5

Fredericksburg, Virginia

The large white house, built in neo-colonial style, was located in a narrow leafy street on the edge of Fredericksburg. Its former owner, an Australian who had made a vast fortune publishing a horse-racing sheet, had sold the property in 1985 to a man who said his name was Galbraith and who hinted vaguely that he had retired from a lucrative career in the aerospace industry. Both the name and the career were fabrications. The property, all seven wooded acres of it, changed hands for one million dollars in a transaction so smooth and quick it surprised the Australian handicapper, who took the money and moved to Boca Raton.

The house, set some distance from its closest neighbour, had undergone considerable changes under the direction of the new owner. Steel shutters were hung on the windows, an elaborate security system installed, and several new phonelines added – although not by technicians employed by the Bell telephone company. A huge mainframe computer was hooked up in a room on the second floor, which had been remodelled for just that purpose. The interior walls were painted a uniform oyster-shell colour. Mature trees were planted all around the property and, as if these did not quite satisfy the owner’s lust for privacy, a ten-foot brick wall, electrified along the top, was also constructed. Galbraith, an enormously fat man with an addiction to things English – such as croquet, crumpets and Craven A cigarettes – was rarely seen in the neighbourhood, perhaps only occasionally glimpsed as he went past in a stately Bentley with darkly tinted windows.

At two a.m. US Eastern District time, two hours after Frank Pagan had left the American Embassy in London, a beige BMW drew up at the gates of the dark house, which slid open to admit the vehicle. The car moved up the circular driveway, then parked directly in front of the house. The driver, a man called Iverson, emerged from the German automobile and climbed the steps to the front door. Iverson inserted a laminated card into a slot, and was admitted after a moment. Inside, he headed at once for the door that led to the basement.

Iverson had bright blue eyes which were heavily lidded and his chin appeared to have been carved in stone. His blond hair had been cut so close to the skull that the scalp seemed blue-tinted. He was in his late forties, but the lack of lines and creases, the lack of animation in the face, made it impossible to guess. It wasn’t the kind of face that accommodated expressions with any ease. There was severity and a sense of singlemindedness about the man. He descended the stairs to the basement in the stiff-backed manner of someone who has been for most of his life associated with one or other arm of the military.

Galbraith, dressed in the kind of loose, monklike robe he found very comfortable, his feet bare, sat on a brown leather sofa in the basement. He sipped espresso from a demi-tasse, then set the cup down on a smoked-glass table and raised one hand, which resembled a small plucked chicken, in a rather weary greeting.

“Sit,” Galbraith said in an accent that was Boston, but had been tempered to suggest the other side of the Atlantic. “Welcome to As The World Turns.”

Iverson sat. He stared at the various consoles on the wall, some of which depicted the darkened garden outside, while others flashed a variety of data transmitted from the mainframe on the second floor. Some of this information, which was coded, concerned the flight-plans of American fighter aircraft on NATO assignments in various parts of Europe. Other data, which constantly changed, listed such things as troop manoeuvres in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the movement of ships and submarines in the Soviet Baltic fleet, the orbits of Russian spy satellites, the location of Russian radar installations, and a whole lot more besides, much of it irrelevant in global terms.

Galbraith had a whole world brought into the basement by the consoles. He was like some fat spider in the dead centre of an intricate electronic web whose strands stretch around the globe. He sat sometimes for hours, observing the relentless flow of information that travelled from space satellites and other complex computer links at great speeds along the filaments of his web. Iverson studied the consoles in silence, glancing now and again at Galbraith’s face in which the eyes were mere slits surrounded by ravioli-like pillows of white flesh.

Galbraith, who weighed two hundred and eighty pounds, breathed noisily as if sucking enough air for three men. His laboured breathing had been one of the arguments he’d used when he’d first gone before a secret session of the Congressional Select Committee on Intelligence Operations to demand funds for the purchase of this property in Fredericksburg. The air in DC, gentlemen, is becoming increasingly hard to live on. It dulls the senses and clouds the mind. Fresh air means increased alertness, and a happier, healthier crew. And cost-effective, too, a lower tax base, cheaper utilities, less expensive housing.

Galbraith was as persuasive in argument as he was imposing in girth. Few politicians ever liked to contend with him, and fewer still demanded a reckoning, although there were always a couple who longed for his blood, small-minded men who called themselves – proudly, mind you – ‘moralists’, and who waited a chance to pounce on the fat man, catching him in some ugly covert operation with blood on his palms. These were men, usually from states where the electorate was corn-fed, who had a smell of old bibles and damp pulpits about them, and who drew their constituencies from the same people who donated money to TV ministries. They were stupid men, and narrow-minded, but they were not to be underestimated because they wielded the kind of power that could punish intelligence efforts where it really hurt-in the old pocketbook. And they waited, with withdrawn fangs, for Galbraith to commit a public faux pas, or fall into an espionage scandal. But not even these critics realised that Galbraith was effectively separating himself from the DIA – the Defense Intelligence Agency – to establish an autonomous branch, an inner sanctum, in the tranquil countryside of Virginia. The operation became known, to those who knew such things, as the GIA, Galbraith’s Intelligence Agency.

The funds were approved and Galbraith moved the computer operation out of the capital, although he left most of his staff behind in the old quarters. He took with him only a handful of specialists, men and women trained to interpret the data provided by the computer. These were people he’d hired personally and who tended to see the world through the same prism as Galbraith himself did, which was one of self-preservation and what the fat man thought of as ‘sophisticated’ patriotism – to differentiate it from ‘frontier’ patriotism, which he considered a mindless kind of thing, a redneck instinct, a mere wormlike reflex. Galbraith’s version was grounded in the simple assumption, which needed no drum-rolls to accompany it, no National Rifle Association to maintain it, that the continued existence of the United States as the primary power in the world guaranteed the continued existence of the world itself.

“Good of you to come at this hour, Gary. Smoke?” And he pushed a box of Craven A across the glass surface of the coffee table. Iverson declined. With a remote control device, Galbraith switched off the consoles. Iverson noticed the absence of electronic humming in the room now.

Galbraith said, “Here’s a fine illustration of the limits of modern technology, Gary. While we sit in this lovely house and can keep track, say, of a couple of penguins merrily fornicating in Antarctica, we still haven’t reached a situation where we can do a damn thing to predict human behaviour. In other words, just as we think we have matters under control, up pops some human idiot to scramble the whole equation.”

“Which human idiot do you have in mind, sir?”

Galbraith stood up. His huge robe flowed around him like a collapsing tent. He went to a closet, opened it, took out a packet of English chocolate digestive biscuits and nibbled on one. Then, disgusted by his own needs, he tossed the half-eaten biscuit into a waste-basket. “They’ve ordered me to diet again, Gary. Which makes me cranky as hell. It came down from no less an authority than the White House physician, who speaks in a voice like God’s. Galbraith, he says, there’s a svelte person inside you, and he’s dying to get out. Either you let him out, or you die. Svelte, I ask you. Do I look like there’s a thin bugger inside me pining for freedom?”

Iverson said nothing because he’d never known how to make small talk. Years of military service and discipline had robbed him of most social graces. He was all business. He smiled uneasily as he looked at the fat man, knowing full well that Galbraith’s obesity was his trademark as much as Aunt Jemima’s face on a packet of pancake mix. On the Washington dinner-party circuit, at least along that inner track where the real power-brokers wined and dined, several people had perfected an imitation of the Galbraith waddle, which the fat man responded to in a good-natured fashion. None of his impersonators knew for sure what he did for a living, an ignorance Galbraith fostered by behaving in a self-deprecating way. He made fat jokes at his own expense. My obesity, he’d once told Iverson, is my cover – in more ways than one.

Iverson said, “You were talking about a human idiot, sir.”

“Yes, so I was.” Galbraith returned to the sofa and plumped himself down. Iverson’s presence was comforting to him because Gary was a man without hidden emotions. No neuroses, no festering depths. Galbraith sometimes thought that Iverson was a relic from the Eisenhower years, when no shadows disturbed the American psyche, a time when the boy next door was exactly that, not some secret cock-flasher or dope fiend or peeping-tom. Iverson made Galbraith positively nostalgic for the simpler days of the Cold War, the apple-pie days.

“I’m talking about an idiot who has scuppered our friend Vabadus, and has thus threatened White Light.”

“Scuppered?”

Galbraith looked wan suddenly. “Vabadus is dead, Gary. He was shot by someone unknown to us.”

Iverson went straight to the only point that mattered to him. “Before or after the connection?”

“Before, alas. It wouldn’t have mattered had it happened after. Then we’d know everything was secured.” Galbraith made a fist out of one of his plump hands in a rare gesture of irritation. “It’s my understanding that dear old Scotland Yard has become involved, which may pose problems for us.”

“Of course,” Iverson said.

“With luck, they may miss the point. They may simply overlook it. On the other hand …”

“On the other hand the Yard may become a little too alert,” Iverson said.

“Precisely, Gary. And we can hardly tell our British allies what’s going on, can we? Nobody tells them anything these days in any event, so why awaken them from their well-deserved slumber now and talk to them about White Light?” Galbraith sat back and sighed. He turned the name White Light around in his head for a moment. It was the in-house code for the Baltic project. Galbraith, who had grown up in intelligence agencies at a time when code-names were bestowed on anything that moved, had christened this project White Light in memory of his one trip through the Baltic countries at the height of the so-called Khrushchev ‘thaw’. What the fat man most remembered, aside from a rather depressing socialist shabbiness in the capital cities of the Baltic, was the extraordinary length of summer nights and how the sky was suffused by an odd white clarity.

“So what do we do?” Iverson asked.

Galbraith stared at the younger man. “I think the only reasonable thing is to keep a very close eye on the situation in London and if it gets out of hand – if, say, certain persons at the Yard get a little too alert – then we may have to do a dark deed.”

Iverson, who knew what was meant by the phrase dark deed, nodded his head slowly. “What do we know about the killer?”

Galbraith took a folded sheet of paper from the pocket of his huge robe and passed it to Iverson. “So far only a name, which I’ve written down for you.”

Iverson stared at the name. “You want me to look into his background?”

“I think it’s essential.” Galbraith picked up the remote device and pressed a button and all two dozen screens flickered back to life. He stared at one screen in particular, which showed a list of all fighter planes, mainly F-16s, allotted to NATO, and their schedule for that day. “At least I don’t see any problem with this aspect of the matter,” and he waved a hand at the screen.

“That’s the easy part,” Iverson agreed.

“I love smooth sailing, Gary. I love it when the parts click nicely together. It’s like solving Rubik’s Cube by sound alone.” Galbraith tapped the remote device on the surface of the table. “But I just hate unexpected problems. And I especially hate the idea of anything unfortunate happening to Scotland Yard personnel, God knows. Sometimes, though, self-interest takes precedence over sentiment, Gary. It’s that kind of world these days. I wish it were otherwise. But we’re all realists in this neck of the woods.”

Iverson agreed again. It was another thing Galbraith liked about Gary. He was such an agreeable fellow. Galbraith dismissed him, heard him go back up the stairs, then there was the sound of the door closing. Alone, the fat man stared at his black and white electronic universe in an absent manner. He was thinking about Vabadus again. He felt he’d lost a friend, even though he’d never met the man. Vabadus, in Estonian, meant freedom. Galbraith thought it a very appropriate choice for the late Aleksis Romanenko.

London

Frank Pagan’s flat in Holland Park had more than a touch of squalor about it. It was the kind of place in which a man clearly lived a solitary life. Somehow, Pagan had the feeling that it was always late in this apartment, always dark, as if sunlight never managed to find its way through the curtains. When he stepped into the living-room, the first thing he did was to pour himself a glass of Glenlivet. He surveyed the chaos of things like a stranger who finds himself suddenly tossed into another man’s world. There was a milk bottle with curdled contents and three slices of hardened toast and a glass of orange-juice that had alchemised into an antibiotic. Pagan shut his eyes and savoured the drink.

In Roxanne’s day, of course, everything had been different. But there was an abyss of self-pity here Pagan didn’t want to encounter. Recollections of a dead wife were at best numbing, at worst excruciating. Loneliness had a gravity all its own and it pulled you down into its bleak centre. He stepped into the bedroom and wondered how long it had been since he’d laid flowers on Roxanne’s grave. Weeks now, he supposed. There had been a time when he’d gone daily to that terrible fucking place and stared at the headstone as if, through the sheer mystic effort of will, he might conjure the dead woman up out of the cold earth and love her again.

He sat on the edge of the unmade bed and stared into his drink. He wondered if he was somehow getting better, if he was finding a quiet place to put his grief, like some safe-deposit box of the heart where it could be left locked and hidden. He’d removed Roxanne’s photograph from the bedside table three months ago but in some odd way it was still there and he imagined it always would be. He closed his eyes again and sipped his drink and tried not to think about his wife and the way she’d died that Christmas because of the festive activities of a mad Irish bomber who’d detonated a killing device on a crowded London street. All he knew was that the planet without her was not exactly a better place. And perhaps this was the loneliest and most dreadful realisation of all – the world was reduced, diminished, by her absence.

These painful recognitions dismayed him. He rose, wandered to his stereo, found a record and set it on the turntable. It was an old Bo Diddley tune named Mona, with the kind of hard, driving rhythm that was almost a form of anaesthetic. He turned up the volume and let the noise crowd the room. Pure therapy, raucous and uncomplicated. Then, as if compelled to move by the music, he strolled around the room.

Consider simpler things that are not connected to love and grief. Consider the violence that had taken place at Waverley Station – when? Had it only been ten hours ago? The music had stopped now and the apartment was eerily quiet and he poured himself a second Glenlivet.

Perhaps it was more than his injured ego that made him want to impose a mystery on the event in Edinburgh, that made him want to look for hidden depths where Tommy Witherspoon claimed there were none. Perhaps it was the fact that his life, which had been about as exciting as that of a guppy mooning around inside an aquarium, had taken an interesting turn. It might be nothing but a brief illusion of mystery – even that was more intriguing than the blunted way things had been before.

He turned his thoughts once more to the contents of Romanenko’s briefcase and as he was wondering whether Danus Oates had translated the material, he was surprised to hear the sound of his doorbell ringing. He went to the intercom and turned it on.

A woman’s voice, distorted by the outmoded electrical system, said, “Mr Pagan?”

“Speaking,” was all Pagan could think to reply.

“I know it’s late, but I’d like to see you.”

The accent was American. Pagan looked quickly around the apartment. How in the name of God could he have a visitor in a dump like this, especially a woman?

“My name’s Kristina Vaska,” the woman said. “I realise we don’t know each other, Mr Pagan.”

“Can it wait?” Pagan asked. “It’s been a long day and I’m tired.”

“I appreciate that. But if’s very important I see you. It concerns Aleksis Romanenko.”

“You better come up. I’m on the second floor.”

He pressed the buzzer that unlocked the front door. Immediately he began to clear some of the mess from the dining-room table, a futile effort because no sooner had he carried the glass of penicillin and the milk bottle into the kitchen than he heard the woman knocking lightly on his door.

She was in her late twenties, possibly early thirties, and as soon as he looked at her Pagan realised it was the person he’d seen driving the yellow VW around Grosvenor Square. He was struck at once by the intensity of her eyes, which were that shade of brown that comes close to blackness, the absence of light. And yet there were lights, tiny flecks that seemed almost silver to Pagan. She had a wonderful square jaw that suggested tenacity. Her dark hair, cut very short, was curled tightly against her head. There was no makeup on her face. She wore a white linen jacket and blue jeans, all very casual, and she carried a bulky shoulderbag. She was lovely in the effortless way some women seem to be, as if by pure chance, a happy collision of disparate elements. The word Pagan wanted was serendipity.

“My humble abode,” he said, thinking he might make some excuse about how his cleaning lady had the pox and couldn’t come, poor old dear, and he was sorry about the shambles.

Pagan stared at breadcrumbs on the soiled table linen and cursed the odd nervousness that had afflicted him suddenly, the unease. It was almost as if the ghost of Roxanne Pagan sat in the bedroom, resentful at the intrusion of a woman into the apartment. Pagan underwent a mild sense of guilt. It was pure bloody nonsense, he thought. It was something a man had to grow out of. The spirits had their own lives to lead. And the living had living to do. But why was it so difficult?

The woman held out her hand and Pagan shook it a little too quickly. Her skin was cool against his own.

“I’m sorry it’s this late,” she said.

Pagan was too restless for sleep anyway. He gestured towards a chair and Kristina Vaska sat down. He noticed she was very slender in the way dancers sometimes are, that she moved as if her body were an instrument she played unconsciously. Pagan was so unaccustomed to company in this place that he didn’t think to offer her a drink. Besides, now that she had impressed him with her appearance, now that he’d looked carefully at her, he had a more important question to ask.

“Do you usually follow people around?”

Kristina Vaska smiled. “Would you believe I was in Grosvenor Square at the same time as you by pure chance?”

“I’ve been known to entertain a few weird beliefs in my time,” he answered. “That wouldn’t be one of them.”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“And so you followed me.”

She nodded her head, still smiling. It was the smile that did it, he thought. He’d always been a sucker for a mischievous grin, for that certain elfin quality. He saw at once that Kristina Vaska was the kind of woman with whom you couldn’t be angry for very long, which put him at an emotional disadvantage because he’d lost one of his more potent wéapons – the forceful annoyance, the irritated flash of the eyes, which sometimes made people very wary of Frank Pagan because they sensed dangerous levels inside him.

“I’ve been following you ever since you left Scotland Yard. I trailed you all the way here. Then I got nervous. So I drove around for a while. After that, what the hell,” and she shrugged. “I just pulled out the old courage and rang your doorbell. I figured I had nothing to lose.”

The quality of persistence, Pagan thought, and a suspicion formed in his mind that he didn’t much like. “Let me guess,” he said. “You want a story. You want Frank Pagan’s eyewitness account of murder in Edinburgh. Sorry to disappoint you, love, but I don’t talk to the press.”

Kristina Vaska gazed at him, and her look was as cool as her hand had been a moment before. “I don’t have any association with the press, Mr Pagan.”

Pagan said nothing for a moment. He had a sense of sheer awkwardness. He fussed with the tablecloth, moving crumbs around. Empty gestures. He wished he could find something terrific to do with his hands. “You mentioned Romanenko,” he said finally. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

“Let me ask you a question first,” she said. “What do you know about him?”

Pagan had an interrogator’s dislike of having questions directed against him. “Not much,” he replied.

“What do you know about the country he came from?”

“Russia?”

Kristina Vaska shook her head. “Estonia, Mr Pagan.”

“I only know if’s part of the Soviet Union –”

“According to whom?” The tone of her question was as sharp as the point of a needle.

Pagan saw it coming. He knew what he was in for and he felt himself cringe. She was going to be one of those slightly cracked ladies, all spit and intensity, who had a firm political stand she shouted about at every opportunity, a portable platform she could assemble in no time at all out of the carpentry of her convictions. Apolitical himself, despite some left-wing leanings that had been stronger in his twenties, Pagan was very uncomfortable with zealots. In his personal experience they were either dangerous or deranged, and sometimes both at once. They had a habit of shaping the world to meet their own political requirements. To Pagan’s way of thinking, zealots were first cousins to terrorists. It was just a matter of degree.

“The United States doesn’t recognise Estonia as Soviet territory,” Kristina Vaska said. “Nor does your own country. So far as the US and the UK are concerned, the Soviet Union illegally seized all three Baltic nations in 1940, after they’d been independent for twenty years.”

Pagan started to interrupt, but it was impossible.

“The pretext – and the Russians aren’t exactly subtle when it comes to such matters – was that the Baltic had to be defended against the Nazi menace. When World War II started, the Germans drove the Russians out of the Baltic, which was only a temporary condition. The Russians came back in 1944 to take up where they’d left off – as the great liberators of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.” Kristina Vaska paused a moment and what Pagan saw in those dark eyes was more than anger, it was a deeply-held resentment, the kind that lodges unshakably in the soul. She stood up and walked around the room now and Pagan, entranced by her movements, that indefinable harmony of motion called grace, watched her.

“The point is, Mr Pagan, the people of the world are very familiar with Nazi atrocities. They know about what happened to the Jews of Europe. But when it comes to Soviet atrocities in the Baltic, there’s a kind of ignorance that frustrates the hell out of me. I’m talking about the mass deportations of Baltic nationals to Siberia. I’m talking about hundreds of thousands of people from three separate nations with their own language and cultures who were uprooted and shipped out of their homelands and if they were lucky enough to survive inconceivable journeys in railroad cars, they found themselves in labour camps, where most of them died anyway. This is a horror story, Mr Pagan. This is genocide, plain and simple. And it’s going on to this very day. It’s going on, perhaps in more subtle ways, but it’s still happening because the KGB sees to that. The KGB makes sure, at every level of Baltic society, that the native peoples of the Baltic countries are being Russified – which is just a polite fucking word for extermination.”

She stopped moving and stared at him. He had the feeling he’d been hit across the skull with a stout wooden plank. She went on about how native languages were falling into disuse, cultures dying, how TV stations broadcast only in Russian, how young people were being conscripted into the Soviet Army and shipped to Afghanistan to fight a war they didn’t care about on behalf of a system they despised, and Baltic peoples were being dispersed to other parts of the Soviet Union, and anybody who raised his voice to complain had the nasty habit of disappearing from view.

There was an aura of energy about her, almost a force-field. Pagan, who could think of nothing to say because she’d somehow managed to make him feel a little ashamed of his own neglect of recent history and uncomfortable with what she surely perceived in him as insensitivity, wondered about her background. She talked with an American accent, but what was her family history?

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“Sorry you don’t know more about it. And sorry I went on at you. I hate to lecture.”

“And I hate being lectured,” Pagan said. But he was intrigued just the same. He had run into many of the disenfranchised persons of Europe in his life. The Poles, the Hungarians, the sad exiles who formed social clubs in London suburbs and held dances and sometimes wrote letters to newspapers. It was just that he hadn’t considered the Baltic nations as countries with identities as singular as those of Poland or Hungary or Czechoslovakia. He’d always thoughtlessly assumed they were iridivisibly a part of the Soviet Union and if he ever considered them at all it was a process that took place on some far edge of his awareness, a subject that never troubled him, never came into focus in a place where he could see it clearly. Every now and then he’d read about a student riot in Latvia or some form of protest by the Catholic Church in Lithuania, every now and then he’d absently read about petitions delivered to the United Nations by people with strange, unpronounceable names – but there was a distance to these things, as if he were seeing them down the wrong end of a telescope. It was, he realised, unforgivably parochial of him. And it was no real justification to tell himself that cops weren’t exactly famous for their interest in affairs beyond their own particular parish, which was usually small and well-defined, a tidy little patch where you knew all the scams that were going on.

“People forget,” Kristina Vaska said. “That’s the problem. When a wrong isn’t righted immediately, it becomes the status quo, and people just don’t think about it any more. It’s easy, you see. It’s the complacent way.”

“And I’m complacent,” Pagan said.

“And ignorant. Which pisses me off.” She looked around the room. “And you also live like a pig, which pisses me off even more.”

Pagan smiled. Her earnestness had suddenly gone and there was levity in her expression and he could see, behind the features that had become so damned stern a moment before, a sense of humour, a warmth. “I’m not here a great deal,” he said feebly.

“I can’t say I blame you.” She glanced through the kitchen door, which unfortunately Pagan had left open. “Now there’s a room where some bodies might be buried. I bet you lie awake at nights and hear things moving about inside the refrigerator.”

Frank Pagan closed the kitchen door. “I thought you came here to talk about Romanenko,” he said.

“You needed a little edification first.”

“Which you provided.”

“I’m not exactly through with the background yet, Mr Pagan.”

“I had the feeling,” he said. The education of Frank Pagan, he thought. And so we grow.

Kristina Vaska wandered to the window and ran the palm of one hand down the edge of the curtain. Then she let her hand fall to her side and turned to face Pagan. “I don’t know how serious you are, Mr Pagan. And I don’t know how seriously you take me. Sometimes you seem just a bit flippant. Maybe it’s something in your manner.”

“I’m listening,” Pagan said. “Seriously.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of a man called Norbert Vaska?”

Pagan shook his head. “A relative of yours?”

“My father.”

There was a silence in the room suddenly. Pagan was aware of the quietness of the night pressing against the house, the darkness laying a still film upon the window. And Kristina Vaska, who could go from impassioned enthusiast to bantering domestic critic in a matter of seconds, had changed yet again. Her eyes were directed into herself and Pagan knew that whatever she was looking at it wasn’t anything in this room.

“My father taught engineering at the Tallinn Polytechnical Institute in Estonia,” she said. “He was a good engineer. At least he was a better engineer than he was a Communist. He didn’t believe in the system. He had status, you understand, and materially his life was fine. A car. A good apartment. A refrigerator. Things we take for granted in the West. Unlike some people, though, my father couldn’t continue living under a system he considered malignant just because he happened to be one of the privileged ones. In 1966 he joined a group called the Estonian Movement for Democracy which developed ties with similar groups in Latvia and Lithuania.”

She glanced at Pagan, as if she wanted to be absolutely sure of his attention. He thought how grave she looked now.

“He became an editor of an underground newspaper, the Estonian Independent Voice. This involved considerable risk to himself. Maybe you can imagine that. Aside from writing articles and distributing the newspaper furtively, he often had to make trips to Riga in Latvia, or he’d go to Vilnius in Lithuania. I’ve tried to imagine how terrifying it must have been for him – attending underground meetings in the dead of night in somebody’s apartment … a group of men whispering about how to fight the Soviet occupation of their countries. I’ve often tried to picture that scene and I always feel the same cold fear. Here was a man with a position, prepared to risk it all for his personal beliefs.”

She looked at Pagan, almost as if she wanted to be sure he was listening. “He was arrested by the KGB on April 14, 1972. I remember it clearly. There was a knock on the door after midnight. Now there’s a simple little phrase that’s utterly terrifying, Mr Pagan. There’s something people like you and me don’t have to live with. A knock on the door after midnight. Three men took my father away. They had no warrant. Who needs a goddam warrant if they’re KGB anyhow? They ransacked the apartment. They trashed the place. They left my mother and me behind. We heard nothing more about my father for three months. He’d been put in what’s called ‘special confinement’. That’s a goddam awful phrase. You see nobody. You talk to nobody. You get nothing to read. You sit in a windowless room and you know nothing because nobody tells you anything. After three months, we heard he’d been sentenced to life imprisonment in the city of Perm in the Soviet Union. It was one of those places that pretend to be psychiatric institutes. You’ve heard of them, no doubt.”

Frank Pagan said he had and that he was sorry to hear about her father. But he wondered where this was going, how the dots were going to be connected, what the relationship was between Romanenko and Kristina Vaska’s narrative.

“After, we heard he’d been transferred to a labour camp in the Arctic Circle. Then, without any warning, my mother and I were expelled from the country and flown to Helsinki. All this was done, you understand, without one single word of explanation. Nothing. A car came to fetch us. We were told to pack as much as two suitcases would hold. We were given passports. We were handed expulsion papers, which meant we were stripped of Soviet citizenship – although that didn’t exactly cause a great gnashing of teeth. After a month in Helsinki we went to the United States. On September 12, 1972, we arrived in New York City. I’m good with dates, Mr Pagan. Certain dates just seem to stick in my mind. For example, I haven’t seen my father since April, 1972. It’s a long time. It’s too long.”

She moved across the room. She came very close to Pagan as she passed. He was aware of something stirring in the air around him. Call it electricity, he thought. Whatever it was, it took him by surprise. It was an unexpected reaction and he wasn’t sure how to deal with it.

“I know it’s brave of me,” she said. “But I’m going to risk your kitchen. I’m dry. I need water.”

She opened the kitchen door. Pagan heard her rinse a glass, then there was the sound of ice-cubes being pried loose from the freezer. When she came back she smiled at him. “There’s a process known as defrosting a freezer, Mr Pagan. A polar bear could live in yours.” She sat down, sipped her water, stared at him.

“I was never very good at science at school. I don’t understand the principles of freezers.”

“I don’t think it takes an Einstein,” she said, shaking the slightly furry, opaque cubes in her glass.

Pagan turned the subject away from his embarrassing domestic life. “Have you heard from your father?”

“He’s not exactly in a place served by a postman, Mr Pagan. As for his location, I’m not sure. The last time I heard any news about him he was in a labour camp near Murmansk in Siberia. That was more than a year ago. According to my source, he was very ill. He had pneumonia and he wasn’t getting the right kind of medication. There’s no such thing as a malpractice suit in a Siberian labour camp.”

Frank Pagan said, “I keep reading in the papers that things are supposed to be getting better for political prisoners in the Soviet Union.”

“Sure, if you’re a famous physicist or you’ve got influential friends in the West. But not if you’re simply a former professor of engineering at the Polytechnic in Tallinn. Norbert Vaska doesn’t have clout. He’s just another forgotten prisoner, another number among thousands. It’s going to take years and years if men like my father are ever going to be released under some general amnesty programme. It takes a long time for anything to change in Russia. There are too many people with a vested interest in the system. People who don’t like change at any price.” She drained her glass, set it down on the table. “Which brings me – finally – to Aleksis Romanenko. You were probably wondering.”

“It had crossed my mind,” Pagan said. And for some reason he couldn’t name he felt an odd little tension go through him. He had the feeling that whatever conclusion Kristina Vaska was approaching, it was somehow going to complicate his life. He saw her reach inside her large purse. As she did so, the telephone rang and Pagan put out his hand towards it, annoyed by the sudden intrusion of the world outside, irritated by any interference at the crucial point of the woman’s story. He had an unhappy rapport with phones at the best of times. Now it was a sheer bloody nuisance and he was tempted just to ignore it and go on listening to Kristina Vaska. But he didn’t.

The urgent voice he heard was the Commissioner’s.

“Young Oates has turned up something that might pique your interest, Frank. I suggest you drop whatever – or whoever – you’re doing, and get your arse over here on the double. I’m keeping a very unhappy Russian diplomat at bay, and I don’t know how long I can stall him before the Third World War breaks out.”

“I’ll be there,” Pagan said. When Martin Burr used the phrase ‘I suggest’, it was always a command meant to be obeyed immediately.

“Come in that fast American car of yours and pretend we’ve just abolished the speed limit, would you?”

“Give me ten minutes,” Pagan said.

“Make it nine. And I’m not joking. There’s been another development here, quite apart from Oates’s translation, that might come as something of a surprise.”

Pagan put the telephone down. Shit. How could Martin Burr’s timing be so damned bad? He looked at Kristina Vaska, who was watching him expectantly. He wondered what kind of surprise Burr had in mind.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve just been summoned by the Commissioner. It’s like getting a message from God.”

“Then you don’t want to keep God waiting,” she said. “I’ll put the end of my story on hold, Mr Pagan.”

“How do I get in touch with you?”

Kristina Vaska shrugged. “I haven’t made a hotel reservation.” There it was again – that smile which changed her entire face and made her eyes light up and dissolved all the gravity of her expression. “I could easily wait here. I mean, if you don’t mind. If you don’t think I’ll be in the way.”

“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” Pagan said.

“I’m not in any hurry.”

Pagan, who was seized by a feeling of total discomfort, gestured toward the sofa. “It opens out into a bed,” he said. “You’ll find blankets in the bedroom if you need them.” He thought of this woman stepping inside his bedroom, and the image was an odd one, like a picture hanging aslant on a wall.

“I’ll be okay. Don’t worry about me, Mr Pagan.”

He hesitated a moment in the doorway. It was obvious that she sensed his awkwardness and found it amusing.

“Just don’t go anywhere,” he said. “I’m anxious to hear the rest of your story.”

“I promise you’ll find it very interesting.”

Pagan opened the door. But he was still hesitant. It was all very strange to him. A woman in his apartment, an attractive woman waiting for his return. Somebody with an unfinished narrative that was connected to the disaster in Edinburgh. Why hadn’t Martin Burr waited just a few minutes more before telephoning? Pagan hated interrupted stories.

“Don’t worry. It’s perfectly safe to leave me here,” she said. “Cross my heart I won’t steal the silverware. It’s probably lying in the sink anyway, too dirty to steal.”

Pagan smiled. “I wasn’t thinking about the silverware.”

Kristina Vaska said, “I bet you don’t have any anyhow. You look like a man who uses disposable plastic cutlery, Mr Pagan.”

“Call me Frank,” he said. “And if you want to know the real truth, I eat with my hands.”

Saaremaa Island, the Baltic Sea

It was almost dawn when Colonel Yevgenni Uvarov stepped out of his quarters and walked quietly across the concrete compound. He passed under the shadows of the radar scanners, which turned silently, ominously, in the early light. Anything that moved out there on the Baltic would send a signal back to the scanners, which would then feed the signal into the one-storey building Uvarov now entered. There was a row of small green screens that received the radar transmissions. They were largely inactive and the technicians who stared at them were bored in the manner of men who spend their days in expectant vigilance that more often than not fails to produce excitement. They watched the screens and their eyesight invariably became bad over a period of time. Uvarov had the thought that the men under his command were prisoners of the green screens, hopelessly addicted to studying radar signals.

Uvarov crossed the large room, pausing every now and then to examine one of the screens, or to check the progress of a trainee operator. He reached his desk, located at the back of the room, and he sat down. His chair was hideously uncomfortable. The surface of his desk was clear. There was nothing of a personal nature to be seen anywhere. He kept a photograph of his wife and children inside the desk. Every now and then, as if to remind himself of the reason for his decision, he’d open the drawer and glance at the photograph – and what filled him was a sense of devotion and gratitude and love. He had only to look at the photograph, which was a stiff studio shot done in slightly unreal colours, to make himself believe that his course of action was the correct one. Just the same, he often felt a fear so great he was convinced it showed on his face, that other people couldn’t fail to notice it. And sometimes the fear yielded to a kind of despair – he had spent fifteen years of his life in the Army and within the next few days he was going to throw it all away. The whole thing had the texture of a bad dream, a nightmare in which he was trapped as surely as a fly in the jaws of a spider.

His wife and two teenage children lived in Moscow. Uvarov only saw his family whenever he was granted leave. It didn’t happen often. Last year, when his wife had fallen ill, he’d requested compassionate leave, and he’d been denied. The refusal galled him. The service to which he’d devoted so much of his adult life should not have denied him such a simple plea. But it was the system, it was the way the system worked, with a lack of understanding for human needs. Uvarov felt he’d been denied more than compassionate leave. He’d been denied his humanity. And his family had suffered needlessly.

A year ago. How much had changed in that short time, he thought. He yawned because he’d slept badly. He always slept badly these days. He stood up, walked around the room, observed the operators at their screens. Then he went outside.

He could hear the slow Baltic tide that came and went upon the beach beyond the wire perimeter. A few gulls, scavenging the shoreline, flapped in the dawn light. This depressing island, thick with military installations, rocket-bases and airfields and anti-ballistic missile interceptors, was another factor in his sense of general disappointment. Now and then an opportunity arose for brief leave on the mainland, which meant perhaps a twelve-hour visit to Tallinn – certainly never enough time to travel to where his family lived. Whenever he returned from Tallinn, a pleasant medieval city, a place with a sense of life and colour, it took days before he could suppress his restlessness and discontent.

He raised his face to the sky. Overhead, six MIG-27s flew in formation, breaking the cloud cover and then vanishing in the direction of the mainland. An impressive display, he thought. A show of force and strength. Suddenly Uvarov felt small and insignificant and the task he’d agree to do struck him as overwhelming. He wouldn’t go through with it, he couldn’t, he didn’t have the nerve. But then he wasn’t alone in the undertaking, there were others involved, officers like himself who were ready to act at the appointed time – or so he’d been told by the man he’d met several times in Tallinn. What if it was a lie, a kind of sadistic ploy to test his loyalty? What if the man in Tallinn was some kind of inspector of internal affairs whose job it was to detect the potentially disloyal, the weak, those who had no commitment to the system?

Uvarov felt a tightness in his heart. He moved back in the direction of the low, grey-stone building, passing once again under the radar scanners. He sometimes had the feeling he was doomed to spend his whole life in this wretched place, forever commanding the men who endlessly studied the green screens and waited for the sky to reveal signs of danger. It was an awful prospect, one he couldn’t tolerate.

He opened the door, crossed the room, returned to his desk. He sat down, studied the reports of NATO activities that had been recorded in yesterday’s logs, the usual harmless catalogue of flights, the practice bombs dropped beyond Russian territorial waters, the idle strafing of the Baltic, nothing out of the ordinary. Then he pushed his chair back from his desk and thought of the photograph in the drawer – which reminded him of the very thing he didn’t want to think about, the brown envelope concealed under the floorboards of his family’s apartment in Moscow, the package that contained three US passports and fifty thousand American dollars in small bills that had been given to him by the man in Tallinn, the man he knew only as Aleksis.