'I don't think you mucked it up, did you?' He turned round again and I could watch his face, the mask with the colourless holes. 'We're giving this one to Waring.'

'Why him? He doesn't know anything about aeroplanes. He doesn't know which end the flint goes in.'

Parkis stood very still. 'It's not really about aeroplanes.'

I was getting fed up. 'You send me out to a precise map reference just in time to fetch a Striker SK-6 on top of my head and now you say it's nothing to do with aeroplanes.'

The thing that nettled me was that I wanted to know something and I couldn't ask him. He'd sent me to observe a Striker crash that he'd known was going to happen, even to the time and the place. I wanted to ask him how he'd known.

'Not really,' he said.

I tried an oblique level. 'You wanted confirmation.'

'We have to put someone on it.'

'Waring.'

'Yes.' 'Why him?' Nobody likes Waring because he can't work without a closed-circuit transmitting system and a bullet-proof jock-strap: he's got a 'low threshold of psychological stress', which is Bureau terminology for being shit-scared. 'Because he's due back from leave and sufficiently refreshed.' 'I've never been fitter.'

He looked down from the Lowry. 'Why are you so upset, Quiller?'

'I want the mission.' 'Yes, I can see that. Why?' 'I was there.'

'Ah.' He waited, and I knew I'd have to give him more than that.

But it was personal. The fly in the lens. His loneliness up there eleven miles away from the nearest human being: myself. The silence in the sky and then the long scream and the crater and the shadow I'd lurched against in the weird white light of the chalk-cloud. Personal.

'And I'm interested,' I said, 'in aeroplanes.' 'Ah.'

I wanted to hit him. Everyone does. 'Look, is it something I could be good at?' 'Something…?' The mission. Is it my cup of tea?'