‘Put up your gun!' he now yelled, coming at Dolgikh at a run. ‘The next shot goes in your belly!'

Gulharov had been trained, but not nearly as thoroughly as Theo Dolgikh, and he lacked the agent's killer instinct. Dolgikh fell to his knees again, straightened his gun arm toward Gulharov, aimed and squeezed the trigger of his weapon. Gulharov was nearly on him. He, too, had fired again. His shot went inches wide, but Dolgikh's was right on target. His snub-nosed bullet blew away half of Gulharov's head. Gulharov, dead on the instant, jerked to a halt, then took another stumbling step forward and crashed over like a felled tree — directly on to the firing box and its extended plunger!

Dolgikh hurled himself flat, felt a hot wind blow on him as hell opened up just one hundred yards away. Deafening sound blasted his ears, left them ringing with wild peals. He didn't see the actual explosion, or simultaneous series of explosions, but as the spray of soil and pebbles subsided and the earth stopped shaking he looked up — and then he did see the result. On the far side of the gorge the ruins of Faethor's castle stood much as before, but on this side they had been reduced to so much rubble.

Craters smoked where the castle's roots were bedded in the mountain. A landslide of shale and fractured rock was still tumbling from the cliff onto the wide, pitted ledge, burying deep the last traces of whatever secrets had been there. And of Krakovitch, Quint and Volkonsky —Nothing whatsoever. Flesh isn't nearly as strong as rock.

Dolgikh stood up, brushed himself down, heaved Gulharov's corpse off the detonating box. He grabbed Gulharov's legs and dragged his body to the smouldering ruins, then toppled him from the cliff. An ‘accident', a genuine accident.

On his way back down the track, the KGB man rolled up what was left of the cable; he also collected Gulharov's gun and the box. Half-way down the ledge where it hugged the cliff he threw all of these things into the dark gurgling ravine. It was finished now, all of it. Before he got back to Moscow he would have thought up an excuse, a reason why Gerenko's supposed ‘weapon', whatever it had been, no longer existed. That was a pity.

But on the other hand — Dolgikh congratulated himself that at least half of his mission had been accomplished successfully. And very satisfactorily.

8.00 P.M. at the Château Bronnitsy.

Ivan Gerenko lay in a shallow sleep on a cot in his inner office. Down below, in the sterility of the brain-washing laboratory, Alec Kyle also lay asleep. His body, anyway. But since there was no longer a mind in there, it was hardly Kyle any longer. Mentally, he had been drained to less than a husk. The information this had released to Zek Foener had been staggering. This Harry Keogh, if he had still lived, would have been an awesome enemy. But trapped in the brain of his own child, he was no longer a problem. Later, maybe, when (and if) the child had grown into a man .

As for INTESP: Foener was now privy to that entire organisation's machinery. Nothing remained secret. Kyle had been the controller, and what he had known Zek Föener was heir to. Which was why, as the technicians dismantled their instruments and left Kyle's body naked and drained even of instinct, she hurried to report something of her findings — and one thing in particular — to Ivan Gerenko.

Zekintha Föener's father was East German. Her mother had been Greek, from Zakinthos in the Ionian Sea. When her mother died, Zek had gone to her father in Posen, to the university where he worked in parapsychology. Her psychic ability, which he had always suspected in her when she was a child, had become immediately apparent to him. He had reported the fact of her telepathic talent to the College of Parapsychological Studies on Brasov Prospekt in Moscow, and had been summoned to attend with Zek so that she could be tested. That was how she had come to E-Branch, where she had rapidly made herself invaluable.

Föener was five-nine, slim, blonde and blue-eyed. Her hair shone and bounced on her shoulders when she walked. Her Château uniform fitted her like a glove, accentuating the delicate curves of her figure. She climbed the stone stairs to Krakovitch's (no, she corrected herself, to Gerenko's) office, entered the anteroom and knocked firmly on the closed inner door.

Gerenko heard her knock, forced himself awake and struggled to sit up. In his shrivelled frame he tired easily, slept often but poorly. Sleep was one way of prolonging a life which doctors had told him would be short. It was the ultimate irony: men could not kill him, but his own frailty surely would. At only thirty-seven he already looked sixty, a shrunken monkey of a man. But still a man.

‘Come in,' he wheezed, as he sucked air into his fragile lungs.

Outside the door, while Gerenko had come more surely awake, Zek Föener had broken a trust. It was an unwritten rule at the Château that telepaths would not deliberately spy on the minds of their colleagues. That was all very well and only decent in normal conditions, normal circumstances. But on this occasion there were gross abnormalities, things which Föener must track down to her satisfaction.

For one, the way Gerenko had literally taken over Krakovitch's job. It wasn't as if he stood in for him at all, but had in fact replaced him — permanently! Föener had liked Krakovitch; from Kyle she had learned about Theo Dolgikh's surveillance activities in Genoa; Kyle and Krakovitch had been working together on —‘Come in!' Gerenko repeated, breaking her chain of thought, but not before everything had fallen together. Gerenko's ambition burned bright in her mind, bright and ugly. And his intention, to use those... those Things which Krakovitch was quite rightly bent on destroying .

She drew air deeply and entered the office, staring at Gerenko where he lay in the dark on his cot, propped up on one elbow.

He put on a bedside lamp and blinked as his weak eyes accustomed themselves. ‘Yes? What is it, Zek?'

‘Where's Theo Dolgikh?' she waded straight in. No preliminaries, no formalities.

‘What?' He blinked at her. ‘Is something wrong, Zek?'

‘Many things, perhaps. I said —‘

‘I heard what you said,' he snapped. ‘And what has it to do with you where Dolgikh is?'

‘I saw him for the first time, with you, on the morning that Felix Krakovitch left for Italy — after he left,' she answered. ‘Following which he was absent until he brought Alec Kyle back here. But Kyle wasn't working against us. He was working with Krakovitch. For the good of the world.'

Gerenko swung his brittle legs carefully off the cot onto the floor. ‘He should only have been working for the good of the USSR,' he said.

‘Like you?' she came back at once, her voice sharp as broken glass. ‘I know now what they were doing, Comrade. Something that had to be done, for safety and sanity. Not for themselves, but for mankind.'

Gerenko eased himself to his feet. He wore child's pyjamas, looked frail as a twig as he made for his great desk. ‘Are you accusing me, Zek?'

‘Yes!' She was relentless, furious. ‘Kyle was our opponent, but he personally had not declared war on us. We aren't at war, Comrade. And we've murdered him. No, you have murdered him — to foster your own ambitions!'

Gerenko climbed into his chair, put on a desk lamp and aimed its light at her. He steepled his hands in front of him, shook his head almost sadly. ‘You accuse me? And yet you were party to it. You drained his mind.'

‘I did not!' She came forward. Her face was working, full of anger. ‘I merely read his thoughts as they flooded out of him. Your technicians drained him.'

Unbelievably, Gerenko chuckled. ‘Mechanical necromancy, yes.'

She slammed her hand flat down on the desk top. ‘But he wasn't dead!'