‘I hate the evil old bastard,’ said Boyd Stuart.

Jennifer shivered and moved away; she had forgotten such frightening glimpses of the cold violence within him.

‘You mustn’t go, Boyd. It sounds dangerous.’ She said it too quickly, too automatically for it to have been a measure of her love.

‘Daddy wants me to go, Jennifer. And what daddy wants, daddy gets.’

‘That’s loutish, Boyd,’ She waved her hand and a taxi, turning the corner at Pont Street, immediately flashed its headlights to acknowledge her summons.

Sollerod is a village on the Danish island of Sjaelland. The old coast road runs close to the large house that is called Widewater. Here the Baltic Sea narrows to the Kattegat and from the garden of the large house there is a view of the Swedish coastline.

General Shumuk’s attempt to appear inconspicuous had resulted in a slightly absurd mixture of western garments. A bright green shirt hung limply on his thin frame, and from its short sleeves his arms emerged like sticks. His trousers were of corduroy and his shoes had gilt buckles. The effect was of a man rescued from a disaster at sea and clothed by an over-worked charity.

The house was large and of modern design, with floor-to-ceiling glass and interior walls of white-painted rough brickwork. The furniture was light-coloured teak of that sort of uncomfortable Scandinavian design that aspires to being art. And the walls were hung with large abstract paintings in primary colours and spotlit by polished steel lamps. To alleviate the bleak interior, there were colourful oriental carpets strewn across the polished wood-block floors. From the windows there was a clear view of the water and of clouds combed thinly across the blue scalp of the sky.

‘The Americans abducted Kleiber,’ said General Shumuk, his voice not revealing his attitude to this event. His hand waved impatiently in front of his face to disperse the strong-smelling Russian tobacco. ‘But London has designated Kleiber XPD. Did you know that?’

‘So where is Kleiber now?’ said Stuart. He was amazed that news of something so secret could have reached Shumuk already. The XPD directive for Kleiber had only been signed a day ago. He wondered if Shumuk’s phone call had actually been to Sir Sydney Ryden.

Shumuk stretched out his legs so that his bones creaked. His head was propped on the hand-woven cushion, his long hand caged the cigarette so that its smoke emerged between his bony fingers.

Was Brezhnev dying, wondered Boyd Stuart. Was there some new crisis with the army or trouble with the harvest? Was this a new step in the Kremlin’s endless game of musical chairs? Or was he going to bargain for Kleiber’s life? A maid brought coffee for them and the conversation stopped while she arranged the cups and saucers and a plate of biscuits.

There were sailing boats in view through the huge window. Sunday yachtsmen, four boats, one with an orange spinnaker, racing before the wind. Beyond them, blurred by the haze on the water, there was the grey shape of a patrolling warship. Boyd Stuart remembered the day he had sailed across from Rostock in East Germany. The warning had come that morning-a mumbled sentence muffled by a handkerchief. The accent was Polish, a girl’s voice; someone’s daughter, girlfriend or wife asked to take a terrible risk for the Englishman. The police cars passed him on his way to the harbour. My God, but that had been a close one. And it had been a damned long sail to the Danish coast. Never since had he ever heard Danish without offering up a prayer of thanks.

‘I have no need to tell you that my participation is unofficial,’ said Shumuk.

Forget any hopes of blackmail or bribery, thought Boyd Stuart. Such a reptile does not move before his lair is fully protected.

‘Of course,’ said Stuart. He returned the stare of this evil old man; skinny and wrinkled, with a constant sneer, like the Uncle Sams depicted in the political cartoons in Krokodil.

‘Kleiber will be meeting one of our embassy people at a hotel at Mount Vernon, just across the state line from Washington, on the evening of Tuesday, August 21.’

‘That soon?’

‘You’ll have to move fast, Mr Stuart. But it gives you more than a week.’

‘Are you asking that your embassy man be protected?’

‘As far as is possible,’ said General Shumuk.

‘And Kleiber not protected at all?’

Boyd Stuart looked at the old man. There was nothing to be read in his eyes or his impassive features. He wanted Kleiber XPD, and his embassy official arrested, and Shumuk’s rank in the upper echelons of the KGB was secure enough for him not to care what accusations came his way afterwards. This was the only safe way to arrange such treachery, of course. No couriers, no messengers, no confidences; just Shumuk talking to an enemy agent with no record of what was said.

‘You’re throwing your man to the wolves, are you, General?’

Behind General Shumuk a huge abstract painting filled the white brick wall between the polished steel light fittings. Its design was like a silver blade updn which some winged shape was impaled, and the general was seated at the hilt of it.

‘The Americans will have no alternative to letting you be there,’ said the general. ‘Now that you know about it they’ll have to cooperate.’ He placed his cigarette in his mouth and inhaled with great care.

‘What has he done, this man in Washington?’ Stuart persisted. ‘And why must Kleiber die?’

‘Don’t cry for him, Mr Stuart,’ said Shumuk. He flicked his ash into the plant pot at his side. ‘No one will cry for us.’ He moved his hand across his face like a small child waving goodbye from a railway-carriage window, but it was just a way of dispersing the smoke.

It was surprising, wrote Boyd Stuart in his report afterwards, that the CIA resisted the temptation to riddle the Rousillon Beach Motel with the customary electronics. It was the project chairman who held out against the adviser from the Technical Services Division, who had come to his office loaded with an extraordinary array of equipment from low-light cameras and parabolic microphones to a miniaturized video recorder which, although small enough to be concealed inside a light fixture, defied all the demonstrator’s attempts to make it function.

The CIA sent Kleiber to the meeting ‘naked’, apart from Kalkhoven sitting in the back office of the motel manager’s unit along with Boyd Stuart. There was no way of preventing the Brit participating: there was in fact some enthusiasm for letting him witness what no one doubted was going to be a memorable coup.

Yuriy Grechko came directly from the USSR Washington embassy. He was in a green rented Ford Fairlane at 7.30 that evening, having booked a double unit, with sitting room fronting the poolside, water bed and colour TV, using the name Lewis. He paid for the room on arrival and asked if there were any messages for him; there were none. At five minutes before eight, Grechko called the office and complained that there was no ice in his refrigerator and he would be needing more cans of Seven-up. The coffee-shop waitress who delivered this order reported that he was drinking heavily, from a bottle he’d brought with him.

Willi Kleiber arrived exactly on the dot of his appointment at ten o’clock. Kalkhoven was behind the desk. He gave him the key to unit No. 12 and told him that ‘Mr Lewis’ was already there. Kleiber phoned Kalkhoven three minutes later and was laughing so much that he could hardly speak.

‘You’d better get over here, Mr Muller,’ he said. (Muller was the cover name by which Kalkhoven was known to him.) ‘You’d better get over here.’ He was laughing hysterically. ‘You’re going to need another scenario, Mr Muller, sir. But don’t hurry yourself, there’s no hurry at all. Did you know that Yuriy Grechko calls himself “Yu-yu”?’ He howled with laughter at the thought of it.