I was also worried because my face had appeared in two of the evening papers already and I knew that by this time tomorrow I'd get world coverage as the man standing behind the British Secretary of State in the instant before he died. If that was Croder's idea of effective cover for an executive arriving in the field I didn't think it was all that funny because it could cost me my life. The Bureau doesn't officially exist and we operate in strict hush, but after a certain number of missions we become known among the opposition networks and intelligence services — known, recognisable and vulnerable.

I'd come out here under RAF security and the opposition didn't even know I'd left London, but all they had to do now was pick up a paper and when I went through those doors and down the steps and into the street I could walk straight into the cross-hairs.

"You'd better get those chaps in here," I heard the Ambassador telling someone. "And McFadden too."

He'd been standing a few feet away from me when it had happened, though I couldn't remember much about it in any kind of order: it had seemed like a moving surrealist picture with sound effects — the heavy brutish grunt of the explosion and then the sudden blizzard of white flowers filling the sky as the shockwave came and the black-suited figure of the Secretary of State was hurled against me, while slowly the flowers settled and the sky was filled again as hundreds of pigeons flocked from the buildings in fright and women began screaming. A moment of strange stillness, then the police began closing in, with press photographers racing in front of them and shooting wild. Then suddenly Ferris's voice right behind me: "Come on — we're getting out."

The Secretary of State had died in the ambulance, they'd told me at the hotel; I'd gone straight there, smothered in blood from his injuries, to change my clothes and wash.