I didn't ask, when he left me, who the other man was, the one he'd buzzed. It wasn't my business.

He caught his breath but I said it was all right and he fell into step, quickening his to mine: I'd been hanging about for nearly an hour and I needed some circulation. We walked by the Vistula, along Kosciszkowskie, because it was mainly for traffic and there wouldn't be so many M.O. patrols.

Shakily he said: 'I thought you'd been arrested.'

'What for?' It had checked me for an instant because I didn't think his communications could be as fast as that; then I realised what the poor little devil meant.

'Well I mean I've been expecting you to contact me.'

'I have.'

The snow was brittle, charcoal grey from the smoke of the factories, and above us the sodium lamps cast a pallor rather than light; objects and their shadows looked derelict, destroyed, as if we picked our way through the ashen afterglow of the city that not long before had burned under the droning sky. In a different way it was dying now, with less dignity, less rage.

This morning they'd done for Horodecki, a major-general at the military academy, not a headline, just a couple of column-inches on page three, a man of honour and high purposes, his brother the chairman of the National Assembly and a leading delegate for the East-West talks. No trial — he was too popular for dangerous publicity but summary medical certification by a psychiatric board: onset of acute paranoid manifestations with earlier developed symptoms of atherosclerosis. Put him away. No dignity in that, no rage.

And widespread dissension among the proletariat, page six, with absenteeism at the factories up by thirty per cent. Pilfering of state property, minor sabotage and slogans across the walls, the city dying again but in a different way, no mourners but the dead themselves.

'Have you got anything for me?'

He fumbled for an envelope, dropping it because of his stiff gloves, and I stood looking down at him as he picked it off the snow. He never got anything right, tripping on things and dropping things, his hands never steady, his nerves in his eyes. Had he been any better than this before Egerton had reached for him out of the dark and infected him with the spirit of subterfuge and sent him out here to forage for scraps among the dustbins of a sick society? Had he been all right, once, all of a piece and uncontaminated, busy with his own little schoolboy dreams of lighting a candle for the oppressed? Not Egerton's responsibility, of course: 'he was rather wished on to me'. But Egerton could have refused to direct him if he'd chosen, instead of which he'd been party to the decision to use an innocent for their own ends: for the ends of the Bureau, a sacrifice to the sacred bull. So here was their key man in Warsaw, wiping the wet soot off an envelope before holding it out to me, his eyes wide with worry behind the glasses, his face deathly under the sodium lamps.

'I'm sorry,' he said.

It had been such a nice clean envelope, his very first report for London, and as I took it I cursed him for uncovering something that I'd thought had been long ago buried under all those years of deceit and betrayal: a sense of compassion.

As my thumb ripped along the fold I wondered by how much Herrick himself had been party to that decision: because he could have refused, too. But like the people of this city he'd been driven to pilfering a bit of freedom for himself, half-frightened and half-defiant, by taking on an enterprise so secret that despite the official sanction of strangers his own father couldn't be told. That was the only kick he was getting out of this: he was striking a petty blow against tyranny, and the deceit in it was prescribed by others, leaving his conscience clear.

'This all?'

'There's quite a lot. It's closely typed.'

I read bits of it as we neared the bridge. Fifteen autonomous units dispersed topographically about the city at what appeared to be strategic points, liaison by cutouts, fully completed arrangements for street barricades, sniper-posts, and grenade areas, the three main power stations already rigged for blasting by radio-controlled detonators. Initial stages marked Sroda minus 10, Sroda minus 9, so forth, final stages just marked Sroda. Wednesday. Wednesday 20th, three days before the opening of the talks. Seven days from now.

'Sailing a bit near the wind, aren't they?'

'How do you mean?'

'They're giving themselves three days to blow this thing open and clear up all the blood and brickdust before the delegates arrive. If any delegates arrive at all I'd say most of them'll be crouching in doorways counting their rosaries, wouldn't you?'

'The whole idea is to mount a threat, not an action.' Excitement came into his tone. 'There'll be action all right if they're driven to it, but the aim is to bring off a bloodless coup d'etat by showing their strength at a. time when it'll be too late for the Warsaw Pact troops to retaliate. The talks are very important to Moscow — you'll find a summary on page five of the public references to the Russian hopes of their success — and no one in Czyn believes they'll risk sending tanks into the city at a time like this. How could they?'

A light wind blew across the bridge and I folded the sheets and put them away and we walked faster again. 'Who's the «Leader»? Several mentions.’

'They never use his name. I think he's a deputy in the Party Committee, quite high up — that's why they're confident that there'll be no tanks sent in, you see, because someone in his position would know what Moscow's intentions would be, at a confrontation.’

'Get his name.'

In the distance we heard a stationary diesel throbbing, and people shouting. Half a mile upriver there was a ring of floodlights with figures moving about; the boom of a crane stuck out from the bank across the break in the ice, with a dark oblong turning slowly at the end of the cable.

'What's happening down there?' Merrick stopped, looking across the balustrade of the bridge.

Water poured from the oblong shape as it was swung towards the bank. The shouting died away and the figures were still now, watching. It had been a cold job: they must have been hours at it.

'How many copies,' I asked him when he'd caught me up, 'have you got of this report?'

'I've got the only carbon, and you've got the original.’

'In future I want the carbon. I won't be adding anything, you're doing this job, not me. How many people at the Embassy know?'

'Only H. E.'

I saw them and turned round. 'Come on, Merrick.' He came trotting after me. 'When's bag day?'

'Tomorrow.' His breath wheezed. 'Eleven-thirty.'

'Put this in.'

C-537441 plus visa plus identity card and a short encoded note that ought to take Egerton's mind off his chilblains for a bit: Blown cover. Send new one. West German image. Also new i.c. as per example enclosed for Wanda Rek, 121 Ulica Niska, profession journalist, other details same, same photo. 10 below, you're cushy.

He took the packet.

'And don't drop the bloody thing.'

Third series, fifth-digit duplications. There was no point in using the Telex or dip. radio because all I wanted out of Egerton were some papers to show so that I didn't have to keep spinning round like a ferret when it sees a fox, it was inconvenient. Merrick had a job getting his breath and I didn't think he even knew what the hurry was but he'd cotton on, give him a hundred years and he'd cotton on.

'When does the bag come in?'

'Saturday. Will there be something for you?'

It wasn't giving them long but it'd shake the dust up, never a bad thing at the Bureau. I didn't want to turn my head: they'd just started on to the bridge when I'd seen them and we'd been walking faster than they should be but the trouble was that the pressure was getting higher every day: unless you looked like a robot they'd pull you in and if there weren't any tanks in this city a week from now it'd be because there was nobody left to shoot at.