A hollow success.

The department was the most exclusive and powerful in the security service. It investigated the Politburo, the armed forces, the KGB itself - if and when necessary.

He had avoided social occasions during the past few weeks. He could not explain why the pressure upon his ego, his self-confidence, had grown so acute and painful during that time. But it had happened. So that he expected his suits, expensive and non-Russian, not to fit him when he put them on in the mornings. There was this physical sense of being smaller, diminished. And he could not speak of it to anyone.

Only Mihail Pyotravich might understand - but even he would be without sympathy, would despise him. The lip would curl, and something like a cast or cataract possess the eye. He could not tell his step-father - though undoubtedly the Deputy Foreign Minister already knew the full extent of the estrangement.

His stomach twisted with the knowledge, and the body revolted again against the surge of thoughts and imaginings. He was truly powerless; the woman dominated him, humiliated him, treated him with contempt - lately lived apart from him, paraded her lovers in public; and he was powerless.

Sometimes, he thought he might go mad. It had been as if he could smell other men on her skin when she came home. And, should he taste her skin now, he would taste three other mouths that had explored her, teasing at each secret part of her he had once believed only he possessed.

The thought of her body tormented him - it was an accurate description; tormented. He still wanted her.

Impossible.

His own infidelities disgusted him. He was amazed that he ' still felt he was betraying her and the vows that he had made silently, though the Soviet ceremony did not require them. His mother had claimed that the father he had never known had made such vows. He could not have done otherwise.

He turned from the window. There was silence beyond the door of his office. His secretary would have already left, and perhaps the others on his floor would have abandoned their offices. He turned the files on his desk with his hand, flicked at the spools of tape. He had been transferring recorded reports to cassette prior to storage in the files. And then the assessment of that week's documentation for his superiors. An assessment that would go directly to the Deputy Chairman of the KGB responsible for the SID.

He would leave it until tomorrow. The reports of the agents seemed unpromising. The movements of a Red Army Colonel-General during four days' leave in Moscow seemed of little significance. And the man would be returning to his duties at HQ, Far East Military District the next morning. Deputy Kapustin had laid emphasis on its importance, but it seemed little more than routine.

He yawned, a nervous reaction. He could sense the details slipping from him even as he dwelt on the matter.

He went back briefly to the window. The sodium lamps along the quay were hazy globes of light. An icy fog was beginning on the river. The Moskya slid beneath it, flecked with lights from the Gorki Park on the opposite bank. Beyond its dark patch he could see the straight ranks of the lights along the Lenin Prospekt.

He sighed, bundled the tapes and files into his desk, and locked the drawer. Then he let himself cautiously out of the office, as if he had no honest business there, his body adopting involuntarily a humiliating posture - cowardly. As if it feared laughter in the shadowy corridor.

The Kremlin office of the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a large, somehow bare, room. It was screened from the apparatus of government by two outer offices. As he paused at the last door, his hand raised to supply a perfunctory knock - the night security staff had informed the First Secretary of his arrival - Chairman of the Committee for Stale Security Yuri Andropov could already envisage the room. It bore none of the terrible blankness of the office hi the days of Stalin, when the room had a plasticity to its visitors that could make it cathedral or oven, depending on the Leader's mood and the force of the visitor's imagination. Now it was simply a large room, with a huge and ornate desk at the far end. Carpet now silenced the footsteps of those who approached the First Secretary, and there were armchairs, some occasional tables - a visible concession to the decade, and to the character of the man who waited for him.

He opened the door. First Secretary Khamovkhin turned from the huge carved fireplace where a pile of logs burned brightly, and Andropov noticed the drink in his hand. There was Scotch for him, too, in a heavy tumbler on one of the small tables. The two men shook hands warmly, and Khamovkhin gestured Andropov to a chair. He sat down heavily himself, his double-breasted jacket undone, flopping open to reveal the swell of the stomach beneath the striped shirt. Sensing the Chairman's eyes on him, Khamovkhin smiled tiredly, raising his glass and encouraging Andropov to drink.

There was a formality about the occasion inseparable from any meeting between them. As if their minds minced carefully round the obstacles in the room, flicked between the lumber that scattered their responsibilities and their public lives.

Khamovkhin suddenly focused his eyes, and rapped out, 'Am I - too suspicious, Yuri ?'

Andropov was silent for a long time. If he gave the correct answer at that moment, the matter would recede, no one would be blamed, and the whole business would be forgotten.

'No,' he said finally. 'That would be the easy way out - for both of us. Would it not ?'

Relief, and regret. The First Secretary rubbed his prow of a nose with thumb and forefinger. He stared into his glass, then looked up. 'I suppose not. No easy escapes, eh?' He laughed. The firelight flickered on the steel frames of the Chairman's spectacles; made the lenses two blank moons for a moment. Then Khamovkhin saw the determination of the eyes as the head adjusted slightly.

'We - have to take it seriously, don't we, Feodor ? You sign a document in Helsinki in nine days' time whereby the Soviet Union agrees to significantly reduce its nuclear arsenal, strategic and tactical - and cuts the throat of its own conventional forces. We know it, the Politburo has agreed it, and the Army is beside itself with anger.'

Khamovkhin was puzzled by the tone. His brows drew together, and his eyes became lidded. Andropov thought him an animal retreating into cunning as its enemies surprised it.

'You are a member of the Politburo - you agreed to it.'

'Naturally. We have no choice. Two bad harvests in three years, crippled by the defence budget - China determined to supplant us bidding for the favours of the West... What else is to be done but follow President Wainwright's line of least opposition ?'

'Secretly, you don't like it?'

'Do I have to ? It's all right, Feodor, it's not my direction in which you need to look. The Army hates the KGB as much as it hates the Politburo.'

'We are agreed on that, at least - my friend.' He smiled, but almost immediately his face darkened once more. 'But -nothing ? You still know nothing, with time so short ?'

He stood up, and loomed over Andropov suddenly. Then he took their tumblers to the cabinet, filled them, then sat down again. He stared into his drink, into the fire, then into Andropov's eyes.

'We cannot show our hand, Feodor. How many of us are there ? Even the whole of the KGB . . . Not sufficient, if we push them to some precipitate move.'

'When will they make their move - dammit, when? You should know!' 'The most appropriate time would seem to be, Feodor, while you are engaged upon your State visit to Finland, when you leave Moscow in three days' time!'

Khamovkhin was stung by the concealed accusation. His hands bunched on the material of his trousers, worked there for a few moments as if throttling something invisible. Then he forced himself to sit back in his chair, appear relaxed, certain.

'You may be right. I - have to go. Very well, Yuri, I shall be well out of it, if anything - happens. I admit that. But I am known to be going. I cannot alter my arrangements . . .' He tried to laugh. 'It might be considered braver to be skulking in Helsinki than in Moscow!'

'It might. But it is the excuse they may be looking for. The Army High Command ...' Andropov continued, breaking the moment of false confidence like a stick in his hands '. . . will see it as an opportunity not to be lightly missed. At least, that is my opinion.'

'Then find them. Find the leaders - arrest them!'

'And provoke the very thing we wish to avoid ? The High Command is edgy - I might almost say, desperate, about this Helsinki agreement. If it is signed, there will be no going back for us. The Army will be melted down - a missile become a shotgun. That is how they see it. And America is waiting to see us go through with what we promise. We're in the cleft stick, Feodor. At least, I will be when you have left for Helsinki.'

'Then find them. Find a way of proving who is involved what exactly they plan to do, and when. Then -finish them !' 'Easy to say,' was Andropov's reply as he sipped at his whisky. 'Easy to say.'

Alex Davenhill switched off the engine of the Porsche, and Aubrey was grateful for the silence. The swishing of the rain under the tyres, the throatiness of the engine - even the speed at which Davenhill drove - had all conspired during their journey to Hereford to irritate and depress him. He resented inhabiting the sleek, expensive shell of Davenhill's car, just as he resented the cheerful flamboyance of the man's conversation and behaviour. He had decided that he felt old tonight -and determined not to be roused from his irritated contempt for his companion.

'Right, Kenneth, shall we go up and see the sinister Major Waterford ?'

'I see no other reason for having travelled for two hours in this wingless jet aircraft.'

'Don't be so crabby, Kenneth dear,' Davenhill laughed, opening the door and climbing out. The noise of the rain loudened, and Aubrey felt cold. Davenhill came round the car and opened his door. Aubrey made an old man's fuss about climbing out of the low, comfortable seat, Davenhill holding his arm. 'Come along, Auntie,' he said with a grin.

Aubrey straightened himself, and turned up the collar of his dark coat. Davenhill looked at the facade of the small hotel, across the street from the car park.

'I agree,' Aubrey said, as if mind-reading. 'Not a very prepossessing place. However, Major Waterford prefers it to SAS HQ just up the road.'

'He must have a penchant for the Gothic.'

'Bring those papers from the back seat, would you, Alex ?' Aubrey replied, scuttling off at a surprising speed to the shelter of the hotel porch. Davenhill took out a briefcase, locked the car, and crossed the splash of wet-lit street after Aubrey.

They climbed the stairs, Aubrey still in the lead. Alex Davenhill, unbuttoning his leather coat, smiled behind him, pleased to feel himself Aubrey's messenger-boy as an alternative to the unnatural stuffiness of most of his professional life as Foreign Office Special Adviser to the SIS.

Aubrey paused before a door that was merely a dull veneered sheet of hardboard, and knocked. Davenhill could see the tic of interest at the corner of his mouth, and composed his own features into an intelligent superiority. Aubrey had warned him not to bicker with Waterford; Davenhill eased his animosity towards the soldier into the back of his mind.

Aubrey heard a muffled voice through the door, and pushed it open. Davenhill followed him through into the cramped room with the hideous wallpaper, purple trumpeting mouths of flowers and wreathed stems on a yellow ground. The sight of it made him shudder.

Waterford was sitting in an armchair with soiled and frayed loose covers. He did not get up when they entered. Davenhill noticed that the single-bar electric fire was less efficient than the heater in his car.

'Mr Aubrey - Davenhill.' Aubrey took a chair opposite the SAS instructor. Alan Waterford was a big man, threatening the chair he sat in with his bulk. Davenhill decided once again that it was that fact that was most potent about the man -threat. A barely contained violence. His face, even now, was angry with a grimace that occupied mouth, eyes, jaw. The moustache seemed to jut at them, as if they had trespassed. Yet there was interest in the grey eyes, too. Davenhill perched himself on the edge of a rickety cabinet, the briefcase clutched, as if protectively, across his chest.