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minutes later.
    Old Admiralty Building, Spring Gardens, London
    The office assigned to Richter, on the first floor of the Old Admiralty Building, was almost exactly what he had been expecting. It was a small room, with yellowish-cream
walls that badly needed repainting, preferably in a different colour, and contained two metal desks, with somewhat worn swivel chairs, and four grey filing cabinets. The single window looked out
into a light well that extended up to the roof, and the gloom meant that the twin overhead fluorescent lights were switched on all day. Although clearly intended to accommodate two people, there
was no sign of any other occupant. The only good thing about it, Richter thought, was that at least he wouldn’t be spending all his working hours here.
    He had driven up from Cornwall on Sunday, and found his room at RAF Uxbridge without difficulty. He knew the base well from his previous appointment at Military Air Traffic Operations –
MATO – which was then based at Hillingdon House, within the RAF Uxbridge station complex.
    That morning he had travelled into London by tube, arriving at the Old Admiralty Building just after nine. He’d been greeted there in a somewhat perfunctory fashion by Colonel Baldwin,
before he was shown round the building by a young Royal Navy lieutenant. Getting his photograph taken, and sorting out his building pass and personal identity card – which identified him as a
Senior Executive Officer, but did not specify for which organization he worked – had occupied the rest of that morning. Richter had then gone for lunch in a nearby pub with the lieutenant,
who was on hold-over pending a posting abroad, and he had returned to his office just after one-thirty.
    He had been sitting at his desk for less than five minutes, doing absolutely nothing because there was absolutely nothing for him to do, when Baldwin knocked on the door and walked in.
    Richter looked up enquiringly. ‘This is somewhat sooner than I expected,’ Baldwin announced, ‘but it looks as if your first trip will be taking place on Wednesday this
week.’
    ‘Where to?’ Richter asked.
    ‘France, I think,’ Baldwin replied, ‘but you’re scheduled to attend a formal briefing tomorrow morning. It will take place in Hammersmith, at this address.’ The
colonel placed a single sheet of paper on the desk top.
    Richter barely even glanced at it. ‘A formal briefing for a courier delivery?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t that a bit of overkill?’
    ‘Not necessarily,’ Baldwin said. ‘It may not be completely straightforward.’
    Richter looked up and smiled thinly. ‘I’d have been very surprised if it was,’ he remarked.
    Baldwin stared at him silently for a few moments, then turned on his heel and left the office.
    Paxton Hall, Felsham, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
    The main conference room was on the ground floor, but the four men had decided to meet in the first-floor library instead. The chairs were more comfortable for one thing,
and Sir Malcolm Holbeche, the current ‘C’ – the head of the Secret Intelligence Service – preferred an informal atmosphere. And in the library he could smoke.
    ‘Are you sure, absolutely sure, of your facts?’ he asked William Moore, the head of Section Nine of the SIS and responsible for Russian affairs, once the pleasantries were out of the
way.
    Moore shook his head. ‘Not one hundred per cent, Sir Malcolm, no. With any data of this sort there is always room for some doubt, some uncertainty. The balance of probability, though,
suggests that we have been compromised.’
    The man at the other end of the table snorted in disgust. ‘Why don’t you just come out with it? What you mean is that we’ve got a high-level mole.’
    Holbeche looked pained by the remark. In his opinion, George Arkin – the head of the Security Service, MI5 – was rather too blunt in his opinion, especially where delicate
inter-service matters were concerned. Arkin’s background was