'Henghao!'

Excitement in his voice, triumph in his whole attitude. He hadn't found the man he was looking for, the man they were all looking for, but he believed he might have found a potential hiding place for a hunted man in transit, if one needed.

He wouldn't be sure. Chong might have told him that the empty crate was for the ore samples they'd be bringing back, and that the blanket and cushions had been thrown in there for the drilling crew as an afterthought, but the search the army had mounted tonight from here to the Lhasa River was for Dr Xingyu Baibing, the notorious dissident, and that was all this sergeant had got on his mind.

'Hia che!'

Chong came across the tailboard and dropped to the ground, his eyes passing across mine with some kind of message that I couldn't interpret. He looked calm, still, and I wondered whether he'd been interrogated before; when I'd asked him earlier if he'd seen any action he'd said sure, a couple of times, but that didn't tell me much. He might have fought some kind of rearguard operation or got clear of an intelligence trap but that kind of experience wouldn't help him now. The sergeant would keep the assault rifle trained on us until we were back in the cab of the Jeifang and he'd be behind us all the way to the roadblock. Then we would be interrogated, and by professionals.

There wouldn't be any kind of rearguard action we could fight and we weren't going to get out of this trap because there wasn't anything we could do about it now. We couldn't do anything with heat or with shadows or with weapons and I'd stopped grasping at straws in my mind and started thinking ahead, and all I could see ahead of us was an interrogation cell and their eyes in the shadow of their peaked caps and the instruments, whatever instruments they would use. These people had refined the art of torture over thousands of years, but there still wouldn't be anything more effective than a sharpened twig of bamboo under the eyelids or the nails.

I tote a capsule.

Quite possibly, but a capsule isn't the answer to everything. If the opposition think you're a high-level intelligence officer they'll search you for a capsule and if they find it you're finished, but even if they don't make a search you've got to reach the bloody thing and pop it and break the shell before they can move in, and there's something else: you can put a man through Norfolk and throw every psychologist in the place at his head and pass him out with a Suffix-8 after his name in the ultraclassified records as a man who is confidently expected to use a capsule if the circumstances dictate the necessity and that is of course a quote, my good friend, it is a direct quote from the book of rules, don't you think it's charming, I mean as a euphemism, meaning as it does that he is confidently expected, this man, this doomed and beleaguered spook, to use his capsule because he believes — and undertakes in his contract to uphold and implement the belief — that his life has less importance than his duty, that he recognizes the highest priority of them all in this circumscribed and exacting trade: to protect the mission.

'Dakai che dangban!'

Chong moved to the tailboard of the truck.

Yet even then, the capsule trick isn't foolproof. You may well have passed out of intensive training — intensive? But I joke, my good friend, it's ruthless, merciless, murderous — you may well have passed out with the exotic Suffix-8 after your name and it may be that the opposition has failed to search you for a capsule, but there will be the moment of decision-making, and that will vary from one man to another, will vary even within each individual according to his personal disposition as he sits under the blinding light with his inquisitors, for you cannot always decide exactly when you will no longer be able to stand this, no longer be able to allow them to do this to you as the sharpened twig of bamboo is thrust again, no longer be able to shut off your mind to what is happening and shift into theta waves, is thrust again and deeper now, deeper, you cannot always decide how long it will be before the instant arrives when you know you would prefer death, and then of course it's too late to get at your capsule.

So you have to compromise.

Chong heaved at the tailboard. He wasn't a strong man, too thin, too light. But he was winning: he'd got it to shoulder level. The sergeant watched him struggling.

You have to compromise. You leave it as late as you can, and then decide. You go into the cell and look around and see what they've got for you, how serious they are, how professional, and you look at the people who are going to work on you, and make a decision. If they look as if they're prepared to take things to the limit and you don't feel within you at this particular moment the ability, the spiritual, almost supernatural ability to go through anything, anything at all, then you go as fast as you can for the capsule and crack it with your teeth, finito.

'La shi shenme?'

Sergeant shouting.

I knew my capabilities, what they would be when we arrived in the interrogation cell. But I didn't know what his would be, Chong's, and it worried me because he knew where Xingyu Baibing was, and that would be their only question.

'La shi shenme?'

The sergeant had moved to the tailboard. I couldn't quite see what was happening because Chong's body was in the way, but I think he'd tried to hide something, push it among the other stuff in the truck, and the sergeant had seen him, wanted to know what it was.

'Na guolai gel wo!'

Chong gave it to him, some kind of wallet, and the sergeant opened it, holding it in the glare of the jeep's headlights, and I was close enough to see a wad, two wads of Chinese banknotes with elastic bands round them.

'Zhe yonglai gan shenmede?'

'Xunllan gongren de gongzhi.'

Wages, for the drilling crew? There wasn't any drilling crew.

They were Y100 banknotes, if both wads were the same. It looked as if there were two lots of perhaps fifty. At a rough guess, the equivalent of?1,000 sterling. The sergeant was looking at them, looking at Chong. Chong was saying nothing. The engine of the jeep throbbed steadily in the background; the exhaust gas clouded blue in the headlight beams.

It's on record that the pay of a sergeant in the People's Liberation Army runs at about Y200 a month. This one was looking at twenty month's pay.

'Ni xiang huiluo wo?'

'Dangran bushi.'

Asking Chong, perhaps, if he was trying to bribe him. But he couldn't be. There wouldn't be any price on the honor and prestige of this man if he could find the archenemy of the People's Republic of China, Xingyu Baibing. Chong would know that.

'Henghao!' The sergeant pushed the wallet inside his greatcoat and went on talking, and when he'd finished Chong turned to me.

'Okay, he says we have to stay right where we are. When he's back in the jeep we have to get into the cab of the truck and head for the roadblock up there. He follows us. Christ sake don't make any kind of move, okay? He's mad at me.' He turned back to the sergeant and gave him a careful bow.

The sergeant began walking backward to the jeep, keeping the assault rifle at the hip.

'You know the worst thing, for me,' Chong said, 'about Tiananmen? They turned the lights out before they started the massacre. Don't you think that was obscene?'

The sergeant swung his assault rifle into the jeep and Chong took his glove off and put a hand into his pocket and there was a dull flash and the sergeant bloomed like a huge crimson flower in the night.

'Don't you think that was obscene,' Chong said, 'turning the lights out?'