One exception. If they're surveying the field from cover it's not so cosy: in any given street there can be a hundred windows and there's nothing you can do about that except change the image radically or use a car and change that image too, as often as you can.

Tonight there was no problem. The field was clear except for the man in the mackintosh and he was watching the check-in counters most of the time, enough of the time to note every single person who entered the immediate area.

He hadn't seen me.

There weren't many people at the Pan Am counter because it was still more than forty-five minutes to the check-in limit so I went over there and asked for a non-smoker and picked up the ticket and turned to my left and kept on going, using the end door of the main hall and crossing the road to the nearest car park. He kept approximately twenty yards behind.

Then I stopped.

There was a pool of shadow here, thrown by one of the trees in a dead area between two of the lamps. The wind Hew moisture against my face, and the heads of the tall palms glistened with it.

He walked with a loping stride, leaning slightly forward and looking at the ground, the mackintosh flapping and the wind ruffling the sandy fuzz of his hair.

I waited in the shadow.

A big one went up, tilting suddenly off the runway and doping into the Pacific night, the fluting of the jets changing to a high thin whine as its lights winked smaller and then vanished into the cloud base. The stench of its burnt gases came into the air.

'I didn't think you'd make it,' he said as he came up.

I was checking behind him and to each side, in the distance. He was clean.

'Washington laid on a lot of transport for me,' I said.. He was studying my face, the plain lenses of his glasses glinting as they caught reflections, hiding his eyes. I looked away but it wouldn't do any good because Ferris is very sharp and he likes his executives to be in top form.

'Someone been treading on you, Quiller?'

'Oh for Christ's sake, what would you expect? Egerton didn't send me into a place like that to pick the bloody daisies.'

He gave a short laugh.

Ferris always gets my back up because you can't ever put anything across him and he won't let anything go.

'Where did you come from?' I asked him.

'Bombay. What happened to Chepstow?'

He was particularly quick tonight and I didn't like it because Ferris is one of the really crack directors in the field and he doesn't normally show his nerves.

It made me think something had happened in London.

'Single shot, medium range, international class marksman.'

'Where were you?'

'Having a cup of coffee with him.'

He looked around him for a moment, his hands stuck into the pockets of his open mackintosh. He always wore that thing and he never buttoned it up: he'd been a schoolmaster once and I think this was his gown, really, in a different form.

'They take a pot at you too?' he asked me.

'No.'

'They didn't?' He swung to look at me, his yellowish eyes now visible behind the lenses.

I knew what he meant. He thought I looked like this because I'd had to get out from under a long gun and it had left my nerves all over the place and of course it was partly true: the long gun is one of the less funny toys they play with when they really want you off the perch-once you know it's there, you can't even walk down a street without knowing that every next second, every next step, you can lose the whole thing and send five thousand roses to Moira.

'They rigged a bang,' I told him.

He wouldn't pass it on: there wouldn't be any sniggering in the Caff. In any case I knew I'd have to tell someone, some time, because Control does a lot of his planning by positive and negative feedback and even an unsuccessful attempt to wipe out the executive in the field is very negative feedback and he can correct the pattern and take more care.

'What sort?' asked Ferris.

He meant what sort of bang.

In his deadpan way he was showing a lot of surprise, so I knew he'd been in very close signals with Control because the executive normally reports an attempted wipe and London would have told Ferris about this one and obviously London hadn't and he knew there was only one reason.

I wished he weren't being so particular tonight: I didn't feel like it. I felt like getting some sleep because every time I started any kind of thought process that bloody wall came at me again.

They rigged something for me behind the door of my room at the Royal Cambodian Hotel,' I said carefully, because if I missed anything out he'd pounce and ask questions. 'I didn't know a lot about it once it'd gone off but there wasn't any retrograde amnesia. In any given five-star Asian hotel the doors are usually teak and quite thick and the lock's good quality, so you can normally count on something with a high-recoil slip-catch mechanism with a spear-type detonator and plenty of fudge, probably gelignite. For your information I walked into the bloody thing and now I'd like to start forgetting it if that's all right with you.'

He looked away.

'Happens in the best of families.' He paused two seconds. 'Why didn't you tell Control?'

'Didn't have the nerve.'

He looked at me quickly and gave another short laugh.

'The Egg wouldn't have said anything, old boy.'

'I know. If I could have relied on him to kick my arse I'd have told him. Listen, Ferris, are you going to be my director out here?'

'Yes. Out somewhere, anyway.'

'Well thank Christ for that. I haven't had one since Istres. You heard about Istres?'

'Yes.'

'I thought you were on the Tokyo thing.'

'They called me in.'

I took a bit of time to think about that. The Tokyo thing was one of the major assignments for this year and Parkis was handling it and if they'd called a top director like Ferris off a mission that big it either meant this one was bigger or something had come unstuck.

'What's gone wrong,' I asked him, 'in London?'

A pair of bright lights had come out of the cloud base towards the west and were lowering along the approach path, throwing fan-shaped beams through the haze. We stood watching them.

'Nothing's gone wrong,' he said in a moment. 'We've run out of objectives, that's all.'

He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the lights of the plane.

The hot wind took on a chill and I didn't say anything till I was ready. I doubt if Egerton has ever run a priority mission into the ground because he takes an immense amount of care in setting the thing up and picking the right operatives and getting the signals network phase-perfect before he hits the tit and gets it under way, but this time he'd picked up the executive while he was abroad on vacation and sent him in without a director and in the third phase he'd had to call in a top man like Ferris from another mission and set up an in-transit rendezvous that could easily have been missed because of conditions in Cambodia.

To date he'd lost Harrison, Hunter, Chepstow, and every one of his objectives. All he'd got left were two men in a car park in Taiwan watching a China Airlines flight making its final approach to the runway, as if they'd got time on their hands.

'It's like that,' I said, 'is it?'

'It's like that,' he said.

'Should've hung on to Erich Stern, shouldn't I?'

He turned his head quickly, hearing the tone of my voice.

'Don't start that.'

'Listen for Christ's sake, why didn't Control tell me I was the last bloody hope you'd got of making any — '

'Quiller, there's no point in — '

'Lost every bloody objective right along the line and left me holed up in the wrong end of a war with signals breaking down and only that poor little bastard Chepstow to — '

'I'm not interested in — '