Detective-Sergeant William Charles Gage of New Scotland Yard, seconded to the Foreign Office on temporary overseas duties. The wad of notes was marked 1,000 yuan and die-stamped by Lloyd's Bank. And now my hands were growing cold and a lightness was coming into my head because I'd been too groggy to realise how close I was to the new mission, after three months of debriefing and recuperating and trying to relax with the saunas and the girls and the long bracing tramps across the Downs at Brighton while the thought hovered in the back of the mind, the same thought we all have, in between missions — the thought that perhaps we ought to get out now before it's too late, before the luck runs out and we're cast up in a Gulag labour camp or lashed blindfold against a post in Beirut or by the grace of unknown gods spreadeagled against the mountainside with a ripped parachute for a shroud and one last intimate friend plucking strength from us with his bone-white beak.

Suddenly, this time, it was too late to get out: they were already pitching me headlong into the dark and I was letting them do it, because who the hell, after all, wants to die in a pensioner's home with the veined hand limp on the tartan rug and a torn bingo ticket for an epitaph?

But Lord, I was afraid.

"I see we're on time," Tilson said, and we got out.

Five men were standing in a group below the rotors of the RAF helicopter and one came a few paces to meet us, and I recognised Croder.

"Has he been briefed?" he asked Tilson softly.

That was typical of the man. He'd spoken as if I weren't there. Croder can get me to hate him instantly, the moment we make contact.

"No, sir."

"Cleared?"

"Yes."

Croder turned to me, standing hunched in his dark blazer with his thin head down and his eyes lifted to watch me in the lamplight. "What have you decided?"

"I want the mission."