'No. It'd be too dangerous.'

She shivered again but I wasn't sorry I'd said it; she had to get the message: she was too exposed here, and I wanted to think of her safely back in Reigate taking Billy for long walks, kicking up the leaves.

Things had moved very fast since I'd got here: only this morning Holmes had said there was no actual mission on the board and already we had Solitaire running and I'd got access to the opposition and there was something much bigger on my mind than making a private kill in the name of McCane. At some time tomorrow, unless we could stop it, tomorrow or the next day, any time at all, there'd be a flight taking off with three or four hundred people on board and it was going to make a sunburst in the sky.

Chapter 7: SAMALA

It was gone midnight when we got back to the hotel and I saw Helen up to her room.

She was still shivering, and her face was haunted as she looked at me in the low light of the corridor, her thin hands holding the fleece collar of her coat pressed against her cheeks.

'Do you want to come in for a little while?'

I said, 'No. You need sleep.'

'Just for a few minutes.' She leaned her head against me and I held her until the shivering stopped.

'I've got to make some calls.'

In a moment she said, 'I'm cold, and a bit frightened, that's all. I thought it would be all right to come back to Berlin, but it wasn't, because this is where that beastly thing happened.'

The plastic key was clutched in her hand and I pulled it gently from between her fingers and put it into the slot and opened the door. 'Didn't you bring any gloves?'

'I forgot them. I'm always forgetting them.'

'Phone room service,' I said, 'for some hot milk, Horlicks if they've got it. Not alcohol, no more brandy.' I gave her a final hug. 'And call me if you really can't cope.'

Going down in the lift I felt a touch of anger. We shouldn't have brought her to Berlin; she was so bloody young for all this, not so much in years but in her mind; she wasn't much more than a schoolgirl, got at by the men in her life, by her father, by George Maitland, perhaps by others, until the personality that had been trying to grow had been crushed and thrown away.

Whatever you say.

In my room I called London and found Matthews at the Signals board and asked him to get the tape running.

'Are you debriefing?'

'Yes.'

Through the window the floodlit spire of St Johan's stood against the hazy dark; one or two pigeons were still awake, dipping from a parapet and circling and going back, their shadows flitting across the stone.

'All right,' Matthews said at last, 'we're running.'

I wondered what had taken him so long; all you've got to do is push a button on the console. He could have been helping out at one of the other boards, some kind of panic going on.

'Executive debriefing,' I said, '00.12 hours, Berlin time, November 7. The subject has been questioned and this is the main content. The Red Army Faction is planning an operation code-named Nemesis, repeat Nemesis, under the direction of a former East German national, Dieter Klaus – will you run a dossier on him for me? You might be able to pick him up from what's left of the Stasi files, maybe get some help from Grenzschutzgruppe-9.' London would have to notify GSG- 9 in any case; they were the official German counter-terrorist organisation and if they hadn't got wind of Nemesis and the bomb threat we'd certainly have to brief them.

'The object of the Klaus operation,' I said, 'is to put a bomb on board a US airliner.' I filled it in for them, told them everything that Willi Hartman had given me plus several assumptions, because he'd told me a lot more than he actually knew. It's always like that: you learn to fit bits and pieces of information into the overall picture, stuff that nobody tells us but we know must be there, the way the astronomers discover dark stars. 'I have a feeling,' I said, 'that Klaus might not actually be running the Red Army Faction as such, although that's what I was told. I think that Nemesis could be the code-name not for an operation but for a group he's formed, a separate cell, possibly taking some of the Faction people with him. I don't think he's the kind of man who'd take over a third generation outfit that hasn't done much lately. But this is just my feeling.'

There was a police car down there, wailing through the streets; I could see its coloured lights reflected in the windows below.

'End of debriefing,' I said into the phone. 'Questions?

'You want this to go to Mr Shatner right away?'

'To Mr Shatner, Chief of Signals and Bureau One. They may want to alert the major US airlines: they'll make a bigger impression than the subject over here. They'll also want to keep a close watch on passenger lists for a heavy contingent of VIPs or a single prominent diplomat or financier or army general, someone like that. What we've got to think about is how to protect every next flight of a US airliner taking off from Berlin.'

Shatner would alert the US embassy in London in any case and trigger a CIA response in Berlin, long before daylight.

'I've got that,' Matthews said. What else?

'How soon can you get my DIF here?'

'He's booked out on the noon plane, British Airways.'

'Get him here sooner than that. Put him on the first plane in the morning, I don't care which airline. I've made contact with the opposition and I've got access and I need a director. I want him to see the Reigate subject out of Berlin as soon as possible, but she must not, repeat not take a US plane. When do I get my briefing on the arms dealer scene?'

Shatner had told me he'd set it up for me, bring me up to date.

'I'll call you back on that. How soon do you want it done?'

'As soon as you can make it, because now that I've got access to Nemesis I'm going right in to the centre and it's going to be very tricky and if I'm not fully briefed I could blow my cover.'

'Priority,' Matthews said.

'Yes.' I thought I could hear Croder's voice in the background. Yes, there was some kind of panic going on, or Croder wouldn't be in the Signals room at this hour.

'How's Stingray?' 1 asked Matthews. I wasn't on the tape any more: I'd finished the actual debriefing a few minutes ago. They'd been having a problem with that one when I'd looked in at Signals this morning; the shadow had got himself holed up in a trap in Thailand.

'Not all that good,' Matthews said. 'He shut down on us.'

The trap must have closed, and I felt a chill along the nerves.

'Mr Croder's looking after things?'

'Yes.'

In a moment I said, 'All right, that's all from here. Just -'

'Control,' someone said, and I recognised Shatner's voice. 'Look, I was listening to your signal, and what I'm going to do is get the RAF to fly your director into the German Airforce base at Werneuchen as soon as I can get the right people out of bed, because no one can go into Tempelhof until morning, because of night-flying regulations. Then we'll ask them to send him into Tempelhof by helicopter, and with any luck hell be on the ground by something like 04:00 hours, which is going to be much sooner than if we waited to use an airline. Will that suit your purposes?'

'Very well.'

'There shouldn't be any problem because well do it through Bonn at Foreign Secretary level. I haven't heard the whole tape but it sounds rather encouraging: you've got access, I believe.'

'Yes.'

'Well done. Anything else I can do for you?'

I told him there was nothing else and he gave the mike back to Matthews and we wound up the signal and I pressed the contact and dialled the first number on the list of local support people they'd given me this morning before I left. There were five on the night shift, ten on the day. The name of this one was Home.