"The calling. The need to serve." Then turning from the window, his hand on Dunbar's shoulder, "Look, Charles, I'm not suggesting anything in particular, but these people do pay badly enough to assure you decent company."

Traditionally there has never been a specific path that young men have followed into the British Secret Service. Rather, those possessing the right sensibilities have usually been recruited on a haphazard basis, generally by tutors and dons at Oxford or Cambridge. Although somewhat more direct, Dunbar's entrance was no less casual, with idle conversations in Knightsbridge. And when it was done, he would finally tell others that one was not so much accepted by the service as absorbed by it.

At first, his duties were parochial and dull. He read a great deal: selected articles from the German press, embassy dispatches from Vienna and Berlin. He helped with tedious paperwork. He manned the telephone. Yet in spite of the boredom these were good days. There were six young men attached to the overt research department, two of them vaguely familiar from Oxford. Their offices were on the second floor of a cramped, sooty annex. The furniture was crude and the cold inescapable. Nevertheless, Dunbar came to love these rooms. He loved the odor of damp paper and plaster. He loved the tread of footsteps along dowdy corridors. He loved the deeper sense of secrecy and shelter. He loved Martin Southerland, and, for a change, he loved himself.

There was a chophouse not far from the Richmond annex, a red brick cavern where Southerland and Dunbar often met for dinner. Eventually Dunbar would look back on these evenings as instructive, his first introduction to the technique of handling spies.

For the most part Southerland tended to speak theoretically. Fear, he would say, turned men into children, and to that extend an agent was a child: clinging love and sudden hatred, unreasoning desire and uncomplicated greed. Agents also tended to be impulsive, he said, but usually responded to a firm hand.

Only once were there specific references to real people and real situations. It was an otherwise prosaic Thursday on the eve of the second Balkan war. There was a yellow fog, and no relief from the damp.

At first Southerland talked about the Germans, specifically Walter Nicolai and his formidable Third Department. He called them strivers, meticulous strivers with a generous budget for almost seven hundred foreign agents. "They're also killers,” he added. "Even on neutral ground they're killers."