'He's in very good shape,' he was saying, 'and we'll debrief on Bombay before he leaves for the rendezvous. Everything is in order.' He filled in the weather conditions and the state of the roads locally and put the phone down. It hadn't been a conversation, just a one-way report for the signals room in London, and Holmes or someone else would pick up a piece of chalk from the ledge at the bottom of the board for Bamboo and fill in the spaces: Exec. arr. base 18:31 HK. Rdv. DIP. Action ready.

Pepperidge got his pad and looked across the little teakwood table at me and I told him what had happened at the hotel. He used the fastest shorthand I'd seen, not noting everything, just the main points. Most DIF's use tapes but there's always a risk of their getting wiped out by interference in transit, and Pepperidge doesn't like that.

'The boy didn't put the snake into the bed?'

'No. He was terrified.'

'Was he a trap?'

'He could have been.'

'How long did you stay there?'

'I got out straightaway, because I was obviously at risk. Other people came along — they'd heard the screaming too. I got my bag and kept clear and then followed the ambulance to the hospital, then peeled off and phoned the emergency room. I think it was a king cobra. The bloody thing was huge.'

'No tags anywhere.'

'I checked, believe me.' I'd spent the evening with a man who'd been already targeted and I'd watched him dying.

'Sojourner didn't seem worried, anxious, beforehand?'

'No. Perfectly confident. But I wasn't certain I was ready to stay in the mission unless London would agree to replace him.' I was picking my words carefully: this would go down on record at the Bureau. 'I wasn't with him very long, but he came across to me as a mercenary, and therefore unreliable, possibly dangerous." I gave him the details of the conversation. 'In fact, I think he might have either killed Ambassador Qiao outside the tube station, or had him killed.'

Pepperidge held his pencil still for an instant, and then went on. 'Why?'

'To keep him quiet. He was a risk to us, I grant that.'

'Yes.'

He made some more notes and then we began going over the action for tonight. It took half an hour and I began checking the time: I would leave here for the airport at 7:40, in twenty minutes from now. The adrenaline had started and the mouth was drying a little. I felt all right about things, felt perfectly sure I could do what had to be done; it was just that very narrow gap in the timing, just nine seconds to go in and get out and take Xingyu with me.

'You'll bring him here,' Pepperidge said, recapping, 'unless for some reason you're prevented. We'll keep him here until he decides where he wants to go; then we'll get him put of Hong Kong. There'll be a makeup artist coming here as soon as I signal for him; he's standing by now. Name's Koichi. He works for the Tokyo Film Corporation and lends his services to the Tokyo police now and then for their undercover people. I — '

'He's not Bureau?'

'He was one of our sleepers in Tokyo until he got too successful; it seems he's a genius.' He caught my expression. 'He is vouched for by Bureau One himself, and I shall be here to look after things.'

'You're staying?' I asked him.

In a moment, 'If you've no objections.'

I had to think. Once I'd got Xingyu under my wing we'd be in a red sector, and wherever we moved we'd take it with us, bring it to this boat. Beijing has grabbed at this deal — Hyde, in Final Briefing — because it's pretty well their only chance of getting their hands on Dr Xingyu again, and when he lands in Hong Kong they'll have their own people in force. And when you take him over they're going to ransack the island and at the same time they're going to put every point of exit under close and immediate observation.

'You'll be a bit close to things,' I told Pepperidge, 'on this boat.'

In any mission the DIF is there to nurture the shadow executive, get his signals out and bring him London's instructions, support and liaise and comfort him, if necessary feed him, if necessary get him out of action when a wheel comes off. But he works from his own secure base, usually a hotel, not hidden but simply unrecognized for what he is. And the executive is to make contact only when it's safe, when he's clear of the opposition and not, in other words a danger, a contaminant. For every director who goes home there can be a dozen shadows out there hanging on the wire because the nature of their work entails risk and the director's does not.

'If it worries you…" Pepperidge said, and waited, his eyes on me.

I gave it some more thought and said, 'Stay on the boat, then, but when Xingyu and I leave here we'll be on our own.'

'Of course.' He put his notepad away and got up, rummaging in a zipped bag. 'It's going to help me, you see, if I can meet Xingyu and get to know him a little. I shall be better informed, more useful to you later. I brought this for you,' holding out a Kevlar vest.

'Instructions?'

'No,' he said, 'I won't insist on it.'

'Those things worry me.'

I believe that if you think you'll be bitten by a dog, you'll be bitten by a dog, though there's more to it than that. There's logic too: you'll behave differently when the heat's on, take unnecessary risks because you think you're protected, and besides, any professional is going to shoot for the head if he means to kill.

'I'm sure you won't need it,' Pepperidge said, and stuffed it into the bag.

There was a whistling in the air, threading its sound through the pelting of the rain on the roof of the cabin, a big jet lowering overhead on its approach path to Kaitak. We were southeast of there across the water, in Chai Wan Bay.

I looked at my watch again. I would be leaving in nine minutes.

'Synchronize?' Pepperidge said.

'Yes.'

The mouth still dry, everything settling now, becoming quiet in the mind as the ego accepted the inevitability of things, the understanding that it was too late to turn back, the feeling of being carried slowly by the force of one's own decision to the eye of the storm.

This degree of gooseflesh surprised me a bit, but I suppose it was partly because there'd been two dead before I'd even reached the field.

I gave Pepperidge the cable that London had sent to my hotel in Bombay: Mary and children arrive 9:12 pm on 11th, very much hope you can meet them. Doris.

He put it away. 'Anything else?'

Bombay hotel bill, air tickets from London to Hong Kong, a postcard I'd bought in Rangoon to look like a tourist. He put those away too. Everything in my wallet now identified me as a resident of Hong Kong: banks, credit cards, driving license; and London had given me shoes made in Kowloon and Hong Kong labels in my clothes.

'That's all.' I said.

'Then I won't keep you.' He picked up the phone and dialled and I got my soaked raincoat and put it on. 'You're in place?' he said into the phone, and listened for a moment and then put the receiver down and followed me as far as the deck and the pouring rain.

'Piece of cake,' he said.

I said that's right and went over the side onto the jetty.

I counted twenty of them.

Flight 206 was running late, with its arrival on the screen showing a twelve-minute delay: 9:24. I had asked about it at the check-in and they'd said there'd been head winds.

At least twenty of them, possibly more: you can't always be sure. They were professionals, all of them, not just standing around in the gate area but keeping themselves busy, buying postcards, sitting with a paper and a cup of coffee, talking to children, ruffling their heads. I recognized them by their physique — compact, muscled, athletic — and by the way they glanced across people's faces, their eyes never resting, never showing interest, never glancing at one another. I recognized them by their shoes, which were rubber-soled, like mine, not leather, and by the way they sat, and stood, and walked, not because the difference between their way of doing it and the way ordinary people did it was very great, but because there was in fact a difference, a slight one, and because I'd watched people like these in a hundred airports, in a thousand streets, and knew them for my own kind.