From far away the tolling of a bell, perhaps in requiem, we are not, are we, feeling too cheerful just now, less than sanguine, because he might not, lacking pride, decide to push the door open and come in with his gun to catch us unawares, Dr Xingyu Baibing and I, and make the arrest and herd us to the nearest Public Service Bureau, promotion assured, the man who caught the infamous dissident, subject of a worldwide search. He might decide instead to play it safe and leave us here, sure of our staying at least long enough for him to fetch help in case we were armed.

I didn't want that to happen. I'd pushed the mission into a new phase by making contact with the opposition, with the intelligence service of the host country, and I wanted it to stay like that, and control the outcome if I could. There were- No, he hadn't gone.

The door had a metal lever, and he was pushing it down, and with great care, by infinite degrees, and sweat came on my skin immediately and the pulse went up and I steadied the breathing, we are engaged, my good friend, we shall have our reckoning, he and I.

They would have been interested in this, the people sitting there at the signals board in far Londinium; it would have broken the ennui for them. There'd been a flurry of excitement I suppose when Pepperidge had put it through the mast at Cheltenham, Executive undertakes to ensure silence of subject if protection of mission necessitates, but since then they'd been sitting on their hands.

That was last night. Mr Shepley, Bureau One. Nothing since!

No, sir.

Then where the hell is he? Hyde, my Control, less patient than the King of Kings, less able to control his nerves.

The lever on the door was still moving.

It would have got them going, wouldn't it, if they'd known the score. Holmes would pick up the chalk and look at the big digital clock and punch the international time-zone button and note Tibetan local and fill in the rest of the line, Red One, DIF on open circuit.

And they'd start walking about, not looking at one another, because Red One is perhaps rather theatrical shorthand for a situation in which either the executive's life or the security of the entire mission is in extreme hazard, which can simply mean that the poor bastard out there is stuck on a frozen roof two hundred feet above the street with the lights of the chopper fingering the buildings one by one or spread-eagled facedown with a boot on his neck and a gun in his spine and the stink of exhaust gas from the unmarked van in his lungs or reeling in the chair under the light and praying for the ill-judged blow that will bring him what he can't bring himself because they found the capsule on him and he's got promises to keep before he sleeps and he can't take much more before he breaks them, not much more of this.

There was light on the wall now, a thin pale sliver of light that ran like a vertical crack on the plaster, and across it was his shadow.

There was nothing to be done yet. Things would take their course. I don't like guns and I never use one, as you know, but that's not to say that I don't respect them, for they can summon the death-bringer.

DIF on open circuit is more technical, and simply means that the director in the field can put his signal straight through to the speaker system at the board, taking automatic priority over all other traffic. It can make things tricky if there are two Red Ones in operation from two different missions but it's the best they can do.

The crack of light was widening.

Shall we raise him, sir?

The DIF?

Yes.

Not yet. It's Pepperidge.

Don't call us, we'll call you: despite his gentle manners, Pepperidge has more nervous stamina than most, and doesn't shoot till he sees the whites of their eyes.

What I didn't like was that the hinges of the door were on the left, looking from the other side, from the side where he was standing now, and I was right-handed, and the choice was unaccommodating: either I'd have to use my left hand or move my whole body into his vision field before I could use my right. Either decision could be lethal.

As I'd thought, this place wasn't very big. The light coming through the doorway was faint, but I could see the opposite wall now, and it was close. There wasn't anything to see on the floor so far except chips of plaster and broken tiles, no cadaver despite this smell of decay, no remains of some starving pilgrim who'd crawled in here to sleep and dream no more, nothing, either, like a fallen joist or a broken pane of glass that would do for a weapon.

I could hear him breathing.

He wasn't going to rush it. I didn't expect him to: he'd be well trained, a professional. We could have a whole armoury in here, Dr Xingyu Baibing and I.

The hinges of the door hadn't made any sound when I'd opened it and later closed it, but that could have been because I'd swung it fairly fast. He was moving it much more slowly now, and that could make it creak, and if it did that I would expect him to use his shoulder and smash the door back before we could find our guns, my insubstantial companion and I, because we might be somewhere off this chamber where we couldn't see the light but could hear the door.

This would be in his mind, as it was in my own. Our heads at this stage were probably eighteen inches apart with the door between them, each the vessel of a quiet blaze of consciousness as the synapses fired in their billions and the nerves at the extremities of our bodies recorded the pressure of the floor underfoot and the tactile impression of the air at my fingertip and the trigger under his and our cortices processed the data and reacted accordingly. I had been as close as this before to a fellow creature whose presence could bring my death, but it's not something you get used to, because every time can be the last and you know that.

The strip of faint light widened on the wall, and his shadow took on bulk. His head was defined now and I could see his right elbow but not the gun: that would be held in front of him.

I could smell him now.

Danger came close — he could smell me.

Nothing, there was nothing to do but wait, and it wasn't easy but it had got to be done because I couldn't leave him alive and I'd have to see more of his body before I could take him down — I was badly positioned because of the left-hand-right-hand thing.

It wouldn't be long now. You can't stand as close as this to someone and not become aware of him, and this man's senses would have started picking up the signals by this time, the almost soundless exchange of air by the lungs, the barely discernible rise in temperature as the heat radiated from the skin, and above all else the vibration of the aura itself beyond the reach of the senses but within the field of the subconscious where the alarm would be raised, the nerves galvanized and — he fired the gun and the shock smashed at the walls.