The tension bar went into the keyway and I felt for the notch on the underside of the bolt, then gave it enough pressure to push the racking stump against the tumblers; I didn’t know how many there were but the standard number was three. My hands were freezing and I was clumsy, getting the pick into the keyway but having a lot of trouble finding the tumbler and raising it. I had to try three times before I could feel the gate lining up with the stump, and I made a time check at 05:43 to establish temporal orientation because you can fiddle with a lock for half an hour and think you’ve only been at it ten minutes: it’s concentrated work and you tend to forget the environment and that can be dangerous. Even with these small tools I was making a degree of noise and Liova could have left someone in the apartment: sister, neighbour, so forth.

I had two of the tumblers raised and felt the third one lining up with the racking stump. My fingers were now partially numbed and I wasn’t sure whether it was the gate coming into alignment or the other tumblers moving laterally because of wear. Below the fire-escape a car had begun moving, accelerating into second gear and going slowly past the corner and into the square. I’d allowed for various contingencies as a matter of routine: the merchandise running out before Liova was at the head of the queue, her original errand becoming abortive, a neighbour giving her a lift back in his car and shortening the time element. As this stage I’d hear her coming in through the front door and the risk was minimal.

I eased the pick away and increased the force of the tension tool and felt for movement and got it and steadied my right hand as the racking stump went through the gates of all three tumblers and the bolt slid back.

05:47.

Once I was inside I put the lights on because I could work faster and that was essential because the risk of being disturbed was greater than the risk of the light’s being noticed and bringing some kind of enquiry.

Living-room, one bedroom, kitchen, small dining-room, bathroom, large closet, skylight, fanlight, four minutes to make certain there was no radio transmitter and no short-wave receiver, then steady work, every cupboard, every drawer, every contained space and every visual cover material — rugs, curtains, pictures — and every disguise feature — radio, lamp-bases, bookshelves, the big leaved table. Forty-five minutes and no go, a blank, try again. The deadline I’d estimated was one hour from the unlocking of the door but that was arbitrary and she could be back here at any next minute and I hadn’t worked out a cover story because I didn’t yet know her personal relationship with Kirinski and that was the key to what I could do here.

Box mattress, clock-case, Chinese vase, sink-cupboard, cistern, gas geyser — the telephone rang and persisted and I waited and the room was quiet again and I went on working — pelmets toolbox, sideboard base, cutlery cabinet, blank every time a blank and the deadline one minute away and I began sweating.

Something had changed in the background sound and I went into the kitchen again and cracked the door open and listened and tried to fit this aural pattern against the one I’d heard before and finally got it: the radio was still going but I couldn’t hear it in the living-room because the walls were thick. Shut the door and went back and began working on surfaces: walls, wainscoting, panels, doors, cupboards, tapping and listening for hardness, softness, diaphragm tones, reverberation, echo effect, dissimilarities in texture sounds, inconsistencies in surface structures, drawing blank, drawing blank wherever I went.

07:29 and an overrun on the deadline of forty-two minutes, it was no bloody go but this was the target centre and London had worked for three months on just getting me here and if Alexei Kirinski was clandestine in any way he’d have to conceal material where he lived.

Sounds: clock, creak of the wood stove, a door shutting a long way off, she didn’t have to come through a door, otherwise total silence. I would hear her footsteps, first. Listen for those.

Air vents, ledges, the skylight, the plumbing access panel at the end of the bath, blank, all of them blank. I began measuring, using the wooden spoon from the tray in the kitchen, comparing widths and thicknesses: the wall over the kitchen doorway, the side of the big closet, the depth of the sink recess, the base of the sideboard, the rear wall of the closet again where I’d tapped before, with nearly four inches unaccounted for, warmer, measure again, four inches, represented by seven spoon’s-lengths from the master wall outside the closet and six and a half lengths inside, try tapping again, higher this time, all the way up to the ceiling, a slight echo effect in this section two feet between the beams and the beams don’t go all the way down so it must be a frame of some kind and this knot-hole is in a separate panel and it -

Slides.

They don’t tell you everything, in London. The principle is that if you know the overall background to any specific mission you’ll tend to over think and over-react to the point of actual purpose-tremor when you’re at the target centre picking a lock or laying a fuse or setting a trap: if you’re aware of the responsibility you’ll shy at an action you’d otherwise take in your stride. When Gary Powers was shot out of the sky in Soviet airspace the imminent East-West summit conference was cancelled and the cold war broke out again in Cuba, Laos and the Congo, and this was the direct consequence of one failed mission. It wasn’t his fault because the U-2 didn’t destruct: the point is that if he had known what the consequences would be he might have turned down the mission at the outset because he was only an executive in the field and he carried the built-in responsibilities of a five-star general in a hot war and that’s loading the dice in any language.

I didn’t know the background to Slingshot and I couldn’t have turned down the mission in any case because those bastards had me over a barrel and indirectly this was a help as I slid the panel back and found the spring release and swung the flat zinc box away from the wall and lifted the lid.

Two compartments, each of them a foot square and with separate serial numbers: Z-A23V2/S and 8-1289, the suffixes presumably belonging to one file and the main body reference belonging to two different systems. A lot of material: photostats, diagrammatic printouts, two sets of holocryptic gammas with red and black pages printed on nit rated cellulose, KGB/GRU Monome-Dinome tables with complete matrices and side and top co-ordinates, so forth.

Local military deployments and facilities.

Airfields, underground communication channels, silos.

Names, file references, variable cypher drafts.

One code-word heading: Opal Light. The first and last pages were slashed across with a graphite pencil and the whole sheaf was stapled top and bottom.

I didn’t begin hurrying because there was no point: the deadline had burned out and all I had time to do was to swing the zinc box back and slide the panel across before she said:

“How did you get in here?”