"I shall be standing behind the official mourners," Ferris told me, "and I'll meet you again after the ceremony. If for any reason we get separated and you need me, phone the Embassy and ask for McFadden, second cultural attache; he's the station officer for the Bureau and he's versed in speech-code, so I want you to use it. Questions?"

"Yes. When is the English contingent flying back?"

"Some time this afternoon, as soon as the Secretary of State has offered his condolences to the Vice-Premier and his party. We then change your cover and papers."

"Understood."

I left him and pushed my way to the roped area below the immense portrait of the late Premier and showed my credentials to an officer of the special police guard; he was almost casual in the way he let me through, and I remembered this was Pekin, not Moscow.

"'Morning, Gage."

Detective-Inspector Stanfield took a couple of steps towards me and half-turned again to watch the Secretary of State. "You want instructions, I understand."

"Just general procedure." All this man had been told was that I was Secret Service and working here as one of his team.

"We're expecting no trouble," he said quietly. "The main thing is to keep your eye on the body. There's no crush here and everyone in this enclosure has had to show their papers, so he'll be all right. If anyone's got any ideas about lining up a pot-shot, the ANFU will spot him in the crowd — there's three hundred of them just at this end of the square. The thing is to relax — and, as I say, keep your eye on the body."

"Fair enough."

The sun had climbed above the roof of the huge Palace Museum and the direct heat was stifling; the breeze from the rice-fields was blocked here by the buildings. The Secretary of State was talking quietly to Claudier and Veidt, the French and German delegates: I recognised a dozen people here from their press photographs.

"Three kings," Stanfield was speaking from the side of his mouth, "twenty-nine presidents and heads of state, twenty-one prime ministers and sundry odds and sods. Quite a turn-out for someone who was only in office ten months."

I noticed Walter Mills, the US Vice-President, surrounded by the ten members of his delegation, with the same number of security men positioned along the edge of the dais.

The crowds along the east side of the square were murmuring now, the sound of their voices trapped by the buildings; I looked twice in that direction and saw the cortege coming, with the draped funeral carriage drawn by a white-painted jeep.

"Eye on the bod," Stanfield murmured, and I turned my head back to watch Bygreave. There were quite a few Europeans on the far side of him but I couldn't see anything of Ferris.

At ten-fifteen the cortege reached this end of the square and Stanfield-drew me along the dais as the first of the official mourners took their wreaths from the attendants and began laying them against the coffin, the Premier's widow and two sons being the first to step down from the dais. The military band had stopped playing now and the square was quiet. Beyond the English delegates I could see hundreds of school children going onto their knees along the roped pavement, one of them dropping her white bouquet of flowers and crawling between two police guards to fetch it; from somewhere nearer I could hear women sobbing, and wondered why. This wasn't Mao, the Father of the Revolution, but a man without charisma and less than a year in office; perhaps they always cried at funerals because the flowers were so beautiful, or because unlike the men their hearts could be moved beyond politics to the thought that whoever this was, here was a man dead.

It took twenty minutes for the Communist Party and military delegates to lay their wreaths and bow three times in front of the coffin. The first of the foreign delegates were the Albanians, whose anti-revisionist creed had been allied to Mao's; they were followed by the North Koreans, Vietnamese and Cambodians, with the Japanese next in line.

The crying of the women was beginning to depress me; I hoped someone would be there in London, to cry for Sinclair.

Pigeons flew from the parapets along the facade of the Museum, their wings black against the sun's glare until they wheeled and caught the light; along the rooftops the flags were at half-mast, some of them catching the breeze; down here the air was still and stifling as the American Vice-President moved forward and laid a wreath of white tiger-lilies against the catafalque, leading the rest of the delegates past at a steady pace.

The British contingent followed, and as Detective-Inspector Stansfield moved to the edge of the dais I went with him and was close enough to read the name on the wreath of white roses as Bygreave took it from an attendant — Elizabeth R.

The delegates formed a short line along the side of the catafalque, watching as their leader placed the wreath carefully against it; then suddenly the sky was filled with flowers and the bloodied body of the Secretary of State was hurled against me by the blast as the coffin exploded.

"Then for God's sake," said the Ambassador, "get him for me on another line."

The girl in green came through again with a file of papers, catching the toe of her lizard-skin shoe in the frayed silk rug but saving herself, dropping a loose paper and picking it up and going on into the Ambassador's room. They'd left the door open: there was no point in shutting it with all these people wanting to see him.

"Then tell him to ring me back."

He dropped the phone and another one rang and he picked it up. "Metcalf here."

The Chief of Police came through again from the main entrance, a small man, hurrying, with an officer trying to catch him up.

"Then tell him to hold the plane." The Ambassador dropped the phone and looked up. "Who are you? Oh, yes, come in."

Another reporter tried to get through the main entrance and I saw the Chinese guard pushing him back with surprising strength for such a small man. The two people from the Xinhua News Agency were still talking to a girl in the room on our left and getting nowhere: she spoke rapid Cantonese with a lot of emphasis.

Night was falling outside the tall windows overlooking Kuang Hua Lu Street, and there was no sound of traffic. We'd been told that the Ministry of the Interior had ordered a curfew throughout the city beginning at ten o'clock; that was a few minutes ago. Checkpoints had been set up along the roads out of Pekin and there were long lines at the railway stations and the airport as passengers were put through an emergency screening. Half a dozen political agitators of high rank had been arrested but their names hadn't been publicised.

I got up and started walking about again, feeling the draught of the slow ceiling fans. Ferris was aggravatingly calm, sitting at his ease on the wicker chair with one arm hooked over the back and his legs crossed, a foot dangling. But that was what he was for: to be calm, to keep his head while I went on fuming. "This isn't a mission," I'd told him when we'd come into the Embassy, "it's just a mess they've got themselves into over here and Croder's thrown me in to see what happens."

I was also worried because my face had appeared in two of the evening papers already and I knew that by this time tomorrow I'd get world coverage as the man standing behind the British Secretary of State in the instant before he died. If that was Croder's idea of effective cover for an executive arriving in the field I didn't think it was all that funny because it could cost me my life. The Bureau doesn't officially exist and we operate in strict hush, but after a certain number of missions we become known among the opposition networks and intelligence services — known, recognisable and vulnerable.