And if I tripped a snare he'd expect me to cut loose.

'You were told not to expose me to the K.G.B., that right?'

His hands went to his face again and he didn't answer and I got up and kicked the chair clear and said, 'For Christ's sake give yourself a break, will you? London knew there was the risk but I don't blame them and I don't blame you — I'm still here aren't I and I'm in bloody sight better shape than you are so stop picking your nits about it. All I'm after is plain information. Exposed me by accident did you?'

He nodded into his hands.

'Well I'm not surprised. When you're doubling there comes a point when you don't know which way you're facing. That was on Friday, was it? Come on I'm pushed for time.’

'Yes.' He got up and tried to face me and couldn't and just stood there with his head down and I turned away and looked at the picture on the wall, donkeys in Clovelly, far cry from here.

Friday. The bar. The rendezvous at the Roxana. That's why he'd been worse than usual, ill with nerves: he knew he'd blown me. There'd been no tags or I'd have seen them or sensed them: they'd wanted to pull me in without my suspecting Merrick, or I'd never contact him again. So they'd used window surveillance in relay and passed me from street to street till I was more than a mile from the Roxana and then they'd rigged the pickup with ordinary patrols just asking for papers, for dokumenty. Then they'd sent for Foster.

Have a look at me and let me go, see where I'd run. That was when they did the switch and started preparing me for the tribunal instead of Merrick.

'I tried not to give you away. I did try.'

'Civil of you.'

'You don't believe that.'

'Oh yes.' But he'd had no chance. Driven by both sides till he broke. 'Didn't you trust their word, in London?'

'At first.' He knew what I meant: he was straight on to it because for weeks he'd lived in terror. 'Then when I was out here again they began reminding me, asking me again for my father's correct address, you know what they're — '

'Yes.'

'So that's all I kept thinking about. My father actually looking at them, even though he'd been told not to take any notice.' I heard him using the thing and then he said: 'I wanted to warn you, but I thought you might leave Warsaw if I did, and then they'd have known they couldn't trust me any more, so they'd have sent the — '

'Get it out of your mind.' I turned back to him and it was all right now, he wasn't looking so bloody abject. There was only one more thing I wanted to know. 'Our last rendezvous in the station buffet. Did you know they were going to come for me there?'

'Yes.' I only just heard it.

'Then what made them tell you to pass on that fake signal? What did they want a full interim report for, when I was booked for grilling?'

His face went loose and he lost contact completely because these things had stopped meaning anything to him.

I said: 'It's important, Merrick.'

He nodded and made an effort and I waited.

'I was meant to give it to you earlier. But I forgot.'

I think he saved himself, then, from any grudge I might ever have held against him.

Webster was getting something through when I went along to the cypher room.

There was a phone in the annexe and I picked it up. He came through the doorway while I was trying the buttons.

'How does this thing work?'

'Want an outside line?'

He pressed the one with the worn Sellotape tag and I dialled for the Hotel Cracow.

We looked up.

'What's that?'

'Sounds like a chopper.'

He'd put the signal-slip on the desk in front of me. Hamilton. Quay 4. End crane

'Did you do a word-count check?'

'That's right.' He was trying to clip another pen into his breast pocket but there wasn't room.

'Hotel Krakow?

'Tak jest.'

I asked for Maitland.

The helicopter was still nosing about and a flush of light passed across the window.

'Anything to send?' asked Webster.

'No.'

He went to shut down the console.

'Maitland?'

'Who's that?'

'Listen. Tomorrow morning there's a second secretary leaving the Embassy for London and the U.B. might arrange an accident on the route to the airport, so why don't you turn up and follow the Embassy car? Let everyone know you're the press, take plenty of Rollies, you get the drift.'

'Well well.'

'You'll need some kind of excuse.'

'Human angle: while the pin-stripe elite of the dip. set come flocking into the flashlights here goes one unassuming second sec. on his lone way home so let's give him a cheer lads. A natural for the mums.'

'Don't leave him till he gets on the plane.'

'Roger. Thing is, I can beat the Street with a nice faked smash that'll only happen if I'm not there to cover it. What d'you do in the coffee break, make up crosswords?'

The light flooded the rooftops again, slanting off the snow.

I asked him if he could hear a chopper.

'What? Yes. They're getting fidgety. Midnight curfew for all Polish nationals, leave cancelled for the police and the army, foreign residents prone to a slight loosening of the bowels, what shall I do with my poor Fido, they won't let him on a plane and I'm not going to leave him behind. Who are you anyway, the Ambassador?'

'Word in your ear: you never had this call.'

'Didn't I?'

'We're being bugged, didn't you hear the click?'

'I thought it was your teeth.'

He rang off smartly. There was nothing they could do: if they wanted to fake a trump they'd have to do it in front of a Western camera.

Someone was talking in Russian, then a lot of splurge came. I went into the cypher room.

'What station's that?’

'Voice of America.' Webster cut the treble and the whole range sank into the porridge.

'They often jam it?’

'They've not done it since Prague.' He changed the wavelength and there was more porridge. 'Radio Free Europe.' Then he flicked the band and got a girl in slow emphatic Polish. 'One of the Warsaw stations hidden up somewhere.'

… been to the point if Minister Podhal had explained the presence tonight of more than five hundred medium tanks and one quarter million motorised troops standing by along Motor-route E8 within twelve kilometres of the capital. If we are to conclude that these forces are -

'More?’

'No.'

'Think they'll come in?'

'No.'

Because they'd lost their licence to occupy the city: the document in the other room.

'Well I can't see who's going to stop them.'

'Do some things for me, will you?' He followed me through the doorway. 'Put those two briefcases into the dip. bag and seal it'.

'I can't do that — '

'Can Merrick?'

'Not officially, till the morning.'

I shut my eyes again because of the light, because of having to think of small important details, because of the worry about what I had to do next, the bloody little organism snivelling for what it knew we couldn't get: a quick plane home.

'Look, phone H.E., get him along here and give him the pitch.'

'The what?'

'Oh Christ, the picture. Ask Merrick. He knows. He's got to leave Warsaw by the next plane, waive all formalities, he's not safe here. And that bag's got to reach London, highest priority: tell the Queen's Messenger what's on, you've got a rough idea.'

Very far away an emergency klaxon sounded and then the buildings muted it. I bent over the briefcases to check the zips and a muscular spasm gripped my chest and I had to wait till it passed. 'Listen, I want you to stay with Merrick. Don't take him to the Residence: keep him here.'

'Okay. Fetch the Doc along shall I?'

'Can do. And don't let him go near windows, watch him for aspirins, he's depressed.’

'You okay yourself, are you?'