Parkis is different. He is like Loman, but infinitely worse. I’ve worked three missions under his control and since a year ago I’ve refused him and I’m going to go on refusing him. Parkis doesn’t think we’re human beings. He thinks we’re robots. And the only reason why he’s still among the top-echelon directors is because he plans his operations so meticulously that nothing can go wrong: providing you’re a robot. But there are situations in the field that even Parkis can’t control: it can rain and your foot can slip; a plane can be late; a shot can ricochet. Then if you’re still alive he’ll throw you to the dogs because there’s nothing else he can do: his operations are designed to tick with the precision of a watch, and they are thus too sensitive to accommodate the unpredictable.

So he wins on points: he brings back as many of us as the other directors do, and he does it by skill; but it’s the skill of a toy maker He finishes the paintwork and winds us up and sets us going and nine times out of ten we don’t hit the wall. It isn’t the odds I mind: they’re pretty good. It’s Parkis.

He spoke.

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Not for long,” I said.

They could have found me in five minutes, wherever I was, since I’d come in this morning.

“What were you doing in Monitoring?”

“Keeping an ear open.” We’re not supposed to wander about on the fourth floor unless we’re on call or briefed.

I looked down at the Telegraph again, just for a second. They’d got a picture of the train, empty and with the doors open. The headline was across the three right-hand columns: Murder in London Underground.

I turned away from it and looked at the rain on the windows.

“Time is very short,” Parkis said thinly.

“Then let’s get it over.”

He said in a moment: “I have a question for you, Quiller. How many men have you been obliged to kill, in the course of a mission?”

“What? God knows. Not many. Half a dozen.”

Bangkok. East Germany. Warsaw. Tunisia. Hong Kong. The States.

Other places.

“Half a dozen,” he said tonelessly. “Possibly more.”

“Possibly.” Zade had taken one or two with him, in that jet.

Parkis swung round and said with soft fury, “Do you think that gives you a licence?”

“Not really.”

He waited to see if I was going to add anything. I let the silence go on.

“This man Novikov,” he said at last.

“Is that his name?” I looked at the paper again.

“Yes. His cover name was Weiner.”

“I didn’t know.”

There must have been someone else there. Or they’d -

“You didn’t know his name?” he asked sharply.

“No. I only — ”

“But you knew who he was?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Parkis, I don’t go around doing that sort of thing to strangers. If you — ”

“Very well. I am now asking for your explanation.”

I took a breath and wondered if there was any point in giving him some carefully-considered lies. I didn’t think there was. And some remnant of human faith was averse to my playing Judas to the dead.

“It was a personal thing,” I told Parkis. “I — ”

“ Personal?”

I shut up again. If he wanted an explanation he’d have to let me give it in my own way, without interruption. But this wasn’t going to be my game anyhow: I’d already lost. I knew it and they all knew it Matthews, Woods, Tilson, and all the rest of the people who’d looked at me this morning as if I was some kind of zombie. And Parkis knew it. “Be good enough to proceed.”

“Without interruptions?”

He stood gazing at me in silence and I could feel the chill.

“It was in Czechoslovakia,” I told him defensively, ‘a couple of years ago. The Bratislava thing. Mildmay handled that one, with Loman in the field.” I looked away from him. “Well, there was a girl.”

He waited. I was trying to remember things about her, but all I could think of was her name. Katia.

“It was the end phase,” I said in a moment. “I’d been in there and sent the stuff out and London was satisfied and my orders were to save myself if I could. Loman was still directing me in the field, with signals through Prague. But they had the girl, so I made a deal. I said they could take me for interrogation if they let the girl go.”

I was trying to remember the details but it’s often hard to go back over the end phase of a mission: we’re usually concerned with saving our skin and I suppose there’s a certain amount of retrogressive amnesia that sets in to protect the psyche; otherwise we’d never go out again. Today, talking to Parkis in a different environment, I found that particular scene was still in sharp focus, fogging out most of the background: Katia standing there under the lamp, scared to death and still smiling for me because that was the way she wanted me to remember her; and those two bastards standing one on each side.

“They agreed to the deal,” I said absently. “And I saw her walk away, free.”

He asked too casually: “You submitted to interrogation?”

“What? Of course not. I knew I could get out: Loman had a plane lined up and I’d got papers for Austria. So that’s what I did.”

I listened to the rain on the window. It had been raining then, in Bratislava; she’d been wet with it, her hair shining as she’d walked away, out of the lamplight, free.

“When I was back in London I heard what they’d done to her.”

That was all I wanted to tell him,

I watched the streaks running down the window, distorting the skyline across Whitehall; it looked as if the roofs were slowly melting out there in the January cold, and the buildings dissolving.

“You failed to keep this 'deal' of yours,” Parkis said.

“So did they.”

“Did you ever imagine they’d keep to it?”

“I think they would have.”

“If you had.”

“Yes.”

“So the blame was yours.”

“Indirectly. But I didn’t kill her. They did.”

He looked at the carpet, his feet together, his hands coming out of his pockets and clasping themselves in front of him. It looked as if the bastard was praying for something. Patience, probably.

“So I am to believe that for the sake of avenging this girl you speak of, you killed a man in a public place and put the Bureau in extreme hazard.”

“Believe what you like,” I told him.

His head came up sharply. “But she wasn’t even working for us! The Bratislava operation was — ”

“She was liaison. She’d been helping us to — ”

“Not Bureau liaison. Loman would have — ”

“Of course not. She was Czech, working through their — ”

“But if you were on the point of getting out, her work must have been finished! You had no further use for her!”

“Use for her?” I realized I was backing off a little, in case I hit him. It wouldn’t do any good. “You mean she was expendable?”

He turned away impatiently. “They had no reason to kill her in any case, did they?”

“She’d blown one of their cells.”

“That would be no reason.”

“I thought so.”

But this was why I’d lost. If it had been anyone but Katia I would have chanced it. The risk wasn’t high: but the risk was to her. And I couldn’t tell Parkis because he wouldn’t have understood.

“How deeply involved were you, Quiller, with this girl?”

“That’s none of your bloody business. I went into Bratislava, I did the job and I got out again. That’s all Control was concerned with.”

He turned away and took a couple of steps and turned back and asked tonelessly: “How did you kill him?”

“Windpipe.” My arm still felt the strain: I hadn’t been able to use my left hand to increase the force because the plump woman might have turned round again and seen his face. He’d gone down slowly, sliding against me as I eased him to the floor. My strength had appalled me, because I knew it was abnormal, fired by the rage; but I had exulted in what I was doing. The only unpleasant thing was that he’d had bad breath.