'A wheel came off.'

Of course he hadn't got a hope. They were still flying them in, what was left of them, and if they meant to send a second wave to mop up the mess they could count me out. I was strictly a shadow executive under contract for solo missions and these paramilitary stunts weren't in my field.

'Nobody's fault,' he shrugged. 'Policy is changing from day to day. There was a time, once, to plan things properly, but now there seems a need for hurry, so instead of picking quietly at the lock we just hurl a brick at the window and grab at whatever happens to be in reach.'

He was talking about Intelligence. Even when Parkis or Mildmay threw in a scratch hit-and-run unit with clearance on explosives it was still purely an Intelligence operation or the Bureau wouldn't be handling it at all.

Egerton said with a note of concession: 'Of course that kind of exercise isn't in your area.'

'No.'

'But policy affects everyone, really.'

It didn't sound very good and I began digging my heels in, but the trouble was that Egerton was already softening up the ground I was digging them into. He was Control, not Bureau: a mission director, not admin. But if he'd fetched me down from Norfolk to give me a job it looked as if I'd have been better off up there as a daily breakfast for Kimura.

You can always refuse a mission: it's in the contract. But you can't ever judge the odds because when they send you in it's in the dark. We don't mind that. We know we'd be scared stiff by the size and scope of a big operation if we could see the overall picture, and all we want is our own little box of matches to play with in the corner while the boys at the top work out how to stop the whole house going up if we make a mistake. But it means you can't assess a mission at the outset, so you don't know whether you're accepting a job that's going to blow up in your hands because of someone else's incompetence or refusing one that could turn out a real classic.