The one alert phase often leads to the other, of course: from standby you can suddenly find yourself put on call and then you’re in line for briefing and transport, within minutes or hours or sometimes days: it depends on how soon the directors can work out things like access, cover, liaison, so forth. The one thing I knew at this moment was that they wouldn’t be putting me on call, because the Turkey thing had developed a lot of problems and we’d lost a courier and blown the escape route and I’d had to get out under fire from the frontier guards at Kazim Pasa. I’d had no cover for Iran and it had meant holing up in a freight yard for three days in the snow before I could reach the embassy. That was all right but I’d lost some blood because one of the guards had made a hit and it was the wrong time to go on a fast in a freight yard at five below zero.

“Hallo, old horse.”

Tilson sat down and began a little tattoo with his fingertips on the plastic table, not looking at me but gazing around at the tea urns and Maisie and the liverish yellow walls.

“Who put me on standby?” I asked him.

“I wouldn’t know.” Then he turned his pale watery eyes on me and said under his breath: “What have you been up to, for Christ’s sake?”

I went instinctively deadpan and felt the heart rate increasing suddenly, whipped up by the shock. He hadn’t said much but it was enough. In the Bureau people talk so little that if someone says good morning you feel like dashing into Codes and Cyphers to find out what he meant. The Bureau doesn’t exist, so you don’t exist, and nobody else exists, so there’s very little to talk about.

I looked at Tilson.

“You want some tea?”

He shook his head, looking away again. “I’ve got a message for you, old fruit, that’s all. You’re requested not to leave the building. Okay?” He got up and wandered off in his red plaid slippers, saying a word to Maisie as he went out, leaving her giggling.