I got into the office to find alarm and despondency spread right through the building. Dicky Cruyer was there already, a sure sign of a crisis. They must have phoned him at home and had him depart hurriedly from the leisurely breakfast he enjoys after jogging across Hampstead Heath. Even Sir Percy Babcock, the Deputy D-G, had dragged himself away from his law practice and found time to spare for an early morning session.

'Number Two Conference Room,' the girl waiting in the corridor said. She whispered in a way that revealed her pent-up excitement: as if this was the sort of day she'd been waiting for ever since beginning to type all those tedious reports for us. I suppose Dicky must have sent her to stand sentry outside my office. 'Sir Percy is chairing the meeting. They said you should join them as soon as you arrived.'

'Thanks, Mabel,' I said and gave her my coat and a leather case of very unimportant non-classified paper-work that I hoped she'd mislay. She smiled dutifully. Her name wasn't Mabel but I called them all Mabel and I suppose they'd got used to it.

Number Two was on the top floor, a narrow room that seated fourteen at a pinch and had a view right across to where the City's ugly tower blocks underpinned the low-grey cloud base.

'Samson! Good,' said the Deputy D-G when I went in. There was a notepad, a yellow pencil and a chair waiting for me and two more pristine pads and pencils that may or may not have been waiting for others who were arriving at work hoping their lateness would not be noticed. Bad luck.

'Have you heard?' Dicky asked.

I could see it was Dicky's baby. This was a German Desk crisis. It wasn't a routine briefing for the Deputy, or a conference to decide about annual leave rosters, or more questions about where Central Funding might have put the odd few hundred thousand pounds that Jim Prettyman authorized for Bret Rensselaer and Bret Rensselaer never got. This was serious. 'No,' I said. 'What's happened?'

'Bizet,' said Dicky, and went back to chewing his fingernail.

I knew the group; at least I knew them as well as a deskman sitting in London can know the people who do the real nasty dangerous work. Somewhere near Frankfurt an der Oder, right over there on East Germany 's border with Poland. 'Poles,' I said, 'or that's how it started. Poles working in some sort of heavy industry.'

'That's right,' said Dicky judiciously. He had a folder and was looking at it to check how well my memory was working.

'What's happened?'

'It looks nasty,' said Dicky, unvanquished master of the nebulous answer on almost any subject except the gastronomic merits of expensive restaurants.

Billingsly, a bald-headed youngster from the Data Centre, tapped the palm of his hand with his heavy horn-rimmed spectacles and said, 'We seem to have lost more than one of them. That's always a bad sign.'

So even in the Data Centre they knew that. Things were looking up. 'Yes,' I said. 'That's always a bad sign.'

Billingsly looked at me as if I'd slapped his face. Uncordial now, he said, 'If you know anything else we can do…'

'Have you put out a contact string?' I asked.

Billingsly seemed to be unsure what a contact string – a roll-call for survivors – was. But eventually Harry Strang, an elderly gorilla from Operations, stopped scratching his cheek with the eraser end of his brand-new yellow pencil for enough time to answer me. 'Early yesterday morning.'

'It's too soon.'

'That's what I told the Deputy,' said Dicky Cruyer, nodding deferentially to Sir Percy. Dicky was looking more tired and ill every minute. He usually came down with something totally incapacitating in this sort of situation. It was the thought of making a decision, and signing it for all to see, that affected him.

'Mass,' said Harry Strang.

'They see each other at Sunday morning Mass,' explained Dicky Cruyer.

'No out-of-contact signals?' I asked.

'No,' said Strang. That's what makes it worrying.'

'Damn right,' I said. 'What else?'

There was a moment's silence. If I'd been paranoid I could easily have suspected that they wanted to keep me ignorant of the confirmation.

'Odds and ends,' said Billingsly.

Strang said, 'We have something from inside. Two men picked up for interrogation in the Frankfurt area.'

' Berlin.'

' Berlin? No Frankfurt,' said Billingsly.

I'd had enough of Billingsly by that time. They were all like him in the Data Centre: they thought we all needed a couple of megabytes of random access memory to get level with them.

'Don't act the bloody fool,' I told Strang. 'Is your information from Berlin or from Frankfurt?'

' Berlin,' said Strang. 'Normannenstrasse.' That was the big grey stone block in Berlin-Lichtenberg from which East Germany 's Stasi – State Security Service – intimidated their world and poked their fingers into ours.

'Over a weekend,' I said. 'Doesn't sound good. If Frankfurt Stasi put that on the teleprinter they must think they have something worthwhile.'

'The question we're discussing,' said the Deputy with the gentle courtesy that barristers show when leading a nervous defendant into an irreversible admission of guilt, 'is whether to follow up.' He looked at me and tilted his head to one side as if seeing me better like that.

I stared back at him. He was a funny bright-eyed plump little man with a shiny pink face and hair brushed close against his skull. Black jacket, a waistcoat full of ancient pens and pencils, pinstripe trousers and the tie of some obscure public school held in place by a jewelled pin. A lawyer. If you saw him on the street you'd have thought him a down-at-heel solicitor or a barrister's clerk. In real life – which is to say outside this building – he ran one of the most successful law firms in London. Why he persevered with this unrewarding job I couldn't fathom, but he was only one step away from running the whole Department. The D-G was, after all, on his last legs. I said, 'You mean, should you put someone in to follow up?'

'Precisely,' said the Deputy. 'I think we'd all like to hear your views, Samson.'

I played for time. 'From Berlin Field Unit?' I said. 'Or from somewhere else?'

'I don't think BFU should come into this,' said Strang hastily. That was the voice of Operations.

He was right of course. Sending someone from West Berlin into such a situation would be madness. In a region like that any kind of stranger is immediately scrutinized by every damned secret policeman on duty and a few that aren't. 'You're probably right,' I said as if conceding something.

Strang said, 'They'd have him in the slammer before the ink was dry on the hotel register.'

'We have people nearer,' said the Deputy.

They were all looking at me now. This is why they'd waited for me to join them. They knew what the answer was going to be but they were going to make sure that it was me, an ex-Field Man, who would say it out loud. Then they could get on with their work, or their lunch, or doze off until the next crisis.

'We can't just leave them to it,' I said.

They all nodded. We had to agree the wrong answer first, that was the ethic of the Department.

'We've had good stuff from them,' Dicky said. 'Nothing big of course, they are only foundry workers, but they've never let us down.'

'I'd like to hear what Samson thinks,' said the Deputy. He had a slim gold pencil in his hand. He was leaning back in his chair, arm extended to his notepad. He looked up from whatever he was writing, stared at me and smiled encouragement.

'We'll have to let it go,' I said finally.

'Speak up,' said the Deputy in his housemaster voice.

I cleared my throat. 'There's nothing we can do,' I said rather louder. 'We'll just have to wait and see.'

They all turned to see the Deputy's reaction. 'I think that's sound,' he said at last. Dicky Cruyer smiled with relief at someone else making the decision. Especially a decision to do nothing. He wriggled about and ran his hand back through his curly hair, looking round the room and nodding. Then he looked over to where a clerk was keeping an account of what was said, to be sure he was writing it down.