'No, it was ---' Then he broke off and looked at me and the faint crinkles began at the corners of his eyes. 'Did the Egg say he didn't have a director for you?'

'Macklin said so.'

'Macklin?'

'He's in Field Briefing.'

'Oh he is, is he? Well, we're not taking any instructions from him, old boy, he gets all his maps back to front. Oh I see,' he said suddenly, giving a soft whinny. 'The Egg thought you wouldn't take it on if he couldn't drop you straight into the action, is that it? Took you in, did he? Serves you right, you're always trying to pick and choose.' He was looking me all over with critical eyes. 'You feeling uncomfy, are you?'

'It was those bloody reptiles, I can't stand the things.'

'Oh really? I thought they looked rather jolly old fellows.'

He got off the sack like a stork taking off and went to the top of the stairs, waving a finger in the direction of the set. 'Keep an ear open, old boy.' Then he was shouting for Chiang, telling him he'd got some shopping for Chih-chi to do, poking his head back in the doorway. 'What are your measurements?'

'Which ones?'

I wished he'd shut up and settle down and let me think because I wanted to know how it happened. I suppose he was being very decent about it, giving me time to work things out: a director like Sargent or Loman would have slung the whole book at me for turning up at a safe-house for initial local briefing with a tag right on my back. It must have shaken him.

'Need a new suit,' he said. 'Get arrested if you went out of here in that one, blood all over it.'

I gave him my measurements and told him to change the image and felt an immediate fool because it was the first thing he'd think of. He pretended he hadn't heard. I sat watching the carrier level and tried again but all I came up with was another negative finding: they hadn't raided Fleetway (again) or if they had it didn't give them a lead because I'd put my address as the Hong Kong Cathay and I'd never been back there.

'Thing is,' Ferris told me as he came back and sat on his sack, 'there were only two characters who were ready to look at this job, but the Egg said he didn't want them because they probably wouldn't live. No names and all that, but they're a couple of clowns, knives in their teeth, that sort of thing.' Feldman, I thought, and Ptack, neither of them long enough out of middle Europe to develop style. 'They wouldn't have looked twice at the toothpaste, for instance, and you know what the Egg always says: "There are old agents and bold agents, but there are no old bold agents."'

There was a fly buzzing at the window and he got up and began stabbing at it with his long pale finger until I heard a light brittle crunch. He came back and sat down, wiping his finger on the sack, and I remembered him in Hanover and before that in Tangier, going out of his way to step on a beetle and coming back without any interruption in what he was saying. We don't know much about our directors but one thing I knew about Ferris was that he'd been sent into Brussels three years ago with express orders to hit a man who'd been turned, and he was back inside twenty-four hours and nobody asked anything or said anything but the next day the tin came round to all departments and we dubbed up for the widow. At the time we didn't know it was Ferris but we knew it was someone in the top echelon, active branch, and it didn't take some of us long to work it out.

Even his choice of phrase was significant: Tried to tread on you, did they?

'They probably saw you in the street,' he said consolingly. There was some static and the S meter reacted and he looked at it and away again. 'Despite what the chamber of commerce says, the two chief industries in Hong Kong are narcotics and espionage, I dare say you know that. They're all here, including MI5, the CIA and of course half the population of Moscow. More to the point, almost the entire population of Pekin is here, and you may have noticed how the walls of the Bank of China appear to be bulging.'

The set came alive and he adjusted the band spread, listening with his head on one side and perfectly still, like a praying mantis. It was a brief request to stand by and he acknowledged.

'So you may have been seen in the street. Unpalatable but not unthinkable.'

I didn't say anything because he was interested in the set now and anyway there wasn't a lot to say. By 'unpalatable' he didn't mean it was unnerving to think one could be sighted by pure chance, he meant that even if it was a fact it left you with the feeling you were dodging the issue and saying oh well, it was probably a bit of bad luck.

That could be fatal.

Still a point 1 was missing so I shut it right out of my mind and let the subconscious work on it without any pressure from the forebrain: it was the quickest way. I could hear Chiang in the shop below, clearing up the last of the glass, and Ferris said:

'He's all right, you don't have to worry. One of those who got across just after the purge. They shot his wife before they were a hundred yards out but he kept on swimming: it's ten miles, you know, where he did it. They'd been married three days. Of course he doesn't remember her now, or not much, but the barb went in and it won't ever come out, you know how it goes. Notice how contented he looked when that character down there stopped moving? Hates their guts.' He gave a titter. 'Doesn't stop him trying to ride the Bureau all the way to the bank.'

He was simply telling me that if I thought I was tagged here because Chiang had blown me I was wrong and I'd better think again. I gave it a try and for the first time came up with a positive: the Honda had still been outside the Golden Sands when I'd left there and the Taunus was in view of the windows so I'd got a boy to bring it across to the steps, told him I'd strained my ankle: it had been the best I could do and it had given me full cover from the upper floors but it was just conceivable that the Honda tag had sighted me from somewhere below.

'Dear oh dear,' said Ferris. 'They really are terribly constipated today, aren't they?' He fidgeted with the band spread again but he could tell he was spot on. Then he stopped fidgeting and sat absolutely ,still, perhaps as an exercise, to prove he could do it. It worried me a bit because he shouldn't have to. Certainly I'd brought a tag right into the safe-house at the initial rendezvous and had to kill him in front of a witness but as far as we knew the situation was secure again, and Chiang seemed confident: he could lose the body.

As far as we knew. It could be that. The tag could never go back to his cell or send them a signal or in any way blow the safe-house, but somewhere he'd picked me up and if he could do it so could someone else, the minute I left here. Until I could find out how he'd got on to me I couldn't come back here once I'd left: so the safe-house was blown anyway, in that it was no longer usable except for transmission.

I wanted to ask Ferris his thoughts on this but I didn't think I'd like the answer so I left it and went on sitting on the floor with my hand beginning to throb, watching his insect like stillness.

'What happened to North?' he asked me. 'You were there, weren't you?' He eyed me obliquely through his glasses.

'I thought you'd been stuck in Pekin.'

There wouldn't have been any signals on a thing like that. On the contrary, half the staff at the Bureau would have been put on special duties, brushing it under the rug.

'We get the Telegraph,' he said innocently, 'by diplomatic bag. Just for the crossword.'

'He shot himself.'

'I know. It said so.'

In the press his name had been given as Dorkins, and he'd been a charter pilot for some unheard-of outfit.

'Well, that's what happened,' I said.

'That all?'

'He didn't blow anything, if that's what you mean.'

'That's what I mean.'

'He was still peddling his cover, even to Connie, just before he went and did it. I thought that was pretty good, considering the state he was in.'

'Oh very,' he said quickly and looked at the wall. 'Poor old North.'

I didn't say anything, just to make it difficult for him.

'He was doing something for Liaison Group, in Moscow, went and fell hook line and sinker for an actress. He always was a bit corny, remember? Actually she was working Venus traps for delegates from Finland - the roof's coming off Helsinki any time now, did you know? Anyway she fell for him too, snap crackle pop, not just drawers off and the door shut, the whole red rosy rigmarole, hearts entwined forever, going to get married and everything. Then dear old Auntie KG found out and shot her dead in front of him when they were getting on the plane for Antwerp; both had perfectly good papers, he'd fixed them for her. He was all right, travelling separately, clean as a whistle, but I suppose it broke him up. Only known her for three weeks, some people are funny, aren't they? Do you like girls?' He gave a soft little whinny and got down in front of the set, spinning the band spread and moving the main tuner to make sure it was working.

'I heard,' I told him carefully, 'that he'd got out of Lubyanka.'

He didn't turn round.

'Oh really, the things people say.'

I knew he wouldn't have brought up the subject of North without a damned good reason. Bureau policy demands immediate smoke out to cover 'any event of a scandalous nature or an event considered to jeopardize security', and this policy has spread a mortuary silence throughout the corridors of that dreary hole in Whitehall. I'd talked for a minute to Dewhurst the night I'd left London because we were alone and both shocked by what had happened. Policy apart, we still don't chew the fat because a lot of it's too depressing and we'd end up neurotic, Most missions are dangerous and all of them impose a strain and every so often you'll see an operator come back too shot up physically or too shaken spiritually to be sent out again, ever: at this time Macklin was one of them and North, God knows, was another.

When something like that happens, we do not ask for whom the bell tolls. We don't want to know.

Watching Ferris at the set, I thought there was only one reason why he'd brought up the subject: that's why I'd made it difficult for him, to bring him down a peg. It's nearly always a part of the executive-director relationship, especially when a mission hots up: you're both having to think like hell just to survive and you keep your wits sharp with a bit of one-upmanship. The North thing had shivered the whole of the network and London was putting smoke out world-wide. As my director in the field, Ferris was giving me the official version of the affair and that was the one I would adopt if there were any questions asked by anyone, anywhere, even - or especially - under duress.

'Ferris?'

'What?'

'Did North have anything to do with Mandarin?'