'And you don't know where he phoned you from,' Tilney was saying.

'No.'

'No kind of background noise, that you can remember? Was he in his car, or maybe a pub?5 'I didn't hear any background.' It was something you're trained to listen for; it can tell you a lot.

Tilney had the pencil between two fingers, and was swinging it up and down; it was getting on my nerves.

'You didn't see much of each other, did you, in the ordinary way?'

'I was in Budapest with him once, setting up a courier line. We did some infiltration work in Beirut a couple of years ago. He was first class, but I'm sure you know that. I enjoyed working with him.'

'And he clearly had a lot of respect for you.'

'I've no idea.'

'I mean for him to telephone you, instead of someone else, to ask for help.'

'Oh for Christ's sake, how do I know?' I got out of the chair and went across to the window, and there was the street down there, the lamplight and the first buses, the world waking up for all of us, but not for McCane. I was letting my nerves show, shouldn't have said that, I needed sleep, but couldn't have any. How long would it be, how long before this smell was out of my clothes, out of my soul, this smell of burning?

Tilney's voice came from behind me. Well, I think that'll do it for now.' He snapped the recorder off. 'Anything else occurs to you, give me a buzz.'

I turned round from the window. 'All right. Now get me in to see Shatner, will you?'

He looked at me. 'Don't you think you ought to crash first?'

'No.'

He puckered his lips, then picked up the phone and talked to a couple of people, trying to find Shatner. The controls aren't easy to run to ground in this place: they're either in Signals or briefing or debriefing or holed up with the top brass working out our destinies, where to put which ferret in the field and how soon, how to run him and when to call him in, how much risk to put on his back and how much mercy to show him when it looks like breaking. I was not, on this black winter morning, inclined to think good of anyone.

'He can see you in half an hour,' Tilney said, cupping the mouthpiece. That suit you?'

'Yes.'

'Where will you be?'

'They can page me.'

'Put your head down somewhere,' he said. There are a few rooms here, cubicles really, where we can get some sleep if we need to.

'I'll try.'

But when I left him I went along to the Signals room to put in time, not eager for the nightmares that sleep would bring.

There were only a few people at the floodlit mission boards – Stacey, Freeman, Holmes, and a couple of new recruits up from training at Norfolk. Only two of the boards were active, with their code names chalked at the top: Stingray and Scimitar. Croder, Chief of Signals, wasn't in here, so there couldn't be much going on.

I told them I wanted to talk to the ambassador, but it didn't do any good.

'They wouldn't let you into the embassy?' This was Freeman, manning the board for Scimitar. He didn't look worried.

They said I could come back tomorrow. Listen, I think… then there was some static and all we could hear was his voice behind it, nothing intelligible.

Holmes had looked up when I'd come in, and now he was wandering across, a cup of coffee in his hand.

… But I'd say what's happened is that he's caught some of the fallout from the palace coup and he's lying low, can't see me or anyone else. This whole scene's a mess – they've sacked God knows how many diplomats but they can't even get a plane out.

Holmes was standing beside me. 'What sort of night?

'Bloody.'

He was watching me steadily in the backwash from the floodlit mission boards. 'Flaying yourself, I assume.'

'Why don't you bugger off?' He meant well, but that wasn't the point. I didn't want to talk about it.

That was an hour ago, and she hasn't shown up.

At the board for Stingray one of the new people was looking edgy, leaning forward over the console. 'Do you think it's a trap?

In a moment: I don't know. Yes, by his tone, he thought it was a trap, but didn't want to say so, didn't want to make it real. The name on the board was Flecke, shadow executive in the field, and in a way I wasn't surprised: he was a world-class womaniser and therefore a target for any kind of honey trap the opposition wanted to set up. He'd been warned more than once about this, and Ferris had refused to work with him on Pagoda in Bangkok, said he could endanger the mission.

'If it's a trap, what are your options? Have you got any support out?' No. The voice coming from the speaker sounded a little tight now. I came here alone.

Holmes left me and went over to the central console and picked up one of the phones, presumably to ask the Chief of Signals to get here. With a new man at the board and Flecke out there in Thailand caught in a trap they'd need Croder to take over.

'Are you under surveillance at the moment?'

I can't tell. This is the market area, with people milling about.

Holmes came back from the phone and looked at me and said, 'Come on, I need a break,' and we went down to the Caff together, because he needed to do this and if I didn't let him he'd be miserable.

'Tilney phoned me,' he said, 'just after you left him. I know you don't want to talk about it but at least you can listen.' Daisy came limping over with some tea for us and wiped the table down and left wet streaks and went away again and Holmes turned his dark serious eyes on me and said, 'From what I gather, you couldn't have done anything. If you'd blocked off the Mercedes when it came up in the mirror it could have gone off the road and you could have found out it was a perfectly innocent citizen out for a joy ride and going a bit too fast and you could have got him killed. When you realised what that car was going to do you had about half a second to get in its way and you were something like a hundred yards behind, not terribly easy.' He sipped his tea reflectively. 'So what we finish up with is a perfectly competent shadow executive sitting here flaying himself alive in front of his old friend Holmes without the slightest justification, and said Holmes finds it thoroughly distasteful.'

I didn't say anything. He didn't want me to.

The first of the winter daylight was coming through the small high windows. It would be creeping among the trees out there, touching the blackened wreck, giving it highlights.

'It isn't,' Holmes said, 'that I don't know how you feel. I just want you to stop feeling it. If you like, we could go along to a funfair tonight and bash the bumpers off the dodgem cars and get some of that lovely adrenaline out of the bloodstream. Would that be nice?'

He watched me from under his thick black brows, trying to size up exactly how bad things were with me. He would have a rough idea. Holmes is the most sentient being in the whole of this bloody building.

In a moment I said, 'It'll pass.'

He said quietly, 'Not with you, it won't. Not so soon.'

'Take a bit of time, yes. There's no hurry.'

Most of the really shitty situations in life don't have an immediate answer; they have to work themselves out. The problem with this one was that they were absolutely, right, Tilney and Holmes: nobody could have stopped McCane getting killed last night, given the set up obtaining. But in a bleak shadowed corner of my mind the excoriating monologue kept up its whispering… He asked you to protect him, and what happened? He was killed.

'What bothers me,' Holmes said, 'a bit, is that Tilney says you're suddenly very keen to see Mr Shatner. I don't like that. I don't like that at all.' Watching me steadily.

He'd made the quantum leap, and it jarred me, because Shatner might do the same, and refuse me the mission. My only chance was that Holmes knew me very well and was exceptionally sensitive, even intuitive, whereas I'd never seen much of Shatner: we were almost strangers. He might not see what I was after.