I didn't have any choice.

'Main board, sir.'

'Can't you get Bureau One?'

'I'll ask them. Just telling you we've got through.'

Photos all over the wall of hang-gliders, I suppose that was his thing, picture of Diana, sign of the times, she was nudging the crown for wall-space in all the government offices I'd been in lately, you couldn't wonder. For Christ's sake hurry.

'You're on, sir. Bureau One.' I took the phone from him

'Ash.'

'Oh, yes.'

His voice was just as quiet at the console.

'I've just left him. I told him I couldn't take it on, but I've changed my mind.'

'Why?'

'Because I want this one. I want it badly.'

'Anyone would.'

'Yes.'

Everything closing in.

'How long ago did you leave him?'

'Say fifteen minutes.'

'Did he have a phone in his car?'

'I don't know. He came as far as Charlie in mine.'

I heard him turn away to speak to someone else, something about fully urgent. He'd have to contact Yasolev now, see if we still had a chance. The KGB wouldn't necessarily want to work with someone who'd shown cold feet. I'd left Yasolev in a rage.

Everything closing in, the walls crowding me. I still didn't know whether the Bureau was setting me up, using me for what I was worth, selling me the pitch that even a top shadow executive could go into a mission this big and bring it home. And I didn't know whether the KGB was trying to use me too, Yasolev for the furtherance of his own career or the whole of his organisation for their own cryptic purposes. All I knew was that the temptation for me to go into this, the challenge, was enough to bring me in here and have me lay my neck on the block in the name of blind ambition.

But the blood was running cold.

'What reason,' Shepley came back, 'did you give him?'

'Too big, too political. And having to work by their rules.'

''That's understandable.'

'He didn't think so. I left him furious.'

'That's understandable too. But I need this from you. Are you prepared to undertake the mission on their terms, if we can't talk them down?'

Now is the chance, my friend, the last chance, if you want to say no and save yourself.

'Yes. On whatever terms.'

Blood running cold.

'Very well. I want you here on the first plane. There isn't too much time.'

I gave the phone back to the man and stood doing nothing for a moment, letting the psyche centre if it could, while at the brink of consciousness I caught glimpses of the pretty coloured hang-gliders and the man watching me and then another face, Yasolev's, and the faceless, nameless people in London who were prodding the new mission into life on their computers, getting the facts in order, November 3, 09:54 hours, signal from the Embassy, Berlin: the executive accepts the mission.

Running cold.

I can't do that.

'Why not?'

They know where I am.

Slater glanced up, looking for Croder, but couldn't see him. He looked down again, leaning forward over the desk of the console, thinking. Slater was new at the signals boards. We always feel vulnerable, with someone new.

'You mean you can't get clear?'

No way.

The voice on the radio was steady enough, but I caught a tone of false nonchalance; probably the others did too. I'd spoken like that myself in the earlier missions; when you're certain you can't get clear and all you can do is let them come for you or pop the capsule, your voice sounds like this at the signals board in London, because your greatest fear of them all is of sounding scared.

'Look,' Slater said, 'if we can do anything, we will. But — hold it a minute.'

Croder had come in and Slater told him the problem. Croder took over the microphone, his mechanical hand resting on the desk like a steel skeleton. 'Stay precisely where you are and wait for dark. At some time before midnight you'll get a signal from the embassy. If they can reach you, they will. If they can't — ' he broke off and there was dead silence in the signals room and I noticed Holmes swallowing '- then I shall trust in your own discretion.'

The Bureau can't actually tell you to use the capsule; all they can do is to issue you one in Clearance when you go out. But if you've really got your back to the wall and there's any major information inside your head the opposition could get out of you, then your 'discretion' is expected.

We didn't find the contact. Instructions?

Different voice, different board. There were three in here. Slater's had Pineapple chalked at the top of the black formica console; this one had Quarry. No one had told me what the code name for my own mission would be, but at this stage they were going from P to Q

'Get hold of your director in the field. It's his job. Ask for a new rendezvous. Weston's ETA is 11:06 hours and you'll have to be at the airport by then.'

Roger.

There was some morse beeping somewhere; we wouldn't have anyone using it; it was just part of the slush. I saw Holmes turning away and pouring himself some more coffee, worried sick about the executive for Pineapple. He always worries, being more human, I suppose, than the rest of us.

Not that I was all that cool. I'd got on the first plane, according to instructions, and they'd shoved me into a police car at Heathrow and dumped me outside the building ten minutes ago and if I never hear another siren again I won't complain: it's not the most reassuring of noises.

She's just a bloody whore.

Malone's voice, you couldn't mistake it. Costain, sitting at Peashooter, said briefly, 'Explain.'

That word from a signaller means a bit more than it says. It means shut up and mind your language and give exact details, because one of the top Controls is in the room.

C–Charlie told me the silly bitch was a Venus trap for the militia but he was dead wrong. She's just a tart. One thousand pesos and not even a good fuck.

It was no use telling Malone what the word 'explain' meant. He was furious; he hates wasting time in the field.

'Tell C–Charlie to report. Where is he now?'

At field base. Now listen, I want new instructions.

The lights dimmed, flickered and came back on, less bright now. 'Power cut,' someone said. 'It's the storm.'

Most of the high-ceilinged room was almost dark; the consoles stood out like ships in harbour at night, lit overall. There were no windows here; this was the basement.

Two people were talking on the other side of Quarry, one of them Stapely, back from Sri Lanka with no injuries and mission completed in the record books. I didn't know the other one. The auxiliary generators had started humming and Costain was talking to his ferret and Holmes was standing near Pineapple, brooding, when the door opened and Shepley came in and the atmosphere changed at once. Even Croder hadn't got this kind of presence in the signals room. I'd never seen him here before, never known him control a mission personally.

'When did you get in?' His voice quiet, no expression.

'Ten minutes ago.'

He watched me in the wash of light from the boards, looking for any signs in me that I was nervy. I didn't show anything. He'd thrown an ultra-grade operation into my lap and put me into a rendezvous with a KGB colonel east of the Curtain and I'd turned the whole thing down because of cold feet — he knew that — and changed my mind and put my neck under the sword and he was looking for any sign that it had built up my stress level to a point where I couldn't be sent out. He didn't know me personally, had never seen me before the meeting in the underground garage in Berlin, and all he'd got to go on was my track record and he wasn't a man to make a major decision without checking me out at close quarters and with a lot of eye contact. The interrogation cells — the really effective ones — had people like this in them and I knew their style.