Standing close, face to face suddenly. 'You're making it very hard for me.'

'I've no intention. I'm just looking for the bottom line, that's all.'

He swung away again. 'The bottom line is perfectly clear if you choose to read it.'

So I read it, took a minute, but I think I got it right. Even Croder wasn't prepared to send a man to his almost certain death over a signals line. It had got to be done face to face, if at all. And he was forcing himself to the issue on the thinnest possible chance: that before my almost certain death I could get close enough to the target for the mission – Vasyl Sakkas – to bring him down. And you can interpret that how you please: put him out of business, run him out of Russia, destroy his network or conceivably arrange to have him found spread-eagled among the stinking bric-a-brac of a rubbish dump or floating in the Moscow River or sitting like a cinder at the melted wheel of a Mercedes 206 in Sokolniki Park: the Bureau too has its hit men, though I am not one of them. But even if I could pull this thing off, the risk would increase a thousand-fold in the final act because of the kill-overkill syndrome.

'Look,' I told Croder, 'if I take on Balalaika, what toys am I going to get?'

Again it was a second before he answered. I don't think he'd been quite ready to believe I'd even consider this one. 'I would be your control,' he said.

I felt the reaction. When you're offered the Chief of Signals as your control it's like being handed the Holy Grail on a gilded platter even before you can wipe your feet on the red carpet.

'On a twenty-four-hour watch,' I heard him saying, 'throughout every phase of the mission.' He wasn't turning away from me now, stood birdlike in the shadows, the candles touching his eyes with brightness.