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help, Dr. Oliver. We want you to work with us." He inhaled massively on the stub of his cigarette and let the smoke out through tightened lips: Bogart leveling with Claude Rains in Rick’s nightclub.
    "Sorry, Mr. Marks, but if you’re expecting a yes or no to that, I’m afraid you’re going to have to tell me a lot more."
    "I know. I’m just trying to decide how much you can be told." He stood up suddenly and made what Gideon assumed was his momentous-decision face. "I’m going to ask the director just how much we can share with you."
    As he walked to the door, he placed his hand on Gideon’s shoulder and tightened it in a gesture of trust and conspiracy. Good God, thought Gideon, the man must have been trained in a used-car salesmen’s school. Closing Technique Number Four: "Just a minute, I’ll have to ask my supervisor if we can go that low." (Smile, shoulder pat.) "I’ll do my best."
    He sat alone for a few minutes, trying to make something of the conversation so far. Marks might be a buffoon, but this was certainly NSD headquarters, and he had just been asked, as far as he could tell, to spy for them. And all this naturally had no connection with an attack by two professional thugs—spies? agents?—last night. He wondered if they had learned from John Lau of his deductions based on speech patterns or if they shared Lau’s apparent suspicion that he was a world champion karate master. No, that was ridiculous; he dismissed the thought. He wished he hadn’t gone so long without a decent night’s sleep.
    In about fifteen minutes, Marks returned with a round, rumply man in his late sixties. Wrinkled gray trousers belted six inches below his armpits and cuffed well above his shoe tops gave him a jolly, elfin quality slightly out of kilter with his watery blue eyes. He moved quickly, reaching out to shake hands with Gideon before Marks had introduced them.
    "Monsieur Delvaux, Dr. Oliver."
    "How do you do, Professor. Please sit down." With the greeting came an exhalation of cheese and wine. M. Delvaux had been interrupted at his
dejeuner
.
    "Do not smoke, please," he said from the side of his mouth to Marks, who raised his eyes heavenward—in Gideon’s line of sight, not Delvaux’s—and stubbed out his cigarette. Marks seated himself at a side chair, leaving the one behind his desk for Delvaux, but the older man perched on the large windowsill—he had to hop to get up—and began to speak rapidly and softly in a flowing French accent.
    "I would like to give you some background on what Mr. Marks has been telling you. For some time now, we have known—this is between us in this room, you understand— about a Soviet action of some sort that is now being planned. We don’t know what that action is, but we know that it requires certain secret information from a number of NATO bases. The surreptitious procurement of that information is among the highest priorities of their intelligence machine; its prevention is among ours. We are asking your help in an activity that may be of the greatest service to your country and to the cause of peace. To yourself, there is very little danger, virtually none."
    "What exactly are you asking me to do?"
    "Simply to tell us if anyone, at any of the bases to which you are assigned—
anyone
—asks you to obtain or transmit sensitive information from that base to himself or to anyone else."
    To his faint surprise, Gideon was disappointed. "You’re not asking me to
do
anything? Just report back to you?"
    "That’s correct.
If
the occasion arises." The blue eyes looked steadily at him.
    "Well, of course I’ll do that. I’d have done it without your asking."
    "I’m glad to hear that. Are there any further questions I can answer? If not, I’ll leave you in Mr. Marks’s capable hands." He hopped down from the sill.
    "I do have some questions," Gideon said. "You said there was very little danger to me. Unless I’m missing something, I can’t see any risk at all."
    "You’re