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any
further with Operation Crystal Clear.   Yet I passed the Operatives’ Floor without a second’s hesitation.   Kathleen came first.
    My shoes tapped down the stone stairs, unusually
audible in the after-hours’ quiet that swaddled the building.    However, not everyone had gone home to
bed.   I’d reached the ground floor and
was just heading towards the garages in search of my wife, when Jay Tamang
emerged from the basement and caught me.   Tamang was the hardest working person at HQ, an affable, dark-skinned
Chinese in his early twenties with an inexplicably vast store of technical
know-how the rest of us would have required several lifetimes to squirrel
away.   He reminded me faintly of my
niece, except that Tamang applied himself to the job in hand, rather than
running away from it.   When it came to
tenacity, Jay Tamang was a limpet.  
    “Mr Upshott,” he beckoned me over to the top of the
basement stairs.   “Do you have   a moment?”
    “Not really, Tamang.”
    “I think you will find this of interest, Mr Upshott.”
    “I’m sure I will, but it’ll have to wait.”
    “You will be sorry to miss it.”
    “Look,” I turned to him, “my wife’s here somewhere
waiting for me and I’ve put her through enough for one night.   I’ll be in touch in the next couple of days,
that do you?”
    “Come, Mr Upshott.   I won’t keep you any longer than necessary.   The longer that we talk in the corridor, the
longer Mrs Upshott will have to wait.”
    I sighed and traipsed after him, down the basement
stairs and into the innards of the beast that was HQ.   Here were the technical bods’ desks and the
labs, where the overhead fluorescent strips might have been switched off for
the night, but lights flashed on and off wherever one looked, and monitors
beeped and chirruped at one another.   An
arcane, world-wide, conversation was in mid-sentence; a gathering and
dissemination of vital information that must never be allowed to cease.   It meant   precisely nothing to a layman like myself, of course, but it was the
necessary conversation of nations that flowed back and forth beneath the
specious babble of newspapers and radio and television.   And, when a nation like the Soviet Union
refused to talk . . well . . we listened, anyway.
    “I hear the Stone girl broke my glass,” Tamang
commented, leading the way around other staff desks to his den.
    “It was an accident but, yes, it’s rather blown our
cover for the time being.”
    “She didn’t touch any of theirs’, I hope.”
    “She had orders not to, Tamang.”
    He nodded.
    “It is always best to know what one is dealing with,
so I’ve been working on a little device for you, Mr Upshott.   It’s here somewhere . .”  
    Professor Monkington (‘The Monk’ to all and sundry)
was the head scientific honcho at HQ, but it hadn’t taken the great man long to
recognise Tamang’s extraordinary ability and he’d given the boy a corner of
floor space all to himself in which to play.   There, Tamang had accumulated enough technical hardware to fill a large
warehouse and one took one’s life in one’s hands venturing anywhere near it, it
was piled so high with God only knew what.   A heavy spanner had once toppled off a six foot high stack of rolled
wire and very nearly brained another boffin; if forced to approach Tamang’s
lair, most people tiptoed with extreme care and some even removed their
shoes.   I stood well back while he rooted
around.
    “It’s not a watch, is it?   There are only so many watches one can
wear.   Or a cigarette lighter; so easy to
lose and then one feels so bloody guilty.”
    He laughed in the affable way he had:
    “I wasn’t able to miniaturise to quite that extent.   Ah, here it is.   Please take it, Mr Upshott.”
    Tamang handed me a brown fedora hat with a narrow
brim.   I turned it over in my hands and
looked inside.   It was an up-market
model, with white silk lining and leather stitched around