'Would you be prepared to work inside the German Democratic Republic?'

'Under what kind of cover?'

'Whatever you felt comfortable with, plus the option of going clandestine at any given time.'

He meant I could bolt for a burrow if things got hot.

'I'd want a guarantee,' I told him, 'that you'd pull me out of there if I made the request.'

It didn't sound a lot to ask but he knew what I was saying. It could mean having to send a chopper across the frontier under the radar and locate me and get me out of whatever hole I was in, and do it in a rainstorm or in the dark with not much time left before the opposition closed right in on me or I lost too much blood or couldn't signal or give my position or lift a finger for that matter. Or it could mean calling a whole covey of sleeper agents and contacts and couriers out of the ground and sending them in to find me if they could, and that meant that Shepley could reach the point where he'd have to balance the value of this single shadow executive against the risk of exposing half the resident moles and sleepers and agents-in-place in the whole of East Berlin or the whole of East Germany, and if the scales didn't tip in my direction he'd have to go back on whatever guarantee he'd given me and throw me to the dogs.

He was watching me steadily.

'We can't do that,' he said, 'as you know.'

I'd just been trying to find out if he was ready to promise me the impossible in order to tempt me into the mission. So far he was playing straight.

'All right.' I shifted my stance, feeling the need for movement. Standing as close as this to Shepley was like standing under a high-voltage power line. Maybe he didn't always pack this amount of tension but he was doing it now. He hadn't, after all, come to Berlin to try the apfelstrudel. 'All right, then I'd want your guarantee that you wouldn't cut me down, whatever the pressure on you.'