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‘What about visitors?’ Gant asked. ‘I could be there for three, four hours.’

Baranovich explained patiently, as if to a child: ‘Conceal the body - there are a number of lockers, metal ones, all with good locks.’ He smiled. ‘The pilots complained of a great deal of pilfering of the Western luxury items supplied them for being well-behaved and well-adjusted … the locks are good. As for yourself, since you do not appear to be very much like Voskov, except in general build - you will be taking a shower.’

‘For three hours?’

‘You will appear to be taking a shower. Once it nears the time for our little - diversion to occur, you will dress and the visor of the helmet will conceal your features. We on the weapons-guidance system request the pilots to wear the helmets until removed in the laboratory. It will not seem strange that you are wearing it even an hour or more before the flight.’

Gant nodded. ‘What about this diversion?’

‘You need not worry. I have a very small radio device, which will tell you when to come down from your room to the hangar area. What you will see there will enable you to enter the cockpit and roll the aircraft out of the hangar, without anyone being in the least suspicious.’

Gant’s eyes widened again. He was thoughtful for a moment, and then he said: ‘What happens to you guys, after I lift out of there?’ His voice was quiet, breathy, as if he already knew the answer.

‘It does not matter,’ Baranovich said softly. His expression betrayed a sympathy for his visitor that the American could not comprehend.

‘The hell it doesn’t!’ Gant said, stepping back, his arms raised at his sides. ‘Hell!’ He turned away from the Russian, his shoulders hunched, then turned back and said, waving his arm before him: ‘You guys, all of you - you’re so damn willing to die, I don’t understand! Don’t you resent those guys in London, ordering your deaths?’

Baranovich was silent for a long time, then he said: ‘It is easy for you to feel indignant, Mr. Gant. You are an American. Any order that you are given is a source of resentment, is that not so? You are a free man…’

Gant smiled cynically, and Baranovich seemed angered by his expression. ‘You are free! I am not. There is a difference. If I resent the men in London who are ordering me to die, then it is a small thing when compared with my - resentment of the KGB!’ Baranovich was staring down at the map with unseeing eyes, his features strained, his hands knuckled on the table, so that the heavy blue veins stood out like ropes. It was a long time before he straightened, and was able to smile at Gant.

‘I’m sorry…’ Gant began.

‘Nonsense. Why should you be aware of - our little problems? Now, shall we go over the armament of the plane again? Luckily, for your purposes at least, they will be concerned to use air-to-air missiles in the first trial, not ground-attack weapons.’

He waved Gant back to his chair. ‘Please smoke,’ he said. ‘We don’t want you coughing amateurishly at the gate, do we?’ His eyes had recovered their smile.

The beat of the rotors over his head had become almost inaudible to Kontarsky during the flight time from Moscow. Now, at ten o’clock, they were more than half way to Bilyarsk, flowing over the moonlit, silvered country below, marked by the lights of the scattered villages and collective farms, sliced by the beams of the occasional truck or car on the road between Gorky and Kazan, which they were, at that point, paralleling. The helicopter seat was comfortable in the interior of the MIL MI-8. Behind Kontarsky as he sat behind the pilot and co-pilot, were seats for twenty-eight more passengers. Only four of the seats were occupied, by Kontarsky’s personal guard, a male secretary and a classified radio operator - all of them were KGB staff.

Kontarsky was sleepy, despite the tension within him. He had delayed leaving for as long as possible, in order that he could arrive in Bilyarsk with at least some information concerning the identity, and therefore the mission, of the man who had passed through traffic controls at Moscow, Gorky, and Kazan as Glazunov.

The result of Priabin’s investigations was - nothing.

True, they had found the tail-car, a few miles beyond the turn-off to Bilyarsk; true, also, that they had found the overturned truck and the crushed body of Pavel Upenskoy ten miles further down the road to Kuybyshev. There was no sign of the second man. Therefore, with a nauseous, logical certainty, Kontarsky and Priabin had been faced with the knowledge that the second man was on his way, on foot; or by some alternative transport, to Bilyarsk. The old man at the warehouse had died almost as soon as they began to beat his knowledge out of him. Frail, weak heart. Kontarsky was still angry at such unfastidious waste.

The man’s photograph had been transmitted to Bilyarsk, and the security guard alerted. Kontarsky had panicked himself into flying at once to Bilyarsk, to take personal charge of the counter-measures.

He lit yet another cigarette, having glanced over his shoulder, at the radio operator sitting before his console. The man, as if telepathically aware that his chief’s eyes were on him, shook his head mournfully.

Kontarsky turned back, facing forward in the helicopter again, staring at the helmeted heads in front of him, as if they might provide some inspiration. There was the taste of fear in the back of his throat. He brushed a hand across his eyebrows nervously. He knew there would be no sleep for him until the trials were successfully completed. He felt the common KGB impotence of having to rely upon computers, upon the whole huge unwieldy apparatus of the security service for results.

At that moment, Priabin was gaming access to the central records computer in Dzerzhinsky Street, a priority request for computer time. He was searching for a man, British or American without doubt, who had entered the Soviet Union recently, under a false name and passport, who could be identified as an intelligence agent. He was using the electronic mind of a huge machine to run to earth the second man in the truck.

An electronic hunt, he summarised bitterly. Like Priabin, Kontarsky’s faith lay in what people could tell him, what they could extract from individual minds and tongues. Yet the two they had picked up knew nothing, that much was obvious, except their own speculations that the man was an intelligence agent whose destination was Bilyarsk and the Mikoyan project; and Upenskoy, who would have known for certain, was dead, crushed to pulp beneath the weight of the truck.

Kontarsky’s thought processes were defensive, even at the moment when he most needed daring, and imagination. Mentally, he was already preparing a defence for the officers of the Special Investigations Department who would be calling on him in the event of his failure. He writhed at the thought of having to depend upon a computer’s master index of files in the Registry and Archives Department of the KGB. Yet, rely upon that machine he had to. There was no other alternative now. There was no one living to ask.

There was a further problem, of course. Unless he allowed the three dissident agents of the CIA and the British SIS to complete their vital work on the aircraft. There would be no trial the following day.

He cleared his throat, cleared his mind. He was terrified of espionage, of an attempt to sabotage the trial in front of Andropov and the First Secretary…

He would, he decided, allow himself at least two hours before the arrival of the official aircraft, to question the dissidents. He looked at his watch. Ten-fifteen.

He was anxious now, to arrive, to be on the spot, to become active.

Police Inspector Tortyev was scrutinising a dossier of photographs of Alexander Thomas Orton. He had spread the snapshots across his desk regardless of date or place, and picked up samples at random. For half an hour, he had been picking up and discarding, and comparing samples from the heap. It had taken his small team three hours to collect the full dossier, from various sources within the KGB 2nd Chief Directorate.

He had been denied computer time, which would have immensely simplified and speeded-up his enquiries. He gathered there was some kind of priority-search being mounted, and his team had been lucky to obtain the number of photographs they had done by manual extraction from the files, to supplement his own dossier on Orton.

Again, as with the man’s shoes, Tortyev recognised the significance of the photographs. Almost casually, he selected two, one of Orton taken at Cheremetievo two days ago, and one of the man taken eighteen months before, in a Moscow street, just leaving a tourist’s shop. It had been taken as part of a routine surveillance, before Tortyev had become interested in the activities of the businessman from England. Holding them together between thumb and forefinger, he passed them across his desk to Holokov and Filipov, who had sat silently awaiting the outcome of his deliberations.

‘What do you think?’ he said, offering the two pictures to Holokov. Filipov leaned across, almost touching Holokov’s shoulder.

The fat man studied the pictures for some time, then shook his head. ‘What is it you want me to say. Inspector?’ he asked.

Tortyev smiled. ‘What you really think - even if that is a rather unusual request for me to make.’

‘Mm.’ Holokov glanced at Filipov, flashed the pictures at him, and then added: ‘It’s not the same man.’

‘Good, Holokov - good.’ Without interest, he added: ‘You agree, Filipov?’

Filipov looked dubious, and then said ‘I - I’m not sure. Inspector.’

‘Naturally. I am - you, too, Holokov?’ The fat man nodded. ‘Which poses a question - eh? Which of these two is the dead man?’

‘How can we tell? They’re very alike,’ Filipov said.

‘Their common disguise makes them alike, Filipov!’

Tortyev snapped. ‘The face was ruined so that we would not discover that there were two men involved in this deception. Why were there two of them?’

Holokov looked bemused, and Filipov remained silent. Tortyev left his desk and began to pace the room. Suddenly, a sense of urgency had come over him, though he could not explain its origin. He felt a nervous energy, a sense of being trapped by the walls of his office. He looked up at the clock. It was ten-thirty. He turned to Holokov.

‘What of that KGB man killed at the Komsomolskaia Metro Station yesterday evening - who killed him?’

‘One of Orton’s associates?’ It was Filipov who spoke.

‘Why not Orton - he’s not dead, after all!’ Tortyev replied, bending over Filipov as he sat in his hard upright chair before the desk. ‘Why not Orton himself?’ Filipov shrugged, as if he had no answer to the question. ‘Who are Orton’s associates? We have men you have pulled in, the usual crowd, the ones in Orton’s file - you have searched their homes, their store-places. What have you found - eh? Nothing - nothing at all!’

He moved away from Filipov and Holokov, and began to reason aloud. ‘Where is Orton - where have they hidden him? Why did he want it to appear that he had been killed? To throw us off the scent? Why not die in London, if that was the case, where we could not check so thoroughly, where we would not have the evidence of the body itself?’ He paused, turned, paced the length of the room once in silence, and then continued. Holokov and Filipov sat mutely, digesting their inspector’s ruminations. ‘No. The answer does not lie there. Orton had to disappear here, inside the Soviet Union, inside Moscow. Why?’

He paused again in his stride, in the middle of his office, and said, calmly, but with a catch of excitement in his voice that both his subordinates felt: ‘If we had not been persuaded that Mr. Alexander Thomas Orton was a drug-smuggler, what would we think he was? Eh? Based on what has happened - including the killing of a KGB man, which must have had something to do with this, and which shows the desperate extent of what has been happening - two deaths, a fake Orton and one of ourselves … based on that, what would we think?’

He stood staring at them, willing them to arrive at his own conclusion, nervous of the leap his mind had made, hoping that theirs would leap in the same way. Holokov cleared his throat, fussily, apologetically, infuriatingly, and said: ‘He is an agent?’

‘Exactly!’ Tortyev was smiling. ‘He is an espionage agent, of the British, or the Americans - the drugs blinded us to the truth! Now, now he has disappeared - for what reason? Where is he - what is he up to - eh?’

Neither of his subordinates appeared to be possessed of further ideas. Gathering up the sheaf of photographs, Tortyev bundled them into his arms, and made for the door.

‘Holokov - come with me. I want this face processed by the central computer - now! This man is dangerous, and I want to know who he is. The central registry of known or suspected agents may give us some clue as to his real identity.’ He turned to Filipov. ‘Get in touch with our people in the British Embassy, Filipov. Give them my authority for your enquiries, and tell them it’s urgent. I want to know who Orton’s contact is - and I want to know now!’

Filipov nodded, but the door had already closed behind the inspector and his fat assistant trailing in his wake. Filipov picked up one photograph that Tortyev’s sweeping arms had failed to gather, and looked down at it. By chance, it was a photograph of Gant in the persona of Orton, rather than Fenton. He seemed to study it for a moment, turning it in his fingers, letting the face catch the light from the striplight overhead. Filipov’s dark, swarthy features were harrassed, his shoulders bowed with concern.

Filipov knew that it would take only a little time if Tortyev began to ask questions of the KGB informants who worked in the kitchens, the corridors and the typing-pool of the British Embassy, a little time before he began to realise that there were a multitude of connections between Edgecliffe and Lansing at the Embassy and the man in his persona as Orton. Fenton was SIS, based in London. He had come to Moscow this time undisguised, an ordinary tourist with a package holiday, and had gone to ground in the Embassy only an hour or so before his death - re-emerging briefly as Orton. Someone might have seen him, made the connection. They might even discover that the substitute for Fenton on the package holiday, now moved on to Leningrad, was not the man who arrived at Cheremetievo from London.