Sometimes one of the directors will put a team together, an active unit with field discretion on explosives, and drop them into whatever banana republic or emergent nation is playing with the matches; but most of the active staff are shadow executives, single-objective people with very specific orders: Pekin has appointed a new military attaché in Sumatra, go and vet him; Cuba has just put a unit of combat troops under secret training, go and get pictures; there's a member of the Secretariat on his way to the border in Berlin, go and help him across.

Exchange of vital information takes place between missions behind closed doors. Friendships aren't discouraged: there isn't any need, because we're dedicated professionals and all we'd want to talk about is our work and that'd bore the bejesus out of us because a lot of the work is a strain and all we want to do between missions is try to forget it.

'He's along at the Lab,' Tilson said.

'Who is?'

'Egerton.' He watched me with his pink and amiable face, tapping his fingertips lightly together.

Not Parkis, then, or Mildmay or Kinloch. Egerton. It's like pulling a name from a hat: you never know who you're going to get, the next time out.

'Where is it?'

'Where's what, old horse?'

The little bastard watched me amiably. He knew what I meant but he was playing hard to get, so I took a shoe off, the one that was leaking, and let the water out all over his nice parquet floor.

'Where's he sending me?'

I was showing my nerves, because Egerton would tell me quick enough where he was sending me but I wanted to know now. The minute you're called in for a mission you become desperate to know everything — whether you're going to freeze to death in Moscow or fry in Casablanca, whether it's a penetration job or a snatch or a radio tap, who's to direct you in the field and who's going to try getting you out if you come a mucker — you want to know everything and you want to know it as soon as you come in, because, I suppose, the more you know about something the less you're afraid of it.

'No earthly idea, old horse.'

So I put my shoe back on and did up the soggy lace and told Tilson he could screw himself and he said thank you very much and I went along to the stairs and down two flights and right to the end of the corridor. The red lamp over the door went out before I reached it: that would be Tilson, told them I was on my way. I went in.

Shaded lights and a workbench and radio gear and a screen and some chairs and a long table where Egerton was sitting, one thin leg dangling. He didn't look up. One of the other people switched the red lamp on again and the man with the headphones adjusted the volume.

You'd have to give me longer than that.

How much longer?

I don't know. I'd have to think.

Egerton looked up.

'Is this the third cycle?'

'Fourth, sir.'

'Can we have isolations?'

The man with the headphones put the tape on fast-forward and stopped and corrected, I assumed the thing was a voice spectograph.

I… I… I… I…

Am… Am… Am… Am…

Afraid… Afraid… Afraid… Afraid…

So…So… So… So…

Idiom all right but an Englishman wouldn't say 'I am afraid', he'd say 'I'm afraid', it didn't sound like a speech, more like an intimate conversation.

'How many have we done?' Egerton asked.

'Seventy-four, sir.'

'You mean altogether?'

'Well, the whole series of matching spectograms, and then the fixed contexts. We did the randoms yesterday.'

Egerton sat like a quiet thin-legged bird on the edge of the table, looking at nothing, saying nothing, until after half a minute the man behind m5 gave a little embarrassed cough and in the silence I heard the cloth of his sleeve rustling as he moved his arm, fingering his hair back, probably not used to Egerton's holy silences.

'What?'

'I didn't say anything, sir.'

'Ah yes.' He got off the table. 'Yes, well, that's fine. Do those again, will you, and double check?'

The man with the headphones took them off slowly. 'The whole seventy-four?'

'Yes. And let me have the report from Williams.'

Somebody whispered oh Jesus and flipped a switch rather sharply, but Egerton didn't seem to notice anything because he wanted the whole seventy-four comparisons done again so they were going to have to do the whole seventy-four comparisons again and that was the only thing that had the slightest interest for him, 'Did you want to see me, Quiller?'

'I'm called in.'

He'd taken to wearing glasses recently and his dull brown eyes wandered around the edge of my face as if he was trying to find the middle.

'Oh yes. Why don't we go upstairs?'

In the corridor I asked: 'What were the voice-prints?'

'Ah. Well they'll be working on those.'

So I shut up and we took the main stairs because the lift in this building gets jammed between floors twice a week and we just can't afford the time.

Egerton had possibly been an owl in a previous life because he'd picked a room on the top floor and turned it into a sort of nest, lined comfortably with maps and books and posters of Edwardian bicycle advertisements, furnishing the rest of it with cherished objects — a skull, an abacus, a bulb-horn, that kind of thing, possibly flying through the small high dormer window with them in the dead of night.

'Make yourself at home,' he said, and draped his body behind the desk like a pile of bones. 'When did you get back?'

'Where from?'

'Cyprus, wasn't it?'

'I haven't been out,' I said slowly, 'for close on two months.'

He reached over and dropped a folder on to his desk and said absolutely nothing for three minutes. I threw my trench-coat across the fire-guard he used in winter and sat down on the Louis Quinze chair that years ago had been filled with stuffing. The phone rang and Egerton answered it.

'Well?'

There were streaks of rain on the window and the glow from the street sent their shadows trickling on Egerton's face as if he were quietly crying, and it suited him, I thought. They said his wife had committed suicide at some boarding-house on the south coast, not so long ago; but nobody know if he was miserable because she'd done it or if she'd done it because he was miserable.

'Has Mildmay seen him yet?'

I could hear Tilson's voice from the receiver, so they were talking about Styles, just in from Ankara, a sticky de-briefing session because we all knew that Styles was in it for the money and one fine day the Rusks or the Turks or the Arabs were going to make him an offer he couldn't refuse and he'd blow the whole network if they didn't watch out 'Not in my opinion.'

Or he'd be found floating.

'I can't see him at the moment, I'm sorry.'

He put the phone down and looked at the stuff in the folder again and sat back and said: 'There's nothing concrete yet.' He expected me to say something so I didn't. 'Things are a little confused over there.'

'Over — '

'In Pekin.' He folded his thin raw hands, studying the scars of the winter's chilblains for a moment. 'Have you been briefed on China?'

I got off the Louis Quinze chair and he looked up in surprise and I said: 'I haven't had a mission for two months and they put me on a ten-day call and brought me in after six days and nobody's told me a bloody thing except that Tilson says you're my Control.'

He gave me a bleak smile.

'I know how you feel? He didn't.

'Look,' I said, 'have you got a mission for me?'

'Oh yes.'

I hadn't expected that. I sat down again, and a thought came at a tangent: the second voice on that tape, the one with the right idiom and the wrong tone, I am afraid so, could possibly be an educated Chinese.

'The problem,' Egerton said apologetically, 'is that they got the timing wrong. It wasn't their fault.' He checked a sheet in the folder, looking down through the lower lenses of his glasses and trying to get used to the focus. 'We were all ready to send you in, and now we're not.' He shut the folder and slid it to one side.