Perhaps they'd hoped they could do it discreetly: he was a man of some age with silver hair below the edges of his black fur kepi, an academic face with nothing desperate in it, only despair; but at the last minute he tried to make a break, nothing sensational, just a kind of token jerk sideways as if he didn't ever want it said of him that he hadn't resisted; it worried them and they used more force than was needed, swinging him round and hustling him back to the doors so fast that he couldn't keep up and they had to half lift him as if they were moving a waxwork. It was, then that I noticed their reaction, the crowd's, the forward motion as if they wanted to help, then the hesitation when they realised there was nothing they could do.

The B.E.A. flight was twenty minutes late and I read most of the news section of Trybuna Ludu which for double-think motives saw fit to quote some of the problems facing the fourth congress of the Polish Psychiatrists' Union, now convening in the capital: mental breakdowns up by eleven per cent, suicides up by ten, alcohol and tobacco consumption up by twenty. On a different page full coverage was given to the fall from grace of 'several hundred' local civil servants, party workers and journalists accused or suspected of 'anti-socialist leanings' incompatible with those in responsible positions, Additionally a further twenty-seven 'known Zionists' had applied for emigration, specifically to Israel, this report being innocent of any hint that most of them would follow the fifteen hundred who since 1968 had changed planes and turned up in Copenhagen.

No mention of Jan Ludwiczak. I hadn't even looked for it: the last faint ripple would have gone by now and the surface would be smooth.

Across the monochrome tarmac the Trident reversed its thrust and drew out a haze of kerosene.

I kept to my cover near the edge of the group. Others bad joined it: they'd moved by casual heel-cooling paces from farther away where they hadn't seen anything clearly.

'What happened?'

'They arrested him.'

'Why?'

'I don't know.'

'Who was he?'

'I don't know.'

They looked away from each other. Across at the tobacco kiosk the sales were going up. What would the Polish Psychiatrists' Union recommend as a solution to the problem? Chewing gum?

He began looking for me as soon as he was through the Customs and I turned away and gave him a few minutes and took the end doorway, watching him from a distance across the freezing forecourt, the grey winter light striking across his glasses, his shoulders hunched inside his coat, his young forlorn face reddening to the bite of the air. He looked for me everywhere. When he joined the group for the Orbis coach I went and sat in the Fiat, running, the engine to work the heater.

I was fed up. Did he think I'd book on a different plane so we shouldn't be seen together and then turn up to meet him when he got in? That was one reason. That was why Egerton hadn't had the nerve to question it: he knew it was routine security. Anyway I hadn't told him I'd meet him, I'd just said I'd get in touch, so what was he gawping around for?

The coach dropped him at the 'Orbis office in Ulica Krucza and I stayed in the Fiat, letting him get across Mokotowska so that I could take a long look down the narrowing perspective. That was another reason and so far he was clean. When he turned into Aleje Roz I drove past and parked at the far end, looking through the half-misted rear window to watch him go into the Embassy. He was still clean.

I started up and turned right into Wazdowskie and went round the square and came back and parked on the other side of Aleje Roz so that I could watch through the windscreen instead of the rear window. It was a short street and the Fiat was a bit close to the police observation post but they were there to survey people entering and leaving the Embassy and nobody else, and the afternoon dark was coming down so they wouldn't be able to see if there were anyone still in the car.

The thing was that I might just as well have taken the cheapest according to standing orders, the Moskwicz 408, because if I wanted any heat in the Fiat I'd have to keep starting up every half-hour and they'd hear that and wonder why I never got into gear and moved off. But even if it meant freezing to the wheel I'd wait till he left the Chancery for the Residence. I'd give him till midnight, wherever he went: wherever he went, till midnight, I'd be there and he'd be safe because if those bastards in London had sent him out with a fistful of marked cards to pass to a contact or shove in a letter-drop I'd be there before he was caught. It was what they wanted, wasn't it, hold his hand?

They'd done it to Heppinstall and they'd done it to others but they weren't going to do it to me.

Two hours before dawn there was the tail-end of a moon lying hooked across the heights of the buildings that stood against the west. In the half dark they seemed windowless but windows were there and maybe from some of them another attempt would be made, today or tomorrow, and maybe. succeed, swelling the numbers of the ten per cent. The cost of living in captivity was going up and the soul knew a cheap way out.

They brought me hot water and I thought about him while I washed. The worst of the worry was over and I'd slept for nearly five hours. If they'd been going to do it they would have arranged it for some time during his first few hours here: that would be logical, to send him early into the trap as if it were important for him to pass the stuff as soon as he could after landing from London, the implied urgency raising the value of the material in the eyes of the opposition. But his light had gone out behind the shutters in the Residence before midnight and I'd come away.

I didn't know how long it was going to take me to find my way into the Czyn network or how long it would be before Merrick signalled London through the diplomatic radio to say I was missing. London wouldn't take any notice but it was the sort of thing he might do because in only two weeks' training they wouldn't have covered even a precis of the practical experience he lacked. He'd expected me to show up at Okecie to meet his plane and now he'd expect me to telephone him or call at the Embassy and ask him to infiltrate me into Czyn and help him analyse its potential. That was understandable because he knew those were the orders I'd been given but he didn't know — he couldn't instinctively see — that I had to work alone and make my own infiltration simply because it'd be too dangerous not to. They hadn't checked him from the airport but from now on he'd be under routine surveillance by the observation post across the street from the Embassy. He wouldn't be given an actual shadow like the military attache but if he made a mistake and revealed his connections with Czyn the central monitoring cell of the U.B. would advise the observation post and they'd slap a tag on him every time he left the Embassy.

I'd have to make protected contact with him because my orders were to check and confirm the info he was sending to London and try to make sure his face didn't get trodden on while he was doing it, but he was expecting me to turn up at the Embassy like a long-lost friend and trot him across the Pink Elephant Club for a drink and I wished he'd got the sense to know that I'd be going as near to him in public as I'd go to a rabid dog.

So I hadn't unfortunately done it on Egerton's doorstep. He'd known I'd get the point before long: he'd wanted a particular type of agent to work with Merrick, the type who could do it best by working alone.

The bit of paper that had been waiting for me in the bar bad told me 29 Mica Zawidzka. It was in the Praga district on the cast side of the river and I took up station there in the Fiat an hour before dawn. It had begun snowing and I used the wipers at intervals. She came into the street at half-past eight and turned left, away from me, and for a minute I sat watching the flakes drifting across her dark blue greatcoat, then got out and locked the car and began following.