Anybody wanting to invent a better mousetrap could beat a path to this mews for a start.

Neale came back. "Sorry, there doesn't seem to be anybody answering at this time of day, but you should get a cab on the road."

"Do you have a gun in the house?"

The Wing-Commander looked startled. "No. No, not here."

"A knife, then. Anything serious, or just a kitchen knife."

A little worried, Neale showed him into the dolls'-house kitchen. Maxim selected a five-inch vegetable knife and plugged its tip with a champagne cork. There was an empty bottle standing on top of the refrigerator.

Zuzana was waiting for them in the hallway, now wearing a dark tartan coat with a wrap-over belt and furry collar. She carried a plastic airline bag without any insignia on it.

"Is that all you've got?" Maxim asked.

"I could not bring more. You know we have to share apartments, I have two other girls, so we can watch each other. If I had walked out with a suitcase… I would not have walked out, that is how it is."

"It'll all be different now." Neale said soothingly. Zuzana suddenly wrapped her arms around him and kissed him thoroughly. The Wing-Commander went pink. Maxim led the way out.

The mews was empty of anybody and everything except Dustbins. Not even a single illegally parked car. Maxim stayed on the girl's right, his hand holding the knife in his pocket. He was worried, and worried that he couldn't work out why he was worried. Perhaps he was just catching it off Zuzana, but perhaps there was a better reason…

The main road, lined with fat Victorian houses that were now mostly residential hotels, was wide but not wide enough for its rows of parked cars and the busy two-way traffic. There were perhaps fifty people in sight, and any one of them could be a watcher, and of course there were no empty taxies.

South or north? North, Maxim decided. He grabbed the girl's arm, and her muscles were locked solid as stone. She was scared, all right. Why?

They hurried, making themselves conspicuous but making anybody who was following conspicuous as well. Maxim kept looking back; he knew all about the theory of tailing and shaking tails in a city, but almost no real experience. Born a townee, as a soldier he was a professional countryman by now. But an unarmed soldier, except for that piddling little knife.

That cork, that champagne bottle. Had they been celebrating her defection at ten in the morning? Or at midnight? Oh God, she hadn't jumped off this morning, she'd got there last night, and the other side had had twelve hours to blow the baboon whistle, not just two, Then a sweet chariot, a taxi with its FOR HIRE light on, coming up behind them. Maxim waved it down, yanked open the door and pushed Zuzana in, turned to shout an address at the driver-It happened very fast. A blue car swerved in to block the taxi, somebody pulled Maxim aside and he saw a hand with a pistol reach at the taxi's open door. As he went down, he grabbed the arm that was pulling him, and the man came over with him, the gun banging into the air.

Maxim rolled free, kicked at the man's head and missed, then tore the knife from his pocket. As the gun hand came up towards him he just swiped at it. The knife skidded off bone and the hand loosened. The man grunted and Maxim snatched away the gun, left-handed.

On the far side of the taxi, another man was standing calmly pumping shots through the window, now opaque with cracks and starred holes. Zuzana was lying flat on the floor. A bullet ricocheted out past Maxim and clanged into a shop front.

He fired twice through the blind window, and couldn't tell if he'd hit anybody, but the shooting stopped. He dropped the knife and dragged Zuzana out, pushed her behind him, kneeling in wait for the next attack.

An engine yowled above the traffic noise and the blue car screeched away, trailing blue smoke. Maxim ducked to look under the taxi and there was no one on the other side.

"Did you get hit?" He turned to Zuzana and she was already ten yards up the street and accelerating. For a moment the good citizen and the soldier in Maxim clashed, then he was back on the streets of Belfast and moving, too. Let the police pick up the pieces.

If she'd been wounded, it wasn't anywhere vital. Despite her shoes and shape, Zuzana could run, the way only a trained sportswoman or dancer can run. She weaved between pedestrians who were trying not to know about gunshots and that side of life, except for one old lady who swung her umbrella at Maxim and screamed. He realised he still had the gun in his hand and the chase could be misconstrued. Just as he caught up with Zuzana, she swerved left into a one-way street, running against the flow of traffic. It was a quieter, residential street. Then she turned right; Maxim said nothing, just keeping up with her. Nobody seemed to be chasing them.

Around the next corner she slowed abruptly to a walk, gasping.

"Are you hurt?" Maxim asked.

"I do not think so," She rubbed her left shoulder. There was a long rip in her coat, but no blood on her fingers when she looked.

Maxim was still holding the pistol. He glanced at it – a Heckler amp; Koch such as West German police forces use – and shoved it into his ripped coat pocket. That cork hadn't done much good. He should never have let go of the knife to open the taxi door.

"Where are we going now?" he asked.

"I thought you were organising me."

"You might have told me you went to the Wing-Commander last night, not this morning."

She said nothing.

"All right," Maxim said. "I'm organising you." And at least he now had a gun.

10

Even on a dull, chill day there were still a number of resolute outdoor lunchers and duck-feeders sitting around St. James's Park lake. George and Agnes met at the Cake House, bought packets of sandwiches, and started to walk.

"I don't know," Agnes said, "whether I shouldn't be seen with you or you shouldn't be seen with me."

"God knows," George munched gloomily. "I just can't tell where we go from here."

"Do we know where they are?"

"We don't even know if they're alive."

"Oh, come on, now."

George gave her his sandwiches to hold while he fumbled in an inside pocket and found a crumpled piece of Press Association tape, torn from the machine just outside his room.

She read:

POLICE ARE SEARCHING FOR FOUR MEN AND A WOMAN, TWO OF WHOM MAY BE SERIOUSLY INJURED, AFTER SHOTS WERE FIRED IN STANFORD STREET, KENSINGTON, THIS MORNING. SCOTLAND YARD'S ANTI-TERRORIST SQUAD HAS BEEN ALERTED AND A HUNT HAS STARTED FOR A BLUE SALOON CAR BELIEVED TO BE A DATSUN. WITNESSES FROM AMONG THE SHOPPING CROWD SAID THAT AT LEAST TWO MEN EXCHANGED GUNSHOTS WHEN THE CAR FORCED A TAXI TO STOP. THE DRIVER OF THE TAXI IS BEING TREATED IN HOSPITAL FOR SHOCK BUT IS REPORTED TO BE UNINJURED.

"And that," George said, "was less than a quarter of a mile from Wing-Commander Neale's mews."

"Well, it certainly sounds like our Harry." Agnes sounded quite happy.

"He was unarmed. I told him he needn't take a gun."

"Oh." She looked back at the tape. "They didn't find any bodies."

"They could have been kidnapped, dead or alive. I blame myself. I should have… I don't know."

Agnes took the lettuce from her sandwich and tossed it to a passing goose. "If this really was the cads and rotters, they've moved very fast and acted very blatantly. Usually they'd wait for months to set it up, then go for something like the cyanide gun or those-"

"I know all that. And it's just the point: if they're that desperate, then the girl must have something that really worries them. But now what can we do? We can't tell the police to start looking for Harry, think where that would land us. And we can't call your service in because of what the girl said. Not even if you'd got the resources. Get out of the bloody way." He lunged his umbrella at a duck which was demanding a sandwich with menaces. It fluttered aside, quacking furiously.