Ten years later, he journeys from Rome to Cairo, where he investigates
the death of a fellow agent, posing as the proprietor of a chicken farm.
St. Petersburg is a long way from Vermillion, and Degaev was, as it happens, an astonishingly slippery triple
agent in Tsarist Russia who somehow managed to escape
death despite doing such normally suicidal things as betraying to his
fellow revolutionaries the names
of the police
agents to whom he had just betrayed his
fellow revolutionaries» among whom were several police
agents masquerading as revolutionaries.