After breakfast the next morning, Blade checked out of the hotel and drove his rented Renault back into Cannes. There was a flight leaving for Paris at 10:15, and with a good deal of scurrying he just caught it. From Paris, another flight took him on to London. The airport bus trundled him into the city through a dreary late autumn afternoon, gray skies hanging low and threatening rain, fog, or a combination of the two. It was a relief to finally reach his own apartment, unpack his bags, and improvise a dinner.

Then there was a note for his charlady. She would probably wonder why he was dashing off again just after getting back from southern France. But she would wonder privately and quietly. She was not bound by the Official Secrets Act, of course, but MI6 had done a quick and quiet check on her before they let him hire her. The report had come back: the perfectly respectable widow of a sergeant in the Coldstream Guards, anything but a gossip.

There were times when Blade could work up a mood of blazing resentment against all the secrecy that surrounded his life. The Official Secrets Act had smashed his engagement, would probably keep him a bachelor until he retired, and had elbowed its way into his life in all sorts of little ways.

Eventually he went to bed because he couldn't think of anything better to do. When there was another trip into Dimension X coming up, he found it hard to concentrate on anything else. Home Dimension, his apartment with its books and bottles, even the women who shared his bed for a night or a week, all came to seem insubstantial and fleeting.

The heart of Project Dimension X was Lord Leighton's underground complex, two hundred feet below the Tower of London.