'Subject is with me, no injuries.'

I confirmed the bearing I'd given Pepperidge when we'd got here three hours ago and then began giving him the general picture, not terribly reassuring.

The snow was still coming down in flurries, making a hazy screen across the terrain below the hills, and through it I saw lights moving. This cave was the third opening along from a granite bluff an estimated four miles, south by south-east of the road where it turned north in a wide curve with an estimated radius of one mile; it was the fifth opening from a low escarpment in the other direction that jutted at thirty degrees from the lie of the hills. There were no other landmarks except for the boulders, some of them huge, ten or fifteen feet high, but they were strewn across the scree at random like thrown dice.

They'd set up a roadblock, the military, halfway through the curve in the road. They'd been alerted by the shooting from the jeep behind me and the obvious decision would have been to trap all traffic in the area: there'd be another road block set up toward the west, though I couldn't see its lights from here because of the snow. But I could see the lights of the convoy; it was still stationary, most of the vehicles facing west, the way we'd come in from the temple. It was difficult to say how many vehicles there were down there: perhaps twenty, twenty-five; the ones that had passed me from the east had been personnel carriers. Estimate, then, three hundred armed troops, at least three hundred. Some of the vehicles had been swung at various angles to the road, providing a fan of light southward toward the hills and containing 180 degrees.

From this distance and with the snow flurries blowing I couldn't see the Dongfeng truck we'd abandoned near the road, or if I could see it I wouldn't be able to distinguish it from the boulders. But it would be there, standing in the fan of light, and they would have checked it out, three hours ago, and found the engine warm, and they would now be looking for the driver and any passengers. Those were the moving lights I could see as the soldiers spread out in a systematic search. They were already a mile from the road, making their way across the scree like a tide rising toward the hills, toward the cave.

I reported this to Pepperidge.

The line of soldiers was at ninety degrees to my angle of vision, and we'd have to allow a margin of error: perhaps fifteen, even twenty percent. This being given, I estimated that they would reach the caves in the hillside before morning, at the latest.

This too I reported.

Nothing but static for a moment or two, then: 'And at the earliest?'

'I can't predict that. If they increase their speed they could be here sooner than that.'

I didn't like telling him, I did not like telling him this, crouching here in the cave mouth in the freezing wind with that man inside there looking so strange, talking so strangely, giving me ideas, one of them so appalling that I couldn't express it to my director in the field until I'd tested it out, because it would change everything, it would blow Bamboo into Christendom.

'But if it occurs to them,' I told Pepperidge, 'that the people in the truck might have headed for the caves, they'll logically send troops in three or four files straight in this direction and spread out and start a search at this level.'

Static. I waited. 'They could reach you, then, in two or three hours.'

'Yes.' Waited again.

'What are your plans?'

'All I can do is play it by ear. I can get out of here and take him deeper into the hills, or stay here and explore the cave and hope to find a bolt hole and cover our tracks. If we start moving higher we'll be making a race of it with three hundred men and I don't think we could win it. On my own, yes, but I don't know how long he can hold out. I haven't questioned him yet. If we stay here, there's the chance that you might be able to do something, you or London.'

He'd said earlier tonight: I can give you a whole cadre if you need one.

We'd need a regiment.

In a moment: 'I signalled London the moment you reported you were at the caves. I said it was impossible for you to get him to Gonggar, that you had no transport, that the Koichi artifact was not in place. That was correct?'

'Yes.'

'But now the situation is fully urgent.'

Argot. In any signal, any briefing, any instructions, fully urgent has ultra priority and takes precedence over everything else: it means sound the alarms, freeze all other action, bring Bureau One into the signals room and clear all communications lines to and from London through the intelligence mast in Cheltenham and the DIP controlling the field in the host country, using scramblers or speech code or audio-grids or whatever means that will pull the whole network together and keep the shadow executive in constant touch with London Control and the signals board and the agents-in-place and the sleepers and support groups and courier lines right across the spectrum of the mission, and if I told Pepperidge yes, the situation was fully urgent, that whole process would kick in and start running.

Said yes.

A beat, then: 'How much time have we got, would you say, before you could be discovered, if they began sending probes into the foothills and the caves directly? What is my deadline?'

I looked down through the drifting screen of snow at the string of lights in the valley. The soldiers would be three miles away by now, as a rough estimate, and the terrain was rough, loose, and inclined at something like ten or fifteen degrees. There was moonlight, but under the snow flurries it didn't amount to much more than a glimmering sheen across the scree, with no real shadows. Across this kind of terrain a man couldn't go too fast without risking a broken ankle, and at this altitude the lungs would be starved of oxygen to a critical degree: we'd reached here, Xingyu and I, exhausted.

I said into the radio: 'Two hours.'

Waited.

'Two hours. That is my deadline?'

'Yes.'

A wind gust came, cutting across my face and leaving snow whirling into the cave mouth.

'Very well.' That tone of cheerfulness again, got on my nerves, made things worse because he only ever used it when things were tricky in the extreme. 'A great deal can be done in two hours. A great deal. Unless there's anything you want to add, I'll get on with things right away.'

There was nothing important. I'd been going to report the suspicions I'd had earlier tonight when we'd been lurching across the scree to the caves: a couple of tunes I thought I'd heard faint sounds behind us, closer than the road down there, and once I'd told Xingyu we were going to take a rest, and I'd sat there listening to the rushing of the wind across the stones, but that was all I'd heard. I hadn't thought about it since then.

'Nothing to add,' I said.

'Then stay open to receive.'

I went into the cave.

'I must get to Beijing.'

Sitting there staring at nothing, a shadow humped against the rock face.

'Dr Xingyu, I'd like you to move a bit nearer the mouth of the cave. I've got to be there to monitor the radio.'

'Radio?'

I spelled it out for him, saying that the signals we'd be receiving would help us to get him to Beijing, and he tried to stand up and I gave him a hand and we managed it. Snow was coming into the cave mouth and we sat crouched with our backs to it.

'It's a bit colder here, I'm afraid.'

'I don't mind.'

Small talk, I'd descended to small talk, putting off the question that had to be asked, that had to be answered, before we could do anything more, before even London could order the fully urgent process into action — because if it was the wrong answer I would have to signal Pepperidge at once.