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what she looks like by the time he walks out into the street. The entire act is meaningless.’ He was almost surprised she was bothering with the questions.
    â€˜Is that what they all were, prostitutes?’
    â€˜What else?’
    â€˜You could have caught something! Given it to me!’
    â€˜They’re special girls, retained exclusively by the KGB: subject all the time to medical tests and examination.’
    â€˜What’s special about them?’
    Reimann sighed. ‘Aren’t you bored with this conversation?’ He was. Sex had never been important to her, in their marriage.
    â€˜I want to know!’
    â€˜They’re special in what they do: particular tastes.’
    â€˜Tell me.’
    â€˜Some like pain: to hurt. Others need a woman, as well as a man. Some do nothing, not at first: they like to watch others.’
    Jutta was silent for several moments. ‘Why so much?’
    â€˜I have to know everything. Never be surprised.’
    â€˜Why! You’re not going to seduce prostitutes! Perverts!’
    â€˜I don’t know who I’m going to have to seduce.’
    â€˜What I …’
    â€˜Stop!’ said Reimann, loudly. ‘You want to talk sex, I’ll talk sex: I’ve been taught how to do that, too. But I don’t want to.’
    Her indifference was immediate. ‘Tomorrow we’ll sightsee.’
    Which was what they did. They went to Red Square, although not to Lenin’s tomb because the queue was too long. They toured the cathedrals and the Kremlin museum, Jutta lecturing with a guidebook in hand. Because the weather was so perfect Reimann took her on a half-day cruise on the Moskva River. And every night they made love, always in the same position, always with the tissues waiting. Twice Reimann didn’t climax at all. Jutta never realized.
    In the intelligence parlance of the KGB, men trained as professional seducers of women, versed in every type and aspect of sexual expertise, are officially called ravens. Women are also trained, to that same degree of expertise, to entrap men. They are known as swallows. Thus a room or an apartment in which a swallow seduces her prey is called a swallow’s nest. The sometimes suggested term honey-trap is not a professional description. Sexual blackmail is, of course, the objective: swallows’ nests are fitted in every room and vantage point with recording equipment and self-focusing and adjusting cameras, both still and movie. Mirrors and apparently framed pictures which from one side appear genuine are frequently two-way glass screens from the phoney side of which observers can sit and witness everything that takes place.
    The apartment on Neglinnaya Ulitza in which Otto Reimann was reunited with his wife was one of the best equipped swallows’ nests existing in the Soviet capital. Everything that occurred there, in any room at any time, was recorded or filmed, usually on more than one machine, as a fail-safe. On this occasion, however, blackmail had not been the objective.
    â€˜Well?’ demanded the psychologist, Yuri Panin. With Nikolai Turev he had spent two days reviewing and assessing all the film footage and tape recordings. Both had actually sat, quite unmoved, on the other side of the main mirror in the bedroom to watch the sexual activity on the day of Jutta’s arrival.
    â€˜I didn’t think much of his performance,’ said Turev. He was chainsmoking American cigarettes, Camels, clouding the room with the odour. Turev, who was a full ranking colonel, was apprehensive at being chosen as Reimann’s field control, which would anyway have been far below his position but for the Politburo and Executive President monitor on the operation. Everyone associated with Reimann’s mission survived or fell by its success.
    â€˜It was absolutely brilliant!’ contradicted Panin, at once.
    â€˜Brilliant?’ frowned Turev, wishing he understood.
    â€˜Think