But London wouldn't be pleased.

It was raining hard and they had the gas mains up from one end of Whitehall to the other and I left clay all over the floor of the lift. Matthews was trudging along the corridor with a wad of papers, which is the only thing I'd ever seen him doing.

'Oh hello, Q — how was the Grand Prix?'

'Bloody awful, where's Tilson?'

'What? Monitoring, the last I saw.'

There were only three people in Monitoring and none of them was Tilson. They were sitting there like waxworks and I picked up a spare set and heard a lot of Asian coming through, probably from Laos. Everybody was worried about Laos these days, which made a change from Ireland. I went along to Incoming Staff and knocked and opened the door. They've got a man there now, instead of the two women clerks, because Incoming Staff is the place where you report first thing at the end of a mission or at the end of whatever phase of a mission you managed to reach before the whole thing blew up in your face. We don't always look very well-groomed when we come in here, and some of us have to go on to a head shrinker or a nervous disorders ward or somewhere Like that; and finally the two women clerks couldn't stand it any more and I don't blame them.

'Interim debriefing,' I said, 'who wants me?'

He looked up with a swing of his big square head. I didn't know his name because in the Bureau we never know the names of people below active rank because it isn't necessary; as a matter of fact we don't know anybody's name at all, Because they're just convenient labels thought up in Personnel. The Bureau doesn't exist, and that allows it to take on operations that no one else wants to be seen dead with: and that's not a bad metaphor. The intelligence lords on the lop floor run the place as if it were a secret munitions ship moving at dead slow through a minefield by night: they like there to be a hush over everything, a permanent blackout, reducing to a calculated minimum the risk of an odd spark sending the whole outfit into Kingdom Come, 'Where from, sir?' the big man asked me.