I said I hadn't.

'It's the deadly sisterhood of the Ninja, originally Japanese. Like the geishas, they were trained in singing and entertaining, see, so they could get access into the household of an enemy warlord, and just when he'd gotten her nice and cosy in his arms he'd end up with an icepick through the ear into the brain - one of their favourite tricks, in my language the ssu chieh wen - the kiss of death. You know something? I was in Phnom Penh maybe around six months -'

A beeper sounded and he broke off at once and went to the desk and picked up his gun. 'You just stay there, Jordan, I'll be right back.'

He went out through the door where the girl had gone, not the one where he'd brought me in at gunpoint. So this was the alarm I'd tripped on my way up the outside staircase, and there must be another one covering the entrance he was going to check on now. I was tempted to get out of my chair and take a look at the crates and the other two desks and the Japanese cabinet but I stayed where I was because I didn't know this man yet, and I didn't know if he'd simply asked the girl beforehand to trigger the beeper and give him an excuse to leave the room so that he could see what I did while he was gone. I hadn't got access yet, the most vital phase of the mission, access to Shoda, and maybe he could give it to me.

He came back through the same door and went to the desk and dropped a small chamois bag onto it, using a key on the padlock. 'Chu-Chu!' The key stuck and he had to worry it. 'Chu-Chu, c'mon in here!'

She was wearing a cheap cotton shift now, and looked younger than ever, glancing at me and standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, watching Chen.

'Hold out your hand, sweetheart.' He opened his own, palm upwards. ''Hand - this thing, right?'

She obeyed him hesitantly, and he fished in the leather bag and dropped a ruby onto her palm. 'A present, okay? Worth a thousand dollars, maybe more.' He stood over her, pleased with himself, with her, with his gift. 'You're my thousand dollar baby.' She gazed steadily at the gem; it was cut, polished and glimmering on her palm, and I sensed the uncertainty in Johnny Chen now: he'd 'picked her up for peanuts', probably from a refugee camp on the Cambodian border or from parents who needed food for themselves more than a daughter's mouth to feed, and now she was his, Johnny Chen's, but he didn't know how to get through to her. Perhaps on an impulse he'd taken over a life, and wasn't sure what to do with it.

'Present, Chu-Chu. Present.' He circled his hands, awkwardly. 'Means I love you.' He kissed her on the brow and touched her cheek and came away. 'You can stay here now,' gesturing to the divan. 'Chu-Chu stay, okay?'

She walked away with the gem held out in front of her, gazing down at its colour; I was aware of the softness of the nape of her neck, the back of her knees.

'Okay, she's just a kid,' Chen said defensively. 'But kids like her get raped every day over there, up at the borders, in the villages. She doesn't get raped, she gets loved, okay?'

'I can see that.'

'Okay. So what's the deal, Jordan? You want to know if Little Kiss-of-Steel has this weapon you're talking about?'

'Very much.'

'If she doesn't have it, she'd sure as hell maim it.'

'Have you ever seen one?'

'No.' He toyed with the chamois bag. 'But I've seen some of the specs. I'd say if that thing got into the wrong hands in Southeast Asia we could see the whole damn place go up. It can knock choppers out of the sky, right?'

'Any aircraft up to 30,000 feet.'

The bag hit the desk with a soft thump. 'Thirty thousand, Jesus Christ. And hand-held? That's more than the Stinger can do.'

'By a factor of three.'

He thought for a while, his eyes down; then he pulled another black cigarette out of the packet and lit up and looked at me through the smoke. 'How long have you known Katie McCorkadale?'

We had lunch.'

'You must have impressed her.'

'Perhaps she's just a good judge of character.'

'I guess. I mean, when Katie tells me I can trust somebody, it's for real. She's never been wrong.'

'That's why you had a gun in my back.'

'I didn't know you were from Katie.' He picked some tobacco from his lip. 'So I've told you what kind of woman this Mariko Shoda is. You still want to meet her?'

'It's why I came.'

'Thing is,' he said, watching me obliquely, 'she doesn't want to meet you, right? Weren't you the guy in the limo, few nights ago? There wasn't anything in the news, but there's a whole bunch of grapevines in Singapore.'

'She got the wrong impression,' I said. 'I don't mean her any harm.' That too was for the grapevine.

'Then you're pretty unusual.' He straightened on the bamboo chair and picked up the phone, dialling. 'Couple of months back,' he told me, 'someone dive-bombed a monastery where she stays sometimes, blew it apart. She wasn't home.' On the phone he asked for Sam. 'That gal has so many people who want her dead, she's kind of jumpy. I guess that's why she gave you the grief in the limo. Sam? How's things? Listen, do something for me. I believe there's a guy named Lafarge in town from Bangkok. He's due out of the airport some time in the next few days but I don't know which flight. I know he's made a reservation because I picked it up when I was coming through Anna Siang's office. Can you hit the computer for me?' He dropped ash into the jade bowl on his desk. 'Okay, get back to me, Sam.'

He put the phone down and crossed his spider-thin legs.

'Like I was starting to say, I was up in Phnom Penh a while back and took a chance and checked out an illegal airstrip out of the city. We have to do that, the flyers. We need to know where the strips are and how to get in there if ever we have to - and you never know when. There's hundreds, see - make it thousands. Anyway, I happened to see some troops drawn up in some kind of a training camp, place was thick with barbed wire but you could catch a glimpse of what was going on. The guys were being reviewed by their colonel, as best I could see, a tiny little guy but absolutely impeccable, like they all were. Even from that distance I could see they were all officer rank, by the uniform. Then I kind of put a few things together - the location of the camp and the obviously elite performance going on, see, and then I got it. That tiny little guy was Mariko Shoda, because, believe me, there isn't another female colonel around in this neck of the woods. I mean, just to see the salute she snapped up - even at that distance I knew I was in the presence of real style. So that's Shoda too, she's -'

The phone rang and he picked it up. 'Yes? Sure.' He pulled a scratch pad towards him and got a pen from a drawer. 'OK. I have that, Sam. And listen, I never asked you about this guy, okay? I didn't even call you up. With the you-know-what connection, if there's any trouble it's going to be my ass. Or head.'

He asked about someone called Lee and said give him my best and rang off, tearing the top sheet from the pad and giving it to me. 'Okay, Dominic Lafarge is a French-born naturalised Thai subject and he's booked out on that flight in the morning. He got himself naturalised because he works for Shoda and she calls the shots. From the grapevine I use, Lafarge has lived in Thailand for the past ten or eleven years and at present he's the major source of the weaponry flowing into Shoda's hands and out again to the rebel forces in Indo-China.' He pressed his cigarette butt into the bowl. 'I don't know what he's doing in Singapore and I don't know why-he's flying to Bangkok in the morning, but if you asked me to make a bet I'd say he's very likely visiting his boss, because that's where she is right now.' He got a fresh cigarette. 'Make any sense?'

'This grapevine. How reliable is it?'

I hadn't expected this amount of luck, so early. I was desperate for access, because once I found a way in to Shoda and her organisation I could leave the deadly environment of the open ground and go clandestine and that would give me a tenfold chance of survival. And it would give me the mission.

'The grapevine I use,' Chen said, 'is better than most. What I've just told you about Lafarge is true, vouched for. I'm in the arms trade, okay? I therefore make it my business to know the others. So if you aim to tag on to this guy tomorrow you'll at least know he's the right guy. But what's going to happen to you at the other end of that flight, God knows - and don't hold me responsible. You'll be moving in to Shoda's territory.'

I got up and walked around and looked at the photographs and the black lace glove and the dried monkey's head and the cigarette packet with the bullet hole in it and then came back to talk to Johnny Chen and took a risk so big that my skin crawled.

'If I took that flight, I wouldn't want you to tell anyone.'

He got up and crushed out a butt and stuck his thin hands into his hip pocket and shrugged. 'It's your ass, Jordan, if anything goes wrong. But if anyone finds out you've got plans to take that flight, it won't be from me. I don't want your death on my hands.'

I cleaned my face up in the small sandalwood-scented bathroom before he showed me out through the back way, down some stairs and across a freight-storage hangar and through a door leading into an alleyway stacked with emptied crates and rubbish bins and oil drums, with only one high yellow lamp at the corner of the warehouse.

'Happy landings,' he said, and went back inside.

I spent thirty minutes checking the riverside environment before I walked into the open street and kept to whatever cover I could find, trying to talk myself out of the half-knowledge that I was driving myself into a trap and talk myself into believing that I'd got access - access to Shoda, and that tonight the mission had started running.

8 FLIGHT 306.

Will Mr Martin Jordan please pick up the nearest paging phone?' I didn't move.

It could only be Chen.

If I took that flight, I wouldn't want you to tell anyone.

I don't want your death on my hands.