“You’re getting the idea.” I checked through the rest of the Soviet stuff and slid it into the envelope because there wasn’t time now to ask him for translation from the Mandarin: I was going to freeze everything until I got a signal from Chechevitsin. “What was Opal Light?”

He looked down at the batch of sheets stapled together top and bottom, and I thought he wasn’t going to answer; then he looked away and said:

“It was a Chinese operation.”

“What sort? Come on, Kirinski.”

“It was directed at the Lop Nor missile installations security services, last November. Intelligence was obtained.”

I let it go at that because it looked like a closed file and London wouldn’t be interested in a Sino-Soviet mission: most of this stuff would probably go to the CIA and I didn’t expect them to find anything new because the Americans were far more concerned than the British with the Sino-Soviet confrontation and its potential for world war, and they had the field well covered.

I put the batch away and looked at the photographs again and put those away too and asked him; “Did you start working for the KGB first?”

Another fractional pause: this was an assault on his innermost privacy and he was feeling the exposure.

“Yes.”

“How long had you worked for them before you started working for Peking as well?”

Pause.

“Two years.”

“Is it the money?”

I didn’t think it could be anything else: there was no kind of motherland ideology involved because this man wasn’t a double agent for one organization he was doubling for two. The amount of material I’d found in his apartment was equally secret and equally substantial for each side, and if either side found out what he was doing he’d go sky-high and that was why I could control him like this, as long as I had the material.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes it was the money.”

I didn’t believe him but I didn’t think he was lying to deceive. He wasn’t the type to go for the money: there was too much tension, too much pride, and too much resistance to my attempts at dominance. The reasons why we go into this trade are varied and we never talk about it because it’s always personal — we do it for money or out of some buried loyalty to a flag or to express an ingrained sense of duplicity or simply because of the razor’s edge syndrome: the inability to live too far from the brink without getting bored or drunk or going round the bend for the want of a starting-point to distant horizons we hope never to reach. It’s convolute and involute and we don’t question even ourselves, especially ourselves, because we don’t want to come up with an answer we can’t live with.

I’d put Kirinski down as a psychopath. That is the type I know best, and for good reason.

“Does Liova work with you?”

He jerked his narrow head to look at me. “No.”

“Does she work for the KGB?”

“No. She is my wife, and that is all.”

“Your legal wife?”

A slight hesitation. “Yes.”

I didn’t go into it. The art of interrogation is a paradox: you learn more from the questions than the answers, if you know how to bring out those questions by your silences; you also learn more from the way the answers come than from what they purport to tell you. Most of them are deliberate lies and this is accepted by both parties, but lies will protect you only up to a point: the point where you produce so many of them that you get lost in the confusion of your own making; the truth is easily remembered because it exists, but lies demand a trained memory and the stress can become overwhelming. This again is paradoxical: the more you lie, the more you reveal the truth.

She wasn’t, for instance, his legal wife. Because of the hesitation.

“Does she have any connection with the KGB?”

“No. I’ve told you, she — ”

“Or any other police or intelligence or security organization?”

“No. None.”

“Is she afraid of anyone?”

“Of course not!”

“So she doesn’t need protection.”

“No.”

“Even the protection of a gun?”

His hesitations lasted only a fraction of a second but they were beautifully consistent.

“No.”

“All right. Now I want a general preliminary picture: your contacts with the KGB, your contacts with Peking, then liaison, couriers, communications and security background. Take your time.”

He hissed in his breath again and began pointing with that long nose of his like a parrot trapped in a cage and I watched his hands because they’d be the first sign of movement and at some stage in the interrogation he was going to try making a break for it.

I could feel the tension in him and it was communicable: I was getting on edge. There was something about this man that I couldn’t place, some extra dimension that explained the inner shaking of his nerves. All right, he knew I could blow him and he knew what they’d do to him as a result; but I’ve been in the company of men in the final stages of stress and I’ve been there myself and all I knew as I sat in the cramped confines of the Trabant with Alexei Kirinski beside me was that his tension was a part of him and not wholly induced.

“I have no regular contacts,” he said, shivering.

“Names,” I said, “come on.”

“But I tell you I — ”

“I want their names.”

He began making them up and I let him because their names wouldn’t mean a thing to me and he didn’t seem to know that: he wasn’t KGB himself because even those people are put through a modicum of training and he wasn’t even a beginner — you don’t just walk away from a missed rendezvous and settle for a bowl of soup without even looking behind you.

We worked at it for fifteen minutes and I didn’t interrupt except to goad him on, and after a time he picked up the tricks and started hesitating deliberately to make me believe I’d asked a sensitive question.

“There is no direct contact with Peking. I use couriers for material, through Yumen.”

“What about signals?”

He hesitated and for no reason: there was no equipment in his apartment and he could throw me another bunch of phony names and get away with it.

“I signal through a frontier post.”

“Both ways?”

“No.”

“Come on then — which way?”

“From here to Sinkiang.”

“What about the other way — look, I want you to go on talking.”

“The other way I use a contact in Yelingrad.”

With a transmitter and cyphers and onward transmission to his contacts in the KGB, so forth. I let him go on talking while I listened for the right lie in the wrong place and watched the scene through the windscreen. Only a dozen people had crossed the waste ground since we’d got here and only a few vehicles had come past the corner, all of them with chains on. The cold was coming into the car and slowly cancelling out the heat of our bodies and Kirinski began rubbing his hands together but his teeth went on chattering as he talked.

“How much money do they pay you?”

“Not very much.”

“How much?”

“Five hundred rubles a month.”

“This bonuses?”

“Bonuses? What kind?”

“For a special assignment, or special information. There must be bonuses.” It’s a major part of Russian economic thinking.

“I received an extra hundred rubles for the decoy airfield photographs on the Chinese side of the frontier.”

“What about Peking? How much do they pay?”

He was tremendously fast and caught my throat with a curving ridge-hand before I could block it and followed this with his elbow rising as my head came forward on the reflex but I avoided it and formed a four-finger eye shot with my left hand but it wasn’t any good because all that tension was coming out of him and he was like a wildcat and I stopped trying to do anything formal because any kind of reaction would have to be instinctive if I were going to get out of this alive.