The bridge at Gerberstrasse is lit at both ends and dark in the middle. That is not an oversight. Two lamps, two barriers, and forty paces of nothing between them where a man cannot be seen from either bank, and it is in that stretch that everything in this business actually happens.

The Section grades none of it. Not the tradecraft, not the planning, not what a man was carrying when he stepped off the boards. At first light a clerk in the customs hut writes down who is standing on which side of the white line, and that single sheet is the only thing that goes into the pouch.

Bill brought the wrong man over.

He had a flat above a locksmith on the eastern bank, two agents sitting in it, and one set of exit papers on the table between them. This is the third month running he has stood in a room with two men and chosen the one who could not walk. It has stopped looking like accident and started looking like method.

He signed out Kimani Vidal.

Vidal came across the bridge with 1.7 on him.

Sean Tucker stayed in the flat with 35.

That is a difference of 33.3, carried by the man who never left the eastern bank, and Tucker was not alone up there. By the time the barrier came down Bill had 47.1 stranded on the wrong side of the water, more than any man abandoned anywhere this week.

The clerk wrote his name on the correct side of the line.

Bill won by 17.92.

Coming the other way in the same darkness were Eric/Blakey, and they had done the hard thing properly. They had a defector. Josh Allen walked out of the east with 45.18 in his coat, 23.51 more than the man has ever been good for on an ordinary night, the sort of arrival that gets a station chief promoted and a debriefing room kept warm until morning.

They lost.

They went back to their own side of the canal at 3-8, ninth, holding the finest single piece of work anybody produced all night and a receipt for nothing.

Nobody at Gerberstrasse is credited for the walk. Only for the arrival.

Which brings me to Bryan, who runs the cleanest network in FantasyWorld and cannot get anyone home.

Understand what he does. Nothing is left in a drawer. No courier is asleep in a boarding house, no file is in a safe he forgot the combination to, no asset is sitting in a café waiting for a signal that never comes. His efficiency is 95.21 per cent, the best figure in this league, and on the night in question the sum total of what he failed to bring to the bridge was 4.2.

He put 98.62 on the boards.

Opposite him was Gabes, who left 34.9 locked in a drawer in another city entirely and did not appear to think about it once.

Gabes got there with 100.96.

2.34.

Nine men worked that river and eight of them beat Bryan. He is 4-7 and eighth. The one man he outscored was Bolek, and Bolek is the reason anyone still believes in mercy.

Bolek came to the middle of the bridge with 91.54 and a bag he never opened. There was 27.2 in it. Justin took him apart by 43.82 without breaking stride, went to 7-4 and second, and had the decency to look bored about it.

The belt is Bolek's for the third time. He has now held it two weeks running, which is what happens when a man is 0-9 against the field and still finds something to leave behind.

Upriver, Daniel had the night of his life and nobody came to meet him.

142.52. The highest anybody managed. He brought over everything he had and left 4.4 behind him, which is the closest thing to a clean extraction that exists out here, and the result of it is this: there was no man in FantasyWorld who could have beaten him. Nine out of nine.

The one he actually drew was Jack, who arrived on 112.24 holding first place in the league and went home third, beaten by 30.28 by a man who is 7-2 against him across their lives.

Daniel is seventh. Six wins, five defeats, a perfect night's work, and seventh.

Mario's radio man went silent halfway through and he won anyway. Justin Herbert managed 3.84 for him against an average of 22.18 — a whole channel down, dead air where the traffic should have been — and Mario still landed 135 and took Nate by 17.1. He is first in FantasyWorld and has scored 1594.74 this season, which is not a total any other man on this river is within reach of.

Nate had a hundred career wins waiting for him and did not get out of the water. Ninety-eight. He has been standing on ninety-eight for a fortnight now, two names short, and the last stretch of any bridge is the unlit one.

Four men left Gerberstrasse at 7-4 and the difference between first and fourth among them is not skill, it is who they happened to be walked out to meet.

At dawn the clerk came out of the hut, folded his sheet, and put it in the pouch. He did not ask Eric/Blakey what they had been carrying. He did not ask Bryan what he had not left behind. He does not record what a man brought, or what he was worth, or what it cost him to reach the paint.

Only which end of the bridge he came off.