It was nearly nine in the evening before Tilson came and got me out of Monitoring, where I'd been passing the time listening to a lot of flak from one of our cells in Africa which was trying to pull itself out of the general bush fire that had gone up after the Kibombo massacre.

'Talk to you,' Tilson asked from the doorway, 'for a jiff?' It was terribly low key, and I started worrying again. He took me along the corridor, with our footsteps echoing from the high arched ceiling; there's still no carpeting in this bloody place: they say the parquet's got woodworm in it and they have to keep a watch on it.

'We've got Mr Croder for you,' Tilson told me and hustled me into Signals. From that moment I began going cold. We can always refuse a mission and we don't have to give our reasons; some of the operations look strictly shut-ended during the planning stage and we reserve the right to go on living if we think the risk is too high. But we can't refuse to listen to a director if he's got something for us to do, and sometimes he'll prick our conscience or our pride and lever us into a tricky one before we know what's happening. My nerves were still out of condition from the last operation, although you'd think we'd get over it, one day, and learn to live with it; maybe some of them have, but I haven't yet, and it's getting late.

There were only four people manning the room tonight, two of them handling separate missions at the main console with the code names Flash point and Banjo on the boards above their heads, and two others waiting for us at the unit nearer the door.

'Where is he?' I asked Tilson.

'Mr Croder? He's in Geneva.'

'He was flying from Rome, the last — '

'Never mind,' Tilson said amiably, and looked at the big international clock.