'Keep going. I want to know if Pol Pot is in good health, and also where he is now.' The intelligence the monk had passed on to me could have been simply rumour.

The barrel of the gun ran silver in the monlight as she shifted it a little as a reminder, prodding the man's brow, talking to him again, her tone quiet, professional: she understood that a raised voice shows lack of confidence, would have lessened the authority of the gun.

The man was starting to shake as Gabrielle brought the count lower, perhaps as far as three. A snuffling sound was coming from him: with the muzzle of the gun against his head, against his brains, he'd started thinking of his mother. Then as she went on counting he broke into sudden, jerky speech.

'Pol Pot is a sick man,' Gabrielle said.

'Is he still in command of the Khmer Rouge?'

'No.'

'Who's in command?'

'He doesn't know.'

'Tell him he knows, and you're going to shoot on a count of two.'

She prodded with the gun.

'General Kheng is in command.'

'Where is he now?'

'He doesn't know.'

'On a count of one.'

The man brought his hands together in prayer, shaking badly again, speech of a kind coming out of him.

'He still says he doesn't know. He's begging for mercy.'

I looked at Gabrielle in the starlight, saw the sheen of sweat on her face, her narrowed eyes.

'Give him his last chance,' I told her, 'on a count of one.' A snuffling sound again, some words in it, his hands together. 'He swears in the name of the Lord Buddha he doesn't know where General Kheng is now.'

'Ask him what's going to happen on the nineteenth.' It took time, and she had to repeat the question. 'There will be bloodshed in Phnom Penh.'

'A palace coup, or what?'

She prodded with the gun. 'The revolution.'

'Led by General Kheng?'

'Yes.'

'How will it be launched?'

He didn't know, stood shaking, his eyes squeezed shut. Gabrielle asked him again, and again he said he didn't know. I thought this was possible: security on the subject of the nineteenth would be tight, and this man had no rank, was simply a saboteur, hiding his little toys for the children to find in the sacred name of the cause.

'Try once more.'

His voice became light, like a woman's, a soft scream, desperate for us to understand that he couldn't answer the question.

'That's all,' I told Gabrielle.

'No more questions?'

'No.'

She spoke to him tersely, made him turn round, goaded him through the archway with the gun at his spine, steered him to his jeep, made him find his flashlight. I followed them, bringing the little crate.

There were four mines, crude, flat, pressure-sensitive models, sitting there like toads. Gabrielle spoke to the man, pointing to them, asking him something, her voice low, expressionless, a monotone.

I stood off a little. He was hers now; this had been agreed. She got some rope from the back of the jeep and lashed him to the steering-wheel, dipped a rag into the fuel tank, came up with nothing, tied another one to it and pulled it out streaming.

She looked at me in the bleak pale radiance of the flashlight.

'Will you wait for me over there?'

I walked across the road to our Rambler and got in, starting the engine. After a little while there was a single shot, too good for him, I thought, for the toy-hider, but I suppose her manners were better than mine. As she came walking slowly across the road, tripping once on a stone, the flames took hold inside the jeep, but she didn't turn round, just kept on coming. The silhouette of her slight figure against the blaze was slack with despair, and she walked with her head down as if she didn't want to know where she was going, or where she'd been. The explosions began as I turned the Rambler, and the glare fanned against the side of the barn as we drove clear with Gabrielle curled up on the seat beside me, her eyes closed and her face wet, like a child who had cried herself to sleep.

23: DEADLINE

'How's London?'

'Rather pleasant,' Flockhart said, 'or it was when I left. The twilights are drawing out.' He looked carefully round the room, the way a dog makes a couple of circles on strange ground before it will lie down.

The place was palatial by average Cambodian standards: four or five bamboo chairs and a round table, a couple of Chinese rugs, an ornate brass lamp hanging from the ceiling, a chart of the seven major chakras on the wall, but no window — this was the basement of the house, and we'd come down a flight of steps cut into the bare earth and supported with redwood boards. There was no fan, either, and the early-morning air was already sticky in here. But there were two telephones, a scrambler and a Grundig short-wave transceiver.

Pringle had followed us down and was standing just inside the door, hands behind his back in a posture deferential, I thought, to his master's presence. A short wispy-bearded Cambodian stood on the other side, in a dark blue sampong and sandals.

'This is our good host,' Flockhart told me, 'Sophan Sann.' The man came forward and shook hands, his eyes lively in the lamplight as he appraised me; it was an honour for him to meet anyone introduced by Mr Flockhart — this was my impression. But for a formal rendezvous like this I could have done without a stranger here, however good a host he was said to be.

Some bottles of soda on the table, a litre of Evian and a plate of quartered lemons; incense was burning somewhere, uncharacteristically, perhaps as a gesture of welcome to Sophan's guests. A salamander clung to the plaster near a bamboo grille set high on the wall, the only means of ventilation that I could see.

'How was the flight from Kuwait?' I asked Flockhart. I wanted him to know that until we were alone he'd get nothing from me but small talk.

'Too long,' he said and took one of the bamboo chairs. 'But then any flight's too long when time is of the essence, don't you agree?'

Talking about the deadline.

I sat down and Pringle followed, putting a thin worn briefcase on the table in front of him. We were here for the executive's debriefing to Control.

'I'm told,' Flockhart said, 'that you suffered a snake bite.'

'Yes.'

'A nasty experience, I can imagine.' He looked at me for the first time since we'd come down here, his eyes concerned. When I'd talked to him in the Cellar Steps, his eyes had been full of rage, barely concealed. I wondered what had happened to it. 'Are you still feeling any ill effects?' he asked me.

'I'm a hundred op.' A hundred per cent operational, which was what he really needed to know. If I had to go into anything difficult I could do it fast and successfully, given a clear field and not too much shooting.

'Splendid.' He brought out a black notebook and put it carefully onto the bamboo table. 'Splendid.'

'If we're going to do any business,' I said, 'I'd rather — '

'Sann,' Flockhart said straight away, looking up at the Cambodian, 'we've kept you long enough.'

Sophan gave a brief bow and looked down at me. 'It was a pleasure to meet you.' Absolutely no accent, possibly Oxford.

'The pleasure was all mine.'

His sandals flapped up the steps and we heard him close the door at the top. From habit I listened for it to open again quietly but it didn't. Call it paranoia, but when Control flies out from London without warning to debrief the executive in the field himself it means the mission has either started running very hot indeed or it's hit a wall, and I would have felt much easier debriefing somewhere with better security, say the top of a mountain.

'Don't worry,' Flockhart said gently. 'This was actually to have been your safe-house. Sophan Sann affords us total security here.'