“The General Secretary will see you now, Comrade General,” he said.

The Deputy Head of the First Chief Directorate, senior professional intelligence officer of the espionage arm, walked straight down the long room toward the man who sat behind his desk at the end. If Mikhail Gorbachev was puzzled by the request for the meeting, he did not show it. He greeted the KGB general in comradely fashion, calling him by his first name and patronymic, and waited for him to proceed.

“You have received the report from our London station regarding the so-called evidence extracted by the British from the corpse of Simon Cormack.”

It was a statement, not a question. Kirpichenko knew the General Secretary must have seen it. He had demanded the results of the London meeting as soon as they came in. Gorbachev nodded shortly.

“And you will know, Comrade General Secretary, that our colleagues in the military deny the photograph was of a piece of their equipment.”

The rocket programs of Baikonur come under the military. Another nod. Kirpichenko bit the bullet.

“Four months ago I submitted a report received from my resident in Belgrade which I believed to be of such importance that I marked it for passing on by the Comrade Chairman to this office.”

Gorbachev stiffened. The matter was out. The officer in front of him, though a very senior man, was going behind Kryuchkov’s back. It had better be serious, Comrade General, he thought. His face remained impassive.

“I expected to receive instructions to investigate the matter further. None came. It occurred to me to wonder if you ever saw the August report-it is, after all, the vacation month…”

Gorbachev recalled his broken vacation. Those Jewish refuseniks being hammered right in front of the whole Western media on a Moscow street.

“You have a copy of that report with you, Comrade General?” he asked quietly. Kirpichenko took two folded sheets from his inner jacket pocket. He always wore civilian clothes, hated uniforms.

“There may be no linkage at all, General Secretary. I hope not. But I do not like coincidences. I am trained not to like them.”

Mikhail Gorbachev studied the report from Major Kerkorian in Belgrade, and his brow furrowed in puzzlement.

“Who are these men?” he asked.

“Five American industrialists. The man Miller we have tagged as an extreme right-winger, a man who loathes our country. The man Scanlon is an entrepreneur, what the Americans call a hustler. The other three manufacture extremely sophisticated weaponry for the Pentagon. With the technical details that they carry in their heads alone, they should never have exposed themselves to the danger of possible interrogation by visiting our soil.”

“But they came?” asked Gorbachev. “Covertly, by military transport? To land at Odessa?”

“That’s the coincidence,” said the spy chief. “I checked with the Air Force traffic control people. As the Antonov left Romanian air space to enter Odessa control area, it varied its own flight plan, overflew Odessa, and touched down at Baku.”

“Azerbaijan? What the hell were they doing in Azerbaijan?”

“Baku, Comrade General Secretary, is the headquarters of High Command South.”

“But that’s a top-secret military base. What did they do there?”

“I don’t know. They disappeared when they landed, spent sixteen hours inside the base, and flew back to the same Yugoslav air base in the same plane. Then they went back to America. No boar-hunting, no vacation.”

“Anything else?”

“One last coincidence. On that day, Marshal Kozlov was on an inspection visit of the Baku headquarters. Just routine. So it says.”

When he had gone, Mikhail Gorbachev stopped all calls and reflected on what he had learned. It was bad, all bad, almost all. There was one recompense. His adversary, the diehard general who ran the KGB, had made a very serious mistake.

The bad news was not confined to New Square, Moscow. It pervaded the lush top-floor office of Steve Pyle in Riyadh. Colonel Easterhouse put down the letter from Andy Laing.

“I see,” he said.

“Christ, that little shit could still land us all in deep trouble,” protested Pyle. “Maybe the records in the computer do show something different from what he says. But if he goes on saying it, maybe the Ministry accountants will want to have a look, a real look. Before April. I mean, I know this is all sanctioned by Prince Abdul himself, and for a good cause, but hell, you know these people. Supposing he withdraws his protection, says he knows nothing of it… They can do that, you know. Look, maybe you should just replace that money, find the funds someplace else…”

Easterhouse continued to stare out over the desert with his pale-blue eyes. It’s worse than that, my friend, he thought. There is no connivance by Prince Abdul, no sanction by the Royal House. And half the money has gone, disbursed to bankroll the preparations for a coup that would one day bring order and discipline, his order and discipline, to the crazed economics and unbalanced political structures of the entire Middle East. He doubted the House of Sa’ud would see it that way; or the State Department.

“Calm yourself, Steve,” he said reassuringly. “You know whom I represent here. The matter will be taken care of. I assure you.”

Pyle saw him out but was not calmed. Even the CIA fouled up sometimes, he reminded himself too late. Had he known more, and read less fiction, he would have known that a senior officer of the Company could not have the rank of colonel. Langley does not take ex-Army officers. But he did not know. He just worried.

On his way down, Easterhouse realized he was going to have to return to the States for consultations. It was time, anyway. All was in place, ticking like a patient time bomb. He was even ahead of schedule. He ought to give his patrons a situation report. While there he would mention Andy Laing. Surely the man could be bought off, persuaded to hold his fire, at least until April?

He was unaware how wrong he was.

“Dieter, you owe me, and I’m calling in the marker.”

Quinn sat with his contact in a bar two blocks away from the office where the man worked. Sam listened and the contact looked worried.

“But, Quinn, please try to understand. It is not a question of house rules. Federal law itself forbids non-employees to have access to the morgue.”

Dieter Lutz was a decade younger than Quinn, but far more prosperous. He had the gloss of a flourishing career. He was in fact a senior staff reporter with Der Spiegel, Germany’s biggest and most prestigious current affairs magazine.

It had not always been so. Once he had been a freelancer, scratching a living, trying to be one step ahead of the opposition when the big stories broke. In those days there had been a kidnapping that had made every German headline day after day. At the most delicate point of the negotiations with the kidnappers Lutz had inadvertently leaked something that almost destroyed the deal.

The angry police had wanted to know where the leak had come from. The kidnap victim was a big industrialist, a party benefactor, and Bonn had been leaning on the police heavily. Quinn had known who the guilty party was, but had kept silent. The damage was done, had to be repaired, and the breaking of a young reporter with too much enthusiasm and too little wisdom was not going to help matters.

“I don’t need to break in,” said Quinn patiently. “You’re on the staff. You have the right to go and get the material, if it’s there.”

The head offices of Der Spiegel are at 19 Brandstwiete, a short street running between the Dovenfleet canal and the Ost-West-Strasse. Beneath the modern eleven-story building slumbers the biggest newspaper morgue in Europe. More than 18 million documents are filed in it. Computerizing the files had been going on for a decade before Quinn and Lutz took their beer that November afternoon in the Dom-Strasse bar. Lutz sighed.