'We weren't going to move him,' Fry said.

That was out of the book, but not everything in this trade's in the book, in fact very little that really matters, none of the deadly vibrations you pick up in a red sector, nothing of what we call mission feel, the unnamed sense that allows a single photon of light to hit the retina and alert the brain, the sound of a sleeve folding in the dark as the knife is raised, the smell of gun-oil. We were standing here at the site of a blown rendezvous and the contact on our side had been killed and the contact on the other side was missing and we didn't know how many of the opposition might be standing off in the shadows waiting for the right time to move in, waiting perhaps for the man from Rome to get here.

They were worried about booby traps, that was all, Fry and the other two. It's in Chapter 3 of the Practical Field Manual with its red cover: Never move a dead body without first considering that it might conceal a booby trap or other explosive device.

'Get a sack,' I told Fry's people, and went across to the body and turned it over to show them it was safe. In terms of security the opposition had been unusually sensitive: when you blow a rendezvous by killing the opposite number you don't normally take the trouble to disguise things, but the people who'd blown this one had staged an accident or a suicide for the local police and left Hornby's body on one side of the rail and his head on the other, so they wouldn't have triggered them with explosives as well — it would have spoiled the picture.

'Where from?' one of the men was asking.

I looked up. 'What?'

'Where do we get a sack?'

'Oh for Christ's sake,' I said, and went across to the flatbed freight truck and got out my penknife and ripped open one of the sacks and poured out the grain and came back and got Hornby's body into