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going to be, just like being at school with all the report marked up in credit and debit columns. And Charlie was bloody sure – absolutely convinced – that if he didn’t get well over passmark in every course Harkness would have him. All the reasons could be manufactured, to bury him in some clerical division: failure to reach minimal but required standards, lack of concentration, inability to cope with the demands of the job, etcetera, etcetera.
    So Charlie tried. He couldn’t recall trying so hard in a practice environment because before he’d always considered war-games to be just that, kids’ games, bang, bang, you’re dead. Now it was different. Now it wasn’t playing pretend. It was him against Harkness, although it wasn’t quite a physical contest. Near enough, though. Important for him to win: always for him to win.
    There was a week of practical fieldwork, mostly around London. The second surveillance exercise was much cleverer and more difficult for him to isolate, although he did. And his target failed to pick Charlie up at all when the situations were turned around and he became the Watcher. He got four Dead Letter boxes, which was the maximum, observing genuine message caches used by the Czechoslovak and Cuban consulates and broke a sample code for which he was allowed two hours in just under one hour. Marksmanship was a real pain, in every meaning of the word. Charlie didn’t like or trust guns because they went off with a hell of a noise and attracted too much attention in a genuine situation, they made his wrist hurt and his ears ache, despite the protectors, and he could never stop his eyes from blinking at the moment of pressing the trigger, when they should have been open. He made a real effort and got five points above the pass level, which with anything else would have worried him but didn’t here. The department had a section composed of men who were experts with guns: funny blokes who didn’t smile much and who always looked behind doors and wore jackets with lots of room in the shoulders. Charlie had his own method of responding to armed confrontation: turn the other way and run like buggery, even with feet as difficult as his.
    The second week was spent in Herefordshire, on a totally secure army base where Charlie lived in barracks and didn’t have a single drink and was disappointed that he didn’t feel any better than he normally did when he woke up in the mornings. Charlie was confident about the language examinations, both written and oral, and felt he’d done well in the three papers of political analysis he was set. He didn’t enjoy the medicals. He had to pee in a lot of bottles and had fingers jabbed up his bum and panted on treadmills and had enough blood drawn for a vampires’ Christmas party. His eyes and ears and nose and throat were peered and poked into and he was attached to machines that blipped and told doctors things from their jumping wavy lines. There were also psychiatric and psychological tests where in the past Charlie had mucked about, quite sure the examiners were dafter than he’d ever be, but now he remained serious and didn’t try to make jokes to risk offending them.
    Charlie felt quite sad in the middle of the third week when the assessment drew to a close and he realized that even being away from the same surroundings as Harkness was practically a holiday. It was an unsettling, sobering reflection because Charlie, who was always scrupulously honest with himself if rarely with anyone else, recognized at once that really was how he felt. Which meant Harkness was getting to him far more insidiously than he’d realized. And that had to stop, right away. He was buggered if he’d let the prick make his life that much of a misery.
    The final session was with someone with whom he’d concluded such visits before, a balding, heavily moustached man named Shearer. He was the Director of the spy