Nick Harkaway

It was as if, as he climbed St.

Martin's Lane in the direction of his old office, he were making his way down onto the plain of an abyssal sea.

For the last months, he had lived in a daylight world, had espoused its meanings and attitudes, and enjoyed the simple pleasures of other men.

Now, as he approached the familiar door, he found that he was once again engaging in the exercise of paranoia which had governed his former life.

Deliberately, he let the nature and movements of his fellow pedestrians function as a random factor in his own movements, making up ridiculous rules as he went along.

The notion of constant danger was a madness that men in his profession must both inhabit and put aside, and the truth was more complex, that the world could change in an instant from clear and kind to desperate and cold, and the trick to survival lay in knowing that instant before it happened, and not when.

This was a skill he had once possessed, but could not guarantee until he tested it again.

By the time he reached the circus, he was, as he had been for the three preceding decades of his life, afraid.

I think...

The job of the spy in many ways is to think the unthinkable, to ask yourself the questions which in normal life you would dismiss as absurd.

I had some brief discussions.

I did a consultancy gig here in the UK where people were asking me to look at what are the unseeable threats, what are the invisible ones.

And it's very hard.

You can't look at the back of your own head in the mirror.

But a spy's job is to do that all the time.

And to do it, if you're an operative in the field, do it in the micro as well, to ask yourself whether the waiter is putting something in your drink, to question whether the person you see delivering the mail is actually a postman.

And, I mean, we are to a certain extent speaking of fantasy life, but hypervigilance, that sense of looking at everything twice and seeing things out of place, the psychological trait that people develop who've been in traumatic situations for prolonged periods of time, I have absolutely no doubt that that is an aspect of being in the field in an espionage context.

So I had a long time ago a conversation with a guy who identified himself as having been trained at a facility like that, which I thought was, I mean, the most extraordinary idea.

But the logic is impeccable.

Yep.