'You've been told we'd like you to work with the KGB on a certain assignment?'

'Yes.'

'How does it appeal?'

'I'll need more information.'

He looked away, at the guards by the entrance or beyond them: I think he'd stopped actually seeing the environment, and had slipped into alpha waves. I noticed pockmarks below his left ear, some kind of scarring left by an explosion, perhaps, a grenade. It would explain why he always turned his head to listen with his right ear.

'More information,' he said softly. 'Of course.' He looked back at me again. 'This man Yasolev. Would you trust him?'

'What with?'

'Your life.'

I thought about it, then said, 'I'd trust him to keep his word to me. If he said, for instance, that whatever the orders from Moscow he wouldn't cut me down, I'd accept that.'

'Would you.'

It wasn't a question. I didn't add anything; he was giving me the information I needed by asking me things and listening, so that he'd know what his next question should be. That sounds complicated but it isn't really; it's the classic technique for limiting the information to what the other man needs to know, so that the least amount of information possible is given. I wished him a lot of luck in this case because I was going to want a lot of data before I'd consider working with the KGB, and he knew that.

'Would you be prepared to work inside the German Democratic Republic?'

'Under what kind of cover?'

'Whatever you felt comfortable with, plus the option of going clandestine at any given time.'

He meant I could bolt for a burrow if things got hot.

'I'd want a guarantee,' I told him, 'that you'd pull me out of there if I made the request.'

It didn't sound a lot to ask but he knew what I was saying. It could mean having to send a chopper across the frontier under the radar and locate me and get me out of whatever hole I was in, and do it in a rainstorm or in the dark with not much time left before the opposition closed right in on me or I lost too much blood or couldn't signal or give my position or lift a finger for that matter. Or it could mean calling a whole covey of sleeper agents and contacts and couriers out of the ground and sending them in to find me if they could, and that meant that Shepley could reach the point where he'd have to balance the value of this single shadow executive against the risk of exposing half the resident moles and sleepers and agents-in-place in the whole of East Berlin or the whole of East Germany, and if the scales didn't tip in my direction he'd have to go back on whatever guarantee he'd given me and throw me to the dogs.

He was watching me steadily.

'We can't do that,' he said, 'as you know.'

I'd just been trying to find out if he was ready to promise me the impossible in order to tempt me into the mission. So far he was playing straight.

'All right.' I shifted my stance, feeling the need for movement. Standing as close as this to Shepley was like standing under a high-voltage power line. Maybe he didn't always pack this amount of tension but he was doing it now. He hadn't, after all, come to Berlin to try the apfelstrudel. 'All right, then I'd want your guarantee that you wouldn't cut me down, whatever the pressure on you.'

He looked at his shoes.

I think someone made a movement beside me, Elliott, on my left, a more vulnerable man than Chandler, more easily embarrassed; or he knew — where perhaps Chandler didn't — that two missions ago London had put a bomb under me because I'd become suddenly and critically expendable, and I'd only got back because I'd found it and pulled out the flint. I didn't want them to do it again.

'That would be difficult,' Shepley said, and looked up at me with his pale mother-of-pearl eyes and began sorting out my synapses again to see what I was thinking.

'Yes, but that's what I'd need from you. From you personally.'

'That would be an irrevocable condition, if you agreed to work on this assignment?'

'Yes.'

It was warm in here, in this waste of cold concrete on an October night in latitude 52, the sweat creeping on my face, on my hands. I hadn't been ready for this when they'd told me to land in Berlin. With the head of the Bureau out here and with the timing so tight that they'd had to switch my flights without warning and shove me into an underground garage face to face with the stark proposal that I should work in liaison with the KGB, I was feeling the heat. God knew what the background was to this thing but it was obviously ultra-high-level and I suppose there was a degree of paranoia creeping in — I felt these people were pulling me into a vortex before I had a chance of getting clear; otherwise I'd never try making conditions like this without even knowing what they wanted me to do.

'By "cut you down",' Shepley's soft voice came, 'you mean order your death. Is that correct?'

I liked him for that. We're all so fond of euphemisms like eliminate, terminate, cut down, so forth, but this man said what he meant.

'Yes,' I told him.

He didn't look away. 'You mean you'd put your life higher than the success of the mission? Of a mission as important as you must realise this one is?'

I turned and took a step, looking at the oil-stained concrete, kicking a broken chip of it with the toe of my shoe, watching it skitter and come to a stop against a pillar.

'No,' I told him. It was the only answer. It's what we settle for when we sign up, and when we sign again at yearly intervals to confirm our commitment. It's on this one that most of the new recruits back out, and I don't blame them. I'd signed because this was the life I wanted, and I was ready to accept the death they might one day want of me.

At the Bureau we don't have a licence to kill; we have a licence to die. 'No, I wouldn't put my life higher than the success of the mission. But look — ' I turned back and met his eyes again '- all I'm asking is that you'll let me do it for myself, that's all. If — '

'There might not be time to ask you.'

'But you wouldn't have to. I'd know if — '

'Not necessarily.'

'Look, I'm seasoned, you know that. I've — '

'You're being impractical.'

'With my life on the line, surely I — '

'We can't let you tie our hands.'

'Oh for Christ's sake, I'd have a capsule on me, so what are we talking about? I just don't want to be stabbed in the — ' but I stopped right there because I could hear the tone in my voice, pitching a degree higher, showing my nerves, no better than bloody Elliott.

The sound of an engine came suddenly and headlights swung into the entrance, dipping as the car reached the ramp, and by this time we'd all turned and were standing with our backs to the light, our faces hidden, our shadows standing against the wall like a group photograph in silhouette, none of us moving as we stood listening to the whimper of tyres as the brakes came on, a man's voice — one of the NATO guards — then another voice, fainter, from inside the car, the engine idling and then speeding up, the sound of the transmission in reverse, the group of silhouettes against the wall shifting to one side as the headlights swung away and the gloom came down again and we turned like puppets, taking up our positions again.

'You have a reputation,' Shepley's soft voice came, 'of showing resistance when offered a new mission. I'll suffer you not to waste my time.'

'This thing,' I said at once, 'was thrown at me cold.'

'I take your point. But time is of the essence. We need to hurry.'

'All right, but I need to know more, a lot more.'

'Of course. You'll be fully briefed. For the moment — ' he began pacing suddenly and I joined him, glad of the chance of movement '- for the moment I simply want you to agree to a meeting with Yasolev. It would take place in East Berlin; he wouldn't come to you, but you would go to him. This was a concession on my part during the initial approach. For your protection — or for the protection, shall I say, of the executive undertaking the assignment — I pushed the KGB very hard for a hostage for us to hold in London, and they finally agreed to send a major-general of the Red Army.' We reached a wall and turned back, our footsteps raising small echoes. 'I also demanded four of our agents — SIS, not Bureau — to be freed from captivity in Moscow and returned to London, together with three Americans. I therefore offered the token concession of our meeting Yasolev on his home ground.'