‘You died—’ Ursula stopped.

‘So you do know that Erik was your father,’ said Gavriela. ‘Your real father.’

‘Mother told me’ – with a dry eyed blink – ‘to stop me cutting myself. Knowing I’m not doomed to inherit his . . . obsessions. There’s a reason I wear long sleeves.’

Gavriela wanted to reach out and hug her, but it was too soon, far too soon.

‘It must have been hard, given your stepfather’s profession.’

Caution now, sounding out the girl’s political worldview.

My niece!

‘It’s not his job that’s the problem,’ said Ursula. ‘The things he’s— Never mind.’

Gavriela swallowed. ‘He . . . hurt you?’

‘Oh, no! Not the way you . . . No.’

So Dmitri’s victims remained outside the family at least. Plus, Ursula separated her stepfather’s actions from his job, implying violence that even the KGB would not sanction. But this would be guesswork on the girl’s part, nothing more.

Still, it was dangerous ground to cover so soon, so Gavriela broke the conversation, taking a chair and placing it opposite Ursula. She sat down, neither too far back – which might convey coldness – nor close enough to intimidate.

Being careful.

‘The war ruined everything,’ said Gavriela. ‘I believe Erik died, but I lost all traces of Ilse. And you . . . I didn’t know you existed.’

‘I contacted the British. I don’t understand why you are here.’

The thing was not to think of this as conducting an interrogation, although there were dangers in two-way information exchange – Gavriela felt exposed enough just being on the wrong side of the Curtain. The intent was for Ursula to help them willingly.

‘In 1940 I reached England,’ said Gavriela. ‘I’ve lived there ever since. Because of my war work, the Secret Intelligence Service knew how to contact me.’ She switched to English: ‘I’m really British these days. And I use a different name, but let’s stick to Gavriela for now.’

That was a little colloquial, but Ursula seemed to understand.

‘Do you know how many people died in Hungary?’ she asked, also in English. ‘Forty thousand.’

‘I know,’ said Gavriela.

‘But my stepfather says’ – in German once more – ‘that if it weren’t for Britain throwing its weight around over Suez, the Kremlin would not have had to react so hard. They have to show strength, he says.’

All Gavriela knew was that the PM was in Jamaica to ‘rest’, his health shattered by the crisis, having backed down following explicit threats from Washington and Moscow, including a Soviet promise of nuclear missiles destroying London if the British army, currently twenty-three miles from Suez, did not depart. Meanwhile, in the Commons, Macmillan had told backbenchers of Britain’s new place in the world: Greece to the United States’ Rome.

‘And what do you think, Ursula?’

The girl – my niece – clasped her hands over her belly.

‘I don’t know any more.’ She sounded old. ‘But I can’t help you kill him’

So she understood that she was of interest to British intelligence only as a way of getting to Colonel Dmitri Shtemenko

‘We don’t want him dead, Ursula.’

It seemed safe to promise that much.

Five days after the extraction of Ursula from the East, Gavriela faced the real challenge.

Getting Ursula into the British Sector had been only stage one, but after that she wore an RAF uniform and carried official documentation, journeying aboard a military lorry on one of the three authorised roads to West Germany. Still, Gavriela had been nervous. When the package received signal finally came in, Gavriela had gone for a walk around the Kleine Tiergarten in falling snow, where wind and cold were sufficient explanation for the tears in her eyes.

Now Gavriela was making the journey from Ku-Damm to Alt-Moabit on foot, while two armed officers in heavy over-coats trailed her, and four more were already in place around the café where Dmitri was due to appear. In one sense, it was a show of strength on both their parts: Dmitri had chosen the area, demonstrating that he, too, could cross between sectors via clandestine means.

Gavriela was not party to the operational details, but some-how messages had moved both ways between her and Dmitri, requesting and agreeing to a rendezvous.

Much of the cityscape she walked through was ruins. The major difference between now and a decade ago was that the rubble had been stacked and sorted, even cleaned, to produce an urban paradox: a tidy catastrophe. Cities like Frankfurt and Munich were revitalised, but sad old Berlin had only one thing to show for the new freedom in the western sectors: rich department stores amid the ruins, especially on the Kurfürsten-Damm, with a dazzling array of goods on offer in their bright interiors. See what you’ll get, they whispered to East Berliners, if you overthrow your Communist masters.

In the café, a large radio was playing ‘Hound Dog’, and Dmitri was sitting behind a table at the rear with his legs crossed – a posture that reminded her of Rupert – and a cup of thick Turkish coffee in front of him. There were no genuine customers, and according to the sign on the door she had entered through, the place was closed.

The bulky owner fetched a coffee for Gavriela and placed it on the table, then moved back behind the counter where his weapons would be at hand. An SIS man stood with coat unbuttoned, watching. One of his colleagues would be up-stairs, two more outside at the rear. The pair who had followed Gavriela remained on the street.

‘I’m very impressed,’ said Dmitri, giving no sign that almost three decades separated today from their only other meeting, hiding in the loft above a school assembly hall. Afterwards, he had saved them both from SA attackers in a churchyard, then escorted her home.

Where he first saw Ilse, at that time engaged to Erik.

‘Precautions seemed in order,’ said Gavriela. ‘Danger seems to follow you around.’

‘Oh, no. I mean I’m impressed with your callous manipulation of a vulnerable schoolgirl, your own niece, in order to serve your political masters.’

Gavriela controlled her breathing.

Keep balanced.

‘Don’t think I’m impressed with you, Colonel.’

Surrounding Dmitri, flickers of darkness, like licking tongues, came into existence and disappeared like short-lived particle-antiparticle pairs.

‘May I?’ He pointed at a cloth-wrapped bundle. ‘Your people have already checked it.’

She looked at the man behind the counter, then said: ‘OK.’

What Dmitri unwrapped was a shard of metal, nothing more. ‘I was stationed in Siberia after the war, until I proved myself.’

Because initially he had remained in hiding, here in Berlin. SIS found out because he had been forced to use an old cover identity, which rang alarm bells during routine denazification procedures. Returning to Moscow, he must have faced some difficult times before his rehabilitation and reinstatement within the KGB.

Gavriela smiled.

‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘Tunguska event, 1920s. Cataclysmic meteor strike, but you’re going to tell me – what, exactly? A crashed UFO?’

There were rumours that the USSR was planning to get devices into orbit, followed by actual people. Some kind of KGB-designed disinformation was consistent with this, enemy confusion being the goal.

‘I didn’t say the material was extraterrestrial, Dr Wolf. You did.’

A wide area of tingling curled around her back.

Something very strange about it . . .

Dmitri wrapped the metal once more.

‘My archaeologist friends were puzzled, because this was beneath ice-preserved fossilised wood that was carved with runes. If the Tunguska event was anything, it was a successful take-off performed by a similar vessel, while this is a fragment of one that blew up centuries before. Maybe it was searching for the first one, the one we found. Assuming you believe any of that, of course.’