I felt very good now. There wasn't one of the KCCPC people in the place who wouldn't have shot me dead with a silenced gun if they'd known who I was, why I was here. The odds against me were massive in terms of numbers, but I liked that; it honed the edge of things for me, brought me to the state of mind where I could work at my best, going into that strange mental zone where action becomes automatic, unimpeded by conscious thought.

You'll need more than nine seconds.

Not really.

You must have timed it wrong. You'll need much —

Shuddup.

But these people are professionals, trained to kill —

I said shuddup.

Bloody little organism, always snivelling when it thinks it can smell trouble.

'I get that for you?'

An American, helping someone. A cardboard box with string around it came out of the chute, one side split open. I watched for my bag.

Xingyu had been asked to pack two bags, one of his own containing junk supplied by the British embassy and one for me, also containing junk with a distinctive multicoloured stripe running lengthwise, so that I could recognise it easily on the carousel. It hadn't come around yet; nor had Xingyu's. I move a little closer to him; both bags should come onto the carousel at about the same time, since he would have checked them in together.

They were speaking in Mandarin, he and his escorts, and he gave another little bow. Then I saw the bag with the stripes drop out of the chute and onto the carousel and I moved forward, passing Xingyu, watching the bag, checking the handle, swinging the bag across the side of the carousel and turning to face Xingyu as I made my way past him, giving him some time to study me while I looked past and beyond him, edging my way through the crowd.

His instructions had been to the effect that the man who picked up that particular bag would be the agent from London, and that agent would take care of him from that point onward.

The man over there by the exit door hadn't moved. He was waiting for Xingyu to get his own bag off the carousel. It hadn't come around yet, and I held back, letting a woman go past me, one of those with the pretty beads in her hair. Then I saw Xingyu move, nodding, and one of the escort people got a bag off the carousel and I turned my head and saw the man at the exit doors go outside and signal for the Jaguar.

The timing was rather critical now: we were moving toward the flashpoint, toward the start of the nine-second phase. With a crowd this size it was easier, in a way, because of all the movement and the confusion; on the other hand I would have preferred a clearer path because I had to stay close to Xingyu now and keep up the same pace toward the doors.

I was into the zone by this time: the light seemed a degree brighter, and images, edges, outlines were sharper; they were talking, to my ear, more loudly now, Xingyu and his two escorts.

They went through the doors ahead of me. I had the bag in my hand. It was still raining outside, and people came across the roadway with umbrellas open, some of them with folded newspapers over their heads; there was a dog, yelping with excitement, soaked, shaking itself, and I heard a woman saying Frou-Frou to it, its name I suppose, you remember the little things as the time telescopes, moving you forward, perhaps because only the little things are unexpected, whereas the major components of the action are already familiar from the exhaustive mental rehearsal that's been going on for hours, days, Frou-Frou, she said, laughing because the dog was so excited about the rain, it was a Mercedes SL 20.

It was standing immediately outside the curb. A Chinese in chauffeur's uniform was waiting with the rear passenger's door held open for Dr Xingyu Baibing. Another Mercedes was standing immediately behind with two men sitting inside. Behind the second Mercedes was the black Jaguar XJ6, the car I'd brought here, the one the man inside the doors of the terminal had signalled for a minute ago, a minute and a half. A man was at the wheel. He was Bureau. These Jags are lively; in Hong Kong you can hire cars like that from Exclusive Rental; you can even get a Rolls if you give them enough time. I put my bag down next to some others and stood waiting.

Stood waiting for a few seconds, for the few seconds that were left before flashpoint, looking to my left for whoever it was that was meant to pick me up, though no one was meant to pick me up, we weren't going to do it like that. There were two green-uniformed policemen, one of them fifty feet away, the other closer but at the far end of the pedestrian crossing. That had been expected.

We had foreseen in Final Briefing that the permutations were countless: Chinese Intelligence could have sent only one escort to meet Dr Xingyu, or three, or four; there could have been two men waiting with the Mercedes, or three, and more than two men sitting in the one parked behind it; there could have been fifty KCCPC people in the background, instead of the twenty or so that I'd counted, so forth. But the reality was containable; we could manage this.

Dr Xingyu was getting into the rear of the Mercedes, the chauffeur still holding the door open for him. One of the escorts was taking the bag across the pavement to wait by the boot of the car. The chauffeur slammed the door and came to the rear and opened the lid of the boot. The escort started to swing the bag inside.

We had also decided in London that if the KCCPC contingent were to fire weapons, they wouldn't do it during the flashpoint period, because there would be policemen here, and other people, innocent people, some of them children, and from the negotiations between Prime Minister Thatcher, the Foreign Office, and the Chinese government, it had been made clear that both sides wanted to proceed in very low profile with Dr Xingyu's arrival in Hong Kong, and gunfire in a public place under the eye of the police could bring disastrous repercussions politically. If there were to be weapons fired, it would happen later, when perhaps there might seem a chance for the KCCPC agents to keep Dr Xingyu under their control, or failing that, to kill him.

But the hairs were lifted a little on my arms: I could feel the gooseflesh, and my scalp was shrinking.

I brought this for you.

Holding out the Kevlar vest.

Instructions?

No. I won't insist on it.

Those things worry me.

But the nerves were still touchy because my body was exposed and vulnerable; and it sometimes happens that when action starts suddenly, someone panics. But don't imagine I had any regrets. I didn't have any conscious fear of a shot exploding in the flesh at this point; the nerves were just reacting to the primitive brainstem awareness of danger, of potential death.

The man was swinging the bag into the boot of the Mercedes, and I watched him. The scene was still, frozen, because flashpoint was very close now. The brass locks of the bag glinted in the light, and I saw that a thread was hanging loose at one corner where the leather had started to split; I don't think I could have seen a detail as small as that from this distance in the ordinary way, but my vision was brilliantly clear as I watched the bag making its arc across the edge of the boot.

For all of us, time is variable; it expands and contracts according to what we are doing. Nine seconds, in one sense, isn't long, when one has to do what I was here to do; in another sense it could seem — seemed, now to me — very long indeed, dangerously, fatally long, because I was exposed and alone here against these considerable forces, alone except for the man sitting along there at the wheel of the black Jaguar; but his instructions were to do nothing at all to help me, only to wait.

One of the policemen blew his whistle as a hotel shuttle bus slowed and tried to move into a gap too short for it; the driver throttled up again.