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It was his supreme moment.

He felt a slow smile break on his face. One thing alone irked Viktor. He did not have sufficient light to see their faces. He missed not having a big flashlight to shine at them and catch the moment. He did it like that instructor had at the counter-intelligence school at Novosibirsk, when he had served in the 3rd Directorate. He could imagine what would be on their faces, the dumb shock, the astonishment and the shame.

Viktor waved to the two men. Not big, not flamboyant, just a raised hand and a short wave.

* * *

He was gone.

Adrian trembled, had never before felt that shockwave in his gut, his limbs and his mind — as if he had lost control.

In the craft talk of his trade, the top men preached a mantra: If the next stage is to show out, you pull out. He and Dennis had gone through that stage and not known it. They had shown out.

Casual, the target had waved.

And the conventional wisdom said: We call it the heat stakes — one to ten. Ten is when you’re busted, have shown out. Go to gaol. They were busted. The dial needle had hit ‘ten’ and they had failed.

From the height of the target, Adrian had realized it was Viktor. Viktor was KGB-trained. The wave had been enough to show his contempt for them.

When they talked about ‘sterile areas’, ‘control’ and ‘housing’, the best men — and Adrian and Dennis would have reckoned themselves top of the tree — always exuded supreme levels of confidence. But a lecture session never finished without the final message: The desperate moment for any surveillance officer, far and away the worst, is when the target looks you in the eye and waves to you. Viktor had.

He thought himself a serious man, and Dennis, was unused to the taint of failure. He had to clasp his hands across his stomach, but it was inadequate — however tight he squeezed his fingers — to kill the shake.

Adrian whispered the question, ‘Did you see it?’

Dennis murmured in his ear, ‘I saw it. We screwed up.’

Stuttered: ‘Big-time.’

‘Doesn’t get any bigger. What to do?’

Adrian said, ‘We can’t go forward, not after that. I can’t get my head round it. Never happened to me before. Twenty years of this, more, and it’s the first time. I’d bollock a rookie who showed out as bad as that. He was laughing at us.’

‘Me too, first time — I feel a prat. They could be anywhere along the bank, and they’re alerted. You got a better definition, Adrian, of disaster?’

‘Could be anywhere, could be a quarter of a mile upstream, more. What to do? That’s the guv’nor’s shout. Have to tell him, come clean. He makes the decision. Say it up front. We don’t know where they are.’

‘And lose what they’re bringing across?’

‘Got better ideas?’

In front of them, where the target had been and where he had waved, gentle and mocking, was a solid wall of darkness. They did not know whether he had backed off by ten yards or a hundred. Right to assume that he carried a weapon, Mikhail too, and that Reuven Weissberg — top target — was armed. They had heard Shrinks talk his syndrome stuff on the agent and knew he, too, was tooled up. They heard only the river’s rush and the wind high above. They would back off, leave decision-taking to Mr Lawson, the guv’nor. Couldn’t blunder on. They left Deadeye down by the water and suggested he didn’t move … Adrian thought the wound was well shared, that Dennis would feel as bad as himself because a target had faced up to them and had waved.

Their professionalism demanded they said it, four square, to the guv’nor’s face. Neither would hide the catastrophe of a show-out and a failure to locate the prime target.

* * *

‘Come on,’ she said.

She led. Katie Jennings had pushed up her sweater, undone her blouse buttons, hitched up her bra and put his hands on her breasts. He didn’t do much for himself.

‘It’s all right, I don’t bite.’

She was astride him. He was against a fallen tree, had his back to it. She heaved up her hips, lowered her trousers and pushed her knickers down her thighs. Hadn’t done it like this since she was a kid, a couple of weeks before her sixteenth birthday. What was the bloody order of battle? She blinked, remembered what the guy had done all those years before because he’d known what he was at. She felt the cold air on her stomach and back, and on her thighs.

‘Don’t go all scared on me. You haven’t a worry, I’m up to date with taking them.’

It was a sort of madness. She was, in reality, a mature young woman. Katie Jennings did not make a habit of shagging around. Those who knew her well, in the Pimlico office, her neighbours, and especially her parents, would have been shocked to observe her baring her buttocks to the evening darkness, then heaving at the clothing covering Luke Davies’s body. It was the way the guy had done it when she was short of her sixteenth birthday; had worked then, didn’t seem wrong now. She had his coat open and his fleece unzipped, his shirt open and his vest up. Then she went to work on the belt and his trousers. She accepted it, the madness. She could put it down to stress, strain, trauma, had the excuses stacked high — but didn’t need them. She was tugging at his trousers. Rare excitement now gripped her. She could not have stopped herself and had no wish to.

‘Just enjoy it, like it’s a chauffeur ride.’

Under her the whiteness of his skin was made silver by the moonlight. Who cared about madness? Not Katie Jennings. A woman in a man’s world, she had been subject enough times to what was called harassment, or gender abuse, but she had never complained of being rated the token female. She thought his body quite thin, spare, rather pretty. He was supine … No, he wasn’t going to help her so she’d have to do the damn job herself. Hadn’t a word to say for himself but his eyes were big and longing and his breath came faster — came a bloody sight faster when she eased back, reached down and took him. The eyes were big, popping, and he was staring over her shoulder. Then he was pushing her back. For a moment, she tried to fight him, then gave up — quit.

She looked over his shoulder, followed his line of sight.

‘Fuck me,’ Katie Jennings mouthed.

* * *

It had been, for Tadeuz Komiski, the incredible moment.

He was the child.

He was in his seventh year. He was in the forest two days after the shooting at the camp, the explosions and the howl of the sirens.

He remembered what he had seen as if it had happened an hour before.

A young man down and propped against a fallen tree. A woman crouched over him. The young man’s skin white and exposed.

Two Christ killers on the ground among the trees.Filthy old clothes on both of them.

They were watching him, gazing up at him, and words spat from their mouths.

He had run to call his father. His father had spoken of a reward of two kilos of sugar for identifying where fugitives hid. He had come with the axe.

The curse had been made.

Much floated in his mind. They stared at him as they had then. Now he was a man and old, but once he had been a child. Visions came to him of his father’s swinging axe and of the young woman fighting back … He remembered the painful death of his father from the cancers, the long, sad silences of his mother before she had gone to her rest, the birth of a dead baby and the slipping away of his weakened wife. He remembered the loneliness of his life and the nightmare dreams … the life of the curse.

Remembered, also, that men had been in the forest, had seemed to search for him and watch him. He had followed them that day and when the dusk had come they were by the river.