'Can't you put me on call?'

'I could,' he said. 'But I'm not going to.'

Fair enough. It could be for a week or two and I'd have to report in every day and hang around and hope the mission was going to break at any hour and within twenty-one days I'd be a nervous wreck and he knew it.

'Zarkovic,' I said. 'Didn't he have any contact in Zagbreb?'

'None that we know about.'

'What about «Cobra» then?'

He looked into the middle distance. 'We've got some people working on that. The only thing we know about it at the moment is that it's spelt with a "K".'

'Big deal.' But I watched him because if he knew that much then he must know more. 'What about this man in Tokyo?'

'We are working on him, too.' He leaned across the desk suddenly, looking up at me. 'We have four people out there, you see, all working very hard. Tonight we are sending a fifth, dropping him into the countryside near Beirut. You must admit, at least, that the opening phase is simple enough? There are five men apparently converging upon a given focal point, and we already have four of them under remote surveillance, and by tomorrow the fifth will be located. With any ruck, our five targets will converge very soon, and we shall be able to send in a penetration agent with the access and objective known and integrated. I don't see why you are so — ' he moved a long thin hand despairingly — 'uninterested.'

I went and sat down again.

The situation he'd given me wasn't uninteresting as such: one of our people had picked up an isolated bit of info in Alexandria quite by chance and checked it with Shin Bet, the Israeli Intelligence Service, and drawn blank. Then he'd checked it with our top contact inside Sovinformburo and got an instant lead. Then there were a couple more blanks: the SDECE in Paris knew nothing, nor did KYP, Athens; but two separate sources in Berlin began putting odd bits of raw intelligence through the monitors and finally Egerton was told to send a man out there to try analysing it It took him six days.

The picture was now reasonably clear. Five international terrorists had started making their way to a predetermined rendezvous from Taipei, Beirut, Cairo, Naples and Tangier, and they were taking a lot of trouble to cover their tracks, doubling back and feinting and leaping gaps. Egerton had now put four men into the field and was sending a fifth, and any number of them-from one to five-would show up at the rendezvous and keep very strict tabs.

'My conjecture,' Egerton had told me, 'is that once the group has come together, it will then move directly to whatever may be the objective.' He'd given one of his quiet sighs. 'I had very much hoped you would want to join them there.'

I saw the point but didn't like it. I want to know what the objective is before I start because I'm a fast-burn operator and I can keep up a lot of heat for a short period but then I'm done. You can't expect it both ways: some people are sprinters and some are long-distance; and I'm a sprinter. Egerton knew that, and he was trying to push me into a crosscountry marathon and I wasn't having any, 'It's not on,' I told him.

He stood up rather wearily and watched the rain trickling down the window above him. It wasn't shifting any of the grime and it occurred to me that if the thing ever got cleaned he wouldn't have to use his glasses any more. He didn't say anything for two minutes but I didn't fidget because that was what he was waiting for.

He turned round and sat down again, piling himself behind the desk like a heap of dead sticks.

'What you might care to consider,' he said in hushed parson's tones, 'is being placed on a five- or six-day call, and-'

A phone buzzed and it was the one on the end and he picked it up without even finishing. It was the yellow one, direct from Signals.

'Yes?'

He listened while I shifted my haunches around on the seat of the Louis Quinze chair: there's a spring that catches you, and one fine day I hope he'll have the bloody thing re-stuffed.

'I see.' He sagged a little, gazing without any expression at all at the dented bugle hanging from the shelf of Coronation mugs. 'Yes, very well.' He put the phone down and picked up the one nearest him.

I heard Macklin's voice come on. Macklin is in Briefing, crack at his job. Egerton said in a still voice: 'Harrison won't be returning. Naples, yes — he got as far as Milan.'

A chill came into the room and I looked away from him. He'd told me that Harrison was one of the four people he'd put into the field on the Kobra thing. Now there were three, Harrison had got too close.

'I want you to send Moresby.'

Macklin said something I couldn't catch, but it sounded like an objection.

'Very well,' Egerton told him. 'What about Perkins?'

Something about 'okay'.

'Perkins, then. Brief him as soon as you can.'

He put the phone down.

'They must be sensitive,' I said.

'Yes,' He studied his knuckles, whose skin was calloused with the scars of winter chilblains. 'The entire situation is sensitive.'

I didn't say anything else. He was a dismal man, a case of chronic melancholia, perhaps because his wife had taken an overdose during a seaside holiday, or perhaps because he was last born dismal, with some kind of acid in his soul. And he was ruthless, because his career demanded it: or possibly it was the reverse — he'd been attracted to this kind of work as la outlet for his ruthlessness. But he wasn't totally without feeling, and I knew from experience that he didn't like losing in executive. Even when it was their fault, through clumsiness or lack of judgement, Egerton saw it as his own failure, and was sobered.

Harrison hadn't been terribly good. He'd been short on nerve when it came to the crunch, and some of his security work was unimaginative (he seldom checked for bugs, and would open a parcel without getting it checked by Firearms first, that sort of thing). Without damning the man out of hand, I'd say it had probably been his fault, in Milan. But Egerton felt diminished, I had some thoughts of my own: he wasn't exaggerating when he said this entire situation was sensitive. These days the major intelligence services were as impenetrable as anyone could make them, and we didn't often try to get inside someone else's preserves. If we had to, and if we succeeded, nobody took it too hard, because there's a certain camaraderie among spooks and it keeps a lot of us alive, except of course when there's a mainline operation in full swing and someone gets in the way.

No one would normally despatch a surveillance man. They'd flush him, bring him in, rough him up a little, try to get something out of him, then let him go. They wouldn't kill him, as these people had killed Harrison. So the Kobra group must be operating wildcat, without any kind of intelligence support or directive. They must be precisely what Egerton had called them: terrorists. They're not usually our game.

'So be it,' he said at last, and got out of his chair and looked at a moustache cup and blew the dust off it and put it back on the shelf.

I didn't know whether he was talking about Harrison or my refusal to take on the mission, and I wasn't interested.

'Do we have a man in Milan?' I asked him, He turned a blank look on me.

'I mean,' I said, 'in place.'

'Oh. No.'

'Christ, you mean you've got directors in the field looking after those people?'

It was the only way Signals could have known about Harrison.

'Of course.'

He went on looking at me.

I got up again, feeling restless. I knew he was trying to trap me, get me into this bloody thing, and I wasn't having any. He was trying to sell it to me on its size alone: it had to be something pretty massive for the Bureau to put local directors out there with the executives before they'd even found out the objective. But it was the size of the thing that was turning me off: I've told you, I'm a ferret and I want them to put me down the hole and leave me alone.