She almost flinched. 'You're going back to Bombay?'

'I am not going back to Bombay. I'm wanted in Berlin.' We began lowering into the approach path.

She wouldn't let it go at that. 'What are you going to tell them, when you're debriefed?'

'I'm going to tell them he left no traces, nobody involved, nothing that's ever going to blow up in anyone's face.' I could have bitten my tongue because there were better ways of putting it than that. 'Look,' I told her, 'he was doing his best and he bought it. Did you love him?'

'Yes.'

'Then settle for that. What else matters, for God's sake?'

They were standing near the Hertz desk in West Berlin, hands tucked behind their backs. I'd never seen them before; they could have been twins, both a bit overweight, pink-faced and recently-shaved, formal blue suits and bright polished shoes — I thought of Loman — and with an air of being totally in charge, not a thing for me to worry about, just leave it all to them, so forth.

Parole and countersign for October but they also asked for my card, the heavy one with the Queen's coat-of-arms embossed on it, kept in the lining, not in my wallet.

'Splendid,' one of them said, 'then we'll be on our way. No baggage, is that correct?'

They could almost be Foreign Office, not Bureau; except for one or two people like Loman we look like down-at-heel Fleet Street stringers out of a job, part of the cover — but then Tinsley had said these two were 'very high in the echelon', and that explained it: they spent their days in the rarified atmosphere of Administration, high under the roof of the building in Whitehall, with nothing much more to worry about than how to get the pigeon-shit off the windowsills. That's not actually true; it's just that we don't like the bastards — at any given hour they can hit their computers and bring up a man's name and put him down for a mission and send him headlong into God knows what kind of mayhem, ours not to reason why, so forth.