Tilson said yes and Hyde turned to look at me. 'You're resting, they said.'

'Technically.'

'Technically. What kind of shape are you in?'

'Not bad.'

'Not good?'

'It depends on what I'd have to do.'

He left a dead stare on me, miles away, and then his eyes focused again. 'All I know,' he said slowly, 'or all I can tell you at this stage, because there's a blackout on, is that it's Far East and I'm running it and I want you in the field.' There were beads of sweat on his forehead where the hair had thinned back; they always turned up the heating in this bloody place in the wintertime, but it wasn't that. This thing had obviously been dropped into Hyde's lap without any warning and he was trying to size it up. 'As far as I know,' he said, 'you wouldn't be going into anything terribly active in the opening phase, but' — his huge shoulders in a shrug — 'nothing's ever predictable. I want you for this one very much, but I do not want you to go into the field if you don't feel ready for it.'

I thought about it, because if I made a mistake at this stage it could be disastrous. 'I'll have to know a bit more; then I can made a decision. Isn't there anyone else available?'

'It's not quite that, you see. There's no one else, in my opinion, who could do this one better than you. And you know the territory, I believe.'

'Some of it. I've been to-'

Tilson,' Hyde said, 'for God's sake tell them to turn the thermostats down to something reasonable. Say seventy.' He swung his head back to me. 'Sorry. You've been to — ?'

'Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, but that's all.'

'Not Beijing?'

'No.'

'Seventy,' Tilson was saying on the phone.

'Do you have any Chinese?'

'No.'

His head tilted back again like a well-balanced boulder and he stared at the ceiling for a bit.

'Mr Hyde's personal request.'

He'd never run me, Hyde, but I knew that people liked him as a control. He'd run Fielding in Malaya and Parkes in Hungary and they both said he was good, knew his signals and support sources better than anyone and knew how to keep things going when there didn't seem to be a hope in hell of completing the mission. And he'd brought that bloody idiot Bates back alive across the border near Chernovtsy into Romania after he'd botched his signals and blown his escape route. We tend to appreciate a control like that.

'You are still the one I want,' he said as his head came down again to look at me, 'whether you have Chinese or not. It won't, I think, be crucial.' To Tilson: 'Are they going to do it?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Like a Turkish bath in here. Get Holmes on the line for me, will you?'

'He's in Signals,' I said.

'Get him in Signals for me, then, and ask him where the hell they are and why they haven't kept me informed.'

'Those people?'

'Those people.'

Your-ears-only.

'There are only two others available for this one,' Hyde told me, 'and I don't much care for either of them. I want someone I can rely on when it comes to the crunch. Not,' he said with his stare fixing me, 'that you yourself are all that angelic to deal with, by repute.'

'I don't suffer fools gladly.'

'You have a tendency to bitch about accepting a new mission, so they say, but you seem to be in a fairly reasonable state of mind at the moment, considering you're meant to be at rest."

I suppose that was true, and it surprised me a bit because they'd dragged me out of bed and they didn't think a shark bite was any more interesting than a chilblain and here was a top control trying to con me into the field, there's no one else, in my opinion, who could do this one better than you, so forth, and the whole thing was a wonderful excuse for me to kick the door down and bite the rug and threaten all manner of mayhem, but I wasn't doing that. I suppose it was the moth-and-the-flame thing.

'I'm meant to be at rest, yes, but on the other hand Tilson said it was fully urgent and the signals room sounded like an electric organ when I passed it just now, and it's got me interested.'

I was the moth.

In a moment he said slowly, 'This mission has, shall we say, potentially major dimensions.'

And that was the flame.

'Sticks out a mile,' I said.

I was unaware of the pulse in the carotid sinus, and that was normal at a time like this; but the psyche is more subtle than the cardiovascular system and I didn't know whether the elevated pulse was because of excitement or fear.

'Holmes,' Tilson said, 'has asked the switchboard to put their call through to his own office, to yours, and to Mr Croder in Signals.'

Hyde prodded his tongue into his cheek and in a moment said, 'And Mr Shepley is monitoring?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Very well. I think,' he said, turning to me again, 'I'm going to do something rather nasty. I can't, you see, tell you anything useful about this one until and unless you have agreed to do it.' Watching me carefully.

'Oh for Christ's sake — you want me to go in blind?'

Dipping his head, 'Not quite. To go in under whatever conditions you care to name, provided of course I can meet them.'

The pulse went up again by a few more beats, and the bloodstream became palpable, like a quiet fire coursing through the veins, not unpleasant. Not much more than an hour ago I'd been asleep in bed, the sores and the spectres of the last mission still lingering but not offering any threat: I'd been safe; and now I was standing in this room with the choice of going or being safe for a little time longer, at least a few weeks, or letting these people pitch me headlong into the field again, of signing that form, the next-of-kin thing, without even knowing what I was taking on. I could tell the difference, now, between excitement and fear.

I was afraid. But there burned the flame, bright and beckoning. There are various forms, as I'm sure you know, of madness.

But there was still a chance. Conditions, Hyde had said.

'You would be my control, at the board?'

'Yes.' His bright stare rested on me.

'No support in the field unless I ask for it.'

'We can do that.'

'In terms of my being expendable-' I said, and stopped right there. I'd tried this once with Shepley and he'd refused. It's something you don't have to sign your name to, but it's implicit in your general terms of service: if you're out there in a red sector and you're blown and there's nothing you can do, London will try to get you out, but if it hasn't got the manpower or the firepower or it can't raise support or send specialists in or if there's a risk to the Bureau, to the mission, then they'll leave you there, crouched against a wall or sprawled on a rooftop right in the line of fire or trapped in a building with every door covered, wherever you are they will leave you there, and all you owe them, if there's time to pay, is to pop the capsule and protect the Sacred Bull, the Bureau, and go in silence and in peace. In terms of our being expendable, there is nothing we can ask. So I told Hyde, 'Ignore that.'

'Ignored.'

Conditions.

'I pick my own DIF.'

'There aren't very many,' he said, 'available.'

'Ferris?'

'We sent him out to Tehran," Hyde said, 'straight from your debriefing on Barracuda.'

'Something major?'

'We wouldn't send Ferris out to wash the dishes.' Perhaps he thought it sounded discourteous, so he said, 'We reserve people like Ferris for people like you.'

'Fane?'

A flash of surprise came into the stare. Fane had betrayed me once, but I'd had the edge and I'd survived, and he was no longer a danger: you're perfectly safe with someone you know you can't trust.

'Fane is down with the flu,' Hyde said.

'Pepperidge?'

'Is available.'

I looked at Tilson. 'Is he in London?'