'Well, the game is most certainly up for you, my friend,' the tall one continued. 'You'll know, of course, that they want you for espionage and sabotage - and murder? Oh, a great deal of the latter, apparently!' He took out handcuffs. 'So much, in fact, that I think we'll just immobilize you a little. One can never be too careful. You look harmless enough, and you're unarmed, but...'

He put the cuffs on, locking Harry's hands together.

'Return air tickets to Rhodos,' (the ferret had been ferreting in Harry's pockets), 'cigarettes and matches, and a lot of American dollars. That's all.' And to Harry: 'Get up!'

He was bundled into the back of the car with the small one beside him, holding his gun on him. The tall, lurching one got into the driver's seat. 'And so you were heading for the airport,' the latter said. 'Well, we shall give you a lift. We have a small room there where we can wait for the flight from Moscow. And after that you are out of our hands.' He started the car and headed for Bucharest.

'I don't get it,' said Harry, genuinely puzzled. 'Since when have the Securitatea been big friends with the KGB? I would have thought the USSR's glasnost and perestroika were totally at odds with what Ceausescu is doing? Or perhaps you two, as a team, are a two-edged sword, eh? Is that it? Are you working for two bosses, Mr, er - ?'

'Shut up!' the ferret scraped his gun down Harry's ribs. 'No, let him talk,' their driver merely shrugged. 'It amuses me to discover how little they know, in the West.' He glanced over his shoulder. 'And how much of what they do know is based on guesswork. Mr Keogh, you may call me Eugen. And why not, since our acquaintance will be so short? But does it surprise you that Russia has friends in Romania, when Romania has been a satellite and neighbour of the USSR for so very long? Why, next you'll be telling me that there are no Russian agents in England, or France, or America! No, I can't believe you're that naive.' 'You're... KGB?' Harry frowned. 'No, we're Securitatea - when it suits us to be. But you see, compared to the leu the rouble has always been so very strong and stable - and we all must look to our futures, eh? We all must retire sooner or later.' He glanced back, smiled at Harry, and gradually let the smile slide from his face. 'In your case, sooner.'

So ... these two were in the pockets of the KGB, who in turn would have a section working with Harry's old 'friends' at the Soviet E-Branch HQ in Moscow. It was the Russian espers who were raising their ugly head again; they remembered Bronnitsy too well and desired to pay Harry back for it. Yes, and they must fear him mightily! First Wellesley's crazy plot in Bonnyrig, and now this. He would be smuggled quietly out of Romania and into the USSR, handed over to Soviet E-Branch, and simply... disappear. Or at least, that was the scenario as they had worked it out.

But it told Harry quite a lot. If he was to be smuggled out of Romania, then patently the actual Romanian authorities didn't know about him at all. To them he was simply what his passport said he was: Hari Kiokis, a perfectly legitimate businessman from Greece. It made sense. The KGB (or E-Branch) had contacted their own in Romania, men who could be trusted to expedite the job - because to try to arrange any other kind of extradition would only prove to be lengthy and frustrating. So maybe there was something to be said for Ceausescu's way of running the show after all.

'Er, Eugen?' he said. 'It seems to me that your main task was simply to pick me up. So why didn't you do it yesterday, at the airport? Because you needed to avoid publicity?'

"That was one reason,' the tall one answered over his shoulder. 'Also, we thought to kill two birds with one stone: tail you and discover your contact. You must have come here to see someone, after all. So we simply followed your taxi. But alas, a puncture! These things happen. Later we picked up your taxi driver and he showed us where he'd dropped you off. Also, he said you'd be catching a bus back into the city in the morning. Now that was frustrating! All that driving up and down since dawn, waiting for you to put in an appearance. As a last resort, of course, we would be obliged to return to Bucharest and wait for you at the airport. There is only one flight to Athens today. As it happened, however, that wasn't necessary.'

'There was no contact!' Harry suddenly blurted it out. 'I was just... just supposed to leave certain instructions, and pick up certain information.' He was taking a chance they knew almost nothing about him, except that he was to be detained for their Russian bosses. Also, time was getting shorter. By now his friends in the cemetery back there should be very nearly ready for him.

Eugen applied the brakes, slowed the car to a halt. 'You left instructions? There's a drop, back there?'

'Yes,' Harry lied.

'And the information you picked up? Where is that?'

'It wasn't there. That's why I waited all night, to collect it this morning. But it still wasn't there.'

Eugen turned around in his seat and stared at Harry with narrowed eyes. 'You are being very open, my friend. I take it this all has to do with our peasant fifth-columnists, right?'

Harry tried to look frightened, which wasn't at all hard. He knew nothing about Romania's peasant fifth-columnists, but he did understand something of the psychology of thugs such as these. 'Something like that,' he said. 'But... you said you have a room at the airport? Well, I think I'd rather tell you everything now, than have comrade Corneliu here beat it out of me in private later.'

'A great shame,' Corneliu grunted, and shrugged. 'Still, I might beat you anyway.'

Eugen said: 'You will show us this letter drop?'

'If it will make life easier for me, yes,' Harry answered.

'Hah!' scoffed Corneliu. This one, tough?' And to Harry: 'Are they all girls, your British spies?'

Harry shrugged. In fact he knew very little about standard British spies, only about espers: mindspies.

Eugen turned the car around and backtracked; there was no more conversation until Harry called a halt at the entrance to the graveyard. 'It's in here,' he said then. 'The letter drop.'

They all got out of the car and Corneliu used his gun to prod Harry on ahead. As he went he sent his deadspeak before him: We're here. One of them at least has a gun -trained on me. In the moment that he sees you he'll be distracted. That's when I plan to disarm him. Is everything OK?

We're OK, Harry, the Zaharias answered at once. And there are several others who wouldn't be dissuaded. We don't know if they'll be much good. But... strength in numbers, eh?

I don't see you, Harry looked worriedly all about. Are you in hiding?

The others are just under the soil, Harry, Ion Zaharia told him. And we're out of our boxes, in our sarcophagus.

Harry remembered: the Zaharias had been buried in the same plot and had a joint sarcophagus, its heavy, beautifully veined lid standing some eighteen inches above the surrounding marble chips of their plot. They hadn't seemed to mind him sitting there for a few moments while he was talking to them. So, they were waiting under the lid, eh? Well, and that should come in very handy.

'Move, Keogh!' Corneliu growled, shoving him forward down an aisle between rows of leaning headstones. 'Where is this drop, anyway?'

'Right there,' Harry pointed ahead. He moved to the huge tomb and stood looking down at its massive lid. 'I had to lever it to one side, but together we should slide it easily enough, once we lift it from its groove.' He hoped that the thugs hadn't noticed how ripe the air was, and how much worse the smell was growing from second to second, but this was something he dare not ask.