'Sir - can I help ?' Vorontsyev saw the eager, brave look in the girl's eyes, and shook his head. He was refreshed by her concern, but wanted no more of it at that moment.

'No, Alevtina. You may be in trouble already. I have to find my father. If anyone questions you, say I tricked you into this -' The girl shook her head.

'Don't worry about me, sir.'

Vorontsyev took his overcoat from a chair, put it on. Then scarf and gloves.

'Leave first, will you ? Just in case.'

'Sir. And good luck, whatever that means.'

'Thanks, Alevtina. Don't worry about me - ' He motioned the girl towards the door. She stared at him, as if to remember, then went out, turned to the left, and was out of sight. Vorontsyev gave her a few moments, then turned up his collar because the cafe was more crowded now with office workers and shoppers, and he could not be certain of the faces that bent over food or were masked behind newspapers and clouds of cigarette smoke.

He stood in the doorway of the cafe, watching the street, and the few parked cars, and the turning into Sverdlov Square. Then be headed for the nearest Metro station.

From where he stood, sipping coffee he had poured from a flask into the plastic beaker that was its screw-top, Mihail Pyotravich Gorochenko could see, at the other end of Red Square, the hideous bulk of St Basil's Cathedral. A slight shift in his stance at the tiny, dirt-coated window and he was able to see the towers and pinnacles of the Kremlin. Should he care to, to alleviate the tense, wearing boredom that must at some time assail him, he could recite the names of each.tower. For the moment, he stared over the high walls, seeing some distant parts of the gardens. The bare trees, the ordered borders of now bare earth, the patches of thawing snow on the grass, the straight, rulered walks.

What was it Ivan the Terrible had done to the architects of St Basil's he wondered as he shifted his gaze. Bunded them so they couldn't build another? Something of the sort.

He sipped noisily, the coffee wetting, the upper lip and the thick moustache. Far below him, the lunchtime crowds huddled along the square, the trolleys sparked and flashed, and shoppers hurried in and out of GUM. The serpentine queue outside the Lenin Mausoleum, all of whom appeared to be dressed in black, or dark-brown, waited patiently for admission.

A few people sat on the benches in that corner of the Alexandrovski Gardens that he could see from his high window.

The waiting was, he admitted, taking its toll. His eyes wandered over Red Square endlessly, like those of a drunken man lying on his back, not daring to focus for too long in case the room began to spin. Yes, like that. As if he could not look at any one thing out there for too long, in case his moral surroundings began to lurch sideways. He could not even look over the walls of the Kremlin for very long - he could not see Khamovkhin's office from where he stood - despite the hatred that it caused in his breast, hot, fiery like a cardiac pain.

Yet he had to go on looking out over the square, down at the tiny figures bustling - seeming to be blown by the wind that whistled at the grimy window. If he did not, then the megalomania assailed him - that or the fury of rage at still waiting, at the distant threat of Dzerzhinsky Street and his adopted son.

It was strange, he thought, that megalomania, a word in history books or psychologists' reports, was palpable like this. A mounting feeling like phlegm in the back of the throat, or extra air filling the lungs so that the chest strained out. A lightness in the loins. No mirrors, but the eyes seeing from just behind the head, shaping the figure consciously from that angle. He did not enjoy the feeling. In fact, he was ashamed of it, and feared it. If anything, he wished for the purer megalomania that might have been more readily available to a religious man. He was not. His purity of motive had to do with ideology, with politics - and they were not visionary like a religious faith, however desperately he had dung to them over the years.

But the megalomania - the strange sensations, the brimming - no, swelling of the brain in its case of bone - did not come when he looked down at the tiny, insignificant people, or even at St Basil's, or the Kremlin. It came when he did not look at them. When all he had was the perspective of the small, bare dusty room full of unopened crates and a small table on which resided a dust-free telephone whose wire ran across the bare boards to the wall-socket that had been fined for him -when that was his only perspective, then it was no bigger than himself. He inflated, weirdly, to fill the room, like a balloon.

The people, the buildings, in the street, gave him scale, perspective. And he had to have scale - otherwise he had no sense of anything outside himself, nothing but ambition, greed, love of cold power.

He had never thought himself like that, having those qualities. Only in a little way. He had tried, and succeeded, to think of himself as a servant, a conscience-keeper, an acolyte of his own ideology.

Was that a more dangerous megalomania, masked in humility? That would be a religious megalomania, perhaps? Sainthood, willed and purposed. Was that what he was ?

He shuddered, and concentrated his gaze downwards, watching one old - man or woman ? He couldn't tell from that angle, in those swaddling lumps of clothing. One old being, walking slowly and with difficulty, the wind plucking at coat-tails. He tried, very hard, to say - for you. For you. It did not work.

He looked, instead, at the serpent before the gates of bronze - he smiled at the vivid rhetoric. The queue of the faithful waiting to look on the mummified remains of V. I. Lenin in their glass box; too luridly lit, he had always considered. There were hundreds of them, even in winter. Nearly sixty years on.

For you, he said to himself. For you. There were more of them, a bulk of people, representative.

For you.

It seemed to ease the constriction in his chest, to free his breathing. He inhaled the dusty, prickling air and almost sneezed. He swallowed the last of his coffee, and looked over his shoulder at the telephone. There was a renewal of purpose. The destructive sense of his own motives had gone like a bout of nausea. But he felt stronger now, not weaker.

One telephone call. He could do it with one telephone call, at six the next morning. Valenkov, who had been a close friend of Kyril Vorontsyev - and who had been with him, as a junior officer, from Stalingrad to the outskirts of Berlin - he would answer the telephone, and receive the command, and in his turn issue the commands to the Moscow Garrison . . .

One telephone call and - he looked across the Kremlin walls - he would start again. It would start again. The new beginning.

He closed his eyes in satisfaction, and was alarmed when an image jumped at him out of the red-spotted darkness behind his lids. Of Alexei Vorontsyev, as a child, holding his hand. The boy had bright red plastic boots, and was kicking up gouts of snow, and laughing.

He shook his head to dear it, and opened his eyes. The image retreated obediently.

Where was he ? Where was Alexei now ?

The apartment was in a block of Vosstaniya flats on the Kutuzovsky Prospekt, near the Ukraina Hotel, an elaborate wedding-cake, and the Comecon building a modern grey slab, hard-edged against the pale blue of the sky. The apartments had been built during the time of Stalin, when Anna Dostoyevna had been Minister of Culture and had had much to do with the design of the new city centre. She had chosen to live in one of the apartments in the Vosstaniya because her ministry had been connected with their design. When she had been allowed to resign quietly from the Politburo after losing Stalin's favour, she had remained in the apartment.

Vorontsyev remembered her from his childhood - a big, powerful woman with a deep voice, who frightened him. And he disliked her, too, because she seemed to occupy a place in Mihail Pyotravich's private world that should have belonged to his adoptive mother. He sensed, rather than knew, that Anna Dostoyevna was not Gorochenko's mistress in the conventional sense. Rather, she possessed an ideological bond with him, shared an intellectual community from which Goro chenko's wife was excluded.

Vorontsyev had found her name in the files, and remembered the intellectual intimacy that had once bound the two of them. And he had felt he might have found the answer.

He had digested the information in the files, as well as he could, in the washroom at the Komsomolskaia Metro Station, locked in a chilly cubicle, hearing the footsteps across the chequered riles outside, the whistling, the splashing of water.

When he had reduced the file to a list of possibilities, he had torn each sheet into shreds, then the file itself into scraps of blue card, and flushed them away. It had been a setting free of Gorochenko rather than a dismissal.

He had travelled on the Metro all afternoon, moving from station to station, making only one, or at most two, calls from any one place. Slowly, he had crossed through all the names on the list, all the places Gorochenko might be, until he had come to the apartment on the Kutuzovsky Prospekt.

Because it was the last name, and he was dog-tired now, and crazed with futility, he was certain that Gorochenko would be there; yet knowing that he would not be with anyone whose name was in the file under 'Known Associates'. Yet, caught as he now was in the pattern of this action, from file to contacts to the elimination of possibilities - he was unable to envisage other possibilities, other patterns.

He did not even know, he realised, what Gorochenko was any more. He was a collection of facts and observations that led nowhere. His Surveillance Log was impeccable - he simply could not be, without additional information, the man Kutuzov. Further back, in the thirties and forties, he was a natural survivor, along with Molotov and Gromyko, in a Politburo periodically purged and decimated by Stalin's psychotic suspicions. When had he changed, when achieved another, and radical, view of the Revolution?

Vorontsyev had abandoned the attempt to understand Gorochenko.

He pressed the doorbell of the apartment. Would she explain his father to him? Would she know where he was?

Vorontsyev realised that the former question had become more pressing - that the afternoon had left him barren of investigatory technique or desire. He only wanted to understand.

He was dangerously in sympathy with Gorochenko now, he perceived; it might prevent him ever finding the man.

She was shrunken, but perhaps he had expected the child's perspective, to have to look up into the strong face. She was perhaps five feet ten, dressed in a sweater and cardigan and a drab start of thick wool. Her stockings were thick and dark, and her shoes stout. She looked like a schoolteacher. Her eyes behind the wire-framed spectacles were sharp with a glistening suspicion.

He showed her the ID card, and she involuntarily backed half a step, and her hand gripped the edge of the door so that the ringers whitened. He said, 'Comrade Dostoyevna - might I speak with you ?' She was suspicious of the careful neutrality of tone, the implication that she possessed choice.

'What is it, Comrade Major?' An old inflection, one she must have used many times during the years when Stalin let her live on in anonymity. 'What do you want ?'

Involuntarily, as if without will, she had opened the door a little more. He stepped forward, and she seemed to retreat silently from the door, spectrally backing towards the lounge. He closed the door behind him, looking at her all the while as at an old film. Cheka, NKVD, MVD, KGB - they were all the same, her posture informed him.

The lounge was sparse yet comfortable. A great many books, one or two blunt, square pieces of statuary and furniture that was old but which had been carefully repaired and recovered. She had never married, he knew. On one low table near the sagging sofa there was a big metal ashtray such as might have come from a bar or restaurant, full of stubs and ash. And one smoking cigarette she picked up with a quick, swooping gesture as if he might have appropriated it.

'What is it ?' she said, standing in front of a packed bookcase of dog-eared Russian paperbacks. It lent her solidity, and he suspected that she knew it. Her mind had always been for midable; the books were an assurance of her personality and her past. She was nervous, but seemed calmed to some degree by his quiescence.

'May I sit down?3 She gestured to an armchair recently recovered in a floral pattern of browns and golds. A threadbare patch of carpet seemed to have slid out from beneath it. He said, 'I want to talk to you about - my father ...' It was the only way to inject a sincerity, a lack of officialdom which would cause her to close like a shell, into the room. 'Not Kyril -Mihail Pyotravich.'

'What - is the matter with him V It was a selfish question, he saw. Her hands brushed her body, as if admitting its age, as if only illness and infirmity could involve someone she had known a long time ago.

'He is not ill,' he said. She seemed to resent it, and puffed at her cigarette. He noticed that the cardboard tube of the cigarette had been flattened by the pressure of anxiety. 'No - I have to find him, Anna Ilyevna.' He recalled patronymic from the files. 'I have to find him very urgently.'