'We couldn't take you through Kathmandu,' Pepperidge had told him, 'because there wouldn't be time to make the trip by road from there to Lhasa. That is where you meant, isn't it, when you said Tibet? You meant Lhasa?'

'Yes. I have friends there.'

'The thing is, we'd have to fly you in, because that's all we'd have time for, and that means we'd have to go Hong Kong to Beijing to Chengdu to Gonggar. As far as I know there's no Air China flight direct from Hong Kong to Chengdu without going through Beijing, which is out of the question. Sorry. You've asked for the impossible.'

'I wish to go to Lhasa. I will be safe there.'

That was an hour ago and Pepperidge had compromised and signalled London through the scrambler and told them the situation. They said they'd confer with Bureau One and send his instructions. We were still waiting.

I hadn't heard any footsteps after the car door had slammed out there on the quay. I would have liked to hear footsteps going from the car to one of the boats. I didn't want to think that a car had arrived and doused its lights and was just standing there with people inside, people watching. I'd come away clean from the airport thing and switched to the Volvo and the chances that anyone had seen the switch and followed me were strictly slight but you can't, you know, you can't entirely ignore the nerves because it's not always paranoia, it's sometimes a warning of danger culled from the observations of the subconscious, and if you don't give it at least a bit of attention you can shorten your life without even trying.

Pepperidge had told me the procedure: if anyone came near this boat, Xingyu would be bundled quietly into the head and I would go to the sleeping quarters behind the curtains and Pepperidge would stay where he was with his.37 magnum on his knees under the table.

But it shouldn't come to that. This thing about Tibet had caught me unawares, that was all. Xingyu had turned out so unpredictable and we couldn't trust him: he must know we couldn't fly him to Lhasa without going through Beijing and that might be what he'd got on his mind — trying to jolly us into getting him back to Beijing so that he could give us the slip there and leave the plane and rush off to join his friends in Bambu Qiao.

'What you must realize' — Pepperidge stirred his tea and watched Xingyu, watched him with no great affection — 'is that we have to consider the timing of this operation. Our deadline, as I have told you, is in three days from now. In three days we expect to be able to fly you into Beijing with impunity, a very different Beijing from the one you have just left. We — '

'You have not told me why it is to be in three days, why it is not ten, or twenty. You tell me little.'

'That is essential, for your own safety. I have told you that, also.'

Patience on a monument.

Hyde had briefed me about the deadline: three days would bring us to the 17th, and that was when Premier Li Peng was going to make a party address and launch a ferocious attack against the intellectuals. It was on that day that we had to get Dr Xingyu Baibing readied for the TV cameras instead. It was information that I'd had to be given as the executive for the mission but it couldn't be given to Xingyu because those three days were going to expose us to the entire force of Chinese Intelligence and Security and I had a capsule to pop if I had to and Xingyu didn't.

'I have also told you,' Pepperidge said, 'that if we — '

The phone was ringing and he answered it.

London. You will on no account take the subject into Tibet, so forth, good old Bureau One.

But Pepperidge was speaking in Japanese, and in less than half a minute he rang off.

'I have also told you, Dr Xingyu, that if we are prepared to expose ourselves to very great danger on your behalf, we expect you to give us as little trouble as possible.' He gave it time to get through. 'That was the man who is coming to design the mask you'll be wearing when you leave this boat. His name is Koichi, and he'll be here later tonight to take the matrix."

'I shall wear a mask?'

'You see' — a wistful smile — 'I tell you as much as I can.'

'I shall wear no mask.'

'Without one,' Pepperidge said gently, 'you will never leave Hong Kong a free man, I can assure you.' The telephone began ringing again and he picked it up.

'Yes?' He reached for his signals pad, and I slid it along the table to him. This, yes, was London.

Headlights swung through the rain again, their beams glancing across the long narrow ports and sparking on the polished binnacle lamp.

'Very much so.' Pepperidge. 'He argues that the last place the Chinese will expect him to go is back into China — a point which I concede — and that he would only be fifteen hundred miles from Beijing when we're ready to fly him there. He has very reliable friends in a monastery in Lhasa, with — as Tibetan monks — a deep hatred of the Chinese.' He listened again.

A point which I concede. I think he threw that in to let London know that if they finally instructed us to take the subject into Tibet then we would do that, however dangerous. We have our pride, my good friend, we have our principles.

A car door slamming outside on the quay. Two. Most of the boats tied up here were cruisers, and I suppose the owners were coming back from the town after dinner there. That would be natural.

While Pepperidge was on the phone I watched Xingyu again, ready to glance away if he looked up. He'd put his hands into his coat pockets now, and his face looked cold, pinched. I'd have put him at no more than forty, forty-two, and the lines in his face were of strain, I believed, the long strain of living in a country that he called his own, but a country where his worst enemies were the people who governed it, ruled would be a better word, ruled with the unanswerable power of the gun. And the strain, more recently, of becoming separated from his wife. I would have felt compassion for him, as I had before, except that he was now trying to drive us straight into a trap if he insisted on going to Tibet and London approved.

'… check out the possibilities,' Pepperidge was saying; he'd been on the phone ten minutes now, listening more than talking, and I hadn't been able to tell which way things were going. I wished, quite honestly, that he'd get it over, so that I could know the worst, or preferably not the worst.

'Understood,' he said and rang off and went straight to the telephone directory and began riffling through the pages, not looking at me, carefully not looking around as he sat perched on the end of the bench with his thin legs drawn up and his shoulders hunched a little, as if against the rain outside, or against the cloud no bigger than a man's hand that had been gathering in here while he'd talked to London.

He picked up the phone and started talking again, this time in Mandarin, to a woman I think, his tone gentle, even more gentle than usual, giving her names Hong Kong and Chengdu and Gonggar, which was the airport for Lhasa. I didn't understand the rest.

Xingyu was listening attentively, his head turned.

I watched Pepperidge too, his hunched shoulders, head bent over the telephone, and had the eerie feeling that I was watching him from the future, looking back on him from some other time and some other place and remembering how it was when everything had become fixed in our affairs, locking us in with our karma, and this feeling persisted when he put the phone down and turned around and said to Xingyu, 'It would be out of the question, as I told you, to take you on any flight that would go via Beijing, but I've found that Air China has a new charter service through Chengdu direct, and according to my instructions we shall be taking you into Tibet.'