I was still hanging around at midnight waiting for someone to take me in Field Briefing, bangers and mash in the canteen when I finally got fed up, then back to square one, thinking I might have been a bloody lemon after all if this was the way they were going to play it.

There was a lot on, of course, and not all of it overseas. Those bastards had put one in St Paul's, nobody hurt, a small one or not very efficient but that wasn't their fault, then one of the staff at the Palace had found something rigged up in the kitchens, God knows how they'd got in there through doubled security. Lawson was in charge of the main counter-terrorist unit and somebody had heard him say if he actually caught one of them at it he'd spear the bastard bodily on the railings outside the Tower and the thing we all knew about Lawson was that he'd probably do it.

Signals was hard at it and all you could see were trays of tea going in, but then Signals was always manned, even when most of the other sections were shut down. There must be a whole unit going out, for Field Briefing to keep me hanging around like this. I didn't check with the upstairs people to see if Egerton had changed his mind because he would have got a message to me, he had good manners, whatever else.

'Quiller?'

'Don't tell me.'

'Macklin's ready for you.'

I was in Monitoring, military communique from Cyprus Radio, air attacks increasing around Nicosia while the Security Council issued further appeals for a ceasefire, the old 1974 lark all over again, couldn't care less, Field Briefing was the next floor up and I began hurrying and then remembered this wasn't really the outset of a mission, I was going to have to piddle about in Hong Kong for a while, looking at all the postcards. Well, I'd asked for it.