He pressed the record button and held the thing closer to me and I'd got nothing to lose this far so I gave it to them again: they obviously hadn't recorded my signal earlier from Bombay. 'From what I could get out of the local sleepers, Hubbard got in the way of the security people at the Soviet consulate without knowing it and one of their.station staff put a man on him and reached a contact and took him inside and grilled him — a Pakistani, not one of ours. When they'd got enough on Hubbard they must have thought it was safer to push him right of the picture and warn us off, so they did that.'

'You don't feel he could have told them anything useful first?' Elliott.

'Whether I do or not, they didn't, which is what matters. I don't know enough about his operation to give a valid opinion.'

Chandler, sitting at the wheel, kept his head turned to watch the nearest entrance to the car park.

'What about the woman?' Elliott asked me.

'She was the final link in the courier line and the instructions from the director in the field were for her to go with Hubbard as far as the rendezvous with the Afghan contact and the leave him and stand by in case she was needed.'

Elliott leaned with his arm on the bac of the seat, holding the Sanyo at an angle between us. 'As regards timing, how long were Hubbard and the woman in the car before he started off and met with the ambush?'

'Three hours. They had to wait for the Afghans to make a signal.'

'Three hours.' Elliott pressed the pause button while he did some thinking.

All I want to know is whether he'd been sleeping with her. Corinne, her eyes puffy with crying, brandy on her breath. How the hell did I know, but what are you going to do to pass the time for three hours closed up in a car with a young woman when you don't have the slightest idea whether or not the rendezvous could have been compromised and you could be lying on the floor of a detention cell by this time tomorrow with nothing ahead of you but ten or twenty years in a forced-labour camp in the Gulag without a woman in sight?