The water boiled. I tipped Nescafe into two mugs and poured. You couldn't move for catering wagons round here, but I didn't fancy joining the breakfast queue now the night shift was over. Apart from anything else, it meant venturing out into the cold, and I liked to put that off until the sun came up.

I hung on to Tony's brew as he faffed about, trying to unzip. He rubbed his eyes and groped around for his glasses in the glow from the stove. He was all right, I supposed. He was thirty-something, with the kind of nose that made it look like his forefathers came from Easter Island. His hair was brown, and style-wise he'd gone for mad professor. Either he didn't have any idea what he looked like or, more likely, he just didn't care; because he was one, his head so full of chemical formulae he didn't seem to know what day it was.

There were nine thousand or so eggheads employed by DERA [Defence Evaluation and Research Agency], and Tony was one of them. You didn't ask these guys at exactly which of the eighty or so establishments up and down the UK they worked, but I was pretty sure, given why he was here, that he wouldn't be a complete stranger to the germ warfare laboratories at Porton Down in Wiltshire.

I'd looked after boffins like him before, holding their hand in hostile environments, or escorting them into premises neither of us should really have been in, and I tended to just let them get on with whatever they had to do. The less I knew, the less shit I could be in if things went pear-shaped. These sorts of jobs always tended to come back and kick you in the bollocks. But one thing always puzzled me: Tony and his mates had brains the size of hot-air balloons, and spent their whole lives grappling with the secrets of the universe – so how come they couldn't even get a decent brew on?