It was bitterly cold, and a few flakes of snow drifted about. Across the street, on the same level as I was, I saw a light come on in an empty office, and a man and a blonde girl stepped in. He shut the door behind them and started kissing her. She resisted for some moments, but he persisted, then suddenly she seemed to fling her reservations to the wind, and started responding equally vigorously. Another affair was no doubt beginning. Another number, or perhaps two numbers, had started their short journey into the vast gullet of the American divorce courts. But that man, who was just disappearing below my eyeline with that blonde girl, right now, I envied him. Maybe she didn’t look so hot close up. Perhaps she had a hooked nose and spots, and bad breath and dirty, scurfy hair, and stank of cheap perfume. Maybe she did, but I had a feeling that she didn’t, and that he and she were having a good time over there, and I wasn’t having a good time over here at all. There was nothing I was going to be able to do about that until I had found what I wanted and got my ass back on a plane to England and presented myself on Gelignite’s doorstep; I hoped that maybe, just maybe, she might forgive me. But from what she’d said when I’d called her from London Airport, it didn’t seem likely that she would.

I went to bed, and bad thoughts crashed around in my head all through the long night. I woke at eleven and thought it was four in the morning, and woke at a quarter to twelve and thought it was seven in the morning, and sat in bed until after midnight, too tired from my jet lag to get out of bed and do anything, and yet not tired enough to sleep.

I felt better after breakfast in the morning, and walked through bitter sleet to the New York headquarters of Gebruder Sleder, at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, where AtomSled was based. I crossed the road and walked up to the entrance of the copper and smoked-glass monolith that surged towards the sky, and in through the revolving door, which was the only entrance in sight. Glancing up and down inside the door, I could see it was fitted with a securi-counter, an electric security device which works on the simple principle of counting all the people that enter and leave the building throughout the day; if by the time the building is due to be locked up at night the counter has on record more people who have entered than have left, it signals an alarm to the security office. A simple and effective end to my plan A.