'Will you please fasten your seat belt?'

If I must but I'd rather put it round Egerton's neck.

We started a long slow dip towards the sludge.

Query: why had he wanted me? There were several who wouldn't have refused a short trip like this to keep out of Norfolk between missions or break up the dreary round of the girls who were always in bed with someone else when you needed them most because once a job came up there wouldn't be time for anything except getting in and getting out alive. Waring was in London now and he'd have done it like a shot just to get into their good books after cocking up the Copenhagen lark but they hadn't asked Waring. They'd wanted a particular type of agent to work with Merrick and the one they'd selected with great care was the one who'd proved time and again that he always worked best alone.

They weren't fools. It'd be dangerous to settle for that.

The windows went grey.

But I'd done it on their doorstep too. I'd keep to the bargain and look after their new recruit for them but I'd do it in my own way, working alone. Egerton would have known I'd asked them for the Tuesday flight but he hadn't questioned it. Merrick was due out tomorrow, B.E.A. direct.

The tension had gone out of the airframe and we'd lost weight. Plastic fittings creaked. The 134 was floating at a slant through the muck.

Query: is it even worse than you think? Have they palmed you off with the worst job of all? That one?

I thought about it again because if I didn't I wouldn't sleep tonight. The kid had said no, they hadn't told him to deliver anything to anyone. He'd seemed surprised when I'd asked that. Two weeks in training, how would he know? But I'd believed him and it should have consoled me: it'd be all right so long as they hadn't given him any kind of document to carry, to deliver. But it wasn't easy to get rid of the chill. Because this whole thing made a pattern and it was the only one that could accommodate all the facts. They don't do it often and no one talks about it afterwards. Correction: Heppinstall talked about it, once, to me. It's not that they're squeamish: you can't fight a full sized cold war without someone sometimes getting pushed off his perch; it's just that there's not often the need to do it because the other ways round are more efficient. But now and then it's the only setup that'll fill the bill and that's when they sign up a new recruit and make a pretence of training him and give him the bait. The bait's not for him — he's already hooked — it's for the opposition, usually a file or a brief breakdown on a spurious operation, some form of written intelligence either encyphered or straight and specifically designed to fox the opposition and send them at a tangent while the real party goes in. In military terms it's the feint attack and the principle's the same.

The mechanics vary. The technique doesn't. You send your man in and he delivers the goods by letter-drop and he's caught doing it because he's meant to be caught doing it, that's what he's for. After that it's just dull routine: he's beaten up till he breaks and tells them all he knows but all he knows isn't much, oh, a few titbits here and there to give them something to chew. on, the odd bit of info they've had on their books since God told Moses to spy out the land of Canaan, it looks quite good, they know he's telling the truth. And while they're busy dashing off in all directions on the strength of the stuff they caught him with, the real operative goes in. Sometimes he's not told what the setup is: he's simply sent as far as the edge of the area and ordered to wait for a signal. He might not know what the mission is or even that he's got one, then they throw him the works and tell him the field's clear: get in there.

Or sometimes they send him out with the new recruit and ask him to hold his hand.

'I've done mine,' I said and she smiled and passed on. Customs Declaration Form to be completed by passengers prior to landing. I hadn't actually done it myself, of course: it's delivered with the visa and the Bureau takes pride in relieving its valued servants of these annoying little details. It's the things it doesn't do for you that sometimes chills your nerves. The things you've got to do yourself.

Heppinstall had been drunk that night and I hustled him round to my place before he could break into Control and knock Loman for six. Loman was his director at the time. 'I didn't have a clue, of boy, not a single rotten stinkin' bloody clue… an' you know — you know what? There was nothing for me, in the end. No mission… nothing. It was for someone else, you get it?' A white face and the tumbler shaking in his fingers, his voice thinned with rage. 'Some other bastard went in… got it all lined up, you see, an' all — all I did was come on home like goo' — good little boy. An' Christ, they shot that poor little squirt, know that, eh? Put him — put him against a wall. Keep me 'way from Lo' — Loman, will you? Oh, God, 'gainst a wall…'

Normally they don't talk about it afterwards but Heppinstall had got deliberately drunk. Also he was unlucky because the U.K. had just sent Sharawi Hassan down for the maximum stretch of fourteen years for the missile programme filch and the United Arab Republic was smarting a bit and a decoy's no good as exchange material so they'd shot him.

No Smoking.

The murk thinned off and I saw lights below and the twisting course of the Vistula, which looked frozen over. The runway beacons tilted across the glass as we lined up.

Was that the one they'd palmed off on me? That one?

Bounce.

An Aeroflot Tupolev T.U. 104 had just come in from Moscow and the building was crowded. The people from the T.U. were waving their papers, eager to show how uplifted they were by complying with the regulations drawn up by their all-wise comrades to protect the rights of the workers. It always speeds up the formalities though because there's no time wasted arguing: tell them to shit and they'll shit.

The young Pole at Immigration was very circumspect as if he was being observed by a proficiency inspector or someone like that.

'How long do you intend to stay in Poland?'

'About two weeks.' I said it first in halting Polish and repeated it in German, the lingua franca, to show him I was happier with that. It was no good making out I couldn't speak Polish at all because of the letters from the dealers.

What is your business, so forth. I showed him the letters, taking them out of the envelope for him. The heavy man next to him didn't say anything.

'You have a special reason for meeting these people?'

'Yes, particularly for meeting Mr Hrynkiewicz. I'm hoping to buy the Lewinski Collection for an American.' It was respectable thinking on the part of Credentials because the Poles need dollars like the Irish need a drink.

'What is that?'

I looked blank as if he should know. 'It's the authenticated series with the 10-korony Mayer engravings of 1860 and the 1918 German Occupation inverted overprints. Look, here's the catalogue with — '

'It is not necessary.' But he took the Croydon Philatelic Society membership card because I'd been letting it peep out from among the currency vouchers: they always seize on new colours because anything strange is suspect. While he was making a show of reading it the heavy man beside him reached out and went through the same motions. He wasn't a Pole, this one: he had the flat bland face of the men you always see on the front page standing close to the Chairman of the Presidium when he's just flown in, and whenever they're actually looking into the camera it's because they think there might be some trinitrotoluene inside it instead of some Perutz Peromnia 27.