Into The Shadows

"Gullberg, formerly Senior Administrative Officer at the Security Police, was now seventy-eight years old and had been retired for thirteen years. But intelligence officers never really retire, they just slip into the shadows."
-Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest (London, 2010), p. 106.

Into the shadows? Then where were they already? This sounds like a fiction writer's idea of an intelligence officer, i.e., a secret agent must never really retire because the author might always write another sequel.

Ian Fleming knocks ten years off James Bond's life in order to keep him active and on the right side of retirement whereas Poul Anderson shows us Dominic Flandry aging despite anti-senescence, gaining his own staff and considerable autonomy while heading towards a Grey Eminence role - from the shadows in the field to the shadows behind the Throne.