The Bureau has facilities not known publicly to exist for inserting into the twice-daily Bourse price announcements the name and movement of a fictitious stock, in my case Quota Freight Tenders. (At the time of the Zossen operation, ‘Quota’ was simply the call-sign (the memorandum being Q) and it could be varied five ways: Quota Freight Tenders in full, Quota Freight, Quota Tenders, Quota alone, and Q.F.T.) Each variation is in itself the key-word to one of four code-systems, and the agent normally uses the book, because the permutations of a single ‘price’ and ‘movement’ (878¼. Plus 2½in my case on that particular day) runs into thousands of signals the meaning of an 8 standing alone is different from that of an 8 appearing before a 7, and different again if it appears before 78. Also the fractions can change the whole of the signal given by the main digits. The ‘movement’ of the share can in its turn change the signal formed by the ‘price.’ I possess no code-book because a systematic permutation scheme can be committed to memory more easily than any random list of figures.

The Eurosound programmes are legitimately aimed at an audience demanding light music for housewives, up-to-the-minute news flashes and entertainment sponsored by the top Continental industrial concerns. That kind of audience does not want market news, and it would have been discontinued after the first probes by listener research, but the sponsors insisted on two daily readings of the Bourse because their stock was listed and it gave them free publicity especially when prices rose. The fact remains that since the inception of the Communication Post and Bourse system no listener has ever telephoned Eurosound to ask who the hell Quota Freight Tenders is and where the stock can be bought.

The reply-system has two advantages, especially when an operator must not carry radio. A letter mailed to him in reply to his would take longer and could be intercepted even if unstamped. A letter delivered to me at the Prinz Johan Hotel would have its tax paid by the desk and would be lying in a pigeonhole for as long as I was absent – sometimes a matter of days. Not safe. Nor is it convenient to pick up mail post restante; post offices are scarcer than beer-houses and an agent would in any case have to carry the letter until he could burn it and could be forced to give it up at gun-point if an adverse party meant to have it. The second advantage of the P and B system is that it can reach an agent anywhere in Europe at a precise time when he can arrange to be alone to take the signal. Also the signal goes direct into his mind without trace. He can, if he must, receive a signal while standing in a public bar with an adverse party at his elbow, and receive it in total secrecy.

But it's a slow system and is never used in emergency. Emergency justifies risk, and the risk in any country is that the Bureau may, for many reasons, be working against the interests of that country's police services. In my case a telephone call to Local Berlin Control would assume a risk and therefore be made only in emergency, because I was working against the interests of certain members of the Federal police services, the unknown ex- and neo-Nazis riddling the department from the highest echelons (people like Ewald Peters, just arrested) down to the constabulary. Any member of the police, seeing me leaving a telephone, could use his credentials and ask the hotel clerk, the barman or the operator what number I had called, and could find the address. Also, the line could be tapped.

Against this risk we have two safeguards. There is a simple code system whereby "I'm dining with Davis tonight " means "I'm going to ground " and so on. If the signal is more complicated and a great deal of vital information has to be phoned in during an emergency, we speak in Rabinda-Tanath, the dialect of the Lahsritsa hill-tribes of East Pakistan, which is even more basic than original Malay and has the advantage of being instantly adaptable. (Oddly, there is no word for ‘bullet’, and we would use ‘kill-ball’. ‘Motor-car’ would be ‘fire-cart’.) A Lahsritsa is stationed permanently in Local Berlin Control, happily studying for a degree in Literature in between emergency calls.

There had been no urgency in getting confirmation of Pol's identity and function, so that I had posted his photograph and set the system going. A photograph is always carried by an agent ordered to make contact with someone who has never met him before. Its receipt at the Bureau, without any message alongside, is taken to mean one thing:

Who is he?

He was 878¼. Plus 2½. TRUE NAME GIVEN. TOTALLY RELIABLE. LIAISON LONDON.

That was why I'd never heard of him before. I'd been out of London for two years: Egypt, Cuba, now Germany. He was one of the new links normally liaising direct with London. I would never have seen him at all if KLJ hadn't bought it and thus created an emergency. Willi Pol (his Christian name had been in the memorandum) had been flown out to make contact and hand me the baby. Where was he now? Flying back. Lucky bastard.

Something about the darkened radio dial afflicted me, on the very edge of consciousnesss, and I worried it until the answer came. KLJ Petroleum had been knocked out of the market, and wouldn't be quoted again.

I woke naturally at the top of a late sleep-curve and thought at once of her lean shoulders and the way she stood, because she'd been the last image of consciousness, quite unbidden.

There'd been a black panther in a dream, already fading. I beat around but couldn't bring it any clearer. It was too late. Dreams are gone in the first few seconds of waking, like ghosts at cock-crow. But she'd been there all right, a dark succuba.

Progress had been made in more practical directions. Before sleep I'd fed in the problem and by morning it was resolved. Decision: action this day.

I had assumed too much, and it had put me into a false position. I had assumed that the car had been out to crush me, and not the Lindt girl. I had assumed that the man who had begun tagging me along the Unter den Eichen was an adverse party: and I'd been wrong. I could have been wrong about the crush attempt too. They might not have been after me at all. They might not even know of my existence. My position would be false if I went on believing necessarily that while I hunted Zossen he hunted me.

So I still had to draw his fire. If they were already on to me, they'd stick, so I couldn't lose by taking action. I had to get where they wanted me, and hope to survive long enough for the overkill.

I was at the West Berlin Public Prosecutor's office before ten o'clock with a file on three suspects and a different set of papers showing me to be working in liaison with the Z Commission – which indeed I was. For six months I'd operated in strict hush; now I would head across open ground so that Phoenix could see me.

"We knew nothing about these three people." Herr Ebert said plaintively.

"You do now, Herr Generalstaatsanwalt."

He nodded ponderously; his head was like a great smooth stone balanced upon another. I had checked his dossier months ago because I'd been working through his office indirectly, unknown to him, merely sending in the evidence as I gathered it and leaving him to pass on the orders of arrest to the Z-polizei. He was a Socialist and a Resistance veteran with a record of escapes from concentration camps equalled by few. The political cartoonist Federmann had pictured him with his huge arms carrying a Jewish child through the mud of littered swastikas, and the original sketch was framed on the wall above him. Invoking enemies by the hundreds as he applied himself to ridding the German cupboards of their skeletons, he wished it to be known that of all the officials firmly astride the fence with a foot dabbling nervously on each side, he was not one.