'What's the aim of these candlelight crusaders you've been running with? Wreck the talks?'

He drew back into his chair. 'They're not just a lot of irresponsible students. Their aim is to bring Russia to the brink. That's quite a — serious intention, don't you think?'

'Could be serious, yes. For them. The other side of any brink is a long drop and if Russia goes down she'll take Poland with her, don't they know that?'

'Their aim,' he said slowly, reading from the dog-eared manifesto they'd been waving at him in the cellars out there, 'is to overthrow the present regime and set up a truly national government in time for the East-West talks to take place in a free Poland.'

'They're cutting it fine.' The West German delegates were due in Warsaw on the 23rd. Today was the 6th.

'I'd put it a different way. They're completing their preparations.'

'You said it was «known». So what chance have they got?'

On the defensive again he said quickly — 'It's one thing for the authorities to know of widespread dissension, and another thing to stop it exploding in their face. They've withdrawn the lenient measures designed to keep people calm while the talks are on — they're trying the other tack now. Stronger discipline, heavy sentences, suppressive control of private life.' In the clear eyes behind the glasses burned the zeal of the convert. 'And that won't work either.'

I got up and looked at the Queen's rather Mona Lisa smile as a change from looking at Merrick's face shining with its second-hand ideals. Correction: they weren't second-hand, no. They were superimposed on someone else's. If the Poles ever got free, something was going to get free inside Merrick.

'If it doesn't work,' I told him over my shoulder, 'then Moscow will find something that will. Didn't you say you were in Prague, for God's sake?'

'This is different' I heard him get up and start wandering about. 'There are the talks, this time. Moscow wants them to succeed. I expect you've read — '

'It doesn't matter what I've read.'

I could hear him pumping the damned thing again. Then he swallowed and said: 'Well, that's why there's a brink. The Action's been planned for three days before the opening of the talks, and if Moscow orders tanks into the city there won't be any talks. Russia's been trying to make the world forget Prague ever since it happened, and she'll remind us in a big way if she does it again; but if she doesn't resort to armed force this time it'll mean a new government, overnight. Whichever way she moves, she'll lose.'

When I turned away from the portrait he was staring at me so I told him what he wanted to hear. 'Hurrah. Poland is saved.!

'Well they've got to do something, haven't — '

'Christ, they're not expecting a wave of arrests are they by any chance? How many brave little soldiers of freedom d'you think there'll be left to start this «action» of theirs? A week before the talks half the population of Warsaw's going to be in a strict regime camp in the Urals, don't they realise? What's it called, this «action», got a name?'

Numbly he said: 'Just "The Action". Czyn.'

His long scrubbed schoolboy's hands hung by his sides, sticking from his sleeves as if he'd not finished growing out of his suit; but the defiance was still there behind the shine on his glasses and I knew that whatever I said it wouldn't knock the bright god Czyn off his pedestal.

'How did you get into this game, Merrick?'

'I'm not really in it. They're just friends I've made — '

'I don't mean their game. Ours.'

I was watching him and he wasn't bad: they couldn't have had time in a crash course to train him to this pitch of instant reaction concealment and ninety per cent of it must have been in his make-up. Perhaps this was one of the things that had appealed to whoever had wished this boy on to Egerton. There'd been the slightest flicker across the eyes, gone now, and it was only experience that had let me sense that my question had opened a wound. I went on watching.

'I'm not sure,' he said. The tone was all right too, almost steady. But this was why Egerton had told me not to 'break the poor little devil up'. Because it was easy and you could do it without even trying. 'I suppose it's a chance for me to help them, in secret.' Then he was saying quickly as the thought surfaced from below the conscious level — 'Even my father doesn't know.'

This was the freedom that Merrick hadn't got,

I said: 'Of course not.'

'But I'm not used to — well, privacy.'

'Must find it refreshing.'

He nodded. 'Yes.'

I turned away. 'What are your orders for this trip?'

'Don't you know?'

'It doesn't matter what I know.'

'I'm to find out everything I can about Czyn and pass it to London. Surely you're meant to be helping me, aren't you?' He sounded uneasy.

'How much training did they give you?'

'Two weeks, if you include — '

'All right.'

I turned and looked through the window at the trees in the park. Their black lacework of branches between the fog-yellowed lamps half masked the pale reflected face that stared at me and waited. Two weeks. There was time, once, to plan things properly. It's no go, Egerton, you can't do it, you can't send this kid out there in the dark without even a candle, or if you want to do it then I won't bloody well help you.

'I suppose,' he said as cheerfully as he could, 'that doesn't sound very long. But I took it all in, and they told me I'd done rather well.' His lips moved on the glass. His voice came from the trees out there, the dark trees. 'I won't let you down.'

Above the haze of the skyline there were vast clouds gathering, coming in from the north. Some people said it could snow tonight.

'There are a few things,' I said, 'they won't have told you.' I didn't turn round. His eyes had shifted from me to my reflection. 'They probably told you that just as a war is an extension of politics, espionage is an extension of diplomacy. The idea is to find out the things you can't find out by asking someone at a conference table: the things nobody will ever tell you, the things everybody badly needs to know. It's a means of keeping the peace, like the bomb is. No one can chuck the bomb without getting it back on his head, and no one can start a conventional war because the enemy's already within his gates, ferreting around and exposing all his plans before he can put them into action. It doesn't always work, the pressure gets too high now and then, but it works more often than people ever know. The balance has got to be kept between one half of the world and the other, East and West, so that the whole thing doesn't blow up. That's what we're for. We're the angels of peace, see how we shine. That what they told you?'

He watched me from the dark.

I said: 'It doesn't matter. What they didn't tell you is that once you're in this game you're on your own. You don't do what you do for the sake of your country or for peace, though you can kid yourself. You do it to scratch an itch, that's all. I'm not talking about the ones who do it for the money: they're just whores. Most of us do it because we don't get a kick out of watching the telly and pushing a pen and washing the Mini on Sunday mornings: we want to get outside of all that, be on our own so we can work off our scabby neuroses without getting arrested for it. We want to scratch that itch till it bleeds.'

As I turned away from the window his face opened in surprise. He looked more vulnerable at this moment than I'd ever seen a man, perhaps because in my trade the men I meet have long since grown a shell, the years and the deceits and the betrayals adding to it layer by layer until they want to get out and know they can't, because it's themselves they've been deceiving and betraying over all those years: the shell grows from the inside outwards, like fingernails.