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tongue.
    Rachel suddenly stood up and checked her watch. “What time will the sun be down?”
    I said not to worry; we’d be out of the park and back at the car before dark. “Free for dinner?” I asked casually as we slipped our boots into the bindings and strapped the poles around our wrists. Rachel wasn’t. A deeper exploration of her complex existence and my bland way of living would have to wait. As it turned out, it took years. The next chance to come along was in Berlin with a jilted banker looking on.
    The Czar was finishing his monologue. In a dramatic finale, jowls trembling, tufts of white hair quaking, he seemed to take hold of a mythical sword, holding it high and brandishing it before us. It wasn’t just any sword. It must have been huge, almost out of his league,because the effort turned him crimson.
We’ll slay the barbarians!
The watchers were taken aback, trying to decipher the bluster. Had Heywood assumed a new self-image, that of an epic figure, a hilltop commander jabbing the sky with a weapon and sending mighty armies into bloody battle? He froze in this pose. For several seconds his face was tense, inner eye focussed on the impending clash. Then he relaxed. “It’s a metaphor,” an altered voice said. “You get the point.”
    Now came a further mutation. The Czar turned fatherly. Solemnly, generously, he desired to hear his family’s anguish, and at this invitation the watchers peppered him.
    What was to be their
exact
role versus that of Jaime? Because what he proposed – that their work be vetted by someone unknown – was unusual and, in truth, unworkable.
    The Czar clasped his hands under his chin before lifting his eyes to the ceiling.
Not for vetting!
he declared.
Good heavens. No, no, no! Please listen again. Information-sharing, co-operation, working as a team
.
    More rapid-fire questions. Had the
Manual on Security Procedures
been thrown out the window? Nothing personal about the girl beside him, but to what level of security had she been cleared? And if one computer genius could be injected into the heart of Service intelligence, then why not boatloads more?
    The Czar, smoothed and soothed and oozed, confronting the anxiety until, with a good assist from Francis Merrick, the focus changed. Someone began asking practical questions.
    No, it wasn’t known yet how the bug scaled the network firewall.
Patience please!
Jaime, we were told, had excellent insight and numerous inventive ideas.
    Yes, new hardware had been ordered; delivery in a day, maybe two.
    True, the back-up tapes were not easily decipherable and, yes, a rumour had started that they might never be. But –
please note!
– that rumour had no substance. Jaime was already identifying a route through the encryption-decryption problem. The missing records would soon reappear.
A land we know, one flowing with milk and honey, lies before us!
    Would we be requesting assistance from the Americans?
    At this the Czar lost his calm. He shook with indignance.
No! No! Never!
A tirade followed, all about self-sufficiency and national pride.
    My ears pricked up. No support from below the forty-ninth parallel? Self-sufficiency? Who had been briefing Heywood? How out of touch was he? I knew our friends to the south had been monitoring our problem from the start. Almost forty-eight hours had passed since the plague struck, and for more than twenty-four I had known something Heywood still had no inkling of: the entry point of the virus into the Service network was the server which we the watchers used for linking into American databases. Admittedly, it was not official information. I had it in confidence from a fellow traveller in the American government, someone I’d never met face to face, but with whom I was in constant contact: Hugh-Stephen Amireault, or, as he preferred, simply Hugh-S.
    Over the years we had developed a regular, close relationship. We began collaborating in