By the time I got back behind the wheel and switched the engine on the police car had swung out and slowed in front of me with its lights still flashing and the siren starting up. I got into gear and we did a tight U-turn across Knightsbridge and went east with the rear end of the Interceptor waltzing a fraction as the tyres lost their grip on the wet surface and then found it again through the gears. They'd been using their radio, and before we reached Hyde Park Corner another police car had fallen in behind and was keeping station as the evening traffic slowed and pulled over to let us through.

We touched sixty in places and my nerves were settling down again. It's always like this when you catch the scent of a new mission; it's like the smell of smoke to an animal. But we don't have to go out again. We have to report to operations four weeks after debriefing from the last time out, but that's all: we're simply on standby again, available but not committed. And when they offer us something we can tell them we need another week or two, even another month or two, before we're ready to take on whatever they've got for us — and even then we can refuse if we don't like the look of it. It wouldn't work in any other way: it's our life on the line and we're not in the army, we're on our own once we're into the field and too far for our local control to help us.

This is the waiting time, between missions, when we've got a chance to look back and think about what we were doing the last time around, how close we came, how lucky we were to get back at all, whether or not we had the product they'd sent us to get: documents, tapes, maps or plans or diagrams or sometimes a defector for debriefing if we can bring him across alive, whatever it is that's going to give us an edge over the potential enemy when it comes to the push. And when we look back, we don't like it. We know we came too close to mucking it up and digging ourselves an idiot's grave in the rubble of some alien city with a bullet in the back or the wreckage of a car for a tombstone or the glass splinters of the capsule still in our mouth if we had a chance to use it.