'Bun?' Holmes asked me.

'Are you serious?' They're like overdone concrete in this bloody hole.

'Tea, then,' Holmes said courteously, and signalled to Daisy. This man's courtesy is one of his many strengths, and guaranteed to drive you up the wall at times when you're ready to strangle the first person who's got the nerve to say good morning.

'Relax,' he said, 'old horse.' He watched me from under his thick black eyebrows, his eyes intent.

'Look,' I said, 'it's been six weeks.'

'I know.' He asked Daisy for some tea and she limped away with her arthritic hip, her red wig wobbling.

'Let me tell you,' Holmes said quietly, 'about friend Kearns. He — '

'They shouldn't send him out there, for Christ's sake, after what happened. How many missions has he been on — five, six?'

'The point,' Holmes said with careful emphasis, 'is that he needs to go out there more than ever, if in fact they don't call the whole thing off, as Shatner says.' He lowered his voice, keeping his rather hypnotic eyes on mine. 'He didn't do terribly well the last time out, went much too fast into the end phase and left his support people behind, wanting to impress London with a race to the finish. He brought the mission home, but — '

'This was Bolero?'

'Yes. But of course he nearly came unstuck, and his control had him on the carpet when he got back to London. He — '

'Who was his control?'

'Mr Loman.'

'That bloody man. Kearns is a neophyte, wants nurturing, not kicking.'

Holmes looked down and said nothing, didn't agree. I heard the door of the signals room slam as someone came out; the Caff was right next to it in the basement.

'So Kearns needs this one,' Holmes said at last, 'if they push ahead with a new director.' His eyes were on me again. 'You could probably twist their arm and get it for yourself, since you're more experienced and everything. But — ' he left it with a shrug, didn't take his eyes from me.

Then the door opened and Baker came in, one of the shadows, and dropped into a chair and tilted it back, one hand on the stained plastic table. 'Jesus Christ, they'll never get him out at this rate.' He must have been the man who'd just come out of Signals.

'Vereker?' Holmes asked him.

'Yes. Support can't get near him, radio contact's gone and his DIF hasn't got a clue where he is. Caffeine, Daisy old dear, for the love of God.'

Vereker had been on all our minds for the last sixteen hours. When you're mission-hungry you spend half your time in the Caff and the other half in the signals room listening to the stuff coming in from the various fields, so I knew what the score was with Vereker. He was in the thick of a sticky end phase in Bosnia and had started asking for help at one o'clock this morning, GMT, the transmission fading and coming back, and his director had been signalling through the mast at Cheltenham for instructions every hour from then on.

It's the worst place there is, the signals room, when some poor bastard's got a wheel off out there in the field; it's like sitting in the waiting room at the dentist's listening to a drill going next door.

'He'll be all right, love,' Daisy told Baker as she brought him his tea. 'Don't you worry.'

She always said that, but often the truth is different.

Holmes was still watching me, waiting. He'd made an appeal to my hypothetical better nature: let Kearns keep his mission, try and do things better this time, earn his stripes.

I was aware of anger simmering. A mission where the DIF was already a dead duck before the action had even started was the kind of thing I could handle better than most.

'That man Vereker,' I said, 'is in the shit. And you want to see Kearns in the shit too?'

'It's not quite like that,' Holmes said.

'What is it quite like?'

He spread his fingers on the table. 'The first few times you went out, things didn't always go well. But you had to push through with it, like a rite of passage. And you're still here. Give him his chance too.' He lifted his fingers, let them drop. 'Not much to ask.'

I looked across the room at the man in the corner. He was still sitting with his legs crossed, one foot swinging, his eyes on his empty cup: I'd seen him finish his tea minutes ago. He looked so bloody young — but then they always do, the neophytes, it stands to reason.

'He's cannon fodder,' I said. 'You know that.'

Holmes nodded quickly. 'Yes. But that's only part of it. If you didn't want his mission for yourself you wouldn't mind so much, would you? You'd let him go out, take his chance.'

It took away the feeling of anger, and immediately, because it had been against myself, for wanting to steal the mission from Kearns over there; and Holmes had put it on the line for me.

'Point taken,' I said. 'I withdraw.'

He flashed his quick white smile. 'I rather hoped you would.' He was more pleased than he wanted to show: he'd expected a tussle. But that's the way he fights, Holmes, for what he wants: he goes in and picks over your conscience and when he finds what he wants he gently pricks it for you. The only way to thwart him is not to have a conscience for him to pick over, but of course in this trade the very idea is hilarious.

'Now let me offer some good advice, old fruit.' He looked around him, back at me. 'For the last few weeks you've been prowling the corridors like a bear — not to put too fine a point on it — with a sore arse, looking for a mission. One of the reasons you haven't got one yet is that there aren't many available, and another reason is that not every control is willing to suffer — not to mince matters — your notorious pigheadedness.'

I sat listening. I always listen to Holmes. He's probably the only man I trust in the whole of this treacherous hell-hole. He also keeps his ear to the ground and therefore knows the score before anyone else has started the game.

'So the risk you're running,' he said softly, 'is that before very long someone is going to drum up an excuse for sending you out to some remote and benighted region of the globe just to get rid of you.'

'More tea, loves?'

Daisy stood over us with a chipped enamel teapot, the brave colours of King George the Fifth's coronation emblem still half-visible under the stains.

'That would be nice,' Holmes said cheerfully.

Daisy poured for us, slopping the tea over as an expression of her generosity, and limped away with her arthritis. She dispenses her undrinkable tea and uneatable buns, does our Daise, with the clumsy grace of a benediction, and if she ever got tipsy and fell into the Thames the entire staff of the Bureau would be there before she hit the water. Cloistered as we are in a covert haunt of subterfuge, we prize the presence of this single innocent soul.

'So what do I do?' I asked Holmes. He'd mentioned good advice.

He looked around him again, at Baker, at Kearns, and back at me, his voice softer than ever. 'You know Mr Flockhart?'

'Not well.' Flockhart was one of the controls, but he'd never run me through a mission.

'He's quite good,' Holmes said. 'Some people find him a bit on the enigmatic side, doesn't give much away. He also comes and goes, runs a mission or two and disappears for a while. Of course, he's fairly senior, he can pick and choose.' He spread his fingers on the table again, keeping clear of the pools of tea. 'My advice, then, is that you should perhaps cultivate his company in the next day or so, and see if he's got anything interesting for you. Don't push it; just listen, and remember that one must handle Mr Flockhart with the tender care demanded by — shall we say — a tarantula.'