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convalescence.”
    “Pity,” mused the Director General. “We shall have to replace him rather fast.” His capacious memory recalled to him that Lessing had been running two Russian agents, low-level staffers in the Red Army and the Soviet Foreign Ministry, respectively—not world-beating, but useful. Finally he said, “Let me know when Lessing is safely tucked up in Helsinki. And get me a short list of possibles for his replacement. By close of play tonight, please.”
    Sir Nigel Irvine was the third successive professional intelligence man to rise to the post of Director General of the SIS. The vastly bigger American CIA, which had been brought to the peak of its powers by its first Director, Allen Dulles, had, as a result of abusing its strength with go-it- alone antics, in the early seventies finally been brought under the control of an outsider. Admiral Stansfield Turner. It was ironic that at exactly the same period a British government had finally done the opposite, breaking the tradition of putting the Firm under a senior diplomat from the Foreign Office and letting a professional take over.
    The risk had worked well. The Firm had paid a long penance for the Burgess, MacLean, and Philby affairs, and Sir Nigel Irvine was determined that the tradition of a professional at the head of the Firm would continue after him. That was why he intended to be as strict as any of his imme- diate predecessors in preventing the emergence of any “Lone Rangers.”
    “This is a service, not a trapeze act,” he used to tell the novices at Beaconsfield. “We’re not here for the applause.”

    It was already dark by the time the three files arrived on Sir Nigel Irvine’s desk, but he wanted to get the selection finished and was prepared to stay on. He spent an hour poring over the files, but the selection seemed fairly obvious. Finally he used the telephone to ask the head of Personnel, who was still in the building, to step by. His secretary showed the staffer in, two minutes later.
    Sir Nigel hospitably poured the man a whiskey and soda to match his own. He saw no reason not to permit himself a few of the gracious things of life, and he had arranged a well-appointed office, perhaps to compensate for the stink of combat in 1944 and 1945, and the dingy hotels of
    Vienna in the late forties when he was a junior agent in the Firm, suborning Soviet personnel in the Russian-occupied areas of Austria. Two of his recruits of that period, sleepers for years, were still being run, he was able to congratulate himself.
    Although the building housing the SIS was of modern steel, concrete, and chrome, the top-floor office of its Director General was decorated with an older and more elegant motif. The wallpaper was a restful café au lait; the wall-to-wall carpet, burnt orange. The desk, the high chair behind it, the two uprights in front of it, and the button-back leather Chesterfield were all genuine antiques.
    From the Department of the Environment store of pictures, to which the mandarins of Britain’s Civil Service have access for the decoration of their office walls, Sir Nigel had collared a Dufy, a Vlaminck, and a slightly suspect Breughel. He had had his eye on a small but exquisite Fragonard, but a shifty grandee in Treasury had got there first.
    Unlike the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, whose walls were hung with oils of past foreign ministers like Canning and Grey, the Firm had always eschewed ancestral portraits. In any case, whoever heard of such self-effacing men as Britain’s successive spymasters enjoying having their likeness put on record in the first place? Nor were portraits of the Queen in full regalia much in favor, though the White House and Langley were plastered with signed photos of the latest President.
    “One’s commitment to service of Queen and country in this building needs no further advertisement,” a dumbfounded visitor from the CIA at Langley had once been told. “If it did, one wouldn’t be