Operation Susie

The story starts with a dead student. A young South American, an apparent cocaine trafficker, is shot, and the trail leads somewhere odd: a department of the British government has been taking a quiet interest in drug-dealing students, up to and including killing them. Cowley wants to know why. The department's interest looks official and smells wrong, and that combination usually means somebody's been paid.

The dead man's sister, Diana Molner, goes into protective custody, and that's where the episode finds its engine. Diana is not the helpless bystander the setup suggests. She has been working to break the drug ring herself, and that has made her enemies at home: powerful figures in her own government, plus a corrupt civil servant in league with her country's ambassador. Bodie and Doyle are told to keep her alive under an operation name, Susie, that is classified all the way up. Protecting her means untangling the racket she was trying to destroy, and the episode manages both without losing sight of her.

Brian Clemens and Ranald Graham wrote it, Ian Sharp directed. Alice Krige plays Diana with a cool intelligence that makes her more than a damsel in a safe house, and you can see why guarding her falls to the two men who talk the least and shoot the straightest. Ewan Stewart's Rudiger, Harold Innocent's Northcott, Maggie Henderson's Jane, John Line's Somerfield, Don McKillop's Maclean and Alexander Davion's Torres fill out the web around her. Years later Krige would meet a very different kind of hive mind as the Borg Queen.

The episode keeps two suspicions alive at once, and it won't say which one is right. The answer arrives in a burst of violence. But by then Diana has earned her place in the middle of it, and even the simplest drug bust, the show reminds us, can have roots in somebody's embassy.