She masked herself and unmasked, during the night hours, revealing herself in a way that left her with a nakedness that seared the nerves.

I'm taking so much risk, she said again and again, and this was the nucleus of her innermost identity, the dark heart of the vortex: she talked of risk as she talked of love, and I had the thought, at some time before dawn, that in this brief exposition of her psyche she was expressing the same pathological drives that had goaded me into mission after mission, each time seeking the ultimate experience — a kiss from death.

She made coffee and we drank it in the first pooling of daylight that came through the shutters. She looked sated, drained, liberated.

'This brave new world of yours,' I said, 'isn't some kind of facade?'

'I know it seems contradictory, but no, it's all I live for. It's an intellectual concept, nothing to do with — what goes on underneath.'

So I told her there was a major threat to General-Secretary Gorbachev and that she could help to defuse it by tunnelling immediately into the substructure of Werneuchen Airforce Base and looking for any changes of plan in its routine training operations during the next four days. I gave her the number of my room at the hotel and told her to use the code-name Renata.

11: MIRROR

Twelve noon: meeting with Yasolev.

I'm not absolutely sure, but at that time I think he was ready to cancel Quickstep and tell us to get out of Berlin. 'We wanted information.' Standing with his feet placed solidly apart to balance him. 'We now have information. We should act upon it.' Thick square hands chopping at the air.

'It's not exactly information,' Cone said quietly.

'It has been confirmed that the target is Gorbachev. Your department has alerted you to Werneuchen Airforce Base and its bombers as a possible threat.'

'It's just possibilities, Viktor, not information.'

'In any case,' I said, 'I've got someone working for us at Werneuchen.'

'Who?' His eyes sunk deep under their brows, defensive, impatient. I believe he might have thought we were trying to play down the few shreds we had to work with, for our own reasons. Yasolev hadn't been trained to trust people.

'One of the officers,' I said, 'in their administration.'

'An agent-in-place?'

Cone looked down. I didn't answer. Yasolev tilted his head, didn't persist. London and the KGB were working in liaison for a single mission, and that didn't mean exposing our networks. Nor was I going to blow 'Renata'.

'I can send ten agents into Werneuchen.'

'We know.' Cone, hunched forward, hands lost in his pockets, watching Yasolev intently. 'You can send fifty in, and the whole of the personnel is going to close up like crabs, and you — '

'Going to shut their mouths,' I said, because Cone's Russian was patchy and he'd meant clams — molluski — and I didn't want any misunderstandings. Yasolev was tricky enough to handle as it was.

'That's right,' Cone said, 'and you wouldn't get anything out of them.'

Yasolev was quiet for a bit, looking anywhere but at us, at the Wall through the window, at the tea tray with its cups still upside down, at the carpet with its cigarette-burns and its worn threads. We hadn't poured any tea; we didn't even sit down; the tension was keeping us on our feet like puppets with their wires jammed.

'You know my responsibilities.' Not chopping now; motionless, sunk into obduracy. 'The welfare of the General-Secretary is in my hands. My hands.'

'We think we all need him,' I said, 'or we wouldn't be here. There's more at stake than your neck.' I didn't use those exact words, but that was the tone. But the stand he was making wasn't entirely because he'd be shot at dawn if anything happened to his General-Secretary; he was a KGB man and when the KGB wanted information they normally sent in a regiment and turned the building upside down and beat on the sides.

'You seriously believe that one agent can do as well as ten?'

'One whiff,' Cone said, 'of any KGB action inside Werneuchen and they'll shut their mouths and Horst Volper will immediately make an alternative plan. We've got to go very careful.'

''Then I will send one of my agents in. One.'

'All right,' Cone said quietly, 'then we'll wrap up the mission and go home.'

That surprised me. But we'd got less than four days left and Yasolev had called us in to do the job our way and that was how it would have to be done.

''That is putting the matter too strongly.' He was chopping at the air again, and I was glad my hand wasn't in the way. 'We agreed to liaise with each other, on the understanding that — '

'Viktor.' Cone's voice was as quiet as Shepley's. 'If you won't stick the rules, we're going home.'

Yasolev swung his body to one side and then to the other like a trapped bear, and I had a flash of what he'd be like when he lost patience and gave the order for someone's destruction.

'You will not see my point of view.'

'I see it very clearly,' Cone said. 'And I want you to see ours. You guaranteed that while the mission was running the KGB wouldn't interfere.'

We waited.

'But you fail to understand the weight of my responsibilities. If — '

'You knew how heavy they were,' Cone told him, 'when you first approached London. Nothing's changed.'

'But of course it has changed. The General-Secretary is now to make a visit here.'

That was true and there was only one way out. 'Do you think,' I asked him, 'there's any threat to the General-Secretary from Werneuchen Airforce Base?'

'But of course. Your department in London spoke of it. Isn't that so?'

'Yes. So the day before Gorbachev lands in Berlin you can send as many people as you like into Werneuchen and close the place down and ground all the bombers and lock up all the pilots. Your General-Secretary isn't at risk until his plane touches down here, so until then we want you to leave us alone.'

1:15: lunch with Pollock at the Steingarten.

'It's just that I can't work up any interest in soccer. Can you?'

'Not really,' I said.

'I don't imagine. Nothing like cricket, is there?' Spoken with passion. 'I spend most of the winter replaying the Tests on the VCR. Any time you'd like to watch, give me a buzz.'

'I'll do that.'

At 2:15 I would walk into the street.

'But even with the videotapes it seems an awfully long time till May.'

'May?'

'When the cricket starts again.'

'Ah, yes.'

Walk into the street, if I could face it.

He'd told me he'd only got an hour for lunch, awfully sorry. 'Miki's' visit had relegated all other business to the back burner. That was why I would walk into the street at 2:15. And there wasn't any question, really, of not facing it. They expected it of me: Shepley, Cone, Yasolev. I expected it of myself.

'Losing your appetite?'

'I had rather a late breakfast.'

'Ah.'

I had asked Pollock to lunch because Horst Volper would have stationed a permanent watch on him. So far I hadn't found a tag on me when I'd left the hotel. So far the safe-house near Spittelmarkt was unblown. Unless Cone or Yasolev had been picked up, Pollock would unwittingly provide Volper's cell with a potential contact with me, and they'd go whenever he went. They would have come to the Steingarten. They would be waiting outside.

It was beginning to feel hot in here, and this was normal; in fact the place was underheated.

'Well, well.' Looking at his watch. 'Tempus fugit.'

I got my wallet out but he put down a 1,000-mark note on top of the bill. 'Honoured guest of the embassy.' Clean white smile, lowering his voice. 'Not often we get anyone out here with your kind of credentials.'