'In here,' There were two doors on the top landing. They were freshly painted light brown. They'd been repainted so many times that the decorations in the woodwork, the peephole and the bell push were all clogged with paint. There was a surfeit of wiring too: phone and electricity wires had been added and none ever removed, so that there were dozens of wires twisted and drooping and sometimes hanging to show where a section of them had been chopped away to make room for more. He unlocked one of the doors. 'In here,' he said again and pushed Dicky, who fell against me. And we stumbled into the darkness.

'Stand against the wall,' said Was. He switched on the light. It was a low-wattage bulb but it gave enough light to see that one side of the room had sandbags piled up to a height of six feet or more. Was slipped out of his pea jacket and hung it on the door. This revealed him to be wearing a dark blue sweater and a military-style leather belt with a pistol in a leather holster. It was a Colt 'Official Police .38,' something of a museum piece but no less lethal for that. 'Hand over your wallets, both of you bastards,' he said. The fat one stood by and grinned.

'I don't think you are police,' said Dicky. 'And you can go to hell.'

'What you think doesn't concern me, shitface,' said Was, leaning forward and putting his face close to Dicky. 'Get out your wallet before I break you in two.'

It was now or never, I decided.

Hampered by my back-against-the-wall position, I put both hands high in the air and, so that the men were not frightened by this sudden movement, I said, 'Please don't hurt us. You can have all my money but please don't hurt us.'

Was began to reply as I brought my umbrella down to hit him on the side of the head. It landed with a terrible crunch and he slid to the floor with no more than a short choking sound and a guttural groan that ended as he lost consciousness.

I swung round but the fat man already had his fur coat open wide and was tugging at an automatic pistol that was tucked into his waistband. I watched the gun coming up to point at me as I brought my umbrella round to hit him. It was like one of those agonizingly slow nightmares from which you awaken in a body-drenching sweat. Inch by inch our arms moved in balletic slow motion until his gun fired, making a deafening cannon's roar in the tiny room. As the flash of the gun came, my arm brought the umbrella up under the fat man's jaw. His jawbone snapped and his glasses jumped off his face and flew across the room, spinning and flashing with reflected light.

The fat man dropped his gun and slumped back against the wall. Both his hands clasped his face as he supported his jaw, and I could see him screaming soundlessly as my ears still rang with the sound of the gun. I hit him a second blow, and this time he toppled to the floor with his eyes closed. His cheeks bulged and a tiny drip of blood came from the comer of his tightly closed mouth.

'Jesus Christ,' said Dicky from behind me, but then I saw that Fatty was not out of play. He was scrabbling around on the floor reaching for his gun. I kicked him and then kicked him again, but my kicking had little effect on him through his thick fur coat, so that I had to use the umbrella to hit him again. I was only just in time. His fingers were touching the gun as my blow landed. Perhaps I hit him too hard: his head slumped sideways, his mouth opened and a torrent of bright red blood spilled over the rag-strewn floor.

For a moment Dicky was frozen. He had his hands clasped tightly together as if holding something that might escape. Or praying. He was looking down at the two unconscious men. 'My God. Are they cops?' he said.

'Who cares?' I said. 'They were going to kill us, or didn't you follow the conversation? This is a killing room. The sandbags make sure the rounds don't end up next door, and the rags on the floor mop up the blood.'

I bent down and started to search the bodies. It was a hasty job. After comparing the two pistols that the men had been using, I took the thin one's Colt revolver, rather than Fatty's Model 35 Browning. The Colt fitted my pocket better.

'This isn't a police station?'

'Are you with me?' I said. 'The room downstairs is a money exchange. Hard currency for local cash. That's what the bars and shutters are for: to protect the money.' Having second thoughts, I picked up the Browning Hi-Power and took that too. It was a pity to leave it behind. He might come after us and shoot me with it. It was then that my fingers encountered a small .22 Ruger pistol in Fatty's inside overcoat pocket. With it, loose in his pocket, there was a screw-on silencer and half a dozen mini-magnum rounds. 'Know what these are, Dicky?' I asked, holding up the gun, the silencer and one of the rounds for him to see.

'Yes,' he said.

'There's only one thing you do with a silenced Ruger twenty-two and a mini-mag round. One shot into the back of the neck is all you need. It's a gun these people keep for executions, and for nothing else.' I had no doubt now about why they'd brought us here.

'What shall we do?' said Dicky plaintively as he looked out of the barred window and down at the empty courtyard. He didn't look round the room or look at me. He didn't want to see the gun and the inert men. He didn't want to even think about it.

'I'll finish searching these bastards and we'll get out of here.' I was bending over them and taking their money and stuffing into my pocket their various identity documents. I got to my feet and sighed. Having Dicky along to help was like being accompanied by a pet goldfish: I had to sprinkle food over him regularly, and check his fins for fungus.

'Are they dead?' He wasn't frightened or sorrowful; he just wanted to know what to write in his report. I would have to find some way of preventing Dicky writing a report. London hated to hear about the grim realities of the job; they believed that firm words and two choruses of 'Rule Britannia' should be enough to bring any recalcitrant foreigner to his knees.

'I don't give a shit, Dicky.' Reluctantly I decided that life in Warsaw was safer without a gun. I pushed all three pistols into the rubbish bin. I could tackle freelance heavies like these, but the resources of the boys from the UB were rather more sophisticated, and I didn't fancy trying to explain away a pocket full of hardware if I was stopped in the street.

'That's not an umbrella,' said Dicky suddenly as he watched me rewrapping tire levers into the umbrella's fabric from which I'd removed the wires and stays.

'No,' I said. 'It's a good thing it didn't rain.'

3

Masuria, Poland.

Dicky was silent for much of the time we were driving north through the wintry Polish countryside to find Stefan Kosinski's country mansion. I could tell he was thinking about the encounter with the two men in the market. It had not been pretty, and Dicky had seldom glimpsed the rotten end of the business. All field agents soon learn that the pen pushers in London don't want to be told about the spilled blood and the nasty treacherous ways that their will is done. With undeniable logic Dicky said, 'We can't be absolutely certain they intended to kill us.'

'To be absolutely certain they were going to kill us,' I said, 'we would have to be dead.'

Three times — in various ways — Dicky had asked me if the two men were dead. I told him that it was a special sort of glancing blow I'd given them, and assured him they would have woken thirty minutes later with no more than a slight headache and a dry feeling in the mouth. Offended by this attempt to comfort him, Dicky went back to staring out of the car window. The dirt road was too bumpy for him to chew on his fingernails.