Stealing Thunder
by
Peter Millar


STEALING THUNDER

PETER MILLAR

BLOOMSBURY

First published in Great Britain 1999

Bloomsbury Publishing plc 38 Soho Square, London W1V 5DF

Copyright 1999 by Peter Millar The moral right of the author has been
asserted

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library

ISBN 0 7475 3039 4 10 987654321

Typeset by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh Printed in the United States of
America To my mother and father, time after time.

How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy?  .. . There
is no monopoly of common sense, on either side of the political
fence.

Sting, "Russians' To betray, you must first belong; I never belonged.

Kim Philby, 1963 Acknowledgements

Many people have been helpful in finishing this book.  For their help
at the research stage I would like to thank Carson Marks and John
Gustafson at Los Alamos, Nick Hance at Harwell, and Lorna Arnold for
her historical insights.  Also Svein Saemunsson of Ice-land air who
introduced me to the extraordinary phenomenon that is his country.
David Reynolds at Bloomsbury for his tolerance and Pascal Carris for
his enthusiasm and care, Julian Coman for listening in the pub, and my
wife, Jackie, for being there when needed, as always.

Author's Note

This is a work of fiction, but much of it is based on facts drawn from
the most important episode in the history of the Second World War.  The
Manhattan Project was an extraordinary achievement.  Its results, for
better or worse, shaped the rest of the twentieth century.  The Cold
War, which grew out of the nuclear standoff, arguably maintained peace
for fifty years until the last legacy of the old dictatorships had
faded; but at a human price which many still believe was far too
high.

Most of the details of Klaus Fuchs's personality, family history and
activities at Los Alamos are true, down to his love of Charles Dickens,
his Buick and the fact that the British mission used him to fetch
drinks for parties.  Similarly, the details of Harry Gold's exploits
are substantially accurate.  As for the other main historical dramatis
personae, I have taken liberties with their actions, but rarely with
their expressed beliefs.

Prologue

The Legacy

Alamogordo Desert, 16 July 1945 The men who were afraid put on suntan
lotion in the dark.  They smeared it over their faces by lamplight. Out
there beneath the ominously empty sky was one of the world's great
wildernesses: flat and cracked by the noonday sun; and at night, as
cold as an empty tomb.  It was known as the Jornado del Muerto, the
Dead Man's Journey.  The only living things were scorpions,
rattlesnakes, fire ants and tarantula spiders.

A few hours earlier an improbable electric storm had raked the parched
earth, drowning it in torrential rain, while forked lightning ripped
the night sky and great cannon roars of thunder cracked above them.

In the small concrete rooms where the men waited and watched, those
with religious inclinations said silent prayers.  The tall, lean,
aesthetic-looking American in a porkpie hat an amateur Sanskrit scholar
and the individual on whom the matter of the moment weighed heaviest,
was an atheist.  None the less, he muttered to himself, "Lord, these
affairs are heavy on the heart."  Edward Teller, the Hungarian with the
Groucho Marx eyebrows, fiddled with his dark glasses.  Enrico Fermi,
the stocky little Italian, reworked his mental arithmetic.  And Klaus
Fuchs, the quiet, academic German with the horn-rimmed glasses, closed
his eyes, asking himself silently if what he really hoped for was
failure.

Then, at precisely 5:29 and 45 seconds, the darkness disappeared.  In
its place was the light of a thousand suns: an artificial sunrise that
cast a shadow over the future of humanity.

Half a century later, as grey slanting November rain fell on the Berlin
cobbles, an indigo Opel glided to the edge of the pavement and stopped.
The driver's door opened and the substantial shape of Hermann Dickel
climbed out.

"Stinking bloody city, stinking bloody weather and stinking bloody
people," he added for good measure to a group of street urchins kicking
stones in the gateway of one of the six-storey, nineteenth-century
tenement blocks that dominated the Berlin cityscape.

Dickel was a Bavarian by birth; he would never forgive Helmut Kohl, the
self-styled "Chancellor of German Unity', for moving the capital back.
Old virtues indeed?  Prussian order?  The city was a quagmire of
lawlessness and vice.  He noticed the eldest of the three boys eye his
car and shot him a ferocious warning glare: "Polizei," he lied in his
best imitation of a Berliner plainclothes cop with a sore head.

"Understand?  One mark on that car and I'll hang you all out to dry."
He pulled up the collar of his raincoat and stomped off into the
courtyard of what had once been the most feared building in central
Europe.

Normannenstrasse, an unremarkable back street in the district of
Friedrichshain, runs parallel to the great avenue that leads out of
Berlin towards the Polish border.  Until 1989 it had housed the secret
city that had been the headquarters of the Staatssicherheits-dienst,
the state security service of the German Democratic Republic: Stasi for
short.  But since then the flats that had housed the families of the
men sworn KGB-style to serve as the 'sword and shield of the party' had
been turned over to the local housing authorities.  The 'elite' shop
which never ran out of bananas was now a supermarket, while the
gatehouse where the armed guards had sat was a snack bar serving
Berliner Kindl pils, advertised by a tousle-haired moppet peering out
of the top of a frothy beer stein.

In the far corner a closed circuit television camera, its eye now
turned blindly to the ground, marked the entrance to the Office of the
Federal Representative for the Documentation of the State Security
Service of the Former German Democratic Republic.  Berliners called it
simply the Gauck-be horde or Gauck's business, after the Lutheran
pastor appointed to supervise admission to the inheritance of
rumour-mongering, blackmail and betrayal.  People in Dickel's line of
work were not strictly welcome, though no one really imagined they
could be completely excluded.

He selected the relevant identity card from his wallet and walked
through to the lobby where Marthe Brunbacker was waiting for him.  She
led him into an antiquated paternoster lift, its cabins continuously
rising and falling on a loop an experience Dickel always found
disconcerting.  Two floors higher, they stepped on to terra firma and
walked down a hospital-like corridor to a small office.  On the desk
was a folder marked, in thin pencil which Dickel had to strain to read
upside down, with a single word: "Donner-stag'.

"Donnerstag?  Thursday?"  Dickel looked at her questioningly.

"Perhaps.  It's a codeword.  For the file.  Under the circumstances I
think our Stasi friends were being unusually whimsical."

The big man squinted.  Uncomprehending.

"Donnerstag," she repeated slowly, separating the two component parts
of the word.

"The day of thunder.  Appropriate, don't you think?"

Dickel frowned.

"No one else has seen this?"  he asked, sharply.

"That's the only copy.  Quite how it got lost is another question.  I
suspect there may have been disagreements about the course of action
taken.  It was all so close to the end, closer than any of us knew, of
course.  It's everything I said, providing it all stands up.  But I
suspect there may be problems."

Dickel raised an eyebrow.

"Yes, so do I. But that's what we pay these youngsters for."

He put the file in his briefcase, nodded curtly and took his leave.

Outside the rain had turned to a steady drizzle in the dismal early
dusk.  Dickel returned to the Opel only to find a jagged white line,
like a dying patient's heart rate, scraped by a stone on the driver's
door.

"Fucking brats," Dickel cursed under his breath.

As he turned the key in the ignition he thought he heard the sound of
jeering giggles.

But the street was empty.

Two weeks later, several hundred miles to the north-west, Gundar
Peterson pulled on his boots, zipped up his down jacket and tied back
the flaps on his fur hat.  Outside, he stood still for a few seconds to
let his eyes adjust to the flat light.  The landscape was an almost
featureless vista of unbroken white, dotted only with the distant
shapes of his shaggy-haired ponies as they nosed around the edge of the
frozen lake.  The wisps of steam rising from the dark surface of the
water bore testimony to the volcanic heat that kept it from freezing.
He plodded across the snow to the barn.  Inside, Freya was tethered to
a rail, shivering.  His eyes moistened as he stroked her thinning mane.
He could scarcely bring himself to look at the bare patches of flesh on
her flanks.  He cursed himself silently for having attracted the wrath
of the true God by naming his little herd after the old pagan
deities.

Killing was not something that came easily to him.  It was with sadness
that he loaded his double-barrelled shotgun and took aim at the
suffering animal's fragile skull.  Out across the snow fields two
explosions sounded in quick succession.  A few of the ponies by the
lakeside whinnied and set off at a brisk canter to nowhere.

The neighbours who came calling two days later found man and beast
together on the barn floor, bone and brain so intermingled that is was
impossible to tell which had belonged to the rational being and which
to the dumb animal.

PART ONE

Initiation Burke's Law

It was a Tuesday evening and El Vino's wine bar in Fleet Street was
nearly empty.  For more years than Eamonn Burke had had liquid lunches,
EV's had been the traditional watering hole for the two most
self-obsessed professions on British soil: journalism and the law.  It
served wine and spirits exclusively, and in large quantities.

"What's up with your lot, then?  All taken the pledge, have they?" said
Derek, the head barman.  He looked to Burke like a Guards officer who
had never quite lost the puppy fat around his chin.

"Our little establishment no longer grand enough for Her Majesty's
press corps, hmmm?"

"Ambition, Derek, the scourge of the drinking classes.  Perrier and
planning meetings.  Where have all the old hacks gone?  Gone to be
executives every one."

Derek leaned across the counter to join in the inevitable refrain.
Burke did the harmonies: "When will they ever learn, when will they
ehhhv-er leaaarn?"

Burke had been disappointed to find the bar empty but for a few tired
lawyers.  Tuesday were normally a good night.  The hacks who worked on
the Sundays traditionally regarded it as a lost day anyway: one for
filling out expense forms and then renewing the necessity for them with
a long lunch that stretched into an evening of gossip-mongering,
character assassination and old war-horse anecdotes over EV claret or
the stuff George Prosset of The Times called 'cooking whisky'.  Also,
any decision taken at the supposedly crucial editorial conference on a
Tuesday morning stood as much chance as an ice-cube in a gin-and-tonic
of making it to the weekend.  Tuesday was a day for voicing
disagreements, a token gesture before the editorial meetings reverted
to the 'nodding dog' format (a nickname born in the sweat shop of the
Daily Mail).  The tough newspaper executives of Hollywood melodrama
were in real life more like the little plastic canines that sit in the
back window of Nissan Sunnys.  But given half a chance, most of these
docile bastards would murder each other for a pat on the head from the
editor.  Burke was deeply disenchanted with his chosen career.

Now approaching forty, he had already made it to the top, as a foreign
correspondent in Washington and Moscow, first for the Guardian and
latterly as a successful freelance.  Burke was good, the word on the
street went, bloody good, in fact: could turn a sow's ear into a silk
purse in less time than it took most of the tossers to turn in their
expenses.  But he was a tad too left, the old school said, for the
mainstream Murdoch empire.  The legend was that Burke might be the best
fireman from Belfast to Burundi when it came to covering a blaze, but
there was always a risk that the wanker might start one of his own.
George Prosset, one of his oldest drinking buddies and closet admirers,
though seldom a hirer, repeatedly recounted in mock-astonishment that
Eamonn Burke allegedly didn't even fiddle his expenses.

The problem was that there weren't many stories that interested him
these days.  The political world had turned squeaky clean, the intrigue
of the Cold War had disintegrated into small wars, mostly rather dirty.
But even they did not fire his imagination.  For him, the only reason
for going back out there was the fag of having to make money.

Burke knew the consequences of concentrating more on somebody else's
spurious excitements than on the things that mattered: his marriage had
effectively ended acrimoniously six months earlier.  There were no
children.  He and Caroline had not even argued long over money.  The
house had been sold and they had both moved into one-bed roomed
flats.

The relationship had foundered on the sharp rocks of their own
incompatible ambitions he constantly on assignment overseas, she
working late with a view to promotion even when he was back in the

UK.

On his side, there had been the girl in Bosnia, of course, but then
everyone had had girls in Bosnia.  Human comfort to take away the bad
taste of too much reality.  But Caroline had her own reality, by the
name of Georgie, a new-wave emigre Russian.  He was a producer with an
independent television production company, fond of chess, late-night
philosophical conversations and oral sex; the kind you did without
making physical contact.  Burke had found a message one day on the
answering machine.  It was just a reminder of an appointment and could
have been perfectly innocent -Caroline was a rising executive in the
BBC and met programme-makers all the time but Burke knew it wasn't.  He
had recognized the tones, the studied formality inadequately
camouflaging complicity.  That offhand, "Give me a call then, if
there's a problem of any, hmmm, sort."  In other words, if Burke
arrived back unannounced from his latest foreign jaunt.

At the beginning of the summer, they had had their last full-blooded
row.  She had actually drawn his blood, with the sharp edge of a floppy
disk she had hurled at him.  She had been remorseful, administered
antiseptic and they had patched it up with a tumultuous night in bed
and woken up with sore heads and the irrevocable feeling that the
marriage was over.  Burke had moved out in August.  All that remained
was the routine sitting out of the legally required waiting time before
filing for divorce.

"Steady astern, madame."  Derek had emerged from behind the counter to
help two male barristers manhandling a well-lubricated lady judge ten
years their junior into her Burberry despite her obvious intention to
sit on a half-finished glass of Chablis.  Thank you, and good night,"
he beamed facetiously.

"Can't have you sitting on the Queen's Bench in wet knickers, then, can
we?"  he delivered between clenched teeth sotto voce as the door closed
behind the swaying threesome.

Burke ordered another claret, took a packet of Marlboro from his pocket
and lit up.  He was slightly embarrassed by the act, but only because
of the brand.  He had come to think of Marlboro as rather vulgar, the
poor man's Americana.  But then that was why he had started them in the
first place, to reclaim a token of his identity in an alien
environment.  Although no one could have told by his accent, Eamonn
Burke was an American citizen, an American by birth; Irish-American,
his father would have proudly insisted, though the fact was he had
accidentally grown up to be something altogether more rare an
English-American.  The old man would have turned in his grave in the
cold earth of County Mayo.  As a first secretary at the embassy to the
court of St.  James's with a watching brief on the Ulster situation,
Mickey Burke had sent back a series of pessimistic and ultimately
extremely prescient reports to the State Department at Foggy Bottom.
There had been hints, from grey-haired men who still kept an open door
for Burke, that it was not just "State' that the old man had been
reporting to.  Langley, Virginia, loomed unmentioned in the background
of every conversation.

The old man had died of a heart attack in his late forties.  Burke had
been ten years old, a happy-go-lucky kid who attended the American
School in London and played baseball.  Within two years his life had
been transformed out of all recognition.  His mother remarried, to a
man who was 'something in the City'.  Burke was sent to boarding
school, 'to get a proper English education."  He had, too, once he got
past the jibes about his accent, the bullying, and learned not to hold
a cricket bat as if he was about to hit a home run.  They had been
difficult years, but, as generations of English gentlemen before him
would have agreed, they had made him what he was.  Whatever that was.

"Time now, ladies and gentlemen.  Let's be having your glasses,
please."  Derek's voice rang out across the bar.

Burke put his hand in his pocket to check that he still had his car
keys, though he was well aware that driving was the last thing he
should be considering.  Instead of the keys, however, his hand closed
on a folded envelope, one that had thunked on his doormat two days ago
and been shoved into a jacket pocket to be read later.

He pulled it out, noticing in passing the German stamp with an
impression of Norman Foster's restored Reichstag in Berlin.  The
letterhead shouted Eon with a smaller strap line beneath that announced
itself as lDas neue Heft fur das neue Jabrtausend, the new magazine for
the new millennium.  Burke had never heard of it.  But these days there
were more new magazines opening and closing than there were readers to
buy them.  The German market in particular seemed to have gone on a
fertility hinge.  Recession or no recession; D-mark, euro, no matter
what you called it, the Germans still had more money.  From a jobbing
hack's point of view, their magazines still knew how to pay properly,
very properly indeed, he noted, scanning the letter in front of him.

The fee on offer was extraordinary: full expenses plus DM6,000/
Euro4,500 per week about 2,000 at current exchange rates, he quickly
calculated to work on an article with one of their staff reporters. The
letter was signed Hermann Dickel, commissioning editor, features. The
name meant nothing to Burke.

If he had been sober, of course, he would have realized that the
absence of any mention of the article's subject matter was most
unusual.  Normally, there was, at the very least, an agreed outline on
the table before any money.  Burke loathed incompetent commissioning:
an ambiguous brief inadequately explained so that two weeks' research
and a week's writing ended up with some overpaid bimbo simpering down
the telephone that 'that is not what we meant at all'.

"Come along, squire.  Even the idle rich have to go to bed sometimes."
Derek was smiling sarcastically across the counter, sublimely aware
that it was still only 8:30 p.m."  but equally determined that one El
Vino tradition that would not die under his stewardship was the one
that got him home in time to go down to the local pub himself.

Burke drained the dregs of his claret, looked at the letter again and
put it back in his pocket, not quite certain what to make of it.  A
decent contract for little more than playing minder to some kraut
reporter might be just what he needed to get his life out of the
doldrums.  God knows, he could do with the money, what with the
inequitable division of the spoils of their brief marriage that
Caroline's lawyer was insisting on wringing out of him.  Ah well, sleep
on it.  He threw on his raincoat and lurched for the door.  Burke's
law, really, he thought: just when you think it's time to give up the
whole business and go into something honest, like running an estate
agency, along comes a deus ex machina to save the day.

Or in this case, he wryly reflected, for it was the point that had
persuaded him to accept the commission, a dea ex machina.  The letter
had given a woman's name for the reporter they were sending him to wet
nurse Sabine Kotzke.  Well he would nurse her okay.  What was that the
Romans did to the Sabines, Burke mused.  Then the macho balloon popped;
it occurred to him that he was unlikely to be a match for some butch
Brunnhilde.

Anyhow, the Germans pronounced it differently: Sa-bee-na, like the
Belgian airline.  Probably look like one, he thought, as he weaved into
the damp night air in search of a taxi.  He had, mercifully, quite
forgotten his car.

A Package from Berlin

When he staggered out of El Vino's at 8:40 on the Tuesday evening,
Burke fully intended to send the fax from his home computer first thing
the next morning.  But, mildly elated by the job offer, he had dropped
in at another Fleet Street pub and, having fallen into a long and
meaningful conversation with a doe-eyed legal secretary with a witching
Edinburgh accent, had consumed four pints of London Pride.  He returned
home in such gloriously self-confident mood -despite being alone, the
secretary having pleaded a pressing engagement early next morning that
he had failed to clamber out of bed before 11:30, which gave him just
under thirty-five minutes to arrive an unacceptable five minutes late
for an editor's meeting at Wapping.

The rest of the day had therefore been spent in muttered condemnation
of the old bastard in the cellar bar of The Vineyard, and in concocting
reasons why he should not go home and ferret around for the scraps of
paper which his accountant was demanding to prevent his being
persecuted by the tax inspector.  It was in the middle of this orgy of
self-pity that he remembered where he had left his car the night
before.  Inspired to a new fit of self-loathing, he set off to fetch it
only to find the vehicle had been immobilized by a wheel clamp.  Its
release required lengthy negotiations plus the payment of a substantial
penalty with the result that it was not released into his care until
the following morning.

Thus it was a distinctly jaded Eamonn Burke who, almost seventy-two
hours later, caught sight of the jacket he had worn on Tuesday evening
lying on the back of a kitchen chair, and remembered the short-lived
euphoric enthusiasm of that night.  Somewhat to his own surprise, he
sent the fax anyway.

It had not helped that she began by complaining.  She had left four
messages on a particularly curt answering machine, without getting any
reply, she said.  Burke remembered vaguely seeing the flashing light
the night before and turning it off rather than playing the messages.
He cursed himself.  It was precisely this sort of call that the damn
thing was supposed to pre-empt.  Trying to keep the annoyance out of
his voice, he had suggested a meeting at 4:30 in the afternoon in a pub
called The Harp, on Chandos Place, close to Charing Cross station.

He had set out, therefore, early, and surprised himself by examining
his reflection in the bathroom mirror before leaving, as if wondering
what sort of an impression he made these days.  It was not as good as
it might have been: tall, gangly, with the slight stoop that came from
forever having to bend down to hear shorter people talking.  His
trademark lopsided grin was still there.  From one profile, George
Prosset had once declared that he looked like an angelic choirboy, but
from the other side he appeared more like a down-and-out who'd just
suffered a stroke.  Caroline had said it was the combination that made
him sexy, sort of innocent and dangerous at the same time.  These days,
he thought, the down-and-out was getting the upper hand.

He caught a bus, got off at Leicester Square and strolled down towards
Charing Cross.  For once he was disinclined to curse the crowds of
tourists and street artists.  He arrived at The Harp just after four
o'clock; time enough for a pint or two, he thought happily.

At the back of Burke's mind had been the fact that The Harp was a
passable pub with decent beer but also easy to escape from if she
turned out to be a middle-aged Teutonic dragon or teenage workaholic
bore.  He had asked how they would recognize each other, and she
replied that she was familiar with his picture byline.  He grimaced.
That particular picture had been shot by a snapper with a grudge
because Burke had left his light-meter in a Belgrade bar, and made him
look like a dangerous lunatic.  The editor liked it.  But then, Burke
thought, that was how he felt about him.

He was just raising a second London Pride to his lips when the door
opened at the far end of the bar and in walked the woman he had been
waiting for.  Improbably, he thought afterwards, Burke recognized her
immediately.  After all, not only Germans wore leather trousers in
London nowadays, although somehow English girls in their tight black
leather rarely managed such a lack of self-consciousness.  Hers were a
natural-looking hide colour, not stretched tight, but
comfortable-looking, functional yet a fashion statement at the same
time.  The French had a word for her: ga mine  Short, but not boyish,
auburn hair that hung in a mock fringe over big bright eyes.  She was
wearing a loose shirt and a shawl thrown carelessly around her
shoulders.  Yet the very way the clothes hung on her frame managed to
suggest the litheness of the body underneath, athletic yet slight.  The
way she moved suggested indifference to men's eyes; he wondered if it
was studied.

"Eamonn Burke, I presume.  So pleased to meet you," she said in the
same faultless English he had been surprised by on the telephone,
coupled with an elfin grin.  Burke beamed back.

"Delighted, I'm sure.  Can I get you a drink?"

She scanned the bar with a flash of sharp brown eyes and asked for a
small Guinness.  He smiled.  In his experience, few Germans knew enough
to avoid the fizzy coloured water that passed for continental-style
beer in England, while good, honest bitter was beyond them.  Burke
fetched the drinks and they retreated to a quiet corner.

His first impression was that Sabine Kotzke had a self-assurance that
bordered on the arrogant, and that it only added to her attraction. Her
hair, he noticed, matched her eyes almost perfectly without either
feature looking as if it had been artificially altered, and she had
that typically German complexion that results from a healthy
carnivorous diet and long skiing holidays.

Those, at least, were the lines he thought of the next day, rehearsing
the story for his next encounter in The Vineyard with Prosset.  At that
precise moment, however, Burke found his usual facility with words had
deserted him.  The last thing he wanted to talk about with any young
woman was the bloody newspaper business.  She thought differently.  So
they talked about Eon.  She told him it had been a relatively
small-circulation magazine that had recently been taken over by a new
entrepreneurial management who were determined to turn it into a
German-language equivalent of National Geographic and The Economist
rolled into one.  He said he could imagine the product.

"Ecology stuff still big in Germany, then?"  he ventured, agonizingly
conscious of the dullness of their conversation.

"In the end, ecology is the only story that matters.  How many
habitable worlds do you know?"

Burke groaned internally and decided to go easy on the irony.  He'd
tried a few Fleet Street jokes on 'greenies' in the past.  Few enough
of them had a sense of humour; there was no point in pushing it, least
of all with a German.

The moment was relieved by two drunks in pinstripes careering towards
them, miscalculating the direction of the door.  Burke corrected their
course, but one of them flung an arm wide and knocked him backwards.
Sabine put out her hand to prevent him toppling into her, and to his
surprise she held him up.

"Impressive," he said, when they had recovered their equilibrium and
seen the drunks lurching off towards the station.

Kotzke surprised him by blushing.

It was the moment that broke the ice.  So it was with unimaginable
horror that Burke heard himself accidentally doing the one thing he had
been intending to delay as long as possible: he popped the question.

"So what's this piece we're supposed to work on, then?"

To his immense relief, Kotzke broke into a broad smile and said it was
too long a tale to start standing in a bar, but perhaps she could tell
him about it over dinner.

They ate in a noodle place in Lisle Street.  Burke was an enthusiastic
lover of Chinese food.  Sabine surprised him with an un-German
characteristic: she handled chopsticks perfectly.  She also did the
right thing in expecting to order several dishes and share them.  Burke
had always assumed an instinctive affinity for Asian food to be a
legacy of empire in the Brits' case.  But then he had no idea what
legacies Sabine Kotzke might be carting around in her psychological

He tried to find out.  To be honest, he thought, anything would be
better than talking shop.  She had been to London several times before,
she said.  The first was in 1990, just after the Wall came down.  She
was eighteen at the time and had spent her whole life on the wrong side
of it.  She had gone through the whole Communist youth organization
bit, been a Young Pioneer with a red scarf around her neck and watched
dubbed Soviet TV series about the adventures of baby Lenin.

She had gone through the "Jugendweihe' farewell to youth -induction
into the ranks of the FDJ, the Free German Youth that actually had more
in common with the Hitler Youth, except that the shirts were blue
instead of brown.  She laughed and said it was terrible, but not that
bad.  Rather a good place, in fact, for boys and girls to get together,
if he knew what she meant.

"And were you ever a Communist?  Did you believe all that?"

"No."  Her answer was brusque.  She changed the subject.  How easy was
it, she wanted to know, to earn a living in England without a steady
job?  Touche, thought Burke.  He had spent most of his adult life
trying to duck the answer.  He waffled blithely about tax breaks and
even narrated the old chestnut that freelance journalism was the worst
job in the world but better than working.  He told her about the old
Fleet Street prohibition against making 'that extra phone call', the
one that blows your whole story up in your face, and was surprised when
she laughed.  He had thought she wouldn't quite have understood the
degree of moral pragmatism involved.

Against his better judgment Burke went over the bones of his impending
divorce.  The last thing he had wanted to do was spend the evening
talking about Caroline, turning the most promising date he had had in
months into a marriage-guidance counselling situation.  He tried to
shift the conversation to Sabine's own private life, the question of a
boyfriend, but, she parried all his probes.

Sabine got the bill and pocketed the receipt.  Burke made no pretence
of objecting.  It was her show, after all, though he reflected that the
waiter would not exactly be out celebrating on her tip.

Her hotel was along Lancaster Gate, with the inestimable advantage, as
far as Burke was concerned, that it meant they were going the same way.
She was going to get a cab, but as it was still early and unusually
spring like he suggested they walk.  Walking in London was a better
option than most people realized.  Burke hated the Tube and gridlocked
traffic equally.  Besides, he thought, if you lived in Notting Hill and
put up with the carnival, the car thefts and the burglaries, you might
as well get the advantage of being able to stroll to the West End.  He
reckoned he could get home from Soho in half an hour, and most of it
through the park.  Since they had not yet discussed business, Burke was
not wholly surprised when he suggested a nightcap and she accepted.

It was only when he opened the door of his half-basement flat that it
occurred to him his domestic circumstances were hardly suited to
receiving visitors.  Mrs.  Konopka, his Polish cleaning lady, came on
Wednesdays; five days later it usually looked like a doss house for
homeless alcoholics who collected newsprint for bedding value rather
than information or literary merit.  He kicked a pile of accumulated
newspapers out of the way.  Sabine, he noticed, took a few seconds
before following; he thought he saw her cast a dubious glance along the
street.  But whether she was looking for something or just summing up
the neighbourhood, he couldn't tell.

Burke turned on the light.  There was no need to pull the curtains; he
could not remember the last time he had got around to opening them.  He
threw some junk mail, telephone bills and a credit card statement off a
battered sofa on to the floor.

"Have a seat."

Sabine Kotzke looked around her.  Piles of paper lay on the floor, and
there were books, dozens of them, stacked in untidy heaps on the
carpet.  A shelf on top of the radiator, by contrast, contained only a
few empty beer bottles and some souvenirs of Burke's career.  She
lifted one, a Russian matryoshka doll painted in an unmistakable
grinning caricature of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.  She
opened it.  Inside was an equally clever depiction of his predecessor,
John Major, who in turn contained a mini-Margaret Thatcher.  Inside
her, like a fat baby, was a solid little Winston Churchill.

"Right, what do you fancy?"  Burke called from the kitchen.

"Gin without tonic, vodka without orange or whiskey without ice?
Brandy?  It's only Spanish but it's fairly decent."

He poked his head back around the door frame.

Thanks."

"Brandy would be great."  He disappeared again.

"I like your matryoshka doll.  Where did you get it?  Moscow?"

"Sort of," Burke called back from the kitchen.

"An old friend of mine sent it.  He and I had been through some rough
times under the Soviets together, there and in Afghanistan.  He thought
it was funny.  It was interesting, he said, that the real expression of
Russian freedom was not that they should have got round to parodying
their own rulers but foreigners too.  Curiously Communism made for
better manners."

"At least your history is not such a problem."

"What do you mean?"  Burke emerged carrying a half-empty bottle of
Fundador and two tumblers.

"I have a doll like this too.  Also bought in Moscow a few years ago.
It has Helmut Kohl outside at least he was the right size."

"And inside?"

"Helmut Schmidt, then Willy Brandt and Konrad Adenauer .. . and Adolf
Hitler."

"Ouch!  I see what you mean."

"That's how they still think of us.  Rotten at the core."

Burke was about to say the expression was 'to the core' but thought
better of it.  He poured a large measure into a whiskey tumbler and
handed it to her.

"Perhaps we should talk business," she said.

Burke moved another heap of papers from a worn leather armchair
opposite her and sat down.

"I suppose so, really.  You're the boss.  What's the story?  And why
me?"

Kotzke stayed standing.  Burke was conscious of her eyes wandering
around the room, taking in the dishevelled state of his existence.  He
guessed she was wondering if it had been like this when he was married
no wonder the woman walked out, she probably thought.

"You have quite a reputation."

"I'm flattered."

"You don't need to be.  You exposed ministers from your own government
giving the okay to arms deals with Iraq before the Gulf War, despite an
international embargo.  If it hadn't been for you, Declan Conway would
have spent twenty years in a Belfast jail for a crime he didn't commit,
and all because a group of unscrupulous Protestant policemen had
decided they could fill in the "missing bits" of evidence."

"That wasn't all me.  I had a lot of help."  Some of it, he still
suspected, at times when the lazy beast that passed for his conscience
stirred, probably from the IRA itself.

"Don't play down your own work.  You were uncovering the hypocrisy of
the Soviet war in Afghanistan when I was a teenager being told our
"fraternal allies" were protecting socialism at the request of the
people.  But when you were in Moscow you still embarrassed Washington
by revealing the CIA thought the Soviets' persecution of the dissident
Andrei Sakharov was "useful".  You have a reputation for being
tenacious, and for not being easily frightened by governments and
bullies."

Just by women, Burke thought.

"I don't know what to say."

"You don't need to say anything.  We have done our homework.  Believe
me: you are just the man for the job."

Burke shrugged helplessly.  If she had wanted to win his cooperation by
appealing to his professional vanity she had done her stuff.

"First of all," she continued, "I am assuming the money as mentioned in
Dickel's letter is agreed.  Secondly, we work together and whatever
comes out is our copyright in Germany.  But you can do what you want
with it abroad.  Including England of course."

Burke nodded.  It all seemed more than generous to him.

"Since you ask, we are particularly hoping that your contacts in Moscow
will be useful."  Burke raised an eyebrow involuntarily.  The time he
had spent in Moscow had not been the happiest of his memories.

"And also, I think, you have intelligence contacts in England."

Burke almost laughed out loud.  He never ceased to be amazed by the way
in which editors liked to believe those who worked for them had a key
to secret places.

"Quite frankly," she said, as if bringing a speech to its conclusion,
"I am glad I hope to be working with you."

Burke was sitting back in his tatty chair grinning broadly.  Kotzke had
managed to do something the jaded man of the day before would have
deemed impossible: made him feel like a twenty-year-old trainee again
seeing his name in print for the first time.

"What can I say?  That's quite a testimonial.  But perhaps now you'd
like to tell me just what this story's about."

She began with a question.

"You have heard of a man called Klaus Fuchs?"

"You mean the atom spy?"

She nodded.

"Sure.  He was the bloke who stole the secret of the atom bomb,
virtually handed Stalin on a plate the produce of the best collected
minds of the Western world and more or less started the Cold War
single-handed."

"That's him.  But do you know what happened to him?"

"More or less.  He got thrown in jail, for a dozen years or so, then
went back home, your home, Germany's home-grown commie-land.  As far as
I know he disappeared into well-rewarded obscurity as a dutiful son of
the state and died happy and contented, of old age, just in time to
avoid seeing it all collapse in ruins.  Right?"

"Up to a point."

"What's the point?"

"The point is, that he didn't die as happy and contented as you might
think.  The obituaries were disinformation.  I'm afraid Herr Professor
Doktor Fuchs did not die of old age.  He was murdered.  I want to know
why."

P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico

July 1944 "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was
the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of
belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it
was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the
winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before
us."  Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs repeated in his head the opening words of
A Tale of Two Cities as he turned the ignition key and his Buick added
its exhaust fumes to the dry air of the Santa Fe.

There were scholars who thought A Tale of Two Cities was not Charles
Dickens's best book.  But to Klaus Fuchs none seemed more apposite to
the day and age, to his own situation and the plight of humanity in the
middle of the twentieth century.  In particular, that rambling prose
ode to ambiguity was singularly suited to the German scientist's
present state of mind.

Fuchs had loved Dickens ever since he had arrived in England as a
twenty-one-year-old refugee from Hitler's Germany in 1933.  Almost
eleven years had passed since then.  This was another world again, he
thought, breathing in the dry desert air, a world on the cusp.  Of
heaven or hell.

From the relative comfort of his vehicle, Fuchs watched the scene at
the little office known only by its street number, 109 East Palace: the
staging post for the "Special' to The Hill.  Women were as usual
struggling with shopping and children on to the big green army bus.
Fuchs had come into town on the first shuttle bus that morning and gone
to Santa Fe's single used-car lot.  He was no haggler and had handed
over what seemed an extravagantly large sum in cash for the gunmetal
grey Buick he had been assured would 'run like a coyote chasin'
chickens', even out on those hot desert roads.  But a car was
necessary.  Also, it would allow him to be helpful, and he liked that.
Making friends was not one of his key attributes.  However, he was not
offering any free lifts today: much as he liked being popular, he could
not have people relying on 'good oP Klaus' for a lift every time they
wanted to go into town.  There would be times when he would have to
make the journey on his own.  In that respect, he reflected
pragmatically, his social incompetence could sometimes be a boon.

The bus was still standing by the roadside as Fuchs put the Buick into
gear and pulled away.  Most of his colleagues liked Santa Fe.  It
represented an idealized remnant of the romantic Wild West legend that
for so many Americans, he had discovered, was a substitute for history.
The strong late afternoon sunlight emphasized the warm sandstone
colours of the adobe buildings against the deep unbroken blue of the
New Mexico sky.  Fuchs could see the superficial romance of the place
that had made it a Mecca for creative types, just as, he reflected
grimly, the pretty Bavarian town of Dachau had been before the Nazis
built a concentration camp there.  Fuchs had thought a lot about
Dachau.  He had almost ended up there.

He took the now familiar route out along the Taos highway before
turning off on to the dirt road up into the mountains.

"Injun country," he mused, smiling to himself.  He had soaked up a bit
of the Wild West mythology in New York, had even watched a western for
the first time.  He had quite enjoyed it.  The morality was so
simplistic.  Was that, he wondered, how Americans really saw the
world?

He was passing the San Ildefonso Indian pueblo village.  More adobe
buildings, superficially less well-kept than the white men's, but with
neat rows of dried red chilli peppers hanging in strings from the
protruding wooden beams by each doorway: the darkest, deepest red in a
landscape dominated by that end of the visible spectrum.  The desert
sand was an orange ochre, the colour of the rust that had eaten away
the paintwork on a pickup truck by the side of the main dirt road
through the Indian pueblo.  Rust, he thought, was a defining motif of
the pueblos, an unmistakable symptom of the cancer that eroded the
Indians' existence: poverty.

Even the dirt was red here, as red as the great outcrops of
sun-scorched rock, chiselled by the wind and the sand into strange
craggy shapes.  This was how the surface of Mars might look, Fuchs
thought.  From what he could tell, the whole of the northern half of
this great empty desert state was the same, rising to the jagged
crimson mountain range that, three hundred years earlier, the Spaniards
had dubbed the Sangre de Cristo, the Blood of Christ.  Only in the
distance did a single natural structure, like some giant's basalt
tombstone, alter the monotone: the great bulk of the Black Mesa, the
local San Ildefonso Indians' sacred mountain.

The Buick rattled and emitted strange squeaking noises above the rear
axle as Fuchs turned on to the dirt road.  He felt the suspension
complain, bumping him from side to side on the rutted track.  He
wondered how long even a big Buick could take this sort of punishment.
To Fuchs, American cars even the older models -were strange, exciting
mechanical animals.  He had not the faintest idea if he had paid a fair
price or whether the machine he had purchased would last only a few
months in this inhospitable climate.  Santa Fe represented the only
outpost of what passed for civilization in a thousand kilometres or
more.  Unless, of course, you counted Albuquerque, the state's only
other big town.  And Fuchs most definitely did not.  He had been
there.

Up ahead was the bridge over the Rio Grande, which saved at least half
an hour on the trip.  One of the bus drivers had felt the entire
structure sag as he attempted to cross from Santa Fe with thirty women
and children, and since then, it had been declared off-limits to
heavier vehicles.  Fuchs held his breath as the Buick trundled over the
boards, noticing that more had broken recently.  Sooner or later, he
thought, the general would have to divert some of his men to a repair
detail.  They were supposed to be the Corps of Engineers, after all.
Bridge-building ought to have been right up their street.

Fuchs smiled to himself at the inappropriateness of the idiom.  He
smiled primarily at the fact of having noticed it.  Perhaps he was
thinking in English at last.  Even after all this time, Fuchs knew he
still had a German accent.  He had been surprised initially to find
that the Americans were even less happy than the English at dealing
with obvious foreigners.  So much for the great mixing bowl, he
thought.  It was different on The Hill, of course; there it was a real
multinational community, even if most of them had become American
citizens through the necessity of fleeing Europe.

Even the British team, he reflected, was more Saxon than Anglo.  Apart
from himself there was Otto Frisch, the Viennese physicist whose aunt
Lise had first identified nuclear fission.  He had shared a cabin with
Frisch on the ship to New York and they had talked music as much as
physics, for Frisch was almost as accomplished a pianist as he was a
scientist.  It was he who had inspired Fuchs to purchase a violin and
take up playing again.

And then there were Rudolf and Eugenia Peierls who had been his
sponsors ever since he had returned to England from his first trip to
North America: five uncomfortable months as an enemy alien at a camp
overlooking the St.  Lawrence river in Canada.  Those months of exile
had been important for Fuchs.  He had met a lot of interesting people.
But he had been delighted when he was given security clearance and was
going back to England.  He suspected Rudi Peierls had had a hand in it.
They had met the year before at a scientific conference and got on
well.  Rudi had seen his talent and was not about to let it go to
waste.  On his return he had been given a job at Birmingham University
working in the great man's laboratory.  Rudi and Genia became like a
family to him, inviting him round to their cosy home for Sunday lunch:
typical hunks of British roast beef, even though Rudi was as German as
Fuchs and Genia was Russian.  But like Frisch, they had something in
common.  They were Jewish.  Fuchs was different.  That was not the
reason he had been forced to flee Germany.

Already he could see The Hill ahead of him.  Never, it occurred to him,
had a nickname been more misleading.  Particularly when he thought of
it in Germander Hiigel was something quintessentially rounded,
something one rolled up and over.  This was ein Pels - a cliff, a great
forbidding rocky escarpment.  That was why the general had given it the
thumbs up.  It could have been the prototype for Conan Doyle's Lost
World.  But instead of a vivarium of the primeval past, it had become
the cradle of the future.

The Buick strained as it began the steep, winding ascent up the narrow
road that climbed from the valley floor.  The road twisted, carving its
way up the face of the red rock, an improbable ascent that even with
the amount of traffic that now used it was not so much a highway as a
dirt track.  The very definition of inaccessibility, Fuchs thought, but
then that was the point.

It had been Oppenheimer's idea originally.  A sickly New York child
from a well-off Jewish family, J. Robert Oppenheimer had been sent west
in the hope that a frontier lifestyle would make him more robust.  It
had worked, better than the family doctor could ever have dreamed.  The
family had a ranch in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and he was fond of
riding there.  He had once confided in a letter to a friend: "My two
great loves are physics and desert country.  It's a pity that they
can't be combined."  When he had been plucked from his laboratory at
the University of California's campus in Berkeley and appointed to head
up the country's most secret physics project, his dream came true.  His
first task was to find a location.  There was one brief: it should be
as isolated as possible.

In the Jemez mountains a series of jutting mesas, the eroded remnants
of a great prehistoric volcano, spread out like tentacles from the
grassed-over volcanic caldera which still lay high above them.  On one
of these rocky spurs in 1917 an east coast philanthropist who, like
Oppenheimer himself, had been sent west to be toughened up, had founded
a ranch school for boys.  He had called it after the deep canyon to the
south which was itself named for the cottonwood trees clumped along the
stream which flowed through it.  It was an innocent derivation for a
name which was to become synonymous with deadly weapons in a future
Cold War: Los Alamos.

When Oppenheimer first showed the site to General Leslie Groves, the
military commander of the operation, he was delighted.  Secrecy was
paramount.  It had been Grove's idea to obscure all traces of the
project and its location by giving it a code name that related solely
to the headquarters site of his engineers corps an office in downtown
Manhattan.  Whatever the Manhattan Project might have meant to an
unauthorized person who by some accident came across the name, it was
unlikely to conjure up an image of a laboratory in a converted boys'
school in northern New Mexico.

Fuchs ground the Buick to a halt by the guard post took out his
security pass, complete with photograph and the print of his left index
finger and thumb, and handed it to the military policeman.  The East
Gate was the main entrance to and from The Hill.  It was the one
official way through the ring of barbed wire and sentry posts that had
been Groves's first priority on the site, put up even before the first
prefabricated houses for the scientific staff.

Despite the security, however, the MP examined Fuchs's card only
cursorily.  Like most of the regulars he prided himself on knowing most
of the technical staff by sight.  No one really believed that some Nazi
spy was going to find his way out to this godforsaken corner of the
desert and try to get in disguised as one of the scientists.  Besides,
for a few dollars any of the Indians would show him the hole in the
fence which they kept open with an almost religious zeal, no matter how
many times the General's men closed it up.  Fuchs knew all about the
hole; his room-mate in the single men's dormitory, an American called
Richard Feynmann, a bright young physicist with an offbeat sense of
humour and a reputation as a bongo-drummer and prankster, used to sneak
back in through it, throwing the books if not the guards themselves
into total confusion by leaving the site twice in a row without having
officially re-entered.

Thank you, sir," the MP drawled in a Louisiana accent as he returned
Fuchs's pass.

"You'll need to report to administration, sir, to get yourself a pass
for this vehicle.  Sure must be nice to have your own wheels out here."
Fuchs smiled his thin smile and drove on.

The East Gate was at the very end of the mesa, where the single-track
road wound up along the only accessible route from the canyon.  From
the gate it was another three miles to the centre of the 'city'.  Fuchs
laughed at the American idea that every settlement was a budding
metropolis.  All Los Alamos had in common with any city he knew was
overcrowding.  When the idea of a secret laboratory had first been
mooted, the initial estimate was that it might house some 100
scientists with their families and associated technical and military
personnel, perhaps 250 to 300 at most.  The construction work at Los
Alamos had begun on that scale.  But very quickly it became apparent
that more people than anyone had imagined would be needed if the site
was to take the project all the way from theory through design to
manufacture and testing.  Already the population was in excess of
4,000.  One thing the military men had apparently failed to budget for
was the proclivity of an enclosed human community to reproduce at
alarming rates.  The average age at Los Alamos was twenty-five and
falling fast: almost all the hospital space had been turned over to
creche facilities.  But even the birth certificates were governed by
the rules of secrecy; 'place of birth' carried only the oblique
official designation "P.O.Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico'.

And no metropolis had unmetalled roads.  Wheels and caterpillar treads
ground up the dust in summer and turned them to mud when the rains
came.  Apart from the mud and the dust, green was the predominant
colour.  There was the summer green of the aspens that rose up the
mountainside beyond the mesa, here and there decimated by the mad Pole,
George Kistiakowsky, head of the explosives testing team, who had
cleared space for a ski slope by taping high explosive around the base
of the trees.  But the most all-pervasive green was of nature's crude
imitation: military paint, camouflage green.  It defined Los Alamos; it
was the colour of the vehicles, the hospital, the houses and the PX
shop; it was even the colour of the water tower that stood on stilts
and served as the focal point for the sprawling makeshift town.

Fuchs pulled the Buick in a wide loop around the water tower and past
the new two-storey houses, married quarters for scientists and senior
technicians with families.  The GIs those who served as guards,
drivers, cooks, bottle-washers were billeted in cramped barracks
intended for half as many men.  There were separate quarters for those
draftees who had useful technical skills: mathematicians, physics
graduates, young men with brains who had thought the war would mean
danger and action, and had instead ended up posted to a shanty town to
crunch numbers for no apparent purpose.  The military, at the General's
own insistence, were told as little as possible about what Los Alamos
was really for.

That was until Oppenheimer had insisted on changing the rules.  He did
as he had done with the civilian scientists, whom Groves had wanted
organized in cells, sharing information purely on a need-to-know
basis.

"Oppie' had arranged for a lecture to be given by Fuchs's
dormitory-mate, Feynmann, who had a gift for explaining even the most
abstract scientific concepts.  The result had been staggering: when the
men found out that rather than working on some administration matter
they were involved in the design of a super weapon that could win the
war, productivity and enthusiasm doubled overnight.  The General had
muttered, but even he had been impressed by the results.

Fuchs hoped Feynmann was in.  He wanted to show him the new car.
Perhaps he would offer to lend it to him.  He knew the young American's
wife was seriously ill in a hospital in Albuquerque and it was not easy
to requisition transport to go that sort of distance, even in an
emergency.

Of course, Fuchs would have to have first priority when the need arose.
And he was sure it would.  The owl-faced man would find him, or someone
else would.  What was happening at Los Alamos was too important to
allow security risks, too important to ignore the only sort of security
that in the long term mattered to the world: mutual security. In the
meantime, he would get on with his work, and wait.

As Fuchs was driving through the East Gate at Los Alamos, a pudgy man
with glasses was standing on the hot pavement outside the Bell Cinema
in Brooklyn.  He had been there for half an hour, studying the poster
for Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  At one point
he walked as far as the hot-dog stall a block away, purchased a
frankfurter in a bun with mustard and relish and ate it as he sauntered
slowly back towards the cinema.  The casual observer would have assumed
he had been stood up.  But a more trained eye might have noticed that
the man had been looking at his watch with more than a passing
interest, and that at precisely 6:15 he crossed the road, put a dime in
a public telephone, spoke for a few seconds and then turned on his heel
and left without a glance back at the cinema.

The Invisible Man

New York, July 1944 For Harry Gold, standing outside the Brooklyn movie
theatre, it was the moment he had been dreading.  When he had realised
his tame German professor was not going to show for their scheduled
meeting, he made a brief telephone call to the man he knew only as
"John'.  The response had been simple: "I'll be in touch."  For the
past year Gold had felt like a champion angler, playing the big fish on
a long line, regularly landing him to the applause of the spectators
and yet, every time he turned back to his rod, there he was still on
the end of the line, ready and eager for a repeat performance.  Now,
suddenly, the line had snapped.

It was on the Monday of the following week that the telephone rang at
his home in Philadelphia.  It was John.  The voice, calm, unemotional,
with just the slightest trace of an accent, betrayed none of the
excitement that Gold felt.  His colleagues, he said, had come up with
an address for his doctor.  They should meet at the usual place and he
would pass it on.

The two men met on Saturday morning next to the stone lions on the
crowded steps of the New York Library.  John handed Gold a slip of
paper with a typewritten address.  He said he did not expect Fuchs
still to be living there, but there was the remote possibility that he
had left a forwarding address.  Gold should call, but be careful not to
draw attention to himself.  It was possible though unlikely that the
address was under surveillance.  If nothing came of it, then they would
have no alternative but to follow Fuchs's advice, and rely on his own
makeshift fallback plan.

As John melted into the anonymity of Manhattan, Gold headed for a
second-hand bookshop on 41st Street.  He had intended to buy a book on
physics, the sort of thing that a boffin would read.  But on second
thoughts he felt it would be unwise to draw attention to Fuch's
occupation.  People were so suspicious these days.  Instead, Gold
wandered over to a small section of books in foreign languages.  German
unsurprisingly, he thought, given the large number of Jewish traders in
the district was well represented.  Without much consideration, Gold
picked up a book by Thomas Mann.  He was one of the few German authors
he had heard of.  Der Zauberberg: he wondered what it meant.  It would
never dawn on Harry Gold that The Magic Mountain was, given the
location Fuchs had moved to, a singularly appropriate choice.

He took his purchase into a nearby coffee shop, pulled out a
deliberately unsharpened pencil and on the flyleaf copied out
carefully, in as neutral block capitals as he could, the address John
had given him: "Dr.  Klaus Fuchs, Apartment 38, 128 West 77th Street'.
Then he went back out and hailed a cab.

The building at 128, West 77th was a typical Manhattan brown-stone,
home to the sort of people who believed the world's fastest-growing
metropolis would one day make them rich.  The doorman, eyeing Gold's
unpressed suit, nodded cautiously and asked if he could be of
service.

"Hi there.  Could be."  Gold had put on his most ingratiating smile.

"I found this here book in a coffee shop over by Times Square.  Said
some fella had left it behind.  This place is kind of on my way home,
so I thought I'd just drop by and leave if off.  Guess the fella who
forgot it might be grateful to get it back if you know what I mean."

The doorman took the book, read the name and address, and smirked. Gold
took a long shot.

"The sort of guy who might only get remembered because of his name,
eh?"  It was the sort of crude comment that he hoped might break the
ice.  It did.

"Yeah, sure thing.  Old Barney the janitor here kept on about it.

"Still no broads, Fuch?"  he used to say.

"I guess Mr.  Fuchs just don't live up to that name of his.  Heh, heh."
Tell you the truth, pal, I got to feel sorry for the guy.  Must have
been hell even introducing himself.  But I can't help you.  He doesn't
live here any more.  Moved out about a month ago."

"Oh, that's sure a shame.  I don't suppose he left a forwarding
address?  A phone number or anything?"

"Sorry.  Can't help you.  I heard he left on a boat."

Gold caught the evening train back to Philadelphia and planned a trip
to Boston.  The professor had a sister there.  He had foreseen all
this.  At their last meeting he had told Gold that when the time came
for him to be moved, it would be sudden.  The link would be his sister.
It was the one time they had almost become close during the nine months
of occasional meetings.

That time they had met outside a movie theatre and, fearing that they
were being stared at by a man in the crowd, had gone in.  They sat
apart throughout some dreary film, and afterwards went off to an
Italian restaurant in the Bronx.  Fuchs had been almost garrulous, for
him.  He had told him about his brother Gerhardt, a devoted Communist
who had taken refuge in Switzerland and lived in fear of Nazi agents;
about his father who had been a pastor back in Germany and then taught
theology.  He was still there but Fuchs had not heard from him in
years.  To make contact would put him in danger.  The Gestapo still had
files on his own student activities at Kiel before he escaped to
England.  He mentioned briefly his mother, said she was dead.  And he
talked of his sister, Kristel, who was married to a businessman called
Heinemann, an American of German extraction, and lived in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, just across the Charles river from Boston.

The man Gold knew as John took the call on his private phone in a
Manhattan office block.  The chief task now was to find their precious
German again as soon as possible.  The Russian was fairly certain he
would be at the secret new laboratory in New Mexico.  The man had come
to them of his own volition.  Everything he had supplied so far had
been in his own hand, much of it in fact his own work which he clearly
felt he had the right to share with whomsoever he wished.  It was not
an ideal state of affairs.  Moscow had been happy, although it was a
happiness that betrayed deep-seated worries about American progress.
The latest communique had contained several questions for Fuchs.  John
was not unhappy; he had been allocated huge sums in American dollars,
should he need to encourage his source financially.  But so far the
German had not even raised the question of money.  Perhaps he should
let Gold raise it with him.  There was no harm in the motherland
showing its appreciation.  Besides, accepting a little offering often
hooked people for life.  He had given Fuchs a nickname of his own:
Prometheus.  He hoped Gold would be lucky in Boston.

As it turned out, Gold was extremely unlucky.  Kristel Heinemann told
him she had heard nothing of her brother for several weeks.  On a
second visit, she showed him a postcard from her brother.  It said
little and gave as a return address only P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe, New
Mexico.  It meant nothing to Gold though John had nodded with apparent
satisfaction when he passed it on.  The Russian gave Gold a plain
postcard to leave with Kristel to be passed on to her brother whenever
he might show up for a visit.  It gave a New York telephone number
where he could leave a message that he had arrived and would be staying
a few days; no need to mention a name or a place.  It was the same
number that Gold used to contact John, and he feared he was being cut
out of the operation.

In fact, John was equally anxious.  It was six months now since he had
been able to pass to Moscow one of the thick brown envelopes crammed
with tight, neat writing and mathematical formulae.  This was not the
way these things were meant to work.  He was the controller, but the
agent was out of control.

Pandora's Box

Burke was sitting on the edge of his chair, sipping his brandy and
looking into the earnest eyes of the young woman opposite him.

"What makes you so sure this man was murdered?  This is all a long time
ago.  Fuchs confessed and went to jail in 1950, and was released and
sent back to East Germany nine years later.  Who do you think murdered
him, and why?"

"The obvious suspects are the Stasi, the East German secret police.  We
have come across some documents.  Things that suggest Fuchs may have
been thinking of defecting again, or at least leaving a testament.
Something that someone didn't want to come out.

"Not least the British and American governments, though he'd already
done his worst by them, one presumes.  I wonder what else Dr.  Fuchs
might have signed up to for his "get out of jail free" card back in
1959?"  Burke raised his eyebrows.

"I'm assuming that this testament didn't survive him."

"Hardly.  In the chaos of 1989-90 it's remarkable anything survived at
all.  Assuming that it wasn't destroyed earlier."

"I think you'd better fill me in."

"It seems that in his confession when he was arrested, all those years
ago, Dr.  Fuchs told the truth, but not the whole truth.  Either that,"
she paused for effect, 'or your British secret service submitted less
than the whole truth to the court."

"Good heavens, can't imagine that."  Burke wondered if she picked up
the irony in his voice.

"I don't know quite where to begin."

"How about the beginning?  Where did you come by this stuff in the
first place and what does it say?"  Burke reached for the bottle and
refilled her glass.

"About six weeks ago," she began, "Gunther Eckberg, one of our science
correspondents, was trying to put together a piece about the extent to
which the old East German scientific establishment had been reduced to
a tool of the Soviet military machine.  He talked to some well-known
Stasi men in Leipzig and Dresden.  Over a few beers one evening, this
old stager who had been the party's eyes and ears in the Dresden
research establishment offers him a pile of "top secret" papers.

"At first our man wants nothing to do with it.  Mostly, what you get
for your money is details of a few researchers' private lives.  But
these days Germany has enough on her conscience without airing more
dirty washing in public; and it doesn't sell magazines."

Burke nodded.  He had always believed there was a moral background to
his journalism, but in a society like Germany, ripped apart twice in
two generations, could that mean sometimes ignoring certain issues for
the greater good of the community's mental health?  Sabine must have to
deal with that question every day.  What sort of compromises did that
involve?

"But," she continued, 'when the guy cuts his price and starts almost
pleading with him for the sake of the starving grandchildren, Eckberg
agrees to take a look.  A routine skim reveals that ninety per cent of
the material is the usual stuff.  Much of it isn't even classified:
requisition forms in triplicate for new valves for bunsen burners, a
whole ream of correspondence on the subject of getting a single new 286
series computer and this is supposed to be the cutting edge of the
communist bloc's top secret scientific research.  It was pathetic.
Believe me."

"I believe you.  I once met a Russian cosmonaut who told me the most
important piece of equipment on board the early Soyuz craft was the
spanner."

"Anyway, eventually our man, mainly to keep his contact sweet, and
partly because he thinks there just might be a whimsical piece to be
done about the appalling conditions GDR scientists worked under, buys
the lot for DM1,000 and ships it to Berlin where it lies around in
various in-trays until my features editor, on a boring afternoon,
decides to sift through it.  What does he come up with?  A couple of
old maths jotters filled with complicated formulae and notes,
apparently unrelated, scribbled down the sides of the pages.  It was
like fragments of a diary.  The sort of book that its owner carried
around with him, to jot things down as they occurred to him.  Someone
who was methodical but also slightly absent-minded."

"An absent-minded professor."

"Exactly.  Though at that stage, of course, we had no idea who it
belonged to.  A few of the notes were connected to the mathematical
formulae, though not many.  This was a man for whom mathematics was a
language in its own right.  Others were notes about his financial
situation, problems with his cars he ran two apparently, an
extraordinary privilege even for the privileged in the GDR - a red
Wartburg and, would you believe, an ageing British MG, for which it was
almost impossible to get parts.  Anyhow, the editor was going to throw
it out, but he tossed it to me to take a look, primarily because I have
a degree in physics."

"I hadn't figured you for a boffin."

"A what?"

"A boffin, an egg-head, a mad scientist."

"Oh.  No, you're right.  I'm not at least not in that league.  The
maths was over my head, and meaningless out of context.  But with a
little concentration, I realized these were calculations used only in
particle physics.  Whoever our "diary" writer was, he knew his stuff.
Just for fun I compared the scribbles against some of the published
orthographs by better-known GDR scientists.  It only took a few minutes
to be pretty certain that this was the work of Klaus Fuchs "Sums can be
that identifiable?"

"At a certain level, you don't even need to distinguish the
handwriting.  Fuchs was not just a spy; he was a world-class physicist.
For most of his later life he was involved in top-notch research
connected to the Soviet weapons programme.  Once I suspected it might
be Fuchs everything started to make more sense.  He had spent his last
years at the Dresden research plant, though nobody knew what the place
was supposed to be doing.  Those were the sort of questions you just
didn't ask.

"When I started to pay attention to more of the words, any doubts
vanished.  There were whole chunks that read like notes for an
autobiography: reminiscences, going back to a time spent in prison in
England, and then, crucially, to Los Alamos.  Suddenly, quite out of
the blue, Fuchs drops in a reference to some great secret which he is
about to reveal.  You can imagine it caught my interest."

Burke nodded.

"What I was reading, I gathered quite quickly, was the rough draft for
a last testament.  There was something quite extraordinary that this
old man who, you have to remember, never really considered himself a
spy wanted to get off his chest."

Kotzke put down her glass and reached for her bag.  She took out a
sheaf of papers and handed them to Burke.

"I photocopied a few of the relevant pages."

Burke took another swig of brandy and glanced at the first sheet.  It
showed a page from a small notebook, about A5 size he estimated,
squared like the sort of paper that continental children used for
maths.  It was covered with writing in a small, neat, precise hand. But
the writer had clearly been brought up to use the old Gothic script.

"I'm sorry.  I can't make head or tail of this.  I had the same trouble
with Goebbels's diaries once."

"Don't worry, I understand.  But as a little girl I learned to decipher
my grandfather's handwriting.  He lived in the West and sent us
presents.  I'm afraid there was self-interest in the correspondence."

Burke liked the apologetic easterner in her; it was a softer, less
aggressive personality.

"The crucial details are here."  She pointed to a paragraph about
halfway down the third sheet which had been highlighted in yellow.
Burke handed it back and sat down on the sofa next to her to follow the
text.  She began to read, drawing an elegantly pointed fingernail under
the tight, precise handwriting.

'"The thing to do is to put the record straight: the efforts men went
to in order to ensure that the world might be a better place.  Now I am
not so sure that it is" you have to remember that it seems he was
writing this in 1987, when East Germany was really going to the devil
and there was no sign of the reforms in Moscow spreading to us."

Burke nodded.  She continued reading.

""Not many people still alive know the whole story.  Perhaps only two
or three at most.  But sooner or later there will be a reckoning.  The
important element, the material evidence, remains frozen.  But one day
there will be a thaw .. . nothing stays hidden for ever .. . it is time
to speak out, I can do no more harm than keeping quiet."

"Good stuff so far.  Go on."

Kotzke kept her eyes on the paper.

"That's it.  There is more but nothing specific."

"I don't believe you.  You're having me on."

Kotzke took a deep breath and looked up.  Burke's face, only inches
from hers, displayed his scepticism only too clearly.  She pulled away
to the end of the sofa.  The voice was offended, defensive, using anger
for a shield: "Look, Mr.  Burke.  My magazine has approached you with a
business proposition.  More than that, we might just be giving you a
handle on the best story of your life.  If you really think we are a
bunch of fools and you know so much better, then there's really no
point in wasting any more of each other's time."

Burke took the point, in his own way.  What was he trying to prove, for
heaven's sake?  If some mad German rag wanted to pay him handsomely for
a couple of weeks trawling around on a dead man's trail, who was he to
spoil it all by nitpicking.  But time-wasting was against his nature.
And he found himself feeling protective towards this rather stroppy
young woman who was, after all, just a kid reporter hoping for a scoop.
The least he could do was let her down gently.

"Okay, I'm sorry.  I just don't see what sort of lead that gives us.
Help me here for a moment: I mean, what are we supposed to be looking
for and where do we start?  There's not very much there to go on."

"That is why you are involved."  The hostile stare metamorphosed into a
smile.  With an edge.

"Fuchs does not leave us completely high and dry."  She turned to
another sheet.

"Look here in the margin.  He has written, " Wer weifi noch?  wuflte?"
Who else knows?  And then he has second thoughts and changes the verb
to the past tense."

Burke looked.  Underneath there was a list of names, some with
question-marks or place-names next to them.

Arnold Skardon MI5 London.  Tot.  Wer son st

John Moskau.

Washington?  iiberhaupt jemandt?

der Monch .. . !

The last line had been added like a postscript, possibly later,
indented and noticeably lower than the others.

"Well, it's something, I suppose: some bloke called Arnold Skardon,
apparently an MI5 man in London, now dead, however, and maybe someone
else, a bloke called John in Moscow.  Washington?  Obviously he means
someone in the State Department or the Pentagon, or more likely someone
who was there fifty years ago!  Which brings us to "the monk", who
merits an exclamation mark in my book too."

Burke could see only two possibilities: either her colleague Eckberg
was being fed a calculated drip by an ex-Stasi man determined to eke
out his pension with a few selectively edited pieces of ambiguous
archive material from his bottom drawer, or -just conceivably, though
he doubted it some item of genuine interest had escaped the CIA hoover
(an in-house joke at Langley, that).  The American spooks had gone
through most of the Stasi archives, electronic or otherwise, while the
West Germans' own intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst,
was still trying to come to terms with its chief espionage target
folding like a house of cards.  Not a few politicians in Bonn were
wanting to know why they hadn't been warned.  Since then stuff had
filtered through to the press in dribs and drabs.  But much of it was
deliberately targeted, leaked, it was widely suspected, by Stasi men
determined to poison the system that had beaten theirs.

"We thought you had contacts, within your British intelligence?  And
also in Moscow.  You spent some time there and I, for one, Mr.  Burke,
was very impressed with what you wrote.

"Also, that part of it at least is not as hopeless as it sounds.  We
know who John in Moscow is: a man who called himself Yakovlev.  He was
an official at the Soviet consulate in New York back in the 1950s.  He
was also an agent of the NKVD, a predecessor of the KGB.  He was
ultimately responsible for transmitting Fuchs's intelligence from Los
Alamos back to the Kremlin.  He was last heard of in Moscow in 1991. If
he is still alive, if we can find him, then at least we have a starting
point."

Heading for bed some hours later, Eamonn Burke was still wondering what
he was doing and why.  The story intrigued him, it was true, but even
with the dubious lead in Moscow, he was not convinced that it would
work out to be anything as interesting as Kotzke thought.

If he was honest with himself, the diary fragments seemed inconclusive.
And then there was the question of how they had survived.  Most
top-secret Stasi files had been shredded in the panicky house-cleaning
the East German secret police had begun after the Berlin Wall had
fallen, when Gorbachev refused to honour Honecker's request for tanks
to crush the workers' protests in Leipzig and it had become clear, to
everyone except the Western intelligence services, that the old order
was over.

Sabine said she had dipped into the magazine's slush fund, and paid one
of the semi-illegal 'burrowers' who specialized in flushing out details
from the officially inaccessible Stasi records that remained the CIA
trawl had been almost as devastating as the Stasi clear out for any
references to the Dresden institute in 1987 or '88.  The man had found
nothing specific, but had offered her a brief set of surveillance notes
on a target in Dresden called "Lunte', a relatively unusual code name:
it was German for a fox's brush.  Given that "Fuchs' was German for
'fox', she had thought it was too ridiculous to be linked, but equally
too obvious to neglect.  She had spent long hours comparing the
surveillance reports, the details in the physicist's diary and other
agenda from the institute.  They matched.  Not only that, they gave a
picture of a man who in the last few months of his life was obviously
under in-depth investigation.

Fuchs had been due to give a lecture in West Berlin.  It would have
been the first time he had been back on the western side of the Iron
Curtain since he was flown out of London aboard a Polish airliner in
1959, following his release from Wakefield prison.  The diary suggested
he had been looking forward to it immensely.  It was to be a quick
in-out, across through Checkpoint Charlie in the afternoon, and back
that same evening as soon as the conference had ended.  The references
in the diary to this upcoming event were blandly factual, excessively
so, in fact.

"As if Fuchs was wary of admitting even to himself the opportunity it
offered," Kotzke had observed.  And in a margin of the partially
complete document 'legacy', she had come across the date of the
conference.  Had the scientist secretly intended to abandon his planned
speech on the night and read out his 'secret' instead?  Did the Stasi
suspect?  And if so, did they decide to pre-empt him?  At any rate, in
December 1988, less than a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but
potentially more importantly, only three days before he was due to go
West, Fuchs died.  Suddenly.  Apparently of a heart attack.

"It could have just been convenient," Kotzke had admitted, 'except for
one little thing."

"Which was?"  Burke was tiring of the tease.

"That the surveillance operation on "Lunte" was closed down the night
before.  The file mark said simply: operation terminated."

It was convincing, Burke had agreed, though not exactly proof.

"The truth is out there," he mused.  The question was: where to start
looking for it?

What the hell?  It was worth going through the motions, if only to earn
his fee from Berlin.  There was always Dickie Boston, his tame
'service' contact.  A decent lunch might screw something out of the old
school.  There were worse ways of spending a few days and a few German
marks.  And he still had friends in Washington, friends of his father
to be accurate, for whatever that was worth, given that they had no
idea where to start.  Meanwhile, perhaps most importantly, there was
Valery Korkin in Moscow.  If anyone could find ex-comrade Yakovlev,
Korkin was the man.  It had always struck Burke as bizarre that the man
who had turned out to be his best friend and most reliable ally had
been born a citizen of a country that was supposedly an enemy.  Even if
Burke scarcely thought of himself as American nowadays, Korkin was
unquestionably a Russian.  It was one of the few scattered pieces of
evidence that Burke could muster for belief in God that his friend was
now extremely successful; and relatively rich, for an honest man in the
new Russia.

Burke checked the time difference it was gone 3:00a.m. in Moscow now;
too late to ring Korkin.  The big man would not be asleep but almost
certainly in the arms of a floozy or drinking the night away in some
den.  Burke made a mental note to call him around lunchtime the next
day, when he would be in full command of his facilities.

It was not just Sabine Kotzke's story, however, that had intrigued him.
The woman herself was a beguiling mixture of arrogance and
vulnerability, intelligence and credulity.  She had reawakened
something in him, he thought, as he dropped his trousers to join the
other heaps of clothes on the bedroom floor for Mrs.  Konopka to deal
with on Wednesday morning.

To his surprise, however, he did not go to sleep immediately.  His
brain, fuelled rather than addled by the alcohol, refused to grant him
rest.

As he expected, his offer had been politely, and firmly, turned down.
She was a big enough girl to get around town on her own, thank you very
much.  But she pecked him on both cheeks at the door.  Delighted to
have you on board, Mr.  Burke.  I hope our little German story will not
prove too boring for you, or too challenging this last with a sting in
it.  Burke had watched her trip lightly up his steps, then hesitate and
suddenly no longer seem quite as confident.  Just getting her bearings,
she had said.  Left at the end, then second right and straight on to
the main road.  Yes, of course, she had replied hurriedly.  Thanks.
Goodbye.  See you tomorrow.

At the end of the road, barely fifty yards away, she stopped briefly
and looked around.  At first he thought she was looking for a taxi, but
two passed with their "For hire' lights on.  A middle-aged couple,
arguing, obviously on their way home from the pub, passed her.  Only
when the street was completely empty did Sabine cross over and head
towards the Bayswater Road.

Kiva

Los Alamos, September 1944 "Klaus, Schatzchen, come with us.  You
really must."

Fuchs was polishing the Buick outside the Big House, as the main
building of the old ranch school now the single men's domitory -was
called.  It was the Russian-accented voice of Genia Peierls, calling
him 'treasure' in her husband's language, German.

Fuchs would have thought anyone else was being sarcastic.  But with
Genia, he knew it was genuine.  She was always trying to make up for
having been the one, back in England, who first dubbed him
'penny-in-the-slot' on the grounds that if you asked him a question, he
gave an answer, but 'put nothing in and you get nothing out'.  Fuchs
found it harmless enough, but Genia now seemed embarrassed.  She and
Rudolf had, after all, a genuine affection for their protege.

Genia was a great organizer.  Best of all, she liked organising hiking
trips into the extraordinary landscape that surrounded Los Alamos.

"Here we are," she would proclaim, 'in the midst of some of the most
fascinating country on God's earth and you men just want to spend your
time off playing poker in a stuffy room."

She was referring chiefly to George Kistiakowsky, the Polish munitions
expert who had taught his fellow scientists the joys of playing cards
for money.

"The thing about a good poker player is that he always believes he
can't lose as long as he keeps a grip on the mathematics."  The trouble
was that Los Alamos was not exactly short on good mathematicians.  One
of the keenest poker novices was "Johnny' von Neumann, the man who
worked on the computers.  But the only man who really worried "Kisty'
was Isidor Rabi.

He was not part of the project as such but a frequent visitor from
Chicago.  Rabi had grown up in a Yiddish-speaking family so orthodox
that he had had to discover for himself that the earth revolved around
the sun.  He had ended up as one of the foremost physicists of his
generation.  But that was no excuse, in Kisty's eyes, for being a
card-sharp too.

Fuchs, despite his own prodigious flair for mathematics, had never been
tempted to join the poker schools.  It was assumed that his reluctance
was just another aspect of his generally reclusive shyness.  But he was
a sucker for Genia's expeditions.  Today she had organized a full day's
excursion, complete with picnic baskets, through the aspen forests
around the end of the canyon, over the next mesa and down into Frijoles
canyon, which 500 years earlier had been the centre of a flourishing
Indian civilization.  There were still cave homes, ruins of stone
buildings including an ancient kiva, the stone circle at the centre of
the most sacred rituals and the spiritual heart of any tribe.  One
particular aspect of today's adventure was irresistible to Fuchs: the
party included the most famous of Los Alamos's occasional visitors,
Niels Bohr.

The Dane's arrival had been a psychological boost to everyone on The
Hill.  It was he who had defined the modern concept of the structure of
the atom, for which he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1922.
Without his ground-breaking work, the Manhattan Project might never
have been conceived.  But, almost more importantly, he was a living
reminder of the evil that justified an enterprise which one or two had
grumbled was not what they had entered a career in science for.

Bohr was one of Denmark's estimated 7,500 Jews.  On 29 September 1943,
only days before the Nazis planned to round them all up for transport
to Germany, Bohr and his wife Margar-ethe had escaped to neutral Sweden
in a fishing boat which threaded its way through German minefields.
From here he was taken first to England and then to Los Alamos.  He had
not volunteered to be a full member of the team Fuchs assumed that at
fifty-eight he was probably too old for the privations but he had
established a role as a visiting godfather, a universal figure of
respect.

Fuchs had met Bohr briefly, and had heard him speak, slowly, with great
deliberation.  Einstein had regarded the Dane as a spiritual son and
had put his ponderous speech down to an exaggerated, but wholly natural
modesty.  He had memorably described him as 'uttering his opinions like
one perpetually groping and never like one in the possession of
definite truth'.  But Bohr was far from the stereotype of a weedy
academic; he was a big man, who had been a spectacular athlete in his
university days.  Even now he was a physically as well as
intellectually impressive figure.

Fuchs did not want to bore or embarrass his famous companion by asking
him to rehearse once again the story of his dramatic escape from
Copenhagen, and it was the Dane who broke the ice.  To Fuchs's
surprise, he raised the one issue he had no wish to talk about.

"So, Klaus.  Do you think this weapon will ever be used?  What do you
feel, as a German, about dropping such a device, with such unknown
power, on your fellow countrymen?  Please, I do not wish to disconcert
you, but it is something we have to think about."

Fuchs had heard rumours that Bohr was becoming increasingly worried
about the morality of using a super weapon particularly when he had
albeit indirectly contributed so crucially to its origins.  But the
last thing Fuchs wanted was to be drawn into a conversation on the
moral implications of a bomb that could alter for ever the global
balance of power.  He knew what had to be done.  He was doing it.  It
was not betrayal.  It was how science was meant to be.  There should be
no secrets between allies.  But to get involved in a discussion of the
topic would be to risk expressing his opinions too freely, and that
might raise security questions, particularly in the mind of the
ever-suspicious General Groves.  He parried Bohr with a standard
response used on The Hill: "If it ends the war, then it will be
worthwhile."

"Precisely."  The big man fixed Fuchs with the steady gaze of an
apostle in search of a convert.

"But it must end not just this war, but all wars.  You know they have
no idea exactly what force this bomb may yield.  You yourself are
engaged on the calculations, so I do not need to tell you that it is a
highly speculative endeavour: we have little frame of reference.  I
suspect that it will be tremendous.  It will set history on to a new
track."

Fuchs noticed an intensity in his eyes, which in anyone else would have
been mistaken for a psychological disorder.  In Niels Bohr it was a
window on to an intellect that never slept.

"What will be the result if one country alone has this bomb?"  the Dane
continued.

Fuchs told himself he was not hearing this.

"The very reason for the work we are doing here was the fear that the
first country to achieve it might be Nazi Germany.  But should any one
country, no matter how benevolent it may seem to us today, be allowed
mastery of human destiny?  This work will not be secret for ever.  If
we are successful, then others will be too sooner or later.  How much
should we be telling our allies?"

Fuchs studied the ground before him as they marched down the dusty
trail.  Could it be that Bohr thought as he did?  Was it not more
plausible that the Dane had been primed to test him?  Scientists at Los
Alamos talked openly, but it was also no secret that the General was
becoming increasingly paranoid and putting pressure on Oppenheimer to
report any doubts about the reliability of his people.

"There is an agreement with Britain," Fuchs began.

"They, I mean we," he found the word strange in his own mouth even
though he had been a British citizen for the past two years, 'we will
share in the weapon."

Bohr swept aside the statement.

"Of course, the British will be in on it.  I too am here thanks to
them.  But I doubt if they or their empire will wield as much influence
in the world that emerges from this bloody conflict.  I am thinking of
the Russians."

Fuchs felt the mild sweat he had worked up on the walk turn suddenly
cold.  He said nothing.

But Bohr was not looking at him.

"Look," he was saying.  The canyon wall was pitted with dark holes,
like dovecotes carved out of the living ochre rock: the precursors of
the pueblo villages, the remnants of a genuine trogolodyte civilization
worshipped as a mythical golden age when the conquistadors were
building their first church in Albuquerque.  Bohr had stopped and was
standing in the centre of a roughly marked-out stone circle.

"You know what this is?"  he asked.

The German had no idea.

"Genia explained to me earlier.  I believe it is the kiva, the Indians'
sacred place.  This is where they performed their mysteries."

Fuchs looked around at the stones and thought it not unlike similar
circles he had seen in England.  There was one, he recalled, not far
from Banbury: the Rollright Stones, it was called.  He had driven there
as a diversion, on the way back to Birmingham, one afternoon after
meeting 'her'.  Even at the thought of the young woman who had called
herself Son] a he felt a dry tickling in the back of the throat, the
beginning of his familiar rasping cough.  He had begun to fear it was a
nervous reaction.  It had begun back then, when he first started
passing information to the Russian at the Embassy in London, and later
to the strange girl who spoke perfect German, but could still pass for
an English country girl.  Things had been simpler then: the stakes
smaller, the betrayal less obvious.  Science had no natural frontiers,
and all he had been sharing was his own work.  To what nation did that
belong anyway?  Certainly not the abomination that his own had become.
Pure science was about channelling mankind's knowledge out of such
narrow boundaries.

It was in New York that the cough had started in earnest, just as the
game had become more elaborate.  He had woken early and choked like a
heavy smoker, he remembered, the morning he was due to walk down 42nd
Street to Times Square holding a baseball in one hand.  Fine for some
American teenager, but the thin German professor with the receding
hairline and the sober suit had felt ridiculously obvious, as if they
had told him to wear a placard around his neck announcing "Secrets for
sale'.  But he had not reckoned on New York.  No one paid the slightest
notice, no more to him than they did to the pudgy-faced man who came up
to him on the corner of the square, wearing gloves and holding a spare
pair in his hand.  Fuchs had felt like a bit-part actor in a bad movie.
He had gone home that evening and coughed over the lavatory bowl until
his lungs heaved in his chest.  Then he had lain back on the sofa in
the brownstone apartment building, poured himself a whiskey and laughed
quietly to himself.  Sadly.

"But you know what was the greatest mystery to them?"  Fuchs was jolted
back to the present by the sound of Bohr's powerful voice as he stood
in the midst of the ancient Indian kiva, "Hmm?"  Bohr looked at Fuchs
questioningly, but answered before the German could respond.

"The gun.  They did not have it.  The Spaniards did.  A new technology
that gave complete mastery to the invaders.  Do we know that Western
culture was so much better than theirs?  How can we tell?  Theirs has
not survived.  Superior technology obliterated it.  That is what we are
building at Los Alamos: the power to obliterate.  I have no doubts that
it has to be built.  Even that it might have to be used.  But I wonder,
sometimes, does humanity have a death wish?"

"Well, look.  Here are our great physicists about to master
archaeology."  Bernice Brode had caught up with them while the others
were setting out picnic things.  The women had prepared southern-fried
chicken, dusted in flour and pepper and deep-fried;

there was potato salad, a cold ham and even a strange green paste that
Genia said was called guacamole, a Mexican thing, made with avocados,
chilli peppers and onion.  She served it with some flat Indian corn
bread.  Bohr seemed to enjoy it.  Fuchs found the texture too bland and
the taste too spicy.  It was the sort of thing Oppenheimer would love,
with his taste for Mexican food.

"Acch," the Dane suddenly sighed and for a moment Fuchs thought he was
about to lapse into German, which he spoke at least as well as he did
English.  To his relief, however, Bohr showed no inclination to
continue the conversation.  He leaned back, closed his eyes and let the
sunshine fall on his pale forehead.  When he did speak, the language
was not what Fuchs was expecting at all.

"Che sera, sera."

In his office back at Los Alamos Robert Oppenheimer was reclining in
his chair, sucking on an unlit pipe.  Before him, the hulking figure of
Niels Bohr paced the room.

"It all depends, inevitably," Oppenheimer was saying, 'on the
General."

"I know."

"Groves is naturally paranoid.  That's his job and if he was any way
different, he wouldn't be doing it.  Security is the military brass's
top priority.  You can see it from their point of view.  If the Nazis
got the bomb .. ."

"Yes, of course.  You don't need to tell me."

"So what do you think?"

"I just don't know.  He is so quiet, even for a scientist.  We
discussed the moral issue, the problem of use.  But I could not draw
him out.  But then one would expect that."  He sighed again.

"Anything is possible, of course.  Anything."

"Even that."  It was not exactly a question.  But Bohr took it as one,
stopping in his relentless stride to look Oppenheimer in the eye.

"So we agree.  We think there is a chance, just a chance, that our
friend Klaus Fuchs is a spy?"

The Dane nodded, almost imperceptibly.

Oppenheimer took another suck on his pipe, pursed his lips for a
second, then, staring into the middle distance, added:

The question is: what do we do about it?"

The Snowman

New York/ Boston February 1945 The message from Moscow, when it came,
was brief and to the point.  The only trouble was that he had not
received it.

Fuchs had not been able to make Christmas 1944 at his sister's.  The
work at Los Alamos was intensifying and he was putting in some eighteen
hours a day.  When he arrived in early February, Kristel had told him
that an old friend of his called Raymond had been to see her back in
November.  He should have been expecting it.  It was, after all, what
he had told the man to do.  But somehow the news that he had actually
been here, intruded on a more personal part of his life, seemed to
Klaus Fuchs like an uninvited intrusion.

Almost immediately the cough came back, sending Kristel rushing into
the kitchen for a glass of water.  He had explained that it was a
reaction to the dry desert air and she told him, as he knew she would,
to take care of his chest.  Then she was back to the topic.

"Here," she said, 'he left this for you."

Fuchs snatched the envelope from her hand and pocketed it.  Only late
that evening did he sit on his bed and open it.  Inside was an
anonymously typewritten card with a New York telephone number and the
instruction to call, leaving no name or address, but saying simply that
he had arrived and how long he would be staying.

Harry Gold was preparing his supper when the telephone rang and he
heard the unmistakable tones of John.  The man was calling, it
appeared, from a gasoline station.  Gold found it hard to make him out
as he was clearly in a state of some excitement.  The doctor had
called, he repeated three times.  It was urgent that Raymond return his
visit.  Could he meet John at the usual place, in the park.  He had a
package for the doctor that he would like him to take.

On a cold New England afternoon, three days after the call from John,
Gold found himself tramping through the snow to the Heinemanns' home.
Fuchs himself answered the door and invited him in.  The two went
upstairs to his room, 'like two naughty schoolboys', Kristel Heinemann
was to recall.

Gold later remembered that Fuchs had seemed genuinely pleased to see
him and talked in detail about the conditions at Los Alamos, which he
described as primitive in the extreme, but intellectually the most
stimulating environment he had ever worked in.  He had lots of
important information to pass on.  But he would need time to collate
it.  He had not known when Gold would arrive.

It was snowing heavily as Harry Gold made his way to the steps of
Boston's imposing State House as arranged.  In the gathering gloom even
the glow of the street lights against the marble seemed cold.  There
was little traffic about.  On the corner a policeman looked him up and
down.

"Hey, pal.  Don't hang out too long in the open tonight.  They say it's
gonna be a cold one."

"Thanks, officer.  I'm just waiting for someone," he said, cursing
Fuchs for choosing such a conspicuous meeting place.  He understood, of
course.  The man did not want to implicate his sister.  As if that
could be avoided.  But meeting here was so much more obvious.

"Well, I sure hope she doesn't stand you up.  I wouldn't put a dog out
on a night like this."

Gold smiled and shuffled his feet, scarcely able to feel his toes.  The
policeman turned up the collar of his cape against the snow and walked
off slowly, leaving Gold alone in the yellow pool of lamplight.  A few
minutes later he saw the gangly figure of Fuchs turn the corner,
unmistakable even in a heavy overcoat and with a small black beret on
his head.

"Good to see you, doctor.  I was beginning to think you'd left me to
freeze."

Fuchs looked him sharply in the eye, as if the fact that "Raymond' was
a human being had not until that moment occurred to him.

"Sorry," he said.

"I was delayed."  He was clearly not in the mood for small-talk.

At times like these Harry Gold felt he hated the man, though he knew he
loved him.  He gave his life meaning.  He was a genius, of course; Gold
genuinely believed that.  He had had just enough time on two occasions
now to glance at the contents of the papers he handed over to John.  He
knew he understood far more of what was in them than the Russian did.
And when he had been given a list of technical questions to pass to
Fuchs at their last meeting he had felt sure they made little sense.
There were errors in the translation, as if whoever was responsible for
putting them into English had been deliberately kept in the dark about
the subject matter.  Which was, of course, exactly the case. Naturally,
he had simply done what he was supposed to: passed them on. But he had
seen Fuchs sneer when he read them, and felt somehow that the German
thought him responsible.  He had even tried to talk to Fuchs about his
work, to discuss the problems of separating the necessary uranium
isotopes, a subject to which he felt he could genuinely contribute, but
Fuchs had brushed his comments aside as if he had been a lavatory
attendant instead of a trained chemist.

The pair were walking as briskly as the conditions would allow, down
the hill.  Occasionally a car would pass them, tyres squelching through
grey slush.  Fuchs put his hand inside his overcoat and pulled out a
thick manila envelope.

"Take this.  It is the most important thing I have ever given you. Now,
we must discuss our next meeting."  The tone was businesslike.

"It will not be possible for me to come here again soon.  The pace is
accelerating.  You must come to Santa Fe."

Gold could see the logic in what Fuchs was saying, but was not sure
when he could get the time off work.  Fuchs had suggested a meeting in
April, but reluctantly settled for June.

"I just hope that when you come, it will not be too late."

The war in Europe was moving into a decisive phase.  No one knew how
long Germany could last.  In the east the Russian advance seemed
unstoppable, something both men naturally welcomed, but what it would
mean for the Manhattan Project was uncertain.  The bomb had been
designed for use against Germany; would it be used against Japan?  And
Soviet Russia was not at war with Japan.

Reaching again into his overcoat Fuchs produced a Santa Fe street map.
Pulling Gold into the shelter of a store doorway, he opened it,
indicating in the glow of the streetlight two parallel lines on the
edge of the city.

"That is the Castillo Street bridge.  It crosses the Santa Fe river.

There is a bench there.  People often sit on it to pass the time of
day.  I shall meet you there at 4:00 p.m. on the fourteenth of June."

Gold opened his mouth and then closed it again.  He would have to make
the arrangements.  Perhaps he could bring forward his summer vacation.
The German nodded and made as if to go.

"Wait."  Gold stopped him.

"I was asked to give you this."  He handed Fuchs an envelope.  The
German looked at it curiously and opened it.  Inside was a slim wallet,
of the type carried by gentlemen wearing evening dress.

Nice, thought Harry.  Not the sort of thing they would offer me.  But
then the doctor is class.

"A present, from Moscow," he said, as John had instructed him.  Fuchs
looked bemused, but put the wallet in his pocket.

"There's also this."  Harry Gold, with his heart in his mouth, took out
the other envelope he had been given to hand over.  In it, he knew, was
$1,500, almost a year's wages.

"In case you need anything, they said."

Fuchs opened it and almost dropped it as if he had been handed
something unclean.  He looked at Gold with an expression the little
chemist would remember all his life.  If he had already formed the
opinion that his admiration for Fuchs was unrequited, now he felt as if
he had defiled himself further.  Like the look on Adam's face
encountering the serpent after it had tempted Eve, was how he would
tell it to unsympathetic FBI ears.

Fuchs stood there in front of him, his face showing scorn mingled with
pity.  He knew, surely, that it was not Harry's doing.  This was more
money than they had ever given Harry.  Surely he knew that.  Fuchs
thrust it back at him, abruptly, said two words, "Till June," then
turned crisply on his heel and walked off into the falling snow.

Gold stared after him for a few minutes, the envelope containing a
small fortune limp in his hand.  He would return it to John.  He would
try to imitate the German's gesture, he thought.  Such scorn.  At that
moment he felt he despised himself almost as much as Klaus Fuchs did.
He looked for a second at the wad of notes inside the open envelope,
then put it back into his breast pocket.  In the bigger pocket of his
raincoat he put the map Fuchs had given him.  It was a move he would
spend long years of his life regretting.  The map would be crucial
evidence at his trial.

Los Alamos, New Mexico, March 1945 It was Saturday night down at the
big hall.  It had been built as the boys' school assembly, but now
served as the general mess, dance hall, bar and social centre.  Tonight
it was a theatre.  Posters had gone up all over the ramshackle
collection of prefab army billets, clapboard houses and barbed wire
fences that passed for a town: The Los Alamos Amateur Dramatic Society
proudly presents Arsenic and Old Lace."  Fuchs had heard the head of
civilian administration, a big Texan with a broad smile and even
broader accent, boasting about the atmosphere he credited himself with
creating up on The Hill: "Just one big happy family, like a summer camp
except that all these here folks are doing work that could win us the
war."

There were all sorts of rumours circulating about some 'surprise' or
other, even suggestions that a few of the project's more eminent
figures had been prevailed upon to take part.

Over a beer Richard Feynmann had persuaded Fuchs to go and see the play
with him.

"Do you good, Klaus," Feynmann had quipped.

"Take you out of yourself, get a bit more of the Anglo-Saxon sense of
humour."

Now Fuchs found himself sitting in the makeshift theatre, wondering for
just how much of the performance the two large GIs in front were going
to munch popcorn and shift around in their seats.  Feynmann, next to
him, was also eating popcorn.

"Hey, Klaus, have some.  It's good."

Fuchs found the stuff dry and unpalatable, and it had an alarming
ability to bring on the cough he dreaded.  But he declined Feynmann's
offer as gracefully as he could.  He liked the young American, indeed
recognized in him an extraordinary talent, though he found his
irreverent, almost anarchic manner disconcerting.  He was touched by
Feynmann, too.  The man's wife, Arlene, was in hospital dying of
tuberculosis.  As Fuchs had one of the few private cars among the
scientists an astounding number of them were unable to drive, he had
discovered -Feynmann had embarrassedly prevailed on him more than once
to drive him to Albuquerque.  He had suggested that Klaus lend him the
car, but Fuchs had seen it as an opportunity and volunteered to take
him.  In his long-term plans an excuse for visiting Albuquerque was
vital.  He made a bit of a fuss about it being no bother, but had
contrived to let the American believe it was simply because he was such
a fuss-pot he would let no one else drive his precious car.  Feynmann
had thought Oppenheimer would be reluctant to let both of them go at
once, and had been surprised when the boss had okayed it.  Fuchs saw it
as proof once again of the basic humanity of his colleagues.

It had been Feynmann's sense of anarchy that had finally persuaded
Fuchs to accompany him to the play, though he feared his English might
let him down on some of the jokes.  His command of the language was
generally excellent, but better in scientific terminology than
colloquialisms, particularly when uttered in some of the stranger
American accents.  Feynmann dismissed his fears.  He couldn't think of
an occasion, he insisted, when Fuchs had missed something.  In the end
Fuchs was delighted he had come; the performance was a huge success.
The young lieutenant playing Mortimer turned out to have a gift for
mimicry, and caused as much amusement with his impersonations of Gary
Grant in the movie version as with the lines he had been given.

But there was no doubt that the piece de resistance was the much
treasured 'surprise'.  When Mortimer finally realizes that his demonic
aunts have been murdering their lodgers and decides to help get rid of
the evidence, the window seat was opened to reveal a succession of
stored corpses.  Last to emerge, covered in flour to give his suntanned
skin a deathly pallor, was the suitably skeletal body of J. Robert
Oppenheimer himself, director of the Manhattan Project.  The audience
erupted in laughter.

Afterwards, as they joined the crowds bustling out of the hall,
Feynmann asked him what he had thought of the scene.  Fuchs was almost
as surprised by the question as he had been by the grotesque event
itself.

"Very typical," he replied, 'very American.  And, I suppose, very
funny.  Quite apt really.  In the midst of life, we are in death.  Here
above all, at Los Alamos, we should know that."

Feynmann, of course, knew it only too well.  And Fuchs knew that he
did.  To what extent, he wondered, did personal tragedy shape a man's
philosophy.  He had his own answer.  Feynmann, slapping him on the
shoulder in that infuriating American manner as they parted company,
had a different one.  Fuchs wondered how he reconciled it with the
world he lived in, and decided he would never know the answer.

Neutral Switzerland, 1 April 1945 The man who occasionally called
himself Mr.  Harper sat lost in thought as he looked through the train
window at the fields already turning green as the last of the winter
meltwater was absorbed by the fertile soil.  Busy housewives waved to
one another from their balconies as they started on the lengthy
business of spring cleaning, beating the carpets, scrubbing the
brightly painted chalet shutters and planting the hanging baskets.

It was hard to imagine that out there, beyond this artificial island,
protected by its invisible walls of secret diplomacy, cynicism and
pragmatic greed, a war was being fought to its bitter conclusion.  But
the eventual outcome of the cataclysm would depend on the urgent report
he would send in top secret cipher to Washington the instant he reached
the Embassy in Bern.  There was also the report sent by his
counterpart, the Englishman known as Colonel White.  And in theory more
important the reply that the men with whom they had spent four hours in
a Geneva hotel room would deliver.  And once the document was agreed,
the 'protocol' as it was technically known, there could be no going
back.

Ever since his early career as a diplomat in Vienna, watching the
Hapsburg empire collapse around him, and subsequently at Versailles,
where he witnessed President Wilson's naive but well-intentioned plans
for a new, fairer Europe based on self-determination become swallowed
up by the same old short-sighted self-interest, Allen Dulles had been
increasingly convinced that the great powers should use more than the
obvious channels of war and diplomacy to shape history.  Only by acting
behind the scenes could catastrophes be preempted  Britain had been too
late in 1939.  The former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain
had sullied his hands and ruined his reputation, to no avail.

Dulles had watched the smelting of the opportunistic alliance between
Hitler and Stalin with the cynical eye of the professional, and had
laughed out loud when the Nazis launched their attack on Russia in June
1941.  But it was not only the Russians who had been caught
cat-napping.  America too had been behind-hand, entering the war only
as an afterthought, in 1941, when anyone with sense might have foreseen
that by then it had long been inevitable.  Pearl Harbor was the wrong
reason.  And the result of wrong reasoning.

The OSS, Office of Strategic Services, had been set up partly to make
sure Uncle Sam was never again caught with his pants down in quite such
embarrassing circumstances.  But to fulfill its real purpose, Dulles
knew, it would have to do more than that.  It would not just have to
pre-empt history, but make it.  Even if on occasion it had to get its
hands dirty.

The meeting he had just concluded in Geneva might be viewed in a
hostile light by public opinion at the moment, and possibly even by
history, if things went wrong.  But history, as any fool knew -even
Adolf Hitler depended on the future.  And the future depended on the
present.  And the present was never without risk.  And the risks were
what he lived for.  A new dawn was about to break over the world.  A
brand new sunrise.  Sunrise.  Yes, he liked the word.

Unearthing the Fox

Eamonn Burke stood by the window of his Ladbroke Grove flat watching a
taxi depositing a fare by the pedestrian crossing.  The driver clicked
the cab light from blue to orange as he moved off from the kerb,
leaving his former passenger struggling with an umbrella on the
pavement.  Burke watched her fight against a gust of wind that
threatened to blow the umbrella inside out, smiled to himself at the
comedy of her misfortune and then thought better of it.  Schadenfreude,
he mused, one of the most basic of human emotions.  And one of the most
base, he added.

"How come your lot invented a word for it?"  he asked of Sabine Kotzke,
who lay on Burke's floor, before her a pile of photocopies and an open
folder with pages of careful notes in her neat script.

"What?"  She looked up.

"Oh, nothing," Burke parried.

"I was just wondering what the point of it all was."

"The point of what?"

"To hell with the story.  Life, the universe and everything.  To what
purpose disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose petals, and so on."

"Rose petals?  I am sorry, Eamonn, if you are going to talk about
flowers I will think you are being romantic."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I'm only joking."

She was, too.  Ms Kotzke was sexually inscrutable.  The thought
flickered through his mind that perhaps she didn't like men at all.

He was interested to see what she had dug up.  He had sent her to the
News International library, courtesy of George Prosset, who had been
delighted to show off the extent of his empire to an attractive young
foreign journalist.  At Burke's request, Prosset had allowed her to
delve into the Times obituaries and cuttings.  She told him what Burke
had told her to: that she was working on a piece of historical
reconstruction that might form the basis of a non-fiction book in
Germany.  He knew that would be enough to bore the pants off his
drinking partner who, despite his up market pretensions, had a
basically tabloid approach to foreign news.  Disasters and football
hooligans were what Prosset really liked best.  On no account was she
to mention that she was working with Burke, he had insisted.

His brief had been specific: to get as much of the original material as
possible from contemporary reports of Fuchs's trial, to add to this the
gleanings from her own German sources and try to paint a picture of the
ghost they were chasing.  Burke wanted to know whether there was any
correlation between the oblique references in the diary snippets and
what was on the record about the atom spy's life.  He had spent most of
the day at the Public Record Office in Kew, looking through the few
publicly available official papers relating to the espionage scandal
and the damage it did to relations between London and Washington. Right
now, he was more convinced than ever that they were scrabbling in the
shadows.

"What's on the record here and in Germany is the same, not too
complicated," she said.

"Fuchs's father was a pastor who lost the faith and found socialism, at
least the Social Democrat type.  He moved the family from Leipzig to
Kiel.  Fuchs went that bit further when the politics in Germany began
to get bad.  He worked for the Communist party at Kiel university. Then
the Nazis got on his trail, and he left.  His cousin was engaged to a
girl working for a family in Somerset.  An "au pair".  A French term,
isn't it?"

"Yes, it means a sort of live-in babysitter.  Never mind."

"This family were also English fellow-travellers of the party.  You
know in Russian the word is "sputniki", like the satellites?"  She
smirked, pleased to have got her own back in the linguistic stakes.
Burke gave an appreciative nod.  Actually he had known, but there was
no point in telling her.

"Fuchs gets himself out of Germany and goes to stay with this English
family.  There he goes to university in Bristol, but the trouble starts
with a Pole.  Doesn't it always?  Jiirgen Kuczynski, a half-Polish
German whose sister Ursula was a sex pussy."

"Kitten."

"What?"

"Sex kitten, is the expression."

Sabine shrugged.

"Yeah okay, some cat.  I mean she used it, you know, like a spy, like
in the first big war: Mata Hari?"

Burke had begun pacing the room.  Outside the light had all but gone.

"Okay.  War breaks out," Sabine continued.

"Fuchs gets put in prison.  Suddenly all Germans are the same again,
yeah?  Everyone is a Nazi."

"It was an instinctive reaction.  They didn't really put them in
jail."

"No, worse.  They sent them to camps," the word was pregnant in her
mouth, 'in Canada," as if somehow the location made it worse.

"They weren't the same sort of camp.  And at least it was out of the
way."

"Like in South Africa, where the British invented the concentration
camp, for the Boers?"

"Invented, perhaps.  But like so many British inventions, it wasn't
developed to its full potential.  Are you sure you want to have this
argument."

"No."  It was said quietly.

"Anyhow, Fuchs wasn't there long, was he?"

"No.  He had a charmed life and another German friend who was not a
suspect, a Herr Peierls.  He has been living here and is part of the
upper class already; it can make such a difference to be ... vornehm}
"Establishment."

"He is working at a university in Birmingham and says Fuchs is what he
needs so he gets him, all the way back from Canada.  What he is working
on is Tube Alloys' she stumbled over the pronunciation: 'toob alloees'
- 'what does this mean?"

"It doesn't mean anything.  That was the point.  It was designed to
sound boring, I imagine, like some sort of plumber's supplies.  There
were probably all sorts of strange minor ministries back then,
thousands of men in drab regulating rationing of everything from
wrought-iron railings to bus tickets."

"So perhaps it is a good name after all.  To conceal the atomic bomb
project.  But it does not fool the Pole.  Kuczynski gets back in touch.
Tells Fuchs he must do his bit for the party.  Soon he is passing notes
just on his own work, however straight to a Russian attache at the
Soviet Embassy in Kensington Gardens.  Hey, that is close to here,
yeah?"

"Yeah."

Burke smiled and sank into the tattered leather armchair.  Secretly he
was rather impressed with the quality of her homework.  But then
perhaps he was just playing to his own stereotypes, thinking of her as
some junior reporter.

"He met the Russian at a secret house .. ."

"A safe house."

"This was also near here.  In Kensington Park Road.  He meets him three
times in '41.  Then he gets transferred, to Mata Hari.  The joke is
that she is Kuczynski's sister, but Fuchs does not know.

"Her code name at the time was Sonja.  She later calls herself Ruth and
turns up everywhere, spying in all sorts of places before finally
disappearing behind the Iron Curtain in the fifties.  She meets him at
a cafe near the railway station at a town called Banbury and out in the
country near some monument called the Rollright Stones, maybe Mick
Jagger comes from there miles away from anywhere, but maybe not so far
from Birmingham.  And Fuchs has a car.

"But then, as always, you English give everything to the Americans.
This "Tube Alloys" is moved to New York.  Fuchs is now a British
citizen.  A mistake, huh?  That is how he got tried for treason in the
end.  His control switched to New York too, a man called Harry Gold,
code named "Raymond".  He in his turn is reporting to a Russian.  This
must be our "John" Yakovlev.  I suppose he's in New York because he is
really at the United Nations."

"Do you?"

"Why else in New York instead of Washington?"

"Except that the United Nations didn't exist until after the war.  And
America was never a member of the League of Nations."

Sabine put her hand to her mouth, embarrassed at the mistake.  Burke
couldn't help rubbing it in.  He had done his own homework and saw no
harm in her knowing it:

"Yakovlev was the Soviet consul in New York.  He was one of the new
breed of Soviet spook, not just a patriot but a guy who actually
believed Communism was the future.  They'd thrown him in at the deep
end after a three-month English course.  When he arrived in New York he
must have sounded like Boris Karloff and been almost as inconspicuous.
He reported direct to the NKVD, Stalin's so-called People's
Commissariat for Internal Affairs."

"Proof if ever we needed it that the old bastard knew his chief enemy
was the common sense of his own people."

"Said with feeling."

"Consider it experience."

Burke nodded.  There had been even less love lost than he had imagined
between Ms Kotzke and the regime she grew up under.

"Anyway, Yakovlev's predecessor in New York had latched on to Gold
years earlier when the Soviets were mainly into industrial espionage.
Gold was willing to leak information on the manufacturing processes at
the Philadelphia chemical plant where he worked.  Hardly first-division
stuff.

"Comrade Yakovlev gave him a dream the great fraternalism of the Red
Flag which would save America from the boom-bust cycle of capitalism,
stop another depression like the one that had turned all his parents'
dreams of a brave new world to dust.  He was Jewish and the family was
originally called Golodetsky from the Russian for hunger rather than
the German for precious metal but the racist thugs who processed
immigrants on Ellis Island weren't concerned with complications like
that.  As far as they were concerned, another load of kikes had to have
some sort of name connected with money.  You Germans weren't the only
anti-Semites, you know?"

Burke glanced down to see if he had provoked a reaction, but her face
was a mask of passivity.  He continued:

"The FBI were on to Yakovlev, but they didn't bother to tail him on a
regular basis.  They intercepted his telex traffic, but it was all in
code.  It was only in 1948 when a bunch of spooks at the US Army
Signals Corps headquarters at Fort Meade got their hands on some Soviet
one-time pads and began reading their old mail.  One of these included
a document written by Fuchs."

"That was what led to his arrest?"

"Yes, but not immediately."  Burke flicked over the page of his
notepad.

"In itself that wasn't proof.  Yakovlev could have got hold of it
without him knowing.  But when they found another signal from Yakovlev
referring to an agent in the British mission, the FBI put two and two
together and talked to MI5, who leaned on Fuchs's current bosses at
Harwell."

"Where's Harwell?"

"Just outside Oxford.  It's not very important now, but back in the
late forties it was Britain's nuclear weapons establishment.  Fuchs had
ended up as head of the theoretical division.  You can imagine how
enthusiastic Whitehall was to hear that he might be a Soviet agent."

Sabine whistled softly.

"They spent time trying to find alternatives.  The trouble was there
weren't any.  When the Russians exploded their first atomic bomb in
September 1949, years before anyone thought they'd be ready, someone
decided it was time to find out just how much help they'd had.  When
they put it to him, Fuchs apparently just cracked.  It seems he was way
out of tune with reality."

"His family were probably quite used to extremes," Sabine suggested.

"His sister later committed suicide, as had his grandmother and his
mother.  Fuchs was the one who found his mother.  He was nineteen years
old.  He comes home from his studies and there she is lying on the
floor, with this horrible look on her face.  She'd swallowed
hydrochloric acid."

"Christ, what a way to go."

"I wonder how much that influenced his ability to block things out, to
lead a double life.  In his confession he described it as "kind of
controlled schizophrenia".  No wonder."

"So what about the man who took the confession?"  she enquired.

"Any chance of getting through to him?"

"Not unless you have a ouija board.  Arnold Skardon, it turns out,
isn't one man but two.  William Skardon, the interrogator, and Henry
Arnold, who was head of security at Harwell, someone Fuchs seems to
have become quite friendly with.  Anyway, it seems Skardon was one of
MI5's hotshot interrogators.  But he retired from the service and died
in 1988.  Gold's gone too.  The FBI put him away for thirty years after
turning state's evidence against the Rosenbergs, the American Jewish
couple who were Communist fellow-travellers and ended up in the
electric chair.

"When he came out after sixteen years, Gold went into medical research
but died during open-heart surgery back in 1972.  Same story with
Arnold.  Fuchs wrote to him a couple of times from prison.  He felt
he'd let him down.  But he's been pushing up the daisies for years."

"Really."  Kotzke narrowed her eyes.

"All of them.  Dead?  Something of a coincidence, don't you think?"

Burke shrugged.

"This all happened a long time ago.  Arnold was eighty-eight when he
died.  I think trying to hatch conspiracy theories might be stretching
our evidence here, don't you?"

"Maybe."  Kotzke was straight-faced.

"But you forget the incident back in '49, just before they arrested
Fuchs."

"What incident?"

"Someone tried to kill him.  That is what he thought."

"You mean that night when he was driving home from Harwell with another
of the scientists?  The other man said a stone shattered the
windscreen."

"Do you think that's what it was?"

"Maybe.  Maybe not.  Look, by then our man must have been getting
pretty paranoid.  The other bloke said afterwards Fuchs hit the deck as
if someone was shooting at the car and took ages to calm down.  At the
time they all thought he was just neurotic as hell.  But surely it was
just his guilt complex.  Maybe he thought the KGB was coming for him; I
can see his point.  If they'd got him before he was arrested, he would
never have been able to confess his espionage.  But no bullet was ever
found, nothing to prove it was anything more than his own
imagination.

"Unless .. ."  Burke's mind was wandering ahead of his words, down the
dark corridors that existed in secret places '..  . unless there were
people who'd already done the digging.  People who thought putting
Klaus Fuchs on trial would be a big mistake, and wouldn't get the right
result.  People worried about dirty washing."

Fellow Travellers

The dining room of the Travellers' Club in London's Pall Mall is one of
the finer examples of Victorian style to be found in the British
capital.  The club itself, on the elegant thoroughfare that leads from
the Foreign Secretary's official residence in Carlton House Terrace
down towards St.  James's Palace, bears only a street number on the
brass plaque.  It was, of course, known to the taxi-driver who
deposited Eamonn Burke there just before lunchtime on Thursday.  If he
had to rattle the bars of the spooks' cages, there was no better moment
than feeding time.

Burke often thought the Travellers was one of those English
anachronisms which his real father would not have understood.  In its
day it had cultivated a reputation as the hangout of spies and
adventurers.  But the world he had grown up in had prepared him for
membership of a gentlemen's club.  And the Travellers these days at
least was prepared to extend that definition even to the gentlemen of
the press.  He had become a member in his mid-twenties and had found
the place a bit of a bore, but of inestimable use for quiet lunches
with the sort of contact who liked to be considered hard to come by.

Dickie Boston prided himself on being the new breed of spook, the
product of a Midlands comprehensive who had taken a first-class honours
degree in history at Cambridge 'the school for spooks, old bean', as he
referred to it in his parody of the old school tie generation that
'people like him' regarded as responsible for the
Philby-Burgess-Maclean conspiracy.  Ever since Burke had come across
him in Peshawar during the Afghan affair, Boston's parodies had
increasingly come to replace whatever personality might have been there
in the first place.

He entered the downstairs bar as if he had been born to a viceroy of
the Raj rather than a Renault dealer in Nottingham, thought Burke.

"Eamonn, begorrah!  Good to see you.  How's the revolution?"

Burke smiled wearily.  It had become one of Boston's many affectations
to treat Burke as some sort of Noraid fund-raiser for Sinn Fein.

Today Boston was full of his own news.  He had been moving flats,
leaving girlfriends, struggling with mortgage repayments and cursing
the civil service pay structure.  It was one of their private jokes
that James Bond never complained about his overdraft.  He sank a fino
sherry and insisted they have another before Burke could persuade him
upstairs to the dining room.

Burke selected a table near the great high windows.  There was a
guffawing from the other end of the room; half a dozen hacks
sycophantically over-reacting to some dirty joke from a minor minister.
About two-thirds of the tables were occupied, but they were far enough
apart for it to be difficult to overhear.  Most members in any case
gave the impression that their own conversations were far more
important than anyone else's could possibly be.

Boston chose smoked salmon with scrambled egg followed by roast rack of
lamb.  Burke opted for quails' eggs and rare calf's liver with bacon.

"So, what's it all about, Eamonn?

"Oh, nothing very exciting.  Just an old anniversary that I'm trying to
put some spin on.  To be specific, one of your lot's more celebrated
catches, Klaus Fuchs."

"Going back a bit, aren't you?"

"That's the point of anniversaries.  It's fifty years since he was
arrested: I thought you might be able to give me a new angle.  There
must be all sorts of bits and pieces that got salted away for
convenience's sake and will never come out under the thirty-, fifty-or
whatever-year-rule because they've dropped off the edge of the table ..
. You know the sort of stuff I mean."

"God, can't say I do, really.  Surely it's all in the cuts somewhere.
Just dig it up and rehash it for Joe Public.  Good for us, right
enough, I suppose.  Not often we get our praises sung these days. Ought
to be all out for it I suppose in this age of transparency .. . "Bottle
of Sancerre, d'you fancy for starters?  Never have found a wine that
works well with smoked salmon.  Tried Alsace Gewiirztraminer -y'know
for the spicy side of it but still ended up tasting like silver polish.
The advantage of a Sancerre is simply that it tastes so good when you
slurp it down afterwards with the brown bread and butter. Still, life's
a party, eh, old man?"

Burke pressed on relentlessly.

"What I was wondering is if there was any snippet you could dig out of
the dead men's files that might give the story a bit of a twist.  There
were all sorts of rumours at one stage.  I seem to recall reading
somewhere that Fuchs was paranoid about being attacked when he was at
Harwell after the war.  And then something about a diary or papers of
some sort hidden in a hollow bed leg in his cell?

"Perhaps there was something in his confession that didn't make the
newspapers at the time.  Too sensitive then but no problem now.  You
know the sort of thing.  By the way, whatever happened to the bloke who
did his interrogation?  An interview with him might just make it sing."
Would Boston admit Skarden was dead?

Boston took out a large white handkerchief and blew his nose loudly
into it, then began to tuck heartily into his salmon.  Burke waited a
moment and then decided his lunch guest was deliberately missing his
cue.

"So, what do you think?"

Boston looked up as if the topic of their conversation had momentarily
slipped his mind.

"Eh?  Oh, dunno.  Can't tell you, old bean.  Must've been one of the
other lot, obviously.  Domestic, I mean."

He used the word much as if he were talking about his family's
ancestral cook.

"Their cock-up in the first place of course, clearing the bugger.
Retired long ago, I suspect.  The interrogator, I mean.  Probably still
hung up by the Official Secrets Act anyway if he hasn't turned up his
tootsies by now.  Not that I can imagine there's anything much that
wasn't let out at the time.  Embarrassing enough I should have thought.
God knows the poor buggers didn't know what they had to come,
particularly my lot.  Mind you, I suppose Maclean would have been one
of "our men" if you'll pardon the phrase in Washington at the time.
God, what a shambles."

Burke dipped a quail's egg in celery salt and ate it.

"Still, I could a shuftie round the antiquities department if they
haven't lost half of it in our move to Caesar's Palace have I told you
that's the latest nickname for the jolly green giant?"

Burke smiled.  Inventing new names for the latter-day glass pyramid
that housed the Secret Intelligence Service on the south bank of the
Thames was a well established Fleet Street game; as was the competition
among the inmates to make sure the one that passed into legend was one
they had invented themselves.  He suspected Dickie was better placed
than he pretended to find out any secret lurking in Fuchs's past; at
their last meeting he had dropped broad hints about his appointment to
the new Joint Steering Committee which was supposed to end the old
rivalry and ensure co-operation between both branches of British
intelligence.

"Not sure I can see your point, though.  Thought you might be targeting
something more up to date.  Bit of a bore, the old Fuchs thing, surely?
Why not get on to something more recent?  Might be easier to help you
there.  Less history to trawl through, and all that."

"I thought that would have made it easier, being so long ago.  Who did
you think I meant?  Gordievsky?"

"Why not?  Bit of a coup old Oleg was, you know.  You should know.  I
gave you the best bits.  A good story, us spiriting him out in a fridge
and all that."

"Sure, sure, Dickie.  Much appreciated, as you know.  But right now I'm
interested in older stuff.  Would have thought you'd have been
delighted.  After all, as you say, it wasn't SIS who cocked up the
initial vetting, was it ... was it?"  Burke suddenly wondered just how
much faith he could put in anything his companion Boston told him.

Boston shook his head in that dismissively definitive way he had that
always made Burke suspect he was lying.  But he decided to take it at
face value, for the moment.

"Anyway, all I'm after is a bit of really deep background: access to
some of the stuff that never made the papers of the day, the sort of
stuff somebody decided to sit on because they thought it wasn't what
the great British reader needed to know and the public was still very
much treated on a "need to know" basis back then."

Boston gave him a reproving schoolmaster look, then lowered his gaze
again.  Burke watched him.

"I mean, there must be somebody, not in the service, somebody on the
fringe even, in the grey area between the scientists and the suits, who
kept track of it all, somebody who has a shrewd idea of what went on at
all those conversations and meetings when they were playing God with
the biggest weapon in history."

"Hmm .. . nuclear winter," Boston muttered.

"Sorry?"

Boston looked momentarily taken aback, as if he had been interrupted on
a totally different train of thought.

"You know, nuclear winter: what they thought would happen if there was
a serious exchange, black clouds over the sun, that sort of thing."

It was an uncharacteristically reflective note for Boston to strike.
Just then the main courses arrived.  Boston eyed the wine list
thirstily before ordering up a bottle of '84 Margaux.

"Just the thing, and the second bottle'll go down swimmingly with the
Bleu de Bresse, eh?  Sure your rag'll run to it, are you?  Highly
placed anonymous sources, all that."

Burke glanced at his own list which included the prices and thought it
was just as well he was working on a German budget.  Not, he reminded
himself, something he would broadcast in Dickie's presence.  There were
people even now at Vauxhall Cross who hadn't forgiven the Hun.

Sins of Omission

It was towards six o'clock in the evening and Eamonn Burke was sitting
in the back bar of the Nag's Head just off Oxford Street waiting for
Sabine.  After the frustrating lunch with Boston he had made his way to
El Vino's in search of the left-over-from-lunchtime mob.  He had found
George Prosset leaning on the bar, staring into the dregs of a glass of
claret.

"Eamonn, good to see you," Prosset had declared with genuine
enthusiasm, and ordered another bottle.  Burke found himself, against
his better judgment, launching into the subject of Fuchs.  Happily,
Prosset's mind was more on his own matters, the labyrinthine intrigues
woven in the corridors of Wapping, where he worried he had lost the
thread, and the perennial sniping of his own foreign correspondents
from their safe bolt-holes overseas.  After a while, Burke had found
himself tiring of his company and realized he needed to be alone.

Now he was, and was annoyed with himself for not making more of it.  To
some people, beer on top of claret might have seemed like suicide; to
Burke it acted more like a brain tonic.  Ideally, he thought, he would
have liked to go to sleep and wake in the middle of the night shouting
"Eureka!".  In reality, he knew, all he would surface with would be a
hangover.

He pulled out a notepad and a pen and began to draw a somewhat erratic
flow diagram.  It took him a minute to see it was flowing nowhere.  He
lifted his head and surveyed his surroundings.  Classic Victorian gone
slowly to seed, by way of flock wallpaper and a fruit machine.  A man
with a hooked nose and a distracted air talking to himself over a glass
of lager reminded him of Fagin in Oliver Twist.  Funny, he thought, how
some human types lingered in the landscape, looking as if they might
have been more at home in earlier generations.  A wizened old man with
a strong Irish accent and a chin like a worn wire brush asked if he
could borrow his Evening Standard.  Burke handed it to him, telling him
to keep it.  He looked at his empty glass, wondered about a refill,
decided against it and turned once again to his notepad.

He was deeply annoyed with the fudge they seemed to be floating in.
Fuchs's murder was a story in itself.  Not front-page material at least
not in England, though possibly in Germany but still a good yarn,
depending, of course, on the identity of the culprit and the motive.
But what intrigued him was something in Kotzke's manner that hinted at
a much bigger story.

On the spur of the moment, Burke decided to take a piece of Prosset's
disinterested advice and ring the Times's former science correspondent,
Edgar Morris, whom he had always considered a doddery old tosser.  But
Prosset had assured him the old boy had been a bit of a whizz on the
atom stuff in his day.  Back when everybody really thought nuclear
energy was a goer.

To his surprise, the number answered almost immediately.  Burke was
relieved when Morris not only remembered him but showed no antipathy
despite the lack of courtesy which he had as he now regretted always
shown the older man.

"An old story, eh?  Well, you've come to the right person."

Burke smiled at the self-deprecation, but was disappointed to find him
not the mine of information Prosset had promised.

"Klaus Fuchs?  Well, that takes me back.  Caused one hell of a stink,
he did.  A right slap in the face for the national ego, and in front of
the Yanks, too.  I wrote his obituary, of course, you know.  One of the
last things they let me do.  But I'm not really the expert.  No, not at
all.  Got most of my information second hand."

"Well, I'd be most grateful," Burke continued in his most obsequious
voice, hating himself for it, 'if you could point me in any direction
that might prove useful.  I daresay the magazine I'm working for could
be persuaded to cough up a few bob, you being a freelance now and all
that .. ."

"Don't be silly.  I'm not deluding myself that I'm anything other than
retired these days.  Glad to be shot of the business, to tell you the
truth.

"Well, as I said, I'd be very grateful .. ."

"Yes, yes.  No problem.  No, old Nora's who you want to speak to.  Must
be getting on a bit now.  Over eighty, I reckon."

"I'm sorry?"

"The archivist, she was down at Harwell in the heyday of the project.
Knew everybody, she did.  Had access to all the records, more or less
the official historian.  No, I don't think you'll find anybody knows
more about it than she does.  Lives in Oxford these days.  A word of
warning, though, don't mention the war."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, don't mention the filthy Hun, really.  She was married to a
German.  Think he might have knocked her about a bit.  Anyhow, it all
ended in tears.  Left a bit of a bad taste, I gather.  Not to worry
though, not as if you're working for Stern magazine, is it?"

"I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch her full name."

"That's because I didn't quite give it to you.  Nora, Nora Winter.
Nuclear Winter, they used to call her.  Here's the number."

Burke scribbled it down and thanked Morris profusely, promising to
remember him to her.  Then he put the phone down.

"You canny old bastard, Boston," he muttered under his breath.  He
lifted the receiver again and began to dial.

Thunder

Sabine arrived at 6:37, Burke noticed, looking at his watch.  Seven
minutes late.  Not very Teutonic.  He smiled.  Punctuality was a vice
he had little time for.

"Hi, there.  How was your spy?"

"Deceptive.  But I've got something out of it, one way or another. I've
found someone who remembers Fuchs, and she's willing to talk."

"She?  One of your British Mata Haris?"  Sabine looked jealous, Burke
thought.  He found the idea seductive, even as he dismissed it.

"Not exactly.  She's a little old for me."

"I thought you liked the mature woman?"

"The lady in question is in her eighties, though frankly it took all
the charm I could muster to get her to see me."

"Great.  So when do we go and where?"

"Oxford, but not "we", just me."

"A liaison after all, then."  She looked at him obliquely, teasingly,
so he let her have it.

"Sort of.  She just doesn't like Germans.  She had a bad experience,
I'm afraid.  Her husband."

"In the war."

"No, in matrimony.  She married a fat chemist from Diisseldorf.  Turned
out to be a right bastard."

"That, Mr.  Burke, is not exclusive to German men."

"Touche.  Anyhow.  I'm going to see her tomorrow.  You'll just have to
trust me."

"Do I have a choice?"

"Only one, actually.  Your place or mine?  .. . For dinner, I mean."

Sabine looked at him for a few seconds, then delivered an answer he
hadn't quite expected:

"Actually neither, if you don't mind."

He didn't mind; he saw what she meant.  A good line was one thing, but
in reality, the idea of cooking a meal in the shambles of his domestic
accommodation appealed to him even less than the prospect of sitting
down in a soulless hotel dining room.

"I know a decent place, not far from either of us, in Notting Hill.  Do
you fancy an Italian?"

"Maybe.  I haven't had one for a while," she replied.  Eamonn Burke
found himself laughing at the double entendre.  Served him right. After
all, he had started it.  But he couldn't help wondering, not for the
first time in the seventy-two hours he'd known her, just how much of a
come-on Ms Kotzke really was.  Perhaps somewhere, some day, he would
run into a woman who did not want to tease pricks.  But then maybe he
should stop acting like one.

It was late-night shopping every Thursday in central London.  Burke had
forgotten the fact when he had arranged the Nag's Head as a meeting
place, and again when he had suggested walking to the restaurant. After
they had shouldered their way through the heaving crowds and reached
the relatively deserted Bayswater Road, Burke felt an immense sense of
relief and slowed his stride.  Sabine, he realized, had been almost
running to keep up with him.  The drizzle had evolved into a slow
steady rain and her hair hung in limp strands across her forehead. She
was not in the best of humours.

"We might have caught a taxi, especially considering I'm paying the
bills."

"I'm sorry," Burke said blandly.

"I just wasn't thinking about you.  It's a failing."

"You bet.  No wonder your wife left you."

Burke stopped dead in his tracks.  Her voice had been matter-of-fact,
almost light-hearted; he wondered if she really had any idea how
fragile even the biggest men could be.  And decided she hadn't.

Sabine kept pace easily now, by his side, but the banter they had
exchanged in the pub had evaporated.  That was it, he thought, he had
been a fool to think anything else.  This was just another woman who
saw him as an emotional failure, cold and unsympathetic.  And maybe
they were right.  Eamonn Burke silently cursed the world.

And the world cursed him back.  The concussion struck him like a hammer
blow to the side of the head.  The blast seared his skin.  The horribly
familiar roar pummeled his inner ear, like being thrust into a 747's
engine on take-off.  For a terrifying instant Burke was back on the
Shankill Road, Belfast, 1991.  The harsh stink of cordite in cold air,
the sickening barbecue smell of charred human flesh.  The 'bits in
bags' as the snappers had called the shots no newspaper could
publish.

He opened his eyes and saw, hurtling towards him through the dark cloud
of smoke the unmistakable black shape of a London taxi.  Behind the
taxi's wheel, James Carterton, forty-nine, from Ladywell, licensed
London cabby number 45324, married with two kids who would never see
him again, fought to control his vehicle, standing on the squealing
brakes as the pain in his chest jack hammered the last fragment of life
out of his body.

The Wild West

The Santa Fe Trail, 14 June 1945 Harry Gold had never been so far west
in his life.  The heat oppressed him.  On the interminable overcrowded
bus journey from Albuquerque to Santa Fe he had leaned against the
window, eyes closed, trying hard not to be sick.  Flies, involuntarily
taken along for the ride, buzzed against the glass.

The bus was full.  In fact, full was a serious understatement, even by
New York rush hour subway standards.  A large Navajo woman was squeezed
next to Gold, beaming at him whenever he looked her way, silver feather
earrings nodding as her vast bulk was rocked to and fro each time the
bus's rickety suspension was challenged by another pothole.  An old man
with a ripped straw hat and a face the colour and texture of an old
well-worn donkey saddle hung to one of the overhead straps and stared
constantly at Gold for, it seemed to him, the one and a half life-times
it took for the bus to reach its destination.

Santa Fe was not all he had hoped for, either.  The name had a romantic
ring, but it looked like just another hick town with no proper
buildings and sanitary facilities he didn't care to think about.  Gold
checked into an overpriced room at the La Fonda Hotel and got out the
street map Fuchs had given him.  It was already two o'clock.  The
journey from Albuquerque had taken nearly four hours.  What depressed
him most was the prospect of the return trip the next day.

He went downstairs and headed for the bar.  At least, the barman was
white.  Everybody else in the goddamn place looked like they had just
stepped out of some Wild West Rodeo show.  He was sure he had spotted
Geronimo and Sitting Bull on the back of the bus, while the driver had
looked and talked like Wyatt Earp's long lost grandson.  At least he
had spoken English, after a fashion.  How long were the Spaniards
supposed to have been gone?  Clearly not long enough, or far enough,
come to that.  Gold had the new immigrant's instinctive prejudice
against any deviations from the culture he had been pushed so hard to
assimilate.  If there was one thing he knew, it was what a real
American was.  He was proud of his patriotism.  In a funny sort of
way.

The barman recommended a margarita.  Gold had never had one before, but
as he sloshed down the potent tequila cocktail and licked the salt from
his lips, his opinion of the south-west began to alter slightly.  He
was sorry he hadn't time for a second.  But this was a strange town
and, despite the map, he wanted to be sure of getting his bearings.
After all this time, it would be a bit rich if he and Fuchs just failed
to connect.

In fact, it took Gold less than twenty minutes to locate the spot Fuchs
had indicated.  To kill time he spent a half-hour wandering around the
town's small historical museum, looking at Indian artefacts and
exhibits relating to the old Santa Fe Trail, when this little town was
the gateway to the rich pickings of southern California.  The original
Spanish settlement had functioned like an oasis.  For the few souls who
stopped here on the route north out of Mexico, he reflected, this crude
little shanty town with its babbling brook that ran under the trees
must have seemed like the celestial city after the bleak, waterless
desert trail.

Shortly after 3:30 Gold left the museum and made for Castillo Street
bridge.  There, exactly as Fuchs had promised, was a little wooden
bench in the shade.  Gold suddenly wished he had bought a newspaper. He
wondered what stories from the secret laboratory in that baking red
sand furnace percolated into the local press.  There would not be much,
he decided.  Probably nothing.  He wondered how the locals felt about
so much obvious activity on their doorstep.  He would have liked to
ask, but he saw no point in drawing unnecessary attention to himself.

At 3:52 the daily shuttle bus to The Hill passed by bulging with
passengers and luggage, and Gold thought perhaps the trip from
Albuquerque hadn't been so bad after all.  Was that really indicative
of the conditions in which the military's top secret project was being
conducted?  It could not be anything else.  The dark green of the army
bus was unmistakable.  Gold laughed to himself: perhaps they should
have had "Secret Service' on a destination card in the cab.

Apart from that, a couple of pickups and a bright red battered Dodge
saloon that appeared to contain half an entire Navajo reservation
crammed together silently while the radio blasted out foxtrot music,
there was little on the roads.  Harry settled down.  Fuchs would be
punctual.

Klaus Fuchs had woken twice during the night.  The first time it had
been because of the heat, and because he needed to pee.  He had spent
the evening drinking beer in the mess hall with Feynmann and Frisch,
watching the Austrian do his increasingly eccentric impersonations of
the "Injuns'.  He had pulled a marine's forage cap down over his head,
pushed out his bottom lip, stuck a cigarette to it, pulled out his
shirt tail and borrowed a string of beads from one of the women sipping
dry martinis in the corner.  Feynmann and he had been in stitches as
the man who had defined the principle of nuclear fission sloped around
the floor performing an approximation of a Jemez fertility dance while
humming "The Blue Danube'.

Fuchs had lost track of the number of beers they had knocked back.  He
had become quite fond of American beer.  It was gassy and relatively
weak, but they managed to keep it cool even up here.  At first he had
worried about his drinking.  He thought he might say something foolish,
be goaded into a political discussion or, worst of all, become maudlin
and reveal his doubts.  In fact, to his own surprise, he found drink
had the opposite effect.  It was as if the alcohol temporarily erased
everything but the superficial.  Beer brought him as close as he had
ever known to sharing a genuine spirit of camaraderie.

But it did not help him sleep.  Once awakened by the insistent pressure
on his bladder, he found he drifted into a more uneasy repose.  That
was when the dream came back to him.  He was with his parents,
returning to the house after his father's sermon, hot, bored and
thirsty.  A few of the townsfolk would come by to share a beer with the
pastor.  But there was nothing for young Klaus to drink.  The thirst
got worse and worse, until he felt his throat crinkle inside like dried
parchment.  The men were laughing, telling jokes, paying no attention
as he screamed in their faces.  Round and round and round the little
room.  And then out, down some dark, echoing hallway that had no
existence in any place he had ever called home.  His throat still
drying until hairs began to grow out of the red raw membranes, hairs
that stood erect like needles as they became the points of great
globular cacti growing to fill his mouth.  He tried to call for his
mother but the cactus spines already pierced his cheeks from the
inside.  Then the ground gave way before him and there in a pool of
light lay his mother on the floor, her eyes wide and staring, an empty
glass by her side and a great green, suppurating cactus bursting out of
her ripped-open mouth.

He awoke in a sweat.  Then breathed a sigh of relief that at least he
had not woken Feynmann, asleep only feet away through the thin
partition.  He had cautiously or perhaps incautiously -broached with
the young American the topics Bohr had raised.  Fuchs had been
suspicious about the Dane: had he been testing him?  How did Feynmann,
a relatively junior member of the team, feel, he wondered?  He had led
the conversation gradually around to the power that the bomb, if it
worked, would give to whichever country possessed it, and was grateful
when the young physicist had instantly leaped to the topic.  Feynmann's
reaction, however, had been radically different: "The only way this
weapon will prove a defence is if we can keep a monopoly on it.  No
monopoly, no defence, if everybody can do it, then no city will be
safe.  It may be the stupidest thing humanity has done to invent this
bomb, but it's too late to go back, and if we get it, we sure as hell
don't want to share it."  Fuchs had agreed, of course.  He always did.
It was how he survived, he told himself.  But somehow, it made the
cough worse, as he crept out, while Feynmann, a man he liked intensely,
yet knew now was a danger to his very existence, lay asleep so close
by.  Outside, he gave vent to it: dry, rough, lung-wracking.  By
tonight, he knew, it would be worse, much worse.

It was barely dawn: a rosy glow creeping across the sky and turning the
Sangre de Cristo range to an even more spectacular shade of crimson. He
decided to take a stroll before breakfast.  It was not often that the
ramshackle little town looked so peaceful.  He thought of going over to
the Tech-area and settling down to a few hours' work.  One of the
projects he had become involved in was compiling the "Los Alamos
Encyclopedia', a bold attempt to bring together all the research being
done on The Hill.  It was fascinating work.  It was also, from Fuchs's
point of view, extremely useful.  There was nothing like having an
overview.

Trying to keep to the wooden boards that served as sidewalks around the
Big House the thing Fuchs hated most about Los Alamos was the dust he
set off at a brisk pace towards the water tower, then turned left and
walked up past the line of bigger houses which had survived from the
Ranch School days.  The street had become known as Bathtub Row, for
these few houses were the only ones to enjoy that private amenity.  The
Oppenheimers lived in one, and the others were taken by similarly
senior scientists with families.

Fuchs noticed the curtains were still drawn in the upstairs half of the
house occupied by Rudolf and Genia Peierls and their boys.  The Fermis
lived downstairs: Enrico, the brilliant little Italian who had been
awarded the Nobel Prize in 1938 for his pioneering work into
radioactive substances, and his Jewish wife Laura, for whose sake they
had fled a Rome that was enthusiastically taking on the Nazis'
anti-Semitism.  Fermi had been drafted into the Manhattan Project at an
early stage and had lived up to expectations by producing the world's
first controlled and sustained nuclear chain reaction.  And he had done
it in a wooden-framed graphite and uranium reactor built in the squash
courts of the west stands of Stagg Field, the University of Chicago's
football ground.  Knowing what they now knew about just how successful
the process could be only after it was proved possible, did the concept
of 'nuclear meltdown' enter the scientific vocabulary Fuchs wondered if
Fermi would still have gone ahead, there, in one of America's most
populous cities.  He decided that he would have done.  It was Fermi,
Fuchs had heard Oppenheimer mention discreetly, who the previous year
had suggested fast-breeding strontium-90 one of the most deadly of
radioactive isotopes, absorbed by the body instead of calcium into the
bone and using it to poison Germany's food supplies.  It was one of
those occasions when Fuchs had found his natural poker face a boon.  He
had thought of his father, and all the other millions of innocent
civilians in Germany who had never supported the Nazis but had been too
weak to stand against them.  Fuchs despised them, but did not feel they
deserved to have their bone structure destroyed from within.  Winning
the war against the Nazis was one thing; but to do so at the cost of
human values seemed pointless.

Within a couple of hours the sun would be mercilessly high in the sky.
Fuchs wanted to be on his way by then.  He crossed over to Fuller Lodge
and found Kistiakowsky already in the line for breakfast.

"Morning, Klaus.  You up with the birds again?  I didn't even hear you
rise."

"I did not sleep well.  Also, today I must go into Santa Fe.  Is there
anything I can get for you?"

Kistiakowsky turned down the offer and the two sat together through a
breakfast of eggs and home fries at the long mess table.

"Have a nice day, Klaus.  Don't goof off too much.  We need that brain
of yours."

Fuchs smiled and headed for the labs.  He had decided to spend the
morning in his role as liaison between Kisty's explosives men and the
theoretical division.  Apart from anything else, it would serve to
refresh his memory.

It was about 12:30, therefore, when Klaus Fuchs finally pulled his
Buick out of the parking lot and headed towards the East Gate and the
road that in his own mind was now firmly established as the Santa Fe
Trail.  The MP checked his pass cursorily as usual and waved him
through.

"Drive safely now, sir.  Hate you to mess up that fine machine of
yours."

Forty minutes later, Fuchs pulled his 'fine machine' off the dirt road
and took a detour on to a little-used track.  There, under the shade of
a spreading Joshua tree, Fuchs took out a thick wad of foolscap paper
and in his neat, careful hand began to write, from memory, complete
with relevant equations and calculations which had become so much part
of his life that they were burned into his unconscious, the memo to
Moscow that would change the fate of the postwar world and ensure that
the Cold War became reality.

Lightning

Numbed as a rabbit in headlights, Burke gaped as the cab swerved across
the road inches from his head.  It careered into the kerb and came to
an abrupt halt, belching black diesel from its rear end.  Burke coughed
as he inhaled, and took in the improbable fact that he was still alive.
Blood dripped into his eye.

He tried to stand, but stumbled to his knees.  On the pavement a young
woman stood as if electrocuted, open-mouthed and screaming as she
stared at the blood that trickled down her thighs.  In the distance
Burke could hear the insane Red Indian war whoop of a police car
siren.

Then, through the pall of smoke, he made out the slight figure of
Sabine lurching towards him from the doorway of the Oriental Carpet
Centre, whose wares now lay exposed to the cordite-ridden air.  Shards
from the plate-glass window now lay like a dully glittering minefield
crunching under her feet.  The blast that had hurled him into the
middle of the road had thrown her the other way.  Which meant it must
have been dangerously close.

"Scheissel Are you all right?"  She crouched beside him, and cradled
his head.  Burke nodded as he put his arm around her neck and allowed
himself to be helped to his feet, all the time achingly aware of the
softness of her breasts.  Glass dust sparkled in her hair.  Strangely
beautiful, he thought, like powdered diamonds.

Burke could see the lifeless body of the taxi driver against the
windscreen.  A policeman came running up to them.

"Are you okay, sir?  The young lady?  There'll be an ambulance along
any minute.  Bloody bastards."  His radio crackled unintelligibly and
he turned away to talk into it.

"Best move to the pavement, sir.  You'll be looked after shortly."  In
the doorway, where Sabine had been thrown, the girl with the cut legs
now lay slumped.  There were two people beside her.  Someone had folded
a coat as a pillow.

Burke surveyed the scene.  For all his experiences from Afghanistan to
Belfast, he had never been quite that close to an explosion.  Only
afterwards.  His mind raced back to Frizell's chip shop on the Shankill
Road where a young man had walked in with a badly made bomb and
massacred nine people, including himself.  Burke had been on the scene
only minutes after it happened, and been sick at the sight of charred
and bloody flesh amid the glass and rubble.  But this time, he realized
with relief, the bomb had been relatively minor.  The taxi driver was
the only obvious fatality.

A police Rover had pulled across the road, its flashing red-and-blue
lights now dominating the night, like a disco without the music.  An
officer with a megaphone was directing cars into side streets and
warning pedestrian ghouls not to gather.  There could be another
device.

Most took heed.  So did Burke.  It was an old IRA stunt.  A little bomb
first, to summon the emergency services, then hit them with the biggy.
A second blue light flashed in the distance: an ambulance, trapped in
the traffic.  Burke wondered where the bomb had been planted.  It had
not been that big, after all, his professional eye estimated bleakly.
Five pounds maybe.  A classic wastepaper bin device.  But it had been
close, bloody close.  What had been its target?  Not that the IRA
needed one.  Or was it the IRA?  Within a hundred yards in either
direction were the old offices of Aeroflot, now Russian airlines, and
of Libyan Arab Airlines.  Both had enough enemies.  Chechens?
Anti-Gaddaffi freedom fighters?  London was too convenient a stage for
other people's quarrels.

"Come on, let's get out of here."

"Eamonn, are you sure you shouldn't go to hospital?"

Burke wasn't sure.  But he knew he didn't want to.

"No.  I'm all right, honestly.  I'm not really hurt.  This is more mess
than damage."

Sabine was dabbing the blood on his forehead with a handkerchief.  His
ears were still ringing.  He could sense a headache coming on.  He knew
he ought to go to hospital, have a brain scan even.  Except they would
be there all night, kept in for observation like laboratory mice.  With
a lack of suspects, the interrogators would work on them instead.

It was Sabine who took the decision.

"Eamonn, come on.  Let's go.  Your flat is not too far from here.  The
old Communist youth organization trained us all in first aid, you know.
That and some more of your terrible brandy is all we need."

The matter was sealed by the sight of an officious-looking woman police
constable approaching them.  He put his arm around Sabine and walked
into the small crowd of sightseers, who parted for them as if they had
the plague.

"Excuse me, sir, madam?  Wait a minute, please.  The ambulance is just
here."  The policewoman had broken into a modest trot but the crowd
closed behind them.  Only injury provoked awe and respect, and the
policewoman wasn't bleeding.  Burke allowed Sabine to steer him into
the side-streets.  A cab rounded the corner in front of them, the
driver puzzled by the obvious commotion ahead.

"You free?"  asked Burke, shielding his head wound with his hand.  No
cab-driver wanted to risk getting blood on his seats.

The man glanced at them.

"Yeah.  As long as you don't want to go that way.  What's going on
anyway.  Bleedin' bomb or something?"

"Think so, mate," Burke replied, giving the man his address.

"Fucking paddies.  Scum, that's what I say.  Send them all home.  Tow
it out into the Atlantic and sink it.  Nothing personal, though.  Not
Irish yourself, are you, guy?"

"No."  Burke breathed deeply.  Like Peter denying Christ, his father
would have said.  Not really, he thought.  Not really anything at
all.

"Here, let me deal with that."

Burke looked down at the woman holding what appeared to be a wad of
cotton wool soaked in antiseptic from the debris of his medical chest.
Sabine had been clearly dismayed by its contents -the average BMW car
first-aid kit was a fully equipped emergency ward in comparison, she
lost no time in telling him.

In the background Burke could hear the evening news on the living-room
television.  The explosion was the main item.  No one had yet claimed
responsibility.  The police had found evidence of a small Semtex device
planted in a wastepaper bin on a lamp-post.  There was worried
discussion about the possibility of some new Irish Republican
offensive, but other, Middle Eastern terrorist organizations were not
being ruled out.  The total number of injured was given as seven,
though not all, the newscaster added, had been admitted to hospital.
Police appealed for witnesses to come forward, especially a man and
woman who were believed to have been among the injured but left the
scene immediately.  Christ, Burke thought, with my luck we'll end up on
the wanted list.  He wondered who the injured were that he had not
noticed.  The taxi driver was listed as the sole fatality.  A heart
attack, possibly caused by shock.

His cut looked worse than it was, Burke had decided: a jagged
laceration running for about an inch and a half above the left eye.
Luckily, there did not appear to be any glass fragments imbedded.  His
head had scraped along the tarmac.  Sabine had been more at risk from
flying glass.  She might have lost an eye; instead he would probably
get away with a black one.

"Where did you get the dressing?"  he inquired.

"It's not a dressing.  Not a proper one.  But it will have to do."

"What is it?"

She looked up sharply into his open eye.

"A tampon."

"A .. . ?"  Burke jerked his head back, not certain if he was more
surprised or embarrassed.

"Yeh, don't move," she tutted, and looked up at him with that witching
smile.  And they both laughed.

He had had to bend to let her fix the dressing with plasters.  She had
bitten her lip as if worried about causing him pain, and raised herself
on tiptoes to meet him.  He had put his left hand on her shoulder to
steady her.  His fingers spread out beneath her hair to support her
head as she tilted her face upwards.  She brushed a strand of his hair
tenderly back from the wound.  Pain, he thought, was so dangerously
like pleasure.

Then, before he had really appreciated it, let alone taken advantage of
it, she pulled away.  The moment was gone, if it had ever been there.

Rude Awakening

Eammon Burke woke up feeling like he had been blind drunk for six
weeks, the gash over his eye like it had been stitched with a leather
thong.  The events of the previous night came back like a bad dream. He
could hear the screams, taste the blood, smell the cordite, the diesel
and the burned tyre rubber.  The crowds, the commotion, the. sirens all
played through his head on a loop.  And then the aftermath. The strange
sensation of being ministered to gently by a woman he hardly knew.  He
lifted his head painfully and looked around him, and saw with a shock
that Sabine Kotzke's head lay barely a foot away from his.

Trying not to wake her, Burke eased himself up on to his elbows.  The
evidence was nowhere near as incriminating as he had hoped.  Whereas
Burke in his jockey shorts was under the quilt, she lay on top of it,
covered by her green raincoat.  Just what state of undress she was in
he could not tell, though a pair of Levi's and her blue jumper draped
across the chair in the corner suggested she had made some compromise
between comfort and modesty.  Burke raised his eyebrows with the sudden
realization that she must have put him to bed.  The fact that he was
still wearing his shorts was proof enough.  Her consideration of his
own modesty made him smile.

Christ, he thought with embarrassment: I must have passed out on her.
The brandy?  No, they had not had that much.  Or had they?  They had
sat talking in the living-room, watching the late news broadcast's un
instructive repeat of the report on the bomb, followed by some studio
speculation that was, if anything, even less intelligent or informed
than their own.  Though somewhere along the line, he vaguely recalled
thinking that it was what he and Sabine were not saying that was more
important.

His head started to throb again.  In the distance he could hear the
sounds of traffic, a low rumble with the intermittent squeal of brakes
on buses.  He looked at Sabine again, moved to touch her shoulder, to
waken her.  After all, who knew what might develop if she found herself
next to him on a bed.  But then again, how many times in his life,
Burke asked himself, had he spoiled not even a relationship, but the
merest chance of one, by making casual presumptions.  He blew a silent
kiss at her sleeping forehead and eased himself as surreptitiously as
possible out of bed.

From his wardrobe he selected one of several crumpled, unironed shirts
and padded into the kitchen in his bare feet, with the intention of
putting the kettle on to make coffee.  Which was when he remembered
Nora Winter.  He had said he would be at the old lady's house in Oxford
by 10:30.

Shit.  He looked at his watch.  Given that it was already gone 9:00,
there was little enough chance of that.  He would have to ring her en
route.  Burke found the chinos he had worn the day before, along with
the rest of his clothes, neatly folded on the sofa in the living-room.
He pulled them on quickly, dragged a comb across his head and winced
painfully.  He dashed into the bathroom and could hardly suppress a
titter at the sight of Sabine's makeshift dressing, though at the same
time he was impressed by its efficiency.  Gritting his teeth, he pulled
away the plasters and the stained cotton wadding.  Not too bad, he
thought, In time, it might even add a Clint Eastwood dimension to his
craggy features.  For the moment, however, another plaster would be a
more practical solution.

A quick glimpse into the bedroom revealed that Sabine was still asleep.
He ripped a page from his battered Filofax and scribbled on it
quickly:

Good morning.  I hope you slept well.  You looked too sweet to waken.
Have gone to Oxford as arranged.  Thought it might be unwise to put off
in case she changed her mind.  If a mad Russian calls, take a message
and tell him I'll call back.  Dinner this evening?  Somewhere less
exciting.  I should be back about 7:00.  See you here?  Keys are by the
telephone.  Have a nice day.  E. P.S. Apologies for my behaviour, or
lack of it.

Burke thought it a bit wordier than he had intended, but had no time to
compose a shorter version.  He propped it on the kitchen table against
a coffee jar, grabbed his cellphone and car keys and left.

Gold Dust

Santa Fe, June 1945 In the eight-page document Fuchs had passed to Gold
the previous Christmas, he had made clear that the future of the atomic
bomb, as far as the Americans were concerned, no longer lay with
uranium.  General Groves had set up huge factories in a semi-wilderness
called Oak Ridge along the banks of the Clinch River in eastern
Tennessee, designed to extract the rare uranium-235 from raw ore using
the latest electromagnetic and gaseous diffusion techniques.  It was a
wasteful, complicated and hideously expensive business.

But twentieth-century science had already discovered its philosopher's
stone: nuclear fission.  Bombarding uranium with radiation could induce
its atoms to split, turning it into known but uncommon elements called
'rare earths'.  And in 1940, two scientists at the University of
California in Berkeley had realized that the uranium was not only
splitting but also capturing nuclei from the bombardment.  The result
was a completely new element: a substance that could be separately
identified by its chemistry.

Uranium had been named after the planet Uranus.  So they called the new
element after the next planet out from the sun: neptunium.  It turned
out to be highly unstable, quickly decomposing into more common
elements.  Inspired by the achievement, however, another pair of
scientists, the Italian Emilio Segre and the Swedish-American Glenn
Seaborg, had taken the logic further.  The element they had produced
was relatively stable.  Continuing the trend, they named it after the
solar system's furthest known planet: plutonium.  The unofficial
historian of the atomic bomb project, Richard Rhodes, would later dub
it 'the element God had not welcomed at the creation'.

The important thing was that plutonium was highly fissile.  In other
words, much smaller quantities were needed to reach the crucial
'critical mass': the density at which an element transformed its matter
into energy at the rate of the heart of a burning star.  It could also
be produced relatively cheaply by a simple reactor powered by ordinary
uranium.  Plutonium had what was needed if the atomic bomb was to
become a permanent feature of the armories of the future: a
production-line capability.

Fuchs suspected that Igor Kurchatov the Soviets' only sensible choice
to head up their own research into an atomic bomb would have already
come to the same conclusion.  But in the report he had given Gold in
Boston, he had revealed what the Russians barely dreamed of: that the
United States had already built and was operating a plutonium
production facility.  A half-abandoned village called Hanford with a
population of barely one hundred souls next to a ferry-crossing on the
Columbia river in the sparsely populated sheep-grazing country of
south-eastern Washington state had been bought up by Groves on behalf
of the government.  Overnight it had been transformed in an overstated
echo of the military camp that Los Alamos had become into a giant
nuclear reactor complex employing tens of thousands of workers.

Fuchs had also revealed the problems that beset the plutonium project.
The new material was so fissile that unless it could be thrown together
from a sub-critical to a critical mass in an incredibly brief instant
of time, it would already have decayed beyond the level needed to
produce a nuclear explosion.  The plutonium bomb might be cheap, but it
might also be a damp squib.

The solution which the Los Alamos team were working on, and which
George Kistiakowsky's explosives group was specifically in charge of,
was an 'implosion' bomb.  This meant engineering explosives in a much
more precise way than anything previously attempted.  Fuchs had
scribbled down within those eight sheets of paper something of
phenomenal strategic importance the fact that the critical mass of
plutonium needed for an explosion had been estimated at around eleven
pounds and he had also given away the Ukrainian's ingenious idea of
creating explosive 'lenses' to focus the blast precisely on the
radioactive core.

Now, sitting in his Buick, as the hands of his watch moved relentlessly
towards the long-planned meeting with Gold, Fuchs was filling in the
rest.  For the first time, he included a detailed diagram of the
plutonium bomb that was now almost ready for testing.  It consisted of
two hemispheres of plutonium, each weighing slightly over five pounds
and coated with nickel, no larger than an orange.  This in turn was
packed within an eight-pound tamper of natural uranium, designed to
serve as a shield that would hold the assembly together for the
microseconds in which the chain reaction started.  Finally this whole
core would be surrounded by a precision-engineered assembly of a
hundred or so pieces of interlocked wedge-shaped high explosives.  In
its casing it stood about five-feet high, like a slightly elongated
egg.  But the hardest part to perfect had been a tiny device about the
size and shape of a golf ball that lay between the dual hemispheres:
the initiator.  Oppenheimer called it 'the heart of the matter'.

The crucial fact in the new design was that the two plutonium
hemispheres could be placed in such dangerous proximity because they
weighed in total less than critical mass.  The scientists were gambling
on playing a trick on nature.  Critical mass had been worked out for
all conceivable conditions on earth.  But at the heart of the
explosion, the pressure would be unlike anything on earth.  It would be
closer to that at the centre of a burning star.  Under those
conditions, the plutonium would be compressed and therefore less mass
would be needed to trigger the critical phase of its
self-annihilation.

Almost by way of a postscript, Fuchs added the calculations he himself
had done as part of his work with Kistiakowsky, roughly estimating the
potential yield of the bomb.  Out of natural modesty he also included
the estimates of Feynmann and Hans Bethe.  The best guess, he summed
up, was that one bomb would have an explosive force equivalent to
10,000 tonnes of TNT.  But by the time of his next meeting with Gold,
there would be real figures.  By then the big balloon would finally
have gone up.  Or burst.

Gold breathed a sigh of relief when he saw Fuchs pull up in the grey
Buick.  He got in and they drove off past the gas station and out on to
the Albuquerque road, exchanging pleasantries.  After a few miles,
Fuchs pulled over.  When could Gold make it out west again, he needed
to know?  Things were moving fast.  He estimated the plutonium bomb
would be ready to test within weeks.  A decision on whether or not to
use the uranium bomb against Japan was imminent.  Targets were already
under discussion.  Although the scientists were not involved, little
was kept from them.  He believed part of the decision might depend on
what happened at the summit in Potsdam, and whether or not Russia would
invade Japanese-occupied Manchuria.  But Gold had no opinion to offer,
and to Fuchs it seemed as if he had little interest.  He was anxious to
take his parcel and be gone.

"Be careful," he said handing over the foolscap envelope.  This is your
most important package yet."

Gold had said he would be catching the next bus back to Albuquerque.
Fuchs dropped him near the bus station, and said goodbye.  He wanted to
meet in August, but Gold said he could not easily get more leave from
work that soon.  They agreed on 19 September.  As Fuchs turned the
wheel and headed back out to The Hill, he wondered, not for the first
time, how much Gold really understood.  The science, he knew, was way
over the man's head.  But the science was not all that mattered in the
information he was passing back this time.  A month's delay in their
next meeting could be critical.  The fate of the world might depend on
it.

From the viewpoint of Allen Dulles, staring out of his window in the
American Embassy in Bern at Swiss burghers in their Sunday best, the
fate of the world looked as if it had already been decided.

The war in Europe was ending in a stampede.  That idiot Eisenhower had
headed for the Alps in the politically inept belief that the Fuhrer had
hidden himself away in some mountain fastness, but the Russians had
taken Berlin, and the capital remained the key.  Now the real power
game was beginning.  The inevitable aftermath of an alliance of
necessity.

Dulles walked over to his filing cabinet and unlocked it.  He removed a
sealed envelope, ripped it open and took out a densely typed document.
He glanced at it, smiled ruefully and then crossed the room to the
tiled stove.  It was unlit, for summer had already begun.  But Dulles
opened the little iron door, put the document inside, struck a match
and lit it.  For a few minutes he watched it burn, then poked at it to
destroy the ash.  Then, for good measure, he added the brown envelope
and watched as it too reduced to grey powder.

They would be doing something similar in Washington, he assumed, and in
London.  And ... he shrugged his shoulders.  Some things had to be left
to the gods.

Winter's Tale

Burke had called from his cellphone in the car to rearrange his meeting
with Nora Winter, apologizing profusely that he had not been able to
get to Oxford by 10:30, but blaming the London traffic.  He had offered
to take her to lunch but she had declined.

"I only take a light snack, you know," she had informed him in a
cultured, high-pitched voice.

So it was nearly 2:00 p.m."  after a pint and a sandwich on his own,
when Burke found himself opening the wrought-iron gate to Nora Winter's
house and walking up the paved path past a couple of bare,
neglected-looking rose bushes.

After hearing her voice, Burke half expected her to look like matron
too, as he stood in the porch, with its neatly swept black and white
cheque red tile floor, and watched the unclear figure approaching
through the frosted, dimpled glass panels in a door painted
hospital-corridor green.

"Good afternoon, can I help you?"

It was Miss Marple, in a shocking purple jump-suit.  She was only half
his height and Burke had to resist the urge to crouch down to talk to
her.

"Ms Winter?  Eamonn Burke, I spoke to you on the phone."

"Ah yes, the young man interested in history.  And it's Miss, by the
way.  I attempt to eradicate all vestiges of my former marriage."

He wasn't sure if it was the sort of remark that required a reply or an
apology, but before he could manage either she had disappeared back
into the house, without inviting him in.  Burke was uncertain whether
he was supposed to follow her.  He had just decided that he was, when
she returned wearing a green jacket.

"Well, what are we waiting for?"  She banged the door behind her and
scurried past him.  Burke looked on, surprised.  Old ladies were
supposed to be frail.

"Sorry, where are we going?"

"Harwell, of co use  I thought we might as well talk in situ, as it
were.  Nothing going on there now, of course.  All closed down in 1990.
Just an awful lot of spent nuclear fuel.  But a visit will stimulate
the mental processes.  Anyhow, I like to turn up unannounced
occasionally, just to show the buggers I'm still alive .. . And do stop
saying "sorry" all the time."

"Sorry.  I mean, right."

"Your car or mine?  Better be mine, less problem at the gate.  They can
be funny about strange number plates sometimes.  You drive, though.  I
hate it."

Burke realized, as she pulled a set of keys from her pocket and
shepherded him towards the ageing Mini Metro parked outside, that he
was going to hate it too.

Twenty minutes later, feeling that he might never walk again after
driving with his knees next to his ears, Burke slowed down as he
spotted the sign that indicated Harwell village and asked if he should
turn off.

"No, no.  Don't be silly.  Keep going."

Burke scanned the countryside ahead for signs of a nuclear research
institute.  It occurred to him that he hadn't a clue really.  The giant
cooling towers of Didcot power station squatted on the horizon, an ugly
stereotyped image of nuclear power, though Burke knew they were a red
herring: Didcot burned coal.

"Slow down, we're nearly at the gate."

It wasn't what he had been expecting.  Harwell looked more like a
housing estate than a scientific facility.  Even the security
precautions were less than intimidating: a low office building and a
neatly painted white gate.  Only the barrier across the road and the
policeman emerging from his cubicle suggested anything out of the
ordinary.

He clearly recognized the little car, as she had said he would.  He was
about to wave them through when he realized that the man behind the
wheel was not its usual diminutive driver.

"My nephew," Nora leaned across from the passenger seat to explain.

"He's helping me clear out junk from my old office."

"Sweet," Nora said, as they drove past the barrier.

"Totally ineffectual, of course, even if he is supposed to be armed to
the teeth.  Now, what was it you wanted to see first?"

Burke had told her over the telephone that he was researching a book
about the parallel development of the Soviet and Western nuclear
deterrents.  Her reply had been disconcerting.

"Rather like Richard Rhodes's Dark Sun.  Hasn't it been done?"

"Yes, well, I hope I've got a new angle," he had replied, cursing
himself for not realizing the old lady would have read everything on
the subject if she were as well informed as Morris had implied.  But
she had agreed to see him anyway.  Burke suspected she revelled in any
chance to make use of a lifetime of research that was probably
seriously under-exploited.  He had talked it over with Sabine and
decided he would fence delicately around the topic of their inquiry.
Winter had had access, in theory at least, to cabinet papers in
compiling her official history of the British nuclear project.  She
admitted there were two versions: the one which had seen the light of
day as a publication of Her Majesty's Stationery Office, and the other
which would in all probability be kept for ever under the cast-iron lid
of the Official Secrets Act.  Burke was mindful that she had obviously
had to sign the act too.  There was no question, therefore, of her
telling him all she knew, certainly not as the result of direct
questioning.  But then sometimes, the best way to score a goal was to
come at the keeper obliquely.

"Well, perhaps if we could see whatever remains of those days."

"Park there," she barked, pointing to a space in front of a
metal-framed building that looked like a vintage aircraft hangar.

"Used to be an R.A.F base, Harwell.  Good flat land like most of south
Oxfordshire."

Burke followed her through a small door to the right of the main hangar
entrance.  Inside it looked more like a scrap yard than the home of
Britain's mid-century hopes for an atom-powered future.  Great hunks of
unidentifiable machinery stood in neglected heaps, ironwork with
transistors, valves, bits of yesterday's high-technology looking crude,
antique, outsized, like toddlers' building bricks.

"Well, what do you think?"  The old lady was gesturing towards a great
cube that occupied fully one corner of the hangar.  It was perhaps
thirty feet high and painted a long time ago dark blue, though it
appeared to be made out of concrete.  As a structure it was wholly
unremarkable, save for one word spelled out in big white letters high
on the wall facing them: GLEEP.

"That's what it was all about, initially at least.  Ought to be
preserved as a national monument, really.  Instead they'll probably
tear it down, as soon as they can."

"What is it?"

"Gleep, you silly boy.  The Graphite Low Energy Experimental Pile.
Europe's very first nuclear reactor.  Produced about enough power to
heat an electric kettle.  But it was a great scientific achievement in
its day.  Went critical in 1946.  Old GLEEP here is the real
father-figure of the European atomic energy programme.  All the other
British reactors are directly descended from it.  It and its big
brother BEPO anyway.  Got their plutonium from here.  The first fast
reactors, Zephyr, Zeus, then Pluto, Dido and Lido, were all built here.
Old Gleep ran longest of them all: forty-three years."

"But not all involved in weapons production?"

"Good grief, no.  That barely outlived Fuchs at Harwell.  In 1951 they
closed down the weapons programme here, transferred all the dodgy stuff
to Aldermaston.  You remember the marches?  No, probably too young.
Lots of pacifist people.  Come on."

Burke found himself striding after the little figure as she scuttled
off to another exit.

"Come on.  I've got a little office in a broom cupboard in here."  She
gestured towards a nondescript brick building in front of them.

"Used to be the R.A.F corporals' mess, back in the thirties.  Ridgeway
House looked a bit like that."

"Ridgeway?"

"I'll show you in a minute."

The building's lobby was filled with an exhibition about Harwell's
future as a science park for high-technology companies, but the walls
were lined with big photographs of how it had looked in the 1940s.  The
outline of the former airfield was immediately apparent.  The straight
road they had driven down had, Burke realized, been the main runway.
Where there were now trees and car parks, there had then been
prefabricated housing, little makeshift laboratories, and a sea of mud
where building contractors laboured on the great 200-foot-high chimney
that now dominated the site: the stack which had once pushed the 'hot'
air from the BEPO reactor out over the Oxfordshire countryside.

Nora pointed to a building on the map that looked very similar to the
one they were in.

"There we are: Ridgeway House.  Demolished a couple of years ago.  That
was where Fuchs lived when he first came here.  Must have been a bit
like that out in New Mexico, I imagine.  Dormitory halls, everyone
sleeping in little cubicles.  Anyhow, they moved the top brass out a
bit later.  Fuchs got one of the little prefab homes they brought in:
over there on 9th street.

Burke followed her as she led the way up a flight of stairs into a
tiny, messy office.  Nora plonked herself unapologetically on to the
single chair.  Burke pushed a few books back and sat on the edge of the
desk.

"Are all the streets like American streets, I mean with just numbers
instead of names?"

"No.  Used to be more.  Got names after some of the physicists now. You
saw Fermi Avenue.  Makes it all rather silly if you ask me, like one of
those theme park thingies.  Nothing wrong with numbers, especially on a
site full of mathematicians."

Burke seized the opportunity.  That was Fuchs's real speciality wasn't
it?  Number-crunching?"

"Absolutely.  He was head of the Theoretical Physics division here.
Started up the whole idea of site-wide computing.  Most calculations
were still done with hand-cranked machines in his day.  He never saw
the results of the changes he put in place.  Don't suppose they got
very good computers in East Germany."

"Do you remember what the reaction was when Fuchs was arrested?"

"It was a shock to the whole country; it was truly traumatic.  But
especially here.  You have to understand what this place was like: a
sort of hard-working holiday camp.  Everyone living in rather primitive
conditions, but with a great sense of camaraderie.  Not as intense as
it had been at Los Alamos, I dare say, but not that different, I
imagine.  There was a determination not to let Britain be left behind,
you know.  Hah."

Burke thought it was rather a bitter little laugh.

"Fuchs was an upstanding member of the Harwell community, the sort of
person you had round to tea.  People looked up to him.  After his
arrest, morale was down to rock bottom.  Very depressing.  The idea
that Fuchs might have been a Soviet spy had simply never occurred to
the other scientists.  Look at this."

Winter began rummaging on the over-stacked shelves.  From a pile of old
magazines she extracted one called ECHO and handed it to him.  It
turned out to be the house journal of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy
Authority, the residual body left after privatization of the rest: the
main business bits of the nuclear research programme.

"Fiftieth anniversary edition.  Came out back in 1996.  Turn to page
sixteen."

Burke opened it at a spread of black-and-white photographs from the
1940s and '50s.  Nora directed his attention to one of a collection of
middle-aged men in glasses and shabby coats.

"That's Sir John Cockroft in the centre, Harwell's first director."

Burke glanced at the figure, who looked like an older Bill Gates.  But
it was the figure next to him that immediately seized Burke's
attention: a taller man with thick-rimmed spectacles and a distinctive
domed forehead.  Unquestionably, it was Klaus Fuchs.

"Read the caption.  Coy, isn't it."

The words below the photograph identified only Cockroft.  The others
were referred to simply as 'early Harwell heroes, 1946'.  Early,
indeed.  Before one of the heroes was unmasked as a villain.

"It was a particular blow to Cockcroft.  Fuchs had been very much his
blue-eyed boy, you know.  He was really pleased to get him back from
the Americans.  Thought they would have tried to hold on to him.  Fuchs
had been working with Edward Teller, you know, on the hydrogen bomb. He
had even taken out a patent on the initiator, I'm sorry tut, now you've
got me at it part of the detonation system, though it's hardly a patent
you'll find on the shelves of the Science Reference section in the
British Library, or the Library of Congress, for that matter. Still
highly classified, which is a bit of a joke really since the Russians
have presumably had it since 1946.  I dare say it's easier to get
access in Moscow these days."

"You don't seem to bear him any malice."

"No.  Why should I?"

"Because he was a traitor.  If there has to be a villain of your
history, surely it's Fuchs?"

"I suppose so.  But not by his own lights.  He never really understood
the idea of nationalism, you know.  Of course, it was a particular
shock for the emigre community; they all came under suspicion.  Think
of people like poor Rudi Peierls.  He had sponsored Fuchs, and now here
he was, himself a German and with a Russian wife, for goodness' sake.
Genia wrote a nasty letter to Fuchs in prison, laying into him for
letting the side down.  I heard he was very cut up about it.  Hadn't
really understood whom he was letting down.  But then he never was very
good with women."

"You speak from experience?"

Burke tried to imagine this prim old lady flirting in her youth.

"Not with Fuchs, believe me; he wasn't exactly a lady-killer.  The
women who did take to him always wanted to mother him.  Let me ask you
a question, Mr.  Burke.  Have you ever been married?"

Burke flinched.  Any moment now and she would be raising the topic he'd
been warned to avoid at all costs.

"Yes."

"But now it's over?"

"Yes."

He wondered how she knew, and how it had come about that the
interrogation roles had been switched.

"Hmmm."  Nora Winter pursed her thin lips and furrowed her wrinkled
brow.

"Did one of you "betray" the other?"

He could hear the inverted commas in her voice.

"Yes."

"Which?"

"Both, I suppose.  In the end."

"Do you feel guilt?"

"Yes.  I mean "no"."

"No, you mean yes.  Morris put you on to me.  Did he tell you about my
marriage?"

"No."

"You mean yes.  But I doubt if he told you the truth.  I doubt if he
knows it."

"He said you were married to a German.  He said ... he ... er might
have hit you."

To Burke's astonishment she threw back her head and laughed.

"Dieter?  He was a lamb.  No, more of a sheep really.  About the most
spineless man I've ever encountered.  That was the problem.  Did Morris
tell you I'm Jewish?"

"No.  I mean, why would he?  Was that part of the problem?"  Burke
wondered why he was not finding it absurd to be sitting discussing
marital problems with a woman twice his age.  But somehow Nora Winter
had a way of making age seem more an accident of history than a barrier
between generations.

"Was he anti-Semitic?"

"Hardly.  He was wracked by guilt.  To listen to him you'd have thought
he'd been a guard at Auschwitz, instead of a poor sap who nearly died
in Dachau for the heinous crime of having been a junior member of the
Social Democratic Party in the thirties.  He was the living conscience
of Germany.  Sometimes I think he married me to make amends.  He'd been
a chemist by profession and after the war got a job offer from ICI.  He
was only too keen to leave Germany.  We met up at a party in London. He
proposed almost the minute he heard I was Jewish."

"What happened?"

"I betrayed him.  Repeatedly, I'm afraid.  Dieter and I were living in
the accommodation they'd built at Abingdon for Harwell staff.  I'd just
been drafted in as a deputy archivist.  I fell for one of the young
scientists.  Nobody important, I'm afraid, and it didn't last.  Dieter
found out by accident."

"What did he do?"

"He forgave me, of course.  Said it was the least he could do.  I'd
forgiven him the sins of his countrymen."

"Generous."

"Ridiculous.  What was the link between the Holocaust and my
infidelity?  Nothing at all.  Was I to have a licence to shag half the
eligible population of England on account of the fact that Hitler had
murdered six million Jews?  What sort of moral equivalence was that?  I
told him to go back to Germany."

"You were harsh."

She shrugged.

"Perhaps.  Cruel to be kind, you might say.  It was never going to
work.  Betrayal is a terrible thing, Mr.  Burke.  But it comes easier
than you think.  And there are many different ways of defining it."

Burke wasn't quite sure if she was trying to make a point.

"To understand Klaus Fuchs, you need to understand the climate at Los
Alamos back in the forties.  It was a lot more complicated than most
people think."

Burke wondered if Nora Winter was keen to say more than she could.  He
decided to try to press her, gently.

"Was there something, do you think, that never came out?  Something
Fuchs might have felt tempted to reveal."

She looked at him sharply.

"Mr.  Burke, there are always things that never "come out", as you put
it.  History isn't fact, just the currently prevailing version of
events.  You might have heard the old joke that God tolerates
historians only because they do the one thing he can't: they have the
power to alter the past."

"But could Fuchs have had a secret?"  He decided it was worth a
gamble.

"One that he might have been killed for?"  Or one that someone might
now kill to protect.  The thought came to him unbidden; he put his hand
to the plaster on his forehead.

"Are you serious?"  The old lady's eyes narrowed perceptibly.

Burke nodded.

"So that's what this is about.  Some lame-brained conspiracy theory."

Burke cursed himself inwardly.  Had he overplayed the hand?  If so,
there was no harm to be done by exposing the rest of it.

"What happened to Arnold, the Harwell security man, the one who
arrested Fuchs?"

"He died of old age, as far as I know."

"And William Skardon, the MI5 interrogator?"

"He's dead too, as I imagine you know or you would not be asking."

"So?"

"So what?  I am not.  They were old men, Mr.  Burke.  This all happened
a very long time ago.  I strongly suggest you are letting your
imagination run away with you."

Burke said nothing.  Nora Winter met his gaze unblinkingly, then turned
and lifted the receiver on a telephone half-submerged beneath the
papers on her desk.

"I'll call you a taxi, Mr.  Burke.  I'm afraid I shan't be going back
to Oxford immediately.  Like I told the policeman, I really must tidy
this place.  They expect me to give up the space any day now.  I'm sure
whoever you work for can afford the taxi fare."

She spoke into the receiver.

"This is Nora Winter.  In the archive section.  Yes, thank you, still
going strong.  Can I have a car, please.  To Oxford.  It's for my
nephew.  Straight away.  Thank you."

They walked in silence down the stairs.  Winter drove to the main gate,
surprisingly capably, Burke noticed, despite her professed dislike. The
policeman by the barrier gave a friendly wave.  She ignored it.  In the
car-park outside, a dark green Ford Sierra with a roof sign that said
"Cumnor Cars.  24-hour service' was waiting.  Winter let Burke out.  He
stooped to say good-bye, and held out his hand.  But she wasn't looking
at him.  From her handbag she had taken a ball-point pen and a small
notebook.  She tore a page out, folded it over and placed it in his
hand.

"Just in case you ever find yourself in Los Alamos, Mr.  Burke.
Goodbye, and good luck."

Burke unfolded the piece of paper.  There was a name on it: "Dr.  Hiram
Carter' and a ten-digit US telephone number.  He pocketed it and walked
over to the taxi.

As the driver turned out of the Harwell car-park and on to the Oxford
road, a blue BMW overtook them and settled to a steady speed in front.
Burke thought nothing of it.

Quis Custodiet... ?

Los Angeles, California, 27 June 1945 The men in the Pontiac sat and
smoked, staring up at the lighted window with drawn curtains.

"How long do you reckon he's been in there now?"  said the older one, a
sallow-skinned man with thinning hair.

"About three hours, I guess.  Got here just before dusk."

"Reckon he's fixin' to stay the night."

"Could be."

"Can't say I blame him.  Nice bit of ass.  Even if it is Commie ass."

"Yup.  Guy like him's gotta watch where he plays ball, though.  Catch
him too far in the left field and he'll find himself back in the
dug-out with his tail between his legs before you can say Babe Ruth."

"Yeah.  But right now I guess that babe's got more than his tail
between her legs."  The older man took a slow draw on his cigarette and
settled down further in the passenger seat, his eyes fixed on the
closed curtains as if visualizing the scene on the other side.

"How long we gonna stick this out?"

"All night if we have to.  The general wants this boy cleared or nailed
to rights.  God knows why but I reckon he's up to more than his balls
in something' top secret.  War work, I guess."

Across the road a few drunks weaved uncertainly out of a corner bar,
dodged a passing pickup truck and disappeared down the dark street.

Behind the curtains J. Robert Oppenheimer lay naked on his back on the
broad bed, staring at the ceiling.  Beside him, the woman with the
closely cropped dark hair lay curled almost into a foetal position.
There would have been hot tears in her eyes, he knew, were Jean Tatlock
the sort of woman who could cry.  Sex between them had been as good as
it had ever been, passionate, intense, physically and emotionally
exhausting.  But there were other exhaustions taking their toll on her.
His life had changed, in ways he himself had never imagined.  Their
youthful idealism had been overtaken in his case by a hard, challenging
and cruel necessity.  What still fired her soul had been devoured in
his.

The early days of their affair before he had been married were like a
dream now.  He had not meant to sleep with her tonight.  He had not
meant to betray Kitty.  But this was not so much betrayal as a reprise
of an old melody, he lied to himself.  There was still something about
her that he could not easily reject.  Now he would have to.  She knew
it.  He wondered how she would survive in the real America.  He
wondered how he would.

He left before dawn.  It was a long drive back to The Hill.  It would
take most of the day.  The men in the Pontiac watched him climb into
his car, noted the time and headed home to bed.

Klaus Fuchs sat back with an iced lemonade on the veranda of the Big
House, watching the summer sun dip low over the pines.  It was a
landscape both familiar and alien, at times eerily reminiscent of the
Thuringian forests, at others still echoing with the war whoops of the
long-departed Jemez Indians.

He watched as Oppenheimer's big, low-slung Chevy turned the corner by
the water-tower.  The chief was back, back from one of his high-octane,
low-profile meets in Los Angeles, the sprawling superannuated
shanty-town that they said would one day overtake venerable San
Francisco as the metropolis of California.  Fuchs suspected the chief's
regular meetings dealed with more than funding.  They had to be talking
about targets, particularly now that the war which most of The Hill's
inhabitants had signed up to fight was over and done.  He felt sorry
for Germany.  No, he corrected himself, not for Germany, but for the
Germans: his own folk Volk had been one of Hitler's favourite words;
the American fondness for it represented an older, decent
understanding, derived from the German of earlier settlers, the people
who had made America great, but whose contributions today were glossed
over.

"Hi, Klaus.  How are you?"  He sat up.  Oppenheimer's voice was
unmistakable.

Fuchs fought the impulse to spring to his feet.  It was not the
American way.  Back in Leipzig, he would have jumped to attention,
bowed to Herr Professor Direktor Doktor Oppenheimer and then the two of
them, having observed the ritual their society dictated, would have
lapsed into an unspoken yet agreed familiarity.  Here the familiarity
was superficially immediate which left him suspecting it was really a
lie.

"Hello."  He heard the awkwardness in his voice, searching for a form
of address with which he felt comfortable, while all too painfully
aware that his striving for acceptability was, in the eyes of his
American colleagues, his most alienating characteristic.

"How's it going?"

He knew this question was rhetorical, a figure of speech.  On the
occasions when he had attempted to give a considered answer, he had
been regarded as eccentric.  Now he just nodded.  But he felt
Oppenheimer was looking at him strangely, with a direct gaze that went
straight through to his soul.

For a brief, terrifying moment, Fuchs felt the familiar dryness start
to clog his throat.  But Oppenheimer was not even looking at him any
more.  The lean, tanned face was staring into the middle distance,
somewhere out beyond the tree line.  An American would have jumped in,
asked the director what was on his mind.  Fuchs knew that.  But he
didn't do it.  There were leaps he simply could not make.  It was a
terrible thing, he thought to himself, the space between men.

"Are you happy here, Klaus?"

The question caught him off-guard.  It was not what he had expected.
Americans worked at being happy, or at least thought they ought to.
Klaus Fuchs did not.  Happiness, as far as he understood it, was a sort
of visitation, something that happened and often was only understood
afterwards.  Long afterwards, in Wakefield prison, when he also, to his
surprise, decided he was at least not unhappy, he would reflect that
the time at Los Alamos had been perhaps the happiest of his life.  At
least, until that evening when Oppenheimer accosted him on the veranda
of the Big House.

But once again, the director had not waited for an answer.  The
question was as much a reflection of his own state of mind as a genuine
inquiry about his colleague's.

"You know, the project's going well, at last.  We may be within range
of a test of the implosion gadget."

Despite General Groves, Oppie believed in openness.  But now they were
in end game  The scientists would not be consulted about how, where and
when their work would be put to practical use -like a mother, the
ever-perceptive Isidor Rabi had said, being allowed no say in what
happened to her child.

"I am aware that there are still some wrinkles to be sorted out with
Kisty's explosive lenses.  But I think he is confident," said Fuchs.

"Oh, yeah.  But there are going to be wrinkles right up until the
moment we press that button.  The only sure and certain way we'll know
that baby will go is by trying her.  The only thing is, we've kind of
missed the boat."

"Boat?"  Fuchs was unaware that plans to ship the bomb overseas were
already so advanced.  This was something he had not passed on to
John.

"Just an expression, Klaus."

Fuchs felt a moment of intense irritation with his own stupidity.
English idioms were a minefield.

"The war in Germany's over," Oppenheimer continued.

"Hitler was the main inspiration for this bomb.  It was only Einstein's
warning that the Nazis might get there first that got Roosevelt up and
running.  God only knows what might have happened if he'd been right.
Given what we're starting to hear out of Germany now, we would have
been right to use the damn thing on them as soon as possible .. . I'm
sorry, Klaus, I know it's your countrymen I'm talking about.  But then
that's why you're here.  Right?"

"Absolutely, Robert.  The Nazis were never my countrymen, except in a
racial sense which only they would acknowledge.  They disgraced
Germany."  Already in the thirties, he had heard rumours of horrors
being perpetrated in the Nazi camps against his fellow Communists.  He
had suspected even then that it was probably worse for the Jews.  Just
how much worse had become evident as the allied troops, from east and
west, entered Ravensbruck, Belsen, Auschwitz.  Fuchs had no doubts at
all.

"They disgraced humanity."

It was said with a passion.  Oppenheimer turned and looked for a moment
straight into the pale eyes behind the horn-rimmed spectacles.  There
was not the slightest possibility of doubt that the young German
scientist was sincere.  No wonder he had passed the vetting procedure.
Okay, he was not Jewish like so many of the others.  He did not have an
in built reason for hating the Nazis.  Except maybe that he was a
decent human being.

Oppenheimer smiled.

"What do we do now?  Eh?"

"There is a problem?"  But it was more a statement than a question.
Fuchs knew there was a problem.  For the majority of his fellow
scientists on The Hill, the war in Europe had been virtually all of the
war.  But not for the Americans.  The enemy that had attacked them
first was still fighting.  On the defensive, but still fighting, in
places with a determination that defied common sense, and strategic
logic.  But for a thousand reasons, many of them more cultural than
tactical, Japan was not about to give up.  And seen from Los Alamos,
that bred a logic all of its own.

"You know."  Oppenheimer sucked on the stem of his pipe.

"In a way I wouldn't mind one hell of a lot if we never had to use this
baby.  Perhaps just proving to the world that it works will be
enough."

"But surely we will not announce the test in advance?"

"Hell, no.  To tell the truth, I'm not even sure they'll announce it
afterwards.  Not even to our allies."

"You mean .. ."  Fuchs let the sentence trail, secretly sorry he had
started it.  What Oppenheimer was saying was obvious.  It just wasn't a
topic he felt he ought to be initiating.

Fuchs got up to go.  He was flattered that the man appeared to be
confiding in him, but worried about what his true agenda was.  Fuchs
felt a wave of affection for this American who had done so much to
bring one of mankind's most fearsome, yet inevitable, scientific
projects so close to its conclusion.  But the conversation was still
one of those best avoided.  In his circumstances, too much honesty
could be fatal.

"Hey, Klaus."  Oppenheimer stood too and stopped him.

"Where are you going?  It's early yet."

"Yes, but it will be getting cold soon.  I'm sure you don't want to
spend too much time sitting around here with me."

Oppenheimer looked genuinely surprised, or was it sceptical?

"Nonsense, Klaus.  I enjoy your company.  Tell you what.  Why don't you
and I head over to my place and knock back a few shots.  Kitty's off
visiting her folks on the east coast.  And there's something I want to
talk to you about.  It's important and it might take some time."

"Now?"

"Yes, now.  Why not?"  the American looked suddenly serious.

"It's not often you and I get a chance to talk alone together.  This
seems like a good moment."

Fuchs's complacency evaporated instantly.  All this talk had just been
a way of putting him off his guard.  They had known all along.

And now it had fallen to Oppenheimer to break the news to him before
they arrested him.  There was one chance, maybe.  He could throw
himself on Oppenheimer's mercy.  The American understood that science
couldn't operate in a vacuum.  Hadn't it been Oppie who argued that
trust was everything and that only by sharing information could a
community of scientists really work towards big breakthroughs.  But
Fuchs had betrayed that trust.  That was how they would see it.  Only
he hadn't.  He had simply done the honourable thing, the right thing.

Would Oppenheimer believe him?  And even if he did, what good would it
do?  At best, it might save him from execution.  But he doubted it.
Oppenheimer was already walking down the steps of the wooden veranda.
He turned at the bottom.

"Come on, Klaus.  What are you waiting for?  Let's go.  Time to face
the music."

It was the first time Fuchs had been invited to Oppenheimer's
relatively splendid abode on Bathtub Row.  There was an irony, he
thought, in the fact that it might be his last.  They walked along the
dusty streets in silence.  Yellow lights were coming on in the mess
halls, where the GIs were sitting down to their evening meal.  Here and
there a mom would call out of the window of her prefab home summoning
the kids in to scrub their hands and eat.

After walking up the wooden steps to Oppenheimer's porch the director
simply turned the handle of the door and walked in.  Crime was almost
unknown on The Hill.  Los Alamos was that sort of place.  It depended
on trust.  Fuchs caught the tickle of his guilty cough in the back of
his throat.

"You okay?"  Oppenheimer asked.

"Of course, it is only the dust."

The director led him into a tastefully furnished if untidy living-room.
Fuchs felt himself surprised suddenly to see this other, domestic side
of Oppenheimer.  This was a married man's abode, with all the trappings
of family life, so very different from the single men's dorm, so very
different in particular from the spartan solitary existence he lived
himself.

Oppenheimer went to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of Bourbon
and two glasses.

"Sit down, Klaus."

The German did as he was told.  He knew what was coming.

"You're a loner, Klaus."

It was a statement rather than a question.  Fuchs was tempted to ignore
it, but replied, "I do not think so, not particularly.  Perhaps I am
just not very good with people."

"But what about women, Klaus?  You're friendly with Genia, lots of the
wives, Kitty even, for God's sake.  But you never seem to have a woman
of your own."

"There is so little time.  You know how it is."

"Don't take everything I say so seriously.  It's not as if we don't
have enough problems keeping our sanity up here."

He smiled and nodded.  Sometimes Fuchs felt enormously grateful that
the Americans could be so distracted by platitudes in place of the
truth.  Yet the fencing unnerved him further.  Was this going to be an
accusation, or an interrogation, or neither?  He downed his whiskey in
one.

"You look like you needed that.  Let me pour you another."

He did.  And another.  And let the spirit reinforce the Chinese walls
within his consciousness.  He had perfected them long ago, dimly aware
that he might be encouraging a latent schizophrenia, as they had
diagnosed in his mother too late to stop her killing herself.  When he
drank, he could close off compartments of his life so that they would
never leak.

But if it was an interrogation, the thought involuntarily crossed his
mind, would Oppenheimer be drinking too?  Seated in a battered old
armchair, the director was examining the hue of the whiskey in his
glass.  He sipped it slowly, running his tongue around his lip after
every sip.  At times, he seemed far away, then the sharp eyes would
suddenly refocus on Fuchs and he would begin talking again.  Fuchs
wondered if he would ever get to the point, if there was a point.

For a few, dangerous moments, the compartmentalization threatened to
fail him and he was tempted to reveal all, to bare his soul about his
meetings over the years with the man he knew only as Raymond, about his
messages exchanged with the man he had never seen and whom he knew only
as John.  Then he remembered that this was how he was supposed to feel,
remembered how the hunted man was always tempted to surrender to an
irrational desire to give himself up.  He began, slowly, to relax.  He
was not, therefore expecting the tremor of angst that ran through him
when Oppenheimer asked how he felt in terms of nationality, as a member
of the British team.

"Nationality is something I don't place much stock in," he answered
carefully but honestly.  Any other approach, he had long decided, would
be foolish.  Always tell as much of the truth as possible.

"I believe science transcends nationality.  In the new world that will
emerge after this war, perhaps the old ideas won't matter so much."

"Perhaps, but perhaps they still will.  There are games the politicians
play that the likes of you and me are not invited to participate in."

"Perhaps that is because we would be no good at them."

"Perhaps.  Then again, they haven't done one hell of a job so far, have
they?"

Fuchs smiled the grim smile required.  It was another rhetorical
question.

"Do you feel yourself British?"

It was an unexpectedly direct question.  The answer of course was 'no'.
Despite the welcome the country had given him, he no more considered
himself English than the English considered him one of them.  The
scientific community was different.  There were colonials like
Rutherford, and then there were emigres like himself.  But he was, in
theory at least, a British subject.  He felt strangely proud of that,
as though it gave him a sense of belonging.  That he was routinely
betraying it was something the compartmentalization coped with.  He
gave the only answer he could:

"I suppose so."

Oppenheimer nodded.

"I know what you mean.  Our community here transcends nationalities, as
science ought to do.  Yet it is war between nations that has gathered
us together.  We have become international politicians, in that our
work will determine the triumph of one nation over another.  America
will emerge from this war the greatest nation on earth."

"Yes.  You must be very proud."

"Pride is part of the problem.  England, of course, will want its bomb
too, providing that the damn thing works."

"Yes, I suppose so."  Fuchs did not know what else to say.

"Sure, it took American guts and knuckle-headed managerial geniuses
like Groves to get this project off the ground and even think about
making it work, but the Brits have their right to equal treatment.
Which is sure as hell what old Winnie is demanding."

"Churchill is making demands?"  Fuchs had always wondered just how much
access Oppenheimer, as director of the project, had to political
information.  Now, it seemed, the man was telling him.  Perhaps because
he knew that very shortly there would be nothing he could do with it.

"Look at it from his point of view.  Here you are, having hung on by
the skin of your teeth through dark years when the rest of Europe was
crumbling all around you.  Then in ride the Seventh Cavalry and
announce they'll finish the job after all.  What's more, they've got a
secret weapon that'll make sure whatever country possesses it will
never ever again face as frightening a threat as Great Britain did in
1940."

"Sounds good."

"Yeah.  But it's not his bomb.  The British will leave here, when this
is all over, with as much knowledge on how to build the bomb as any
American, but Britain won't have one straight away.  All of a sudden
America is the new empire, overtakes Britain overnight, becomes some
kind of... I don't know what superpower.  Churchill knows it's inevitable.
He's playing the "English-speaking peoples" card, as if we're all one
great tradition, Rome taking over from Greece.  He plans to ride on
Uncle Sam's coat-tails, but that depends on them keeping a monopoly on
our Frankenstein's monster.  And you and I know that that can't last
for ever.  Sooner or later others are going to get there."

"You mean Japan?"

"Come on.  You know as well as I do that the war with Japan is about to
end.  We're going to end it, whether they actually use the thing or
just show it off.  And my bet is that anything that has cost them this
much they'll want to use.  I'm talking about our other allies .. ."

Fuchs said nothing.

"I mean Russia, Klaus.  I think you know that."

Fuchs clutched his handkerchief to his mouth, stifling a choking retch
that he hoped would pass as indigestion.  At any moment, he was
certain, the door would burst open and the MPs would march in.  He
composed himself as best he could.

"Yes, I assume they must be working along similar lines."

Oppenheimer nodded.

"Yes, I would assume that too.  But they're going to have the same
problem as our British friends."

"Which is?"

"Which is, as you know, that it is one thing getting the theory of this
bomb together, another getting hold of enough plutonium.  Everything
we've been doing over the past nine months has rammed home to us that
it is something else again to make it function properly.  Just
duplicating some of the mechanical factors we've had to account for
could take years of trial and error.  Without help.  I thought maybe
Niels had mentioned the subject to you?"

Fuchs tried to make his face convey interest rather than
understanding.

"He was worried that we were being dishonest," Oppenheimer continued,
'worried that we would encourage Stalin's suspicions, that we ought to
share technology.  He had friends in the scientific community in
Moscow."

"Ah, yes.  He did say something."

"And not just to you and me.  Bohr has access.  He went to the top.  He
talked to Roosevelt.  And he went to Churchill."

Fuchs held his breath.  Was that what Bohr had been hinting at all
along, that afternoon of the picnic in the canyon?  Or was this just
another trick?  Was Oppenheimer looking for a positive reaction?

"What happened?"

"What do you think?  Churchill patronized Bohr like hell, told him how
the free world was pleased as punch to have his services, great man and
all that, towering figure in the world of science, but if he didn't
mind could he bugger off back to his lab bench and leave the real
business of running the world to the grown-ups.  And by the way no need
to say "thank you" for having been saved from the jaws of death by
British bravery.  The empire didn't expect gratitude, least of all from
small nations, just glad to do its moral duty.

"Which is what it all comes down to in the end, isn't it, Klaus?
Morality.  Do you know where your moral duty lies?"

Fuchs felt faint.  Oppenheimer crossed to the big mahogany desk in the
corner, took a small key from his pocket and unlocked the second drawer
down.  A gun?  But what he produced appeared to be a photograph of a
document in fine print.  Oppenheimer sat down again, ran his eyes down
the document as if to make sure he knew what it said, and handed it
over.

Fuchs adjusted his glasses, feeling the fine beads of sweat on his
nose.  It seemed to be a draft agreement of some sort, written partly
in German.  One word, printed in bold, stood out: "Sonnenaufgang'.
Sunrise.

He read the rest, then bowed his head and closed his eyes for a full
five minutes before looking up to find Oppenheimer's eyes waiting for
him.

"Where does this come from?"  he asked.

"Geneva.  Just two months ago.  Signed by a man named Dulles.  I wasn't
supposed to see it.  As you can imagine, not many people were.  But I
still have a few friends in Washington."

Fuchs gulped down the remains of his whiskey.  This was not what he had
anticipated at all.  He looked up at Oppenheimer and thought suddenly
that the man looked immensely tired and drawn.

"But Bohr said the bomb could stop wars."

"Yes," Oppenheimer replied.

"That's what he told Churchill, too."

"And Churchill..  He gestured at the piece of paper in front of him.
Oppenheimer sneered.

"Churchill threw him out."

Los Alamos

America.  Burke rolled the word around on his tongue.  It felt strange
to be 'home'.  He supposed even Albuquerque was someone's home.  He had
never been to the American south-west before.  It was more alien than
he had expected.  In the depths of winter the sun beat down from the
cloudless sky.  The air was crisp, dry, warm and filled with the noise
of engines, jet, diesel and petrol gasoline, he corrected himself and
the par ping horns of traffic pulling up in front of the terminal
building.  Deep down, he knew that this, not England, was his country.
Except that it did not seem like that.

"This way for the complimentary shuttle to Hertz, gateway to America,
folks.  Thank you, sir, lady.  May I take your bags.  Sure is a nice
day today."  The big black bull of a man with a fixed smile but eyes
that said it was phoney whisked their luggage on to the rack in the
yellow bus.

It had been Sabine who decided to follow up Nora Winter's lead to Los
Alamos itself.  A quick check revealed that Hiram Carter had been a
relatively junior physicist on the Manhattan Project.  But he had
almost certainly known Fuchs personally.  Burke agreed, though he
wondered secretly if Nora Winter had been feeding him a line.  He had
obviously irritated her.  What worried him rather more was the
possibility that he and Sabine were irritating other people too, people
who had ways of showing their irritation.  At Heathrow there had been a
young man in a grey suit spending an improbably long time at Tie Rack
while Sabine picked up shampoo at the Body Shop next door.  He had
loitered in W.H. Smith, buying batteries, while Burke picked up a copy
of The Times.  And then he had turned up again in the check-in queue
for the first leg of their flight to Dallas.  Burke had told himself he
was being ridiculous.

Bumping into the same person three times in half an hour was almost
inevitable, particularly if he was on the same flight.  None the less,
he had scanned the faces in the rows on a couple of trips to the toilet
and had not seen him.  Which meant nothing, of course.  Except that if
he was not on the plane, why had he been in the check-in queue?  Though
there was always the possibility he was travelling first-class.

He had told Sabine but she had looked at him sceptic ally so Burke had
dismissed the idea.  In any case, he had not recognized anyone on board
the one-class onward flight to Albuquerque.  Perhaps the Bayswater bomb
had reactivated his old conspiracy-theory syndrome.  Nora Winter was
right.  He was letting his imagination run away with him.

In the Hertz reception area Sabine took charge, as he had almost become
used to her doing, producing her credit card to settle the hire car.

"Here, homeboy," she said as they walked out on to the parking lot.

"You take the wheel."  She tossed the keys through the air, and Burke
caught them with a look of surprise that obviously amused her.  He
didn't know why he'd assumed she would be driving.  There was a curious
new lightness in her mood, as if she had left a burden behind.  Was
that what the "New World' did for people: liberated them from their
past?

The car was a brand-new Pontiac Firebird.  A convertible.  Burke
laughed when he saw it, and Sabine beamed back, pleased by his
reaction, as if the thing was a birthday present.  Left to his own
devices, he would have had the knee-jerk reaction of any freelance hack
on a British budget hired something dull and spent the next two days
cursing the lack of air-conditioning and leg-room.  Sabine, on the
other hand, he thought as he drove towards the busy Albuquerque
freeway, was in it for fun.  From the moment he had told her about his
encounter with "Nuclear Winter' and produced the scrap of paper with
Carter's name and telephone number, she had been busy booking airline
tickets, using the magic EON credit card that seemed to have no
spending limit.

"Okay."  She looked up from the street map.

"The road to Santa Fe goes straight through the city and on to the
interstate heading north.  Unless, of course, you want to stay the
night in a piece of history?  At least what passes for history out
here.  Look, there.  See that big building on the corner?"

Burke followed her eyes.  They were, he assumed, on the edge of the
city, driving through drab streets of low-rise buildings,
part-industrial, part-closed commercial, walls here and there daubed
with graffiti, the sort of streets that made you want to accelerate
through stop-lights in case someone pulled out behind you.

"You mean that brownstone up ahead?"

"Yeah.  Conrad Hilton's first hotel.  Local boy made good."

He nodded, impressed.

"That's what you got from the guide book?"  She had spent hours on the
plane absorbed in the Lonely Planet New Mexico Handbook.

"Uh huh.  Want to take a look?"

Burke pulled in to the near side lane and took a right at the hotel.  A
sign advertised pizzas.  Clearly Conrad's roots had not moved along
with his global ambitions.  There was a plaque next to the old wooden
door which commemorated the birth of an empire, even though the
birthplace itself had been left behind.

"What do you think?"

"Are you serious?"

"Sure.  I mean, we can hardly drive all the way tonight.  Even Santa Fe
is a good few hours on the road."

Burke thought, why not?  Somehow just being in America opened new
horizons, real or imagined.

"Anyway," she added.

"This was virtually the only hotel in town back in the forties.  If
Klaus Fuchs came to Albuquerque and we have to assume he did then the
chances are that this is where he stayed."

Burke blinked for a moment, then found himself almost laughing at the
little fantasy his subconscious had been in the business of creating.
Of course, she was still working.

Inside, Burke was surprisingly impressed by the style of the place.  A
grand piano dominated the foyer, with a couple of potted palms and a
richly varnished horseshoe bar, which, judging from the rattle of
cocktail shakers and the noisy banter, looked like it was already
gearing up for happy hour.

Even the reception desk looked unchanged from the forties: heavy
polished oak.  The clerk behind it was efficient, but in a
matter-of-fact way almost English, Burke reflected even down to the
surreptitiously insolent flicker of his eyes when Sabine confirmed, as
Burke had known she would, that they wanted two rooms.

Her room was on the sixth floor.  His, on the eighth, was just slightly
shabby, with paintwork flaked in places, hulking iron radiators and
noisy, bolt-on air-conditioning units.  There was a television in the
corner, but not one that would have graced any hotel still belonging to
the chain Conrad Hilton founded.  Burke turned it on, and off.  Because
it was there.  Then he took a shower to wash the twelve-hour flight
from his pores.

Half an hour later, Burke was settling himself in at the horseshoe bar.
The shabby genteel style of the hotel appealed to him and he felt he
had gone into a time warp: at any moment the great revolving doors
would spin to admit Sidney Greenstreet, complete with fly whisk and
Peter Lorre in his wake.  Or Klaus Fuchs.

"Nal' He had got so used to her talking English, even American-English,
that German was the last language he expected to hear from Sabine
Kotzke.

"See.  I told you so."

"What?"  Burke was uncomprehending.

Sabine bounced up to the bar clutching a sheet of white paper.  She had
not changed, not even as far as he could tell been up to her room for a
wash or a shower.  She thrust it under his nose.

"Don't you just feel it, Eamonn?  At last, we're really on to the
trace.  We're going to get there.  I know."

Burke looked down.  It was a photocopy of something that looked like a
list, handwritten, of names and addresses, with numbers written against
them.

"Sorry, what is this exactly?"

"It's the hotel register, for God's sake.  The reception clerk knew
just where to find them.  Old boxes in a store-cupboard."

Burke peered at the list.  The entries were for September 1945.  It had
been a busy time, but nothing looked like Fuchs.

"Here.  Look."  Sabine's finger jabbed at a name written in a space
dated 9.17.45, in that curious back-to-front American way that Burke
had long since abandoned for European style.

"The seventeenth of September, 1945."  He squinted at the signature.

"Doesn't look like Fuchs, though.  Surely that's a "G"?"

"Of course it is.  It's "G" for Gold.  Harry Gold.  Fuchs's contact.
The idiot even signed his own name.  What's more, he didn't stay the
night.  Couldn't have, probably; the hotel was almost perpetually full
in those days.  He rented a room for the day.  Just what you'd do if
you wanted to meet someone in private .. ."

"And stay out of sight."  Burke completed the train of thought.  She
was right, of course.  What it meant, though, he had not the faintest
idea.  They were tracking a dead man.  And while dead men didn't tell
lies, dead men didn't necessarily tell the truth either.  In fact, dead
men don't say anything at all.

High above the Thames, Dickie Boston was standing at the window of his
office.  His secretary Monica had left for home two hours earlier.

When the telephone rang, he looked at it for a few seconds before
lifting the receiver.  He answered, as always, briefly, giving nothing
away.

"Hello."

"Dickie, it's Nora."

"My dear, what a pleasant surprise."

"Is it?"

"What pleasant?  Or a surprise?"

"Either."

"That depends on why you're calling.  Though it's always a delight to
hear your voice."

"Hmmph.  I've had a visitor.  A reporter.  He was asking questions."

"They do."

"About Fuchs."

"Really?  I'm sure you had a lot to talk about.  Reminiscences can be
important in the scheme of things.  Don't you agree?"

"You know I do.  That's why I'm calling."

"You weren't indiscreet, were you, Nora?  Of course not.  How could I
even think such a thing?  An old trooper like you."

"Don't play with me, Dickie.  I'm doing you a favour."

"Some might say you were only doing your duty."

"I sent him away."

To America?"

"What?"

"He and his young lady friend boarded a plane this morning for Dallas,
Texas, with an onward connection to Albuquerque.  Any idea why they
might have done that, Nora?"

Silence.

"I'm sorry?  I didn't quite catch that."

"I might have mentioned a name.  Carter.  Hiram Carter.  I thought it
would get him out of my hair."

"I see .. . Was that the only name you gave him?"

"What do you mean?"

"Just checking.  You didn't, for example, mention Mrs.  K.?"

"What .. . ?  No.  Of course not."

"Of course not."

'..  . Dickie?"

"Yes?"

"It won't affect anything, will it?  I mean, pension-wise.  I did
call."

"Of course you did, Nora.  I'm very grateful.  Do keep in touch.  I
like to look after people, you know.  It would be such a pity to lose
contact."

"Yes.  Thank you."

"Thank you, Nora.  Good night."

Eamonn Burke had set the car on cruise control at a steady sixty-five,
and was lying back in his seat, relaxed, enjoying the wind on his face
and in his hair.  The open road stretched before them like a black line
drawn in the sand.  He longed to reach out his right arm and pull
Sabine Kotzke's head on to his shoulder.  He longed for the essence of
James Dean and Peter Fonda and Tom Cruise.  He thought maybe the
American in him wasn't dead after all.

Sabine, beside him, had already surrendered to the hedonism.  Was that
how she had imagined America, he wondered, back in her teens as a
member of the ironically named Free German Youth, reciting the Marxist
catechism and learning that America was the devil's spawn?  Had she
dreamed of tossing back her fringe in the desert wind in the front seat
of a speeding sport scar high on the adrenaline of life for its own
sake?  He shot a glance at her.  She caught his eye, as he knew she
would.  And winked.

They cruised into Santa Fe before they even realized it.  Burke was
tempted to stop, to search here for spoor of their ancient quarry too.
They had reserved rooms for the night at the La Fonda Hotel: Los Alamos
was still low on good-quality guest accommodation, Carter had advised.
But now it was Sabine urging him on.  Pointing out that their meeting
was scheduled.  That Hiram Carter might not wait.  That he might change
his mind.  And there was, as ever, an urgency to her voice that
overrode anything Burke could think to say.

As they continued north along the highway, Burke had to force himself
to imagine how it might have been back then, more than half a century
ago, heading out of a frontier town for a destination that didn't
exist.  The war in Europe must have seemed a long way away.  In
comparison this must have appeared a new world indeed, yet at the same
time terribly old, primeval even, scarcely touched by man's presence.
Was it the obvious place to discover the ultimate weapon, the one
capable of destroying civilization?

"Here's the turn-off.  I bet the road sign wasn't even there back in
the forties."

Burke turned the car left on to a road that widened as it climbed,
giving room for faster vehicles to pass.  No bad idea as heavy trucks
made their way to Los Alamos.  Unlike Harwell, which had lost its
mission, Los Alamos remained part of the American nuclear weapons
programme.  The neutron bomb had been developed here, and much of the
work done on the cruise missile.  Burke was surprised, however, at the
ease with which the modern road took them up the side of the mesa,
leaving him wondering where the original track had run and where the
wooden guard posts had been.  It was only when they crossed a great
modern bridge over a river canyon that he realized the original wartime
road must have taken a very different, much more tortuous route up the
mesa face.

The modern town of Los Alamos turned out to be disappointingly similar
to so many other small American communities: a huddle of burger bars,
Tex-Mex restaurants and gas stations.  Only and again Burke was
reminded of Harwell - a few of the street-names recalled the pioneers
of the atomic era.  But some things had survived.  Bathtub Row was
obvious with its big timber houses set back from the road.  The
water-tower that loomed over the end of the street was presumably the
same one that had dominated the ramshackle wartime settlement.

Hiram Carter's instructions to Sabine turned out to be meticulous,
taking them through Los Alamos proper and out again.  Having outgrown
its confines and its secrecy, the complex now extended over hundreds of
acres of adjoining countryside, much of it closed off behind electric
fences and watchtowers as intimidating as anything Burke remembered
from the bad old days of Europe in the Cold War.

Carter's house lay amid a small community of exclusive homes, where top
staff from the laboratories lived.  Burke spotted the house sign first,
a polished wooden board with the single word "Edge' burned into it with
a hot poker.  He turned in between the gate posts and stopped on rough
gravel drive, behind a grey Toyota land-cruiser.  The air was crisp,
cool but dry.  He climbed out of the car taking his hand-held
tape-recorder from the glove compartment.

"You can leave that where it is, son."

The man leaning on a walking stick on the veranda was thick-set,
silver-haired, with a thin smile on his face and eyes behind tinted
spectacles that might have agreed with it and might not.

"I don't like taped interviews.  Makes them seem too much like
interviews, if you know what I mean."

Burke shrugged and put the machine back, though it would have been
useful to have a more reliable record than his cruddy shorthand if the
man actually said anything useful.  But then the first priority was to
get him to say anything at all.

"Professor Doctor Carter?  So glad to meet you."  Sabine was on her
best charm offensive.  She held out her hand.

"I'm sure."  Carter turned in her direction and widened the smile but
did not hold out his own hand.

"Come inside, why don't you?"

Burke followed Carter into an open-plan living area.  A log fire burned
in the grate of a tall grey slate chimney that took up most of one
wall.  Chairs were draped with Native American embroidery; the
furniture was heavy and burnished to a rich deep colour.  Here and
there, on top of two great sideboards and a low coffee table were lumps
of rock, some interestingly stratified with different coloured
layers.

"Can I get you something?  Coffee perhaps?"

He pronounced it in that long drawn-out western American way: kaw-fee.
Personally, Burke could have murdered for a cold beer.  But Sabine got
there first.

"Coffee would be fine."

Carter made his way into the adjacent kitchen slowly, using his stick,
and began the business of grinding beans and setting up the
percolator.

"It's all right, really," Sabine butted in.

"Instant would do."

"Might do you," came the reply which managed the trick of being slow
but still abrupt, Burke thought.  He tried to break what he felt was a
rapidly building sheet of ice.

"We're very interested in your work here, Dr.  Carter."

"Glad to hear it.  Seeing as you've come all this way.  On Miss
Winter's recommendation," he added in a way that managed to make clear
that without it he would not be seeing them at all.

"Particularly in the old days, the genesis of the programme."

"Genesis, eh?"  The old man turned to him.

"That's a good enough word for it, okay.  Birth of a new world, that's
what we thought it'd be.  Hasn't quite turned out like that though, has
it?"

Burke suspected the question was rhetorical, and decided to play safe:
he smiled instead of answering.  The response was a frown.

"No.  I can tell you.  It hasn't.  Some folks'll tell you that it's
safer at the moment than it has been for decades.  Well they're wrong.
Just 'cause there isn't an obvious enemy doesn't mean there isn't an
enemy.  It just means you don't know who it is."

"How much do you remember about the programme back in the forties?"
Sabine asked.

"All of it," Carter grunted.

The people?"

"All of them.  Including your damn Fuchs.  That's who you want to know
about, isn't it?"

Burke and Sabine nodded simultaneously.  Carter produced cups and
poured the coffee.  He did not ask if they wanted milk or cream.

"Let's sit down."

For the next forty minutes they fenced around details of the early
atomic bomb programme, about the atmosphere, the secrecy, the personal
relations, about the characters of Oppenheimer and Groves, about people
like Rabi and Kistiakowsky, Fermi and Frisch and, of course, Fuchs.  To
Burke's huge disappointment, Carter had known him only slightly, and
had less impression of the quiet German than of some of the more
colourful characters.

"I was only young, you have to understand.  And I was one of Teller's
boys.  We were more concerned in the end with the "super" the H-bomb
than with the little Nagasaki jobs."

"You thought it was a good thing, did you?  Dropping a second bomb?"
Sabine asked Carter's face froze into a passive mask, one Burke guessed
he had worn more than once before.

"Who was counting?  We were ending a war."

"Yes, but you had already effectively ended it, hadn't you?  Some of
the scientists thought that even Hiroshima was too much, that a simple
demonstration would have convinced Japan to surrender."

Burke winced.  To make matters worse, Carter shrugged.

"It was a war, lady.  A war your people started, if you want to get
moralistic.  Our job was to provide the tools for the military to
finish it.  And to make sure we had the wherewithal to prevent some
smart-assed dictator doing it again.  And before you start accusing me
of trying to secure one-power hegemony, I'll admit it for you.  The
world would be a better place today if only the United States had had
the bomb.  Your friend Fuchs and his gang began the rot .. ."

"His gang .. . you mean the Russians?"

"I mean what I say, lady."

Carter drained the dregs of his coffee, then stood up, leaning heavily
on his stick, and walked towards the sliding glass doors that led into
his back garden, motioning to them to follow.

The sight was breathtaking.  Barely twenty yards from the house, the
land disappeared.  Carter walked across the rough rye-grass lawn almost
to the edge.  The visitors followed him, and Burke immediately
understood the curious house name.

Below them, a near-vertical drop of more than 2,000 feet, the young Rio
Grande gushed through the bottom of the great canyon it had carved over
millennia.  The waters, still fed by melting snow from the mountains,
were a greeny-brown.  Beyond, the mountains rose, majestic as ever,
just beginning to turn from russet-brown to bright vermilion in the
late-afternoon sun.

"They call them the Blood of Christ, you know.  Fitting somehow."

Burke nodded silently.  He knew no answer was required.

"Mr.  Burke, Miss uh," he stumbled over the German name, "Kotzke, I can
see that we don't share views about the usefulness and the morality of
the atomic bomb.  This is not the time to argue about that, nor would
there be any point in doing so.  But believe me, this is not the first
time the argument has been had.  The first time was perhaps the
fiercest.  The first time was here.  Then."

"You mean there was open argument among the scientists on the Manhattan
Project?"

He shrugged.

"What is open?  Now or then?  We were all building the gadget.  We all
wanted it to succeed.  Scientifically.  But we were not in charge of
its use.  There were some among us who felt they were being used.
Abused even."

"And you?"

"No.  I had no qualms.  I am a physicist, not a military man.  Unlike
some of my colleagues, I do not make the assumption that we have the
right to do everything.  I accept limits to my competence.  Would the
war have ended?  Were the people who were getting so excited about it
the right ones to decide?  We scientists did not do much to stop it
happening in the first place.  And those of us who stayed on here, who
gave this country the best arsenal in the world, the arsenal that
stopped the Soviet dictatorship taking over your Europe, the arsenal
that has put Saddam Hussein in his place, are we not worthy of a little
praise too?  Even if we don't claim the moral high ground?"

Burke thought it best not to answer.  He closed his eyes when he heard
Kotzke start.  But she was not initiating an argument.

"I'm not sure what you're suggesting happened back in '45."

Carter continued to stare out across the chasm towards the red
mountains beyond.

"I'm not suggesting anything.  There was treason.  That's documented.
That's why you're here.  I'm not sure there's anything else I can tell
you."

"What about the others?  What about Oppenheimer?"

Carter glanced at Burke, then turned back.

"What about him?"

"He came under suspicion, didn't he?  Later."

"That was during the McCarthy era.  Who wasn't accused of Commie
sympathies?  He'd had contacts, of course, but he'd abandoned all
those, hadn't he, for the good of his country?  National hero and all
that.  Even Groves in the end said all his suspicions were ill-founded.
So it must be true.  What was that quote: "I am convinced that J.
Robert Oppenheimer never consciously did anything to harm his country."
What a way with words the old general could have when the moment took
him."

"Sounds suspiciously like faint praise to me."

Carter gave a smile that reminded Burke of Nora Winter.  He wondered
when the pair had last met.  He could imagine them getting on well
together.

"You noticed those baskets on the table back in the living-room?"

"The ones with the rock samples?"

"Would you be so good as to fetch the smaller one for me?"

"Sure thing," he said, wincing as he noticed another Americanism escape
his lips.

The basket was heavier than he expected.  He wondered what the old man
wanted it was hardly the time for a geology lesson, interesting as the
strata of the Sangre de Cristo mountains no doubt were.

Carter thanked him, took the basket and set it on a garden table.

"How much do you know about radioactivity, Mr.  Burke?"

"Not as much as you, sir, that's for sure."

"Quite."

Carter lifted a lump of what appeared to be ordinary granite.

"Do you know what this is?"

"Looks like granite."

"Excellent.  English granite no less.  From your Cornwall.  You
wouldn't consider it particularly harmful."

"Not particularly.  Unless you hit me with it."

Carter laughed, a short hard laugh.

"Indeed.  That is its most dangerous potential.  Yet, it is, you know,
radioactive.  It emits radon.  Everything around us is permanently
interacting with radioactivity; it is the nature of the universe. There
is, I've heard, a restroom in Cornwall where the dose of radioactivity
obtained from relieving one's bowels is many times the permissible dose
in England today.  And many more times what is allowed here.  But it's
not fatal.  You can't escape radioactivity.  It is all around us.  It
is what men do with it that makes it dangerous.  Take that other
sample, the grey one."

Burke reached out and lifted a smooth, round grey sphere, abnormally
heavy for its size.  It appeared to be not rock but a dull metal of
some sort, and felt almost warm to the touch.  Not so much like an
inert object as something vaguely alive.

"Interesting.  What is it?"

"Plutonium."

Burke dropped the sphere immediately, watching in horror as it rolled
to Carter's feet.  He half expected it to go critical.  He looked up to
see the old man, still smiling, pick it up and put it back in the
basket.

"You've come to no harm.  Even plutonium is not as dangerous as people
think.  You won't die.  At least, not because of what you have touched.
It is not something you'd want to eat off, of course -though people
did, in the fifties, you know still eat off plates coated with mildly
radioactive paint.  And we hardly had a nationwide cancer epidemic."

Or just not one that anyone recognized, and traced, thought Burke.  But
he said nothing.  His eyes were still fixed on the small orb of the
first man-made element, lying so apparently innocuously in its wicker
basket.

"I am sorry," said Carter.

"It wasn't a fair trick.  But I wanted to make a point.  The plutonium
bomb was the key to the nuclear deterrent it was the only sort of
nuclear device that could be produced on any scale.  But even plutonium
on its own was not enough.  For all their brilliance, their implosive
lenses, Oppie's bomb would never have worked if it had just been
plutonium."

"I know."  Sabine stepped in for the still-shocked Burke.

"There was the uranium shell as well."

Carter sniffed audibly.

"Fat lot of use that would have been if the core hadn't exploded.  The
whole point about the sort of uranium they could get their hands on in
any quantity was that it wasn't fissile.  The U-238 isotope you know
what an isotope is, for God's sake?  An atomically different variation
of an element.  the common form of natural uranium, just wouldn't work.
No chain reaction.  It wouldn't go off.

"If it had done, there would never have been an implosion bomb.  They
would have used the "gun" design, Little Boy, the bomb they dropped on
Hiroshima.  A Danish scientist, guy called Niels Bohr, had proved U-238
didn't work and discovered the rare variant that did, U-235.  Any
idiot, even back then, could have made a bomb like that but there
wasn't enough U-235 easily available on the planet for more than one
and God knows that took enough blood, sweat and tears to extract.  The
fuel in that one bomb was worth billions of dollars."

"Which was why they turned to plutonium," said Sabine, eager to restore
some vestige of intellectual credibility.

That's right."

"So .. ."  Sabine began tentatively.  But Carter needed no prompting to
finish for her.

"They needed an initiator.  Call it a detonator, if you like, although
there was one of those too, in the conventional sense, for the
high-explosive shell.  They needed something that would start off the
chain reaction at the heart of the bomb."

"Polonium?"

"Yeah.  Named after Poland.  Fitting, eh?  Discovered by Marie Curie
killed her in the end."

"Wasn't polonium incredibly rare?"

"Was once.  Not now.  Not by then even.  Ever since Curie discovered
radium they'd been using it in cancer hospitals.  Polonium is a
daughter-product of radium decay.  Los Alamos got its supply from a New
York infirmary.  They mixed it with another radioactive element,
beryllium.  Squeezed together by the imploding plutonium, they would
fuse and release the neutrons that started the chain reaction, made the
bomb go critical.  Otherwise you would just have had a big conventional
explosive bomb that scattered a lot of radioactive debris.  The
initiator turned it into an atomic weapon.

"But it still took them more than a year to get the initiator right:
they conducted endless experiments, making what looked like giant ball
bearings filled up with the stuff and then blowing them in on
themselves to see how well they had mixed.  They only needed to produce
about ten neutrons in the crucial ten-millionth of a second that would
matter if they were to initiate a reaction."

Burke was lost and thought he might as well admit it.

"I'm not sure I'm following this."

Sabine shot him a look, but Carter seemed happy to explain.

"You need neutrons to set off the chain reaction.  Not many, but just
enough.  That was what the initiator did.  You could call it a
catalyst.  Think of the bomb as a giant ammunition dump, if you want.
Throwing a match in wouldn't be dead clever.  But it probably wouldn't
be catastrophic.  Throwing in a Molotov cocktail on the other hand ..
."

Burke took the point.

"The trouble was," Carter continued, 'in those days, it was almost
impossible to measure neutron emissions with the degree of accuracy
required.  It wasn't until after the Trinity test that we knew for sure
we'd succeeded."

"We'd been experimenting with initiators for so long that we had
several different models.  When we found one that worked, we scrapped
the rest: recycled them for the polonium and beryllium to make the new
models.  It wasn't as if the raw materials were particularly scarce. It
was the quantities, design and manufacture that had been the problem.
By the end, there were even one or two copies of each type lying
around.  In the euphoria over getting it right, people perhaps weren't
as careful as they should have been."

Burke wondered if that was what Nora Winter had been trying to say.

"So when the Soviets did get one to work," Carter said, 'so relatively
soon, it seemed something of a miracle.  To those who believe in
miracles."

"What are you trying to say?"

"I'm not trying to say anything, Mr.  Burke.  I am, like you and your
young friend here, and indeed any good scientist, merely posing
problems and looking at the theories.

"People nowadays imagine that the Manhattan Project was some sort of
hyper-efficient installation.  In reality, it was more like a load of
bright kids trying to invent something in the garage.  Like that guy
who made all the money with computers back in the eighties."

"Bill Gates?"

"Yeah, came out of nowhere and changed the world."

"Except that the Manhattan Project made more of an immediate impact."

Carter shrugged.

"You could say that okay.  Fuchs told the Russians everything, of
course.  But as the technical types here had found, there was one hell
of a big difference between theory and practice.  An initiator's damned
hard to construct.  And the Soviets were working with cruddy
equipment."

"You have a theory?"

"I'm too old for theories, Mister Burke.  I'm retired.  I just sit here
and watch the sun set over those damn mountains with a glass of Bourbon
and my memories.  And what I remember is just what remarkable luck
those Rooskies had in the end."

Burke looked the physicist square in the eyes, and found his stare
returned.  There was something the man wasn't saying.

"Tell me, Dr.  Carter."  If he was determined to play a roundabout
game, Burke could play along.

"Just how big was this "initiator"?"

"Oh, not big.  About the size of a golf ball."

"And how do you think the Russians managed to copy it so quickly?"

"Ask them about that, them Rooskies.  And ask them about Mrs.  K." too.
They're famously generous with their records in Moscow these days, I
believe.  Leastways, that's what they say, even in Langley, Virginia.
The sun rises in the east nowadays all right.  Ask them about that,
too.  Ask them about the sunrise.  The one that never happened."

And with that he turned around, leaving Burke and Kotzke staring after
him, open-mouthed, as he limped back towards the house.

Burke looked at Kotzke to see if she made any more than he did from a
conversation that had suddenly gone off the rails.  Not for the first
time, he found the look on her face inscrutable.

"Excuse me, sir," he called after Carter's retreating back.

"I think you should explain yourself."

"Ha!"  Carter didn't even bother to turn round.

"Explain myself.  Who do you think you are?  Who the hell ever asked
Allen Dulles for explanations?  They were all honourable men,
honourable men all.  The side gate's open.  Let yourselves out."

He stumped into the house and closed the door behind him.  The
interview was definitively at an end.

The dusk was falling fast as the convertible wove its way down from the
high mesa into the valley of the Rio Grande and the road back to Santa
Fe.

Burke was swimming in confusion.  Carter had opened doors only to slam
them shut, had raised ghosts without laying them.  He had teased
Burke's instincts and beggared his imagination.

"Jesus, I'm just glad I don't play poker with that man.  He pulls wild
cards from the bottom of the deck."

"Wild cards?"

"Jokers.  Whatever.  Except that he wasn't joking, was he?"

"No.  He wasn't.  I think maybe there is nothing to joke about."

Burke looked at her, wondering again if she had briefed him as fully as
she might have done.  That was the thing about journalism, he sighed.
Even when you were working on a story together, there was always the
possibility that someone was holding out for a better angle.

"What do you make of Mrs.  K, Miss K?  he asked.

"Nothing at all.  And what about Allen Dulles?"

"What about him?  The first fucking head of the CIA, the man who coaxed
Kennedy into the Bay of Pigs disaster in Cuba.  Brilliant but bonkers,
and probably the prototype for every insane secret service chief
since."

"Where does he fit in?"

Burke turned to Sabine, but she was gazing out over the desert to where
the low lights of Indian dwellings shone a warm yellow glow.  She
didn't seem to need an answer.

The air had turned cold.  Burke swung the Pontiac on to the Taos
highway, looking forward to a hot shower and a drink at the hotel.  He
began to whistle.

"What's that?"  Sabine had turned towards him, her face full of
curiosity.

' "From Russia with Love."  I figured if I have to play James Bond,
then I might as well get to do the theme tune."

She shook her head and gave an uncertain smile.

"Next stop Moscow," she said.

Big Bang

Los Alamos, 15 July 1945 It was, at last, the evening before.  Up on
the high plateau, as they sat around over a few glasses of wine and
more than a few bottles of beer in the bar at the Big House, the
atmosphere crackled with mental electricity.

Like when Enrico Fermi, the short, stocky Italian, more than a little
drunk, lurched over to the green baize table by the fireplace where
Isidor Rabi sat chain-smoking over a pile of dollars that represented
the scale of his expertise at seven-card stud.

"Anybody for a real bet?"  Fermi had announced, swaying slightly.

"What do you mean?"  asked Kistiakowsky, one eye still on his losses.

"On the fireworks, of course.  Our little dawn divertimento.  Will we
have a big bang, or a little phut, like the fart of an old woman?"
Fermi made a scornful, wet noise with his lips.

Edward Teller had been leaning on the mantelpiece, his eyes fixed on
the empty grate.  It was part of his job to calculate the margins of
error.  The dimensions of terror.  Fuchs, who had made private
calculations of his own, sometimes wondered if Teller inhabited the
same planet as the rest of them.  Already, at the Pentagon's behest,
his eyes were fixed on the 'super', a 'hydrogen bomb' that would use
the unimaginable blast they had yet to witness as merely a detonator.

"There are fixed parameters, Enrico.  As you know," Teller said.

"The question is how many thousand tonnes of TNT equivalent and I am
conservatively estimating .. ."

"Estimates?  Guesses .. . you don't really know, do you?"  the Italian
interrupted him.

"You don't know for sure.  None of us does.  That's the point of the
test.  Isn't it?  George here doesn't really know if his clever
explosive "lenses" will work.  It might all end in a wet firecracker,
huh?  A big bomb that just makes a mess of itself, but no nuclear,
huh?"

"I'm quietly confident, Enrico," Kistiakowsky replied in his most
measured, poker player's monotone.

"But of course, you are right.  We do not know anything for certain
until we experiment.  That is a law of physics you would agree with, I
think."

But Fermi was enjoying himself tap-dancing on their hopes and fears.

"Hey, Edward," he called again to Teller, 'what's the betting that the
whole thing's a flop.  But maybe that'll be okay, you know, because it
will prove it's impossible.  If we can't do it, nobody can.  Of course,
on the other hand," the man was almost giggling, Fuchs noted with a
chill, 'maybe it'll be bigger than any of us expect."

Kistiakowsky was getting annoyed.  He had no time for the Italian's
friviolity.

"For Christ's sake, Enrico, quit playing the fool," he snapped.

But Fuchs knew better.  As did Teller.  Fermi was nobody's fool.  It
was his juggling within the very heart of matter that had brought them
this far.  His alternatives were not as preposterous as they sounded.

"What do you think the odds are, Izzy?"  Fermi asked big, silent Isidor
Rabi.

"What's the chance that we might just fry everybody in the state?"

"You mean .. ."  Rabi began, but Fermi was in full flight.

"I mean the goddamn oxygen, that's what I mean.  The stuff we breathe.
The stuff that makes fire burn."

"The atmosphere?"  Kistiakowsky was an engineer, not a molecular
chemist.

"That's right, set it alight," Fermi's eyes were blazing.  He was
clearly enjoying himself, 'and who knows, we might just sizzle the
entire planet."

Fuchs had been watching the discussion from the bar where he had been
keeping company with Feynmann, on whom the question weighed less
heavily than the recent death of his wife.  He was tempted only
momentarily to say something.  He had little time for Fermi, though he
respected his brilliance.  There was something too clinical in his
cynicism.  As if he meant it.

"Because maybe, just maybe," Fermi was continuing, now that he had an
audience to command, 'we shouldn't do it at all.  Has anyone thought of
that?"

The idea that they might never test the 'gadget' had not occurred to
Fuchs.  Too much work had gone into it.  The device itself had imposed
its own imperatives.

"Maybe you are right, Enrico," said Rabi.

"There has been so much killing.  It is too late now for vengeance. The
Nazis are gone.  We Jews who have suffered so much so much more, it
seems, than even we had feared have we done too much, those of us who
have put our energies into this weapon?  Are we the same as them?"

"Like hell we are.  You've seen the pictures the GIs are sending back
of those concentration camps."  Fermi was not Jewish, but his wife
was.

"We're just too damn late.  We should have used this stuff sooner."

"But you know it was not possible."  It was Teller who spoke now.

"You yourself have just said that even now we are not perfectly sure
the gadget will work."

"So who in hell's talkin' about the gadget?  There were a thousand
other ways we could've got those bastards.  Dumped strontium in their
water supply, for example."

Rabi sucked in his breath.  Kistiakowsky looked mildly puzzled.  Fuchs
sighed.  He had heard, and been sickened by, the suggestion before.

"What would that have done?"

"Only killed off the populations of whole cities, that's all."  To
Fuchs's surprise, Feynmann, next to him, had looked up from his glass
and addressed the party in a strong, clear voice.

"Poisoned millions, condemned them to a slow, painful but very, very
certain death from within as the stuff destroyed their bone tissue.
Very inventive.  I'm surprised no one has thought of it."

"It is an abomination, that is what it is," blurted Rabi.

"Worse than these gas chambers, worse than this Ossvitz place?"  Fermi
was challenging.  The news of the camps in occupied Poland was just
beginning to come in, the scale of the atrocity still defying belief.

"The place you mean is called Oswiecim in Polish, or Auschwitz in
German, and yes, what you are suggesting is worse.  Is this what this
war has done to us all?  Reduced us to the level of the Nazis?"  Fuchs
was surprised to hear his own voice.  These were the sort of debates he
usually kept out of.  But then tonight was not a usual night.

"Maybe," said Fermi crisply, twirling his wine glass in the air before
raising it to his lips to down the last red drops.  Fuchs suddenly felt
acutely aware of his nationality, the unspoken subtext to the
conversation.

"Maybe we will all find out in the morning what we are made of, and
what we have made.  Gentlemen, I bid you good night.  We have quite a
journey ahead of us in just a few hours."

At the bar Fuchs finished his beer and turned to Feynmann, who, he
noticed, was looking more animated than he had seen him in weeks.

"Do you think he meant that?  About the strontium?"

"Who knows, Klaus?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  But it would have worked all
right.  You know that."

Fuchs did.  And as he placed his empty beer bottle on the bar he tried
to dismiss from his mind the image of all those years ago: his mother,
her face contracted into a mask of agony on the kitchen floor.  But
into its place came a vision of Arlene Feynmann, as he had last seen
her, wasting away in Albuquerque hospital.

"That's what it's all about, isn't it?"  he said.

"Killing time."

Alamogordo Desert, 16 July No one got any real sleep, though a few,
like Fermi, had retired early for a few hours' rest.  The others stayed
up and dozed in their seats en route.  The journey had begun shortly
after midnight in uncomfortable buses, bumping in and out of potholes
on the desert track.  Now, as they stood on the slopes of Compania
Hill, their watches ticked towards 5:30a.m.

It was Teller who had suggested the suntan lotion.  Perhaps, more than
any of the others, he knew the power they were about to unleash, and
the potential risks involved even in witnessing it.  But he was
determined not to turn away.  Smearing the oily lotion on his face he
told himself he would 'look the beast in the eye'.  He had spent months
calculating every possibility of error, weighing every chance of
disaster, but in truth they were venturing into uncharted territory.

He pulled on heavy gloves and a pair of dark glasses, held a thick
welder's glass visor against his face, and stared in the darkness
towards the twenty-mile-distant point on which all attention was
focused, the spot that the man in charge had dubbed Trinity.

The man himself was much closer.  In an earth-sheltered bunker with a
thick concrete roof supported by oak beams, Robert Oppenheimer scarcely
dared breathe.  SI0000, the southern command centre, was only 10,000
yards less than six miles from the tall tower which supported the
absurd-looking mechanical device, a man-sized sphere of steel covered
in rivets, wires and bolt-on metal boxes sitting under a corrugated
iron roof.  The room was crowded, the atmosphere thick with nervous
tension, the smell of sweat and adrenalin.

At twenty-nine minutes past the hour, the automatic timer was engaged.
Forty-five seconds later the timer needle touched zero.  Around the
inside of the sphere of steel thirty-two detonators simultaneously
fired, sending a wave of compression inwards.  For a microsecond
conditions at its core echoed the fiery birth of the universe itself.
Had astronomers been watching the moon that July dawn they would have
seen it reflect an unearthly flash.

More than twenty miles away a few of the scientists, including a
youthful Hiram Carter, had assumed the recent storm had caused a
postponement and were walking carefully downhill, picking their steps
in the darkness.  Suddenly they saw the earth before them illuminated
with a light so sharp that each blade of grass cast its own individual
shadow.  Seconds later came the shock wave that nearly knocked them off
their feet.

For Isidor Rabi it was the most omnipotent sensation of his life.
Afterwards he would recall it with a sense of awe: "It blasted; it
pounced; it bored its way right through you.  It was a vision which was
seen with more than the eye.  It was seen to last forever.  You would
wish it would stop; altogether it lasted about two seconds.  Finally,
it was over, diminishing, and we looked toward the place where the bomb
had been; there was an enormous ball of fire which grew and grew and it
rolled as it grew; it went up into the air, in yellow flashes and into
scarlet and green.  It looked menacing.  It seemed to come toward one."
The atomic age was born with a bang.  The whimper was yet to come.

At SI0000, there was no shout of triumph.  The tense silence in the
shelter was broken at first by a few nervous laughs, then a few tears
of released tension, and gradually a solemn apprehension of what they
had witnessed.  The noisy bustle seemed like a deathly hush in the wake
of the apocalypse they had unleashed.  Oppenheimer, the physicist who
was also a Sanskrit scholar, looked into the depths of his own learning
and experience for words to express the terrible enormity of their
achievement and found only bleak comfort: the words of the Hindu god
Vishnu in the Bhagavad-Gita scripture.

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

PART TWO

Fission

Red Eye

Eamonn Burke sat in seat 22a of British Airways flight BA224 into
Moscow Sheremetyevo and surveyed, as he always did, the great expanse
of forest to the north.  Somewhere down there, amid the trees, were the
ageing remnants of the the Cold War air-defence systems.  When Ronald
Reagan was in the White House, Moscow's anti-missile system had been
the excuse for the Strategic Defence Initiative, known to most people
as "Star Wars'.  There were advantages, the boys in the boardrooms had
told themselves as they counted the cost of incoming contracts with an
open-ended timetable, to having a president educated in Hollywood.

The deeper irony was that they had proved their own undoing.  Most
unexpected of all had been not that the Russians were so far ahead, but
that even entering the race was beyond them.  Mikhail Gorbachev
recognized that fact, thereby ending the Cold War and with it the
lucrative arms race.  The balance of terror that had kept an uneasy
peace since the Soviet nuclear test in 1949, had come to a seemingly
sane end.  Though there were still those who regretted it: men like
Vladimir Zhirinovsky and other psychopaths, some of them little more
than gangland bosses wrapped in flags, who nurtured dreams of a
restored Russian empire achieved through an unholy alliance between
Communists feeding on a cult of Soviet nostalgia and the nationalist
nutters whom freedom had allowed out of the woodwork.

And the silos were still out there, somewhere.  As the Boeing 757
banked for its final approach, Burke scanned the great expanse of
trees, looking for another explanation for every fire-break line,
examining the circles that purported to be a sewage plant, wondering
about the nondescript blocks of flats clustered within dark clumps of
trees with only one access road.  Secret installations?  Or just bad
planning?  And between and beyond them all the little wooden houses,
with their peeling paintwork, the age-old izbas, often without running
water but always thanks to Lenin's diktat -with electric light: village
houses that still marked the ancient pattern of rural Russian life.

Sabine tightened her grip on the armrest.  He noticed that she had her
eyes closed.

"Don't laugh," she said.

"You didn't spend your early years flying on Tupolevs."

Then the wheels touched down.  Welcome home to the nightmare, Burke
thought.  Moscow was the city he loved and loathed more than any on
earth.  He hoped the journey would be worth it.  On the face of things,
Valery Korkin had done them proud.

Since the end of Communism, Sheremetyevo had undergone a facelift,
chiefly at the hands of the Irish, who now ran most of the duty-free
establishments that sold caviar and Kremlin T-shirts (made in Co. Cork)
to departing tourists, and camcorders and ghetto-blasters to returning
natives.  Their symbol was a shamrock superimposed on the Kremlin's
Spassky tower.  It made Burke laugh.  The last great joke of the
imperial age: the Irish colonization of Moscow.

The passport officials were the same as ever: spotty nineteen-year-olds
in goblin-green uniforms that had once nominally marked them out as
members of the KGB.  The old stencilled sign on the wall was still
there, Burke noticed as he and Sabine waited at passport control, the
one that read: "Please wait until emigration is free', and used to
provoke the remark among resident foreigners that hell would freeze
over first.

But it was the smell that reminded him most vividly of where he was:
the smell of warm, wet dog.  He had first remarked on it ten years ago
to Valery Korkin.

"Ye-ess, maybe," the Russian had mused in his thick guttural English.

"After all, it is only natural.  My hat' Burke recalled him gesturing
to the admirable, brown-furred creation that never left his head
between the beginning of November and the end of March 'it is, of
course, dog.  Very good hat.  Warm.  And waterproof."

Burke had gagged, but Valery had continued to defend the virtues of his
headgear.

"Much better than cat .. . And you, Mr.  Burke, why do worry about dog
when you have dead rabbit on your head?"  Russians, Valery rattled on,
were simply more practical about animals.  This was a cold country.
Fake furs were useless.

The smell, Burke had come to realize, was not just because everyone
wore dead dogs on their heads.  The smell was poverty in a cold
climate: people wrapped up tight in old clothes, a scarcity of soap, an
ignorance of underarm deodorants and a staunch belief that chewing raw
garlic kept germs at bay.  It was how most of Europe, Burke
rationalized, had probably once smelled.

Then, finally, he and Sabine were struggling towards the airport exit.
The crowd was everywhere.  Pushing, jostling, touting.  Men with dead
dogs on their heads and what looked like dead mice along their upper
lips.  Swarthy faces, pale faces, eager, entreating faces, threatening
faces.  Only, as ever, no smiling faces.  No wonder, he thought, he
hated the place.

"Eamonn, here."

Kotzke was behind him, fighting off attempts insistently helpful to
wrest her suitcase from her grasp.  One particularly persistent
middle-aged man with gold teeth had hold of the handle.  Burke thought
he looked like a Georgian, or possibly a Chechen.  He was urging her in
execrable American-accented English to make use of his 'leemooseen'
service.

Burke turned to help her, but Kotzke hissed something at the man in
fast, fluent Russian and he withdrew rapidly.

Burke was impressed.

"What on earth did you say to him?"

"I told him he was a piece of Caucasian pig shit and could go fuck his
mother.  They taught us something, you know, in the Young Pioneers."

Burke followed her, laughing, into what passed for fresh air.

"Yamon, Yamon!"  Burke recognized the familiar distortion of his name.
Within a second he was smothering in the powerful bear hug of the only
Russian he could genuinely, unequivocally, state that he loved.  The
man to whom he owed his life.

"Enough Valery, for God's sake, you'll asphyxiate me."

"How are you, skinny bastard as ever, while your uncle Valery fattens
like pig at Easter.  See I am an example of Russia's economic miracle.
Everyone is returning.  Even God has come back, you know, at least
there are enough of his bloody priests."  Valery poured out a torrent
of loud, hearty laughter.

"Come.  We must go.  Later we have some vodka, and you tell me all
about how is London now, how the West is finally crumbling and then we
find some nice whores to fuck.  You have lots of dollars I hope.
Christ, the price of everything is rising these days."

"Wait a minute, you ox, let me introduce you to my friend."

Kotzke was standing by her suitcase.

"Please, gentlemen.  I would hate to disturb your plans for the
evening."

Burke would have said Valery Korkin was immune to embarrassment but not
now.  Eventually the Russian stammered into speech.

"You must be Yamon's friend.  He has told me he was not coming alone. I
am such a pig, please forgive me.  I was just making men's jokes of
course.  I had simply not expected a .. . a .. ."

"A woman, perhaps."  Kotzke flashed the big eyes.

"Now if you'll tell us where the car is," she began, lifting her bags
in anticipation.

"But please, allow me."  Korkin made to take them.

"That's quite okay.  We girls can manage our own things.  She turned to
Burke as if for confirmation.

"Oder night, Hen Burke?"

Korkin started back abruptly, then smiled again a touch too
deliberately, Burke thought and gestured towards where a line of
unwashed, snow- and slush-covered cars stood behind a high iron
fence.

"So the beautiful young lady is really a beautiful Fraulein."  (Burke
winced at the word, let alone Valery's pronunciation as Froleen.) "We
have much respect for our new friends from Germany," he said, offering
his hand formally.

Kotzke shook it and set off towards the car-park, turning her head only
briefly towards Burke.

"Well, let's go.  Business, remember?"

"Nice girl, Yamon," Korkin nodded, eyeing Sabine's calf muscles
appreciatively.

"German, huh?  Very nice."

Burke pretended not to notice him spit in the snow.

The drive from the airport to the Radisson Hotel took nearly an hour.
The three of them sat in the back of Korkin's smart new Mercedes
estate, driven by Slava, a shrewd-looking young man whom Korkin
introduced as his bodyguard.

"Everybody in business nowadays has to have one.  Slava is a good boy.
Former spetsnaz," he confided to Burke in a loud stage-whisper.

"Can kill a man with his bare hands.  Very useful in the queue for
cabbages, ha ha ha."  Burke noticed Slava smiled too.  He obviously
knew his boss's jokes.

"Also he is a good driver.  Very fond of German cars.  Speaks English
too, and German.  Such talent."  Slava nodded in polite acknowledgment
of his employer's praises.  In the rearview mirror, Burke could see his
bright blue eyes.  He looked, he thought, like one of those
blond-haired, idealized portraits of "Soviet Man' that used to adorn
gable wall ends during the Communist regime: the model worker.

Moscow's traffic was as slow and dirty as he remembered it, except that
now the jam of old Ladas, clapped-out buses and rusty lorries had been
augmented by a sprinkling of Western cars.  Mercedes, Volkswagen and
BMW were the most numerous, well-maintained, obviously status symbols.
Clearly the old feelings about the Germans no longer applied to the
motor industry.

"You see, Yamon," Korkin bellowed as the car bounced in and out of
potholes, 'now we have lots of your smart cars in the new Russia.  Most
are stolen, of course.  The Poles bring them in.  Park a nice car in
Warsaw for ten minutes these days and they say it is already on the
road to Moscow with a nice new Polish number plate and a man in the
passenger seat rewriting the import documents.  Very efficient.  I
wonder why they were not when they were under socialism?  You see, we
have understood the basics of this entrepreneurialism that is the right
word, I think very fast.  Perhaps I should take a Polish business
course.  Then Slava can have a nice new car, every year.  A German car,
even."  He roared with laughter at the prospect.

If Sabine was listening she gave no sign, just stared out of the window
at the country that had dominated her youth, as if she were sizing it
up for occupation.  There you go, thought Burke.  When it came down to
it, the Germans and Russians deserved one another.

Valery Korkin lay stretched out on the double bed in Burke's room in
the Radisson, a soulless box decorated in bland international
'executive' style.  Without the presence of the two Russians, Burke
thought, it could have been anywhere in the world, from Manchester to
Michigan.  Korkin, however, gave it context.  With his best Moscow
manners, he had at least taken off his slush-soaked felt boots.  A fine
steam was rising from the socks of indeterminate colour that rested on
the end of Burke's bed.  Sabine had gone to her own room the fact that
she had requested one as a matter of course eliciting a nudge in
Burke's kidneys from the big Russian to shower and change, having
agreed to meet them downstairs in the bar in forty minutes.

Korkin's young driver stood by the door of Burke's room, impressively
rigid.  Burke himself sat on the edge of the other double bed sometimes
he wondered what international hotel chain managers thought went on in
their rooms wishing the kid would sit down or something.  He made him
nervous, as if he was expecting an armed intrusion at any minute. Maybe
he was.  Korkin noticed his discomfort and said, "Ha.  Don't worry
about Slava.  It is just his manner.  He is a good boy, well-trained,
even if he daydreams a little."

Slava, aware that he was being talked about, gave Burke a thin-lipped
smile.

"So, how are you, my old friend?  As slow as ever to offer drinks to
your old comrades, I see."

"Sorry.  Wasn't thinking."  Burke opened the minibar.

"The usual?"  he asked rhetorically, reaching for a miniature of
vodka.

"You think Moscow's new sophistication has made a Campari-drinker of
me, perhaps?  Smirnoff, please.  Anyway, Stolichnaya has a Soviet
after-taste, though Slava here would not agree, would you, boy?"

Burke threw the miniature to Korkin, took one himself and looked at the
driver, who was standing impassively by the door.

"Slava does not drink.  At least not on duty.  Na zdorovye.  Your very
good health."

"And yours."

Korkin unscrewed the bottle cap, clenched the neck in his teeth, then
threw his head back to swallow the contents in one.  Burke copied him.
It was an old chums' ritual.  Even so, he nearly choked as the fiery
spirit dashed down his gullet.  Korkin roared with laughter, Burke
joined him.  The Russian held out his hand for another.  Burke threw it
to him and took a second himself.

"So, how easy was it to find him?"

"Like looking for a pig in a shit house.  If you think about it, you
know where they are.  Slava was very useful.  He still has many
contacts in the "service" and among the remnants of the old regime.
There are some very bitter men out there, but even bitter men have to
eat.  There is nothing in Russia today that does not have a price.
Information is just another commodity.  But you must tell us what you
want it for.  You have been most unspecific, Yamon."

Burke sighed.  He could sense the concentration fixed upon him.

Even Slava seemed to have dropped his mask of professional
impassivity.

"It's complicated, Valery.  In fact, I'm not wholly sure I understand
it.  But maybe I can tell you more when I fix up a time to see Yakovlev
himself."

It was a poor answer, Burke knew.  Slava looked at him suspiciously.
But Korkin waved it away.

"Of course, it is not my business.  You must arrange your meeting with
him .. . except .. . that it is not him."

"What?  Valery.  Don't do this to me."

"I am sorry.  That's life, or perhaps, in this case, the opposite."

"But you said you'd found him."

"I said one thing.  You understood another.  But do not despair, my
friend."

Korkin was lying back again, the tiny, half-empty vodka bottle held to
his lower lip.  Burke had the curious impression he was enjoying
this.

"Valery has done what he can for you.  For a start there never was any
such person as your comrade Yakovlev."

Burke had had this sort of conversation with Valery before.  The only
option was to let the man get on with it at his own pace, and feed him
the link words when necessary.

"What do you mean?"

"It was a false name.  Not a very good one, I have to say, not so very
different from his own."

"Which was?"

"Yatzkov."

"And he is where now?"

"Kuntsovo cemetery, not far from your Kim Philby.  He died in 1993.
Funny, eh?  He lived just long enough to see everything he'd worked for
collapse in ruins."

"Hilarious."

"Believe me, if you were Russian, you'd laugh."

"Where does this leave us?"

"Maybe in a good place.  It depends on what you are looking for, not
who."

"It's a complicated story.  I'll explain as we go along.  But first I
have to know if we're going anywhere at all."

"Okay, okay.  Anyhow, this is how I think: I know you.  I think: always
he wants the man at the top.  So I do some digging.  Yatzkov is dead.
But even Yatzkov was only a small rat in a big maze.  Who is the bigger
rat.  Once this was impossible to know.  Today it is not so hard.  Two
bottles of Johnnie Walker for bribes and a spare wheel for a Mercedes
do not worry, it is on your bill."

"My colleague's bill."

"Really?"  The Russian's eyes opened wider.

"I should have made it four wheels and an engine."

"And the result?"

"Yatzkov's wartime controller at the KGB was a man called Yakunin."

"Bloody hell," interrupted Burke.

"Does everyone have to have a name that begins with "Ya"?"

"Including yourself, Yamon.  But you should listen now.  He was a big
chief very young.  Then something went wrong.  Around 1948before the
Soviet bomb.  He got posted to Novocherkassk.  In the Caucasus.
Cherkassians, Chechens, old Cossacks.  Not very nice for Russians,
especially good party men.  But maybe for him it was a blessing.  Not
to be in Moscow in the fifties, during the show trials, the purges.  He
survived."

"And came back?"

"At the end of the Khrushchev era.  Somebody must have felt sorry for
him.  Anyhow, he was pensioned off early enough to get one of the old
nomenklatura apartments.  Not high-ranking enough to get a good one,
mind.  Out in the fucking sticks, in the south-west of the city:
Yugozapadnaya metro."  The Russian picked something sinewy from between
his teeth, examined it and discarded it on the carpet.

Burke made a mental note to avoid that part of the floor, especially in
socks.

"Slava here did most of the legwork, identifying the man we needed.
Once we had his name, it was easy.  I gave one of the girls in the
records department on Smolensk Square a cock and bullock story about
being Comrade Yakunin's lost cousin from Petropav-lovsk-Kamchatsky. She
opened the ministry address book and told me where he lived.  In the
old days I would have got a one-way ticket to one of the gulags just
for asking."

"Have you spoken to Yakunin himself?"  Burke was apprehensive.  Korkin
never seemed able to draw a line between discretion and rudeness, or
verbosity and offensiveness, for that matter.

"Please, Yamon.  I am the soul of the secrecy.  And I know these old
birds.  What he is wanting is peace and quiet in his old age, but also
money and most of all, I think the idea that it was not all a waste of
time.  I have told him you want to write a book about America's
mistakes in the Cold War, about how mother Russia was always the
champion of peace.  You know a lot of them really believed it."

"A lot of our lot believed what they were told, too."

"But tell me: why do we want to see him?  If I am to be of help to you,
then I must know what it is about."

Burke considered the logic.  He knew Sabine would hate letting anyone
else in on her precious story.  But he could see no harm in it.
Korkin's money-making schemes did not extend into the media business,
and Slava, despite his eagle eyes, did not exactly look like a cub
reporter.  As best as he could, he went through the tale that Sabine
had told him, and the gobbets of information and inference he had put
together from his trips to Harwell and Hiram Carter.  Korkin sat
spellbound.  Slava picked his nose and looked distracted.

At the end the big Russian stood up and shook his head.

"So you think Yakunin may know something that this Fuchs wanted to tell
the world.  And the Stasi scum killed him to keep it secret?"

"Maybe.  The Stasi are clearly the prime suspects.  But they would have
been acting on the orders of the KGB.  East Germany was where Fuchs
ended up, but Russia the Soviet Union was the country he worked for."

"I have heard of him."

Both Korkin and Burke turned.  Up until then Slava had not even seemed
to be following the conversation.

"There was a film, in the Gorbachev days.  It said he was a great
scientist who helped the motherland's de fences  Not that we needed
help from foreigners then."

"Of course not."  Burke raised his eyebrows.

"But this isn't the only country with secrets.  I have a suspicion that
"our" side the West -had something to hide too.  Fuchs got a relatively
light prison sentence, then disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, never
to emerge.  If someone wanted to keep him sweet, but out of the range
of Western reporters, then they managed it very well.  Right up to the
end."

"And now maybe our man will tell all.  How about that, eh, Slava?
Russia is the home of glasnost.  Perhaps now we give lessons in
openness to the British and the Yankees.  Yamon, my friend, you have a
brain like a bolshevik, always plotting."

"Perhaps."  Burke smiled.

"Anything's possible.  So when do we meet this Yakunin?"

"I said you would telephone this evening.  I think he'll see us
tomorrow.  I'll come and show you.  Otherwise you'll get lost.  All
look the fucking same, those blocks.  Fucking Soviet architecture.
Fucking shit country, you know.  Still is."

"Good work, Valery.  You're not such a bad bastard after all.  I don't
know what I'd do without you."

"You'd pay some stupid tart decent money.  Still I suppose you'd get
your cock sucked.  Even I won't do that.  How about Brunnhilde?"

Burke narrowed his eyes, raised a finger and pointed it straight at the
Russian.

"Strictly business, old chum."

"Of course, Yamon baby.  I am disgusted for even having mentioned it."
Then the great crevasse that passed for a mouth cracked open and he
laughed long and loud.

"Perhaps she likes it up the arse instead."

"Christ, you are something else, comrade, come on, let's go and get
pissed."

"Not comrade, please."  For a moment the Russian looked serious, then
broke into his customary grin.

"But you must make your telephone call.  Then we can play find the
lady?"

The telephone rang eight times before it was answered, each ring a long
solid burr followed by a silence that Burke had always believed was the
old Soviet communications system's attempt to encourage every caller to
give up in advance.  Then he heard the standard Soviet-style telephone
greeting: "Allyo?"  It was aggressive, questioning, gave nothing away,
not even a name or number, until the caller identified himself.  Burke
knew the rules; he addressed the man formally by his first name and
patronymic, trying his best in limited Russian:

"Anatoly Nikolayevich, eto Eammon Burke vas bespokoyit.  Moi drug uzhe
pozvonil vam."  This is Eammon Burke troubling you.  My friend has
already called you.  Again, no name.  Again, no reason, Burke thought,
for this sort of obliqueness on the telephone, not nowadays when there
was surely?  no risk of anyone listening in.  But old habits died hard.
That was what really constituted Moscow rules.

"Hmmm, da, da, da."  It was an old man's voice, tired, soft, the
instinctive aggression suddenly gone.

"I guess you'd prefer if we spoke English?"  The man's English was
good, with an American accent, the sort learned from listening with
impunity to "Voice of America'.

"Your English is certainly very much better than my Russian, Dr.
Yakunin."

"Hm, maybe.  I haven't used it a whole lot over the past years.  Now
maybe you're gonna tell me just what it is you want us to talk about.
Your Muscovite friend wasn't very helpful."

"I think he mentioned that I was writing a book."

"Yes, yes, but there are many types of books these days, even in
Russia."  Burke thought he detected a wry chuckle.

"I need more information before I know if there is anything I can tell
you.  I am an old man, you know.  My memory is not what it was.  I
would hate you guys to come all the way out here for no reason."

Burke smiled at the vernacular, but was worried by the tone.  It would
be all or nothing, he realized.  With an inward sigh, he took the
plunge:

"It concerns the late Dr.  Klaus Fuchs.  I believe you knew him?"

There was silence on the other end of the line.  It was as if the very
name of Fuchs was enough to strike dumb anyone who had ever come into
contact with him.  Burke pressed on, terrified that the other man was
about to hang up.

"We have found some papers.  They contain some very interesting
material."

Again nothing.

"We... I thought you might like to see them.  It may be nothing."  He was
in danger of gabbling now, he realized.

"But they might jog your memory."  For Christ's sake, don't insult the
man, and don't make him feel you want something out of him he doesn't
want to give.

"I'm sure we could reach some arrangement."  Hint at money.  Don't be
forthright.  You don't know how much Sabine's lot are willing to fork
out, anyhow.  You don't even know what this old bird could tell us. But
by God, he's not volunteering anything.

"Dr.  Yakunin?"  Burke waited.

"Yes.  I see.  Hmmm .. ."

Another silence.  Then:

"I'm not sure I can help you.  I'm afraid I had no direct contact with
Herr Dr.  Fuchs.  It was all a very long time ago."

Again, a long pause, and a sigh.

"Is there anything ... in particular .. . that you need me to comment
on?"

It was the question, Burke thought, of a man who knew the answer. There
was no point in holding back.

"I think so, Dr.  Yakunin.  Dr.  Fuchs kept a diary.  We have it.  I'm
sure you know there was an important matter that was never disclosed.
We think it is time the world knew the truth.  We think you can help.
The old days are behind us now.  We mustn't allow any more mistakes."
He just hoped the old boy didn't think it sounded too corny.  He also
hoped it wasn't obvious how little they really did know.

There was another sigh, resigned this time.

"I thought it might be that.  A diary, you say.  A brave man, our
Fuchs.  And perhaps a foolish one.  Perhaps you are right.  I don't
suppose I can do anything about it, anyway.  But if you have all that,
why do you need to speak to me?"

Shit.  Don't blow it, Burke told himself.

"I like to do my research, Dr.  There are some things I would like to
check.  If we are going to tell the truth at last, we ought to make
sure it is accurate, don't you think?"  Korkin nodded sagely, obviously
approving of this appeal to higher moral values.

The voice on the end of the line had mellowed.

"Yes, I guess so.  Come and see me then, tomorrow.  Will your Muscovite
friend be with you?"

Burke glanced up at Korkin, who shook his head vigorously.

"No, but I have a companion who is working as my research assistant,"
he hastily improvized.

"A young woman.  A German."

"Ah, yes.  A German.  There would be.  There is always a German.  Very
well.  I live at Yugozapadnaya, south-east Moscow.  I am not far from
the cinema.  It used to be called the Hanoi.  Now, I think they have
changed it.  The street number is 212, not that it means very much,
fourth block at that number, third staircase.  Flat number 114, on the
eleventh floor.  I hope the lift is working.  You should come about
11:00.  You will excuse me if I do not offer you lunch.  I live a very
simple existence."

"Certainly, Dr.  And thank you very much.  Do zavtra.  Until
tomorrow."

"Do zavtra."

Burke looked at Korkin and let out a sigh of relief.

"Bloody hell, Valery.  I think we might have cracked it.  Whatever old
Fuchs-face was hiding, I think your man will spill the beans."

"That is if he has any beans.  This is still a very poor country, you
know."  He roared at his own joke.

As they left the room, heading for the bar and Sabine, Slava closed the
door behind them.  Burke noticed he was not laughing.

Anatoly Nikolayevich Yakunin's hand shook slightly as he replaced the
receiver.  He crossed to the massive writing bureau that stood against
the opposite wall.  It was a fine piece of furniture, the sort of
bureau that some nineteenth-century aristocrat would have sat at to
write orders to his serfs.  Its mahogany bulk was a pre-revolutionary
anachronism in this typically compact example of the proletarian
state's housing accommodation.

Yakunin unfolded the bureau's writing surface, its worn leather veneer
scratched and scuffed with decades of use.  He pressed lightly on a
small section of the marquetry inlay and it sprang back to reveal a
tiny keyhole.  Fumbling in the pocket of his baggy trousers, he
produced an old iron key ring and inserted the smallest of several keys
into the lock.  A panel about six inches long and three inches deep
(where no doubt some nobleman once kept his mistress's jewels) clicked
quietly open.  Yakunin reached in and took out a package in cheap,
Soviet-era brown wrapping-paper.

What it contained was not as valuable, perhaps, as diamonds or pearls.
But infinitely more seductive.  And a lot more dangerous to own.  Now
they were coming for it.  As he had always known they would.

Fall from Grace

Snow was falling gently in thick heavy flakes as Valery Korkin's white
Mercedes crossed the Great Stone Bridge over the Moska River, past the
gates of Gorky Park and through the underpasses that allowed a left
turn on to Lenin Prospect.  Burke noted with wry amusement that that
name had not been changed.

They had been delayed because Slava, uncharacteristically, had been
late in arriving at the little office in Neglinnaya Street.  Burke had
suggested they drive themselves, but Korkin had been reluctant.  Burke
wondered if he was becoming used to the status of having his own
driver, or if he really did think a bodyguard was essential in modern
Moscow.

"He's a good lad, really.  Has some dodgy friends, of course, a bit too
far on the right wing for my liking.  But then who isn't dodgy in this
place nowadays?"

Burke noted that his enthusiasm for Slava's abilities did not prevent
him giving the young man a serious dressing-down.  As a consequence,
Korkin was in an ill-tempered hurry.

"Fucking peasants," he exclaimed as a couple of likely lads in woollen
hats, one sporting an Adidas logo, approached the Mercedes at traffic
lights, offering to clean the windscreen.  Slava put his foot on the
accelerator.  Magically the light went green.

They crawled through Gagarin Square, with its soaring monument to the
drunk hotshot MiG pilot who'd attained immortality for being stuck on
top of a huge and unreliable Roman candle and managing to come back
alive.  It was one of the few pieces of Soviet monumental architecture
that Burke could stand.  At least it alleviated the unremitting gloom
of the monolithic flat blocks stretching endlessly on either side.
Frankfurter Alice in East Berlin had been modelled on this, he
recalled, when it was rebuilt after the war and called Stalin Alice.
The Stasi's headquarters had been just up a side street.
Normannenstrasse.  Funny that he should be reminded of the Stasi now,
and their role in the fate of the late Dr.  Fuchs.  Old shadows
lingered long.

Kotzke leaned forward and unexpectedly ran a finger down behind his
left ear, sending an electric tingle down his spine.

"Mmmm, I had no idea you were so sensitive.  So, have you decided how
to play our veteran master spy

"I think all we can do is string him along, hope he actually wants to
talk.  Sometimes with these people, once they've made the psychological
commitment to open up, it just pours out.  Then again, he may decide to
play difficult with us.  See how much we really know.  It would be
better, of course, if we actually had some sort of clue to what we are
looking for.  Are you sure you've told me all you know?"

Kotzke sat back in her seat.

"Well, I guess I'll leave it to you and just watch.  It'll be
interesting to see a master interviewer at work."

The car lurched suddenly to the left.

"Nakhui!  Chart vozmi!"  Slava uttered a series of obscenities.  Burke
looked back to see a dumpy form sprawled at the roadside, gesturing
angrily at them.

"Hey, wait.  Shouldn't we see if she's hurt?"  Sabine was genuinely
shocked.

"This is Russian babushka," Slava replied.

"Hard as old boots.  Anyway she was drunk, almost falls in front of me.
I did not hit her.  Stop and we will have a policeman.  And because you
are foreigners he will look for dollars, a present, you understand.
Russia has become more corrupt than ever.  There is no law and order
any more."

Burke looked at Korkin, who just shrugged.

"I am afraid he is right.  In fact, it is worse.  If we had been
stopped, they might have threatened Slava with a blood test, for the
drink-driving, with an old needle used on Aids victims.  We would have
to pay to be excused.  This is how they make their money."

But Burke noticed the big man angle the wing mirror on the passenger's
side to enable him to see the woman stagger back to her feet.
Corruption might be alive and well, but compassion was not yet totally
dead in Russia.

Soon Burke spotted the cinema Yakunin had told them to look for.  He
was wrong in one thing.  It was still called Hanoi.  Burke looked at
the street numbers on the lamp posts: 200-220.  They were on the right
block.  Slava in any case clearly knew the area.  He pulled off into a
parking area full of battered Zhigulis and rusty Moskviches.  A single
Mercedes, its roof carefully covered with tarpaulin against the ravages
of the Moscow winter, testified to the new times.  Clearly the fortunes
of the inhabitants of this corner of Yugozapadnaya were mixed.

"Park here and stay by the car," Korkin told Slava.

"Don't want any of these bastards pinching my wing-mirror for their
handbags."

Burke realized what was going on before either of his companions.  He
recognized the attributes: the clump of clucking babushkas, arms folded
beneath ample bosoms, in flowery head scarves faces like Mongolian
yak-herders in a blizzard, heads shaking sombrely in reflection on
mortality and its minimal blessings; the young policeman in grey
uniform, his fake fur hat still bearing, faute de mieux, the redundant
hammer and sickle symbols of authority of a dismantled state, spotty,
cold, his breath condensing in clouds as he asked the few questions
needed to jot down details of another demise in this sad excuse for
suburbia; and on the fringes of the crowd the flowering saplings of
post-Soviet manhood, a few stubble-chinned, pasty-faced youths in dog
hats, blue jeans and worn sneakers, keeping the cold at bay with swigs
from a half-empty vodka bottle Smirnoff, he noted.  Even here the new
order held sway.

The youths stood back as they approached.  The big Russian strode
forwards to question the least intimidating-looking old lady.  She
gestured with an arm so thickly padded it barely protruded from her
dumpy body.  Burke looked round to find himself alone.  Sabine had
retreated to the edge of the car park.  She clutched at the lapels of
her coat, apparently to keep out the cold, but her face was blank, eyes
staring into the middle distance.  She looked as if she were hugging
herself.  As he watched the crowd, he suddenly began to feel that what
was holding back the German girl was a sense of premonition.

He had witnessed the scene before.  Taking Kotzke by the arm, he
hurried her to the edge of the little crowd that had gathered for no
obvious reason.  Korkin followed, puzzled.  They stopped dead when they
saw the body lying in the soiled snow.  The man's torso seemed
unnaturally long and he appeared to have no head.  Then Burke
understood why.  A sweater had been pulled up over his head, almost as
if he had been in the act of taking it off.

Korkin was questioning an old woman.  White, visibly shaken, Sabine
whispered an impromptu translation into Burke's ear.

"Fell, didn't he?  Jumped maybe.  Can't blame him.  Not much to live
for around here, is there?"  The babushka crossed herself, right to
left in the orthodox manner, to excuse the blasphemy of condoning
suicide.

Burke looked up at the grubby concrete walls towering above them, then
down again at the blood seeping into the snow.  Involuntarily, he found
himself counting the floors upwards to eleven.

Korkin read Burke's mind and asked the babushka who it was.  The answer
relayed to Burke was brusque: "An academic.  Or something.  Some old
fellow.  Ask her."  She pointed out a particularly bulky woman who
appeared to be telling a young policeman what to write in his
notebook.

The policeman turned away and spoke into his crackling radio.  Korkin
approached the woman who had been so authoritatively dictating to
him.

"Yakunin?"

"Da, da.  That's him."

She was merely confirming what Burke had known from the moment they saw
the crowd: the man spreadeagled on the ice in front of him was the man
they had come to visit, the man they had hoped would take them one step
further on their trail into the labyrinth.  Instead he was dead.  It
was one hell of a coincidence.  Eamonn Burke didn't like it.  Not one
bit.

He looked back towards the little crowd, thinning now.  Two more
policemen had arrived and they were covering the body with a dirty
sheet.  Burke was suddenly struck by the meanness of it all.  No doubt
Yakunin had been just another Party functionary, just another little
shit in his day.  Now he was just another wasted life.

Korkin came towards them, shaking his head.  He too was clearly
shocked.  He ushered them back to the car.  Burke felt his anger give
way to logic.  His mind started racing.  Slava looked at them
quizzically as they climbed in.

"Dead," Korkin told him.

"The old man's dead."  Slava asked no questions.

"Drive.  Just drive."

He started up the engine and pulled the Mercedes out of the parking
lot.  Korkin turned around in his seat.

"They say it happened just after ten this morning, so we can't blame
Slava for being late."

"He would already have been dead even if we'd got here on time."

"But why?"  asked Burke, of no one in particular.

"I thought you might know that."

"It's almost as if it was planned for us to see him like that," said
Sabine.

"Like a warning," said Burke.

"You think it was because of you this happened?"  asked Korkin.

"Don't you?"

The Russian pursed his lips.

"I mean," Burke went on, 'it's hardly a coincidence, is it?  And if the
thought of seeing us was enough to scare him into suicide, why did he
agree in the first place.  And did it look like suicide to you?"  The
question was loaded.

"No.  It looked familiar."

"What?"  Sabine interjected.

"What do you mean, familiar?"

"Tell her the story," Burke said.

"This business with the sweater.  It brings back bad memories."

"I don't understand."

"It was a long time ago.  In Afghanistan, where I first met Yamon here.
I was in the army.  Drafted, of course.  We all were.  In Kabul.  One
of our young kids.  A pretty boy, from Novocherkassk.  Some Chechen
blood in him I think.  He got drunk one night and started talking about
going home.  About the war being wrong.  About it not being our
business.  One or two of the older men tried to shut him up.  There was
a political officer there, a lieutenant from Rostov.  He told them to
be quiet, said it was not the party line to stifle discussion.  The
young man should be encouraged to speak his mind so he could be
convinced of the error of his attitude.  The kid really warmed to that,
said he had been worried about getting put in the brig for speaking
out, said he was only saying what all the men thought anyway.  There
was grumbling at that, and a lot of sighing among the old lags.  But
the political smiled at him, said we would continue the conversation
the next day, when we were all fresher, had had a chance to sleep on
it.  He made it clear he was bringing the camp-fire chat to an end.

"The next morning the kid was found dead in the street.  Thrown himself
off the roof of the barracks apparently.  Pulled his tunic up over his
head first.  The political officer said what a pity it was, he must
have been so ashamed of letting the motherland down.  Sent him home to
his mum in a box with a medal on it.  Good for morale, he said.  Pah.
Stinks it does.  And still this country stinks."

In the driving seat, Slava wound down his window and spat into the
road.

Pass the Parcel

Burke had been watching Slava's eyes in the rearview mirror when he
first noticed the little red Zhiguli.  Now he was certain: they were
being followed.  What puzzled him was the incompetence of the person
doing it.

As they had turned the corner on to Lenin Prospect, heading back into
town, the little car had suddenly put on a burst of speed to get
through the lights behind them, then had equally suddenly slowed down.
His first instinct had been to dismiss it as typically bad Muscovite
driving, or maybe even the eccentricities of an erratic "Zhig' gearbox.
But even when the Mercedes pulled up early at a traffic light about to
turn red, the car behind had not drawn level.  If it really was a tail,
it was a laughably amateurish one.

"Valery," he said in as matter-of-fact a voice as possible.

"Don't look now.  We're being followed."

Korkin fiddled with the wing mirror so that he could see the road
behind.

The red car?"

"Obviously, I think."

Korkin snorted.

"What do you want to do about it?  We can lose him.  Easily."

"Maybe it would be a better idea if we could find out who it is that's
so interested in us.  And what they know about a suspected murder."

"My thoughts exactly."  Korkin barked a quick set of instructions to
Slava.

Instead of going straight on, the Mercedes took a sharp right and then
a left along the embankment.  Sure enough, within minutes the little
red car was there again.  Whoever was following would have to be very
stupid to continue much longer without getting the idea that they had
been spotted, Burke thought.  And that was not what he wanted. Suddenly
Slava swung the wheel to the right and the car turned on to the
forecourt of what Burke remembered from years ago as State Petrol
Station number 76, tucked out of the way, a good place to get diesel
when everyone else had run out.  Now it was run by the Italian firm
Agip, but it was still on a road to nowhere.

Slava stopped the car short of the pumps and let Korkin out, then drove
on a few metres as if to refuel.  Burke watched as the Russian darted
out of the car with a nimbleness that belied his size and made for the
well-lit office.  Instead of going in, he disappeared into the
undergrowth beyond the air and water machine.  Within less than a
minute the red Zhiguli approached the forecourt uncertainly.  I don't
know who taught you your tradecraft, Burke thought, but it sure as hell
wasn't the boys from the Lubyanka.  Slava's eyes were equally
scornful.

The car pulled off the main road, and over towards the air machine.
Burke watched as Korkin emerged from the bushes to the rear of the
Zhiguli, walked briskly up to the driver's door and tapped on the
window, holding out a cigarette as if looking for a light.  The
windscreen wound down about six inches, just enough for the big man to
thrust in a hand and grab a fistful of ear.

Instead of the stream of macho obscenities Burke had expected, there
was a loud, unmistakably female wail.  Burke was familiar with Korkin's
tactic; he had seen muggers practice it.  The idea was to get the other
hand on the occupant's neck before any weapon could be produced.  On
this occasion Valery let go in shock.  Burke ran to the opposite side
of the little Zhiguli and, bending down, found himself staring into the
tear-streaked, panic-ridden face of a woman aged about fifty.

Korkin pulled open the door, put his hand on the wheel she instantly
withdrew hers and ordered her out.  As the trembling woman stepped from
the car, Burke saw she was younger than he had thought, in her late
forties perhaps.  She was wearing a dowdy, calf-length coat with a
stitched-on astrakhan collar that had obviously been handed-down.
Shabby-genteel, or what passed for it, in Moscow.  Burke could see she
was about to scream again.  Korkin yelled at her and she fell silent,
looking now as if she were about to burst into tears.

Instead she began to gabble rapidly in Russian.  Korkin bundled her
into the Mercedes beside a stunned-looking Sabine Kotzke.  He gestured
for Eamonn to get into the front.  He himself remained outside, leaning
through the wound-down window like a spectator at a Punch and Judy
show.

"I would complete the necessary introductions," he said, 'but I am
afraid I lack some of the necessary information.  Madame here has been
following us.  She says she needs to talk with our beautiful German."

The woman looked lined and drawn by decades of struggling with
shortages and repression under the Communists, and too set in her ways
to cope with the wolf-pack mentality of embryonic capitalism.  The sort
of woman who formed the backbone of most Western societies, thought
Burke, the sort Russia relentlessly eroded.

"Excuse me," she began.

"You understand Russian?"

Sabine nodded.

"You are the friend of Anatoly Nikolayevich?"

"He was expecting us."

Burke noted the sidestepping of the question.

"I am Anna Matveyevna Sukhova.  I live lived opposite Dr.  Yakunin."

Sabine nodded again, willing the woman to continue.

Burke followed the conversation as best he could with his limited
Russian.  Afterwards he had Sabine piece it together for him.

"It was about ten o'clock last night.  I was going to bed.  There was a
knock at the door and it was Anatoly Nikolayevich.  I was not so
surprised to see him.  Sometimes he will come around like that, in the
evening, to ask for something.  He lives lived on his own.  He was
always forgetting things.  Things are still not so easy, you know, in
Russia.  There is everything there but who can afford it?  I would lend
him some tea, or perhaps a little bread.  He was forgetful, he said,
not very good at housekeeping since his wife died.  Sometimes he would
come in, just for a few minutes.  For politeness' sake, I always
thought.  But this time, his mood was different.  He seemed preoccupied
Vague.  As if there was something on his mind.  That's when he produced
the package."

"What package?"

"This."  Burke watched her delve into the folds of her coat and produce
a small paper parcel tied with string.  She looked down at it in her
hands, fingering it, as if it contained some last essence of Yakunin.
Burke wondered if their friendship had gone beyond late-night cups of
sweet tea in that bleak high-rise.

"He said he was expecting someone to call tomorrow that is, today and
that this was for her.  A woman, he said.  I thought it might be a
daughter; he once mentioned a girl a long time ago, but she never came.
His son never visited him either.  But he said she was German."

Kotzke was watching Sukhova with what seemed to Burke a remarkably
detached enthusiasm.

"But why did he give it to you?"  she asked.

"That's just it.  I do not know."  She was fighting back tears.

"He simply said I should keep it in case he missed her.  I asked how
could he miss her?  Was he going out?  He just shrugged and said,
"These things happen.  Probably there is no need, I will call about
eleven and collect it from you."  Then he went back to his apartment.
That was the last time I saw him .. . alive."

Sabine's hands were almost trembling at the prospect of getting hold of
the shabby parcel.  Sukhova was watching her with eyes that were now
dry and red and searching.  This woman had lost someone.  She wanted to
know why.  So did Burke.  But if she thought she would find the
solution here, she was surely mistaken.

Sabine was pressing the woman.

"What else did he say?  Did he seem depressed?"

"No, why should he?  Apprehensive perhaps.  He was clearly worried
about something.  About you."  She grunted.

"But depressed?  No, I don't think so.  Her tone changed and she looked
Sabine straight in the eye.

"Young lady.  I do not know who you are or what you wanted with Anatoly
Nikolayevich.  But I can tell you one thing.  He did not kill himself.
He was murdered."  She almost spat the words out.

"For you.  For this."  She thrust the package towards Sabine.

"What about this?"  Sabine's eagerness seemed almost indecent.

"Did he tell you what is in here?"

"No, nothing."  Sukhova's voice was suddenly brusque.

"I know only that whatever it is caused him to be murdered.  Whatever
mafia you belong to, you are all as bad as each other."

With a choked sob, she threw open the car door, hurled herself out,
knocking the big Russian leaning on the window off his balance, and ran
across the forecourt to the Zhiguli.

"Korkin, get her back!"  Kotzke screamed.

Burke looked from one to the other.  Valery stood silent and still,
watching as Anna Sukhova pulled open the door of her little car and its
engine spluttered into life.

"Burke, for God's sake, why don't you do something?"  She had opened
her own door.

"Wait!"  boomed the big Russian's deep voice.

"Leave her."

"What the hell for?"

Burke put his hand on Sabine's arm.  He sensed that Korkin was right.
Anna Sukhova had delivered her package.

"You have what you wanted," Korkin continued.

"It is what the old man died for.  I hope it is worth it."

"But we can't just let her vanish like this.  We don't even know what's
in here yet."

"Nor does she."  Korkin paused, letting the phrase sink in.

"In any case, where do you think she has gone?  This is Russia, you
forget.  A very big country, with nowhere to go."

Burke opened the mini-bar and took out two miniatures of Smirnoff for
himself and Korkin, and a bottle of Pilsner Urquell for Sabine.  It was
not exactly a celebration; all three needed a drink to steady their
nerves.  Only Slava seemed, as ever, unmoved.

When Anna Sukhova had disappeared into the Moscow traffic, Sabine's
first reaction had been to open the little parcel there and then in the
back seat.  Burke had restrained her.

"Wait.  We don't know what's in there.  Five minutes won't make a
difference."

So instead she had sat, like a child nursing a present delivered ahead
of her birthday, with the little brown paper package on her knee.

Now, she sat chastely on the end of Burke's bed and looked up at him.

"Well, do I have your permission?"

"By all means."

She undid the string and unfolded the paper.  Inside were two sealed
envelopes and two maps.  Burke picked up one of them and handed it to
Korkin who spread it out on the second bed.

It was a relief map, obviously in some detail although in simple black
and white only, with a few heights and topographical features marked.
There was no coast-line and the whole central area appeared to be a
blank white space.

"What do you make of it?  Recognize anything?"  Burke asked the
Russian.

"It is obviously a Russian military map.  Old.  Maybe thirty, forty
years.  It is hard to tell.  They were so paranoid.  Nothing was
dated."

"But where is it?"  Kotzke pressed.

"What's that big white blank area?  Some sort of military restricted
area?"

"No, no.  It is a natural feature.  I thought at first a lake, like the
Aral Sea, with shifting shoreline.  You see here, there are dotted
lines.  But I do not think so.  I think it is ice, an ice cap perhaps,
where the land underneath was uncertain before modern depth-sounding
machines, like some of the Siberian islands perhaps.  Yes, I am certain
of it.  Here, this abbreviation, is for ice.  But I do not recognize
any of the words.  It is not Russian, though some words might be, like
this river name, "hvita", or here, across the ice mass: "lanyukal".  It
doesn't mean anything to me.  It might be some Inuit or Chukchi word
from north Siberia, but the scale is too close-up to be sure what it
refers to."

Burke stared at the lines, clearly marking mountains and rivers, all
with incomprehensible names written in Cyrillic.  The second map was,
by comparison, almost featureless: apparently a great flat expanse with
a river running through it.  But without points of reference or scale,
or the slightest indication of geographical location, it was barely
worth looking at.

Sabine was shaking the small envelope, which contained something round
and hard.  There was writing on it, typed, in Russian: "Za
prekrashchemya voskhoda solntsa," Korkin read, translating, "For the
prevention of the sunrise.  What do you make of that?"

Burke shrugged.

Sabine slit open the top and extracted a round medal, still shiny, with
a bright red ribbon.

"I recognize this," she said.

"So should you, comrade."

Korkin grimaced at the bait, looked over, then gave a low whistle.

"The old bastard himself."

Burke recognized the familiar profile, the domed head and jutting
goatee beard of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

"Perhaps Comrade Yakunin was more important than we thought."

"What is it?"  asked Burke.

"Only the highest military decoration of the evil empire, Hero of the
Soviet Union.  The medal won by Marshal Zhukov for taking Berlin and
Yuri Gagarin for conquering outer space

"I wonder what he did to deserve it."

"Or why he didn't wear it, at least the ribbon," Korkin added.

"Even these days that medal still gets some show of respect.  At the
very least he could have sold it to a Western collector.  Stalinist
relics have adapted better than human beings to the free market."

"My dearest darling Josh .. ."

Burke spun around.  Sabine had opened the second envelope and was
reading from wrinkled piece of paper.  It looked like the first draft
of a letter, in English, but littered with crossings-out and spelling
mistakes, clearly not written by a native speaker.  It was brief:

'..  . This is my only way to tell you the news I had hoped to show you
in person.  We have a son.  He is beautiful.  He looks like his father.
He is well.  Perhaps now it will be possible for you to see him.  He
would like that, I know, and so would I."

The next line began with the words: "But I will understand if you do
not .. ."  crossed out heavily, as if the writer had changed her mind
about expressing any doubt.

"I embrace you," Sabine continued reading.

"I know you will act for the best.  For all of us.  For the whole
world.  I long to see you soon.  Your ever loving Natalya."

"Well, what do you make of that?"  Burke said.

"I make this."  Sabine pulled a stiffer sheet from the same envelope
and looked at it.  She held up a black and white photograph of a
good-looking young man in his early twenties, with dark eyes and a
quiff of swept-back black hair.  There was a number beneath him, as if
it were a file photograph of a convict.  Except that this had been
taken for military records.  The young man was in uniform.

"It's an identification number of some sort," said Sabine.

"Finch, J. 637290 USAF."

"I thought I recognized the uniform," said Burke.

"United bloody States Air Force.  That's his dog-tag number."

Cross References

"Mabel!  Will you get that darn thing?"  General (retired) Abe Steiner
was in no mood to answer the telephone, least of all when it was likely
to be one of his wife's golf partners aiming to fix a round that would
end up in another of their sessions at the nineteenth hole of the Army
and Navy Club's Arlington course, slugging back vodka martinis and
spitting olive pips into the ashtrays, along with the shreds of their
long-suffering husbands' reputations.

Truth to tell, Abe Steiner hated the mention of golf at any time these
days.  He had once been down to a par 6 handicap before bad braking on
a wet night coming round Rocky Creek Parkway on his way home from the
Pentagon had left him with two crushed feet.  The worst of it was that
it had been his own fault.  The driver of the Mack truck was only doing
35mph when the general's ancient and much-loved Corvette had skidded
across the centre of the road, and embedded itself as far as the
driver's seat in the heavy machine's undercarriage.  They had had to
cut Steiner out.  He had spent three weeks and a small fortune in US
taxpayers' money at the military hospital in Arlington.  He could now
get himself to the bathroom and back with the help of a stick, but
mainly he was confined to a wheelchair, albeit a motorized one that had
cost the US taxpayer another few dozen pay packets  At times he thought
he had single-handedly sunk Bill Clinton's plans for health service
reforms.

"Maaay-bell!"  he hollered again, and this time got a response.

"O-kayyyyy, A-bell," as she always called him when he got her riled.

"Just you keep your wheels on the floor.  I'm there already."

At the age of sixty-three he had become a fast-track surfer on the
information superhighway.  His final paycheck and a substantial
proportion of the army's generous early retirement package had gone
into a state-of-the-art desktop system.  The only reason there was no
telephone on his desk was that almost all his communications were
conducted by e-mail.  He had Voicenet too, of course, and as many other
plug-ins as Netscape had yet devised, as well as Microsoft's competing
alternatives.  He could use the computer for verbal communication, if
necessary, and with an on screen image too if both parties wanted
(though occasionally, unknown to Mabel, he had used the entertaining
one-way only facility with a few of the premier services available for
discerning gentlemen).  He saw little personal advantage in answering
the telephone.

So it came as something of a surprise when Mabel, in a puce
trouser-suit and a gold necklace that glinted with a sheen as metallic
as her hair, put her head around his door and announced, "It's for you,
dear."

Steiner reluctantly clicked the transfer button on the handset next to
the anonymous white box that housed his new twelve-gigabyte hard drive,
and lifted the receiver.

"Hello, Abe Steiner here.  Who the hell is that?"

"General," came the response, in measured English tones which, despite
Steiner's widely publicized anglo phobia came across as warmly
familiar.

"I hope you remember me.  It's been rather a long time since we last
saw one another.  My name is Burke, Eamonn Burke.  You were a close
friend of my father's.  We last met at..  ."

The hell you talking about Eamonn, boy?  How the devil are you and
where the hell did you get that limey accent?  Hey, Mabe, guess what,
it's Mickey Burke's boy," Steiner called out, though the whine of the
automatic garage door told him that Mabel was already on her way for
her regular Tuesday morning appointment at Beatrice's Georgetown
Coiffure and Manicure.

"So what do you know?  And what can I do for you?  You in town?  I'm
kinda guessing this isn't a purely social call after all these
years."

"No, general, it isn't."

On the other end of the line, watching a slow steady snowfall over
Moscow's Kievskaya Square, Burke remembered how Steiner, then a sturdy
red-haired colonel in his prime, had put a hand on his shoulder on a
similar winter's day, a quarter of a century ago, when they had buried
his father in a small grey town in the west of Ireland.  Steiner had
taken him aside after the service, before they got into the diplomatic
car that would take him to Dublin and the flight back to an England
that still seemed like a foreign country.

On the edge of the graveyard, Steiner had crouched down and looked him
in the eyes.

"Eamonn, your daddy and I were buddies.  The best.  He did more for me
than I can ever repay, or tell you.  Your life is going to be different
now, with your mom being English and everything.  But just you
remember, kid, I'm always there for you.  If there's ever anything your
old Uncle Abe can do for you, you just holler, y'hear."

A year or so later, when Steiner was passing through London, he had
taken Burke to the cinema, which he called the movies, and bought him
popcorn and Coca-Cola and a hamburger afterwards and all the things his
stepfather disapproved of.  They exchanged Christmas cards, and every
now and then Steiner had sent him a birthday present, usually some
piece of extravagant American whimsy.  Burke had been delighted to hear
that Steiner had made general and dismayed by the news of his accident.
But this was the first time in his life that he had ever asked him for
a favour.

"I hate to trouble you but I've got a few queries about an old story.
And I think you might be just the man to help me."

"And you aren't in Washington.  Right?"

"Right."

"So you callin' all the way from London?"

"More or less."  This was no time to start explaining the
complications, Burke thought.  The general belonged to an older
generation.  If he knew Burke was calling from Moscow, he would clam up
immediately.  Burke gave the general a heavily censored version of
events and dictated the number on the dog-tag.

"Any idea when it was allocated?  Steiner asked, seizing the
essentials.

"It doesn't sound recent."

"It's not.  It might even be before your time.  As far back as the
forties, possibly."

Steiner breathed a deep sigh.

"Well, I'll do what I can, Eamonn.  But that's one hell of a long time
ago.  Still, some of those serial numbers ought to check out.  Just a
question really of how good my access is these days.  I'm not the
powerhouse I used to be, you know."

"Don't worry, general.  I'm sure you'll do just fine.  Anything you can
help me with will be really appreciated."

"Okay, boy.  Now, why don't you give me your number so's I can ring you
back, or you want I should just leave a message on your
answering-machine in London?  Presuming you're still on the same old
number you were when you last sent me a Christmas card.  And that
wasn't last year, I have to tell you."

Burke blushed involuntarily.  Those were the sort of things Caroline
had always dealt with.  On another occasion, face to face, he might
well have confided in old Abe Steiner about the decay of his marriage
and the despondency he had come through.  The old man, he felt sure,
would have understood.  As it was, he said simply, "I've moved.  But
don't worry, anyhow.  I'm out and about at present," the corny old
foreign correspondent's euphemism for a life lived out of a suitcase.
He gave the general the number of his mobile and that of his flat in
Notting Hill.  If there were problems getting through, Burke said, he
would check the answering machine there and call back immediately.

"Any idea when you might be able to give the matter some attention,
Sir?"

"Ha!  Well, let me see: I've got bridge scheduled next Thursday and my
accountant's pestering me for last year's tax returns.  Hell, what do
you think, boy, we geriatric cripples don't get much fun out of life.
I'll be straight on to it.  Don't promise nothin' now, but at least
you'll get a progress report within the next day or so.  Maybe I'm off
the active service list, but I'm still okay in the research and
development department, you know."

"I sure do," said Burke.  He hit the 'close' key and handed the phone
back to Korkin.

"I couldn't tell the old boy where I was calling from."

Korkin nodded.

"Of course not.  But I am certain the satellites are secure."  He had
lent Burke his satellite phone, which he argued was even safer than
Burke's Eurodigital mobile.

In the Washington suburbs, Abe Steiner smiled to himself.  Well, well,
well.  Mickey Burke's boy indeed.  He hadn't ever forgotten his
responsibilities towards his best friend's only son.  But Burke Jnr had
seemed to have little need of him over the years.  But he did like the
idea that he could be a friend.  Particularly a useful one.  And he was
more useful than most people reckoned, despite his disability.

Two hours later, Eamonn Burke was sitting in Valery Korkin's Moscow
office studying an atlas while Sabine looked over his shoulder.  Korkin
was rummaging through his shelves for other reference books.

"I still do not see," Korkin announced.

"We have identified many of the people Fuchs mentions Arnold, Skarkon,
John in Moscow.  But who is this monk?"

Burke shrugged.

"There you have us, old chum.  Perhaps some orthodox priest?  Maybe a
nickname for some Commie intelligence honcho.  Or someone in a position
of power."

"Here it is," shouted Korkin.  He had lugged a heavy tome out from
under heaps of paper on the uppermost shelf and was now pointing to a
line in it.  Burke looked up.  Korkin was holding the Velikaya
Sovyetskaya, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

"I keep it," he said in response to the unspoken question, 'if only
because it is worth remembering how people used to see things.  Also
because apart from the bullshit, it is full of real information, albeit
from a parallel universe."

The word Korkin was pointing to was the one that had been printed
across the featureless white expanse on the map: Lanyukal.  But the
spelling, it turned out, was less than accurate: a transliteration from
the Latin letters, themselves approximations to ancient Viking runes.
In the original, according to the encyclopedia, which helpfully
included the Latin script, it read "Langjokull," which in the language
of the country in which it was situated meant 'long glacier'.

"Here," Korkin said triumphantly.

"God knows what it is you are looking for, but that's where to start:
on one of the greatest glaciers in the world, on an island where they
have glaciers like Siberia has forests.  Iceland."

Burke spread out the old map beside it and there was no doubt.  The
topography was the same, though on a much larger scale: the same curved
flow of ice forcing its way between two great blobs that Burke supposed
were small mountains poking up through the glacial sheet and
compressing it.

"So that's where we find what happened to Operation Promifey."

"To what?"  Burke and Korkin turned to Sabine, who looked exceptionally
pleased with herself.

"Promifey, at least that's what it says here."  She leaned between them
and turned over Yakunin's map to reveal a scribble of Cyrillic
characters in faded ink.  What's a Promifey when it's at home?"  She
looked to Korkin.

"Not a what, a who.  Promifey is some character from a Greek legend."

"Prometheus!"  exclaimed Burke, thinking not for the first time that it
was odd the occasions on which his old-fashioned English public school
education was called upon.

"Chained to a rock for ever, at the command of Zeus, his liver pecked
at daily by vultures, but unable to die."

"Yeeeuch," said Kotzke.

"What was his crime?"

"The ultimate," said Burke, his eyes suddenly focused on the map with a
new intensity.

"He stole fire from the gods."

His eyes met Sabine's.

"And here, maybe, is where he stole it from," interjected Korkin
gleefully behind them.

"Your second map was much easier.  This is America.  I am surprised you
didn't recognise it, even written in Cyrillic.  This is a close-up of
one of the land-locked desert states."

"Don't tell me," said Burke.

"New Mexico."

,

From Russia with Love

Moscow, 30 July 1945 The scream of the brakes, metal wheels slowing on
metal rails, roused her from fitful sleep into worried wakefulness.
Natalya Artyomovna Molitva was afraid.  She had never even been to
Moscow before.  Now, as she looked out of the steamed-up window of the
crowded train carriage, she realized she was nearly there.  The city
was already rising around her, smoky, grimy, miraculously almost
untouched by the war, even though the Nazi army had come right into the
suburbs.

She had been on trains for more than thirty-six hours, changing in
Leningrad, where she had been shocked to see the artillery-ravaged
shell of the city which had withstood the greatest siege in history.
The overnight last leg to Moscow had been spent cramped in the smelly,
sweaty obschii vagon, the general sleeping car.  An old man kept
squeezing past her, using the opportunity to touch her breasts, until
one of the soldiers returning from the Finnish front had warned him
off.

When she had been hassled, she had thought for a moment about producing
the letter with the stamp of the NKVD, the Narodni Kommissariat
Vnutrennikh Dyel, the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, and
telling all of them that she had been summoned to Moscow on the command
of Beria himself.  Any sane person would have been terrified even to be
seen in her company after that.

Natalya shivered, as she had when she kissed David, her baby son,
goodbye.  Her mother had looked at her with the ill-concealed sorrow
born of bitter experience.  There was nothing for her to be afraid of,
the two men in raincoats had said as they stood at the door of her tiny
flat, waiting for her.  On the contrary, she was being given a rare
opportunity to do the state a service.  Still, she was afraid.

In a way it was no surprise.  In fact, she had often wondered why they
had not called on her earlier.  A liaison with a foreigner was always
dangerous, even when he was an ally.  And now the war was over.  Things
would change.  Yesterday's allies could overnight become deadly
enemies.  She remembered what had happened in 1941.  When the Germans
invaded.

Like everyone else she had crowded around the wireless to listen to
Stalin's words at the 1945 victory parade on Red Square, and her chest
swelled with patriotic pride as she heard him praise Soviet arms,
enthuse about the magnificent victory to which he had led the great
Soviet people, and prophesy as ever the inevitable victory of the
socialist system.  But then she knew, as did all the other inhabitants
of arctic Murmansk who had sat listening with her, the role played by
the aid that had poured in from the now-unmentioned capitalist allies,
Great Britain and the United States.  Up in Murmansk they knew how much
Soviet prowess owed to the convoys that had braved the northern seas
infested with Nazi submarines, and to the mercy flights, the bombers
and cargo planes that had dodged the Messerschmitts over occupied
Norway to bring in medicines, blankets and ammunition and, most
importantly of all, him: so different from Russian men, so brave, so
beautiful.

She had not meant to love an American, but she had found herself
powerless not to.  Every time she looked down into the blissful blue
eyes of her child, so like his, her heart ached for him.  And now the
war was over: a blessing for some, but maybe not for her.  It had been
eighteen months since last she saw him.  When he left, he had thought
it would only be a few weeks before they met again.  One day, he had
said, when all this was over, he would take her away, to his home where
the mountains were blue and the air was clean and they could make
babies, little Russian-Americans who would grow up to see in the great
new era of peace and friendship that was about to dawn.  But he had
never returned.  She had gone on hoping for a sign of life, for a
letter, though she knew it would be intercepted by the post office
censors and sent to the NKVD.  Was that what had happened?

Now she had been plucked from the cycle, summoned to the big building
that dominated Dzherzinsky Square.  The building was feared the length
and breadth of Russia, from the new republics on the Baltic to distant,
dreaded Magadan on the Siberian shores of the Pacific.  But in the back
of her mind was a tiny glimmer of hope: if a letter had been
intercepted then it meant at least he was alive.

A young man in a sailor's uniform opposite asked if she was cold, and
offered her his greatcoat.  She smiled back.  Did she know where she
was going in Moscow, he asked.  He knew the city well, had grown up
there, could show her around.  She knew a pickup line when she heard it
and thanked him again, but no, she did not need assistance; she had
'friends' her heart missed a beat at the word -who were supposed to be
meeting her.  The young sailor sat back.  He understood, he said, but
if she should change her mind .. .

The train lurched to a sudden halt.  Natalya reached up for the rough
canvas bag into which she had thrown a few items of clothing and pushed
her way to the door.

The platform was a seething mass of people.  Young men, mostly in
uniform, jostled with wrinkled babushkas in widow's weeds.  Swarthy
Georgians and pale-faced Russian boys mingled with exotic, slant-eyed
Kirghizians and Kazakhs, as well as Uzbeks and Turkmenians from the far
south with their tight black ringlets and faces lined and leathern from
the beating of the desert sands, all of them in the rough dirty khaki
of the Red Army's battle-dress, the raggle-taggle defenders of the
greatest, cruel lest most ramshackle land-based empire on earth.

How would she recognize the men meeting her, Natalya wondered.  The men
who had called to see her in Murmansk had said their colleagues would
be there to escort her from the station.  She need not have worried.
Reaching the great cream marble concourse, she recognized them even
before they spotted her: men with long faces in grey raincoats, even
though it was a sultry summer morning.  She walked instinctively
towards them, and they to her.

"Comrade Molitva," the smaller of the two said.

"We have come to escort you.  The colonel is most pleased that you have
been able to accept his invitation."

She looked back at the bustling platform and the great locomotive still
belching clouds of dirty white steam.  The young sailor who had offered
his coat was walking towards her.  He smiled, then saw the two men at
her side, and the expression on his face turned blank as he quickened
his pace and passed by.  That's it, thought Natalya, I have already
become invisible.

She turned and walked with her two companions down the station steps
towards the car, a Pobyeda Victory, she thought they were called, the
very latest model.  Clearly only the best would do for the men they
called warriors on the invisible front.

Soon the driver was speeding through the streets towards the building
that had begun life as home to the All-Russia Insurance Company but was
now better known as the Lubyanka.

Outside stood the great black statue of Dzerzhinsky, founder of the
Cheka, set up by Lenin to purge the socialist state of traitors.
Subsequently it had been renamed, reinvigorated, purged and reorganized
as the NKVD.  Since 1938 it had been run by Lavrenti Beria, a
chubby-looking man with wire-rimmed glasses who in his official
photographs, she thought, bore a disconcerting resemblance to Heinrich
Himmler, the man who, Natalya had heard, did much the same sort of job
for the Nazi enemy.  She shivered when she thought of him, and again as
they passed into the courtyard and the iron doors slammed behind
them.

The smaller of the men (Natalya had worked out that he was the
higher-ranking) pushed open the door in response to the call from
within.  Gingerly, she walked in.  Her escort made to follow her, but
an arm imperiously flung out by the man standing by the window sent him
back.  The door closed.  She found herself facing a man of medium
height, no more than thirty, with still-thick brown hair, and a face
lined with care.  An intelligent face, she thought, to her own
surprise.

"Natalya Artyomovna."  The face broke into a carefully composed
smile.

"How good of you to come."  She wondered whether any of his 'guests'
had declined such an invitation.

"Please, sit down."  He gestured to a simple wooden chair facing the
desk.

"My name is Pavlov," the man said, "Ivan Mikhailovich."  He sat down
opposite her and folded his arms.  He could be intimidating, Natalya
decided, if he wanted to be.  This was obviously the face designed to
placate, to reassure.  She doubted he used it often.

"You are probably wondering why you have been invited here."

She nodded.  Though in her heart she already knew.  She would tell them
that she had committed the cardinal sin of falling in love with a
capitalist.  She would plead foolishness and take whatever punishment
was coming to her.  She had done no wrong to the Soviet motherland. She
had no secrets to betray.  She had not betrayed Russia in her soul. And
she would not betray him.

"We have information .. ."  he began, watching keenly, 'to the effect
that you have been having a sexual relationship with a foreigner."

"I cannot deny it.  But it was not an act of disloyalty.  The man is an
officer of an ally of the Soviet People."

"That is a technicality.  He is an American.  That is a fact.  You know
that you are required to report all such contacts, for security
reasons; in particular, contact with foreign military personnel."

Natalya hung her head.  Of course she knew.  Everyone knew.  Was this
the reason they had brought her all the way to Moscow, to read her the
damn rule book?  Couldn't they just have sent her direct to a camp?

Tn Murmansk, in war," she mumbled, 'all the girls.  There were lots of
affairs.  These things happen."

"That is not an excuse.  However, the state is not as strict as some
people think.  In the end Comrade Stalin, and Comrade Beria of course,
have all our interests at heart.  We would like to help you.  We would
like you to write a letter."

"A letter, comrade colonel?"

"Yes, my dear.  A letter.  It should not be too difficult.  After all,
it is to the man you love.  And I think you have a lot of news for him.
About a little package of his that has borne fruit?"

Natalya looked flustered for a moment, then flushed.  Of course, how
could she have expected them not to know about David?

"But how .. . ?"

"How can you write it?  Oh, I do not think that will be so difficult.
We will help you.  And do not worry.  We will also see that it is
delivered."

Natalya's eyes opened wide.  What did they want her to say?  Why were
they involved at all?  But who cared?  They were offering her the one
thing she wanted more than anything else in the world: a way to get
back in touch with Joshua Finch, to tell him he had a son, her son.

"Why .. . ?"  she began.

"Why are we doing this?  My dear girl, our great leader has always
believed in doing everything possible to bring families together."

Natalya sat back in her chair.  Never in her life had she been so eager
to believe an obvious lie.

"Now, what do you say," he said brightly.

"Shall I fetch pen and paper?"

She nodded.  And the man who called himself Pavlov, but whose real name
was Anatoly Nikolayevich Yakunin, beamed at her.

The message he had received from Klaus Fuchs was almost beyond belief.
The frightened young woman in front of him could help it become
reality.

Albuquerque, New Mexico, 17 September 1945 For Harry Gold it was a trip
too far.  Albuquerque at the fag end of a hot summer was stifling: dry,
dusty, dirty, as if the whole heat of the desert had drifted south to
lie in a pall over a small city that had cracked and blistered in
response.  John had been categorical.  Nothing, not even the risk of
losing his job, was to get in the way of this trip.

Until now it had been the trips to Santa Fe that he had thought were
all-important.  Fuchs was the gold.  Now his priority was an air force
guy, some hot jock pilot attached to the big base out at Kirkland. What
the heck, Harry Gold was a man who did what he was told.  Besides, the
pay had just gotten a damn sight better.  The envelope he had collected
on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art the previous week had
been stuffed with greenbacks of the best denomination.  And what he was
delivering was not exactly high-risk: a letter, it looked like, with a
photograph.  He was to wait for a reply.  It shouldn't take long, John
had said.  But if it did he was still to wait, for a week if need be.
Harry sure hoped like hell it wouldn't be.  He'd made the meet
yesterday and the kid had said he'd be back today.  He sat in the
leather armchair of the hotel lobby and gazed up at the rotating
ceiling fan.  At least this Conrad Hilton guy had a decent hotel, not
at all what he expected from a New Mexico boy in a one-horse town like
Albuquerque.  Big ambitions too, he heard.  But not as big as Harry
Gold's, he thought.  Yes sir, Harry, he told himself, when this
business is over you are going places.  You have earned your reward in
a socialist heaven on earth.

He did not even notice the footsteps approaching until he found his
view of the ceiling fan interrupted by the dark good-looking features
of the young pilot.

"Hey, Ray, how's it goin'?"  Joshua Finch slapped him on the shoulder
cordially.  The bonhomie was part of the routine but this time, Gold
could see tension on the man's face.

"Fancy a drink, kid?  A beer or something?"

"You know me, Ray.  If I'm not flyin', I'm flyin'.  Sounds real good.
But let's go head down one o' the town saloons.  I could do with some
air."

Outside the swing doors, Finch dropped some of the banter.  He was
walking fast and Gold found himself almost running to keep up.

"I must thank you for the letter," he said at last.

"I'm counting on what it says being true."

Gold nodded vigorously.  He had no idea what he had delivered, but he
had been told that if there were any questions about its authenticity
he was to dispel them as best he could.

"I have it on the "highest" authority."

"Yeah, sure."  Finch's smile was suddenly back, genuine this time, as
if the tension had dissipated.  He looked down at Gold.

"The answer's "yes".  But then you knew it would be."

Gold nodded.  He hadn't.

"Anyhow, thanks for the photograph.  Beautiful kid, isn't he?"

Gold found himself looking, more out of idle curiosity than anything
else, at a small photograph of a baby.  The young woman cradling the
child in her arms certainly looked attractive enough, if a little
dowdy.  To Harry Gold, the baby could have been any baby anywhere.

But to the young man next to him, it was the only child in the
universe.

The Surface of the Moon

The land below was like nothing Eamonn Burke had ever seen before on
earth.  As the Icelandair Boeing 737 circled lower on its descent
towards Keflavik airport, the barren rock beneath folded, as if in
waves a surreal stone sea, grey and shiny, surrounded by the dark
winter waves of the north Atlantic.

Lava fields, Burke knew in theory, covered great swathes of Iceland.
But the lava he had seen elsewhere, at Pompeii in Italy or on the
Antrim plateau of Northern Ireland, had been black and rough, thousands
of years old and weathered accordingly.  Here molten rock had flowed as
recently as the fourteenth century.  Burke remembered the spectacular
aerial photographs of the 1996 eruption of Grimsvotn, the volcano
buried under the vast glacial ice-cap of Vatnajokull, which was larger
than all the glaciers of continental Europe put together.  The
explosion and the heat it generated sent torrents of meltwater rushing
down the scree slopes to the south, washing away the bridges on the one
ring road that connected the sparsely populated west coast of the
island to its bustling little capital.

Beside him Sabine Kotzke stirred and stretched in her seat.  She had
fallen asleep shortly after leaving Moscow.  They had talked through
the night about Yakunin, and the implications of his death.

One thing was certain: after a day of murder, intrigue and discovery,
Sabine's claim that Klaus Fuchs had been murdered by the Stasi had
suddenly seemed a lot less fantastic than it had done in the bar of the
Nag's Head back in London.  Despite that, the idea that the Stasi was
reaching out from beyond the grave of the East German state was
something Sabine seemed too horrified to even contemplate.  Why?  Burke
asked.  What experience had she had with the Stasi?  Had she ever been
arrested by them?

"No," she replied, with unexpected vehemence.

"Then why the denial syndrome?"

"Denial?  Eamonn Burke, believe me, you have no idea.  No idea at all."
And then in a quiet, small voice, she added: "My father."

"He fell into their hands?"

"Um Gotteswillen."  She raised her eyes to the ceiling, and then
lowered them again with a heart-weary sigh.

"No, no, no, no, no.  He was one of them."

Burke closed his eyes.  How blind, how stupidly blind.

"I didn't know, not for a long time.  I don't know if my mother did or
not.  But anyway they were divorced before I was a teenager."

"It's okay.  You don't have to tell me."

"You may as well know.  He wasn't even a serving officer at
Normannenstrasse, oh no, not Vati.  He was just someone who told tales
on his colleagues.  His whole life at the paint factory was a cover, as
was his volunteer work at the youth club.  In reality he was collating,
cross-referencing and passing on, with recommendations for action that
meant the destruction of other people's lives."

"How did you find out?"

"Oh, not until it was too late.  Way too late.  I had a boyfriend:
Gerd.  My first, as it happened.  He was a bit of an old hippy, wore a
"Swords to Ploughshares" pacifist motif on the backside of his jeans,
but never to work.  He knew better than that.  But he still lost his
job.  I told my father, and said how unfair it was.  And he put his arm
around me.  And said how sorry he was.  And all along it had been his
doing.

"Then in the spring of 1989, when the whole sorry system was on its way
to hell, Gerd was picked up on the outskirts of Dresden, him and a
whole van load of young "holiday-makers" heading for Hungary.  Except
that they weren't, of course.  Who was in that spring?  The Hungarians
had opened the frontier with Austria.  Budapest might as well have been
the suburbs of Vienna.  They were all sent to Bautzen jail and might
have rotted there for a year or two if the damn Wall hadn't fallen
first.

"When the mob stormed Normannenstrasse, my father's files were among
the first to be found.  He was damn near lynched.  And do you know, I
would have been the first to tie the noose."

"Where is he now?"

"Somewhere.  In the West, where they have no memories.

Working in a paint factory, I suppose.  A member of the proletariat
proper for the first time in his life.  I don't know, and I don't
really care."

Don't you?  Burke wondered.  But he said nothing.

"People like my father were the tip of the iceberg, no, the scum who
floated on the surface of a sick society."

Burke nodded.  But the evil, he tried to tell her, had never all been
on one side.  There were people in the West people who today claimed
sanctimoniously that the 'right' side had won the Cold War who had done
things that deep down were every bit as terrible as their ideological
enemies.  To say that the ends justified the means was no excuse, just
as it hadn't been for Hitler, or for Stalin.  Or Klaus Fuchs.

"Or Joshua Finch?"

"Maybe.  It depends, doesn't it?"

Ever since he had seen the young man's face staring out of a photograph
half a century old, and read the strange, hauntingly incomplete little
letter, the spectre of Joshua Finch had dogged his imagination.  And
somewhere out there, if they had read the runes correctly, at the
location marked on the old military map, in the inhospitable terrain
rapidly rising to meet them, lay an answer: at 19 degrees, 58 minutes
west, 64 degrees 39 minutes north, an ice-covered pass between two
mountains on the eastern edge of a formidable crescent-shaped glacier
more than fifty kilometres in length and twenty across.  It had to be
one of the most inaccessible spots in the world.

In contrast to the moonscape of the country's surface, however,
Keflavik's modern airport terminal seemed the epitome of normality.
Provided, Sabine had added, one ignored the fact that the returning
natives headed straight for the inbound duty-free shop to stock up on
booze to beat the draconian alcohol laws they imposed on themselves.

"Did you know," she chirped from the pages of the airline's inflight
magazine as they waited for their baggage in the customs hall, 'that
beer's only been legal here since 1989?"

Korkin had warned Burke to be surprised by nothing in Iceland.
Strangely, it turned out to be somewhere the Russian knew quite well.
He had never been there, but he had been responsible for negotiating a
business deal for an Icelandic company setting up in Moscow in the
early days after the collapse of Communism.

The company directors had visited Moscow for ten days to sort out the
details and, according to Korkin, they had not only spent most of the
time extolling the virtues of their national culture and dismissing the
Moscow mid-winter weather as 'mild' but had also drunk him under the
table.  He had given Burke the company's telephone number and told him
to ask for Birna, who ran its communications.

"Mention my name," Valery had said.  The magnificent Birna, he insisted
with a slightly disconcerting smirk, would put him in touch with the
right people.

"Well, thank God beer's legal now."  Burke frowned at Kotzke as her
leather suitcase came round on the conveyor belt.

"I'm gasping for a pint."

"According to this, a pint may be your ration for the week, Mr.  Burke.
Eon may have money to spend, but to have a serious night on this town,
you would have to take out a second mortgage."

Sabine ran to the conveyor belt to pick up her bag, gesturing to
Burke's own battered suitcase rolling past.  Burke watched as she
hoisted the luggage clear, simultaneously tossing her head back to
throw her untidy fringe out of her eyes.  He could almost have mistaken
her for a student backpacker, such was the strength and energy she
exuded.  And the enthusiasm was catching, he felt more alive than he
had done in years.  Burke grabbed both bags and humped them towards the
exit door where a cluster of noisy Icelanders were arguing with a
customs official over an improbably large quantity of Johnnie Walker
whisky.

Burke and Kotzke were politely ushered through ahead of them.  As, a
few minutes later, was the patient man with the thick scarf about his
neck who had collected only a black Samsonite case from the carousel.

Washington DC A fresh-faced USAF cadet was beaming good-naturedly at
the wrinkled visage of Abe Steiner approaching him.  The smile faded
when he realized the motorized wheelchair was hurtling towards the
double doors at breakneck speed.  Shit.  Just like the old boy to
challenge his disability.  He dashed forward to open them just in time
to prevent collision.

"Afternoon, General Steiner sir, nice to see you again.  Hope we can be
of help."

The boy was one of those automatons the US services turned out too
easily, the old man reckoned: polite, punctilious, patriotic and a
pinhead.  But he smiled back all the same.  At least this was one place
cripples could get into without begging, he thought as he manoeuvred
his wheelchair down the ramp into the nondescript grey-stone building
in the Arlington suburbs that housed the oldest records of the US Air
Force's ramshackle archives.

In fact, Steiner had been horrified at just how chaotic the records of
the supposedly most powerful strategic strike force on the face of the
planet really were.  Naturally, he had tried hacking his way into them
using the Internet.  It had seemed easier than he expected.  His own
old passwords (plus those of others, still in harness, which he had
taken a twelve-year-old's joy in ferreting out) had got him harmlessly,
and frighteningly easily, past the first electronic countermeasures.

Hell, did none of those guys watch the movies?  Did none of them pay
attention to the rudimentary rules of password protection?  Take
Willcox, for example.  There was nothing more predictable than using
his daughter Melanie's date of birth as a password.  Steiner had been
godfather at the christening.

It had been more or less the same story with Mervyn Elie, who was air
force chief of staff.  Steiner did not even attempt to try the man's
family connections.  Elie lived for his work and when he found he could
no longer do it in his office usually because no one would come to see
him there on a weekend he did it on the golf course, suborning staff to
play with him, and then piling on the psychological pressure to be sure
they lost.

Unhesitatingly Steiner tapped in the general's golf handicap followed
by those of Jack Nicklaus and Severiano Ballesteros, Elie's two revered
idols.  He had gained access to the minutes of the man's last meeting
with the Defense Secretary, including a discussion of air alert status
in the Persian Gulf.  Steiner tutted to himself.  The only hope for
Western civilization, he reflected, was that neither the Iranians nor
the Iraqis were big golf players.

But what really riled him was that none of it had been to any avail.
Sure, there had been programmes to put all of the archives on to
computerized format.  But what had happened was that military
bureaucracy had mushroomed.  The archivists were so busy recording all
the day-to-day traffic, that archiving the past remained an idealistic
daydream.  Even the most comprehensively catalogued departments ran out
around 1972, hardly surprising in the chaos of Vietnam.  There were
numerous cross-references to files in outhouses scattered throughout
the country.  Clearly there was some material available locally, but it
occurred to Steiner that to do as his old friend's boy wished might
even entail him heading out to Albuquerque, a thought that filled him
with no enthusiasm.

The room at the Hotel Esja in Reykjavik was a twin.  Sabine had made it
clear that this was for practical purposes only: even German magazines'
budgets were not open-ended, plus this story was beginning to call for
a bit more travel than her editor had calculated, and Icelandic prices
were notoriously high.  Burke had held up his hands as if to say he
understood perfectly, and anyway, what was she trying to imply?

The beds, however, turned out to be so far apart they might as well
have been in separate rooms.  Kotzke had staked out the limits in any
case by declaring her intention to have the first shower.  As soon as
he heard the water running, Burke picked up the telephone and called
the fabled Birna on the number Korkin had given him.  Within minutes
they had arranged a meeting with her director for that evening in a bar
in downtown Reykjavik.  How would they recognize each other, he asked.
No problem at all, she replied.  Just go to the bar and ask for
Siggy.

"Quiet place, eh?"  Burke ventured.

"Not exactly.  It is Friday night.  Is this your first time in Iceland,
by any chance?"

"It is indeed," Burke replied, warmed by the simple hospitality in the
woman's voice.

"Well, have a nice night.  Just keep your head down and roll with the
punches."

Which was not, he thought as he replaced the receiver, exactly what he
had been expecting her to say.

Under the Skin

Burke and Kotzke left the hotel about nine o'clock after an excellent,
if rather bland, meal of shrimp rolled in cod fillets served in a
delicate dill sauce.  He had, to her vocal disgust, smothered his in
black pepper.  They had both washed it down with a shot of brennivin,
the Icelanders' extraordinary schnapps, a sort of firewater flavoured
with caraway seeds.  Burke pronounced it brilliant, particularly with a
chilled beer chaser, and announced that for a nation which had only
recently rediscovered the art of brewing, they did not do at all
badly.

Sabine had chided him for his "English' elitism, which prompted Burke,
fired by the alcohol, to redeclare his Irish-American roots.  And amid
much teasing banter, they had linked arms and set off in the cool night
air for the brief stroll into downtown Reykjavik.  The traffic was
heavier than they had expected.

"Jesus Christ.  Watch it!"  yelled Burke as a rusty Honda Accord with
four blond teenage boys hanging out of its windows almost careered out
of control on to the kerb.

"So-rr-y," came the chorused reply in exaggerated English as the lads
waved like maniacs.

"Do you think there are no drink-driving laws here?  I thought this
would be a quiet place."

"Eamonn, you're showing your age.  And you didn't read the guide book.
This is Friday.  Reykjavik's big night out."

As Sabine spoke a bar door in front of them opened, spilling out two
stunningly beautiful girls, Burke could not help but notice, with long
legs under the shortest mini-skirts he had seen in a decade.  Holding
each other up, arms around the shoulders of their matching denim
jackets, the pair staggered across the pavement to slump against a
parked Toyota land cruiser

"Steady, girls."  Burke smiled encouragingly.

"Hey-ey, hello.  How are you?"  the taller girl replied, eyeing them up
and down unsteadily.  Her friend suddenly vomited noisily over the
Toyota's windscreen.

"My god," said Kotzke.

"Still fancy them?"

Burke, feeling decidedly queasy, pulled at her arm.

"What a place.  Come on, the bar's only two streets from here."

Soon they were outside a corner bar guarded by a tough-looking bouncer
in a shiny black jacket.  Burke could see the need for him: every two
minutes the door would open and a couple of drunk teenagers would fall
on to the street, pick themselves up and head for the next bar.

Burke approached.

"Good evening, sir.  Have a nice night," said the bouncer in flawless
English.

Inside, electronic rock music blared through loudspeakers at maximum
amperage across a red-lit mass of heaving youngsters, most with glasses
in their hands, engaged in heavy pelting and halfhearted attempts at
on-the-spot dancing; conversation was not an option.

"Siggy' was clearly not the orthodox middle-aged businessman he had
imagined.

Sabine took it all much more naturally, jiving her way through the
throng.  For the first time Burke began to fear they belonged to
different generations.  He followed her awkwardly.

The bar was long, wooden, and crowded.  Burke ordered beers, in sign
language, by pointing to the pump and indicating a large one with his
hands, then holding up two fingers.  First things first, he told
himself, even in extremis.  And these were just about as extreme
drinking conditions as he had encountered since spending Saint
Patrick's Night in O'Neill's bar in New York.  He had been younger
then, too.  He was not sure he had ever been as old as he felt right
now.

He exchanged a 1,000 krona note for the two beers, and was not wholly
shocked when he received no change.

"Can you tell me where Siggy is?"  he bawled at the barman at the top
of his voice, realizing that he had not even established whether the
man spoke English.

The barman smiled in a way that suggested it was what he always did
when nonplussed by customers.  Conditioned reflex, Burke thought.
Probably not a bad one, considering.

"S-I-G-G-Y?"  he repeated, doing his utmost to win the decibel war, but
failing miserably.

The smile changed from neutrality to recognition.  The barman leaned
across, took Burke's sleeve and pointed him towards the end of the bar
where a striking woman, almost as tall as himself, was standing with
one foot on the bar-rail, a half-litre of beer in one hand and a long,
thick cigar in the other.

"I'm not sure, but I've a funny feeling the mountainous ice-maiden
there might be our man," he bellowed into Kotzke's ear.

He inched his way towards the big blonde woman, who took her cigar from
her mouth as he approached and delicately blew a cloud of thick blue
smoke into the air, away from him.

"Are you Siggy?"  Burke bellowed.  It was just like Korkin to omit the
minor detail that his contact was female.  Though Burke also recalled
that she had drunk the big Russian under the table.  Perhaps another
good reason for him not to have revealed her sex.

She nodded, grasped Burke's hand with a grip like a Valkyrie who had
taken lessons in weightlifting, and gestured that he and Sabine should
follow her.  Lifting a hatch in the bar counter, she motioned them
through.

"The back bar lacks some of the Friday night atmosphere, but perhaps
you have had enough of our simple Nordic amusements for the present. It
also makes talking easier," she said, closing a barred wooden door. The
noise level fell from intolerable to merely excruciating.

"At least, there's no danger of being overheard."

Siggy smiled.

"Are you worried about that, Mr.  Burke?"

Burke returned the smile a little nervously.  This woman had
antennae.

"Perhaps we should introduce ourselves properly: Sigurdir
Hafnarsdottir.  But Siggy will do."

"Eamonn Burke, and this is my colleague, Sabine Kotzke."

Sabine nodded politely and held out her hand.  Siggy bent down to take
it and Burke winced.  He had never before seen a woman shake another's
hand like that.  Sabine didn't flinch, but he saw the pupils of her
eyes harden into needle-sharp pin pricks.  It occurred to him that he
had not understood the expression 'looking daggers' until then.

"Welcome to the Reykjavik runtur.  I am sorry if you found it a little
hectic.  But then you chose your day of arrival."

"I'm sorry?  The Reykjavik what?"

Kotzke gave him the patronizing smile of a woman who had read the
guidebook.  Siggy explained:

"It's a ritual.  Friday night.  All the young people go out and get
drunk and try to pick each other up, while those who are left pick
fights.  Primitive.  But then we are a primitive people.  It is part of
our charm."

Her smile revealed a mouth full of flawless white teeth.  Burke had, he
realized, never come across anything quite like her.  Siggy
Hafnarsdottir was a woman who knew her place in the world, and that
place was wherever she happened to choose.  For the moment, it was here
and now.

"So you are friends of Valery?  How is the old fox?  Has he learned to
drink yet?"

Burke smiled.  It was a question he would relish passing on.

"Well, you know Valery."  He could see the woman sharing his
amusement.

"He tries."

The Icelander produced a laugh that was a perfect imitation of the
Russian's own.  He was going to like Siggy Hafnarsdottir, even if
perhaps particularly if Sabine wasn't.

"We're working on a story about something that happened a long time
ago, during the war," he began.

"The cod war?"  No Icelander could resist baiting a Briton over the way
their few gunboats had stood off the might of the Royal Navy in the
1970s in its attempts to protect British fishing vessels when Reykjavik
unilaterally declared a 200-mile limit.

"Actually I was thinking of the Second World War.  Were there any
Americans here then?"

"Ha.  Are there fish in the sea?  That's what brought them.  Iceland
has a history going back twelve hundred years and never had an army.
Now it has someone else's, and their damn bombs too."

"Atomic bombs?  Out at the US base near Keflavik?"

"They deny it, of course.  Plausible deniability is part of "our" Nato
doctrine.  Besides it would cause much unpleasantness.  But everyone
knows they are there.  We just pretend we do not.  People used to
protest.  A lot at first and in the sixties and seventies, they say,
when no one liked the Americans.  But no one wanted them to leave
either.  Now there are fewer and people who complain about that too,
because there is less money.  Such is life.  But we should not be that
ungrateful.  If it was not for the arrival of the Americans during the
war, we might never have had independence."

"From?"  Burke's Icelandic history was not brilliant.

"Denmark, of course.  The Americans were only too keen to support us in
1945 against the return of any colonial power.  Not that the Danes were
exactly in a position to do anything about it, having been occupied by
her lot," she gave a politely jovial but clearly poisonous glance at
Sabine, 'for most of the war."

Don't mention the war, Burke thought to himself.  He had never worked
on a story with a German before.  Christ, he wondered, was it always
like this?  Swimming against a tide of residual resentment, even more
than half a century later?  He had never thought before what it must be
like to be German and carry around the weight of the world's
prejudices, for the sake of an earlier generation.  If Sabine was
affected, she didn't show it.  Perhaps you got used to it.

"Is there anyone around who knows a lot about that period, maybe
someone who worked on the base, anyone who would remember any unusual
events?"

"Hmm, well it was all pretty unusual, wasn't it?  But Reykjavik is a
small town.  Everyone here over a certain age remembers of course there
are fewer of them than there were.  But if you want to talk to someone
first-hand, I suppose you could do worse than meet my mother.  She
worked in the canteen for the British soldiers."

Why not?  thought Burke.  There were few better places to keep up with
military news than in the chow line.

"Would she talk to us?  When can we see her?"

Siggy looked at the bulky aviator's watch on her wrist.

"Too late now.  Mother goes to bed early, particularly on a Friday.  To
miss the ruckus, you know.  How about tomorrow, say lunchtime?  We
could meet for a coffee in town to recover -and I'll take you there.
It's not far."

Burke agreed readily and tried to pass on his enthusiasm to Sabine, who
merely nodded politely.

"And now, as they say in England, it's your round."

She leaned forward and pounded on the door they had come in through.  A
moment later it opened, drowning any attempt at conversation with the
mega-decibels of an old Bjork hit.  The barman entered carrying three
more beers and set them down on the table announcing ceremoniously,
"Thrir bjora, takk."

"Takk fyrir, Erik," said Siggy, lifting one and draining half of it in
a single mighty gulp as he closed the door.

It was late afternoon in Washington with the sun sinking slowly over
the marble dome of the capitol, though Abe Steiner would not have paid
it any attention even if it had been visible from the dark recesses of
the archives across the Potomac in Arlington.  For the past two hours
his only light had been the fluorescent tubes that burned in the
disconcertingly low ceiling.  This was not the sort of work he enjoyed.
Searching through archives on computer was one thing.  He could cope
with hypertext and mutually linked data pages.  But it had been a long
time since he had had to deal with real paperwork and even then he had
had clerks to do it.

He had begun with the dog-tag serial number.  In theory, every
able-bodied serviceman or woman who passed through the ranks of the
United States military was recorded by a serial number given them on
the day of their enlistment and retained for ever.  Even after return
to civilian life or death that number said for ever that John Doe had
done his bit for Uncle Sam.  It was linked to medical and service
records, the dry bureaucratic annotations that in the end reduced even
the greatest deeds of military prowess to ticks on a register.  An
accounting practice in humankind.

Joshua Finch was no exception.  Up to a point.  And that point was 21
October 1945.  Two years earlier, the records indicated, Finch had been
posted to Kirkland Air Force base, Albuquerque, as a reserve pilot on a
bomber crew.  He had been through basic training and had checked out
way above average, both on intelligence and flying skills.  It was an
embryonic air force career that had all the makings of a great future,
or at least a short and glorious contribution to the war effort. Except
that by then the war was over.  Which was what made the brief final
remark on Finch's file so strange: "Missing in action."

Under the circumstances, when Burke first raised his head from the
pillow the following morning or rather later on the same morning after
barely four hours of sleep it was a mercy that he was still capable of
rational thought at all.

"Fuck."

"Hmm," came the response from the bed across the room.

It did not sound like an invitation.  Which was just as well, he
considered.  Only vaguely, on the fringes of his mind, was there a
picture of Siggy waving a hearty goodnight in the black Reykjavik
pre-dawn as they climbed into taxi cabs outside the umpteenth bar.

Slowly he edged his feet over the side of bed, in a search for the
hotel carpet.  The remainder of his body seemed reluctant to follow
suit.  When it did, he found himself on all fours.

"Fuck," he said inaudibly, or so he thought until a voice came from a
seemingly distant plateau:

"What a convesrsation this is."

"Sarcasm," Burke forced himself to reply, 'is a privilege of the
healthy."

"In that case, I give it up.  Next time you decide to accompany an ice
maiden through the flames, leave this poor mortal out, okay?  I only
hope you feel like you deserve to."

From his position on the floor, Burke could see nothing of Sabine.  She
had pulled the thick goose-down quilt over her head.  He stood up
shakily and made his way to the was basing

It was then that he noticed his mobile phone's green light blinking
where he had left it on the floor, indicating that there were messages
awaiting collection on his answer phone service.  With his head aching
as if his mental processor had been overloaded, he was seriously
tempted to ignore it.  After all, what was he waiting for?  Nothing
much.  Except, of course, a message from the one man he hoped could
advance their cause.  Burke dialled the Notting Hill number and pressed
the code he had programmed to release his messages.

There were two.  The first was from George Prosset, whingeing that he
had not been in touch for the past week Burke cut him off in mid-flow
and advanced to the next.  He heard the unmistakable southern-American
drawl of Abe Steiner.

"Hrrrumph .. ."  The pause seemed to last for ever.

"Eamonn .. . it's Abe here.  Boy, we've gotta talk.  I don't know what
you're workin' on, but it sure ain't a loser.  Watch your arrrrse' he
exaggerated the letter 'r' ridiculously 'as you fuckin' limeys say.
Call me as soon as you get this message.  You ain't gonna believe
this."  Burke thought he could almost sense a repressed chuckle in the
recorded voice, as if the old man was keeping his last line in reserve,
well aware of the effect it would have:

"One of our bombers is missing."

After the Party

Los Alamos, New Mexico, 17 September 1945 As the big Buick rolled down
the red mesa road, Klaus Fuchs felt almost sad at the idea that it
might soon be for the last time.  The party was over.  It was time to
go home.  For those who had a home.

The British mission was packing up.  Rudolf and Genia Peierls were
already talking about getting 'back to Brum', the abbreviation for
Birmingham being part of their adopted Englishness.  There was some
doubt, at least in public among the scientific community, about how the
nation-states would deal with the product of their labours.  There was
much talk about a concept called 'non-proliferation'.

James Chadwick, the head of the mission, had been particularly nice to
Fuchs, talking about 'big things' in his future.  He would put him in
touch with Sir John Cockroft who, he had heard on the grapevine, would
be setting up an establishment somewhere in England, under the aegis of
the wartime Ministry of Supply.  There was talk, too, about the great
potential of nuclear energy as a fuel source, about harnessing the
power of destruction to fuel the industry of peace.  Talk, thought
Fuchs, as an excuse for the absence of reasoning.

He would be staying on a while.  Oppenheimer had vouched for the
necessity of him remaining.  Surprisingly, so had Teller.  But perhaps
it was not that much of a surprise.  Fuchs was working on a new
intitiator, a more powerful device that would detonate a more powerful
bomb.  Teller wanted it for his 'super'.  A super bomb for a
superpower. The age was making new words by the minute.

If Fuchs had thought about the future at all before now, he had done so
only vaguely.  Things got in the way.  There were arrangements to be
made if he was to continue his work in every sense -after his return to
England.  He had made notes, things to pass on to Raymond.  He would
not miss the little man with his owl-shaped face, but he needed to know
that whoever filled the role would also be reliable.  The contacts
would need to be regular, and he would want to be in charge.

In his heart he hoped there would be a time, not too far away, when the
need for conspiracy was past.  There was no doubt that the atomic bomb
would change the world for ever, but how drastically and with what
ultimate consequences he scarcely dared imagine.  Those who worried him
most were the men like Teller, who thought they already knew.  Only as
the Buick bumped up the ramp on to the newly repaired river bridge now
that Los Alamos was no secret any longer, things were changing fast did
it occur to him that his vision of the future might be a fantasy, the
reality much more terrible.  No, he told himself.  It would not be.
What they were doing would make sure of that.  What he was doing right
now was a crucial part of that.

What he was doing, according to Genia Peierls, as she cut sandwiches in
Kitty Oppenheimer's well-equipped kitchen, was one of the most
important tasks imaginable: fetching the drinks for the farewell party.
They had decided to do it in style, with real champagne if he could get
some.  And she had been assured he could, from Morley's Liquor Store in
Santa Fe.  Her husband had looked surprised and thought they might be
palmed off with some of the sparkling wine the Californians were
experimenting with.  But Fuchs had promised to try.

On the corner of Castillo and Alameda, where they had last met those
fateful few months earlier, he spotted Raymond at the wheel of a Dodge
pickup truck.  Fuchs turned left, and drove down the road to the
parking lot outside the liquor store.  At this early hour it was
empty.

Morley had been expecting him.  Genia Peierls, anxious about her
champagne, had been on the phone.  He was a jovial man with a drinker's
red nose, and was clearly pleased to be able to fulfill such a rare
order.

"Here ya go," he beamed, indicating to Fuchs a wooden case with the
word Mumm and the date 1938 burned into it.

"Real champagne, all the way from France.  Probably the only case in
the whole damn state.  Don't know as I reckoned I'd ever sell that lot
after the war started.  But then I guess you folks up on the hill sure
got something' to celebrate.  Watch where you pop those corks, hear?"

Fuchs smiled and the two of them took the case and carefully put it in
the trunk of the Buick.  He collected the rest of the order, paid cash
in ten-dollar bills adding an extra one, as Genia had instructed, for
Morley, who thanked him, clapping his back disconcertingly.

When he came out, the pickup was parked next to his Buick, with the
hood up and a man peering amateurishly under it.

"Need some help?"  he asked.  Harry Gold looked up at him.  Fuchs
thought he detected in the little man's manner a greater, more awkward
awe than before.  The bomb has changed the world, he thought.

"Don't suppose you've got any tools?"

"Yes.  I think I can help you," Fuchs replied and opened the trunk of
the Buick to reveal, next to the case of vintage champagne, a grey
metal tool box.

"You can borrow these."

The toolbox was heavier than it looked.  Fuchs helped him carry it to
the pickup.  Gold wondered what it contained, but he knew better than
to look.  Anyhow this time, once again, he had been more than
adequately paid.

"I'm in a bit of a hurry.  You can hang on to them."

"Well, that's real kind of you."

In the dull, dry heat, the two men shook hands.  It was not a farewell
with any warmth to it, given the scale of their collaboration and the
the probability that they would never meet again.  But Gold, though he
felt disappointed as he drove south along the dusty highway, knew Klaus
Fuchs had never given him cause to expect more.  He was just a conduit.
As he mopped the dusty sweat off his brow, he wondered if that was how
history would remember him: as a sad cypher.  Then he realized with a
jerk that, if he was lucky, history would not remember him at all.

Four miles north of Albuquerque he saw the big green military truck
stationary on the side of the road, its hood raised and a young man
tinkering with the engine.  He pulled over.

"Hi there, you look like you could use some help."

"Sure could, don't suppose you got any tools?"

"No problem.  I've got a box in the back.  Wanna help me fetch it?"

And he smiled as Joshua Finch came over and shook his hand with a
hearty American grip.

Long Distance Information

Still feeling much the worse for wear, Burke and Kotzke met Siggy
shortly before 10:00a.m. at a cafe beside Tjornin, the lake that
dominates the centre of the little city.  Flocks of wild ducks gathered
on the surface of the melting ice.  Siggy grinned broadly over the rim
of her coffee cup.

"Well, Mr.  Burke, how about a breakfast brennivin?"

Burke groaned at the thought of further alcohol.  The fact that Siggy
looked, and apparently felt, fine, did not make him any happier.

"Let's go, then," she announced, draining her coffee, just as Burke was
getting round to thinking he could do with another one.

"Not to worry, I've warned mother to keep the pot on."

Siggy drove them in her Toyota land cruiser  She said most Icelanders
used four-wheeled drive vehicles outside the cities, though she spoke
scathingly about the increasing number of her compatriots who never
left Reykjavik and knew little about the magnificent interior of their
own country.

"Well, maybe you'll get a chance to show us some of it," said Burke,
gritting his teeth as they rolled over uneven cobbles.

Her mother lived in a charming little wooden house, painted dark red.
Siggy ushered them into a small, cosy sitting-room, with net curtains
on the windows.  A woman whom Burke judged to be in her late seventies
sat on a straight-backed wooden chair next to a tiled stove.

"Please excuse me if I don't get up," she said in faultless English
that was, if anything, even better than her daughter's.

"I'm afraid it's not quite so easy as it used to be.  I suffer terribly
from the stiffness .  oh, what's the word?  Arthritis.  It is the curse
of old people, particularly in a cold climate."

"Please, Mrs.  Hafnarsdottir, don't bother .. ."  began Sabine, only to
stop short as she noticed Siggy laughing.

"Oh, now you must forgive me too," the tall Icelandic woman said with a
touch of genuine reconciliation in her voice.

"My mother's name is Helga Petersdottir.  It is confusing I know for
foreigners, but we do not have surnames in Iceland.  Everyone takes the
name of a parent.  It used to be always the father of course, but
nowadays we are more egalitarian."

Burke and Kotzke perched together on the sofa while Siggy went off to
make coffee.

"You worked for the British, in the NAAFI, the canteen?"  Burke
began.

"I hadn't realized that there were British troops here during the
war."

"They just don't teach history like they used to.  Instead of the Nazis
we got the Tommies and the Yankees.  One after the other.  You English
came first.  We didn't ask you, of course.  Not too much is said about
that these days.  Hitler knew that rule: nobody asks questions of the
victors.  You just marched in because Mr.  Churchill said so.  Now you
know why we enjoyed winning the "cod war".  We were invaded
"protectively", which I think is what the Russians said when they
invaded eastern Poland in 1939.

"Anyway, the big thing is: the 1940s were important times for Iceland,"
the old lady continued.

"After the Germans took Norway and Denmark, we were the next obvious
step.  For one side or the other."

"Why?  You had no strategic resources."  Burke thought Sabine's
question had the absence of tact that won her countrymen their
reputation.

"Iceland may seem out of the way to you nowadays.  But back then, your
U-boats were trying to sink the British convoys crossing the Atlantic.
They would have liked to be able to put in here.  So I suppose it was
important enough that the British got here first.  I mean, they were
merchant seamen, weren't they, on those convoys, like our lads, just
trying to do a job, get food through.  We could understand that all
right."

"When exactly did the Americans arrive?"  Burke decided it was a good
moment to steer the old lady back towards their topic.

"I can't remember exactly.  The English must have been too stretched.
Or maybe the Americans just told them what to do.  Isn't that what they
always do?"

Kotzke smiled.  Burke grimaced.

"I don't know.  But by 1943 there were half as many Yankee servicemen
here as there were of us Icelanders in Reykjavik.  And I mean
servicemen.  Can you imagine how our local boys reacted to seeing yet
another of Iceland's few vital resources used up?  But the Yanks had
lots of dollars and fish prices went up.  So they built their airport
and flew out the girls and the men went fishing and said nothing; at
least not to their faces."

"So that was when they built the American base at Keflavik?"

"No, no, no."  She said it as if rebuking a silly schoolchild.

"That came much later.  No, the British built the first airfield, out
into the harbour.  You must have seen it.  It's still Reykjavik's main
airport today, for internal flights, that is.  Keflavik, the new
airport next to the American base out on Reykjanes, the peninsula
that's for foreign flights only.  That's right, isn't it, Sigurdir?"

Her daughter called an affirmative from the depths of the kitchen.

"Of course, for us girls, it was a different matter.  We were very much
in demand.  I settled for a local boy in the end, of course, didn I,
dear?"  Siggy had come in carrying a tray with four vast cups of strong
coffee.

"But your father, God rest him, would get angry enough in his way over
those Yankees, with their stockings and their chewing gum and the way
they smelled of aftershave rather than dried herring.  Oh dear, it was
a revelation for us, I can tell you."

Burke tried to imagine the scene as the strapping local lads, hardened
by years of fighting force-nine gales in the north Atlantic to bring
home a few kilos of cod, found themselves hopelessly outclassed by
doughboys from Arkansas or Indiana who'd never seen the sea before they
flew out across the ocean, and landed here to talk up a storm and trade
nylons for dropped knickers.

"Oh, yes," she continued, 'but that's when we found out where we really
were in the world: just a convenience.  Not part of America or Europe,
but a halfway house in between.  An unsinkable aircraft carrier, that's
what they called us.  But what they meant was a ready depot of girls
and kerosene.  Not so much a country as a refuelling stop."

Realization dawned on Burke.  Hiram Carter's cryptic remarks, the old
Soviet military map, the medal, the photograph of the dashing young US
air force man and the love letter, and now Steiner's vanished airplane.
It all fitted together.  Except that the picture made no sort of sense.
A missing bomber.  What sort of bomber?  Was there a chance? No.  But
yet.  If what he was thinking stood up, was it possible that Fuchs had
had an unknown ally, and that together they had pulled off a coup that
Western history couldn't bear thinking of?

"Eamonn, what is it?"  Sabine had caught the sudden change in his
mood.

"The half-way house."  What we're looking for is here because this is
halfway between Europe and America.  A refuelling stop.  For Josh
Finch."

He turned back to the old lady.

"Was there anything in particular, any incident that stands out, any
scandal, any alert at the base?"

"Heavens.  Let me think.  There were always alerts, at least in the
early days.  But it was only practice, they told us, Special fire
drill, of course.  Didn't want the place going up in smoke, they said.
Is that the sort of thing you mean?"

"Sort of.  But something more unusual.  Anything to do with aircraft.
An accident?  A panic of some sort.  A "flap", they used to call it."

The old lady's sudden high-pitched laugh took them by surprise: "Why,
of course they did.  Of course."

"Yes?"  said Burke eagerly.  But it was his choice of language that had
enthused the old lady.

"A flap!  A flap!  My goodness, I had quite forgotten.  We had learned
our English so seriously at school and were so keen to try it out on
real Englishmen.  But they all spoke so funnily, with such strange
accents.  And then there were the Americans, all speaking like Clark
Gable in those films shown down at the picture house.  Oh, the richness
of the language some of it not very repeatable, either."

"Yes."  Burke was desperately worried that she would lose the thread he
had been searching for.

"But this particular "flap", what was it about?"

"Yes, yes.  Not an ear-flap, or a cat-flap, or the flap on the wing of
a plane.  Just a flap.  Like the night the big American plane went
missing."

Burke shot a glance at Sabine.

"Tell me about it," he said, in his best Fleet Street bedside manner.

Abe Steiner was not normally a man to lose sleep, not that he needed
much these days.  Even before the accident he and Mabel had slept in
separate beds but after it, he had insisted on moving his bed into his
study.

When he did finally put himself to bed, however, going through the
tedious business of hauling himself from the wheelchair on to the cot
that lay next to his desk, it was usually because he was ready for
sleep.  And then he was out like a light.  Except that tonight was
different.  He had deliberately sat up until 4a.m. waiting for young
Burke to answer his call.  The boy had given the impression that it was
important and, given what he had come up with, he was beginning to
think that might be an understatement.  By 4:15, however, he had
decided enough was enough and got himself into bed.

He was certain that if he had still been on active service, he would
not be passing on the information he had gleaned to an outsider.  But
hell, Mickey Burke's boy was scarcely an outsider.  In his day his
father had been so far inside, the only circle tighter than the one he
belonged to was the President's asshole.  Besides, it seemed the lad
had found most of this stuff out for himself; Steiner was just
confirming it.  But confirming what?  He had more questions than
answers.

Then the phone rang.

"Timing, boy, timing," he muttered to himself.

Using the grip attached to the wall, he pulled himself up to a
half-sitting position and, not bothering to turn on the light, reached
across for the phone on the end of the desk "Steiner here.  Who's that?
Not the pope, I guess?"

At the other end of the line, Burke could not resist a grin.

"General, sir.  I'm very sorry to disturb you at this hour.  But I got
your message.  It sounded ... ah ... interesting, to say the least."

"Funny, I kinda guessed you'd say that.  The only trouble is, boy' the
laughter went out of the old man's voice 'it appears to be true."  He
hesitated, and Burke could hear the question in his voice.

"But then I guess you already know that."

Burke hedged.  He didn't know what to tell the old man.  Steiner was an
old friend of the family, but he was also or until recently had been
part of the US military establishment.  And somehow Burke had the
impression that the trail they were following led on to thin ice.
Playing careful was the only real option.

"We know a lot of the story, sir.  But I'm really keen to know what
your search turned up."

"Okay, for starters this guy Finch was a regular ace flyer, one o' the
best a hero of the Murmansk flyin' in to Rooskyland once every coupla
weeks to deliver supplies during 1943.  He was a real hot dog who
looked like he was headin' straight for the stars until he suddenly
disappears one day back in October 1945."

"Disappears?"

Kotzke was standing on tiptoes next to Burke, straining to catch both
sides of the conversation.

"That's what I said.  The note is brisk and final "missing in action"
no details, no circumstances, nothin'."

"Couldn't it have been some routine mission and he was shot down?"

"Who by, guy?  You got cloth ears?  Didn't you hear the date?  21
October 1945.  We weren't fightin' a war with anybody."

"No?"  Burke probed.

"No, siree.  What is interestin' is where he disappeared from," "Don't
tell me."  Burke couldn't help himself.

"Reykjavik, Iceland?"

"Iceland?  What the hell's Iceland got to do with it?  This guy was
based just where the squadron number you gave me suggested he'd be. You
know where that was?"

There was a note of interrogation in the voice.  The old man was
testing him, trying to find out how much of this story Burke already
knew and how much he was waiting to be told.

"You remember, don't ya?"

Desperately he scanned his mind.  Finch had not disappeared in Iceland.
Therefore he must have been logged as missing before he got there.
Where had he come from?  What was the link to Fuchs?  One possibility
struck him: there were only two air bases in New Mexico back then that
Burke had ever heard of: Roswell and Albuquerque.  The latter was, as
far as he knew, the only one that Klaus Fuchs would ever have been
anywhere near.

"Albuquerque."  He tried his best to make it sound like an answer
rather than a question.

"Absolutely."  There was renewed confidence in the voice.  Burke
breathed a sigh of relief.

"Kirkland air force base, Albuquerque, New Mexico," the general
continued.  Biggest backwater in the whole of the US air force
establishment in 1945, except for one little thing."

"Which was?"

"Hey, come on, you're havin' me on.  Kirkland just happened to be the
base where they tested and flew the modified B-29 Superfortress
bombers.  Your boy was one of the squadron that got left behind when
the first wave left for the island."

Burke's head was swimming.  He stuck to repeating the words that left
him behind.

The island."

"Yeah, Tinian, the island captured from the Japanese where the rest of
the guys were already practising high-altitude approach runs and
post-blast evasive manoeuvres.  The island Enola Gay left from."

"Enola Gay."  Burke found a line from an old pop song running through
his mind: "Enola Gay, you should have stayed at home yesterday."

"Yup.  Just about the most famous bomber of all time or infamous, I
guess, depending on your point of view.  A B-29 just like your boy was
flying when he disappeared.  Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb
on Hiroshima, named after the pilot's mother, conferring on her the
most dubious immortality in history.  Of course, it was the Nagasaki
type they were really modified to carry."

"The Nagasaki type."  Burke was beginning to feel he had got lodged in
a conversational pattern he could not escape from.  Steiner had noticed
it too.

"Hey, you on a tape loop or something?"

"Sorry.  Just trying to make sure we don't get any
misunderstandings."

"Yeah.  Though I have to tell you, I ain't at all sure what I do
understand from this lot."

"How do you mean, sir?"  Burke didn't want to add that he wasn't at all
sure himself, though his suspicions were growing fast amid the
circumstantial evidence.

"Well, when I said your boy and a B-29 disappeared, I meant it
literally.  It's not in the records, not as such.  But there's a gap in
the squadron numbering.  They moved outta Kirkland at the beginning of
October that year, up to Edwards.  And the numbering no longer tallies
like it did during a routine inspection back in August when the others
left for the Pacific.  There's one plane too few.  Which to my mind
fits uncomfortably with the disappearance of Finch.  Do you think your
boy could have been joy-riding or something?  You think this guy could
have written off a B-29 somewhere in the New Mexico desert?  Is that
the idea?"

Up to a point, thought Burke on the other end of the telephone.  But
only to a very small point indeed.

"Eamonn?"  Burke sensed a caution in the old man's voice.  As if what
he had said had worried him.

"Tell me, do you know what the hell you're getting into?"

"I think so, sir," Burke replied, with more confidence than he felt.

"Hmm, what got me thinking that there might have been an accident of
some sort was an oblique reference in one file.  It uses the phrase
"broken arrow".  Finch's B-29 was called "Navajo Arrow".  It's probably
just coincidence, and it may mean nothing.  After all, it wasn't until
those unfortunate accidents in the sixties that the expression gained
currency."

"What expression?"

"Broken arrow."

"I don't get it."

"As of 1961, when a F-14 accidentally shed its nuclear payload over the
Nevada desert, the records use the phrase "broken arrow" for a bird
that fell out of the nest."

Burke frowned.  There was no getting away from it.  The old man was
sharp.  As razors.

"Eamonn?"

"Sir."

"You aren't trying to tell me that boy was carryin' cargo?"

"I think it has to be a possibility, sir."

The general exhaled a long deep breath that sounded almost like a
whistle.

"I had a feelin' about this.  If what you're saying is true, then
somebody sure as hell doesn't want the world to know.  And you're gonna
tell 'em?  I have to say, I find it hard to believe that a plane that
size could have come down anywhere in the continental United States and
stayed a secret.

"Least of all," the general continued, 'if it was carrying some sort of
device.  Unless he crashed in Area 51, heh heh?"

"Heh, heh," Burke echoed the general's laugh.  Hollowly.  As far as he
could see, the last thing New Mexico had needed back in the late 1940s
was some aliens dropping in on Roswell air force base to see how things
were going on.  Things were complicated enough as they were.

"What sort of range did a B-29 have?  Where could he have reached
without refuelling?"

"Just about anywhere in the country.  The B-29 was designed to be the
world's first intercontinental bomber.  It had the range to go four
thousand miles in one hop.  Could have got to Tokyo if he'd wanted."

Or to Iceland, Burke thought.  The refuelling base.  Wasn't that one of
the reasons the Allies had taken the island in the first place?  The
reason the Americans were still there.  That was what had struck him as
he sat in Siggy's mother's armchair.

Kotzke was mouthing at him to tell her what was going on.  He nodded
agreement.

"General, I have to go now.  Listen, I can't begin to tell you how
grateful I am."

"Hey, for what?  But listen, kid, don't go jumping to mad
conclusions."

"Sure thing, general," he replied.  Though what other conclusions were
there?

"Keep me posted."

"Will do, sir," Burke lied.

"And thanks again."

He closed the connection and sat down, heavily, on the bed.

Kotzke, her modesty forgotten along with the remnants of her hangover,
flung her arms around his neck, her eyes glinting with excitement.

"The plane, the missing plane, that's what we're looking for, right?"

"Right."

"The Soviets didn't just get stolen information about the bomb, did
they?"

"Maybe not," he muttered, lying back suddenly and laughing as Sabine
tumbled towards him, her spiky fringe brushing his eyes, their
camaraderie verging on something more sensual.

"Maybe," he said, 'just maybe, they got the whole fucking thing."

"And we," she announced, to his disappointment sitting up and tossing
back her hair, once again all business-like, 'are going to find it."

Maybe, thought Burke.  Unless someone stops us.  Or gets there first.
And his mind drifted back to the lifeless figure of Anatoly Yakunin
sprawled in the dirty Moscow snow.

On the Wires

Burke was pacing the floor of their hotel room, his eyes moving from
the mobile phone in his hand to the panorama of Mount Esja outside the
window.  He lifted the phone and stared at the digits, then dropped it
to his side again and resumed his pacing.  It was the obvious thing to
do.  It made all sorts of sense under the circumstances.  And all sorts
of nonsense.  There were times when what was the old American business
school jargon?  the obvious step was counter-indicated.

"What's the matter?"  asked Sabine.

"I'm worried."

"What about?"

"About what the hell is going on here.  About what the hell we're
chasing.  And who else might be."

"What makes you so certain someone else is?"

Burke was close to anger.  Why on earth was she being so obtuse?

"Look, the reason we're on this story in the first place is that you
believe Klaus Fuchs was murdered because of something he was
threatening to reveal.  Anatoly Yakunin was about to do the job for him
and he ended up bungee-jumping without a rope.  And Christ knows how
much of a coincidence that bomb in London was."

"You don't think .. .?"

"I don't think anything.  I don't know.  But I am damn certain it is
about time we started being careful about watching our backs, and who
we trust.  If there is some ex-Stasi involvement, it's dangerous
enough.  But if any of what we think we've pieced together is true,
then there could be more players in the game than either you or I
imagine.  It depends how wide the circle has grown."

"Who do you not trust?  The Russian?"

"Valery?  I trust him with my life.  He's already saved it once."

"He has?  You didn't tell him."

"I didn't want to embarrass me.  It was a long time ago.  I was a
junior reporter in the war in Afghanistan, got into trouble trying to
interview the Mujahideen rebels on an official Soviet press trip out of
Moscow.  The local Red Army captain caught two of us trying to make
contact and accused us of being American spies.  Threatened to have us
shot on the spot.  Korkin was a sergeant in his regiment, stepped in,
made a fuss and took the tempo down.  A year later I met him in Moscow.
He'd been given a dishonourable discharge and was living hand-to-mouth
as a street-sweeper.  I found him a job with The New York Times as a
translator."

"What about your British spy, do you trust him?"

"Dickie Boston?  About as far as I could throw him."

God, he thought.  Boston was logically his next call.  Dickie had the
access, or ought to have.  But would he use it, and if he did, would he
have any interest in sharing what he found?  Honesty, after all, was
not exactly part of his job description.  But doing nothing would get
them nowhere.  He willed his finger out of its indecision and stabbed
the keypad numbers.

"Hello."  The voice on the end of the line conveyed just the right
amount of business-like briskness a neutral tone that could easily
swing into effusiveness or reprobation depending on the evolution of
the conversation.

"It's me.  Is that you?"  Burke couldn't resist it.  It was not often
he had the man on the end of a string.

"Who's calling, please?"  And then, after a brief silence: "Eamonn?"

"Well it's not Jesus Christ."

"Indeed, nor his virgin mother."

"This is important.  Maybe.  I mean, I think it might be."

"Good grief, old thing.  You sound serious."  Boston passed for a
second and Burke wondered if he was turning a recording device on, or
off.

"I am.  I mean, it is.  Dickie, you remember I asked you to trawl the
archives on Klaus Fuchs?"

"Like it was yesterday, old man.  I thought I'd got back to you, filled
in a few of the gaps.  Don't tell me the story's died under you.  Can't
say I'd be too surprised, though.  Not exactly any crackers lurking in
the safes here, at least as far as I can make out."

"That's why I'm calling.  Dickie, are you sure you told me the whole of
it?"

The question hung in the air.  Burke pressed his ear to the speaker,
cursing atmospheric interference that at this distance interfered even
with digital cellphones.

"Absolutely.  At least, as far as I know.  It was all a bit before my
time, you know.  Where are you, Eamonn?  This line isn't very good."

Did that mean he really didn't know, Burke wondered.  Should he tell
him?  Was Boston one of those who might have an interest?  In a missing
bomb, even an ancient one?  The answer had to be yes, undoubtedly.

"I'm in Iceland."

"How very exotic.  I can't imagine our friend Fuchs ever got there.
What's the connection, Eamonn?"

"I don't know.  Maybe there isn't one.  Listen, Dickie .. ."

"I am listening, Eamonn.  Please go on.  But bear in mind that I have
other things to do than serve as a conduit for antique anecdotes about
dead spies, even to the loyal servants of Her Majesty's Press Corps."
He uttered the stock phrase in a way that managed to emphasize the
mock-respectful capital letters.

Burke took the plunge.

"What would you say if I told you that in 1945 someone stole an atomic
bomb right out from under the Americans' noses in Los Alamos, and then
lost it?"

There was a moment's silence on the other end of the line, and then
Burke heard Boston's voice, as self-assured and cynical as ever.

"I do hope that's not what you are going to tell me?  Because if it is,
I'm going to have to tell you that I think you are stark staring
mad."

As Burke put the phone down with exasperation, Sabine looked up at him,
her dark brown eyes focused narrowly on his:

"Not convinced, hmm?"

"No.  But can you blame him?  This half-baked hack rings up to tell him
that there's a nice line going in previously owned atomic devices, that
Iceland has joined the nuclear club unintentionally, that the CIA and
the FBI and MI5 and MI6 and the KGB and God knows who else accidentally
mislaid one of the most dangerous eggs in the global nest half a
century ago and nobody has bothered to pick it up."

"No.  But it's not a question of belief, is it?  We have evidence."

"Oh no, we don't.  I'll tell you what we have.  We have a cryptic diary
left by a confessed traitor going gaga; a dead Russian's map of
"Treasure Island"; and a piece of yarn-spinning by an incapacitated
geriatric Cold War warrior with an overactive imagination backed up by
nothing more concrete than an Icelandic granny's reminiscence?"

"Perhaps we should think it through."

"Okay.  Let's just imagine that this whole thing is true, that an
American airman really did smuggle a bomb out of New Mexico in 1945. It
begs a few questions, doesn't it?  Such as: where is it going and why
does it stop in Iceland?"

"The second part we've done: it had to refuel somewhere."

"So why not somewhere on the eastern seaboard, in the continental
United States?"

"I don't know, unless the presence of a B-29 would have aroused too
much speculation at one of the big east coast bases."

"So where was he taking it?"

"There's only one real answer, isn't there?  Where do you think?"

"Moscow?"

"Where else?  Or at least Murmansk.  That's the route our boy knew.  It
avoids going over most of inhabited Europe.  The question is: did he
get there?"

"Well, if he didn't we have to face the fact that Finch and his cargo
may still be out there.  And that that is what someone is willing to
kill for."

"To get hold of an atomic bomb."

"Maybe.  Except something's wrong somewhere.  Apart from anything else,
it would be a very old atomic bomb.  Still lethal, no doubt, but of
more real interest to a museum than a would-be superpower.  Since the
collapse of the Soviet Union there has been more atomic technology
floating around on the open market than pig meat in a hot-dog
factory."

"Terrorists?"

"Same thing applies.  It's easier to buy raw material for a bomb these
days than to start a global chase for one that's half a century old. Of
course, back in 1988, when our friend Fuchs was offed, things were
different, weren't they?  What if the Stasi killed Fuchs not just to
keep him quiet, but because he had revealed to them the possibility of
getting their hands on a bomb of their own?"

Sabine looked perplexed.

"But East Germany was an arsenal of nuclear weapons.  Why would they
have been interested in a vintage model preserved in the ice?"

"Think about it."  Burke was warming to his theory.

"All the nuclear weaponry in the DDR was under Russian control.  The
last thing they wanted was a German finger on a nuclear button.  And
even before Fuchs died, it was fairly clear that the Kremlin could no
longer be relied upon to support the straw men in Berlin.  So when the
Stasi finds out that Herr Doktor Fuchs, of all people, knows the
whereabouts of a vintage, but presumably still functional, atomic
device, it must have seemed like a golden opportunity."

"For what?"

"For insurance."  The more he thought about it, the more plausible it
seemed.

"To preserve Erich Honecker's tin pot dictatorship.  Imagine how the
world would have changed if East Germany, back in the spring of 1989
with the winds of revolution whistling around the corridors of power
everywhere from Warsaw to Budapest, acquired a unilateral nuclear
deterrent."

To deter against what?"

"Against reunification, for Christ's sake.  What other threat did
Honecker face?"

"The real threat was from within, from people like me."

"Yes, but with a bomb, they would have had a free hand to do what they
liked internally.  They could have sent tanks into the streets and
declared martial law.

"And who would have been the saviour of the politburo, the heir
apparent?  Mielke, of course."

"Erich Mielke, the Stasi minister?  But he was even older than
Honecker."

"Sure he was, but those old bastards believed they were immortal.
Besides, everyone knew by then that Honecker had cancer.  His days were
numbered.  Mielke must have believed he could be Europe's equivalent of
Kim Il-Sung, last defender of the Stalinist system."

Burke was getting carried away.  Kotzke shook her head slightly.

"But all that is gone, Eamonn.  Long gone."  She took a deep breath and
looked at him sceptic ally as if she was sure there was a better
explanation.  Burke had seen the expression before, from unimaginative
editors doubting a tortuous but disarmingly comprehensive story he had
painstakingly pieced together to fit the facts.  But wasn't conspiracy
theory what Kotzke had hired him for?

The Insecurity Man

Several dozen arctic tern rose from the icy surface of the lake,
turning a lazy circle in the air before descending once again, like a
squadron of fighters returning to base.  Burke was impressed by their
sense of formation.  Envied it even.  Formation was what he longed to
see imposed on the tumble of conflicting ideas in his brain.

For the second morning in a row they were sitting around a window table
in the cosy cafe beside Tjornin pond.  Yakunin's map and an Icelandic
equivalent lay on the table.  Siggy was entranced and admonitory in
equal measure.

"This is simply not the time.  You must wait.  A few weeks at least."

Any journey to the 'interior' required serious preparation, especially
in winter.  Two months earlier, she insisted, she would have turned
down the expedition altogether.  With temperatures that never climbed
above freezing, and a sun that barely climbed above the horizon, the
world of ice and snow and semi-permanent darkness was a prospect that
only a fool would have considered.  The problem was not the cold but
the heat: the volcanoes, in many cases still active, that lay under the
ice caps.

"The danger is that when travelling on glaciers at any time and
particularly in such geologically unstable conditions there is a real
risk of a crack opening up, or of finding a huge chasm blocking your
way.  And detours themselves are dangerous; there is no effective way
to map the shifting ice.  It's better in summer: at least it's clear
where the glacier starts and stops.  I'd recommend you postpone this
until the end of June."

"I don't think we have the time," said Burke.  One thing was clear:

they were not acting in a vacuum.  A circle was closing around them.
And a circle always reminded Burke uncomfortably of a noose.

"The initial route is fairly simple," Siggy sighed and continued.

"Up towards Kjolur in the central highlands.  At this time of year,
it's easiest to fly there.  Just a few kilometres south-west there is a
hut, at a place called Thojafell it is used as an emergency shelter,
but we also keep snow cats there.  We will be able to use a four-wheel
drive that far, but after that the cats are the only option.  You have
used one before?"

Burke and Kotzke looked blank.

"Don't worry.  It is just like riding a motorbike, only not so painful
if you fall off.  Most of the time."  And she did another imitation of
Korkin's loud laugh.

Burke cast a make-the-best-of-it smile at Kotzke.  He thought her grin
looked distinctly phoney.

"Okay, I am probably mad.  But I agree," said Siggy.

"When do you want to start?"

"As soon as possible, really.  How long will it take you to set things
up?"

"A day or two at most."  Despite the attempts to put them off, Burke
was impressed now by the cool confidence of the Icelander.

"I will call one of my colleagues up in Kjolur.  It is useful to have
someone who really knows the territory.  I suggest we take the 4:30
p.m. flight the day after tomorrow.  That will give us a good night's
rest.  It will be important to start early when we set off for
Langjokul itself."

"Sure, whatever you say.  But what are we going to do here for the next
forty-eight hours or so?"

"Go swimming," the big blonde said, as if it were the most natural
thing in the world.

The man at a window table in the restaurant across the lake from the
cafe in which Burke and his friends were seated was also thinking of
birds.  He cut another pink slice of the local delicacy which he had
decided to make best use of his time to enjoy as an early lunch: roast
puffin.  It tasted slightly fishy.

He wondered about the state of mind of his quarry, so seemingly safe
and secure in their warm cafe.  People took security for granted.  But
it was not the natural order.  It was something forced upon an unruly
world.  It was people like him who made the difference: the troops who
patrolled the front line between security and insecurity.

Once, in a very different context, people like him had been labelled
'fighters on the invisible front'.  It was not such an inappropriate
description, he thought.

The old man in Yugozapadnaya had once stood on that front line too;
that was why he had been reluctant to open the door, so early in the
morning.  He had peered timorously through the crack he opened, putting
his faith in the flimsy metal chain.  But a second's violence had
ripped the little screws from the woodwork.  The man had not been as
scared as he had hoped, or imagined, despite the knife held at his
throat.  Instead there was steely resentment lurking beneath the
surface of the watery old eyes.  He had revealed nothing.  The security
man had felt no remorse as he pulled the old man's sweater over his
head and manhandled him towards the window: it was an old KGB trick,
and he relished the irony.

A movement at the corner of his vision refocused his attention.  The
doorway of the cafe opposite opened.  He summoned the waitress quickly,
asked for the bill and paid in cash, assuring her that the unfinished
plate of puffin breast had been delicious, but that he had a plane to
catch.  Slipping into his dark blue anorak, and pulling the hood up, he
walked out into the cool sunshine and strode as briskly as any
Icelander out for a morning constitutional.  He watched as Burke and
Kotzke climbed into a Jeep Cherokee with hire plates, while Siggy
headed up the hill towards the Toyota he already knew was her's.  That
was awkward, he thought; but then again maybe not that awkward.  Maybe
they were just forcing his hand.

Blue Blood

Burke pulled the Cherokee on to the black tarmac strip that ran through
the thick blanket of snow and on to the moonscape of Reykjanes
peninsula.

It was barely twenty minutes' drive to the Blue Lagoon, one of the
country's most famous and most easily accessible tourist attractions.
Burke swung the wheel to turn the jeep off the smooth tarmac and on to
the rough and ready stretch of asphalt that led to the bath-house.

At first sight it looked more like an oil refinery.  Huge silver domes
and intricate coils of blue-painted piping emerged from a thick white
ground mist: warm water turned to steam on contact with the freezing
air.  The lagoon was a by-product of the Svartsengi power station,
siphoning up super boiled water from one and a half miles beneath the
earth's crust.

"Looks like something out of Star Wars," Burke remarked.

"More like the devil's brewery," responded Sabine.

"Time for your afternoon dip, Ms Kotzke."

"Eammon," she exclaimed in a voice that exuded not so much enthusiasm
as queasiness, 'have you seen the water?  It's turquoise, like
someone's imported it straight from the cover of one of those Caribbean
holiday magazines, only boiled it first."

It did, too, Burke thought.  The colour was not a reflection of an
azure sky, but the product of the copper oxide in the spring's mineral
content.  The Blue Lagoon's waters were touted as a cure for anything
from impotence to angina.  But most people came for the thrill of it.

In the little tourist shop Burke bought the house speciality, a
disposable waterproof camera.  When else might he get a picture of
Sabine in a bikini?  A few minutes later, he emerged from the men's
changing rooms and took in the unlikely scene framed in the viewfinder:
a landscape of snow dominated by a vast, brightly coloured industrial
installation forming the backdrop to a rowdy gang of hulking semi-naked
men splashing two blonde ice maidens in black swimsuits carrying trays
of iridescent cocktails, clearly designed to match the hue of the
steaming water.  At that moment Sabine emerged from the women's
changing rooms, but not he noticed with disappointment in a bikini.
Instead she wore a silvery snakeskin-design one-piece.

"Eammon, what the hell's going on?  This looks like something from
Fellini's Satyricon."I "According to Siggy, it happens every couple of
weeks.  Oil workers from one of the Norwegian rigs.  So as soon as they
get the chance they book a helicopter and a hotel and paint Reykjavik
red.  Or blue, it looks like tonight."

"Naaa, haaalloo."  A bearded bear of a man, with a figure like Luciano
Pavarotti, approached them, beaming, his eyes at Sabine's
thigh-level.

"English?  Come on in, the water's lovely."  He held up one of the
bright blue drinks for Eammon.  Burke took it, sniffed and threw it
back in one.  Curacao and brennivin with a twist of lime, he guessed.
Who said fire and ice didn't go together.  He plunged beneath the
gently bubbling bath-water of the lagoon.

A second later, Sabine surfaced inches in front of him, rising like a
sultry, slick-haired sea goddess, silver and gold, eyes closed, dark
hair dripping.

"Christ, that's wonderful," she gasped.

"It has to be bad for you."

"Hey, Englishman," came the cry from across the lagoon.  Burke looked
over and saw the nordic Pavarotti raise yet another iridescent cocktail
to him while simultaneously raising a stocky hairy leg between the
lithe pair of one of the ice maidens.  She screamed, sending a tray of
empty plastic glasses over her head to mixed cries of shock and
hilarity.

The blonde valkyrie's swimsuit had slipped off one shoulder exposing a
perfect platinum breast with pert nipple which she seemed in no hurry
to cover up.  Pavarotti, half-submerged and advancing upon her like a
surfacing whale, had it clearly in his sights.  Suddenly he rose from
the water as if about to break into an aria.

"Aaaaargh .. ."

It was always the same, a high-pitched wail that Burke had heard a
thousand times, in the backstreets of Belfast, the deserts of the Gulf,
Sarajevo's sniper's alley.  The truncated cry rose and snapped with the
detonation, a whiplash crack that burned through the arctic air even as
it filled with screams.

Burke fell forwards instinctively into the red-stained water, pushing
Sabine down, submerging her head.  Half-naked bodies scrambled for the
pool edge or cowered like frightened frogs.  Through the clamour Burke
heard the roar and squeal of a car engine gunned into life and
retreating at speed.  Then the shouts, sobs and screams subsided,
eerily, into the silence of horror.

On the surface of the water floated a great inanimate mass: Pavarotti,
a whale now in the gun sights of the hunter, a wasted mass of blubber
oozing blood and guts.  The bullet, Burke noted, with the war
correspondent's eye of experience, had blown a hole the size of a
child's head in his belly.

Sabine was pulling herself out of the water on to one of the rocks.
Burke, already out, stretched out a hand to her.

He noticed he was still holding the disposable camera in his other
hand.  The old freelancer's instinct, he thought grimly: never drop
anything that has a chance of making you money.  It must have been from
about here that the shot was fired.  Burke lifted the camera to his eye
as he had done a thousand times at scenes of devastation.  The lens
confirmed what he had known instinctively the moment the shot exploded
in his ears: from here it was clear he and Sabine must have been the
target.

The circle had indeed become a noose.  And they had only just escaped
the executioner.

God's Kindergarten

The turbo-prop engines of the little Icelandair commuter plane throbbed
noisily.  Eammon Burke was worried, but he was also very, very happy.
He looked at Sabine's tousled hair and felt her breath warm on his
neck, then turned his face and kissed the top of her head, breathing
deep her faint, slightly musky, sweet scent, like fresh hay drying in
the sun.  It had taken murder to bring them together.

They had fled the Blue Lagoon like guilty thieves and driven out to
Keflavik rather than back into the city.  Whoever was responsible might
have been waiting for a second shot.  From a cafe they had telephoned
Siggy.  Her first reaction had been incredulity, her second caution.
She advised them to leave the hire car at the airport and take a cab to
the little harbour of Grindavik, a few kilometres away.  There was a
guesthouse there; she would call ahead and tell them they were coming.
In the meantime, she said, she would call her contacts and make sure
that everything was ready.  With luck they would be able to leave the
next morning, half a day earlier than planned.

At Grindavik they checked in and then walked out on to the jetty that
protected the town's fishing boats from the arctic squalls.  A cold
salty breeze was gusting in and Sabine had taken Burke's arm
instinctively, as one does for warmth, and he had held it tightly, both
of them aware now, for the first time, as they watched the light fade
and deep ochre, blues and gold stretch briefly across the northern sky,
that they faced something more sinister than either had imagined: not
just the echo of an old evil, but a very present one.  She had hunched
her shoulders and suggested they return to the warmth of the little
guest house.  He had looked down into her eyes, fancied he saw an
entreaty of another order and kissed her hard on the lips.

In their small twin-bedded room they had fallen upon each other
hungrily, peeling clothes like the loose skin of ripe fruit as they
fell into the embracing warmth of the goose down duvet on Sabine's bed.
His hand unzipped her tight jeans and burrowed into the damp warmth
between her legs.  Sabine sighed and raised her buttocks as he eased
the denim, stiff and damp from the rain, over her thighs, tracing a
warm wet line with his tongue down the inside of one, his mop of unruly
hair brushing between her legs until he came back up to roll his tongue
around the tight little bud of erogenous flesh, swollen already by her
excitement.  He felt her shiver with desire and his own erection swell
almost painfully in response.

She clawed at his back, pulling the open shirt over his head and hers,
enclosing them as if in a tent while his lips, still wet with her own
juices, fastened upon hers.  She came before he penetrated her, aroused
by the moist firm pressure of his penis as he held her arms above her
head and rubbed his hard chest against her small soft breasts, and then
again as he thrust himself inside her, inspired by her orgasm, and
whimpering with lust as he slid his big firm hands down the length of
her body.

"That," she said afterwards, as he lay spent across her, suddenly so
much smaller and more vulnerable, 'was fucking brilliant!"  He laughed,
and she laughed too.  But it hadn't been, he told himself later,
drifting off into a troubled sleep; it had been more like making
love.

The flight to Kjolur took barely thirty minutes.  The place reminded
Burke of the grey villages in the west of Ireland, small, homely and
functional.  From the air Siggy had pointed out the Langjokul glacier
in the distance: a great lake of ice spilling over barren rocky crags.
He tried to imagine what it would have been like, flying over this
terrain in bad conditions in an aircraft equipped with only the
primitive navigation equipment of the 1940s.  The thought made him
shudder.  Sabine had stared out of the window for almost the whole
trip.  He feared for a moment that the night before might have become a
morning-after embarrassment.  But then she squeezed his hand.  And held
on to it.

On the ground their welcoming party was an automatic boost to morale: a
striking, tall, suntanned man with hair the colour of white gold.  He
came striding out of the tiny terminal building behind Siggy, who ran
across the snowy tarmac to embrace them.  They looked to Burke like a
different species: arctic animals frolicking in the landscape that only
they could consider home.

"This is Magnus Haraldson.  I call him my polar bear."

The tall man grinned, displaying a dazzling array of white teeth, and
held out a hand to grasp Burke.

"Nice to meet you," he said in English as flawless as Siggy's.

"Und Sic auch, gnediges Frdulein."  His German sounded to Burke as
archaic as it was immaculate, and the gestures matched, inclining his
head as he held out his hand to Sabine.

"Es freut which sehr," she replied, with a remarkably ready smile that
made Burke feel jealous.

"So, I think everything is in order," said Magnus as they clambered
into his Japanese four-wheel drive.

"I have thought the best thing is to go straight to the hut at
Thojafell," Magnus said, looking at Siggy with an implicit question in
his voice.

"Yes.  How is the heating?"

"I have been there already this morning and lighted the stove.  It
should be warm as a sauna.  The scooters are ready and fuelled.  I have
also checked out the GPS.  Everything as it should be."

"What's the GPS?"  asked Sabine.

Burke looked ironically askance at her.  Surely in Germany even gung-ho
girl reporters were more techno-savvy than that.

"Ah, it is the great American toy," replied Magnus.

"Global Positioning System.  It works with the satellites.  An aerial
on each scooter bounces up a signal to the sky and back comes a map
reading.  Or even better, if you live in a part of a world that has
good maps, it can feed in on to it."

"Like this," said Magnus, adjusting a few track pad controls on the
clip-on unit, until the digital numerical co-ordinates disappeared to
be replaced by a grid that to Burke's eyes appeared empty, until he
recognized the name Kjolur in one corner and a flickering hairline
sight a few millimetres to the south-west.

"It has changed lives up here," said Siggy.

"For the first time people can have a definite idea of where they are,
even if the ice fog comes down."

"Pahh!"  went Magnus.

"My father's people always knew where they were.  They could tell from
the winds, from the light in the sky."

Burke leaned against Sabine and was rewarded by a tongue darted into
his ear.  The world wasn't such a bad place after all.

In fact, he thought, as he looked out through the frost on the
vehicle's side windows, the world was extraordinarily beautiful.
Already the sun was beginning to go down, casting a glow over the
snowscape that mixed baby-blue and rose-pink.  God's colours for
kindergarten, he thought.  It seemed incredible, as they crunched their
way along a trail that led up on to a high plateau limited by the
tinted peaks of the ice-capped mountains beyond, that this frozen
paradise had been tainted.

The little hut appeared out of nowhere as the four-wheel drive lurched
over an escarpment.  The roof was low, gently sloped and weighted down
with thick snow packed in successive layers since the beginning of
winter, some six months earlier.

Magnus was already out of the vehicle, unloading their bags on to the
ground.  Siggy had gone up and opened the door which, to Burke's
surprise, was unlocked even though it contained valuable supplies.

"There's no theft around here," Siggy had explained.

"How could there be?  Everyone knows everyone else.  A stranger in
Kjolur would stick out like a tree.  Still, given the unwelcome
interest in our expedition, perhaps it was rash."

Inside, the hut was illuminated by a fluorescent strip which showed up
the concrete of the walls and the spartan metal furniture.  It was not
at all the homely place Burke had imagined.  He had seen too much
Switzerland.

Siggy told them the place was part of a network funded by the
government but maintained by local people as a shelter in case of a
sudden storm.  Out on the ice it was important to have a fixed point of
reference, somewhere that offered at least a degree of protection if
the weather turned against you.  They were marked on every map.

Sleeping accommodation was communal four sets of bunk beds, Burke noted
with some disappointment.  Magnus was busy in the corner lighting a
fire in the stove.  The fuel was anthracite and took a lot of heat to
ignite.  At last the coals began to glow and he left the little iron
door open to allow the warm air to circulate.  Siggy, meanwhile, had
put together a rough-and-ready meal of hot soup and dumplings from
their supplies.

"Here, try this."  Magnus produced a bottle of clear liquid and began
to pour measures into tumblers.

"No thanks," Burke countered.  His night on the town had left him with
a psychological resistance to the burned caraway seed flavour of the
local poison.

Siggy laid a hand on his arm.

"It's not brennivin."

"I should think not," boomed her compatriot.

"Birna would never forgive the suggestion even."

"Who is Birna?"  asked Sabine.

"My friend," Magnus replied in a voice that implied everyone knew who
his friends were.

"She also makes this," put in Siggy.

"Which is?"

"Only the best aquavit in the world," Magnus answered Burke's query
proudly.  He leaned across the table conspiratorially.

"Up here, we make it from local grain and the water of the glaciers.
Pure.  Water that fell as rain a thousand years before the first Viking
set foot on Iceland.  Skol, cheers, prost my friends."

He lifted his glass across the table.  Eamonn, Sabine and Siggy clinked
their own against his, then followed suit as their host downed the
alcohol in one.  Burke felt the warmth course through him, but to his
surprise felt no burning in his throat, though his brain immediately
registered the kick.

"Impressive."

The Icelander smiled appreciatively and refilled their glasses.

"Wait just one minute," said Sabine.

"Maybe it is not such a good idea we all get very drunk."  She turned
to Siggy.

"Have you told Magnus?"

"About what happened at the Blue Lagoon?  Of course, I imagine all
Iceland knows by now."

Magnus nodded.

"You think someone was trying to kill you because of what you are
looking for in the ice.  Do you think whoever it was is still after
you?"

Burke glanced at Sabine.  She nodded.

"I'm afraid, yes.  But we don't know why."

It was Burke's turn to frown.

The two Icelanders looked at him.  It was Siggy who spoke:

"That's not strictly true, is it, Eamonn?"

Magnus leaned forward across the table.

"Perhaps you might at least enlighten us as to what exactly we are
looking for?"

"What we believe to be out there is a plane, a plane that we think
might be carrying .. ."  Burke hesitated a second, 'radioactive
material."

"Radioactive material?"  Magnus repeated.

"You mean a nuclear missile?  From Keflavik?  The Americans' base?"  He
banged his fist suddenly on the table.  The empty glasses jumped.

"I knew it.  I always knew they were not to be trusted."  He went to
get up.

Siggy put a hand on his arm.

"Wait, my big bear, you jump to too many conclusions.  Let us hear the
man out."

Eamonn took a deep breath.

"We don't know exactly but it may be something like that, though it may
go back even before Keflavik.  But whatever it is, we think someone
desperately wants to stop us getting to it, telling the world about
it."

"Then we will help," the Icelander declared, as if delivering a
government statement, while replenishing their glasses.

"Iceland is not just a puppet any more.  We may be a small nation but
we have our pride.  Do you think that these people who tried to kill
you at the Blue Lagoon, they are from the CIA?"

Burke was taken aback.  Funny, it took someone else, someone fresh to
crystallize the worry that had been forming in Burke's mind.  The CIA
meant Allen Dulles, the man Hiram Carter had mentioned.  But Dulles had
been dead for decades, his interventionist policy cast on the rubbish
heap of history even before the Cold War had ended.  But what about his
legacy?  Were there still those who might be endorsing it?  What else
had Carter said?

"Ask them about that an' all, them Rooskies."  They had done that.  And
the man who could have given the answers had paid with his life.
However, there had been something else, too.  It had almost flashed
into his head the evening before when he had stood with Sabine on the
jetty at Grindavik, watching the sun set.  Sunset.  Sunrise.  That was
what Carter had said just before he mentioned Dulles: "Ask them about
Mrs.  K, too.  Ask them about the sunrise.  The one that never
happened."  The words scrawled in Russian, by Yakunin, on the envelope
containing the letter and the photo of the airman: "For the prevention
of the coming up of the sun."  In other words, stopping the sunrise.
Was there a link?

He sifted through the evidence again.  A scrap of a diary from the man
who gave Moscow the secret of the bomb, suggesting that he had done
much more than that.  The link to Yakunin, and the murdered Russian's
legacy which had, thanks to Abe Steiner, unearthed the unresolved story
of Joshua Finch.  But what was Nora Winter hinting at, and what had
Hiram Carter meant with cryptic comments about the other Los Alamos
scientists?  Was it possible that Fuchs was not the only spy?

No wonder he had got short shrift from Dickie Boston.  Though that had
been before the Blue Lagoon nightmare, just as when he had first spoken
to him in London, the explosion on the Bayswater Road had not yet
happened .. .

Magnus was looking at him intently as if trying to read his mind.

"If you think there is some sort of nuclear device out there, is it not
dangerous?"

"It might well be.  This thing has been out there a long time.  It
almost certainly crashed to begin with.  We have no idea what condition
it's in.  It could be fractured, even leaking radioactivity.  What is
certain is that there is someone out here who either wants to prevent
us reaching it or, probably more importantly, wants to get there
first."

"Wait," Magnus said.

"If you are correct, then they might kill others also who know about
this."

"Certainly."  Sabine, obviously relieved that Burke had not told the
whole story, was not going to be left out of whatever spin-doctoring he
planned.

"Why?"

"I don't know.  It is just that..  . Well, you remember old Gundar
Peterson?"

"Yes, of course."  Siggy turned to him and for a moment Burke thought
they were going to have a cosy chat about mutual acquaintances.

"I heard he committed suicide.  About a month ago."

"That's what people said."

"But you think something different?"

"It is just his death was so unexpected.  For him to have killed
himself, you see.  Gundar used to be a bit of a heathen.  Named all his
ponies after the old Norse gods.  But he had caught religion recently,
taken to going to seeing the pastor.  We had a bit of a laugh about it
down in the village, thought he just fancied her.  At the funeral she
was pretty cut up.  But she allowed him to be buried on consecrated
ground, even though it was assumed he was a suicide.

"And there was something else.  Something that ties in uncomfortably
with your story."

"Gundar had a little farmhouse not far from here.  He kept ponies, good
old Icelandic ponies, like your Shetlands," he nodded to Burke.

"Gundar loved his beasts, looked after them like a father.  Some said
he was the father of a couple."  He laughed, a short brief laugh.

"Then they all started to die.  It was what depressed him."

Sabine grimaced.

"How awful.  What was the reason?"

"No one knew.  Least of all old Gundar.  He thought it was divine
retribution for his past misdeeds.  He had been at sea, and led a
pretty racy life."  He smiled at the old man's memory.

"In the end it got to him.  At least that's what we thought.  He shot
Freya, his favourite old mare, then blew his own brains out."

"Yeech," went Sabine.

"Except that .. . ?"  Burke was watching the man's eyes.  They seemed
troubled.

"I don't know.  There just seemed something wrong about it.  I took a
look at a few of the other animals and asked the vet to carry out an
autopsy on the remains of the mare Gundar shot.  What he found was
cancer, a deep-seated bone cancer.  It baffled him because it was a
sort normally associated with long-term absorption of radioactive
material."

Silently, the big Icelander got to his feet, lifted the bottle of
aquavit.  Burke thought for a moment he was going to drain the rest in
one gulp.  Instead, he walked over to the sink and quietly poured it
out.

"Magnus, what's the matter?"  Siggy asked, then stopped herself, as if
she had suddenly realized what else was troubling him.

He turned back to the table.

"The ponies didn't just graze on the grass near the glacier.  They
drank from the meltwater.  The same water that Birna uses to make her
aquavit."

Cracked Ice

When Burke opened his eyes it was already after dawn, and a pallid grey
glow tinged with pink was filtering through the small, heavily misted
window.  Sabine stirred beside him, curled inside the thick down
sleeping-bag.  She had climbed down from the top bunk shortly after
they had turned the lights out.  They had made love quietly, but
without guilt, passion almost intensified by the modest necessity of
containment, after a little rearrangement zipping together their two
sleeping-bags.  She told him afterwards she remembered doing the same
at Communist youth organization weekends in the Saxony hills.  He had
sulked at her for awakening his jealousy.  She had kissed him on the
nose and snuggled down, falling asleep in the crook of his arm.  He had
lain a while revelling in a togetherness he had thought banished from
his life.  But he could not stop his mind working on the tale they had
heard over supper, until eventually the alcohol worked its insidious
magic and he succumbed to tiredness.

Awake now, and filled with the apprehension that comes with dawn in a
strange climate, he realized that Magnus and Siggy were nowhere to be
seen.

For a fleeting moment, he panicked.

Then the door crashed open and Siggy stormed back into the room, her
breath trailing clouds of steam behind her.

"Come on.  Magnus has everything nearly ready.  We would do well to be
on the move as soon as possible.  You can never tell how long a
journey's going to take."

Burke stirred himself, shaking Sabine gently by the shoulder.

"Hey, mousey.  Time to end the hibernation.  Spring's nearly here."

Siggy smiled.

"You should wash if you want to.  There is hot water.  We are quite
civilized, you know, even up here.  I will go and tell Magnus we are
ready to go soon.  Half an hour at most, please.  There are special
coveralls in that cupboard."  She pointed to a wooden chest in the
corner.

"Put them on.  They are insulated and also stop snow getting inside the
clothing."

Sabine hauled herself to her feet and stumbled towards the sink in the
corner.  Burke stretched and made his way to the door.  He closed it
again rapidly.

"Brrr.  Wrap up warm like the lady said.  You could catch your death
out there."

Sabine turned and looked at him.

"Sorry, that was an unfortunate turn of phrase."

"Taste isn't exactly our profession, is it?"

Magnus was standing alone uttering what sounded like old Norse
imprecations when Burke emerged from the warmth of the hut, dressed in
his tomato-red overall.

"Good morning.  You look troubled?"

"It is nothing too terrible.  Just that the weather is not as friendly
as I'd hoped."

Burke looked around him.  Apart from the cold, it seemed a beautiful
morning.  Visibility was excellent and the sky was the palest blue.
Magnus noticed him looking up at it approvingly.

"Hah, you like our light?  It is one of my country's best features. But
not today.  Behind that blue is a white you do not see, yet.  It is
coming down."

Burke looked at him quizzically.

"A storm of some sort?"

"The very opposite my friend: a stillness, a great whiteness that
sometimes descends over the glaciers.  It cuts the light, or rather the
reflections.  Suddenly everything is as one colour.  At times like that
distance and height become very hard to judge.  And on a glacier those
are the things that matter."

"Should we wait until it looks more settled?"

The Icelander shrugged.

"Maybe.  Maybe not.  This is a very obvious place to wait.  Perhaps too
obvious.  Also, I might be wrong."  He grinned.

"Even we folk up here are only human, you know, although we do not like
to admit it.  Come along, it is best we get started."

Burke looked back to the door of the hut to see Sabine emerge.  Her
skin shone in the pale sunlight and her eyes sparkled.

"Look at me," she shouted, pirouetting in her scarlet overall.

"Am I cool or what?  And get a load of these!"  She fished in her
pocket and produced a pair of deep blue-lensed wraparound sunglasses.

"Maybe I look like some fifties Italian movie star on a skiing
holiday."  She posed as if for the cameras, and then ran up to him.

They walked arm in arm across the crunchy fresh snow to where Siggy was
already removing sheets of tarpaulin from what appeared to be motorbike
sidecars on tank treads and skis.

"Snow scooters," Magnus said with evident relish in his voice, like a
motorcycle enthusiast showing off a collection of vintage Harley
Davison.

"The best mode of transport on earth."

Burke did a quick count and realized that there had to be almost a
dozen of the hybrid vehicles.  Siggy was firing up the engine of the
lead scooter, a gaudily painted red and yellow machine.  Clearly
visibility rather than camouflage was the prime consideration.

"You have not ridden one before?"  asked Magnus.

Both Burke and Kotzke shook their heads.

"Do not worry, it is very easy.  Watch."

The Icelander threw his leg easily over the nearest machine and turned
a key in the ignition.  All of a sudden the preternatural silence of
the winter landscape was shattered by a Hell's Angel on a moped.

Magnus grasped the throttle with his right hand and revved the engine,
then demonstrated the clutch and gear change.  Without warning, he
disengaged the clutch and the machine slid off, accelerating rapidly
across the snow, propelled by its treads.  The Icelander cut into a
sharp U-turn a hundred yards away, leaning into the curve like a
motocross master, then coming back towards them, standing up in an
obvious feat of bravado.  Faster and faster.  Burke wondered what the
vehicle's top speed was.

The Icelander brought the machine to a stop only feet in front of them
and leaped off, leaving the scooter still chugging away.

"Now it is your turn."

Sabine checked the zip on her overall and climbed astride a scooter.

"Like this?"  she asked, as Magnus leaned over her to demonstrate the
gear change.

"Hey, Eamonn, yours is over here."  Siggy had stopped tinkering with
her own scooter and had started up another.  Burke walked across to it,
looking back just in time to see Sabine bolt off across the snow.  For
a novice, she was obviously a very quick learner.

"Your friend is good."  Siggy nodded appreciatively in her direction.

"She is, isn't she."  Burke was considerably more apprehensive, but
after a few false starts and firm but tolerant instruction he too
managed to get the machine going.  The sensation of speed was
exhilarating although he noticed from the speedometer that he was
barely doing 40kph.  As he crested a small snow drift, he saw Sabine
and Magnus hurtling towards him.

"Whoa," he called as they drew alongside.

"Well, what do you think?"  said Magnus.

"Are we ready for an expedition?"

Sabine was radiant.

"Aren't they exciting?  I'm going to give up all other jobs and become
an arctic explorer, no, polar racer."

Soon Magnus and Siggy were loading supplies on to a small trailer on
skis that was attached to the back of his scooter.

"Not too much.  But our chances of getting to the spot marked on your
map and back again before the light fails are only fifty-fifty," Siggy
explained.

"This is a four-man tent with good insulation.  Also we have some
heating equipment, lights and a little food.  With luck we will need
none of it, but out here only a fool travels in the dark and it would
be unwise to go without it."

"Hey, no need to convince me," said Burke.  The thought of spending a
night out on the glacier was scary enough even without someone with a
gun looking for them.

"Normally we would have left a detailed itinerary with the town
services in Kjolur, but in the circumstances .. ."

"I understand.  It would have been too easy to trace us."

"Yes, though Magnus is not entirely happy.  He thinks whoever is trying
to harm you already knows where you are headed.  If he was hoping we
would lead him to this thing, then he would not have tried to kill you
at the lagoon."

"Yes," said Burke.

"That had occurred to me too."

Magnus looked up and beckoned them over.

"I wanted to show you this.  It is important.  I hope none of us will
get separated but in case something stupid should happen, this is your
lifeline."

He was indicating a small device that looked to Burke absurdly like a
lap counter, just behind the handlebars on each scooter.

"This is the GPS, the global positioning system I was talking about
earlier.  Up here there isn't a sensible man or woman now who'd go out
on the glacier without it.  This antenna," he pointed to a small
plastic wand on the rear of the scooter, 'transmits continuously to the
nearest American communications satellite, which then triangulates it
with others in a network all around the planet.  It beams back to you
the precise co-ordinates on the map and the direction you are currently
taking.  You cannot get lost.  Ever.  At least in theory."

"Ever?"  Sabine looked doubtful.

"I said you cannot get lost.  I did not say the ground could not open
up in front of you.  It is small consolation knowing your exact
latitude and longitude if you are stuck thirty metres down at the
bottom of an ice crevasse."

"Thanks."

"But the most important thing is that this should allow us to establish
when we are at the precise co-ordinates indicated on your old Russian
map.  Not that we have any guarantee, of course, that those are
accurate."

"Of course."  Sabine smiled.

"But we also have this."  She removed from her shoulder bag a hand-held
device in black plastic with a dial and a speaker.

"What is it?"  asked Siggy.  Burke suspected he knew already.

"A Geiger counter," replied Kotzke.

Burke looked down at the physically unimpressive liquid crystal display
of the GPS.  It seemed simple but it was a perfect guide only if you
had a good grasp of latitude and longitude, along with a detailed
knowledge of Icelandic geography.  He suddenly wished he'd taken that
orienteering course back in school.

It was agreed that Magnus should take the lead.  His bright orange snow
scooter and fluorescent green coverall set against the white snow made
him look like a day-glo version of the Irish Republic's flag.  Sabine
followed close behind, with Burke on her tail and Siggy bringing up the
rear.  Burke resisted the temptation to catch up with Sabine and try to
carry out a conversation which would in any case have scarcely been
possible, given the noise of the scooters.  It was just that there was
so much they had not yet talked about.  Their plans when this escapade
was over.  Both of them, he thought, might become minor media
celebrities after the story broke.  Then there would be a book,
certainly.  With a bit of luck, it might even be a success.  He
fantasized that it might bring them in enough money to buy a small
property somewhere he fondly thought of as 'away from it all'.

He looked around him.  Iceland maybe?  Only joking, he told himself,
though on a day like this, crisp, cold with a clearing sky above them,
he could almost imagine it.  He could certainly see what magic Magnus's
bleak homeland held for its inhabitants.

Bavaria came to him in a flash: somewhere in the foothills of the Alps,
with Austria only a skip and Italy a jump away.  He was tired of
London, but, Dr.  Johnson's maxim notwithstanding, he was by no means
tired of life.  Not any longer.  Not when a new life might be just
around the corner.

How far Sabine shared his attitude was something he preferred not to
think about.  Little more than a one-night stand, Burkey boy, and
already you're a mug for the woman, he could imagine George Prosset
telling him in El Vino's.  Daydreams are one thing, he thought, but
what mattered was never again to let a woman become the the be-all and
end-all.  There were other things that mattered more in life.  Or then
again as Sabine dropped back and took one hand free off the handlebars
to blow him a kiss on the rushing icy wind maybe there weren't.

The sun was high now, or at least as high as it would go this far north
of the equator at this time of the year.  The insipid sky of early
morning had given way to a pastel blue and now deepened to an almost
turquoise shade.  Magnus turned around in his seat and gave them a
thumbs-up sign, indicating the sky.  Clearly his concerns about the
weather had been somewhat allayed.  The GPS, Burke was glad to note,
appeared to be functioning perfectly, with the liquid crystal display
indicating both their position and heading.  Only one thought gave him
momentary cause for concern: if he could fix his own location so
accurately, then so perhaps could someone else?  Were they in a quest
after a missing artefact, or the prey in a winter hunt?

According to the readings on his GPS they were only a few dozen
kilometres from the co-ordinates on the map he now mentally referred to
as "John's legacy'.  The timing was good.  With luck they would be at
the site well before midday.  Who knew how long they might have to
search, or whether there was anything to find?  Even in late March
there was little light left in the sky much beyond 3:00p.m.

Neither Burke nor Kotzke noticed when they left terra firma and began
travelling over the last slowly shifting ice mass that was Langjokull.
The snow provided a seamless cover.  After about an hour's travelling,
Magnus braked to dawdling speed and held up a hand to signal to the
others that they should draw level, carefully.  As soon as they had
done so, Burke realized why.  Just beyond the Icelander's scooter was a
chasm almost two metres wide, big enough to have swallowed any of the
snow scooters.  He could not see the bottom, at least not without
venturing a lot closer to the edge than he felt would be wise.

"Be careful," warned Magnus, 'you must always remember this is ice, not
land.  It is always possible for a whole section to sheer away and
widen the crack."

Burke suddenly appreciated with what skill their 'polar bear' was
negotiating the seemingly featureless landscape.  The terrain they were
traversing was a natural minefield.

"How deep is it?"  asked Sabine.

"From the appearance, I would guess some twenty metres here, but maybe
further along it could be up to fifty or sixty metres.  The icecap here
is thick, and it makes its own laws."

"But the direction we want to go in," Kotzke said, indicating the GPS,
'is that way."  She pointed straight across the crevasse.

Magnus shrugged again in the way, Burke guessed, that had become his
habit with foreigners who tried to deny the forces of the elements.

"Here, you can see, nature is often master.  We must do as she says. We
cannot go across, therefore we will go around.  It will take time. We
must simply hope it will not take too much."

Sabine turned and looked at Burke as if he might somehow have a
solution.

"What do you think, Eamonn?"

"I think', he replied, looking at the great blue-white shards of ice,
'that it reminds me of Superman's fortress of solitude," he replied,
slipping his scooter into gear and starting off after Magnus who was
already making tracks in front of them, keeping at least ten metres
from the edge of the crack.

For what seemed like a wasted eternity they coasted alongside the ice
chasm, while their GPS indicators showed clearly that they were moving
diagonally back on themselves and away from their destination.  Then,
just when Burke had begun to think they would end up camping for the
night on this glacial wilderness without even having reached their
target, the crack disappeared, sealing itself up as if they had reached
the end of a giant zip-fastener in the ice.  Magnus turned and set off
on a new heading, straight for the twin peaks of the hills that
channelled Langjokull's frozen water towards now-distant Kjolur.

The sun was no longer clearly visible by the time they reached the
first outcrop of rock that indicated the great glacier was being
squeezed by the earth underneath.  By now even Burke and Sabine were
handling the snow scooters confidently, and had taken to swopping
places in the convoy or occasionally drawing level to exchange a few
shouted words of conversation.

The change in the landscape, however, worried Burke.  He had noticed
Magnus also scan the horizon from time to time for any sign of human
presence.  On the stark emptiness of the glacier any colour other than
white would have stood out sharply.  They themselves he thought
disconsolately, must have been visible from miles away, little specks
of brightness in an empty landscape that was turning more monochrome by
the minute.  But he had been reassured that anything else moving would
have been equally visible.  Now, however, as they approached the rocky
excrescences, he realized that either would provide excellent
concealment for a watcher, or even a whole team of watchers, if they
were in camouflage gear.

When the sun began to fade, Burke had pulled his scooter up beside
Magnus and pointed his head at the whitening heavens above them.  The
Icelander had simply nodded, not exactly glumly, but not exactly
enthusiastically either.  As he had predicted, the sky was fading to a
flat eggshell that in turn dulled the surface of the snow beneath,
killing reflections.  It was as if colour had been slowly stripped from
the world.  Burke thought it must have been days like this that
inspired the old Norse legends about the end of the world, when the
great wolf would eventually catch up with the sun and swallow it.

So he scarcely noticed when Magnus stopped his machine dead in front of
them, until the Icelander cut off the engine.  Burke eased his throttle
back and came to a stop alongside.

"To save petrol," the Icelander replied to the unspoken question.

"This is it.  We're here .. . wherever here is."

Burke felt a burst of adrenalin, looked around triumphantly at Siggy,
then down at his GPS which, almost to his surprise, gave the reading
that until now had been no more than a legend on a faded military map.
He lifted his head again and looked around him, and saw .. . nothing.

Sabine came up to him.  He saw the look in her eyes too: blankness.

"Well," he ventured, 'what did we expect?  Smouldering wreckage?  A big
yellow radiation warning sign?"

As if he had prompted her, Sabine reached down into her pannier and
produced the Geiger counter.  She turned it on and they all heard the
familiar ticking, soft, barely perceptible at first, and then, as she
moved her snowmobile forwards, markedly louder.

"That's it, that's a trace."  Burke almost shouted the phrase.

"Sorry, that was just me playing with the volume.  This is a sensitive
device but the signal here is extremely faint, indicating little more
than a high level of background radiation."

"That's it, then.  Wild goose-chase."

"The map co-ordinates were hardly going to be spot-on, Eamonn, were
they?"

"No, but this is obviously the place.  In the sort of storm we're
talking about that night, those two mountains over there, small as they
are, could have been a fatal obstacle."

"Particularly to a pilot flying low to avoid radar."

"Which you British had only just invented, and would almost certainly
have been installed at Reykjavik airstrip."

"So let's go closer."

"Yeah, but we have to presume that that's what the search parties they
sent out must have done."

"Then and for how many years afterwards."

"Eamonn, that's it.  That's what we have to consider.  Why did they not
find the plane?"

"I don't know.  Remember, up until two days ago I didn't really believe
it existed.  Since then, I've been assuming it either disintegrated or
got buried in snow."

"Snow melts, not all of it, not here on the glacier, but enough to
reveal something as big as a crashed bomber.  It couldn't have
completely disintegrated.  At any rate, we have reason to believe its
cargo didn't, so how could it suddenly disappear?"

It was Siggy who spoke.  She had been listening to their conversation
with a wry smile.

"I think you have just seen the answer to that question."

"Uh?  Of course, the crevasse.  You think it got trapped in there?"

"No."  Siggy was trying not to be condescending.

"Not in there, it was not big enough to swallow a plane, although it
could have taken large parts of it.  But that is a new crack, not an
old one.  You see how they change.  Next year the ice will press
together again in winter and the crack will close up, much of it.  Then
we will get spring and the thaw and the tensions change.  Maybe it will
open wide again, wider even, or maybe another will take its place.
There are many such fissures in a glacier like this.  That is why it is
such a dangerous place."

Sabine turned to her.  For almost the first time, Burke could detect
not the slightest hostility towards Siggy.

"I understand.  She's right, Eamonn.  But what do we do?  Could this
thing be trapped in the ice underneath our feet?"

Magnus looked at her in surprise.

"Maybe, but it is unlikely, even if your plane crashed on this exact
spot.  This is a glacier, and glaciers move.  Right now, the ice we are
standing on is heading -slowly but surely for Kjolur.  It would take
many thousand years for it to get there and, unless a new ice age
occurs, it will melt before it does, but we still know the direction we
are going in: through the peaks and down to the lowland."

"So all we have to do is follow the flow of the ice?"

"It is not that easy; the glacier is big, and we do not know exactly
where we should start from.  Glaciers do not move fast.  It is unlikely
that anything would have drifted in the ice more than a few hundred
metres at the very most, even over the course of half a century.  It is
not possible to tell where a fissure might have been more than fifty
years ago.  But there is another option.  I should have thought of it
yesterday."

"What is it?"

"Follow me."

Magnus turned the key in his snowmobile's ignition again and set off
towards the nearest of the rocky peaks jutting through the ice.

"Look," he said as they stopped close to the snow line.

"Follow the line of my finger, down there; about eight kilometres away
is Gundar Peterson's cottage."  Burke could just about make out a speck
that at this distance might have been a house or a rock.  But both he
and Sabine nodded.

"Look above it and you will see a black line."  This time both of them
could clearly see it.

"That is a volcanic lake; the one I told you about.  It is kept warm
from beneath, but it is also fed water from Langjokull, up here where
we are now.  The meltwater starts about a kilo metre or so higher up.
If I am right about Gundar's ponies then that is where we could pick up
a trace."

"Come on," said Sabine, her face brightening, 'what are we waiting
for?"

Burke shrugged and, with only a half-glance at the greying sky,
followed them.

From his own vantage point the security man watched the little
procession of snow scooters make its way down the rock.  He was
secretly impressed.  He had never believed they would get there.  He
lowered the telescopic sight on the M40A1 and stroked his moustache.
The rifle could hit a target a kilo metre away with an accuracy of
inches, magnified ten times through the Unertl sniper scope mounted on
the barrel.  He had acquired a liking for it during his service with
the United Nations forces in Bosnia.  He had practised with it,
cynically, playing the crosshairs over men, women and children as they
moved in the streets of Sarajevo, forever worried, but unaware that one
of their 'guardian angels' was also the angel of death.

The rifle was only a last resort.  He had already made arrangements for
the main firework display.  He thought his masters would approve.  The
evidence would be gone.  For ever.  He set down the gun and used a
small pair of field binoculars to track their progress.  He had not
used them earlier when the sun was high.  He had known too many good
men in the thick forests of the hills around Sarajevo shot in the head
because the sunlight had caught the reflection of their polished lenses
(and a few macho Balkan dick-heads, too, killed because they insisted
going to war in Ray-Bans).  But now there was not enough sun in the sky
even to cast a shadow.  He was not sure, of course, if anyone in this
group was armed, although he had watched the big blond native in the
ridiculous lime-green outfit scan the hills like a hunter as they
approached.  But he was confident that he had not been spotted.  His
white with dappled grey battle camouflage, from the winter war in
Bosnia, blended perfectly with the snow and rock terrain.

Now, as they set off in the direction of the distant volcanic lake, he
eased himself out of the rocky niche from which he had been watching
them and clambered quickly over the black basalt towards the hollow
where he had left his own snow scooter.

"Stop!  There's something here," shouted Sabine suddenly.

Burke turned around.  She had fallen back about 100 yards behind the
rest of the party.  They had descended a quarter of a mile from the
pass between the two stunted mountains, and were now at a part of the
glacier where they could see large snow-free patches where the ice
itself was clearly visible, a vibrant blue even under such a
featureless, insipid sky.  Not far from here, Magnus had explained,
there was still volcanic activity beneath the glacier itself.  As a
result, a river of meltwater, still at temperatures just above
freezing, ran under the ice cap towards the lake in the valley below.
Sabine had jumped off her scooter and was kneeling by the side of the
ice holding out the Geiger counter.  It was ticking loudly.

"The reading just took off.  It's clearly limited to the snow-free
area."

The radiation level was mounting, though still well short of anything
that might be considered dangerous.  Though not so for the ponies that
Peterson had kept: if they had been drinking water with this degree of
contamination for any length of time, it was no wonder they had got
sick.

"Then let's follow it upwards," Burke said.

"Nothing trapped in the ice is likely to have made it down this far."

There was suddenly enthusiasm in the air.  Despite himself, Burke found
he was twisting back the throttle to get a little extra speed out of
the vehicle as they climbed.  Sabine, however, had thrown off her
earlier caution and was driving as fast as the machine would go on the
slope, hurtling past Magnus who shook his head.

"Careful," Burke called after her.

He looked ahead to see Sabine accelerating ever faster.  Then with a
sudden shock he saw her scarlet scooter throw its caterpillar treads
into the air in a flurry of snow and vanish from view.

"Sabine!"  he yelled at the top of his lungs, his cry drowning out any
scream from her.

Magnus too had watched in horror, then pushed his throttle to full and
headed for the spot.

Siggy and Burke followed, Burke driving erratically, his eyes glued to
the empty space where he had last seen the girl he now knew with a
bitter certainty he loved, as they covered the few hundred yards to
where the 'bear' had stopped.

Magnus had halted his scooter about ten metres away from the edge,
dismounted and scrambled up the slope, his feet in their felt-soled
boots crunching on the thin layer of compacted fine dry snow.  There
was a familiar smell in the air, one that did not belong here, the
smell of spilled diesel.  Sabine had disappeared at a point where the
slope evened off so it was impossible to see beyond what she had
obviously assumed was a plateau in the ice field but which now revealed
itself to be the edge of a precipice.  The question was: did it drop
six feet, or 600?

It was with a dry mouth that Eamonn Burke rushed past Magnus, and
stopped on the edge.

Meltwater

The North Atlantic, off the east coast of Iceland, October 1945 Artyomy
Nosov was feeling sicker than any dog he had ever seen.  Over the
heaving gunwales of the survey vessel the waves pitched, dark
green-black and sinister.  He clasped his stomach and once again
retched into the dark water.  Never again, never ever again, he
promised himself, would he take up an assignment at sea.  But even as
he thought it, he knew it was a hollow boast: when orders came direct
from Dzerzhinsky Square, it was a brave man who said "No'.  Or a dead
one.

"Comrade lieutenant, a radio signal.  Come quickly, please."

Nosov staggered towards the door that led to the bridge.  Icy sleet
whipped by the furious wind stung his face.  Jerking open the door, he
glanced up briefly at the blackness above.  No night to be on the high
seas in a small ship; no night at all to be trying to fly.

Inside, the lights gave an artificial impression of cosiness,
reinforced by the haze and aroma of strong Russian tobacco smoke.  It
was muggy even.  Warm from the engines below.  The heavy smell of hot
diesel mingled with the smoke and the acrid scent of sailors' sweat on
well-worn clothing.  Nosov could see the captain sneering at him.  He
was a loyal Communist but like most hardened seamen, he had little time
for political officers, especially some Muscovite who had no experience
of the sea.

Oleg Baranov, the pale, timid-looking radio operator who to Nosov
seemed little more than a child, was looking up from his desk, one hand
holding his headphones, the other poised with a pencil above a sheet of
damp paper.  Nosov looked at him questioningly  The boy nodded
urgently.

"Yes, yes, it's what you said.  I have been monitoring the frequency
all evening."

Nosov frowned.  It was too early.  But then, even Yakunin had been
unsure just how and when the man would make contact.  A call sign, that
was all.  Repeated once or twice at most, to make sure it was picked
up.  A sign that he was on his way.  With cargo.  A short signal
transmitted on a short-distance frequency.  A signal that Nosov would
then translate into a different codeword, one that they could send out
on the ship's shortwave without fear of interception because it would
be meaningless, one that would reach Murmansk, where Yakunin would be
pacing the floor of the freezing control tower, still believing his
Greek heroes would deliver: Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods,
and Perseus, the slayer of the Gorgon.  Nosov had looked them up, these
funny code words in the great Soviet Encyclopedia, but he was damned if
he understood what relevance they had.

But it was academic, in more ways than one.  It was obvious that the
boy was not hearing what they had been expecting.

"Perseus?"  Nosov prompted him.

"In Morse, Latin script, remember, not Cyrillic."

The boy nodded but his face was still drawn.  His hand worked on the
paper with the pencil.  They had assured Nosov that despite his youth
he was one of the best 'listeners' in the Soviet navy.

"It's fast, repeated.  But not Perseus.  I think it's a position, a
heading .. . this."  He pointed to the marks he had made on the paper;
a precise, neat hand.

Nosov bit his lip.  The boy was right.  This was a map reading, the
last thing in the world he had expected.  The man if it was him -was
broadcasting his position.  It was insane.  Unless ... he was in
trouble.  He looked through the smeared windows at the featureless
sleet-streaked blackness outside.

"Now, repetition," the boy was saying.

"The same letters, over and over .. . SOS."

Nosov closed his eyes.

The boy was looking down now as if afraid to face the world.

"It's stopped," he said.

Fate's Fickle Finger

Eamonn Burke looked down into the abyss with half-dead eyes that
dreaded what they might see.  The sight that confronted him took his
breath away.  It was not at all what he had expected.

Instead of Sabine's body lying like a discarded doll on jagged shards
in a deep ravine, he saw a virtual rift valley extend beneath him, a
great canyon of ice and snow, as if a fault line had opened up in the
glacier.  And against the far wall, more than twenty metres away, where
the ice again rose vertically, lay a chunk of torn grey metal bearing
the silver star roundel of the United States Air Force.  A cry from far
below tugged him back to reality.

"So for God's sake, stop admiring the view and come down and help
me."

Beside him, Magnus broke into a loud belly laugh and pointed down
almost vertically to where the ice fell away before their feet.  Sabine
was lying face-down in a drift, more than a dozen yards away from the
crumpled wreckage of her scooter.  The handlebars were twisted round
180 degrees, and a thin trail of blue vapour escaped from the ruptured
fuel tank.

That she was at least still alive was demonstrated by the number of
German obscenities.

"Verdammtes Arschloch.  See, what did I tell you?  Aoow, Scheisse.  And
you didn't believe me.  Verdammt noch mal.  Will someone help me; I
think I've broken my damn leg."

Magnus returned to Burke's side with a length of thick nylon twine, and
proceeded to construct a cat's cradle which he then told Burke how to
use.

"Wait until I give the signal."

With that he walked to the nearest scooter and attached the twine to
the frame, just above the caterpillar treads.  He turned on the
ignition.

"Now," he said.

Burke stepped into the cradle, waited until Magnus had taken the strain
of his weight on the scooter, and began to lower himself over the
precipice.

"Okay, I'm there," he called, as his feet touched the snow layered on
the surface of the sunken glacier.  Christ, he thought, she must have
hit this hard.  He made faltering progress, even though Sabine lay only
a dozen or so yards away.  All the time he found his eyes wandering
from her to the great hunk of silvery metal on the other side of the
chasm.

Burke kneeled down, stroking her hair.

"Can you move?"

"It depends which bits.  I'm afraid I'm going to be even more
flat-chested than ever.  God knows how much of me was crushed by the
impact.  I felt like so much air had been expelled from my lungs I'd
never breathe again."

"You were lucky."

"We were lucky."  She turned on to her side, the effort causing her
pain.

"Look, Eamonn, there it is.  The diaries were right.  They really did
do it."

"Or at least had a go at it.  This hardly looks like a success story,
in anyone's terms.  Where does it hurt?"

"Just about everywhere.  But I'll live."

Burke rolled up the leg of her scarlet snowsuit.

"It doesn't look good."

"It doesn't feel good."

From the knee down, her leg was a mass of purple bruising, with an
ominous, almost black mark about halfway down the shin.

"It's probably broken."

Kotzke grimaced.

"What next?"

Burke glanced up at the walls of ice that surrounded them and the
darkening sky above.  Already there was little light left in the pale
northern heavens.

"Don't even think about it."

"I'm trying not to.  But Eamonn, it's all true.  There really was a
crash."

"Yes, but I still have to be convinced of what it proves."

"It proves at the very least that a Russian master spy half a century
ago knew about the crash of an American bomber that the Pentagon itself
has never admitted."

That, Burke had to admit, was pretty undeniable.

"And," she added grimly, 'that he was probably murdered for that
knowledge.  As was Klaus Fuchs for threatening to reveal it."

In the drama of the past half-hour, Burke had pushed the other danger
that threatened him to the back of his mind.  For the moment it was
enough to deal with the situation they were in.

"We're going to have to call in a helicopter to get you out of here."

"Like hell you will.  Are you serious?  We have just landed in my case
almost literally on the scoop of the century, and you want to call in
the flying doctor with the camera teams that will follow.  Not on my
budget, Mr.  Burke."

"But you're hurt, for God's sake.  A story's just a story."

"But some stories are bigger than others.  I've done my leg in, not
broken my neck."  She smiled the engaging big-eyed smile that Burke had
found irresistible at their first meeting.

"And I'm damned if I'm going to let it, or you, spoil the sensation."

"He-lloo.  Room for a little one?"  It was Siggy, he saw, coming down
the sheer ice face the same way he had.

"Magnus has decided to pitch camp for the night."

Burke looked at her, horror-stricken.

"We have to get her out of here."  He ignored Sabine's renewed
protests.

"I agree," said Siggy, examining Sabine's bruising.  The internal
bleeding was obviously bad, although it seemed unlikely to lead to a
serious haemorrhage; the broken leg would need setting.  There was no
possibility of her using a snow scooter even if hers had not been
written off.  She could ride on Magnus's ski-tow, but it would hardly
be very comfortable.

"In any case, there is nothing we can do now until the morning.  They
do not send out the helicopter from Reykjavik after dusk unless it is a
real emergency and it would be dark now by the time they reached us.
Magnus is calling to Kjolur on the radio telephone to advise them that
we have had an accident."

Sabine sat up, her face contorted occasionally as a flash of pain shot
through her.

"Eamonn, as we're stuck here, why don't you at least see if there's any
sign of the rest of the thing, before what's left of the light
fades."

He looked at her with a mix of frustration, exasperation and
admiration.  Even in these circumstances, he knew she was right.

Burke trudged off across the ice towards the remains of Joshua Finch's
B-29.  Here it was the physical proof that Fuchs had been talking about
in those cryptic diary entries: 'the material evidence remains frozen.
But one day there will be a thaw .. . nothing stays hidden for ever."
Burke almost laughed.  They had thought the thaw he referred to was
metaphorical, the end of the Cold War.  But the dour scientist, with
his literal, empirical mind, had not been indulging in poetic licence.
He had quite simply meant what he said.

Awe overcame him as he approached the the severed aircraft tail
section.  The thing was enormous, he realized, far bigger than he had
imagined, a colossal feat of aircraft engineering for its generation: a
huge aluminium sail almost as big as a three-storey building.  The left
horizontal section that had obviously hit the ice wall had buckled
beyond recognition, but the right side protruded still at an angle of
almost ninety degrees to the vertical.  Burke took off his insulated
ski gloves and bent down to touch an aileron.  The metal felt,
unsurprisingly, as cold as the ice it was all but imbedded in.

He found himself wondering about the last moments of Joshua Finch.  Was
he alone?  Had he realized the risk he was taking?  He would have known
the route, of course, the long flight through dark skies over icy
waters around the North Cape and down on to the Kola peninsula and the
forbidding arctic city of Murmansk.  That was what he had planned,
Burke was sure.  That was Klaus Fuchs's secret.  What Burke was less
certain of was the links between them.  Who else had been involved? Was
it possible that Joshua Finch was just the lynch ping for some wider
conspiracy?

The plane had broken up in the crash.  Perhaps Finch had been flying
low to avoid detection and in the apalling weather had clipped the
hills, plummeting down on to the glacier.  Whether the fissure had
existed then was impossible to tell.  Perhaps it had been caused by the
impact.  The plane's disappearance into it and the heavy snow which had
fallen for days afterwards went some way towards explaining why the
search parties had never found it.

But then they would not even have known where to start. Thermal-imaging
was science fiction in the forties.  There would have been no
helicopters equipped with high-tech heat-sensitive equipment scouring
the country, as there would be if something similar happened today.
They probably thought Finch had crashed into the sea.  Or even imagined
he had succeeded.  They must have deduced soon afterwards, surely by
the time of Fuchs's arrest and trial four years later, the extent to
which the West had been betrayed, just how far American atomic
supremacy had been compromised.  For all they knew, back in the cold
winter of 1945, the atom bomb might already have been in Stalin's
hands.  Was the history of the immediate post-war years based on that
false premise?  And would history have been different if it had been
true?

But where was the main body of the plane?  In the falling light,
Burke's eye followed the trajectory that the angle of the tail section
indicated.  It meant nothing, of course.  There was no guarantee that
the rest of the fuselage had not been snapped off at an angle.  It
depended whether the plane had broken apart on crashing.  Or whether,
for some reason or other, it had cracked up in mid-air, although that
seemed unlikely.

With a glance back to where Siggy was ministering to Sabine's leg, he
began cautiously to make his way along the ice wall.  The running water
that Magnus had heard was somewhere in front of him.  For more than 200
yards he continued.  Then the landscape altered dramatically.  The rift
in the glacier had widened to a point where the opposing ice walls were
nearly 400 yards apart.  Now, in front of him, the 'ground', as he
could not stop himself thinking of it, fell away again.

Burke watched as the running water flowed between the cracks in the
ice, falling through the fissures, slowing as it lost heat.  Here and
there strange shapes like frozen fingers emerged from the body of the
glacier where the running water had joined with it.  Around them the
flow slowed until the water seemed sluggish, as if its very molecules
were slowing, tempted by the solidity around them to settle down.

Burke clambered carefully downwards, watching as he did so to make sure
of a way back.  When he got to the base of the nearest 'finger', he
realized that it towered above him, more than twice his height.  He
reached the edge and looked, not without trepidation, around the corner
to where the chasm plunged away even further, and a distant rumble and
fine spray suggested a real waterfall of considerable magnitude.

It was then that he saw it.  Indeed, it was as if it had been suddenly
dropped on him.  The sundered fuselage of the bomber its colossal wings
still attached but each snapped upwards in the middle at a preposterous
angle lay like a maimed eagle, wedged in between walls of ice, the
great engines like fledglings sheltering underneath, their vast
propeller blades twisted and broken.  The flow of water descending from
the flaw in the glacier ran through the broken fuselage as if it were a
feature in an ornamental garden.  Inside, Burke was certain, were the
answers to their questions.

But now was not the time to go further.  Within twenty minutes it would
be dark.  The flat colour of the sky suggested maximum cloud cover.
There would be no moon, and Burke did not fancy trying to make his way
up through the maze of ice in darkness.  By the time he got back, in
fact, it was already dark.

Siggy was waiting for him at the bottom of the precipice where a tent
had now been set up.

"I've found it," he managed breathlessly.  Then, remembering his
priorities, said, "How's Sabine?"

"She is fine.  She is lying down in the tent.  It would be too risky to
try to move her in the dark."

"Where is Magnus?"

She gestured upwards.

"He is up there.  He will sleep with the equipment.  We have all we
need down here.  Also it will be more sheltered here if there is a
wind."

Burke was horror-struck.

"He'll freeze to death up there without protection."

Siggy smiled, a firm smile that Burke thought was more generous than
genuine.

"He will be okay.  He has a good sleeping-bag.  He will sleep on the
supply trailer, under the tarpaulin.  It will not be comfortable, but
he is an Icelander.  He is used to worse.  It would be much more
dangerous to leave the equipment and the vehicles unattended."

Something about her tone made Burke realize that there had been a
change in their situation while he had been gone.

"Has something happened?  Any sign of "company"?"

She knew what he meant.

"Not as such.  It is just that when Magnus tried to radio to Kjolur, he
couldn't get through.  All there was on the airwaves was static."

"Is that unusual?"

"I don't know enough about it.  Sometimes, I know, there can be
interference when there are electrical storms.  But this is not that
sort of weather."

"What does Magnus think?"

"He is not happy.  He says it is "white noise".  It happens out here.
There is electricity in the air.  When there is the aurora borealis,
the lights in the sky, then it is impossible even to try to radio.
Sometimes phones work up here.  Sometimes not."

The Heart of the Matter

Much to his own surprise, Burke found the atmosphere in the tent
convivial.  But the thought of Magnus doing the real macho bit, braving
the elements up on the surface of the glacier took the sheen off the
occasion, that and the gnawing worry over the lack of radio
communication.  In the back of Burke's mind was the uncomfortable idea
that their signal might be being jammed.  They had contemplated taking
turns at keeping watch during the night, but in the end decided against
it.  The insulated tent was black and almost invisible in the moonless
night.

Sabine had been almost beside herself with excitement when Burke
revealed that they were so close to the main body of the wreck's
fuselage.  He could not be sure, he said, but from what he had seen it
seemed the plane had simply cracked in two, probably on impact with the
glacier.

"If there ever really was a "Fat Man" bomb in there, we're about to
find it."

"What I don't understand," said Siggy, 'is that if this plane was
carrying any sort of bomb, why didn't it explode when he crashed?  Why
wasn't half of Iceland evaporated?"

"An atomic bomb was never designed to explode on impact," Burke
explained.

"In fact, the biggest problem they had in designing the first ones was
in getting the things to explode at all, in a nuclear explosion that
is."

"I still don't follow."

"The sort of bomb they dropped on Hiroshima was dead simple, a sort of
gun assembly that fired one piece of uranium into another.  But they
were too expensive.  They simply didn't have enough uranium of the
right grade.  The type of bomb we have here, if we have one at all the
type used on Nagasaki and the one that was the prototype for all
immediate post-war production-line atomic weapons depended on a
complicated controlled "implosion".  A whole shell of explosives
arranged to blast inwards and compress the radioactive core to beyond
critical point.  In fact, the core itself was one of the most difficult
parts of the whole assembly .. ."

"Hey, you were actually listening to what that mad American told us,
weren't you?"  Sabine interrupted.

"Anyway, not only did they have to have this very precisely tooled
initiator made up of highly radioactive materials, but in order for it
to work, the explosives in the shell all had to be set off
simultaneously; which meant the detonators all had to fire at exactly
the same time, and that meant wiring them up to an electric trigger
device set on a timer, which in turn, of course, had to be primed. When
the people from Los Alamos set off the first one at the Trinity test
site in the New Mexico desert, it was all wired up to the command
centre.  They just threw the switch and an automatic timer took
over."

"Fine on a test site.  But how do you do that when you're dropping the
thing on a target?"

"Ever heard of batteries?"

Siggy's face cracked up.

"You're kidding me.  You mean the reason that thing could crash at
whatever the hell speed it did and not go off was .. ."

"Yep," confirmed Burke.

"Batteries not included."

Shortly after first light the next morning, Magnus woke them.  The big
Icelander was putting a brave face on his night out, but it was clear
he was freezing cold.  Siggy brewed up coffee using the fuel cells he
had brought down from the supply trailer.

"What worries me most is that I still can't get through on the radio.
It's not as if the weather could be responsible.  You can see from the
sky that it's clearing.  It'll be perfect flying weather within the
hour.  We could call in a helicopter and be out of here in no time."

"Are you crazy?"  said Sabine, inevitably.

"I for one am not leaving here without the proof we came for.  This is
no time to give up."

"You're in no condition to move anywhere much, let alone start hiking
over the ice," Siggy told her.

"Look, I understand what you've done for us here, but don't play the
schoolmistress.  I know what the situation is.  I've a broken leg,
probably, though it might be just a crack.  But if Eamonn's right, then
the wreckage of this damn plane is only a few hundred metres away.
Surely you two big strong men can support a little girl like me as far
as the beginning of the second crevasse, at least to where I can catch
a glimpse of the thing."

Burke looked across at Magnus, who shrugged and sighed, a gesture Burke
took to mean that they had already exceeded safety parameters beyond
any common sense.

"There's another consideration," Burke said.

"We could be walking into trouble."

"Did you see any sign of life yesterday?"  inquired Sabine.

"No, but .. ."

"No, but nothing.  What was the point of even getting this far if we
give up now?"

And that was it.  Somehow they had agreed that Eamonn and Magnus
between them would support her as far as the 'rollover', from where she
would be able to see into the crevasse where the wrecked B-29 lay. Then
they would think again.  Siggy had rescued the camera from the pannier
of the written-off snow scooter.  They would leave the makeshift camp
as it was, but Magnus insisted on taking his radio phone along; they
would try at ten-minute intervals to get a message through. As soon as
they established contact, he insisted, they would ask for help,
whatever ideas about exclusivity Sabine might have.  If they had no
luck in getting through by noon, they would pull out anyway.  It was
not ideal but they could always winch her up to where the remaining
scooters were and load her on to the trailer for the trip back to
Kjolur.

The sun had already begun to creep up towards its low zenith by the
time they reached the point where the fault in the ice-cap split.  In
front of them, the crumpled wreck of the aircraft's shattered fuselage
lay like the broken silver toy of some primeval giant.

Sabine gasped involuntarily.

"Oh, Eamonn, it's beautiful."

He gave her a sideways look.

"I bet you enjoy road accidents too."

"No."  She feigned annoyance.

"But it is, isn't it?  There's a sort of tragic poetry to it, like
coming across Scott's camp in Antarctica or the wreck of the Titanic,
still untouched after all those years."

"I know what you mean," Burke admitted reluctantly.  There was
something unexpectedly moving about the vision in front of them.  This
huge, deadly artefact had been neutralized by its surroundings, a
weapon of death with a potentially lethal cargo brought down to size by
the merciless inhospitable landscape around it: an instrument of
destruction reduced to the status of incidental decoration.  Except, he
reminded himself, that it was still leaking poison.

"I'm coming down with you."

"What?  Don't be ridiculous."

For an instant her eyes flashed at him with the cold fire of a wounded
animal.  Burke looked at Magnus, who nodded.  Despite the glint of
victory in it, her smile seemed like a reward.

"Come on then, but keep hold of the radio phone.  It's up to you to
keep trying to get through.  Believe me, you'll prefer it if Magnus
here doesn't have to strap you sideways across his scooter for that
long ride back to base."

Sabine made a face.  But even so, Burke could sense the satisfaction as
he and Magnus took her by the arms again and began the slow, tricky
descent down the broken ice.

"We have to have pictures, you know," she said.

"Once it gets out that this is here, there'll be cordons all over the
place; the US military will go bananas, and that'll be the last we ever
see of it.  You have to find the papers.  There's bound to be
something: orders or documentation, the original flight schedule maybe.
Something that'll prove that this flight was what we know it was. Make
sure you check.  They'd be in the cockpit, next to the pilot, I mean ..
."  Her voice tailed off.

"Yes," said Burke.

"He's going to be in a hell of a condition after all these years."

"It only just occurred to me.  I hadn't thought, really.  That there'd
be bodies."

"We don't know that.  We don't know anything much, do we?"

"I guess not.  Be careful."

But they did know, Burke thought, as they picked their way gingerly,
like competitors in a strange three-legged slow-motion obstacle race,
down through the ice boulders towards the wreckage.

Siggy had descended ahead of them, armed with Sabine's weatherproof
Nikon.  Eamonn and Magnus called over to her from the entrance to the
shattered fuselage.

"Smile for the cameras, boys," she shouted to them.

They waved back, and Siggy clambered to join them.

"Hand me the camera," Burke called, as he and Magnus let Sabine down on
to an ice boulder by the side of the aircraft.

"We're going to want some shots of the interior of this thing."

There was something surreal about stepping inside the broken fuselage
of any aircraft, let alone one that had crashed half a century ago.
Almost immediately the world outside disappeared.  He was inside a
tunnel, a vast open tunnel made of metal but cluttered with the
paraphernalia of wartime and a dead generation: webbing, steel
compartments bolted on to the inside of the airframe containing
emergency equipment that had turned out to be useless when the end had
come.  Burke put out his hand to steady himself against the
superstructure only to find he was clutching paper.  He withdrew his
hand and saw a faded black-and-white photograph of a young girl with
platinum blonde hair fall to the floor and turn to slush as it soaked
up the condensed moisture from the volcanic stream that trickled
through the compartment.

Burke looked down and saw water lapping around the thick soles of his
insulated boots.  The warm water that flowed down from the heat source
under the ice and continued over an escalating series of cascades down
to Hvitarvatn lake below, trickled here through the cavernous empty
hull of the plane.  Empty.  Burke stopped, and looked around him as if
uncertain of the evidence before his eyes.  Or rather, the lack of
evidence.  The bomb bay doors were enormous, clearly modified for the
possibility of dropping an early atomic device.  But of the device
itself, there was no sign.  He cursed under his breath, and then
laughed at the irony.

"What the hell..  . ?"  Helped by Magnus, Sabine had limped into the
doorway, and stared, as he did, at nothing.

"I don't understand .. ."  she began.

"Nor do I," replied Burke.  He knew how desperately she had wanted this
to be the scoop of a lifetime.

"We've found it okay, and then again, maybe we haven't."

"They've been, haven't they?  We're too late.  It's been stolen."

"Hardly."  Burke was letting her down gently.

"Look: this plane may be ripped open but there isn't a hole big enough
to get a 1945 "Fat Boy" out of, except for the bomb bay doors and
they're on the ground.  There never was a bomb in here, at least
certainly not when it came down.  We have to face it."

"I just don't understand."

"So what was it all about?  What was this guy doing if not stealing a
bomb?"

"Maybe there's something in there that'll tell us."  She gestured
forward, towards the flight deck, where the door lay open, thrown
carelessly back as if one of the crew had just passed through it.

He picked his way towards the open door and put his head through. Burke
had seen corpses before, only too recently.  The vision of the fat
Norwegian swimming in his own blood and intestines in the Blue Lagoon
rose unbidden to his eyes.  But he had also seen the bodies of those
long dead and still unburied: in Afghanistan particularly, where the
ancient belief that carrion should be allowed to pick clean the bones
of the dead had fitted in only too well with the ebb and flow of civil
war.

This was different.  The glass of the cockpit windscreen was,
inevitably, shattered.  But no wind blew through it.  The air was
still, cold, like the air inside a butcher's walk-in freezer.  For a
moment he wondered if the body that lay slumped forward over the
instrument panel might conceivably have been preserved, like a lump of
meat in a chill cabinet.  There was no smell of decomposition.  Then he
came to his senses.  It had been more than half a century since there
had been life in the corpse before him, half a century of winters and
summers, even here, half-buried in a glacier on the edge of the arctic.
He braced himself, and touched the cracked leather flying jacket.
Almost at once, the body that had been Joshua Finch toppled to one side
like a broken puppet.  Burke found himself staring into the empty
sockets of a yellowed skull, black holes in bone to which vestiges of
shrunken skin still clung, like rotted leather, their only colour that
of corruption.  He started back involuntarily, restraining the impulse
to gag.  The figure slumped to the cockpit floor, landing with a
sickening crack as the exposed skull hit metal.

Beneath it, Burke noticed for the first time, lay a hard black
briefcase.  Papers?  Documents?  He bent down to pull it out from under
the body.

"Eamonn, quick, look at this."  Back in the main body of the aircraft
Magnus and Sabine were squatting as she held out her Geiger counter,
which was going wild, only a few feet away from what appeared to be an
old metal toolbox, lying broken and rusty in the stream that flowed
through the fuselage.

"I had forgotten to turn the Geiger on."

Thanks, thought Burke, though he said nothing.

"The question is," Magnus was saying in his annoyingly ponderous way,
'what is inside?"

"Be careful," Burke warned.

But the big Icelander had already managed to use an ice-pick to prise
open the corroded lid.  Inside the box was another one Burke was
reminded of Russian matryoshka dolls this time made of heavy, soft grey
metal, probably lead, similarly fractured, presumably by the impact of
the crash.  Sabine's Geiger counter was thundering in their ears.

"I'm not sure this is at all safe," she said.  Burke winced at the
understatement.  His first instinct was to get out of there as quickly
as possible.  But his experience at Hiram Carter's hands had persuaded
him to risk a few minutes' exposure.

Magnus was working on the lead box with the pick.  It opened easily.
Burke had no idea what he was expecting to see, until the moment he saw
it, when he realized it was what he should have been looking for all
along: in a dull grey metallic casing lay a sphere of shiny metal of an
unearthly hue, somewhere between grey-green and silver, the size of a
golf ball.  With a chill of recognition he realized he was looking at a
mixture of polonium and beryllium embedded in plutonium, exactly as
Hiram Carter had described it: an initiator, the perfectly machined
heart of an atomic weapon.

He looked up, unable to prevent just a hint of triumph creeping into
his voice.

"Maybe we weren't so very far wrong, after all."

Back outside in the clear light of the winter sun, Burke took the
ice-pick and used it to break open the combination lock on the document
case.  He had begun to suspect what he might find inside.  With
trembling fingers he pulled out a thick sealed manila envelope.  He
glanced at Sabine.

"What do you think?"

"I think we open it.  We're journalists, not archaeologists."

Burke used his thumb to rip open the envelope from the corner.  Inside
was a letter, typed on lined foolscap paper.  Burke caught his breath.
In the top left hand corner, it bore only a one-line address: TO Box
1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico."

The letter was brief.  It was addressed to Igor Kurchatov, care of the
Soviet Academy of Sciences, Moscow.

"Dear colleague," Burke read.

"In deep and troubled awareness of the new era that has dawned upon the
world, we send you a gift.  It is a dangerous present and we are acting
dangerously, many would say, in sending it to you.  But we know that
your own research has led you in the same direction.  And we believe
that only by providing this token of our belief in the need for
openness in the scientific community can we prevent calamity overtaking
us.  There is no future in conflict; there can now be no future for
conflict.  The hope of humanity lies in achieving an equitable balance.
We trust you will understand this, and that you can persuade the men of
political power to understand also.  Yours in science."  There were
sixteen signatures.  Burke read them with a sense of awe.  At the top
of the list was Niels Bohr, followed by Isidor Rabi and Klaus Fuchs.
Near the bottom came the name that he had secretly been hoping to see:
"J.  Robert Oppenheimer, Director, The Manhattan Project'.

But the one below that was a bonus.  A bonus that would shake the
world.  A signature so immediately recognizable that the name typed
alongside was redundant: "Albert Einstein'.

Farewell, My Lovely

Burke threw back his head and laughed.  All of a sudden he could see
nothing but the picture that swam in front of his eyes: a grainy black
and white photograph that stared down from the bedroom walls of a
million science students an old man with an unruly shock of white hair
and twinkling eyes sticking his tongue out at the camera and the world.
At last Burke understood what Albert Einstein had been laughing
about.

"Do you know what this means?"  Burke demanded.

"This is the biggest story of the decade.  It cracks the Western
establishment's mythology wide open.  Fuchs was just the fall guy.  The
top half of the Los Alamos team the best brains on the planet was
willing to give the bomb to Moscow rather than allow American hegemony.
With fucking Einstein thrown in.  We'll make every front page in the
world.  This calls for a celebration.  Wait here."

Burke's mind was dancing as he scrambled back towards the little tent
he now thought of as their 'base camp'.  His emotions had done as much
see-sawing as they could cope with in a single day.  The idea that
Fuchs had had high-level support had been creeping into his mind more
and more.  He saw now that the idea of stealing a bomb had been fantasy
from the start.  He had missed the scientific approach: send the
Russians the one bit they really needed.  But he had never imagined
that Einstein might be involved.  It made perfect sense, of course.
Even though the great physicist had never been involved personally in
the work at Los Alamos, it had been his inspiration.  His letter to
Roosevelt back in 1942, pointing out how close German research could be
to achieving an atomic weapon had been crucial in persuading him to
back the Manhattan Project.  But Einstein's purpose then had also been
to ensure a balance of terror, a balance that would make it impossible
ever to use the weapon and survive.  There could be no repeat of
Nagasaki.

But what the story needed, it occurred to Burke, was a photograph that
would win over editors and back up the Einstein signature: a long view
of the bomber, with its shattered cockpit and the faded paintwork of a
red Indian brave above the legend "Navajo Arrow', in its grave in the
glacial ice.  He eyed the landscape through Sabine's Nikon in the hope
that it would give him the perspective he needed.  In the centre of the
viewfinder was a rocky outcrop, where the stone once again squeezed the
river of ice.  It was not far, about two hundred yards.  From there, he
guessed, looking back up at the plane, he would get the right sort of
vista.  Treading carefully, he began to climb.

Tucked into a nook on the stone slope above the glacier on the other
side of the aircraft, the man in the camouflage suit panned the
fuselage with his Unertl gun-sight.  He had seen Burke enter the
shattered silver tube.  The German girl, unfortunately, was not with
them.  He focused on her separately, wondering if it was worth trying a
single shot, but even as he considered the possibility he saw Kotzke
move forward.  She too was clearly going towards the plane.  The
trouble was, from his vantage point he could not quite see the entrance
to the fuselage.  Too bad, he mused.  As long as he didn't see her
emerge back into his field of vision, he could assume she would go down
with the rest.  He put down the rifle and took out a small radio
transmitter from his rucksack.  He did not see Eamonn Burke leave the
fuselage.  By the time he looked up again, Burke was out of sight
behind the wall of ice that hemmed in the plane's nose section.

He pressed the frequency button, sending the LCD display rocketing
through the numbers.  He watched it spellbound; having come to it later
than most, he never ceased to be amazed by modern technology.  For the
past twenty-four hours the little gadget had been set to block the
standard radio telephone frequencies.  Now it was going to send a
signal of its own to the little radio-activated detonator he had
implanted at one end of the Semtex plastic explosive fixed along half
the length of the bomber.

Funny, he thought as he hit the 'send' key; he had always wanted to
know what it would be like to bring down an aircraft.

The explosion threw Burke forward almost before he heard it, jarring
his knee painfully against the exposed rock at the edge of the ice
sheet.  He turned in horror at the long, slow roll of thunder that
followed.  The scene was unimaginable.

Instead of a great silver cigar lying in a trench of blue-white ice,
there was a pall of grey-black smoke.  For a second he wondered if
there really had been a bomb on the plane that they had not noticed. He
scrambled to his feet as the ominous rumble continued.  The ice was
cracking.  With a noise like the sudden snapping of lightning-struck
oak, the entire landscape seemed to give way.  He glanced in panic back
towards where Sabine, Magnus and Siggy had been sitting on the ice.
None of them was to be seen.  The whole 'rollover', where the ice
descended from one layer to the next, was in motion, like a frozen
waterfall in a sudden thaw.  He watched in horror as the crescendo
built.  Burke staggered, slipped, and then he too was on the ice ice
that was moving.  His footing gave way beneath him.  Then the lights
went out.

The Wages of Sin

Brixton Prison, south London, December 1949 5 When they finally came
for Klaus Fuchs, they did not knock at the hour before dawn, the
apocryphal favourite time of the secret policeman, but in very English
fashion, around tea-time on a Monday afternoon.

He knew already when he saw the black Rover saloon pull up outside the
prefab house on Ninth Street, which he had been so recently allocated.
And now here was Henry Arnold, Harwell's security man who had become
his friend over the past few months, even as Fuchs had begun to suspect
he was really his interrogator.  He was rattling the door knocker,
politely, patiently.  With two plainclothes officers, probably not from
the local constabulary, he thought, waiting calmly by the car.

The journey to London was pleasant, in the circumstances, the
conversation almost affable, as if there was an eagerness on both sides
to avoid any embarassment.  What mattered to both was that it was over
now.  His arraignment in a closed court at Bow Street was quickly
conducted in an atmosphere of terse formality, before he was taken in
another car, handcuffed to a very ordinary, if extremely burly
policeman, to the bleak Victorian fastness in south London they called
Brixton Prison.

It was on the second day there, spent in a solitary cell that seemed
surprisingly adequate accommodation to a man who had endured four long
years of the privations of the high desert, that he met William
Skardon, though he introduced himself only as "Jones'.  Skardon told
him that he represented 'another branch' of the security services.  He
was the man who had made his reputation within the ranks of MI6 by
interrogating William Joyce, the notorious "Lord Haw-Haw' who had
broadcast for Hitler.  Skardon had extracted the confession that had
led to Joyce's execution -something Klaus Fuchs did not need to know.

Ever since seismologists back in September had detected the tremor that
was the unmistakable signature of an atomic device, detonated somewhere
in the vast deserts of Kazakhstan, it had only been a matter of time
before they moved on Fuchs, Skardon told him.  The newly constituted
Central Intelligence Agency, under a man called Allen Dulles, had
worked with the FBI on some old transcripts out of the Soviet consulate
in New York.  Armed with a newly deciphered code book, they picked up a
trail that was not hard to follow.  But there were gaps.  It would help
him if he filled in the details for them.  He knew the penalty for his
crime, did he not?

"Yes," Fuchs replied calmly.  He had been resigned to it, ever since it
was made clear to him that as a British subject, one who had taken the
oath of allegiance to His Majesty King George VI, he was guilty of
treason.

"Death," he said simply.

Skardon said nothing.

And in the end, with no hope of clemency suggested, Fuchs painted a
picture of the early days of his espionage.  In that he was un stinting
He sacrificed everything he considered of little worth, including
details of a pudgy, owl-faced man he knew only as "Raymond', enough
corroboration for the FBI of the evidence already pointing to Harry
Gold.

But on other matters, he proved more resistant.  Were there others of
his level, Skardon probed, who had perhaps shown more sympathy with the
idea of nuclear proliferation than was considered correct?  Fuchs was
enigmatic, preferring to sidetrack the conversation into abstract
areas, though he insisted they were strictly relevant.

"Words are so very emotive.

"Proliferation" would be a bad thing.

"Balance" is not.  The illusion of omnipotence is."

Only once did the conversation verge on what might be termed politics,
when Skardon challenged Fuchs about his reason for selling his
knowledge to a foreign power.

"First of all, I sold nothing.  That implies a transaction of some
sort.  None occurred.  Second, let me ask you a question: if you were a
horticulturalist and had discovered a new strain of wheat that was far
more productive than any other known to man.  What would you do?  It
would be very profitable, would it not?"

"I suppose so.  Yes."

"And to share it would be folly?"

"Maybe."

Fuchs smiled.

"Even if by so doing, you could avert the disaster of famine?"

"Dr.  Fuchs, that is not what we are talking about here.  We are
talking about weapons."

"Ah, of course, I thought we were talking about principles."

When asked directly about his relationship with Oppenheimer, all Fuchs
said was: "A brilliant scientist; an estimable man.  But he is an
American.  I am not.  You must not equate us."

And when Skardon brought the conversation down to the issue of atomic
initiators, Fuchs was genuinely shocked.

"First you must persuade me, Mr.  "Jones", that your own security
clearance is adequate for me to discuss such details with you."

Skardon found him exasperating.

"We know what happened," he bullied, 'back in 1945."

"Yes," replied Fuchs.

"I thought you would, sooner or later.  That is probably a good thing,
don't you think?"

Only once did Skardon get more out of him than the confession that was
eventually published:

"Dr.  Fuchs, I believe you could tell us more about the object that
landed at the base of Army Group 509 in New Mexico in July 1947."

Fuchs allowed himself a rare smile.

"Ah, yes, Roswell.  I'm afraid that was a bit of a prank.  But it was
necessary, you know.  As necessary as anything else."

In the end Skardon was resigned to the fact that Fuchs had told him all
he ever would.  Even the threat of death seemed to have no terror for
him.  Skardon left it to the officially appointed lawyer, however, to
tell him that, as Britain had been an ally, rather than an enemy, of
the Soviet Union at the time of his offence, the maximum penalty was
only fourteen years.  He never knew if Fuchs registered any relief.

Quiet Time

Burke opened one swollen eyelid a fraction and tried to close it again.
He saw nothing but white.  Then he tried again, and made out shapes in
the white.  His hands, he realized, were freezing.  He tried to raise
his head off the blissfully numbing surface that he now understood was
ice.  A world filled with threatening noise had suddenly been replaced
by one of total silence.  Somehow it was even more threatening.  He
forced himself up to his knees, painfully, and looked around at a
landscape of almost spectral beauty.

There was no aircraft, not even a deep glacial trench where it had
lain.  The sheet ice had closed over it: as definitively as a bank
vault slamming on its treasure.  But no combination on earth could open
this closed door.

He stumbled forwards uncomprehendingly, calling out a single name, the
name of a woman who ten days earlier had meant nothing to him, but now
meant the world.  A lost world.

"Sabine!  Sa-bine!"

Panic fought with shock and despair for command of his logic and
emotions.  Rescue.  He would radio for rescue.  But the radio didn't
work, he remembered.  And in any case he didn't have it.  And there was
nothing to rescue.  They had been in the plane, all three.  And the
plane had gone.  Gone for ever.  Cold, bitter tears coursed down his
cheeks.  There was no point in doing anything.  Ever again.  There was
nothing out there but silence.  The silence of the tomb.

PART THREE

Fallout

The False Dawn

Lager 65771 Gosudarstvennoye Upravlemye Lageryei.  Trans-Ural
jurisdiction.  Magnitogorsk, April 1955 The old man spoke through
cracked lips, his face lined and weathered by the frost, his eyes
almost opaque, the effects of the encroaching cataracts compounded by
snow blindness

"Rudi," he breathed, his voice coming in harsh rasps.

"You know what is happening."

"Yes, my general," the younger man replied, 'you are dying."

The old man nodded.  He was glad that his friend had told the truth.
His brother officer, he reflected, but now also above all, perhaps his
friend.

Rudiger Aschenheim watched with cold eyes.  They would have been filled
with tears, had he any left to shed.  But crying was not something he
could even remember how to do.  Tears were for other men, and women
too.  So many women, and their children.  Tears were a luxury.  They
had all learned that, in the end.  Blood was the fluid that mattered:
the fluid that was spilt most copiously in their profession.  Tears
were part of the mopping-up operation.

The general turned his head painfully.  He looked at the cracked window
that failed miserably to let light penetrate the freezing wooden hut
they inhabited along with forty-eight other prisoners.  But in any case
the general could no longer see anything more than a vague patch, a
lighter rectangle in the pervasive gloom.  And that was only now, for
the few short weeks of the year when they were permitted to quit their
back-breaking labour before the pale light faded from the sky.  Soon
the spring would come.  In Bavaria, he thought, it would have arrived
weeks ago, brought girls out into the English Garden, young men
swigging from litre steins of frothy beer by the Chinese pagoda.  They
had passed through Munich briefly, in the spring of '45, seen the
charred remains of the pagoda, after an R.A.F attack.  He had wondered
at the time if the young Englishmen who had blown this oasis of
conviviality to hell had known it was named in honour of their country.
Not that it mattered.  Not that anything mattered.  Not now.

The Siberian spring was an altogether different case: no gentle
blossoming of snowdrops and crocuses followed by the translucent green
of the linden trees in new leaf.  Here spring was a torrent of
meltwater, an eruption of new life out of the arctic tundra, most of it
malevolent: swarms of mosquitoes rising from the fetid swamps as the
frozen earth melted on top of the permafrost; and the water, with
nowhere to go, turned the soil into slush.  The temperature would soar
and then, none too soon, drop again, freezing the sweat on their backs
as they laboured on the dictator's mad plans to carve factories into
this inaccessible wilderness.  The general would not regret his failure
to see another summer.  He would labour no more.  Another dictator had
plans for him.  Death.

"R-R-Rudi," he began, his feeble voice almost failing him.  The other
inmates had crowded to the far end of the hut, not just because the few
coals they were allowed glowed miserably in the rusted brazier.  They
respected the privacy of old comrades at the final hour.  Their own
discipline had gone, long ago.  But they had not all become animals.
The Russians saw that, and resented it.  It had given them the strength
to achieve the onerous tasks set them each morning.  Some, perhaps,
still hoped, even now, to return home.  To what, none of them knew.

"R-R-Rudi."

"Hush.  There is no need.  There is nothing to say.  Nothing that needs
to be said."  A trace of a smile crossed Aschenheim's cracked lips.  He
would have made more of it, but it had been so long.  The only smiles
that passed between men in the camp were faint expressions that said,
"Yes, you and I face the same fate, each day."

That was all anyone could expect.  Survival was what mattered, or
didn't, depending on the individual.  No one questioned anyone else's
decision, not any more.  One day, they had all said, one day.  But that
was once upon a time.  Today there was only today; tomorrow, there
might be today also.  But not necessarily.

He put his left hand gnarled, horny and dirty, the hand of a man of
sixty who had spent all his life in manual labour, rather than that of
a forty-year-old who had once trained to be a lawyer on top of the
general's.  The old man's flesh felt like little more than strips of
scrawny meat hanging on cold bones beneath shrivelled chicken skin.

General Hermann Freiherr von Rulenstein closed his almost useless eyes.
He could see more in the darkness that lay within.  More of the things
that he wanted to see.  As well as those he would rather have
forgotten.

"Yes, Rudi, there are some things that should be said."  His words came
out as a croaked whisper.

"Things that someone, someday, should know, for the history books, if
they still write them."

Aschenheim looked back at him, his face expressionless.

They had been through it all together, from the glory days in France in
1940, when they rolled through the fertile countryside like young gods
with the world at their feet, and nubile French goddesses in their
beds.  Resentment was fleeting, resistance a joke, more an invention of
the beleaguered British.  In the summer of 1941, he had watched the
young Frenchmen of the division Charlemagne sign up to serve the Fuhrer
in the crusade against Bolshevism.  The new world order, that's what
they had called it.

Europe was being remade.  Yes, there were problems.  The black uniform
of the Waffen-SS was regarded with respect but also with fear, not only
by the local population but by the regular Wehr-macht.  Though he knew
that most would have given almost anything for a transfer, to join the
elite, to wear the "Death's head' badge that signified they were ready
to make the ultimate sacrifice for their country, if needs be.  He had
even laughed at those who had suggested their 'skull and crossbones'
made them look like pirates.

Yes, of course, he had heard the rumours that unpleasant things had
happened, that the Reich division had been involved in ugly scenes, had
done things that even in wartime were not supposed to be tolerated. But
he put most of it down to enemy propaganda.  And some of it to the
excess that he knew was inevitable when men were frightened and
fighting for their life, and then, in spite of their fears and against
their own expectations, ended up in a position of invincible power.
There would be apologies needed, later.  But he was in von Rulenstein's
division, and they were one thing and one thing only: the best damn
army in Europe, possibly in the world.

And he was the general's adjutant, far from some of the fighting
perhaps, but always there, where it mattered, when it mattered.  As he
had been at the end, after the ugliness of Croatia, after the disaster
of Greece, then the reverses in Italy, there in the closing chapters
when the young gods were turned into messenger boys -the moment,
ironically, when fate hung heaviest on their shoulders there when they
could have fled the cruel future hiding in wait for them, when they
failed history, and history failed them.

When the general spoke, therefore, the words came as little surprise to
him.

"Do you remember Switzerland?  The hotel by the lake in Geneva?"

As if he could ever forget.  How long ago was it?  Only ten years,
almost exactly.  But it seemed like a lifetime.  Or two.

Geneva, March 1945 "Herein."  As soon as he had uttered the command to
enter, General von Rulenstein regretted it.  The tone had been too
imperious for a Zurich businessman.  It had been such a long time since
he had worn civilian clothes that he had forgotten some of the
mannerisms that went with them.  He looked down at the lapels of his
suit as if to remind himself.  Rather nice, he thought, a fine, dark
blue woollen herringbone, almost English in cut.  Not inappropriate,
under the circumstances.

"Two gentlemen downstairs to see you, sir," the maid announced, bobbing
respectfully.  Von Rulenstein was immensely relieved that she spoke the
local French patois, which he had little trouble understanding, rather
than the Swiss-German dialect he found both incomprehensible and comic.
The idea of mimicking it himself had been the only aspect of the
mission that worried him.

"Ah, the Americans."  He smiled.

"Send them upstairs, please, and ask them to wait a few moments in the
sitting-room.  We shall be with them shortly.  See to it that we are
not disturbed.  We have business to discuss."

Turning to the younger man standing by the window, he added in German,
"This will be the importers from New York, Rudi.  Please check that the
documents for the chocolate contract are ready."

One could not be too careful.  There were few Swiss in Geneva, even in
the lower ranks of the hotel trade, who did not have at least one other
language.  The maid bobbed again and left.

"Shall I go next door, sir, to greet them, while you change?"  the
younger man asked, coming almost to attention as he spoke.

"Yes.  I suppose I ought to.  It will be what they expect.  Creates
more of an impression.  And this is, after all, an important occasion.
Come to think of it, perhaps you should change too."

"Sir."

Major Rudiger Aschenheim, equally ill at ease in his tweed jacket and
baggy dark flannels, brought his heels together, a movement of
subconscious habit, bowed slightly from the waist and walked to the
door of the adjoining bedroom where his own uniform hung.  They had
unpacked them this morning, from the bottom of their business luggage.
He had taken the precaution of pressing both, not a job he appreciated,
but on a mission such as this, bringing a batman would have been
unwise.  And there was obviously no question of entrusting that
particular chore to the hotel laundry service.  Their uniforms would be
needed for only a short spell, but useful, to impress on their visitors
that, despite everything, they were still a force to be reckoned with:
a fighting force, and one that had shown itself, before the odds were
stacked so heavily against them, to be without equal in the world.

Von Rulenstein breathed out, feeling more himself as he pulled on the
familiar high-coloured tunic of his uniform.  It had been a good idea
to take a suite, he reflected.  In any cases, a hotel sitting-room was
no doubt where many of the business deals that took place in Geneva
were conducted.  The Hotel Walliserhof had been a good choice, too.
Friulani, the Italian intermediary who had arranged the meeting, had
suggested it.  Respectable.  Expensive, of course.  Formal.  Its
distinguished nineteenth-century frontage was modest in comparison to
some of the grander hotels which had sprung up along the lakeside in
the 1920s and 30s.  The interior was all dark mahogany and antique
Persian rugs scattered on polished parquet; the staff were polite,
efficient and apparently wholly un inquisitive  Herr Zwiingli, the
owner, was the soul of Swiss confidentiality, he assured them.

The two men were already seated in the heavy brocaded armchairs in
front of a fireplace of almost baroque magnificence when Aschenheim
opened the door and entered the adjoining sitting-room.  He saw them
stiffen slightly at the sight of his black uniform.  It was a reaction
he had become used to, although he had never before come face to face
with a ranking enemy officer who was in civilian clothes, or one who
was not his prisoner.

The chemistry in the room was awkward.  Both men had risen from their
chairs as he entered.  But neither had exactly stepped forward to shake
his hand.  It was as if they were hanging back, embarrassed somehow by
the fact of their presence in the same room.  As well they might have
been, of course.  Out there in the wider world, only a few dozen miles
to the south and to the north, soldiers of the great alliance they
represented were engaged in mortal conflict with his countrymen:
killing and being killed for a few feet of territory.  The war was not
over yet.  Except that in reality, of course, it was.  The only
question was whether or not the result was a foregone conclusion.  That
was why they were here.

The awkardness was dispelled, however, by the entry behind him of von
Rulenstein, resplendent in his black Waffen-SS general's uniform with
the knight's cross and oak leaves at his neck, a man who even when
staring defeat in the face knew the worth of displaying his honours.
Von Rulenstein could be hearty when he felt the occasion demanded it.
Before either of the other two could react, he had moved quickly around
the octagonal table that separated them and grasped the hand of the
thinner of the two, a tall, gangly man with an aquiline nose whom
Aschenheim took from his demeanour to be English, though he could not
prevent himself from wondering if he might be Jewish.  How odd it must
have been, he thought obliquely, back in the days when no one noticed
or cared about such things.  If there ever really had been such a
time.

The Englishman seemed taken aback.  But instinct had won out and he had
gripped the SS-general's hand.  The American, he noticed, had taken the
opportunity to move towards his own side of the table and had busied
himself with his briefcase, taking from it a bound folder of documents
which he laid face-down.  Aschenheim studied him.  He had no doubt that
this was the senior partner.  The man was older than he had expected,
about fifty he would have guessed from the greying of his hair and the
little moustache which, had the man been German, he would have said was
a tribute to the Fuhrer's own upper lip.  It was not quite as
square-cut, of course, and on this American, allied with the
gold-rimmed glasses and the darting, intelligent eyes under beetling
brows, made him look more like a member of an American comedy troupe he
had vaguely heard of, bizarrely named Marx.

It was the American who, still not having shaken hands, took the
initiative, speaking in clear German with just a hint of Viennese
dialect.

"Good to see you, gentlemen.  My name is Harper, and my colleague here
is Colonel White, from British Intelligence."  Aschenheim was certain
that they were cover names, and resented a situation that required him
and his superior to prove their identities while they were forced to
take the enemy's word on trust.  But that was a factor of the position
forced upon them.

"May I suggest we get down to work," the man who called himself Harper
said.

"We do not have much time.  As you know things are moving quite fast,
both on the Rhine and in Italy, and of course on the Russian front."

The SS-general nodded.  He had no need to hear more allied gloating. It
was only a matter of time.

"I must congratulate you on your forces' capture of the bridge at
Remagen.  It was a very well executed military operation."

"As planned.  Thank you for your co-operation, General.  Unfortunately,
it has caused one or two problems with the Russians."

"Problems?"  Von Rulenstein sounded apprehensive.  Remagen, Aschenheim
knew, was part of the package.  But the others had negotiated that, at
enormous personal risk.  It was the gambit; now it was time to examine
the consequences.  There could not be problems at this stage.  It was
too late.

It was the Englishman who spoke next, his German equally impressive, if
rather correct and un colloquial

"We have had a missive from the Soviet foreign ministry.  They have
suspicous minds.  They were surprised that one bridge on the Rhine had
been left intact, and suspect, I believe, that German capitalists would
prefer their industrial heartland to be captured by Allied capitalists
rather than Communists."

Von Rulenstein snorted.

They have also, I am afraid, heard rumours of the meeting in Lugano two
weeks ago."

Aschenheim could not keep the shock from his face.  The brief encounter
in a small chalet on the outskirts of the lakeside resort had been set
up only after the most complex manoeuvres to which he himself had been
party.  It had been negotiated through Italian intermediaries who, he
had been assured, were wholly trustworthy.  He should, of course, have
known better.

"Is this a problem?"  Von Rulenstein had asked the question with a
remarkably straight face.  He made a mental note never to play poker
with the general.  As if they would ever be in a bigger game.

The American smiled, the eyes half-closed behind his gleamingly
polished spectacles."

"I don't think so, general.  We have decided that, given this
unfortunate leakage of information, we can no longer rely on keeping
the project referred to as Operation Sunrise secret from our Soviet
allies."

Aschenheim almost fell off his seat.  The general, he noticed, had gone
white, but remained otherwise outwardly calm.

The American continued.

"We have therefore let it be known that we are negotiating a separate
surrender of the German forces in Italy, without reference to the high
command in Berlin.  Obviously this is a highly classified matter and
there is every need for the utmost discretion, which is why Moscow was
not informed."

"And their reaction?"

"They have asked for two Soviet generals to be present at the talks."

Aschenheim sat dumbstruck.  The conversation was spiralling out of his
comprehension.

"But I do not see them.  I trust you have not kept them waiting
downstairs.  Herr Zwiingli would not like that.  Most untidy."

The American smiled.  He knew this game.

"No.  We did not wish to trouble them too much.  They have been
informed that we will let them know the precise date and time of the
surrender ceremony as soon as we ourselves are aware of it."

"An excellent choice of words, Mr.  Harper."

"Thank you, general.  May we then proceed to the details?  I would like
to convey to you and your associates, once again, our appreciation of
the measures already undertaken, but also the need for a speedy
resolution.  I have with me, as requested, a status report -severely
curtailed, I'm afraid, for reasons which I have no doubt you will
understand on a development which we expect in the near future to
radically alter the situation.  I am instructed to let you see this but
not, I regret, to take it away with you.  I am, however, empowered to
present you with an already drawn-up version of the protocol already
discussed.  We will expect an answer within the shortest period of
time.  I am willing to go through it now with you and answer any
questions."

"I have one, first of all.  Is it signed?"

"It is signed, general.  At the highest level.  For that reason I can
allow you to take one carbon flimsy copy only, which will of course not
bear the signatures.  You can imagine the ramifications if this got
into the wrong hands.  The originals will stay with us, until
everything is settled."

"I understand."

For the remaining two hours, as the pale spring sunshine faded from the
sky over Geneva, a scene of tranquillity untouched by the carnage in
the rest of Europe, they sat in that room and pored over the piece of
paper as if destiny itself depended on it.

"Rudi."  The old man's breath was coming in short rasps now.

"They betrayed us."

"Maybe, Hermann.  Maybe history betrayed us."

"But they promised.  The world could have been so different."

But would it have been better?  Aschenheim had long wondered.  The
thought of how things might have been had weighed heavily over the
years, like a leech draining blood from the source.  Only here, in the
camp, was life reduced to its bare essentials, to life in the face of
death, to a genuine appreciation of what constituted kindness and the
quality of mercy in the sure and certain knowledge that the world was
full of unforgiving cruelty.

"Rudi, you will go back, one day, to Germany.  Maybe someday soon."

He was stroking the clammy parchment of the dying man's skin.  It
occurred to him that he did not know what he was dying of.  Medical
care was non-existent, even for the guards, as far as he could see.
Cancer, perhaps, he had lost so much weight; malnourishment, of course,
though that went without saying; the loss of hope, undoubtedly, perhaps
the worst thing of all: a slow steady atrophy of the soul.

"You must take this with you when you go.  Hide it.  Show them.  Tell
them all."

Rudi looked down.  From within the rags wrapped around his waist, the
old general was fumbling at the piece of rope which served as his belt.
He tried to help him without really knowing what he was trying to do.
The belt undone, the old man dug his skeletal hand inside his soiled
underclothes.  For a few seconds it seemed as if he was panicking, then
his breathing slowed again and his hand emerged from a tear in the
grubby grey material with a tiny oilskin pouch, grey too, the colour
Rudi recognized immediately as the old Wehrmacht waterproof material
used to cover ammunition.  It had been cut down and crudely sewn
together.

"This."  The general held it towards him.

"Take it, keep it.  They never found it, never took it."

He was unsurprised.  When they were brought to the first camp, they had
been stripped of everything from their uniforms to their boots, but
they had never been strip-searched.  Their old Wehr-macht underwear was
left to them as a sole reminder of their fatherland.  Ten years later,
they were still thankful for it.  There had never been any
replacements.

"Fertig, fertig."  The words were little more than a whisper. Finished,
he seemed to be saying.  His last business done.  But it also meant
'ready'.  Was he saying that he was ready to meet his maker? There had
always been a religious element beneath the general's once-tough,
unshakeable exterior, some relic of his Catholic childhood. Was that
where he was now, in some sunlit foothill of the Alps?  Far from the
horror to come; the horror that was now behind him for ever. Rudi made
the sign of the cross over his forehead.  But it was another four hours
before he was dead.

Afterwards, when they had carted the body outside to be covered in an
old tarpaulin, left by the side of the hut, with the others, an
effective deep freeze until the earth would be soft enough to bury it,
Rudi took the oilskin and opened it, although he knew already what it
contained.  The thin flimsy paper with its blurred carbon copy printing
was still surprisingly legible.  A testimony to German oilskins, he
thought.  There was no point in opening it out.  He knew what it said.
He just had no idea what the old man expected him to do with it.
History had already been written.

Head Filled with Straw

The days after his return from Iceland were hollow pages in the life of
Eamonn Burke.  He wandered through them aimlessly, his mind without
focus, mostly in a vague alcoholic daze.  He was rarely drunk, but
never really sober.  He developed a routine that revolved around the
opening hours of The Parson's Nose, an unremarkable, relatively
anonymous public house on the corner of a side street off Notting Hill
Gate, frequented by market traders from the Portobello Road, a small
clique of locals and a large number of occasional drinkers; trendy
folk, Burke might have called them if he had been in a mood to notice.
Mostly he sat in the corner, quietly, over one pint after another.  He
usually took a newspaper, though he rarely read it.  He took it because
he had found it discouraged conversation.  He hid behind it.  From the
world.  From himself.  In the afternoons, he took long, slow walks
around the houses, oblivious to his surroundings, often un noticing of
the weather which remained inclement.  It was one of those years in
which spring would come late to England, when summer frocks would
emerge optimistically from winter wardrobes, and then be covered up
again under long raincoats as common sense once more took precedence
over sensibility.  Burke paid little attention.

After the 'event', as he still referred to it in a protective impulse,
a way of avoiding the detail of the memory, he had scrambled his way
back towards the top of where the original ice rift had been.  The tent
and all the supplies that they had let down into the glacial chasm had
vanished as the great masses of ice had lurched together.  But to his
surprise, if he had still been capable of such an emotion, the three
undamaged snow scooters had remained essentially in one place, carried
along on the top of the tidal wave of frozen water.

Acting on blind instinct, he had managed somehow to gun one of them
into life and clamber on board, setting it chugging across the ice,
guided very roughly by his memory of what their original GPS
co-ordinates had been, uncaring if some uncharted chasm swallowed him
up.  Chance he could scarcely call it luck -preserved him, even when
night fell.  By the time he saw the few lights he took to be Kjolur he
was on the verge of total exhaustion, and stumbled into the small town
only to collapse on the step of the incongruous brightly lit burger bar
that was its solitary eating establishment.  The last thing he heard
was the sound of an over-amplified Oasis hit blaring out of the door
opened by two giggling teenagers who fell over him screaming.

The following morning he had wakened in soft sheets in the small town's
only guesthouse and told the owners an abbreviated version of his tale
minus the plane, minus the history; all these people were interested in
was any possibility of saving lives.  But they had shaken their heads,
and muttered among themselves.  He caught the name "Magnus' and thought
he read in their stern compassion a withholding of blame, partly out of
politeness and partly because this was a self-reliant land and Magnus
should have known better.  He gave them the map co-ordinates, as best
he could remember, but if they organized an expedition, he was not
asked along.  Transport back to Reykjavik was arranged; the road was
now already passable.  And in his pocket he still had the only thing
that gave him any grasp on reality: a ticket back to London.

There had been fourteen calls on his answering machine when he came
back.  He left it switched on.  Over the first few days, he noticed
involuntarily, the number continued to mount up, but now the phone had
ceased ringing.  Life was like that.  After a while people gave up on
you.  Quite rightly, he thought.  He had not even bothered to listen to
them.  Once, when he was on his way out to the pub, he heard George
Prosset's voice wondering where he had got to, and suggesting lunch at
The Vineyard.  For half a second, or probably less, he thought
afterwards, he had almost considered taking him up.  He knew Prosset
would urge him to resume his life, to start taking journalism seriously
again, to forget the strange German girl, to write up the story, even
as a feature a magazine piece of course, not something for the foreign
pages of The Times really but someone would take it, as an act of
exorcism really.  It would be good for him.  Lots of things would be
good for him, Burke knew.  It was just that he wasn't interested in any
of them.

II

He had even sacked Mrs.  Konopka.  By default.  He had simply forgotten
to leave her money out and as he was seldom in when she called there
had been no possibility to sort things out.  She had left him a series
of notes, polite at first, then curt and finally angry.  She had a
family to support, money to send back home to Krakow.  She knew he was
not well, she said he wondered why, or how?  but she really could not
work for charity.  He meant to pay her, but increasingly felt he could
not face the embarrassment, worse still her solicitous care.  She would
want to talk things through, make him nice cups of tea or her own,
special, Polish remedy, the one she resorted to when her husband (an
almost mythical figure to Burke) disappeared on one of his regular
benders: strong hot coffee laced with Wyborowa vodka.  An antidote, she
called it, to reality.  In the end he sent her a cheque for three
weeks' pay, apologized for his inattention and said he would be going
away again.  He would be in touch when he got back, if she still cared
to work for him.  Since then, however, he had seen her in the street,
leaving another house where she worked on Tuesdays, and crossed the
road to avoid discussion.  He knew she had seen him too, seen the lie,
and taken umbrage.

With Mrs.  Konopka's departure, the habitual chaos in his flat had
multiplied.  He found himself kicking things into heaps in corners in
order to find space to walk across the floor.  Only the newspapers were
tidier than normal; Burke lifted the pile each morning and set it on
top of the previous day's, unopened.  It would have made sense, he
knew, to call in at the news agent and cancel them.  But that would
have been another psychological admission.

He avoided other journalists' haunts, watched little television, didn't
go to the cinema, couldn't even pick up a book.  It was as if
distractions were a betrayal.  Though he knew that there was nothing to
betray.  The dead didn't care.

At times, the Fuchs business troubled him, but not enough for him to do
anything about it.  Whatever it had all been about was over.  It didn't
matter any more.  Nor did he.  Nor did she.  Life, he realized, had
changed tack and was moving on again, leaving the incidental casualties
behind.  Burke had been thrown overboard, like surplus ballast, and he
had no intention of swimming along futilely in the wake.  If sinking
was the only alternative, well that was okay by him.  There was no
burning desire for vengeance, no itching, unslaked curiosity, just a
dull emptiness that could not be cured, only suffered.

Occasionally, sitting awake late at night listening to the noise of the
wet tyres on the tarmac in Ladbroke Grove, he would pass the time by
playing himself at chess.  It was, it amused him to think, a suitably
sterile occupation.  The chess set was expensive: a British Muesum copy
of the old Lewis chessmen, with carved figures of Norse warriors.  He
found himself staring at the figure of the black queen.  Each game
ended in stalemate, or a draw.  It was not even that he was bored by
the lack of an opponent, rather that he saw the dance of the pieces on
the board as a suitable expression of his life: a frenetic, pointless
jousting, manoeuvring for position, without any meaningful conclusion.
The idea of either side pushing into a winning position seemed
ridiculous.  It amused him to play without taking pieces, watching the
confusion multiply in the centre of the board.  But without casualties,
the game was more pointless still.

He left the board permanently set up on the one corner of the
dining-room table that was unoccupied by piles of paper or empty
bottles.  Most of the flat was strewn with shed clothes, unwashed.  He
had recently summoned the effort to take some to the launderette after
he noticed people sniffing at him in the pub.  For all his lack of
self-respect, he had no desire to be barred as a vagrant.

But there were still piles of clothing everywhere, particularly on the
bed.  Two nights in a row he had simply fallen asleep on the
living-room carpet.  On the second occasion he woke up in the small
hours to find the light still on and the carpet beside his face wet. He
told himself he must have spilled some beer, though for once there was
no bottle beside him.  He had not been crying.  To have done so would
have been self-pity and even he was not that pathetic.  But as a result
he remade the bed and slept in it.

The next night Valery Korkin called.

Burke was in the kitchen when the telephone rang.  The sharp,
electronic brrr startled him.  His domestic world had become one of
predictable silence.  He ignored it and let the answering machine take
over while he continued applying rough-hewn hunks of cheese to a stale
slice of bread, ready to grill.  He smothered it in black pepper.  Even
his taste-buds were jaded.

Korkin's voice was remarkably clear for a line from Moscow.

"Yamon, how are you?"  the Russian declared, obviously half-expecting
an answer.

"Why are you never there when I want you, you useless piece of bat shit
Your uncle Valery must as always do all the work.

"Also, best of all, I have your monk."  The voice waited, as if still
not believing that there was only a machine at the other end.  But it
was also what Valery did in conversation, waiting to see what
impression his pronouncements made.  He thought about picking up the
phone, clearing things up straight away, but his heart was not in it.
He would send Korkin's office a fax, something he could compose when he
had more time to think about it, a formula of words that would let him
down gently without getting involved in explanations.

The Russian's voice continued, talking to the tape as if he now,
reluctantly, accepted it was the only listener.  In fact he was not
even talking to the tape.  It had long ago filled up with all the
messages Burke had ignored.

"Hmmmha?  You see.  I have been working like you said.  And it is very
interesting.  But I will tell you in person.  You must come here.  To
Munich.  Ahhha?  You see.  You are thinking I am Soviet man still,
bound to the gulags.  But no, here I am enjoying German luxury.  I am
not leaving an address or number.  It is too complicated, too
dangerous.  Too many people might be interested.  You will understand.
Come here and we will go to see the monk together.  He knows
everything, why they killed my Siggy, the filthy secret they are
hiding.  I see you Tuesday, midday, at the Veesun, hmm?  Your little
German girl said you knew where that was.

"Oh, by the way, she will be coming too."  The phone went dead just as
Burke reached for it.

Bavaria, Bavaria

Margarethe Kroning arrived late for work on the last day of her life.
By the time she got out at Messegelande U-bahn station, a fine, steady
spring drizzle was falling.  She pulled up her coat collar as she
stumped the few hundred yards to the base of the Bavaria monument.  As
she hauled the heavy iron key out of her handbag and walked up the
stone steps, she took no notice of the young man sitting in the BMW
parked on the other side of the road.

Less than five minutes later the car's occupant, having glanced at the
heavy Rolex oyster on his wrist, put down the Munich guide book he had
been reading.  He found the neo-classical pseudo-goddess ugly, but the
book praised the monument for the fine view from the top, which was all
that mattered.  He put on his 'working' jacket, climbed the steps
slowly and approached the open door in the base of the pediment.

"Guten MorgenJ he addressed the dumpy woman seated beside a little desk
inside.

"Too cold for the time of year."

"Am I your first customer?"  he said, watching for any reaction to his
accent.  He hated that.

She nodded.

"Won't be many today.  Not the weather for sightseeing."  He handed
over his two Marks.  She thanked him perfunctorily and, for form's
sake, gave a thin smile and wished him a good rest of the day.  He
smiled back, stepped inside and then strangled her from behind with a
length of piano wire.

Cursing at the old lady's unexpected weight, he dragged her body into
the corner.  He took from his pocket a neatly printed sign and hung it
on the outside door-handle.  It read simply: "Geschlossen, ivegen
Personal-mangel."  Closed because of staff shortages.  He had copied it
from one in the window of a restaurant downtown.  Quite apt, really. He
shut the door, took a key from the desk drawer and locked it behind
him.  Quietly, calmly, he began climbing the circular stairs.  In his
other hand he carried a neat nylon padded bag, in a pocket of which he
had stored the piano wire, close to the other tools of his trade, and a
freshly-made salami sandwich.  He had an hour or so to wait.

Eamonn Burke got out of the Munich U-bahn at Theresienwiese station,
and was struck by the desolation that confronted him as he came up the
escalator to street level.  It had taken him a while to grasp that
Korkin's "Veesun' was actually die Wiesen: the meadows, short for
Theresienwiese, the site of Munich's annual beer festival, the
Oktoberfest.  The last time he had been here, it had been hard to move
for the crowds.

Burke realized he was seeing the fabled "Wiesen' for the first time as
they must be for most of the year: a great plain of gravel and tarmac
that looked more like a bomb clearance site than any sort of meadow.
The only structures were a couple of drab grey port aka-bins, a few
dozen yards from the U-bahn entrance, serving no obvious purpose, with
blinds drawn over the windows.  He scanned the drab expanse for any
sign of the bulky Russian's figure.

His nerves were agitated.  From the instant Korkin had put the phone
down on his answering machine, it was as if caffeine had been injected
undiluted into his veins.  Sabine was alive.  That was what the Russian
had clearly implied.  No matter how he turned it around in his head,
there was no other easy interpretation to be put on that final
sentence.  He replayed the message in his mind, cursing the fact that
the full tape meant he had no way of hearing Korkin's actual words
again.  He looked for ways of telling himself he had misheard.  He had
seen her die, hadn't he, along with Siggy and Magnus, when the ice
cracked and the damn plane disappeared into the bowels of Iceland?  And
why had she not contacted him if she was really still alive?  The
questions tormented him, robbed him of sleep.  There was no
alternative: he would make Korkin's rendezvous.  But what had the man
discovered.  Was he really going to get to the bottom of this?  Did he
want to?  Yes, if it meant he was really going to see her again.

Burke glanced at his watch.  Still five minutes until noon.  Not that
he expected Korkin to be strictly punctual.  Not unless he had changed
his habits.  Here and there a few dog-walkers strolled with their pets,
stopping for them to answer the call of nature, scrabbling in the
gravel.  One of the city's prime sites was nothing more than a giant
dachshunds' toilet.  In the distance, towards the great statue that
dominated the skyline, there were one or two couples, walking arm in
arm like lovers out on a spring day despite the drizzle.  Burke thought
he could have imagined more romantic venues.

He looked up at the Bavaria statue, a jolly green giantess standing in
front of the stone neo-classical portico that reminded Burke of the
British Museum.  Munich's Hall of Fame, a mini-state's
mid-nineteenth-century folly modelled on the Pantheon in Paris,
dedicated to busts of great and famous Bavarians, an ambition that made
even the old joke about famous Belgians seem good.  And this ridiculous
statue: a hulking female figure modelled perhaps on one of the
Oktoberfest waitresses who could carry a dozen steins of beer at once
standing by the side of a lion, a sword in her belt and a laurel wreath
clutched in her raised arm: Bavaria personified watched over the empty
arena of debauchery like a tutelary deity, with sightless eyes.

At that precise moment, however, Bavaria was not as blind as Burke
imagined.  Inside the hollow head, the man smiled as he identified the
solitary figure ambling down the central tarmac pathway.  There were
three apertures, designed for tourists to gain a panoramic view over
the city's spires.  Through the one to the left he caught a glimpse of
the great neo-Gothic pinnacle of St.  Paul's with the giant gold clock
hands pointing almost vertically to indicate midday.

He settled into position in front of the central aperture, amused to
notice the almost perfect resting-place for his right knee provided by
the concave contours of the inside of Ms Bavaria's nose.  He levelled
the telescopic sight and centred the cross-hairs on Eamonn Burke's
forehead.

Burke saw them only when they were almost upon him, the old couple,
huddled together against the damp, cool weather.  For a moment he
thought they must be short-sighted, advancing upon him as if he wasn't
there, she with her wicker shopping-basket over one arm, stooped
slightly against her husband, a big man with a typical Bavarian hat
pulled down over his eyes.  He too was bent over and walked with the
aid of a stick.  Only the speed of their awkward gait was surprising.

Burke moved aside, off the tarmac path on to the gravel, to let them
past, then flinched suddenly, thrown off-balance, when the bulky old
man stretched out one arm to grab him.  At the same time he threw back
his head to stare into Burke's eyes and cackle.

"So you do not recognize your old friends?"

With astonishment Burke found himself staring into the unmistakable
ogre-like grin of Valery Korkin.

"Or even little old ladies."  The voice was instantly familiar.

"Sabine."  Burke turned in wide-eyed wonder to see her wink up at him,
her spiky fringe sticking out from under the grandmother's headscarf.

"I thought you were .. ' "Yes.  I know.  Me too."  She squeezed his
arm, beaming at him, holding yet restraining him.

"Not here.  Quick.  Valery fears you may be being watched."

Korkin had taken his other arm and was steering him gently but firmly
towards the Bavaria statue.

"Let's go, my friend.  We have a lot to talk about."

Burke felt suddenly light-headed.  Surely, none of this could really be
happening.

And then it wasn't.

Plucked by a giant hand, Korkin leaped backwards, falling, pulling
Burke with him, throwing him and Sabine together.  Sabine screamed.
From somewhere in front of them came a flat crack, echoed, like a car
backfiring in a cul-de-sac.

"What the .. ."

"Run, Eamonn, run.  Come with me."  Sabine was shouting at him, terror
in her voice.

"Come, Eamonn, please.  He'll fire again."

Burke looked down at the great bulk of Korkin, flat on the ground,
astonished eyes staring into space.  A dark, seared hole was punched in
his forehead and thick scarlet rivulets formed amid the gravel behind
his hair.

Eamonn Burke sat hunched in a trance over the body of his friend, his
hands soaked in blood, his slow, almost silent sobs swallowed by the
hubbub.  Sabine Kotzke kneeled beside him, hugging him, every now and
then still staring around her apprehensively as if she, too, believed
that at any moment black lightning might strike.

The paramedics' from the Krankenhaus arrived with the bustle of
authority, ready to remove mourners by force if need be to deal with
the injured.  But one look at Korkin's staring eyes and the dark hole
drilled in his forehead was more than enough to persuade them to leave
Burke alone with his grief.

Uniformed police officers in their distinctive bottle-green trousers
and mustard shirts were fanning out in all directions.  Several were
instantly deployed in the streets, hurrying traffic along with whistles
and gestures.  A young sergeant, constantly conferring with a crackling
voice on his radio, attempted to take details from Sabine.  No, she had
told him, she had seen nothing.  One moment they were walking together,
the next he was dead.  The shot came from up there, in front.  She
waved wildly towards the huge neo-classical monument.  A detachment was
sent at the double.  The policeman was talking trajectory, turning to
his radio.  There was talk of roadblocks, arguments about traffic flow.
No, she lied, she could think of no reason why anyone would want to
kill the victim.  An old friend, of Herr Burke's.  No, he was not
Irish.  A journalist, from London.  The dead man?  No, also not from
Munich, a visitor, Russian.  Ah, the policeman nodded as if everything
had suddenly become clear.  Russians were everywhere, the new
Sicilians.

And all the while, Eamonn Burke remained there, staring into eyes that
stared back, but not at him.  The medical orderly kneeled opposite him,
on the other side of the body, and reached across to take his hand.  He
gave it to her, unthinking, and she moved it down, watching his face as
she did, gently, testing his reaction, and with Burke's fingers closed
Valery Korkin's eyes.

"Komm schon," she said softly.  He did as he was told, allowed her to
raise him to his feet.  Instinctively, the ambulance men moved in,
lifting the not-inconsiderable bulk of the dead man on to the green
canvas stretcher.  A blanket was pulled up over his face.

Without waiting for instructions, they carried him away.  Untidy,
thought Burke, that's what it would have been.  Untidy to have corpses
littering the Wiesen.  Two women police officers were escorting Eamonn
and Sabine to the car.  They knew it was difficult at a time like this.
But there would have to be statements, details, forms, next of kin ...
Burke thought of the big Russian's unfettered existence.  No, no next
of kin, just some sad faces and empty beds from Minsk to Magadan.

Death and Resurrection

The morning after Valery Korkin's death, Eamonn Burke awoke to the
sound of persistent pattering rain on the wooden windowsill of the
Hotel Am See.  Sabine Kotzke, resurrected from the dead, lay next to
him, leaning on her elbow, her dark eyes watching his.  He wanted to
reach out, to kiss her, to tell her it was all okay.  Except that he
wasn't sure that it was.  She had come back into his life when it was
at its emptiest, but she had brought murder with her.

It had been late by the time they got to the hotel in Starnberg, on the
edge of the great lake south of Munich.  Not far from here, on the
nearby Ammersee, Sabine had told him, Bavaria's mad King Ludwig II, the
one who built all those crazy palaces, had been found drowned.  She had
planned it as a romantic destination, a place that reminded her of the
little guesthouse on the Icelandic coast at Grindavik.  She had not
counted on them bringing a ghost into their bed.

It had not helped either that Frau Kruger, the manageress, had clucked
like an old hen, welcoming the young couple and tittering salaciously
how she'd saved them the best room, with the view over the lake.  And
all because the junge Dame had said it was a special reunion.  And what
a pity the junger Herr was looking so pale, but it was probably the
weather.

Most of the day had been spent at the police station, both grateful for
the numbing effect of ritual and bureaucracy: statements delivered,
arrangements set in force for cremation.  Burke had seen no point in
having the body shipped back to Moscow; it was an indulgence Korkin
would have laughed at.

"What, like Vladimir llyich, pickled and placed in a mausoleum, there's
a thought, ha ha ha ha," he remembered the Russian once cackling with
black humour at the thought of his own funeral.  The police had said
they would be in touch.  They were somewhat obviously, Burke had just
refrained from saying aloud treating it as murder.  There was a lot of
trouble with the Russian community.  Burke had said nothing, merely
acquiesced when Captain Wegener had asked him not to leave the Munich
area without letting him know.  Not that there would be any problem, of
course, but they could be needed as witnesses, if he meant 'when' the
murderer was apprehended.  Then they had left, arm-in-arm, not so much
as young lovers, but an old couple united by an unexpected
bereavement.

Later, at the hotel, Burke had held her close.  Squeezing her to him as
if the action might prevent her from being ripped away from him again.
They had made love almost guiltily, with a fierce passion.  And then he
had rolled away from her, leaving a suddenly cold empty space between
them, until she had stretched out a hand to touch his, and he had held
it tightly, coming back to kiss her on the lips, softly, tenderly,
before they both fell asleep.

Now, with the rain drumming on the glass pane, Burke was struggling to
come to terms with what had happened.  Numbed by the shock, Sabine and
he had still managed to pull together the pieces of the weeks they had
spent apart, the weeks of her death, as Burke insisted on putting it,
as if this was some sort of afterlife.

After the explosion that had sent the Navajo Arrow, Magnus, Siggy and
all proof of the "Einstein conspiracy' hurting into a hole in the
earth's crust, she had lain unconscious for longer than she knew.  At
least several hours, they told her later.  When she came to, she found
herself lying in a wide deep crevasse, and freezing cold.  As night
approached she thought she was finished.  Only then, turning painfully,
had she found in her pocket Magnus's radio phone.  Unsurprisingly, in
retrospect, the signal was clear.  She had hit the 'send' button, homed
in on his pre-set frequency and, against the odds and her own
expectations, a helicopter out of Reykjavik had picked her up within
hours.  She was suffering from frostbite and her leg was broken in
three places.

They had sent a search party back to look for Magnus and Siggy.  The
offical report said that the whole ice shelf had cracked and shifted,
closing together over a new fissure that stretched for more than a
mile.  There was no hope that anyone who had fallen into it could have
survived.  These things happened, occasionally, towards the end of
winter, when the temperature changed.  They were surprised to find
anyone venturing out on to the glacier at this time of year. Especially
an experienced guide such as Magnus Haraldson.  But everyone could make
mistakes.

The magazine, she said, had medevacked her back to Berlin where she had
lain in the Charite Hospital for three weeks and had learned how to
walk again.  The plaster had only just come off when Korkin rang from
Moscow.

"Why the hell didn't you call?"  Burke cut in.

"Why didn't you call me?"

"I thought you were dead.  I'd seen you die, for God's sake."

"Had you?  How well did you search?"

The protest died in Burke's mouth.  In the end, the only possible
answer had to be: not hard enough.

"I was in shock," he said finally, lamely.

"I know.  Now," she said, and brushed his hair with her hand.

Had she really thought that he cared so little?  But what had he done
to prove otherwise?

He turned his head away on the pillow.  Sabine turned it back.  All
that mattered, she insisted, was that they were together again, and the
death of Valery made it more important than ever that they finish what
they had set out to do.

"You seriously want to go on with this?  Now?  This stupid bloody
business has nearly cost both of us our lives.  And has undoubtedly
caused the death of one of my oldest, dearest friends.  Brutally,
stupidly, meaninglessly.  Isn't it about time we called it a day, quit
while we're ahead, or at least still alive?  No bloody story is worth
martyrdom, let alone dying at the hands of some psychopathic hit man
with an agenda that, in the end, I don't give a flying fuck for."

"Don't you?"

"No!"  He was almost shouting.

"Then you're not the Eamonn Burke I remember."

"No."  His voice had dropped, was quiet now.

"No, maybe I'm not.  And maybe I don't want to be."

"And it's all meaningless?"

"Yes ... At least it is to me."

"Even if it wasn't to Valery?  Even if he knew the risk he was taking.
If he thought that there was something here worth telling the world
about.  Whether or not his death was meaningless depends on you."

Christ, thought Burke.  Let this cup be taken from me.

"He did more than just identify the "monk", you know.  He found "Mrs.
K'V "Who?"

"Mrs.  K. Or I should say Comrade K. Hiram Carter mentioned her.  Told
us to ask the "Rooskies" about her.  Turns out it took a "Roosky" to
unearth her."

"And .. . ?"

"Her name was Konenkova, Margarita.  She lived in America with her
husband Sergei, a sculptor, from the mid 1930s until the end of the
war.  In 1935 a young woman called Margot introduced her to her
stepfather, Albert Einstein.  She was fifteen years younger than him,
but that did not stop them having an affair which ended only when she
was dragged back to Moscow in 1945."

"So ... ?"  Burke swallowed his feelings, suppressed his choking
admiration for what Valery Korkin had done for him.  He was reluctant
to let her draw him back into this with some stupid cat-and-mouse
guessing game.

"She was also a spy for the NKVD, reporting straight to Lavrenti Beria
in the Lubyanka."

Burke closed his eyes and wished the world away.

An hour later, Eamonn Burke found himself driving Sabine Kotzke's red
convertible through sunlit spring woods along the shores of the
Starnberger See.

The 'monk', she had explained, was real.  He lived in a monastery.
Korkin had arranged for them to meet him at 11:00, after mass.  Easter
mass.  Burke had jolted.  It had not occurred to him that today was
Easter Sunday.  Yet somehow the news failed to uplift his heart.  The
road ran from the Stanberger shores through dark pine woods which
parted to allow a glimpse of the sparkling blue waters of the
Ammersee.

"Breathtaking, isn't it?"

"Umhumm," Burke acknowledged tersely.  But it was, he admitted, despite
himself, undeniably beautiful: well-tended countryside, neat and
ordered, a harmony of man and nature.  Each village they passed through
had a blue-and-white maypole decorated with spring flowers.  Here and
there a brightly painted onion dome poking over the trees would
indicate the presence of a church.  Wherever one was visible, a trickle
of people could be found making their way to the Easter morning mass.
Still a god fearing folk in spite of everything.

At Herrsching they took a left turn by the maypole.  Burke kept one eye
on the rearview mirror.  The road rose and then descended into another
village.  He swung the car right again and another onion dome appeared
in front of them, green, wooden, set high on top of a tall square tower
painted white and pastel pink: a church made out of coconut ice, he
thought absurdly.

"Die Wallfahrtskirche.  We're here.  The Pilgrimage Church, on the holy
hill of Andechs.  That's where the monastery is."

"Monastery?  It looks more like the entrance to a failed theme park."
He turned the car into a huge, packed car park with a banner above
proclaiming it was reserved for guests of the monastery.  Apart from
the church tower on the hill behind them, the main thing he could see
was a rather down-at-heel mini golf course.

"This is a working monastery."

They had crossed the road from the car park and were climbing a steep
cobbled path that wound up the side of the hill towards the church.  He
could now see the more substantial, fortress-like buildings of the
monastery itself.  They passed a white stone building painted in the
inevitable Bavarian blue and white.  A sign declared it was the
Monastic Brewery Gaststatte.  Two middle-aged men sitting on a bench
holding litre pots of frothing dark beer smiled at them.

"Do a good pint, do they?"

"Andechs is also a farm, famous for cheese and butter.  And yes, they
brew one of the best beers in Bavaria," she said.

The place seemed more given over to commerciality than godliness.  On
the right was a children's playground, an ice cream stall and a booth
where a character with a wizened face was sticking mackerel on wooden
sticks and arranging them around a brazier.  Only the poster in a glass
case advertised the more sacred aspect: "Ostersonntag.  Heilige Messe
zur Auferstehung unseres Herrn Jesus Christus."  Easter Sunday, holy
mass for the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

"It is a big day, Easter.  They will be very busy, especially later.
Right now most people are at mass."

Though not all of them.  As they reached the top of the hill the
monastic buildings opened out into a great enclosed square of tables
and chairs with views over the green fields below.  Parents clinked
beer glasses together and soaked up the morning sunshine while children
argued over big salty pretzels and boiled eggs, brightly coloured in
greens, oranges, reds and blues.  But over the clatter of plates and
the noise of profane conversation, Burke could hear the soft, almost
ethereal piping of plainsong, a high melodic arhythmic chanting
unchanged since the Middle Ages.

"I forgot to ask.  What order are they?"

"Benediktiner."

"At least we won't have a vow of silence to contend with."

Sabine went ahead and edged open the main door to the church.  The
volume of the singing had risen: a strange melody, ancient yet
unfamiliar, the high perfect plainsong of the chanter answered only
slightly less musically by the congregation.  Burke followed her and
stepped inside, into a world of high baroque splendour he had almost
forgotten existed: grand swirls of gold on pastel blue, incense and
cherubs, candelabra, candles and statues of the virgin.  Burke stood,
pressed amid the crowd facing the altar, and wondered.  Sabine, close
to him, whispered in his ear as the organ surged into Mozart's
"Credo'.

"They have a lot of treasures.  Old things.  Relics."

He gave her a quizzical glance.

"The sceptre of Maximilian of Austria.  It contains a bit of the rod
with which Christ was beaten.  And twigs from the crown of thorns
itself."

He turned to look at her, the theatrically sceptical look on his face a
mute question.  She shrugged in reply.

An old wooden rod, some dried twigs.  People had gone to war over such
things.  Old ironies, wars over memorabilia of the God of Love. Perhaps
some day a cult would preserve with equal humbug and adoration a lock
of Michael Jackson's hair, a pair of the Spice Girls' pants. Perhaps
they already did.

He was brought down to earth by, of all things, the Lord's Prayer,
chanted in alternate lines by the priest at the altar a monk, Burke
supposed, perhaps even the abbot himself and the ranks of people
standing before him.  The words, so familiar as to have lost most of
their meaning in English, reimpressed themselves upon Burke now in the
German, as if the language alone altered their context.  Forgive us our
sins, the audience repeated, as we forgive those who have sinned
against us, 'und erlose uns von dem Bosen'.  Deliver us from evil.

Burke saw again Valery's body hurled between them, heard the precise
distant crack, saw the hole in his head, the astonishment in his eyes,
the mess of the exit wound, dark blood and matted hair.

"Come on, let's go."  He pulled Sabine's arm.

"No, this way."  She looked at him, alarmed by the tone of his voice.
He followed her to the side door across the body of the chapel.  She
pushed him through.

"I'm sorry."

"You don't have to say anything."

They had emerged into a courtyard, roofed over with glass, between the
church and the main part of the monastery.  In front of them, against
the whitewashed wall, a row of crosses was fixed: large wooden crosses,
five or six feet high.  There was writing on them.  A couple with
obviously bored children pushed past them.  Burke could hear the man
complaining:

"Hurry up, Trude, or all the seats will have gone."

"Ja, ja, Ernst.  I know what you are like.  And I suppose you think I'm
driving us home."

The older boy, a sulky looking youth of about fourteen, took a blob of
chewing gum from his mouth and stuck it on one of the crosses as he
passed.

Burke thought of calling after him, after his father, but thought
better of it.  He walked up to the cross and flicked off the offensive
material.  He looked at the inscription.

"Magnitogorsk.  Ural.  Danke fur den gesunden Heimkehr," he read aloud.
With thanks for safe return.

"Former POWs, captured on the eastern front.  Some of them spent a
decade and more in captivity.  Lucky to have survived," Sabine said.

"Some of them brought crosses here, on pilgrimage, as a gesture of
thanks."

"And atonement?"

"Sometimes.  But not all of them were criminals, you know."

"No, not all," said a voice behind them.

Both of them turned round, surprised at the interruption, and found
themselves looking into the open, calm face of an elderly monk in a
black cassock, tied with a simple white rope belt.

"But many of them sought atonement even so.  There is much to atone for
in the world; that is why we have the chapel over there."

He gestured to a small glass door in the wall at the other end of the
courtyard, leading into a dark room lit by candles.

The Chapel of Reconciliation," the monk explained.  His face was deeply
lined, weather-beaten, the look of a man who had spent much of his life
outdoors, in manual labour perhaps, a careworn face, but not a sad one,
as if years of reflection had conquered ancient grief.  The little hair
that remained in sparse clumps at his temples was white.  Burke thought
he had to be at least eighty years old, maybe more.

"You are tourists, perhaps pilgrims?"  It was said with a smile, a
courtesy implicit in the suggestion of any sort of religious motive
rather than just the festival of eating and drinking going on below.

"Not exactly," Sabine answered.

"We are here to meet someone."

"Brother Klement, perhaps?"

"Yes," replied Sabine in surprise.

"I am he.  I noticed you arrive.  I have a room above, with a view," he
said in answer to Burke's obvious, unspoken question.

"We need to talk," Sabine said.

"So I understand.  Let us go for a walk in the gardens."

He led them through the courtyard round the side of the church where
they had come in, a benign old figure, nodding to the tourists and
making the sign of the cross over the worshippers now beginning to flow
out of the church down towards the beer hall.

In the garden, however, the monk's tone changed.  He asked the first
question: "Your Russian friend.  He was so very persuasive in asking me
to see you.  He did not come with you?"

Burke answered brusquely, the only way he could.

"Valery was murdered, last night in Munich."

"Ah, yes."  He nodded, as if he had somehow been expecting it.

"On the Wiesen.  I feared it might be him.  You look surprised. Andechs
is a place of sanctuary, but it is not so very unworldly.  I saw the
television news.  The police are linking it to the Russian mafia.
Obviously that is not what you believe."

They walked slowly the old man was no longer very nimble -Burke and
Kotzke on either side of him.  Inevitably it was she who went straight
to the subject.

"Brother Klement.  Valery Korkin was a good man.  He should not have
died, certainly not in vain.  He had already lost someone dear to him
because of this business.  He said you could explain."

"This business?"

"I don't know where to begin," Sabine was rattling on.

"It goes back to 1945.  Before he died, Valery said it was the context
that mattered.  He said that you knew."

"What, may I ask, set you off on this dangerous "wild goose chase"?"

Burke thought it was time he made a contribution.

"A diary, apparently' he saw Sabine flinch at the qualification
'written by Klaus Fuchs, the atom spy."

"Hmmph."  The old monk almost chuckled.

"So he did write it after all, good for Klaus."

Old Books and Old Faces

Burke stared at the monk, hardly able to believe what he had just
heard.

"You knew Fuchs?"

"Of course.  In Dresden.  I was his driver.  That is why you are
here."

"Are you going to explain?"

The old man sighed, as if he was dredging up troubled memories buried
deep under years of contemplation and tranquillity.

"Yes.  That is what I agreed with your friend.  And I do not break
promises, especially not promises made to dead men."

They had reached the end of the path.  The monk turned around and began
pacing back along the path.

"To start with, I should tell you that I was not always known as
Brother Klement.  My real name is Rudiger Aschenheim.  Bavarian by
birth, Berliner by adoption, veteran of the bad old days."

"The war."  Sabine filled in the blank.

"Yes, the war.  And before.  And after.  But for the years that you
think of, I served in the Waffen-SS."

Burke recoiled.

"Oh, do not get sanctimonious.  The SS were not all concentration camp
guards.  We did not all bayonet babies for sport."  His face was
serious.

"Some of us murdered men our own size, and bigger, men who were trying
to kill us, though as a rule we killed more of them.  At the time that
was considered a virtue rather than a crime.  It was called war, and we
were good soldiers, in a rotten cause.

"I know about atonement, believe me.  The cross you looked at in the
courtyard, it was mine.  I carried it here when I decided to take a
different sort of orders.  On my shoulder.  Today, looking back, it
seems a foolish gesture, but at the time it seemed worthwhile.  But
then perhaps we make gestures largely for our own sake."

"I don't understand," Sabine interrupted.

"When was this?"

He looked at her with those dark eyes that seemed to Burke to take in
more than just outer appearance, eyes that went deep, confessor's eyes,
searching the soul.

"Don't you, young lady?  Are you sure?  I wonder."  Burke could see
Sabine shift from foot to foot, as if something in the tone of the old
man's voice had made her uneasy.

"If you want to know the story, you will have to be patient with me.  I
came here in the summer of 1961, via Berlin.  I walked into West Berlin
only two days before they built the Wall.  But in one way or another I
had been away from home almost all my life."

"You were a prisoner of war?"

"Yes, I was a prisoner.  Not like those who were taken in the West. You
Westerners forget that sometimes.  You think we were all released in
1945, to enjoy the Wirtschaftswunder, launched by American cash while
you, the loyal allies, were still paying America interest on your war
debt.  Hardly fair?  I quite agree.  But it was not like that for all
of us.  Fate in 1945 was a particularly arbitrary mistress: twelve long
years in the gulags I spent, for being in the wrong place at the wrong
time.  From April 1945 until June 1957.  When they let me go, they sent
me to the "zone", to their puppet state, to Dresden.  They gave me work
as a driver ah, the things I had driven, even tanks and attached me to
the local scientific institute.  That's where I met Klaus Fuchs."

"He was already there?"

"No, it was nearly two years before he arrived.  Even then I did not
know that he had come almost straight from an English jail.  He was a
quiet man, very much the typical professor, ostensibly glad to be
"home" although it must have been a quarter of a century since he had
lived in Germany.  His father was still alive, nearby in Leipzig.  And
anyway, for him, work was home.  He lived for his science more than for
politics.  I don't think it took him long to realize that life in a
Russian colony wasn't exactly the free socialist paradise some of the
old Communists had dreamed of, even though he didn't have to queue like
the rest of us.  He could go to the special shops.  It was useful for
me too.  I had a wife at last.  Spates Gltick, we say in German, Mr.
Burke, late happiness.  Ach, short happiness."

"What happened?"

"She died.  Cancer.  In 1960.  They said it was natural causes.  Klaus
told me the truth we were on first-name terms by then.  He said it was
pollution, from the chemical factories, and worse, in the air and in
the water of the housing complex where we lived on the outskirts of
Dresden.  I was lucky to escape the same fate, if that is what you call
luck.  That was when I decided to leave, to discover if there was
anything left for me in the home of my childhood.  I found this."  He
gestured at their surroundings.

"But this is not why you have come.  You have come, as the general
always believed someday someone would, for the piece of paper that he
left with me.  A piece of paper that I believed no longer mattered. But
what do I know?"

Burke looked questioningly at Kotzke.  But her eyes were on the monk.
He turned to the old man.

"What piece of paper?"

"You do not know?  Funny, the Russian knew.  It is a draft treaty, an
agreement if you like, between two warring parties."

"A surrender document."

The monk smiled enigmatically and looked into Burke's eyes.

"Not exactly.  In fact, quite the contrary.  More like a draft
declaration of war."

Burke was as impatient as Sabine now, willing the old man to get on
with it.

"I have told you I was in the Waffen-SS. I place great store by the
prefix "Waffen", you.  understand .. . ?"

Burke nodded again.  Perhaps sanctimoniousness was only to be expected
from an ex-Nazi in holy orders.

"I must take you back to the closing stages of that terrible war.. ."

He closed his eyes, as if turning back time behind the shut lids.

"In the late spring of 1945, the war was over for Germany.  Allied
forces were in Italy and on the left bank of the Rhine.  The Russians
were driving a spearhead through East Prussia and Pomerania towards
Berlin."

Burke nodded impatiently.  He was not looking for a history lesson. Yet
all of a sudden those distant events came back to life, except that it
was a different life, seen through the eyes of a man who had been
there, fighting, on the losing side, seeing his world vanish into
rubble around him.

"I was stationed in northern Italy under the command of General von
Rulenstein."  His eyes misted over.

"A strange man; charismatic is the word you would use nowadays.  A good
soldier, but his real talent was people.  He knew how to play them,
from the foot soldier to the power brokers in Berlin.  We had served
together in France, tasted the fruits of victory, entertained Heinrich
Himmler himself, head of the SS.  Von Rulenstein laid Paris at his
feet.

"Himmler was impressed.  Von Rulenstein, with me at his side, became a
trusted envoy throughout the senior ranks of the SS and the Wehrmacht.
We heard the rumblings, at all levels, the first real prophesies of
doom after von Paulus's Sixth Army was destroyed at Stalingrad.  After
that, we knew we could no longer win the war.  The Fuhrer still
believed in miracles.  But for those with any military sense,
damage-limitation was the only strategy that made sense.  Hitler
believed in a "wonder weapon".  For a while it seemed there might even
be one: the V-2 rockets launched against England, the jet fighter
aircraft.  Who knows what might have happened if there had been time.
But there was nothing to stop the Russian steamroller.  Everyone but
Hitler could see it.  The Allies too.  And they were almost as unhappy
as we were.

"The countries in eastern Europe, for whose sake the Western powers had
entered the war, saw victory stolen away from them: the replacement of
one occupying power by another.  The Poles, in particular.  They knew
from April 1943, when Berlin announced the discovery of mass graves
containing the bodies of ten thousand Polish officers at Katyn and
claimed it was the work of Stalin's NKVD, that for once the Nazis were
speaking the truth.  The Allies pretended not to believe it, but it was
only a sham.  As so often in warfare, pragmatism won out over morality.
Even then, you see, you thought in terms of "West" and "East", "us" and
"them".  Even before the phrase was invented, the Poles knew an iron
curtain was being built and they were on the wrong side of it.

"You know who invented the phrase?"

"Of course," Burke said.

"Churchill."

"Pah."  The monk's eyes were sparkling.

"He only borrowed it.  The real master of rhetoric coined it first:
Joseph Goebbels, in February '45.  Hitler was right about one thing:
the winners write history."

"How does your piece of paper come into it?"

"Ah yes, our little piece of paper that meant "peace in our time", in
the phrase of your Mr.  Neville Chamberlain.  How easily we fool
ourselves.

"You have to understand that at its end the Nazi state was not as
totalitarian as it had been.  Hitler was finished.  The fact that he
did not see it and was determined to go down in the flames, pulling
Germany with him, did not sit well with the rest of the gang.  After
the purge in July 1944, following the bomb plot, things went quiet. But
from the spring of 1945, when even a blind man could see that
everything was lost, others SS-chief Himmler in particular were putting
out feelers for peace."

"But no one would have listened to Himmler," Burke interjected.

"In the end, no one did.  But the full horror of the camps had not yet
been revealed.  Atrocities were a matter of scale.  Good and evil are
prejudiced terms in wartime.  After Katyn, you already knew the truth
about Stalin.  And did it matter?  In March, through the intermediary
of some highly placed Swiss-Italian businessmen, contact was made
between Von Rulenstein and intelligence officers of the United States
and Great Britain.  We were looking for a way out.  To our surprise,
they offered one."

Burke was speechless.  Sabine hung on every word.

"They said they were acting on the highest authority.  There were fears
that Stalin would not stop, even at Berlin; that the Red Army's goal
was the Rhine, if not the English Channel, or worse.  Sooner or later,
there would be a confrontation.  They wanted it on their terms.  They
said they had a wonder weapon, but it was not yet ready.  It had been
designed for use against Germany, but few of us now believed that
Germany would last that long.  There was another option; but it
depended on us.  They wanted proof of co-operation.  If the Allies were
bogged down on the Rhine, then all would be lost.  But if a way could
be found for the Allied forces to cross, then the Red Army's advance
could at least be equalled.

"Once that had happened, on the right terms, an armistice in the West
would be declared: an unconditional surrender in theory but not in
fact.  Crack Waffen-SS divisions would be transferred to the eastern
front; the Allies would proceed to Berlin, and beyond.  The Poles would
retake Warsaw.  No one imagined that Stalin would live with it, but by
then they hoped, the wonder weapon would be ready.  The Soviets would
not be given the option.  The Americans would have the power to destroy
Moscow with a single bomb.

"The map of Europe would be redrawn according to America's and
England's plans.  Germany would lose land, but not as much as Stalin
intended.  The country would still exist, even if there could be no
guarantees for members of the present government.  We were being
offered a lifeline and an ultimatum: refuse, and annihilation was
inevitable, with war crimes trials to follow.  They called it
"Operation Sunrise", a new dawn for Europe."

"My God," Burke breathed rather than exclaimed.  Sunrise.  Men like
Hiram Carter had known all along what the atomic bomb had nearly been
used to seal: a pact with the devil.

"What went wrong?"  Sabine pressed.

"History.  Von Rulenstein circulated the ideas secretly through the
network.  Himmler was unhappy, for obvious reasons, worried that his
role in ordering the executions in the camps would come out; worried
that the deal would not spare him.  But others took the initiative. The
division on the Rhine did their bit and "forgot" to destroy the bridge
at Remagen.  The Western allies got the bridgehead they wanted. A few
days later, Von Rulenstein and I travelled incognito to Geneva. There
we met with two intelligence men, one representing the British and the
other, the one who was really in command, the Americans.  He later
became quite powerful."

"Allen Dulles," Burke filled in, wondering how he had taken so long to
see the connection.

"Precisely: the first director of the CIA.  We left with a document,
the original of which had been signed by both Roosevelt and Churchill,
a piece of paper that could have changed world history."

"Except that it didn't happen."

"No."  He gave a wry smile.

"When we returned to division headquarters outside Milan, there was an
urgent message from Himmler ordering von Rulenstein to report
personally to Berlin.  There was an aircraft waiting.  By the time we
got there, everything was in a state of chaos.  Himmler was no longer
making sense.  The Fuhrer had had one of his fits when he learned about
Remagen, accused everyone of treachery.  Von Rulenstein decided that
even to show Himmler the paper was to invite a firing squad.  We
speculated how to get it to the rest of the network, but even if we
had, there was no longer any easy way to get out of Berlin.  We tried
to drive east, to see how near the Russians were.  On the road outside
Frankfurt-on-Oder our staff car was overturned by an artillery shell.
The driver was killed.  We were unconscious.  When we came to, the Red
Army had passed us by.  We swopped officers' uniforms for those on the
corpses of ordinary soldiers and surrendered.  There was no option."

"And von Rulenstein still had the copy of the Allied offer?"

"Yes.  The Russians never thought to search ordinary ranks for papers.
We lost our boots and our over shirts and were shipped to Siberia.  We
didn't even know the war was finally over until we reached the Urals in
July, and were joined by troops who had been taken in Berlin during the
last days in May."

"And now you have the paper."  Sabine was making a statement, not
asking a question.

"Von Rulenstein held on to it like a talisman; he had this idea that
some day it ought to be published, so that future generations could
judge whether or not what had happened had been for the best.  Before
he died, he gave it to me."

"But you disagreed?"

To be quite honest, I didn't care.  I kept it because he asked me to.
It was only when I met Klaus, all those years later, that we realized
we had both played parts in the same drama.  His was the greater, of
course.  But for what he and the other scientists had done, they might
have gone ahead anyway."

"And used the atom bomb on Moscow."  Christ, thought Burke.

"But they didn't dare, because by then they weren't sure the Russians
didn't have a bomb of their own."

Burke saw what Hiram Carter had been hinting at.

"They'd found out they had one fewer initiators than they thought."

"Precisely.  Moscow didn't get the initiator, of course.  We know that
now.  But the Americans didn't know that then."

"No, they wouldn't have.  But they knew that one was missing, along
with a B-29 which was last seen making an unscheduled refuelling stop
in Iceland.  And that was enough for the men in the Pentagon to put two
and two together and make five.  Especially if anyone bothered to look
up Joshua Finch's service record."

The monk waved the comment away.

"In any case, the Russians decided to make sure.  Moscow sent a message
back to the Americans.  A sort of practical joke, Klaus called it.  But
then he had a strange sense of humour.  I suppose the right word for it
was a dummy.  Constructed with the help of Klaus's instructions and the
brilliance of the Soviets' chief nuclear expert, a man called Igor
Kurchatov .. ."

To whom the Einstein letter had been addressed, thought Burke.

'..  . They built a flawed replica.  It still took nearly two years,
and would never have worked, of course.  But it was never intended to.
To disguise the fact, it was already cracked when they sent it on its
one-way trip to America .. ."

"To Roswell, New Mexico," said Burke, the final piece of the puzzle
falling into place.

"You may know better than I. All Klaus told me was that it was
contained in a low-altitude ballistic missile, based on the German V-2,
fired from an offshore warship and designed to fall in the vicinity of
some important army base.  He said it was a brilliant decoy that
averted war.  I do not know if it was true."

You bet, though Burke.  No wonder there had been such a fuss about the
"Roswell incident'.  No wonder the first spokesman to talk to the media
had said it was a UFO.  Anything must have seemed safer than the truth
at the time.  Roswell was the new home of the 509th Bomb Group, Finch's
old unit.

All of a sudden, the worst fears of the US military establishment must
have appeared to be confirmed.  Instead of a pre-emptive strike against
a state with no comeback, the nuclear stalemate had been born
overnight.  There would have been doubters, of course, hawks and doves,
as always.  But the governments in Washington and London had changed.
Roosevelt was dead; Churchill was out.  Enough for a serious case of
cold feet: a hiatus of nearly four years until 1949.  By which time
Kurchatov and co.  had got their act together for real, as the whole
world knew.  Burke saw abruptly what the combined effect of the
Einstein letter and the "Sunrise Protocol' would be: first-hand
evidence of infidelity.  Together they would overturn the prevailing
myth of the Western world.

That myth held that the men of knowledge and the men of war, the
scientists and the politicians, had acted as one to face down evil.
They had developed a terrible weapon but used it in the cause of peace,
and then no more.  They had been united in purpose and sense of
responsibility: white knights wielding a mighty sword, dispensing both
judgment and mercy.  And they had been stabbed in the back.  Only
ignominious betrayal had let down the powers of light and ushered in
the dark age of the Cold War and the arms race.  Klaus Fuchs had been
cast as the Judas of our era.

Except that it was all a lie.  Far from being united, they had all
along been riven by doubt and distrust.  With good reason.  The
scientists had distrusted both the morals and motives of their leaders,
and stepped outside them to take their own fateful decision.  And the
men of war had proved as dangerous as the scientists had feared,
practising not restraint but further aggression.  It had not been mercy
or magnanimity or simple humanity that in the end had held back their
hand from unleashing further horror on the world, but older, more
familiar deterrents.  Doubt.  And fear.

"Can you show us this document, this treaty offered to the Nazis?"
Sabine was breathless, gripping Burke's arm though he hardly seemed to
feel it.

"Yes, of course.  Didn't I say?  I don't break promises.  But it is in
the library.  Come."

It was like waking from a dream but finding the real world harder to
focus on.  As they walked, from within the ancient stone walls of the
church Burke could hear calm clear voices, thin on the cool April air,
sacred music dedicated to the Saviour's resurrection, unheeded by the
revelling crowd of beer drinkers below.  All human life is here,
thought Burke.  Lies and legends.  Piss and wind.

The monk took from his rope belt a heavy iron key and turned it in the
massive oak door before them.  It swung open, admitting them to a
magnificent room nearly three storeys high, lined with bound volumes
and illuminated gently by light falling through panes of old glass that
rose from the top of the book stacks into the great Gothic arches.

It was just as the monk turned to close the door behind them that they
heard a voice which set Burke's nerves on edge:

"Entschuldigung, darfich aber mitkommen," Excuse me, might I join you.
German, spoken with a matchless English accent, one that Eamonn Burke
recognized only too well, even if the context was one that confused
him.

"Eamonn, old man, begorrah.  Good to see you."

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

He stood there, smiling, an expectant look on his face like a pregnant
pig, an expression of infinite politeness and self-confident
superiority.  He might have been jumping the queue for taxis at Charing
Cross.  You don't mind, do you, old boy?  his manner said, my business
is so much more important than yours.

"Boston," Burke said the name with contempt in his voice.

"I suppose we should have been expecting you."

"He stepped through the library door, leaving Brother Klement holding
it in his wake, like a college porter ministering to one of the 'young
gentlemen' Boston had always affected to despise.

"Jolly well done.  And this, I presume," turning towards Sabine, 'must
be your delightful young partner-in-crime, if you'll pardon the
expression.  So glad to see you're unharmed by your recent dreadful
experiences.  I believe we have mutual acquaintances."

Burke shot Sabine a quick glance only to find her staring at him with
an outraged "Who on earth is this and what is he doing here?"
expression on her face.

Behind them the monk had closed the door and turned the key.

"Ein unerwarteter Cast?"  An unexpected guest, he was asking.

"Oh, surely not.  Hardly unexpected, as I think Mr.  Burke here was
trying to say in his inimitable way."

"You bastard."

"Yeh, tch, tch.  Breeding will out.  So much for that expensive public
school education.  Didn't quite make an Englishman of you in the end,
old thing, did it.  Or maybe it did, hmm?  An Englishman in the mould
of Philby, Maclean, Burgess and Blunt, eh?  Shirtlifters and traitors
unlimited."

"I haven't betrayed my country."

"No, maybe not, but then that's because you don't have one.  Or perhaps
you're rediscovering your roots.  I'm afraid it's not exactly what
Uncle Sam wants either, the sort of muck-raking you're up to."

"Americans have a respect for the truth that matters more than
upholding myths."  But Burke hated the words for their naivety even as
he heard them coming out of his mouth.

"Yes, but only Nixon could go to China.  I'm afraid the world's a much
more complicated place than that, as you very well know.  My job's not
as terrible as you seem to think, Eamonn.  I just clean up the mess
other people make, or in this case before they make it."

"That's what you call it, is it?  Making people sick and then cleaning
up the vomit?"

"Let's just say that in Hollywood terms, I'm the continuity boy.  One
of those charged with making sure the sins of the fathers aren't
visited upon the next generation.  Certain things, you see, have to be
dealt with outside the normal framework of operations.

This'll make the biggest story since Philby and Watergate rolled into
one.  They'll swallow you and your stupid service."

The smirk faded.

"That's what they want, of course."  He turned to Sabine.

"I was intending to ask you to pass on my regards to Hermann Dickel at
the end of all this.  How is my friend?"

"Dickel?"  Burke shot a sideways glance at Sabine.  The name was
familiar.  Dickel had been the commissioning editor at EON who had
signed the letter giving him the assignment.  What had he got to do
with Dickie Boston?

But Sabine was not looking at him.  She stood clutching her bag so
tightly, Burke could see her knuckles whiten.  Brother Klement had
moved back against a bookcase and was watching, intently, carefully. He
had spoken no English.  Burke wondered if he understood what was being
said.  How much did he himself, come to think of it, really understand?
 Except one thing.

He spat it out.

"I knew it had to be you.  One of your thugs pulled the trigger, but
you did it.  Siggy, Magnus, Valery, all of them, even some poor bloody
Norwegian oil man and a London cabbie.  Why?"

"To scare you off your story.  That's what you think isn't it?"

"Because it's bloody well true, that's why.  All to save your version
of the past, to protect the great legend of the Cold War warriors.

"Preserving history", that's what Nora Winter meant, except that it
took me such a bloody long time to realize what she was hinting at.
That's why you didn't want me to see her, isn't it?  So how come Nora
survived?  Why didn't she get her Majesty's Government's short sharp
terminal shock treatment too?  Or is she too much inside, still one of
the boys; didn't leak too much and ran back to teacher to report what
she'd let slip out of school.  Is that it?"

"My God, you've really swallowed it, haven't you?"  Boston looked at
Kotzke.

"Congratulations, my dear.  But then he never was very bright, not half
as bright as his reputation."

Burke was not going to be distracted.

"You're pathetic, Boston.  Worse, you're defending a rotten system and
you don't even see it.  Might is right, eh?  Except that half the best
brains in the Western world saw what you were up to and tried to stop
it .. ."

'..  . and started the Cold War instead!  What's that to be proud of? A
bunch of naive idealistic fools who thought that just because they knew
numbers and theorems they knew how to direct the future of humanity.
How much did it cost to save their consciences, in terms of the
thousands killed, the tens of thousands jailed, the millions oppressed
over forty years in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe?  Not to mention how
close we nearly came to blowing the planet apart?  All because Moscow
got a bomb ten years earlier than it would have done without help, and
because we thought they had one even earlier."

But Burke still had the vision of Valery Korkin's bloodied corpse lying
in his arms.  He wanted to wipe the smug supercilious sneer off
Boston's face and grind it into the ancient library's floor.  Except
that Boston was making a strange sort of sense.

"We didn't know the plane never got there until you found the damn
thing for us.  We fell for their stupid trick."

"Roswell."

"You are well informed."

"Well enough informed about the bloody murderous game you've been
playing to cover up."

"Stop it, Eamonn."  Boston took a step backwards.

"Don't be a bloody fool.  None of this is your fault.  You've been
used.  Don't make it worse on yourself."

It was not the voice Burke was used to.  Gone were all the effete
cadences, the mocking wordplay.  This was Dickie Boston with his
Midlands vowels talking business.

"He's lying," Sabine burst out, an angry edge to her voice.

"It has to have been his men, killing to cover up their foul-smelling
little secrets."

"I think you know the boot's on the other foot.  I've a feeling your
honesty credentials aren't going to impress our friend here very much.
I'm surprised at you, Eamonn, going along so happily as the krauts'
patsy."

"What the fuck are you on about, Boston?"

"Oh, you don't mean she didn't tell you?  Yeh, tch, that was naughty.
Still I can see how she might not.  No guarantee, was there, really,
that you'd be keen to do the bidding of the BND?"

"The what?  Shut the fuck up, Dickie .. ."

"Oh, come on, Eamonn, for God's sake, you've been around.  BND,
Bundesnachrichtendiensrt German intelligence?  Don't tell me you really
didn't guess?  I thought you journalists were supposed to be on the
ball."

"You're scum, Mr.  Boston," Sabine spat out.

"You and your kind always have been.  Claim the moral high ground, the
great white Anglo-Saxon democracies, can do no wrong, don't you?  Or is
it just that you don't get found out?  All we wanted was to tell the
world the truth.  And is it so very terrible, to say that Germany does
not have the monopoly on skeletons in the closet?  None that we're
going to kill to protect half a century later.  Unlike you, you
murderous bastard."

"She's right."  Burke was staring at her, infected by her passionate
indignation, even if the words weren't quite what he was expecting. And
Boston was talking nonsense, lying to turn him against her.

But Boston seemed unperturbed, his eyes riveted on Sabine, though he
was talking to Burke.

"Listen to her, Eamonn.  Oh yes, I wanted to stop you all right.  Just
what good do you think you'll do with this tale?  You'll blow a bloody
great hole in the Atlantic alliance.  And whatever you might think,
whatever excesses we might have committed and I stress might it's still
been a sight better than any of the alternatives in this godforsaken
century.  But it was her side that did the killing.  I wasn't prepared
to murder you, or anyone else for that matter, just to kill off a
newspaper story.  There are other ways, you know."

Burke looked to Sabine and registered with a queazy stomach the look of
uncertainty in her lowered eyes.  Boston was unrelenting.

"Wise up, for Christ's sake.  You were meant to think I was behind
those assassination attempts.  They knew that was the one way to
convince you this was the exclusive of a lifetime.  Spooks kill to keep
secrets.  Just a little too enthusiastic in their execution if you'll
pardon the pun but then it wouldn't be the first time Jerry's gone over
the top, would it?  I always knew old Dickel could be a ruthless
bastard.  But even I was impressed.  Nothing like real blood to give
the illusion of authenticity, eh?"

Sabine was shaking her head.  Violently, as if hearing something she
refused to believe.

"It's not true, I swear.  Hermann can be impetuous, but he is not a
cold-blooded killer.  He would not have given those orders."

"What's not true .. . ?"  Burke began.

"Hermann?  Your editor, right?"

A harsh little laugh erupted from Boston.

"Editor?  Herr Chefre-dakteur Dickel?  What a good name for the head of
END disinformation.  A creative job if ever there was one."

Burke watched with horror the cold light die in Sabine Kotzke's eyes.
In the church across the courtyard, the voices swelled.  The glass in
the library window exploded into fragments.  Burke dived under the
thick oak reading table as a hail of bullets raked the room, hurling
splinters of wood and fragments of ancient bookbindings into the air.

For a second he held his breath.  From his position underneath the
table, Burke could see Sabine's legs and the monk's black robes, where
they had thrown themselves to the floor about ten yards away, next to
the wall.  Their upper halves were blocked from his vision by a long,
glass-topped display case.  Of Boston, he could see no sign.  He
wondered if he had been hit.  That sort of fire was meant to kill.  It
could cut a man in half.  Or woman.

There was no doubt about who was firing.  Korkin's killer had come back
to finish the job.  But who was he working for?  Boston's little speech
had raised a terrible doubt in his mind, one the gunman's first words
did nothing to dispel:

"Raus, alle," he called in German.  But then he repeated it in
English.

"Out, all of you."

The gun opened up again.  A short staccato burst.

The reply was a single round that Burke heard ricochet off a wall.  He
edged towards the rear of the heavy table.  Only a few feet away, he
realized with a start, Dickie Boston was standing up, behind one of the
Gothic pillars.  From inside his smart navy blazer he had produced a
gun which he was now clutching with both hands, more like a Los Angeles
cop than a denizen of London's club land  Fuck me, thought Burke:
bloody James Bond after all.

Another round winged into the architecture, sending a spray of white
plaster dust like a miniature snowfall on to the library's floor.

"Please.  The documents please.  Then no more killing."

Boston dropped, and rolled over, to end up under the table beside
Burke, breathing heavily.  A single shot slammed off the edge of the
heavy oak.  It had to be four inches thick.  Burke wondered if a direct
shot from a high-velocity weapon could pierce it, and decided,
uncomfortably, that it probably could.

"The traitors are dead.  Vecbna Rus requires no more blood."

"Jesus Christ.  Vechna.  Not the Krauts after all," muttered Boston.
Burke stared at him perplexed.

"Eternal Russia," Boston whispered.

"A band of nationalists well to the right of Zhirinovsky.  Based in St.
Petersburg.  Most of them ex-special forces.  Mad as hatters.  And I
thought it was her lot."

"We thought it was you."  But even as he said it, Burke wondered what
he meant.

"Her lot': was he accepting Boston's preposterous allegations?  The
whining ricochet of a bullet off the masonry behind them brought him
back to the matter of the moment.

"Please.  The documents.  But now."

There was something familiar about the voice.  A tone, a timbre, an
inflection, an accent.  With a tingle that ran the length of his spine,
Burke recognized the voice of Slava Rusakov.  Korkin had been killed by
his own bodyguard.

A bullet zinged through the empty space above them and embedded itself
in the wall behind.  From the real world outside, the great bells of
the pilgrimage church erupted into their booming, joyful carillon,
pealing the glad tidings of the Resurrection.  Loud enough to waken the
dead.

Thunk, thunk, thunk.  Three single rounds thudded into the pillar
behind which Boston had been hiding.  The man was playing with them.
But how long would his patience last?

"Slava," Burke called out.  Boston stared at him as if he had gone
mad.

"Slava, why did you do it?  You killed Valery, for God's sake?"

Crouching beside him, Boston mouthed in astonishment, "You know him?"
then nodded in encouragement.  The more the nutcase was distracted, the
better their chances.

"Ah, Yamon."  Slava was calm, worryingly so.  It made Burke sick to
hear the killer mispronounce his name so familiarly.

"You are so very right: for God's sake, indeed."  The voice turned
harsh.

"He was a traitor.  He had to die.  You were not the target.  He was.
He would have sold Russia for a moment of fame."

No.  But for the lives of his friends, Burke was tempted to say.  He
said nothing.

"Like the old man.  He was a traitor too.  He should have known better.
But he was a Soviet.  He cared nothing for the real Russia."

"And Siggy and Magnus, in Iceland.  And the Norwegian.  And the taxi
driver in London."

"For the Norwegian, I am sorry, but even good marksmen cannot avoid the
fool who leaps into the bullet.  Of your taxi driver, I know nothing.
Your mad bombers, they are not ours."

Burke closed his eyes and groaned at the irony.  His imagination had
taken him one step too far.

"But the others, Magnus and Siggy."

"Regrettable.  But necessary.  We do not want the status quo damaged
any more than your British secret service does, whatever the treachery
of the West towards Russia in the past.  Your cause and ours is
identical, Mr.  Boston.  Give us this document and we will make sure it
never sees the light of day."

Burke turned to Boston, who sneered.

"Like hell they won't.  Vechna are dedicated to restoring an orthodox
Christian version of the Soviet Empire, probably with a fucking Tsar,
for all I know."

But it was Sabine who was doing the shouting now, from somewhere on the
other side of the long bookcases that ran down the left-hand side of
the library.

"You're lying, Slava.  Admit it.  You destroyed the plane and the
evidence of how the scientists of the West helped Russia back in 1945
because you don't want your people to know about it.  That's why you
tried to stop us.  You don't ever want to admit that there might be
people in the West who aren't dedicated to destroying Russia."

Of course, thought Burke.  Suddenly it made sense.  But if she had seen
it like that all along, why had he been so blind?  Or had he simply
failed to understand what made Sabine Kotzke tick.  And then he stopped
thinking and started worrying.  About the sudden silence.  About the
effect her words were having on Slava.

But Sabine hadn't finished.  She was speaking again, a loud, measured
tone, a very German tone, Burke thought, that was meant to be
calculatedly calm, but he worried that the Russian might find it smug,
even goading.

"That's why you want the Sunrise Protocol, isn't it, so that you can
use it as and when you want to show that the West has been plotting
against Russia for ever?  That's your version of the truth.  Pravda,
eh?  Like in the newspaper."

A hail of automatic fire raked the room.  She had hit a nerve.  An
exceedingly raw one, too.

The next instant, Burke was thrown back as Boston sprang out from under
the table, letting off four shots at the Russian, before again darting
behind the stone pillar.  From the balcony Slava Rusakov could probably
see almost the whole of the room.  The balcony ran in a U-shape along
both sides and straddled the width of the library at the end opposite
the main entrance.  Access to the gallery level was by a single spiral
staircase in the centre at his end.  Simply by moving along the "U',
the Russian had a clear shot at almost any angle.  He could wait, Burke
thought, but not indefinitely.

As it turned out, the decision was not wholly up to the Russian.
Suddenly he was hurled backwards by a shot from below.  The bullet that
tore through the wooden floor he was standing on seared the arm of his
leather jacket and left him winded against the wall.  But he sprang
back to his feet, sprinted across to the far corner of the balcony,
leaned over and fired repeatedly across the floor below.

Burke heard a shot, a shout, and a female cry above the explosive roar.
Two sharp reports slammed into his brain.  The harsh hot reek of
cordite singed the musty air.  He squinted at the pillar where Boston
had taken cover.  He was not there.

Burke edged to the left-hand side of the table, hoping it was outside
Slava's line of fire.  On the other side of the library, beneath the
balcony, Sabine lay on the floor, crawling slowly towards her lost
weapon.  Burke realized what had happened.  Sabine Kotzke had had a gun
and had used it.  She had counted on surprise, marksmanship and luck.
But too much of the latter.  She must have known she would only get one
shot.  And she had blown it.  Her weapon lay in open view of the
gunman.  Inaccessible.  Except that, for some unknown reason, he had
stopped firing.

"Scum."  The voice was unmistakably English, albeit without a trace of
its usual affected plumminess.  It was followed by a single, muffled
report.

In the brief moment that Kotzke had distracted the Russian's attention,
Dickie Boston had summoned up all the adrenalin and the instinct he had
once honed on the firing ranges of southern England and spun round the
pillar, both hands forward in the classic firing position, and pumped
two rounds straight into the god sent target of Slava Rusakov blazing
over the edge of the balcony.

Eamonn Burke raised his head cautiously above the table to see Boston
standing by the foot of the spiral staircase, gun still smoking from
the final shot he had put into the back of the head of the corpse that
slumped like a seasick sailor over the edge of the gallery.

Burke's heart was pounding as he emerged from his shelter, noting the
charred gouges in the old oak.  Glass lay on the floor in glinting
multicoloured shards.  The air reeked of gunsmoke.  Burke breathed it
deep into his lungs as he sighed with relief.

"Well done, Dickie.  Bloody well done."

He looked for Sabine, eager to take her into his arms, the doubts that
Boston had sown forgotten.

"Don't touch it."  Boston snapped.  He had spun round to face Sabine
who was crawling slowly towards her lost weapon, his pistol trained on
her.

"Stand.  Now."

She did as she was told, one hand clutching her bleeding shoulder.

"Thank you.  Over there, please, next to old Eamonn."  Sabine, her eyes
flickering between them, moved slowly across the room.  Like a reprise
of a nightmare, the whole grotesque conversation of a few minutes
earlier came back to Burke.  He stared at her, willing truth out of her
blank expression.

"Stop," Boston commanded bluntly, when she was only a few feet from
Burke.  He had both of them covered.

"Right, let's have no more fucking about.  Just hand over the
"dokumyentf," he parodied Slava's accent, 'and we'll get the history
books nicely closed again, all right?"

"You think it's that easy, don't you?"  Sabine spat out.

"I know it's that easy.  This silly little episode is almost over, and
I intend to finish it.  Now be a good girl, and I won't blow your silly
fucking head off.  Because I could, you know.  I can always blame it on
him."  He jerked his head in the direction of the Russian's corpse.

"And believe me, no one is going to be asking me any questions.  So
don't piss about.  Let's just get on with it, hmmm?"

Burke watched with horror.  Boston, just seconds ago their saviour, was
now the threat.  And he wasn't joking.

"Dickie?"  His voice was imploring, appealing to the man's humanity.
Surely the madness was over now.

"I'm sorry, Eamonn, but this is important.  Your friend here's little
lot have broken the school rules.  We're out of bounds now."

"But she doesn't have it."

"I'm well aware of that.  But there would be no point in threatening
Brother Klement now, would there?  He's become far too unworldly to
care for his own life."

The monk was hovering timidly, his face ashen, his arms folded and
ardwithin the sleeves of his cassock, his eyes closed as if in
penitence, a vain prayer that a burden he had never asked for be lifted
from him.

"But he might just care for hers.  Or yours.  So what do you say,
Bruder, I'm not going to waste time.  Let's make it a count of three,
shall we?"  He levelled the pistol at Sabine's head and squeezed the
trigger.

"One .. . two .. . three .. ."  u The detonation came like a blow to
the head with a cricket bat.  Burke felt the force physically, his eyes
squeezing shut, his ears protesting at the pain.  He looked up to
see Dickie Boston slumped on the ground at his feet, a black burn mark
on the side of his head oozing red, the gun still smoking in his hand.
A few feet from him, Sabine Kotzke stood wide-eyed as if glued to the
plaster work gaping at the hole in the wall beside her.  Then her head
turned, slowly, as did Burke's, to stare in amazement at the old
black-robed figure standing by the library wall holding Sabine's pistol
in his hand, an expression of almost incalculable grief on his face.

"It may seem a strange thing," the monk said in impeccable English.

"But that is the first time I have ever killed an Englishman," and he
dropped the gun with a clatter on to the parquet floor.

Gotterdammerung

Burke looked at her, then down at the body of Dickie Boston, and at the
monk who now kneeled on the blood-spattered parquet, his eyes closed in
prayer, or perhaps just to blot out the world around him.  Sabine
Kotzke stared at the ground, then lifted her head and stared back.
Burke thought that for a moment she looked grateful.  He was almost
laughing, trying not to cry.

"Listen to me, Eamonn."  She was angry now.

"The CIA thought they'd hidden all traces of the Sunrise Protocol when
they bought up the Stasi files.  Most were destroyed, not by some
Communist praetorian guard determined to go down with the secrets of
the old regime but by the boys from Langley, the computer kids with
their electronic erasers."

Burke watched her lips move, his face blank.

"Why?"  he asked.

"What the hell was it all about?  What's in it for you?"

"You wouldn't understand, would you?  I grew up in a world that rewrote
history to order.  My schoolteachers pretended Hitler and Stalin had
never been allies.  They told us Berliners welcomed Soviet troops with
open arms in 1945 when my grandmother and her sisters were hiding in
the coal cellar with blackened faces in the vain hope of avoiding gang
rape.  For all I know, my grandfather was some Ukrainian peasant who
used his prick like a bayonet.  I could go on and on, you know: Berlin
1953, Budapest 1956, Prague 1968, Warsaw 1981 all the lies that made
evil acts of cynical repression seem justifiable for the greater good.
Instead, here we had a different story, a legacy left by one of the
demons of the Cold War, Klaus Fuchs.  A story of a few scientists
getting together to do the wrong thing, but for the right reasons,
individuals who could make a difference, while the bloody governments
went about their bloody business as usual.

"Okay, so Boston knew it was Dickel's idea, not the politicians'.  Ours
are as bad as yours.  Worse maybe, ever since the move back to Berlin.
But a few of us, in the service, a few of us who'd been victims already
of a state abusing its power, we thought we could make a difference.
Were we so bloody wrong to try?"

But Burke was shaking his head, eyes closed now.

"All right, Eamonn.  Hear no evil, see no evil.  Is that your attitude?
Well what's the difference between that and your precious Winston
bloody Churchill and the saintly FDR plotting to switch sides at the
last moment to secure their global ambitions.  Nothing, except that
they were on the winning side.

"Okay, so it didn't happen.  But just because they think they won the
Cold War too, even yesterday's questions are not to be asked.  Is that
it?  Maybe it is only some nutcases who're prepared to kill to stop the
truth coming out, but maybe not.  So what will you do now?  Join the
cover-up?"

Burke was silent.

"Look," she said.

"We didn't know it would end like this, didn't know about Vechna, about
Slava and his mates.  Or at least, I didn't.  Dickel didn't.  Or just
didn't think.  I don't know.  Oh, for Christ's sake, Eamonn, don't you
see.  We knew most of it.  Fuchs's diary was relatively complete, but
we didn't have the evidence.  We knew you could find it.  And it would
all be so much better coming from you."

"Fuchs.  Who killed him?"

Sabine gave an exasperated shrug, as if nothing mattered less.

"Oh, Eamonn.  God.  The devil.  I don't know.  He was an old man."

"There was no murder, was there?"

"We had to get you interested, involved.  You needed a conspiracy.  But
we couldn't just feed you the big one.  We needed you to find out, for
yourself, as well as for us."

"Dickie was right.  You thought I'd be your patsy.  The mad conspiracy
theorist who'd be delighted to learn that his own side were the bad
boys after all.  Oh yes.  And what's more it damn near worked."

The torrent dried up as quickly as it had begun.  She had tried to get
him angry, he thought, to force some emotion into him.  She had got him
angry all right, but not in a way she would ever know.  Not now.  He
shook his head.  And looked back at her, wondering what she saw.

All Eamonn Burke could see the was futile vanity of the whole
vainglorious endeavour.  He could see it as plainly as he saw Brother
Klement, kneeling by Sabine's weapon, tears trickling down his cheeks,
tears of regret for the necessity of taking a life in order to save a
life the age-old dilemma of the Christian soldier, faced even by
ex-Nazis.  He saw it as plainly as he saw Sabine Kotzke standing there,
convinced of her own righteousness, yet shaking with uncertainty.  He
turned his head and walked quietly towards the library door, turned the
key in the lock, and stepped out into the pale spring sunshine.  Away
from the stupidity of it all.  Away from the slaughterhouse.  Away from
her.

Outside, he saw nothing.  Not the laughing beer-drinkers.  Not the
shocked faces of those who had gathered in a tipsy group, frightened
and astonished by the commotion.  He didn't know what he was going to
do.  Didn't know who would believe him, or what they would do if they
did.  He didn't know what he believed in any more.  But then nothing
really had changed; he had never really known.  Only for a moment, he
had made the mistake of deluding himself.  He had grasped hold of a
string in a hurricane only to find out it, too, was blowing in the
wind.  Now the ground he stood on had turned to dust, dust with blood
in it.  Behind him he heard a woman's voice cry out.  He thought it
called a name.  He didn't notice whose.  The red convertible sat there
brazenly with its hood down in the spring sunshine.  He walked past it
to where the buses brought the strangers and took them away again.  The
last thing he wanted to do was look back.  He resisted the
temptation.

and and-who nday the has leaks

Appendix two

From the spring of 1945 Heinrich Himmler began to put out peace feelers
to the West.  Official history says he was rebuffed.  In March 1945, to
the Russians' surprise and envy, the Western Allies found the Rhine
bridge at Remagen undefended.  Allen Dulles, then working for the OSS
in Bern, met on several occasions in Geneva with 'top-level contacts',
including SS representatives, to discuss a separate surrender of German
forces in Italy.  The plan, known as "Operation Sunrise' became known
to Moscow and provoked protests from Stalin.  It was overtaken by
events on the eastern front.

By June 1946, nine months into the programme to develop the hydrogen
bomb, the atomic arsenal of the world consisted of nine American "Fat
Boy' weapons of the type dropped on Nagasaki.  Of these only seven
could be made operational.  The reason was a lack of the crucial
initiator devices.

On 29 June 1954, after hearing evidence from Edward Teller, among
others, the United States Atomic Energy Commission concluded: "Dr.
Oppenheimer is not entitled to the continued confidence of the
Government and of this Commission because of the proof of fundamental
defects in his character."  His security clearance was withdrawn.  He
died of cancer of the throat in 1967, at the comparatively young age of
sixty-two.

Secret material from Albert Einstein's private archives, only released
in 1998, revealed that from 1935 to 1945 he had an affair with
Margarita Konenkova, the wife of a Soviet sculptor.  She was, in fact,
an agent of Moscow Centre.

Anatoly Yatzkov, also known as Yakovlev, code name "John', was the
NKVD's 'rezident' in New York throughout the Second World War.  He died
in Moscow in 1993.  To the end, he maintained that his successful
espionage owed a debt of gratitude to an unnamed agent, known only as
"Perseus', based in Albuquerque.

United States intelligence services have never identified Perseus, nor
pinpointed his treason.  As a result, the most authoritative government
publications insist, in spite of the evidence from Moscow, that this
agent was either 'mythical or a composite'.

PETER MILLAR was born in Northern Ireland and educated at Magdalen
College, Oxford.  He is an award-winning foreign correspondent, critic
and columnist who has covered Central and Eastern Europe for the Sunday
Times and now also writes for the Financial Times, the Daily Mail and
the London Evening Standard.  He has lived in Berlin, Moscow, Paris and
Brussels, and speaks four languages fluently.  He is married and has
two children.