'I need to debrief.'

Clinging to the broken booth like a drowning man to a raft. '1200 block and Riverside Way. West Riverside Way. Hurry. For God's sake hurry.'

Four men.

The clock – a jade clock in a gilt frame, standing on the desk – snowed 11:56. A little before midnight. 1330 West Riverside Way, not later than midnight, so forth. No longer important.

One of the men was Ferris.

It was a big room, ornate, in a way. Dark heavy furniture, velvet curtains, a pile carpet, all very substantial, reassuring. I felt reassured. I felt as if -let's get it absolutely straight – I didn't just feel as if. I had, in fact, come through something and reached the other side, and the other side was here, the here and now, the true reality. But dear God it had left me weak, punch-drunk.

Greenspan was another of them. He was the only one standing up.

'Did you pee in the jar?' he asked me.

Ferris was in one of the deep leather chairs, a thin leg draped over one of its arms.

'What? Yes.'

'Great.'

'And what is so fucking great,' I asked him, 'about peeing in a jar?'

He watched me quietly. No one spoke. It had helped, a little, the rush of anger, but had left me exhausted again. In a moment I said, 'I'm sorry.'

'No problem,' Greenspan said. 'What is so great about it is that you remember doing it. And we took a little blood, right?' The Chaplinesque eyebrows lifting.

'Yes.' Needle in the arm, out there in the hall, I think.

'Very good. Your memory's fine.'

'My memory?'

'You bet.'

'Why shouldn't it be fine, for Christ's sake?'

'Well I guess – ' a shrug, a glance across Ferris – 'you've kind of had a busy day.' A hand on my shoulder, 'Feel okay now?'

'I have never,' I told him carefully, 'felt better in my life.'

'Well I can take a hint,' Greenspan said brightly. 'You don't need me around here any more.'

He fetched his bag from the desk, leaning across Ferris for a moment, saying something; then he slapped my arm with an excessive amount of good cheer and left us. It occurred to me that I wasn't quite straightened out yet, too aggressive, too defensive; but then he was damned right – it had been a busy day.

I shut my eyes for a while, less than a minute, and the firework show died down behind the lids and left mostly black. Then I opened them and saw Ferris watching me.

'What's this place?'

'A safe-house,' he said.

I looked around the room again. Big geographical globe, a glassed-in case of ivory elephants, massive tomes on dark mahogany shelves, Existential Psychotherapy, Noyes' Modern Clinical Psychiatry.

'It's a what?' I got up and looked at the shelves, at some of the other titles. 'Is this a psychiatrist's office?'

'Yes,' Ferris said. 'It's also a safe-house. That's why we're here.'

I had an urge to walk out and slam the door but a certain degree of reason stopped me. A Bureau safe-house can be anything and anywhere – there's one in the basement of the British Consulate in Marseilles and there's one in Madame Labhouet's bordello in Abidjan on the Ivory coast and there's one in the Horacio Escobar Clinic for Enteric Diseases in downtown Santiago – so a psychiatrist's office in Miami, Florida, wasn't untypical.

Jade clock: midnight, the gilt hands together at the top of the dial in a prayer of thanksgiving. Rendezvous aborted.

It is also a sacrosanct rule that once the opposition has made contact with the executive in the opening phase of a mission he is not to approach his director in the field at that director's base, since it risks exposing him. The DIF can only function from an ivory tower, controlling the shadow from a distance and keeping clear of the action. Directors in the field, by their nature, amass an infinite store of intelligence data every time they go out, and their value to the organisation is beyond the price of pearls. Most retire after sixty and take up golf; most shadow executives are dead before thirty-five, or if not, uninsurable.

So it was entirely reasonable that Ferris had ordered me brought here from the 1200 block on West Riverside Way for debriefing. Entirely reasonable.

'What's his name?' I came away from the bookshelves and dropped into the armchair again, a dead weight.

'Whose?'

The shrink's.'

'Dr Xavier Joachim Alvarez.'

'Are you going to have him check me out?'

'Only if you ask.'

The quietness came back into the room. Everyone seemed to be listening. 'I'm in first-class condition.' Said it straight to Ferris, carrying the weight of it in my eyes, the shadow executive formally reporting to his DIP that he was able to take on any kind of action if the need arose. 'He didn't put anything in, did he?'

Ferris turned his head a fraction, and I realised I was tending to talk in ellipses, my thoughts jumping ahead. 'Again?' he said.

'Greenspan. I mean he only took some blood, is that right? He didn't give me any dope. Sedative or anything.'

Quietly, 'Would you like a sedative?'

'No. What the hell for?' Be warned: this was the second time it had happened. A minute ago I'd thought they were going to have me checked out by the shrink but it'd only been in my mind, not theirs – Only if you ask. And now it had been in my mind that they might have wanted to sedate me and I'd been wrong, dangerously wrong, putting ideas into their heads. Did I really want a shrink, sedation, but didn't have the guts to ask for them?

Paranoia. Relax. I was much better now, less scared about what was happening to me. It was going to be all right.

'What is he going to test me for?'

'Drugs.' Ferris watched me steadily. There was a chandelier over the desk and that was where I was facing.

'Can we have that thing out? Bloody bright. What sort of drugs?'

Ferris turned his head and one of the other people got out of his chair and went to the wall switch. 'Oh,' Ferris said, 'any sort, really. We'll come to that.'

He looked less cold now in the softer light from the wall lamps, less hostile. So we will come to that, will we? Meant, I suppose, that I'd been behaving a bit oddly of late. Damn his eyes, I'd nearly got my head shot off, enough to shake anyone up.

The man sat down again and I said to Ferris, 'Who are these people?'

'Upjohn,' he said, turning his head again. 'And Purdom.'

'I need to know more than that.' Said it with an edge. The director in the field calls the shots at every phase of the mission but he is also there to succour, support and sustain the executive, who may indeed look like a snotty-nosed little ferret down in the catacombs but who is nevertheless the only man who can bring the mission home, and when I'm brought into a room to debrief and there are total strangers hanging around I want to know who they bloody well are, if you'll be so kind.

'Upjohn,' Ferris said, 'is a sleeper here. He knew Proctor, though not well. It's possible that he can help us find him, if he listens to the debriefing. Unless you object.'

A small man, Upjohn, with a spotty skin and a slanting eye and a pucker in the face for a mouth, terrible haircut, stuck up like bristles, the kind who can surprise you, former lieutenant-colonel in the special services or something like that.

'I don't object,' I said.

Thank you. Purdom,' Ferris said evenly, 'is here from London to get experience in the field.'

I jerked my head to look at the man, saw red suddenly – 'Experience in the what? You were in China, weren't you, on Pagoda? You did Mirage, didn't you, for that bastard Loman in Morocco? Jesus Christ, what sort of experience - '

Watch it.