'And Ladbrook?'

'He's a good man, Bernard. Apart from you, Ladbrook is the only person who can see what's really going on. But that won't make any difference. Ladbrook will tell them the truth, but that won't help me.'

'What will he say?'

Bret looked up with alarm and annoyance. I had become the interrogator now, but there was nothing he could do about that; I was his last hope. 'He'll say that Stinnes has given us only operational material.'

'Good operational material,' I said. It wasn't a statement, it wasn't a question; it was a bit of both.

'Wonderful operational material,' said Bret sarcastically. 'But every time we acted on it, things seemed to go unaccountably wrong.'

'They'll say that was your fault,' I said. And to some extent it was his fault: Bret had wanted to show everyone what a fine field agent he might have made, and he'd failed.

'Of course they will. That's the brilliance of it. There is just no way of proving whether we did it wrong or if it was material arranged to fail right from the word go.'

I said, 'Stinnes is a plant. A solitary. His briefing must have been lengthy and complex. That's why it took so long to get him to move. That's why he went back to Berlin before coming out to Mexico again.'

'Thanks, buddy,' said Bret. 'Where were you when we needed you?'

'It's easy to see it now,' I admitted. 'But it looked okay at the time. And some of the stuff was good.'

'Those early arrests in Hannover, the dead-letter drops, the kid in our office in Hamburg. Yes, it was good, but it wasn't anything they couldn't spare.'

'How did they arrest you?'

'Five sent two men from K7 who searched my house. That was Tuesday… no, maybe Monday… I've lost all track of time.'

'They found nothing?'

'What do you think they found?' said Bret angrily. 'A radio transmitter, invisible ink and one-time pads?'

'I just want to get the facts straight,' I said.

'It's a frame-up,' said Bret. 'I thought you were the one person who'd see that.'

'I do see it. I just wanted to know if there was anything planted at the house.'

'Shit,' said Bret. He went pale. 'Now I remember!'

'What?'

'They took a suitcase out of the loft.'

'What was in it?'

'Papers.'

'What papers?'

'I don't know, typewritten paper, reams of it. They took them away to examine them. There were several pieces of baggage in the loft. I thought they were all empty.'

'And now one is full of papers. Any recent visitors to the house?'

'No, none. Not for weeks.'

'No repairmen or telephone wiring?'

'A man came to fix the phone, but that was okay. I had our own engineers out the next day to check the house.'

'Check the house for bugs and wires, not check the house for suitcases full of papers.'

He bit his lip. 'I was a fool.'

'It sounds as if you were, Bret. They would put your phone on the blink and then turn up.'

'That's right. They arrived after I had trouble – they said they were in the street, working on the lines. It was a Saturday. I said I didn't know you guys work on Saturdays.'

'The KGB work a long week, Bret,' I said.

'He can't sustain it,' said Bret, hoping that I would agree. He was talking about Stinnes. I didn't answer. 'It's a bravura performance and the committee are eating out of his hand right now. But he can't sustain it.'

'When did they arrest you?'

'First the senior grade officer from K7 came to my home. He told me I wasn't to leave the house.'

'Your house?'

'I wasn't to go to the office. I wasn't even to go to the shops in the village.'

'What did you say?'

'I couldn't believe my ears. I told him to remain in the room with me while I phoned the office. I tried to get the D-G, but Sir Henry was on a train going to Manchester.'

'Clever Sir Henry,' I said.

'No, it was genuine enough. His secretary tried to reach him with messages at both ends.'

'Are you crazy, Bret? Five send a K7 search and arrest team to pick up a senior officer, and the D-G just happens to have another appointment that he can't break and no contact number? Are you telling me the D-G wasn't in on the secret?'

Bret looked at me. He didn't want to believe they could do that to him. Or that they would want to. Bret didn't just happen to be born in England like the rest of us – Bret was an Anglophile. He loved every blade of bright green grass that Shakespeare might have trodden on. 'I suppose you're right,' he said at last.

'And you skipped?'

'I left a message saying that I urgently wanted an appointment with the D-G and gave my phone number. I said I'd stay by the phone and wait for the call.'

'And then you took off. That was good, Bret,' I said with genuine admiration. That's what I would have done. But they'll have you on the airline manifest even if Immigration didn't identify you.'

'I have a friend with a Cessna,' said Bret.

He needn't have told me that, and I felt reassured that he was prepared to fill in the details. 'Did they leave anyone outside the house?' Bret shrugged. 'Do you think they tailed you?'

'I changed cars.'

'And the watchers don't run to anything that could follow a Cessna, so they'll be trying to trace the plane landing.'

'I flew to Hamburg and then came on by car. I rented the car in a false name. Luckily the girl at the counter didn't read the driving licence carefully.'

'You can't win them all, Bret. You forgot about the computer on the autobahn entrance point. They even get traffic violators on that one.'

'I'm innocent, Bernard.'

'I know you are, Bret. But it's going to be tough proving it. Did anyone say anything about a Cabinet memo?'

'Cabinet memo?'

'They're trying to lock you up tight, Bret. There is a Cabinet memo; the numbered copy is the one to which you had access. It's been to Moscow and back again.'

'Are you serious?'

'And a lot of people have been told about it since then.'

'Who?'

'I was singled out to be shown a copy, and so was Dicky Cruyer. You can bet there were others. The implication is that the full report went to Moscow too.'

'I should have been told.'

'You're not wrestling only with Stinnes,' I said. 'You've got the whole of Moscow Centre to contend with, and they've spent a lot of time working on it.'

He drank a tiny sip of whisky as if he didn't trust himself any longer. He didn't ask what it was all about or anything like that. He'd had a lot of time to think what it was all about. He must have known by that time that his chances of getting out of it and becoming Mr Clean again were very slim. The sea was rough. Bret was going down for the third time and there was every chance he'd take me with him. 'So what do I do, Bernard?'

'Suppose I said, "Turn yourself in"?'

'I wouldn't do that.'

'Suppose I turned you in?'

'You wouldn't do that,' said Bret. He looked away from me, as if meeting my eyes would increase the chances of my saying I would turn him in.

'What makes you so sure?' I said.

'Because you're an egomaniac. You're cynical and intractable. You're the only son of a bitch in that Department who'd take the rest of them on single-handed.'

It wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear, but it was sincere enough and that would have to do. 'We don't have a lot of time. They'll trace you right to this room. Getting into Berlin without leaving a track is almost impossible, unless you come in from the East, in which case no records are kept.'

'I never thought of it like that,' said Bret. That's crazy, isn't it?'

'Yes, it is, but we don't have time to write to Ripley about it. We don't have tune to do anything very much. I'd say that London Central will trace you to Berlin, and maybe to me at this hotel, within two or three days.'

'Are you saying what I think you're saying?'