'My beloved Barley. ' He tilted the letter and began again. 'My beloved Barley, Do you remember a promise you made to me one night in Peredelkino as we lay on the verandah of our friends' dacha and recited to each other the poetry of a great Russian mystic who loved England? You swore to me that you would always prefer humanity to nations and that when the day came you would act like a decent human being. '

He had stopped again.

'Is none of that true?' said Clive.

'I told you. I never met the hag!'

There was a force in Barley's denial that was not there before. He was shoving back something that was threatening him.

'So now I am asking you to redeem your promise, though not in the way we might have imagined that night when we agreed to become lovers . Total balls,' he muttered. 'Silly cow's got it all mixed up. I ask you to show this book to English people who think as we do. Publish it for me, using the arguments you expressed with so much fire. Show it to your scientists and artists and intelligentsia and tell them it is the first stone of a great avalanche and they must throw the next stone for themselves. Tell them that with the new openness we can move together to destroy the destruction and castrate the monster we have created. Ask them which is more dangerous to mankind: to conform like a slave or resist like a man? Act like a decent human being, Barley. I love Herzen's England and you. Your loving K. Who the hell is she? She's off her tree. They both are.'

Leaving the letter on the table, Barley wandered off into the dark end of the room, softly cursing, hammering his right fist downward on to the air. 'Hell's the woman up to?' he protested. 'She's taken two completely different stories and twisted them together. Anyway, where's the book?'He had remembered us and was facing us again.

'The book is safe,' said Clive, with a sideways glance at me.

'Where is it, please? It's mine.'

'We rather thought it was her friend's,'said Clive.

'I've been charged with it. You saw what he wrote. I'm his publisher. It's mine. You've no right to it.'

He had landed with both feet in the very ground we wished him not to enter. But Clive was quick to distract him.

'He ?' Clive repeated. 'You mean Katya's a man? Why do you say he ? You really are confusing us, you know. You're a confusing person, I suppose.'

I had been expecting the outburst sooner. I had sensed already that Barley's submissiveness was a truce and not a victory, and that each time Clive reined him in he brought him nearer to revolt. So that when Barley sauntered up to the table, leaned across it and slackly raised his hands, palms forward, from his sides, in what might well have been a docile gesture of helplessness, I did not necessarily expect him to offer Clive a sweetly reasoned answer to his question. But not even I had reckoned with the scale of the detonation.

'You have no damned right!' Barley bellowed straight into Clive's face, smashing his palms on to the table so hard that my papers bounced up and down in front of me. Brock came rushing from the hall. Ned had to order him back. 'That's my manuscript. Sent tome by my author. For my consideration in my good time. You have no right to steal it, read it or keep it. So give me the book and go home to your squalid island.' He flung out an arm at Bob. 'And take your Boston Brahmin with you.'

'Our island,' Clive reminded him. 'The book, as you call it, is not a book at all and neither you nor we have any right to it,' he continued frigidly and untruthfully. 'I'm not interested in your precious publishing ethics. Nobody here is. All we know is, the manuscript in question contains military secrets about the Soviet Union that, assuming they are true, are vital to the defence of the West. To which hemisphere you also belong - I take it, thankfully. What would you do in our place? Ignore it? Throw it into the sea? Or try to find out how it came to be addressed to a derelict British publisher?'

'He wants it published! By me! Not hidden in your vaults!'

'Quite,' said Clive with another glance at me.

'The manuscript has been officially impounded and classified as top secret,' I said. 'It's subject to the same restrictions as this meeting. But even more so.' My old law tutor would have turned in his grave - not, I am afraid, for the first time. But it's always wonderful what a lawyer can achieve when nobody knows the law.

One minute and fourteen seconds was how long the silence lasted on the tape. Ned timed it with his stopwatch when he got back to the Russia House. He had been waiting for it, even relishing it, but he still began to fear that he had hit one of those maddening faults that always seem to happen with recorders at the crucial moment. But when he listened harder he caught the grumble of a distant car and a scrap of girl's laughter carrying to the window, because Barley by then had thrown the curtains open and was staring down into the square. For one minute and fourteen seconds, then, we watched Barley's strangely articulate back silhouetted against the Lisbon night.Then comes a most frightful crash like the shattering of several windowpanes at once, followed by an oil gush,and you would suppose that Barley had staged his long-delayed breakout,taking the ornamental Portuguese wall plates and curly flower vases with him. But the truth is, the whole rumpus is only the sound of Barley discovering the drinks table and dumping three cubes of ice into a crystal tumbler and pouring a decent measure of Scotch over them, all within a couple of inches' range of a microphone that Brock with his characteristic. over-production had concealed in one of the richly carved compartments.