The next morning Dima arrives with my breakfast and stands by the door, his arms folded, as I eat and drink.

An hour after sunrise I'm brought food and coffee on a tray by Dima, Tikhomirov's assistant. He doesn't speak, instead he moves quietly and swiftly. Looking out of the window I recognize the courtyard below and realize that I am inside the Lubyanka complex, the headquarters of the FSB. The door to my room is unlocked; there's a corridor outside with a bathroom, and stairs leading downwards, but I don't go further than the bathroom. I spend the day curled up on the bed, staring at the rooftops and the falling snow. Later, a man in civilian clothes comes in and gives me an injection, following which I sleep deeply. On the second day a female doctor comes in, asks me to undress, and subjects me to a medical examination. I spend a second day lying on the bed, too tired and numbed to think. In the evening there's another injection, and the soft rush into forgetting.

"You're going on a driving trip," he tells me. "To Perm, fifteen hundred kilometers away. You will be on the road for two days."

No such thought has occurred to me but I nod blankly. I have to go somewhere, and it might as well be Perm as anywhere else. Dima takes my breakfast tray, and returns shortly afterward carrying a suitcase and a winter coat. The suitcase contains new but nondescript clothes, washing things, and a plastic folder of documents.

"You need to leave Moscow. It's too dangerous here, and you will be in safe hands. Also…" He looks at me sympathetically. "We thought you might like to see the city where Miss Vorontsova grew up."

An hour later I'm sitting in the passenger seat of an unmarked 4x4 vehicle, some kind of Lada, beside a plain-clothes officer. Alexei, as he introduces himself, doesn't say much, but radiates tough, unhurried competence. As he swings the Lada through the narrow, slushy streets east of Lubyanka Square he conducts a speakerphone conversation with a woman named Vika, telling her that he will be away on official business for four days, and asking her to take Archie to the vet if his limp persists.

"Why?" I ask. "And why Perm?"

He glances at me. "Please. I don't know the details, but General Tikhomirov told us that you did a brave thing for us. A brave thing for Russia."

Twenty minutes later we are on a motorway, headed east. The windscreen wipers thump back and forth, and a snow-blurred landscape rolls past, dull gray and frozen white.

As the movement ends I wipe my eyes and blow my nose on a tissue, sniffing loudly. "I'm sorry," I say.

Seriously? What the fuck did he tell them?

"Music?" Alexei suggests, and I turn on the radio, which is tuned to a classical station. A violin concerto is playing, all spun-sugar romanticism, not my sort of thing at all, but I feel the tears running down my cheeks. Alexei affects not to notice. "Glazunov," he murmurs, transferring a packet of cigarettes from his tunic pocket to the glove compartment. "Heifetz recording."

"Undercover work is hard," he says, speeding up to overtake a line of slow-moving vehicles. "It's stressful. We are in your debt."

"Thank you," I reply. It seems wisest to leave it at that.

Warm cars always make me sleepy. After a time I close my eyes, and dream of Oxana, rising up out of the steamy Shanghai street, with her cobra gaze fixed on me. I try to reach her but the pinprick of monsoon rain quickly becomes the slap of bullets into our flesh. We fall into the North Sea, and there, suspended in the icy half-dark, are Charlie, Anton, Kris in her velvet coat, and a naked and gray-lipped Azmat Dzabrati, all of them watching as the currents draw us apart until only our fingers are touching, and Oxana drifts into invisibility. I try to call after her, but the seawater rushes into my mouth, and I wake up.

"Sure. Am I in danger?"

"Not at all. But I agreed not to leave you unarmed and unprotected until we reach Perm."

"Right." I pocket the Glock, go for a pee in the foul, frozen toilet, and wonder about shooting myself, as I did in Dasha's apartment. Is this my future? Moving from place to place, never settling, never resting, never forgetting? That afternoon we drive for a further six hours in a hissing column of trucks and cars. To either side of the motorway an endless vista of snowbound plains and shadowed forests unrolls beneath cloud-packed skies. At intervals we pass small administrative settlements.

Alexei tells me that I've been asleep for more than three hours. We stop at a service station for sandwiches, coffee and Milka chocolate. Then Alexei fills the Lada with diesel, takes his cigarettes from the glove compartment, and hands me a loaded Glock. "Five minutes, OK?"

Alexei points to the passenger-side glove compartment, where among the crumpled cigarette packets and spare Glock magazines I find a cracked plastic case housing a CD of Rachmaninoff's first piano concerto. As the music plays Alexei glances at me, as if to check that it's having the appropriate effect. Perhaps it is, because while I find it complex, and its themes difficult to follow, the act of listening to it occupies me to the exclusion of everything else. It doesn't anesthetize my grief, but it acknowledges and orders it. It gives it a place.

Alexei seems as disinclined to talk about himself as I am. Instead, we listen to music, about which he appears to know a great deal. As each piece starts, he gives me a thumbnail sketch of the work in question. His favorite composer, he tells me, is Rachmaninoff, who saved his sanity in the days and nights following the Dubrovka Theatre siege, his first experience of action, in which a hundred and thirty hostages died.

Evening comes early, bringing with it a sharp wind that scours the snowfields and sends crystalline trails flying through our headlight beams. We stop for the night at a featureless town in the Svechinsky district. Our hostel is a single-story cinder-block building attached to a motorway service station. The rooms are unprepossessing, but Alexei tells me that the food in the all-night café is good. I try to eat, but I can't swallow. Tears run down my nose and drip onto the plate.

Alexei puts down his fork, passes me a paper napkin and tells me about his home life. He's divorced, and met Vika a year ago at a fellow-officer's birthday drinks. Vika works in the Moscow State University library. She's also divorced, with a football-crazy young son who Alexei says "has been running wild too long." They live in a block near Lubyanka Square exclusively occupied by FSB officers and their families. A neighbor takes Archie for walks during the day.

I half listen, grateful not to have to talk, and walk to my room with the Glock weighing down my coat pocket. In the washbag I find a box of sleeping pills. I take one, climb into bed and listen to the rumble of the trucks outside. Sleep comes blessedly fast.

In the morning we start early, and drive for a further nine hours. Today the sky is clearer, and sunlight pushes through the cloud cover, illuminating the frozen fields and the ice-silvered lakes. The terrain begins to change as we approach the Perm Krai. This is deep Russia, and as the snow's glitter fades the rivers and forests are briefly suffused in soft, glowing pink.

The Azov Hotel is a tiny, one-star place in a side street off Ulitsa Pushkina in central Perm. Alexei pulls up outside shortly after 10 p. m., walks me inside, stamps the snow from his boots, and has an inaudible conversation with the elderly man behind the reception desk.

My room has been paid for, Alexei tells me, and I will be contacted there at some point over the next few days. Reaching into his coat pocket, he hands me a wallet containing a wad of banknotes and a Gazprombank debit card. I probably look as lost as I feel, for Alexei gives me a quick, soldierly hug, squeezes my hand, and wishes me courage. Then he climbs back into the Lada, backs out onto the street, and drives away.

My room is small, with a liver-colored carpet and a single window overlooking the street. Drawn net curtains admit a thin, diffuse light. There's a divan bed covered by a crocheted blanket, a wooden chest of drawers, and a miniature fridge that throbs so loudly that I turn it off within ten minutes of moving in.

On the windowsill, behind the curtains, I discover a pack of tarot cards. Left behind, I assume, by a previous tenant. I have no idea of the supposed meaning of the cards, but I spend hours sitting on the bed, turning them over one by one, and gazing at the strange, enigmatic images. The angel on the judgment card looks like Oxana. I am the ten of swords, pierced through and through.

This room, and the snowbound streets around the hotel, become my world. I sleep late, eat my lunch at the café over the road, and walk until it gets dark. On my first day I make my way up Komsomolsky Prospekt. I'm glad of the light and warmth of the department stores, but something about the family groups in their coats and headscarves and snow boots upsets me. I feel that I no longer belong among them, and seek out quieter routes in the neighboring park and along the River Kama.

I haven't read a newspaper since arriving in Perm, and I've hurried past the shops and bars that have TVs playing, because they always seem to be showing images of the murdered presidents. I'm not ready to learn about it, or to read about Oxana dying, although God knows I've thought about little else. I accept the offer of the paper, nevertheless, touched by the kindly meant gesture, and once I start reading I can't stop.

The Café Skazka is dim and steamy, and the middle-aged couple that run it are friendly, acknowledging me with a smile and a raised hand when I come in, and leaving me to linger over my tea. On the fifth morning their daughter, who works in the café at weekends, refills my cup and offers me a day-old copy of Pravda.

The lead story, in effect the only story, offers new revelations from "government sources" concerning "the crime of the century." It tells how a transnational anarchist organization planned the assassination of the American and Russian presidents, and how the Russian security services eliminated the killers in two fierce firefights. There are graphic images of the dead conspirators. Oxana Vorontsova, "a notorious contract killer known as Villanelle," is described as the leader of the cell, and pictured lying on her back in the snow in front of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, her face and chest dark with blood, surrounded by armed members of the FSB's Alpha counterterrorist group. An automatic pistol is clearly visible in her right hand. A photograph captioned "Larissa Farmanyants, the second assassin," shows Charlie's body, torn apart by submachine gun fire, lying next to their sniper's rifle at the window of the Nikolskaya tower on the Kremlin wall, "to which she had illegally gained access."

On an inside page, where the story continues, there's a TASS news agency photograph, dated seven years earlier, of athletes on the medalists' podium after a pistol-shooting event at the University Games at Ekaterinburg. Farmanyants, looking wistful, has taken the bronze medal, and Vorontsova, half-smiling, the gold. Both look very young.

According to official government sources, the assassination of the two presidents was very nearly prevented by an undercover operative of the British Secret Intelligence Service, working in collaboration with the Russian security services. The unnamed female officer had penetrated the group, but tragically had been unable to relay the details of the plot to her FSB handlers in time to prevent the assassination. No details are known about this individual's identity or present whereabouts.

On the sixth day, at eleven-thirty in the morning, I'm sitting cross-legged on the unmade bed, still undressed, turning over the tarot cards, when there's a knock on my door. I assume it's the cleaner, a haunted-looking teenager named Irma who slips fearfully around the hotel with an ancient vacuum cleaner, and I call out to her to give me a minute. When the knock is repeated, I sweep up the cards, wrap the crocheted blanket around me, and open the door an inch.

The article affirms that the FSB, under the leadership of General Vadim Tikhomirov, has been waging a long, covert war against terrorism and anarchy. "With such people, there can be no compromise, and no negotiation," Tikhomirov is quoted as saying. "Our priority is, and always will be, the security of the Russian people." In the accompanying photograph he looks sage and reassuring. A little like the actor George Clooney, but steelier around the eyes.

It's not Irma, but the hotel proprietor, Mr. Gribin. "You have a visitor," he informs me.

I splash my face with water, dress and walk warily downstairs. Standing in the lobby, facing away from me toward the street, is a woman in a dark coat, with a beret pulled over her hair. Hearing me descend the stairs she turns. She's about forty, with soft, tired eyes. There's a faint smell of cigarettes about her.

"Good morning," she says, extending a hand toward me. "I'm Anna Leonova."

I stare at her.

"I wondered, perhaps, whether we might go somewhere and talk."

I belatedly extend my hand. "Yes, I know who you are."

"I was Oxana's French teacher," she says. She glances at Gribin, still hovering lugubriously.

We walk to the Café Skazka and order tea. I tell Anna that Oxana spoke of her affectionately, but sadly.

"I'd like that."

"She was probably the most gifted pupil I ever had," Anna says. "Language flowed through her. She had an instinctive feel for it. But she was broken inside. Terribly broken. In the end she did something so terrible that I had to let her go."

"Were you never afraid of her, Eve? Truthfully?"

I pick up my cup, touch my mouth to the scalding tea and put it down again. "Never. I loved her."

"Knowing what she was capable of, you loved her?"

"I did. And I saw Oxana die. She wasn't holding a pistol. She was unarmed, and they shot her in the back. Not in the chest as the photograph suggests."

The café owner's daughter places a cup of tea in front of each of us. My question is ignored.

"She loved me, in her way. I don't expect you or anyone else to understand that, but it's true."

Anna looks away, her eyes distant. "I was fond of her, more than fond of her, but I can't pretend I was surprised by what happened. By what she… became."

Anna regards me thoughtfully. "Did you see the article in Pravda, two days ago?"

"Yes."

Anna shrugs. "I believe you. Photographs lie. Even the illusions are illusions." She interlaces her fingers on the table in front of her. "I was contacted about you. Told your story. Asked if I could help you make a future for yourself."

"Knowing that she could never love you back."

"Why am I here, Anna? And how do you know who I am?"

"She told me."

"No, I have to go. But before I do, I have something for you." From her bag, she takes an envelope and hands it to me. Inside is a small photograph of several girls in school uniform, among them Oxana. She looks about sixteen, and the photographer has caught her off guard. She's half-turning, open-mouthed and laughing. There's something lank-haired and feral about her, but also a childish joy.

"I… Yes, I'd love to. Thank you."

"I know how unhappy you are, Eve, but will you do something for me?"

"Come with me this evening to the Tchaikovsky Theatre. There's an opera playing. Manon Lescaut. It's one of my favorites. I'm sure you'd enjoy it."

"I wish I could say, but I can't. This is Russia."

"Yes, I noticed that." I try the tea again. It's still too hot.

I look at her, surprised. Her gaze is soft and unblinking.

"Shall we meet there? Seven o'clock?"

"By whom?"

We sip our tea in silence. It's approaching lunchtime, and a steady stream of customers comes into the café. "Are you going to have something to eat?" I ask her.

"I'll look forward to that very much."

"Oh my goodness," I say, feeling the tears welling. "That's so precious."

"Now that I have, is it still precious?"

"Yes. I can remember exactly when it was taken. There had just been an announcement that the whole class had passed the term exam, and that a girl called Mariam Gelashvili, who had slipped on the ice that morning, had fractured her ankle."

It's snowing heavily by the evening, and as I step into the sudden warmth of the theater foyer I'm surrounded by people elated to find themselves in such grand, old-world surroundings. I find a corner to wait for Anna, beside a couple with two daughters. The little girls have been elaborately prepared for the occasion, with giant organza bows in their hair.

"Why did you tell me that?"

I slip the photograph back into the envelope. "She's gone, Anna. It's all precious."

Anna catches my attention with a wave. She's wearing a black coat with a fur-trimmed collar that must be decades old, and her mouse-brown hair is pinned up in a French roll. She leads me up the staircase, slipping through the crowds with practiced ease. The tea room is splendid, with walls of duck-egg green and russet velvet curtains. Twin chandeliers dispense a soft, yellowish light. We find a corner table, and Anna makes her way to the counter, returning not with cups of tea but two vodka martinis.

I follow her up to the balcony, the martini racing icily through my bloodstream. Our seats are in the back row. "Not so expensive," Anna whispers. "But the best acoustics. They know me in the box office. I always sit here."

"This is all very generous of you," I tell her. "I'm still not sure why you're going to all this trouble for me."

She smiles over her glass. "Perhaps we're not so different. We've both lost people."

At the interval Anna excuses herself, saying that she has to make a call, so I remain in my seat and gaze out over the crimson and gilt auditorium. Twenty minutes pass and she hasn't returned. Around me, people are returning to their seats, murmuring, consulting programs. As the house lights go down the buzz of conversation dies. There's a burst of applause as the conductor takes the podium, then the curtain rises to the tremulous sound of a flute. In the near-darkness I register a brief glow of light as the balcony door opens and closes, then see Anna moving along the row toward her seat.

The lights fall, the curtain rises. The opera is sung in Italian, and I don't try to follow the plot. There are frock coats and cloaks, libidinous men and fallen women. The music washes through me, sweetly sorrowful. I'm carried on a flood tide of vodka and Puccini.

"Pupsik."

It isn't Anna. The silhouette's wrong.

"Eve, lyubimaya." She sits, pulls me to her, and presses my face into her shoulder. She can't be here, and this can't be happening, but I can smell her body and her hair, I can feel the strength in her arms, and her heart beating beneath my cheek. "I'm sorry, my love," she whispers. "I'm so, so sorry."

I start to cry, and she looks anxious for a moment, then pulls a tissue from her sleeve and tentatively holds it out to me. It's such an Oxana gesture that I finally know it's her.

It's her, and I can't speak.

I pull back to look at her in the faint light from the stage. She's thinner in the face, and looks tired. Her clothes are plain: a sweater, jeans, snow boots. A parka coat trails over the empty seat next to her.

"I know, pupsik."

"I thought you were dead."

"I did tell you to trust me," she says.