‘They’ve caught them. The French, as you know, they caught last night, and the Spaniards have somehow managed to shut down.’

‘So it’s just us and the Americans in the soup?’

Fifeshire’s smile turned to a large grin. I decided he was definitely cracking up. He started shaking a piece of paper at me. ‘Volcanoes!’ he said. ‘Volcanoes!’

I wondered if there was anybody here who could certify him.

‘Coguana des Tyq, Mount St Helens,’ he said. ‘Look at this weather report!’ He thrust the sheet of paper at me. I read it. It was an emergency weather report, put out to all shipping at half past twelve. It stated that the wind would be starting to veer and that easterly gales were imminent.

‘What do you mean, “Coguana des Tyq”?’ I said.

‘Haven’t you read your newspapers?’

‘I’ve had quite a busy schedule lately, in case you hadn’t noticed, sir.’

‘Volcanoes – two erupting at the same time.’

‘I was aware,’ I said.

‘Well, it often happens, apparently, when there’s a volcanic eruption, that the world’s weather pattern gets disrupted. This is precisely what has happened – only with two, it’s even worse. There’s some vortex or something they’ve created, I don’t quite understand it all, but the point is that it’s causing our winds to veer to the east. All the stuff from Huntspill is going to go straight out into the middle of the Atlantic, and then probably get blown north up into the Arctic. It’ll have dispersed almost completely by the time it gets up there.’

‘All the same, I wouldn’t want to be a penguin right now. What about America?’

‘Same thing. The idea was obviously to blow up the west coast stations, so the fall-out would blow eastwards over the whole of America. Now it’s going to blow over Siberia.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said, ‘the Russians won’t be pleased!’

‘No.’ he smiled, ‘I don’t expect they will.’

I sat back and lit a cigarette. There was a long silence.

‘You look glum, Flynn,’ he said.

‘I don’t like to fail.’

‘You didn’t fail.’

‘What do you mean? Of course I did. The reactor is going to blow up. So, okay, all the stuff’s going to be blown out to sea; fifteen million Englishmen aren’t going to be decimated; but that’s no thanks to me, to any of us – it’s all a bloody fluke. Next time, it could be very different.’

‘There isn’t a “this time” and a “next time” in our business,’ said Fifeshire, ‘there’s no official beginning and end. Ours is an ongoing process. We’re forever walking down a dark tunnel, snatching at patches of light. We win some and we lose some; but often we don’t know whether we have really won, any more than we know whether we have really lost.’