'Yes, please.'

Rupert reached over his seat for a leather document case on the floor of the car. From it he brought three photos; color snapshots taken in a busy street. He took a tiny flashlight from the case and shone it for me to see better.

'George Kosinski,' said Rupert. 'Here, and here.' Leaning across he stabbed a finger at a blurred head and shoulders amid a dozen or more people on a busy street. The picture had been taken on one of those cameras that imprint a date and time on the negative. It was in any case obviously made recently. The people were bundled up in fur hats and woolen hats, and most of them looked blue with the cold. I recognized shop signs and a section of the Nowy Swiat, Warsaw's main street.

'Why didn't they want me to see these?'

'Oh, I wouldn't make too much of that. You are more familiar with George Kosinski's appearance than any of us. If you had dismissed the photos as being of someone else, it would have ended the discussion, wouldn't it? Cruyer didn't want to provide you with that amount of leverage.'

'Can I keep these?'

'I'm afraid not, old chap. I have to show them to the D-G tomorrow.'

'I heard he was sick.'

Rupert looked at me as if suspecting that I'd tried to catch him out. 'I'm invited to the D-G's home,' he said very slowly.

'Take sandwiches,' I advised. 'His idea of lunch these days is tea with lemon in it and a dry biscuit.'

'I owe you a big favor, Samson,' he said, as if he'd been bottling it up and rehearsing this announcement. 'I never did say thank you.'

'A favor?'

'A long time back, when that ghastly fellow Kosciuszko was blackmailing my chief . . . Everyone, that is to say everyone who worked in the office at that time, felt deeply indebted to you.'

'Oh, that,' I said, although I had only a vague recollection of the business he was talking about.

'I don't know what you did, and I don't care. He was a poisonous reptile. Someone told me you threw the little bastard into the river somewhere and left him swimming for his life through the ice-floes. My God! I would have enjoyed the sight of it. I hope your good deed didn't go entirely unrewarded.' I was tired; I didn't respond. He said awkwardly: 'And I believe the best way I can return that favor is to speak to you frankly.' It was a question. I looked at him but made no response. 'Man to man,' he added.

I appreciated the effort he was making. Rupert Copper wasn't the sort of man who readily resorted to man-to-man conversations, especially with outsiders, the sort of outsiders who tossed men into the water for fun and profit. 'Shoot,' I said.

'Tonight I watched you talking to Cruyer, and that chap Rensselaer. And quite honestly, old chap, I wonder exactly what goes on in that head of yours.'

'Not much,' I admitted.

'The whole service, from London to the other side of the world, seems concerned with nothing but rumor after rumor.'

'It's what the service does to earn its keep,' I said. 'We're in the rumor business aren't we?'

'Rumors about you, Samson,' he said with emphasis. 'Rumors about your wife. They are still asking if that business really was . . . what it was later described to be. Or whether she really defected with a lot of choice material, and then was lured back. No, no . . .' He raised his hand, stopping my objections while he went on. 'I hear more rumors about that girl you lived with, the one that Rensselaer now seems to have some claim upon. That was a somewhat sudden elevation to the top floor, wasn't it? There are endless rumors about who killed your sister-in-law, and why. And now, a new one going the rounds in the last few days says that she was never really dead. She's alive and living in Moscow or some bloody nonsense. Now there is all this shenanigan with your brother-in-law. And that's in my bailiwick, and not something I can ignore. Do you see?'

'I don't know what I can do to stop people telling each other ludicrous stories,' I said.

He sighed and tried again. 'You're a danger to all concerned, Samson. To Whitehall and to Normannenstrasse. What do you think would have been the reaction here in London Central, had it been you stretched out dead in the Berlin mortuary tonight, instead of that kid who worked for you?'

I didn't respond.

'A yawn,' said Copper, answering his own question. 'And have you properly considered Fiona's position?'

'In respect of what?'

'In respect of those Stasi bastards. Remember that poor little Simakaitis? The Lithuanian KGB captain who came over to us with all the wavelengths? A bright fellow who got sick of seeing the rough stuff going on over there. Eight years ago next month, if my memory serves me. We brought all his family out too. It was a textbook operation. Warsaw office handled the children.'

'I remember the case,' I said.

'Normannenstrasse was determined to destroy him. The Stasi lost their Berlin codes and ciphers and wavelengths.'

'Yes, but that was a different generation of Stasi in those days. Those gorillas were the last remnants of the Stalinists.'

'The same sort of vindictive crew are holding the reins again now. Anyone less than fanatical finds himself shunted off to a frontier job, to be replaced by a dedicated Marxist. Every day in my office I see the results of what they're doing. These people are fueled by hatred. They see Gorbachev's concessions as a threat to their sacred creed, and they have dug their heels in.'

'Well, they didn't get Simakaitis,' I said. 'I heard that someone went over to Florida last summer to get his opinion on some new radio material.'

'They didn't get Sim because the Yanks took him into one of those elaborate witness protection programs they designed for Mafia informants: a completely new life.'

'So what did they do?'

'The KGB let Sim live. Sim's elderly parents were killed in a shooting in a filling station hold-up in Brussels. The killers didn't stop to steal any money. His wife died six months later. She went overboard from the Flushing ferryboat, and the Scheldt estuary is very cold in January. No one saw her go over. That happened one year, to the very day, after he defected. Washed up a week later. No water in the lungs. Unconscious before she went in, the coroner said. Then Sim's sister took a big overdose one summer night when she was on holiday in Spain, and in the best of spirits. His brother died in France. That happened the same day Sim went to Washington: fell from the Paris-Lyon express. His four children were all swimming together . . .'

'Okay, that's enough,' I said.

'Sim is in a nursing home in Orlando. I was the person who went to see him. They did for him all right. He sits and looks at the wall all day. It's just as well he doesn't want to go anywhere or do anything, because he can't even go to the toilet on his own.'

'Fiona are you thinking about?'

'Of course I'm thinking about Fiona. Sim did nothing compared to what she did. No matter about the exact circumstances of her departure, her subsequent treachery is unforgivable in their eyes. They trusted her; she betrayed them. They did everything for her, a decent place to live, a car and driver, they even gave her a department and authority. You know what those things mean in the East. She spat in their eye.'

'You think Fiona might be targeted in that same way?'

'How can you rule it out? Perhaps the wheels are. already turning. Her only sister is dead. Her brother-in-law has been forced into taking a trip to Poland, for reasons we can only puzzle about. The boy was killed, perhaps because they mistook him for you. You are on your way there, and we both know how exposed you'll be out there in the sticks.'

'It would have happened by now,' I said.

'That's what Sim thought. But they don't hurry their retributions. They like their victims to think about what's coming. You know what they are like; how can you be so blind?'