'Istres, south of France.'

'Ah, yes.' He checked the board that would tell him which mission I was on, and who was running it. He didn't find anything because no one had given me a mission yet, so he opened a drawer and moved his colourless eyes twice from left to right.

'Room 6,' he said and shut the drawer. 'Just let me tell him you're here.' He picked up a phone.

They've put numbers on some of the doors now; their lordships went a bit too far in the beginning, when even the doors had to be anonymous; it had worked up to a point but there'd been a couple of cases where a visitor had wandered into Codes and Cyphers without an escort, scaring the daylights out of us all; and they kept having to haul Thompson out of the Ladies, though God knows what he was doing in there because most of the ladies at the Bureau have brogues and rimless bifocals.

'Yes sir,' the big man said into the phone and put it down and looked at me. 'Would you care to wait five minutes?'

'All right.'

So it wasn't going to be Parkis, and it wasn't going to be Egerton. Parkis always keeps the executives waiting for half an hour because he's paranoid on the subject of status; and Egerton is too courteous to keep anyone waiting, though it comes to the same thing in the end because no one can ever find him.

'How did it go?' the big man asked.

'Got a negative.'

'Ah.' He eyed me without looking at me, in the way ex-Scotland Yard men have learned, but he couldn't see any cuts or bruises or anything wrong with my nerves, only some clay on my shoes and that wasn't too bad because five months ago Bateman had come in from a nasty one in Tangier and been told to wait and couldn't manage it: he just went along the corridor and dropped over the banisters into the stairwell before anyone had a clue what was in his mind.