"The deadline was close and I knew now what London had sent me out here to do. And I couldn't do it just by standing in the way of the program Moscow was running. I'd have to get inside and blow it up from there." This time he is without direction, feeling his way carefully through the Polish underground on the eve of a coup. Playing the KGB against itself in a high stakes cat and mouse scenario is the only way Quiller may come out of this one ... The alternative is 20 years in a forced labour camp.

Quiller 04

Foreword

This dramatized report of an Intelligence mission by a shadow executive controlled from London forms part of a series bearing the key-titles of Memorandum, Directive, Portfolio, and so on. It may seem curious that in all these reports the name of the executive rarely appears. The reason is as follows. It is necessarily a code-name. Further, the policy of the Bureau controlling him dictates anonymity even in confidential speech, as a point of routine security. During a mission the code-name is never used, since a mission demands a cover and hence a cover name, which is used even in signals between the executive and his Control. This name itself must sometimes be changed if the cover is blown and he is thus exposed to great and immediate hazard: a new cover must be arranged and with it a new name. The identities, therefore, of the Bureau's active staff are confined strictly to its secret files, for the purposes of administration. For the record, the executive whose work is the subject of these reports bears a single code-name: Quiller.