That, was the important thing, I suppose, that I'd felt she'd wanted to say.

'By the police?'

'No. By anyone.'

'I'll be careful,' I said, and took her hand from my arm and kissed it and went out and down the stairs and waited in the hallway until the siren's howling had died to a moan. Through one of the windows I could see the vehicle was an ambulance; it had stopped some fifty yards along the street, and people were gathering to watch. There was one minute to go, but when I walked into the street the huge green Jeifang was already waiting there higher up with its engine running, facing away from the scene of the accident and out of sight from the hotel windows, and I crossed over and the door of the cab came open and I climbed inside and we started off. There wouldn't be anyone following us: he'd be in the ambulance by now.

It looked all right until we got as far north from the town as the No. 4 truck depot along Jeifang Beilu, I mean the vehicle we were in was good cover and Pepperidge had protected the rendezvous and I was looking forward to telling Xingyu Baibing we were going to get him to the airport and fly him into Beijing tomorrow — he'd be seeing his wife sooner than he'd expected — but as we approached the crossroad where Daqing Lu runs east-west we saw red lights flashing in the dark and Chong said it was a police roadblock and put his foot on the brakes.

Chapter 17: Chong

'Not police,' I said. 'They're military.' I could see the vehicles had camouflage paint on them, as the lights of the traffic swept across their sides.

'Yes,' Chong said. 'Soldiers.'

There was snow blowing on the wind; there'd been a few flakes in the town when we'd left there ten minutes ago.

Most of the traffic was coming the other way, from the north; the soldiers weren't stopping it; against the dark background of the hills we could see lighted batons waving the stuff through: jeeps, a tourist bus, horse-drawn wagons. Another big green Jeifang overtook us from the south, from the town, and came to a stop behind the traffic piling up against the barrier, a couple of hundred yards from where we were standing.

'What are they looking for?'

Chong sat with his thin shoulders hunched over the wheel, a big moth-eaten fur hat dwarfing his small face, his jaws working on some chewing gum. 'They're always looking for something.'

'Can we go north any other way?'

'We could turn back and get onto Linkuo Lu.'

'Then where?'

'North again as far as the Sky Burial Grounds, then west, then north again on the road we are on now.'

'How long would that take?'

'Maybe forty-five minutes.'

'Let's do it.'

'Okay.'

'Turn your lights off before-' But he'd hit the switch already and looked at me and away again and made a U-turn and switched the lights on and throttled up, some heavy metal clanking in the rear of the truck.

'What are we carrying?'

'Mining gear.' He'd learned his English in the States, or from an American. 'I'm on contract."

'What's your cover story for this run?'

'Oh, I sometimes work late.'

'Do you know what we're going to do?'

He looked at me briefly again. 'Pick him up, take him to the airport at Gonggar.'

We rumbled through the night.

It is difficult. Everything is very difficult for me to understand. There are things I would like to tell you, but I cannot. Her long eyes shadowed.

What things?

You must be careful. When you go down the street, make sure you are not followed.

Why had she said I could go to her hotel when she'd known there'd be surveillance on it from the street?

By the police?

No. By anyone.

Who?

The snow slanted across the windshield, whitening from the dark across the headlight beams. When we turned again I asked Chong if we were now on Linkuo Lu, the road to the north he'd talked about.

'Yeah. Maybe another thirty minutes now.'

I wound the window down an inch and the freezing air blew in, but it was better than the exhaust gas seeping up through the floorboards.

'You know you've got a leak in the exhaust on this thing?'

"Sure. Leaks everywhere.'

Head was aching again because of the bumps when we went across potholes; everything rattled and bounced, the windshield, the seat, the floorboards, the brains inside my skull.

I would ask Pepperidge to get a coverage on her from London; her father was a university professor and she was an employee of the Civil Aviation Administration of China with a licence to practice shiatsu, and all those things would be in the official records. London could get one of our sleepers in Beijing to raise everything there was on her background; if we ran into trouble it might be useful: I could get some idea of where her loyalties lay, what value she might have for the mission, what dangers she might pose. But of course if we could get Xingyu to Beijing tomorrow it wouldn't matter a damn, nothing would, mission completed, so forth.

'Shit,' Chong said.

Red lights flashing, a mile ahead of us to the north.

'Are they at the crossroad?'

'Yeah.'

'We should turn west there, then north again?'

'Yeah.' He braked and ran the big truck onto the rough ground at the side of the road and doused his lights.

'Have you seen military blocks like this before?'

'You bet.'

'I mean at two adjacent crossroads?'

'Not so much. Thing is, when they block every goddam highway, means they're probably in a ring right around the town.'

Traffic was coming past us from the north, running into the screen of snow and breaking it up, sending it into eddies as the wind took it again.

'This snow. Is it going to settle?'

'Guess not. The ground's too dry. It'll maybe pile up into drifts against the scree, that's all. It's too cold for it to keep on coming down.' He moved his gum to the other side of his mouth. 'We go back?'

A ring around the town, Jesus, it wouldn't matter where we went, we'd run into a block. In a minute I asked him, 'If I weren't with you, would you have any trouble getting through?'

He thought about it. 'I can't answer that. I mean sure, in the ordinary way, maybe I'd get through okay, my cover's watertight, I've got my contract I can show them, this is one of my regular routes and everything, but see, it depends what they're looking for, what they want, they can just say, look, I don't give a damn if you're the king of Siam, you just turn around and get your ass back down that highway. With these people you can't make any predictions.'

'Switch this bloody engine off, will you?' I got the window down as far as it would go, blast of cold air but at least it was fresh. Snow blew against the side of my face, and I put a gloved hand up. The wind hit the truck, rocking it on its springs. I didn't know, suddenly, what we were doing here: with a ring of military checkpoints set up around the town there wasn't a chance of reaching the monastery and bringing Xingyu Baibing back through an armed blockade.

Your instructions are to get the subject to Beijing as soon as possible.

Pepperidge.

No go.

'Chong, was there a phone anywhere along the road we've just come up, any building we could phone from?'

'Guess not.'

'Are you sure?'

'Yeah.'

He was probably right. The only buildings I'd seen were sheds, barns, ruined temples.

'Then where is the nearest phone?'

'Way back down there on Dongfeng Lu, the Telecommunications Office.'

Thirty minutes away. We don't often feel like asking for instructions at the highest level from London when we're stuck in the field with the odds stacked and the chances thin because we know the situation and the environment better than they do; but tonight I thought there was a case for putting a signal through, phoning Pepperidge: We're cut off by roadblocks set up by the military and there's very little chance of bringing this thing off until at least the morning, if then, so please signal London and see what they say.