'What time was that?'

He was talking to Signals. Every senior member of the active staff has a yellow telephone on his desk, among others, and he always picks it up the instant it buzzes.

'All right, will do.'

He put it down.

'There's another one.'

'Another what?'

He was making notes.

'Objective for surveillance. Tangier says he's just got in from Teneriffe.'

He picked up a telephone.

'Put Whitaker on immediate call, will you?'

He put it down. I said:

'Who's this one?'

'They think it's Fogel.' He made another note.

'Heinrich Fogel?'

'Yes.' I began counting the seconds and he got it on four, looking up quickly. 'He was your opposition in Budapest, wasn't he?'

'Yes.'

'Old times.'

'Yes.'

The bastard had lined up a very long shot that had smashed a hole in the wall an inch from my head. I wished Whitaker luck.

'General theory,' Macklin said.

'Wait a minute. They only think it's Fogel?'

'That's right'

'When are they going to find out?'

'As soon as they can find someone to identify him. For the moment he's gone to ground.' He got up and put the file back into the cabinet and kicked the drawer shut and stubbed out his cigarette, lighting the next, cupping his hands round the match. There wasn't any draught: he liked people to think they were steady. 'Right. I've no specific instructions for you but Egerton won't be leaving the building until you're through Clearance: he'll probably go and sit in with Signals. All I know for the moment is that Perkins will be going out as soon as we can find him, with Ferris local-directing in Milan-'

'If they can pick up Ramirez again.'

He squinted at me through the smoke. 'You know, one of the most encouraging things about this situation is that we only really need to keep tabs on one of these objectives, on the reasonable assumption that they're converging on a fixed rendezvous.'

'You're talking a lot of cock, Macklin. Look what happened to Harrison: you'd have lost the whole bunch.'

He drew in smoke, his face twisted into a half-smile.

'Just making sure you know the score, old boy.'

'You're not putting me into surveillance, so you can stop wasting your time.'

'Wouldn't dream of it,'

'That's good.'

'Any questions?'

'Yes. Who's going to direct me in the field?'

He hooked his leg over a stool and dangled one foot, trying so hard to look unconcerned that it had me on edge. He and Egerton knew such a bloody sight more than I did about this operation and they'd both got gooseflesh and I didn't find it terribly reassuring. The mission wasn't even running yet and there was one man dead: two, if you counted Milos Zarkovic.

'We shan't know,' he said, 'until we know the field,'

'It could be anywhere. Right?'

'Right. Anywhere.'

There was a knock on the door and it opened and one of the security guards put his head round.

'Mr Perkins has just come in, sir.'

'Thank God for that.'

Macklin got off the stool and went over to the cabinet.

'I'll go and get cleared,' I said.

'What? Yes. You do that.' He pulled open the drawers and then turned his head suddenly, looking at me over his shoulder, the bleak light on his face and one eye squinting over the cigarette. 'If I don't see you again before you go,' he said, 'take care.'

I always go through Firearms like a dose of salts because a gun is more trouble than it's worth: you've got to conceal it across frontiers and get it through the airport peep-shows and look after it in strange hotels and you finish up babysitting for the bloody thing right through the mission. Some of the front-line executives carry them but don't often use them, so maybe they look on them as a suitable fetish for their trade, like garters for tarts.

I don't draw a capsule either.

Because if you're firing correctly on both frontal lobes you can often convince the opposition that you don't know anything of interest; but if they find one of those things on you they'll understandably believe you've got a headful of information more valuable than your life and they'll put you through the whole roller-coaster from electrodes to heroin-deprivation and you'll die with your hair white and only yourself to blame. It's strictly no go.

'Sign here sir, will you?'

No weapons drawn.

I wasn't long in Accounts either: Nothing to bequeath, no next of kin, so forth. The routine thought crossed my mind: at any given moment I'm not worth much in cold cash but why not leave it to Moira? But the routine answer came up: she got a quarter of a million in sterling for her last film so the only gesture I could make would be to put down on this form: Five thousand roses for Moira, to be delivered at dawn by six white horses from Harrods. But these arthritic old bags would only talk me out of it because their pet charity is the Salvation Army and they'd send the cheque round on a bike.

'Your medical card has come through.'

I took it over to one of the windows where there was a bit of light. String of normals, vision 20/20. Remarks: 12 lbs below ideal weight for height. Vitamin and mineral deficiences. Suggested supplementary intake daily as follows — 500 mg Vitamin C organic and 100 mg Calcium. They might as well print that last bit because in our trade we live on the nerves and the adrenals are under constant pressure, and there's nothing we can do about it except drink more milk and orange juice and see a bit more of the girls.

'When did this medical card come through?'

One of them looked up from her knitting.

'Last night.'

This is the sequence: when we come out of a mission we're sent to Norfolk for various tests including a medical and it normally takes a month to come through to London, and this is well in time for clearance on the next mission because the leave period is a standard two months. During these two months they can drop on us if something urgent comes up and we have the right to tell them to buzz off if that's the way we feel. In most cases we rally to the call because that's what we live for and the only reality is when we're working. The point is that I'd come off my last mission precisely seventeen days ago and they must have rushed the medical analysis in Norfolk so that I could get clear for a new mission in record time.

Typical Egerton. He'd got me into his office and I'd dug my heels in and told him no, repeat no, and I'd come out saying yes and I do not know how that bastard does it. There's always a reason but it's never the kind of reason he could possibly have manufactured: only this occasion some bloody fool in the hierarchy had made a mistake and set up a chain reaction that ended when Egerton picked up that phone. I think he would have told them what he did in any case: he doesn't like those people throwing their weight around where his executives are concerned. But this time he'd done it at the precise psychological moment: and I was into the mission.

No, you don't take on a job that's not in your particular field just because a director puts in a good word for you: if it's not in your field then you'll be uncomfortable and that can be dangerous and sometimes fatal. I'd taken on this one because Egerton had reminded me by pure chance that he always looks after his executives. I probably hadn't thought about it consciously: it had been civil of him, and that was about all. But the data had hit the organism on the subliminal level and got an emphatic response, because all the time the forebrain is driving you through a mission against grievous and increasing odds the organism is kicking and yelling somewhere down there inside you, desperate to stay alive.