We were standing outside Monitoring, and there was some stuff coming through on the short-wave, something about street-fighting breaking out again in Cyprus, and Dewhurst wandered off and I went with him, wanting to hear more about North, if he knew anything, like scratching a sore. Since last week I'd been on a ten-day call, which meant two things: they had a mission lined up for me and at any next minute they were going to shove it in my hands and tell me to get on with it. And when you're on a ten-day call your nerves are quite tender enough without some poor bastard like North blowing his head off right in front of you.

It was like scratching a sore because there wasn't any need for me to know any more about North. On the shadow-executive level we work in totally separate fields and there's just no connection.

'How long had he been there?' I asked Dewhurst.

'Where?'

'Lubyanka.'

'Oh, I dunno really.'

Lubyanka is the place you're sent to if you're picked up on the wrong side of the Curtain and they specialize in implemented interrogation and if you can ever get out of there alive then you'll finish up like North. There wasn't anything more I wanted to know about him — the whole thing had suddenly turned my stomach sour. We were standing by the stairhead now, with the open space between the flights running from the top of the building to the bottom like a vertical tunnel, the low-wattage bulbs throwing a depressing yellow light through the rows of banisters, Dewhurst quietly watching me.

'You're on call, aren't you?'

'Yes,' I said.

'Well, I wouldn't let a little thing like this put you off your stroke. He simply didn't have what it takes, that's all.'

He wandered off to see if there were any more signals for him, and I stayed where I was for a minute, looking into the shadows of the stairwell and thinking it wasn't the sort of epitaph we'd ever want to be landed with… he simply didn't have what it takes… We'll fight like hell to go out respectably when the crunch comes and the last gate slams, then tell us who your contacts are, the bright lamp burning into your eyes and the bruises throbbing, I've told you already I haven't got any contacts on this operation, the night-stick again on flesh already aching for peace, but you were seen using a letter-drop, the big white light coming through your eyelids and into your head and burning there, you mistook me for someone else, the stick or the flame or the jerk of the current or whatever it was they were using, tell us, using so expertly, there's nothing, their foul breath heavy and excited, tell! the light in your head, screw yourself! and reason beginning to go, tell us! the jerk of their hands, no! Always the answer, the same answer, for as long as you can — No! No! No! Till it's over.

Not because of any loyalty to the Bureau, nothing like that, because by this time you're quite beyond any thought of alma mater and the team spirit and what-not, all you're trying to do is get yourself a half-decent epitaph out of sheer stinking pride, deceased during mission, nothing spectacular, found with security intact, just something we can live with in the last few minutes before we die. Unlike that poor bastard, we hope to prove to the clerks and the accountants and the operations staff and the whole bloody bunch in this building that when the crunch came and the last gate slammed we'd got… after all… what it took.

I went down the stairs, this place gave you the creeps at night, shrugging my wet mack on, passing one of the briefing staff in a lower corridor.

'Hello, Quiller, what are you doing here?'

'None of your bloody business.'

It occurred to me, driving back to Knightsbridge through the rain, that I could be entirely wrong about this: maybe North hadn't told them anything in Lubyanka, maybe he'd stood up to it and got out clean and then just couldn't stand the reaction, gone a bit too far. There must have been something still left in him even in the last few minutes of his life, because he'd made an attempt to explain his misery to Connie in terms of his cover: 'nearly crashed', and something about fog across the airport. That hadn't been easy to do and he'd done it so maybe they'd chalk up something decent for him as an official epitaph, better than the one Dewhurst had given him.

Not that we'd ever hear of him again. Outside the hermetically sealed circle of his immediate contacts — his briefing officer, mission controller and director in the field — there wouldn't be any enquiry. After tonight, along those warren-like corridors of that anonymous building in Whitehall where no one officially exists even when they're alive, there'd be no questions asked, and the name of North would never be mentioned again. In the Bureau, death is a disease with no complications.

The call came through over the week-end and I ducked down the steps below the leaky guttering and got into the car, every bloody window misted up, had to find the cloth and even then it wasn't much better, the rain drumming on the metal roof and the street lamps just coming on as I drove through the park. Well over the limit and one eye on the mirror, no real hurry but this was the sixth day of the ten-day call and that meant they'd set it up in record time: someone had been on the blower or there'd been a bunch of signals in and Parkis or Mildmay or Kinloch had looked at the picture again and said all right tell him to come in.

No real hurry but it'd been nearly two months since I'd done a mission and I'd forgotten how it affected the nerves when the call came through, nothing to show, just an eyelid flickering, a tendency to keep the foot down through the park, that sort of thing, because we'd made it the last time and the time before that and it had brought us closer to the time when for one reason or another a wheel was going to come off and our name, along those quiet and echoless corridors, would never be spoken again.

Nothing to show, just an eyelid flickering and the sudden awareness of a composite personality — 'we', 'us', 'our', because the shadow executive, creeping alone through the maze where his work has led him, cat-nerved and ferret-quick, sniffing the damp and the dark and ready to run, ready to kill, comes inevitably to know the plurality of the creature that lives alone and close to death, the mind busy with logic, talking to itself and reasoning the way ahead while the flesh chills and the body pleads for life, go back, go back while there's time, and the psyche calls for courage, go on, go on while we can, calling sometimes for more than that, for everything, banners raised and bugles sounding, forward my friend to a fool's death and cheap at the price, out of pride.

Lights flashing, hemming me in. Black plastic waterproof over his uniform.

'Can I see your licence, please?'

'All right.'

A temptation to flash the worn leather holder with the card framed in it, the one that would get me through almost any door, Ten Downing Street or New Scotland Yard or Chequers, but you had to justify it later in de-briefing and the Bureau was fussy about it, take your head off at the neck while you weren't even looking.

'D'you know what speed you were doing over the last mile?'

'Flying too low, was I?'

Worse for him than for me, he was getting soaked out there, served him bloody well right, he should've joined the Navy.

There was a parking-slot open for me in the yard behind the Bureau: they always see to little things like that when you're on call and in a way it's infuriating because you're always trying to catch them out and never can. I slopped up the worn steps, one shoe leaking, and pushed the door open, nothing on it, no name or number or brass plate or even Keep Out — nothing at all and therefore perfectly appropriate to the business this building housed. At this hour there were quite a few people about but the corridors were almost as quiet as they'd been the other night when I'd talked to Dewhurst by the stairs. The Bureau is a government department but officially it doesn't exist, and this nihilistic status has long ago cast a sort of creeping blight over the people who work here. Most of us don't know each other even by our code names because we're a shifting population of rootless souls and our business is our own business and we're not interested in anyone else's.