'Not Beijing?'

'No.'

'Seventy,' Tilson was saying on the phone.

'Do you have any Chinese?'

'No.'

His head tilted back again like a well-balanced boulder and he stared at the ceiling for a bit.

'Mr Hyde's personal request.'

He'd never run me, Hyde, but I knew that people liked him as a control. He'd run Fielding in Malaya and Parkes in Hungary and they both said he was good, knew his signals and support sources better than anyone and knew how to keep things going when there didn't seem to be a hope in hell of completing the mission. And he'd brought that bloody idiot Bates back alive across the border near Chernovtsy into Romania after he'd botched his signals and blown his escape route. We tend to appreciate a control like that.

'You are still the one I want,' he said as his head came down again to look at me, 'whether you have Chinese or not. It won't, I think, be crucial.' To Tilson: 'Are they going to do it?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Like a Turkish bath in here. Get Holmes on the line for me, will you?'

'He's in Signals,' I said.

'Get him in Signals for me, then, and ask him where the hell they are and why they haven't kept me informed.'

'Those people?'

'Those people.'

Your-ears-only.

'There are only two others available for this one,' Hyde told me, 'and I don't much care for either of them. I want someone I can rely on when it comes to the crunch. Not,' he said with his stare fixing me, 'that you yourself are all that angelic to deal with, by repute.'

'I don't suffer fools gladly.'

'You have a tendency to bitch about accepting a new mission, so they say, but you seem to be in a fairly reasonable state of mind at the moment, considering you're meant to be at rest."

I suppose that was true, and it surprised me a bit because they'd dragged me out of bed and they didn't think a shark bite was any more interesting than a chilblain and here was a top control trying to con me into the field, there's no one else, in my opinion, who could do this one better than you, so forth, and the whole thing was a wonderful excuse for me to kick the door down and bite the rug and threaten all manner of mayhem, but I wasn't doing that.