'Search him in there and then bring him to my office. Is Colonel Vader in the building?'

'Yes, Captain.'

'Tell him we have the suspect in Room 9.'

Barred windows, and the smell of sweat and damp uniforms and my own fear.

'Good evening. My name is Vader.'

'Good evening, Colonel. Kapista Kirov.' He was in uniform but without a cap 'Would you like to smoke?'

I shook my head and he put the packet away. He was a short square man with red hair on his head, in his nostrils and on the backs of his hands. His face was heavily freckled and his eyes were honey-coloured, a luminous amber. His hands were square and spadelike, and moved when he spoke, spreading out on the table or pushing at its edge; his nails were short and well trimmed, and there were no nicotine stains on his fingertips. I found I was interested in him, because he was probably going to be the man who would force me to decide, in three days from now, four days, five, whether I must kill myself.

He tilted his chair back, and the light cast the shadows of his brows against his face, so that he looked as if he were frowning suddenly; but I don't think he was; he had an amiable face, well composed, contemplative. He looked the kind of man I could have soldiered with, in a different world; but there was the risk here of deceiving myself: I was also dangerous, and had been known to kill.

This wasn't his office we were sitting in; it was one of the interrogation rooms. There are photographs of them in London, overprinted to show where the microphone is, and giving all the dimensions: floor area, height of the small barred window, width of the door, so forth. The furniture is also featured: table, two upright chairs, single overhead lamp, nothing else. The lamp is angled rather more on the face of the man being interrogated, but this one wasn't blinding or even uncomfortable: this wasn't where they would bring the pressure on. They'd probably do that at the Serbsky Institute if I proved difficult. The London photographs are not meant to help us plan some kind of escape: things aren't so boyish inside Lubyanka. They're just meant to give us information we might need one day, on the principle that to be informed about one's environment is to give one confidence, because it's the unknown that makes people most afraid. I remembered looking at those photographs before I was sent out here for training in the Soviet theatre three years ago. None of us likes having to look at them, as a required part of the briefing. We make a little joke and say we prefer the ones in Playboy.

'How do you feel?' the Colonel asked me.

`Fine.'

'Did they get all the glass out?'

'There wasn't any glass. But she did a good job.' A large and efficient woman, smelling of antiseptic and perspiration, talking all the time behind her cotton-gauze mask as she put the stitches in.

'I think there was some glass,' he said, and smiled with his square even teeth. 'That was quite a crash.'

'I hit some railings,' I said, and he smiled again.

The microphone was built into the lamp, invisible in the glare. The other man would be in the next room, working the tape recorder. On the wall behind me was the opaque screen, for flashing directions on the closed circuit; Vader was First Chief Directorate, counter-espionage, but I didn't know whether he was handling this session himself or whether a superior would be using the screen to guide his questions.

'We don't want to waste each other's time,' he said briefly, his hands pushing at the table. 'Your name is not Kirov, and your papers are false. We've been through the main computer. Kapista Mikhail Kirov, born in Skvira in the Ukraine, died at the age of seven months, of pneumonia. You should have bought some better shoes.' He smiled comfortably.

They too had their little jokes. 'Shoes' meant walking papers, i.e. passport. But my papers weren't forged: they were false, and he knew that. London doesn't forge anything if it can get the real thing and put a photograph on it: it saves all the fussing about with sized safety paper and fugitive dyes and watermarks and perforations and date-coded numerals. But the problem with using genuine papers is that a good computer can dig through the historical records and find the grave.

'Requiescat in pace,' I said.

'M'm? Oh.' He smiled dutifully.

The thing was, I couldn't lie and I couldn't tell the truth. I had to say nothing.

In the silence I noticed the marks on the table: narrow parallel striations. I wondered what they were.

'I'd like you to tell me,' Vader said, 'about yourself.' He was different. I began listening.

'There's not much to tell,' I said.

'All the same, I'd like to hear it.'

'Well, I slipped on the snow, and hit my face against some railings. Your people picked me up, thinking I was someone else. That wasn't my fault.'

He watched me with his head slightly on one side, like an amiable ginger cat. 'Very well, you slipped on the snow and hurt yourself. But what are you doing with false papers? What is your real identity?'

'I can't tell you that, Colonel. It would mean letting someone down.'

'Letting someone down?' In Russian the idiom is perhaps ambiguous.

'Betraying them.'

It was as far as I could go. He knew I wasn't Kapista Mikhail Kirov and he knew I was the man who'd come out of that crash and run for cover. But that was all he must know.

'Yes,' he said easily, 'I understand that. But we want to know all about you, and we shall succeed in doing that, as I'm sure you are aware. But I thought we might start like this, with just the two of us talking around a table.' He leaned forward slightly, and his leather belt creaked. 'I don't consider this a waste of time; I regard it as a gesture of hospitality. We are a hospitable people.' He leaned back again.

'I appreciate that,' I said.

He hadn't looked behind me yet, at the little screen. He was handling this on his own, so far. There wasn't a lot I could do to change the pattern. He was going to give me a chance of talking freely; then, if I chose not to, he was going to force me, or have me forced. I could speed things up or delay them, but not by much. It wasn't that I hadn't been prepared for this. Croder had pitched me into the field with light cover at short notice and I'd known what to expect if I got caught. This.

'Talking of hospitality,' Vader said, 'would you like a drink? A little vodka?'

'Not now.'

'I would be happy to join you.'

'You go ahead, if you'd like something yourself.'

He shook his head, smiling. 'I'm rather too fond of it,' he said in a stage whisper, and the smile became a chuckle.

There was no point in speeding things up, but there was a point in delaying things: there might, somewhere in the next few days, be a chance of getting out of this alive, just a chance in a thousand. But it wasn't going to be fun, delaying things, because it would give me a lot more time to anticipate what they would finally do to me if that chance never came.

'Which intelligence branch are you in?' Vader asked with polite interest.

'What makes you think I'm in intelligence?'

'Oh, false papers, an attempt at surveillance, an attempt to avoid arrest, a reluctance to betray your cell. Good heavens, I've been through all that myself, plenty of times.' The smile relaxed. 'London, are you?'

'The problem,' I said, 'with security people is that they see everything from their own specialized point of view. I suppose that's true of most people. What I mean is, betrayal isn't confined to the intelligence services. One can betray a friend.'

'Oh, agreed. Also, of course, oneself.' He pushed his red-haired hands across the surface of the table, watching them. 'As a human creature, for example, you've no wish to suffer pain, but if the ego decides you shall submit to it, that would be a kind of betrayal. Wouldn't you say?' His hands stopped moving.