'They'll try.'

'All right, and then I'll need an rdv, say about fourteen hundred. Where?'

'You tell me.'

The only place I knew was the one I'd been to with Su-May Wang, so I told him where it was. I didn't want to go to his hotel more often than I had to; it's always dangerous to establish patterns.

'I'll be there,' he said. He sounded relaxed, quietly cheerful, though he must be working out the signal to London: any kind of major action had to go on the board, and this involved a death, the fourth of Bamboo.

'For now,' I told him, 'you need this: they were watching every source of insulin in Lhasa, and this man tagged me, so it looks as if they either suspect or know that the subject is here in the town.'

Short silence; it had rocked him, of course. 'How did that happen?'

'I think I know. But we'll talk about it later. I've got to go now.'

'Fourteen hundred,' he said and rang off and I went out to the taxi.

'Where go?'

Told him north, I'd show him the way, got out some money, quite a lot. 'Go very quick, understand?'

The apothecary had given me a dozen new needles, 23-gauge one-inch Becton Dickinsons, and I pulled one off the strip and fitted it to the syringe.

'You feel all right?'

'Yes,' Xingyu said. 'But I was worried.'

'I got delayed.' Drew five cubic centimeters out of the ampoule, pressed out the air. I didn't tell him he could save saved his worries if he'd just let me know he was out of insulin a bit sooner.

'You do not look well,' he said.

'Touch of indigestion.' Pulled the plunger, got no blood, put pressure on it.

Everything had become very clear, sensitive. Head was throbbing and I was still out of breath from climbing the ladder, but even in the light from the dirty windows things had a sharp outline and I could hear one of the monks chanting three floors below and could feel the plunger hit bottom before I pulled the needle out. Mental clarity was back too, heightened, the dance of conscious thought quick and coloured.

Put the plastic sheath back on the needle and dropped it into the waste box, pressed the cap on the syringe, everything orderly, the blood singing quietly through the veins, the beat of the heart strong and steady, vital signs, the vital signs that had come so close to getting cut off down there in the temple, and this was it, what it meant, this feeling of heightened awareness, I've had it before, it comes as a revelation when you realize that life is going on and not without you as you thought it must, were certain it would, the reek of cordite in the lungs and the crash of the last shot still roaring in the brain, the certainty of oblivion in the next breath and then the reprieve. It leaves you exalted for a little time, touched with grace.

I put the box in the corner of the cell, underneath the pile of hides that Jiang had given us for extra warmth at night. 'You know where it is,' I told Xingyu. 'If I'm absent at any time, remember where the stuff is, and do it yourself.'

Exalted, touched with grace, but touched also with the guilt when the struggle has been to the death, though we mustn't put it too dramatically, must we, but that was what it had been today, and the loser loses all, lying there in the dark with a rat's carcass his fellow traveller to the shades of Lethe, I can never take a life without adding it to the little wooden crosses in the shadows of the mind, of the memory, I'm never free of them, never shall be.

'What is that smell?' Xingyu Baibing asked me.

'Antiseptic. Where did you put your mask?'

He finished buckling his belt and went across to a part of the wall where the plaster had broken away and left a hole that he'd covered with a bit of loose timber.. 'In here.'

He stood with his arms hanging by his sides, head turned to look at me, something in his eyes asking for my approval, and I was moved and it caught me unawares because nothing much can ever get through the scaly carapace of this man's soul, moved by his attempt to play the espion, hiding things away, making my life easier.

'A good place,' I said. 'I'd never think to look there.'

'I washed it.'

'And dried it completely?'

'Yes. The Japanese gave instructions.'

I went and sat down, my back against the wall. 'We need to talk, Dr Xingyu.'

'Very well.'

He squatted on the floor with his legs drawn up, the light catching his glasses as he looked at me. The chanting rose from below, many voices now, surrealistic m this great shadowed ruin, the voicing of lost souls.

'In the town,' I said, 'I found out that the KCCPC suspect that you're here in Lhasa.' I didn't tell him that when the body was found in the temple they'd know for certain. But it might not happen before we flew this man 10 Beijing. 'Can you think why?'

He went on watching me for a time, and then looked down.

'I mentioned it,' he said.

I didn't say anything for a moment. My tone would have to be perfectly normal when I spoke again, with no anger in it, no frustration. He was an astrophysicist, not an intelligence agent; he was also a man, by reputation, to say what was on his mind, even to the chiefs of government.

'When did you mention it?'

'When I was in the British embassy in Beijing.'

It had been the only answer I could think of, when I'd known they were watching the sources for insulin, the KCCPC. I was certain we'd reached the airport at Gonggar clean, and that we hadn't been followed, Xingyu and I, into the town: I'd checked thoroughly for surveillance. I'd even thought that one of the Chinese agents who'd seen the snatch outside the terminal in Hong Kong might have recognized me when we went through there later, on our way out to Chengdu; but if that had happened they'd have seized Xingyu on the spot. They hadn't known. We'd pulled it off, Pepperidge and I, we'd got Xingyu Baibing through a whole regiment of the KCCPC and into Lhasa, clean. But he'd brought his own seed of destruction with him, like a bacillus in the blood.

You told someone you might come here, if the Chinese allowed you to leave the embassy?"

It was easier for him if I gave him questions, easier than having to tell me direct. He knew now what he'd done.

'Yes.'

'Who was it? Who did you tell?'

'One of the embassy staff. I think his name was Fellows.'

A first secretary: they'd given me a list of people at the embassy when I'd gone through Clearance. Fellows was down as totally reliable; they all were, except for two counsellors, Murray and Sleight, whose backgrounds were less well documented.

'Fellows,' I said, 'didn't give you away. Was there anyone else there at the time?'

He took a little while. 'Yes. We were in the cafeteria.' Spreading his hands, 'I was just talking, that was all.'

And hadn't known that when you're talking about something sensitive you've got to make bloody sure you know who you're talking to and that there's nobody else around. He wasn't an espion, that was the trouble with this man, he wasn't one of us; he was just a normal human being with a brilliant reputation in science instead of secret intelligence and that was why he'd walked straight into the trap in Chengdu and I'd had to get him out again by giving him Bamboo, chapter and verse, filling his head with stuff that was going to blow us all into Christendom if they found him and put him under the light, and that was why he'd brought those KCCPC agents into Lhasa on our track, a whole cadre of them, specialists, assigned specifically to hunt him down and throw him into a cell and get all that stuff out of his head, finis, finito.

'You were "just talking,"' I said.

I hadn't meant to say it, hadn't meant it to sound like that; I was furious, that was all. No excuse.