I had only worked once before against Asiatics and that was in Bangkok, nine or ten missions ago; but I remembered that they killed readily. In the Curtain theatre it seldom happens; there are hundreds of KGB agents in London and as many CIA and British Secret Service people in Moscow, but we leave each other alone unless we're really pressed: there's a tacit understanding that if once we decided to wipe each other out on our home ground there'd be no possibility of carrying on our trade any more, and that would be dangerous in the extreme because Cold War espionage lowers the risk of a hot war breaking out. The Asiatics are different, and these people at the monastery were terrorists rather than spooks. It wasn't that life was cheap, but that death was expedient.

They'd tried to kill me four times, and the odds were growing short; in our trade a man has only so many lives.

The organism was sensitised now; the appropriate chemicals had been poured from the glands into the cardiovascular and muscular systems; blood had receded from the surface and I was breathing deeply; my pupils were expanded to make full use of the available light. I was cocked like a gun.

He believed I was asleep, and couldn't see the glint of my eyes between the narrowed lids because I lay in shadow; he would also assume that if I were awake and had heard him come in here I'd be on my feet by now. But all I had to rely on was the advantage of surprise; in all other respects I was appallingly vulnerable here on the ground. From my viewpoint he looked tall, dominant and invincible, and I knew that when he came for me he'd come very fast, exploding against me, fired by the hate that burned in him; he wouldn't be human, but monstrous, and with a monster's demoniacal strength. My quickest way out would be to underestimate him, I knew that.

He seemed to be moving now.

Or I thought he was moving, my imagination anticipating the event. I wasn't sure; I had to watch the soft edge of his shadow and the gap between it and the shadow of the door, but even then I couldn't tell if his movement were real. The saliva was thick in my mouth and I wanted to swallow but that would trigger him: the sound would be loud in the infinite stillness of the little cell. Anything would trigger him, however slight, even the rustle of the straw under my body. He wanted to do it while I slept, forcing my brain from its slow delta waves into the terminal stillness of annihilation.

Yes.

He was moving.

He was crouching over me, so slowly that even now there was no real indication of movement; his shadow-form was simply becoming larger, and changing shape. I could hear his breathing now, and in it the trembling rhythm of the animal engaged in a matter of life and death. And now I caught a glint of light on something he was holding in one hand; it was very small.

My breathing became deeper, and my veins sang with their blood; my ears were loud with its coursing.

What have you brought for me, Yang, in the dead of night?

Nothing kindly.

By Christ he was fast and the thing was in my mouth before I could stop it because my jaws had opened in readiness for stress the instant he'd moved and he'd known that would happen and as I bit into his fingers a warning rang in my head not to bite the capsule because that's what it was and we've all held them in our mouths before to get an idea of the feel and the taste, biting his fingers, biting hard, my jaws locked and my teeth sharp and the blood coming as I broke through the flesh, and all the time the feel of the capsule lying at the side of my tongue with only the thickness of the glass between the cyanide and my nervous system, I've seen the stuff work, I saw that poor bastard Lazlo put one in his mouth in Parkis's office in London because we were going to throw him back across the frontier, gone down in five seconds with his skin turning blue and his fingers hooked and his teeth bared, so this was what Yang wanted them to think: rather than wait for them to finish me off I'd do it my own way.

Monstrous strength, his other hand rising and thudding against the mattress with the force of an axe as I rolled my head clear and used a splay-hand into his eyes, their resilience against my fingertips as I drove them hard again and again as he jerked his head back but not fast enough, my teeth clamped and his blood running into my mouth until I swallowed and felt the capsule go with it into the safety of the alimentary canal, unbroken, the cyanide unreleased.

I won't have this. A sob came from him because of the pain of his eyes; he was blinded by now because he'd brought me to the edge of death and I'd had to work hard to get clear again, I will not have this do you understand, coming in here and trying to kill me, this is the fifth time you bastards have — his hand tugging to get free of my teeth, his other hand slamming a sword-edge for my throat and reaching it and producing great pain for an instant before I rolled half over and brought my knee into his groin and felt him rock back with his breath hissing, I won't have it, it's too personal, too intimate, you're too fucking impudent to think you can come in here and splodge me out like a fly, it can't be done, I won't have it, but great fear somewhere, too, fear for my life, its stimulus giving me the strength I would not have had without it, and now an end to this, my hand rising for his larynx and connecting easily because he was blind now and couldn't see its shadow in the shadows of the night, rising and driving against the cartilage and breaking it and going deeper as his head and body jack-knifed and their dead weight came down on me and we lay like lovers, where no love ever was.

Sinitsin lit a cigarette.

"That won't be necessary. They won't send a new ambassador now; even the Americans have that much sense."

"But the Chinese Premier," Major Alyev said with a certain deference, "will have to go?"

"Of course. But not by violence."

He was sitting in the only chair, a bamboo tripod with goatskin stretched across it; his two aides were on the long stone bench nearer the radio transceivers; the interpreter was cross-legged on the floor, one foot sticking out at an odd angle and his head in a listening attitude. One of the Korean guards was crouched on his haunches in the big arched entrance, facing away from the room with a submachine gun tucked under his right arm. There might have been other people there but I couldn't be certain: this was as far as I could go along the stone-flagged passage without their seeing me.

The time was 11:54.

There had been a rough blanket in the cell, folded tightly and thrust into a niche in the wall, and I had spread it over the body on the mattress, leaving the head half-exposed; in the faint light it hadn't been possible to see where blood had stained the floor and the mattress; all I could do was increase the chances that if anyone shone a lamp through the oblong in the door they'd believe it was the Englishman lying there asleep.

The element of time was totally unpredictable. If anyone went along the passage to my cell they would see Yang was no longer there on guard, and would try to find him, sounding the alarm when they failed. That could happen within minutes from now, although the cell was at the end of a passage forming a cul-de-sac where only my guards would normally go. The latest deadline was an hour and six minutes from now, when Yang's relief took over the guard and saw he was absent. That would be at 01:00 hours tomorrow.

I stayed where I was for a few minutes longer, hoping to pick up evidence of anyone else's being in the room with the KGB party. Both transceivers were switched on, with their panels glowing; one would be waiting to receive Moscow; the other would be tuned to the Triad or the KGB group holding Tung Chuan. It was tempting to stay here in case a message came through, but time was already running out. Half an hour ago the chances of my taking any kind of action, even to save my own life, had been nil; but now that I was free to move through the monastery the situation was radically changed.