“Well, sir, they come and go, don’t they?”

He didn’t have executive status and this was his way of telling me to get the hell out of his office.

“You must be a pain in the neck to your dentist,” I told him and went out and tried to find Thompson. Someone said he was down in the Cafe for a tea-break. He wasn’t.

I sat down at one of the tables and ordered a cup and didn’t drink it because the last thing my nerves wanted at the moment was caffeine and in this place the stuff tasted like something out of a horse.

“Is it too cold?” Maisie asked me.

“It’s fine.”

She went away.

The thing that worried me was that someone had slapped me on standby and they wouldn’t do that without checking the records and the records showed that I’d got back from Turkey a week ago and was due for special leave. Special leave is granted when you come in looking like something the dog has found in a rubbish dump, and we nearly always get it because no one ever comes in looking very fit: it’s in the nature of the job.

Being on standby isn’t the same as being on call. When you’re on call it means they’ve got a specific mission lined up for you and you have to be ready to hit the field at a moment’s notice, so you don’t go far from a telephone and you don’t leave your pad without telling them where you’re going. They let you see one of the girls but it’s on the understanding that if her phone rings you’ve got to put down the tiddlywinks and get to your car in zero seconds flat, so it’s no use complaining. Standby is less demanding and more general: it means they may have a job for you but you can leave home and travel around the Metropolitan area providing you call them at twelve-hour intervals.

The one alert phase often leads to the other, of course: from standby you can suddenly find yourself put on call and then you’re in line for briefing and transport, within minutes or hours or sometimes days: it depends on how soon the directors can work out things like access, cover, liaison, so forth. The one thing I knew at this moment was that they wouldn’t be putting me on call, because the Turkey thing had developed a lot of problems and we’d lost a courier and blown the escape route and I’d had to get out under fire from the frontier guards at Kazim Pasa. I’d had no cover for Iran and it had meant holing up in a freight yard for three days in the snow before I could reach the embassy. That was all right but I’d lost some blood because one of the guards had made a hit and it was the wrong time to go on a fast in a freight yard at five below zero.

“Hallo, old horse.”

Tilson sat down and began a little tattoo with his fingertips on the plastic table, not looking at me but gazing around at the tea urns and Maisie and the liverish yellow walls.

“Who put me on standby?” I asked him.

“I wouldn’t know.” Then he turned his pale watery eyes on me and said under his breath: “What have you been up to, for Christ’s sake?”

I went instinctively deadpan and felt the heart rate increasing suddenly, whipped up by the shock. He hadn’t said much but it was enough. In the Bureau people talk so little that if someone says good morning you feel like dashing into Codes and Cyphers to find out what he meant. The Bureau doesn’t exist, so you don’t exist, and nobody else exists, so there’s very little to talk about.

I looked at Tilson.

“You want some tea?”

He shook his head, looking away again. “I’ve got a message for you, old fruit, that’s all. You’re requested not to leave the building. Okay?” He got up and wandered off in his red plaid slippers, saying a word to Maisie as he went out, leaving her giggling.

I sat at the table with the cold cup of tea and didn’t want to move. My stomach had gone sour and I tried not to think about what Tilson had said what Tilson had meant. But I’d have to think about it and I left the Cafe and went up to the fourth floor and looked for Woods, because he might know the score. He was in Signals, perched in front of the mainline Asia console trying to get a director in the field some kind of access before his executive ran out of information they were so bloody good at kicking you into a red sector and leaving you there like a sitting duck while they sat around here in London working out the material they should have worked out before you were even briefed.

Not true. They sometimes did it. Only sometimes, or no one would ever get back with his skin on. I was just feeling paranoiac, that was all, and when Woods turned round from the console to look at me and turned right back without saying anything I gave it up and cleared out. I hadn’t expected him to say anything except hallo or something because he didn’t have time: the yellow was flashing and the director was asking for a signal and Woods had one for him because he hadn’t got the phone in his free hand; but it was his face that had rattled me: the quick surprise in it and then the shut-down as he looked at me for a moment without any expression at all before he went back to the set.

I was beginning to get the message.

For the next hour I hung around the upper floors but couldn’t find anyone to talk to. There was a lot of pressure on this morning and everyone looked as nervous as a cat on moving day. Harrison might have spared me some time but he was sending a group out to one of the African states and asked me to leave as soon as I went in there. In Room 12 there was a dental mechanic installing a three-phase micro-receiver in a wisdom tooth for one of the Moscow couriers, and I didn’t stay. Young Gray was fiddling about next door with a couple of Dinky Toys and the model of a street intersection. One of the buildings had a little flag and the whole thing looked terribly like a long-range elimination set-up for telescopic sights and I didn’t interrupt him, except to remind him to lock the door as soon as I’d gone: we get a few visitors to the Bureau and although they’re usually deep-screened people from the Foreign Office or DI6 we ought not to be seen playing games like that on the fourth floor, which is now the executive action complex.

I was sitting around in Monitoring with one ear on some stuff going out on the Chinese-speaking propaganda programme from Moscow when one of the phones rang and someone picked it up and looked around and said:

“Yes, he’s here.” He passed it to me and I gave my name and listened very intently because this was the call I’d been waiting for: it couldn’t be anything else.

It was one of the girls from Admin, asking if I could be in Mr. Parkis’s room as soon as possible and I said yes I could and put the thing down and went out, keeping my breath steady and my pace steady but finding it difficult, having to work at it. Because I knew what had happened, and I’d spent half the night and all this morning trying to tell myself that I didn’t.

A copy of the Telegraph was lying on the desk with the front page turned towards me as I came in. Parkis was looking down at it, his pale fleshy hands in the side pockets of his jacket with the thumbs hooked over the top. He didn’t speak.

When he saw I was looking at the newspaper he turned away and began walking in a short straight line between the window and the Lowrie on the wall, his soft elegant shoes leaving traces of dark and light as they disturbed the nap of the carpet. I didn’t spend long looking at the paper: I’d seen it already.

Parkis stood still and looked at me with his ice-blue eyes. He is made entirely of ice, this man, and one day when I blow my cover at the wrong time or spring a trap in the wrong place or walk into a red sector without checking it first I’m going to go out cursing Parkis. This I promise.

They’re all ruthless bastards, the London directors: they’ve got to be. They wouldn’t survive if they weren’t, and nor would we. But most of them understand what this kind of work does to us, and what it can do to us if it’s allowed to get out of hand. Most of them regard us as human beings even when they’re directing us into operations that no human being could be expected to bring off and keep his sanity. So we usually manage to get back, give or take a few exceptions; and this is partly because when we’re out there in the field we know there’s someone doing his best to look after us from London Control.