I said: 'Point taken.'

'Good. I run things differently.'

7:51.

'Yes. No more questions.'

Hyde came to the door with me. 'There's an enormous weight of responsibility,' he said, 'on all of us. The destiny of a billion people, if one were to put it vulgarly, is at stake. But don't let that discountenance you. This is a case of softlee, softlee, catchee monkee — in other words we play this very low-key.'

I saw Holmes for a minute and picked up my briefing and the prepacked suitcase on my way out of the building and the time on the round oak-framed clock in the hall showed 8:02, and that was the time they would note on the signals boards for Bamboo, after the date and the chalked entry: Executive dispatched.

Chapter 4: Incense

They circled continuously over the dead.

'And how is London?'

'Cold.'

Here in Bombay the evening was mild, a little humid.

'I miss London.'

We were on a veranda overlooking a courtyard full of frescoes and eroded statuettes and frangipanis, with only a boy in sight, white-robed, watching.

'Not everything, of course,' Sojourner said, 'happens in London. One has to peregrinate.'

They were black against the sky, images cut from black crepe and thrown to the azure heights above the Parsee Towers of Silence on Malabar Hill, where they dived and rose and circled in the lowering light. They worried me.

'One can hardly stay all one's life in one place,' Sojourner said, 'even London.'

I was becoming interested in seeing how long he could keep talking without actually saying anything. But he wasn't just trying to make small talk at our first meeting. He was, I thought, assessing me very carefully, watching for gestures, alert to the tone of voice.

I didn't answer, and he listened to that too.

'You flew straight out?' he asked me.

'Yes.'

'And shall you be flying straight to Hong Kong?'

'I don't know.'

It was the first time he'd looked at me directly. Up to now he'd been like a headmaster questioning a schoolboy, studying his nails, eyes averted, stripping the boy of his identity, listening as if to a liar. But now Sojourner looked up, but couldn't make contact: I was watching the boy down there, slender in the white robe, his eyes jeweled in the shadows as he stared up at the veranda. He hadn't been in the courtyard when I'd arrived, but had come through the crumbling stone archway soon afterward.

Sojourner looked away from me, and down at the boy. 'Door wo ja-"o', Patil. Chalah ja-'o'.'

The boy slipped through the shadows, not glancing back.

'You don't know?' Sojourner asked me. About flying straight to Hong Kong.

'No.'

I looked upward again. They worried me, those bloody birds. In the five towers the dead would be lying on stone slabs in three concentric circles, the men on the outside, then the women, with the children in the middle. They would be picked clean before dark.

'I see,' Sojourner said, and left it at that. The implication was that he would certainly find out, and I wished him luck. You may trust Sojourner. You may trust him completely. Hyde. But I make my own rules in the field.

There wasn't anything to dislike, particularly, about Sojourner, except perhaps for the rather cloying cologne he used, or the slender grace of the boy in the robe. To look at he was unremarkable, a smooth well-shaven face, heavy thick-lensed glasses, decent enough suit, a lawyer, to look at, or a scientist, one of the brilliant younger men searching cleverly through the subatomic particles for the Nobel Prize. And I disliked, of course, his arrogance, because arrogance is a dangerous trait in the netherworld of subterfuge where an inflated ego can prove fatal. But I suppose it was understandable in this man, because Hyde had said the whole operation was his idea in the beginning, and he'd naturally feel he was running the show.

'Ba-ai-ra,' he called, and our server came, moving quietly through the gap in the shutters, smelling faintly of body oils. 'Hum kuche order kerna cha-ha-thi hy.'

'Sahib.'

'What do you think?' Sojourner asked me. 'They do curries well here, of course, or do you prefer something European?'

I said I'd have whatever he was having, and we watched the last of the sated vultures drift away from the hill to the trees below as the light lowered.

Later the server touched the wicks in the brass openwork lamps with the flame of a Bic lighter, and as the darkness was pressed back, Sojourner began talking, wanting to show me, I think, how well versed he was in the world's affairs, perhaps even trying to make me see that I could trust him, because of his openness.

'The idea is not actually to save China,' he said, 'but to save Hong Kong, as you have probably realized. China is very resilient, and if all those people are content to live with a bowl of rice and a bicycle all their lives then it's their right to choose, and they've chosen the form of government they want, in the broader sense. We are committed, nevertheless, you and I and certain others, to bringing about a form of government that only a few thousand of them want, and with the grace of God we shall see that they get it. But that's not the real focus. The real focus is Hong Kong.'

Below the veranda, people moved through the courtyard, mostly in white tunics and saris, their sandals scuffing across the cobblestones. I wasn't worried about the people in the courtyard; I'd checked the environment with the strictest attention on my way here from the airport, and the only danger was if Sojourner hadn't also covered his tracks. I assumed he would have.

'There are of course great opportunities for trade between China and the West. Ten years ago the trade figures were in the region of two billion U.S. dollars, and it's now five times bigger. But what these bright-eyed and bushy-tailed captains of industry don't realize is that a trade boom fifty times that big would come into being given a democratic government in China. But no one had time to squeeze the present government out of Beijing with a quick and effective stranglehold of sanctions and embargoes in '89. It would have been easy enough — the top people had already begun transferring massive amounts of cash into Swiss and Hong Kong bank accounts as soon as the uprising started, and they had a Chinese Air Force transport plane standing by in Beijing with an escort of MiG fighters to get them out of the country. Success for the democracy movement was that close, but big business had its nose stuck fast in the bookkeeping. Is the patatchi all right?'

I said it was very nice.

Some kind of argument had started down there on the far side of the archway; a man in a rumpled white suit was apparently trying to get into the hotel. Sojourner watched for a moment and then lost interest.

'But in Hong Kong it was different,' he said. 'It couldn't apply sanctions, as the West could have done. Moreover, it was told by Beijing that any real signs of support for the democratic movement would deny it the continuance of a capitalist economy after the takeover in 1997. But there were things it could do, by virtue of its unique political and economic position. Politically, it can do pretty well what it likes, since it's responsible to no one — it is not, for instance, a world leader required to set a shining example in everything it does. Economically it has great power and many friends among the giant corporations.' As the twilight bled from the sky the lamps along the veranda held back the dark, but shadows came close, and I could no longer see Sojourner's eyes: his thick horn-rimmed glasses had become a mask, showing only reflections. 'Hong Kong also has enough cold cash,' he said quietly, 'to buy up the People's Republic of China, and that is why we are here now.'