14

Virginia Beach

There were days when Galbraith needed to get out of the house in Fredericksburg, when he suffered from a rarified form of cabin-fever and had to step away from the consoles and the never-ending flow of data. A man might choke to death on so many tiny bones of information. Sometimes he sat in the back of his chauffeured car and was driven to Cape Hatteras or Williamsburg or Richmond. On this early Tuesday morning he chose to go to Virginia Beach, city of soothsayers and palmists, tea-leaf readers and cosmic masseurs, hitch-hiking gurus and astral travellers, faith healers and tarot interpreters and astrologers and other fools. It was a city Galbraith found refreshingly silly, all the more so since it took its ‘metaphysics’ with grave seriousness. On his last visit here Galbraith had had his chart done by a fey astrologer – just for the hell of it – who told him that the heavenly portents were far from pleasing. Galbraith listened to talk about one’s moon being in Venus, and how an absence of earth signs indicated a certain abstract turn of mind, utter nonsense over which he nodded his head grimly. He declined the opportunity to have his past lives revealed for the further paltry sum of twenty bucks. One incarnation, in Galbraith’s mind, was more than enough. Anything more was arguably masochistic.

He surveyed the ocean from the back of the Daimler, or at least those stretches of it one might spot between high-rise hotels. It was a sunny morning and the sea was calm, and the yachts that floated out towards the Chesapeake Bay did so with slack sails. Galbraith observed the streets, the summer festivities, people strolling through sunshine, men and women in bermuda shorts, kids in funny hats, the kerbs clogged with Winnebagos from faraway states. The great American vacation, he thought. He wouldn’t have minded a vacation himself. He hadn’t taken one in fourteen years, unless one considered a trip four years ago to Monaco but that had really been business. And this quick jaunt to Virginia Beach, which had the superficial appearance of a leisurely drive, was still connected to work. Nothing Galbraith did was ever done without purpose. Aimless was not in his vocabulary.

The chauffeur, a black man called Lombardy, turned the big car away from the strip and through streets that quickly became dense with trees. Graceful willows hung over narrow inlets of water. There were expensive homes here, many of them refurbished Victorian affairs filled with brass and stained-glass and heavy with a ponderous sense of the past lovingly restored. Galbraith watched the Daimler plunge down a lane and listened to branches scratch the windows. Lombardy parked the car outside a house which was so well-camouflaged by trees that it couldn’t be seen from the road. The black man opened the door and Galbraith slid out of the back seat, puffing as he waddled towards the front of the house.

Galbraith pushed a screen-door, entered a yellow entrance room which led along a yellow hallway to rooms the colour of daffodils. He felt like a man plummeted without warning into a strange monochromatic world, a place of yellow sofas and chairs, yellow lampshades, yellow rugs, a house in which even the mirrors had a faint yellow tint. The effect, he decided, was to make one feel rather jaundiced.

“I liked it better when it was red,” Galbraith said.

The small man who appeared at the foot of the stairs wore a saffron kimono. “Red is rage,” he said. His black hair, heavily greased, had been flattened on either side of the centre parting.

“And yellow’s mellow, I dare say,” Galbraith remarked.

“Yellow is springtime and rebirth, Galbraith. Yellow is the colour of pure thought.”

“Also yellowjack fever and cowardice.”

The man inclined his head. He had some slight oriental lineage that showed in the high cheekbones and the facial colouring. He had exceptionally long fingers.

“Colour and harmony, Galbraith. In your hurried world, you don’t take the time to plan your environment. You eat fast and hump fast and read fast and think fast. What an ungodly way to live. The gospel according to Ronald MacDonald.”

“When I want to hear about taking time to sniff the goddam flowers, Charlie, I’ll read Thoreau. Meantime, I’ve got other things on my mind.” Galbraith wandered to the window and released a blind, which sprung up quickly, altering the monotonous light in the room. “Do you mind?”

“What if I did, Galbraith?”

“I’d ignore you anyhow.” Galbraith wandered to a sofa and lay down on his face, closing his eyes. “It hurts here and here,” and he pointed to a couple of places at the base of his spine. Charlie tugged Galbraith’s shirt out of his pants and probed the spots. Charlie, who had built an expensive clientele among the richly gullible, and employed a hodge-podge of massage techniques together with some oriental mumbo-jumbo, always managed to fix Galbraith for a couple of months or so.

“You’re too fat,” Charlie said. “No wonder you hurt.”

“I didn’t drive down here to be abused, Charlie. Mend me. Spare me bullshit about the Seventh Temple of Pleasure and the Six Points of the Dragon and the Jade Doorway to Joy and all that other piffle you fool people with, just fix me.”

Charlie pressed his fingertips into the base of Galbraith’s spine and the fat man moaned. “You’re carrying around an extra person, Galbraith. For that you need two hearts. Do you have two hearts, fat man?”

Galbraith closed his eyes and felt little waves of relaxation spread upward the length of his spine and then ripple through his buttocks as Charlie went to work with his sorcerer’s fingers. For a while Galbraith was able to forget his usual worries, drifting into a kind of hypnotic state. There were times in his life when he needed a retreat from the vast panorama of detail that was his to oversee, an escape from the insidious pressures of his world, the network of responsibilities that each year seemed to grow more and more elaborate. Power, he realised, was an ornate construction, delicate membranes imposed one upon another, creating strata that sometimes perplexed him, sometimes made him nervous. He’d realised in recent years that he couldn’t carry the weight of his job alone. He had to rely on other people. There was no escape from this fact. The best you could do was make sure you didn’t delegate important matters to total idiots. If Galbraith had one dominant fear it was the idea that a dark deed would be traced back to his own outfit, even to his own office, and that some form of public exposure would follow. Sweet Jesus – there were freshfaced youngsters in Congress who fancied themselves investigative officers of the people, ombudsmen for the commonfolk, and they were like hounds out of hell if they had the smell of any illicit expenditure of the taxpayer’s money, the more so if it were used in a covert manner.

He came suddenly alert when Charlie said, “Your associate is here, Galbraith. I’ll leave you now.”

Charlie draped an ochre towel across the exposed lower part of Galbraith’s body before he left the room. Galbraith twisted his face to see Gary Iverson looking uncomfortable in the middle of the floor. Galbraith had almost managed to forget that he’d arranged to meet Iverson here.

“Pull up a pew, Gary,” Galbraith said. If he had more men like Iverson – reliable, loyal, patriotic, devious – he might eat less and sleep more. A svelte, well-rested Galbraith – it was quite a thought.

Iverson dragged a wingbacked chair close to the sofa where the fat man lay. He’d come directly from New York, travelling by helicopter to Norfolk and from Norfolk by car. It seemed to Iverson that he spent most of his life in motion, like a pinball in Galbraith’s private machine, banging between Fredericksburg and DC and New Jersey and Manhattan and Norfolk.

“Ever had one of Charlie’s specials?” Galbraith asked.

Iverson shook his head.

“Remind me to give you one for Christmas.” Galbraith rolled over on his back. “He issues gift certificates good for one bath and a rub-down. Highly recommended, Gary. Besides, this is probably the most discreet place I know. Charlie appreciates how much some people treasure privacy.”

Iverson looked round the room. Yellow wasn’t his colour. He gazed at the square of window where the blind had been released. He was very glad to see greenery brush against the pane. He said, “Early this morning Frank Pagan and his sidekick Max Klein made inquiries concerning certain vacant properties on the boardwalk at Brighton Beach.”

“Did they now? Whatever for?” Galbraith sat upright. He had the feeling he wasn’t going to like anything he heard from Gary.

Iverson said, “They went to the boardwalk last night after interviewing Rose Alexander.”

“Ah, yes, Kiviranna’s unwilling friend. I recall her name from your report. And she sent them scurrying off to Brighton Beach?”

Iverson nodded. Galbraith closed his eyes a moment. He had times in which he could literally see trouble as one might witness thunderheads gathering on a distant hill. There were connections here that made him very unhappy indeed.

“Do we know what she told them, Gary?”

“An inquiry was made, sir.”

Galbraith frowned. Inquiry was a word that could conceal a multitude of sins. “I trust this inquiry was peaceful?”

“The woman was cooperative. She had nothing to hide. She told us exactly what she’d told Pagan. Shortly before he left for London, Jake Kiviranna had an appointment with somebody on the boardwalk – in one of the old shops.”

“Ye gods,” the fat man said. “You don’t suppose there’s coincidence here, do you?” Galbraith asked this question with heavy sarcasm. He thought of coincidence the way an atheist might think of God. Acceptable if you were naive enough to have faith, preposterous if you gave it only a moment’s consideration. He stood up, adjusting his pants, discarding the towel. “You understand where this is leading, don’t you, Gary?”

Iverson nodded. He had a quick eye for complexity. Galbraith raised a finger in the air and said, “Jake goes to an old shop on the boardwalk. Carl Sundbach just happens to own such an establishment. Carl Sundbach also happens to know that Romanenko is due to arrive in Edinburgh.” Galbraith paused, then paced the room, speaking very slowly. “Sundbach tells Kiviranna … go to Edinburgh … shoot Romanenko …”

“Why though?”

“Why indeed? Why participate at considerable expense in the Brotherhood only to make an attempt to scotch the entire goddam operation by using a hired gun? Do you see any sense in that?”

Both men were silent for a time. Galbraith said, “We know Sundbach wasn’t happy with the plan. Good Christ, he walked out on it. It’s all there on the tape of that last meeting in Glen Cove. But was he so unhappy with it that he decided he’d ruin the goddam thing himself if he could? And then when he realised he couldn’t halt the Kiss express, no matter what, he walked away …”

“A change of heart,” Iverson said.

“Fear maybe. An old man’s terror. Old age and terror – there’s a combination made in hell. And utterly unpredictable.” Galbraith looked thoughtful for a while. “What worries me, you see, is this fellow Pagan getting too close to the flame of the candle. I don’t want him singed, Gary, unless it’s essential. And if it’s essential, I don’t want us to be involved. Not even remotely.”

In an unhappy voice Iverson said, “It may very well be essential, sir.”

“Meaning?”

“I’ve heard from London.”

“And?”

Iverson gathered his thoughts, parading them in an orderly manner in his mind as if they were foot soldiers with a tendency to be unruly. He noticed a pitcher of iced water, rose, poured himself a glass, returned to his chair. “It seems that Frank Pagan has been travelling in some interesting company, sir. The daughter of a former member of the Brotherhood, a man who vanished into Siberia some years ago, has become a companion of Pagan’s. The assumption is that this young lady, Krishna Vaska by name, has provided Pagan with some information about the Brotherhood. We’re not sure what. But Pagan may be able to come to certain conclusions. He knows something about the Brotherhood, he’s about six inches away from Sundbach – it’s a situation fraught with danger.”

Galbraith loved the fraught. He adored the way Iverson spoke in general, with a kind of polite precision. But he worried now over Frank Pagan who was meant to remain on the safer fringes of things and stay well clear of the centre. It really was too bad. He said, “So Viktor Epishev has been running amok over there in an attempt to silence this potential menace.” He pulled at his lower lip and looked for all the world like a petulant choirboy who has just been told that his voice is about to break and his singing career is kaput.

“Apparently,” Iverson replied. “His initial objective was to make sure that nothing inhibited the scheme, that Romanenko’s message wasn’t deciphered –”

“Deciphered?”

“It seems Greshko told Epishev the message might contain a code of some kind, which in the wrong hands –”

Galbraith interrupted, his jowls quivering with sudden anger and his eyes popping. He was rarely touched by rage but when it happened it was an awesome sight. Iverson was hypnotised by the fat man’s volcanic display of temper.

“Classic Greshko! No matter what you tell that old fucker, no matter how goddam hard you try to ram something into his head, he runs it through that paranoid brain of his and comes up with something off the goddam wall. He was told there wasn’t a code. I told him that personally. I told him there was nothing hidden in that message, nothing secretive, nothing that needed to be analysed. It’s a simple bloody message, I said, and it couldn’t mean a damn thing to anyone outside the Brotherhood. But oh no, oh no! – that wasn’t good enough for him. Classic goddam Greshko! Trust nobody, especially your friends, especially your American friends! Always look at the world through the prism of suspicion. Always think the next fellow is trying to put one over on you. He probably thought I was trying to slip a nuclear weapon past him, for Christ’s sake! Or drop some fucking bombs on his beloved railroad tracks! Sweet Jesus!” Galbraith shook his head. “The truth of the matter is he didn’t need to send Epishev to London at all. He didn’t need a man running around over there doing that kind of damage. All he had to do, Gary, was to leave everything alone. And that’s the one thing he’s never been able to do in his entire goddam life. He’s never been able to leave anything alone! And that includes White Light!”

Both men were quiet for a few moments. Galbraith walked to the corner of the room where an old-fashioned upright piano was located. It had been lacquered in high-gloss yellow and was almost painful to behold. He sat down and thumped out the first few bars of St James Infirmary Blues. He broke off and, feeling a little less tense now, looked at the keys pensively. He was thinking of that summer in Monaco in 1984, the leisurely mornings spent reading on the beach, the splendid dinners at Les Lucioles in Roquebrune or La Couletta in Eze-Village, the magnificent room he had at the Hotel de Paris on the Place du Casino, the white sunlight on a blue ocean. He was remembering evenings in the Grand Casino, walking through the verdant gardens or strolling the gambling rooms, casually playing roulette here, blackjack there, chemin-de-fer – rare moments for Galbraith, who hardly ever left anything to pure chance.

He dropped his hands from the keyboard, thinking of how Vladimir Greshko, travelling as incognito as incognito can get, hadn’t appeared in Monaco until the third day. Their encounters had all taken place indoors at night – in dark little bars, hotel rooms, secluded restaurants. Their talks at first had been guarded. After all, they had little in common on any superficial level. What could Galbraith, with his Ivy League sophistication and wealthy background, share with the Chairman of the KGB, a rough-edged peasant more cunning than intelligent? The only novel Greshko had ever read, for example, was Crime and Punishment. Galbraith on the other hand was a Henry James aficionado. He loved the convoluted sentences and the cultivated world James described what could he possibly feel for a yarn in which the central event was the sordid murder of a moneylender by a broodingly unsympathetic student? All that Russian gloom, dear Christ!

The only true bond between them was a world view, a global vision which, although different in some respects, nevertheless consisted of many common elements – a well-defined balance of power between the two super-nations, an intermittent detente characterised by periods of warm progress and years of arctic chill, a status quo that, precisely because it achieved nothing real other than to promote national anxieties and keep the arms manufacturers of the world on cheerful terms with their shareholders and bankers, was more acceptable than any of the proposed changes both men knew were coming, and both loathed. And their hatred of change, of disruption, of any erosion in their spheres of influence, glued them together with a fastness unusual between men of such different backgrounds.

It wasn’t exactly an easy camaraderie. It had its origins in a meeting concerning international terrorism that took place in Geneva in the fall of 1983, when it had seemed to Galbraith that Vladimir Greshko was sending invisible signals across the conference room. An enigmatic note was slipped under a hotel door, a couple of terse phonecalls were made in the ensuing months, and the eventual outcome was the secret meeting in Monte Carlo.

Greshko had said I am on the way out, Galbraith. Now we will have a world where our much-admired new General Secretary will alter the fabric of things. He wants to create a Russia that neither you nor I will recognise. One we will not understand at all. A dangerous place for me, and for you, Galbraith … because you will not know where America stands when Russia changes. And I will not know. And all the people you have become so used to dealing with over the years will be sent to the glue factories like tired old horses. You replace old horses with hardworking young ones, Galbraith. With colts and stallions who have new feeding habits. Think about it…

And Galbraith did think about it, and he cared very little for any of his thoughts. Under the sun of Monte Carlo, both men discussed what might be done to preserve a world both had become accustomed to, a world they considered safe and manageable. Endless talk, demanding and exhausting, two days without sleep, periods of high excitement followed by dismay, too much coffee, too much vodka. What they needed was a plan, something they could remain aloof from and yet somehow take part in, what they needed was a scheme they hadn’t themselves designed but one they’d inherited, and could shape to their own ends. Something which, if it happened to go wrong, couldn’t possibly be laid on their respective doorsteps. It was two more years before such a situation presented itself in the form of an old friendship between Gary Iverson and Andres Kiss.

And still there existed a mutual lack of trust between Galbraith and Greshko, a situation that would diminish with the years but never entirely dissolve because Vladimir Greshko was programmed never to trust a fat capitalist. Galbraith brought his fingers down on the keys, creating a melancholic minor chord that echoed for a while through the room. With just a little more trust, Greshko might never have sent his man Epishev to London. The old fart must have imagined something was being kept from him, that the devious Americans were up to their usual nefarious nonsense, that the message contained coded details which were to be denied him, and that in the end the Americans wanted to throw a little sand in an old man’s eyes. And nobody – nobody! – was allowed to make a fool of General Vladimir Greshko.

Galbraith ran off a few more chords, then he played the chorus of Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out. He turned to Iverson. “Epishev is still in London?”

“Yes,” Iverson replied.

Galbraith looked contemplative. “I’m thinking aloud, you understand. But he might be useful.”

“Useful, sir?”

“He wants Pagan, doesn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“And Pagan’s here, about to make a nuisance of himself…”

Gary Iverson nodded his head slowly.

“And Epishev’s in London,” the fat man said quietly. “Not any great distance as the crow flies.”

Glen Cove, Long Island

Mikhail Kiss lay on a deckchair in his sunlit garden. He wore dark glasses and a cotton shirt and khaki shorts that revealed the thick silvery hair covering his muscular legs. He glanced at his watch. It was just after eleven a.m. In eleven hours from now, Andres was going to step on board a Scandinavian Airlines flight from Kennedy. Eleven short hours. Kiss felt nervous suddenly.

He sat upright, looked back at the house, saw the shape of young Andres inside the glass-walled room – he was so damned cool, so cold, you might think the trip that night was no more than a casual tourist affair.

For his own part, Mikhail Kiss couldn’t silence his nerves. Maybe it had something to do with the dream, the awful dream that had come to him in the darkness and filled him with dread. In this dream he’d been sitting in a restaurant with Carl Sundbach and Aleksis Romanenko, a very strange place with neither menu nor cutlery, a still room where no waiter ever came to serve. The three men had sat in a silence broken only by a thin music coming from a distance, the unrecognisable music that existed only in dreams, neither melodic nor familiar but shatteringly atonal. And then, from nowhere, a shadow had fallen across the table – but Mikhail Kiss hadn’t raised his head to look at the newcomer, at least not immediately.

He got up from the deckchair and he thought Dreams mean nothing. Dreams are not the harbingers of future happenings. He walked towards the house, stepped inside the glass-walled room, saw Andres skim through the pages of a news magazine. Mikhail Kiss filled a glass with water and drank quickly. Then he sat down, taking off his dark glasses.

“How are you?” he asked.

“How should I be?”

The older man shrugged. “A big night ahead of you, I thought…”

“It’s just another night.” Andres kept flicking pages.

Just another night. Mikhail Kiss thought how difficult his nephew had been ever since Carl had walked out on Sunday, how distant and aloof, locked inside his own head. It’s not just another night for me, Andres. I’ve lived a long time with this idea. I’ve breathed it. I’ve slept with it and nursed it. I’ve travelled thousands of miles to make it real. Even when it looked impossible, I still kept going. He wanted to say these things to Andres, but he couldn’t form the words in any way that would give them the hard conviction he felt in his heart.

Andres Kiss smiled, seeing the odd expression on his uncle’s face and thinking how old men could be like little kids. He patted the back of Mikhail’s hand. “There’s nothing to worry about, Mikhail,” he said. “Everything will go according to plan.” And he thought: Especially now. Now that he had the idea.

Mikhail Kiss wondered about the certainty in his nephew’s voice. The confidence. Andres had always had that supreme self-assurance that almost seemed at times to be indifference, as if he thought of himself as specially blessed, a magical being, a beautiful young man protected by the gods. Experience hadn’t caused him any suffering. What he knew of pain and sorrow he’d learned second hand. Kiss searched the smooth face, the eyes, the perfect mouth, for some sign of uncertainty, some little touch of concern, a feeling, anything – fruitless. Andres Kiss gave nothing away. Mikhail Kiss realised that his nephew scared him sometimes.

Andres closed the magazine and laid it down. The idea had come to him during the conversation with Iverson in Trenton. It had begun like a vapour drifting slowly at the back of his brain, and then it had taken shape and become hard as it floated into the light, and then he’d known with certainty what he had to do with Carl Sundbach. Besides, hadn’t Iverson practically instructed him to do the thing? Hadn’t Gary Iverson done everything but spell the goddam business out? To protect himself, to protect his own position, to cover his ass, Iverson obviously couldn’t come right out and say Do it, Andres. But he’d left Kiss in absolutely no doubt. Sundbach’s a menace, therefore …

Therefore. It was obvious. The young man stood up and looked at his uncle a moment before he said, “I have to go out for a while.”

Mikhail Kiss heard something in the young man’s voice, only he wasn’t sure what. A false note, a distortion. “Out? Now?”

Andres Kiss nodded. “I’ll be back in plenty of time for you to take me to JFK. Don’t worry.”

Mikhail stood up. “You shouldn’t go anywhere. Not today. You should stay here. You should be relaxing.”

Andres turned away, and Mikhail went after him, following him out of the sun-room and into the hallway. “I don’t see what’s so important you have to go out.”

Andres didn’t reply. He walked towards the front door.

“What is so damned important you have to go anywhere, especially today, for God’s sake?”

Andres opened the door, turned to look at his uncle. “I’ll be back, Mikhail.”

Mikhail Kiss watched the door close, then heard Andres’s car in the driveway. For a long time after the sound of the automobile faded, Kiss stood motionless in the hallway. Then he went back to the sun-room, sat down, lit a cigarette, closed his eyes. He felt a strange little nerve, a cord, flutter in his throat.

And there was the dream again. There was the shadow on white linen, the eerie music. He saw himself raise his head up, saw himself look into the eyes of the fourth man, the one who approached the table, the one who stood over the other three and said nothing. Distanced by the dream, Kiss rose and extended his arm, his hand held out to shake that of the fourth man – who had said nothing and done nothing, except to offer a small, spectral smile.

That smile. That face.

Why had Norbert Vaska come back after all these years to make Mikhail Kiss shudder in the warm morning light?

Manhattan

Of the four properties vacant on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, two belonged to a massive mortgage company in New Jersey, one to a pair of brothers who lived in a retirement home in Manhassett, and the last to a company called Sundbach Incorporated, with corporate offices given as an address in lower Manhattan. On the basis of geographical convenience, Frank Pagan decided that the address in Manhattan was the first one to check, then the retirement home in Manhassett, and finally, if need be, the mortgage company in New Jersey. He had Klein drive him from the Warwick down through the midday sunshine of Manhattan. It was one of those gorgeous late summer days that bless the city all too infrequently, the air marvellously clear, a blustery breeze blowing through the canyons, no humidity, blue skies, skittish little clouds more suggestive of spring than fall.

The address in lower Manhattan turned out to be a rundown brownstone carved into three or four apartments. An assortment of bells were arranged at the side of the door, but the names written on small cards were faded. Pagan squinted at them, locating one that had the name Carl Sundbach on it in very faded blue ink. He glanced at Klein, who said that as corporate edifices went this one was more than a little inauspicious, then pressed the button. After a while the face of a man appeared behind the glass panel set in the door. He stared at Pagan and Klein without opening the door.

“Who is it? What do you want?”

Pagan took out his credentials and pressed them to the window and the old fellow, putting on spectacles, stepped forward to look. Klein did the same thing with his NYPD badge, but still the old guy didn’t open the door.

“What do you want with me?”

“Just a couple of questions,” Pagan said.

“Go ahead. Ask!”

Pagan, exasperated by having to shout through a closed door, said, “It’s going to be a whole lot easier if you open up and let us come inside.”

Carl Sundbach stared at the two cops, whose appearance bewildered him, especially the one with the Scotland Yard ID. He was inclined to panic a little, because if somebody had come all the way from London then it had to be connected with Kiviranna. What else? Now he had the thought that the man who’d been following him in the streets and markets was also a cop. For one dark moment, Sundbach had an urge to throw the damn door open and spill the whole story, keeping nothing back. But he couldn’t do that, not even if he lived through a thousand years of torture.

Pagan pressed his face against the pane. “A few questions, that’s all. We’ll take five minutes of your time at the most.”

Sundbach wondered if the failure to open the door was going to be construed as suspicious, if the most reasonable course of action was to admit this pair of jokers, remain extremely cool with them, and send them away satisfied. Cups of tea, perhaps, some quiet hospitality. This was the behaviour of a man with nothing to hide. Lurking behind a locked door, on the other hand, was probably a strategic mistake.

“Okay. Five minutes,” and he opened the door, turning towards the stairs even as the cops entered. “This way,” he said, leading them up into the gloom. He took a key out of his pocket, opened the door to his apartment, and showed the policemen inside, smiling now and bobbing around them. “You fellows drink on the job? I got some nice Yugoslavian wine somewhere.”

Both Pagan and Klein declined. Pagan looked around the apartment, absorbing the sheer quantity of items here, the overstuffed furniture, the heavy curtains, the shelves of books, the scores of old prints that covered everything save for what must have been Sundbach’s special wall, reserved for photographs of the old fellow in the company of celebrities. It was a suffocating apartment, overloaded with Sundbach’s possessions, many of which must have had nostalgic significance for him. Pagan had the strong feeling of having stepped into another era – back, back to the turn of the century, when people lived around their possessions in rooms where you couldn’t breathe and where you just knew a tubercular child lay white and still in a shuttered attic bedroom. There was dust here, and the dampness of old paper, a sense of an unindexed life collected and stored in these rooms.

Carl Sundbach took the stopper from a fine old decanter and poured himself a glass of dark red wine. The glass, he said in a thick accent, had once belonged to the last Tsar’s uncle, General Alexei Alexandrovich. He was making conversational noises. Pagan wandered to the bookshelves, glancing at titles, most of them in foreign languages. L’Entente Baltique. Die Nationalen Minderheiten Estlands. And pamphlets, scores of them, stacked in bundles, held by string or elastic and stuffed with sheets of notes. They were mainly in languages Pagan couldn’t identify. He stepped away from the shelves and gazed at various prints on the walls even as Sundbach was proudly explaining some of his celebrity photographs to an interested Klein.

“This was taken when Bobby came through here on his campaign. A young man, much vigour. I had raised money for him, you understand. You see where he signed the picture? Look there. To my friend Carl, it says. Now this one over here, taken with Perry Como, that came about when he opened the wing of a hospital in Brooklyn. I give a little to charity now and then. America’s been good to me.”

Pagan found himself looking at a copy of an engraving made by a certain Merian in 1652. It depicted a walled city with steeples and according to the brass plate attached to the frame the city was Tallinn. There were others, views of castles, tall ships in a harbour, churches, all carefully framed and labelled, all pictures of old Estonia. Bingo, Pagan thought. He had an equation, a connection between Carl and Jake Kiviranna, an ethnic bond. But it was too easy, too thin. Unless anybody could prove beyond doubt that Sundbach had sent Jake overseas on a mission of murder, unless there was solid evidence of the kind so loved by prosecutors and judges, Carl could fly the Estonian flag from his window day and night and it wouldn’t mean a damned thing. It certainly wouldn’t connect him to a murder in Edinburgh.

Carl poured himself a second glass of red wine. The New York cop was simple to deal with. He was the kind of American impressed by celebrity. He probably read People magazine. The tall inglane on the other hand worried Sundbach because he prowled, taking everything in with a quiet, hooded look. And those grey eyes were cold and unreadable. Warmed by the wine, Sundbach felt a flood of confidence. Let them ask their questions and be on their way. He had nothing to hide. He sat down at his desk.

Pagan asked, “What exactly is Sundbach Enterprises?”

Carl Sundbach replied, “A few hotels, a couple of small-town newspapers, a little real estate here and there.”

“And you operate this yourself?”

Sundbach smiled. “Nowadays, no. Sundbach Enterprises is part of a big corporation called Van Meer Industries, which is part of something else. IBM for all I know! It’s too complicated for me. I got nothing to do with it other than some financial interest.”

“You own an old shop on the boardwalk,” Pagan said. “Is that yours personally or part of this big corporation?”

Sundbach sipped his wine. The old shop, he thought. They knew about it. So what? It wasn’t exactly a secret. “That I keep as my own,” he said.

“Any reason?”

Sundbach stood up and, a little flushed, pointed to a framed dollar bill that hung above his desk. “This, my friend. Look carefully. The first dollar I ever made in my own business in this country and I made it on the boardwalk. So I keep the shop. It’s sentimental. Do you understand me?”

Pagan nodded. “When did you come to America?”

“Early 1950s,” Sundbach said.

“Have you kept up an interest in the politics of the old country?” Pagan asked.

“The old country?”

“Estonia,” and Pagan waved a hand at the prints.

“Pardon me, I don’t think there’s any such place. There used to be, and it was a wonderful country, but now it’s called the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic and soon you won’t even see that much on a goddamned map.” Sundbach smiled sadly at the Englishman. “You said you had questions, Mr Pagan. Maybe you could come to the point?”

Pagan turned to look at the old man. Shoot from the hip, Frank. “Do you know a man called Jacob Kiviranna?”

Sundbach, whose heart skipped only a little, looked puzzled. “No, I don’t.”

“Think,” Pagan said.

“What’s to think?” Sundbach asked.

“Somebody saw you with Kiviranna on the boardwalk.”

Sundbach shook his head. He stared at the inglane. This was all bluff, it had to be. Even if somebody had seen him with Kiviranna, what did that prove? “I don’t know the man. Your information’s wrong.”

Pagan came a little closer to the old man. He smelled the wine on Sundbach’s breath. “Kiviranna shot a man named Aleksis Romanenko.”

Sundbach turned over the palms of his hands. There was a forced smile on his face. What he wondered was how any kind of connection had been made – had that perse Kiviranna talked? But what could Jake have said anyhow? Sundbach had always taken the greatest care to conceal his identity from crazy Jake, who wasn’t a man who asked too many questions anyhow. They’d held their very first meeting at the shop on the boardwalk and Sundbach had made a great pretence at forcing entry, as if he wanted to show Jake Kiviranna that he was beyond the law, he broke into abandoned shops, he had a bandit’s disregard for other people’s property. He was a goddam anarchist, the kind of guy Jake could trust without losing any sleep.

Carl Sundbach cleared his throat. “Aleksis who? You got any more names to throw at me?”

“Just those two,” Pagan said.

Carl Sundbach made his chair swivel as he reached for his wine. “I like to help policemen, Mr Pagan. I think they do a great job without much thanks, you understand. But you’ve given me nothing except puzzlement. I don’t know the men you mention. And a shooting – what would I know about a thing like that? I’m a retired businessman, not a gangster.”

Pagan said nothing for a time. He studied Sundbach’s face in silence. The old man was pouring a third glass of wine in a composed fashion. Pagan wandered round the room, glanced through open doors, saw a bedroom with a vast four-poster bed, an enormous bathroom with an antique tub, a kitchen with an old-fashioned black stove. There was the scent of camphor from somewhere. Pagan imagined closets packed with clothes and mothballs.

Sundbach, he realised, could maintain his innocence until the sun froze over. Perhaps he was telling the truth anyhow, perhaps he knew nothing about the killing in Edinburgh, but Pagan had one of those niggling little instincts that told him otherwise. He stopped moving, leaned against the wall, folded his arms. It’s all here, Frank. Everything you’re looking for is in this room. Crack the bastard open.

“Talk to me about the Brotherhood, Carl,” he said.

The Brotherhood. How did the English policeman know about the vendlus? How had he stumbled into that one? Sundbach, the essence of serenity, sipped his wine. “The what?”

“Tell me why you wanted to wreck the Brotherhood’s plan, Carl. Why did you send Jake to Edinburgh to murder Romanenko? Are you KGB? Is that it? Did you get an order from Russia? Or straight from the Soviet Mission in New York?”

Sundbach, as if astonished, blew a fine spray of wine through his teeth and laughed. He looked at Klein in the manner of a man appealing to reason. “Is your English friend here on a day-release programme from some kind of institution? Does he have to check back in at six o’clock every night?”

Pagan stepped quickly towards the desk, looming over the figure of Sundbach, who was still seated. “Does the KGB tell you what it needs, Carl? Does it tell you what hoop to jump through – the hoop in this case being the murder of Romanenko? You get poor Jake Kiviranna to do the job because you know there’s something loose in his attic, therefore he’s a loony, exactly the kind of fellow to pull a political assassination. You don’t get any blood on your hands that way. Keep them nice and clean, don’t you, Carl?”

Sundbach had an urge to scream at the inglane and to tell him how very wrong he was, how his conclusion might be correct but his reasoning was all bent out of shape – but that would have meant telling the truth about the Brotherhood and he wasn’t going to do that. The trick was to let the moment pass, let this man’s accusations fade into silence, and stay very calm.

“You through, Mr Pagan?”

“I’m through,” Pagan said.

“I lost my two brothers between 1945 and 1949,” Sundbach said. The anger he felt made it difficult to talk. “The KGB killed them. And you accuse me of working for the KGB. I don’t want to say any more to you. I don’t want you in my house. Go. Go now.”

Pagan walked towards the door. He longed for fresh air and sunlight and the breeze scampering along the streets. In this apartment it was hard to draw air into your lungs unless, like Sundbach, the air you breathed was from the past. He opened the door and stepped out on to the landing, and Klein followed.

Sundbach, decanter in one hand, glass in the other, stared across the room at both men. “I would die before I worked for the KGB,” he said. “That’s the truth.”

Pagan drew the door shut and stood for a second on the gloomy landing before turning and going down into the street.

Pagan sat in the passenger seat of Klein’s car, which was parked four or five doors from Carl’s building. He stared across the street at the windows of Sundbach’s apartment. Klein said, “I think I heard one of the old guy’s blood vessels pop. You backed the wrong horse there, Frank, when you said the magic letters KGB.”

Pagan rolled down his window, let his hand hang out of the car. He didn’t question the genuineness of Sundbach’s emotional reaction to the mention of the KGB. He said, “I agree. But I’ve got a feeling he’s lying about all the rest of it. He hired Kiviranna, arranged the trip, set everything up. The only thing I got wrong was the KGB connection.”

“If that’s true, who’s he working for?”

Pagan was silent a second, looking up at the apartment as if the curtained windows might be made to yield an answer. “Maybe himself,” he said.

“And the motive?”

Pagan pressed his fingertips into his eyelids. “Who knows? Maybe he just didn’t agree with the Brotherhood’s plan. Which tells us something definite – he knew all about it.”

“Which means he’s either one of the Brotherhood, or he’s got an inside source,” Klein said.

“Precisely.”

Klein undid his bow-tie, which collapsed and fell in two thin strands across the front of his chest. “What now?”

“I think we let old Carl marinate for a while,” Pagan said. “Then we’ll go back over there and we’ll put some real pressure on him.”

Max Klein, who wondered what Pagan meant by ‘real pressure’ but didn’t want to ask, took a pipe from the glove compartment and lit it, filling the car with a richly-perfumed tobacco smoke. Pagan watched the street, noticing a gang of kids outside a corner grocery store, a couple of men passing a bottle back and forth, a TV repairman’s van. A young man with blond hair that fell to his shoulders got out of a parked Jaguar on the corner and walked past the clutch of kids and the men drinking. In his white cotton jacket and pants – casual chic, obviously expensive – he had the appearance of somebody who’d made a wrong turning along the way. He looked as if he’d happened upon this drab street purely by chance, which was why Frank Pagan tracked him idly as he came along the pavement.

The man went directly to the building where Sundbach lived, climbed the steps, rang one of the doorbells, waited. Pagan saw Sundbach come to the door, open it, and the young man entered the building after exchanging a couple of words with Carl, who seemed reluctant to let him in. An intriguing pair – the old man in the shabby cardigan and the well-tailored visitor who had the looks of a fashion model. What could they have in common?

Pagan glanced at Klein, who had also seen the young man enter Sundbach’s building. “They make an unlikely couple,” Klein said. He took a small notebook from his pocket and wrote down the registration of the Jaguar. The notebook was stuffed with loose slips of paper, suggesting the enormous, if finally futile effort of an untidy man to impose order on his world.

Pagan settled back in his seat. “Give it ten more minutes. Then we’ll go back for the pipe you just happened to leave behind in Carl’s apartment.”

“Gotcha,” Max Klein said brightly.

Andres Kiss drank a glass of the old man’s horrible Yugoslavian wine. This apartment, which he’d visited only once before, was unsufferably cluttered. He put the wineglass on the table, then smiled across the room at Carl, who was sipping quietly. Although there was a sociable grin on the old man’s face, he was puzzled, even troubled, by Kiss’s presence.

“You go tonight,” Sundbach said. “It’s still the same?”

Andres Kiss looked at his glass and reminded himself to clean it before he left the apartment. “The plan hasn’t changed, Carl.”

Sundbach realised he was slightly drunk, that his reactions were coming to him through a series of filters, just like the daylight that fell first through muslin then damask at the window. His head was like the inside of the apartment, murky and overloaded.

“You go be a hero, Andres. Myself, I think there are other options.”

Andres Kiss smiled. He put a hand in the pocket of his pants. “Such as?”

Carl Sundbach shrugged. He was remembering the meetings with the madman Kiviranna, the night on the boardwalk, the time they met in Penn Station, or the afternoon they’d walked through the Metropolitan Museum of Art – five, maybe six encounters in all. You shoot Romanenko, Jake. That’s all there is to it. You’ll be a goddam hero. Jake Kiviranna, another asshole, a tagumik, with a hero complex, hadn’t even asked questions. Romanenko was a Communist, a turncoat, and that was all there was to the business. He deserved to die. Perfectly logical. Perfectly natural. Jake’s mind didn’t have compartments that spilled over into each other. There were no complications when it came to Kiviranna. Of course, it would have been a different matter if Jake had known that he was assassinating one of the leading figures in the anti-Soviet underground in the Baltic.

One of the leading figures …

Carl Sundbach was suddenly depressed. The murder of Romanenko wasn’t a decision he’d taken lightly. He and Aleksis had fought side by side for years, not always liking each other, and not always agreeing, but they’d developed a mutual trust, a dependency. And the Brotherhood’s plan had always seemed feasible to Carl, although less so with each passing year. It wasn’t just that his memory of his native country was beginning to fade around the edges and had begun to recede in importance to him. It wasn’t even the fact that age had depleted his energy, his sense of commitment. It was the idea that fresh new voices were being raised in the Soviet Union which had caused him to stop and think and to debate whether the Brotherhood’s way had any merit in the end, or whether it was time to put the scheme under wraps – at least until the new directions in Russia had come into focus. Perhaps the directions would be good, perhaps not. But it was a chance worth taking, especially when the consequences of the Brotherhood’s scheme could bring about wholesale slaughter – and not simply inside the Baltic countries.

Carl, who knew Mikhail Kiss was beyond reasonable argument and could never be persuaded to give the Kremlin a chance, saw only one way to make the plan grind to a halt. Aleksis had to die. He had to die because nothing short of his murder would make Mikhail Kiss consider abandonment. And it hadn’t worked. If anything it had backfired, because both Kisses were simply more determined than ever to go ahead. Especially this young one, this terrifying boy with the yellow hair and the face that wouldn’t melt margariini, this young creature with ice in his veins.

“I asked a question, Carl,” Andres Kiss said.

“There are alternatives that are less destructive. That’s all I’m saying. I’m talking about reality.”

“I’m listening,” Andres said. “Reality fascinates me.”

“You don’t hear the pulse, sonny. You and Mikhail, you’re deaf men. You don’t want to hear.” Sundbach picked up the decanter, but it was empty.

“Tell me about this pulse, Carl. I’m curious.”

The old man wandered round the living-room in an unsteady way. “Things are changing over there. The time for this plan has gone, Andres. It’s time to put violence in cold storage.”

“You really believe what you’re saying?”

“Listen to me,” and here Sundbach placed a bony hand on the young man’s wrist. “We can’t get our country back the way it was. But we can get something back. We can get some kind of self-determination over there but only so long as we stay inside the system. So maybe it’s not independence. Maybe it’s not the way it was. But it’s the best goddam shot we’ve got! Your way is doomed, sonny. Your way is pure romantic bullshit – a fart on the wind, Andres. I didn’t always see it like that. But I’m prepared to give this new regime a chance.”

Andres Kiss shook his head. “You swallow their crap about all these terrific changes?”

“I believe it can happen. Slowly, sure. But it can happen.”

“Nothing’s so cheap as words. The Russians can talk up some fine intentions. After all they’ve put us through, you’re still ready to trust them?”

“Up to a point –”

“You’ve grown soft in the head, Carl.”

“Listen,” Sundbach said. “Try to have patience. Don’t go ahead with this foolish scheme. Things will get better in the old country. More freedoms will come. Why not let the new system have a chance? And if it doesn’t work out, you can go back to the plan later.”

“In your world, Carl, cows will fly.”

Sundbach sat down in a very old grey leather armchair. “You’re an impossible boy, Andres. What do you know? From where I sit I can smell milk on you.”

“You want us to fail, don’t you?” Andres asked. “You want the whole fucking thing to fall apart!”

Sundbach said nothing. Why bother to answer the question? It was wasted breath. Tomorrow, over the Baltic, Andres Kiss might have his moment of truth.

“What did you feel when Aleksis was shot, Carl? Glad?”

“Glad isn’t the word,” Sundbach said.

“What is the word, Carl?”

Sundbach was quiet a moment. “I thought it would be a time for quiet reconsideration. Why rush into violence? Why go ahead with something so drastic if another way could be found?”

Andres Kiss stepped closer to where the old man sat. He saw Sundbach turn his face to the side and look across the room. Andres folded the hand in his pocket around the length of soft, silky material that lay concealed there. It wouldn’t take long, he thought. A minute perhaps. A little more. He gazed into Sundbach’s discoloured eyes, detecting nervousness in them, something furtive.

Andres touched Sundbach’s shoulder very lightly. “You listen to the Russians, you think you’re hearing something new. But there’s nothing new. It’s the same old song only with a new singer. Freedom isn’t in the melody, Carl. The words haven’t changed. The only thing that’s changed is your mental condition.”

“All I said was we give it a try. Postpone –”

“Postpone nothing.”

Sundbach began to rise from his chair, but Andres gently pushed him back into it. It wasn’t a violent gesture, but Sundbach interpreted it that way, as the first trivial skirmish in a situation that would escalate. He tried to rise again, but again Andres pushed him back down. Carl Sundbach, who had always been a little afraid of this young man, albeit in an abstract sense, was surprised to find how quickly the fear could become a concrete thing.

Andres Kiss said, “With Aleksis dead, you thought the plan would be abandoned, didn’t you? That’s how you wanted it to be.”

Sundbach didn’t speak. He sensed violence all around him, the very air of his apartment electrified by it. He saw it in this young man’s cold eyes and mirthless smile. So much beauty and no heart.

“You thought if Aleksis was killed, Mikhail would lose his nerve and give up.”

Sundbach shut his eyes. The sound of a gun fired in a railroad station echoed through his imagination. He didn’t believe he’d been mistaken in arranging for Aleksis to be murdered. But he’d failed to change anything, and it was a failure purchased at a very high price.

Andres Kiss took the soft length of material from his pocket. It weighed nothing in his hand. He let the thing dangle against the old man’s lips. Carl opened his eyes quickly.

“What’s this?” He pushed it away from his mouth.

“What do you think it is?”

“A stocking, a lady’s nylon.”

“You got it, Carl.”

“Mikhail sent you here,” Sundbach said. “Mikhail sent you here to be my goddam assassin!”

Sundbach, panicked into movement, tried to get up out of the chair but Andres struck him quickly on the mouth, knocking him dizzy. Sundbach felt the nylon go around his neck and he kicked vigorously at the young man, striking Andres Kiss on his cheek. The old man got up, rushing across the room to the door. Andres caught him there. He pinned him against the wood and shoved his palm up under Carl’s chin and thrust the old man’s face back. Sundbach gasped and made a claw of one hand and dug it into Andres’s forehead, scratching the flesh, breaking the skin. For a moment, shocked by pain, Andres Kiss released his grip and Carl was able to get a hand on the door-handle. But before he could pull it open Andres struck him on the back of the head with his clenched fist.

Carl slid to the floor and moaned.

Kiss went down on his knees, twisting the nylon stocking around Carl’s neck even as the old man flayed at him feebly with his fists.

“For the love of God, Andres.”

Andres crossed the ends of the nylon. He pulled them very tightly, hearing Carl groan and feeling Sundbach’s hands, which fluttered desperately upwards, pressing against his mouth. Andres held his breath and kept tightening the stocking.

And then Carl was finally silent and his neck, caught in the fatal tourniquet Andres Kiss had applied, hung at an odd angle to his body. Kiss, out of breath, stood up.

“I think it’s time,” Frank Pagan said, and got out of the car, slamming the passenger door shut. He took a step in the direction of Sundbach’s building, conscious of Klein sliding out from behind the wheel, aware at the same time, from the edge of his vision, of the TV repair van pulling away from the pavement.

Later, Pagan might marvel at the gall of the operation, but his first impression was of the van swinging in a squealing arc, making an illegal turn on a one-way street. Then the vehicle clambered up on the kerb and struck a fire-hydrant, which immediately sent a great jet of water rainbowing into the air behind Klein’s Dodge. Pagan, halfway across the street, watched the van continue in its destructive path, seeing it plough into the trunk of Klein’s car, which crumpled like construction paper. Klein, emerging from the driver’s side, was tossed forward by the impact. He fell face down under the glittering cascade of water that rose out of the ruptured hydrant. Pagan hurried back to the sidewalk and leaned over Klein, who was sitting up and dazed, looking at Pagan with the expression of a man on thorazine.

“Holy shit,” Klein muttered. “Was it lightning?”

The van, which had the logo Rivoli’s TV & Radio Repair on the side panel, wheeled into reverse and pulled away from the smashed Dodge. It came to an abrupt halt half-on, half-off the sidewalk and then, roaring madly, lunged straight towards Pagan, breaking open plastic garbage sacks and strewing the air with fishbones and potato peels and clouds of feasting, breeding flies. Dear Christ! Pagan, half-blinded by water, threw himself to the side as the van rocketed towards him. He slid down a short flight of steps to the door of a basement apartment, twisting his head in time to see the van roar along the street. He rose, raced back up to the pavement. The van was already turning the corner at the end of the street, leaving a pall of blue exhaust like something conjured out of existence by a flamboyant magician.

He walked to where Max Klein sat. “You okay?”

“I’ll live,” Klein said.

Pagan helped Klein to his feet, then stared through the sunlit water at the empty space where the Jaguar had been. Slick, he thought. The whole thing, dead slick. He looked up at the windows of Sundbach’s apartment and something caused him to shiver, and he thought he knew what.

“You want to go after the van?” Klein asked.

Pagan saw the way Klein’s feathery red hair had been plastered across his scalp with water. “Let’s go back to Carl’s.”

Saaremaa Island, the Baltic

Colonel Yevgenni Uvarov walked between the computers and the consoles, passing the stern portrait of Lenin, whose eyes seemed to follow one no matter where one moved. The Colonel gazed across the wide expanse of floor towards his desk, then up at the clock on the wall. He couldn’t put this moment off for long, not now. He checked his watch, returned his eyes to the clock, as if he were all at once obsessed by time – but he was in reality stalling, delaying the moment from which there was absolutely no return. Burning the bridges, Uvarov thought. Setting them all aflame.

He moved towards his desk. A technician named Agarbekov stepped in front of him. Uvarov was startled by the sudden movement and it must have shown on his face because Agarbekov gazed at him strangely.

“Console eight isn’t working, sir,” Agarbekov said.

Why was he being bothered by this utterly trifling detail now? Uvarov wondered. “You know the procedures, Agarbekov.”

Agarbekov was hesitant. “I followed procedures, comrade Colonel, and nothing was ever done. The repairs were never made. Don’t you remember?”

Uvarov put one hand up to the side of his face. He was flustered suddenly, thinking he heard reproach in Agarbekov’s voice. He couldn’t remember, it was really that simple. For weeks he’d been operating on a level where ordinary things receded, and his memory malfunctioned. He was living – not in the now, the present – but in the immediate future. He looked at Agarbekov, a white-faced twenty-year-old from Kiev with a lock of greasy black hair that fell over his forehead and which he kept pushing away.

“Are you unwell, comrade Colonel?” Agarbekov asked.

Uvarov shook his head. “I’m perfectly fine, Agarbekov. I have so many things on my mind. I can’t be expected to concern myself about one small repair. Go through the usual procedures a second time.” The sharpness in the voice, the impatience – Uvarov wondered if Agarbekov detected stress in his behaviour. He smiled and tried to appear calm. He placed a hand on Agarbekov’s shoulder and made a mild little joke. “Procedures are designed by Moscow with only one purpose, Agarbekov. They weren’t written to help you, only to test your ingenuity in getting around them. Didn’t you know that?”

“I had my suspicions, comrade Colonel,” Agarbekov said.

Uvarov walked to his desk. He sat down, looked at the clock on the wall. He was aware of Agarbekov watching him from across the room. Had the small joke alerted Agarbekov to something? Uvarov wondered. How could it have done? It was innocent, a simple act of sympathy for Agarbekov, who was caught up in the often stupid rules and regulations and procedures that were a part of military life. Uvarov shut his eyes and wondered if Agarbekov was KGB, if he’d been stationed here to observe men in sensitive positions. He opened his eyes, and now there wasn’t any sign of Agarbekov. KGB! You see them everywhere. You imagine them all over the place.

He opened the middle drawer of his desk and quietly removed a sheet of typewritten paper. He scanned the words quickly even though he knew them by heart. Then he looked at the top of the page where bold letters read: From the Office of the Deputy Minister. Uvarov picked up his pen and his hand shook and he had to work hard to still it. He carefully signed the name S. F. Tikunov across the bottom of the page, then he rose and walked to the Orders Board, where he pinned the sheet up. He could barely breathe. He looked at the sheet hanging on the board and he had the thought that his forgery was utterly childish, anybody could see through it, it would be spotted at once by the operators who religiously took note of all new material on the Orders Board.

His face covered in perspiration, he went unsteadily back to his desk. He passed the computers, two of which were out of order still, and lay exposed to his view – circuit boards, yards of thin wire, the intestinal confusion of broken electronic equipment. He looked at the clock again. At midnight, the message he’d placed on the Orders Board would be routinely transmitted by computer from this installation which – as the major tracking station in the area – was an electronic post office for all pertinent orders issued in Moscow by the Deputy Minister, and relayed to a score of lesser installations along the Baltic coast.

Uvarov sat down. He was conscious of Agarbekov watching from the other side of the enormous room. The young Ukrainian’s face was white and expressionless, floating in the bleak fluorescent lighting like a balloon. Don’t stare at me, Uvarov thought. But then Agarbekov had turned away already and had vanished beyond the banks of screens, leaving Uvarov with a strange sense of unfocused discomfort.

The Colonel looked in the direction of the Orders Board. Even though he couldn’t read anything from this distance, he felt that the sheet he’d just pinned there was very distinct, the letters large and bloated. He imagined he could read it plainly. Routine Electronic Maintenance Order Number 09 06, 1600–1700hrs Wednesday September 6.

Uvarov got up. For a second he was tempted to remove the notice before anyone had seen it. But he’d made his mind up, and he couldn’t cancel now, and besides one of the operators was already standing in front of the board and looking at the faked order pinned there. Uvarov, who expected his forgery to be detected there and then, was filled with relief when the operator turned away from the order without any unusual expression on his face.

Uvarov stepped out of the building. The night air was chilly and he shivered. He listened to the soft sound of the tide, and he thought of the dark waters beyond the range of his vision, and how for one short hour tomorrow the defences of the Baltic coast would be stripped of their eyesight, and in this state of temporary blindness astonishingly vulnerable.