'Then can I turn it around a little and ask whether you are acquainted with any peace people back in England at all?'

'I've no idea.'

'Barley, would you be aware that two members of a certain blues group you played with between 1977 and 1980 were involved with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, as well as other peace outfits?'

Barley seemed puzzled but a little enchanted. 'Really? Do they have names?'

'Would it amaze you if I said Maxi Bums and Bert Wunderley?'

To the amusement of everyone but Clive, Barley broke out in jolly laughter. 'Oh my Lord! Forget the peace label, Bob. Maxi was a red-toothed Com. He'd have blown up the Houses of Parliament if he'd had a bomb. And Bert would have held his hand while he did it.'

'I take it they were homosexual?' said Bob, with an old dog's smile.

'Gay as trivets,' Barley agreed contentedly.

At which, with evident relief, Bob folded up his piece of paper and gave Clive a glance to say he'd finished, and Ned proposed to Barley that they take some air. Walter moved invitingly to the door and opened it. Ned must have wanted him as a foil, for Walter would never have dared otherwise. Barley hesitated a moment, then picked up a bottle of Scotch and a glass and dropped them one into each side pocket of his bush-jacket, in what I suspect was a gesture designed to shock us. Thus equipped he ambled after them leaving the three of us alone without a word between us.

'Were those Russell Sheriton's questions you were shooting at him?' I asked Bob amiably enough.

'Russell's too bright for all that damn stuff these days, Harry,' Bob replied with evident distaste. 'Russell's come a long way.'

Langley's power struggles were a mystery even to those who were involved in them, and certainly - however much we pretended otherwise - to our barons of the twelfth floor. But in the seethings and jockeyings, Sheriton's name had featured frequently as the man likely to come out at the top-of-the heap.

'So who authorised them?' I asked, still upon the questions. 'Who drafted them, Bob?'

'Maybe Russell.'

'You just said Russell was too bright!'

'Maybe he has to keep his boyars quiet,' Bob said uncomfortably, lighting up his pipe and swinging out the match.

We settled down to wait on Ned.

The shade tree is in a public garden near the waterfront. I have stood under it and sat under it and watched the dawn rise over the harbour while the dew made teardrops on my grey raincoat. I have listened, without understanding, to an old mystic with a saintly face who like's to receive his disciples there, in that self-same spot by daylight. They are of all ages, and call him the Professor. The bench is built round its trunk and divided by iron arm-rests into seats. Barley sat at the centre with Ned and Walter either side of him. They had talked first in a sleepy sailors' tavern, then on a hilltop, Barley said, but Ned for some reason refuses to remember the hilltop. Now they had come back into the valley for their final place. Brock sat wakefully in the hired car keeping a view of them across the grass. From the warehouses on the other side of the road came a whine of cranes, a pumping of lorries and the yells of fishermen. It was five in the morning but the harbour is awake from three. The first clouds of dawn were shaping and breaking like the First Day.

'Choose somebody else,' Barley said. He had said it before in several

different ways. 'I'm not your man.'

'We didn't choose you,' Ned said. 'Goethe did. If we knew a way of getting back to him without you, we'd jump at it. He's taken a fix on you. Probably been waiting ten years for someone like you to turn up.'

'He chose me because I wasn't a spy,' said Barley. 'Because I sang my bloody aria.'

'And you won't be a spy now,' said Ned. 'You'll be a publisher. His. All you'll be doing is collaborating with your author and with us at the same time. What's wrong with that?'

'You've got the draw, you've got the wits,' said Walter. 'No wonder you drink. You've been under-used for twenty years. Now's your chance to shine. You're lucky.'

'I shone at Peredelkino. Every time I shine, the lights go out.'

'You might even be solvent,' said Ned. 'Three weeks of preparation back in London while you're waiting for your visa, a jolly week in Moscow and you'll be off the hook for ever.'

With the prudence that was innate in him, Ned had avoided the word 'training'.

Back comes Walter, a touch of the whip, a piece of flattery, both over the top, but Ned let him run. 'Oh never mind the money, Barley's far too grand! It's one shot for your country and a lot of people never get the chance. They dream of it, they write in for it but it never comes their way. And afterwards, when you've done your bit. you can sit back and enjoy the benefits of being British, knowing you've earned them even if you sneer at them, which is your good right, something that has to be fought for like everything else.'

And Ned had judged rightly. Barley laughed and told Walter 'Come off it,' or something of the kind.

'One shot for your author too, if you think about it,' Ned cut in, with his plain man's talk. 'You'll be saving his neck for him. If he's going to hand over State secrets, the least you can do for him is put him on to the competent people. You're a Harrowman, aren't you?' he added as if he had just remembered this. 'Didn't I read somewhere you'd been educated at Harrow?'

'I just went to school there,' Barley said and Walter let out one of his hoots of laughter, in which Barley out of politeness joined.

'Why did you apply to us all those years ago? Do you remember what prompted you?' Ned asked. 'Some sense. Of duty, was it?'

'I wanted to stay out of my father's firm. My tutor said teach at a prep school. My cousin Lionel said join the spies. You turned me down.'

'Yes, well I'm afraid we can't do you the favour a second time.' said Ned.

Like old companions the three men silently surveyed the waterfront. A chain of naval ships straddled the harbour mouth, their rigging drawn in necklaces of lights.

'Do you know I've always dreamed there'd be one?' Walter sang suddenly, talking out to sea. 'I'm a God man at heart, I'm sure I am. Or else a failed Marxist. I always believed that sooner or later their history had to throw one up. How much science have you got? None. You wouldn't. You're that generation - the last of the arts virgins. If I asked you what a rate of burn was, you'd probably think I was talking about baking a cake.'

'Probably,' Barley agreed, laughing again despite himself.

'CEP? Not a concept?'

'Don't like initials, I'm afraid.'

'Circular-error-probable then. How's that?

'Illiterate,' Barley snapped, in one of his unpredictable fits of tetchiness.

'Rccalibrate? Whom or what do I recalibrate, and what with?'

Barley didn't bother to reply.

'Very well, then. What's the Big Motherfucker, familiarly known in circles as the BMF? That won't offend your ear for English, will it? Nice Anglo-Saxon words?'

Barley shrugged.

'The BMF was the Soviet SS9 superrocket,' Walter said. 'It was wheeled out at a May Day parade in the dark years of the Cold War. Its dimensions were breathtaking and it was later credited with a notorious footprint . Also not a name to you? Footprint? Never mind, it will be. The footprint in this case was three huge holes in the Russian wastes, that looked like the pattern of the Minuteman silo group with its command centre. The argument was whether they were made by independently targetable warheads, and could the Sovs therefore hit three American silos at once? Those who didn't want to believe they could called the footprints A fluke. Those who did upped the ante and said the warheads were for destroying cities not silos. The believers won the day and got themselves a green light for the ABM programme. Never mind their theory was discredited three years later. They squeezed through. I'm losing you, I see.'

'You never had me,' Barley said.

'But he's a fast learner, of course he is,' Walter assured Ned contentedly across Barley's body. 'Publishers can get their minds halfway round anything.'

'What's wrong with finding out ?' Ned complained in the tone of a good man confused by smart talk. 'That's what I never understand. We're not asking you to build the beastly rockets or push the button. We're asking you to help us improve our knowledge of the enemy. If you don't like the nuclear business, so much the better. And if the enemy turns out to be a friend where's the harm?'

'I thought the Cold War was supposed to be over,' Barley said.

At which Ned, in what appeared to be genuine alarm, exclaimed, 'Oh my dear Lord,' under his breath.

But Walter showed no such restraint. Walter pretended to be indignant, and perhaps he was. He could be anything at any moment and often several things at once. 'Cheap political theatricals and feigned friendships!' he snorted. 'Here we are, locked into the biggest ideological face-off in history and you tell me it's all over because a handful of statesmen find it convenient to hold hands in public and scrap a few obsolete toys. The evil empire's on its knees, oh yes! Their economy's a disaster, their ideology's up the spout and their back-yard's blowing up in their faces. just don't tell me that's a reason for unbuckling our guns, because I won't believe a word of you. It's a reason for spying the living daylights out of them twenty-five hours a day and kicking them in the balls every time they try to get off the floor. God knows who they won't think they are ten years from now!'

'I suppose you do realise that if you walk out on Goethe you'll be leaving him to the Americans?' said Ned on a practical point of information. 'Bob won't let him go, why should he? Don't be fooled by those old Yalie manners of his. How will you live with yourself then ?'

'I don't want to live with myself,' said Barley. 'I can't think of anybody worse to live with.'

A slate-coloured cloud slid across the red sun path before shattering into fragments.

'It comes down to this,' said Ned. 'It's crude and unEnglish but I'll say it anyway. Do you want to be a passive or an active player in the defence of your country?'

Barley was still hunting for an answer when Walter supplied it for him, and with an air of finality that brooked no contradiction. 'You're from a free society. You've no choice,' he said.

The din of the harbour rose with the advancing daylight. Barley slowly stood up and rubbed his back. He seemed to have a permanent patch of pain there, just above the waistband. Perhaps it accounted for his slope.

'Any decent Church would have burned you bastards at the stake long ago,' he remarked wearily. He turned to Ned, peering down at him through his too-small spectacles. 'I'm the wrong man,' he warned him. 'And you're a fool for using me.'