'I suppose it doesn't make any sense,' Corrine was saying, her head off my shoulder now as she messed about with the tissues.

I moved my arm at last and felt the tingling as the circulation got going again.

'I mean, he won't ever be able to — ' But that thought broke her up again, expectedly.

When she'd calmed down I said, 'It doesn't matter why it's important to you. The thing is, she was just a courier, and that was all.'

We're trained to lie in our teeth but this time it wasn't to get me out of a death trap or anything; it was for personal reasons. I'd got the idea now: she couldn't let herself go, couldn't cry over the coffin and things like that, if she thought he'd gone out doing it with someone else. I suppose there was a certain raw logic in that.

'How do you know?' she asked me.

'Because I knew him.' A bit of false anger: 'Do you think we ever have time, for Christ's sake, when we're pushing a mission at that pace?'

After a while she said, so softly that I only just caught it, 'I so much want to believe you.'

'Then you can.'

I had to protect him, too.

They were sending him back on a freight plane in the morning, the coffin, anyway, though God knew what they could have found to put in it. The opposition had set up an ambush and blown the car apart, both of them in it, the girl too, the courier, bits of her in the same coffin with him, unavoidably, and if that wasn't the ultimate act of intimacy, what was it, what did the sex thing matter?

But Corrine was his wife — widow, yes — not just a girl-friend, so she'd expected some kind of fidelity from him, not knowing much about the job we do, the kind of stress we work under. The shadow executives don't often marry; there are no promises we stand much chance of keeping.