“It was a personal thing,” I told Parkis. “I — ”

“ Personal?”

I shut up again. If he wanted an explanation he’d have to let me give it in my own way, without interruption. But this wasn’t going to be my game anyhow: I’d already lost. I knew it and they all knew it Matthews, Woods, Tilson, and all the rest of the people who’d looked at me this morning as if I was some kind of zombie. And Parkis knew it. “Be good enough to proceed.”

“Without interruptions?”

He stood gazing at me in silence and I could feel the chill.

“It was in Czechoslovakia,” I told him defensively, ‘a couple of years ago. The Bratislava thing. Mildmay handled that one, with Loman in the field.” I looked away from him. “Well, there was a girl.”

He waited. I was trying to remember things about her, but all I could think of was her name. Katia.

“It was the end phase,” I said in a moment. “I’d been in there and sent the stuff out and London was satisfied and my orders were to save myself if I could. Loman was still directing me in the field, with signals through Prague. But they had the girl, so I made a deal. I said they could take me for interrogation if they let the girl go.”

I was trying to remember the details but it’s often hard to go back over the end phase of a mission: we’re usually concerned with saving our skin and I suppose there’s a certain amount of retrogressive amnesia that sets in to protect the psyche; otherwise we’d never go out again. Today, talking to Parkis in a different environment, I found that particular scene was still in sharp focus, fogging out most of the background: Katia standing there under the lamp, scared to death and still smiling for me because that was the way she wanted me to remember her; and those two bastards standing one on each side.

“They agreed to the deal,” I said absently. “And I saw her walk away, free.”