Without looking at either of them, he said quietly, 'We are running to schedule, I take it ?' His tone implied that it would be their fault if they were not.

'We are.' The taller of the two men, and the one appearing more distinguished, more moneyed, seemed undisturbed by the tone of command in Galakhov's voice. His voice implied that Galakhov was in their hands now, and that they knew their part - did he ?

'Where is he now?'

'On his way here - the flight leaves in two hours. He left the Embassy a short while ago, driving himself here. There's a radio car downstairs, and he's being tailed.' Only in the exhaustive detail of the operation was the distinguished man betraying his subordinate role.

Galakhov nodded. 'Good. Where is the gun?'

'Concealed in the toilet - third cubicle along from the door. I still consider a gun the wrong method -'

'You consider ? Just do as you're told.'

The tall man was silenced. Then his companion, who seemed to have observed the exchange with truculent boredom, said, 'The blood on the floor, Comrade.' And Galakhov realised that the squat, dark-haired, badly-shaven man was effectively in charge of this part of the operation. He bridled at the insulting tone, but held his tongue. 'We do not want to have to explain, or to clean up after you. You will be up and away, Comrade, but we will still be here.'

'What do you suggest ?' Galakhov said quietly, restraining all feeling. 'And where ?'

'That's better.' Galakhov winced inwardly at the reversal of roles now so evident, and enjoyed by the dark man. Another of those occasions when he was nothing but an executive, a tool to be used by little men with hair coming from their ears and nostrils, and the cunning of foxes. All of them taking a tem porary royalty borrowed from Kutuzov. 'Stick to the original plan, Galakhov. You have an important message - trick him into the toilet, and kill him there - you've got two useful hands, if your file isn't out of date.'

Galakhov looked down at his hands, and looked up again, grinning.

'You're a pair of shits, you know that ?' he remarked, still grinning. The tall man bridled, but he saw an element of new respect in the way in which the dark man looked at him. Then he nodded.

'Very well. But do it our way - mm ?'

'Naturally. Where is the briefcase ?'

The tall man handed it over. Galakhov looked inside. A couple of slim files, and a sealed envelope bearing the stamp of the Trade Mission at the Soviet Embassy in London. It would lure the man they wanted to somewhere quiet so he could open it.

'You tell him there's an answer required.'

'Yes. What's his cover - what we expect ?'

'As far as we know, yes. You'll recognise him, anyway?' Galakhov nodded, placing the briefcase by his seat. 'He's still travelling as a Finn, returning to Helsinki, and his business. Export saunas, that's the line.'

'Good.' Galakhov looked at his watch, then said to the tall man, 'Get my change of clothes, and find out where he is as of this precise moment.'

There was no more than the hesitation of a moment before the tall man got up, and left them, heading out of the coffee shop with an admirably military bearing.

'Good front man,' Galakhov's companion murmured. 'Spent years in England. You should hear him in a pub.'

'Really ?' Galakhov remarked. 'I wondered what it was he did to any useful purpose.' He looked at his hands, then picked up his coffee cup, cradling it. The dark man, too, looked at Galakhov's hands.

Vorontsyev had not shaved. He was uncertain as to whether he had shaved the previous day or when he had left the hospital and returned to his cold flat. It might originally have been lassitude, or boredom. Now, he prowled the bare room that he called his study, the walls of which seemed to have enclosed him further, pressing on him with a brightness of maps, diagrams and his scrawled handwriting. He had not had time to wash, or clean his teeth. He was unsure as to how much sleep he had had, or the time at that moment.

His mouth, he noticed as he ran his tongue over his teeth, tasted awful. He had smoked too much. The air of the cramped study was thick and blue, and smelled of ashtrays - there were two big ones, one on the arm of an easy chair, the other on his small bureau, full of ash and stubs; and there were deposits of ash on the worn carpet, like the droppings of some desiccated bird.

He was still dressed in his old woollen dressing-gown - but he had replaced the thick striped pyjamas they had given him in the hospital with his own silk ones.

He was, strangely, not tired. Even though his head was thick, and seemed at times close to seizing like a cold engine; he was too excited, a tangible feeling in his stomach. He was no longer aware that he was merely duplicating what must be happening in dozens of offices in Moscow and other towns. With better facilities, better sources of information more easy to tap. He was alone, on sick leave, denned in a situation where he had surrounded himself with the blueprint of a system - the Soviet Union reduced to a problem to be solved on paper.

It satisfied him. His study, which seemed dusty and airless when he had first opened the door - hours, days ago ? - had become familiar again; almost a part of him. There was no private experience any more - no feelings at all except for the barometric effects on him of his deliberations. He was rid of self; he was merely a brain, a memory, an imagination -operating upon known facts, assumed realities.

One plain wall of the study was decorated with something that resembled a genealogical table. The power infra-structure of his country, his state. He had drawn it on a huge tablecloth of paper, held together with sticky tape, pinned high on the wall. It was carefully drawn in red felt pen - with touches of green and blue here and there.

Each box in the branching table was clearly labelled. It was partly for information; and part of its function was a treasure-map, a cipher.

Near the ceiling - he had had to climb painfully on to a hard chair, his bruises protesting, sweat breaking out because of the simple, repeated exercise - were four boxes, representing the Praesidium, the USSR Council of Ministers, the Politburo, and the Central Committee of the Party. The four organs of control. Around the Politburo and the Central Committee he had drawn blue boxes - the organs of decision making and real control.

The branches of the table that interested him, descending from these two boxes, were the Ministry of Defence, below it the main military council and the First Deputy Ministers; then, spreading like the fertility of some medieval king, the general staff, the High Command of the armed forces, and the various branches of the services, details describing their subdivisions more hurriedly scrawled beneath the boxes - because by that time he had become convinced that the military structure alone could not supply the answer to his problem.

From the Central Committee he had drawn a vertical line downwards to GLAVPUR, the Political Directorate of the armed forces, which was the Party's means of control over its huge war machine. An arrowed line descended from the GLAVPUR box, then slid leftwards beneath the sections of the services, dropping like seeds at each one, a symbol - the letters 'PS'. Each arm and branch of an arm of the Soviet armed forces possessed a Political Staff, responsible to GLAVPUR.

At that point, as he completed it, he left it; he did not need to add the GRU, Military Intelligence, which operated on the same infiltrated system as GLAVPUR; not the KGB, the Committee for State Security. He knew, too well, how that diagram would read, and he knew its intimate, unavoidable entanglement with the armed forces as with every aspect of Soviet Life. In the Politburo, the effective governing body, the KGB was represented by Andropov himself; on the Central Committee sat at least one KGB Deputy Chairman at any time; in the Praesidium and the Supreme Soviet, the titular government, the KGB was present. In the Secretariat, the Party's civil service and therefore present in every Ministry, there were KGB officers in civilian guise. And the GRU was operated by the KGB, subordinate to it.

He thought for a moment that he might have a clue, there and at that point. But it did not work. The whole of the GRU would have to have been suborned.

At that point, he had rested, sitting back in the armchair, staring at the system reduced to a chart - like the one that had been at the end of his hospital bed. This one measured the temperature of the state. He returned to the image of the king's genealogy. The fertile son was the KGB; his children were everywhere. And, because of that, nothing made sense. He had smoked, made a scrappy sandwich lunch, and drunk some beer.

The beer had grown warm and fiat hi the room, despite the temperature in the grey street outside the fugged window.

He tried to enter the matrix at a different point - went back to the files left with him by Deputy Kapustin. He had drawn the diagram, he admitted, out of arrogance. The brilliant candidate who requires no revision, no cribs supplied by an earnest, dim bookworm. But it had been stupid. He sorted the files, selected another wall, and pinned the photographs, one by one with a gallery's neat spacing, labelling each one with the name he found printed on the reverse.

It was as if Kapustin was an examiner at the training school, where Vorontsyev had first shrugged off the oppressive influence of Mihail Pyotravich Gorochenko, his adoptive father; where he had forgotten, for the first time, the privileged position that had made him envied, and disliked, at school and the Lenin University - which had paralysed his ability to decide his own future. Gorochenko had enlisted him in the KGB engineered it. The man, his real father's oldest and best friend, had made him safe. That had always been the strange feeling he had had - of being protected by Gorochenko, placed where he could inflict rather than be inflicted upon.

It was an examination, he thought, staring at the photographs later in the day, when the galleried neatness of rows of faces had become edited, and there were large gaps above scribbled names as the least suspect were removed, lying in a discarded, spread pile on the floor. And it had been as at first -when he had first revelled in the power of mind, of reasoning, and - yes, he admitted it, the secret nature of the work, the intrusive, spying quality of it. After the training school, he had found his identity, and could once more love his adoptive father, whose name he had never been forced to take. He was himself.

Until Natalia, and the way she rubbed off the acquired skin, wearing his identity away as she made him a cuckold, a jealous, suspicious, agonised fool whose work suffered, whose reputation began to decline.

He brushed aside the thought.

Ten photographs. Ten case-histories.

He had selected them carefully, only removing a face from the wall after much deliberation, cross-referencing in the files that had come from the cheap briefcase as from a cornucopia. Endless riches of detail; a ceaseless diet of collected observation. Six military men. Two members of the Politburo. Two members of the Secretariat. Not all the suspicious ones, just those best placed. Samples, really. If nothing transpired, then others . ..

Then that, too, seemed complete, and he blenched before the mass of documentation stretching back over twelve months. He sat in his chair, looking at a discarded photograph that had slipped from the arm. He picked it up, and smiled. A dead man; he had been the first to come off the wall, with a laugh at the hidebound attitude that included corpses in the ranks of the suspected.

Twelve months of detail - periods of leave, all journeys within the Soviet Union or countries of the Warsaw Pact; all committees, all social engagements, and contacts. Sexual indulgences. Digests of tape-recordings; contacts leading back to the old man who had spoken over the tapped phone of Group 1917. Private habits, reading material, exercise of the bowels, the dog, the digestion; holidays; second homes, financial records . . .

He had baulked at it, for the moment. Instead, he let his mind assume another tangent. The couriers.

For there had to be couriers. There could be no written or recorded messages or instructions. Word of mouth. Had it not been for Ossipov, then he would have concluded that the cell was tight-knit; after all, to achieve a coup, sudden and certain, would take only troops stationed in the Moscow Military District; no need to include Ossipov. Yet he was the one who had dodged his tail - been aware of it in the first place. Far East, based on HQ, Khabarovsk. Why was he necessary ?

The local KGB Resident had been altered, but as yet there was no report. It was one-horse outfits, in the east. Like frontier lawmen in American films, he thought. Far East was a military business, altogether. And suitably masked from heavy surveillance, therefore.

Couriers ?

Civil servants, GRU personnel - back to the problem of subversion. Not soldiers, no real freedom of movement there. Not the senior officers, too attractive to the magnet of surveillance, they. Someone, some group - able to move freely ?