It was all so neat, so quiet. All the same, there had been whispers; and Miss Smith, who kept her ear to the ground, knew of worried relatives who had been visited by anonymous soothing officials, and who now wore a 'We could an if we would' air. It had also not escaped her attention that the names accumulating in File LB 0806 included a high proportion of technicians, as well as one nurse and one pest control officer.

And now eighteen of them in one day – immediately after a nation-wide chain of local disasters which some said were a portent of worse to come. Eighteen people, with their immediate families if any, from a single London borough.

Miss Smith had a strong instinct of survival and she had been thinking ahead for some time. She had converted all her savings into small valuables and rarities which she estimated had a good chance of retaining at-least a barter price in any circumstances. She also kept £800 in notes stitched into the lining of an anorak. It was a pity about her pension, but…

She finished her day's work meticulously, and a busy day it was; none of the eighteen names was missed, though it cost the Council a lot in taxi fares, for which (and for the milk and newsagents' payments) she took care to reimburse herself from Petty Cash immediately. She said good night to her colleagues in exactly her usual manner.

Then she caught a bus home, to her terraced house in Vicarage Road. She was as unobtrusive as possible about the final packing of her motor caravan which stood outside the front gate, but in fact there was little to do because she kept it always ready.

She rolled up a note to the milkman and put it in an empty bottle; the pound note pinned inside it would pay for this week's milk so far. No problems with the newsagent because she always bought her papers over the counter on her way to work. She checked again that the electricity and gas were turned off at the mains.

Everything ready. She picked up Ginger Lad under one arm, which started him purring. Thank God he hadn't been out courting, or she'd have had to wait for him. She'd never had the heart to have him doctored.

With her free hand, she put the milk bottle on the step and double-locked the front door. Then she climbed aboard.

She sat behind the wheel in a last moment of doubt, while Ginger Lad, quite undoubting, curled up on the seat beside her. Was she being too precipitate? It might be days, or it might be months

She braced herself. Days or months, she had no intention of being caught in a great city when it happened.

Miss Smith started the engine and drove off.

Suddenly she chuckled, remembering her secret parting joke. She had added her own name to File LB 0806. After all, the LEB might as well get its money.

'Your little "incident" rather missed the limelight, didn't it?' Jennings grinned.

There were times when Harley found his ironical manner exasperating but he was too aware of Jennings' quality, and of his importance to his own private plans, to react to it outwardly.

‘We'll see,' he smiled back. 'Its coincidence with the earth tremors may turn out to be to our advantage in the end.'

The four of them were meeting in very different surroundings from those of their last conference. This, too, was Harley's office; but here were no tall Whitehall windows, only grey concrete walls hung with maps and charts; no Adam fireplace, only an extractor grille through which the conditioned air whispered steadily. One feature alone echoed the Whitehall room, an Aubusson carpet. A little out of place two hundred metres below Primrose Hill, Harley realized, but he was, after all, the Permanent Secretary.

As yet they were still on Beehive Amber so he spent about half his time here and half in Whitehall. In the unpublicized hierarchy which had been set up for Beehive, Harley was Chief Administrator of the London hive, responsible to the Prime Minister alone and senior to all the regional Chief Administrators. With Beehive Amber, only certain key personnel of the Beehive establishment – just over twenty per cent – were already in full-time residence; another five per cent, either because they were top officials like himself or because of the nature of their work, still commuted with Surface. The remaining three-quarters were on standby, awaiting Beehive Red. When Red was ordered, all would come below; only law enforcement units, intelligence agents and certain specialists need come and go from Beehive by one of the thirty-seven airlocked exits which were concealed all over London, or their equivalents around the regional hives. In the case of real surface chaos (the situation defined by various criteria in the Beehive directives as 'Category Five Disorganization') even these would be withdrawn; the airlocks would be steel-shuttered and Beehive would settle down, secure, fed, immune and disciplined, till Surface life was so weakened and demoralized that Beehive could send out its forces and take control. (Half a dozen secret exits would remain available whatever the situation, but these – which emerged in such places as a grocer's shabby garage in Camden Town and the up platform of Brixton underground station – were known only to Harley and to a handful of others, most of them in Intelligence Section.)

Beehive, sealed off, could survive on normal rations and full establishment for two years and seven months. Power supplies would never run out, coming as they did from fourteen well-dispersed and interchangeable submarine-type nuclear reactors.

When the time came for Beehive Red (it could be days, it could be months) individual orders would be impracticable. So would watertight security. 'Beehive Red' would be announced without explanation on television and radio; whereupon the remaining three-quarters would make for their designated entrances without further notice. According to plan, twenty-four hours should see virtually all of them underground, out of reach of alerted popular interference or sabotage. Martial law would then be declared. But that part of the plan had to remain elastic; there were too many imponderable factors.

Harley was allergic to imponderable factors and worked round the clock to minimize them.

One thing worried him constantly. Three-quarters of eighteen thousand people meant altogether too many possible leaks, even allowing for the fact that half of them were Servicemen who needed to know very little till their officers told them to move. And one or two of the more sensational continental newspapers had carried stories… Most of Britain must have heard hints of Beehive, however distorted; and Beehive Amber must have spawned more hints which would fall on much more attentive ears in the aftermath of the earth tremors.

It was just as well, Harley thought, that the seismologists' reports were top secret (the real ones, of course, not the statements they were allowed to give to the media). These experts could not hide the inadequacy of their time-factor data but the secret reports showed their unanimous alarm. Harley had not only read the reports – he had cultivated the authors, with everything from flattery to alcohol. And with every day his conviction grew that Beehive Red was approaching rapidly.

With these thoughts, as ever, hovering about the threshold of his mind, Harley said: 'I'm sure I don't have to tell you that a scapegoat may at any moment become an urgent necessity.'

'You lost one of your men on Bell Beacon, didn't you?' General Mullard asked.

'Yes, that was unfortunate. One doesn't like identifiable bodies getting into the hands of unbriefed authorities. So was the death of the Hassell woman. We don't want to provide the witches with any martyrs, especially young and beautiful ones. But I think something can be made of Andrea Sutton, by way of compensation.'

'The leader of the banner lot?'

'Yes. I've seen the autopsy report. Multiple injuries -the burning motor-cycle ran over her and so did another that went out of control. But those injuries would be compatible with her already having been dead, considering how quickly it all happened.'