"Listen to me. Do you want me to save Tung Chuan?"

I noticed his face was running with sweat, and deathly pale.

"Yes." His voice was perfectly normal.

"I'm not sure I want to. You're giving me a lot of trouble. Are you going to give me any more trouble?"

"No."

"Well that'll be a nice change." I walked round the room a bit, finding my feet again, rotten headache but not surprising, covered in sweat, stinking with it, damn him, what did he want to go and do that for, bloody great brass gong, I wanted to kick it, bring it down off the wall with a bloody great boom, boom, boom, steady for Christ's sake it's over now and we've got to get moving. "Listen," I said to him, "I've come here to do a deal. Tung Chuan's life for exposing the Soviets, and I can't give you long to think it over."

"I will do anything," he said.

I stopped walking about and looked down at him. He'd aged ten years in the last six minutes. I suppose it took an awful lot of effort to throw that much force around, serve him bloody well right.

"It's going to be up to you," I told him. "You make one false move and Tung Chuan won't live. One false move. Just one. For Christ's sake get that into your head." I crouched on my haunches in front of him. "I'm getting out of this place now, or I'm going to try. You've got that submachine gun in the corner there, and there's another one behind the Buddha at the end of the passage where they had me in that cell, you know where that is?"

"Yes."

"If you need them, use them."

"Both?"

"What? One at a time, of course." Wild laughter ringing out, somewhere inside what he'd left of my head; long time since I'd heard a joke. "I don't want either of them, that's why I'm leaving them to you. I'm not going to try shooting my way out of here because you might get killed by a stray bullet, and you're one end of the deal, remember. Besides, you can never do anything really useful with a gun."

I straightened up and tried to think, still a bit wobbly but managing well enough now. "It's your job to stay alive, you understand? That's the deal. They won't connect you with my getting out of here — you've been sitting here praying on your bloody mat all night and you never heard anything happening to the guard. As far as they're concerned you're still in charge of the Triad and your operation's still going and you've got the next assassination set for noon tomorrow, or that's what you told me. All that's going to happen is that I'm going to get away, in order to save my own skin. Nothing to do with you."

What else? Something else. I wish I didn't feel so bloody tired, suppose I lack protein, bean curd's not the answer, you can stick it. Yes, "Listen, if we can get your son away from the KGB unit we'll keep him under guard till you've honoured your part of the deal." Banner headlines, we're interrupting our scheduled programme to bring you this flash, and so forth, Soviets Responsible for Pekin Assassinations. World Shock at Terrorist's Exposure. "Sometime before dawn," I told him, "we'll be sending in paratroopers to pull you out of here, understand? I can't take you with me, there's too much risk. Wait for them to come. Don't antagonise Sinitsin or anyone else. Keep a low profile, but if they try to get you away overland don't let them: hide up somewhere or use the guns on them. Stay alive. That's the deal, understand?"

"Yes." He got up and stood facing me. "How will you escape?"

"None of your bloody business."

I left him, checking the courtyard and using shadow cover, my bare feet silent across the stones.

I stood in the jungle shadows, with the moon's light dappling the ground through the filligree pattern above my head. Then I went forward, stopping for a few seconds to listen.

12:48.

The luminous digits of my watch cast a faint glow across the hairs on my wrist. In twelve minutes they would relieve the guard on my cell, and see that Yang was gone.

I looked upwards, and the moon's light burst against my eyes from the edge of the big black cross. I listened again, and then looked for a foothold, swinging upwards with one hand on the grip. The fuel-cap was now within reach and I unscrewed it, putting it in my pocket so that it shouldn't fall and make a noise. Then I opened my jacket and took the bookmatches and lit the cigarette.

They were two Russian Mil Mi2s standing side by side under a single camouflage net, with only a few feet of clearance between their rotor radii; I'd seen this much when they'd brought me in from the mountains. This was the biggest area of flat ground anywhere near the monastery, but it wasn't ideal: there wasn't room for one of these things to be pushed clear of the other in an emergency, because of the parapet walls.

When I had arranged the cigarette and the bookmatches. I climbed down and made my way towards the second machine, pulling myself up and opening the door quietly. By the time I was sitting in the pilot's seat my watch showed 12:56. I'd left it rather late, because that bastard Tung had decided to fight me for the information inside my head. The twelve minutes had narrowed to four.

I looked around the cabin. There were two seats forward and four behind, with the cyclic column and stick disposed for right-seat pilotage and the facia panel set centrally inside an anti-glare hood. The general layout was much the same as the one we used for refresher training; the only differences would be in the operating requirements for the two GTD-350 turboshafts and the triple-bladed rotor.

A pair of string gloves was lying across the cyclic column: the pilot had sweaty hands; the navigational map was on the left seat, opened out and clipped to the board and showing South Korea. The radio display was central, with headsets hooked behind the seat squabs, and I found it tempting to switch the thing on and raise 5051 kHz and tell Ferris to alert the airport police at Kimpo and watch for Tung Chuan's party coming through; but the sound of my voice in the stillness could reach one of the guards and if the Embassy didn't answer immediately or if Ferris wasn't actually at the console I wouldn't have time to get the signal through before they came for me.

12:59.

Leaving it late.

I thought I heard voices; perhaps I did; they probably came from the operations room where the two radios were: twenty minutes ago when I'd crawled on my stomach below the parapet wall I'd heard Sinitsin talking in there. These weren't raised voices I was listening to.

The moonlight picked up silver crescents from the chrome rims of the reserve fuel tank gauges; they should have been blacked over. Small sounds came as the landing-gear suspension shifted minutely under my weight, and I stopped moving and sat still and listened to the deep percussive rhythm of my heartbeat as the idea came to me that perhaps it wouldn't work; technically I was satisfied, but the psychological aspect was starting to worry me: I was resting the outcome of the whole mission on a single cigarette, and not because it was the best way but the only possible way; it wasn't that the odds were long; it was that the stakes were high.

Ignore.

01:00.

Deadline.

Synchronise your watches, gentlemen, so forth: maybe Yang's relief had his watch a bit slow.

The incandescent end of the cigarette should have reached the match-heads by now.

Sweat. Sitting in my sweat. Left it too late.

Ignore negative reactions and concentrate and look at the map. There wasn't enough light to see any of the figures but I'd worked them out already from the data de Haven and I had been given at the US Air Force base. Kimpo Airport, Seoul was 224 kilometres from here and the maximum cruise speed of this thing would be in the region of 200 kph and we'd need an hour and eight minutes to get there, giving us an ETA of 02:11 including a give-or-take five-minute delay in getting this thing off the ground, which gave us a margin of seven minutes before Cathay Pacific Flight 584 got the green from the tower and started rolling.