"Would there have been any training indestabilisation?"George had thought carefully about risking that word. But one thing he was sure he had learnt was that Marriage was no part of any conspiracy, had indeed no useful friends left. That was why he was reduced to talking to George Harbinger.

"Destabilisation? God, no. You can't destabilise an occupying army, you've got to blow the buggers up. All that came later, when the Company reached the big time. "

"Sorry. And you think Winter Garden's all withered away now."

"Just think about it. They wouldn't have been recruiting schoolboys: they'd want mature people, organisers, types with a sense of responsibility and a bit of gloom, kids and a mortgage. You need to be pretty gloomy to think of Resistance in peacetime, don't you? So they'd have been picking people in their thirties then, now they'd be in their sixties. Past it, except for running safe houses. Dead of heart attacks, crippled old men like me. It's long past, now.

"As much as anything, it was the Company that changed," he mused into his cup, beginning to slobber the whisky now. "They got more confident-more money, too, of course. Not just giving radio sets to bank clerks, they were giving bank accounts to politicians. They didn't want to wait and react, they wanted the Other Side to react to them. That's when they began thedestabilisationthing… but Winter Garden, no that's long past."

George could have cabled Maxim, but that would have meant a cypher clerk at each end reading the material, and a letter by diplomatic bag would have taken at least thirty-six hours. So he settled for a secure telephone call, indifferent to what that would do to Maxim's reputation among the Defence Staff at the embassy. Until then they had treated him with a mixture of sympathy as a man caught up, by line of duty, in a political imbroglio, and suspicion at what he might do to make things worse. A long secret call from a Ministry of Defence civilian locked the pendulum on the side of suspicion.

Colonel Lomax contrived to bump into him as he left the booth. "Harry, I don't know what that was all about, and I'm not asking, but can I beg one thing of you? Unless you've got a clear order through the proper channels, please don'tdo anything over here. I don't think London realises just how touchy things were even before the shooting at the Abbey. With the Peace Crusade and the Berlin business, we've got so many fences to mend already that we just can't afford another broken strand. So be a good chap and just look at the sights, do a little shopping, try to get to a football game…"

"And of course, I do feel bad about it," Maxim confessed to Agnes a few minutes later. "They must have a rough time of it at the moment…"

"Let 'em sweat a bit; Washington's a key career posting for most of them, it can't all be cherry blossom and cocktails. So what did George have to say?"

Maxim told her. She ended up shaking her head in slow disbelief. "It's too facile an explanation: blame everything on the CIA. And it still isn't their scale of operation; they'd do it big or not at all."

"All right, but… these people have got connections with somebody. The training-"

"Out of books."

"Not a Russian rifle, grenade and typewriter, not out of books. It's just the sort of kit Charlie would have been supplying. Who else could do it?"

Agnes stood up slowly, stretched her back, lit a cigarette and sat down again, frowning thoughtfully. "Winter Garden was before my time, but I did hear about it in my training. And there was a move to set it up again in the late Sixties, but that got sat on. Do you know about the UKUSA agreement? That was when they first created Central Intelligence over here. It's all classified, but what it amounts to is that we won't play the Great Game over here and they won't play it in the UK. So we invoked that agreement, and Charlie said Winter Garden had set a precedent and we said No it hadn't, it had just been a Cold War expedient and those days were over. My own mob was right at the front of the fuss: we didn't want any more secret organisations on our patch."

"Could they have gone ahead and set it up anyway?"

"No. They could never have done anything wide-scale without us knowing-and a Resistance movement has to be wide-scale to be any use. You must have learnt something about this in recent months?" She said it with a sly smile; he hadn't mentioned any of his own stay-behind training.

"Would you remember who was involved from Charlie at the time?"

"Why?"

"George read me over a list of CIA personnel who were in London in the late Sixties-"

"A list? He's barmy. It must be like a telephone book: their London station's the biggest they've got, there would have been hundreds coming through…"

Maxim silently handed over his notes.

Agnes read them through, then said more calmly: "Well, he does seem to have got the top people… I met most of these… Bodey, but he's dead, now; Kilmartin was strictly an analyst, wouldn't have been involved… Ithink Foulqueresigned way back… Magill, yes, old Mighty Mo, I rememberhim. But he retired, too; they're just about all gone, the old team.

"Mo would know something about it," Agnes went on thoughtfully. "He was OSS, then in London at the time of Winter Garden, then he came back in the mid-Sixties. A real player, that man; could charm the pants right off a girl."

"Did he?" Maxim asked innocently.

"No… but it might be worth talking over old times with him. He's got a law office in New York; a lot of the old team were lawyers. He must be sixty-something now… yes, I think I'll give him a call. D'you feel like a shopping trip to New York? Everybody ought to get a bite of the Big Apple."

In a way, it was a waste of the cover story Maxim had been kiting for his trip to St Louis, but if it was a step forward…

October is the cocktail month in Washington; the British embassy can be throwing three parties a week, and with the Liaison Office's yen to keep Maxim busy, he inevitably found himself sipping deep-frozen Scotch with a wing-commander from the Office.

"How on earth," he wondered aloud, "does anybody stay sober in this city?"

"Iron willpower and a stainless-steel liver." The RAF man peered into his empty glass, trying to decide which to rely on. "And the last man on his feet gets the extra hundred mil in foreign aid. No"-he nodded at the babbling drawing-room behind them-"this is just froth. The real business gets done at working lunches and small dinner parties. When they start feeding you, you'll know you're somebody. Ah, I spy a presidential aide: that makes the evening A Success." A small crowd had knotted at the door where the Ambassador was greeting guests. "Clay Culliman, you've heard of him?"

"I met him," Maxim said, stupidly slipping in a bit of inter-service one-upmanship.

"Didyou, now?-Where?"

"The President's visit to London."

"Of course. Yes, you were the chap at the Abbey." His round pink face beamed. "That's something to tell my wife. We couldn't get a babysitter, so I was expecting a cold TV dinner thrown at my head when I rolled back. Now I can say I've been mixing with both the noble and the notorious. You won't mind being that, for the sake of a fellow warrior in the cold drinks war? I think I can risk one more, in that case. Nothing for you?" He ambled off towards the nearest tray.

Disgusted by his own conceit, Maxim drifted out to the steps down to the lawn-the night was still warm enough for the big windows to be open-flanked by two huge, discreetly floodlit magnolia trees. A few couples and small groups were there already, muttering and sipping in the half-shadows, but Maxim stayed clear, drowning his sorrow in darkness.

I wish I could bedoing something, moving, he thought, with an infantryman's loathing of being pinned down in a known position.