'Yes.'

She fetched a couple of faded blue cushions and dropped them onto the floor, one on each side of the stool. 'Or do you want to sit a the table?'

'No.'

'Okay — ' she lugged a weathered black briefcase from under the stool and flipped the buckles open — 'this will be yours to keep, as well as the stuff inside.' she pulled out a thin typed file and a map and turned them to face me. 'Light cover — you probably won't have enough time to study anything deeper, will you? The map's only a few months old. When were you in Moscow last?'

'Before Yeltsin.'

'Been a few changes.'

'Yes.' I hadn't seen any KGB when I'd come through the airport, and there'd been no «concierge» on the ground floor when we'd come into the building.

'They're surface changes,' Jane said, 'at the moment. The KGB are meant to be calling themselves the MPS, Ministry of Public Security, but of course most of them are still very much KGB under the skin — think of the power they had! — and a lot of them are just going through the motions of being nice to the proletariat while they wait for another coup. And there — '

'You think they'll get one?'

'Coups and rumours of coups… someone sounds the alarm about once a week, for obvious reasons: unless the Russians and the satellites can get through the winter with enough food and the basics they're liable to storm the government offices and demand a coup just to get Yeltsin out. This is mainly embassy gossip, but everyone knows there are something like three million die-hard apparatchiks holed up across the country with a hammer and sickle behind the curtains. We can't let our guard down yet, that's all.' With a shrug — 'But I expect you know all this, from the stuff going through the London signals room.'

'It's a help to have it confirmed in the field.'