He went back. "You're short one car. It looks as if one of them took it away and dumped it somewhere while the other loaded up the Land-Rover. Then he was going to release you and give himself time to get out of the area while you wandered around trying to find a phone. I think we should start doing that."

"D'you really think they were going to let me go?"

"I think the smashed phone proves it; not much point, otherwise. And once you'd got here, this place was blown as a base. They'd have to expect a follow-up. " He looked around longingly in the low, opaque light from the terrace windows. "I'd like to do a proper search, but it would take days. Leave it to Special Branch: we can tip them off from London."

"We can walk into the police station at Eastbourne. Damn it, / haven't done anything wrong. I've beenkidnapped."

"And because you were kidnapped / shot somebody who went over the cliff in that Land-Rover. I'mnot walking into any police station. Now, let's move. "

They walked back roughly the way Maxim had come, across the pasture to where he had left his car in a lay-by on the main road. Maxim did his best to demilitarise himself by letting his camouflaged jacket hang open to show the civilian sweater and shirt, but the only pace George could make across that ground didn't look suspicious anyway.

"Do you know," George said thoughtfully, "what was the worst thing about being down there in the dark?"

"Lack of whisky, I should think," Maxim said lightly.

George was silent for a time. Then he said: "Yes. But not just wanting it: feeling how much I needed it. It worried me."

Realising George was serious, Maxim tried to think of something helpful. "You were under a lot of stress. I've never been a prisoner, unarmed, helpless-except in exercise situations. And you can't really fake the real thing."

"Thank you, Harry. But it wasn't that…"

"Did they try interrogating you?"

"The one did. He asked how I'd found the house, who else knew, he said nobody would find me there in that place… I don't think he was very serious, though. And he didn't stay very long."

"Probably wanted to nip upstairs and check the place wasn't full of coppers, if he was on his own by then."

"Yes… it all seems a bit unreal and tame, now. Isuppose they really weren't going to kill me. I mean, that isn't the way they seem to work. I told myself that, in the dark, but I wasn't very convincing." He looked around at the wide green downs, the tattered grey sky and out to the Channel, where a broad blade of sunlight broke through to glitter the surface: " 'Set in the silver sea"… he must have been looking south when he wrote that. There's a helicopter."

Maxim had heard it already, its pulsing carried on the wind as it tracked the line of the cliff edge. "Somebody's reported the Land-Rover."

"We'd better keep moving."

"Better if we watched. We're just taking a stroll. You'd stop and watch a helicopter rescue act, wouldn't you?"

They stood there-luckily too far from the cliff for it to be natural for them to hurry down and peer over-as the helicopter swung into the wind and began hovering.

"I didn't know you were coming back," George remembered suddenly.

"It was a bit hurried. Things happened out in Illinois…" He told George briefly. The helicopter wavered itself into position, the winchman standing in the open doorway, then sank gradually below the cliff edge.

They walked on towards the road. "So it's finally got into the open," George said. "Well, not the open, with the broad bottoms of the Security Service planted on it, but the whole thing, back to the Abbey and the Reznichenko Memorandum and Tatham himself in 1968… Harry, when we add our experience here today, you know I think we've won? There isn't a committee in Whitehall that can whitewash this lot away. "

"If that matters any longer."

"What do you mean by that?"

"They could have done more to cover themselves. Pushed you over a cliff in your own car, driven you away somewhere, anything to give themselves more time… I don't think they want much more time. They think they've got enough."

"They can't do anything now without it being obvious it's part of the pattern."

"But do they know that?"

George phoned Annette, then the DDCR, from a telephone box in the little village just before Eastbourne, while Maxim sat in the car sorting the dead man's belongings and guessing how long it would take to establish that he had bullet wounds as well as the other problems of being dead. But just empty pockets would be suspicious enough.

"Charles Henderson," he told George, when he got back. "Address in Bath. He's got credit cards, too, so it's probably genuine. He wasn't on the CCOAC list, as I remember." He started the car, then slipped a cassette into the player. After a moment, it launched into a rock number.

He turned down the volume. George glared: "Harry, I didn't think even you liked this syncopated rubbish."

"It's pretty much unsyncopated, really. Almost everything on the beat. Mr Henderson had it in his pocket."

They listened to five minutes of it, George hunched and miserable. Abruptly, it became a sequence of bleeps, then a gabble of electronic noise. With one pause, it lasted about a minute. The rock music started again in mid-track.

Maxim wound the tape back and listened again.

"For all I know," George said, "that could be number one on the Hit Parade."

"I think it's more likely to be a computer program."

"Do they use those things in computers?"

"Normal thing, for the household computer. The trouble is, we don't know what brand of computer. "

"They're different?"

"Yes."

"Do you mean these blasted things are supposed to be revolutionising the world and they don't even speak the same language? How d'you know about computers, anyway?"

"I'd like to say it's because I belong to the computerised Army. In fact, it's because Chris has gone crazy about them. I'm going to have to buy him one for Christmas."

Mollified by Maxim's ignorance, George said: "Well, if he knows more about it than you do, why don't we ask him what brand it is? Your parents don't live far from here, do they?"

Crawling around Brighton and through Worthing stretched the thirty-mile journey to over an hour, and it was almost dark when they had picked Chris up from his school and reached the centre of Littlehampton. Or not quite, because it was one of those small towns which had closed off its centre to make a pedestrian precinct; Maxim parked as close as he could, but on a yellow line. Chris's eleven-year-old morality made him draw in his breath with solemn disapproval.

"I know," Maxim said, "but I've been mixing with some corrupting influences. Anyway, Mr Harbinger will pay if we get nicked."

Chris led them straight to a small home-computer shop, and Maxim realised how many Saturday mornings the boy must have spent with his nose pressed to the window. The proprietor, small and elderly, greeted them warmly. Two men-one expensively dressed-with a boy seemed a certain sale.

Maxim held out the cassette. "There's a program on this. Can you tell us what computer it's written for?"

The proprietor's smile faded.

George said: "If you've got the one it fits, I'll buy it."

"No, I will," Maxim corrected.

The proprietor didn't care who won that argument. Chris, however, cared very much. He stood very still, his golden-brown eyes following the discussion, and only reluctantly switching away to watch the proprietor run the cassette into one machine after another.

"I've been meaning to get one for months," George insisted.

"You? You need an instruction book with a pair of scissors."

"I have two daughters," George said with dignity.