And to be inconspicuous, a never-seen, never-heard man, had been the repeated lesson at those training centres at Gofkovskoye Shosse and Metrostroevskaya Street and Turnaninski Pereulok. And insisted upon again in those mock-up American and Continental cities specially built at Kuchino where he had been trained to think and behave and live like a Westerner. To be the Westerner he had become.

All wasted: four years of dawn to dusk study – of top-grade passes in every test and examination – utterly and completely wasted. But Yuri’s concern was not in the KGB’s loss. His concern was as his own, personal potential loss.

Yuri had liked – come to need and expect – the cosseted life of the son of someone secure within the Soviet hierarchy. He’d never known anything but an apartment in Kutuzovsky Prospekt and the dacha in the Lenin Hills and the cars that had always been the surefire aphrodisiac with the girls. He’d enjoyed the concessionary allowances and the freely available foreign imports and never having to wait or to queue for anything; and then to be told it was not available. Nothing ever had been unavailable to him.

So it was unthinkable for it not to continue. But eventually properly awarded and allowed, for himself, not obtained through his father. Which was why he had responded so immediately to the KGB recruitment approach at college – and until his enrolment kept that approach secret from his father, striving then for the independence he would so willingly have surrendered now, to be spared Afghanistan. He’d never doubted his ultimate promotion to the Dzerzhinsky Square headquarters, with all its benefits. Nor underestimated that irrespective of his ability – and Yuri had never been unsure of his own ability – there would be political pitfalls it was necessary to avoid.