11

Riga, Latvia

Three Soviet Army trucks with full headlights burning clattered along Suvorov Street toward the Daugava River. It was dark and the covered vehicles moved with the illusory urgency peculiar to military trucks, a briskness that suggested high speeds to anyone watching. In reality, the trucks were travelling at no more than forty miles an hour. They crossed the river and entered the area of Riga known as the Pardaugava, the industrialised left bank of the sprawling city. They passed an isolated green area, a rather rundown park, and then an old cemetery, beyond which there stretched a district of factories and warehouses.

Some of these factories were new, but there was a general deterioration the farther the vehicles travelled. They left behind the kind of showplace industrial plants so beloved by Intourist officials and Party chairmen and penetrated a darker, less attractive area of early twentieth-century warehouses and factories and sites where old buildings had been gutted. The air smelled of mildew, and the corrosive aroma of rust, and from elsewhere, borne on a breeze, the salty suggestion of the Bay of Riga. The trucks rolled down streets that became progressively more narrow, little more than lanes built in an age when horse-drawn cabs pulled factory owners from one business to the next, and men filled with inchoate hatreds and resentments planned revolution in sweatshops.

Killing their lights, the trucks stopped finally in a dead-end street, the kind of place city mapmakers conveniently overlook and then ultimately forget and future generations of city planners rediscover with total amazement. For many minutes nobody emerged from the vehicles, which were parked close to a decrepit building that over the years had housed companies manufacturing window-shades, then shoelaces, then tobacco pipes, and most recently camera lenses. It was abandoned now, although four years ago it had been briefly used as a rehearsal studio for an outlawed rock and roll band called Gulag.

A door opened and a man appeared with a flashlight. He blinked it twice, switched it off. The drivers, dressed in the uniforms of the Soviet Army, emerged from the trucks and hurried towards the building. From the rear of each truck, from under canvas, other soldiers appeared. A mixed crew – a couple of corporals, a sergeant, a major, and a colonel.

The interior of the old factory had a basement, reached by descending a staircase that hung on the crumbling wall in a precarious way. The man with the flashlight went down carefully, warning the soldiers to follow him with caution. The basement, lit by a single kerosene lamp, was filled with all the detritus of all the industries that had ever occupied the building – lengths of twine, slivers of broken glass, unfinished pipes and stemless bowls, tassels of the sort that hung to blinds. There were also thirty wooden crates, the only things in the basement that interested the men.

The man with the flashlight kicked aside the lid of one crate and the uniformed men gathered round in the yellow-blue paraffin flare to look. The weapons, American M-16 rifles, Swiss SIG-AMT and Belgian FN auto rifles, lay in no particular order. There were handguns in some of the other crates – Brownings, Colts, Lugers – and ammunition. One crate contained Czech-made grenades, another Uzi pistols. It was as if whoever had purchased this supply of arms had scoured all the darker bazaars of the international weapons market, buying a lot here, another lot there, an oddment in a third place.

The men were thoroughly delighted with the delivery. They knew the number of weapons was comparatively puny, the task ahead of them overwhelming, but the guns represented support from a world beyond the Soviet Union, and that made the men both glad and touched, and less isolated than they’d ever felt before.

The man with the flashlight, who was known only as Marcus, said they had better hurry. He didn’t like staying in this basement any longer than he had to, and the crates had to be moved and the sooner the better. His nervousness was contagious. The uniformed men worked quickly and silently, carrying the crates up from the basement and placing them in the trucks, under canvas. The whole operation took about five minutes before the trucks were ready to roll again. One was headed for Tallinn in Estonia, a second for Vilnius in Lithuania, and a third had only a short distance to travel – a concealed place in the forest around Kemeri, some thirty miles from Riga.

The men took only a few moments to part, even though they knew it was highly unlikely they’d ever meet again. There was handshaking, some edgy laughter, some back-slapping, but mainly there was a sense of grim fatalism about them. Their trips were hazardous ones, their ultimate actions bound to be deadly. But they had no qualms about dying. Even so, there was a moment in which the agitated banter stopped, a profound silence of the kind in which people realise, as if for the very first time, the exact nature of their commitment.

And then the trucks left the area, travelling in convoy for several miles until they reached the bank of the river again, the place where each vehicle went its own way. Headlights flashed three times in the dark, a signal that might have meant good luck or farewell. They moved away from one another now through the streets of the city, past the dark windows of closed shops, unlit office towers, silent houses, past the eyes of patrolling militiamen who, if they paid much attention at all, would see only army trucks hurrying on some military task, and the faces of uniformed men in the high cabs.

These same militiamen wouldn’t have any way of knowing that the trucks had been stolen weeks ago, that their cargoes were illegal and their registration plates fake, that the transportation dockets carried by the men were forged and that the men themselves were no soldiers – but a collection of assorted dissidents in stolen uniforms, Baltic deserters from the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, some students from the University of Vilnius, a couple of patriots from the last days of the old Brotherhood, and a few men who had spent time in Soviet jails for their democratic beliefs.

Nor could the uninquiring policemen have any idea of how the weapons inside the trucks were to be used or the blood that might be shed a couple of days from now.

Manhattan

Dressed in a grey Italian suit and matching homburg, Mikhail Kiss moved along Fifth Avenue. It was ten o’clock and the night had shed some of the clamminess that had characterised the day. He looked down at his wedding-ring as he headed in the direction of Columbus Circle, which loomed up just before him. He hadn’t removed the ring in more than forty years and as he gazed at it he realised he’d come to think of it as a natural part of himself. It was a source of heartbreak, even after so much time had passed. But time didn’t erase everything. Quite the opposite. Sometimes, through the years, things grew instead of diminishing. And Ingrida’s face floated before him, spectral and lovely, and then he felt it, the old pain, the cutting sorrow, the sharp glass in his heart, and what he pictured was how she’d died, with a Soviet bullet buried in her chest.

He squeezed his eyes shut as he paused at a Don’t Walk sign. He hadn’t seen Ingrida die, and what he knew was only what he’d pieced together from rumour and gossip in the early years of the 1950s. She’d been taken in a truck, along with other women whose husbands were suspected of guerilla activity against the great Russian Empire, to a meadow outside the town of Paide in central Estonia. There, the women had been made to stand in a line, and then a machine-gunner, hidden by trees, had opened fire. Kiss wondered if death had come as a surprise to her or if somehow she’d known it was going to happen, if she’d stepped into that meadow and come face to face with the certainty of her own end even before the gun had fired. What the hell did it matter now? He had an image, and it wouldn’t leave him, and it was of Ingrida’s face turned up to a wintry Estonian sky and blood flowing from the corner of her mouth and a fat fly, waxy and obscene, alive, landing on her lips. Ingrida, mu suda, mu hing. Ma tunnen puudust sinu jarele. Ingrida, my heart and soul. I miss you.

For a very long time, even after he’d found his way to the United States via Germany, he’d had a fantasy in which he encountered the machine-gunner. Accidentally – on the street, in a store, anywhere. And what he did in this murderous hallucination was to tear the man apart, to rip his limbs from his body, fibre by agonised fibre. After years had passed, the fantasy started to assume other forms. The gunman, after all, was only obeying orders. And the official who issued the orders to the gunman did so only because he was following policies set by the Kremlin. Therefore, individuals weren’t to blame. It was the system, evil and corrupt, which operated from behind the thick walls of the Kremlin that was to blame. So Mikhail Kiss’s fantasy had become channelled elsewhere.

He passed the Lincoln Center, moving under lit street-lamps. Then he turned into a narrow street where he paused. Perhaps it was nothing more than the absence of lights, perhaps something he thought he detected in the shadows of doorways, but he was suddenly afraid. He looked back the way he’d come. He realised that the feeling didn’t lie in the notion that some local KGB agent might be following him – instead, it was buried inside himself, in the coils of his own nerves. What if Carl Sundbach had been right and this whole affair was doomed? What if Romanenko had been carrying a message that was meant to cancel the project because something had gone wrong?

You grow old, he thought. You’re thinking an old man’s thoughts, fearful and silly. The truth of the matter was simple – he just didn’t want to ponder the motives behind Aleksis’s murder. Some disaffected emigrant, some crackpot with a pistol, a madman with a political axe to grind – Aleksis’s killer might have been almost anyone. He didn’t want to think, even for a moment, that anything could have gone wrong with the scheme itself. It would go ahead as planned. He and Romanenko had spent too long a time welding their network together, joining each link in secrecy, from the Finnish businessman who carried Kiss’s letters to Helsinki to the radical human rights activist from Tartu who placed each communication inside an old windmill at the Wooden Buildings Museum on Vabaohumuuseumitee Road about two miles from Tallinn, from which place it would be retrieved by one or other of Aleksis’s trusted associates and delivered to Romanenko. Sometimes, in moments of paranoia, Kiss wondered if along the way there might be a weak link, a treacherous coupling, somebody who revealed the letters to the KGB. But since the operation hadn’t been stopped, and Romanenko hadn’t been arrested, Kiss always assumed the network had never been penetrated.

He came to another narrow street now and the fear passed as suddenly as it had come. He was in the vicinity of Fordham University, where expensive apartment buildings flourished on side-streets. He might have taken a more direct route to this neighbourhood than he’d done, but he never came here the same way twice. He crossed Amsterdam Avenue and went inside an old building, a former warehouse converted into studios and apartments.

He climbed to the third floor. At the end of the hallway he knocked on a door, which was opened almost at once by a man Kiss knew only as Iverson. He was probably in his late forties, but the lack of lines and creases, the lack of animation in the face made it impossible to guess. Kiss couldn’t recall Iverson ever smiling or frowning. There was something decidedly spooky about the man, as if he had no inner life whatsoever, and that what you saw on his face was all there was. Kiss always thought of him as a külm kala, a cold fish.

The suite of rooms was completely devoid of furniture. There was white fitted carpet throughout and the walls were glossy white, reflecting the recessed lights. It was a strange apartment, Kiss thought, neat and always spotless, and yet without any sign of ever having been lived in. He assumed that Iverson used it only for these meetings. Kiss took off his homburg and wiped his damp forehead with his palm and considered how perfectly this empty apartment matched Iverson’s personality.

“Do we go or don’t we?” Iverson asked.

Always straight to the point, Kiss thought. For a moment he hesitated. He walked to the windows, which had a view of the dark river. A barge, bright yellow upon the blackness, floated past. Do we go or don’t we?

Kiss turned and looked at the man. “We go,” he said. There. It was done. And there was no going back.

“You’ve had confirmation?” Iverson asked.

“Yes,” Kiss lied.

“I never had any doubts.”

Kiss smiled now. What he felt was a rush of pure relief, like a chemical flooding through his body. It was the sensation Americans called ‘high’. He had a tangible sense of the network he’d created, an adrenalin flowing out of this building and through the darkness, a powerful vibrancy that went untrammelled across land and sea to stop, finally, in Moscow. He had a sense of all the links he’d spent years hammering into place coming together at last, as if each link had been galvanised suddenly by a surge of lightning.

Iverson leaned stiffly against a wall. Even the pinstriped suit he wore was bland and unremarkable. He was a man who courted the prosaic avidly. “All you have to do is make sure your man is in Norway. We’ll take it from there.” For the first time in any of their meetings, Kiss thought he detected an emotion in the man.

Iverson said, “Now it’s finally happening, I’ve got this strange feeling in my gut. You ever ride a rollercoaster, Kiss? It’s that kind of thing.” And he allowed a very small smile to cross his lips. It looked as if it had been airbrushed on to his face.

Kiss had to come to understand that Iverson – who was either an officer in the United States Air Force or had been at one time, an anomaly Iverson deliberately failed to clarify – feared the Russians. But Kiss, whose focus was limited to three countries with an area of some sixty thousand square miles and a population of eight million, had no particular interest in Iverson’s motives. Andres, who had maintained all kinds of connections in the armed forces, had brought Iverson in about eighteen months ago, saying he was a completely dependable man who could provide an essential service. And that recommendation was enough. Whether Iverson was acting alone, or whether he represented a consortium of men who shared his views, some shadowy congregation of figures who preferred to stay offstage, Kiss didn’t know, even though he sometimes felt that Iverson was merely a spokesman. But without Iverson’s help the whole scheme would have been more difficult, perhaps even impossible.

Strange bedfellows, Kiss thought. An old Baltic guerilla fighter and a mysterious figure with military connections who saw a way to undermine a regime he feared.

“Well,” Iverson said. “I guess we don’t see each other again.”

He held his hand forward and Kiss shook it. Iverson’s clasp was ice-cold, bloodless.

“Nägemiseni,” Iverson said. Goodbye.

Kiss was touched by Iverson’s effort to learn a word in Estonian, a language totally alien to him.

“I practised it,” Iverson said.

“You did fine.” Kiss, smiling, went towards the door. There he turned and said, “Head aega,” which was also goodbye.

Iverson said, “One thing. We never met. We never talked. This apartment ceases to exist as soon as you step out the door. If you ever have any reason to come back to this place, and I hope you don’t, you’ll find strangers living here. And if anybody ever asks, Kiss, I don’t know you from Adam.”

London

Frank Pagan looked at the corpse of Danus Oates only in a fleeting way, before turning his back. Oates’s splendid silk pyjamas were soaked with blood. Martin Burr, who had come up to London by fast car from the depths of Sussex – where on weekends he lived the life of an English country squire – gazed down at the body with sorrow.

“Damned shame,” he said to Pagan and he swiped the air with his cane in a gesture of frustrated sadness. “I wish the cleaners would get here and remove the poor lad. Let’s go into the living-room.”

Frank Pagan followed Burr out of the bedroom. The Commissioner sat in an armchair, propping his chin on his cane and gazing thoughtfully through the open door of the flat. A uniformed policeman stood on the landing and three neighbours – two emaciated women and a leathery man, the latter having discovered the body while making a social call – were trying to sneak a look inside the place with all the ghoulish enthusiasm of people who consider murder a spectator sport.

“Shut that bloody door, would you?” Burr asked.

Pagan did so. When they’d first come to Oates’s flat, Pagan had told the Commissioner what he’d learned about Epishev from Kristina Vaska, and Burr had absorbed the information in silence. Now Pagan said, “The way I see it is Epishev came here because he’d learned Oates had worked on the translation. He wanted to know what Oates had found out. The answer was, of course, very little – a few lines of verse in an obscure language. What else could poor Oates say? Maybe all he could tell Epishev was that I had the thing in my possession – who knows? Epishev, covering his tracks like any dutiful assassin, killed him. And I was the next name on the list, because I’d come in contact with the verse as well.”

“The damned poem’s like a bloody fatal virus,” Burr said angrily. “You touch it, you have a damned good chance of dying.” He was genuinely shocked by this murder and the presence of a KGB killer in London, and the fact that his own dominion was tainted by international political intrigue. He liked, if not a calm life, then one of logic and order and watertight compartments.

Pagan stuck his hands in his pockets. “If it’s a virus, it acts in very peculiar ways. The thing I haven’t been able to figure out is why the KGB would want to come after people like Oates and myself. Obviously, they imagine I know something, and they don’t like me knowing it, whatever the hell it is. But what’s the big secret? If the Brotherhood’s working on an act of terrorism against the Russians, let’s say, why would the KGB want to destroy the people who might have evidence of it? Unless the KGB is involved in the plot as well – or at the very least doesn’t want it to fail.”

“And that’s a rather odd line of reasoning, Frank.”

Pagan agreed. He moved up and down the room in an agitated manner. He was remembering now how Witherspoon had talked about a struggle between the old regime and the new, and how Epishev had belonged in the Greshko camp along with the old power-brokers, those who had been sent scurrying into reluctant redundancy. It was an elusive thought, a sliver of a thing, but perhaps what was unfolding in front of him was some element of that power struggle, some untidy aspect of it, the ragged edges of a Soviet situation that had become inadvertently exported to England. He turned this over in his mind and he was about to mention the thought to Burr when the Commissioner said, “This Vaska lady. Do you think her information is on the level?”

“I had a few doubts at first,” Pagan replied.

“But not now?”

“I’m not so sure.”

“But you want to believe her.”

“I think what she says about this Brotherhood and Romanenko’s part in it is true. And I believe her when she says she came here in the hope of seeing Romanenko about her father. I also have the strong feeling she wasn’t mistaken when she identified Epishev.”

Oates’s living-room was cluttered with very tasteful antiques. There was a photograph on one wall that depicted Danus, around the age of fifteen, in the straw-hat of a Harrow schoolboy. Fresh-faced, rather chubby at the cheeks, all innocence. Pagan paused in front of it, shaking his head. You couldn’t begin to imagine Oates’s doomed future from such a guilelessly plump face. It was all going to be sunshine and a steady if unspectacular climb up the ladder of the Foreign Office.

Martin Burr was quiet for a while. “If what she says about this Epishev chap is correct, I don’t think this whole business belongs to us any more, Frank. I really don’t think this is anything we can keep. If Epishev is KGB, it’s no longer our game.”

Pagan felt a flush of sudden irritation. “We give it away? Is that what you’re saying?”

Martin Burr frowned. “I don’t think we give it away, Frank. Rather, it’s taken from us. There’s a certain kind of skulduggery that doesn’t come into our patch, Frank. We’re not equipped. And you may bitch about it, but sooner or later you have to face the fact that intelligence will want this one. No way round it, I’m afraid. Besides, I understand our friend Witherspoon has already dropped the word about Epishev in the appropriate quarters.”

“Good old Tommy.”

“He was only doing what he perceived as his duty, no doubt.”

“I bet.” Frank, you should have seen that one coming. What else would Tommy do but run to his pals and gladly confide in them that Uncle Viktor had surfaced in England and that a certain incompetent policeman was handling things? Pagan could hear Witherspoon’s voice, a cruel whisper, maybe a snide laugh, as he chatted to his chums in intelligence. La-di-da, don’t you know?

“You want me to forget Epishev, is that it?”

“Frank,” the Commissioner said. “Don’t make me raise my voice. I’m trying to tell you how things are. Consider it a lesson in reality.”

“I may forget about Epishev, Commissioner, but is he going to forget about me? I’ve got something he believes he wants. Keep that in mind.”

Martin Burr shook his head. “Ah, yes, I’ll expect you to trun your translation of the poem and the original over to intelligence when they ask for it – and they surely will – and then wipe the whole damned thing out of your mind.”

“Commissioner, if Epishev shot Oates, that makes it murder in my book, and I don’t give a damn if Epishev’s KGB or an Elizabeth Arden rep, he’s a bloody killer. What makes this very personal, sir, is the fact that this killer has my number. And you want me to turn him over to some characters who call themselves intelligence – which so far as I’m concerned is a terrible misnomer. Anyway, Epishev’s going to believe I’ve got what he wants whether I turn it over or not.”

Martin Burr ran a hand across his face. “Sometimes I see a petulantly stubborn quality in you that appals me.”

Pagan knew he was playing this wrongly, that he was coming close to alienating the Commissioner, who was really his only ally at the Yard. He took a couple of deep breaths, in through the nostrils and out through the mouth – a technique that was supposed to relax you, according to a book he’d once read on yoga. But spiritual bliss and all the bloody breathing exercises in the world weren’t going to alleviate his frustration.

The Commissioner said, “It upsets me, too. I want you to know that. I wish there was some other way.”

“Then let me stay with it.”

“There’s nothing I can do. I wish it could be otherwise. But sooner or later, Frank, I’m going to feel certain pressures from parties that I don’t have to name. And I’ll bow to them, because that’s the way things are. Those chaps know how to press all the right buttons.”

“I could always work with them,” Pagan said halfheartedly.

Martin Burr smiled. “The idea of you working with anyone is rather amusing.”

“I could give it a try.”

The Commissioner shook his head. “Damn it all, how many ways can I tell you this? Intelligence doesn’t like the common policeman. Let’s leave it there.”

Pagan opened a decanter of cognac that sat on an antique table. He poured himself a small glass. There had to be some kind of solution to all this, something the Commissioner would accept. But Martin Burr, even though he’d complained about Pagan’s stubbornness, could be pretty damned intractable himself. It was a knot, and Pagan couldn’t see how to untie it. What he felt was that he was being brushed carelessly aside, and he didn’t like the sensation at all.

The Commissioner reached for the decanter now and helped himself to a generous measure. He returned to his armchair and turned the balloon glass slowly around in his hand. He said, “I like you, Frank, perhaps because I think your heart’s in the right place. Even at your worst, I’ve never questioned either your heart or your integrity. But this –” and Martin Burr made a sweeping gesture with his hand – “this tale of a Baltic clique that a young gal weaves and the presence of this Epishev and a dead Communist up in Scotland into the bargain, all this, my dear fellow, is not your private property, alas. Do we understand one another?”

“Perhaps,” Pagan said, and drained his glass. The cognac had eased only a little of the pressure inside him.

Martin Burr smacked his lips. “Let’s take some air, Frank. I don’t want to be here when the cleaners and the fingerprint boys come. They tend to reduce death to a business, which I always find unseemly.”

Pagan followed the Commissioner out of the flat and down the stairs, past the goggling neighbours and their questions. Outside in the early morning darkness, Martin Burr stood under a streetlamp and leaned on his cane. The neighbourhood was silent and sedate in that way of well-heeled neighbourhoods everywhere.

“Is she pretty?” the Commissioner asked suddenly.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Touchy, touchy, Frank. All I’m saying is that human nature, being the general old screw-up it is, sometimes allows a fair face to turn a man’s head. Has she turned yours?”

“Hardly,” Pagan replied.

“Just watch yourself. Subject closed.” The Commissioner smiled like a one-eyed owl. “As for this Brotherhood, how much does the young lady know?”

“Less than I’d like.”

“Intriguing, though. The idea of some old fellows plotting against the Russians after all this time. Makes you wonder what they’re up to. And then there’s the wretch Kiviranna. Who sent him to kill Romanenko? Too many unanswered questions, Frank.”

Pagan detected something in Martin Burr, a quality of curiosity that wouldn’t leave him. Even if he was about to turn the Epishev affair over to the lords of intelligence, Martin Burr was still intrigued by it all, more so perhaps than he really wanted to admit. The old cop, Pagan thought. The scent in the nostrils. The mysteries. The rush of adrenalin. Martin Burr was animated, perhaps even hooked.

“I’m still thinking aloud, you understand, Frank, but if Epishev is hunting down this piece of paper, then he knew that Romanenko left the Soviet Union with it in his possession – reasonable assumption? Question – if it’s so damned important that it gets Oates killed, why was Romanenko allowed to leave with the poem in the first place? Answer – because the KGB wanted him to make the delivery. Is that also reasonable? It implies that Aleksis, either willingly or unwittingly, was working for the KGB.”

“Or at least for certain KGB personnel,” Pagan remarked quietly.

With a rather thoughtful look, Martin Burr stared up into the light from the overhead lamp, where a flurry of moths battered themselves to pulp against the bulb. “Are you positing the existence of factions within that venerable organisation, Frank? Can of worms, old chap. Somebody else’s can.”

“I don’t know exactly what I’m positing,” Pagan replied. Can of worms, he thought. He kicked a pebble from the pavement and heard it roll across the narrow street. For somebody about to give up a case, Martin Burr was fretting over it more than a little.

“Pity to turn it over, Frank.”

“Pity’s not strong enough,” Pagan said. How could he conceivably walk away from this? More to the point, how could Martin Burr expect that of him?

The Commissioner glanced at his wristwatch. As he did so, a taxi came along the street, slowing as it approached the lamp-post where Pagan and Burr stood. Ted Gunther, the man from the American Embassy, emerged from the vehicle. He paid the driver and the cab slid away. Gunther, wearing a suit over striped pyjamas that were plainly visible at his cuffs, looked apologetic as he entered the circle of light.

“They said at the Yard I’d find you here.” He blinked behind his thick glasses. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

“Nothing that can’t wait,” the Commissioner said in the manner of a man whose weekend has been totally ruined anyhow.

Gunther scratched his head. He’d obviously been roused from his bed and had hurried here. His crewcut was flattened in patches across his skull and there was an excited little light in his large eyes. He was also slightly short of breath. “I just received the information you asked for about Jacob Kiviranna, and I thought you’d want it right away. I pulled a few strings, called some old favours home.”

“You got some poor schmucks to work on a Sunday for you,” Pagan said.

“More or less. I sent an inquiry out over the wire immediately after we talked and I made a couple of phonecalls.” Gunther took a couple of sheets of paper from his coat pocket and tipped them towards the glow of the streetlamp. He reminded Pagan of somebody raised in the dead of night to get up and make an impromptu speech, somebody who has welded together a few odd phrases but hasn’t had time to develop a theme.

“Let me just read you what I’ve got,” Gunther said. “Kiviranna lived in Brooklyn –”

“Brooklyn?” Pagan asked. He remembered that Kristina had told him that some members of the Brotherhood had settled in Brooklyn in the 1950s. He found himself stimulated suddenly, his interest aroused the way it always was when he confronted correspondences and connections, even when they consisted only of thin threads, such as this one.

“Brooklyn,” Gunther said in a slightly testy way, as if he resented having his narrative interrupted. “He had no known family – he was apparently smuggled out of the Baltic as a baby by relatives who are now dead. We don’t know anything about his parents. He worked as a freelance carpenter, drifting from job to job, making sure he was paid in cash for his labours. Cash is always hard to trace, and it’s easy not to declare it, which meant that Kiviranna managed to steer clear of the scrutiny of our Internal Revenue Service. In other words, for all his adult life, Kiviranna paid no taxes. In fact, I’d say he might have avoided all public records of his existence if it hadn’t been for his jail sentences. To begin with, he did five days in 1973 for public nuisance.”

“Meaning what?” Pagan asked.

Gunther read from his sheets. “He urinated on a diplomatic car registered to the Soviet Mission in Manhattan then he tried to punch his way inside the Mission itself.”

“He didn’t like Russians,” Pagan said drily, and glanced at Martin Burr, whose face was expressionless. But Pagan had the distinct sense that something was churning inside the Commissioner’s head, that even as Gunther recited Kiviranna’s history Burr was partly elsewhere.

“It’s a running theme in his life,” Gunther agreed. “In 1974 he attacked a policeman outside the Soviet Embassy in Washington. In 1977, he drove a motorcycle into a limousine occupied by the Soviet Ambassador, causing considerable damage both to himself and the vehicle.”

“A kamikaze sort,” Pagan remarked.

Gunther swatted a moth away. “He did five months for that little escapade and underwent psychiatric evaluation. Which …” Here Gunther shuffled his papers. “Which revealed that Kiviranna was something of a loner, didn’t join clubs, didn’t make friends, felt inferior, that kind of thing.”

Predictable, Pagan thought. Assassins tended to be loners. They weren’t usually renowned for having social graces and joining clubs.

“In 1980 he became involved in narcotics. He was busted for possession of heroin. Probation, more psychiatric evaluation. Then he appears to have behaved himself until 1984, when he formed an attachment with a woman, or thought he did – the lady thought otherwise. Kiviranna became obsessed with her. When she spurned him, he slit his wrists. He was committed for a period to a psychiatric unit in upstate New York and diagnosed as schizophrenic.”

Schizophrenic. What else? Pagan felt impatient. Nothing he’d heard here was compelling enough to explain Gunther’s appearance after midnight. There was nothing spectacular in any of this. Why hadn’t Gunther waited until morning? The eager ally, Pagan thought. Throwing on his suit over his pyjamas, making haste in the darkness. Pagan thought suddenly of Kristina Vaska in his apartment, and the patrol car in the street, and he realised he wanted to be away from this place and back home with the woman. A little twinge he recognised as something akin to panic rose up inside him.

“He was released in 1985, tried to contact the woman in 1986, was rejected a second time, then he attacked the Soviet Ambassador to the United Nations. Somehow, he managed to smuggle himself inside the UN building, waited for the Ambassador to appear, then stabbed him with a flick-knife. The wounds were superficial, thankfully. He got two years for that one. He was released only five months ago.”

Gunther folded the sheets. “That’s the story, gentlemen.”

Pagan sniffed the night air. He knew why the narrative didn’t satisfy him. There was a missing element, and that was the shadowy figure who’d been Kiviranna’s accomplice, the person who sent Jake overseas to a rainy Scottish city with a gun in his hand. It was like looking upon the bare bones of a life, a bloodless synopsis from which all detail has been omitted and an important character suppressed.

“You’ve been very helpful,” Martin Burr said to Gunther.

Pagan made a small noise of gratitude because he felt he had to, but he still couldn’t keep from thinking that this brief history was hardly worth getting up in the middle of the night to deliver. It rang a slightly false note, only he wasn’t sure why. It was as if Gunther had been commanded to deliver this scant information by the powers over him. A sop to the Yard from its Americans chums, Pagan thought. Sheer condescension. No, it was his own state of mind, he decided. It was frustration that made him create whole chapters out of thin nuances.

The three men were quiet for a time as a slight wind picked up along the street and blew through greenery. Martin Burr took a small cheroot from his jacket and lit it, cupping one hand against the breeze.

He smiled at Ted Gunther and asked, “Do we know the name of the woman who treated poor Jake so callously?”

“I don’t have that information,” Gunther answered.

“Is it something you can find out?”

“I guess. I don’t see a problem there.”

“Mmmm.” Martin Burr tossed his cheroot away, barely smoked. He prodded the pavement with the tip of his cane, then he turned to Frank Pagan, who recognised the Commissioner’s mmm sound. It indicated an emerging decision, a step he was about to take – but only after due consideration of the protocols involved. Pagan was apprehensive all at once, waiting for Martin Burr to continue.

The Commissioner said, “There’s a nice American word to describe Kiviranna, and I think it’s patsy. Somebody used him to kill Romanenko. Somebody used Kiviranna’s apparently bottomless hatred of the Soviets. Directed him, shall we say, although he dearly needed very little direction. The question I have is this – did the chap who sent Jake all the way to kill Romanenko know what Aleksis had in his possession? Was that the reason he wanted Romanenko dead? Did he want the message to go undelivered? And if that was the case, how did he know Romanenko was carrying anything in the first place?”

Burr looked up into the lamp, staring at the suicidal mazurka of moths. Then he said, “Do you see where I’m leading, Frank?”

It was dawning on Pagan, and he wasn’t sure he liked the light that was beginning to fill his brain. You sly old bastard, Martin, he thought, but he said nothing.

Martin Burr grinned. He glanced at Gunther, as if he’d just remembered the man’s presence, then he returned his mischievous one-eyed stare to Pagan. “I may have to hand Epishev over to other parties, Frank. But I don’t have to give them Jacob Kiviranna, do I? He’s dead, after all. And intelligence isn’t likely to give a tinker’s curse about him. I rather think Kiviranna, who did commit a murder, is our pigeon, and ours alone. The man wasn’t some bloody KGB villain, after all. He was a common killer, exactly the kind we specialise in.”

The Commissioner pressed his fingertips against his eyepatch. “We’re perfectly entitled to examine Kiviranna’s background, Frank. We’re perfectly within our sphere of influence to look into his mysterious life. Nobody’s going to take that away from us. And who knows? Perhaps something in the fellow’s history will clarify certain matters that are baffling us at the moment. Perhaps you’ll even learn more about this odd fellowship – what’s it called?”

You know damn well what it’s called, Pagan thought. “The Brotherhood, Commissioner.”

Gunther had discreetly drifted several yards away, and stood beyond the reach of lamplight, as if he sensed a private conversation he shouldn’t be eavesdropping.

Pagan saw it all now, and he wasn’t exactly happy with it. “You get me out of the way, which leaves things open for intelligence. And at the same time you’re offering me a bone which may just have some meat on it – enough at least for me to chew on for a time.”

“You’re an insightful fellow,” Martin Burr said. “Like I said, Frank, you may turn something up that will surprise us all.”

“You want to have your cake and eat it,” Pagan said. “You should’ve been a politician.”

“I’d slit my throat first.” Martin Burr looked at Gunther. “How’s the weather this time of year in New York, Ted?” he asked.

V.G. Epishev stood for a time in the centre of the darkened square. The rain had blown away, leaving the darkness damp. There were few lights in the windows of the houses around the square – but in what he took to be the windows of Pagan’s apartment a lamp burned behind a thick curtain. Epishev parted a tangle of shrubbery, hearing his feet squelch in soft black mud. Nearby, a flying creature – bat, bird, he couldn’t tell – flapped between branches.

He moved under trees, stepping closer to the street, glancing up at the lit windows, then observing the police car which had been parked in the same place for hours. He made out the shapes of two policemen inside the vehicle. One, smoking a cigarette, let his hand dangle from the open window. Epishev walked close to the low stone wall.

That afternoon, when he’d first seen Pagan with the woman, he’d driven back to his hotel in Bayswater – a greasy room, an anonymous box overlooking an overgrown yard – and he’d lain for a long time on the narrow bed, pondering the presence of Kristina Vaska. The conclusion he came to was simple: if Pagan had known nothing of the Brotherhood before, he almost certainly knew something now, courtesy of Miss Vaska. Whether the message was coded or not, the fact remained, so far as Epishev was concerned, that Kristina Vaska would have provided Pagan with some insight into the Brotherhood, at least as she understood it. The question that burned Epishev now was the extent of the woman’s understanding.

Did she know of the plan? If not all of it, did she know any part? Did she know enough to cause the destruction of the scheme? Even if she didn’t – could Epishev take that kind of chance?

All such speculation was finally fruitless. How the woman had come into Pagan’s life, the nature of her information – he could dwell on these matters to infinity and still solve nothing. The solution didn’t lie in further pointless rumination. The answer lay elsewhere – in action.

He skirted the wall. He reached the street, looked up once more at the lit window, then he gazed along the pavement at the police car. He stood very still, merging with the trees behind him, becoming in his stillness just another inanimate shadow. He saw the red glow of a cigarette behind the windshield, then the spark as the butt was flicked away. It was very simple. He’d walk straight towards the car. He wouldn’t look extraordinary at all, just a man taking the night air. He moved out from beneath the branches.

He put his hand in the pocket of his raincoat and curled his fingers around the gun. Then he paused, conscious of the flare of a match inside the police vehicle and the sound of a man’s voice carrying along the pavement – I told the missus, I said the last thing we needed was another bleedin’ crumbsnatcher, and then there was silence. Epishev kept going. He was about twenty-five yards from the patrol car now. He took the gun out of his pocket and held it against his side, so that it was concealed by the folds of his coat. Fifteen yards.

One of the policemen was staring at him now from the car. Epishev had the impression of a face half-lit by a streetlamp. Cigarette smoke drifted out of the open window. Epishev called out “Maxwell! Maxwell!” and kept moving until he was only a couple of feet from the vehicle. Then he called the name again “Maxwell! Here, Maxwell! Come to me!”

The policeman with the cigarette asked, “Whatsamatter?”

Epishev stopped at the window of the car, lowered his face, looked inside. There were only two of them, nobody concealed in the rear seat.

“I am missing my cat,” he said. He wondered if he sounded suitably concerned. “Brown male with white paws. Very distinct markings. Impossible to overlook.”

The smoking policeman turned to his partner. “Seen any cats, Alf?”

Alf shook his head. “Sorry, chum.”

Epishev shrugged. He smiled apologetically, as if he were ashamed to have wasted the valuable time of these two guardians of law and order, then he brought the silenced pistol up very quickly and fired it twice into the squad car. It was brutally efficient. The policeman closest to Epishev dropped his cigarette and slithered sideways and his head slumped on his partner’s chest. Alf, the younger of the two, lowered his face like a man dozing. Blood stained his blue shirt in the region of his heart.

Epishev stepped away from the car and crossed the street swiftly to Pagan’s house, climbing the steps, stopping outside the brown door, checking the lock. It was a simple affair and easily forced, nothing more than a little quiet surgery undertaken with a pen-knife – and then he’d be inside, he’d be climbing the stairs to Pagan’s apartment, where perhaps both Pagan and the woman were in bed even now, making love. Two quick shots, Epishev thought. The ultimate orgasm.

He took out his knife, selected a short thin blade from the selection of ten or more available to him, forced it into the lock. He turned it gently, listening for the inner mechanism to be released. Then, breathing in the patiently shallow way of the safecracker, he heard the lock click and felt the door move. He nudged it a little way. A darkened hallway faced him, a stairway. He didn’t step into the house. He was wary of the silences and the lack of light.

He put his knife away, took out the gun again. The hallway smelled of stale air and a hint of damp. All he had to do was to stride along the hall and rise quietly up the stairs – and yet he hesitated, because his instincts told him something was not quite right here, something was out of joint and he wasn’t sure what.

He didn’t move. It was only when he heard the sound of the car draw up and he turned his face back to the street and saw the bright headlamps that he knew –

Frank Pagan wasn’t at home.

He’d gone out, leaving the woman with the police to guard her, and now he was back. Epishev heard a door slam and he saw Pagan get out of an American car and come quickly along the pavement, then pause in the manner of a man who has forgotten something. Pagan turned away. He walked back across the street to the police car.

Epishev saw Pagan incline his face to the window of the police vehicle, then he raised his pistol even as Pagan, stunned by the sight of the dead policemen, turned his face in the direction of the house. Two things occurred to Frank Pagan almost simultaneously – one was the realisation that a man was about to fire a gun at him from a darkened doorway across a narrow street. The other was that this same man might already have been up to the apartment where Kristina was alone –

Pagan threw himself to the ground, rolling as soon as he hit concrete, twisting his body in the manner of a burning person trying to douse flames, sliding for the safety of the underside of the squad car. He saw powdered concrete rise up inches from his face, dug out of the ground by the violent impact of a bullet. And still he kept twisting, until his body was jammed against the exhaust system. He reached behind him for his own weapon, a manoeuvre that called for a certain double-jointedness in the cramped space between exhaust-pipe and ground. He fumbled the weapon free and fired it twice but his angle was low and useless and his shots struck a garbage-can on the pavement. They were loud though, wonderfully loud, spectacularly so, and they echoed along the street with the intensity of a car backfiring, except worse.

The gunman took another shot from the doorway of the house and Pagan heard the bullet slice into one of the tyres of the patrol car, which immediately deflated so that the vehicle listed to one side, making Pagan’s position even more uncomfortable. But it was the last shot of the brief encounter because now windows were being thrown open along the street, and lights were turned on, and cranky voices, disturbed in sleep, were calling out a variety of obscenities.

Pagan squeezed himself out from beneath the car as the gunman, afraid of all the public attention, started to run. Pagan glimpsed the man’s sallow face briefly under a dim streetlamp – somebody you wouldn’t look at twice in the street. Then the gunman headed for the darkness of the square, jumping the stone wall and vanishing into the trees. Pagan got to his feet and considered the idea of giving chase, but his mind was on Kristina Vaska now, and he hurried towards the house, rushing the stairs, finding the door of the flat locked, pounding on it, then hearing the deadbolt being drawn and seeing Kristina Vaska standing there, bright and freshly-showered, in one of his robes, an old paisley thing that had never been worn with anything like this kind of elegant sexuality –

“I thought,” he said. The relief he felt was like a narcotic. He was stoned by it.

“Thought what?” she asked.

Pagan put his arms around her and pulled her towards him and felt her wet hair pressed against his cheek. He wanted her with a ferocity that astounded him. And he knew it was reciprocated, he could feel her heart beat against him and the heat of her breath on his skin, he knew that he would only have to slide a hand between the folds of the robe and touch her lightly on the breasts – he understood he’d have to travel only a very short distance before he’d be lost.

He stepped back from her. He was thinking of the two young cops in the squad car, how they lay so very close together in a position of intimacy that only death had the chilling skill to choreograph. Two young cops – and they’d been murdered because of a situation they knew nothing about, something that should never have touched their lives, events from a history of which neither of those two men would have been aware.

It was waste, bloody waste.

In a frustrated gesture, Pagan pressed his large hands together until the knuckles were white. He walked over to the window. Below, people were milling around the squad car. Gore drew them out. Violence magnetised them.

He was aware of Kristina Vaska standing at his side. He said, “Two young cops are dead down there. Uncle Viktor’s handiwork.”

Kristina Vaska shut her eyes and bit very gently on her lower lip. Pagan put an arm round her shoulder and thought how this intimacy provided no real defence against the brutality of the street below.