19.13.

Ferris couldn't have left the safe-house yet because he was still in signals with Control. There hadn't been time for him to rig up a set of his own on the junk or somewhere because he'd need to make directional tests and check out the interference patterns and he wasn't a radio man. And he wasn't signalling through Chiang; the present traffic was too sensitive. So even if we could get London to agree, it was going to take a lot of time and we were going to miss the 20.00 hours rdv and arrive late for the midnight jump and it was giving me the sweats because if ever there's — a time during a mission when you want everything to run like clockwork it's when you're down for final briefing and taking up the slack on your nerves so you'll be ready to do what you have to do, wherever it is and wherever it's going to take you.

Ferrets have feelings.

The phone didn't ring for twenty-five minutes and I spent the interval in a limbo, not wanting to do anything intelligent like checking over the briefing material because the whole thing could have gone dead and cold by now, very much wanting to phone Ferris and tell him to send a final signal: Executive withdraws from mission. But there wouldn't be any point because they'd know I'd started to go gently round the bend. I'd never withdrawn from a mission even when Loman was running me, even when the bastards booted me into Tunis to pick up an operation already half wrecked and with two top-echelon ferrets out of the running, one dead and one blown before we'd even found access. That's why they shanghaied me into these stinking rotten jobs, because they knew no one else would take them and they knew I wouldn't back out once I'd Phone.

19.38.

No bugs.

'London,' he said, 'is going to compromise. You don't get a shield but they're sending in a reserve.'

I thought about this for so long that he had to ask if I was still on the line. I said:

'All right. But keep him out of my way.'

'I told them that's what you'd want.'

'You didn't tell them anything they didn't know.'

He said there was time to. keep our rendezvous and I said that was a bit of luck and rang off before

I could say anything else: because you don't feel relieved when the pressure comes off, you feel like murder. It's something to do with the organism using the quickest way to get rid of the shock and I was quite happy about that, spending the next three minutes murdering half the directors in the Bureau very slowly and with an awful lot of screaming as the volts came on. While this was happening I put the gear back into the canvas bag and shoved it into the wardrobe with the track suit and the other stuff and rigged entry traps and went down to the station wagon sixty seconds ahead of schedule.

I didn't object to a reserve. They were taking a risk, I knew that. Since my signal reporting that Tewson was alive they'd been logically assuming he was either in Hong Kong or on the Chinese mainland, where I could have got to him through the normal penetration channels. Ferris had then shaken them by reporting that he was in fact under guard in what amounted to a maximum security block entirely surrounded by water and he'd shaken them a second time when he'd told them he planned to send me in solo.

He knew it was the only thing he could do. In the specific circumstances of this mission at this phase he knew it was the only possible access to the target zone: not by a fleet of ships or an airborne regiment, but by one man, alone. And he knew we couldn't use a shield because this one man would himself become a target, and we didn't want to double its size. Ferris had told me he thought London was right because he wanted to see if I had any doubts. He'd seen I hadn't, and- he'd got into signals again and persuaded Control to lay off.

A reserve was all right. A shield would have followed me about and tried to keep me alive, and got in my bloody way, but a reserve would be told to stand off and do nothing; unless I was blown or killed. Then he'd move in. That was all right.

I drove steadily. The lights had come on in the dusk an hour ago and now they were bright, the whole of the Kowloon shoreline glittering across the night-black harbour where the shipping floated like patches of fire that had broken away from the land. The traffic was easing off towards Causeway Bay, but I was taking the narrower streets, doubling sometimes to check, finding it clear.

Waiting at a set of lights, it occurred to me that London must be terribly nervous, wanting to send in a reserve. People like Egerton realize the whole thing isn't a chess game: they know the shadow executive comes under strain the minute the mission starts running, and he's not expected to feel reassured if they send a man out to sit like a vulture on a tree while he's doing his best to stay alive and bring home a winner if he can. Normally London never tells you: they might tell the director in the field but he doesn't necessarily pass it on. Well, they could screw themselves.

There were people milling around the car, trying to swarm across the road before the lights changed, and a Boeing went sloping weightlessly down the night sky towards Kai Tak on the other side of the harbour. Maybe they'd told me about the reserve because London was narked about my refusing a shield, and Ferris wanted me to know what Control's thinking was: he was very good about that, and tried not to keep you in the dark even if it meant telling you something you didn't want to know. There was no time to think about it anyway, because they were holding the gun hard against my left temple and I couldn't even turn my head to see who it was.

Chapter Ten: MIME

The Boeing drifted lower, its port light flicking on and off as it vanished behind the buildings and reappeared again, its attitude slightly nose-up as it settled along its flight path. Most of the people milling across the road were Chinese, coming up from one of the ferry piers, but there were also a couple of American sailors and a group of Japanese tourists and an airline steward, Royal Dutch. The lights were still red.

Not many things in this scene were registering on a conscious level because they weren't significant, except for the lights. When the lights changed to green I'd have to drive off. The forebrain was very active, triggered by the sensation of pressure against the temple. Before we do anything physically we go through the performance mentally, as an automatic projection of intention to find out if it's really a good idea. If we think it is, the motor nerves are fired and the muscles ordered. There's still time to cancel the whole thing halfway or at any other stage: the freedom of choice is infinitely variable. But it's normally better to go right through with the intention once we're committed, because we've seen it happen mentally and we're fairly confident it's going to work: otherwise we wouldn't have put it into action.

There didn't seem a lot I could do. A mass of data was streaming in from the sensory systems and it had to be computed before anything useful could be done. Movement was restricted: with the people thronging in front of the station wagon I couldn't drive off. This was one of the countless combinations presenting themselves for review: a strike upwards with the right arm and a stab downwards with the right foot, leaving it for the sudden vacuum in the induction manifold to kick the automatic shift into low and send thrust into the final drive. Most of the combinations involved both movable components: man and machine. This one got an instant negative because I couldn't drive through the people and because the computing element of the cortex didn't estimate sufficient time for the right-arm action to hit the gun away before it was fired.