Director in the field. His name was Fane, and he'd directed me once in Murmansk, had rigged a bomb like that one in a truck I was going to drive, did it on orders from Control in London because I'd become expendable, a danger to the mission. But I'd smelled the bloody thing out and my large intestine was still where it should be while his was snaking all over the video screen, a bit embarrassing for him when you think about it.

He came across to the car again but I wasn't interested in him now. There were seven people in the frame apart from Fane: three Europeans standing together talking, identical suits, identical briefcases, two bearded Hindus shading their eyes and looking down the street for a taxi, and a woman in white holding a rose and waving to someone in a car just leaving, apres tout, c'est Paris. And the man reading a paper.

Kerboom.

'They must have all been killed,' I told Shatner. The screen had been going blank a couple of seconds after Fane's leg began coming down, but the blast had obviously started to reach the other people.

'Yes,' Shatner said, and tugged at his rumpled trousers, a nervous habit I'd noticed in him before — he'd been my control for Solitaire. 'They were all killed. We're working, you see, with nothing much to go on. We want to know who placed the bomb. It obviously wasn't one of the people in the picture, but we just thought one of them might have been surveilling him, not knowing the car was hot.'

The rickety chair creaked as he shifted his weight. The screen went blank again and the operator hit the rewind button. 'All we can hope for,' Shatner said, 'is to find a recognizable face and try to trace things from there.'

The tape was running again, and after a bit I said, 'The man with the paper. Just a possibility, that's all. No one — ' 'I wondered.'

'Right. No one else.'

'Freeze it,' Shatner told the operator. 'Then make a still and we'll blow it up and send it to the field to work on.'