"About bloody time. You never said could you live there? Damn sure I couldn't."

It wasn't for Markham to pick a pointless argument with his superior.

"I couldn't, but it's right for him."

"Come again?"

"He chose well, Perry did."

"Don't give me riddles."

Markham pulled out into the main road and slashed his way through the gears for speed.

"He wants to make a stand, he won't run… It's good ground for him. One road in and the same road out. The sea is behind and it can be monitored. Natural barriers of flooded marshland to the north and the south with no vehicle access. If you were in a city street or a town's suburban road, you couldn't get protection like that. He chose well, if he's really staying."

They would be back in London, on Millbank, in three hours. Then the bells would start clamouring and the calls would go out for the meeting.

He went, like a sleep-walker, around the ground floor of his house, and seemed not to recognize the possessions they had collected over four years. Frank Perry felt a stranger in his house. He had made himself three cups of instant coffee, sat with them, drunk them, then paced again.

Of course he knew the reality of the threat. Whatever had been done with the information he'd given in the briefings at the house behind Pall Mall, he would have made a lasting enemy of the authorities in Iran. He'd assumed that the information had been used to block sales of equipment and chemicals from the factories of the old Eastern bloc and from Western Europe, from the works of his old company in Newbury. There would have been expulsions of Iranian trade attach, the loss of their precious foreign-exchange resources, and the programme would have been delayed. Of course the threat was real, and he'd known it.