'I am not authorized to tell MI5 anything and everything about our operations.'

'You're just being pigheaded.' She laughed as if pleased I was giving someone else trouble rather than her.

'It's not just a matter of a combined committee: we've had those before, plenty of them. But it looks as if Bret has been shunted off onto that committee while they decide whether he should face an enquiry. If Bret is suspect… if Bret might turn out to be a KGB agent, why should I go over there and fill in the blanks for him?'

'If Bret is really suspect, the people on that committee must know,' said Gloria. 'And in that case, they'll make sure that you provide no evidence that would matter if it got back to the Russians.'

'I'm glad you think so,' I said. 'But they're more devious than that. I suspect that the Stinnes committee wants to use me as a blunt instrument to beat Bret across the head. That's the real reason I won't go.'

'What do you mean?'

'That committee isn't called the "Stinnes committee" – it's called the " Rensselaer committee". Was that a Freudian slip? Anyway, it's a good name because that committee isn't primarily interested in Stinnes except as a source of evidence about Bret. And if they finally get me over there, they won't want to know about how we enrolled Stinnes – they'll be asking me questions that might trap Bret.'

'If Bret is guilty, what's wrong with that?'

'Let them provide their own evidence. They think I'll play ball with anything they want. They think I'll cooperate in order to prove that I'm whiter than the driven snow. Dicky more or less told me that. He said I should be pleased that suspicion has fallen on Bret because now they'd be less inclined to believe I was helping Fiona.'

'I'm sure he didn't mean that,' said Gloria.

'He meant it.'

'You're determined to believe that the Department doesn't trust you. But there are no restrictions on you, none at all. I bring the daily sheets up from Registry. If there was any restriction on what you could see, I would know about it.'

'Perhaps you're right,' I said. 'But there's still an undercurrent of suspicion. Perhaps it's just a way of keeping me under pressure, but I don't like it. And I don't like Dicky telling me that Bret's being convicted will let me breathe easy.'

'Do you think the committee was convened by the Director-General as a way to investigate Bret Rensselaer?'

'The committee was the brainchild of someone higher up the ladder. The old man wouldn't be arranging for MI5 to help us wash the dirty linen unless he was ordered to do it that way.'

'Higher up the ladder?'

'I see the hand of the Cabinet Office in this one. The Coordinator of Intelligence and Security is the only man who can tell both us and Five what he wants done. The D-G made it sound like his own idea so that the Department wouldn't feel humiliated.'

'Humiliated by having MI5 investigate one of our people?'

'That's my guess,' I said.

'If Bret is guilty, does it matter how they trap him?'

'If he's guilty. But there's not enough solid evidence for that. Either Bret is a super-agent who never makes a bad mistake or he's being victimized.'

'Victimized by whom?'

'You haven't seen at close quarters the sort of panic that develops when there's talk of an agent infiltrating the Department. There's hysteria. The other day Dicky was remembering all sorts of amazing ramifications of a trip to Kiel he made with Bret. Dicky was turning Bret's reaction to a KGB man into conclusive evidence against Bret. That's how the hysteria builds up.'

'They say that where Bret went wrong was in the launderette,' said Gloria.

'At first I thought so too. But now I'm inclined to see it as evidence in Bret's favour. The kid who came through the door shouted "Go" to us. Why did he do that, unless he thought Bret was Stinnes? He was expecting someone to run off with them. Everyone is trying to believe that it was something Bret arranged to eliminate Stinnes, but that doesn't make sense. It was planned as an escape; I see that now. And don't forget that Bret could have picked up that shotgun and killed me.'

'And the bomb under the car?'

'Because they thought Bret was in the car.'

'And you say that clears Bret?'

'I told you, those hoods were trying to spring Stinnes.'

'Or to kidnap him,' said Gloria.

'Not on a motorcycle. A back-seat passenger has to be willing to go along.'

'If Bret is completely innocent, there's so much else to explain. What about the Cabinet memo that Bret sent to Moscow?'

'There's evidence that Bret's copy got to Moscow. But there was only one copy of that memo in the Department. Why shouldn't Fiona have sent a photocopy to Moscow? She had access.'

'And then used it to frame Bret?'

'I'm only saying that all the evidence against Bret is circumstantial. We aren't certain that Moscow ever got the report that followed the memo. There isn't one really good piece of it that nails Bret beyond doubt.'

'You can't have it both ways, Bernard. You say they put the bomb under the car in which Stinnes was sitting because they thought Bret was inside it. Either Moscow is going to immense trouble to frame Bret or else they tried to kill him. But those two actions are incompatible.'

'Both actions would benefit Moscow. If that bomb had killed Bret, the Department would be in an even worse state of panic. As it is now, they have Bret under observation, they have a measure of control over who he sees and what he does. Everyone feels that if Bret is guilty, he'll fail prey to the interrogator, especially with Stinnes inventing some difficult questions for him. They're comforting themselves with the idea that Bret will cooperate fully with the investigation to avoid a long jail sentence. But if Bret was dead, things wouldn't look so rosy. There'd be no way to pull the chestnuts out of the fire. We'd have to be digging out all the material he'd handled, supervetting all Bret's contacts, and doing the same sort of complicated double-thinking that we did when Fiona went over there.'

'If a dead Bret is worse for us than a live Bret, why haven't they tried again?'

'They don't have hit teams waiting in the Embassy, sweetheart. Such killings have to be planned and authorized. A hit team has to be briefed and provided with false documentation. It all went wrong for them at the launderette, so now there will probably be some KGB officials arguing against trying again. It will take time.' What I didn't say was that Fiona might be one of the people arguing against another attempt on Bret's life, for I suspected that Bret's life might depend upon what she decided.

'Do you think Bret knows he's in danger?'

'This is just one theory, Gloria. It could be wrong; Bret might be the KGB mole that everyone thinks he is.'

'Will they make you go before the committee?'

'The D-G won't want to go back to the Cabinet Office and say I'm being difficult, and yet the Coordinator is the only one who can order me to do it. I think the D-G will decide it's better to delay things and hope the committee will decide it can manage without me. In any case, I've got a breathing space. You know what the Department is like; if the committee insists on me attending, they'll have to put it in writing. Then I'll put my objections in writing too. In any case, nothing will happen until I come back from Berlin.'

'When are you going?' said Gloria.

'Tomorrow.'

'Oh, Bernard. Couldn't it wait a week? There's so much I wanted to talk about with you.'

'Is there?' I said, fully alerted. There was something in her voice, a plaintive note I recognized. 'Is it something to do with that suitcase?'

'No,' she said, quickly enough to indicate that she really meant yes.

'What's in it?'

'Clothes. I told you.'