'Yes, sir, I understand that.' He'd dropped his right hand, spilled his explanations all over the floor, Croder wouldn't buy them, he should have known that, Croder wouldn't buy a box of matches from you even if you were starving. 'Yes, he's just come in.' He looked across at me and held out the telephone. 'COS.'

Chief of Signals: Croder.

I took the phone. 'Good evening.'

There was silence on the line for a couple of seconds, while Croder wrenched his mood round and put his towering rage onto the back burner for a while — this was my impression. When Croder and I made contact with each other we both had to keep our cool: we shared what some people called a flint-and-tinder complex.

'I'm most grateful to you,' he said at last, 'for giving up your holiday in Rome at such short notice.'

'I wish I could say it was worth it. There's nothing I can do here.'

'We thought there might be time.'

'Yes, I understand that. Are you keeping the mission running?'

The green LED was glowing on the scrambler to show that it was in synch with the unit on the Government Communications HQ signals mast at Cheltenham, and the red LED was unlit: we weren't being bugged. But it always worries me to trust a telephone with ultra-sensitive information.

'No,' Croder said. 'I'm taking it off the board.'

So we'd lost the Russian contact, Zymyanin. And for the record book under Longshot: Mission unaccomplished, executive deceased.

'Then blame COT Norfolk,' I told Croder. 'No one else.'

I didn't say that for the sake of the man standing over there watching the street from the window: I'd been wrong — this crash hadn't been Turner's fault even though he'd been the DIF running die mission locally. Hornby had just gone and got himself killed because he hadn't secured his approach to the rendezvous, couldn't have done.