Phone ringing.

Jim looked up from the mat and I said I thought it was for me and he said go ahead and I went into the cluttered little office and picked up the phone.

'Yes?

'Bureau One. What is the problem?'

'Incompatibility.'

'In what way?'

I couldn't say there wasn't time to tell him: he was as high as I could go and if I couldn't make him understand that the mission was jeopardised I'd have to play the last card I'd got, and I didn't want to do that, it would make things infinitely more difficult, more dangerous. So I told him about the impasse we'd reached, Thrower and I, on the subject of sending in support when I went in to the rendezvous, and told him also that my DIF didn't seem to understand the way I worked, the way I had to work if I was to bring the mission home. Then I waited.

Play the last card, yes, if I had to. If Shepley called me in or if he told me I'd have to work out my differences with my DIF, I would go to ground, cut myself off from the DIF and from London and go it alone, let them chalk it up on the board in Signals, Executive withdraws, a graceful way to put it, typically euphemistic, because what it would really mean was that I would have to find myself a burrow in the bowels of Berlin and operate from there, surface from there and do what I could to infiltrate Nemesis, penetrate to the centre, blow it up on my own without any help, without signals, without franchise, without authority.

Infinitely more difficult, more dangerous, but I would do it if I had to. I've done it before.

'Do you feel,' Shepley was asking me, 'that your DIF has a case? That he's thinking of your protection, rather than of imposing his own will?'

'Possibly.'

'You concede that?

'Yes. But he doesn't understand what's involved. I'm going to be on sensitive ground, ultra-sensitive, and I don't want the opposition to pick up the vibrations. It could be fatal.'

I waited. In the ceramic mug the pencil was buzzing again as a plane got airborne. Hold fast, yes, I must hold fast. And if necessary, go to ground. They hate it, in London, if you do that. They like to keep their puppets on the string, they don't like to think they've got a rogue shadow loose in the field, you can see their point.

'You realise,' Shepley said, 'that I might feel it best to have you recalled?'

He had a calm voice, Bureau One, calm, measured and contemplative.

'Yes,' I said.

'And you realise that your DIF has a case to make, on your own admission, and that I might feel it best for you to settle your differences and proceed with the mission?'

'Yes,' I said.

Thrower had moved away from the door; he was watching the wall again, his feet neatly together. I suppose he'd thought it rather rude if he'd stayed by the door listening. He was a gentleman, give him that. But this is not a trade for gentlemen.

'What would you do,' Bureau One asked me from Washington, from his bed five thousand miles away through the night, 'if I recalled you, or if I instructed you to work with your present DIF?'

One of them was on the punch-bag again, thump – thump – thump, and it gave me energy, I think, gave me strength, gave me the feeling that it was my own fist pounding into the leather bag, thump – thump – thump, a good feeling, sanguine, confident.

'I'd go to ground,' I said.

Australian Airlines came drifting across the skyline, a winged kangaroo on the tail, lowering to the runway with the pale winter sunshine flashing on the windows, the soft scream of the jets pitching up a little as it reached for the surface of the earth.

Shepley hadn't answered me. I didn't mind. I'd said all I wanted to say and he'd have to take it from there. If all went well I had a rendezvous to keep and nothing was going to stop me. But I'd rather do it for the Bureau, stay on the Signals board, keep the life-line open. I'd have a better chance that way.

His voice came, Shepley's. 'Who do you want as your director in the field?'

Thump – thump – thump on the bag, come on, bust the bugger.

'Ferris.'

'Ferris is directing Stingray.'

'Mayhew.'

'He is in Morocco.'

'Cone.'

'You can have Cone. I'll instruct Control.'

The line went dead and I put the phone down and. tucked the corner of a hundred-deutsche-mark note underneath it and went out of the office and across to where Thrower was standing. 'You can go home now,' I said.

Chapter 12: CONE

It is contended legally that Voest-Alpine of Vienna licensed Gerald Bull's howitzer technology about 1979, some time before he dismantled his American operation and went to work with Poudriere Reunie Belge, who wanted to produce and market howitzer shells together with Austrian gun sales.

Crumbs dropped from the meat pie as I took bites at it, and I held it over the greaseproof paper. A jet took off, leaving echoes among the buildings.

It was just gone 10:00 hours.

By eleven I had got through the whole cassette, made notes, turned them face down, making up questions, answering them, some of them right, not all of them, not enough.

Terpil and Korkala were convicted in absentia for conspiring to sell 10,000 machine guns and 10 million rounds of ammunition to a small unit of New York under-cover police officers posing as South American revolutionaries. Several private people and agencies are now looking for these two in Lebanon, but their hideout is quite difficult to locate.

It was cold in here, in this small oblong room at the top of the building; there was an electric heater but it didn't do much more than warm the air within a few inches of it, where I had my feet. The cold was coming from inside me, some of it. I hoped Cone would get into Berlin before I needed him, before Inge Stoph telephoned, if she were going to telephone, if Klaus had told her he'd see me.

A woman laughed, lower in the building, one of the tarts, I suppose. I didn't think the top floor rooms were used, or at least not by the girls: when || I'd been shown along the passage most of the doors had been open, with nothing in the rooms except for tin trunks, mattresses, a portable bidet, some newspapers, no beds or furniture. But the room was all right because it was on the third floor and the one window wasn't Overlooked and there was a metal fire escape and a courtyard with six-foot walls on three sides. When the woman with the huge mole on her neck had left me I'd stood outside on the fire escape and checked on the roof; there wasn't easy access but it could be done if it didn't snow. It surprised me that a man like Thrower had chosen a place like this; it should have offended his sensibilities; perhaps he'd just signalled Kleiber's support group and asked them where he should book me in.

The biggest dealer across the globe is Sarkis Soghanalian, born a Turkish-Armenian Christian and naturalised as a Lebanese. He lives most of the time in the USA. The weaponry he has sold has been used in Lebanon, Nicaragua, Angola, Ghana, Biafra, you name it, even against Britain in the Falklands mini-war, though Soghanalian claims he is friendly to the US and her allies in the West.

He spoke quietly, Ahmad Samala, leaving silences for note-taking; sometimes I could hear his smile when he talked about new weapons, the latest and shiniest of his toys… Terpil was after that particular model but I beat him to it, and he was most upset…

There was a telephone in here; they'd led an extension cable from the next room, but there was a big enough gap under my door for it to shut. I would be glad when the thing rang: I didn't know the timing for the day. Inge could call Kleiber and make a rendezvous an hour from now and it could take me an hour to reach there. I would also be glad when Cone rang to say he was in Berlin; the executive would have a director in the field and Solitaire could start running again and those bloody people controlling the board in London could settle down and try and get things right in future: Shatner must have been out of his mind to pick someone like Thrower to handle me.