'D'you know what speed you were doing over the last mile?'

'Flying too low, was I?'

Worse for him than for me, he was getting soaked out there, served him bloody well right, he should've joined the Navy.

There was a parking-slot open for me in the yard behind the Bureau: they always see to little things like that when you're on call and in a way it's infuriating because you're always trying to catch them out and never can. I slopped up the worn steps, one shoe leaking, and pushed the door open, nothing on it, no name or number or brass plate or even Keep Out — nothing at all and therefore perfectly appropriate to the business this building housed. At this hour there were quite a few people about but the corridors were almost as quiet as they'd been the other night when I'd talked to Dewhurst by the stairs. The Bureau is a government department but officially it doesn't exist, and this nihilistic status has long ago cast a sort of creeping blight over the people who work here. Most of us don't know each other even by our code names because we're a shifting population of rootless souls and our business is our own business and we're not interested in anyone else's.

Sometimes one of the directors will put a team together, an active unit with field discretion on explosives, and drop them into whatever banana republic or emergent nation is playing with the matches; but most of the active staff are shadow executives, single-objective people with very specific orders: Pekin has appointed a new military attaché in Sumatra, go and vet him; Cuba has just put a unit of combat troops under secret training, go and get pictures; there's a member of the Secretariat on his way to the border in Berlin, go and help him across.

Exchange of vital information takes place between missions behind closed doors. Friendships aren't discouraged: there isn't any need, because we're dedicated professionals and all we'd want to talk about is our work and that'd bore the bejesus out of us because a lot of the work is a strain and all we want to do between missions is try to forget it.