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the Library of Congress. There he had been in charge of Copyrights. Here he was in charge of Lives. He was an orderly man with a mild manner.
    W. Murray Hendricks, now able to examine all the papers calmly and without pressure, had come to three conclusions.
    The first was that the relationship between the unknown correspondent and Lazenby was likely to have been social rather than professional. His assessment of Lazenby was that he was a remote sort of fish: professional matters he might remember, social ones not. This one he didn’t remember. It was probably social.
    To be social with Lazenby called for qualities of warmth and gregariousness in the other party. Hendricks looked through the candidates on the list and found three warm and gregarious ones. Two of them, he saw, had sent Lazenby condolence notes on his wife’s death – they had appeared in the twenty-four letters sent from London – but one of them had not. He looked this one up.
    It was a Professor Rogachev – Professor Efraim Moisevich Rogachev – and the department held a useful file on him. It stopped abruptly. In examining where it stopped he saw why no condolences had been received; why there were, in fact, no letters at all from him. Lazenby’s archive covered a period of sixteen years. This man had gone missing seventeen years ago. He had had a motoring accident at Pitsunda on the Black Sea. His wife had been killed and he himself injured. He had returned to work briefly but had then had something resembling a nervous breakdown, after which – nothing.
    Hendricks looked up the man’s activities before the accident. He found that the week before he had been at a conference in England, at Oxford. The department kept records of conferences, and Hendricks sent for this one. It contained a full delegate list and also reports on the conference activities. Leafing through, he saw that Lazenby and Rogachev had met there on at least three occasions: at a welcoming reception for the delegates; as fellow panellists on a seminar; and as members of a sub-committee.
    Before this they hadn’t met for three years – far too long ago to be relevant now; which brought him to a second conclusion.
    Efraim Moisevich Rogachev was the likeliest man to have sent the message to Lazenby, and he had done so as a result of the meeting at Oxford.
    The relevant meeting was probably the social one, the reception. Something had happened at it. Whatever it was, another person had also been involved. The message asked for another person. The person might merely have been mentioned, but it was more likely that he was there. He would be a Russian-speaker; and most probably a Russian. He was being asked to go to Russia. Without a fair knowledge of the place he wouldn’t get far in it.
    But if he was being asked to go there, he was evidently not there now.
    Hendricks had a closer look at the Russian delegation. It was a strong one; twelve members. Three of them, he saw, had defected not so many years afterwards.
    Third conclusion. The man required had been present at the Oxford conference and was likely to be a Russian not now in Russia.
    Hendricks had copies made of the photographs of the Russian delegates, together with brief biographical details. But before despatching them to London he had second thoughts.
    The mission that was being suggested was a hazardous one and needed a young man – at least not an old one. All the Russian delegates were now old. It couldn’t be any of them. Just possibly it might be some other Slav who was present, a Pole or a Czech, Russian-speaking. But further reflection showed this to be unlikely too.
    Getting someone into Russia on clandestine business wasn’t a difficult matter, but this was not a matter of simply sending someone to Russia, but to Siberia. And not simply Siberia but a sealed area of Siberia. Quite a different proposition.
    On the face of it, an impossible proposition.
    Yet Rogachev thought it could be done. He thought he knew