‘Don’t be a fucking amateur,’ he said. ‘You know what this is about. Don’t lose your cool now. We’re moving out. And we’ll take our chances along the river. I need us to move fast.’

Belotserkovsky gave a decisive nod and Buslenko knew he was fully back in the game.

‘Let’s move.’

They moved in a half-run, covering a considerable distance in a short time. The forest on either side of the river had begun to thin out, offering less cover for their pursuers. Added to which the dawn that Buslenko had dreaded now worked in their favour. Maybe they were going to make it after all.

The only thing that worked against them was that the Teteriv river was wider and shallower here, and they had lost the cover of a steep bank. Buslenko heard a cry behind him and turned to see Olga Sarapenko fall, her rifle clattering on the stones.

‘You all right?’ he asked.

She sat up and cradled her ankle. ‘Nothing broken.’ She got up with a struggle. ‘It’s badly sprained, but my boot saved it from anything worse.’

‘Can you walk?’

‘For now,’ she said, with an apologetic expression on her face. ‘I’ll slow you down.’

‘We stick together,’ said Belotserkovsky. The big Ukrainian threw his rifle to Buslenko and then hoisted Olga Sarapenko onto his shoulders as if she were a deer that he had bagged hunting. ‘We’re nearly there. You have to keep us covered, boss,’ he said to Buslenko.

Buslenko grinned and shouldered both Olga’s and Belotserkovsky’s rifles. At his command, they made off again towards the houses on either side of the river that marked the outskirts of Korostyshev. But Buslenko was focused on more than making it alive to the town of his birth. Instead he was fixed with grim determination on a goal far to the west: a strange city in a foreign country. Where he had an appointment to keep.

Part Two

KARNEVAL

CLOWN DIARY, FIFTEENTH ENTRY. UNDATED.

CHAPTER SIX

1–3 February

1.

Fabel put the phone down. It all made sense now.

Something had been nagging away at him for days and he hadn’t been able to put his finger on what it was. It had unsettled him, because every time he had had a feeling like this in the past it had turned out to have a solid foundation. He understood the process behind it: little scraps of seemingly unrelated information that he had picked up coming together in his subconscious to start an alarm bell ringing. There had been nothing unusual about the telephone conversation that he had had with Maria, but her claim that her psychologist had said she should cut herself off from her colleagues for a while had rung false with him.

And now, two weeks later, Minks had called him at the Presidium and everything had fallen into place.