'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.

Now they knew I wasn't. They'd checked on me during the night and found out I was London Intelligence and gone for me straight away, working for quick elimination. They were professionals out of Pekin and they'd know the international networks: we all did, we all knew each other, you can't go through ten or twenty first-line missions in ten or twenty geographical areas without the opposition sometimes getting a look at your face, sometimes even getting a picture - telescopic and fuzzy with grain but still your picture, recognizable enough to go into the files.

Last night they'd seen me operating a tag and they'd seen my face and they'd made signals and looked me up. They might not know my name and they might not have a dossier on me but they knew I was London.

West into Hennessy Road and in four minutes I came up on the Fleetway Rent-a-Car office with its windows, one of them smashed, that's right, and patched up with cardboard and sticky tape till they could get it replaced. I didn't even slow down, no need, just kept on going, south along Tin Lok Lane and then east again, heading north after a while towards the Excelsior. No police link, then: they'd raided the Capri outside the Orient Club and found the Fleetway documents but they didn't have anyone in the police who could ask Fleetway the name of the man who'd rented the car. They could have gone there first thing this morning and said a Ford Capri with this number had clouted their wing and not stopped, who was the renter and what was his address, so forth, but they were moving too fast and they didn't want to wait for the morning and the office had closed at eight so they'd just broken in and looked at the books, Clive Wing, nationality British, Hong Kong Cathay Hotel.

Final phase: they'd returned to their base, the impressive building with the big brass doors at the corner of Statue Square, overtly the Bank of China, covertly the party and diplomatic headquarters of the Communist Chinese Republic in Hong Kong, Pekin's listening-post and window on the West. They wouldn't have bothered to look up Clive Wing because cover names are only used once, and they wouldn't find Quiller on their books because it's a code name and never used for cover or signals, never used at all outside the doors of the Bureau in Whitehall. They'd looked up the mug shots in the Western Intelligence section and found this particular scarred and bitten-eared alley-cat face with the cynical mouth and the watchful eyes, the picture that some bright spark had managed to take when I was crossing the road or going through Customs or feeding the ducks in Bangkok or Tokyo or Seoul - because they're everywhere, the Chinese, everywhere in Asia, a cell in every city and a plant in every consulate; and they'll follow anything that moves, they'll survey and observe and monitor every intelligence operation they can smell out, whether it involves Pekin or not. They'd looked at the pictures and the man who'd observed me outside the Orient Club and outside Jade Imperial Mansions had identified me. Very well, they'd said, this man is London. Eliminate him.

I left the Capri outside the Excelsior and went in and used a phone and the ringing tone began.

Flower had said she never left her pad before ten or eleven in the morning and it was now 11.21 and I could have missed her and that would mean driving through her travel pattern in the hope of seeing either the Hillman or the Jensen and taking it from there. But it had been near dawn when I'd left her this morning and she might want to catch up on her sleep, so I let it ring eight times, nine.

It didn't matter too-much if her schedule was different today because part of my object was to meet Flower, get a complete report on every aspect of his surveillance, take his notebook and then tell him to get on the first plane to London and don't come back. I could make contact with him anywhere and at any time. But the other part of my object was to ease myself into the tag: watch her travel pattern and note the busy areas and short cuts and cover availability, taking loops and coming back while Flower manned the tag.

Eleven rings, twelve.

If I found more than two of the opposition in the field at Jade Imperial I'd warn Flower off and order him to London straight away because there wouldn't be room for two of us if they were going to move into an actual guard action around Nora Tewson. The mission had already gone into active phase and it could keep on changing as fast as an automatic gearbox, all the way up through the range.

Fourteen, fifteen.

I'd left it too late. I'd have to take the risk and 'Hello?'

This is Clive,' I said.

Slight pause and then a soft easy laugh. 'Oh. And how do you feel this morning?'

'I'm only just coming down.'

There was another soft little laugh, and she said sleepily, 'Let's do it again.'

'That's why I rang.'

I was having to think what to say, because the bug was already there when she'd opened the line: they had a permanent three-way station operating. There'd been the slight ker-lunk as the circuit had tripped in, and now the line was hollow.

'Hoping you would,' she said.

'Would you like to go somewhere tonight? The El Caliph -'

'Not tonight,' she said quickly, and didn't say why. 1 tried to catch the tone, to imagine what she would have added in explanation, I've got to do my homework, or my mother's coming round, it was on that wavelength.

'Tomorrow?'

'Yes.'

'What time shall I come?'

'Don't come here. I'll meet you there at eight.'

'The El Caliph Room?'

'Yes.'

I tried every time to listen between the words and get the message. Her voice wasn't sleepy any more: it was a little breathless, secretive, excited, guilty, not quite any of those things but all of them. In her inexperienced way she was conducting an intrigue.

'All right,' I said.

'Clive.'

'Yes?'

It came in an arch little rush. 'I've never known anything like it. You know?'

'Nor have I.'

'My God, I bet you have.'