then its eyes froze.

I made my way back downstairs and replaced the ladder next to the bookcase. A bookcase, I now noticed, that was built into the wall. I knelt down and inspected the skirting board. A few inches from the floor there was a sharp line in the board. I pressed the base of my hand against it and pushed. It slid upwards, revealing a small metal knob beneath, rather like a light switch. I flicked it, and the lowest shelf of the bookcase moved a few inches. I pulled it all the way out. Hidden behind it was a small space, inside of which sat a blue and silver cardboard box with the words ‘Baci Perugina’ printed on it.

The chocolates had long since been eaten, but in their place was a sheaf of papers bound with an elastic band. The front page was embossed with a red star in a black circle, and a string of reference numbers lay beneath the typed heading: .

The world around me suddenly hushed, and everything narrowed to the field of my gaze. It was as if a mouse had scuttled its way across my scalp, and that one word had snapped the spring shut. The last time I’d met Sasha I had asked him what my codename was, and he had told me: ‘NEZAVISIMYJ’, meaning ‘independent’.

This was my file.

I picked it up and slowly turned to the first page:

INDEPENDENT was recruited in the British Zone of Germany in 1945 – please see Appendix 1 for details of the operation . . .

Well, hadn’t Sasha been clever? He’d realized I might not listen to his message at Heathrow, so he had given Toadski a copy of my file and told him that if I didn’t come in with him he should follow me and hand it over to the local resident wherever I arrived. Presumably the photographs were in here, too? Yes, there they were, in a small plastic pouch beneath the file. I shook them out and saw that, as well as the pictures with Anna that completed the nasty little honey trap that had brought me into this mess, there were around a dozen surveillance shots that had been taken of me over the years, in London, Istanbul and elsewhere. My anger at not having spotted the tails was somewhat mollified by the fact that I was now sitting in Pyotr’s flat looking through their photographs.

I turned back to the file itself. The typeface was raised and glossy, almost like Braille, and the paper thick and crested. The pages were torn in places, with official stamps placed haphazardly over them and the words Glavnoe Razvedyvatel’noe Upravlenie everywhere. So I was under the control of the GRU: Sasha hadn’t lied about that, at least. There was a long biography that focused mainly on my military service and relationship with Father, and detailed reports of every single meeting I’d attended. There was even a brief essay on my character, dated 12 December 1948, by one Nikolai Pavlovich Vasilyev – presumably Georgi’s real name:

When meeting with INDEPENDENT, be advised to choose your words carefully: he has a sharp tongue and his temper cools slowly, so you will waste valuable time antagonizing him unduly. Do not make the mistake of trying to become his friend or sharing your views on the wider world with him. INDEPENDENT is intensely irritated by anything that he senses as prevarication or skirting around an issue – you would be much better advised to take a direct approach.

INDEPENDENT is prone to questioning any statement he regards as unclear or euphemistic. He is also insistent that he will only give us information on matters of principle, so every request for information must be framed in such a way as to make him believe that it is of crucial importance, not just to our own efforts but to the benefit of all humanity. This is, naturally, sometimes a difficult task . . .

Quite an astute assessment, on the whole. Had I really wanted everything to be of benefit to humanity? I couldn’t really deny it, absurd as it looked in black and white. Still, Pyotr hadn’t taken this advice to heart: his approach had been direct, all right, but it had certainly antagonized me, and unduly at that.

I checked my watch again: it had just gone half eleven. He would be at the gardens soon, and wondering what had happened to me. I calculated I had at least an hour before he would be back. I read on, transfixed. There was a bundle of correspondence from early in my career that made for very curious reading. Skimming through as fast as I could, it appeared that Moscow had not initially believed that they had succeeded in recruiting me. They had become convinced that the Service had knowingly let me be recruited, so they could then use me to pass disinformation over. This suspicion appeared to stem from one of the earliest reports I had given. In 1949, Georgi had asked me to note down everything I knew about the Service’s efforts to recruit agents in the Soviet Union. As far as I knew there were no such efforts, and so I had said so. But that hadn’t been good enough for one Anatoli Panov, an analyst in the Third Department of the First Directorate:

No British agents of note have been exposed as a result of INDEPENDENT’S assistance, although he would certainly have access to such information. Are we expected to believe that he and others have chosen to fight for our cause, and yet the British have failed to recruit a single one of our men to theirs? Ours is clearly the more desirable ideology, but this is nevertheless not a plausible assessment. The truth, of course, is that INDEPENDENT has come up against a piece of information he cannot divulge without hindering the British more than they would like, and has stubbornly insisted on this fatuous line in the hope that we swallow it whole. Let us not fall for such a simple trick. It proves comprehensively that he is a plant: a triple agent.

I read the last line several times, my temple throbbing. It seemed this idiot had been incapable of accepting that I might have been telling the truth. I was even more shocked to see that his report had been counter-signed by Stalin himself, who in the margin had even scribbled – ‘Investigate further’. It took me several moments to take it in, and I realized my hands were shaking. After the whole rigmarole they had gone through to recruit me, the extraordinary organization and time and resources that must have gone into that operation, after all the meetings in London and the precautions taken, and all the files I had passed over and reports I had written . . . After all of that, Uncle Joe hadn’t believed I was a genuine double agent! Flicking forward, it wasn’t until November 1951 – over two years later – that they had finally given me the all clear:

We are now satisfied that INDEPENDENT is secure and that no disinformation is being passed to us. Please renew contact with this highly valuable agent.

Thinking back, I realized that this coincided with Sasha’s arrival in London. After several frustrating years of intermittent contact, I finally had a regular handler again, and he had pumped me for information in a way Georgi had never done. But, it seemed, to very little purpose. I searched in vain for reports on the operations I had betrayed at that time. It looked like Sasha had decided not to pass any of it on. But why on earth not, if I had been cleared? One reason immediately sprung to mind. Even in the Service, information that inconveniently contradicted a widely held theory – especially if it were also held by a Head of Section – was sometimes skimmed over or quietly dropped for fear of the messenger being shot. It looked like that might literally have been the case for Georgi: a brief note at the top of a file from 1949 explained that he had been classified as an ‘undesirable’. He had been recalled and sent to the gulags, of course – perhaps Sasha didn’t want to make the same mistake.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. So it had all been for nought, or as near as dammit. My recruitment and handling hadn’t been some grand game of chess, but a muddle of crossed wires, paranoia and office politics. I’d spent twenty-four years deceiving everyone around me, but it seemed that for several years the men I had thought I was serving hadn’t even been given the information I had obtained, let alone used it.

I straightened up. Did it matter, ultimately, that they had failed to take advantage of the material? Did I really need a tally of my own treachery, a count of the dead men? No. I had done it. I was a traitor, no matter what the cost had been.

But a terrifying thought suddenly occurred to me. The analyst Panov would have vanished from the scene long ago, of course, no doubt sent to the gulags himself for not having tied his shoelaces the right way. But his way of thinking had been accepted for two years, and clearly something of it had survived because it looked like much of the information I’d handed over subsequently still hadn’t been passed up the ladder. What sort of an organization could have allowed that to happen? What if there was a new Panov in Moscow, or a group of them even, and they had decided that my actions in Nigeria proved I’d been a triple agent all along? After all, they had lost two long-serving agents at my hand. Could that be why I had been targeted? Yes, of course it bloody could.

I looked at my watch again. I’d been in here nearly an hour already, and Pyotr would soon be boarding a tram on his way back. I took the file and chocolate box and walked over to the desk by the window. There was an old Olivetti typewriter on top of it. I lifted the cover, took a sheet of paper from the drawer and rolled it into the machine. I began typing.

A couple of minutes later I scrolled the paper out, folded it, and placed it in my jacket pocket. I walked back to the bookcase and replaced the chocolate box, then glanced around the flat again, checking that everything was in order, picked my file from the desk, turned off the lights and quietly closed the door behind me.

*

I took the lift back down and thanked the landlady for her assistance. I warned her that I might return with some of my colleagues, but that whatever she did she should give no signal to Signor Valougny that he was under suspicion. She promised heartily to uphold her patriotic duty.

I went back into the bar across the street and asked for the lavatory. The barman pointed down a flight of rickety stairs. Once there, I locked the door and tore each page of my file into strips before feeding it into the bowl. Then I flushed it all away. There would be copies in Moscow, of course, but this would do for the time being. And there was a strange sense of satisfaction in watching the words dissolve and disappear. A plan of action had started to form in my mind. I went over all the scenarios I thought it could lead to, and decided that, while it was certainly a risk, it was one worth taking. Or perhaps I simply no longer cared.

I went upstairs again and asked if I could use the telephone. The barman looked at me, and nodded his head imperceptibly to the left. I gave him 100 lire, received two tokens and ten lire in change, and walked over to the machine. Severn picked up on the first ring.

‘Where the hell are you? You’ve been gone over three hours, and Zimotti just called to say a body has been discovered in the museum—’

‘It’s Barchetti,’ I said. ‘But I’ve got him. I’ve got the bastard . . .’

‘Slow down. Got who?’

‘The man who arranged Farraday’s assassination. The head of Arte come Terrore. Barchetti was scared at the meet, insisted I follow him into a dark room at the end of the gallery. But by the time I got in there, someone had already strangled him.’

There was a short silence, and I imagined Severn’s face turning paler.

‘Did you manage to get anything from him at all? What about his European lead?’

‘Nothing. But I saw this chap leaving the museum in a hurry and he looked fishy, so I trailed him and he came running back to a flat in Trastevere. I waited until he left, and broke in. It’s him,’ I said. ‘He’s our man. Call Zimotti and tell him to bring a few of his men around to Viale Trastevere as fast as he can. Then jump in your car and come here yourself. I’m in a bar called’ – I picked up a menu from the top of the telephone set – ‘La Maddalena, about halfway up the street. I’ll tell you about it when you get here.’

 

X

‘I demand to see a lawyer.’

Zimotti offered him an insincere smile. ‘I’m afraid we can’t extend you that right, signore.’

Pyotr glared back with contempt. I didn’t blame him: his flat was suddenly looking rather cramped.

Severn had arrived in his race car fifteen minutes after my call, accompanied by his wife. Hot on their heels had been Zimotti, who had arrived with a couple of black Lancias containing two of his men, nasty-looking brutes in leather jackets and jeans. I had explained the situation in the back of the bar and shown them the note: Severn and Zimotti had glanced at each other in grim acknowledgement. Almost as if on cue, Pyotr had stepped off the tram, walked up the street and unlocked his front door.

And we’d pounced. The landlady had fretted over what the neighbours would think, but one of Zimotti’s men had taken her to one side and explained that she was performing a great service for the republic, and her massive chest had risen with pride at the thought and she had waved us through, almost in tears. Pyotr had been brewing himself a cup of coffee when we’d broken the door down. He’d protested, of course, strenuously and in fluent Italian, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it: he didn’t have diplomatic cover.

I looked over at Severn, who was standing by the door watching Zimotti at work. ‘Let’s get him,’ was all he had said in the bar. Now he looked equally calm, but his jaw was clenched tight and he was drumming his fingers against his thighs. He sensed my gaze and looked across at me, then smiled unconvincingly. It sent a shiver through me. Woe betide anyone who got on the wrong side of Severn. For a moment, I almost felt sorry for Pyotr.

Almost.

Sarah Severn was standing next to her husband, smoking her third cigarette since we’d arrived. I wished to God Severn hadn’t brought her along. She was a radio officer; there was no need for her to see any of this. She also seemed to be under the illusion that I’d been some sort of a hero in London, and I didn’t like having to go through this grotesque charade in front of her. But go through it I would, of course.

We’d only been here a few minutes, but the flat was already halfway to a shambles. Zimotti’s men had removed the drawers of the desk and shaken the contents onto the carpet, and they were now attacking the chairs, removing the cushions and tearing off the covers. Pyotr began objecting again and Zimotti pulled him up short, leaning over him and yelling at him to sit down. Pyotr glanced at the heavies and decided to do so.

‘Will someone please tell me what is happening here?’ he said, pouting like a child.

Zimotti smiled. ‘Va bene. We are representatives of the Servizio Informazioni Difesa, and we are here because we suspect that you are engaged in activities that may be harmful to the interests of Italy, Great Britain and its allies.’

‘Only them?’ said Pyotr with a sneer.

Zimotti ignored it. ‘Specifically, we suspect that you are involved in terrorist activity, or are in contact with people who are. I am now going to hand you over to this man,’ – he nodded at me – ‘who is a very senior member of British intelligence. He has some questions to put to you.’

I stepped forward.

‘Hello. My name is Paul Dark. Could you tell me yours, please?’

He didn’t answer, just glared dully at me.

‘The quicker you cooperate,’ I said, ‘the quicker we are going to get through this. If you are not involved in the way we think you are, we will soon clear this up and leave you in peace. You can have that coffee you were looking forward to.’

I tried to keep the tone relatively light, and glanced at Zimotti several times while I was talking. I wanted to hook Pyotr into believing that the Italians had somehow caught onto him but that I had engineered my way into handling the situation and was going to extricate him from it. That I was his friend, essentially.

There were a few seconds of silence, and then:

‘Pierre Valougny.’

Hooked.

‘Nationality?’

‘Swiss.’

‘Occupation?’

‘I run a small printing company between here and Geneva.’

Someone had opened a window to let the air in and I walked over to it. The noise of the traffic drifted up. I strained to make out other sounds: birdsong, a dog barking, a fountain trickling in the piazza. I turned back to Pyotr.

‘Edoardo Barchetti,’ I said. ‘Recognize the name?’

‘No. I have absolutely no idea what any of this is—’

‘He contacted us recently, concerning a small group he was a member of here: Arte come Terrore.’

No reaction, but there was no reason for there to be, yet.

‘I say “was”. A couple of days ago we learned that members of this group were planning a series of attacks in Europe. I went to meet him a few hours ago at the modern art museum to find out more, but I didn’t get very far. Care to guess why?’

His nose twitched, but his eyes were glued to me. He didn’t know where I was heading, but his instincts were telling him it wasn’t the right way.

‘Because by the time I reached him, Edoardo Barchetti was dead. However, I saw you leaving the museum in a hurry, so I followed you here. I’d like to know why you killed him.’

I didn’t like myself for saying the last part, but in a way it was true. He had forced me into it, and now I was going to make him pay the price.

‘I am a printer,’ he said. ‘My company prints art magazines. I was interested in the exhibition—’

‘Is that an attic you have?’ I said, glancing upwards. He made to stand up and I stepped forward and pushed him back down into the chair. I walked over to the bookcase and pulled out the ladder. Zimotti nodded at one of his men and he began climbing up.

I looked back at Pyotr. He was starting to realize the situation. The Italians hadn’t caught onto him; I had framed him. His anger was rising and he was desperately trying to keep a lid on it. He was furious with himself for letting me get the upper hand on him. He’d wanted to play the big man with the compromised agent, and I’d responded by doing the unthinkable and he hadn’t seen it coming. He was holding up well, considering, but I knew that he would go to the ends of the earth to pay me back if I didn’t manage to pull this off. It was him or me now, and if he’d had no problem in blowing my cover earlier, he would now be itching to do it.

There was a noise from upstairs, and I knew the Italian had found the transmitter. A couple of minutes later and it was sitting on the desk, along with the magazines and gallery invitations. Zimotti and Severn both walked over and peered at the untidy-looking heap. Severn started leafing through the notes, his face set.

‘How do you explain these items?’ I said to Pyotr.

‘The money is for emergencies – we Swiss are prudent people, and I always keep some at home, in all currencies.’ He smiled sweetly, almost in recognition of his cleverness.

‘And the transmitter?’

‘I have a passion for amateur radio.’

‘Why is it hidden in your attic?’

‘My landlady does not like the idea – and it gets much better reception up there. It is not, as far as I am aware, a crime.’

‘This is a spy transmitter, Signor Valougny, and you are using it to communicate with your colleagues in the Soviet embassy. And this,’ – I picked up the Praktina – ‘is a spy camera, used for copying documents.’

‘I don’t see why you use that term. I bought it in a shop in town, and I often use it to photograph pictures from my books here to take to the office with me. Books are unwieldy.’

It was weak, but then he wasn’t playing to us. He was playing to a jury. We had to be a lot more solid than this to convict him; if we weren’t, he wouldn’t confess. He was skating on thin ice – I had to cut the ice away from his feet and make sure he fell in.

‘You say you print art magazines.’ I picked up the copy of La Classe and placed it on the table. ‘But this is a Communist magazine, calling for class struggle – for revolution, in fact.’

‘We print lots of different magazines. We are not responsible for the content. You must take that up with the editors and writers.’

Printer as a cover was a new one to me, but I could see the benefits. He could hover around the edge of the underground movement, but if pressed by the authorities – as now – could plausibly distance himself.

I pointed to a copy of Transizione.

‘Did you also print this?’

He peered at it, then nodded.

‘This is the same magazine that published a series of articles last year putting forward the case for violent acts against the state.’

‘Yes, I read those articles. They were purely theoretical, of course. They weren’t intended—’

‘We don’t think so. We believe that they constituted a kind of manifesto, in fact, and that they led to the foundation of Arte come Terrore. What do you know about the assassination of the head of British intelligence in London yesterday?’

‘The assassination of who? I have no knowledge of this whatsoever. I demand that you leave my home at once. I am a respectable businessman, and I do not take kindly to this treatment.’

Enough cat-and-mouse. It was time to close in for the kill.

‘All of this,’ I said, gesturing at the table, ‘is circumstantial. I found this piece of paper on Barchetti.’ I took it out of my pocket and read it to him. It was only a few lines in Italian, but I’d packed it with enough to damn him to hell and back:

We feel that the committee is now ready to step up its actions, and recommend the targeting of senior members of Western intelligence agencies. Details will soon follow of a public event in Britain. Please choose an operative for this task from among your number. We will provide the necessary weaponry once they have entered the country. Further operations in Italy, France and elsewhere are in advanced stages of planning.

I threw the letter onto the table and placed a hand on the Olivetti.

‘How much do you want to bet that the typeface matches the one produced by this machine?’

Pyotr licked his lips anxiously. Perhaps he was missing his chocolates. He was sweating now, and his face seemed to be turning an ash-grey. It was doubly insulting to him, because only the sloppiest of agents would have handed a contact such a note, in the clear and typed up on their own machine. But he could hardly point that out.

‘I did not write this,’ he said coldly. ‘I have never seen it before.’

I pressed it with my finger. ‘Is this why you killed Barchetti? Did you realize he was an infiltrator? Or was he perhaps blackmailing you, threatening to tell someone about your plans?’ I leaned on the word ‘blackmailing’ and was pleased to see him flinch at it. ‘Tell me!’

‘This is an amusing game, Mister . . .’

‘Dark.’

‘An amusing game, Mister Dark. But how far are you prepared to take it?’

‘All the way,’ I said. ‘I have no choice.’

He looked up at me sharply. ‘What do you mean?’

I smiled – he thought I’d slipped up. ‘A sniper killed the head of our agency in front of my eyes in London yesterday,’ I said. ‘It appears they have not finished their work. I can’t let it go. I can’t let you go until you tell us what you know.’

‘So you’re a patriot, is that it? You don’t strike me as the type.’ He glanced down at the letter disdainfully. ‘I have never seen this letter before in my life.’

‘Then why was it in Barchetti’s—’

‘Because you planted it there, Mister Dark!’ His cheeks were burning now. ‘You planted it there because you want to prove to your colleagues that I had something to do with the death of Mister Farraday in London.’

Trapped! Severn sprung forward. ‘So you do know about—’

‘I know because Mister Dark here told me,’ said Pyotr, and I shook for a moment, realizing that he had decided to go all the way, dragging us through the whole charade. Well, so be it. I had a whole heap of evidence against him, and all he had against me was his say-so. ‘Mister Dark told me when I met him outside the British embassy yesterday evening,’ he said, his voice rising in pitch, ‘because Mister Dark is a Soviet agent, and I am his contact here.’

There was silence for a moment.

‘Are you confessing to being a Soviet spy, Mister Valougny?’ I said.

He laughed derisively. ‘No. I am confessing that you and I both are.’

Severn took a few steps closer. ‘Do you have any evidence of that?’ he asked, but I cut him off before he could go any further.

‘Please, Charles,’ I said. ‘Let me handle this. It’s a desperate gambit, Mister Valougny, but I’m afraid it won’t work. All you have to do is tell us what it is that Arte come Terrore is planning next, and we can take it from there. Perhaps we can make some sort of a deal if you were to work for us from now on. But please show my colleagues and me a little more respect. Throwing around melodramatic accusations is an easy game to play, but you’re not convincing anyone and you’re not going to disrupt this investigation.’

Pyotr smiled, but it was the grim smile of a man who knew he was defeated. Oh, he would be cursing the day he met me for a long time. It served him right. Don’t blackmail someone unless you are very certain of your ground – and can lose a tail.

‘Let’s take him out of here,’ said Zimotti, who was pacing around by the door. ‘We need some time to crack this nut and this isn’t the place for it.’

‘What do you suggest?’ I said.

‘We have better facilities in town,’ said Zimotti. ‘Let’s get this bastard into an interviewing room.’

*

We went outside and bundled into the cars. The Severns took the Alfa Romeo, Zimotti’s men took Pyotr in one of the Lancias and I went with Zimotti in his own car. He didn’t say anything as he drove through the early afternoon traffic, his face staring ahead grimly. I reviewed the situation. It had gone well, all things considered. Pyotr had thrown out the counter-accusation, as I had expected he might when cornered, but the timing was a little awkward: I hadn’t bargained on our being split up like this. No doubt he was now telling the others in the car behind that I had been recruited in Germany or some such thing. No matter – I’d disposed of all the evidence, and I doubted they would let him say very much: Zimotti’s men looked like pretty tough customers. I would have to tread very carefully now to make sure none of the mud he flung stuck to me, but if I applied more pressure on him, and quickly, I reckoned I would be in a strong position . . .

We took a sudden lurch to the left, and I caught a glimpse out of the window. Zimotti had taken a minor road, and it seemed we were heading away from the city centre.

‘Where are we going?’ I said, but as I turned I felt a sting in my upper thigh and saw him removing the needle. I started calling out, but it was no use, because my world was fading to black and all I could think was: I’m finished.