'I put it in the microwave for you.'

Standing over me with her bright ginger wig like a fire in the gloom and her rouged cheeks burning with the warmth of motherly love.

'Good old Daise.'

We come here for escape and the comfort of this woman's saintly presence as she limps from table to table and back to her huge steaming urn, our very own blowsy and overblown Mother Teresa, garbed in her stained and sluttish apron and dispensing not only her black undrinkable tea and her stale uneatable buns but also the sweet anodyne of compassion that we need so badly when we crawl back from a mission with the rattle of shot or the scream of a dying man still echoing in the far reaches of the mind, or when we sit here with our hands around a cup while our fate hangs in the balance like a rope in the wind as those bastards upstairs turn the signals around and peck at the computers and shuffle softly from room to room in their worn suede shoes and finally decide which one of us should be picked for the mission that's come onto the board, which one of us shall be sent out to worm our way through the serpentine shafts of the labyrinth to seek the enemy and overcome him, pre-mission nerves, I trust you will understand and perhaps even excuse, this is just a touch of the willies.

'You'll need to get that dressing changed every three days, until they say you can leave it off.'

Clearance, Medical Section. I'd said yes, I understood.

'And you need to take a gram of C and two hundred and fifty milligrams of calcium in this form, the citrate, every day.'

'Why?'

'You're just back, aren't you, and going out again?'

'Yes.'

'That's putting a strain on the adrenals.' She gave me the small plastic box. 'Don't forget.'

I'd got a map of Hong Kong and a plan of the airport from Travel but I hadn't studied them yet and didn't want to: nothing was certain; they might not be able to con the Chinese into giving Dr Xingyu free passage out of the embassy, or any one of a dozen scenarios could come up and we'd have to abort this one while the shadow executive was still trying to get his teeth into this bloody bun.

I kicked the chair back and went out of the Caff and op the stairs along the corridor to the room at the end and found a slack-bodied woman in a drooping twinset peering into a filing cabinet through a pair of steel-rimmed glasses that were surely thick enough to be bulletproof.

'The buns,' I said. This was what they grandly called Administration Services. 'Those bloody buns down there.'

She looked around and stared. 'Buns?'

A girl came through the doorway and took a look at my face and scuttled for cover behind a pile of papers. 'Those buns down there in the Caff,' I said, 'are nothing more than resuscitated crud left over from Oliver Twist's workhouse. Have you ever-'

'If you wish to make a complaint, you'll have to fill in the appropriate form in triplicate. We can't-'

'You expect us to go out there and shove our heads right into the cannon's mouth and when we're lucky enough to come back the best you can give us is crud.' I looked at the mousy-faced girl. 'What's your name?'

'Gertrude, sir.'

'Little Gertrude, do something for me. Fill out the appropriate form in triplicate with my complaint, which you can put down as attempted food poisoning, and drop it into my message box for me to sign.'

I went along to see Holmes and blow his head off for nothing at all, which is what friends are for, but he wasn't in, so I looked in at Signals and saw a very sticky endgame going with Croder himself manning the board for Flamingo and Holmes watching the score as the stuff came in from Nigeria. Two other boards were open, the fourth was dark, and the last one was lit up but blank except for the word Bamboo chalked at the top, code name for the mission. That would be mine, and I stood for a moment looking at it with a feeling of time warp going through me, as if I could already see the future, the board filling with status reports as Pepperidge sent them in from the field, with routine information or requests for help; and I wondered how far down the board we'd manage to go before something flew at me from the dark or a wheel came off or I ran into a dead end with nowhere else to run, and Pepperidge would have to send the last signal: Shadow down.

The adrenals, yes, a strain on the adrenals, so let us quietly close the door of the signals room and go back to the caff and drink some tea and pop some calcium and inform Daisy that one fine day she might well Achieve a certain tawdry stardom in this bloody place for being able to offer its hard-pressed denizens some eatable buns.

Ten minutes later my beeper went and I used a phone and they told me Hyde wanted to see me for one final briefing, and I knew they weren't going to abort this one: the mission had started running.

'Pepperidge,' Hyde told me, 'will be in Hong Kong by the morning. That was a good choice you made,' swinging his large head to watch me obliquely, 'with Pepperidge. He's very fine indeed with his signals and of course he's got a great deal of regard for the way you work.'

'I didn't know'.'

'He said it was an honour. I'm sending you out tonight, is that all right?'

'Whenever.'

'You'll stop over in Bombay to meet someone. The situation is this. The Foreign Office together with the PM has managed to complete a workable deal with Premier Li Peng, assuring him that we are willing to keep Dr. Xingyu Baibing in our care at the embassy out there for as long as he wishes, which could of course be years, during which time our relations with China would remain distinctly cool. We have made it clear that a guarantee from Beijing that Dr Xingyu could move safely from the UK embassy to the airport would in turn bring our guarantee that normal trade could be resumed between the two countries.'

'Xingyu's going straight to Hong Kong?'

'Straight there.'

'When?'

'Within a few days. They'll give a specific date and time when they're ready — they're making the concession, not us. That part, actually, was comparatively easy. The difficult part was to persuade them that we're not aware that the moment Dr Xingyu lands in Hong Kong he's to be snatched by Chinese agents and sent straight back to Beijing for brainwashing.'

He poked his tongue into his cheek and waited.

'Why can't Xingyu be met by a platoon of Hong Kong police and taken into hiding?'

'I'm not sure,' Hyde said, 'whether anyone's made an estimate of the Hong Kong police force who are active agents for Beijing, but I would put it rather high. Xingyu would be walking right into the tiger's mouth. We can trust, you see,' his large flat hand hitting the desk, 'no one. No one at all. We also have to relax their agents at the very critical time when Dr Xingyu lands at the airport, by letting it seem that we have not the slightest idea that he's up for snatching. We shall be sending only one man to meet him — a junior clerk in the British High Commission — as a formal courtesy. The major requirement is to play this operation hi very low key.'

'What happens to the clerk?'

'He'll melt away at the right time. I'll go into that for you; then you must tell me how you think you're going to get Dr Xingyu clear.'

'Few questions first.'

'Of course.'

It was after seven in the evening, and the sounds of the traffic outside had changed, coming off the rush-hour high with not so many buses now, more taxis honking as people started out for the evening, it calmed, I think, him a little, to hear the steady beating of the city's pulse, something for me to remember, a touchstone, when I was out there in the cold.

'What are we going to do,' I asked Hyde, 'about the media? They'll be jamming the airport and they'll get in my way.'