Vorontsyev settled in the single easy chair - his team were stiff and upright on dining-chairs from the other room. He said, 'Alevtina, what's new ?'

'Nothing, sir,' the girl said, correctly, almost primly.

'Sent the bill for your coat to Tortyev, have you ?' Ilya asked.

'I have,' she snapped. Then, to Vorontsyev, who was smiling: 'We can't trace anything suspicious in his contacts -and no one saw him that night. This is a dead-end, sir.'

'Naturally. He wasn't mugged for his wallet. All right - his history. He's been on the Finland border for two, three years. In charge of a section of the wire. Overall security. You know how the Border Guard works - compartments, autonomously run, but with a central co-ord.'

'Then is he being used in his capacity as a Border Guard officer, or as something else ?' Pyotr's mind seemed to unclog as he asked the question. There was just a dull patch of brain at the front of his head now, solid as an undigested dinner.

'As a Border Guard - what for ?'

'Doesn't it depend what this Finland Station is supposed to mean ?' Alevtina remarked. Vorontsyev looked at her carefully. The girl never started hares.

'Explain.'

'What I wondered, sir, was whether it was just his code, or the code for something bigger.'

'Bigger ? In what way ?'

'What are we dealing with, sir - revolution, or something else ? We are dealing with the Army, aren't we ?'

'We are. But it's the revolution aspect that we have to be concerned with here - so where does Vrubel fit into that setup ? I can't believe that a Border Guard Captain is behind a revolution! Can you?' Ilya shook his head. 'Quite. However, we are going to divide our strength, as of now. What we have to know is what the set-up along his stretch of the wire is. Know everything. His men, their attitude, his movements, and the like.'

'You know what you're saying, sir ?' Maxim said. 'You are suggesting that he's concerned in some kind of border crossing ...'

'Don't talk rubbish!' Pyotr burst out, then saw Vorontsyev's unamused features. 'Sorry.'

'Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it ?' he said. 'But - is it ? I want to know. Which is why I'm going to Finland in the morning -at least, to the border. Deputy Kapustin has placed this team in charge of the Vrubel business - run everything down. You four will stay here, and branch out as much as necessary over the next couple of days - tracking down any lead suggested by his contacts, his background, his behaviour-pattern.'

Not one of them uttered an audible protest. Then Pyotr said, 'This is while we're checking on your Rogues' Gallery, sir?'

'Yes. I want you to concentrate on Vrubel, but on the others as well, taking two each for the moment. When I get back from Finland, I'll take on the other two myself - Ossipov and Praporovich.'

'We can presume that Vrubel knew a lot - otherwise why try to kill you when you tailed him ?'

'That may have been already set up - witness the body of the old sod in the black coat. I wonder whether Vrubel wasn't laying for me all the time ? However, I can't see it. We assume no one else knew of our suspicion that Ossipov had a double...'

'Hundreds of people did, by the time we started asking questions. Vrubel was in the KGB. So are a lot of others who must be helping!' Maxim said, his eyes staying fixed on the wall-chart that Vorontsyev had drawn.

'Agreed. It could be anyone. Which is why we have to turn up something, and soon. Some common factor.'

'How widespread is it, sir ?' Ilya asked. 'I mean, you don't need much to knock over the Politburo, not if you're using tanks.'

'True. Moscow Military District could supply more than enough - even a nice airborne assault on the Kremlin!'

'What a bloody mess that would be!'

Vorontsyev smiled thinly, then went on: 'So, we have to gain some kind of inside knowledge of Moscow District without arousing suspicion. But, if it's Moscow, then why Ossipov - he's at the other end of the world ? And why Vrubel -he was based a thousand miles away ? And all the others. What of them?'

He napped his hands on his thighs, an audible disturbance in the sudden silence.

'We're going to make a lot of noise doing this, sir,' Ilya offered unhelpfully.

'I know. We can't afford low profile, but we have to look like a small and isolated group, just making enquiries. Remember that. We can't afford to trigger off the thing we're trying to prevent.'

'But, sir -' Ilya again. 'Do you really think that a revolution is on the cards ? It's impossible, surely ?'

'Is it ? Not if the Army does it, surely ? Can you see the Air Force bombing their comrades in the tanks, or the fleets shelling Moscow from the Baltic ? It only needs a little push -and what is there to tumble down ? The Politburo, the Kremlin clique - and MS! Do you fancy taking on a T-72 with a 9 mm pistol, Ilya ?'

'I see.'

'All of you - do you see ? All they need to do is to take and hold the centre. If they're sure of enough Army support from the other Military Districts. Then no one could touch them. The KGB swept away, and replaced by some military police organisation, and the Kremlin in the hands of the Marshals. It's easy - as long as it's the Army doing it!'

His face had gone bright with perspiration and effort. He wanted the best out of them. They were young, and the system was their safe, warm womb. He had to show them how unsafe the whole thing was when threatened by an army. The Red Army.

'But why would they want to do it ?'

Vorontsyev paused, then looked at each face - each clean, scrubbed, confident face. They seemed so young, and incapable of being hurt, or believing themselves mortal. And a mental consideration that might have been going on beneath the conscious surface seemed to clarify, achieve a peroration. Those faces in front of him in the untidy room dazzled him with insight.

'You four - not one of you believes in anything - right ?' They appeared puzzled, grins starting and fading like little glimpses of sunlight. Alevtina looked quizzical, but as if she teetered on the edge of his own realisation. 'You don't read Lenin, you don't read Lenin, you don't remember Stalin, or the War against the Fascists - think about being in Berlin, in the grounds where they found the petrol-soaked corpses -' He felt the rhetoric whirl up, speaking through Gorochenko's experiences, and what he knew of his own father's life. If he could suddenly understand, perhaps they could, too. 'Or rinding the thousands of lime-decayed bodies in the mass graves -Babi Yar and all the other places the SS had been. Go further back, remember the Civil War against the Whites, the hungers, the billions who've died since 1917. Think about these things when you buy your next bottle of malt whisky in the shop across from the Centre, or eat your subsidised breakfasts in the Centre canteen, or order a new suit from imported Italian cloth. Silk scarves, fur coats -' he added suddenly for the girl's benefit. 'It's a cushy number, brothers and sister. Without history. But these old buggers remember - and perhaps they still believe!

'Or maybe they're just not ready for their pensions, or to throw away their 88-22 toys and new bombers and reactor-driven aircraft-carriers. In the end, does it matter a toss whether they have a motive or not ? They may be doing it - and that's all that should worry us!'

Slowly, they looked at each other, then to him. Each one of them, as if present at some ritual, nodded to him. He sat back again, relieved. Then the telephone rang in the lounge. He had not switched the extension through. Ilya got up, and he waved him out.

The others got up, stretched, and began to study the faces on the wall. Vorontsyev tried to relax into the satisfaction of authority, to attend with a complacent half-ear to their comments, often ribald, frequently irreverent. Yet it was a hard quietude. What he had told them, the emphases he had placed, had frightened him, too. It was no longer easy to think in terms of wall-charts, pictures taken with the power of secret surveillance. If the Army was really engaged on a coup, then there was no stopping them - not if they had the agreement, even acquiescence, of the majority of senior commanders. Like those men on the wall.

Moscow would be no safer than Luanda, or Beirut. Except that the struggle would be short, and bloody - and the Army could not lose it.

'I'll take that hatchet-faced bastard, Timochenko!' Maxim said with delight, tugging the photograph from the wall. 'He once gave my cousin the shaft - I owe him!' It was said with amusement, and with an underlying enthusiasm.

'Don't frame him,' Pyotr laughed.

'I shan't need to!'

Ilya came back into the room at that moment. Vorontsyev turned to receive the message, still smiling at the enthusiasm of Maxim as he now hunted for the files on Timochenko, one of the two members of the Secretariat he had pinned to the wall. His smile vanished when he saw Ilya's white face - as if, he thought, only at that moment had the danger come home to him.

'What is it, Ilya?'

'Sir, that report on Ossipov and his staff from Khabarovsk KGB Office-'

'Well?'

'They're all dead - the office was blown to smithereens early in the morning - the off-duty team were murdered at home. Bombs . . .'

'What?'