Lowering in the night sky.

'What's the ETA?' the driver said.

'11:37. British Airways.'

'Sure, that could be it.'

The nose coming up, the lights of the town silvering the wings. 'How long can you wait here?'

'Maybe a minute. Fuzz here don't have no patience.'

'Then go in and check the arrival time for Flight 293.'

'I can't leave the cab.'

'I'm a generous man.'

He came back and said the flight was on time.

'All right, make a circuit.'

'A what?'

'Go round again.'

'Come back here?'

'Yes.'

Reversing thrust, the roar waking the night. The cop said something as we pulled out but I only heard the driver.

'Gimme no shit, man. I wasn't no more than a half-minute.'

Reek of kerosene blowing through the driving window.

Ferris.

I nursed his name, going over all the things it meant: a major mission, for one thing, because of his status and his track record and because I'd seen his name on the board for Catapult when I'd looked into the signals room before I'd left, so they'd pulled him in from Paris overnight and sent him out here direct with no local briefing from Monck unless it had been done on the phone between Nassau and London. Monck would have given Ferris everything he knew without keeping selected material back as he'd done with me, because that's the way it works: the shadow executive in the field is told only what he needs to know at any given time; the background to a major mission can be infinitely complex with areas of ultra-classified material on a government level right up to your-eyes-only files exclusive to the Prime Minister.

'Go round again.'

Even Ferris wouldn't have all of it in his hands. His job was to direct the shadow in the field, see that he was fed and watered and kept in signals with London, give him the information he needed to know and send him wherever he had to be sent, wherever the mission took him, protect him from the opposition and from his own paranoia when things got rough, and finally bring him home with enough life left in him to stand up to debriefing for days on end, weeks on end, while they turned off the light over the board in the signals room and got on with something else.

'Shit, man, I'm getting giddy.'

'How does this bloody window open?'

'It's broke.'

There was reflection on the glass but I could see him now, Ferris, coming through the arrival area but not from the baggage claim; he'd have only one case, prepacked for him and stored by the travel section in the Bureau and marked F.I.P. – For Immediate Pickup.

'Can you pull in here?'

Between a limo and a dirty red VW, luggage all over the place, two men with sideboards and black coats and padded shoulders and Panda-style smoked glasses ducking into the Lincoln, a college boy lurching under the weight of a surfboard and scuba gear, somebody's maiden aunt with a carnation corsage and blue hair. And Ferris.

'That man there,' I said, 'Tall, thin, glasses -'

'I got him.'

'Fetch him in here.'

Exhaust gas thick on the air as the door came open and I shifted over.

'Where we go now, man?'

Ferris said the Flamingo on 30th street and the driver pulled out and gave the cop the finger and I told him to turn up the radio nice and loud.

'It's two blocks from your place,' Ferris said, but I told him I'd need to move out because someone had searched my room at the hotel and I'd been tagged there from Proctor's in the storm.

'You've made contact already?'

'Yes. Or they have.'

Chapter 4: PATCHOULI

'While you were at Proctor's?'

'Yes.'

'He sent someone round to your hotel?'

'He could have. I phoned him when I left there, to say I was coming. No one else knows me here, and there was no tag from the airport when I got in.'

'No contact until you called on Proctor.'

'No. But I suppose Monck could have been blown.'

The light caught his glasses as he turned his head. 'No. He keeps his cover in the bank.'

Meaning that Monck was unblowable; so no one had got on to me from there. 'Then it was Proctor. Monck said he might have been turned.'

'Who by?' Ferris dropped a pair of new socks onto the bed. 'I do wish they'd get it right. Look at this, dogshit brown.' He was already half unpacked. We hadn't talked much in the taxi, even with the music. Ferris is impeccable with his security.

'I don't know. Anyone could've turned him, especially out here.'

He glanced at me again, a black shoe in his hand, brilliantly polished. 'Out here?'

'It wouldn't have to be anyone political. There are people here earning a million dollars a week running cocaine in from the south. A good sleeper with Proctor's communications could monitor the US Coastguard rather efficiently, and make a pile.'

'I see. Look at the polish on these bloody shoes, they think I'm Loman?' He had a soft, rather sibilant voice, like a snake shedding its skin. I wouldn't want to be whoever it was in Travel who'd packed his bag. 'All right,' he said, 'you know Proctor well. That's why they sent you out here. Would he be likely to bust his career for big money?'

'I can't say.' I got up to walk about, not near the window blinds: there was only meant to be one of us in here. 'He's changed. He's changed a lot.'

'Oh really.' He took a black leather toilet bag into the bathroom and came back, fingering his thin straw-coloured hair. 'Then who'd be sending the product in?'

'Possibly Cheyney. He -'

'But you don't mean turned.'

'I've been out here,' I said, 'for twenty-four hours and I talked to Proctor from ten till eleven tonight, thereabouts. I can't give you processed feedback.'

'I don't expect it. First we've got to beat the air.' He put a Kent brush on the dressing-table, setting it at a precise angle. They hadn't moved surface things in my room at the hotel but they hadn't remembered that the second drawer down in the bureau had been left half a centimetre open, for one thing.

'Where are you going to put me?' I asked Ferris.

'The Cedar Grove, near the airport.'

'Is that the reserve base?'

'Dear God,' he said, 'would I do a thing like that?'

'Sorry.' I wasn't thinking fast enough.

The reserve base could have been vetted by Cheyney or even Proctor himself and passed on to Travel for recommended use. Tonight it could be a trap, or bugged, or both.

'I've stayed,' Ferris said, 'at the Cedar Grove. It's small, clean and secluded, even though it's near the airport. Good access, egress and rear-view vision. And cheap, so Molly will be pleased.' He dropped a green-striped shirt into a drawer.

Molly is that acidic old bitch in charge of Accounts.

'What about cover?' I asked Ferris.

'We don't know yet.' Zipping the empty bag and dropping it onto a chair, 'Listen, it's late, so I'm going to give you the basic scene as it looks at the moment, but realise this: Proctor is the key.' He sat on the end of the bed and leaned his elbows on his knees. "The overall picture is vast and as yet undefined. Only three people have seen the actual print-out that comprises the essence of weeks of signals, sleeper-data and private-line conferences that have been shoved through the computers for analysis and evaluation. Only three. I'm not one of them. So what I've got to do is funnel you a selected breakdown of what London gives me, and your position is this: you're in the field to give us the access we've got to have before Barracuda can begin running. That's the code-name for the mission as you probably know because Holmes has doubtless told you.' He ran his fingers through his hair. 'Proctor is therefore the key and he's also the access, because this is the information I've been given to work on and I can give it to you intoto. Do not think of Proctor as a possibly-turned or renegade sleeper who's conceivably been feeding disinformation to London for an unspecified time – or I should say don't think of him only as that. He is more. He is much more.'