In trap-shooting the pigeon is released from the trap and then shot down.

This was my situation now.

I had stopped for a few minutes at the end of the bridge to survey the terrain; now I had reached a street in Zehlendorf, and stopped again.

One of them was seventy-five yards distant, standing in shadow. Another was closer, waiting some fifty yards in the opposite direction. (It was the pincer trick, one tag rounding a block and keeping ahead. It is useful but can be done only when there are plenty of tags.) A third man was not far from the first and I couldn't see him but I knew where he was because I'd seen him fade. The taxi had pulled up quietly at the intersection and no one got out.

A clock struck eleven. I listened patiently to the strokes, calmed by their measured certainties. It was a half-hour since I had left the bridge and so far I'd seen five of them.

There was no hurry. Some time before dawn I must get a signal through and do it without their knowledge. On the way from the bridge I had passed four phone-kiosks but couldn't use them. If I went into a kiosk to call up Control in Rabinda-Tanath I would come out into a hail of fire. They would then go into the kiosk and call up their highest contact in one of the police departments, probably (and preferably) the Kriminal polizei because they could get a quicker reaction from the Berlin Exchange. The exchange would be told to find out what number had just been called from the kiosk and to find out the name and address of the subscriber. Phoenix would then send a party into Local Control Berlin to seize all papers and personnel.

Phoenix was ready to launch a big-scale operation and they couldn't do it before they were certain of how much my Control knew about it. It must be an operation whose success would depend on absolute secrecy and/or surprise. Pol had told me: "If you help us bring down Phoenix you'll save a million lives and it will almost certainly cost you yours." He had said: "We want information badly. We want to know where Phoenix has its base. They want information too, and as badly. They want to know how much we know of their intentions. Their most direct way of getting that information is through you." He had said: "Your mission is to get near enough to see them and signal their position to us, giving us the advantage."

I had believed him at last and still did. They would be waiting now in the room on the ninth floor of the corner building at Unter den Eichen and Rhoner-allee with a full staff, waiting for me to signal. The line would be open to London. Phoenix was also waiting for me to signal, so that they could locate Local Berlin and wipe it out before my people could reach their base and wipe out Phoenix. It was my own situation in macrocosm: the kill and the overkill.

There were no more doubts that Phoenix did in fact intend launching a big-scale operation: they were taking immense trouble with me, keeping me alive and hoping to crack me open by one method after another. I was the third operator to have been assigned to this one mission. They had let Charington get too close and had killed him off early. They had given Kenneth Lindsay Jones more rope – he'd been within rifle-shot of their base when they had killed him. Now they had let me right in and let me go again, matching my last single throw.

I was now certain that KLJ had died because he'd been working with a contact. He had approached that contact within sight of the Phoenix base and Phoenix had panicked and shot them both. (It is not easy, even in Berlin, to dispose of a corpse. Probably they had managed to get a sinker round the contact, but KLJ was found floating.) He had got so close to base (and had possibly been let in and out again, as I had been) that the risk of his passing his information to Control was too high, and it was a double risk because of the contact.

Now they were going the limit because their need to locate Local Berlin was fully urgent. Ergo, the time for the launching of their operation must be getting very short.

It would have been Oktober who had triggered the present situation. He had lost patience when Inga had failed to report any success in interrogating me on the Dachau principle, which she had been ordered to do. He had decided to try me with the file on Sprungbrett. Helmut Braun had been sent in with it to convince me that he was a defector, as I was thought to believe Inga herself.

The file trap had possibly been tried on KLJ, in which case I was surviving him only because I had no contact. It may have been simply that they didn't have sufficient tags to cover him and his contact safely. Tonight they had five working on me, probably more.

Sprungbrett didn't look too bad on paper and they wouldn't expect a field-operator to have much knowledge of military strategy. But there were some obvious flaws and it was then that I had decided on my single throw, gambling on the assumption that the file had been given freely into my hand in order to force me into action. I was to grab it and try to get it to my Control and make the touch-down before they tripped me.

Their risk was slight: Sprungbrett was a faked file, got up specially for me, and if I managed to reach Control with it I'd have wasted my time. But it would give them a chance to locate my base by tagging me to whatever point of contact I made.

I'd never seen Braun or a photograph of Braun. I was sure that Inga was still allied with me but too scared to make a move in front of Braun. I think she would have told me that the Sprungbrett file was a fake if it had been possible to talk. It wasn't. First Braun, then the man in the lift, then Braun again in the taxi. He must have been worried when I said I was going into the Phoenix base. He had no orders to cover that one. So he stayed behind us in the apartment and either made a quick phone-call or tipped off one of the tags that were by that time thick in the area. The message had gone into the Phoenix base: Quiller is on his way.

They were thrown off balance. They had covered the area with heavy tagging, given me the file, and sent me along the path to my base. Now I was heading for theirs.

Braun left the taxi first and went straight in to see Oktober without my knowledge (he was a ‘defector’). He told him I had arrived outside. Decision: to carry on with the same game. I'd read the file and wanted confirmation. I would have it.

Inga and I were kept waiting in the hall. In the operations room they set up the map-table for Mediterranean Area and positioned the markers: a ten-minute undertaking with a section leaf table of that kind where a dozen maps can be slipped in and out together with the magnetic strips.

They brought me in.

A defector is a creature as peculiar as the chameleon. He will tend to take on the colour of his environment. In the London Bureau we had a man who worked with us for five years and defected during a mission in Tangier. Two weeks and he was back with us and we knew what had happened but didn't tell him. He was sent out again under cover that he didn't suspect and three days later we sat listening to the tape: he had met the adverse party again and talked to him in a room where we had miked the ceiling-fan. He told the adverse party that he had defected: yet we knew by his actions that he was now back on his mission and doing a fine job for us. But we'd shut down on him and he found out and hanged himself on the iron grille of a shrine in the Iglesia San Augustino.

Normally a true defector will get out and stay out unless great pressures (financial or political) add their influence to his already uncertain values. Then he will either double or bounce and they mostly bounce. Our man hanged himself because he'd lost direction and couldn't find his way home because he no longer knew what home was.