Novetlyn smiled.

'It isn't even today. I shan't tell him his new nickname - it is appropriate. He's a shit when he's not interrogating, you know.'

'So are you.'

'Very well - back to the cot, and to the foetal position you are increasingly adopting, and no doubt the thumb in the mouth. Don't wet the blanket. Your guard might laugh.'

He pressed the buzzer beneath his desk, to summon the guard.

Khamovkhin slumped in his chair, and poured himself a large whisky. He spilt some of the liquid on his waistcoat, muttered a curse, then ignored it as the dark stain spread. His mind was so exhausted by the day that he did not consider the symbolic properties of the stain.

The helicopter flight over the sixty miles from the centre of Helsinki had been a final strained weariness after the other events of the day - a hammering metal box around him, shadowed by two other helicopters, and a flight path patrolled on the ground and in the air all that day. It had drained him, so that an aide remarked on his health, behind his back, to one of the security men who had surrounded him since this morning.

Now, even the walls of the Lahtilinna - the sixteenth-century castle frequently used for prominent political visitors to Finland, even for meetings by visiting heads of state with the President and Prime Minister - failed sufficiently to enclose him, rid him of the day-long sense of exposure, of helplessness.

The castle overlooked the Vesijaarvi, squatting on a hillside above the lake, three miles outside Lahti itself. A fortress it still was; except to him.

He could barely remember the rapturous applause with which his address to the Finnish Parliament had been greeted. Politically, it had been a fitting climax to a day of success. Lunch with the President, in the company also of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, a tour through the streets - here he had refused, politely but insistently, to undertake a fashionable 'walkabout' - and there had been crowds, enthusiasm more marked than curiosity. Yes, it was good, and seen to be good. Everywhere the cameras, the flash of bulbs, the chatter of commentators.

A little fat old man in a little room. His imagination insisted on that, and on the vulnerability of the body, and the title, and the power. All vulnerable.

A decoded transmission from Andropov lay on the eighteenth-century writing-desk behind him. He had glanced at it, but could not turn past the first sheet, as if the paper burned him. Nothing, and more nothing. But, oppressively closer the threat - a KGB Office blown up somewhere by pretend-dissidents.

A knock at the door. Smile, smile, he thought - then a moment of fear, distrust of his own voice, more whisky to unfreeze the chords.

'Yes?'

'Security report, Comrade First Secretary.'

'Who is it ?'

'Captain Ozeroff, sir.'

'Come in.'

Galakhov opened the door, and saw Khamovkhin seated at the writing-table, presenting his back to him. He knew that it was bluff, saw the deep impression of the man's body in the cushion on the armchair. Khamovkhin was frightened, had been all day from the talk of the daytime security team that had accompanied him to Helsinki. He closed the door behind him, and stood to attention. Khamovkhin went on reading something, then turned to him. Galakhov admired the strength that appeared in the square face, the ruddiness of accustomed power.

'Yes, Captain ?'

'Your daily security digest, sir.' He proffered the file.

'Thank you.' Khamovkhin indicated a low table before the fireplace, and Galakhov placed the file on it. 'I - may take a walk by the lake later, Captain. Bear that in mind in your -security patrols, would you ?'

'Sir.'

'They tell me it's quite beautiful here.'

'Sir - but it's hard to see it that way when you're on duty.'

'Hard for me, too, young man.' Khamovkhin's gaze seemed to penetrate, question, understand - just for an instant. Then there was nothing but an old man's rheumy eyes and tired, baggy folds of skin beneath them. 'Thank you, Captain. You may go.'

'Sir.'

Galakhov smiled to himself as he closed the door behind him. The officer on duty at a desk in the chilly corridor, looked up and said, 'The old boy still jittery ?'

'Not so you'd notice. I think he feels safer here.'

'Good.' The man looked at his watch. 'I'm off duty in an hour. See you in the bar - you can tell me all about London. Years since I was there.'

'Sure,' Galakhov replied, walking away down the corridor.

The KGB office in Khabarovsk was a ragged hole in the grey facades along Komsomolskaya Square. A bitter wind blew sleet into Vorontsyev's chilled features, and scattered a lying whiteness over the charred, smashed array of spars and frames that had once been a four-storey shipping office, the second and third floors of which had been the security HQ.

The wind sought through Vorontsyev's heavy sheepskin coat, down its turned-up collar, and the damp of the ground struck through the thick fur boots. He shifted his feet again, to warm them, and the powdered fragments of glass crunched under his steps. There was no longer even a wisp of smoke from the fires the bomb had started to suggest that anything recent had happened. It was old wreckage, the black stumps of teeth in an ancient jaw.

The explosion had torn out the sides of the buildings on either side of the shipping office. He looked up, his eyes squinting against the wind-blown sleet, and saw an office desk leaning drunkenly out over black space. Apparently, a secretary had been sitting there. Flying glass had decapitated her. He had not seen the body.

Alongside him, respectful and silent, stood Inspector Seryshev of the Khabarovsk Police. He was in a uniform overcoat and cap, and his ears were red with cold, like his nose. Occasionally, he murmured deferentially as if afraid to cough, and shifted his booted feet. He was a middle-aged man, careful of his pension and his prospects, and he knew that the younger man was a Major in SID and that it behoved him to stand alongside him for as long as Vorontsyev remained.

Vorontsyev said, turning to him so that his pale face was lit by the flashing red light on the police car, 'Why the hell were there only seven in the KGB team here ?'

Seryshev shrugged without taking his hands from his pockets.

'You should know the answer to that one, Major.' He observed what he considered an appropriate deference, sensing that Vorontsyev would react unfavourably to a greater obsequiousness, and because he could not overcome the habitual lack of fear the KGB inspired five thousand miles from Moscow Centre.

'I don't know! A town of nearly half a million, and there are seven KGB men to look after it.'

'Don't forget we're here too,' Seryshev muttered.

'What happens in the summer - tourists ?'

'The KGB come in with the Intourist guides. More of them here, then. Bloody uncomfortable, being out here otherside. Military District, too - the GRU are more than enough to make up for the absence of your lot.'

'Are they?' Vorontsyev said musingly, and Seryshev decided not to enquire. 'Tell me about the Separatists. What sort of information do you have on them ?' He rounded on the policeman as if he expected to be told lies, or fed excuses. His face was drawn with cold and with anger. And perhaps something, something like fear, Seryshev decided, even though he could not understand such a feeling.

Seryshev looked around at the forensic team poking among the wreckage of the shipping office while he replied. Four hundred pounds of explosive - it could be as much as that. He shook his head. There were still some bodies in there - or parts of things that had once been people.

'No fuss just lately,' he said. 'About eighteen months ago, one or two minor incidents ...'

'Any with bombs ?'

'One. A car blown up. No one injured.'

'What else ?'

'Some nameless threats - leaflets, banners. One or two arrests.'

'Anybody special ? What's the set-up ?' Vorontsyev, despite his indifference to Seryshev, felt an anger which he could not define welling up in him, so that his throat was constricted. It was as if he suddenly sensed the distance between himself and Moscow; was one of the men who had died. Certainly angry on their behalf.