Now the tricky part. His three guards were becoming impatient.

Blade got partially up, groaned hideously, then sank to the seat again. He tried to smile at the men. They stared blankly back at him.

"Be just half a mo," Blade said. "Ohhhhhh - now my guts are cramping. Ohhhhhh - "

He raised, turned, put his hands on the sides of the bowl and began to retch miserably. It was a convincing performance. One of the men said, "He is a sick bloke, all right. Glad it ain't me."

Blade reached down into his own excreta and palmed the capsule. Done. He retched for another minute, acting out his part, then staggered weakly to the washbowl. The razor blade lay waiting. This was also tricky. The capsule was the size of three aspirins - he had swallowed it with oil - and he held it between his left thumb and first finger as he washed his hands. His guards watched.

Blade retched again, bent over the bowl, groaned. He brushed the razor blade into the bowl and waited. Had they seen it?

"Get a jump on," one of them said. "You think we want to fool with you all the bleeding night?"

Blade washed his hands. He gashed the thin shell of the capsule with the razor and dropped the capsule and blade into the bowl. He ran a thin stream of water, saw the capsule vanish down the drain. The acid was at work. Two minutes.

Blade dried his hands on toilet paper as he began to count to himself. Nothing could stop the explosion now. The RXD 1, cyclonite hexogen, T 9, was a liquid plastic that was the latest thing. Only atomic fission exceeded it in fury. In the tight space of the drains it was going to tear everything to hell.

A minute and a half now. The acid was eating away at the inner capsule. It was precise. Two minutes and the acid would eat through and activate the explosive. The explosion, Blade thought, would be mainly upward. But there would be a fringe effect and he would just have to take his chances. He kept counting.

He slowed his steps. Not too fast. He set the training post in the courtyard as his marker. Beyond that he could not go. The rain had thickened. That might help.

Blade listened for the Sten gunner taking the cocking lock off. That he didn't want. That would mean that he took a burst in the back as he ran for the wall. He did not hear the snick he dreaded. They were approaching the training post now. The rain wept and the cobbles were like dirty glass under his bare feet. He began to pull the blanket around him with one hand, bunching it.

They were at the post. For the first time he thought of it as an executioner's post. Stop thinking. Time to go.

Blade stopped and pointed. He screamed, "Rat! Look at that big rat!"

The man behind him bumped into him. Blade whirled and flung his blanket at the Sten gunner. It fluttered and folded over the man's head. Blade butted hard into the man behind him and hurled him back into the third man, who had just raised his pistol. Blade ran.

For the wall on his right. He ducked and he ran, not trying to zig-zag - too slippery for that - and he put on a burst of speed that he had not known he was capable of. Behind him a pistol snapped and the bullet whirred past, smacked the wall and disintegrated. Fragments stung his bare legs. Another shot.

Blade lunged at the wall. It was six feet high and he caught the top with one mighty bound, getting his elbows over and pulling himself up. His spine was an icy rod. Where was the Sten?

A nasty chatter told him. Part of the brick wall exploded at his left elbow. Then Blade was over and falling into the soft earth of a flower bed and running into darkness. Roots and weeds and branches caught at him and clawed and dragged and slashed his flesh. He fell. He got up and kept running into nothing. He held his hands outstretched to keep from braining himself on a tree or another wall. He slipped down an incline and rolled through gravel and rock, punctured himself a few more times and ended up against a thick hedge. Dark. He was as good as blind.

The sky lit up behind him. A huge red flower blossomed in the wet night sky. It turned yellow at the edges and before the blast knocked him into the hedge he saw that a lane ran just beyond it. He was flung painfully into the hedge and half through it, wedged into it, while a great G force slammed at his belly and he watched dark objects rise and Soar over what had been the stable. Strange shrapnel pattered down about him as the first sharp flame began to die.

Richard Blade forced his way on through the hedge, came out on the narrow muddy lane and began to run as best he could. He hurt all over.

Thomas Chatters, of the Salisbury Fire Department, never forgot that night. He was to tell the tale a thousand times in the pubs, while his friends stood him pints, and as an old man he told it to his children's children.

He would say: "Got this call to Nine Yews Manor, we did. Lord Hale's place, only the Lord wasn't living there since his divorce. Empty, it were, or supposed to be.

"Engines from St. Giles got there first, you see, and we come along after. Right when we're turning into the lane there comes this great bloke walking out of the woods. Naked as the day he was born, I swear. All cut and bleeding, too. I swear, and don't mind saying he give us all a bit of fright. Great huge lad, he was, and as cool as ice. Walks right up to Ned, as was Captain then, and asks for a slicker to cover him. When he gets that he takes Ned aside and whispers to him. We was all watching, like, and could see poor Ned was puzzled and maybe a little afraid. We see Ned shake his head. Then this big bloke - dark man he was with a stubble, dark, too, and a mean look - this bloke reaches out and shakes Ned like he was a baby and yells something at him and Ned he sudden agrees to whatever it was and the next thing we know Ned puts me in charge. Just like that. And Ned is driving away with the stranger in his own car, turning back to Salisbury. Strangest thing is - Ned never would tell what the stranger said to him."

Blade was dropped off in Salisbury at a police station near Poultry Cross. He whispered a code word to the Sergeant and was given a private room and a phone. The Sergeant left him to rustle up some hot tea and a drop of something to stiffen it.

J was not at Copra House. The night duty man said that he could be reached in Prince's Gate.

Lord Leighton answered the phone himself. His Lordship wasted no time. He congratulated Blade on being alive and, he hoped, well, and turned him over to J.

J sounded ravished. Like a man in shock and drawn so fine that he might go over the edge any moment. After listening to Blade's brief explanation J said: "Stay there. I'll start a man down immediately for you. Any emergency needs?"

Blade said that he could do with some clothes. All of the local coppers were small men. Or so it seemed.

J would see to it. He sounded so apathetic that Blade said, "I get the feeling that something has gone badly wrong, sir. Aside from the whole plan, I mean. They made fools of us. But there will be another time. And there are a few of them that will never bother us again."

J was silent. Blade said, "I know something is wrong, sir. You haven't asked me for positive identification yet. How do you know I am the real Richard Blade?" He laughed.

J did not laugh. He said, "I don't have to, dear boy. I know who you are. I should, damn it all! We just sent the fake Blade through the computer."

Blade could think of nothing to say. He was not sure that he had heard correctly. The connection was not too good.

"And you," J continued, "are going after him. Get up here as fast as you bloody well can."