London was six thousand miles away and I didn't know how they were going to do it. I just knew they had to.

If Egerton hadn't played it so close to the chest they could have put a director into Hong Kong with me and there wouldn't have been any trouble: he would have tickled up the Navy or a private small-boat fleet operator and I would have been on board by now, that's what a director in the field is for. Sometimes Egerton is too clever by half.

The man under the looking-glass tree was bending and swaying, bringing his spirit into harmony with the rhythm of the universe as the rose light turned gradually to gold on the hills of Lamma.

Binocs: nobody moving anywhere outside the building itself, two Chinese boys trying to get a sail up near the end of the jetty, could only be to air it, there wasn't any wind. The man on the launch was shutting the engine hatch and in a few seconds I heard the slight thump of the timber. A minute later the throb of the engine began.

Fatalism now necessary. Either London would do something in time and we'd still have a mission or London would be too late and we wouldn't. Nothing I could do.

Of course I wasn't certain it had been Tewson, the European in the bush jacket and sunglasses. But he'd looked like the photographs — the one in my briefing file and the one in the Hong Kong Standard, and his greeting of Nora and her response had been precisely in character with what I knew of their relationship. They'd been meeting, probably, for the first time since Flower had tagged her to the Golden Sands, and they'd met in the presence of strangers, or at least alien acquaintances. They'd kissed, but not like lovers: it had been a gesture of almost anything but love-habit, convention, the need to demonstrate a token affection, leaving nothing for the neighbours to say.

I wasn't sure it was Tewson but I'd bet on it because the whole thing fitted in with her attitudes towards me and her behaviour at Jade Imperial: as a young widow released from a sexless marriage her eagerness, archness and inexperience had been predictable, but it hadn't explained her sense of guilt and intrigue. She wasn't just having an affaire: it was an extra-marital affaire.

Hindsight makes you look a fool: I should have known two nights ago that Tewson was alive.

The engine of the launch was still running and I lifted the 7X50's again, not wanting to, making myself, because if Tewson put to sea and I couldn't follow and find out where he went, the only lead would be Nora again and she'd have to be worked on and that would mean asking London for one of the psychos and he'd have to come all the way out — unless they could rake one up from the embassies or consulates in Pekin or Taipei or Tokyo — and start from scratch and it could take weeks to break her down and get what he wanted without her knowing. And all I'd get out of it was a free ride home and a stomachful of adrenalin, what the hell was London doing, I didn't want the bloody Guards called out, I just wanted a boat, for Christ's sake, and I wanted it now.

It wouldn't have made much difference if I'd used speech code instead of cypher: it would have saved maybe a few minutes but no more than that because C and C were open twenty-four hours and there'd only been two signals to unzip and besides, it would have been highly dangerous. They picked the flower was perfectly safe because even if it was intercepted and its meaning understood, it didn't say anything they didn't already know. It was a whole lot different asking for a director to come out to the field: it not only meant the operator had got hold of something big enough to need direction, but that he was going to try for immediate penetration, a tacit declaration of war that would bring in their troops — and their supply line was a few miles long, from here to the South China coast, with ours having to stretch half across the globe.

The second signal, ordering a boat and specifying the rdv, couldn't have gone in any other way but cypher: it was fully urgent and strictly hush and if the opposition had intercepted and decyphered it they'd have just sent someone down here to the twelve-pile breakwater half a mile north of the Golden Sands Hotel in Telegraph Bay with orders to tread all over my face.

The man had finished his calisthenics under the looking-glass tree and was walking slowly up the beach to his fishing boat. I wasn't worried about him: he could have tagged me here from the hotel and semaphored the entire Book of Mao if he'd wanted to, but he hadn't. His movements had been genuine tai chi chuan and I'd made certain that no one was tagging me when I'd come down here. The immediate field was totally secure.

There was movement now and I refocused: two figures detaching themselves from the edge of the building, one white, one darker, indistinct because the line of magnolias was in the way. More movement, this time on the far side of the pagoda: two figures again, both white, the same stature, their motion co-ordinated. A slight burst of noise from the launch as the seaman cleared the cylinders.

The darker figure stopped, looking up at one of the first-floor windows, and even at this distance and with no depth of field I could see his awkwardness as he waved his hand. Then they were filing down to the jetty, forming the same kind of procession I'd seen last night.

I estimated that Mandarin had another two minutes to run.

London was six thousand miles away but they'd got a radio hadn't they, got a telephone for Christ sake, this wasn't an alien state, it was a Crown Colony and they could pull some rank, couldn't they, and what the hell was the Minister doing about this, the one they were so bloody proud of because he could cut through the red tape in ten seconds flat, hadn't anyone picked up the blower and got him off the pot?

Sweating like a pig.

The seaman was in the stern, handing his party aboard, and the launch heeled slightly to their weight. Two of the figures were going into the cabin, one of them the man in the bush jacket, George Henry Tewson, the man from London, dead on paper, killed off by bought witnesses at the dictates of clandestine necessity, the man at the centre of Mandarin, alive and well and vanishing from sight as the stern went down and the exhaust note bubbled to a roar. Within thirty seconds the launch was a small indistinct blob half lost in the morning haze, and I lowered the binoculars.

Mission aborted. Am returning to London.

Because there wasn't anything else I could do. Tewson was I being released periodically on some kind of parole and he might come here again but it wouldn't be for another week, unless they changed the pattern. I'd already got as close to Nora as I could without getting killed and if I stayed in Hong Kong for another week I wouldn't have time to do anything but keep out of their way and hope to stay alive: but that wasn't what I was here for. All London could do was send one of their tame mind-benders to work on Nora Tewson and by the time he'd produced results I'd be somewhere else and stuck into a different jumble sale — Helsinki, if I could twist their arm, there was a ministry scandal blowing up and we all knew it was Nikolai again and we'd have to stop him. Aware, at the edge of my thoughts, that the sound of the launch remained steady, even though it was on the horizon now. They were going to go straight through the roof in London because they hated a mission to abort, it meant someone had blundered. I supposed it was something to do with the acoustic properties of the East Lamma Channel, there was an echo coming back from the hills over there, making it seem that the launch was stationary at full speed. So what did we do, we lost yet another of those poor little wretches they always put in the field too early and we had all the paper off the wall at the Hong Kong Cathay and we ran out of toothpaste. London was going to fire Egerton from a cannon every Tuesday at the Horse Guards Parade for as long as they could find anything to put back in the barrel. But the direction of the sound had altered too, and I turned my head.