It's difficult.

Someone over there was getting drunk, a round-eye, hitting the table, shouting something in English, something about bloody travel agents.

It's difficult for me, always has been, to give London credit. It's not because they don't deserve any: they're not stupid, in fact they're brilliant, or I wouldn't work for them. The trouble I have with London is a lot of my own making, you know that if you've known me long, although they've certainly got habits that can drive you straight up the wall, and people, of course, people like that bastard Loman with his cufflinks and his polished shoes and his pedantic bloody speech, enough to send you — but you note how easily I can get carried away, about London.

'Come and see the marvels of the Holy City on the Roof of the World,' the man over there was shouting, 'and all I've seen so far is a lot of burned-out fucking monasteries and yak shit wherever you go, stinking the fucking place out!'

Hitting the table, red-faced, woollen hat with a bright green bobble on it, while two other men tried to shut him up.

No, the thing with London is that they control me. I signed for it, fair enough, but it's not easy to live with. I don't like it when a signal hits the board from the field and Croder or Shepley picks up the executive like a bloody pawn and puts him down on another square, when in point of fact the said executive can be working his way through a minefield in the dark with a pack of war-trained dogs on his tracks or cooped up in a plain van with a gun trained on him while he tries to get at his capsule before they put him under the light — I've been in both situations and a dozen like them, not a dozen, dear God, a hundred, and you get to resent those people back there in Whitehall, the red-tabs ensconced comfortably behind the firing line, doing their daily stint and going home to a nice hot shower while you're lying out there in a cellar in Zagreb with four days' filth on you and blood in your shoe. You get to resent-

'Invigorating mountain air, they told us, Christ, you can't even fucking breathe!'

You should try those people in London, my good friend, then you'd have some real yak shit to chew on.

'They're right,' I told Pepperidge.

He leaned back, letting his breath out.

'I was hoping you'd see.'

'It's the only thing we can do. If we can do it.'

'But of course. Carpe diem.' Seize the day, quite so. 'The mask is still in safekeeping?'

'Yes.'

'And you can fit it on for him?'

'Yes.'

'Then we shouldn't have any trouble. How is he?'

'Bearing up. I'm treating him as gently as I can.'

Head on one side- 'In what way?"

'He's so bloody innocent. I had to know what had brought the KCCPC on our track, and I found out. He'd told someone at the embassy that he wanted to go to Lhasa if he could get out of there. I think he was overheard.'

His fingers began drumming again. In a moment, 'Possibly. But I got a signal early this morning. Our people in Bombay have taken a good look at Sojourner's body. He'd been tortured.'

In a moment I asked him, 'Between the time he was taken out of hospital and the time he was killed?'

'Right. Not before the snake bit him. So it could have been that. Sojourner had talked to the subject at the embassy, of course.'

'Oh, my God.'

'Not happy, is it? But let's not see demons-'

'Sojourner could have blown the whole thing. Bamboo.'

A brief shrug. 'Possibly. London doesn't think so.'

'Why not?'

'Because our sleepers in Beijing have reported no movement at all among the army generals and their garrisons. If the Chinese government had got wind of things, they'd have taken our general away from his command and shot him. He is alive and well.'

'Is that all we're relying on?'

A wintry smile. 'We rely on anything we can get. But it stands up, you know. They wouldn't have let the subject leave the embassy if Sojourner had been broken.'

It wasn't easy. I'd never known a mission to be so dogged, step after step, by the threat of destruction. Ambassador Qiao, in London, blown and killed; Sojourner, in Bombay, blown and killed; and the very man we were protecting, the subject, the messiah, treating the whole thing as if those thugs in power in Beijing were a league of gentlemen. He knew bloody well they weren't.

'He's such a saint,' I said, 'and he thinks everyone else is the same. He-'

'The subject?'

'What? Yes. He-'

Crash as the man over there knocked a metal bowl off the table, shouting his head off, and another gust of freezing air came through the door as one of the staff went trotting outside. The talk had died down in here; these people were unused to drunkenness, and all you could get in here anyway was chang.

'He thought it was all right,' I said, 'to talk about coming to Lhasa, he fell straight into their trap at Chengdu, and he didn't believe I'd been followed this morning — I had to spell it out. I've warned him not to talk to any of the monks, but he hasn't got any idea of even normal discretion. And he's got the whole thing in his head, you know that, the whole mission.'

Pepperidge sat with the collar of his sheepskin coat turned up against the draft from the door, fingers restless on the rough tabletop, the dregs congealing in his soup bowl.

'Then we must simply be careful,' he said, 'and you know how to do that.'

He was quiet again for a while; I assumed he'd started working out the future, the immediate future for the mission. Anytime now I was going to get his instructions, and I didn't feel ready for them: I wasn't fully active, wouldn't be able to take on anything really critical and be certain of coming through.

'You got a lift here,' Pepperidge said, 'on a tour bus. You still don't want a car?'

'No.'

We'd been over it before, in my first briefing here. In a big modern city the executive has got to have a car because it gives him transport, cover, protection, a mobile base, and a weapon, but in a place like Lhasa a car was too noticeable, and if I'd used one it would have established a dangerous travel pattern to the monastery and back.

'Very well.' Pepperidge leaned forward again and folded his hands on the table. 'We're safe for the moment in thinking that while the subject is instantly recognizable without the mask on, the KCCPC are not looking for you. This gives us the edge we need: you're still operational at street level.'

Argot. The opposite of street level is going to ground, losing yourself, burying yourself. 'Unless someone saw me at the temple,' I said. I didn't think anyone had, just wanted to make the point.

'What are the chances?' He watched me with his yellow eyes, trusting me not to lie.

'How do I know, for Christ's sake? Anyone could have seen me go in there, or come out.'

Not precisely a lie. Call it an exaggeration, playing it safe, playing it too safe, because I didn't want any action, I was still healing, uncertain of my strength if there were demands made on it, out there at street level.

'I think,' Pepperidge said, 'the chances are slight. But I won't push you.'

I looked away. We were getting awfully close to the unthinkable. Signal for Bureau One, his eyes only. Executive's injury has left him less fully active. Suggest bringing replacement to stand by.

The unthinkable.

'Push me,' I said. 'Push me as hard as you need to.'

'Perhaps, then, a compromise. Take every chance you can find of normal cover. Don't reinforce the image.'

Show my face, in other words, as little as possible. That was all right.

'What I'll do," Pepperidge said, 'is bring in the Jeifang. The truck, I'll use the same man, Chong.'

'The man you sent to the temple?'

'Yes.' He got out a scrap of paper and a ballpoint. 'The Jeifang is green. Most of them are, in Lhasa. This is the number plate. He'll be at the rendezvous after dark, at twenty hundred hours, and he'll take you and the subject to Gonggar, where you'll sleep for the night in the truck. The CAAC plane normally leaves between ten hundred and ten-thirty in the morning. I want you to fit the mask on the subject and see him as far as the departure gate, but don't keep close; you'll be there simply in case of any trouble. Then you'll go back to the truck. He'll be met in Beijing and taken off the street immediately.'