Free Spy Story by Len Deighton

road I parked and thought about it for a minute or two. For a moment I wished I had confided in Ferdy and perhaps brought him here with me, but it was too late now.
    I walked back on the other side of the street. It was a fine night. Above the crooked rooftops there was a pattern of stars. The crisp polar air that had driven away the low clouds made the traffic noises, and my footsteps, abnormally loud. I trod warily, moving past each of the parked cars as if looking for my own. I need not have been so cautious. I saw them fifty yards ahead and long before they might have seen me. It was an orange Ford: black vinyl top, rear-window slats and that absurd spoiling device to stop the rear wheels lifting at speeds above Mach One. Frazer. There were undoubtedly others like it, but this was Frazer’s car. The long whip aerial and finally the silhouetted triangle of the Admiralty permit on the windscreen confirmed it. It would be just like Frazer to want a mileage allowance instead of using a car from their pool.
    There was a girl with him. They were smoking and talking, but they were situated perfectly to watch the entrance to number eighteen.
    They say that on his deathbed, Voltaire, asked to renounce the devil, said, ‘This is no time to be making new enemies.’ That’s how I felt about Frazer, and whoever and whatever was behind him. I turned the ignition key and thought about home.
    I wanted the end of the live concert on Radio 3 but got the news on Radio 4. On Monday the car workers would strike for a thirty-five per cent wage increase, and a six-week paid holiday. The Russians had announced the six-man team that would go to Copenhagen for the German reunification talks. Two of the Russian team were women, including its leader, who was in the running for chairman of the whole circus. (A proposal energetically supported by Women’s Liberation, who planned to march to Westminster on Sunday afternoon.) There’d been a fire in a Finsbury Park hairdresser’s, and a stick-up in a pay-office in Epsom. The weather forecast was frost, overcast skies and rain following. And I’d missed the best part of the concert.

6
    There is no limit to the number of staff officers or advisers in either Suite, nor need the Red and Blue Suite staffs be of equal size.
    RULES . ‘ TACWARGAME ’. STUDIES CENTRE . LONDON
    The Studies Centre – now STUCEN LONDON – is a particularly appalling example of Gothic revival, that in anywhere but Hampstead would have been too conspicuous to house secrets.
    â€˜Caledonia’, for such was deeply incised on its portals, was built by a nineteenth-century ironmaster to celebrate the Royal Navy’s decision to reinforce the wooden walls of England with ironclads.
    It was a three-storey maroon and mustard monolith, with turrets, domes and slots for bowmen. The main staircase would not have cramped Busby Berkeley, and the marine life depicted in mosaics in the hall might well have made Disney feel quite proud.
    The smell of cheap metal-polish and warm machine-oil penetrated even to Ferdy’s stove-heated den, and the carbolic that they used to swab down the hall was probably what was killing the winter lettuce that I was trying to grow in the conservatory.
    But it was probably the ballroom – with its glazed dome roof – that attracted the men who chose Caledonia as the Studies Centre. Most of its panelling was intact. And, although it had suffered under a decade or two of military footwear, the inlaid sprung floor would still have supported a light fantastic or two. The minstrels’ gallery had been extended and glass-faced to make a long Control Room – or ‘god box’ – from which the Director and his staff could look down upon the War Table.
    The Table took up most of the ballroom. It was well over seven yards wide and at least twelve yards long. In the bottom left-hand corner there was the tiny Jan Mayen Island. The North Pole was