'Fawn's not a gentleman,' Smiley would have replied - or words that meant the same.

You can say that again too, thought Guillam, remembering the broken arms.

Jerry was equally conscious of abandoning someone to the wolves, even if it was Lizzie Worthington rather than George Smiley. As he gazed through the rear window of the car, it seemed to him that the very world that he was moving through had been abandoned also. The street markets were deserted, the pavements, even the doorways. Above them, the Peak loomed fitfully, its crocodile spine daubed by a ragged moon. It's the Colony's last day, he decided. Peking has made its proverbial telephone call. 'Get out, party over.' The last hotel was closing, he saw the empty Rolls-Royces lying like scrap around the harbour, and the last blue-rinse roundeye matron, laden with her tax-free furs and jewellery, tottering up the gangway of the last cruise-ship, the last China-watcher frantically feeding his last miscalculations into the shredder, the looted shops, the empty city waiting like a carcass for the hordes. For a moment it was all one vanishing world here, Phnom Penh, Saigon, London, a world on loan, with the creditors standing at the door, and Jerry himself, in some unfathomable way, a part of the debt that was owed.

I've always been grateful to this service that it gave me a chance to pay. Is that how you feel? Now? As a survivor, so to speak?

Yes, George, he thought. Put the words into my mouth, old boy. That's how I feel. But perhaps not quite in the sense you mean it, sport. He saw Frost's cheerful, fond little face as they drank and fooled. He saw it the second time, locked in that awful scream. He felt Luke's friendly hand upon his shoulder, and saw the same hand lying on the floor, flung back over his head to catch a ball that would never come, and he thought: trouble is, sport, the paying is actually done by the other poor sods.

Like Lizzie for instance.

He'd mention that to George one day, if they ever, over a glass, should get back to that sticky little matter of just why we climb the mountain. He'd make a point there - nothing aggressive, not rocking the boat you understand, sport - about the selfless and devoted way in which we sacrifice other people, such as Luke and Frost and Lizzie. George would have a perfectly good answer, of course. Reasonable. Measured. Apologetic. George saw the bigger picture. Understood the imperatives. Of course he did. He was an owl.

The harbour tunnel was approaching and he was thinking of her shivering last kiss, and remembering the drive to the mortuary an at the same time, because the scaffold of a new building rose ahead of them out of the fog, and like the scaffold on the way to the mortuary it was floodlit, and glistening coolies were swanning over it in yellow helmets.

Tiu doesn't like her either, he thought. Doesn't like roundeyes who spill the beans on Big Sir.

Forcing his mind in other directions he tried to imagine what they would do with Nelson: stateless, homeless, a fish to be devoured or thrown back into the sea at will. Jerry had seen a few of those fish before: he had been present for their capture; at their swift interrogation; he had led more than one of them back across the border they had so recently crossed, for hasty recycling, as the Sarratt jargon had it so charmingly - 'quick before they notice he has left home'. And if they didn't put him back? If they kept him, this great prize they all so coveted? Then after the years of his debriefing - two, three even - he had heard some ran for five - Nelson would become one more Wandering Jew of the spy trade, to be hidden, and moved again, and hidden, to be loved not even by those to whom he had betrayed his trust.

And what will Drake do with Lizzie - he wondered - while that little drama unfolds? Which particular scrapheap is she headed for this time?

They were at the mouth of the tunnel and they had slowed almost to a halt. The Mercedes lay right behind them. Jerry let his head fall forward. He put both hands over his groin while he rocked himself and grunted in pain. From an improvised police box, like a sentry post, a Chinese constable watched curiously.

'If he comes over to us, tell him we've got a drunk on our hands,' Guillam snapped. 'Show him the sick on the floor.'

They crawled into the tunnel. Two lanes of northbound traffic were bunched nose to bumper by the bad weather. Guillam had taken the right-hand stream. The Mercedes drew up beside them on their left. In the mirror, through half-closed eyes, Jerry saw a brown lorry grind down the hill after them.

'Give me some change,' Guillam said. 'I'll need change as I come out.'

Fawn delved in his pockets, but using one hand only. The tunnel pounded to the roar of engines. A hooting match started. Others began joining in. To the encroaching fog was added the stench of exhaust fumes. Fawn closed his window. The din rose and echoed till the car trembled to it. Jerry put his hands to his ears.

'Sorry, sport. Going to bring up again I'm afraid.'

But this time he leaned toward Fawn, who with a muttered 'Filthy bastard' started hastily to wind his window down again, until Jerry's head crashed into the lower part of his face, and Jerry's elbow hacked down into his groin. For Guillam, caught between driving and defending himself, Jerry had one pounding chop on the point where the shoulder socket meets the collarbone. He started the strike with the arm quite relaxed, converting the speed into power at the last possible moment. The impact made Guillam scream 'Christ!' and lifted him straight out of his seat as the car veered to the right. Fawn had an arm round Jerry's neck and with his other hand he was trying to press Jerry's head over it, which would definitely have killed him. But there is a blow they teach at Sarratt for cramped spaces which is called a tiger's claw, and is delivered by driving the heel of the hand upward into the opponent's windpipe, keeping the arm crooked and the fingers pressed back for tension. Jerry did that now, and Fawn's head hit the back window so hard that the safety glass starred. In the Mercedes, the two Americans went on looking ahead of them, as if they were driving to a state funeral. He thought of squeezing Fawn's windpipe with his finger and thumb but it didn't seem necessary. Recovering his gun from Fawn's waistband, Jerry opened the right-hand door. Guillam made one desperate dive for him, ripping the sleeve of his faithful but very old blue suit to the elbow. Jerry swung the gun on to his arm and saw his face contort with pain. Fawn got a leg out but Jerry slammed the door on it and heard him shout 'Bastard!' again and after that he just kept running back toward town, against the stream. Bounding and weaving between the land-locked cars, he pelted out of the tunnel and up the bill until he reached the little sentry hut. He thought he heard Guillam yelling. He thought he heard a shot but it could have been a car backfiring. His groin was hurting amazingly, but he seemed to run faster under the impetus of the pain. A policeman on the kerb shouted at him, another held out his arms, but Jerry brushed them aside, and they gave him the final indulgence of the roundeye. He ran until he found a cab. The driver spoke no English so he had to point the way. 'That's it, sport. Up there. Left, you bloody idiot. That's it,' - until they reached her block.

He didn't know whether Smiley and Collins were still there, or whether Ko had turned up, perhaps with Tiu, but there was very little time to play games finding out. He didn't ring the bell because he knew the mikes would pick it up. Instead he fished a card from his wallet, scribbled on it, shoved it through the letterbox and waited in a crouch, shivering and sweating and panting like a dray-horse while he listened for her tread and nursed his groin. He waited an age and finally the door opened and she stood there staring at him while he tried to get upright.

'Christ, it's Galahad,' she muttered. She wore no makeup and Ricardo's claw marks were deep and red. She wasn't crying; he didn't think she did that, but her face looked older than the rest of her. To talk, he drew her into the corridor and she didn't resist. He showed her the door leading to the fire-steps.

'Meet me the other side of it in five seconds flat, hear me? Don't telephone anybody, don't make a clatter leaving, and don't ask any bloody silly questions. Bring some warm clothes. Now do it, sport. Don't dither. Please.'

She looked at him, at his torn sleeve, and sweat-stained jacket; and his mop of forelock hanging over his eye.

'It's me or nothing,' he said. 'And believe me, it's a big nothing.'

She walked back to her flat alone, leaving the door ajar. But she came out much faster and for safety's sake she didn't even close the door. On the fire-stairs he led the way. She carried a shoulder bag and wore a leather coat. She had brought a cardigan for him to replace the torn jacket, he supposed Drake's because it was miles too small, but he managed to squeeze into it. He emptied his jacket pockets into her handbag and chucked the jacket down the rubbish chute. She was so quiet following him that he twice looked back to make sure she was still there. Reaching the ground floor, he peered through the glass mesh window and drew back in time to see the Rocker in person, accompanied by a heavy subordinate, approach the porter in his kiosk and show him his police pass. They followed the stair as far as the car park and she said, 'Let's take the red canoe.'

'Don't be bloody stupid, we left it in town.'

Shaking his head, he led her past the cars into a squalid open-air compound full of refuse and building junk, like the backyard at the Circus. From here, between walls of weeping concrete, a giddy stairway fell toward the town, overhung by black branches and cut into sections by the winding road. The jarring of the downward steps hurt his groin a lot. The first time they reached the road, Jerry took her straight across it. The second time, alerted by the blood-red flash of an alarm light in the distance, he hauled her into the trees to avoid the beam of a police car whining down the hill at speed. At the underpass they found a pak-pai and Jerry gave the address.

'Where the hell's that?' she said.

'Somewhere you don't have to register,' said Jerry. 'Just shut up and let me be masterful, will you. How much money have you got with you?'

She opened her bag and counted from a fat wallet.

'I won it off Tiu at mah-jong,' she said and for some reason he sensed she was romancing.

The driver dropped them at the end of the alley and they walked the short distance to the low gateway. The house had no lights, but as they approached the front door it opened and another couple flitted past them out of the darkness. They entered the hall and the door closed behind them and they followed a handborne pinlight through a short maze of brick walls until they reached a smart interior lobby in which piped music played. On the serpentine sofa in the centre sat a trim Chinese lady with a pencil and a notebook on her lap, to all the world a model chatelaine. She saw Jerry and smiled, she saw Lizzie and her smile broadened.

'For the whole night,' Jerry said.

'Of course,' she replied.

They followed her upstairs to a small corridor. The open doors gave glimpses of silk counterpanes, low lights, mirrors. Jerry chose the least suggestive, declined the offer of a second girl to make up the numbers, gave her money and ordered a bottle of Remy Martin. Lizzie followed him in, chucked her shoulder bag on the bed and while the door was still open broke into a taut laugh of relief.

'Lizzie Worthington,' she announced, 'this is where they said you'd end up, you brazen bitch, and blow me if they weren't right!'

There was a chaise-longue and Jerry lay on it, staring at the ceiling, feet crossed, the brandy glass in his hand.

Lizzie took the bed and for a time neither spoke. The place was very still. Occasionally, from the floor above, they heard a cry of pleasure or muffled laughter, once of protest. She went to the window and peered out.

'What's out there?' he asked.

'Bloody brick wall, about thirty cats, stack of empties.'

'Foggy?'

'Vile.'

She sauntered to the bathroom, poked around, came out again.

'Sport,' said Jerry quietly.

She paused, suddenly wary.

'Are you sober and of sound judgment?'

'Why?'

'I want you to tell me everything you told them. When you've done that, I want you to tell me everything they asked you, whether you could answer it or not. And when you've done that, we'll try to take a little thing called a backbearing and work out where those bastards all are in the scheme of the universe.'

'It's a replay,' she said finally.

'What of?'

'I don't know. It's all to be exactly the way it happened before.'

'So what happened before?'

'Whatever it was,' she said wearily, 'it's going to happen again.'

Chapter 21 - Nelson It was one in the morning. She had bathed. She came out of the bathroom wearing a white wrap and no shoes and her hair in a towel, so that the proportions of her were all suddenly different.

'They've even got those bits of paper stretched across the loo,' she said. 'And toothmugs in cellophane bags.'

She dozed on the bed and he on the sofa, and once she said. 'I'd like to but it doesn't work,' and he replied that after being kicked where Fawn had kicked him the libido tended to be a bit quiescent anyway. She told him about her schoolmaster - Mr Bloody Worthington, she called him - and 'her one shot at going straight', and about the child she had borne him out of politeness. She talked about her terrible parents, and about Ricardo and what a sod he was, and how she had loved him, and how a girl in the Constellation Bar had advised her to poison him with laburnum, so one day after he had beaten her half to death she put a 'damn great dose in his coffee'. But perhaps she hadn't got the right stuff, she said, because all that happened was that he was sick for days and 'the one thing worse than Ricardo healthy was Ricardo at death's door'. How another time she actually got a knife into him while he was in the bath but all he did was stick a bit of plaster over it and swipe her again.

How when Ricardo did his disappearing act she and Charlie Marshall refused to accept that he was dead, and mounted a Ricardo Lives! campaign, as they called it, and how Charlie went and badgered his old man, all just as he had described to Jerry. How Lizzie packed up her rucksack and went down to Bangkok, where she barged straight into the China Airsea suite at the Erawan, intending to beard Tiu, and found herself face to face with Ko instead, having met him only once before very briefly, at a bunfight in Hong Kong given by one Sally Cale, a blue-rinse bull-dyke in the antique trade who pushed heroin on the side. And how that was quite a scene she played, beginning with Ko's sharp instruction to get out, and ending with 'Nature taking her course' as she put it cheerfully: 'Another step on Lizzie Worthington's unswerving road to perdition.' So that slowly and deviously, with Charlie Marshall's old man pulling, 'and Lizzie pushing, as you might say', they put together a very Chinese contract, to which the main signatories were Ko and Charlie's old man, and the commodities to be transacted were, one, Ricardo and, two, his recently retired life partner, Lizzie.

In which said contract, Jerry learned with no particular surprise, both she and Ricardo gratefully acquiesced.

'You should have let him rot,' said Jerry, remembering the twin rings on his right hand, and the Ford car blown to bits.

But Lizzie hadn't seen it that way at all, and she didn't now.

'He was one of us,' she said. 'Although he was a sod.'

But having bought his life, she felt free of him.

'Chinese arrange marriages every day. So why shouldn't Drake and Liese?'

What was all the Liese stuff? Jerry asked. Why Liese instead of Lizzie?

She didn't know. Something Drake didn't talk about, she said. There had once been a Liese in his life, he told her, and his fortune-teller had promised him that one day he would get another, and he reckoned Lizzie was near enough, so they gave it a shove and called it Liese and while she was about it she pared her surname to plain Worth.

'Blonde bird,' she said absently.

The name-change had a practical purpose too, she said. Having chosen a new name for her, Ko took the trouble to have the local police record of her old one destroyed.

'Till that sod Mellon marches in and says he'll get them to rewrite it, with a special mention about me carrying his bloody heroin,' she said.

Which brought them back to where they were now. And why.

To Jerry, their sleepy wanderings occasionally had the calm of after-love. He lay on the divan, wide awake, but Lizzie talked between dozes, taking up her story dreamily where she had left it when she fell asleep, and he knew that near enough she was telling him the truth because it made nothing of her that he did not already know, and understand. He realised also that, with time, Ko had become an anchor for her. He gave her the authority from which to survey her Odyssey, somewhat as the schoolmaster had.

'Drake never broke a promise in his life,' she said once, as she rolled over and sank back into a fitful sleep. He remembered the orphan: just never lie to me.

Hours, lifetimes later, she was woken by a squawk of ecstasy next door.

'Christ,' she declared appreciatively. 'She really hit the moon.' The squawk repeated itself. 'Uha! Faking it.' Silence.

'You awake?' she asked.

'Yes.'

'What are you going to do?'

'Tomorrow?'

'Yes.'

'I don't know,' he said.

'Join the club,' she whispered, and seemed to fall asleep again.

I need the Sarratt brief again, he thought. Very badly I need it. Put in a limbo call to Craw, he thought. Ask dear old George for a spot of that philosophical advice he's taken to doling out these days. He must be around. Somewhere.

Smiley was around but at that moment he could not have given Jerry any help at all. He would have traded all his knowledge for a little understanding. The isolation ward had no night-time and they lay or lounged under the punctured daylight of the ceiling, the three Cousins and Sam one side of the room, Smiley and Guillam the other, and Fawn striding up and down the line of the cinema seats, looking caged and furious and squeezing what appeared to be a squash-ball in each tiny fist. His lips were black and swollen and one eye was shot. A clot of blood under his nose refused to go away. Guillam had his right arm strapped to his shoulder and his eyes were on Smiley all the while. But so were the eyes of everyone, or everyone but Fawn. A phone rang but it was the communications room upstairs saying Bangkok had reported Jerry traced for certain as far as Vientiane.

'Tell them the trail's cold, Murphy,' Martello ordered, his eyes still on Smiley. 'Tell them any damn thing. Just get them off our backs. Right, George?'

Smiley nodded.

'Right,' said Guillam firmly, speaking for him.

'The trail's cold, honey,' Murphy echoed into the phone. The honey came as a surprise. Murphy had not till now shown such signs of human tenderness. 'You want to make a signal or do I have to do it for you? We're not interested, right? Kill it.'

He rang off.

'Rockhurst has found her car,' Guillam said for the second time, while Smiley still stared ahead of him. 'In an underground carpark in Central. There is a hire car down there too. Westerby rented it. Today. In his workname. George?'

Smiley gave a nod so slight it might have been no more than an attack of sleepiness which he had staved away. 'At least he's doing something, George,' said Martello pointedly, down the room from his own small caucus of Collins and the quiet men. 'Some people would say, when you have a rogue elephant, best thing to do is go out there and shoot him.'

'You have to find him first,' snapped Guillam, whose nerves were at breaking point.

'I'm not even sure George wants to do that, Peter,' Martello said in a reprise of his avuncular style. 'I think George may be lifting his eye from the ball a little on this, to the grave peril of our common enterprise.'

'What do you want George to do?' Guillam rejoined tartly. 'Walk the streets till he finds him? Have Rockhurst circulate his name and description so that every journalist in town knows there's a manhunt for him?'

At Guillam's side, Smiley remained hunched and inert, like an old man.

'Westerby's a professional,' Guillam insisted. 'He's not a natural but he's good. He can lie up for months in a town like this and Rockhurst wouldn't get a scent of him.'

'Not even with the girl in tow?' said Murphy.

His strapped arm notwithstanding Guillam stooped to Smiley.

'It's your operation,' he whispered urgently. 'If you say we've got to wait, we'll wait. Just give the order. All these people want is an excuse to take over. Anything but a vacuum. Anything.'

Prowling the line of the cinema chairs, Fawn gave vent to a sarcastic murmur.

'Talk, talk, talk. That's all they can do.'