'Ferris. Where are we going to talk?'

'Up here.'

I walked to the stairs, watching for another one and ready to kick out. A girl was coming down in a cheongsam, not looking at me, looking at Chiang. He spoke to her in Cantonese, with no particular urgency in his tone. They had to see to the Saiyan, his hand was bleeding, then they had to clear up all this mess and find the reptiles, they would keep the door locked, so forth, and she kept saying yes, yes, quickly and repetitively like the chatter of a bird, expressing her fright at the mess, looking down at my hand, then fleetingly up at my face. She went back up the stairs.

'Chiang,' Ferris said. 'What about him?'

'Ah!' He threw his head back quickly. 'I will make all in order.' He came shuffling quickly to the stairs, scattering bits of glass and flicking the dead snake aside with his pointed shoe, folding his strong stubby hands and speaking softly and emphatically to Ferris. 'Will cost money, to take him long way and bury with fung shui. There will be many others to pay, tea-money and for not speaking of this. Will cost two thousand dollars,' watching our faces to catch our reaction.

'You will be paid,' Ferris said thinly, 'what London decides you are to be paid.' I remembered he hated mercenaries, even though we had to depend on them for so many things. It was nothing to do with morality: he knew they were dangerous. 'And there will be no fung shut, because he was our enemy, not yours. And there will not be "many" others to help. You will use one other, and you make damned sure he's deaf, blind and dumb. You should be ashamed of yourself: in London Mr Chiang is not said to be a greedy person. I would not like to report otherwise.'

Chiang gave a breathy little laugh to cover his loss of face, and said nothing more. Ferris didn't look at me, but turned and went up the stairs. The girl, Chih-chi, was at the top, beckoning me to follow her. She sat me on a wicker linen-basket in a bathroom on the first floor, with my wrist across the edge of the cracked handbasin, and used running water and a pair of eyebrow tweezers while I looked at the two rust stains running down beneath the taps, and the toothbrush and Lifebuoy soap and the bottle of black hair dye, one of Mr Chiang's little secrets. She didn't speak English, or was too shy, so we spoke in Cantonese: she was the third daughter and working in a doll factory before going to the university next spring, if she could pass the examinations; but she found English difficult, 'like Chinese puzzle', with a sudden warbling laugh at her own joke, her eyes darting to mine again, wondering who I was and who had smashed the jars and released the snakes down there and what had happened to my hand. The things she told me were only the record I'd asked her to put on.

She used the tweezers delicately, her hand pecking at mine like a bird, flicking the pieces of glass into the basin while I sat there feeling the reaction and feeling it more strongly because I didn't want there to be any; I had to start thinking again. But all I could think was how bloody chancey this trade was getting, it could have been me down there lying in all that hideous mess, with Ferris getting on the radio, Wing broken, or whatever phrase he'd use for immediate and urgent speech-code transmission to Norfolk and by direct private phone to Egerton's bedside at one in the morning. Deceased during mission on the right-hand page in the book before it was closed, and nothing to show for it, nothing like Thornton had shown, just a vulgar brawl with a hit-man, almost an accident.

Hadn't you better think?

Well, I'm bloody well trying to.

She had to grip my wrist to keep my hand still: I was shaking all over, muscular reaction, nervous reaction, could do without it, had to get back on form because they'd dropped in a director for the field and he was waiting to local-brief me. She got some bandage and a dressing and I tried to blank off my mind, clear it of all references and associations and start all over again. It worked, up to a point, and the question came in pretty sharply: Hadn't you better think about what he was doing here?

Well, he didn't tag me from the car because I checked, all the way. And he didn't tag me from the Golden Sands. So he 'Did that hurt?'

'No.'

Must take great care, so forth. She tied the knot.

'How did he get here?' Ferris asked me when I went up to the radio room. He assumed I knew, and it made me touchy, because I should know, and didn't. He was fiddling with the set, his long body angled and propped on one of the sacks that Chiang kept here.

'How the hell should I know?'

He turned his narrow sandy head to look at me for two seconds with his yellowish eyes. They were rather bright, with shifting lights in them, but just about as expressive as a cat's-eye on the road. He wore plain glass in his spectacles: we all knew that. It was some kind of image he was trying to identify with, and it was very successful because you only had to imagine Ferris without his glasses to realize you'd never recognize him. He looked away, with the faintest smile, and went on fiddling with the set. He knew I didn't mean how the hell should I know, I meant shut up I'm trying to think.

There'd been no tag from the Golden Sands and no tag from the Taunus. Either he was one of the people they'd drafted into the field to keep watch for me, or Chiang had blown me.

'Ferris.'

He looked up. I said:

'Has Chiang had recent screenings?'

'Oh, please be serious,' he said, and gave a token giggle, concentrating on the set again, trying to clear the signal identification bleep from the background noise.

I realized I must be in mild delayed shock because if that boy had been one of the people who'd been drafted into the field to watch for me he'd be doing it at the Hong Kong Cathay and the Mauritius and the Orient Club and places like that where I'd been sighted and identified, not here at the safe-house. No one had ever seen me come here: no one. Except him.

There was something I was missing and it wasn't anything to do with Chiang. When London sets up a safe-house it doesn't leave anything to chance because if one major operator gets blown at any given time and in any given place it can shake the whole of the network and do irreversible damage and we'd all know that and I'd forgotten and Ferris had reminded me.

I was forgetting too much.

'Ferris.'

He looked up again.

'I've got something for them,' I said.

'London?'

'Yes.'

'I'm holding open for them now. Can it wait?'

'If you like. But I know where Tewson went to.'

'Oh Jesus Christ,' he said and switched over to send.

I told him where the thing was, 114 X 22 , and he began sending in cypher.

Forgetting too much, but some of it was corning back and I went down the stairs and found Chiang putting those bloody things into a canvas bag while Chih-chi swept the glass into a cardboard box marked Nestle's.

'Chiang, are there any more of those things loose?'

'Is all now,' he said, 'all home.' He was looking despondent and I didn't know whether it was because I'd finished off one of his most expensive delicacies or whether he was still annoyed with Ferris for not letting him screw the Bureau for a couple of thousand Hong Kong dollars.

I went behind the counter and bent over the boy and he stared at me with one eye as I found his wallet, checking it, yes, a picture of me, a copy of the one they'd found in their Western networks file, not so good as the one I had of Tewson but quite recognizable, some kind of minaret in the hazy background, it could have been a stray they'd shot while I was doing the Bangkok thing. I took the wallet upstairs for Ferris to go through, and put a match to the photograph and waited until he'd finished sending.

923-843-01 blank 267-783-14 . . .the same as the one they'd given me, because that was the cypher for Mandarin. He was telling them about the boy downstairs while he was at it: no smoke necessary, contact will deal immediate, and dossier to follow. There might be something in the wallet he could send, but the boy was only a hit and wouldn't know anything about the Pekin cell, any more than Flower had known about the Bureau.

'An oil rig,' said Ferris, and swung round on the sack of herbs. 'Now there's a funny place.' He sniffed the air and looked at the curl of black ash. 'Your picture, was it?'

'Yes.'

'They must have it on file.' He looked up at me critically. 'Would you like a tetanus shot or anything?'

'Not really.'

'Are you ready to fill me in?'

'There's not much.' I slid my back down the wall and sat on the floor and told him everything I could think of. He broke in only when he wanted me to know something or when he wanted me to see that he already had the background . . . yes, his parents are flying out to take his body back home . . . yes, they sent me a microfilm on the lady Nora ... all right, I'll deal with that, when you've told me what sort of damage they did ... It took only ten minutes but by that time I'd formed a conclusion about Egerton: he was a worse bastard than I'd thought. Because Ferris had too clear a picture for London to have jumped him in from Pekin as a reflex action in the last twenty-four hours.

'When did they bring you in on Mandarin, Ferris?'

'Six weeks ago.'

'Did they tell you who you were going to direct?'

'They said they hoped to get you.'

'I bet it wasn't Egerton who said that.'