A close look at the wrinkles around his eyes would indicate he was in his late sixties, but in spite of that age, he looked capable of vaulting the giant desk, which he dwarfed with his presence, in one leap – that was, unless you knew that, tucked somewhere under the back of that massive expanse of mahogany, was a thin but strong walking stick. It wasn’t age that had brought on the necessity of this stick, but a hail of bullets from a would-be assassin’s sub-machine gun just over a year ago.

Closeted behind the front door of 46 Carlton House Terrace, behind the brass plate with Portico Investments Ltd engraved on it, was an organization that could trace its roots back to the days of Queen Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada. It was a secret organization, so secret, in fact, that it did not officially exist, in spite of the fact that it spent its way, annually, through some one hundred and forty million pounds’ worth of British taxpayers’ money. Outside the organization itself, there were only two people, at any one time, who had the faintest clue what it was up to: the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister, and what they knew could be written with a fairly thick felt-tipped marker on the back of a postage stamp.

The organization sprawled across three other complexes of its own in London, largely as a result of Fifeshire’s expansion plans, as well as sharing a massive complex beneath the Hyde Park underground car park with the Army, the police Special Branch, the Secret Intelligence Service – MI6 – and no doubt, half the leading Russian moles in England. The organization was MI5, and the man who sat on the fifth floor of Portico Investments, Sir Charles Cunningham-Hope OBE, better known by his code name, Fifeshire, was its Director General.

Fifeshire rarely saw most of his operatives from year in to year out, but I was privileged – if any of the hundred, different, rotten assignments I have had could be called a privilege – to work directly for him. He was my control. We had got on extremely well at my first ever interview with him – whether he had taken pity on a waif in distress, or had spotted a gullible mark who could be manipulated, or had any of a thousand other reasons, I could not tell, so I consoled myself by believing that Fifeshire was intelligent enough to recognize a fine man when he saw one.