It had been unnerving, getting out of the car and walking away, remembering it could be a trap and even believing it was a trap, the nape of the neck going cold, Western secret agent shot down in street, the crusts of snow skittering in front of my shoes like sooty sugar, the tram queue and the throb of the big saloon moving away, the higher noted gear whine of the van. Standing under the open sky where I'd prayed to the ikon to let me be, free and alone, the long night gone and the day beginning.

Later I'd done some brain think. The city was mine and I could go where I liked but if I tried to get on a plane or a train or an Orbis coach or took a car too far I'd find out how free I was. As free as a fly in a bottle.

We've got your name.

Also my photograph but he hadn't mentioned that. Pictures like those are normally useful only when they've pulled you in and start hunting you in the files instead of the streets but this was a special case and by now they'd have been processed, life-sized blow-ups with a superior, posed kepi, pride of place on the notice boards in every M.O. station, subject: image assimilation by all, patrols going on duty, remarks: report on movements and whereabouts, do not question or ask to see papers.

The only point they hadn't covered was too clear to miss and this afternoon I'd started research on it. Because they couldn't have just left the cork out.

I put down three zlotys and edged between the small round tables to the swing doors, then came back.

'Christ, I told you to send someone, didn't I?'

It was over a mile from there and if they'd picked her up they'd have booked her for the trains.

My cup was still there but it wasn't the same place.

'There wasn't anyone else.'

'You could have sent — ' then I shut up. She sat very still, her dark eyes not really seeing me, a nerve alive at the corner of her mouth. I went over and said I wanted a cognac, meaning I wanted it now. She hadn't moved.

'When did it happen, Alinka?'

'An hour ago. Viktor is dead. I don't know where the others are — '

'How did they blow you? How did they find out?'

'He said he would never let them take him — '

'How did they find out?'

She began shaking and I shut up again, pushing the glass against her hand where it lay like a dropped white glove. It was a pointless bloody question. anyway: they'd been wiped out and that was that, boots on the steps and the mirror smashed and the Typolt giving shot for shot, the dead eye of an eagle with the rage still in it, trust an amateur to make a mess of things: he'd looked like a professional but he'd been a professional suicide, that was all, the city was full of them.

'I was afraid you would have gone,' she said.

'You were actually there, were you?'

'No. I had gone for a walk, and Leo was with me; ho wouldn't let me go alone, even in the little streets. There were cars there when we went back, and Josef was running. We all ran, then, and Leo said we must separate.'

She drank some of the cognac, both her hands round the glass, her eyes closing as she put it to her mouth.

'He wouldn't have lived longer than Wednesday. He was going to do it then. He was a born martyr.'

'I know,' she said.

I gave her the folded green card. 'Don't look at it now. Look at it later.'

She put it into the side pocket of her coat.

They'd been a bit pressed but it looked all right, thin cheap pasteboard and feint print, the photograph peeled and backed and stuck on slightly off-centre, not difficult but give them credit: it's the ageing process that takes most of the time because if you hurry the machine it'll just shred the thing up instead of reproducing the right degree of wear and tear. They'd even got cocky and put a lipstick smudge.

I'd told Merrick to send out one of the female clerks with the package from London in case he was tagged again. That was the reason I'd given him and it was partly true but more important than that was the danger of my exposing him to the K.G.B. I was contagious now. I'd used the girl as a cutout for protected contact: if an M.O. patrol or a U.B. agent had seen us meet it wouldn't get them anywhere useful; they'd know I'd made contact with the Embassy and that was all: it wouldn't expose Merrick. And they'd expect me to trade with the Embassy because that was where they'd left the cork out.

The line had been safe so I'd told him to start the research for me: 'I want you to vet the cypher room staff. Get the Ambassador to give you plausible facilities and tell London what you're doing so they can lend a hand. If you turn anything up you can hold it ready for me.'

He said he wasn't quite sure what I wanted him to do.

'You assume that the cypher room staff has been infiltrated and that incoming and outgoing signals are being copied and passed to the opposition either as a routine measure or as a special surveillance operation. If you tell London to cover dossiers they'll turn up the last screening programmes and they'll automatically monitor all signals for evidence of tampering. At this end you can give them the idea that you're in trouble because one of your signals was inaccurate or that you broke a security regulation and you want to check what you sent. Make it a recent one and give the impression that you know you've dropped a brick and that it's not their fault, in other words that they didn't make a duff transmission. What's your code?'

He said it was fourth series with first-digit dupes.

'All right, send off a couple of signals using the ignore key and tell them they're fully urgent and that they've got to send them while you're there. If they kick up rough because the tea's getting cold tell them it's on H.E.'s orders. Ask them to give you back your own originals and tell them you want their recorded originals and copies as well. If they let you have them, send another signal informing London they've done that and for Christ's sake leave out the ignore key this time. Watch their reactions at every stage and see if they fit your idea of people who've got nothing to hide.'

He said he understood. He also asked what he should put in the ignore signals: I suppose the poor little tick had never had to send one before.

'Tell them you've caught it in the zip again.'

The frightening thing was that it could be important: I wanted to know why they'd bottled me up in Warsaw but hadn't cut my line of communication through the Embassy. I didn't need to go there if I wanted to send anything out: within fifteen minutes of picking up the telephone in the Bar Kino the clerk in London could be decyphering. And they wouldn't want me to do that. Correction: they'd want me to do it but only if they could know what I was sending,

So I'd moved an untrained recruit into a highly sensitive area and it had felt like putting a match to a fuse because if Merrick exposed an opposition agent actually installed in the cypher room of the British Embassy it was going to make a nasty bang at a time when the East-West delegates were sending each other roses. Merrick would be all right but I'd get the chopper: I was out here to local control his mission and his mission was circumscribed and didn't provide for my pitching him into an area with this much potential for blast.

There'd been no choice. The Bureau doesn't like commandeering facilities in Her Majesty's embassies unless there's something big in progress and even if London sent me a ticket for the Warsaw cypher room I couldn't go in as young Merrick could, the image already established and the cover story dependent on it: I'd have to go, in as a stranger with inspectorate powers and if in fact the opposition had planted someone among the staff he'd scare so fast that the next morning his desk would be empty and so would the filing cabinets.

I had to know their minds, to know if they'd said: Let him run and we'll watch where he goes, let him signal and we'll read what he sends. The fifth series comes fairly high among the international unbreakables but a code only stays locked till someone finds the key.