Eventually, deep in the night, he stopped to rest, his breathing laboured as if to impress him with the body's exertions and the distance he had travelled. He unslung the pack and the rifle in its canvas sleeve, and set up the tiny gas heater. He brewed coffee, hunched in the darkness behind a fold of the land. The burdened trees leaned over the lip of the dell, as if in some fish-eye lens. He felt enclosed by the trees from the flatness and the flowing white curtains of the forest.
He cupped gloved hands round the mug and swallowed the coffee, grateful for the pungent taste. It shocked the palate, unfroze the mind. He could hear Waterford talking in his steely, precise tones, suggestive of a masked or restrained power — even a deep and bitter fury.
He knew something of Waterford's cavalier and even brutal army record, his connections on more than one occasion with the SIS. He allowed himself to laugh, a sound sharp as cracking wood in the silence and cold air, as he recollected the small, childish excitement he had felt as the briefing had begun. He had understood the crude exploitation of information in his CPP (Complete Personality Profile) by the senior man, yet he had been unable to quench the sudden warmth of the belly or control the shallowness of his breathing as the words separated him from others, acknowledged that he was the only suitable selection for the Snow Falcon thing.
Ski-training in Scotland, the hours in the gym, the shooting practice with unfamiliar weapons, the hurried Finnish instruction from a professional type — for a long month he had lived with that. And it had all been unexplained until that last meeting in Waterford's room. Then transport by Hercules to the NATO base at Tromsø.
He had tumbled through the door of the Wessex even as snow billowed out and blinded him and the helicopter pulled up and away, banking severely and heading back into Norway.
'What we want,' Waterford had said, 'is evidence, and the harder the better. That's why you have the camera. And you are expendable, Folley, and so is the mission in this instance. There'll be as many Snow Falcons as we need to find the answer.' The hard blue eyes had stared into his at that point. 'This isn't just suspicion, or pissing about trying to resurrect old networks or anti-regime movements in Eastern Europe. This may be now, and tomorrow. So, don't be too easily convinced, and don't miss anything, either. Find out if there's more than reindeer and a few Lapps infancy dress in Finnish Lapland these days I' As if he heard the voice now, insistent in his ear, he woke himself from the narcosis of his rest and the coffee. He could be close now, and the empty landscape might not be as empty as it seemed. Soon it would be light again, the time of caution. He threw away the dregs of the coffee, and stood up. He had more miles to cover before he pitched camp.
Alexei Kyrilovich Vorontsyev pushed the files away from him, leaned back in his chair rubbing his eyes, and the persistent nightmare flashed against his lids almost in the instant that he closed his eyes. His wife — Natalia Grasnetskaya, mezzo-soprano with the Bolshoi, a rising operatic star. He could see her dearly, as if she were in his office on the Frunze Quay, above the book repository. He wanted to remove his long fingers from his eyes, but he did not. She still fascinated him, even after the years of her infidelity. He could not rid himself of the persistent obsession with her, even after her body passed into the possession of others, and she had rendered him, he believed, faintly ridiculous to the wide and privileged circle of their acquaintance.
He pulled his hands away with an effort, and blinked in the harsh strip-lighting. He got up from behind the desk, galvanised by some current of thought, and went to the window. He looked down from the third floor, along the almost deserted Frunze Quay, the cold Moscow evening kept out by the double glazing and central heating.
He was thirty-six. He jiggled the coins in his pocket, a small comfortable sound that seemed to interpose itself between his awareness and his recriminations. He held the rank of Major in the KGB. More than that, he had transferred from the 2nd Chief Directorate five years before, at the age of thirty. A meteoric performance to have become, so early, a member of the Special Investigations Department, to move out of the Centre of Dzerzhinsky Street into these more discreet offices.
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.