'Even though Silas had gone,' I said, moving aside and letting Silas see the table to choose his shot.

'I wasn't dead!' said Silas indignantly over his shoulder as he pushed past. 'I kept in touch. A couple of times, Bret came back here to consult with me. Frequently I sent a little parcel of forbidden goodies over to him. We knew he'd recognize the way I chose what he liked, and so on.'

'But after last year's big reshuffle he went soggy,' Bret Rensselaer added sadly. 'He went very patchy. Some great stuff still came from him but it wasn't one hundred per cent any more. He began to ask for more and more money too. No one minded that too much – he was worth everything he got – but we had the feeling he was looking for a chance to get out.'

'And now the crunch has come?' I asked.

'Could be,' said Bret.

'Or it could simply be the prelude for another demand for money,' said Silas.

'It's a pretty fancy one,' said Bret. 'A pretty damn complicated way of getting a raise in pay. No, I think he wants out. I think he really wants out this time.'

'What does he do with all this money?' I asked.

'We've never discovered,' said Bret.

'We've never been allowed to try,' said Cruyer bitterly. 'Each time we prepare a plan, it's vetoed by someone at the top.'

'Take it easy, Dicky,' said Bret in that kind and conciliatory tone a man can employ when he knows he's the boss. 'No point in upsetting a darn good source just in order to find he's got a mistress stowed away somewhere or that he likes to pile his dough into some numbered account in Switzerland.'

It was of course Silas who decided exactly how much it was safe to confide to me. 'Let's just say we pay it into a Munich bank to be credited to a publishing house that never publishes anything,' said Silas. If I was going over the wire, they'd make sure I knew only what they wanted me to know. That was the normal procedure; we all knew it.

'Hell, he wants a chance to spend his pay,' I said. 'Nothing wrong with that, is there?'

Silas turned to me with that spiteful look in his eye and said, 'Nothing wrong with that, unless you need the stuff he's sending us. Then there's everything wrong with it, Bernard. Everything wrong with it!' He cleared the pocket and sent the ball down the table with such violence that it rebounded all the way back to him. There was a cruel determination in him; I'd glimpsed it more than once.

'Okay, so you're trying to prove that I'm the only one who can go and talk to him,' I said. 'I guess that's what this friendly little game is all about. Or am I mistaken?' I fixed Silas with my stare and he smiled ruefully.

'You're not the right person,' said Bret unconvincingly. No one else spoke. They all knew I was the right person. This damn get-together was designed to show me the decision was unanimous. Dicky Cruyer touched his lips with the wet end of his cigar but did not put it into his mouth. Bret said, 'It would be like sending in the massed bands of the Brigade of Guards playing "Rule, Britannia!". Brahms Four will be terrified, and rightly so. You'll have a tail from the moment you go over.'

'I don't agree,' said Cruyer. They were talking about me as if I were not present; I had the feeling that this was the sort of discussion that would take place if I went into the bag, or got myself killed.

'Bernard knows his way about over there. And he doesn't have to be there very long – just a talk with him so that we know what's on his mind. And show him how important it is for him to stay in position for a couple of years.'

'What about you, Bernard?' Silas asked me. 'You haven't said much about it.'

'It sounds as if someone will have to go,' I said. 'And someone he knows would have a better chance of getting a straight answer.'

'And,' said Bret apologetically, 'there won't be much time… Is that what you mean?'

Cruyer said, 'We sent a courier over by tour bus last month. He took the regular tourist bus over there and came back as easy as falling off a log.'

'Do they let the tourists from West Berlin get off the bus nowadays?' asked Silas.

'Oh, yes,' said Cruyer, smiling cheerfully. 'Things have changed since your day, Silas. They all visit the Red Army memorial. They even stop off for cakes and coffee – the DDK desperately needs Westmarks. Another good place for a meeting is the Pergamon Museum. Tour buses from the West go there too.'

'What do you think, Bernard?' said Bret. He fidgeted with his signet ring and stared at the table as if interested in nothing but Cruyer's tricky corner shot.

I found their sort of conjecture exasperating. It was the stuff of which long memos are made, the paperwork under which the Department is buried. I said, 'What's the use of my guessing? Everything depends upon knowing what he is doing. He's not a peasant, he's a scholarly old man with an important and interesting job. We need to know whether he's still got a happy marriage, with good friends who make speeches at the birth celebrations of his grandchildren. Or has he become a miserable old loner, at odds with the world and needing Western-style medical care… Or maybe he's just discovered what it's like to be in love with a shapely eighteen-year-old nymphomaniac.'

Bret gave a short laugh and said, 'Two first-class tickets to Rio, and don't spare the champagne.'

'Unless the shapely one is working for the KGB,' I said.

Bret stared at me impassively. 'What would be the best way of 'depositing' someone for this sort of job, Bernard?'

'I certainly wouldn't discuss with you guys the way I'd choose to go over there, except to say I wouldn't want any arrangements made from this end. No documents, no preparations, no emergency link, no local backup – nothing at all. I'd want to do it myself.' It was not the sort of private enterprise that the Department liked to encourage. I was expecting vociferous objections to this proposal, but none came.

'Quite right too,' said Silas.

'And I haven't agreed to go,' I reminded them.

'We leave it to you,' said Silas. The others, their faces only dimly seen in the gloom beyond the brightly lit table, nodded. Cruyer's hands, very white in the glare, crawled across the table like two giant spiders. He played the shot and missed. His mind wasn't on the game; neither was mine.

Silas pulled a face at Cruyer's missed stroke and sipped his port. 'Bernard,' he said suddenly. 'I'd better – ' He stopped mid-sentence. Mrs Porter had entered the room quietly. She was holding a cut-glass tumbler and a cloth. Silas looked up to meet her eyes.

'The phone, sir,' she said. 'It's the call from London.'

She didn't say who was calling from London because she took it for granted that Silas would know. In fact we all knew, or guessed, that it was someone urgently interested in how the discussion had gone. Silas rubbed his face, looked at me, and said, 'Bernard… help yourself to another brandy if you fancy it.'

'Thanks,' I said, but I had the feeling that Silas had been about to say something quite different.

Weekends with Uncle Silas always followed the same pattern: an informal Saturday lunch, a game of billiards or bridge until teatime, and a dress-up dinner. There were fourteen people for dinner that Saturday evening: us, the Cruyers, Rensselaer and his girlfriend, Fiona's sister Tessa – her husband away – to partner Uncle Silas, an American couple named Johnson, who were in England buying antique furniture for their shop in Philadelphia, a young trendy architect, who converted cottages into 'dream houses' and was making enough money at it to support a noisy new wife and a noisy old Ferrari, and a red-nosed local farmer, who spoke only twice the whole evening, and then only to ask his frizzy-haired wife to pass the wine.

'It was all right for you,' said Fiona petulantly when we were in the little garret room preparing for bed that night. 'I was sitting next to Dicky Cruyer. He only wants to talk about that beastly boat. He's going to France in it next month, he says.'