“How about some shopping?” I asked her, showing her the bulging envelope. We were surrounded by Hermès, Prada, Tiffany, Vuitton, and others that I knew she craved. “I’d like to buy you some new things, if you want.”

She smiled and her eyes lit up. “Hontou?” she said. Really? Probably she was glad that whatever that weirdness with the Arab guy was seemed to be over.

I walked us to the Marks & Spencer up the street, a destination that interested me less because of the store’s wares than because of its design. The front was all plate glass, and offered a clear view of the street outside. Keiko and I browsed among the silk and cashmere, and I watched Sunglasses and two recently arrived companions setting up outside, two in front of the HSBC bank, the other in front of a Folli Follie jewelry store.

The way they were assembling, I was getting the feeling that they were no longer just in “following” mode. If they had been, they wouldn’t have positioned themselves so closely together-a configuration that tends to be counterproductive for surveillance, but has certain advantages for a hit. They were getting ready, ready to move, and they wanted their forces in place, concentrated, good to go when the moment was right.

All right, time for me to head out. Alone.

I walked over to Keiko and took her gently by the arm.

“Keiko, listen to me carefully. Something bad is going on. I’ll tell you what you need to know to get out of it.”

She shook her head slightly as if to clear it. “I’m sorry?”

“There are some men following me. The Arab with the cell phone is one of them. They intend to do me harm. If you’re with me, they’ll harm you, too.”

She gave me a hesitant smile, as though hoping I was going to smile back and tell her the whole thing was a joke. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t… I don’t understand.” The smile widened for a second, then faltered.

“I know you don’t, and I don’t have time to explain. Here, take this.” I handed her the envelope. “There’s enough in there to get you back to Japan, and then some. You’ve got your passport. Get to the airport and go.”

“Are you… is it that you’re not happy with me?” she asked, still thinking like a professional. But of her profession, not of mine.

“I’ve been very happy with you. Look at me. What I’m telling you is the truth. You need to get away from here now if you don’t want to get hurt. It’s me they’re after. They don’t care about you.” Before she could ask any more questions, I added, “Here’s what you need to do. Stay put for ten minutes. I’m going to leave and those men will follow me. After ten minutes, you leave, too. Go into one of the women’s stores nearby. Tell them you’re being hassled by a guy and want to lose him. He’s following you, waiting for you outside. They’ll let you out the back, which the men won’t be expecting. If it doesn’t work at the first one, try another.”

“I don’t-”

“Just listen. Use cabs. Go into stores that men don’t visit-lingerie, things like that. That’ll make it harder to follow you because I don’t think these guys work with women. Go in the front and out the back. Take a lot of elevators. It’s hard to stay with someone in an elevator without getting spotted. Stay in public places.”

She shook her head. “Why would… I don’t-”

“I don’t think anyone will follow you. You don’t matter to them. But I want to make sure, all right? I don’t want to take chances. When you know you’re alone, get to the airport and leave Hong Kong on the first flight you can get. Then go to Japan. Go home. You’ll be safe there.”

She shook her head again. “I have… I have things at the hotel. I can’t just go.”

“If you go back to the hotel, they’ll pick you up again and follow you in the hope that you’ll lead them to me.”

“But-”

“Your things aren’t worth dying over, Keiko. Are they?”

Her eyes widened.

“Are they?” I asked, again.

She shook her head. In agreement or disbelief, I couldn’t tell.

I wanted to go, but she needed to hear one more thing. “Keiko,” I said, looking at her closely, “in a few minutes, certainly in an hour, this conversation will start to seem unreal. You’ll convince yourself that I was making this all up, trying to get rid of you, something like that. You’ll be tempted to go back to the Mandarin to try to find me. I won’t be there. I can’t go back any more than you can. You seem like a smart girl and you’ve got a lot of good things ahead of you. Don’t be stupid today. This isn’t a game.”

I turned and left. I’d done all I could do. She would either act tactically or she wouldn’t.

I headed for the MTR subway’s Central Station. I didn’t know if they were armed, and the way they were configured around me I couldn’t be confident of dropping all three and getting away clean. Also, there were a number of uniformed policemen in the area. The police presence would likely inhibit my friends for the moment, as it was inhibiting me. I decided to take them sightseeing someplace, somewhere casual where we could all let our hair down.

This would be tricky. From the way they had been following us, my gut told me they were waiting for the right venue to act. Someplace unusually empty, or someplace extremely crowded. Someplace that would give them a chance to act and then get away without being stopped, or even remembered by witnesses. Until they found that place, I could expect them to continue to refrain. If they thought they were losing me, though, or if they sensed that I was playing with them in some way, they might decide the hell with it and do something precipitous.

I hoped I was right about them. It was hard to be sure. I was used to dealing with western intelligence services and yakuza, not potential fanatics spawned by the culture that had once invented arithmetic but whose most notable recent contribution to world civilization was the suicide bomber.

I took the escalator down to the MTR station, maintaining a brisk pace to make it harder for them to overtake me in case I had been wrong about where they might make their move. The station was filled with surveillance cameras, and for once I actually welcomed their presence. Unless Larry, Moe, and Achmed wanted whatever they had in mind to be captured on video, they would have to wait a little longer. And a little longer was all I needed.

That is, if they even noticed the cameras, of course. Assuming your enemy is intelligent can be as dangerous as assuming he’s stupid.

A Tsuen Wan-bound train pulled in and I got on it. My friends entered the same car on the other end. I’d been right, at least so far. They were hanging back, not yet wanting to get too close, not yet realizing that I’d already spotted them.

I decided to take them to Sham Shui Po, a colorful community in West Kowloon, one of the many areas I had spent some time getting to know while setting up for Belghazi, contingency planning for circumstances like the one at hand. On a more auspicious occasion, we might have been hoping to take in the two-thousand-year-old Lei Cheng Uk Han Tomb or the century-old Tin Hau Temple. Or bargain hunting on Cheung Sha Wan Road, the area’s “Fashion Street,” where garment manufacturers sell directly to the public. Or hunting for secondhand electronic goods and pirated CDs and DVDs in the area’s outdoor flea markets. But today I wanted to offer them something a little more special.

I stepped off the train at Sham Shui Po station, moved through the turnstiles, and took the C1 exit to the street. The teeming scene in front of the station made familiar Tokyo look deserted by comparison. The street stretching out before me between rows of crumbling low-rises and slumped office buildings looked like a river of people gushing through a ravine. Cars jerked through congested intersections, pedestrians flowing around them like T-cells attacking a virus. Laundry and air-conditioning units hung from soot-colored windows, high-tension wires sagged across overhead. Signs in Chinese characters leered from buildings like lichens clinging to trees, their paint gone to rust, colors faded to gray. Here was an emaciated, shirtless man, asleep or unconscious in a lawn chair; there was a plumper specimen, leaning against a lamppost, clipping his fingernails with supreme nonchalance. An indistinct cacophony blanketed the area like fog: people shouting into cell phones, street stall hawkers exhorting potential customers, cars and horns and jackhammers. A couple of pigeons soared from one rooftop to another, flapping their wings in seeming amusement at the seething mass below.