'We'll get out here,' Chandler said, and turned off the engine, prodding his seat-belt release.

The BMW had parked in the next aisle and there were three other cars further away among the concrete pillars. Two men were standing further away still, near the entrance, where the ramp sloped down from the street. Pilot lamps burned in here above the parking-bay numbers, throwing a bleak light through the gloom.

We got out and stood doing nothing for a minute, breathing in the exhaust gas.

'Not Yasolev,' Elliott said quietly. 'We're not meeting Yasolev here, of course. It'll be Mr Shepley.'

I looked at him but he didn't turn his head. He was watching the BMW. I'd heard of Shepley but never met him before; not many of us had. He was the head of the Bureau. His status was approximately that of God.

Shepley in Berlin.

According to legend he never left London; never, some said, left the building in Whitehall with the false door behind the lift shaft and the mole's citadel of rooms above the street with no numbers to them, no names. Legend also had it that Shepley was a former colonel in the SAS and had taken a leading part in the raid on the Iranian Embassy in Princes' Gate; but then legends, with or without substance, are to be expected in a place like the Bureau, where we bury ourselves in deep cover as a matter of principle.

'Chilly,' I head Elliott say, 'for this time of year.' He gave me a faint smile, and it occurred to me that underneath his air of calm his own nerves were running close to the edge. It could have been because it doesn't give me the giggles to be in the presence of people very high in the echelon. They get my back up, and I suppose he didn't want it to happen now, with God here.