A rich blue-grey cloud of Bolivar corona smoke unfurled itself across the room, some of it rising to the stuccoed ceiling, some of it sinking to the Axminstered floor, some of it drifting sideways and turning into a mad eddy in front of the massive window. Somewhere out beyond the double-glazing, beyond the clacking of the wiper blades and the slashing of tyres through wet roads of London’s Christmas-week traffic, was a man who called himself Patrick Cleary, who had to be found and found fast. Horace Whalley had gone on holiday to the Seychelles, and Ben Tsenong had gone into Tesco’s in Oxford and vanished from the face of the earth. The mood in the room was not unlike the mood in a solicitor’s office at the reading of a will, when the relatives, expecting to learn they have all been left vast fortunes, have just been told that the deceased died in debt.

The Director General of MI5 put the cigar back into his mouth and drew hard; the tip glowed bright red, and a good thirty-pence worth of Havana-flavoured exhaust went into his mouth and then out into the room in pursuit of the fast-vanishing first cloud. The officially dead chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority was busy doodling on a small card he held against the back of his diary. He was drawing short little men with big noses. He didn’t like being officially dead and felt that the charade was being taken too far. He had been a prisoner in this building ever since his release from the Illushyn. No one outside, not even his wife, knew he was in England. But he had agreed to carry on like this until after 4 January, and he was reluctantly sticking to his word.