And throw this in: Ferris had said the target area was ‘still undefined’ but they needed someone with fluency in metropolitan Russian.

They normally put Egerton on to me when they’ve got some shit to shovel and can’t find anyone to do it: he has that old-world fustian charm that cons you into believing you’re dealing with a league of gentlemen; but this time they’d got their foot on my neck because there was a murder hunt going on throughout the British Isles and the Yard would have contacted Interpol and even here in north-east Spain I was already vulnerable.

The only hope I had of keeping out of sight until the Novikov thing blew over was by doing what the Bureau told me to do and going wherever it sent me. This was still my thinking, three weeks out of London: that I was on the run and would use the Nesbitt cover for all it was worth as my only means of staying free. But of course this was much too subjective. The larger truth was that London had a mission on the board and I was the executive and we were moving near zero.

I peeled off from Joe and his group in the Plaza de Madrid some time about eight o’clock. They said they’d heard of some sensational girls who could do things I’d never dreamed of, and I said that was quite possible but as a matter of fact I’d got an elderly aunt near the consulate who was worried about her drains and I’d promised to go and poke around with a coat-hanger.

Ferris was waiting for me when I arrived.

“Five-ten,” I told him, ‘twelve stone, black eyes, dark skin, black moustache, beret, otherwise dressed like a clerk.”

“Where?”

“Still outside the building. I had to come in the back way, over the dustbins.”

“Oh,” Charlie laughed, “that’s Ignacio. He’s sweet on Pepita.” He rolled his chair to the window and looked down over his half-moon glasses.

“Are you sure?”

“Takes her to Los Caracoles, I can’t say more than that.”

I got a glance from Ferris meaning everything was all right, but it still wasn’t easy to relax: the Interpol connection was still on my mind. Charlie was a sleeper and this place had the status of a safe-house and we were a hundred per cent secure according to the book; but we’d had a sleeper in Tehran on the top floor of the radio-station building and London must have put half a dozen operations through there before something blew and the SAVAK sent in six armoured cars to surround the place and put a helicopter down on the roof and took seventeen minutes to do the snatch: two spooks and their field director and the communications man who’d been using Tehran radio for years, tinkering with aural cypher patterns on the Coca-Cola programmes.

The only one they didn’t get was Sinclair and that was because he took a capsule: he was on his way through to Bahrain with his head full of stuff on a Near-East network project the Bureau was going to run through Crowborough and the embassy and he obviously didn’t trust himself because he couldn’t stand pain. It was Sinclair, of course, they’d been after, and at the other end of the line we’d all breathed again and wished him peace, but the point is that a safe-house is a safe-house until it’s blown.

It can happen anywhere, and at any time.

“Oh Christ,” I said when Ferris dropped the picture on to the table. It had everything: the noncommittal eyes, the sharp nose, the lopsided jaw and the go-to-hell line of the mouth. “Where did you get this?”

“Liaison asked the Yard for a copy.”

“Going a bit close, weren’t they?”

“They knew what they were doing.” His yellow cat’s eyes lingered on me. “Which is more than you can say.”

“Leave the poor sod alone,” Charlie told him. He was putting a tie on, his huge hands losing track of it.

I looked at the picture again, avoiding Ferris. The Novikov thing had been a gross breach of security and it had shaken the Bureau and they’d lost their faith in me and that was why they were kicking me into a shut-ended mission and Ferris thought they were right, and so did I. But he didn’t have to look at me like that. I’ve done a bit of good, too, along the line.

“It’s in the London papers,” he told me in disapproval.

“I don’t give a shit!” I said and my voice cracked and I saw Charlie look up quickly, shocked. “It was something I had to do understand?” Ferris went on watching me, pleased to have drawn so much blood from such a small scratch. I watched him back and thought of other things to say and heard myself saying them in my mind, enjoying them, things about Novikov, like he’d never made a sound, things like that. Then I slid the Identikit thing across the table to him and turned away and saw Charlie reaching for a jacket, blue serge, the cleaner’s tab still on it.

“Very sharp,” I said, knowing better than to help him on with it. “Are you cutting out Ignacio?”

“No. Little Sevillian dolly. Mastectomy.” He jerked the lapels straight. “That’s why she goes for me.” The rubber tyres squawked across the floor. “Lots of Carlos Primero for the good Mr. Ferris. Help yourself,” he said to me, ‘to whatever you fancy.”

By the show he was making I assumed he’d been asked to leave the two of us alone and that would be logical because the tower had confirmed wind shear and Gilmore had told me he wanted ten more flying hours with this type so we must be getting pretty close to it and I hadn’t had any briefing. We could trust Charlie, of course, or we wouldn’t be meeting here; but no one strictly no one is given access to information that doesn’t specifically concern him. The risk of being picked up and put under implemented interrogation is always present at any time and in any place, and the less we know the less we can give away when it comes to the breaking point.

When the door was shut Ferris stood for half a minute with his sandy head tilted and his eyes moving by degrees around the room, looking at nothing. We could hear the sound of the tyres on the landing outside and the whine of the lift as it came up from below; then the door rattled shut and the whine began again, rather lighter than before: presumably the counterweights were less heavy than the lift cage plus Charlie and put less strain on the motor.

Ferris went on listening. The door of the lift may have closed by now — I couldn’t tell; there were other sounds from below: street traffic, someone on the phone, the voice of the chestnut vendor, a dustbin lid banging in the rear. Ferris waited another fifteen seconds and then padded across the floor and opened the door and looked out, listening again.

He wasn’t normally like this: the field directors aren’t executives and they take security for granted; all they have to do if something blows is to get out as fast as they can, and perhaps that makes them less cautious. Tonight Ferris was nervy and I didn’t like that: one of the things your director in the field is supposed to do is to assure you, by his whole attitude, that things are running perfectly and you’re going to come out all right.

He closed the door and came padding back in his soft green shoes, looking at the spiders in their transparent plastic boxes as he passed the bench.

“They’ve got a lethal bite, haven’t they?”

“It depends on your condition,” I said. “They pack about the same kick as a rattlesnake.” Charlie had filled me in.

Ferris peered down at them, fascinated. “They’re so small.”

“For Christ’s sake don’t tread on them. He has them flown in from Arizona.”

He tapped a box to make one of them move, then lost interest and padded past me and sat on Charlie’s bed. “How are the flying lessons?”

“All right.”

“Nearly through, I’m told.”

“Another two days.”

“Did you get any prelim briefing out there?”

“Only on flying.”

He looked up quickly. “Well, they wouldn’t have briefed you on anything else, would they?”