'Of course. You will not stop me.'

'I - have to . . .' Vorontsyev, as if threatened, let his hand move from the table.

Gorochenko smiled. 'No you won't, Alexei.' His eyes hardened their gaze. 'Look at yourself. You have spent the last ten years working your way up in an organisation you have not questioned, whose nature you have largely ignored. That, and being an emotional spendthrift at the expense of a tart. You have no capacity to stop me - because you have no perception of any concerns larger than me. You came to save me. Admit it. Perhaps from my own foolishness, perhaps from your organisation. The one thing about which you are certain is that I must go on living ...'

It was the experience of being told of your contemptibility by a beloved, the revelation of despite where he thought there was love. Like Natalia's flaunted lovers. Perhaps deeper.

He flinched away from it. Get back to the debate. He said, 'You are beaten, Mihail Pyotravich. Praporovich and Dolohov have been eliminated. How can you do anything ?'

Gorochenko looked at the telephone, the only object, other than his big hands, on the table. He said, 'There is all the power I need. One telephone call - and the change of leadership occurs today, the conquest of Scandinavia is only a matter of time.'

'You mean to go on, then ?' Vorontsyev was appalled, despite the fact that he knew Gorochenko was unyielding, determined.

'Of course. As I said - it is a simple matter of a telephone call.'

'I won't let you make it!'

'How will you stop me, Alexei? You have no moral or political reason for doing so. Have you ? What is it ? Loyalty to the state ? To the KGB ?'

'Perhaps.'

'Foolish. You have no loyalties. Your work has been an anodyne, an escape from your personal life. You are just a bureaucrat disguised as a policeman. A clerk.'

'Are you so certain ?' He was pleading. Gorochenko despised him, and he could not bear it.

'Yes, Alexei. I love you, you are my son. But you are not a man of vision or faith. Which is why you cannot stop me. You have nothing to outweigh the love you have for me, the debt you owe me. I don't say this in contempt, but in understanding.' He reached his hand forward across the table, but Vorontsyev snatched his own hand away from the gesture like a sulking child, shaking his head as he did so. He was near to tears, and hated the truths he had been told, the hollowness his own father had exposed; hated the way in which his ego had been assaulted, and the superiority his father had displayed. He could not admit all those things, could not.

'Why are you doing it - why ?'

It was a distraction, and he saw that Gorochenko knew it.

'I believe. Do you understand that? I believe in the old dream of revolution. That is why.'

'You want power - that's all. Just greedy for power they never gave you!'

'Stupid,' Gorochenko murmured, but two spots of colour appeared on his cheeks. 'You do not understand. To have been alive in the twenties, and to see the whole country turned into a shit-pile by Stalin and Beria and the NKVD! Terror as the normal experience for millions 1 Can't you see any of it} 43'

Alexei ?' He half-rose, then sat down heavily, as if winded. But his voice was dear as he went on. 'I swore, every time I saw an empty chair at a Politburo meeting - every time I heard of another purge, every time a new, subservient face appeared on a committee or in the Secretariat - I swore I would survive, and I swore I would do what I could, when I could. I have waited a very long time. But now it will be done, for all those who died.' He clenched his fist. 'The people were at his throat when the Fascists invaded Russia! He was almost finished!' His voice cracked, then, more calmly: 'It has taken me another thirty years. A long time.'

'Stalin died thirty years ago.'

'What he did to weaken the Soviet Union did not die, Alexei. Now we have detente, another way of dying slowly.'

Vorontsyev was appalled. He seemed unable to absorb the successive shocks of his father's obsessive determination. None of the previous revelations immunised him against those which followed. It was a drill breaking through to the living nerve each time.

'You're mad.' Gorochenko smiled. Vorontsyev felt rage boil in him at the continuing superiority that smile symbolised. He drew his gun, and it lay heavy and black on the edge of the table. Gorochenko looked at it unflinchingly. 'I'm going to stop you. I'm arresting you.' Then he added, lashing out like a child: 'And you're not my father!'

Gorochenko rubbed at his cheek, as if the blow had been a physical one. He looked at his watch.

'I have only a little time left to wait. And you are not going to arrest me.' He seemed so certain, of everything.

'I am! I am! You're a traitor! My father - my real father -would have hated you for this!'

Gorochenko groaned, and passed a hand across his face. But it was as if he was afraid of something in himself, rather than of the rejection Vorontsyev proffered.

'No, he would not, Alexei.'

'He would, he would!' Vorontsyev was no longer conscious of his grotesque approximation to the voice and manner of a child. He crowed: 'My father was a hero! He would have despised you for what you're doing. You're a traitor!' The cliches comforted and strengthened him. They gave him a sense of existence to some purpose. An armour against Gorochenko's words.

'Alexei!' It was a command. Vorontsyev watched him, shamefaced. Gorochenko seemed engaged in some silent debate, then to relent to some inner decision. 'Very well,' he said. 'Very well. I swore - perhaps an oath as the one I took every day of the Stalin years - never to tell you this. But I will.'

'What ? More bogeymen ?' Vorontsyev sneered.

'If you like.' The old man's face was ancient now, filled with bitter wisdom. He reached into a breast pocket. Vorontsyev watched the hand carefully. It came out holding a letter - an old, stained letter with fluff in the creases where it had been folded for years.

'Read this,' Gorochenko said carefully. 'It's from your father.'

'Where is he now?9 Aubrey flipped the transmitter's switch, and heard the crackle of the radio in the spotter helicopter.

'A couple of miles outside Heinola, still moving fast.'

'You're experiencing no difficulty in keeping track of him 'None at all, sir.' Philipson was up in the Finnish Police helicopter which had picked up the fleeing Volvo less than ten miles north-east of Lahti only minutes before. The helicopter had been based in Lahti - a piece of good fortune for which Aubrey was grateful. He glanced at his own map.

'Where can he go when he gets there ?'

'North again.'

'Very well. Alert ground units - talk direct to the Police Chief via their channel. No interference.' Aubrey switched the set to receive, and turned round in the operator's swivel chair to face Anders. He appeared like an abandoned, betrayed child, or a worried parent. Aubrey could not decide which, but his concern for Buckholz was evident.

Anders was staring at the set. 'You want to try Moscow again, sir?'

'Not after the last little snub, thank you, Anders. If Chairman Andropov is unavailable, he will remain so. Hell tell us soon enough if he's succeeded in finding Gorochenko.'

'He hasn't succeeded, has he ?'

'No Anders, - I'm afraid he hasn't. All we can do is hope the coup will fizzle out - or he's got Druzhinin or somebody to order other units into defensive positions - ' Anders was scowling. 'I agree, Anders. It does seem unlikely.'

'So - what the hell does Khamovkhin matter ?'

'He is the elected head of the government of the USSR,' Aubrey said with no trace of irony. 'He must be kept alive. We simply cannot afford to let him be killed. Your President has made that more than dear.' He looked at his watch. Four-forty.

'The more he runs, the more that guy is going to realise he has nowhere to go,' Anders observed.

'I know that, Anders!' Aubrey snapped. He studied the map. 'Now, where can he go ? Get my driver in here.'

The smile on the driver's face was inappropriate, but Aubrey recognised it not as self-importance or amusement, but derived from the experience they had shared escaping from the ambush in Helsinki - when Waterford had been killed.

'Quickly, Fisher - tell me where they could go. They're here at the moment.'