'Merde,' she said.

'Are you on the metropolitan flights?'

'No. I will be in Durban.'

She opened her eyes and looked at me for a minute and then curled her bare brown legs up on the seat and closed her eyes again and we didn't talk any more till we were rolling along the Promenade des Anglais, one motard still ahead of us and one behind. They'd taken us through most of the Corniche at a hundred kph and all we'd met were the La Turbie bus and a couple of deux chevaux but they'd used their hee-haws on sight and the indications seemed to be that London had sent a real phase-one priority to Interpol with the end result that these two anges de la route had been given instructions to get me through fire and water if it were necessary. It hadn't been necessary but they'd at least tried to show they were right on the ball in case any questions were asked later.

London doesn't normally fidget like that.

Marianne had an apartment in the Gustave V and I turned off the sea front and dropped her there, the rearguard motard following up and the front one meeting us from the opposite direction when he found out we'd made a deviation. She told me not to come up.

'All right,' I said.

She'd been quiet for most of the time since we'd left the Principality, because the Strobel thing was still on her mind. Also I think she'd been looking forward to the three days in we'd planned, and probably thought I should ring Paris and tell them I was down with the grippe or something; and that was what I would have done, if it had been Paris.

I got out of the Lancia and opened the little rusty iron gate of the Villa Madeleine, breaking another tendril of the morning glory that was twined round the hinges.

'Are you ever in Durban?' She gave a little moue and turned away and went up the tiled steps, finding the key in her bag; and when I was back in the car she'd gone, Marianne, with her slim brown legs and her smoky eyes and the way she made you feel it was the first time and never-coding.

Steadman had left a message at the desk saying he'd be in the Rotunda, and I saw him on the far side sitting alone at a table with a tray of tea. He looked at me over the cup.

'Took your time,' he said.

We went through the code-intro for the month, inter-national and unspecified, and he ordered me some tea.

'I had a fast police escort,' I said, 'what more do you want?'

He looked faintly surprised. 'I was just joking.'

He was a small man with sideboards and a huge tie and suede shoes and I wondered where they'd got him from. He wasn't Bureau. I looked around and saw it was all right: there aren't any bugs in the Rotunda at the Negresco and the dome doesn't throw any echoes because of the carpet and all those gilt-framed copies of Little Lord Fauntleroy.

'Where are you from?' I asked him, 'Liaison 9.'

That explained it: we call them the Wet Look. The thing is they spend their time liaising with the major services and therefore know a lot more than we do and we resent that Our only consolation is that we know one or two things they can never hope to get their hands on because they're filed in a heat-proof box with an all-eventualities cutout circuit and a bang-destruct and they'd never get near the thing, even if they took off their little suede shoes.

'All right,' I told him, 'what's the form?'

We spoke just above a whisper, because people could go past on the other side of the pillars to look at the onyx ashtrays in the display windows.

'There isn't any.'

He sipped.his tea, I didn't say anything. If I said anything it would get his back up and there wasn't any point in doing that because he wasn't anyone important: he was just a contact thrown in to early-warn the executive, that was all; and once the mission was set up they'd give me a first rank director in the field I'd have to live with and like it He'd have to be different from Steadman.

'You're on stand-by,' he said, and brushed his lips with the napkin.

'What phase?'

He gave a little laugh, displacing a lock of hair, 'Oh, it's nothing like that.'

Sometimes they try and shove a between-mission executive straight into a middle-phase or an end-phase assignment that's come unstuck and we all squeal like hell but never refuse it because we can hear the sound of distant bugles and we want to get in there where the bloodied banners are reeling through the fray. And there's another reason; we know there's always the chance that someone's managed to put most of an important mission in the bag before he caught a stray shot or hit a wall, so we can go in and tie up the end-phase and reach the objective and come out alive and take the glory for the poor bastard who couldn't quite make it-listen, if we weren't people like that we wouldn't be in this trade, work it out for yourself.

My tea came and when the boy had gone I said:

'Is it a mission?'

'It has all the earmarks, old boy.'

So he'd been getting the lingo wrong, that was all: trust Liaison 9. He'd told me I was on stand-by and they only use that term when they want to throw you into the fire to look for the chestnuts and that's why I'd asked the obvious question, to find out what phase they'd got the thing running at. When you're down for a mission they don't put you on stand-by, they put you on call; and maybe it doesn't sound very different but it is: a full-scale mission is your very own little toy to play with and you take it very seriously indeed and that was how I was taking it now.

The nerves were on edge.

'What time are they, calling up?'

He sipped his tea.

'No special time.'

I sat back and looked at Little Lord Fauntleroy. Under the big glass dome of the Rotunda the silence was peculiar, made up of tiny sounds that ticked or scratched or bumped and then died away before you could place them; but they weren't the ones I was listening to. Up there on the far side of the Channel there were doors opening and closing along those dim-lit passages, and the gibberish was crackling through the static and out of the scramblers in Signals while a phone rang and was picked up and someone in Monitoring sent a memo to Egerton or Mildmay or Parkis and everyone waited for the word that would start this whole thing running. Somewhere in Beirut or The Hague or the Azores they were looking for the hole, and when they'd found the hole they were going to put the ferret down, and the ferret was me.

From where we sat in our plush chairs in this sepulchral calm we could hear the telephone, faintly, at the desk in the foyer. I listened to that sound, too.

'You must have some idea,' I told Steadman.

Sat cursing myself. Perfectly normal for the executive to be on edge when he's on call but we always try not to show it and we always try not to show it especially to little ticks like this one.

He looked at the shine on his nails.

'There's someone trying to get across.'

I sat forward an inch, 'Where from?'

'We don't know.'

'Oh for Christ's sake, you must know where the-'

Stopped.

He looked around him, terribly casual, hamming it. The executive is requested to keep his cool and not shout the place down so that strangers can hear.

'Correction,' he said blandly, his gaze passing across my face as if by accident 'For «we» don't know, read "I" don't know.'

He let three seconds go by and added gently: 'Possibly that's why they're going to phone.'

It was twenty-five past six and at ten past seven the little bastard got up and wandered about looking at the costume jewellery in the display window and the brass plates at the bottom of the picture frames and then came wandering back. I'd counted twenty-three calls to the desk out there, 'M'sieur Steadman?'

'What? Oh, yes.'