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cubbyhole in Whitehall and the telephone that he prayed would stay silent, and a thermos of instant coffee. Millet was thankful to accept a lift. In the back of the car they talked in desultory fashion. Two practised civil servants, uncertain of the other's role and standing, and cautious of confidences. Millet was dropped in Great Charles Street at the entrance to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which left him a long walk along the river to Century House.
    The wind whipped at Alan Millet's legs as he hurried along the empty pavements. The sleet pecked at the skin of his cheeks, fluttered his close-cut hair. He was obsessed with a man called Michael Holly. A tall man, alive with enthusiasm, totally self-contained. Memories more than a year old. He supposed that every desker felt a stifling involvement with his field man. Like the first whore of a man's life, never forgotten, never to be escaped from. There was a pub across the river, where he had taken Holly - he always called himself that, never bothered with his given name -
    where they had sipped their drinks and nibbled at the tired bread and ham, where Holly had asked the expected question. What happens if . . . ? No problem, Alan Millet had said, no problem there. The ransom money's under lock and key in the Scrubs, and a bloody good laugh he'd had as he said it. Nothing for Holly to worry himself with, and of course it wouldn't come to that anyway. A bloody good laugh . . . The street lights picked out the man who stood against the river parapet, and who stared down at the ruffled water. Must have been the antibiotics he had been taking to stifle the influenza bug, must have been that which had loosened his tongue. A field man should never have been given a guarantee.
    But Millet had offered Holly a promise.
    It won't happen, of course. . . but there's a man in a cell at Wormwood Scrubs. Of course it won't happen . . . but if it did, well, there'd just have to be a swap.
    Bloody marvellous, wasn't it? And all the spadework done through Belgrade, all the ribbons tied. All ready for the flight to Berlin, and the only haggle was over which crossing-point, what time, which day.
    Michael Holly for Oleg Demyonov. Them happy and us happy.
    But now a man lay in the mortuary of the Hammersmith hospital and Alan Millet's promise was a worthless thing.

    Chapter 2
    His weapon against the rusty binding of the bolt was a fifty kopeck coin.
    For more than an hour he had crouched on the floor, bracing himself as the speed changes of the train and the unevenness of the track destroyed the momentum of his painstaking work. With the milled edge of the coin he chipped at the red-brown crust that had formed between the lower lip of the cap of the bolt and the metal sheet plate of the carriage flooring. He had something to show for his effort. A tiny pile of dust debris was collected beside his knee, and some had stained the material of his grey trousers.
    Those who had known Michael Holly at his home in the south-east of England, or had shared office and canteen space with him at the factory on the Kent fringes of London, might not now have recognized their man. A year in the gaols had left its mark. The full flesh of his cheeks and chin had been scalped back to the bone. A bright confidence at his eyes had been replaced by something harsher. Clothes that had hung well now fell shapelessly like charity hand-outs. A ruddiness in his face had given way to a pallor that was unmistakably the work of the cells. His full dark hair had been cropped in the barber's chair of the holding prison to a brush without lustre.

    This was an old carriage, but still well capable of performing the task set for it when it had first joined the rolling-stock in the year that Holly had been born. It had carried many on this journey. It had brought them in their hundreds, in their thousands, in their tens of thousands along this track. It was a carriage of the prison train that ran twice weekly from the