I made him repeat it and he got it word-perfect and I hung up and listened again to the sounds in the passage: a trolley was squeaking, one wheel off-centre, and a girl was laughing with a high silvery sound. They wouldn't have laughed like that if they'd come in here and found me on the bathroom floor with a blue cyanosed face.

I picked up the phone again and dialled.

'Good morning — Fleetway Rent-a-Car?'

'I'll need something this evening. What time d'you close?'

'Eight o'clock, sir. May we reserve a particular vehicle for you?'

'No, I'll be along.'

I hung up and put the whole thing into the computer again and the answers came out the same. Unless there'd been some kind of a break-in there must be a police link; the field had been absolutely clear last night when I'd picked up the Capri — they'd tagged me from Jade Imperial to the Mauritius Hotel because I'd let them but they hadn't tagged me from the Orient Club to the Cathay because I'd made sure they didn't. I'd got here clean: but they'd been here already, got here before me and rigged the toothpaste thing, just as they could have rigged a bomb.

Sole possible link: Fleetway Rent-a-Car.

I checked the time at 10.50 and went into the bathroom and put the tube into my pocket and spent five minutes throwing a whole web of traps around the room. Then I went out and put the notice on the door, Don't Disturb. I'd know if any of the staff went in there because they'd make the bed and everything.

Then I was standing for a moment on the hotel steps, looking around in the sunshine and catching the faint brackish tang of the harbour on the humid air.

'Lover-lee morniang,' the boy said.

'Yes.'

I didn't go down the steps. It was a lovely morning and the sunshine was casting soft shadows in the street where cars were parked. I looked particularly at the shadows, and the cars. The sensation of mortal vulnerability was intense for these few seconds, even though I knew that the odds were in my favour. If this hotel had been in the States or the UK or France I wouldn't have gone down the front steps at all: I'd have used the service exit or a fire escape and got to the car very fast in the hope of disturbing their aim or at least dodging the shot. Countries vary and there are characteristic national and even regional tendencies towards the use of the rifle, the knife, the bomb, the rope or the bare hands. There are other aspects involved: the need for speed, silence, accuracy, anonymity, so forth — for instance in Antwerp they blew Hodgson apart with the slot-meter massage boy the instant he got into bed and exactly an hour after he'd landed on a night-flight from Paris, because he was an experienced operator in a highly sensitive field and they wanted him out early and would have prepared back-up techniques in case he didn't use the massage thing. But in Tunisia they'd hounded Fyson for three days with a telescopic rifle and let him know it, till his nerve went and he was taken out of the mission and found floating in Tunis harbour.

It depends who you are, what you're doing, and how soon they want you out of the way. They'd let Fyson run because they'd wanted to know what he was doing before they went in and broke him up as a warning to the next man in. A lot of factors are involved but the first consideration is the locality. In the Middle East they like the knife and the garrotte, but the farther you come into the Orient the more personal things tend to be, because they can use their bare hands with more effect than a bomb, and they can do it in almost dead silence. They are subtle in other ways, and sometimes exotic, and in a place where they burn incense and eat birds' nests and adulterate the wine with snake venom as an aphrodisiac you can expect to find KCN in your toothpaste the moment your name comes up.

'Want taxi?'

'No.'

I walked down the steps and the skin reacted, gooseflesh, the nerves already feeling the impact and the penetration, the ripping away of the bone. Then I was in the street and the sunshine was still bright and the soft air innocent. They might be relying on the stuff they'd put in the bathroom: it nearly always works because when you're cleaning your teeth you're usually thinking about something else. It had worked with Harris in Mexico City and the police had blamed the tart he was with, said she must have put it in his sangria.

I was checking the whole time as I walked along to where the Capri was parked, every car, every window, every angle of the rooftops, because they'd got on to me so diabolically fast that I couldn't rely too much on the oriental preference for the bare hands: they could be in so much of a hurry that their orders were to throw the lot at me, whichever way I turned. I knew when they'd got on to me: right at the start of the tag last night when I'd taken up station behind Flower and the Tewson woman. It had been the Taiwan-registered Toyota, the one I hadn't liked, the one I'd actually checked on and ignored, like a bloody amateur. They'd seen me hanging around Jade Imperial and they'd seen me take up the tag when Flower moved off and from that minute they were on to me.

Two months out of active operations and you lose the fine-tuned alertness that comes back to you as soon as you're in business again, unless you've left it too late.

Note: there were three of them watching Nora, at least three. The thin tubercular, the shorter one and the man in the Taiwan Toyota. The shorter one hadn't been in the Toyota because he was working shifts with the thin man and they'd changed somewhere about midnight. At least three, logically four: a lead tag and a back-up for each of the working shifts. It seemed a lot of attention for a poor little widow consoling herself on Ming after her hubby had been drowned in that dreadful fishing accident. There was a monsoon drain near the dark blue Capri and I got the tube and squeezed the stuff out, holding it below the level of the roadway. It hung and dangled like a thin venomous snake, then fell away as I flattened the tube and dropped that in too.

I hadn't left any traps on the Capri so I had to go in cold, not liking it, starting with the front end and rocking it on the springs in case they'd put something in there with a pendulum detonator, not liking it at all, taking a look downwards through the driver's window with my hand screening out the reflections, using the key and getting in and checking under the dash, nervy and furious because I should have left routine traps around, bloody carelessness: I'd known Mandarin was already running when I'd taken off from London. Wires okay but it wasn't nice, turning the key and hearing the starter kick: I'd seen what was left of the vice-consul's Chevrolet in Saigon, bits everywhere and his scalp plastered against a tree.

Got moving and turned west into Leighton Road. Flower would be leaving the Wanchai district about now and ideally it would have been safer if I'd driven straight to Jade Imperial and got there before him, cover the field and warn him if too many had moved in there this morning: one tag and a backup were all right but things had changed since last evening — they knew I'd joined the operation. But I had to find out how they'd got on to me so fast: it was important because it would tell me a lot of other things as well — their capabilities, techniques, and something about their local contacts.

Percival Street, going north. So they'd picked me up in the Toyota and when they'd seen me comfortably settled in the Orient Club they'd used a stock key off the bunch or put a cleaner's coat-hanger through the moulding and got into the Capri and poked around, finding the papers in the glove pocket. Fleetway Rent-a-Car. They could have rigged a bang for me on the spot, but maybe there hadn't been time to fetch the necessary equipment, or they hadn't felt a hundred per cent certain I was in opposition or they thought I was Hong Kong Special Branch and weren't too worried, didn't want to do anything terminal. Obviously they'd been on to Flower just as fast and they'd been letting him run, possibly to see what he was going to do, possibly because they thought he was also Special Branch.