Halfway back to Knightsbridge they called me up.

Base to Fox…

Read you.

Communicate 4 soonest.

Five minutes.

Roger. Over and out.

There was time to spare because they'd accepted my five minutes instead of switching to speech-code and giving me a directive but I put my foot down slightly and took the short cut through the mews because Extension 4 was Travel and it looked as if Egerton had made up his mind to set me running.

Within three and a half minutes I had the Jensen standing outside the fiat and got the ammunition clip out of my pocket and dropped it down the drain and went in and picked up the phone in my study, checking for bugs. Negative, 'I think we're clear, aren't we?'

'Yes,' I said.

It was Jeffries, in Travel.

'All right, you're booked out on Flight AZ279 by Alitalia, Terminal 2 Heathrow, depart 19:15 today, minimum check-in time thirty-five minutes. Your night is non-stop to Fiumicino Airport, Rome, arriving 22:30 hours and the aircraft is a Douglas DC9. Your ticket is waiting for you at the check-in counter and we have a dark blue Fiat 1100 for you at Fiumicino. Any queries so far?'

'No.'

Rome was somewhere new, unless it was Brockley doing that one. According to Macklin, Smythe had last reported from Cairo and Hunter was doing Geneva and Fitzalan was keeping tabs on Fogel in Tangier.

'All right, are we still clear?'

'Yes.'

'Your contact in Rome will be Fitzalan. You will — '

'Say again?'

'Your contact in Rome will be Fitzalan. Any queries?'.

'No.' We don't keep the office on the line arguing the toss: if Travel said my contact was to be Fitzalan they weren't making any mistake. But the last I'd heard of him was in Tangier and he must have been getting on a plane while they were playing his report on the monitor tape in Signals: he'd said that Fogel had gone to ground but he must have come into the open again very fast and he'd broken for Rome.

Jeffries was talking.

The rdv is to be outside the Cielalto office on the ground floor and at this time we don't know who will arrive there first. No code-intro necessary. Now I'll give you the routine checks.'

He began going through them and I half-listened: they were just fail-safe reminders to leave private keys behind or in a deposit box at the airport, look for a message at Heathrow and Fiumicino, so forth. What interested me was that Fitzalan and Fogel must be arriving in Rome on the same flight from Tangier and since they were in a surveillance situation Fitzalan was going to have his work cut out to make a rendezvous with me and keep the peep on the objective at the same time. Not that I was worried: you learn to have faith in people like Parkis and Mildmay and Egerton when they've controlled you through half a dozen missions. If they said that Fitzalan would make contact with me and keep surveillance on his objective at the same time then that was precisely what was going to happen.

Jeffries finished the routine checks and asked for queries.

'Any backups?'

'We don't know at this stage.'

'Who's his local control?'

'There hasn't been time.'

I should have known. Egerton had been expecting something to break because he'd been sitting in at Signals but he couldn't have known what was going to break or he would have sent out a director to local-control Fitzalan before he got there. That man Fogel had broken ground with the speed of a ricochet and nobody in the Bureau had been given time to set up the necessary machinery to contain his travel pattern: at this stage they were relying totally on Fitzalan.

'No more questions?

'No,' I said. 'But tell Egerton there was a Ruskie in here, and get someone to put the kitchen window right when they come to shut the place up.'

'Is that the only damage?'

'I got him in time.'

'Noted. All right, we want you to keep in continuous con-tact between 15 and Heathrow, and we'll have your car picked up and put in the garage, so leave the key in the usual place.'

'Will do.'

I hung up and got some clean shirts and things and dropped them into the suitcase, stopping once to listen to the small sounds in the house: the spitting of rain on a window, me creak of a swelling timber, the drip of a tap. The place seemed already abandoned, and in the morning they'd send someone to see to the kitchen window and turn off the electricity and take the laundry bag; and afterwards there'd only be these sounds here, and sometimes the ring of the telephone that no one would answer.

Normal introspection at this stage: ignore. It was just that we never know, for certain, whether well be back.

I took the suitcase downstairs and passed the puddle where the ice cubes had melted and shut the front door, dropping the case into the boot of the car and starting up, reporting mobility to base.

There was a delay going through Richmond because some bloody fool had lost traction on the wet road and wrapped his Vauxhall round a traffic-light standard and someone else had gone into 'him: glass all over the place and bobbies' capes and flashing lamps while the time ticked away and I sat listening to Signals telling one of the executives to cancel niner-niner and freeze all movement: I suppose he's blown a fuse somewhere and they'd got a flap on.

There'd be another one on if they couldn't get this road cleared in the next ten minutes and I started tinkering with the idea of going across to one of the police cars and asking them to get me to the airport without touching the ground anywhere, but the breakdown crew had swept most of the glass into the gutter and the ambulance had made a U-turn and gone off into a No Entry street with its headlights on and five minutes later the nearside lane of traffic began moving and we did a slow crawl for the next half mile until the whole situation was back to normal except that some of us were doing well over the limit to make up for lost ime.

Terminal 2, Heathrow, 19:07.

No problem at the check-in counter.

No message on the board.

But I noticed a headline on the newsstand and bought a copy on my way to the departure gate and didn't like it much. Innocent bystander shot dead in Geneva. He was a British tourist and his name was Hunter.

Things were getting rough out there.

'Would you like anything to drink?'

A brilliant smile, the eyes by Michelangelo.

'No thank you.'

London tilting away below, its lights hazy with rain.

'Something to read?'

'No.'

Thank you very much, I've read all I want to. He'd been coming out of a bar along the Rue de Lac: there was some kind of disturbance and an "inebriated patron" had fired a gun and the unfortunate British tourist had been hit by accident. Owing to the confusion the police had been unable to make an arrest.

You can bet on that. There's a strict routine and we all use it when we're hot-operating in a red sector. They'd gone for Hunter with the whole thing worked out: timing, topography, escape lanes and mobile pickups and finally a fake brawl to provide the confusion. And Francisco Ventura had vanished into the thin mountain air and left the Bureau's signals network quivering. Quite possibly the man with the niner-niner directive had been ordered to freeze his movements as a preliminary to switching him to Geneva and if that were the case they'd have to get him out there in an RAF interceptor with automatic over-flying rights under the NATO umbrella. They'd do that, if this operation was big enough.

By the way things were shaping, I thought it was.

Gjesk lqoilz piu oma kelasx.

May Hunter rest in peace.

I did some inversions and threw in five alert numerals and transposed them, cupping the thing in my hand and taking a look when I felt a need for reinforcement. The radicals were tricky considering I'd chosen a short flexible pattern, and it took me fifteen minutes before I was confident.