The Conduct of Major Maxim

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High over London, a single aircraft trail was just beginning to glow like a hot wire against the steel-blue sky, picking up the sunlight that was still below the horizon to the ground. A lone cyclist in a track suit rushed down Kingsway at a speed impossible at any other time of day. An electric milk float whined around Aldwych and a baker's van was delivering French loaves, carried like big bundles of orange firewood, to the Waldorf Hotel. But most of the city was still asleep, its streets empty and at peace.

High up in Bush House, two men and a girl sat reading the newsflashes on a television screen, calling up fresh ones by tapping instructions on a computer keyboard. The shimmering green printout made the news seem unreal, like stock market prices, and they longed to hear the original broadcasts that the BBC monitors at Caversham Park had picked out of the air. Six hundred miles away, where it was already full day, an army was out in the streets of East Berlin.

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