We waited by the traffic lights and he pressed the button.

'What time is he coming in?'

'As soon as it's light enough for him to see the ground. The idea is that there won't be a lot of people about at that hour.'

'How far's the landing site from Istres?'

'I'm going to show you.'

The little green man flickered into life and we went across and opened the Lancia and got in and took Section 84 out of the glove compartment. He had a red felt pen in his hand.

'Just here, okay? A kilometre south of St-Martin-de-Crau.'

The place would be visible from the tower at Istres airfield through a pair of 7X50s but that wasn't critical because the minor road ran north and then west behind a low elevation and that was where I could lose people, 'All right,' I said.

'You want to recap?'

'No.' I wanted to find a phone and tell London they could screw the Pulmeister 101 and screw Milos Zarkovic because tins wasn't a mission they were handing me, it was a contact and escort operation and they could have used Coleman or Matthews or Johnson or anyone from the general facilities pool: they didn't need a first-line shadow executive for this thing and they knew it. But I was between missions and not far along the coastline from Istres and they thought they'd save the expense of flying someone else out from London and risking the operation through lack of experience so they'd winkled me out and sent this little jerk to local-brief me and sell me the thing about 'handling it solo' to give it the look of a first-line penetration job.

His cologne was rather heavy and I folded the map and put it back with the others and got out of the car and stood watching an Air Force Boeing sliding down to the airport across the bay.