When we first meet Maxie — he has no other name — he is wearing a crumpled tropical suit with a sleeveless Fair Isle jersey and a sun-bleached khaki canvas bag swinging from his shoulder. He has come on his pushbike to a house off Berkeley Square full of tycoons and chandeliers and he is cursing because the bike has got a puncture. With his manic stride, his faraway blue eyes and haywire mop of sandy hair, he has the slovenly self-confidence that says Special Forces, the unnerving indifference to what others may think of him that goes with a man who is capable of anything. Mr Anderson, who is high up in a very secret bit of the Ministry of Defence, says, ‘Maxie is, I am told, a genius in his field.’ What is his field? Maxie himself explains that he has come to sort the Eastern Congo, ‘to bring sanity back to a f**king madhouse’.
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