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English -- and there had been nothing in Szendro's eyes or tone to betray his meaning. Reynold's turned back slowly, an expression almost of boredom on his face.

'A school boyish trick. I speak English' -- he was using English now -- 'why should I deny it? My dear Colonel, if you belonged to Budapest, which you don't, you would know that there are at least fifty thousand of us who speak English. Why should so common an accomplishment be regarded with suspicion?'

'By all the gods!' Szendro slapped his hand, on his thigh. 'It's magnificent, it's really magnificent. My professional jealousy is aroused. To have a Britisher or an American -- British, I think, the American intonation is almost- impossible to conceal -- talk Hungarian with a Budapest accent as perfectly as you do is no small feat. But to have an Englishman talk English with a Budapest; accent -- that is superb!'

'For heaven's sake, there's nothing superb about it.'

Reynolds almost shouted in exasperation. 'I am Hungarian.' 'I fear not.' Szendro shook his head. 'Your masters taught you, and taught you magnificently -- you, Mr. Buhl, are worth a fortune to any espionage system in the world. But one thing they didn't teach you, one thing they couldn't teach you -- because they don't know what it is -- is the mentality of the people. I think we may speak openly, as two intelligent men, and dispense with the fancy patriotic phrases employed for the benefit of the -- ah -- proletariat. It is, in brief, the mentality of the vanquished, of the fear-ridden, the cowed shoulder that never knows when the long hand of death is going to reach out and touch it.' Reynolds was looking at him in astonishment -- this man must be tremendously sure of himself -- but Szendro ignored him. 'I have seen too many of our countrymen, Mr. Buhl, going as you are, to excruciating torture and death. Most of them are just paralysed: some of them are plainly terror-stricken and weeping; and a handful are consumed by fury. You could not possibly fit in any of these categories -- you should, but, as I say, there are things your masters cannot know. You are cold and without emotion, planning, calculating all the time, supremely confident of your own ability to extract the maximum advantage from the slightest opportunity that arises, and never tired ,of watching for that opportunity to come. Had you been a lesser man, Mr. Buhl, self-betrayal would not have come so easily...'

He broke off suddenly, reached and switched off the roof light, just as Reynolds' ears caught the hum of an approaching car engine, wound up his window, deftly removed a cigarette from Reynolds' hand and crushed it beneath his shoe. He said nothing and made no move until the approaching car, a barely perceptible blur behind the sweep of its blazing headlights, its tyres silent on the snow-packed road, had passed by and vanished to the west. As soon as it was lost to sight and sound Szendro had reversed out on the highway again and was on his way, pushing the big car almost to the limit of safety along the treacherous road and through the gently falling snow.

Over an hour and a half elapsed before they reached Budapest -- a long, slow journey that could normally have been done in half the time. But the snow, a curtain of great feathery flakes that swirled whitely, suddenly, into the flat-topped beams of the headlights, had become steadily heavier and slowed them up, at times almost to walking pace as the labouring wipers, pushing the clogging snow into corrugated ridges on the middle and at the sides of the windscreen, swept through narrower and narrower arcs until finally they had stopped altogether; a dozen times, at least, Szendro had had to stop to clear the mass of snow off the screen.

And then, a few miles short of the city limits, Szendro had left the highway again, and plunged into a mass of narrow, twisting roads: on many stretches where the snow lay smooth and deep and treacherously masking the border between road and