'Bloody cheek,' I said and went out to look for the jag.

In the next ten minutes we cleared all the red lights in the town with the siren and flashers going and settled down into the nineties as soon as we got on to the motorway north, reaching Mitcham in seventy minutes flat.

'Chopper,' Norton said. He hadn't spoken before.

I'd been watching it. The patrol car was slowing hard in front of us and taking us across the common, pulling up close to the spot where the helicopter was touching down on skis. It was a police machine with the coat-of-arms of the Royal Borough of Westminster on the side; I suppose they hadn't been able to get the Sussex constabulary to fly us in from the coast. Everyone had obviously been playing about with the radio and I began feeling depressed because this was fully-alert procedure and I was meant to be on leave.

The door slid back and a voice came above the sound of the blades. 'No baggage?'

'No'

'Hop in.'

Norton's foot slipped on the metal rung of the step as he swung up.

'Watch it.'

They slammed the door and gunned up and lifted off with the first of the neon lights falling away below. Norton was still untalkative; he sat puffing his cheeks out, trying to get rid of the tension. He'd been with the Bureau nearly as long as I had and he knew the signs. This wasn't a mission they wanted me for: someone had blown a fuse and the whole network had gone out of whack. It had happened twice before, during my time: once when Fraser had been pulling a Polish intelligence colonel across the frontier at Szczecin and the checkpoint had shut down on them, and once when they'd hauled me out of Tokyo to look for some nerve gas some bloody fool had dropped all over the Sahara. Whatever they wanted me for this time it was no go.

London was coming up, a haze of light from horizon to horizon under the late January fog. Norton was rubbing his hands together, though it wasn't cold in the cabin; I felt sorry for him, with all that adrenalin sloshing about before we'd even started.