Said I was sure I would.

The next thing he wanted was a newspaper, and I was surprised he hadn't asked for one before; perhaps in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the boat he was forgetting the facilities of the outside world. I didn't refuse him this time: Pepperidge had briefed me privately that within the stifling confines of the mission I was to allow Xingyu as much freedom and as much information as I could, to build his trust in me and keep him from going crazy.

I used the phone and told the contact what I wanted and fifteen minutes later a car stopped and there were footsteps and a knock on the cabin door, three long, two short, three long, and I opened it and took the copy of the South China Morning Post and gave it to Xingyu. He went through the first two pages and passed them to me, not saying anything, just prodding a finger at a half-column report on the second page.

XINGYU BAIBING SENT INTO EXILE. As the result of an agreement reached between the People's Republic of China and Great Britain, Dr Xingyu Baibing, formerly Professor of Astrophysics at Beijing University and a notorious agitator, has been released from the British embassy here, where he fled to evade arrest after fomenting dissension among his colleagues in the faculty. This concession on the part of the People's Republic was granted in order to preserve the positive relationship between the two nations.

Should Dr Xingyu choose to return to Beijing of his own free will, his present status as an exile in disgrace would be reviewed, a source close to Premier Li Peng has revealed, but he would face a rigorous inquiry as to his actions before fleeing to the British embassy. Certain other intellectuals, several of them friends of the exiled scientist, have-been placed under arrest and will be invited to explain their part in the unrest of the past two weeks and to volunteer information on the role played particularly by Dr Xingyu Baibing, so that the truth may be brought to light in the interests of the people.

The rest of the report was a summary of Xingyu's repeated attempts to interrupt the steady progress of socialism in the People's Republic, and ended with praise for Premier Li Peng's magnanimous gesture to Great Britain in relieving her of the embarrassment that inevitably followed her misguided decision to offer sanctuary to a notorious troublemaker whose continuing presence in her embassy could only have exacerbated her predicament.

Photograph of Xingyu, carefully chosen from hundreds of others, that had caught him with an expression on his face that could be seen as fearful, hunted.

I'd asked for the English-language Morning Post because it would give Xingyu an indication of Beijing's attitude toward him and his present position. The Hong Kong Times would have slanted the report in sympathy with Xingyu and would have used a different picture. What worried me was that the Post hadn't mentioned Xingyu's wife, hadn't reported her feelings about losing her husband to the West, a traitor to his people, so forth. I would have expected it to do that, to turn the screw.

Lying in my bunk, hours later, my eyes open and watching the play of light on the overhead from boats moving in the bay, I went on worrying about it, about the obviously deliberate omission of any reference to Xingyu's wife, certain that it was designed to set him up in some way, designed as a trap, went on worrying instead of sleeping, as the boat moved gently to the waves coming in from the bay and the lights played on the varnished timbers and the sound came of Xingyu's quiet sobbing in the dark.

'Have you been there before?'

'Where?'

'To Lhasa?'

'Yes,' I said.

'Why did you go?'

'To meditate.'

'Ah. I saw the Dalai Lama, once.'

I didn't say anything.

'He is beatific. Beatific.'

The wheels went down with a thump and the cabin shuddered.

'He radiates good. You can see it, like an aura.'

I think the Hong Kong Chinese chew more gum than the Americans. Everyone, I'm sure you've noticed, does more American things than the Americans do.

'He personifies the second coming of Christ, I truly believe.'

Or he would, I suppose, if he weren't a Buddhist. I saw Xingyu scratching at his face again. He was sitting five rows back from the flight deck. I was in a rear seat, from which I could watch everyone.

'You don't talk much.'

'I've got toothache,' I said.

'Ah. You should suck cloves.'

The aircraft settled into the approach. Buildings below us now, a waste ground of buildings, block after block of apartment houses, factories, their smoke clouding like stirred mud across the bare winter trees of the apple orchards to the west.

Chengdu.

I had expected trouble going through Hong Kong airport, because that had been where the objective for Bamboo was to have been completed: to get Dr Xingyu Baibing out of Hong Kong. There was a new objective now: to get him into Tibet and under cover and protect him until he was needed in Beijing. But I'd still expected trouble going through the airport, because the mask might not have been good enough, or my own blue woollen cap and glasses might not have been enough to change my image. That image hadn't been in view for more than a minute outside the terminal where I'd made the snatch on Xingyu, but someone might have remembered it.

But there had been no trouble in Hong Kong.

The Chinese stewardess came down the aisle checking seat belts, her face lit with a china-doll smile.

The trouble came in Chengdu.

'You may find itching,' Koichi had said, Koichi the Japanese. 'Sometimes find itching, under mask. But do not scratch. Must think of something else.' Huge grin. 'Think of very fine Chinese dinner, very good sizzling rice and everything.'

There was no grass down there below us, no trees, nothing but stones, asphalt, bricks, rooftops, with a tangled web of electric cables spread across the streets to power the trams.

I would have liked to go forward and tell Xingyu not to scratch, to think of very good sizzling rice. In a few minutes we'd be going through immigration and customs checks, and the mask had to go on looking perfect. But I couldn't leave my seat now.

It was going to be more difficult, of course, to get through Chengdu than out of Hong Kong. In Hong Kong there'd been a strong cadre of KCCPC agents on the watch; in Chengdu there would be more, simply because this was a major Chinese airport and passengers from Hong Kong would be coming, in effect, from the West.

'Do you speak Chinese?'

'Not very much.'

'Then I will try to buy some cloves for you.'

Scratching again, Xingyu. He must be mad.

The cabin levelled off and we bumped three times and then the brakes came on and there was some Chinese coming from the speakers and then some English.

All passengers must remain in their seats with their seat belts fastened until the aircraft comes to a stop. For your information, CAAC Flight 304 will depart from Chengdu at 12:25 p.m. in thirty-five minutes from now. Your guide will escort you to the gate.

I got into the aisle without wasting any time and reached the queue at the immigration desk with Xingyu ahead of me in plain sight. The terminal was huge, bleak, echoing, built on Soviet lines, and there were upward of a hundred people here in uniform with peaked caps, most of them standing at the line of desks and farther out near the walls and the exit doors; they formed what amounted to a living barricade, a potential trap, and it was now that I looked at Xingyu standing there under the immigration sign and thought for the first time that there wasn't a hope in hell of getting him through this massive array of police and onto the flight for Tibet, not a hope in hell.