The only cover in the room itself was under the bed and if a man were there he would be facing this way, towards the door, so I moved very fast, using the bed itself as a springboard and spinning as I hit the floor on the other side and checked the space underneath against the light from the open doorway. No. I opened the bathroom door and threw the bathrobe in and waited two seconds and dropped and went in and looked behind the door. No. Check wardrobe, check window, no point in checking the main doorlock for signs of tampering because in a small hotel you don't have to force a lock, you get the concierge to turn his back on the keyboard for the required five seconds.

So everything was perfectly all right and I put the light on and shut the door and began checking small details: I'd left the bottom corner of the hotel literature precisely lined up with the pattern on the table and the three drawers had been left pulled open a quarter-inch at the right-hand, left-hand, right-hand ends from top downwards, and the cases had been set with their top corners exactly touching, the left rivet an inch lower than the right, so forth, it wasn't anything special, we always do it and we do it with the speed of habit and we can check just as fast. It's absolutely foolproof providing the opposition isn't too professional but if it's professional enough then you don't have a chance unless you go into the more refined mechanisms: a hair across the wardrobe doors, tautened between notches; a dead match on the floor with the ash still intact; £ pin balanced across the gap in the bathroom doorway.

I hadn't used these traps because no one had tagged me since I'd landed except for the two men surveying Nora Tewson and I'd made sure neither of them had tagged me to this hotel. When I'd picked up the Capri just now I'd been absolutely clear and I'd come into the hotel with security intact. Except for one factor: If they'd wanted to they could have got my address, the Hong Kong Cathay. I didn't think they'd want to, because I'd gone in overtly to make the contact in the Orient Club and I'd let them tag me to Jade Imperial and later from there to the Mauritius Hotel. There was no reason why they should suspect my cover: no reason at all.

Disregard.

Discount the animal instinct, ignore the slight raising of the hairs along the arms under their sleeves, the prickling of the scalp, the micro-watt surge of galvanic force along the nerves of the spine. Dismiss and rationalize: fatigue, flight-disorientation unfamiliarity with the environment, imaginative fears, so forth.

Very well. Because it was so very unlikely they would have taken any real interest in me so early, so fast. The young thin tubercular Chinese had been police-trained and predictable: he hadn't even noted Flower in the surveillance area. The older man had been much better and I'd nearly missed him in the lobby of Jade Imperial, but he'd been so cautious on the run to the Mauritius Hotel that I'd had to give him a full minute outside the place so he could keep me in sight.

The access to the Mandarin target was prescribed and orderly: it wasn't a night-drop or a crash-drive or anything panicky like the Tunis thing. Egerton and Macklin and the administration in London had roped me in but they hadn't thrown me in: they'd given me time to contact the key figure — Nora Tewson — and develop a relationship and the thing I had to do now was give her total attention until she showed me the way in and I sent for a director and set the action up and got moving.

So there was no reason for me to stand here in Room 39 of the Hong Kong Cathay Hotel with the instinctive feeling that someone had been here in my absence. No reason. Because Mandarin wasn't as big as that yet: this was still the preliminary phase and I'd have to make a mistake or provoke them or get in their way before they'd extend their own routine surveillance of the Tewson woman and move into my field on covert combat level. If they'd been here this early and this fast it would mean that the initiative had already passed from the local cell or unit to the major directive: not Hong Kong but Pekin. And I just didn't believe that had happened. I wasn't prepared to credit the idea that within twelve hours of landing at Kai Tak Airport I was faced with a mission that had started blowing right open in the primary phase.

Sleep.

Normal precautions, pull the shutters and swing the catch, throw the security bolt, put a coin on the door handle and the two glass ashtrays on the carpet below, a gesture to the needs of survival now that I'd rejected instinct. Last thoughts as I took off my things: call her later today and listen to see if they've got her phone bugged, go and ask Fleetway Rent-a-Car if anyone's been trying to find out who hired the Capri, tell them about the carburation, difficult to start and that could be critical on a tagging run.

There was a mosquito Whining in the bathroom and I wondered what the humidity was in this place in September, felt somewhere near eighty. Then I forgot about it because when I squeezed some toothpaste on the brush an air-bubble popped and the stuff was too runny and I felt suddenly cold and thought I don't mind London offering me capsules but I don't like people putting the bloody stuff in my toothpaste.

'Where the hell have you been?'

The light in the room was dim, because I hadn't opened the shutters. Earlier, bars of gold had appeared on the carpet as the angle of the planet, relative to its local star, had changed progressively. Now the beams of sunlight through the shutter-slats were thinning again as I watched. Motes of dust drifted through them, suddenly bright and then vanishing, and I saw them with great clarity, as I saw everything in the room. I've noticed before that to miss death narrowly leaves you with your senses heightened: these bright hallucinatory images were always there before but you were too busy to see them.

'Nowhere,' he said.

'Yes you bloody well have. I phoned you fifteen minutes ago and you weren't there.'

'Oh — I had to go and move the car.' He sounded surprised and aggrieved. 'They wanted to unload a — '

'You could've given them the keys couldn't you, for Christ sake?'

Bit of a pause, then rather quietly: 'Yes, sir.'

I let it go. I'd told the little fool to stay at his base at all times except between 15.00 and 16.00 hours and just now I'd phoned him at 10.25 and there'd been no answer from his room and they'd failed to locate him by page, said he'd gone out. Moving his car, all right, three minutes, but three minutes could make a critical gap at a time when there had to be instant liaison. The opposition believed I was dead and fifteen minutes ago they could have come in here to search the body and I might not have had time to do anything about it — except to phone Flower with a last signal so that Control would know what had happened. But he would have been moving his car. I needed him today but tomorrow I'd have him on a plane for London before he could do any damage.

'Flower,' I said.

'Yes, sir.'

'Have you been on an active mission before?'

'No'.'

There was a click and I stopped to listen, but it was one of the cleaners in the passage outside, nothing on the line. I'd checked it for bugs when I'd made the connection and we were clear.

'Listen,' I told him. 'This operation has become extremely dangerous in the last few hours. You'll now have to follow my instructions with absolute precision, for your own sake as well as mine.'

Someone knocked and I heard a key jangling and I called out for them to go away.

'In ten minutes, go and take up station at Jade Imperial and continue surveillance. Stay with the subject regardless of her movements, but break off the moment you think you've been exposed. Break off at once and get right out of the field and leave a message here for me, to the effect that Mr Jones has telephoned and will call again.'