‘Then you’re coming with me to Toronto.’

‘What the hell for?’

‘I’m taking you to the police and I’m going to ask them to charge you, under the British Official Secrets Act, with selling classified information to the Soviet Union.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘No, my friend, Canada hasn’t given me a sense of humour. I am most definitely not joking.’

There was a silence, then Sparrow spoke. ‘What’s involved?’

‘I knew you’d come round to our way of thinking.’

‘I’m not agreeing – I want to know what’s involved.’

‘Nothing much. A little burglary and a long train ride. Get dressed. I’ll explain everything in the car.’

‘Car? Where are we going?’

‘I’m taking you to the airport. You’ve got to make a flight to Seattle in exactly—’ I looked at my watch – ‘seventy-five minutes.’ I pulled out of my pocket a thick brown envelope. ‘Put this in your pocket before you forget it. It’s plane tickets, train ticket and ten thousand dollars expenses.’

His eyes opened wide.

‘And I want every cent accounted for. You aren’t going on a freeloading holiday jaunt.’

‘Really?’ he said. ‘You could have fooled me.’

I dropped Sparrow at the airport, then drove into Toronto and checked into the Four Seasons Hotel. It was twenty to one. I went to the cashier’s desk and changed thirty dollars into quarters, then left the hotel and found a call box down the street. A few seconds before one o’clock, I dialled the number of a call box in Manhattan. It was answered before it even rang once.

‘Hallo?’ It was Martha’s voice.

‘How are you?’

‘Fine, Max. And you?’

‘I’m okay; I got what I wanted, or at least a lot of it.’ I decided not to tell her about Bruhnler. ‘Anybody twig me?’

‘Not as far as I know.’

‘Good. When exactly is Sleder due back from Gstaad?’ She had told me he had flown over there to spend Christmas.

‘Tomorrow afternoon.’

‘He’s not going to Hamburg today?’

‘Definitely not. He’s going to a luncheon in Monaco and then flying out here tomorrow morning.’

‘As soon as he’s arrived in the office tomorrow, I want you to send a telex to AtomSled Hamburg – can you get to the telex machine?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay. When you’ve sent the telex, I want you to jam the machine up.’

‘How badly?’

‘Enough to stop it receiving any replies for the rest of the day.’

It was unlikely there would be any reply the same day, since it would be late afternoon at the earliest in Hamburg before they received the telex, but I didn’t want to take any chances. I took the pieces of paper on which I had written down numbers from the pages of Fear of Flying from my wallet, and read the numbers out over the phone. ‘Good luck,’ I said.