'I’m not really — '

'You're a liar — '

'Now why should I want to — '

'Oh for Christ's sake stopponcing me about, will you?'

He sighed gently. 'They asked for Loman.'

'As my director in the field?'

'That's right.'

He looked at his pink shiny nails.

I got up and walked about and thought of saying no, I'm working with that bastard, but he was waiting for me to do that and I didn't want to give him the pleasure of being right.

'What's the mission, Tilson?'

Tm not sure I — '

'Oh come on, don't waste my time.'

He looked up amiably and said: 'Are you in a hurry?'

I turned away and did some more walking and thought of saying no, I'm not in a hurry, but he'd got me and we both knewit and I was fed-up because they'd hijacked me into a new mission the fastest way possible: by holding back and keeping off and letting me get interested without anyone coming to interfere.

Yes I was in a hurry.

We can refuse a mission. We can refuse to work at the kind of thing that's not our speciality or the kind of thing that we've proved in the past to be beyond our particular talents. We can say no, this one sounds too political or complex or dull or dirty or dangerous and we can say we don't like the director or we don't like Bangkok or Warsaw or Tunis. We can say we've got a cold or we can just tell them to go and find someone else without even giving a reason. It works all right because if a shadow executive lets himself be forced into an assignment he's a dead duck and they know that and it doesn't suit their book.

But if we refuse a mission it means we have to hang around and wait for another one to come up and it gets on the nerves, the waiting. So in the end we'll take almost anything if it looks as though there's a break-even chance of getting out alive. Today I wasn't interested in that because the chances are always as good as you want to make them. They knew what I was interested in today.