'All right. Look,' I said, 'I've told her he didn't mess anything up. If he has, don't let anyone tell her.'

'I am not,' Tinsley said evenly, 'a total idiot. And how are you feeling?'

'I'm used to it, and I'm not his wife.' The floor of the deck shuddered slightly as the undercarriage went down and locked in.

'How are you feeling in general?'

This time I didn't let him get away with it. 'I've no information for you if you've none for me.'

'Over a telephone?'

With Tinsley you can't win. 'I'm feeling normal,' I told him, 'whatever that means.' I waited for another question, one that might give me a clue. I was picking up some nasty vibrations in the background and they were reaching the nerves, because they'd been left exposed by the Hubbard thing: I'd known him for five years and worked with him twice and when someone gets blown apart there's always the thought in our minds: it could have been me.

'The two people,' Tinsley said, 'who are going to meet you at Tegel Airport are rather high in the echelon, and they'll handle you extremely well. Total reliance. Is that understood?'

'Roger.' I knew one thing now: Hubbard couldn't have left a clear field, and if high-echelon people were moving in to debrief me I didn't want to think what kind of mess he'd made out there. I also knew another thing: they weren't going to send me back there to clear it up. When I got back to my seat I found Corinne staring up at me with her eyes haunted. 'What went wrong?' she asked me.

'Nothing went wrong.' She was shivering, and I rubbed her hands. 'They want me to switch flights, that's all.'

She almost flinched. 'You're going back to Bombay?'

'I am not going back to Bombay. I'm wanted in Berlin.' We began lowering into the approach path.

She wouldn't let it go at that. 'What are you going to tell them, when you're debriefed?'

'I'm going to tell them he left no traces, nobody involved, nothing that's ever going to blow up in anyone's face.' I could have bitten my tongue because there were better ways of putting it than that. 'Look,' I told her, 'he was doing his best and he bought it. Did you love him?'

'Yes.'

'Then settle for that. What else matters, for God's sake?'

They were standing near the Hertz desk in West Berlin, hands tucked behind their backs. I'd never seen them before; they could have been twins, both a bit overweight, pink-faced and recently-shaved, formal blue suits and bright polished shoes — I thought of Loman — and with an air of being totally in charge, not a thing for me to worry about, just leave it all to them, so forth.

Parole and countersign for October but they also asked for my card, the heavy one with the Queen's coat-of-arms embossed on it, kept in the lining, not in my wallet.

'Splendid,' one of them said, 'then we'll be on our way. No baggage, is that correct?'

They could almost be Foreign Office, not Bureau; except for one or two people like Loman we look like down-at-heel Fleet Street stringers out of a job, part of the cover — but then Tinsley had said these two were 'very high in the echelon', and that explained it: they spent their days in the rarified atmosphere of Administration, high under the roof of the building in Whitehall, with nothing much more to worry about than how to get the pigeon-shit off the windowsills. That's not actually true; it's just that we don't like the bastards — at any given hour they can hit their computers and bring up a man's name and put him down for a mission and send him headlong into God knows what kind of mayhem, ours not to reason why, so forth.

'I'm Chandler, and this is Elliott,' one of them said — the shorter one with the trimmed military moustache — and pushed open a swing door and got us into the Customs and Immigration hall. 'We shan't be delayed very long, just a formality.'

They guided me right past the end booth and told me to wait on the cleared side while Elliott spoke to a plainclothes immigration officer and flashed his identity and signed something and came back and joined us.

'Terribly cooperative chaps,' he said briskly, by which I suppose he meant we were sailing through the formalities under the NATO flag.

Just to debrief me on Hubbard?

'Car outside,' Chandler said. He spoke like a very quiet machine gun. 'Shan't be long now.'

'You're wasting your time,' I told him.

They both gave me a half-glance and Chandler coughed discreetly and no one spoke again until we'd got into the black 420 SEL outside and driven to the corner of the east car park and stopped and waited with the engine off but the side-lights still burning.

A cold drizzle blew around the overhead lamps and frosted the bonnet of the car.

'Wasting our time?' Chandler.

'Whatever kind of mess Hubbard left out there in Bombay, you'll have to get someone else to wipe it up.'

They've done that too often — pushed me into one red sector or another with a checkpoint blown apart or a body in the street with dangerous papers on it or a courier line scattered and one of them sitting under a bright light with his brains being picked. Not this time. Not again.

'We've got a few minutes,' Elliott said, and pulled out a mini-Sanyo and slipped a cassette into it and snapped the cover shut. 'Let's just do a little debriefing on that one, shall we?' Smoother than Chandler, not a machine gun at all, more like a soft shoe shuffle, almost apologetic.

He pressed the record button and held the thing closer to me and I'd got nothing to lose this far so I gave it to them again: they obviously hadn't recorded my signal earlier from Bombay. 'From what I could get out of the local sleepers, Hubbard got in the way of the security people at the Soviet consulate without knowing it and one of their.station staff put a man on him and reached a contact and took him inside and grilled him — a Pakistani, not one of ours. When they'd got enough on Hubbard they must have thought it was safer to push him right of the picture and warn us off, so they did that.'

'You don't feel he could have told them anything useful first?' Elliott.

'Whether I do or not, they didn't, which is what matters. I don't know enough about his operation to give a valid opinion.'

Chandler, sitting at the wheel, kept his head turned to watch the nearest entrance to the car park.

'What about the woman?' Elliott asked me.

'She was the final link in the courier line and the instructions from the director in the field were for her to go with Hubbard as far as the rendezvous with the Afghan contact and the leave him and stand by in case she was needed.'

Elliott leaned with his arm on the bac of the seat, holding the Sanyo at an angle between us. 'As regards timing, how long were Hubbard and the woman in the car before he started off and met with the ambush?'

'Three hours. They had to wait for the Afghans to make a signal.'

'Three hours.' Elliott pressed the pause button while he did some thinking.

All I want to know is whether he'd been sleeping with her. Corinne, her eyes puffy with crying, brandy on her breath. How the hell did I know, but what are you going to do to pass the time for three hours closed up in a car with a young woman when you don't have the slightest idea whether or not the rendezvous could have been compromised and you could be lying on the floor of a detention cell by this time tomorrow with nothing ahead of you but ten or twenty years in a forced-labour camp in the Gulag without a woman in sight?

No, she was just someone in his courier line, that was all. With one of her blackened finger-bones or the charred remnant of an ear lying inside the coffin by mistake, to be prayed over in ignorance by his grieving widow — how complicated life can be, my friend, how very poetic.