Gavriela nodded. The information might have come via semi-official channels or from eavesdropping on French intelligence: both were par for the course.

‘But this is in fact an Anglo-French-Israeli initiative,’ continued Rupert. ‘And you and I will have our ears nailed to the wall if we give a hint of knowing that.’ He related the details, and they were explosive: Israel to invade Egypt under secret agreement with Britain and France, after which the combined Anglo-French forces would ‘liberate’ the place while the Israelis withdrew.

‘Do the Cousins know this?’ asked Gavriela, meaning the CIA.

‘Maybe I should ring the Kremlin and ask.’

It was a year since Burgess and Maclean had surfaced at a Soviet press conference. Since then Kim Philby, SIS’s liaison to Washington and tipped to be a future head of service, had denied being the third man; but dirt tended to stick. Internal investigators, Rupert added, were right now tearing the Recruitment Office apart.

‘I’m glad I’m out of it,’ said Gavriela. ‘All that makes the news is defection and failure. The Crabbe thing was a disaster.’

In April, Premier Kruschev and Prime Minister Bulganin had sailed into Portsmouth Harbour aboard the Ordzhonikidze, a Soviet cruiser which had been too tempting a target: the famous wartime diver, Commander Crabbe, had been despatched to fix bugging devices to the hull. When his torn-up body eventually washed ashore, the UK government owned up to the operation.

The official story involved his being caught up in propellers. Not likely.

‘Berlin and the Stopwatch débâcle,’ said Rupert, ‘are more to the point.’

‘In what way? What point exactly?’

Portrait of a spy grandmaster sitting in a dusty room moving pieces across the board, but she was no longer in the game.

‘I mean, dear Gavi, your popping over to Berlin. Let me ask Alfredo to fetch up more coffee, and perhaps a plate of biscuits, before we discuss the details.’

‘No,’ said Gavriela. ‘No coffee, no biscuits, and definitely no Berlin.’

Rupert’s voice went as mild as she had ever heard it.

‘And no curiosity,’ he asked, ‘about the niece you have yet to meet?’

And that was it: game, set and match to the master.

She might have known.

Intercepts from Berlin, earlier in the year, had begun to reveal uranium shipment details – East Germany being currently the largest Soviet provider, while Prime Minister Bulganin’s public announcements had hinted at nuclear tests under way in Siberia. It was all part of Red paranoia regarding Western intent, said Rupert, and Eden’s intransigence over Suez was likely to trigger World War III.

‘We desperately need more info,’ he told Gavriela, ‘but with Stopwatch/Gold all over the papers, our chaps are having to lie low.’

And this, he went on, was where it fitted Gavriela’s personal interest. Normally, a schoolgirl civilian wanting to defect meant nothing to UK interests; but the dissatisfied daughter of a senior KGB officer with responsibility for the security of East Germany’s uranium mines, that was something else.

‘Her name is Ursula,’ he said. ‘Ursula Shtemenko, and at this stage we don’t know if she’s aware her birth certificate reads Ursula Wolf.’

Up until April, Operation Stopwatch, an SIS brainchild but funded by the CIA who called it Operation Gold, had delivered priceless intelligence. But four days after the Crabbe operation – and before his body appeared – somehow the Soviets had found the secret tunnel between Schönefelder Chaussee and Rudow, filled with telephonic equipment for eavesdropping on KGB signals; and the world’s press went crazy: a propaganda coup for Moscow.

Gavriela wondered if Philby had had anything to do with the tunnel, but knew better than to ask.

‘I’ve photographs of the girl.’ Rupert drew an envelope from inside his jacket, and passed it over. ‘Taken since she made her first enquiry.’

Exactly where that was, Gavriela would find out when she agreed to the operation; but they both knew she was unlikely to back out, having learnt this much. None of the pictures were posed. Clandestine surveillance, then.

‘Identical to my brother Erik, near enough,’ she said. ‘And Ilse?’

There was no need to explain who she meant: Rupert would have briefed himself beforehand on her family, on her brother Erik and on Ilse, the wife whom Erik adored.

‘Passed away six months ago, I’m afraid. Another trigger for Ursula’s current crisis.’

Gavriela leant back against the couch, resting her head on the antimacassar.

‘One more factor for us to take advantage of, is that, Rupert?’

But of course, he had a counter-argument ready, probably cooked up days ago.

‘You think she’s better off with Dmitri Shtemenko as her stepfather?’

Gavriela let out a sigh, and asked him to brief her on the details.

Two hours later she was walking home through a damp grey pea-souper fog, inured by frequent exposure to the airborne tang of sulphur dioxide, wondering why she had agreed to help, while knowing there was no other choice. There was evidence she had worked hard to confirm that Erik had been a slave at Peenemünde, almost certainly starved and worked to death on one of the projects headed by Werner von Braun, now sunning himself in Florida and raking in the big bucks from NASA, never mentioning the doodlebugs and V2 rockets that had devastated British cities, bringing fear and death to civilian adults, children and their pets.

So now there was Ursula Wolf, who called herself Ursula Shtemenko, asking someone on the British Council, at an artists’ event in East Berlin, for help in defecting. Did she really have access to her stepfather’s information? Or did Dmitri plan on using Ursula as leverage against one Gavriela Wolf? He might believe that Gavriela-turned-Gabrielle was an intelligence officer still; and even if he knew she was retired, there were secrets worth pulling from her brain.

What if the real game were Dmitri versus Rupert, while everything else was context?

Berlin beckoned, regardless.

EIGHTEEN

NULAPEIRON, 2604-2605 AD

Realspace, where every one of the countless points of light-against-darkness may be a distant star, an even more distant galaxy, a cluster or an ancient supercluster beyond a cosmic void. The photons that convey this information have travelled for up to thirteen point seven billion years without experiencing the passing of a moment – it is only those photons that reach non-vacuum media, such as human-built windows, that slow down and experience the march of time.

Here floats an Earth like world, large for its type, its purple-grey continents strewn with clouds, showing no sign – save for some near-deserted orbitals – of the humans carving out a new society in strata below the cheerless surface. They call it Nulapeiron, the name implying boundlessness, with a paradoxical irony typical of the human culture’s designers, for the dwellings are subterranean.

And now a golden ship appears, banded with cobalt blue, polished and magnificent.

We’re here.

Another new world, my love.

Yes.

Rhianna Chiang disengages from her ship, wanting to review her briefing material before descending to the surface; and it is that decision which will account for the deciseconds-long delay reacting to movement on the periphery of her ship’s senses.

In a tenth of a second, everything can change.

Shortly, she will discover that.

Before the disaster occurs, she will have time to display only a first-facet projection of her briefing material:

LANGUAGES: Plentiful.

In the four centuries that Nulapeiron has been inhabited, deliberate design has prevented single-language monopolies (cf. Whorf Sapir hypothesis and the Web Mand’rin Catastrophe) from jeopardising cognitive Weltanschauung diversity. Only one of the major language groups is fully artificial, the others deriving from recognised Terran antecedents.