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wins, we want to make our arrangements with our friends in Ukraine. Redress the balance.’ He looked severely at them and Viktorov wondered, not for the first time, if Putin actually didn’t have any eyelids, if he was like a snake. Putin leaned back in his chair and stared at the two generals. ‘You know, of course,’ he said with finality, ‘that Ukraine is not even a state.’

CHAPTER TWO
    8 January 2010
     
    T HE HEAD RESTED gently between two reinforced glass clamps on the glaring white surface of a disinfected plastic tabletop. The table had gleaming, skeletal aluminium legs protruding beneath it and its aluminium wheels were locked in place at the bottom of the legs in the unlikely event that the trolley might roll away on the perfectly level, spotlessly clean, white floor.
    The chill in the laboratory storage facility at the CIA’s Forensic Investigation Department in Langley, Virginia was almost as great as the freezing winter temperatures outside the building and the two men and one woman who stood closest to the trolley table were still wrapped in the thick winter coats they’d worn for the short walk across the car park to the building. Three white-coated laboratory workers who stood behind them like pagan ceremonial guardians of the severed head wore Arctic thermal wear in here, for the greater freedom of movement of their arms.
    The head was indeed like the graven image of some ancient god. Though it was a thing of flesh, it was not a thing of blood. Its dull, lifeless, fish eyes in the grey, dead flesh seemed to bring the temperature down still lower, as if temperature were a kind of mood that fitted the sombre circumstances.
    The head had a plump face which showed a round-cheeked man, with bristling black eyebrows, slightly frosted from the deep frozen drawer that had contained it until the visitors’ arrival. The bloodless lips were generous, the ears looked almost enormous. There was a scar on the left cheek that looked more pronounced without any blood flowing beneath the skin around it. The neck, foreshortened by a jagged cutting instrument, was jowly and flabby and the wild thick black hair that topped the head seemed frozen in a concoction of swirls and curlicues, as if the head were a still photograph of a man captured in a high wind.
    It looks like a sculpture, Burt Miller thought – though he was thinking, not of a stone god, but of one of the modern pieces the British artist – something-or-other Quinn, he seemed to remember – made and which consisted of a plastic head filled with the artist’s own blood. But the colour of the flesh, Burt mused with an art historian’s appreciation, was more like the grey, dead-looking humanity to be found in a Lucian Freud, one of whose works Burt owned – at a cost from Christie’s in New York of something in the region of ten million bucks.
    ‘So, Theo ...’ Burt said breezily, exhaling a slightly frosted breath. Then, sticking to the modern art similes that continued to come and go in his mind, he said, ‘Exhibit A.’
    Theo Lish, the CIA chief, drew his coat further around his neck. ‘Exhibit A-Z actually,’ Lish replied moodily. ‘It’s all we have, Burt.’
    ‘Not the usual headless corpse, but the less common corpseless head,’ Burt said lightly and with his usual upbeat view of any situation that presented itself to him, no matter how complex and inconvenient it was. ‘It’s a message, then.’
    ‘Presumably,’ Lish said with a nod. ‘They want us to know the man’s identity. That’s the significance.’
    Burt looked to his left at Anna Resnikov, the only woman present in the lab. ‘Normally, in an identification parade, we’d have half a dozen severed heads for you,’ Burt joked. ‘I guess the others just never turned up. You’ve got to up your fees if you want these identity parades to make a difference, Theo,’ he said, turning back to Lish.
    But his gaze returned to rest on Anna.
    She didn’t return his look. Either