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she wasn’t amused or she was staring so hard at the head on the table that she hadn’t heard his little witticism. That was the reason she was here, after all – to study, identify, bring her knowledge to bear. For she was not just Burt’s highly valued lieutenant in his vast private intelligence empire that went under the cheekily named Cougar Intelligence Applications, she was also a former colonel in the KGB and – until her defection – right at its dark intelligence heart, Department S.
    ‘How did it get here, Theo?’ Burt asked, looking back to the CIA chief again.
    ‘It was delivered to the home of one of our junior embassy officers in Kiev,’ he replied. ‘Young man, name of Bill Singleton, married, two small children.’
    ‘What about security?’ Burt shot back.
    ‘In Ukraine all our staff houses have cameras, security alarms, early warning systems, sensors – you name it. The usual, in terms of the bare minimum. But Kiev isn’t high up on the list as far as security threats are concerned. This’ – he indicated the severed head with a nod from his own living one, ‘... this was left in the garden, actually, not the house,’ he said by way of correction. ‘The person who placed it there was caught on camera, but set off no sensors. Not close enough to the house, apparently. The film shows a man, we presume, wearing a balaclava. He enters the garden, carefully removes the head of the Singleton children’s snowman, drops this one out of a sack, and replaces the snow head with it. The four-year-old daughter of the family found it next morning. Someone had been tampering with the family’s snowman and she was outraged – in tears.’ Lish sighed. ‘Clearly it was delivered in that particular place because security allowed it to be. We don’t have – or need – razor wire-topped, twelve-foot walls for all our Kiev embassy staff. But it was clearly left for us. So, yes, it’s a message. They want us to know who it is.’
    ‘And then?’
    ‘Singleton called our embassy sweepers in straightaway. We kept the head in the freezer until it could be put on a NATO bus that was flying into Kiev from Afghanistan for refuelling that morning. It was here twenty hours later. Left as a decoration on a snowman on Thursday night – in this here laboratory by today at six a.m.’
    ‘And if you know who the man is,’ Burt said, ‘what’s the purpose of Anna’s presence? What’s she here to identify?’
    He looked at her again to find she was tracing the man’s scar with her finger, not quite touching the flesh, and her face only an inch or two from the head. Then she stepped back for another overall reappraisal. Burt was keen now to head for lunch, but it looked like that was some way off.
    ‘He goes by the name of Yuri Saltyakov,’ Lish explained. ‘He approached one of our operatives in Kiev three weeks ago saying he had “information”. We checked him out on all the Agency photo and data bases. No tags. Nothing. Nothing in London, either. Adrian was very obliging. No match to anyone we know. His story was that he had information on work being carried out at Novorossiysk port on the Russian side of the Kerch Straits, opposite the Crimea. He was a dock worker there, according to him. Wanted to sell us his story. But we never received any of the information about the port. His main interest to us was that he seemed to have quite detailed information about a ship called the Forburg . He described it as a “terror ship”, whatever that means. We never got out of him what he meant about that either; was it carrying nuclear fissile material, nuclear triggers, other high-grade weapons, anthrax ... who knows? We don’t. We tracked the Forburg , however, having eventually picked it up on the Worldview Satellite off the coast of Burgas, in Bulgaria, to the western end of the Black Sea. The Forburg seemed to be heading for the Bosphorus, then presumably the Mediterranean, unless Istanbul was its