'No, we thought about that, so the FO made the kind suggestion to Beijing that Dr Xingyu should be smuggled in plain van from the embassy to the airport and put onto the last night flight, strictly incognito and with a briefed cabin crew. This would avoid, we suggested, unwanted publicity that would make it seem that in allowing Dr Xingyu his freedom, Beijing had lost the game. It was meant to look like another concession and they went for it.'

There'd been some good thinking, and it reassured me a little. 'Where do you want me to take him?'

'Out of Hong Kong.' One of the phones rang and he pressed the off switch. 'There's no way you could safely keep him there, even if he wanted to stay — the place is infested with mainland agents. Beijing has grabbed at this deal because it's pretty well their only chance of getting their hands on Dr Xingyu again, and when he lands in Hong Kong they'll have their own people there in force. And when you take him over they're going to ransack the island and at the same time they're going to put every point of exit under close and immediate observation. That,' he said with his hand dropping onto the desk again, 'is the objective for the mission. Not just to take this man into your safekeeping at the airport, but to get him out of Hong Kong.'

'Where to?'

That bloody shark bite had started itching.

'Wherever he wants to go — subject to our good counsel.'

It was on the left forearm, and the smell of the antiseptic was getting on my nerves.

'Are you sending pictures of me to the U.K. embassy for Xingyu to look at?'

'We faxed them out there as soon as you accepted the mission. Dr Xingyu's instructions will be that once he recognizes you at Hong Kong Airport he'll do exactly as you tell him. His life, he realizes, will be in your hands, because if they can't snatch him back they'll go for a kill.'

He poked his cheek again; that was getting on my nerves too, like the shark bite. Everything was getting on my nerves, and it was going to be like this until I reached the field. Part of it was because of the kill they'd already made, early this morning.

'Ambassador Qiao,' I said. 'What's the analysis?'

Hyde got up and went to a window, shoving his huge hands into his pockets. His voice bounced off the glass. 'It's too early for a complete analysis, of course. It's been impossible to ask any questions of his embassy here, even by phone. The diplomatic card is that Her Majesty's Government deeply regrets the affair, but the language was couched to make it perfectly clear that the assassination was none of our doing and they'd better not try to accuse us. It's fairly obvious that Qiao hadn't been able to hide what he called his disgust with his government, and when his brother surfaced as a resurgent last week they added things together and ordered a wet affair, before Qiao could try defecting. They were of course too late.'

'He could have been followed,' I said, 'to the tube station last night.'

'Despite the precautions, yes.' He half-turned his head. 'The Foreign Office set up that rendezvous, together with the Yard. We'd have done it differently.'

'All those police.' I got out of my chair, too, feeling restless.

'All those police, yes. But what could we do? The FO had called us in. It was their field.'

'Hou Jing,' I said. The little embassy counsellor with the briefcase. 'Where's he now?'

'In the country. He seems terribly cut up, but he's bang rather carefully questioned, of course.'

There was a black rectangular clock on the desk, with a disk you could turn through the international time zones. Here in London it was 7:14. 'Was Hou Jing's briefcase actually hit?' I asked Hyde.

'At an angle. It was in fact shot out of his hands.'

In a moment I said, 'I don't want to be blown before I'm even clear of London.'

Hyde moved his head, tilting it upward, his eyes remaining on my face. 'We shall make it our business,' he said, 'to ensure that nobody gets at Hou Jing. Until you complete your mission, he will remain under protective house arrest.'

I left it at that because most of it was paranoia and I didn't want it to show. I felt drawn to the clock again because time was running down, my time in London.

At 7:20 we sat down again and I told him how I was going to take over Dr Xingyu at the airport and put him in a safe house until we could get him out of Hong Kong. The safe house was for Pepperidge to set up when the time came. It took me twenty minutes and Hyde said he liked it and told me I'd get the people I wanted at the scene.

'You'll be flying to Bombay,' he said, 'via Cairo, where you won't leave the aircraft. We've made a rendezvous for you with a man named Sojourner.'

'He's Bureau?'

'No. He's been around the U.K. embassies for quite a few years and he's been a first secretary in Beijing for the past eighteen months. He's made contacts there, some of them underground — it's the way he likes to work. One of his contacts is the People's Liberation Army general who's pledged to support Dr Xingyu.' He didn't tell me the general's name. He wasn't telling me a lot of things; all he wanted me to have in my head when I went out there were the absolute essentials. The less I knew, the less anyone could get out of me if I ran into a trap and couldn't reach the capsule in tune.

'What is Sojourner's job?'

'He's the coordinator. He'll put everything together at ground zero, as you'll hear when you meet him. Let me say that he's extremely capable and we have every confidence in him.'

'What's his intelligence background?' I would have been happier if Sojourner had been Bureau, not an itinerant diplomat.

'He has no actual intelligence background, but in point of fact it was he who suggested this whole scenario to the late Ambassador Qiao, in essence, following clandestine approaches to the army general. You may trust Sojourner. You may trust him completely.'

There wasn't anything I could say. I had to trust all of them completely: the Head of Bureau, Chief of Signals, London Control, my director in the field, and whoever was manning the signals board if Bamboo began running hot.

7:46 on the black clock and I looked away. 'How many people have you got lined up to replace me if I go down?'

In a moment Hyde said heavily, 'I don't understand.'

"Oh, for God's sake.' Showing my nerves; too late to sake it back.

'I would certainly have told you,' Hyde said, 'earlier in your briefing, if I intended to put anyone else into the field. We-'

'Look, I'm just one man, and you're talking about winging down a government. It's-'

'You don't feel confident?'

'Of course I feel confident, but why not put ten people into the field, a protective cadre with Xingyu in the saddle?'

'As they did with Guzhenko?'

It stopped me dead in my tracks, as it was meant to do. Five years ago the Bureau had tried to bring Guzhenko 'cross to the West, an invaluable double agent with his head stuffed 'with ultrasensitive information, and it had to be done extremely fast because he'd been blown and our people had picked him up from the half-submerged wreck of a dredger on the Volga where he'd run for cover. Portland had been London Control for the mission and he'd sent out six men and a support group backing them up, and one of the six had been aught and took a capsule in time, and the next one had run out on the operation when the KGB had closed in, and two others were shot in a rearguard action, and the support group had scattered because Guzhenko was exposed and targeted and there was nothing they could do, nothing, and the trap was shut and Guzhenko was taken back to Moscow and thrown into a psychiatric ward and came out five weeks later with his head as empty as a coconut husk and half the files in our Moscow desk blown through the ceiling.