"I don't understand, Sergei."

"Oh, you British," Sergei smiled, and they kept moving through the hushed rooms of the Hermitage, night draping the masterpieces in the shadow world that they both lived and thrived in. "You think you have unravelled it all. You think that simply because you were able to piece together that Morris was really one of our agents, who was turned by the Americans, and then re-turned by us, and then counter-spied for you, feeding you misinformation that would lead you to the right action for all the wrong reasons, that simply because of that, the whole operation was a mistake, there you are mistaken."

"But why, Sergei, why?"

"Because," said Sergei slowly, removing his facial hair, "because it was in that night in the Spanish town in Andalucia, among the gypsies, as they howled their cante hondo that I fell in love with you, for I am not really Sergei Rostrenko, but" -- and here Sergei pulled off the dark wig revealing a fall of bottle blond hair --"Natasha Rostrenko!!!".

Colin gasped. So that was where the triple agent had been all that time, under his very patrician nose!