He shot me a look of relief and I lifted the phone again.

'We would like you to meet him there,' Croder was saying.

Meet Zymyanin in Moscow.

Bloody nerve. Someone else could do that.

'We could see Carmen tonight,' she'd said at lunch today at Gaspari's, 'if you would like that. I have a permanent loge at the opera house.'

Valeria Lagorio, her huge dark eyes glowing, two locks of black hair damped and curled into perfect circles against her shadowed alabaster cheekbones, you don't go to Rome, do you, my good friend, to wade through the ice cream wrappers in the Coliseum. As things were, I'd had to break my date with Valeria when the embassy had phoned my hotel, and that was going to take a dozen very expensive gardenias and a champagne supper at the Palazzo di Firenze just to get things back on track again.

'You've got plenty of people in Moscow,' I told Croder, 'who can look after Zymyanin.'

It was only three weeks since they'd pulled me out of the Atlantic with a helicopter, and not in terribly good condition. I'd got another week to go before they could put me in a briefing room again, officially, and we can always ask for more time if we don't feel we've got our nerve back: go into a new mission with your scalp still tight and you'll crash, somewhere along the line. I felt fit enough, but I wanted my final week, it was in my contract and I'd already done my bit — instead of sitting in a plush and gilded box at the opera tonight with the totally breathtaking Valeria Lagorio I'd been grubbing around in a freezing freight yard stuffing a body in a sack, not quite my idea of a holiday.

'Zymyanin,' Croder was saying, 'is an important man, and we think he's carrying an important message — was carrying it to the executive in Bucharest and may still be able to give it to us if we show willing.'

I didn't say anything, so he knew he'd got to go on, give me the whole thing.