She was looking behind me again, her eyes ranging. 'Thailand and Burma are the big centres here, as I'm sure you know. I mean, there are some very ritzy clubs around in the major capitals where most of the members are growers, refiners, couriers, dealers, middle-men, pilots, you name it. But what interests you is the arms connection. I'll -'

I was standing over him and he looked frightened to death, his eyes very wide and his mouth open, and it took a second before I could cancel out the whole operation and get things back to normal, though I knew it'd take much longer than that for the adrenalin to shut off and the nerves to come down from their high. It had just been the noise, that was all - he'd dropped a metal tray and it had touched my left shoulder, just lightly but enough to digger me, and then the organism itself took over and I had a sensation of flowing light and a series of stop-action photographs: the background swinging down as I was suddenly on my feet and then his face and body superimposed in close-up - the ear, temple, neck, the vital targets - while my right hand was moving so fast that I felt the air-rush even on its way up. The reflex was still building up its force but the left brain had started doing some very urgent work and the motor nerves of my right arm got the signal just in time and the braced half-fist stopped an inch short of his neck, even though the necessary imagery was still flickering in my mind: the knuckles moving through the sinews and crushing the carotid artery against the spinal column.

Everything had slowed down and for a while we just stood there in a clumsy tableau, the Chinese in a half-crouch with his eyes staring up into my face, my arm fixed at an angle and my body leaning over as the force died away and the first breath came and sounds filtered into the consciousness and movement started up again.

Faces in the background, watching. Other still figures, people poised in whatever act they'd been performing, a hawker with a basket, three women caught in mid-stride with their mouths open, a small child staring upwards with a doll in its hand.

'I'm sorry,' I said.

He was relaxing and straightening but not trusting me yet. I picked up his tray and got my wallet out. There was a whole spill of mangoes and papayas and oranges on the ground and my small bamboo chair was quite a long way off. 'Sorry - I made a mistake.' I gave him a US$50 note and he stared at it for a moment before he took it, gingerly. 'A mistake,' I told him, 'all right?'

Katie was standing up too and I took her arm and she went with me between the little tables and the hawkers' stalls and the trunks of the trees, neither of us saying anything. Of course I was making a big deal of it in my mind because of the security situation but in point of fact the whole thing had happened so fast that no one had actually seen the details; all they'd seen was a man standing up from his chair and accidentally knocking some fruit out of a hawker's hands. But the rule is to get away, fade, leave as little as possible in people's memory. Creating a scene is not terribly good cover.

We stopped to talk for a moment under a magnolia tree at the edge of the park.

'Is that the most help I can be?' Katie asked me. 'Just to get information?'

'Yes.'

Her eyes didn't leave my face. I had the thought that she wanted to catch the memory of what I looked like in case she never saw me again.

'I was watching the crowd,' she said, 'behind you.'

'I know.'

'I don't want them to find you again.'

'Maybe they won't.'

The woman in the chongsam was just at the edge of my field of vision, a blob of colour in the distance.

'I'll think of someone,' Katie said, 'who can tell you about Mariko Shoda. That's what you need most of all, isn't it?'

'Yes.'

'A good source of information,' Katie said in a moment, 'would be Johnny Chen.'

'How much can I trust him?'

'All the way.' She wrote on a slip of paper and gave it to me. 'You can find him there.'

'All right. I'll phone you as soon as I can.'

'I don't know where I'll be.' If I gave her the number of the Red Orchid there was a risk; she wasn't trained. 'I'll phone you at the High Commission tomorrow.'

'All right. And take this.' She wrote on an official card. 'That's my flat, in Victoria Street. I'll be home all evening.'

I got her a cyclo.

'You're not coming with me?'

'I'll walk. It's the other way.'

She touched my arm. 'Martin, you already know how dangerous Mariko Shoda is, so shouldn't you just call it a day?'

'I'm committed.'

She compressed her lips. 'I see.'

When the cyclo started off she looked back once, but didn't wave.

I began walking, and after ten minutes the woman in the chongsam was still with me, and after an hour there were two of them and I used right angles, windows, crowds, cabs and any kind of cover that would give me five seconds and a vanishing point, but I couldn't lose them, and at the end of another hour there were three, so it hadn't just been nerves, not just nerves.

7 JOHNNY CHEN.

Who are you?' I didn't move. 'My name's Jordan.'

Lamplight fell slanting across the rough timber wall.

'What do you want here?'

I couldn't see him. He was behind me.

'Some information.'

'But why come here?' He dug into the psoas muscle.

'Katie sent me.'

'Sent you?'

'She told me where to find you.'

The balcony was thirty feet up and there was nothing I could do anyway. By his tone he wasn't playing.

'What name did she tell you?'

'Johnny Chen.'

He began whistling softly, no actual tune.

My face was still bleeding from the flying glass.

'Open the door.'

I turned the loose brass handle.