After two hours of walking she reached a single, vast step in the ground. She stared at it for a moment, her mind unable to process its strangeness until it realised it was a road, raised up to protect it from the freeze-thaw swelling of the tundra, and she had hit it side on. Valera could either cross over it and keep going the way she was, or follow it and find out where it went. Her body decided it was too tired even to guide her by instinct, so she stepped up, turned right, and let the road lead her. Twenty minutes later she stopped dead in her tracks. There was a sign in front of her and it wasn’t in Cyrillic. Its letters were from the Latin alphabet. She wasn’t in Russia any more. She was in Finland.

The nearest place worth being on a road sign, somewhere called Ilomantsi, was only a few kilometres away. It turned out to be a small village, just a few paved streets and a few more muddy tracks rutted by cartwheels. But in the middle of its little square stood a large memorial to a battle that had been fought somewhere nearby. There was also, more importantly for Valera, a bus idling next to the monument.

The engine was running and a short queue of people was waiting to get on. Valera didn’t know where the bus was headed, but even her foggy, malnourished brain reasoned it wouldn’t be back across the border. So she joined the end of the line and pulled a purse out of the top of her rucksack, hoping the small amount of rubles she’d been able to secrete away over the last three years would be enough to buy her a ticket somewhere.

It turned out that Finnish bus drivers were as uninterested in asking questions about their passengers as Karelian truck drivers. It also turned out that Valera was not the first person to try to pay her fare with Russian coins. The driver took a few coins from the handful she offered him, and nodded at her to take a seat.

Chapter 24

Chapter 24

Medev knew that one day someone, somewhere would decide he knew too much about something he shouldn’t and he’d suddenly become a threat to the people he’d spent his whole life serving. He’d been part of the Soviet intelligence apparatus long enough to have worked for the NKVD, the MGB and now the KGB. He’d survived’Stalin’s purges of his own spies, and the jostling for control that had followed his death. Medev was now as near to the heart of the Party as he could be without being chairman of the KGB himself. His position as chief of the scientific directorate came with many powerful allies and untold, invisible enemies. But, for the moment, his standing was still good and his authority unquestioned.