He took a drag on his cigarette. "This, gentlemen, isn't Lodd Airport and it isn't the Munich Olympics. Nobody has come forward to claim responsibility, even though the PLA and half a hundred other terrorist organisations would be sorely tempted to do just that, simply because this was a Hollywood spectacular and if there'd been any message for anyone it would've gotten an Oscar for Western Union. The only message I can see is that somebody wanted the British Secretary of State to be dead. You boys will know a lot more than I do about that, but you have my deepest sympathies; it's a lousy way to go."

"You think it was a political assassination?" Ferris asked him.

"I think it was a political assassination." He flicked ash off his cigarette and I noticed his good hand was never quite still. He watched Ferris with his bright blue stare.

"Don't you think it's a bizarre way of doing things?"

"Sure. But hellish effective. Look, they didn't do it this way for fun. These are experts. Technically it took a lot of working out, and I know of what I speak." He glanced down briefly. "My left hand was last seen travelling at five hundred feet in a south-westerly direction, and although it was a mistake on my part, I'd been trixying around with these toys for ten years without so much as a broken finger-nail. They decided this was the most effective way of working, that's all. Remember how the Basque activists terminated Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, the President of Spain? They dug a tunnel thirty feet long underneath the street in Madrid where he used to pass every day on his way to morning mass, then they packed the place with a hundred and seventy-five pounds of dynamite and blew it up from a hundred yards away by remote control. The President's car was lifted five storeys high and it wasn't found for several hours because no one thought of looking for it on the far side of the Church of San Francisco de Borja, where it had landed. Bizarre? Sure. But effective? Sure."

Ferris got up and began walking about and Conyers watched him and waited to see if he wanted to say something, but he didn't. He was just restless, and it didn't do my nerves any good because Ferris walking up and down was like anyone else yelling the roof off.

"We also have to consider this," Conyers went on. "It might seem that it would have been easier to pick up a telescopic rifle and do it that way, but with an estimated crowd of half a million people and the security services of fifty-three nations plus the Pekin contingent can you imagine any way it could have worked? They had to put the assassination instrument right into the centre of the target area, where it could be guaranteed to do the job, and then they simply had to wait for the target himself to approach the instrument — which again, he was guaranteed to do. How could they miss? They didn't. And the man who pressed the button just went on standing there. So let's forget the 'bizarre' angle, gentlemen. It makes our teeth ache to say so, but this was a success story."

After what seemed a long time Ferris stopped walking up and down and said, "Does anyone feel a draught?"

"What?" McFadden took his chin out of his hands. He saw Ferris was looking up at the two big fans overhead. "Oh," he said, and went across to the scalloped brass switch on the wall, and the fans began slowing down.

"You'd rule out the Chinese?" Ferris was looking at Conyers now.

Conyers lit another cigarette and picked a strand of tobacco off his lower lip and said: "The Chinese aren't a nation of uniformed robots. I'd say that none of the Chinese in present authority would want such a thing to happen, especially at a time when, as I've said, they're looking forward to increased trade with the West, subscribing to the American presence in the Pacific and entertaining — like they did just a month back — a US Defense Department logistics delegation on their own ground here, for meetings with the Chinese armed forces chief of staff. I'd say that these people wouldn't want this kind of thing to happen to any Western government representative, and certainly not to a representative of Britain or the United States, with their close historic and military affiliations."

The big ceiling fans had come to a stop and a dying fly came down in spirals from one of the dusty motor housings, landing on the worn leather blotter of the escritoire and buzzing in mad circles until Ferris went over there and stabbed one finger down and wiped its tip on the blotter and came back and said:

"Then who?"

Conyers blew out smoke. "Who? Holy cow. You're pointing at a broken window and looking around at a playground full of kids and asking who? Terrorist organisations aren't isolated units. They're Communist inspired or directed or motivated, and all roads lead away from Moscow. They're all in touch with one another; they help one another; they lend one another hard cash and weapons and forged papers. The order for this coup might have originated anywhere on earth. But in the final analysis, like I said, I frankly don't see this thing as an act of terrorism anyway."

"Is terrorism criminal or political?" Ferris asked him. "It's the criminal implementation of political ideals." "Was Bygreave's assassination political?"

"Okay, I know what you're saying, but the fact that polar bears are animals, and white, doesn't mean that all animals are white. I'm going to put it on the line. I'm going to say that whoever assassinated the British Secretary of State was a political but not a terrorist."

"Or somebody," Ferris said, "who was paid to do it?"

"Or somebody who was paid, sure, by a political group that is not a terrorist group, since terrorist groups do their own dirt without paying other people to do it for them."

I said: "A hit man?"

Conyers put his bright-blue stare on me. "Or a hit group. This had to be the work of more than one operator."

"So that we're not concerned with questions of nationality."

"Right. Not if this job was paid for. The Mafia will hit for the Church Army Zionists so long as the money's good."

Ferris was watching me, perhaps thinking I'd got someone in mind. I hadn't. Twenty-four hours into the mission we were still at ground zero, with a major objective already achieved by the opposition — the major objective, if it was Bygreave's death alone. Sinclair could have told us; Jason could have told us; but without the information they'd taken with them we couldn't make a move. If the Bygreave assassination had been the thing we'd been pushed into Pekin to prevent, we might as well go home.

Except for London. London would have called us in by now.

"There's nothing on my mind," I told Ferris obliquely. "Nothing at all."

All I could think about was the way that man's arms had been flung out like a cross by the shockwave as his body was hurled against me in Tian'anmen Square this morning, knocking me down, while the flowers had clouded the sky. What would Sinclair have put in his signal? What would Jason have told us?

Don't let the Secretary of State lay the wreath. Tell him to feign a sudden turn and ask the Chinese attendant to do it for him. Then get him back inside the RAF transport, fast.

No. They couldn't have known, or they would have sent a signal, in code. Then what had they known?

"The thing is," Conyers said, "the Chinese are working on it. They are the host country and it's their responsibility. And they're smart. They're also as conscience-stricken as hell over this thing, even though they didn't have any part of it — in my opinion. They want to get that son of a bitch that pressed the button, so they can prove to the world they didn't do it themselves. Look what they stand to lose if they can't: zillions of yuan in international trade; nuclear power equipment from theWest; Japanese and American support against the Soviets. Who wants to support a country that can't even put on a funeral without a major international incident?" He dropped more ash into the fern pot. "So maybe we should wait a few more days and see what these guys can come up with. Maybe we —»