God, what have I done? Rosalind Myers stared through the cracked and grimy window at the desolate spectacle beyond. The Moscow sky was a filthy, metallic grey, the lumbering clouds smeared with the ever-present air pollution and heavy with rain. The highest floors of the endless ranks of crumbling Soviet-era tenement blocks stretched up to and were lost in the murk. What the original planners may have intended to be lush green lawns between the buildings had been converted by the weather and years of neglect into rutted seas of glutinous, sludgy mud criss-crossed by the footprints of those, like her, unlucky enough to be living in one of the blocks. The muted, mumbling growl of Moscow's traffic was like an ill-tempered animal lurking somewhere just over the horizon. Every few minutes a car alarm went off. Every vehicle in the city seemed to be equipped with the same one – a maddeningly repetitive melody of different types of police siren – and it had already begun to haunt Ros's dreams.
She turned away from the window and took her glass of tea back to bed, pulling the Russian excuse for a duvet – a thin quilt stuffed inside a sheet – around herself for warmth. Now that spring was allegedly approaching the always erratic heating system in the building seemed to be giving up the ghost altogether. She had quickly learned to recognise that the sight of steam - or even worse, water - issuing from the ugly, rusty heating pipes that crawled around the courtyard below like a steel tapeworm meant tepid radiators, damp bedclothes and evenings spent trying to keep warm by huddling next to the gas ring in the over-sized broom cupboard that passed for a kitchen in the one-room flat.
Stop wallowing, Myers. You're bloody lucky to be here at all. She had fled from London with the remnants of the Yalta organization and a vengeful CIA hot on her heels, with little other than the clothes she stood up in and the money and passport Adam Carter had given to her in Kensal Rise church. It had taken all her skill and experience to lose her pursuers, and even with it she had avoided capture in Paris by sheer chance and almost stopped a bullet in Vienna. After being on the run for almost two months and living hand to mouth on the streets among the dispossessed of three different European countries, she had finally obtained a false passport in Poland and managed to go to ground here, in the sordid, anonymous underbelly of a country in political turmoil and social upheaval.
She sipped the tea and closed her eyes. In many ways, it was the ideal bolt-hole. Russians were conditioned by years – God, centuries, more like – of oppression not to ask unnecessary questions or show curiosity about strangers. Her colouring and bone structure allowed her to pass for a Russian, and her passport, claiming her to be an ethnic Russian born in Riga of a Latvian mother and Russian father, accounted for her accent when speaking the language. Moscow was one of the most expensive cities in Europe, but Ros had carefully husbanded her funds and lived frugally, even now that she had a job. Mindful of the fact that she might need to run again, she kept the remaining money from Adam as an emergency reserve. She would never become rich from her position as a waitress in a seedy club, but it had its advantages. The proprietor wasn't interested enough in the law to comply with its formalities, so she had avoided getting enmeshed in the tentacles of the state bureaucracy. The pay was poor, but it just enabled her to pay for the roof over her head, and the club at least provided her with one decent meal a day. Most important to Ros, the job also kept her occupied, and although in almost any other circumstances she would have crossed the border, never mind the street, to avoid most of the clientele and many of her fellow-workers, the human contact brought at least some relief from her otherwise relentless isolation and the loneliness it caused. It also helped to limit the time available for the kind of self-recrimination and regrets into which she was sliding now.
Stop it! She angrily thrust the duvet aside, and crossed to the kitchen. It didn't take more than three strides; built to Soviet-era specifications, the room was tiny. Ros snorted. Biggest country on earth and the government had rationed out the kind of niggardly living space to its citizens that Battersea Dogs Home wouldn't be allowed to offer a stray Chihuahua.
She boiled up a couple of handfuls of kasha, sliced up a banana to make it taste like something, stirred in some kefir, and sat eating it while the water boiled for more tea. Russian food, as the babushka who staffed the cloakroom at the club was forever telling her, might well be pure and healthy, but, Ros thought sardonically, there was probably a law on the statute books that prevented it from actually tasting of anything. Not that she had to eat it; central Moscow these days was full of supermarkets stuffed to bursting with all the Western foods and condiments a newly-crowned oligarkh could wish for, but Ros avoided them. They were too expensive for one thing, and she didn't like going into the centre of the city very often; rightly or wrongly, the risk of being recognised there seemed greater. It was twenty years since she had visited her father here when he was ambassador en poste, but she wasn't the only person in the world with a good memory for faces. And the centre of the city also meant the Lubyanka with the FSB's copious files on the intelligence services of the West, the Foreign Ministry, and the British and American embassies. Not to mention Western tourists. Ros knew that her best protection lay in the grubby, grey anonymity of these faceless, soulless mikroraioni populated by the narod, the ordinary Russian people who had been the largely unacknowledged worker ants of the Soviet system. She could never bring herself to think of the district as a suburb; the word was too evocative of all she had left behind.
Stop thinking of it, Ros, for God's sake! She stabbed her spoon into the bowl and forced down another mouthful of food. Ros Myers had always had a gift for compartmentalizing. Things she didn't want to acknowledge were simply shut away in the deepest recesses of her mind and sealed there so that they couldn't disturb her concentration or trouble her thoughts. Irina Selesnikova wasn't quite so good at it. Since her arrival in Moscow Ros had been struggling to prevent herself from thinking back over the events that had brought her here. Being on the run had meant concentrating every minute of the day and night on surviving, and it had left no time for the luxury of memories or nostalgia. Even now 'Ros Myers' was little more than a shadow that she sometimes glimpsed in a car's wing mirror or in the window of a shop. Reality was Irina Selesnikova, the daughter of a dead factory worker, who worked her shift, took the crude jokes and insults of her customers in a timid silence, jostled her way home on the swarming, clanking Metro train and went hungry at the end of the month when her money ran out. But there were some days when Irina couldn't keep Ros as deeply buried as the rest of the world supposed her to be in Kensal Green. When she was elbowed aside by that other woman, the one who had clung to Adam Carter's hand in those last few minutes, desperate not to lose the man whom she had loved without ever being able to find the courage to tell him so. When Irina was serving watered-down champagne to a petty crook with more roubles than sense, she sometimes found herself looking into a pair of light blue eyes, and her heart would race until she pushed away the errant memory. The back of a head glimpsed across the crowded dance floor might make her catch her breath for a second until a drunken bawl for more drinks jerked her back to reality – Irina's reality. Ros sometimes thought that life – if this, empty, meaningless, dreary grind through the days could be described as that – would be a lot easier if Adam Carter had been swarthy and dark-haired rather than blond and blue-eyed.
She was wondering wearily if she could face the goose-pimpling prospect of a shower under a trickle of barely-tepid water when she heard a sound from the direction of the narrow corridor leading to the flimsy, plywood front door. Instantly, Ros was on her feet, every nerve on alert. Silently, she moved back to the bed and eased the pistol she had obtained during her flight across Europe from under the sagging mattress. If – when – she saw Adam Carter again, she would give him both barrels for not having had the sense to put one in her bag instead of a sweater the colour of goose turds and a pair of jeans the wrong size.
She advanced cautiously into the corridor, flicking the safety catch off the gun as she did so. The door lock wouldn't stop a determined granny with a darning needle, never mind the CIA, the FSB, or the shock troops of the Yalta group. Or, she thought grimly, anyone else. Her father might have been one of the leading lights of the British Diplomatic Service; he had also had 'friends' among the Russian mafia, and it was she who had been instrumental in putting him behind bars for twenty years. In theory, of course, none of them knew she was here. Ros Myers had never had much time for theories.
She waited tensely at the end of the corridor, aiming the gun straight at the front door, straining to sense movement or sound from outside. The silence was absolute – so absolute as to be suspect. There was always some noise in the building – children shrieking, drunken arguments, bawling televisions or the throbbing pulse of Russian disco music, the inanity of which made its English equivalent sound like grand opera. Now she could hear her own breathing.
She was just about to move forward when an envelope slid under the inch-wide gap between the door and the cheap, curling linoleum, and she heard feet clattering down the stairwell outside. Ros stared at the envelope. It was a standard, cheap Russian one, but it was the one word written on it that pinned her where she stood. ROS.
Don't be fooled. She looked back at the door, edged past the envelope and lifted the cover on the spy hole in the wood, the fingers of her right hand still clenched around the butt of the gun. The goldfish-bowl view of the landing showed nothing but stained, chipped yellow and black floor-tiles, a rotting wooden banister and the steel-reinforced door gunmetal-grey door of her marginally more affluent neighbour on the other side of the landing.
Ros let the cover drop and looked back at the envelope. It was a trick. A lure. A threat. She didn't know which, but it had to be one of them. No-one knew her real identity. And no-one who did had any idea that Rosalind Myers, erstwhile Senior Case Officer in MI-5's Anti-Terrorist Section, was now Irina Selesnikova, waitress in the Zolotoye Koltso nightclub in Moscow.
Someone does, Ros. Someone, somewhere, had pierced the shield of anonymity that Ros knew was her only, flimsy protection against the many people who wanted her as dead as that empty grave in Kensal Rise cemetery apparently proclaimed her to be. And whoever that someone was, they knew she wasn't in it.
With one eye still on the door, she squatted down and lifted the envelope. It was light, and it felt as if there was nothing more than paper in it. Of course, if the FSB had coated or contaminated it with something a la Litvinenko, she had already signed her own death warrant merely by touching it. She glared at it.
All right. Sudba. Fate. The one word with which the average Russian shrugged off everything life threw at him, from a minor domestic mishap to full-scale civil war. With a final glance towards the door, Ros put the gun on the floor, slid her finger under the flap of the envelope and tore it open.
She didn't recognise the handwriting. She did know that the words hadn't been penned by a Russian. Even the best-educated Russian intelligence officers couldn't disguise the way they wrote in the Latin alphabet. The shape of the letters 'r' and 'l' were immediately recognisable to the trained eye. And then there was the ultimate giveaway. The capital I. Alwaysdotted. Always. And it wasn't. The note read 'Novodievichi. 28th March. 16.15. The Grim.' Ros turned the paper over. On the reverse side were scribbled the words 'you are my outstanding officer'.
Bozhe moi. Without even realizing it, Ros whispered the words in Russian rather than in English. None of those who might still be threatening her – not the CIA, not the FSB, not Yalta, nor her father could have used those words. They had significance for only two people in the world that Ros knew of – herself and Harry Pearce. The flimsy sheet of paper fluttered as her hand trembled, and for the first time since she had watched Adam Carter walk out of the church and out of her life, tears blurred her vision.
Impatiently, she wiped her eyes. Don't you dare, Myers. Don't you bloody dare. She read the message again. The Grim. The Grim Grom, Western diplomats had called him. Andrei Gromyko, the long-serving Soviet Foreign Minister, the man without a personality but with a survival instinct that had enabled him to stay in his plush office in the Ministry on Smolenskaya Ploschad while men less attuned to the vagaries of Soviet politics found themselves waving the flag of proletarian internationalism in the mountains of Tajikistan or the jungles of the Congo. He was buried among the great and the good in the cemetery at Novodievichi convent on the outskirts of the city.
28th March. Three days from now. Ros got to her feet, dazed, picked up the gun and the envelope and carried them back to the window. Nothing had changed outside. The billowing clouds were leaching a sullen, steady sleet onto the city. A young woman, her fuchsia pink raincoat a defiant challenge to the bleak greyness all around her, slithered and lurched across the mud towards the main road. A chill dampness seeped through the rotting window-frames and slid under Ros's bathrobe. Even as her body shivered in protest, Ros felt a tiny tendril of warmth tentatively uncurling deep inside. You are my outstanding officer. She looked back at the thin sheet of paper, incredulity still mingling with her surging emotion. God knows how they'd found her, but they had. She could almost feel Harry's hand gripping her own.
She looked at her watch. Arriving late at the club was guaranteed to earn Irina a good slapping; it had happened once before when Moscow's notorious traffic jams had held her up. It could also put her job in jeopardy. Cheap female labour grew on trees in Moscow; the poorer districts of the city were a hive of deserted wives, illegal immigrants and single mothers desperate for any job, however menial, to make ends meet. The battered, wheezing fridge in the kitchen was almost empty, and there was a week to go until the owner of the club made his usual contemptuous gesture of throwing her skimpy pay packet at her. Irina Selesnikova couldn't take the risk of losing her place. So Ros Myers would hold her tongue, play the cowed and grateful refugee, and count the hours until the 28th of March.
She turned her back on the street and headed for the Lilliputian-sized shower to see if the cockroaches would deign to share their domain with her.