"I'm a busy man, youngster, so what's troubling you?"

''No crisis"

''Bea bit soon for a crisis."

''It'sonly that I'm going with the ambassador and Miss Canning to the Crimea on Saturday, and I wondered if there was anything I should know."

''About what?"

''Well about security, that sort of t h i n g… " He felt absurdly pompous. He should have stayed at his desk, The security officer looked sternly at him. "Just the obvious, What you'd naturally assume. You don't discuss anything of a confidential nature in your hotels, nor in any vehicle. You don't accept invitations late at night to a Soviet household – what they'd have told you in London. Your rooms might be bugged. There will probably be a KGB operative with you as chauffeur or interpreter, a natural assumption. But His Excellency and Miss Canning know the form. Should be rather a nice trip Good idea of H.E. to take in the battlefield, wish I was with him, if you could walk down that field with a metal detector, God, you'd make a fortune…"

''There's nothing else I should know?"

''Like what?''

''Well, I just wondered…" Holt stopped, making a fool of himself.

''Ah,, I get you." The security officer beamed, all avincular. "You wondered about security, your own security, eh?"

''Just that."

''This is not Beirut, young man. H.E. does not have minders in Russia. This is a very peaceable country.

Hurts me to say it, but H.E. can walk the streets of any city in the Soviet Union, any time of day or night, and have less prospect of getting mugged, assaulted, stuck up than in a good many cities at home. This isa highly policed country. The moscow posting iscategorised as Low Risk. I'm not a bodyguard, the personal security of the staff here is about bottom of my agenda, and that's the same with every western embassy in town My job, young Holt, is to protect the confidentiality of this establishment, to block KGB attempts to compromise and recruit our staff, and that takes the bulk of my time. Right?"