We walked for about ten minutes, him taking seven paces to my one, until we reached a small building out on the edge of the village. It was a wooden, single-storey affair, and it might have been very old, or it might not. It had loose-fitting shutters over the windows, and the marks in the snow said that a lot of people had been paying calls recently. Or perhaps it was one person, who kept forgetting something.

It was a strange experience, walking into that house, and I think it would have been just as strange if I’d been sober. I felt like I should have brought something; gold or frankincense, at the very least. I didn’t feel so bad about the myrrh, because I’ve never been quite certain what it is.

The Very Short Man stopped at a side door, glanced over his shoulder at me, then knocked once. After what seemed like a while, a bolt was shot somewhere, then another, and another, and another, and at last the door swung open. A grey-haired woman peered at the Very Short Man for a moment, at me for three moments, nodded, and stood aside to let us through.

Dirk Van Der Hoewe sat on the only chair in the room, polishing his glasses. He wore a heavy overcoat, with a scarf tucked in at the neck, and his fat feet bulged out of the side of his shoes. They were expensive shoes, black Oxfords with leather laces. I only noticed this because he seemed to be studying them so closely himself.

‘Minister, this is Thomas Lang,’ said Solomon, stepping out of the shadows, looking more at me than at Dirk.

Dirk took his time polishing his glasses, then stared at the floor while he slid them delicately on to his nose. At last, he lifted his head and looked at me. Not a friendly look. He was breathing through his mouth, like a child trying hard not to taste the broccoli.

‘How do you do?’ I said, holding out my hand.

Dirk looked at Solomon, as if no one had warned him that he might have to touch me as well, and then grudgingly offered me a limp wet thing with fingers on it.

We stared at each other for a while. ‘May I go now?’ he said.

Solomon paused for a moment, sadly, as if he’d been hoping that the three of us might stick around for a while and play some whist.

‘Of course, sir,’ he said.

It wasn’t until Dirk stood up that I saw that although he was fat - oh by golly yes, he was definitely fat - he was still nothing like the size he’d been when he arrived in Mьrren. That’s the thing about Life-Tec body armour, you see. It’s wonderful stuff, and does everything you hope it will do in the line of keeping you alive. But it’s not flattering. To the figure, I mean. Worn with skiing clothes, it can make a slightly fat man look very fat, while a man like Dirk ends up as a barrage balloon.

I couldn’t begin to guess what sort of a deal they’d struck with him. Or with the Dutch government, come to that. Certainly no one was going to put themselves out telling me. Maybe he’d been coming up for his sabbatical, or his retirement, or his sacking - or maybe they’d caught him in bed witha dozen ten -year-old girls. Or perhaps they’d just given him a lot of money. I understand that sometimes works with people.

However they did it, Dirk was going to have to lie pretty low for the next couple of months, for his sake as well as mine. If he popped up at an international conference next week, pronouncing on the need for a flexible exchange-rate mechanism amongst the north European states, it was going to look distinctly odd, and cause questions to be asked. Even CNN might have followed that one up.

Dirk didn’t make his apologies, and left. The grey-haired woman squeezed him out through the door, and he and the Very Short Man disappeared into the night together.

‘How are you feeling, sir?’

It was me on the chair now, and Solomon was pacing slowly round me after our de-briefing, measuring my morale, my fibre, my drunkenness. He had one finger held to his lips, and pretended not to be watching me.

‘I’m fine, thank you, David. How are you?’

‘Relieved, master. I would say. Yes. Definitely relieved.’ There was a pause. He was doing a lot more thinking than talking. ‘By the way,’ he said at last, ‘I am to congratulate you on a very fine shot, sir. My American colleagues want you to know.’

Solomon smiled at me, in a slightly sickly way, as if he’d now reached the bottom of the Nice Things To Say Box and was about to have to open the other one.

‘Well, I’m delighted to have given satisfaction,’ I said. ‘What now?’

I lit a cigarette and tried to blow rings, but Solomon’s pacing was spoiling the playing surface. I watched the smoke drift away, streaky and misshapen, and eventually realised that Solomon hadn’t answered me.

‘David?’

‘Well yes, master,’ he said, after a pause. ‘What now? That’s certainly an intelligent, pertinent question, and one that deserves the fullest kind of answer.’

Something was definitely wrong. Solomon didn’t normally talk like this. I talk like this, when I’m drunk, but Solomon never does.

‘Well?’ I said. ‘Do we wrap it up? Job done, bad guys caught with their hands in the till, scones and knighthoods all round?’

He stopped, somewhere behind my right shoulder.

‘The truth, master, is that things get a little awkward from now on.’

I turned to look at him. And tried to smile. He didn’t smile back.

‘So what would be the adjective to describe the way things have been up to now, do you think? I mean, if trying to hit someone in the middle of a flak jacket isn’t awkward…’

But he wasn’t listening to me. That wasn’t like him either. ‘They want you to go on,’ he said.

Well, of course they did. I knew that. Catching terrorists was not the object of this exercise and never had been. They wanted me to go on, they wanted it all to go on, until the setting was right for the big demonstration. CNN right there on the spot, cameras rolling - not arriving four hours after the event.

‘Master,’ said Solomon, after a while, ‘I have to ask you a question, and I need you to answer me honestly.’

I didn’t like the sound of this. This was all horribly wrong. This was red wine with fish. This was a man wearing a dinner jacket and brown shoes. This was as wrong as things get.

‘Fire away,’ I said.

He really did look worried.

‘Will you answer me honestly? I need to know before I ask the question.’

‘David, I can’t tell you that.’ I laughed, hoping he’d drop his shoulders, relax, stop frightening me. ‘If you ask me to tell you whether or not you’ve got bad breath, I will answer you honestly. If you ask me… I don’t know, practically anything else, then yes, I will probably lie.’