'Date vuelta y duermete, mi querida.'

Alvarez put the phone down. Ferris asked me quietly:

'Where did they come from? The instructions'

'I don't know, damn you, I don't know.'

They all brought their heads up. It had sounded very loud. Alvarez hadn't moved. Perhaps I'd woken his wife, upstairs, shouting like this: he'd just told her on the phone it was an emergency case. I had to get control.

Alvarez said to Ferris, 'He really doesn't know, you must understand. It's very frustrating for him.'

Ferris was watching me. 'Don't worry. Take your time.'

'We haven't got any time.'

The mission had been running only forty-eight hours and Proctor had gone to ground and the opposition had put the executive into the cross-hairs and got right inside his mind and left instructions there and I'd come appallingly close to walking straight into a trap. There wasn't a chance to -

Run that through again.

'Ferris,' I said, 'there's something that doesn't match. They wouldn't go for me with a hit and get inside my head with subliminal instructions at the same time.' Ferris was making notes. 'They wouldn't have told me to go to that address if they didn't mean it. They'd set it up as a trap, and I couldn't walk into it if I'd been shot dead first.'

Upjohn said, 'Unless you were given the instructions after they'd failed with the hit.'

'What? No, I was given them before we were back in harbour. Before the shooting.'

Ferris asked quickly – 'How do you know when?'

'Because of her breasts.' Straight from the subconscious.

He tilted his head. 'Say again?'

Alvarez was leaning forward now.

'When I was coming to, I had visual impressions of the girl on the boat, Harvester. But I don't – '

'There was a voice,' Alvarez said, 'overlying the visual impressions?'

Feeling of panic suddenly. I reached for the glass and drank, hand not quite steady, did they notice? 'Yes, the voice was in the background. She was talking, too, but in the foreground.'

Panic because it had just occurred to me that there could be other instructions still inside my head, like a worm in an apple.

'There was music?' Alvarez. 'A radio playing?'

'No.'

Purdom looked across at him. 'It could be radionic. Remote beamed.'

'At what distance?' I asked him.

'I'm not too conversant.'

'I'll talk to Parks,' Ferris said. He was the electronics man who'd checked Proctor's flat for bugs.

'There was a launch,' I said, and told him about the field glasses. 'It followed us into harbour.'

'Noted. But this inconsistency – they wouldn't have put those instructions into your head and then put you under that gun.'

Upjohn said, 'Be unwise to assume it was the same cell. I mean the whole thing's open, isn't it? The drug scene's very big here – eighty per cent of the cocaine used in the States comes in from Cuba, a lot of it by sea. The Harvester girl could be running stuff herself or for one of the cartels. They might've thought you were an undercover man for the Coast Guard or something, bang bang. Happens all the time.'

'Do you think she's in drugs?' Ferris.

'Christ,' I said, 'I wouldn't know. If – '

'She's American?'

'English.'

He turned the top sheet of his pad over and said, 'All right, can you take a debriefing on Harvester?'

'Yes.'

It took forty minutes, because there was a lot of material: her relationship with Proctor and her present feelings about him – he's trash – and the phone call she'd overheard and everything we'd said on the boat and of course the points Ferris picked on:

'Did she try seduction?'

'No.'

'But you mentioned her breasts.'

'She was in a bikini and bra.'

'There would have been,' Alvarez said, 'a certain amount of dream content surfacing when you were coming to. We tend to undress women in our sleep.'

Ferris thanked him and turned back to me.

"The launch,' he said. 'Did you think she knew what it was doing there?'

I got out of the chair, weakness in the legs, getting up quickly to make it look all right, but Ferris caught it.

'When did you last eat, Quiller?'

'Lunch. On the boat.'

'Protein, then,' Alvarez said at once and came out from behind his desk. 'You need some protein. Cheese, yes? Would some mozzarella appeal?'

Debriefing went on.

'The field glasses. You say she noticed them.'

'This is complicated.' I thought it through and then said, 'One scenario is this: I noticed them and of course said nothing. She saw them, innocently, and called attention to them, a bit annoyed. Or: she noticed I'd seen them and called them to my attention to clear herself in case I thought she'd seen them and wasn't saying anything because she knew all about them. Knew all about the launch.'

'Did she make anything of the fact that the launch followed you in?'

'No.'

'Do you think she saw that it had followed you in?'

'I was watching for that but I can't be certain. I was tying up the boat.'

'We've got photographs of her, of course. I had a man with a zoom on the quay.'

'When did you put her under surveillance?'

'Before you got there.'

'You're keeping her under surveillance?'

'But of course.' His amber eyes on me. 'I know it hasn't escaped you that she might have set you up for that hit, on Proctor's orders.' In a moment, 'Does that trouble you?'

'No.' But I said it too quickly and he caught it. He can catch flies in flight.

'Perhaps a little.' Making a note. 'She's not unattractive, and you've got some sympathy for her because of what happened to her father.'

'Are you putting down what I think or what you think?' Tone with an edge. I was leaning with my back to the bookshelves, wanting to move about, restless, not able to because of the weakness, not wanting to sit down because I was being put on the defensive – debriefing always has that element in it because you're asked to give reasons for things you said and things you did, to justify every move you made and take responsibility for every signal, every strike, every mistake, and what makes it difficult is that you said those things and did those things in hot blood with the dark coming down and nothing between you and the unmarked grave but a random blow or a desperate last-ditch run that in the cold light of enquiry are seen as ill-advised and potentially hazardous for the mission: the one sin above all others.

Debriefing can leave the spirit naked, and sometimes we rebel. Are you putting down what I think or what you think?

He didn't answer, and with good cause. As the director in the field he had the right, the sacrosanct obligation, to record events as he saw fit, because when the executive's back is to the wall he'll say anything to protect himself.

Some morose and mission-weary shadow with a penchant for statistics has worked it out, slumped over a tea-stained table in the Caff with his busy abacus, that in the first three phases of a mission the executive in the field has been pulled out and replaced on four occasions out of ten because his debriefing proved that he couldn't handle the demands on him, couldn't control the field, couldn't proceed without increasing the risk of blowing his own operation or half the Bureau's ultra-classified files. And whoever they are we forget their names because it scares us to remember them.

'When you asked her for a diving lesson, did she get you to sign a waiver in case of accident?'

'What? Yes.'

'What address did you give?'

The hotel. The first one.'

'She phoned you there.'

'When?'

'Twenty-three minutes after the shots were fired.'

'What did she say?'

'She left a message, asking you to phone her back. She sounded – ' he checked his pad – 'agitated.'