Their orders hadn't been to tag us. They'd been told to set up a pincer trap for anything that moved, and we were in it.

16: HASSAN

No, this is Angela, with Robert.

They'll be coming over to see us while you're here and I'm longing for you to meet them.

Yes, aren't they? And always hand in hand — they weren't posing like that for the photographer. Deeply in love, and we're so very happyfor them.

On Tuesday, coming down from Cambridge. They're just dying to meet you — of course we've told them all about you.

No, that's our youngest. She — she was a lovely child.

Yes, I'm very sad to say. It happened in North Africa, one of those mysterious and dreadful things that sometimes happens to people when they're abroad.

We never really found out. It was sort of — hushed up, and even our own Embassy advised us to let the enquiries drop. Yes, all very strange.

Murdered. But no one was ever accused. They say there were just some Arabs, and it was night-time, and — well we don't let ourselves think too much.

Oh not a bit, no. That's why we keepher picture here, with the rest of our little family. She was such a lovely girl and it sort of helps, to talk about her to people. It makes her seem — well — still a little bit alive.

The Citroen GT was backing and turning.

The term in the personnel files is 'an assault on the person designed to extract intelligence'. If you've held out against it you get the 9 suffix to your code name but it's not exactly an award for meritorious duty or anything: it just means they can give you some of the high-risk jobs in the hope that you'll do the same again, refuse to expose the mission or the cell or the Bureau even though the light blinds and the flesh burns and the scream is private inside your skull, for pride's sake.

An assault on the person. Your own person. No one else's.

Backing and turning and coming in this direction, no longer blocking the road entirely, leaving me enough room to go through if I wanted to. But there wasn't any point: the Fiat was farther along the avenue with a muzzle poking out of a side window. The lights of the Citroen came on, full heads, and most of the scene was blacked out because of the glare.

'Shall I shoot at them?'

'No'

'Why not? They — '

'When you're outnumbered, the thing is to think, not shoot.'

I turned my head sideways to avoid the glare. She was looking at me, her skin silvered by the brightness of the light, her eyes exaggeratedly blue because of the contracted pupils. She would have made a good photograph.

'What will they do?' she asked me.

'Nothing much. They want some information, that's all.'

Because if they'd intended to kill, as the other cell had intended, they would simply have sent a marksman to wait for me to leave the clinic or they would have ordered an armed group into the building to do it summarily. And if they'd intended to put mobile surveillance on me they wouldn't have used four vehicles to set it up: they couldn't hope to do it without my knowing and in a mall town like Kaifra it wasn't even necessary.

They wanted me for interrogation.

This idea would have worried me in the ordinary way, but not too much. I had twice explored this psychological terrain in earlier missions and I knew roughly what to do: the only possible way is to remove the mind from the body and to look at the situation objectively — the pain is expressed in the nerves and is perfectly natural but it doesn't have any significance; it's totally physical and there's no message; you merely want it to stop and you could say the word but you couldn't live with yourself afterwards so you might as well die now and if you're prepared to die then they've had it because once you're dead you're no more use and they know that.

The worry would have been about the unpleasantness, that was all, not about whether I'd break. And at the moment they wouldn't have a lot of success because there were bruises everywhere and the effects of the gas were still hanging around and they'd only have to push me a bit too far and I'd flake out and they wouldn't learn anything.

But there was a new factor involved tonight. I didn't know how long I'd be able to hold out if they went to work on Diane instead of me.

The Citroen pulled up and someone got out and walked up to us holding a sub-machine-gun. For a moment his shadow grew immense, flitting across the bonnet of the ambulance; then the light blazed again and he came to the side and stood there waiting for something, the muzzle aimed at my head.

I turned to look at him. Except for the man who'd died in the ravine this was the first time I'd seen anyone from an opposition cell because they'd worked covertly for the most part: the bomb in Tunis, the marksman here in Kaifra. This man wasn't of any interest because he was just a factotum but I looked at him so that I'd know him if I saw him later.

There were footsteps on the loose sand and another man came up from one of the cars behind us and stood looking in at Diane.

'Get out of the car.'

I noted that he was an Egyptian, with a Cairo dockside accent. I told her 'You only speak English.'

'What?' she called to him through the window.

He jerked his sub-machine-gun.

'Get out this side,' I told her, 'with me.'

'All right.'

I opened the door and the one who'd come up from the Citroen got worried and jerked his gun at me.

'Get your hands up!'

'Oh bollocks.'

He was Egyptian too. I suppose Loman must have known the UAR was involved but hadn't been allowed to tell me, on the grounds that the less the ferret knows the longer he lives.

Diane followed me out and we stood waiting. Two other men came up, one from the Fiat and one from behind us, and both had guns trained on us. Only one of them wore a fez: the others looked inferior material, capable of subduing or killing but nothing more. By their speech they were all from dockside Cairo and they called the man in the fez by the name of Hassan.

'Bring the Fiat here,' he told one of them. Then he turned to me. 'Give me your gun.'

'I haven't one.'

I spoke in Arabic because at least one of the opposition cells had a dossier on me: Loman had warned me about that.

'Search him! Get his gun!'

Hassan was very nervous and I placed him fairly high up in his cell or even in the network: he had the intelligence to know his responsibilities and to know that if I got out of this trap he'd probably get a chopping.

One of the thugs frisked me and I didn't make it difficult for him.

'He has no gun, Hassan.'

'He must have!'

I was frisked again and they dragged open the doors of the ambulance and ransacked the compartments and then one of them said it was the woman — she had my gun. Hassan looked at me to see my reaction when they tugged the Colt.38 out of her pocket and I looked suitably upset.

'He gave the woman his gun,' said a man, 'but we found it!'

Hassan told him to shut up and turned away and spoke to the man who'd brought the Fiat alongside.

'Is Ahmed coming?'

'Yes.'

The transmitting aerial went on waving, slower and slower.

I thought that Ahmed wouldn't be likely to come alone: he was obviously higher in the cell and would have at least one trigger-man. So far there were only the four of them here, unless there were others who'd stayed in the Mercedes or the 404 and I doubted this because Hassan was nervous and. would have brought every one of his men in to guard me. There was no hope of estimating how long it would take Ahmed to reach here from their radio base but it would need only ten minutes to cross the whole of Kaifra. He could be here within sixty seconds.

Hassan was watching me.

'Where is the rest of your cell?'