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happens. For instance, he kills a Spanish diplomat visiting Paris in nineteen seventy-seven--a Fascist. The French government had to react appropriately and within twenty-four hours, every left wing agitator in Paris was in police hands. Not only Communists, but Socialists. The Socialist party didn't like that, which meant the unions also didn't like it. Result, unrest among the workers, strikes, disruption."
    She paused suddenly, lower down his list, and glanced up, her face bleak. "You mention here a possible involvement in the Mountbatten assassination?"
    "We've the best of reasons for believing his advice was sought."
    She shook her head. "It doesn't make sense."
    "It does if one considers his known links with the KGB. I believe that most of the incidents he has been responsible for were commissioned by the KGB, even the assassination of those supposed to be their friends, with the sole purpose of causing the maximum amount of disruption possible in the West."
    "But Barry is no Marxist?"
    "Frank Barry, ma'am, isn't anything. Oh, he'll take their money, I'm sure of that, but he'll do what he does for the hell of it. I suppose the psychiatrists would have fancy terms to describe his mental condition. Psychopath would only be the start. I'm not really interested. I just want to see him dead."
    The Prime Minister passed the list back to him. "Then get on with it, Brigadier."
    Ferguson took the list from her automatically as she pressed a buzzer on her desk. "Ma'amT'
    "Department Four has the power--total authority from this office, so it would seem. Use it, man. I'm not going to tell you how to do your own job, you're too good at it. I've read your record. The only thing I will say is that it seems obvious to me you must put everything aside and concentrate all your activities on Barry."
    Ferguson got to his feet and slipped the paper back in his briefcase. "Very well, Prime Minister."
    The door opened behind him, and the young secretary appeared. The Prime Minister picked up her pen. Ferguson walked to the door and was ushered out.
    Ferguson usually preferred to work when possible from his Cavendish Square flat. He was sitting by the fire, drinking tea and toasting crumpets on a long brass fork, when Kim opened the door and ushered Harry Fox in.
    "Ah, there you are, Harry. Got what I wanted?"
    "Yes, sir, every last piece of paper in the file on Frank Barry." Fox was thirty, a slim, elegant young man who wore a Guard s t ie, not surprising in someone who until two years previously had been an acting captain in the Blues. The neat leather glove that he wore permanently on his left hand concealed the fact that he had lost the original in a bomb explosion during his third tour of duty in Belfast. He had been Ferguson's assistant for just over a year.
    "What exactly are we looking for, sir?"
    "I'm not sure, Harry. Jack Corder was the third man I've put up against Frank Barry, and they've all ended up in a box. We've got to come up with something different, that's all I know for certain."
    "You're right, sir. Takes a thief to catch a thief, I suppose."
    Ferguson paused in the act of spearing another crumpet on his fork. "What did you say?"
    "Jack Grand of Special Branch was telling me the other day they put one of their men into Parkhurst Prison, posing as a convict. He was attacked within two days and badly injured. I suppose the truth is most crooks can spot a copper a mile away. Frank Barry will be the same, if you think about it. He'd smell a rat in almost anyone you tried to infiltrate into his kind of action."
    "You could be right," Ferguson said. "Start reading through those files. Aloud, if you please."
    They were at it for six hours, only Kim disturbing them from time to time to replenish the tea. It was dark when Ferguson got up and stretched and waved to the window.
    "I'd like to know where the bastard is now."
    Fox said, "The photos on him are a bit sparse, sir. Nothing since nineteen seventy-two. The earliest seems to