Forget the origins of the man.

What of Millet? Complacent, plausible Millet. But neither was Millet a part of these last days, nor was the journey to Moscow, nor the rendezvous that was aborted, nor the arrest and the trial. Millet had a place in the history of the affair, but that place was not in its present, not in its future.

Where did the present begin?

Michael Holly, now on his knees on a Stolypin carriage floor, and unshaven because they would not permit him a razor, and with the hunger lapping at his belly, had been a model prisoner in the Vladimir gaol 200 kilometres east of the capital. A foreigner, and housed on the second floor of the hospital block in the cell that it was said had held the pilot Gary Powers and the businessman Greville Wynne.

Down for espionage, given fifteen years by the courts.

Everyone from the governor to the humblest creeping

'trustie' knew that Michael Holly would serve only a mini mal proportion of those fifteen years. There was a man in England, there would be an exchange. So they gave him milk, they gave him books to read, they allowed food parcels from the Embassy. They waited, and Michael Holly waited, for the arrangements to be made. The Political Officer at Vladimir said that it would not be too long, and the interrogations had been courteous, and the warders had been correct. When they had taken him from the hospital block with his possessions and spare clothes in a cloth sack he had smiled and shaken hands and believed that the flight was close, Berlin he had thought it would be. In Lefortovo holding prison he had learned the truth across a bare scrubbed table from the Consul sent by the Embassy. An obsequious little man the Consul had been, crushed by the message that he brought. The Consul had stumbled through his speech and Holly had listened. .. It's not that it's anyone's fault, Mr Holly, you mustn't think that. It's just terribly bad luck, it's the worst luck I've heard of since I've been here, that's eight years. It was all set up – well, you know that. People had worked very hard on this matter, you really have to believe that…