"All right," I told her, "it was a mistake. Go home and give that gun back to your friend, and forget about vengeance; it could get you life imprisonment."

She closed her eyes for a moment in relief and then stood back as I opened the door for her, giving me a formal little bow and saying something softly in Chinese and then in French. "I thank you for your great kindness. May good fortune always be with you."

I went down the stairs with her past the great brass gong and left her at the entrance doors, which were still open to the warmth of the night. She walked down the steps into the windy street, and didn't turn her head.

Here in the old quarter of the city the streets were narrow, sometimes no wider than alleyways, and Soong Li-fei slipped through them as if carried along on the warm rain-smelling gusts of the monsoon, the dark silk of her dress shimmering in the lamplight as she vanished at a corner and reappeared as I turned after her; she had looked over her shoulder twice since I'd begun following her, but she couldn't have seen me: I'd been working my way- from cover to cover through the shadows of the fluttering fan-palms and past bicycles knocked over by the wind; the few people I passed walked with their heads down against the gusts, hurrying, some of them dodging into the small restaurants that were scenting the night air with the smell of kimchi and sinsollo.

"Hey, mister — you wanna girl?"

"No."

"You wanna boy?"

"No."

The wind sent another bicycle over with a clang from its bell. She had told me at least this much truth: she didn't live far from my hotel; she was already slowing her pace at the end of a narrow street of shop-houses and turning to go into a doorway; then a man came from the shadows and stopped her.

Contact.

He was asking her something and she was replying, explaining, shaking her head. He didn't think she was a prostitute: in this quarter she was too pretty and too elegant. I watched them from the distance of a stone's throw, keeping in the cover of shadow.

This was a contact, the first I'd made in security since I'd left London, the end of a thread that could lead me through the night and the wind to Tung Kuo-feng. But it wasn't going to be easy: there was the length of the street between the contact and me, and he was close to a turning; there would have to be some luck.

Soong Li-fei was already going into the doorway, leaving the man standing there alone; then he moved, and so did I, at first walking fast and keeping to cover and then breaking into a soft run as he vanished beyond the corner. I ran hard now, taking the risk that he'd hear me above the noise of the wind's rattling among the shutters and along the tiled roofs, but there was no sign of him as I swung into the alley at the intersection; it ran for fifty yards and opened into a small square filled with trees and parked horseless carts and a few benches. There was limitless cover for him here but I didn't think he'd used it; I didn't think he'd seen or heard me; I thought he'd simply moved into a doorway and gone inside, into one of a dozen buildings and with no clue as to which.

I walked twice from the square to the intersection and back, desperate for the sign of a half-open doorway, a silhouette against a light, the sound of a voice; but he'd gone. There was no point in my staying; if I saw him now I wouldn't recognise him for certain as the man I'd seen talking to Li-fei; in the distance and the lamplight I'd seen nothing more of him than that he was young bareheaded Asian in dark slacks and a white open-necked shirt.

I went back to the hotel the way I'd come, checking now and then to make sure I was alone. The big carved entrance doors at the top of the steps were still wide open, but there was no clerk at the desk. I looked for a copy of the Korean Herald in English behind the counter but found nothing; I'd get one tomorrow; I wanted to see the report of Soong Yongshen's death on the steps of the temple in Pekin before I signalled Ferris with information.

The time by the American Express clock on the wall was just gone eleven as I went up the stairs, my shoes quiet on the marble. Rock music was coming faintly from somewhere, and a woman's liquid laughter; a door banged in the street outside, or it was the wind shaking something; a sound was coming from the big brass gong on the wall, so low that it was hardly more than a vibration as it trapped the other sounds and held them like an unceasing echo.

Sleep. It was all I wanted now. She'd been going to kill me but it hadn't happened, and I was still here. Someone had made contact with her, someone who could have led me to Tung, but I'd lost him; so be it. Tomorrow was another day and with luck I'd outlive this one. But I'd get no sleep until I'd gone to ground; it was just the thought of it that slowed me a little as I climbed to the second floor, my senses lulled by the strange murmuration of the gong. The fatigue curve is not constant; it dips faster as time goes on. But I wasn't totally relaxed; one must never be totally relaxed in a red sector, if life is still held to be sweet.

Light was filtering through the grilled windows of the stairwell, throwing the restless shadows of the fan-palms in the square outside; faintly through the coloured glass I could hear them rustling; my own shadow came for a moment against the wall as I turned on the curving stairs.

The woman had stopped laughing. There was still within me the degree of alertness necessary for the memory to remain aware that she had been laughing before, and now had stopped. I was also noting other things, as the impressions of light and sound and touch went shuttling secretly across and across the undefined borderline between the conscious and the subconscious, arousing the interplay between the primitive and the modern brain that would turn incoming data into decision when the need came.

I reached the second-floor passage, my shadow moving again on the wall, this time with the other shadow as if we were dancing; but we were not dancing; this was more serious, and as time slowed down I was aware only of the primitive animal-brain impressions: the flare of alarm along the nerves and their response; the swift rushing of adrenalin and the contraction of muscle; the locking of the breath as the strength of the organism gathered with the force of a storm and then broke loose. Nothing was thought out; everything was done in the light of ancient wisdom, tapping the store of racial memory wherein it is recorded, for all of us, what must be done to survive when there is no time to think.

Something snapped, possibly his arm. I remember very little about it, but that first sound was sharp. For an instant I felt his breath fanning against my face before the force in me, which was in essence the force of the living creature refusing to be killed, reached its peak and he span slowly with his back curving against the low balustrade and his arms flying upwards, the hands set in the shape of empty claws; then he was flung away from me and began going down as I watched, down the lamplit stairwell, his body turning slowly until one of his shoulders hit the huge brass gong and broke it away from the wall, so that it fell with him like a giant discus, striking the marble floor below and sounding his death knell with a clangour that shook the night.