Blade stood up and somehow managed to finish stripping himself without fumbling or delay. Somehow he reached Elva and lifted her in his arms. Somehow he carried her to the bed and placed her on it. The room was so warm that they did not need to crawl under even the top blanket. Probably neither of them would have done so even if the room had been as chilly as the night outside. It would have held them apart for a few more seconds, and that would have been too much time for either of them.

Elva lay down on top of the blanket, and Blade lay down on top of her. It was as simple as that. Blade moved deep inside Elva, and Elva twined herself around Blade and matched his movements with her own. At first they moved to separate rhythms, then the rhythms matched. They soared steadily toward the same goal, and they reached it in so nearly the same moment that neither could ever tell afterward who was first. Both could tell that the climax seemed to whirl them along with the terrible and beautiful force of an autumn wind whirling leaves through the air. Neither of them could tell anything for quite a long time after that.

Eventually they both realized that the room seemed cooler, even cold. It chilled the sweat that ran down Blade's neck and trickled down between Elva's breasts, and sent new and unpleasant shivers up and down both their spines. They crept under the blankets, and the warmth they felt then slowly built until another kind of warmth was once again flowing through them. When that warmth was at last exhausted, they slept.

Blade and Elva began their relationship with an intensity that could not have lasted even if they'd both had unlimited free time. Since both had jobs to do, there was only so much time they could spare for each other. Still, they made love again in the morning before returning to headquarters in time for a late breakfast. They were also able to snatch a night in town every ten days or so.

There turned out to be more time for them than Blade had expected. Summer was passing and autumn not far off before he was called in for the first full briefing on his next assignment.

«Your mission will involve assisting an extremely valuable defector to get out of one of the satellites. You will have the assistance of as much of the underground in the area as may still be functioning at the time.»

«General Golovin's been at work again?»

R grimaced, as if the cigar in his mouth tasted sour. «General Golovin, and also some of his handpicked younger colleagues. He's a good picker, so they're not to be despised any more than he is.»

R gave up on the cigar and threw it angrily into the wastebasket without bothering to stub it out. Fortunately the wastebasket was nearly empty. One piece of paper flared up in a puff of blue smoke, then died out. «We also have a Probability Two estimate that there's a major leak within the Special Operations Division itself.»

The Probability Scale ran from One, a nearly mathematical certainty, to Seven, almost impossible. A Probability Two for a major internal security leak was bad news. Blade mentally braced himself. He knew what the next question would be, and it also would be bad news.

«What is your best personal estimate of Elva Thompson?»

Blade let his breath out in a long hiss, while his mind swiftly assembled the most accurate words it could find. «I would say Probability Three that she is unreliable. I can't honestly give a Probability Estimate on whether she is unreliable for personal reasons or-political ones.»

«After six weeks of your relationship with her?» R showed no signs of being concerned about the relationship itself, only about what Blade might have learned in it.

«Yes.» Blade matched R's cool stare with one of his own. «I don't think this is the first time it's been hard to tell the difference between a gossip and a subversive.»

R laughed shortly. «Well put, and quite right. However, I think you would agree that gossip can reach subversive ears much too easily. So I don't think we can take any more chances with Elva Thompson or several other people who are also under suspicion.»

Blade would have been uneasy by now, except that R's voice held no hint that he was planning to haul Elva or anyone else before a firing squad. Apparently he had something less drastic in mind.

«Fortunately, we can kill a whole flock of suspect birds with one stone,» R continued. «We are setting up a shadow Special Operations HQ in Norfolk next month. The dozen or so key posts will be duplicated, so that the new facility can take over part of the administrative and planning load-even all of it, in an emergency. We'll assign all of our suspect people to the shadow HQ. They won't be getting any plans or operations material for several months, so they can't do a damned thing, regardless of their motives.»

«Meanwhile, a real shadow headquarters will be set up in still a third place?» put in Blade.

«Yes. Probably somewhere in Scotland. Norfolk's a little too close to the Nord Sea coast for comfort.»

Blade nodded. R was handling the situation by one of the classic methods. The best way of handling a suspected enemy spy was not to simply eliminate him on the spot. That gave the enemy useful information about your security measures. Instead, you created a sort of administrative isolation booth for the suspect, keeping him there and seeing that he got nothing but false information. That not only told the enemy nothing, it could also deceive and confuse him.

«In due course, we will be able to tell whether any of the set of suspects we've reassigned were involved in the leak. Then we can tell whether we need to shoot them for treason or merely dismiss them for talking out of turn.» R smiled at the last phrase, but it was an extremely thin and entirely mirthless smile. «Do you have any suggestions, Captain Blade?»

Blade shook his head. Regardless of what R had proposed, he wouldn't have said anything that might be interpreted as a plea to deal lightly with Elva Thompson. R's actual proposal threatened Elva with nothing worse than boredom, at least for the time being.

«Now,» said R briskly. «Back to the matter of your forthcoming assignment.» He raised into view a bound stack of envelopes as thick as the manuscript of a long novel. «This is the basic data. You have a full week to assimilate it, and I suspect you will be needing every bit of the time. Oh, one more point. I'm trying to put through your promotion to major. We have a few vacancies now.»

Blade didn't ask how those vacancies had come about. He didn't need to know, and in fact he didn't altogether want to know. One thing he did want to know, however-

«Could you tell me what kind of defector I'm going to be dealing with?» That could make a good deal of difference in a tight spot. If the defector was a deadly marksman with the physique of a champion soccer player, he could be an asset. If he was seventy years old, half blind and totally deaf, he would be a very different proposition.

«It's a woman named Rilla Haran. She's the most brilliant of Russland's younger geneticists, responsible for some fundamental breakthroughs in genetic manipulation and large-scale cloning. Apparently she felt that she could no longer lend herself to the use of her discoveries for military purposes, so she- Captain Blade, are you listening to me?»

«Yes, sir.» That was not quite correct. Blade was listening to R. He was also listening to an echo in his own mind-the echo of J's words as they walked along the corridor below the Tower of London.

«In genetics, we've had reports that the Russians are on the pointing of cracking the codes for direct genetic manipulation.»

So now he was about to go off in search of a young lady from Russland who'd been doing exactly the same kind of work, and who carried in her mind-what?

No one in Englor knew at the moment. But he, Richard Blade, would be among the first to learn.