'Good man. Jump in,' I said, although hearing four dangerous opponents referred to in the singular was disconcerting. I got into the driver's seat and started up the car and went as fast as I could drive towards the other end of the strip, bumping over roots, rotten tree trunks and who knows what.

'Jump out and stand off fifty yards, George. I'm going to torch this one now.'

'They'll see us for miles.'

'I hope so.'

The Volvo went up in flames so quickly that it scorched my hair. With a flaming car marking each end of the strip the Swede came right across the lake, descending gently for a nice soft landing. I knew what he'd be flying: a curious old BN Trislander, its long nose extending like a crane's neck, and its third engine perched up high on the tail. The Swede had lost none of his magic touch. He was the best of our contract people. There was snow and ice — more than I'd reckoned on — but I suppose a few years based in Sweden had provided him with plenty of practice.

'You didn't have to kill them, Bernard,' said George, having looked for our pursuers without spotting them. Perhaps this admonition was designed to cool my overheated blood. If so it didn't work, it simply made me want to beat sanctimonious George over the head.

'Stay where you are!' I said. 'He'll swing round and then brake. We'll go together. The door is this side. Watch out for the prop blades; he won't switch off the engines. The security stiffs? They are just scratched. Don't worry about them.'

'I'm not sure,' said George. He could be a lot like Dicky at times.

The pilot reached back and opened the door and I heaved George up into the cabin. It was a prop-driven eight-seater with extra tanks built into the cabin. The tanks divided the pilot from the seats we were in; they had to keep the weight forward to preserve the center of gravity.

'Trouble?' shouted the Swede.

'No. Just friends seeing us off,' I said.

'Strap in. Here we go. I thought it would be you when I saw the bonfires.' He revved up and let go of the brakes and we went rushing forward, skimming the tops of the dark trees. I looked back and saw the two burning cars. From up here they looked very close together: getting into the strip wasn't quite the simple task it seemed from ground level. By now the Volvo was almost burned out, glowing deep rosy red. Our car, the Fiat, was still bright with flame — the burning fuel had poured out of it to make flaming petals flat on the ground. There were sparks coming from a third place, nowhere near the cars, but these sparks turned out to be gunfire from the spooks, a reassessment confirmed by the smacking sounds of rounds hitting the tailplane as we banked steeply before skimming low across the dark still water of the lake.

George sat back breathing deeply, and with his eyes tightly closed. 'Are you all right, George?' I said.

'Did you plan that?' he said between catching his breath.

'No. Plan what?'

'Did you let them follow us all the way so that you could have a burning car at each end of the strip. Did you kill those men and then just wait for the plane?'

'No, George. I didn't torch the car until I heard the engines of the plane. And I didn't kill them; I just fired in their direction to keep them from killing us.'

'You said this pilot would try night after night. What would you have done if he'd not turned up tonight?'

I would have thought of something.'

The Swede was reaching back over the auxiliary internal gas-tanks. He didn't look back: he was watching the dark forest that was almost close enough to touch. His hand held a bottle and he waggled it to get attention. I took it from him. Johnny Walker. I uncorked it and took a swig. 'What about you, George?' I said and offered it to him. But George made a retching sound and was dramatically sick into a tin can.

'Take it easy, George,' I said.

He was trying to say something. I leaned close. 'I'll pay for it to be cleaned up,' said George. 'Tell him I'm sorry.' He was winding his rosary tightly around his wrist, and unwinding it to reveal deep indentations, as though this self-inflicted pain might preserve him from something worse.

'It's all part, of the job, George,' I said. 'Cleaning up other people's mess is what people like me and him are employed to do.'

The plane was battered by the gusting wind so that we skidded and bumped through the turbulent air.

George closed his eyes and concentrated upon feeling sorry for himself 'I wish you'd never told me, Bernard. I wish you'd let them give me the baby, and let me pretend. Wouldn't that have been kinder?'

'I don't know, George. Try and sleep. It's a long flight; these old planes are very slow. This whole coast is dotted with the Soviet navy's electronics. He'll have to fly low to get under the radar.'

'Those dead men will be on my conscience,' said George.

It was the point at which I'd had enough. I leaned across arid grabbed him. 'Don't lecture me, you sanctimonious little stooge. You're nothing but a lousy traitor, so don't tell me about your rotten conscience because I don't want to know. See the man up there at the front? tie's over sixty years old: he's the best man we have, and he doesn't do these trips to keep his cross-country qualification. I should have wasted those bastards back there but I didn't have the guts to do it and I'm ashamed. Do you hear that, I'm ashamed. Because the next time the old Swede drops in to some battered little wartime airstrip, to pull some poor bastard like me out of trouble, they are likely to be waiting for him. Got it, George? They'll be waiting for him with a complete description of me, and this funny old plane, and him and how he works. And that is all because of you and your stupid fantasy life.'

I had him tight by the collar and was shaking the life out of him. Now I released my grip and he slumped back in his seat inert, as if I'd scared him to death. I suppose he'd never seen me lose my temper before. It wasn't something that happened very often.

'The coast,' shouted the Swede. 'Order your duty-free.'

'We might get shot at again,' I told George. 'And he'll throw the plarie around. They don't like unidentified aircraft flying low at night, and you can't get insured against flak.' George showed no reaction. I looked out the window. The gray Baltic Sea is a daunting prospect in winter when seen from spumed wave-top height. I thought about George and about the night in London when he collected that injured man and took him off to see a doctor. George had obviously done a useful job for the regime when he became a generous supporter of Polish expatriate organizations. I wondered how the gold from the moneybelt fitted into the picture. Perhaps it was the way in which George was funded. Perhaps some enterprising expatriate had grabbed the gold for himself. I pushed it out of my mind; the interrogators would get it out of him, I was sure of that.

As we crossed the Swedish coast the sky was streaked with sunlit red clouds. 'Home sweet home,' said the Swede. It was a private air-field built alongside the extensive buildings of the Schliemann company, which once made wooden office furniture and exported its entire production to Russia. I'd never been able to fully understand why the USSR, a vast land covered in forest, imported not only wooden furniture but lumber too. But it did. Now however the Russians had little money to import anything from anywhere. Mr. Schliemann's factory was boarded up and most of the machinery sold. Mr. Schliemann lived in Antibes and rented his airstrip, and an outbuilding, to three middle-aged pilots who shared the costs of this funny old Trislander plane and had printed notepaper that claimed they were an 'all-Sweden air service.' They had Panamanian passports, a registered office in the Cayman Islands, took payments through a bank in Luxembourg and did any kind of work that came along.