Even in the instant of deciding I'd take over from KLJ the main plan had presented itself to me, just as a player sometimes gets an overall vision of the board before he makes his gambit. Therefore I'd told Pol: 'I'm going in alone.' Because it had to be a fast operation or nothing, a blitzkrieg on their own terms. I could stick this city another month, no more. In a month I'd have to find him or get out.

There were two ways to do it: the slow and the quick. The slow way was to flush those men one by one – Helldorf, Sickert, Kalt and the whole forty-odd of them – in the hope that they'd lead me to Zossen. Pol had played too fair with me, calling Zossen no more than 'a part of the search area'. The first quick reading of the memorandum told me that Zossen was the whole of the area. Knock him down and the rest would skittle over. To get to him by first calling on those forty-odd contacts would bring a great deal into the light, and that was what the Bureau wanted. It was the slow way. But the quick way would get the same result. Go straight to Zossen and strike.

The quick way was to reverse the order of things. To find one man among three and a half million I must let him find me. Let him know I was here and here to get him. Draw his fire, so that he'd show himself. Then try to finish him off before he finished me. Hope for an overkill.

So I'd told Pol I must work alone. The only way was the quick way and I didn't want it cluttered up with a motley crew of cover men who'd trip me and get killed in the process.

The snow lay shimmering under the lamps. There'd been another light fall while I'd been working on the memorandum and the pavement was covered again. It had long gone midnight and the street was empty. After six months of cover protection I was alone; not in any doorway nor in any shadow did a man stand. Control had got my signal and called them off.