He came back to Ned. 'Bluebird is straight , Ned! Remember? Your words. I loved you for them! I still do! Bluebird is telling the unpolluted truth as he knows it. And my myopic masters are going to have it shoved up their asses even if it turns their balls to water. Do you read me, Ned? Or have I put you to sleep already?'

But Ned would not rise to Sheriton's black rage. 'Don't give it to him, Russell. We've lost him. If you give him anything at all, give him smoke.'

'Smoke? Play Barley back , you mean? Admit the Bluebird's bad? Are you joking? Give me proof , Ned! Don't give me hunches! Give me fucking prooP Everybody in Washington who hasn't got hair between his toes tells me that Bluebird is the Holy Bible, the Talmud and the Koran! Now you tell me, give him smokc! You got us into this, Ned! Don't try andjump off the tiger at the first fucking stop!'

Ned pondered this for a while, and Clive pondered Ned. Finally Ned gave a shrug as if to say perhaps it made no difference anyway. Then he returned to his desk where he sat alone seeming to read papers and I remember wondering suddenly whether he had a Hannah too, whether we all did, some life unled that kept him to the wheel.

Perhaps it was true that VAAP had no small rooms or perhaps Ahk Zapadny, after his years in prison, had an understandable aversion to them.

In any case the room he had singled out for their enc8unter seemed to Barley big enough for a regimental dance, and the only thing small about it was Zapadny himself, who crouched at one end of a long table like a mouse on a raft, watching his visitor with darting eyes as he ambled down the parquet floor at him, his long arms dangling at his sides, elbows up a little, and an expression on his face such as neither Zapadny nor perhaps anyone else had ever seen in him before: not apologetic, not vague, not wilfully foolish, but of an almost menacing firmness of intention.

Zapadny had arranged some papers before him, and a heap of books beside the papers and a jug of drinking water and two glasses. And it was evident that he wished to offer Barley an impression of being discovered in the midst of his duties, rather than facing him in cold blood without props or the protection of his numberless assistants.

'Barley, my dear chap, look here it's most kind of you to call by and say your farewells like this, you must be as busy as I am at this moment, my hat,'he began, speaking much too quickly. 'I would say that if our publishing industry continues to expand like this, then I see no way out of it, though it is only my personal and unofficial opinion, we shall have to employ a hundred more staff and most likely apply for larger offices also.' Hc hummed and fussed his papers and pulled back a chair in what he imagined to be a gesture of old-style European courtesy. But Barley as usual preferred to stand. 'Well it's more than my life is worth to offer you a drink on the premises, when the sun is not even over the yardarm as we say, but I mean do sit down and let us kick a few thoughts around for a few minutes - ' raising his eyebrows and looking at his watch -'my God, we should have a month of it, not five days! How is the Trans-Siberian Railway progressing? I mean I see no basic difficulties there, provided our own position is respected, and the rules of fair play are observed by all the contracting parties. Are the Finns being too greedy? Perhaps your Mr. Henziger is being greedy? He is certainly a hard-nosed character, I would say.'

He caught Barley's eye again and his discomfort increased. Standing over him, Barley bore no resemblance to a man who wished to discuss the Trans-Siberian Railway.

'I find it actually a little odd that you insisted so dogmatically on speaking to me completely alone, you see,' Zapadny continued rather desperately. 'After all, this one is f2irly and squarely in Mrs. Korneyeva's court. It is she and her staff who are directly responsible for the photographer and all the practical arrangements.'

But Barley also had a prepared speech though it was not marred by any of Zapadny's nervousness. 'Alik,' he said, still declining to sit down.

'Does that telephone work?'

'Of course.'

'I need to betray my country and I'm in a hurry. And what I would like you to do is put me in touch with the proper authorities, because there are certain things that have to be hammered out in advance. So don't start telling me you don't know who to get hold of, just do it, or you'll lose a lot of Brownie points with the pigs who think they own you.'

It was mid-afternoon but a wintry dusk had settled over London, and Ned's little office in the Russia House was bathed in twilight. He had put his feet on his desk and was sitting back in his chair, eyes closed and a dark whisky at his elbow - not by any means, I quickly realiscd, his first of the day.

'Is Clive Without India still cloistered with the Whitehall nobles?' he asked me, with a tired levity.

'He's at the American Embassy settling the shopping list.'

'I thought no mere Brit was allowed near the shopping list.'

'They're talking principle. Sheriton has to sign a declaration appointing Barley an honorary American. Clive has to add a citation.'

'Saying what?'

'That he's a man of honour and a fit and proper person.'

'Did you draft it for him?'

'Of course.'

'Silly fellow,' said Ned with an air of dreamy reproof. 'They'll hang you.' He leaned back and closed his eyes.

'Is the shopping list really worth so much?' I asked. I had a sense, for once, of being more practically disposed than Ned was.

'Oh it's worth everything,' Ned replied carelessly. 'If any of it's worth anything, that is.'

'Do you mind telling me why?'

I had not been admitted to the inmost secrets of the Bluebird material, but I knew that if I ever had been I would not have been able to make head or tail of them. But conscientious Ned had taken himself to night-school. He had sat at the feet of our in-house boffins and lunched our grandest defence scientists at the Athenaeum in order to bone up.

'Interface,' he said with contempt. 'Mutually assured bedlam. We track their toys. They track ours. We watch each other's archery contests without either of us knowing which targets the other side is aiming at. If they're aiming for London, will they hit Birmingham? What's error? What's deliberate? Who's approaching zero-CEP?' He caught my bewilderment and was pleased with himself. 'We watch them lob their ICBMs into the Kamchatka peninsula. But can they lob them down a Minuteman silo? We don't know and they don't. Because the big stuff on either side has never been tested under war conditions. The test trajectories are not the trajectories they'll use when the fun starts. The earth, God bless her, is not a perfect globe. How can she be at her age? Her density varies. So does the old girl's gravitational pull when things fly over her, like missiles and warheads. Enter bias. Our targeteers try to compensate for it in their calibrations. Goethe tried. They pour in data from earth-watch satellites, and perhaps they succeed better than Goethe did. Perhaps they don't. We won't know till the blessed balloon goes up, and nor will they, because you can only try the real thing once.' He stretched luxuriously as if the topic pleased him. 'So the camps divide. The hawks cry, "The Sovs are pinpoint! They can knock the smile off the arse of a fly at ten thousand miles!" And all the doves can reply is, "We don't know what the Sovs can do, and the Sovs don't know what the Sovs can do. And nobody who doesn't know whether his gun works or not is going to shoot first. It's the uncertainty that keeps us honest," say the doves. But that is not an argument that satisfies the literal American mind, you see, because the literal American mind does not like to grapple with fuzzy concepts or grand visions. Not at its literal field level. And what Goethe was saying was an even larger heresy. He was saying that the uncertainty was all there was. Which I rather agree with. So the hawks hated him and the doves had a ball and hanged themselves from the chandelier.' He drank again. 'If Goethe had only backed the pinpoint boys instead, everything would have been fine,' he said reprovingly.

'And the shopping list?' I asked him again.

He peered whimsically into his glass. 'The targeting of one side, my dear Palfrey, is based on that side's assumptions about the other side. And vice versa. Ad infinitum . Do we harden our silos? If the enemy can't hit them, why should we bother? Do we superharden them - even if we know how - at a cost of billions? We're already doing so, as a matter of fact, though it's not much sung about. Or do we protect them imperfectly with SDI at a cost of more billions? Depends what our prejudices are and who signs our pay cheque. Depends whether we're manufacturers or taxpayers. Do we put our rockets on trains or autobahns or park them in country lanes, which happens to be this month's flavour? Or do we say i(s all junk anyway, so to hell with it?'

'So is it ending or beginning?' I asked.

He shrugged. 'When did it ever end? Turn on your television set, what do you see? The leaders ofboth sides hugging each other. Tears in their eyes. Looking more like each other every day. Hooray, it's all over! Bollocks. Listen to the insiders and you realise the picture hasn't altered by a brush-stroke.'

'And if I turn my television off? What will I see then?'

He had ceased to smile. Indeed his good face was more serious than I had ever seen it before, though his anger – if such it was – seemed to be directed at no one but himself.

'You'll see us . Hiding behind our grey screens. Telling each other we keep the peace.'