A bolt of water, icy-cold, struck Steve Carradine in the face. Coughing and retching, he tried to move, found that his arms were anchored tightly behind his back. Slowly, his eyes and brain cleared. The musty, decaying smell of the deep dungeon hit him forcibly; yet the harsh, glaring light was oddly out of place in this world of dim shadowed walls and age-old antiquity.

A voice, flat, uninterested, coldly ominous, said from the back of the harsh, actinic light: "Now you will tell us the truth. Who are you? Who sent you here? How much do you know?..."

Set in the troubled, stormy Balkans, an uneasy frontier between East and West, every chapter of this spy thriller seethes with excitement piled high on excitement, as from a background of ancient capital cities emerge the characters in an epic drama of political and Secret Service intrigue; of a nightmare journey across the Hungarian plains, of a desperate flight on the Orient Express; all in a superhuman effort to remain alive and deliver vital information into British hands.

The man standing by the window had a heavy, gloomy face, filled with the knowledge of much trouble and intrigue and many worries. His thick, horn-rimmed glasses winked briefly as he turned his head slowly and said: "I appreciate your Government acceding to our request for you to be transferred temporarily to us. I know your past record, know that you're the very man we want."

Carradine said soberly: "Naturally I'll do anything I can to help but I don't see what--"

The other held up his right hand. "You will in a moment," he said quietly. There was a pause while he glanced down at the teeming New York street more than a score of floors below, then, incongruously, or so it seemed to Carradine: "Odd thing about that hobo the police picked out of the alley in the Bronx last night. He wasn't drunk, he'd been drugged - and we now know he's one of our top security men from the Missile proving grounds in New Mexico. We know there's an organisation in America working to find the location of our nuclear defence posts. This man of ours was after the top men in that organisation."

He paused, lowered his gaze onto Carradine, his lips forming an almost cherubic smile. "As from today, Mr. Carradine, so are you."