'There isn't any.'

He sipped.his tea, I didn't say anything. If I said anything it would get his back up and there wasn't any point in doing that because he wasn't anyone important: he was just a contact thrown in to early-warn the executive, that was all; and once the mission was set up they'd give me a first rank director in the field I'd have to live with and like it He'd have to be different from Steadman.

'You're on stand-by,' he said, and brushed his lips with the napkin.

'What phase?'

He gave a little laugh, displacing a lock of hair, 'Oh, it's nothing like that.'

Sometimes they try and shove a between-mission executive straight into a middle-phase or an end-phase assignment that's come unstuck and we all squeal like hell but never refuse it because we can hear the sound of distant bugles and we want to get in there where the bloodied banners are reeling through the fray. And there's another reason; we know there's always the chance that someone's managed to put most of an important mission in the bag before he caught a stray shot or hit a wall, so we can go in and tie up the end-phase and reach the objective and come out alive and take the glory for the poor bastard who couldn't quite make it-listen, if we weren't people like that we wouldn't be in this trade, work it out for yourself.

My tea came and when the boy had gone I said:

'Is it a mission?'

'It has all the earmarks, old boy.'

So he'd been getting the lingo wrong, that was all: trust Liaison 9. He'd told me I was on stand-by and they only use that term when they want to throw you into the fire to look for the chestnuts and that's why I'd asked the obvious question, to find out what phase they'd got the thing running at. When you're down for a mission they don't put you on stand-by, they put you on call; and maybe it doesn't sound very different but it is: a full-scale mission is your very own little toy to play with and you take it very seriously indeed and that was how I was taking it now.