"You see," I told her, "I'm no one you know."

She stared at me for another few moments and then broke, her head going down and the tears coming and her slight body shaking under my hands; and when I released her she covered her face and sank slowly to the floor, the gold embroidery of her long silk hanbok glowing in the light as her black hair fell forward and revealed the pale ivory of her neck. I left her there, going to pick up the gun. She'd come close to killing me and by mistake, and now the reaction was setting in.

For a long time she didn't move, and when the worst of the sobbing was over I asked her gently: "What is your name?"

She turned her tear-wet face. "Soong Li-fei."

"What were you doing in my room?"

I was holding the gun, its trigger-guard hanging from one finger; but she didn't even glance at it.

"It was a mistake," she said, so softly that I only just heard; her French was cultured, with the accent of Touraine.

"What kind of mistake, Li-fei?"

Slowly she straightened up, wiping at her face with the back of her small hands. "It was for my brother. They killed my brother."

The wind was rattling one of the shutters, and I went across to the windows and secured the stay. Her handbag was on the floor near the door, where she'd dropped it; it was of the same dark eau-de-nil silk as her dress. I took it over to her and she found a handkerchief and blew her nose a few times, turning away from me. When she was quiet again I said:

"They killed your brother?" I went over to the handbasin and washed the blood off my face. "Who did?"

"This is the wrong room," she said, "or you are the wrong person. Please let me go now."

"Someone told you I killed your brother?"

"No." She put away her handkerchief and clicked the bag shut. "It was a mistake, m'sieur. I apologise."

"Then someone must have told you that the man who killed your brother would be coming to this room tonight."

"No."

"It's got to be one way or the other, Li-fei."

She watched me with reddened eyes, the last of the tears still glistening on their lids. "I had the room number wrong."

That was possible, but I had to make sure. In the initial phase of a mission I like my privacy.

"Who gave you the room number?"

"I forgot." She was lying with a child's simplicity now, embarrassed, wanting to go. Her lip was trembling and she was making an effort to keep control; it occurred to me that she'd cried tonight from disappointment because I'd been the wrong man and she hadn't been able to avenge her brother.

"When did they kill your brother?" I asked her.

On a sudden sob that she couldn't stop — "Yesterday." I went across to her quickly and held her small cold hands, and she looked up at me in surprise.

"Was this in Seoul?" I asked her.

"No. In Pekin."

My nape crept; but she'd said yesterday, not this morning. "How did they do it?"

She opened the little silk bag quickly, showing me a news cutting folded many times. It was in Korean. "I can't read it," I said.

"It says — " but there was another sob, and she gripped my hands tightly, refusing to break down again. "It says it was a ritual murder, on the steps of a temple." She thrust the small wad of paper back into her bag and closed it.

I felt the tension leaving me. "What was his name?"

"Soong Yongshen."

"I'm sorry. Do you live with your parents?"

"I have no parents."

And no brother now. "I'll see you home," I told her. "Where do you live?"

"No. Just let me go, please.

The monsoon sang through the street outside, banging at the shutters and swinging signs on their rusty hinges. It would blow her away, scattering her like fragments of porcelain.

"I'll get a taxi for you downstairs."

"No. I don't live very far away."

I took out the gun and put it into her hands, and her ivory fingers closed round it clumsily, as if she'd forgotten what it was, and what it was for.

"Thank you."

"I'd throw it away, Li-fei."

"No," she said at once. "I will find him, and kill him."

"Where did you get it?"

"From a friend."

I went with her to the door. "What do you do?"

"I'm an official interpreter for the airline."

"French and Chinese. No English?"

"No. Japanese. There are so many who speak English." We were by the door now but I didn't open it yet; I'd been giving her time to recover. "What did your brother do?"

She caught her breath but steadied. "He worked for — for some kind of organisation. I'm not sure."

"Why would anyone want to kill him?"

"He did something wrong. It was something to do with the dreadful thing in Pekin."

"What dreadful thing?"

"The bombing at the funeral."

Blown.

As if from somewhere outside myself I noted that my voice didn't change in the slightest, but my skin was creeping along the whole length of my spine as the nerves reacted.

"What did your brother do wrong, would you think?"

"I don't know."

I'd been in this city three hours and no one had followed me in from the Chinese mainland and only Ferris knew where I was staying and already I was blown and I didn't even know how to start believing it.

She wanted to go but I kept her.

"How do you know he did something wrong?"

"I was told." My voice hadn't changed and my face hadn't changed but her eyes were wider now as she watched me, her own nerves picking up the alarm in mine. There was nothing I could do about that.

"Who told you?"

"It would be dangerous for me to say."

"That doesn't worry me."

She was frightened now, underneath the perfection of the pale porcelain skin, underneath the elegance of the softly articulated French. There was nothing I could do about that either: it wasn't my fault that I'd walked in here at gunpoint tonight.

"It would be dangerous for me," she said, "to tell you anything."

"I think you're running with the wrong set, Li-fei." I chose the Parisian idiom of the milieu and she looked suddenly bitter, her head going down.

"Yes. There are things happening that I don't — that I don't understand. But I understand that my brother is dead."

I listened to every word and the way she said it; I watched her cinnamon eyes and the way they changed when she spoke of her brother and when she spoke of other things, the ones she didn't understand; I listened and watched for the slightest sign that she wasn't in point of fact Soong Li-fei, an official interpreter for Korean Airlines, but an exquisite and deadly emissary of the Tung Triad who'd been sent here to trap me with the performance of an accomplished actress. There was no sign; but my mind was clouded with fatigue and the dizzying certainty of the impossible: that I was blown and within the next hour would have to go to ground and somehow stay alive.

I'd tested her, but it had been crude: when I'd put the loaded gun back into her hands the safety-catch had been on and the whole of my body's musculature had been tensed and prepared to hit the thing away again if she changed her mind and tried for a second time. I'd have to test her again when the chance came, before I could be sure. I asked her now:

"Did someone tell you I'd killed your brother? I mean did they give me a name?"

"No."

"What did they say? How did they put it?" I gave an edge to my tone and she heard it, and looked trapped.

"You are nothing to do with this," she said in sudden despair. "It was a mistake — you are not the man I'm looking for. Please let me go, and I promise you'll never see me again."

Choice: threaten her or make use of her. I could threaten to get the police here and accuse her of attempted murder if she didn't tell me what I wanted to know; but she might still decide it was safer to keep silent, whatever I chose to do: I had no means of knowing how unyielding she might be, how enduring, at the dictates of the torment that was driving her; the shock of her brother's death would have unbalanced her for a time.