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headquarters and fetch me Win throp's personal possessions, Kramer. Go yourself! An American tourist in Leningrad in February? I tell you, Kramer, I smell stinking fish ...'
    Walther Kramer, forty-five years old, a short, stout Communist Bait from Lithuania who moved with the agility and silence of a cat, didn't believe a word of it. As Papanin's assistant he had a certain latitude in talking to his chief, a latitude about as wide as the edge of a razor blade. He voiced his disbelief cautiously.
    'There's no evidence that this American was anything but what his passport says ...'
    'Haven't you gone yet?'
    As the Bait left the second-floor room Papanin stood up and went over to the window, then he took out a pocket chess set from his jacket and stared at it. The window a foot from his smooth-skinned, hard-boned face was rimmed with frost as he studied the tiny board. At eight in the morning it was still dark outside and he could hear below the shuffle of footsteps on the cobbled street as people hurried to work. An ancient green-tiled stove he had recently lit stood in a corner behind him and its warmth hadn't yet penetrated the chilled room. Only one wall away the most modern American teleprinter was chattering non-stop, but Papanin warmed himself with a stove as old as the revolution itself.
    It was the Jewish problem which had aroused Papanin's suspicion of Winthrop, and the Jewish problem was another reason why Leonid Brezhnev was glad he had put Papanin inside Leningrad. On top of all his other duties it was now Papanin's responsibility to find out how finance was being smuggled in to help Jews emigrate to Israel.
    As he stared at the chess board Papanin grunted to punctuate his thoughts. Winthrop could have been a courier, a contact man with the Jewish underground, so Winthrop -even though he was dead - was going to be investigated up to his eye teeth. Literally. The Siberian had already ordered an intimate examination of the naked corpse. He frowned, decided on his move, shifted a pawn. He was sure he was right: there was something very odd indeed about Mr Harvey J. Winthrop.
    At eight o'clock on Saturday morning Papanin still had no idea that he was engaged in a race against time - to solve the Winthrop mystery before Michael Gorov fled from North Pole 17 at midnight on Sunday.
    In Washington it was still only midnight, Friday. Beaumont was still inside the sleeping-car aboard the Florida Express. At the Soviet base North Pole 17 it was four in the morning and Michael Gorov had only recently arrived from Murmansk.

    Michael Gorov, forty years old, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science and the Soviet Union's most distinguished oceanographer, was almost ill with the strain, sick with the tension of waiting, of counting away the hours to Sunday.
    At four in the morning he stood in the moonlight at the edge of the recently-swept airstrip which bisected the ice island, North Pole 17. He was very carefully gazing towards the east, not to the west where the American research base, Target-5, lay twenty-five miles away. Beyond the island the tumbled pack glittered in the moonlight like a vast endless heap of frosted glass, smashed frosted glass. Behind him lay the huts which formed the base, their flat roofs deep with snow. It was from that direction that he heard the footsteps coining, the steps of Nikolai Marov, the security man. Marov came close, stopped and watched the stooped back of the oceanographer. 'Are you feeling all right, Academician Gorov?' he inquired.
    'Never felt better.'
    'You're up early,' the security man persisted.
    'I'm always up early - you should know that by now.'
    Gorov deliberately let his irritation show and the stratagem worked. Marov mumbled something and padded back towards the base. Inside his coat pocket Gorov's gloved hands clenched: Marov was going to be a problem - because Marov always came with him when he ventured out on the pack. And there was another reason why Gorov had allowed his