'Quite sure.'

'I don't know what happened'

Her tone was quiet with worry.

'They got picked up.'

She said: 'It must be that.'

A black Moskwicz was pulling up outside, with big M.O. letters on it. I watched it through the window.

'Get me three more.'

The receiver was beginning to feel slippery. 'Yes.'

'Tell them to take care.'

The hours were running towards midnight and anyone could be picked up, they were busting whole units.

'I'll tell them.'

No one was getting out. There were four of them and they sat with their heads turned, watching the bar.

'In half an hour. The same place.'

I trusted her because it was logical. They would have caught me there, otherwise, at 16:30 on the west bank.

'All right.'

The Moskwicz was moving off and I remembered there were traffic lights at the corner. They'd stopped for the lights. I'd forgotten they were there. I mustn't forget things.

'Will it be long enough? Half an hour?'

The coffee machine roared and I lost what she said.

'What was that?'

'I will do all I can. Remember that, please.'

The thought came after I'd paid for the call. You grow sensitive at this stage of a mission. She'd said it with slow emphasis and it could have carried the undertone of a classic alert-phrase: all I can, am under duress. Stomach-think. Discount. This time they should be there.

They didn't come.

An hour ago the wind from the north had changed and it had stopped snowing. Beyond the balustrade the Vistula was a desert of white, untouched by the soot that would later darken it. Along the Wybrzeze Gdanskie the traffic was still running, its sound deadened by the new fall. Ashen light flowed from the lamps above my head, triplicating my shadow.

I had asked Merrick for them and he'd blocked me. Now I had asked Alinka. All I can.

Patrol car, and I went down the steps again into shadow. The steps were a hundred yards from the bridge and that was why I'd made the rendezvous here. There was no time now to phone and make another one. This was where time ran out.

There was no usable alternative project: this was already the alternative to the one that had been blown up when they'd doubled the guards on the Praga Commissariat. I could switch and go in alone and do damage but it wouldn't be enough and the risk was prohibitive: not only to me but to the Bureau. The risk to myself was acceptable because of professional vanity: we know that one day there'll be a mission we shan't complete and that the chances are that we shall go in ignominy, a slack shape spreadeagled below the window of an empty room, something afloat in a river, and that it will have been for nothing; and sometimes we think of how it could be otherwise, of how we might play the odds and go out winning and be remembered for it, be granted at least an epitaph: Hunter? He was Bucharest, '65. Went down with the ship but Christ, what an operation. We all remembered Hunter.

Discount considerations of stinking pride: there'd be a risk to the Bureau, to the Sacred Bull.

The chains crumped rhythmically through the snow and from the city centre came the moan of trams.

If it had been a deliberate alert-phrase meaning she was under duress I would have to go along there and do something about it, at least do that.

I expected him to go past but he stopped and stood with his back to me, to the steps, looking both ways, taking a pace and coming back, watching the traffic.

Decoy.

You get too sensitive. I was behind him before he heard me when I spoke he swung round with his hands whipping into the guard posture.

'Where are the other two?'

He relaxed.

'With the car.'

'Where?'

'Along there. We didn't want to — '

'Come on, we're late.'

The Hotel Cracow was busier than yesterday because there'd been a couple of flights in and the foyer was crowded: most of the atmosphere-coverage journalists were hemming in the dip. corps people, free vodkas, and I recognised Maitland of the Sunday Post, one of the brightest of the I-Was-There boys.

I showed my credentials at the desk and they said they hoped there was to be no trouble and I said none at all, I just wanted to visit one of their guests, and they gave me the number of the suite.

'Don't announce me.'

It was on the first floor and I pressed the buzzer. There were voices somewhere, speaking in English.

He was a short square man with his jacket pulled permanently out of shape by the holster. I told him my name and he came back in less than five seconds and opened the door wider for me.

This was the sitting-room and there were four people here.

With typical courtesy he left his armchair and came towards me. 'Hello, old boy, come along in.'

19: KICK

Foster went across to the trolley.

'I hope you'll have a drink?'

'There isn't time.'

'There's always time, old boy.' His laugh wasn't quite in key but he was doing pretty well because he must have been upset when they told him I'd slipped their surveillance: I was his personal responsibility.

'London wants a report.'

'Yes?’

'They'll be lucky to get it. Don't they know we've enough to do? Don't worry about the Czyn people I asked for.' There was a clinking sound: perhaps the woman washing a cup.

'I can try — '

'Won't you ever bloody well listen? I said don't worry about it. They were to give me support while I tried to break out of Warsaw but there's no need now.'

'I see.'

Foster turned round with a drink in his hand.

'Switch that thing off, there's a good chap.'

Merrick reached for the tape recorder and the voices stopped. He wouldn't look at me: he sat hunched in the armchair, just as he'd sat on the bench at the station. I felt sorry for him: he thought I was only just finding out that he'd used audio surveillance in the buffet while we'd sat with our bowls of soup.

That was all right: it was what I wanted them to think. 'You put a mike across me, did you?'

He didn't answer.

'You know how it is, old boy.' Foster tilted his glass and drank. 'We like to have things on record.'

He'd been much more than upset when they'd told him I'd slipped them. It wasn't coincidence that the tape had been playing when I got here: he must have run it a dozen times since he'd got the bad news from Warsaw Central, listening for clues as to what kind of op I'd got lined up, clues to where I'd gone.

'Well I hope it was worth listening to.'

'So-so.'

Most of the tape could be dangerous but it was too late to worry about that. It was safe — even valuable to me — from the point where Merrick had exposed himself, because from then onwards I'd suspected a mike and used it for my own purposes. It was the point where he'd given me the signal he said was from London.

In that instant he was blown.

There'd been three things wrong. (1) The code was fourth series with first-digit dupes. (2) P.K.L. was instructed to furnish a fully detailed interim report. (3) These instructions were sent during the final phase of the mission.

Fourth series was Merrick's code, not mine, and London would have used my own code or if for any reason they'd changed it to a different series they'd have put a prefix to indicate express intention and there wasn't a prefix.

They would have sent the signal to K.D. for Karl Dollinger and not to P.K.L. for P. K. Longstreet because Longstreet had ceased to exist when they'd given me the new cover.

They wouldn't have asked for a fully detailed report during the final phase of the mission because they know that at this stage of a mission you're lucky if you can hit the Telex or the short-wave, let alone draft a ten-page coverage with itemised refs and carbons. They knew I was in the final phase because Sroda was the deadline for all of us.