In that priestlike scarecrow with the dull brown eyes my organism had sensed a friend. If I were going out on a new mission, this was the one Where I stood a chance. And there was another reason, appealing this time to the forebrain: whatever kind of mission Egerton was cooking up it didn't look like anything in my field because I'm a penetration specialist: the hole, the kill and the get-out. But that man is highly intelligent.and he wouldn't want a misfit in anything he was running and I therefore supposed that somewhere along the line in Beirut or Cairo or Tangier he was expecting the operation to take on the character of a penetration job and that was why he wanted to get me in.

Well he'd got me.

I took the medical card back and dropped it on to the desk.

'Get Sam along here for me, there's an angel.'

'My name is Miss Robinson.'

'All right, but for Christ's sake get Sam here, I'm on a count-down.'

I think they spray the air with carbolic after I've gone.

The security guard met me outside and took me along the corridor to Codes and Cyphers and unlocked the door for me and left me there.

'What've you got?'

The new seventh,' she said, 'or you can stay on one of the series.' She touched her blue-rinsed hair.

I tried out the new one but it was too complicated: you could commit it to memory inside half an hour including the inverted radicals and the alert numerals but if you got one of the prefixes wrong you could throw the whole pattern out and finish up with gibberish.

'I'd have to keep this on me, Harriet You got a sixth series, acid-destruct?'

'With or without abbreviations?'

'Without.' They can trip you unless you're phrase-perfect.

I finished up with a short, flexible pattern designed to pomp crude intelligence into the network without any frills, embossed in high relief on fifteen-second acid-soluble plastic.

'Be good, Harry?'

She looked up from her work, 'When are you going?'

'Any time.'

'Look after yourself,' she said.

'You know me.'

Credentials: Paul Wexford, overseas representative of Euro-press, London Division; passport with extensive frankings and selected western visas including Portugal; independent assignments, letters of introduction, continental references, so forth. It was light cover, unsophisticated and convenient at frontiers, with a press pass in five languages and some invitations to public seminars and grand openings. You could blow a hole right through it with a peashooter and as soon as the operation began taking on some kind of shape there'd be a directive from London to change it; but for the moment they couldn't provide me with viable specifics because even Egerton didn't know what I was going into.

Four American Express guest cards and the usual mnemonic aids, Paul Wexford running from the first line to the tenth in ten separate lists of names, so forth: the only thing they don't give you in Credentials are alphabet bricks. Driving licence, worn Polyphoto of current girl friend (not unlike the one Milos Zarkovic had carried in his wallet, and my scalp contracted for a moment).

'Keys?'

She dropped a bunch on the desk: two Yales and a tumbler model, two car keys and a Jaguar tab. They wouldn't ever open anything but you can keep the opposition fiddling about for hours if they snitch them on what they think is your home ground.

Going down the staircase on my way to Travel I saw Perkins coming out of Briefing and thought he looked a bit off colour: we're always superstitious about replacing a deceased executive in the field. I didn't talk to him.

In Travel they fitted me out with currency and credit cards and told me that Mr Egerton was in Signals and would be glad if I'd go along there as soon as convenient: typical Egerton again, courteous to a degree. I found him hitched angularly across a packing-case of new electronics with a set on his head. He saw me come in but went on listening, his eyes wandering forlornly from wall to wall. In this section of the room, currently reserved for his operation, one of the sets had gone dead and I knew it had been beamed on Milan.

'If you need to repack your things,' Egerton said at last, 'I think you might do that.' He got off the packing-case and hung the set on the hook.

One of the Signals wallahs across the room was bent over a speaker, monitoring some stuff that had come off the un-scrambler a few minutes ago: I could hear the interposed time slips.

'Surveillance secure… aid requested from local police and granted… discreet forces deployed in area Riff Hotel. I will come in at ten-minute intervals…

Tangier. And Egerton was pushing him hard, asking for ten-minute intervals on a gone-to-ground situation: the poor bastard could be on the air all night. He must have our man-in-place working with him: Glover, at the Oasis Bar.

Egerton was half-listening to the monitor tape.

'What am I on,' I asked him, 'immediate call?'

'Yes. Oh yes.' His eyes wandered over my face. 'You may have to leave directly from your flat, of course.' He was holding out a thin knuckly hand. 'I'm really most grateful, you know, most grateful. I didn't want anyone else, you see, not for this one.' He smiled wanly and turned away, forgetting my existence.

There was a break in the overcast and the sun was coming out for the last hour of the day as I reached Knightsbridge and sent up a wave from the gutter with the nearside wheels of the Jensen.

Fox to 15.

Base acknowledged and I cut the switch and clipped the mike back and got out and opened the boot. There are one or two obligations when you're on immediate call and one of them is to keep them informed of your travel pattern so that they can pick you up at once when they want you. Another obligation is that you remain on readiness at all times and that means you can't see a film or go along to the Turkish baths or visit a girl friend: most of our girl friends have telephones but the directors have agreed not to ring us unless there's something urgent and since any kind of signal is designated urgent when we're on immediate call we tend to live like monks during this period: the nerves are quite sensitive enough in the pre-mission phase and we don't want 13 risk being hauled out of bed by the telephone right in the middle of everything. The girls wouldn't like it either.

Perkins hadn't been on immediate call but they'd still got on to his known girl friends because it was urgent.

I lugged the suitcase out of the boot and slammed it shut and went up the steps and opened the front door. The obvious choice was a full yoharka and I did it very fast and one of his shoes came off and smashed into the mirror on the wall as he went down with the breath grunting out of his kings. Part of the butt was showing through the gap of his jacket and I pulled the thing free of the holster and took the magazine out and put it in my pocket and kicked the gun across the floor where he couldn't reach it. Then I checked his eyelids and saw he was still well under. The trouble with the yoharka is that you tend to use it only when there's no time to prepare anything more subtle, so you can't always place it correctly or work out how much force the situation requires: it's a very fast nerve blow and strictly for killing unless you pull the momentum a little, and I'd used it about halfway between because I didn't know whether he was armed.

I felt for the heart and it was all right so I went into the kitchen and got an ice tray and came back and propped him up and stuffed some cubes inside his jacket in line with the spine. He took three or four minutes to surface. 'How do you feel?'

His eyes rolled a bit and his hand went at once to the holster. He was a middle-aged Slav with a gold tooth and slight stubble and garlic on his breath. He was focusing at last and trying to move so I used a pressure point progressively to stop him from fidgeting. There hadn't been time to shut the front door after me and I could hear the rain starting again, pattering on the roof of the porch.