'Of course not. Rest all you can.'

I wasn't quite sure where I should start, so I looked around the room while he got his pad, cracks in the wall-plaster, the Cantonese rug worn to a hole in the middle, some kind of bleached burlap for the curtains, not totally opaque — I could see a streetlight in the distance — picture of Premier Li Peng over the bamboo chest of drawers, shot of three pretty Chinese girls being photographed against the gates of the Forbidden City, cockroach moving in fits and starts along the bottom of the wall, telephone on the bed table, with its plastic chipped and the cable in knots, was that our lifeline to London?

He was waiting, Pepperidge.

'All right,' I said, 'but you won't like it much. Just before we got on the plane in Chengdu this morning, Xingyu bought a newspaper, and there was a trap in it.'

'I saw it,' Pepperidge said.

'Did you?' For some odd reason it made me feel a bit better. 'Well, he read that part and told me he was going straight back to Beijing.'

'And you told him he couldn't.'

Your director in the field doesn't normally jolly you along like this; you're meant to give it to him straight and he just shorthands it or puts it on tape and then he starts asking the questions. But Pepperidge is a kind man, and he knew I was going to tell him something quite appalling — but you won't like it much — and he was just helping me along, more than you'd get from that bastard Loman.

'Yes,' I said, 'I told him he couldn't.'

You cannot stop me.

Facing me under the bleak tube lights, the blast of cold air from the ventilators sending a corner of the newspaper fluttering between his hands.

'That is a trap,' I'd told him, 'don't you know that?' He went on staring at me, hadn't heard of traps in newspapers, thought I must mean something else. 'Your wife's not in danger — they just want you to think she is, to get you back there. Try and understand.'

'How do you know that?'

'It's an old trick, that's all. They're just working on your emotions. If you — '

'You cannot say that!' You cannot give me any guarantee that my wife is safe!' He shook the paper, pushing it against me. 'It could be true, don't you understand? No one is safe in Beijing!'

I heard the girl at the gate talking to the tour guide, raising her sharp thin voice, we were going to be late, so forth.

I got the paper out of Xingyu's hands and folded it, bunching the bloody thing up and throwing it into the big oil drum against the pillar and standing close to him, talking quietly, holding his arm, looking into his masked face and moving into his mind with my own, just as they'd done, the people in Beijing. 'Dr Xingyu, you're playing into their hands, and if you go back now your wife won't see you again, not the man you are now, not when they've finished with you. All we're asking of you is three days, and in three days you can go back to Beijing, do you understand? You've got-'

'Look, if you're coming with us' — tour guide — 'it's now or never, come on!'

'I am not going with you,' Xingyu said and turned away and began walking and I caught him up. 'When we land in Gonggar you can phone your wife, then you'll-'

'You say three days — why three days?'

'It's all the time we need. You-'

'To do what? I know nothing of what you are trying to do, nothing. I am going back to Beijing.'

Tour guide shouting now- 'You'd better phone my office, okay, tell them what happened!'

The need to make a decision came right up against my face and I stopped walking and thought about it, thought about everything, all the options, all their permutations, and finally faced the stark fact that if Dr Xingyu Baibing got as far as the check-in counter across there and booked to Beijing we were finished and there was only one way I could try stopping him.

Caught up with him again and said, 'If you knew our plans for you, you wouldn't want to go back to Beijing.'

'That is possible. If I knew. But I do not know.'

Standing together in the unearthly light of this place, attracting God knew what attention from the police and the plainclothes PSB agents among the crowd, with Bamboo ticking to doomsday on the big round clock.

'So I told him.'

Pepperidge didn't react.

'How much?'

'Most of it.'

'When did you tell him?'

'There wasn't time at the airport. I just gave him my word that if he caught our plane I'd answer any questions he wanted to ask.'

He sat very still, Pepperidge, the pad on his knee and the ballpoint sticking out from his thin wrinkled fingers, his eyes looking down, and in a moment he said gently, 'Well, there's always something that can be done.'

He should have blown my head off.

I felt very tired suddenly, as if I'd been climbing a real bitch of a mountain and got to the top, felt I could let go at last, flop out, because I'd told him now, I'd got it over, very tired indeed, suddenly, or perhaps it was the AMS the tour guide had warned us about, acute mountain sickness, exactly, the one I'd just been climbing, I'm sure you see my little joke.

'What else could I have done?'

Sounded angry, didn't have the gentleness of this bloody saint, didn't have the kind of philosophy that was going to get us through this one if anything could.

'Not much," he said.

Well yes, I could have gone on arguing the toss with Xingyu until the plane had left, taken him to a hotel and called London, not having Pepperidge's number in Lhasa yet, called London and told them the situation and asked for instructions, let them take this one on their back, or I could have told Xingyu to phone his wife or a trusted friend, anyone in Beijing who could have told him there was nothing in fact to worry about, his wife was only under house arrest with no interrogation going on, but it might not have worked all that well because the pretty Xingyu Chen could indeed be in Bambu Qiao under a five-hundred-watt lamp bulb and it would have been someone else who'd answered the telephone, a colonel of the KCCPC who'd been stationed in their apartment to wait for this very call.

Or I could have simply tried to muscle him onto the plane for Gonggar, a center knuckle on the nerves here and there to get his attention, to show him I was serious, but of course he could well have reacted, started an uproar, and they would have closed in rather smartly, the chaps in their peaked caps, and finis, my good friend, finito.

'The alternative,' I said, 'would have been to try keeping the man hanging around Chengdu scratching his mask off while I tried phoning London or tried getting some news from Beijing, and-'

'You don't have to explain.'

So I shut up. He'd thought out all the alternatives for himself in five seconds flat. But I hadn't been trying to tell my director in the field how to suck eggs; I'd wanted him to know that I'd seen what the alternatives were and seen that they weren't worth using. But he would know that too.

I closed my eyes and let the whole thing ride, because I was going to need my strength. Someone, my gentle DIP or my Control in London or Bureau One himself, would have to work out what to do next, and their instructions could be frightening.

It had seemed so easy, almost a model exercise. The shadow executive was to take charge of a distinguished dissenter from Beijing at Hong Kong airport and keep him discreetly sequestered for a day or two and then send him back to the capital when all was ready. The distinguished dissenter would not of course be informed of the main operation, would know nothing of the People's Liberation Army general who would contain Tiananmen Square with his tanks while Dr Xingyu Baibing, the hero of the hour, went before the television cameras in the Great Hall of the People and offered to lead his country out of the shadow of Communism and into the light of democracy.