By mid-December I’d been myself again for a month or so. I was wearing the blonde-brown wig and had removed my tinted lenses to again peer out through naturally blue eyes. It still didn’t feel entirely comfortable. I was moving around inside my own life like a burglar, rattling door handles and peering in cupboards, constantly alarmed by my own reflection. I’d been medically cleared for whatever operation might need my services, but in the interim I was damnably desk-bound: a grey smudge of fag ash and manila festering away at a borrowed desk in HQ. Eight-hour days with an hour for lunch. Barely a soul to talk to and going slowly mad, poring over reams of paperwork, red pen hovering above a great blur of reports, transcripts and internal memorandum. Intelligence Analysis only became fun when you found something, which meant most of us poor buggers spent our days eagerly trying to unearth evidence of mendacity, duplicity or imminent global threat. There weren’t many people to talk to in our little section of the office and I can’t pretend I was a known quantity. I got mistaken for the tea girl so often that I found it easier just to go along with it. I knew I was only killing time until I was able to be put to a proper use, but I could feel myself going a little mad in the silent stillness of those close little rooms. If I hadn’t picked up the call on the Pandora line I might have been sat there for months on end.