Oh are they really well that's very interesting.

It came fast and grew gigantic, a black mountain on the move towards me, and she lay there with her lean body stretched under the lamp, her shadowed ivory breast tipped with blue in the deathly light and a dark curl creeping in the wing of her arm, then the sky was blotted out and it was on me with a shriek and I was down, too many friends, next time they'll make sure his head's under the wheel.

The long sound of it drew out, thinning to silence, and a signal clattered. The ceiling was dark again. Polyphasic sleep had left me surfaced and I leaned across her, a dream fragment persisting, and checked the time: 00:15. The 00:15 to Krakow via Lodz and Czestochowa, a black brute loosed southwards across the snows.

Fqb fqqi lub ddqb gjuu hhr ixxn gls eedf nlqq jri srrw hqw oouh yoxx wqk huuh.

I'd seen one this morning, with weak sunlight throwing clear reflections on the windows because all the blinds were down. It had drawn away slowly eastwards towards the Russian frontier.

Third series with fifth-digit duplications and recurring blanks, normal contractions: Can you confirm any degree of U.K. diplomatic backing of potential revolution here.

But I wouldn't send it. Somewhere on the crest of a sleep-curve a thought had come: Egerton knew. And he expected me to know, to have found out. All he wanted was for me to do something about it. He was waiting for some raw intelligence to give his analysts, not for a signal saying look my drawers are all wet how did that happen.

There wasn't a lot of time. Merrick might get me some stuff on this but we were both moving into the red sector by now and I'd have to pull him out before long: behind the official preparations for the reception of the Western delegates there was a much bigger operation running. And the trains were rolling east.

The thing was that Czyn was being fed with doped sugar. The U.S.S.R wasn't alone in hoping for the total, success of the talks: the U.S.A., Britain, France and the Benelux states had been grooming their spokesmen since last August and the message was perfectly clear. The cold war had been devalued from the moment it was seen that short of global annihilation a hot war couldn't be won. Detente was back in fashion and when the Bonn delegation arrived in Warsaw there'd be quite a few bricks of the Berlin Wall lying on the ground. If the talk succeeded they wouldn't be the last: they'd open the way. And the U.K. would give diplomatic backing to a full-scale revolution in Poland as promptly as it would put the whole of its sterling reserves on a three-legged hundred-to-one outsider with its arse to the tapes at the off.

They'd know this, if their minds weren't inflamed with their dreams of manning the barricades in the holy name of the motherland.

The smell of the soot came now: it always took a few minutes. The building was old and decade after decade the trains had shaken it, loosening tiles on the roof and the cement round the doors and windows and making cracks in the brickwork so now it was like a sponge, absorbing the smell of soot and diesel gas and exuding the smell of bigos and karp po polsku from the kitchen below.

Assumption: the doped sugar was being fed to Czyn by an agency purporting to be British and spuriously offering diplomatic backing in exchange for information. This agency served a state considered alien to resurgent Poland or it wouldn't have to assume British identity. Rule out the West: the C.I.A. and the Deuxieme Bureau and the Gehlen Organisation and the little mail-order firm in Geneva that sent all its bills in plain envelopes to NATO.

What information? Information on the activities of Czyn. We were getting that without any offers of backing. Egerton had meant what he said to Merrick: 'Nor must you lead them to feel that the United Kingdom is in any way prepared to assist them in whatever projects they have in mind, morally, physically, officially or unofficially. You must not even let them infer that such is the case, from anything you say; and if you think that despite your caution they have so inferred, then you must negate it. Is that perfectly understood? He'd been so specific that he'd clearly known, at that time, what I'd learned only last night: that someone was soft-footing it round the Warsaw cellars with a borrowed Union Jack poking out of his breast pocket. And Merrick would follow that explicit order to the letter: his anxiety to make a good showing in his first mission was half killing him. From behind me, his numbed face reflected against the dark trees of the park, he'd said with fledgling courage: 'I won't let you down.' That was his one fear.

Recheck and rule out the hairline possibility that it was M.I.6, and not a foreign agency. The Bureau doesn't exist, publicly or officially, simply because it's empowered to do things that could never be admitted, publicly or officially, to have been done; and built into its anatomy is a self-destruction unit triggered to go off in the instant when any one of its operations runs wild enough to risk exposing it. We all know that. Each of the shadow executives in the overseas missions echelon has the suffix-9 after his code name to indicate his proven reliability under torture, and among the facilities available to agents in clearance is the death-pill. Because one single operative, nosing his way through the warrens of a sensitive area in Manchuria or Paraguay, can hit a counter-intelligence tripwire and blow up London Control. That was why there'd been a death-house chill over the Bureau last week when a wheel had come off in Gaza: they didn't know where it would roll. And that was why Merrick, for all his tail-wagging eagerness to bring us the right bone, would have to work through half a dozen missions of increasing complexity before his director would brief him anywhere but in a taxi.

The situation that ruled out M.I.6 was that despite its official non-existence the Bureau was responsible to the same Minister and therefore subject to the same policy. Syllogism: the Minister dictated policy to both agencies. The Bureau had orders to negate any inference that the U.K. might assist Polish insurgents. The same orders would have been received by M.I.6 Ergo, M.I.6 could be ruled out. Q.E.D.

It wasn't the U.S.S.R. For one thing the set-up was untypical of Russian thinking and for another thing they'd rather tuck a broken stink-bomb into their breast pocket than a flag of the decadent capitalists even for the indirect purpose of hurrying their ruin. If Moscow wanted information on Czyn it didn't have to get it by subterfuge: the trainloads quietly leaving the city for the frontier at Briest would be passed through the interrogation centres before their dispersal to the camps. The snowball effect was already. in operation: one member of Czyn, efficiently grilled in the detention cells, would buy an east-bound ticket for at least two of his fellow crusaders.

So there was no one. No one with any reason to use the U.K. as a cover for extracting information from Czyn. Yet it was being done.

The room was too small, shutting me in. The window was opaque, coated with ice, and I couldn't see beyond it. I got off the bed and pulled my coat round my shoulders, standing by the window to scrape at the ice with my nails. A ragged hole grew against the glass and I went on scraping until I could see a lamp below in the station, and then other lamps beyond, and finally the soft blue haze of the city thrown by the sodium lights and deflected upwards from the snow against the faces of the buildings. And the farther my eyes could reach the farther my mind could range, and I knew with sudden tingling clarity that tonight I'd arrived at the edge of the area that Control wanted me to explore, and that once inside it I must tread with infinite care.