The forecast had been right: snow began falling on the city before midnight, the wind bringing it from the forestlands in the north.

Wtorek. Tuesday.

The streets had become altered, the new whiteness covering the soot and making the sky seem lighter. During the morning I went out twice and made a show of telephoning, talking with the contact down and using the chance of thinking aloud, going over the major points and looking for trips, not finding any. I couldn't give it much longer now and the nerves were playing up because once I'd hit the switch the pace was going to be fierce and there wouldn't be time to rethink. I'd give it till noon.

The time factor didn't balance. I had to go slow to keep him happy, letting them observe and report, letting him see that I was ostensibly in contact with Czyn; and I had to go fast, bringing the deadline back as far as I dared: to noon. The waiting was unpleasant and I sensed being caught up in the feverishness that today had come to Warsaw, showing in people's eyes, in the sudden movement of their heads when they believed someone was near them, in small accidents as the snow thickened and the traffic tried to keep up speed, impatient with the conditions, in the increasing efforts of the police to search out the last of the suspected hostile elements: a man in the Hotel Kuznia itself, going with them peaceably through the lobby and then making a bid at the doors, glass smashing and shouts and a shoe wrenched off and slithering across the pavement and under the wheel of a bus as they crowded him and threw him limp into the back of the saloon.

The fever had a name: Sroda.

At 10:40 I was in my room and used the phone to book a call to London so that the man in the switchboard room could confirm what I'd told Foster: that I was in direct contact. The delay was estimated at two hours and that was well across the deadline so I made it the Foreign Office, Governmental Communication Headquarters, and told them to give me what priority they could.

At 11:00 I blanked off mentally and let the subconscious review the whole set-up without disturbance while I thought of irrelevant subjects: they'd probably done it with photographs and I'd have to deal with that; it had been a light brown shoe with arrowhead indentations on the sole for better grip, still lying there when they'd driven away, would they find a pair his size? Foster hadn't telephoned me although he knew my room number: I'd half expected him to get through, how are things going, old boy, to remind me that I was entirely in his hands, but perhaps he'd found a bit of pride at last, didn't want me to think he'd started panicking, afraid of losing me.

At 11:45 I rang the switchboard and asked if they were giving my London call priority. They said there was nothing they could do: there were many visitors here for the coming conference and the pressure on the lines was heavy. I asked for a precise time-check and rang off and set my watch.

No point in packing anything: washing tackle could stay where it was on the shelf over the basin, g chance, a thin chance, of coming here again. Check shoe laces and making double knots. Couple of glucose tablets. All.

Sweating a lot. Stress reaction developing hypothalamic stimulation, pituitary and adrenal cortex, secretion of cortin, pulse rising, the organism responding to the brain's warning of danger to come. Normal therefore reassuring.

At noon I left the room and took the stairs and handed the key in at the desk and went through the doors and down the steps into the street and began walking.

15: BREAKOUT

They came with me, two ahead and two behind, keeping their distance. I checked the flank and saw two more and it threw me a fraction because they wouldn't have left the rear of the hotel uncovered. It was an eight-box. He really didn't want me to do anything that he didn't know about.

The snow fell from an iron-grey sky and in a lot of the windows the lights were on. I took the yellow Trabant at the head of the rank and told him the Dworzec Warszawa Glowna and as we pulled out I saw a black 220 making a U turn across the station gates. It tucked in and waited and I leaned forward with my arms on the front squab so that I could square up with the mirror. It was an eight-box with mobility. We passed two of them walking back to the Kuznia to cover the point of departure, routine and predictable. Two others were using an M.O. telephone point to report movement.

You can't plan anything specific when you have to flush an overt surveillance complex but you can't rely on luck either: the compromise is to watch for breaks and take them and play them as they develop. The difficulty is built-in: with a covert tagging operation the assumption is that you don't know they're on to you and if you sense and start flushing they won't risk showing themselves but in an overt situation they'll close in and block your run the minute you start anything fancy. because they've nothing to lose: you already know they're working on you. So it has to be done very fast and the danger is that when you choose a break it's got to be the right one because it's going to be the only one you'll get.

In this case there'd been a gentleman's agreement between a rat and a ferret and when I broke the rules and made my run they'd go for an immediate snatch. Those were their orders because Foster was taking' a chance and he knew it. My offer was quite a big one or he wouldn't have listened: they knew that even if they decimated the population of Warsaw by midnight tonight there'd still be a few isolated Czyn groups ready to shed their blood across the barricades and I'd told him I knew where they were. But he didn't trust me: he wasn't a fool. The risk he'd taken was calculated and he'd imposed a break-off point: the point where I went out for a flush.

The Slasko-Dabrowski was a mess. A five-tonner was spreading sand and clinker-dust along the north side and the traffic was being diverted, a man with a flag at each end of the bridge. Someone had spun a Mercedes and put the tail through a gap in the balustrade and a crowd was there but it had happened some time ago because a small boy had lost interest and was throwing snowballs, lobbing them high so they'd burst on the roof of the car. A crash truck was crawling through the diversion lane with its heavy-duty chains throwing out clods of broken ice and we had to wait and my driver said it was very malowniczy, the snow in Warsaw, very picturesque, did I not find it so? The public services had been briefed by Orbis and tomorrow when visitors were running for cover they'd be told how exciting the city was, how very animated, did they not agree?

First-class chance of a break here with the five-tonner available for cover, and the crash truck turning through ninety degrees across our bows and if it had been the boy with the quick eyes in the beaten-up Wolga I'd have told him to get traction and beat the gap and keep going but this was the Trabant and I'd have to do it on foot and we were standing halfway across the bridge so there'd only be one direction I could use, no go.

The 220 had closed right up, not chancing anything. In the mirror I saw their faces and they could see part of mine and we looked at each other.

'It would be quicker for you to walk, I think.'

'Perhaps.'

It was tempting.

'What time does the train go?'

'In twenty minutes.'

Let him go through the gap when the crash truck had pulled over and get out and walk and use it for cover, a fair chance, a respectable chance.

'You could walk there in twenty minutes.'

'I'm not sure of the way. I'll stay with you.'

Because a fair chance wasn't good enough: it had to be as close to a certainty as I could make it. This was only the first step in the operation I'd spent twenty-four hours working out and the set-up was so flexible that even the Merrick thing had only called for a bit of tinkering and if I made a mistake as early as this I'd blow the whole lot.