`so you would like to work in the soviet union, mister grant?'

it was half an hour later and the m.g.b. colonel was bored with the interview. he thought that he had extracted from this rather unpleasant british soldier every military detail that could possibly be of interest. a few polite phrases to repay the man for the rich haul of secrets his dispatch bags had yielded, and then the man could go down to the cells and in due course be shipped off to vorkuta or some other labour camp.

`yes, i would like to work for you.'

`and what work could you do, mister grant? we have plenty of unskilled labour. we do not need truck-drivers and,' the colonel smiled fleetingly, `if there is any boxing to be done we have plenty of men who can box. two possible olympic champions among them, incidentally.'

`i am an expert at killing people. i do it very well. i like it.'

the colonel saw the red flame that flickered for an instant behind the very pale blue eyes under the sandy lashes. he thought, the man means it. he's mad as well as unpleasant. he looked coldly at grant, wondering if it was worth while wasting food on him at vorkuta. better perhaps to have him shot. or throw him back into the british sector and let his own people worry about him.

`you don't believe me,' said grant impatiently. this was the wrong man, the wrong department. `who does the rough stuff for you here?' he was certain the russians had some sort of a murder squad. everybody said so. `let me talk to them. i'll kill somebody for them. anybody they like. now.'

the colonel looked at him sourly. perhaps he had better report the matter. `wait here.' he got up and went out of the room, leaving the door open. a guard came and stood in the doorway and watched grant's back, his hand on his pistol.

the colonel went into the next room. it was empty. there were three telephones on the desk. he picked up the receiver of the m.g.b. direct line to moscow. when the military operator answered he said, `smersh'. when smersh answered he asked for the chief of operations.

ten minutes later he put the receiver back. what luck! a simple, constructive solution. whichever way it went it would turn out well. if the englishman succeeded, it would be splendid. if he failed, it would still cause a lot of trouble in the western sector-trouble for the british because grant was their man, trouble with the germans because the attempt would frighten a lot of their spies, trouble with the americans because they were supplying most of the funds for the baumgarten ring and would now think baumgarten's security was no good. pleased with himself, the colonel walked back into his office and sat down again opposite grant.

`you mean what you say?'

`of course i do.'

`have you a good memory?'

`yes.'

`in the british sector there is a german called dr. baumgarten. he lives in flat 5 at no. 22 kurfürstendamm. do you know where that is?'

`yes.'

`tonight, with your motor cycle, you will be put back into the british sector. your number plates will be changed. your people will be on the lookout for you. you will take an envelope to dr. baumgarten. it will be marked to be delivered by hand. in your uniform, and with this envelope, you will have no difficulty. you will say that the message is so private that you must see dr. baumgarten alone. then you will kill him.' the colonel paused. his eyebrows lifted. `yes?'

`yes,' said grant stolidly. `and if i do, will you give me more of this work?'

`it is possible,' said the colonel indifferently. `first you must show what you can do. when you have completed your task and returned to the soviet sector, you may ask for colonel boris.' he rang a bell and a man in plain clothes came in. the colonel gestured towards him. `this man will give you food. later he will give you the envelope and a sharp knife of american manufacture. it is an excellent weapon. good luck.'

the colonel reached and picked a rose out of the bowl and sniffed it luxuriously.

grant got to his feet. `thank you, sir,' he said warmly.

the colonel did not answer or look up from the rose. grant followed the man in plain clothes out of the room.

the plane roared on across the heartland of russia. they had left behind them the blast furnaces flaming far away to the east around stalino and, to the west, the silver thread of the dnieper branching away at dnepropetrovsk.

* * *

the splash of light around kharkov had marked the frontier of the ukraine, and the smaller blaze of the phosphate town of kursk had come and gone. now grant knew that the solid unbroken blackness below hid the great central steppe where the billions of tons of russia's grain were whispering and ripening in the darkness. there would be no more oases of light until, in another hour, they would have covered the last three hundred miles to moscow.

for by now grant knew a lot about russia. after the quick, neat, sensational murder of a vital west german spy, grant had no sooner slipped back over the frontier and somehow fumbled his way to `colonel boris' than he was put into plain clothes, with a flying helmet to cover his hair, hustled into an empty m.g.b. plane and flown straight to moscow.

then began a year of semi-prison which grant had devoted to keeping fit and to learning russian while people came and went around him-interrogators, stool-pigeons, doctors. meanwhile, soviet spies in england and northern ireland had painstakingly investigated his past.

at the end of the year grant was given as clean a bill of political health as any foreigner can get in russia. the spies had confirmed his story. the english and american stool-pigeons reported that he was totally uninterested in the politics or social customs of any country in the world, and the doctors and psychologists agreed that he was an advanced manic depressive whose periods coincided with the full moon. they added that grant was also a narcissist and asexual and that his tolerance of pain was high. these peculiarities apart, his physical health was superb and, though his educational standards were hopelessly low, he was as naturally cunning as a fox. everyone agreed that grant was an exceedingly dangerous member of society and that he should be put away.

when the dossier came before the head of personnel of the m.g.b., he was about to write `kill him' in the margin when he had second thoughts.

a great deal of killing has to be done in the u.s.s.r., not because the average russian is a cruel man, although some of their races are among the cruellest peoples in the world, but as an instrument of policy. people who act against the state are enemies of the state, and the state has no room for enemies. there is too much to do for precious time to be allotted to them, and, if they are a persistent nuisance, they get killed. in a country with a population of 200,000,000, you can kill many thousands a year without missing them. if, as happened in the two biggest purges, a million people have to be killed in one year, that is also not a grave loss. the serious problem is the shortage of executioners. executioners have a short `life'. they get tired of the work. the soul sickens of it. after ten, twenty, a hundred death-rattles, the human being, however sub-human he may be, acquires, perhaps by a process of osmosis with death itself, a germ of death which enters his body and eats into him like a canker. melancholy and drink take him, and a dreadful lassitude which brings a glaze to the eyes and slows up the movements and destroys accuracy. when the employer sees these signs he has no alternative but to execute the executioner and find another one.

the head of personnel of the m.g.b. was aware of the problem and of the constant search not only for the refined assassin, but also for the common butcher. and here at last was a man who appeared to be expert at both forms of killing, dedicated to his craft and indeed, if the doctors were to be believed, destined for it.

head of personnel wrote a short, pungent minute on grant's papers, marked them `smersh otdyel ii' and tossed them into his out tray.

department 2 of smersh, in charge of operations and executions, took over the body of donovan grant, changed his name to granitski and put him on their books.

the next two years were hard for grant. he had to go back to school and to a school that made him long for the chipped deal desks in the corrugated iron shed, full of the smell of little boys and the hum of drowsy blue-bottles, that had been his only conception of what a school was like. now, in the intelligence school for foreigners outside leningrad, squashed tightly among the ranks of germans, czechs, poles, baits, chinese and negroes, all with serious dedicated faces and pens that raced across their notebooks, he struggled with subjects that were pure double-dutch to him.

there were courses in `general political knowledge', which included the history of labour movements, of the communist party and the industrial forces of the world, and the teachings of marx, lenin and stalin, all dotted with foreign names which he could barely spell. there were lessons on `the class-enemy we are fighting', with lectures on capitalism and fascism; weeks spent on `tactics, agitation and propaganda' and more weeks on the problems of minority peoples, colonial races, the negroes, the jews. every month ended with examinations during which grant sat and wrote illiterate nonsense, interspersed with scraps of half-forgotten english history and misspelled communist slogans, and inevitably had his papers torn up, on one occasion, in front of the whole class.

but he stuck it out, and when they came to `technical subjects' he did better. he was quick to understand the rudiments of codes and ciphers, because he wanted to understand them. he was good at communications, and immediately grasped the maze of contacts, cut-outs, couriers and post-boxes, and he got excellent marks for fieldwork in which each student had to plan and operate dummy assignments in the suburbs and countryside around leningrad. finally, when it came to tests of vigilance, discretion, `safety-first', presence of mind, courage and coolness, he got top marks out of the whole school.

at the end of the year, the report that went back to smersh concluded `political value nil. operational value excellent'-which was just what otdyel ii wanted to hear.

the next year was spent, with only two other foreign students among several hundred russians, at the school for terror and diversion at kuchino, outside moscow. here grant went triumphantly through courses in judo, boxing, athletics, photography and radio under the general supervision of the famous colonel arkady fotoyev, father of the modern soviet spy, and completed his small-arms instruction at the hands of lieutenant-colonel nikolai godlovsky, the soviet rifle champion.

twice during this year, without warning, an m.g.b. car came for him on the night of the full moon and took him to one of the moscow jails. there, with a black hood over his head, he was allowed to carry out executions with various weapons-the rope, the axe, the sub-machine gun. electrocardiograms, blood-pressure and various other medical tests were applied to him before, during and after these occasions, but their purpose and findings were not revealed to him.

it was a good year and he felt, and rightly, that he was giving satisfaction.

in 1949 and `50 grant was allowed to go on minor operations with mobile groups or avanposts, in the satellite countries. these were beatings-up and simple assassinations of russian spies and intelligence workers suspected of treachery or other aberrations. grant carried out these duties neatly, exactly and inconspicuously, and though he was carefully and constantly watched he never showed the smallest deviation from the standards required of him, and no weaknesses of character or technical skill it might have been different if he had been required to kill when doing a solo task at the full-moon period, but his superiors, realizing that at that period he would be outside their control, or his own, chose safe dates for his operations. the moon period was reserved exclusively for butchery in the prisons, and from time to time this was arranged for him as a reward for a successful operation in cold blood.

in 1951 and `52 grant's usefulness became more fully and more officially recognized. as a result of excellent work, notably in the eastern sector of berlin, he was granted soviet citizenship* and increases in pay which by 1953 amounted to a handsome 5000 roubles a month. in 1953 he was given the rank of major, with pension rights back-dated to the day of his first contact with `colonel boris', and the villa in the crimea was allotted to him. two bodyguards were attached to him, partly to protect him and partly to guard against the outside chance of his `going private', as defection is called in m.g.b. jargon, and, once a month, he was transported to the nearest jail and allowed as many executions as there were candidates available.

naturally grant had no friends. he was hated or feared or envied by everyone who came in contact with him. he did not even have any of those professional acquaintanceships that pass for friendship in the discreet and careful world of soviet officialdom. but, if he noticed the fact, he didn't care. the only individuals he was interested in were his victims. the rest of his life was inside him. and it was richly and excitingly populated with his thoughts.

then, of course, he had smersh. no one in the soviet union who has smersh on his side need worry about friends, or indeed about anything whatever except keeping the black wings of smersh over his head.

grant was still thinking vaguely of how he stood with his employers when the plane started to lose altitude as it picked up the radar beam of tushino airport just south of the red glow that was moscow.

he was at the top of his tree, the chief executioner of smersh, and therefore of the whole of the soviet union. what could he aim for now? further promotion? more money? more gold nicknacks? more important targets?

better techniques?

there really didn't seem to be anything more to go for. or was there perhaps some other man whom he had never heard of, in some other country, who would have to be set aside before absolute supremacy was his?