He did not see her face again.

She took him by the hand to the bed.

There was a grey light in the room, filtered through the thin curtains from the street lights below, that played on the ceiling but her face was now close to his and in shadow. The quiet of the room was broken by the pursuit of the cars and buses in the street. For a short time he was aware of the raucous commentary on a televised soccer match from the room next door.

He emptied himself into her, into the contraceptive. He fell away from her. Before he slept he was aware of the caressing movements of her hands on his neck and shoulders. He slept easily, swiftly, because the girl had soothed away the exhaustion of his last journey. In four days he had flown to Paris and then travelled to the plants at Saclay and Fontenay-aux-Roses, and he had then flown to Genoa, where he had had crucial discussions with the director of a factory that specialised in the precision-worked equipment urgently required for his project, and he had flown to Rome. He slept now because his exhaustion was exacerbated by extremes of tension that always gnawed at him when he travelled on missions of secrecy.

He had no awareness of the girl slipping from the bed, dressing fast in the darkness of the bathroom. He slept on as she put the key to the hotel room into her coat pocket.

She closed the door with great gentleness behind her. For a moment she sagged against the wall in the corridor outside. Her own task was completed. The lift ahead of her opened. They were the same group of tourists who had seen her take the man through the lobby, and the same men gave her the glad eye, and the same woman stabbed at her with a glance of pure disgust.

The man dreamed.

Peshawar, under the forbidding weight of the climbing foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains, in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, where his father was a government administrator, had been his childhood home. He dreamed of cricket at a school presided over by an elderly white-bearded Englishman.