The two men had worked together for a long time and their relationship was firmly established. Frank Harrington regarded Bret's patrician deportment and high-handed East Coast bullshit as typical of the CIA top brass he used to know in Washington. Bret saw in Frank a minimally efficient although congenial time-server, of the sort that yeoman farmers had supplied to Britain's Civil Service since the days of Empire. These descriptions, suitably amended, would have been acknowledged by both men and it was thus that a modus vivendi had been reached.

'Germans who live near the border get a special pass and can go across nine times a year to see friends and relatives,' said Frank, suddenly impelled for the sake of good manners to include Bret in the conversation. 'One of them came through yesterday evening – they are not permitted to stay overnight – and told us that everything looked normal. The work on the Wall and so on…'

Bret nodded. The hum of the air-conditioning seemed loud in the silence.

'It was a good spot to choose,' Frank added.

'There are no good spots,' interposed the BGS officer loudly. He looked like a ruffian, thought Frank, with his scarred face and beer belly. Perhaps riot policemen had to be like that. Meeting no response from either of the strange foreigners, the German officer drank what remained of his whisky, wiped his mouth, belched, nodded his leave-taking and went out.

The phone in the next room rang and they listened while the operator grunted, hung up and then called loudly, 'Dogs barking and some sort of movement over there now.'

Bret looked at Frank. Frank winked but otherwise didn't move.

The English guide swallowed the last of his whisky hurriedly and slid off the desk. 'I'd better be off too,' he said. 'I might be needed. I understand two of your freebooters might be going in to try to help.'

'Perhaps,' said Frank.

'It won't work,' said the Englishman. 'In effect it's an invasion of their soil.'

Frank stared at him and didn't reply. He didn't like people to refer to his men as freebooters, especially not strangers. The guide, forgetting his glass was empty, tried to drink more from it. Then he set it down on the desk where he'd been sitting and departed.

Left to themselves, Bret said, 'If young Samson pulls this one off I'm going to recommend him for the German Desk.' He was sitting well back in the chair, elbows on its rests, hands together like a tutor delivering a homily to an erring student.

'Yes, so you said.'

'Can he do it, Frank?' Although framed as a query, he said it as if he was testing Frank with an exam question, rather than asking help with a difficult decision.

'He's not stupid.'

'Just headstrong,' supplied Bret. 'Is that what you mean?'

'Are you sure you wouldn't like a drink?' asked Frank, holding up the bottle of scotch which was on the floor near his chair. Bret had bought it in the duty-free shop at London airport but he hadn't touched a drop.

Bret shook his head. 'And the wife?' said Bret, adding in a voice that was half joking, half serious, 'Is Mrs Samson going to be the first female Director-General?'

'Too fixed in her viewpoint. All women are. She's not flexible enough to do what the old man does, is she?'

'A lead pipe is flexible,' said Bret.

'Resilient I mean.'

'Elastic,' said Bret, 'is the only word I can think of for the capacity to return to former shape and state.'

'Is that the primary requirement for a D-G?' asked Frank coldly. He'd trained with Sir Henry Clevemore back in wartime and been a personal friend ever since. He wasn't keen on discussing his possible successors with Bret.

'Primary requirement for a lot of things,' said Bret dismissively. He didn't want to talk but he added, 'Too many people in this business get permanently crippled.'

'Only field agents surely?'

'It's sometimes worse for the ones who send them out.'

'Is that what you're worried about in the case of Bernard Samson? That too much rough stuff might leave a permanent mark? Is that why you asked me?'

'No. Not at all.'

'Bernard would do a good job in London. Give him a chance at it, Bret. I'll support it.'

'I might take you up on that, Frank.'

'Freebooters!' said Frank. 'Confounded nerve of the man. He was talking about my reception team.'

From the next room the operator called, They've put the searchlights on!'

Frank said, 'Tell them to put the big radar jammer on. I don't want any arguments: the Piranha!' The army hated using the Piranhas because they jammed the radars on both sides of the line. 'Now!' said Frank.

The first searchlight came on, spluttering and hissing, and its beam went sweeping across the carefully smoothed soft earth ahead of them.

Now neither Max nor Bernard could hope that they'd get right through undetected.

Bernard went flat on the ground but Max was a tough old veteran and he went running on into the darkness behind the searchlight beam, confident that the region round the beam was darkest to the eyes of the guards.

The Grenzpolizei up in the tower were caught by surprise. They were both young conscripts, sent here from the far side of the country and recommended for this special job after their good service in the Free German Youth. There had been an alert, two in fact. Their sergeant had read the teleprinter message aloud to them to be sure they understood. But alerts were commonplace. None of the Grepos took them too seriously. Since the boys had arrived here six months ago, there had been nine emergencies and every one of them had turned out to be birds or rabbits tripping the wires. No one tried to get through nowadays: no one with any sense.

On the Western side of the Wall, Frank's reception team – Tom Cutts and 'Gabby' Green – had come up very close by that time. They weren't directly in Frank's employ, they were specialists. Despite being in their middle thirties, they were, according to their papers, junior officers of the Signal Corps. With them was a genuine soldier, Sergeant Powell, who was a radar technician. His job was to make sure nothing went wrong with their equipment, although, as he'd told them quite frankly, if something did go wrong with it, it was unlikely that he'd be able to repair it there in the slit trench. It would have to go back to the workshop, and then probably to the manufacturer.

These 'freebooters' had been dug in there a long time, dressed in their camouflaged battle-smocks, faces darkened with paint, brown knitted hats pulled down over the tops of their ears. Helmets were too heavy, and, if you dropped them, dangerously noisy. It was a curious fact that they were safer dressed as soldiers than as civilians. Those Grepos over there were cautious about shooting soldiers; and soldiers on both sides of the Wall were garbed almost identically.

They didn't speak very often: every sound carried a long way at night and they'd worked together often enough to know what had to be done. They'd manhandled the little radar set forward and got the antenna into a favourable position ahead of them as soon as darkness came the previous evening, and then spent all night with the set, watching the movements of the vehicles and the guards. Both men were wearing headphones over their knitted hats, and Gabby, whose taciturn disposition had earned him his nickname, had his eye to the big Hawklite image-intensifying scope.

'Yes,' he said suddenly, the rubber-sided microphone clamped tight to his mouth. 'One! No: two of them. One running… the other on the ground. Jesus!'

The searchlight had come on by that time, but it provided no help for anyone trying to see what was happening.

'And there go the infra-red lights too. My, my, they are getting serious,' said Gabby calmly. 'Can we jam?' Tom had already tuned the jammer to the required wavelength, but it was a lower-power machine that would only affect the small sets. 'I'll have to go forward. I can't get it from here.'