And grief, yes, mixed in with the fright. We're meant not to care what happens to anyone else and we try to play it like that, because there's a high mortality rate among the field executives and any kind of friendship would bring the whole thing too close to us and we'd start breaking up. But we can't avoid contact when there's a big mission going and the heat comes on and the thing starts running wild: Sinclair had been in the helicopter when they'd pulled me out of that awful mess in Mecklenburg after I'd gone in too close and no one could find me — no one except Sinclair, who'd been turning the signals base inside out till he'd traced my last call and told them where I was: halfway across a minefield in the dark and with no support; my own bloody fault because I'd refused it, didn't want anyone getting in my way. The border guards had started firing and we put the chopper down three miles away on one skid and a rotor tip, wrecking the whole thing but getting out alive and with nothing to show for it except that Sinclair had started limping with his left -

Limping, but not any more. Grief, yes, as I drove beside the Thames with his pale blue stare still on me, an unfamiliar sourness in the pit of my gut, some kind of emotion that was strictly disallowed by the faceless, nameless, dehumanised institution we worked for, and hated, and stayed with because it gave us what we craved: a clandestine but lawful place outside society where we could search endlessly in the shadows for our identity, sometimes unto the death. This Sinclair had been doing; but what had he found? The bastards had come for him too soon, cutting him down.

Grief, then, and anger, and persisting fright as I drove alongside the river in the warm summer night. They'd invaded our home ground for the first time, and made a killing.

The people walked slowly along the embankment, watching the lights across the Thames, not wanting to go home yet because it was too warm to sleep and the stars were out and the town stood shimmering in the night.