This wasn't the room with the Lowry and the smell of polish. It was originally a dormitory, I suppose, right under the mansard roof, the kind of place where the little frilled domestics had hacked at their lungspots through the winters of the nineteenth century. There hadn't been much progress: Egerton was rubbing chilblain ointment into his raw blue hands when I came in, and looked up rather guiltily as if discovered in the enactment of a mystic rite.

'Ah yes,' he said vaguely, and fitted the lid back on to the tin.

An opaque grey panel showed where the window was, its grime and the fog outside filtering whatever daylight was still in the sky; a single bulb in a white porcelain shade dangled from a flex looped in paper-clips to keep it out of the way: we might have been at the bottom of a mine shaft.

Egerton gestured to the only chair for visitors, an incongruous Louis Quinze with little yellow puffs of stuffing exposed to the wan light. I'd only seen Egerton twice before, on any kind of real business, and each time it had been in this room. He was a thin and tired-looking man, his eyes weathered by too many winters of inclement thought, his mouth still slightly twisted from the shock of his first disillusionment, whenever that had come; it was said his wife had committed suicide during one of their seaside holidays at Frinton, and that the smell of a certain suntan oil made him physically sick; but then he might always have looked like this, a vessel of despair, and that might be why she'd done it. Facts are short at the Bureau, where nobody's meant to exist, so rumours are a prime necessity of the resident staff.

'How was Norfolk?'

'Foggy.'

He smiled thinly. 'We always consider we have a monopoly, here. Sorry to have fetched you away.' His voice was beautifully modulated, an actor's voice. 'I expect you've heard what happened in Gaza.'

'A wheel came off.'

Of course he hadn't got a hope. They were still flying them in, what was left of them, and if they meant to send a second wave to mop up the mess they could count me out. I was strictly a shadow executive under contract for solo missions and these paramilitary stunts weren't in my field.

'Nobody's fault,' he shrugged. 'Policy is changing from day to day. There was a time, once, to plan things properly, but now there seems a need for hurry, so instead of picking quietly at the lock we just hurl a brick at the window and grab at whatever happens to be in reach.'

He was talking about Intelligence. Even when Parkis or Mildmay threw in a scratch hit-and-run unit with clearance on explosives it was still purely an Intelligence operation or the Bureau wouldn't be handling it at all.

Egerton said with a note of concession: 'Of course that kind of exercise isn't in your area.'

'No.'

'But policy affects everyone, really.'

It didn't sound very good and I began digging my heels in, but the trouble was that Egerton was already softening up the ground I was digging them into. He was Control, not Bureau: a mission director, not admin. But if he'd fetched me down from Norfolk to give me a job it looked as if I'd have been better off up there as a daily breakfast for Kimura.

You can always refuse a mission: it's in the contract. But you can't ever judge the odds because when they send you in it's in the dark. We don't mind that. We know we'd be scared stiff by the size and scope of a big operation if we could see the overall picture, and all we want is our own little box of matches to play with in the corner while the boys at the top work out how to stop the whole house going up if we make a mistake. But it means you can't assess a mission at the outset, so you don't know whether you're accepting a job that's going to blow up in your hands because of someone else's incompetence or refusing one that could turn out a real classic. Last year Dewhurst nearly refused a dull routine investigation of a hijack attempt on board a Pakistan International Airlines Boeing 727 and finished up three weeks later jumping the Romanian frontier at Orsova with short-range shots of the heavy-water installations north of Piatra that everyone had thought was a sugar-beet processing complex. You can never tell. All I could tell at the moment was that if Egerton had a mission for me he was quite certain I wouldn't like it and all I could hope was that he'd be wrong. Because I wanted one.

'It affects training,' he said, 'particularly.' He meant policy did. 'People are being hustled into sensitive areas without preliminary experience even in minor operations. I'm not talking — ' he looked at me quickly — 'about this unfortunate debacle in Gaza.'

'No.' He was.

In his dead eyes I could see two red sparks, the reflections of the little electric fire with its cracked insulators that was perched on a pile of split-spined encyclopaedias near my chair. 'To a limited degree we can resist these dangerous changes in policy — or at least avert some of their dangerous results.'

When the telephone rang he didn't look at it for a moment, as if deciding not to answer it. Then be picked up the receiver, the ointment gleaming on his knuckles.

'Yes?' All I could hear was a name — Gilchrist — from the speaker, but Egerton was saying sharply: 'Couldn't they?' He tilted his narrow head back as he listened, his eyes cast down. 'I'll go and talk to his wife. Don't let her get the news from anyone else. Warn Matthews particularly; they were close friends.' He put the receiver down and said with slight irritation: 'They shouldn't get married; it's inconsiderate. Where was I?'

A small cracked 250-watt fire like this would never get the chill out of Egerton's room. I thought they must have been after something pretty serious to throw in a man like Gilchrist. I'd never liked him but he'd been first class. So had Lovett, only last year in Hanover. I'd liked Lovett. We seemed to be getting a bit too cheap.

'Changes in policy,' I said. 'Averting dangerous results.'

'Yes.' He studied his shiny hands. 'We've just taken on someone new.'

'Long live the king,' I said.

He looked at me quickly but there was no reproof in his tone. 'He's not replacing Gilchrist. He's too young. And he's been given his first mission before he's had time to feel his way.' Carefully he said: 'That is my opinion. Unfortunately it's for me to send him out. The exercise isn't inherently dangerous but you know better than I do how easily things can turn awkward.'

No, I thought, I won't bloody well play.

He was hunched over his clasped hands, as if without any heat of their own they could warm each other. 'His name is Merrick. Good background in the Foreign Office; he was in Prague as an assistant attache during August 1968 and was deeply affected by events there; he is now with a different embassy and is at present here in London on sick leave, following a slight accident. His father is Sir Walford Merrick, an equerry of the Queen's Household. Would you like some tea?'

'Not really.' I got out of the chair, not wanting to sit there while he tried to truss me up. In the raw chill here I felt suffocated by the deadness of his eyes and the smoothly intoned innuendoes and the way he'd thrown the epitaph across the wreath: It's inconsiderate. 'Look,' I asked him, have you got a mission for me?'

'No.'

'Well it's time somebody had. I've been out for nearly three months and I'm going to seed.'

'That's why I thought you might like a little trip abroad.’

'Where to?' Durban would be all right, or Mexico. Anywhere out of this freezing hole.

'Warsaw.'

'Christ, in winter?'

'It would be convenient, I know, if we could choose — '

'It's all I'd get out of it, a bit of sunshine. Send him far enough south and I'll do what you want. I'll go with him and hold his hand.'

He didn't say anything. Maybe I was raising my voice too much: you don't do that till you start feeling you're on a loser. Among all the stuff on his desk I could see my dossier and among all the things it said in there was the fact that I spoke a bit of Polish. Not many of us do: it's like stuffing your tongue in a jar of used razor blades.