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ways, also understood it. And I understood it when I ran the KGB. But this new gang! This new gang thinks they have a magic wand and they can wave it and everything will change overnight. They fail to realise this isn’t the West. Democracy isn’t our historic destiny. Adversity is the glue that has always held Russia together.”
    Greshko raised himself up once more with an amazing effort of will and looked towards Volovich.
    â€œPut something on the turntable, Dimitri,” he said.
    Volovich found an album and played it. It was a man singing about his life in a place called Folsom Prison and it was very maudlin. Epishev wanted to get up from the place where he sat and put a little distance between himself and the wretched plastic tube, but he didn’t move. Even as he lay dying, there was a magnetism about Greshko, perhaps less well-defined these days but still a force Epishev knew he couldn’t resist.
    Greshko licked his dark lips, stared up at the ceiling, seemed to be listening less to the sounds from the speakers than to some inner melody of his own. He moved his face slowly back to Epishev and said, “Romanenko is dead.”
    So that was the reason for this midnight summons! For a moment Epishev didn’t speak. Greshko’s sentence, so baldly stated, floated through his mind.
    â€œDead? How?”
    â€œShot by a gunman in a railway station in Edinburgh about six hours ago.”
    â€œA gunman? Who?”
    â€œI have no more information,” Greshko said. “I only learned about the assassination less than two hours ago,” and he twisted his neck to peer at the bedside telephone, as if he expected it to ring immediately with more news. So far as Greshko was concerned the phone was both a blessing and a threat. His various contacts and sympathisers around the country could always keep in touch with him, but at the same time they always had to be circumspect when they called, because they were afraid of tapped lines and tape-recorders, and so a curious kind of code had evolved, a sub-language of unfinished sentences, half-phrases, substitutions, a terminology whose caution Greshko disliked. He had always preferred forthright speech and down-to-earth images and now it seemed to him that more than his exalted position had been stripped from him – they’d taken his language away from him too.
    Epishev asked, “How does this affect us?”
    Greshko smiled, a weird little expression, lopsided, like that of a man recovering from a severe stroke. And then suddenly he looked bright, more like the Greshko of old, the one who had regarded the delegation of authority as a fatal weakness. This was Greshko the ringmaster, the man who guarded the computer access codes of the State Security organs with all the jealousy of an alchemist protecting his recipe for gold, a man as cold as the tundra and whose only love – and it was love – was for his precious KGB, which was slowly having the life sucked out of it by the new vampires of the Kremlin. Epishev imagined he could hear the brain working now, whirring and ticking, then taking flight.
    Greshko said, “Our main concern is whether Romanenko’s message has fallen into the wrong hands or whether it reached its intended goal. If it was intercepted, then by whom? And what did the message mean to the interceptor? The problem we have is that we were never able fully to ascertain the content of the message. The only way we might have done that would have aroused Romanenko’s suspicions, and that wasn’t worth the risk …” Greshko drew the cuff of his pyjama sleeve across his mouth and went on, “We know Romanenko had planned to pass it along in Edinburgh to his collaborators, we also know the message was an indication that all the elements of the scheme were successfully in place – but we don’t know the extent of the information it contained. Was it some vaguely-worded thing? Or was