He said

'This is Webster.’

'Signals?'

'Yes.'

Small alert cheerful man, knitted tie and Rotarian badge, breast-pocket stuffed with pens. 'He's okay now.' He looked at Merrick again. 'Okay now?'

'Yes.'

I asked what had happened.

.'Eh? He saw someone run over. Turns you up.'

Merrick went and stood at the window, his back to us.

'Is that the cypher-room?' An inner door was ajar.

'That's right.' With his pert gaze he tried to see who I was, what I was, a red-eyed man with stubble and a German name and no trace of accent, something urgent to send.

'Open up transmission.’

'Okay.' He'd put a pad ready for me on the desk. 'You got a pen?'

'I'm giving it to you direct.’

'I'll have to have it written. It's rules.'

'Just open it up, d'you mind?'

I dumped the briefcases on to a chair and got one open and took out the envelope and dropped it flat on the desk so Merrick could hear it. 'They're yours.'

I pulled the door open. Webster had half closed it behind him: a cypher-room is sacred ground.

'You can't come in here.'

I heard Merrick in the other room, opening the envelope.

'Do they ever jam you?' I sat on the nearest stool. 'I mean by accident on purpose?'

'Not often.'

'Get Crowborough's acknowledgement on a word-count for each sending. What code've you got?'

'Standard.' He just meant bugger off.

'Don't send standard.' The cowled lamps threw a lot of back-glare and I could feel needles in my eyes. It wasn't exactly fatigue: the organism that started panicking because some of the brain-think had filtered through and it was squealing to know what I intended to do about its survival and there wasn't an answer. 'Send priority.' It didn't want to stay trapped in this dark winter city where people would try to kill it.

Webster wasn't touching the knobs. I'd been vouched for by a second secretary but it wasn't enough.

'I'll want some kind of authority.'

By approximate reckoning it'd take five minutes to give it in fifth series and another five minutes for him to re-encode. It wouldn't matter if anyone was tuned in: I was destroying their operation and they couldn't stop me. They could only stop me if I gave them enough time,

'These are to BL-565 Extension 9. No copies and no repeats. You ready for me? First: K.G.B. operation mounted to stage rigged show-trial as proof that-'

'Hold on a minute.' He'd found BL-565 E-9 on his list. For the Curtain embassies it approximates to the hot-line and I suppose he'd never had to use it before. He threw a couple of switches and dialled for pips and got them and said: 'Okay.'

'K.G.B. operation mounted to stage rigged show-trial as evidence of — '

'Evidence or proof?'

'Proof.' I let my eyes close against the glare. 'Proof of Western conspiracy to incite Polish uprising.' He was on automatic encode but I didn't want to rush this so I gave him time. 'Justification thus established in event of subjugation by Warsaw Pact forces. Primary aim protection of imminent East-West talks.' I heard him making an interval reception-check. 'This operation now defused since candidate for trial no longer available but suggest all Western agencies Warsaw receive immediate warning to retrench in case of 'effort made to provide substitute.'

My foot slipped off the rung of the stool and I sat up and opened my eyes. Bloody little organism trying to flake out and forget its problems.

'Relevant documents by Q.M. next run. Dollinger.'

I found him in a room at the end of the passage, putting the lid back on the cast-iron stove. Even though he knew I'd come in he stood for a minute listening to the dying away of the flames. Then he looked at me. I know exactly how he saw me, exactly what I represented to him: I'd become a composite creature, the object of his hate for my having seen the photographs, gratitude for having vouchsafed him their destruction, guilt for what he had done to me and fear for what I might now do to him.

'How did you find them?'

'I knew where to look.'

He went to the door and shut it: the building was quiet and Webster was still in the cypher-room waiting for an answer to my second signal.

'There won't be any others, will there?'

'No.'

The negs had been the middle ten in a roll of thirty-six and the rest were blank: automatic exposure with a dummy run and timed cut-off, the prints tallying.

He stood uncertainly, his raw hands hanging from his sleeves and his feet neither together nor astride. The calm that had come to his eyes was also in his voice: he could speak abstractly about things that had been for him, so recently, a crucifixion.

'It was horrible of them, to do that.'

'Just routine. They do it to anyone they can get hold of, embassy staffs, businessmen, didn't you know? It's the classic hello-dearie.' I didn't want to ask but I had to because someone else might be glad to know he was off the hook. 'Who was the boy-friend?'

His eyes squeezed shut behind the spectacles and he couldn't say anything for a second or two, then it was over.

'Someone I met in a bar. I didn't see him again.'

'Because if it was anyone here in the Embassy we'd have to fix things'

'No.'

The door clicked open: there was a draught somewhere and the catch hadn't quite sprung home when he'd shut it. He could never do anything properly. He pressed it harder this time.

'They told you they'd send those to your father?'

'Yes. And to a Sunday paper.'

Sir Walford Merrick, K.C.M.G., O.B.E., Equerry to the Queen's Household. An initialled spoon beside the silver eggcup, the paper-knife arranged beside the mail and in the mail a letter with a Polish stamp and in the newspaper the headline.

'First thing you did was to throw yourself under that tram?'

'Yes.'

Never anything properly.

I hooked a chair from the desk and sat on it and the organism woke up and squealed that we'd got no shelter here because there wasn't any diplomatic immunity, British territory or not, and no hope of a plane and no frontier that didn't border a Russian-controlled state, but there were some things I needed to know and only Merrick could tell me.

'They asked you to give them information on Czyn. What else?'

Suddenly he said: 'Why did they choose me?'

'You were in Prague in August '68 so they were going to pin that one on you too. You'd already got friends in Czyn so you could develop your access to information on their programme. You've got personal tendencies so they could take pictures to entrap you. Your father's position was their guarantee that you'd obey orders and it also gave you great value as an exchange-monkey if there was no uprising and therefore no invasion and therefore no trial.'

He was only taking some of it in: the first time he'd known he was being groomed as a star turn in the Moscow circus was a few minutes ago when he'd heard my signal through the open doorway of the cypher-room, and he was having to look back over the recent past and see it in this new light.

I was thinking suddenly of Egerton again, sitting up there rubbing the bloody ointment in while both Merrick and I were headed for perdition. It was a case of murderous incompetence and I'd have him roasted for it. The worst hazard of them all is a mission formulated on false concepts and in this case it was his belief that Merrick was just another second secretary willing to do a little bit on the side for the U.K. secret services. He's been fully screened, of course.

I had to stop thinking about it. Egerton was done for anyway: the document included references to Merrick's recruitment by the K.G.B. prior to his sick-leave in London.

'What are you going to do with me?'