It doesn't always work, the pressure gets too high now and then, but it works more often than people ever know. The balance has got to be kept between one half of the world and the other, East and West, so that the whole thing doesn't blow up. That's what we're for. We're the angels of peace, see how we shine. That what they told you?'

He watched me from the dark.

I said: 'It doesn't matter. What they didn't tell you is that once you're in this game you're on your own. You don't do what you do for the sake of your country or for peace, though you can kid yourself. You do it to scratch an itch, that's all. I'm not talking about the ones who do it for the money: they're just whores. Most of us do it because we don't get a kick out of watching the telly and pushing a pen and washing the Mini on Sunday mornings: we want to get outside of all that, be on our own so we can work off our scabby neuroses without getting arrested for it. We want to scratch that itch till it bleeds.'

As I turned away from the window his face opened in surprise. He looked more vulnerable at this moment than I'd ever seen a man, perhaps because in my trade the men I meet have long since grown a shell, the years and the deceits and the betrayals adding to it layer by layer until they want to get out and know they can't, because it's themselves they've been deceiving and betraying over all those years: the shell grows from the inside outwards, like fingernails.

'The thing is, Merrick, I don't think you're the type. You make friends too easily; you like people too much; you don't want to cross the line and live your life outside society because society's made of people and you'd have to shut yourself away, cut yourself off. Values are different out there: let a man show friendship for you and you've got to deny him, mistrust him, suspect him, and nine times out of ten you'll be wrong but it's the tenth time that'll save you from a dirty death in a cheap hotel because you'd opened the door to a man you thought was a friend.