Norton still didn't talk and by this time I didn't want him to. We tumbled out of the car across the slush of a recent thaw and slipped through the narrow doorway halfway down Whitehall and hit the lift button and waited, not looking at each other. Dirty water seeped from our shoes under the bleak security lights as I thought of Helena and wondered if I'd ever see her again.

Tilson met us as we got out of the lift.

'My dear fellow,' he said, and held out his warm dry hand. 'Long time no see.'

'Two weeks. That's not long.' Norton had gone quietly rushing off along the corridor: I suppose he'd been told to report somewhere the moment we got in.

'I know what you mean,' Tilson said with a slow blink. He was trying hard to look amiable and comforting, since it was his role in life; but tonight he couldn't manage it; he just looked frightened to death, right at the back of his eyes. 'What about a spot of tea?'

'What the hell are you talking about?'

'We've got a few minutes, you see.' He guided me gently along the corridor as far as the Caff. 'We're not quite set up for you yet.'

'Look, Tilson, just give me a clue, will you?'

'It's not really for me to.say, old horse.' He shuffled across the room in his carpet slippers to a corner table, one of the few left. Maggie saw us and came over and mopped up some spilled tea, and when she'd gone again he said with his lips hardly moving, 'They've sent for Mr Croder. He's on his way in from Rome.'

'Croder?'

'He shouldn't be long.'

I shut up for a minute. Croder was chief of the base directorate and handled the ultra-sensitive operations and had a mortality rate for foreign actions higher than the rest of them put together, not because he wasn't brilliant but because he took on risks that most of the others shied at. I'd never worked for him, not even on the Sahara thing. I didn't want to.