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only discovered what I have just told you this year, after I received the report about Zamyatin being sighted near Mount Kailas.   My information was reliable.   There were photographs, as I said.   So I believed Zamyatin had really been there.   And I asked myself what could possibly bring a man like Nikolai Zamyatin to such a God-forsaken place.   A man on his way up.   A man with access to the corridors of power.
    “It was then I remembered that you had been there in 1912.
    Looking for Russian agents.   Perhaps, I reasoned to myself, you had been mistaken.   Perhaps there had indeed been agents, or at least one agent.   If so, I argued to myself, there must have been a report, there must still be a report somewhere .. . and Nikolai Zamyatin must have found it and read it.”
    Abruptly, Winterpole reached out a hand and cleared a space where fresh condensation had fogged the windscreen.   Outside, the snow still fell, its faint flakes drifting down past the street-lamp, remote and colourless, like shadows falling from another planet.
    “I instructed my best agent in Moscow to look for the report.   It took him a week to find it.   Or, to be precise, to find the file it had been in.   The report itself was missing Zamyatin had either kept it or destroyed it, there was no way of knowing which.   There was, however, a second file in Badmayeff’s hand.   It contained a synopsis.
    of the full report, intended for the eyes of the Tsar himself.   The synopsis is less than a foolscap page in length and it tells us very little.   But it does make one thing clear: Maisky and Skrypnik were sent to Tibet expressly to search for something.   And whatever it was, they found it.
    “What is also clear is that their discovery did not go back to Russia with their Mongol guide.   It was left in Tibet.   Badmayeff’s synopsis ends with a request for further finance in order to kit out an expedition to bring it back.   But war broke out in Europe and everybody started waving flags, so no expedition was ever sent.
    Until this year.   Until Nikolai Zamyatin appointed himself to the task.”
    Somewhere, footsteps sounded on hard ground and faded again.
    Someone was reclaiming the streets from Sunday’s violence.   A light went on in a room opposite and was extinguished a few seconds later.   A dog barked once and was silent.   The night continued.
    “What has any of this to do with me or my son?”   Christopher asked again.
    Winterpole leaned his forehead against the cold rim of the
    steering-wheel and breathed out slowly.
     
    “I don’t know,” he said.
    “I wish to God I knew, but I don’t.   I swear that’s the truth.”
    “Then why .. .”
    “Go through all this?   Because, Christopher, although I cannot begin to explain it to you, I know that there is a connection.   So far, all I know is that you were in the Kailas region eight years ago.   And Nikolai Zamyatin was there four months ago.”
    “You mean that’s what brought you all the way up here?   My son is kidnapped and you come here talking about coincidences.   You tell me stories about a man I’ve never seen or heard of.”
    Winterpole did not answer at once.   Outside, the snowflakes danced as he came closer to the heart of the thing.   They were all dancing: himself and Christopher Wylam, and somewhere far away, Christopher’s son and a man called Zamyatin, all caught in a Dance of Death, turning round and round in the still darkness like figures on an old clock.
    “There’s something else,” he said at last, his voice flat and
    emotionless.
     
    “Go on.”
    “Last month,” he said, ‘a Tibetan monk arrived in Kalimpong in northern India.   He was dying: he’d come over the high passes during some very bad weather.   Somehow we’re not sure exactly how he managed to get a message to a man called Mishig.
    Mishig is a Mongol trader with his base in Kalimpong.   He’s also an agent for the Russians.   Until the