John le Carre - Our kind of traitor

Grabbing Dima by the arm – who must have just one last kick before he goes – Luke leads him past the lavatories, up some steps and across an unused reception area until they arrive at the iron-clad delivery door marked EMERGENCY EXIT. This door requires no key but has instead a tin green box mounted on the wall, with a glass front and a red panic button inside for emergencies such as fire, flood or an act of terrorism.

Over the last eighteen hours Luke has devoted serious study to this green box with its panic button, and has also taken the trouble to discuss with Ollie its most likely properties. At Ollie's suggestion, he has loosened in advance the brass screws attaching the glass panel to its metal surround, and snipped through a sinister-looking red-clad wire that leads back into the bowels of the hotel with the purpose of connecting the panic button with the hotel's central alarm system. In Ollie's speculative view, the effect of snipping the red wire should be to open the emergency exit without provoking an emergency exodus of staff and guests from the hotel.

Removing the loosened pane of glass with his left hand, Luke makes to push the red button with his right, only to discover that his right hand is temporarily out of service. So he again uses his left hand, whereupon with Swiss efficiency the doors fly open precisely as Ollie has speculated, and there is the street, and there is the sunny day, beckoning to them.

Luke hustles Dima ahead of him and – either out of courtesy to the hotel or a desire to look like a couple of honourable Bernese citizens in suits who happen to be stepping into the street – he pauses to close the door after him, and at the same time establish, with grateful acknowledgements to Ollie, that no siren call for a general evacuation of the hotel is resounding behind him.

Fifty metres across the road from them stands an underground car park called, rather oddly, Parking Casino. On the first level, directly facing the exit, stands the BMW car that Luke has rented for this moment, and in Luke's numb right hand lies the electronic key that unlocks the car's doors before you reach them.

'Jesus God, Dick, I love you, hear me?' Dima whispers through his panting.

With his numb right hand, Luke fishes in the hot lining of his jacket for his mobile, hauls it out, and with his left forefinger touches the button for Ollie.

'The time to go in is now,' he orders, in a voice of majestic calm.

*

The horsebox was backing down a hard incline and Ollie was warning Perry and Gail that they were going in. After the wait in the lay-by they had driven up a tortuous hill road, heard cowbells and smelled hay. They had stopped, turned, and backed, and now they were waiting again, but only for Ollie to ratchet up the tailgate, which he did slowly in order to be quiet, revealing himself by stages up to his wide-brimmed black fedora hat.

Behind Ollie stood a stables, and behind it a paddock and a couple of good-looking young horses, chestnuts, which had trotted over to take a look at them, then bounced off again. Next to the stables loomed a large modern house in dark red timber with overhanging eaves. There was a front porch and a side porch, both closed. The front porch faced the road and the side porch didn't, so Perry chose the side porch and said, 'I'll go first.' It had been agreed that Ollie, as the stranger to the family, would stay with the van till summoned.

As Perry and Gail advanced, they noticed two closed-circuit television cameras looking down on them, one from the stables and one from the house. Igor's responsibility, presumably, but Igor has been sent out shopping.

Perry pressed the bell and at first they heard nothing. The stillness struck Gail as unnatural so she pressed it herself. Perhaps it didn't work. She gave one long ring then several short ones to hurry everyone up. And it worked after all, because impatient young feet were approaching, bolts were being shot and a lock was turned, and one of Dima's flaxen-haired sons appeared: Viktor.

But instead of greeting them with a buckwheat grin all over his freckled face, which was what they would have expected, Viktor stared at them in nervous confusion.

'Have you got her?' he demanded, in his internat's American English.

The question was directed at Perry not Gail because by now Katya and Irina had come through the doorway and Katya had grabbed one of Gail's legs and was squeezing her head against it, and Irina was reaching up her arms to Gail for an embrace.

'My sister. Natasha!' Viktor shouted impatiently at Perry, suspiciously eyeing the horsebox as if she might be hiding in it. 'Have – you – seen – Natasha, for Christ's sakes?'

'Where's your mother?' Gail said, breaking free of the girls.

They followed Viktor down a panelled corridor that smelled of camphor into a low-beamed living room on two levels with glass doors leading to a garden and the paddock beyond. Crammed into the darkest part of the room between two leather suitcases sat Tamara, wearing a black hat with a piece of veil round it. Advancing on her, Gail saw beneath the veil that she had dyed her hair with henna and rouged her cheeks. Russians traditionally sit down before a journey, Gail had read somewhere, and perhaps that was why Tamara was sitting down now, and why she remained sitting when Gail stood in front of her, staring down at her rouged, rigid face.

'What's happened to Natasha?' Gail demanded.

'We do not know,' Tamara replied, to the void before her.

'Why not?'

Now the twins took over, and Tamara was temporarily forgotten:

'She went to riding school and didn't come back!' Viktor insisted, as his brother Alexei clattered into the room after him.

'No, she didn't, she only said she was going to riding school. She only said, asshole! She lies, you know she does!' – Alexei.

'When did she go to riding school?' asked Gail.

'This morning. Early! Like eight o'clock!' Viktor yelled, before Alexei could get his word in. 'She had a date there. Some kind of demo lesson on dressage! Dad had called like ten minutes earlier, said we'd gotta be ready midday! Natasha says she's got this date at riding school. Gotta go there, an unbreakable deal!'

'So she went?'

'Sure. Igor took her in the Volvo.'

'Bullshit!' – Alexei again. 'Igor took her to Berne! They never fucking went to riding school, you idiot! Natasha lied to Mama!'

Gail the lawyer forced her way back: 'Igor dropped her in Berne? Where did he take her to?'

'The train station!' Alexei shouted.

'Which train station, Alexei?' said Perry severely. 'Calmly now. At which train station in Berne did Igor drop Natasha?'

'Berne main station! The international train station, Jesus Christ! It goes all over. Goes to Paris! Budapest! Goes to Moscow!'

'Dad told her to go there, Professor,' Viktor insisted, lowering his voice in deliberate counterpoint to the hysterical Alexei's.

'Dima did, Viktor?' – Gail.

'Dima told her to go to the train station. That's what Igor said. You want I call Igor again and you talk to him?'

'He can't, you asshole! The Professor don't speak Russian!' – Alexei, by now nearly in tears.

Perry again, firmly as before: 'Viktor – in a minute, Alexei – Viktor, just say that to me again – slowly. Alexei, I'll be yours just as soon as I've listened to Viktor. Now, Viktor.'

'It's what Igor says she told him, and that's why he dropped her at the main station. "My dad says, I gotta go to the main train station."'

'And Igor's an asshole too! He don't ask why!' Alexei shouted. 'He's too fucking stupid. He's so frightened of Dad he just drops Natasha at the station and goodbye! He don't ask why. He goes shopping. If she never comes back it's not his fault. Dad told him to do it, so he did it, so it's not his fault!'