Theo, you stupid bastard! They'll come in and tear you all to pieces now. In my younger days I might have turned around, briefed them about reassembling and started them all running for cover. But I was no longer young. I stabbed the gas pedal. The glow of the fire disappeared behind a hill and I rolled up my car window and kept going.

*

All the following day I sat behind my desk waiting for the next hammer blow to fall.

'A teleprinter intercept from Dresden,' said Lida, putting it, on my desk together with a fiercely strong cup of coffee. I looked at her; she stared back without expression. Frank Harrington in a characteristic gesture of support had assigned to me the brightest and best secretary in the building. Lida was a fifty-year-old widow with diamant6-studded bifocals, a remarkable supply of brightly colored woolens, an encyclopedic memory and adequate command of most Western European languages.

'How many of them is that?' I asked her.

'Five.'

'But not Theo Forster?'

'Not yet.' Lida was a realist.

'No,' I said grimly. 'Not yet. They'll leave him to last.'

Lida had left my door unguarded and now the Idd poked his head around it. 'Can I see you, boss?' His arms loaded, he pushed the door with a shoulder and entered (!rabwise.

'I suppose so.'

The kid put two box files on my desk and opened the top one. 'I'd better show you what I found,' he said.

'I know what you found,' I said. 'You found that there is no way to immediately replace the DELIUS network as a means of putting people into place.'

'Yes.'

'No matter,' I said. 'With DELIUS compromised, all the Church networks are suspect. We'll have to think of something drastic.'

He stood by my desk stroking his files. 'Why do they pick them up one at a time?' he said. 'Why not a swoop that brings them all in together? Keep the prisoners apart and interrogate them separately.'

'It's their system,' I said. 'Always one by one. They tap all the phones and watch all the houses and try to stamped(- the other suspects into doing something foolish. They hope to get leads to people they don't know about.'

'They have more or less got the lot now.'

'More or less,' I agreed.

'Are you all right?'

'I'm one hundred percent,' I told him.

'You look done in. I hope you didn't catch that Chinese flu that's been going around the girls in the cashier's department. It starts with a rough furry tongue. Have you got the same?'

'I don't think so, but I haven't had time to match tongues with the girls in the cashier's office.'

'And stomach pains,' explained the kid earnestly.

'I've got a lot of work to do.' He meant well, I could see that, but I needed time on my own. I needed to think.

'They didn't arrest the pastor,' said the kid, waving some more papers at me.

'Give them time,' I said. 'We'll look at all the intercepts tomorrow. And we'll see what Frank has to say. He might want to come back here and take charge.'

'You haven't told him yet?'

'I'll phone him in London. He'll probably want to warn the D-G what's happening.'

'That should spoil his evening,' said the kid.

'Frank's been around a long time. He's seen the networks come and go.'

'I suppose you get used to it. Is that what you mean?'

'No, you never get used to it,' I said. 'You don't break down and weep, but you don't get used to it.'

'I'll see if there's anything on the Magdeburg criminal police sheets,' said the kid, balancing the contents of my out tray on the top of his box files and making for the door. Then he stopped and said, 'My father wrote to me the other day and asked me what I thought I would be doing when I was fifty years old. He said that if a man thinks about where and what he's going to be when he's fifty all the preceding years fall into place. Do you agree, boss?'

'I'll let you know,' I said. Sometimes I wondered if he said these things to wind me up.

When he had gone, Lida said: 'Shall I stay on tonight?'

'No. Go home. 'Fell the night-duty man to switch his internal line through to me and give me two outside lines. I'll sleep on the sofa.'

'I sent your bags over to the Hotel Hennig but I didn't ask for a room for you.'

'It's okay,' I said. 'There's a little attic room. Frau Hennig lets me use it when I'm in Berlin.'

'And what about a meal?'

'I'm all right,' I said. I didn't want her to mother me. She nodded and said good night, but about thirty minutes later she returned waving a flimsy sheet from the monitoring service. 'I thought you'd want to see this immediately,' she said. 'Magdeburg area. A pastor severely burned in a vehicle fire. With it the news services are putting out a government warning about illegal storage of gasoline.'

'Thanks,' I said.

'I think it's our man. They are trying to play it down by means of the warning.'

'Can I smell burning?' I said. She looked at me and shrugged. 'There is a burning smell,' I said.

'I was making toast. Is it forbidden?'

'No, Lida,' I said.

'There is an electric toast machine for the office staff . . . If it is forbidden . . .'

'No. No. Get along home, Lida- I'll see you in the morning.'

'Good night Herr Samson.' As she went out through the door the smell of burning was stronger and far more pungent.

Any last hope I was nursing, about Theo being eliminated from the list of suspects, was gone by midnight when it was confirmed that he'd been arrested. Theo was the last one to go into the bag. I read the message twice and then closed my eyes to think about everything that had happened. The next thing I knew it was six in the morning and I was waking up with a headache and dry mouth, just like the girls with the Chinese influenza. I had just keeled over and gone to sleep at my desk. It wasn't flu, it was nerves. Never mind all that stuff about the adrenalin flowing; real petrifying fear and despair brings only an overwhelming weariness.

Yawning and disheveled I went and sniffed at early morning Berlin — with all the sounds and smells I remembered as a child going to school. I had a stubbly face, bleary eyes and an urgent need for a cup of coffee. A car pool driver took me to one of my old haunts, an all night bar tucked away between the bus tenninal and Witzleben S-Bahn. Its neon sign looked pale in the watery pink dawn. I went in and looked around at the people in there — truck drivers, railway men, pimps and night shift workers — but the only face I recognized belonged to the proprietor.

'Bernd. Long time, no see,' called Sammy the owner without removing the cigar from his mouth. He was a plump, pink-faced Hungarian who used to earn a comfortable living from Berlin clubs and restaurants to which he sold alcohol, cigarettes and cigars stolen from the big trucks. Now he'd become almost completely respectable, providing food and drink to long-distance truck drivers at the end of the Autobahn that led through the DDR to West Germany. He was still selling alcohol and tobacco but his days of thieving were gone; he had a wholesale business and two large warehouses from which he could make just as much money without breaking the law.

I sat down and waited. The air was laden with smoke and coffee and the sweet smell of doughnuts. I drank a strong espresso coffee with a schnapps chaser and read a newspaper that some customer had left behind. There was no real news in it, just stories about TV stars and sports. Bruno Forster arrived eventually as I felt sure he would. He stood in the doorway looking around the room to find me. He was bareheaded and wearing mechanic's coveralls with a railway uniform jacket. He was obviously on duty. When he spotted me he did not smile or wave, he came over to the table holding a packet as if he was about to deliver a warrant.