Tung Kuo-feng sat perfectly still.

"My son is precious to me," he said in his toneless English. "Our line stems from the Ch'ing dynasty, and he is my eldest."

The thing moved closer to him.

I said nothing.

"They knew that," he said with his night-dark eyes brooding on mine. "That is why they abducted him."

The thing had reached him now, or one end of it had. The rest of it lay across the flagstones like a heavy rope. I tried to warn him but there was no sound.

"That is why it is so important for you to find my son. If I die it is not important to me. If my son dies, the line will be finished. I will do anything you wish, if you can save him."

The narrow mottled head slipped gracefully between the arm and the body of Tung Kuo-feng, appearing on his other side and curving across the golden dragons on the front of his robe, curving again and winding, compressing the dark silk.

Tung Kuo-feng began smiling, as if he knew a secret. I had never seen him smile before.

"They must have put something in the rat. Inside the frozen rat. Kori, perhaps. Or something synthetic, like flarismine." His body was almost hidden now by the squeezing coils. "Something to send it into a frenzy."

Then it constricted in one powerful spasm of nerve and muscle, and Tung's face turned dark with blood; it constricted again and again like a tensed coil-spring retracting until Tung Kuo-feng was a bloodied effigy in the shape of a man, with the dragons writhing across the wet silk of his robe as the boa went on squeezing, squeezing, until it blocked my breath and I woke shivering with the taste of his blood in my mouth, sour and primitive.

I opened my eyes. The oblong gap of light was still there in the door, with shadows moving across the arched ceiling as the flames of the lanterns moved in a draught of air. Under me I could feel the soft resilience of the straw-filled hessian mattress.

The sound came again.

I often dream about snakes.

Figures on my watch-face: 11:36.

That bloody thing in Seoul had upset me; I was going to dream about it for a long time, if there was a long time left to me. Highly unlikely.

Came again. So quiet that it could have just been in my mind; but I know my mind; it doesn't play tricks on me; it lets me know things; it lets me know the kind of things I should know.

The shadows on the arched ceiling outside the door of my cell looked much as I'd seen them before; they were moving in the same rhythm, as the mountain air breathed through the labyrinthine passages and apertures of the monastery, pulling at the lantern flames. These people could have lit this place like a supermarket if they'd wanted to; they had a generator going for the transceivers; but it was probably visible at night to some of the villages on the far slopes of the foothills, or to the wagoners and goatherds along the mountain tracks. They'd put camouflage nets over the two helicopters out there, so they wanted things to look normal.

A very definite click. Immediate associations: gun, wooden box, lock. It was too quiet for the moving mechanism of a gun and there wasn't a wooden box in this cell for anyone to open and nobody could get in here without -

Lock, yes.

Turning.

Rotten taste in my mouth from that dream: the taste of fear.

It was a heavy door, solid oak and with huge wrought hinges. I'd seen the key when they'd first put me in here, an enormous thing, the kind of thing you'd only ever see in a flea market, genuine antique, and so forth. They'd oiled the tumblers through the ages; monks run a tight ship, orderliness next to godliness. But there's no way you can turn a lock this size without making at least a slight noise.

Tung.

For the last five hours he'd been shut in with his sense of impotence in the face of karma, hearing his son's name again and again in that heavy Russian accent. I will do anything you wish, if you can save him. That was only in a dream, yes, but dreams are cyphers for a reality we haven't the time to understand.

No, it couldn't be Tung outside my door. He didn't need to come along here in the dead of night to talk to me, because he didn't think I knew any more about the Moscow signal than he did; he didn't know I understood Russian. Besides, he'd have to knock out Yang or the other guard: one of them was always outside and at this hour it would be Yang; I knew the shifts they worked. Yang wouldn't let him in here without permission from Sinitsin: the KGB was running this show, not Tung Kuo-feng.

Yang wouldn't let anyone in here.

I would have to think about that.

Other tiny sounds, from a different direction. Immediate associations: water rushing, fire crackling, both very far away; distant rain. I turned my head a little to listen and the sounds were suddenly much louder; it was the straw in the palliasse, close to my ear.

Mechanical sound again, of tumblers falling against the force of the spring, held back by the tines of the key. And I'd thought about it now. Yang wouldn't let anyone in here, so either he'd been called away from guard duty or someone had got at him. Unsatisfactory: these Koreans were military and they wouldn't take a guard away without relieving him, and no one could have got at him because no one would want to, except Tung, and Tung was under house arrest and had guards watching him wherever he went.

Pride?

There was nothing over me; the night was too mild. My arms were free, and lying along the mattress. The mattress was on the stone floor. The only light in here was coming from the small oblong in the door, and its source was a good way off, near the second archway along the passage to the operations room; if I lifted my hand I would just about see it, but that was all.

Wounded pride.

Because I'd gone for him in front of the others, even though he'd had a submachine gun pointing at me. For whatever his reasons, this was Yang coming in here.

He took his time. I watched the thin strip of luminosity forming on the wall as the big door began swinging inwards, and smelled the oil from the lamps out there, and the lingering sweetness of the incense that had filled the arched chamber where Tung Kuo-feng had talked to me last evening. The far voice of a night bird came from the mountain heights; it had been too faint to register through the narrow oblong in the door, and there was no window here.

Yang was moving with infinite patience. I could see his hand now, and his shoulder, a shadow against the shadows beyond, as the door swung inwards. Its edge was three feet from the end of my mattress; when he had the door wide open he would be within reach of me if he leapt. But perhaps he wouldn't do that. Perhaps he'd just come to talk. Not seriously, no.

The far cry of the nightbird. Incense.

The door was wide open now, and he stopped moving. He was a shadow the shape of a man, and I watched him. He had left the big gun outside; it would make too much noise in the still of the mountain night.

He stood watching me. I lay watching him.

I suppose the instincts of his ancient race had been working in him over the hours while he'd been pacing outside my door, pacing tiger-like, soft-footed in his trackshoes, ten steps to the left and then ten to the right, the gun in his arm and hate in his heart for me, the bruise pulsing in his throat and in his pride, his instincts begging revenge and so strongly that his military training was gradually overwhelmed, with the stealth of an infiltrating foe.

He wanted my blood.

Not moving. He was not moving now.

But what would he tell them afterwards? That someone else had come here and done this bloody deed? There'd be a lot of awkward questions: who were they and why did he let them pass? Perhaps he was going to do it in some way that would leave no mark, no evidence, pricking my skin with a poisoned thorn or holding me still while I inhaled exotic and lethal fumes, so that it would look as if I'd died in my sleep, or of a poison that someone else had put in my food. It wasn't my concern, and I stopped thinking about it because time must be short now.