He looked at his shoes.

I think someone made a movement beside me, Elliott, on my left, a more vulnerable man than Chandler, more easily embarrassed; or he knew — where perhaps Chandler didn't — that two missions ago London had put a bomb under me because I'd become suddenly and critically expendable, and I'd only got back because I'd found it and pulled out the flint. I didn't want them to do it again.

'That would be difficult,' Shepley said, and looked up at me with his pale mother-of-pearl eyes and began sorting out my synapses again to see what I was thinking.

'Yes, but that's what I'd need from you. From you personally.'

'That would be an irrevocable condition, if you agreed to work on this assignment?'

'Yes.'

It was warm in here, in this waste of cold concrete on an October night in latitude 52, the sweat creeping on my face, on my hands. I hadn't been ready for this when they'd told me to land in Berlin. With the head of the Bureau out here and with the timing so tight that they'd had to switch my flights without warning and shove me into an underground garage face to face with the stark proposal that I should work in liaison with the KGB, I was feeling the heat. God knew what the background was to this thing but it was obviously ultra-high-level and I suppose there was a degree of paranoia creeping in — I felt these people were pulling me into a vortex before I had a chance of getting clear; otherwise I'd never try making conditions like this without even knowing what they wanted me to do.

'By "cut you down",' Shepley's soft voice came, 'you mean order your death. Is that correct?'