Valeri Sharygin was described on the personnel lists as First Attache to the Secretary of the Soviet delegation to the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament. It was not an arduous post and one designed to consume little of the time of the principal security officer at the Residence. As a senior KGB officer, as a man noted for the penetration of his intellect and the gimlet sharpness of his suspicion, he was almost always alone, often on the outside of the group. He was feared, he was avoided, he was respected. Through narrow-rimmed and thick-lensed spectacles, over a close-cut brush of a moustache he watched the bobbing endeavours of the rubber dinghies that circled the short and white-painted hull of the capsised yacht.

Two searchlights that were powered by mobile throbbing generators played their beams from the shore onto the water where the frogmen dived and where the ropes with the grappling hooks were thrown. And they were futile, the efforts of these searchers, an obligatory show with very little prospect of success. Three hours since the angry keeper of the marina beside the Jardin Botanique had telephoned the Residence to ask how much longer was he supposed to wait for Monsieur Guttmann to bring back the yacht that was on permanent hire to the delegation. When anyone was late, missing, overdue at the Residence Sharygin went first to their sleeping quarters with his pass-key, sifted their possessions, and evaluated whether their tardiness was innocent or criminal. There had been clothes scattered on the floor, money and a half-written letter to his father on his desk, a bag of laundry by the door, an empty suitcase under his bed. One hour later the Second Secretary to the Permanent Mission had run into Guttmann's room, found Sharygin rifling a drawer, hesitated in an embarrassed silence and then blurted the information that the drifting boat had been sighted from the Coppett road. So Willi Guttmann, junior interpreter, had overturned a yacht on a foul afternoon when only an idiot would have put out from the marina.