Things were different now. He'd picked up the paper.

Plopping sound, like a silenced shot. I let my lids open a degree and saw Pepperidge had pulled the cork out of his big thermos flask.

'A drop now,' I said.

'Do you good. Rest a lot, drink a lot.'

'Yes.' Rest, drink, but do not be merry, my masters, 'tis not the hour.

If he hadn't done that, Xingyu, if he hadn't picked up the paper, there would have been no mission-breaker, no ultimate risk of something happening that could blow the whole enterprise. Even if Xingyu was killed in some kind of unexpected action he could be replaced by someone in front of the television cameras, a disciple of the messiah who could still do the job at a pinch. Even if they blew us, the KCCPC, blew Pepperidge or me or both, we would pop our capsules to protect security and London could replace us and the operation could still proceed. If Xingyu was captured and sent back to Beijing and brainwashed it could still proceed, because the army general would still make his move and Xingyu's replacement would still do his job, at a pinch.

But now we had a mission-breaker. We would have to go on from here in the face of the ultimate risk.

'Cheers.' Pepperidge gave me a mug of tea.

'Cheers,' I said.

And the ultimate risk was buried like a bomb inside the head of Dr Xingyu Baibing himself. He knew everything now, because I'd had to tell him, and if they got at him tomorrow or the next day and put him under implemented interrogation he'd blow every phase of Bamboo like a firecracker, and within the hour the PLA general in Beijing would be arrested and shot and his division ordered out of the capital and when Xingyu was finally propped in front of the cameras like a ventriloquist's doll they'd wind him up at the back and he'd say he'd been wrong after all, he'd say that the people had mistaken their way along the road to socialist salvation, tempted by foreign blandishments, he'd say they must hold high the torch and keep the faith, while all over the city and across the nation a hush would fall, and hope for the future would limp away like the beggar at my table in the cafe, his tin bowl empty.

Pepperidge sipped his tea. 'I shan't inform London.'

I sat up straighter. 'You've got to.'

'I see no reason.'

'This is major. You can't just go it alone.'

'I don't see,' he said slowly, 'that London could have instructed you to do anything else at Chengdu, other than what you did. I think you took the only way out, and it must have shaken you to do it. I can only commend your decision.'

He was going right out of his way this time. But it wasn't just charity. We were going to have to keep the mission on track if we could, and the director in the field didn't want to run a shadow executive who was living on the edge of his nerves because he'd made an ultrasensitive move without asking London's permission.

'Few things you should know,' he said, 'before we make up our minds what we're going to do. I've been in signals with London quite a bit since I got here, picked up some of the gossip. The Bombay police found a body in a canal last night, been garotted, head half off but with the face still there and papers intact in his wallet, five snake bites on him. It was Sojourner.'

I thought about it and then asked him, 'Are they certain?'

'Oh yes. Two of our people were flown out from London to dig up the facts. Apparently Sojourner was released from the intensive-care unit twenty-four hours after he went in there, and a friend of his fetched him from the hospital. He was reported as being "still weak, but ambulatory," and his friend — Hindu — declared he would look after Sojourner with great care.'

'How old was the friend?'

'I asked that, too, because of what you'd told me. He was an adult, not the boy. Of course, it wasn't necessarily that man who killed him, though it looks like it. They're trying to put everything together.' He brought the thermos over and sat on the edge of the bed. 'Top you up. The only thing that worries us, of course, is that he might have been interrogated, during the time when he was escorted from the hospital and the time he was killed. For the moment London is assuming that Sojourner's assassin didn't get it right the first time and simply had to finish him off. Snake venom's uncertain in its effect, depends on body weight and general constitution. Whatever they find, I'll let you know.'

'If he was interrogated,' I said, 'and they got everything out of him…'

'Let's not think about it. On the more positive side,' getting up and fetching a news clipping from his briefcase, 'when Dr Xingyu was at our embassy in Beijing they asked him if he'd got any photographs of himself taken abroad, and he came up with this one, among others.'

Head-and-shoulders shot, saying cheese, against the background of Big Ben, unmistakable. Caption: Dr Xingyu Bribing, released yesterday from the British embassy in Beijing, in London for talks with the Foreign Office.

'Any chance they'll swallow it?'

'Not much. The first place Beijing would expect him to go is of course London, and of course they would have posted a very large contingent of their people at Heathrow to watch for him. But who knows, they might fall for the snapshot.'

He took another sip of tea and sat looking down into the mug, perhaps waiting for me to say something, though I didn't think so. He'd been going over the Chengdu thing while he was talking, and had now reached, I believed, a decision. I had an idea of what it was going to be, and I hoped I was wrong, hoped to God I was wrong.

Sand hit the windows as the gusts came whipping into the streets from the plateau. I found I was watching the telephone with its chipped plastic and its tangled cord, and either Pepperidge noticed this or there was one of those little flashes of telepathy that we become used to, when the mission begins to take shape and our nerves follow the same rhythm and our minds touch and drift away again but not far.

'I would phone London, of course, if you wanted me to.'

In a moment I said, 'Have you got the answer?'

Swinging his head to look at me. 'I think so.'

'And you're ready to go ahead with it?'

'Not really the question.' He looked down again. 'It's whether you will be ready to go ahead with it.'

Sand on the window, coming in waves across the rock desert out there in the night, eroding the town by infinitesimal degrees, reminding me how impermanent life was, how fragile.

I said, 'Try me.'

He got off the bed, taking his mug and putting it down carefully on top of the chest of drawers with its patchy varnish, one brass handle missing.

'The only added risk,' he said, 'that we now face is Dr Xingyu himself. For as long as he stays uncompromised, we shall have no trouble.' It's one of the precious euphemisms those snivelling scribes at the Bureau think up to soften reality: in this case, for the opposition to 'compromise' Dr Xingyu Baibing they would throw him into an interrogation room and squeeze out every bit of information he'd got in his head while the radio was turned up to full volume to cover the noise. 'If he were found and seized and interrogated,' Pepperidge went on, 'all would of course be lost, and there wouldn't be anything we could do about it. After all, Sojourner possessed the same information that you-' tiniest hesitation '-that Dr Xingyu has now become privy to. The only difference is that we believed Sojourner was safe from any attention, whereas Dr Xingyu is being actively sought throughout the world. We should have protected Sojourner, and didn't but at least we know we must protect Dr Xingyu, if necessary to the point of death.'

I sat with my hands around my mug of tea to warm them. The ancient electric heater set into the wall was keeping the room just this side of freezing.