He stepped back on to the path. He was now about thirty yards from the house. Its low roof was clearly silhouetted. He could see an aerial and the bulk of a tall chimney with a satellite dish attached to it. It was too big to be an ordinary domestic receiver.
It was while he was staring distractedly at the dish that his eye was caught by a glimmer of light in an upstairs window. It vanished so quickly he thought he might have imagined it and he told himself to keep his nerve, just find a tool, get out of here. But then it flashed again, like the beam of a lighthouse - pale, then bright, then pale again - as someone holding a powerful torch swivelled anti-clockwise towards the window then back towards the blackness of the room.
The suspicious security guard was back.
'God.' Kelso's lips were so tightly drawn he could barely shape his breath into the syllable. 'God, God, God.'
He ran up the path towards the greenhouse. A rickety door slid back just far enough for him to slip through. The vines made it darker inside than out. Trestle tables, an old trug, empty trays for seedlings, terracotta pots - nothing, nothing. He blundered down a narrow aisle, a frond of something brushed his face and then he collided with an object immense and metal. An old bulbous, cast-iron stove. And next to it, a heap of discarded implements - shovel, scuttle, riddling iron, poker. Poker.
He squeezed back on to the path, holding his prize, and jammed the poker into the gap between the garden door and the frame, just above the lock. He heaved and heard a crack. The poker came loose. He jammed it back and pulled again. Another crack. He worked it downwards. The frame was splintering.
He took a few paces back and ran at the door, rammed it with his shoulder, and some force that seemed to him beyond the physical - some fusion of will and fear and imagination - carried him through the door and out of the garden and into the quiet emptiness of the street.
AT SIX O'CLOCK that evening, Major Feliks Suvorin, accompanied by his assistant, Lieutenant Vissari Netto, presented an account of the day's developments to their immediate boss, the chief of the RT Directorate, Colonel Yuri Arsenyev.
The atmosphere was informal, as usual. Arsenyev sprawled sleepily behind his desk, on which had been placed a map of Moscow and a cassette player. Suvorin reclined on the sofa next to the window, smoking his pipe. Netto worked the tape machine.
'The first voice you'll hear, colonel,' Netto was saying to Arsenyev, 'is that of Madame Mamantov.'
He pressed PLAY
'Who is this?'
'Christopher Kelso. Could I speak with Comrade Mamantov?'
'Yes? Who is this?'
As I said, my name is Kelso. I'm using a public telephone. It's urgent.
'Yes, but who is this?'
Netto pressed PAUSE.
'Poor Ludmilla Fedorova,' said Arsenyev, sadly. 'Did you know her, Feliks? I knew her when she was at the Lubyanka. Oh, she was a piece of work! A body like a pagoda, a mind like a razor and a tongue to match.'
'Not any more,' said Suvorin. 'Not the mind, anyway.'
Netto said, 'The next voice will be even more familiar, colonel.'
PLAY
All right, this is Mamantov. Who are you?'
'It's Kelso. Doctor Kelso? You may remember me?' 'I remember you. What do you want?'
'To see you.
'Why should I see you after that shit you wrote?' 'I wanted to ask you some questions.'
About?'
A black oilskin notebook that used to belong to Josef Stalin.'
'Shut up.
'What?'
'I said shut up. I'm thinking it over. Where are you?'
'Near the Intourist building, on Mohavaja Street.'
'You're close. You'd better come.
STOP
'Play it again,' said Arsenyev. 'Not Ludmilla. The latter part.
Through the armoured glass at Arsenyev's back Suvorin could see the ripple of the office lights reflected in Yasenevo's ornamental lake, and the massive floodlit head of Lenin, and beyond these, almost invisible now, the dark line of the forest, its edge serrated against the evening sky. A pair of headlights winked through the trees and disappeared. A security patrol, thought Suvorin, suppressing a yawn. He was happy to let Netto do the talking. Give the lad a chance.
A black oilskin notebook that used to belong to JosefStalin...'
'Fuck me,' said Arsenyev, softly, and his flabby face tautened.
'The call was initiated this afternoon, at fourteenfourteen, by this man,' continued Netto, handing out two flimsy buff-coloured folders. 'Christopher Richard Andrew Kelso, commonly known as "Fluke".'
Archangel
'Now this is nice,' said Suvorin, who hadn't seen the photograph before. It was still glistening from the darkroom, and reeked of sodium thiosulphate. 'Where are we?'
'Third floor, inner courtyard, opposite the entrance to Mamantov's staircase.'
'So now we can afford an apartment in the House on the Embankment?' grumbled Arsenyev.
'It's empty. Doesn't cost us a rouble.'
'How long did he stay?'
'Arrived at fourteen-thirty-two, colonel. Left at fifteen-seven. One of our operatives, Lieutenant Bunin, was then detailed to follow him. Kelso caught the metro at Borovitskaya, here, changed once, got out at Krasnopresnenskaya, and walked to a house here -' Netto again put his finger on the map '- in Vspolnyi Street. A deserted property. He made an illegal entry and spent approximately forty-five minutes inside. He was last reported here, heading south on foot along the Garden Ring. That was ten minutes ago.
'What does that mean exactly? "Fluke"?'
"A lucky stroke", colonel,' said Netto, smartly. "'An unexpected success."'
'Sergo? Where's that damned coffee?' Arsenyev, immensely fat, had a habit of falling asleep if he didn't have caffeine every hour.
'It's coming, Yuri Semonovich,' said a voice from the intercom.
'Kelso's parents were both in their forties, sir, when he was born.'
Arsenyev turned a tiny and astonished eye towards Vissari Netto. 'Why do we care about his parents?'
'Well -' The young man wilted, stalled, appealed to Suvorin.
'Kelso was a fluke,' said Suvorin. 'The joke. It's a joke.'
'And that is funny?'
They were spared by the arrival of the coffee, borne in by Arsenyev's male assistant. The blue mug said 'I LOVE NEW YORK' and Arsenyev raised it towards them, as if drinking their health. 'So tell me,' he said, blinking through the steam over the rim, 'about Mister Fluke.'
'Born Wimbledon, England, nineteen fifty-four,' said Netto, reading from the file (he had done well, thought Suvorin, to get all this together in the space of an afternoon the lad was keen, you couldn't fault him on ambition). 'Father, a typical petit-bourgeois, a clerk in legal chambers; three sisters, all older; standard education; nineteen seventy-three, scholarship to study history at the college of St John, Cambridge; starred first class honours degree, nineteen seventy-six -Suvorin had already skimmed through all of this – the personal file dredged up from the Registry, a few newspaper cuttings, the entry in Who~- Who - and now he tried to reconcile the biography with this snatched picture of a figure in a raincoat leaving an apartment. The graininess of the picture had a pleasing, fifties feeclass="underline" the man, glancing across the street, a cigarette in his mouth, had the appearance of a slightly seedy French actor playing a dodgy cop. Fluke. Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name? Fluke, the spoiled and lazy teenager, doted on by all these family women, who astonishes his teachers by winning a scholarship to Cambridge - the first in the history of his minor grammar school. Fluke, the carousing student who, after three years of no apparent effort, walks away with the best history degree of his year. Fluke, who just happens to turn up on the doorstep of one of the most dangerous men in Moscow -although, naturally, as a foreigner he would have felt
invulnerable. Yes, one would have to be wary of this Fluke scholarship to Harvard, nineteen seventy-eight; admitted to Moscow University, under the "Students for Peace" scheme, nineteen eighty; dissident contacts - see annex 'A" - led to re-categorisation from "bourgeois-liberal" to "conservative and reactionary"; doctoral thesis published eighty-four, Power in the Land: The Peasantry of the Volga Region~ 191 7-22; lecturer in modern history, Oxford University, eighty-three to ninety-four; now resident in New York City; author of the Oxfbrd History of Eastern Europe, 1945-87; Vortex: The Collapse of the Soviet Empire, published ninety-three; numerous articles -'