The door of the wine shop was open and I went inside, but Spur wasn't there. I called out twice, but he didn't answer and there was no sign of Kim. A boy ran past the open doorway hauling a handcart full of what looked like papayas, the wheels rattling over the stones; then the silence came down again.

"Spur?"

I'd told him nine o'clock and he'd said all right. It was nine now.

"Spur?"

No one answered so I went up the wide staircase and looked through the grille at the top. Two of the arabesque lanterns were burning, their light throwing a mottled pattern across the rugs where Spur was lying, his body half hidden by the strong dark coils that had formed a spiral around it.

I hadn't made a mistake.

The digital clock on the instrument panel of the ZX flicked to 9:14 as I drove south, perhaps instinctively drawn to the place where I'd talked to Ferris earlier today.

But I hadn't made a mistake. What was starting to happen now was unavoidable.

Drawn to the place where I'd talked to Ferris, I suppose, because there I'd felt safe for a while and in physical touch with London, via the director in the field and the Embassy cypher room and the radio waves. Most of the time we curse London because it makes inhuman demands on us, but now and then, when the pressure becomes relentless and we know we can only lose, we think of London as a mother, or God — something omniscient and indestructible, with a signalling network as complex and efficient as a spider's web and with brains like Croder's watching over us and protecting us from evil.

I hadn't telephoned Ferris. He said he'd be standing by at the Embassy from nine onwards, waiting to hear whether Spur had given me information we could use as a way into the opposition, to Tung Kuo-feng. To have telephoned Ferris would have been a mistake, and tonight a mistake could be fatal. I had stayed long enough at the top of the stairs, looking through the grille at the shapes lit by the arabesque lamps, to be sure.

The man and the snake were both dead. Spur's face didn't leave any doubt; his lungs had been crushed. It took longer to be sure that the creature was also dead; it had still been coiled round the man's body, but no longer tightly: I could see narrow areas of lamplight between the coils and the man's body, and the thing's head was lying flat along the floor, upside down, with the jaws open and flecked with foam.

I wasn't going to open the grilled gate and go in there to look closer: it would have made me sick; instead I threw a hundred-won coin and landed it an inch from the snake's head, and got no reaction, trying again and thinking they should perhaps put a notice on the gate here: Do Not Throw Coins at the Boa Constrictor. The mind is irrational, and finds little jokes for you in the midst of horror.

Then I came away.,

I walked the four blocks through the alleys and side streets with due care and attention, and knew by the time I reached the Datsun that I hadn't been followed. It would have been a mistake not to check this carefully, and, as I say, I hadn't made a mistake. What was happening now was unavoidable.

He'd be lonely without me.

Well then, he wasn't lonely now; they were cuddled up together.

What kind of man had Spur been?

Everyone loves old Alexander.

Not really.

I had been driving south for three minutes and was now going round Namsan Park. The car went very well, though the gearbox was a fraction tight because there were only 3,476 miles on the clock. Traffic wasn't too bad because most people were eating at this hour or watching the prime time shows.

I'd wanted to drive for a while before phoning Ferris at the Embassy because I was safer in the car than on foot: you can see at once if there's a tag on you.

There was one on me now.

It had occurred to me, during the last few minutes, that Spur had been killed because he'd got too close to the Triad.

I didn't know how it was possible for that bloody thing to have been incited to kill, but I didn't have any doubts. Spur must have had it for some time because the screws in the hinges of the grilled gate were dulled over and one of them had started to rust, presumably because of the humidity here in the summer rains; and it must have been born in captivity because that Armenian in Calcutta hadn't just pulled the thing out of the jungle and wrapped it up for Spur: it'd be like giving someone a live lion. Old Alexander, whom everybody loved, had been a domesticated pet until by some potent magic its primitive brain had been goaded into the area of racial memory and inherited characteristics and it thought it was back in the rotting dark of the jungle, where this other creature that walked in jerks on its hind legs was an enemy, and food.

But what had made it die, up there in the light of the arabesque lamps? Spur couldn't have done anything to it: the thing was a huge galvanic spring that could strike and coil with the speed of a tension trap. What made me so sure that it had been incited to kill was that the Tung Triad always chose indirect means when it could.

Spur's death had conformed to the pattern. Sinclair had been killed either in his car or thrown into the Thames half dead, to drown. They'd tried to smash me up in a hit and run and they'd killed the Secretary of State with a remote-controlled bomb and then they'd sent Li-fei to shoot me instead of doing it themselves. The US Ambassador had been shot dead, but it might not have happened directly by a Tung agent; they might have used someone like Li-fei.

I take note of patterns in the shifting sands of a mission: you can read from them a great deal about the opposition. This man Tung enjoyed high drama: a cloud of flowers exploding against the sun; a headless man on the temple steps; a woman's grief in the shape of a gun; and a jungle death in downtown Seoul.

Also, he was a man of some magic, though it was not magic that had brought the black Porsche into my driving mirror; it was the result of expert planning. I had made sure that no one was shadowing me from the wine shop to the Datsun, but that was the most I could do, and I'd known that. They'd used chain surveillance, which is impossible to detect unless you can recognise your opponents. In any given network of streets there are always men standing still, waiting for a bus or buying a paper or looking into a shop window, and there'd been men like that in the streets I'd walked through a few minutes ago.

Four of them-at least four, because there were that number of exits from the square — had been positioned within sight of the wine shop, either in the street or at the windows of a tea house or a restaurant; they had seen me go into the wine shop and they'd seen me come out, and they'd started their routine looping action, one of them staying where he was and keeping me in sight while the others moved off to make quick detours round the streets where I walked, so that at all times there was one man watching me, standing still, as each of the others went ahead of me along a parallel street and took up his station.

I had used checks and cover all the way from the wine shop to the car to make certain I wasn't followed. But I was followed. The Datsun had been delivered to me, left parked outside the Jang Chung Gymnasium by a runner from the Embassy at Ferris's request, and when I'd taken it over I was unsurveilled; and when I'd driven it to Toegye Street the mirror had been clean all the way. They'd picked me up at the wine shop and let me lead them far enough from the area for Spur's death and mine to seem unconnected, and now the black Porsche was turning left when I turned left, and right when I turned right, because chain surveillance isn't possible when there are vehicles involved.