I knew of course what Croder would say.

Follow your instructions.

His small pointed teeth nibbling at the words like a rat with a corncob, one hand stroking the metal claw that he used for the other, his black eyes watching for your reaction, ready to catch any sign of hesitation, of weakness, ready to pull you off the mission and throw you out of London and into Norfolk for refresher training, executive replaced, stroking the metal claw, ready to bury it into your guts if you were found wanting, following your instructions, oh, the bastard, follow your instructions.

'Chong, can we make any kind of detour?'

'Mean get past the block?'

'Yes.'

He began chewing faster. 'Jeez, I dunno.' I waited for him to run it through his head. 'Thing is, sure, we could try, yah, but we couldn't use our lights. They'd see us, I mean they'd see we weren't on any kind of a regular highway. Be on a pretty rough surface west of here, but of course this baby can handle what you might call inclement terrain, so high off the ground. Sure, we could try it. That what you want to do?'

'Yes.' He started the engine. 'But take an angle,' I told him. 'Go south about half a mile if the ground's all right, then stay parallel with the east-west road.'

'You got it.'

I think he was pleased, in his quiet way, hadn't wanted to give up and go back. 'Chong, have you ever been in trouble?'

Argot for intensive action: getting out of a trap, battling unequal odds, running a frontier under fire, things like that.

'What kind of trouble?'

He didn't work in London, wasn't used to the idiom.

'Say, breaking out of an interrogation cell and leaving dead.'

'Oh, right, yeah, couple of times.' He turned his small head to look at me. 'I tote a capsule.'

'I just wanted to know what your status is.'

'We get into trouble tonight,' he said, 'I aim to kick any asses around I can find." Working his gum. 'Call me reliable.'

He looked ahead and put the big truck at a slope of shale and gunned up. With the lights off we couldn't always make out what was ahead of us; the moon was a hazy crescent high and beyond the flying snow.

Pepperidge would not of course have given me an amateur. It was nerves, that was all: I'd never worked with this man Chong and if those people up there at the roadblock caught the outline of this truck they'd come and ask questions. The snow made a light screen but this thing was as big as an elephant.

'Can we work our way south a bit more?"

'Guess not. There's ravines down there, not big ones but we get a wheel jammed and we could break the axle.'

Crash of metal from behind us as we took a bump, skewing across loose stones and swinging back.

'Take it slower,' I told Chong.

'You got it. But sometimes, see, you got to take a run at a slope or you don't have enough momentum.'

'Keep the sound down as best you can.'

'Yes, sir.' He fished in a pocket. 'Care for some gum?'

'Not just now.'

He spat out of the window and peeled the packet. 'Saves my nails. You worked in Beijing?'

'No.'

'I was born there. Mom and Dad fighting like cats when I left school, so I shipped out on a freighter to San Francisco, five or six years there, got involved with a private detective agency and took in most of the cities across the States, did a few things for the CIA kind of under the table, then I shipped out again to London, got into a very interesting situation getting a Nicaraguan vice-consul out of a hostage deal at the embassy in Gloucester Road — that time I was still on the unofficial payroll of the CIA, but it brought me in touch with your outfit. They wanted someone like me in Beijing, bilingual native with a little experience in what they called the "clandestine arts" — those guys kill me — so I said okay.'

The wheels began spinning again across loose shale and he played with the steering and got us straight. 'Then you know what happened? I found I was Chinese again, and see, I had a kind of advantage in Beijing — I could sink right down into the daily life and look out from there with what you could call Western eyes and see what was really going on, and at first it didn't bother me too much — this was in Mao's time but I learned to live with it because I was in your outfit now, sending stuff in to London, and they were very pleased.' He slowed the truck and we rolled carefully down a slope with the brake shoes moaning in the drums. 'Then something happened that kind of changed things. I had a sister, see, and she had a kid, couple of years old, good husband, I liked him, still do, works in a coal mine, and then they made a law you couldn't have more than one kid, keep the population down, and she made a mistake and had another one and they towed her and a lot of other women naked behind a truck through the streets as punishment, and that was what really changed things for me, see.' He turned to look at me. 'That really changed things. I told my director I wanted different work, where I could get at these people with my bare hands, you know, the police and the PSB and the KCCPC and the military, any son of a fucking gun I could get near, so I could practice my clandestine arts, you understand me?'

The slope levelled out and he gunned the engine again. 'You wanted to know my status, and now you do.'

His big fur hat bobbed as we took the bumps, his thin body coming right off the seat over the bad ones, his small gloved hands playing on the thick rim of the wheel. I didn't say anything, but it reassured me, what he'd said; if we got into anything sticky on this trip I wouldn't have to carry him.

Sometimes the moon came out as the wind took the snow and cut swatches through it, letting the light reach the ground.

'What happened at the rendezvous, Chong?'

He caught the truck as it skewed again over the stones. "I guess it was more or less routine. Your DIP sent a guy along to see if the hotel had any surveillance on it, and it did. So we took it from there.'

It's in the book, under the heading of Protecting the Rendezvous. There are fifty ways of doing that but tonight Pepperidge had chosen this one because it had suited the situation: there were people in the street and the Jeifang had a big profile and I had to climb into it without anyone paying attention and in any case the peep had got to be removed so that he couldn't tag me, so our man had worked out the timing and ten or fifteen minutes before the rendezvous he'd dropped the peep with a discreet nerve strike and then made a show of helping him as he lay on the ground, told someone to call an ambulance, this man was having a heart attack, and by the time the ambulance was on the scene everyone in the street was watching the action while I got into the truck farther along.

'Is he going to follow up?'

'Your DIF?'

'Yes.'

'Sure, told me he would. We need all the info we can get, right?'

Right. Who the peep was, who was running him: the man who'd dropped him would stay close.

There was an inch of snow on the window on my side and I let it down an inch again and saw the red lights still flashing up there to the north, behind us a little now. We'd been going for fifteen minutes but this was virgin rock without even a wagon track and our average speed wasn't much more than walking pace.

'Snow's easing,' Chong said.

'Yes.'

We didn't want that. The light from the three-quarter moon was brighter now across the ground, throwing shadows. It made the going easier but the truck would stand out more against the lights of the town to the south.

'Chong.'

He turned his head.

'What's your cover story for driving overland like this?'

'I'm looking for the new mining site. The research crews have just set up camp, there's no road made yet.'

'What are they going to mine?'