'Right, Mr Mawby. We'll be on our way again.'

'Good… oh, and Henry, it's been very well done. Very smooth.'

'Thank you very much, Mr Mawby.'

For a man of his build, Henry Carter had quite a sharp step as he returned to the car. At his position in the Service with a lowly plateau of advancement reached and little to look forward to bar the cut glass decanter and the hand- shakes and the good riddance and the bored smiles of the retirement party, praise was welcome. It was his talent that he sold himself short, that was what his wife said anyway, and he usually told her she was right.

Lying on the carpet in his small study, wearing the Guernsey knit sweater that provided him with a boyish sense of the outdoors, puffing at a cigarette that dropped from a monogrammed holder, Charles Mawby studied the mole hills of paperwork that he had dispersed across the floor. His wife never disturbed him while he was working, left his coffee and tea outside the door before going at tip-toe back to the living room of their Knightsbridge flat, and the consolation of the portable television.

Sometimes he wished that she would intrude so that she could flavour the concentrations of files and maps and photographs with their 'Secret' and 'Restricted' stamps, but the door stood as a barricade between his professional life and what private existence the Service permitted him. If she had come in then Charles Augustus Mawby, of good pedigree, good school, good Cambridge College, would have assumed irritation and made a show of covering typescripts and said something about 'Not really good for you to see this sort of stuff, darling', and wallowed secretly in a sort of pride. An Assistant Secretary nominally working at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Mawby was a career officer of the Secret Intelligence Service, climbing high and well. A bright future at every compass point in the offing.