No real hurry but it'd been nearly two months since I'd done a mission and I'd forgotten how it affected the nerves when the call came through, nothing to show, just an eyelid flickering, a tendency to keep the foot down through the park, that sort of thing, because we'd made it the last time and the time before that and it had brought us closer to the time when for one reason or another a wheel was going to come off and our name, along those quiet and echoless corridors, would never be spoken again.

Nothing to show, just an eyelid flickering and the sudden awareness of a composite personality — 'we', 'us', 'our', because the shadow executive, creeping alone through the maze where his work has led him, cat-nerved and ferret-quick, sniffing the damp and the dark and ready to run, ready to kill, comes inevitably to know the plurality of the creature that lives alone and close to death, the mind busy with logic, talking to itself and reasoning the way ahead while the flesh chills and the body pleads for life, go back, go back while there's time, and the psyche calls for courage, go on, go on while we can, calling sometimes for more than that, for everything, banners raised and bugles sounding, forward my friend to a fool's death and cheap at the price, out of pride.

Lights flashing, hemming me in. Black plastic waterproof over his uniform.

'Can I see your licence, please?'

'All right.'

A temptation to flash the worn leather holder with the card framed in it, the one that would get me through almost any door, Ten Downing Street or New Scotland Yard or Chequers, but you had to justify it later in de-briefing and the Bureau was fussy about it, take your head off at the neck while you weren't even looking.