Pepperidge briefed us a little before eight o'clock. 'This is the way it goes. I shall take the nine-oh-five charter flight this morning to Chengdu and change planes there for Lhasa.' He was sitting at the table, with two manila envelopes in front of him. A courier had come to the boat in the night, leaving some papers with Pepperidge and three worn leather suitcases near the door. 'In Lhasa I shall go to the monastery you've indicated and tell them you're coming. I'll then go to my hotel. You will take the same flight the next day, keeping your distance from each other as strangers. If the flights are on schedule there's a twenty-five-minute stop in Chengdu and you'll change planes, but remember that flights are often overbooked, unavailable, or cancelled because of bad weather. The airport for Lhasa — Gonggar, ninety-five kilometres from the city — is notorious for strong winds, and the CAAC will only allow flights when conditions are perfect.'

He briefed us on customs, immigration, boarding requirements, and slid one envelope across the table to Xingyu and the other to me. 'Everything you need is there.' He was making less eye contact than usual this morning and was, I thought, a little reserved, distant, and it occurred to me that while I felt that he and Bureau One had agreed to push me through the mission under the nose of the KCCPC and had left me with no choice, it couldn't have been easy for them. If a wheel came off and we crashed, Pepperidge would have to answer to Shepley, and Shepley to the head of state, and just incidentally a nation of one billion people would have to go on living under the boot of a decadent clique until they were ready to risk more bloodshed in the streets.

'You should also know,' Pepperidge said, 'that the charter flights out of Hong Kong were of course fully booked, and we had to buy three cancellations, and if any of the airline computers get things mixed up, the passengers you're replacing are a Mr Brian Outhwaite and a Mr Yan Hanwu. Everything was done correctly, so you have to insist that those are indeed your seats.'

It's standard Bureau practice when a flight's booked solid: you send in a contact who picks the shabbiest-looking passenger in the waiting area and makes him an offer he's not liable to refuse for cancelling his flight and leaving a seat available.

'That's all,' Pepperidge said. 'Questions?'

'Any support?'

He looked at me briefly. 'None on the first flight, one at the airport in Chengdu. That's all' — a shrug — 'we'll need.'

Because if the Chinese secret police got on to us for any reason we'd just have to argue things out in the interrogation cell. Pepperidge could send in a dozen people in support and there wouldn't be anything they could do because the KCCPC wasn't just a private opposition unit in the field: it controlled the field, sharp-eyed and gun at the hip. We were going through the Bamboo Curtain, and the only reason for putting a man into Chengdu airport was to have him report to London if he saw us being hustled into a van.

'Signals?'

'Through Cheltenham,' his yellow eyes on me again, 'but all you'll have is a telephone booth. Have you made many calls in China?'

No signals line, then, no contacts, no couriers, nothing, just that one man in Chengdu with a watching brief. Xingyu Baibing was the most wanted man in China and that was where I was taking him and we couldn't risk anyone else getting near him because they'd know where he was, and if they were picked up and put under the light they could break and speak and we'd crash.

It was the way I'd always wanted to work: no support in the field, no contacts, no cutouts, no one who could get in my way, I'd argued the toss about it time and again with Loman, Croder, Shepley, trying to make them see that I could work best when I worked solo. This time I'd got what I wanted.

And felt lonely.

'I lock up?'

'Yes,' Pepperidge said. 'Drop the key into the letterbox on the jetty.'

'No more questions.'

He looked at Xingyu, who was sitting at the table with his head in his hands.

'Dr Xingyu?'

He looked up. 'What? No. I have no questions.'

Perhaps it was partly the diabetes that was making him so depressed. Did diabetes make people depressed? I didn't know, didn't think so. All I knew was that it was going to be a long day, and a long night.

Pepperidge looked at his watch and got up and let his eyes rest on me for a moment and then got the attache case with his name tag on it and opened the door of the cabin, going out and looking around him.

'Smells nice,' he said, 'after the rain. It's going to be a fine day.'

'She is very attractive.'

This was at noon. We'd got through four hours together, mostly in silence, with the tension in Xingyu filling the cabin.

'You have seen photographs of her?'

I said I had.

'She is very attractive, yes?'

'Very.'

'And she is quite a little younger than I am, as you know, if you have seen her photograph. I am a lucky man.'

I didn't say anything. He wanted to think aloud, not talk to anyone. But it was true: the press photographs I'd seen of his wife showed that she was very attractive, with a brilliant smile in some of the shots, and younger than Xingyu, but, from her description, as brave, marching with him in the streets, sharing the contempt hurled at him in the government controlled media nationwide, an intellectual, Xingyu Chen, a professor in economics.

'I wish to telephone Beijing.'

This was soon after three in the afternoon. He'd lapsed silent for hours, doing something with papers, foolscap sheets he'd found in a drawer of the small writing desk near the galley, filling them with Chinese script and mathematical hieroglyphs and formulae. But now he wished to telephone to Beijing.

I told him no.

'I must know how she is,' he said, and his eyes behind his heavy horn-rimmed glasses were hard, obstinate. 'I must know that she is not being victimized. Victimized because of me. Because of me.'

Told him he couldn't telephone. He knew that already; Pepperidge had told him enough times. Perhaps he thought I'd be softer to work on, couldn't read faces very well.

'I wish to telephone a friend, a very close friend, the dean of my department at the university. He will know what is happening to my wife. They will not trace the call, you must realize that.'

Water slapped the beam of the boat as another vessel left the quay, spreading a wake. Light dappled the bulkhead from the ports on the other side, from the sunlit sea.

'No,' I said, 'they wouldn't trace the call, but your friend would be excited to hear from you, and would be very quick to tell your other friends, and when one of the plainclothes Armed People's Police on the campus picked it up, your friends would be arrested. Is that what you want?'

It took another hour to get him to see what his situation was really like, to think more like an intelligence agent than a philosopher, more like the most wanted man in China, to understand that just by picking up the telephone over there he could send his best friends into the interrogation rooms in Bambu Qiao prison.

Perhaps he managed to get a different perspective on himself, I don't know; I hoped so, because he could let us take him through this mission as an exercise in clandestine intelligence work or he could drag us through the labyrinth with death and destruction grinning from the dark at every turn.

'Have you a wife?'

Back to that, to his pretty Chen.

'No.'

'If you had a wife — ' He reached for his worn black wallet and began opening it, then shut it again and put it away, remembering there was no photograph of her there anymore, because Pepperidge had cleared out the whole contents and sent them to London through our courier line for safekeeping. 'If you had a wife like mine, you would know what I mean.'