He replayed the last ten minutes in his head. He could barely believe what Yegerova had done in Britain, or what she’d just tried to do to him in the Kremlin. He was overcome with an urge to change direction, head north to the Lubyanka and inflict some form of vengeance on her immediately. But, as he got nearer to Saint Basil’s swirling coloured domes, he told himself that would just play into her hands, and confirm what she still only suspected. And he wanted to keep her in the dark, grasping to know what he and Line Z were up to. So, he continued walking to Kitay-gorod metro station, and rode the M7 line one stop to Taganskaya.

People survived life in the Soviet system in different ways. Some accepted obedience and anonymity, while others pretended to, and vented their frustrations secretly and impotently in basements. Yegerova had picked fanaticism, and Rykov had chosen deception. It was the foundation of everything he did, and everything he was.

He knew Yegerova thought he was the child of some old Muscovite bourgeois family who somehow held enough sway to avoid having all their money and influence confiscated. In reality, his beginnings were far more humble. He’d been born in the Soviet capital, but not into some powerful dynasty, and he hadn’t been handed the opportunities he’d taken on a gilt-edged plate. He was a mere son of the proletariat, who had ideas and ambitions above his station. But he found it useful for certain people to believe the myth rather than the truth about him, which he’d let get lost in the fog of the past. If people knew he’d come from nothing, they’d think they could send him back there.

He walked along Goncharnaya Ulitsa, then up the stairs of his apartment block to his front door. His home was large, one of the bigger properties the KGB had requisitioned for its officers, but it was also modest, and not that dissimilar to Yegerova’s. He knew this because he’d visited hers a year ago while she was busy with one of her important little ideological quests at the Lubyanka. He’d gone looking for anything he might be able to use against her one day, but had found nothing. He kept his apartment fairly unremarkable and devoid of personal touches for exactly the same reason. In fact, the only signs anyone actually lived there beyond the clothes in the wardrobe and food in the kitchen were the scrupulous lack of dust on any surface, and the set of large constructivist posters of hardy workers and tumbling athletes Rykov had hung in his living room. No one knew he only enjoyed them ironically.