"Did you catch that leak?" I asked him.

"Yes."

"We're going to the Embassy?"

"Yes."

He smelled of soap.

"Who was it?"

He always smells of soap. He's always washing. They say he's guilty about something and I can believe that: there's something in his voice like the echo of a distant shot.

"A Korean clerk, handling host-country PR."

Everything coming up roses. Tonight nothing was going to go wrong. The mood was swinging wild now: I'd stood there watching the pretty Japanese fans and thinking my God they've got Ferris and he's not just late, he's dead, and so's the mission, and now the elation was coming in, and when I finally flew out of this bloody place I'd take one of those plastic Buddhas back for some poor sod at the office, preferably Croder.

"How did you get him?" I asked Ferris.

"Routine trap. We asked HE to say there was a suspected security problem, and checked everyone on the staff below second attache on their way home. This character had some papers on him, nothing classified but not his business."

A lot of the elation going, downswing now, but that was normal. "This man Tung," I said, "is just about everywhere."

"It might not have been Tung's man. In Asia there's a lot of intelligence mercs: they'll pass on whatever they can pick up, to whoever will pay most."

"There could be someone else," I said, "at the Embassy."

"No. I've been working all day on that: five trial rendezvous with Youngquist and three contacts, half of them by open phone and half over various radios in open speech, three languages, and no one ever turned up to survey. Youngquist took the skin off his feet."

"That's a shame."

"I thought you'd like that."

When the lights of downtown started swinging overhead I told him about the priest and he listened for ten minutes without interrupting before he asked:

"Is he sure?"

"Yes. I told him that lives depended on it, and he said he could believe that, because he knew what kind of man Tung was, and he knew I was an agent opposing him."

"You told him that, did you?"

"I had to, for Christ's sake"

"Just wanted to know," he said quietly.

"Look, he wouldn't have opened up if I hadn't told him that much, Christ, I could've been anyone, can't you see that?"

"Everything's perfectly all right," he said, and I sat back and started cooling in my own sweat. Nerves, that was all; paranoia; it'd been a rough four days.

"Bloody Ferris," I said. "You know what they say about you in the Caff? They say you strangle mice."

He gave that thin, rustling laugh of his, like a snake shedding its skin, and we pulled into the Embassy yard in Chung-dong Street and got out of the car and went into the building and up the stairs to a room on the second floor, empty except for some garden furniture and a cardboard box of paper cups and a projection screen hanging at an angle against the wall.

Ferris shut the door and I got out the map.

"You mean there's no approach by road?"

"The nearest road is this one, twenty miles away. All you've got are mule tracks."

Ferris looked at the larger map he'd got from the night clerk. "He pinpointed the monastery here?"

"Yes."

"He was absolutely certain?"

"He said it was his home for fifteen years."

"We're depending," Ferris said, "on the word of one man. A blind man."

"He had his sight up till three years ago."

"How did he lose it?"

"I don't know. But I asked him. He said it was 'karma'. And I realised we'd have to depend on his word alone; that's why it took an hour and a half to get it all clear; and I'm satisfied. He knows the mountains, the terrain and the layout of the monastery."

"You say it's in ruins now?"

"Partly. There was a rock fall, three years ago, and the monks had to leave."

"That was when he was blinded?"

"He told me it happened three years ago, only that."

"You think Tung did it? Or had it done?"

"That was my impression. I'd say their paths had crossed."

There was a knock on the door and Ferris went over and unlocked it. The night clerk looked in.

"I've got the cook out of bed." He was a young chap with a long face and inquisitive eyes; or perhaps they hadn't looked so inquisitive before we'd come in here and asked for food and maps and a camp bed and absolute privacy; he didn't know who we were but he knew Ferris must be persona grata with HE. His eyes were darting from our faces to the maps all over the floor. "Bacon and eggs and toast, was that right?"

"And coffee," Ferris said.

"Okie-doke. Coming up."

That was at 11:25.

I'd slept for an hour by the time Ferris came back from the cypher room, his face perfectly expressionless. He told me they'd exchanged fifteen signals so far, and that London was «open-minded». Two people from the Bureau had gone across to the Foreign Office to sit at the radio, and ten minutes ago Croder had come on the air.

"Why doesn't he make up his mind?" I asked Ferris.

"He's in the process of doing that." Cool tone: rebuke. He was getting fed up with his executive needling Control all the time; I could see his point so I shut up. "They want to know," he said in a moment, "what the chances are of putting a chopper down in that area."

"I asked the priest. He said the only place you can put down a chopper in that region is at the monastery itself; the surrounding terrain is nothing but peaks and crags."

He got onto the floor with the maps again. "We're going to assume that if Tung is using this place as a refuge it's liable to be more like a fort than a monastery."

"Thank you. That'll give me a chance."

"You wouldn't want to try going in with a chopper?"

That was obviously an official question and for the record.

"No. There's only one way I'm prepared to go in, as I told you."

He sat there cross-legged like a thin sandy Buddha. "Why did he go there? Why did he need refuge?"

Some of these questions were passed on from London; some were coming into his mind as the sessions progressed.

"The priest didn't say."

"But you asked him?"

"Yes."

"You think he didn't know?"

"I think he knew, but wasn't saying."

"What are your thoughts on that?"

"I'd say that Tung is under some kind of pressure; that he's running his operation by remote control, using a radio."

"A defensive operation?"

"I don't think there's anything defensive about assassinating a secretary of state and an ambassador."

"So what do you think?"

"He could be running his operation this way to avoid the danger of getting hit."

"You think if he got hit, personally, it would destroy the operation?"

"Yes. I think he's running a cell of out-and-out fanatics, totally loyal, totally obedient, riders of the divine wind. They're the type who break if the leader breaks."

He went on questioning, with intervals of meditative silence. I did the best I could, but it wasn't easy because there weren't too many facts: I was bringing out feelings, recalling things that Li-fei had told me in the Chonju Hotel, and at her house, and in the car, and at the temple, when I'd listened half to the things she wasn't saying, and taking more notice of them than of the things she was. I had also listened to the silences of the priest, unconsciously measuring their length, knowing that the longer he was silent the more he was troubled by the questions I'd asked him through Li-fei.

"You think the priest would like to see Tung dead?"

"What?" I had to think about that. "Yes. But not in the way we'd mean it, in the West. He'd feel personally relieved to see Tung cleansed of his earthly sins; that was a phrase he used, if Li-fei got the translation right. And the kind of sins he was talking about can only be atoned for by death."