Showing my nerves. It was six weeks since I'd got back from Singapore and I'd been standing by for a month and no one had remembered my existence until the phone call to the plane. The thing is, we come off the last time out with the blood still up and the nerves at the pitch where we've stopped being scared any more, and at that point they could send us straight out again and we wouldn't miss a beat; but then there's the debriefing and the medic exam and two weeks' paid leave with an air ticket to wherever we want to go or a stint at the spa in Norfolk with breakfast in bed and Swedish massage and saunas and the whole treatment; and then we're put on the list for standing by and the rot sets in — the nerves have come down and the blood's cooled off and we've had time to remember that it was only a bit of luck that got us back the last time, or at least a calculated risk that worked out according to the book. We shouldn't be here; we should have stayed stuck under that boat with the air-line still snarled or been pushed into a cell with the light still boring a hole in our head or found by the dustmen in the first grey light of the dawn with half the skull gone and the grin lopsided. So what do we want to go out again for, why push our luck?

The answer's another question. What else is there?

Elliott's voice came into my thoughts. 'Do you remember Yasolev? Viktor Yasolev?' Looking at his nails again.

'Yes.'

'Got on well with him, I believe.'

'As well as could be expected.'

He smiled indulgently. As well as could be expected, considering that Viktor Yasolev was a colonel in the KGB and had come extremely close to throwing me into Lubyanka.

'I mean,' Elliott said carefully, 'you found him, as an adversary, an honourable man?'

We turned left onto the Saaltwinkler Damm alongside the canal, with the windscreen wipers clearing the way through the drizzle and the rear lights of the BMW still ahead of us.