'I get it. Penang. People think we speak the same language, you know that? They okay?' Looking at the eggs.

'Excellent.' Penang was the race-track just across the border.

'You want anything, you name it.'

He went away on his small, careful feet, his shoulders a little hunched against the rains of Providence. There's nothing, my good friend, that I want, though it's kind of you to ask, unless perhaps you can by some ethereal magic erase the beginning of this day and run reality through once more and render the street out there innocent of the death-bringers, so that I might stroll through the doors and wander among the stalls and the handcarts and the colourful canvas awnings and pick perhaps at a ripe guava, paying too much for it and loving the merchant for his greed, which would equal mine, though mine would be the greed for life itself.

Someone shouted and the skin crawled suddenly, tightening across the skull, a man protesting that a cyclo had nearly knocked him down. I'll have to do better than this, my masters, better than this if I'm going to outdo Manif Kishnar when he comes for me.

'You want coffee?'

Said no, because I couldn't judge the timing yet, didn't know precisely when I would need the stimulus of the caffeine before its effects died away and left a treacherous dip in the energy-wave.

'No time in the day when breakfast doesn't go down just right, what? You from the Old Country?"

Red face, clipped white moustache, club tie, a jolly laugh.

'Excusez-moi, m'sieur, mais je ne park pas l'anglais.'

'Ah. Sorry, my mistake. Er - par-dong.' Hurried away, waving.

Think nothing of it, old boy, and good luck with the gee-gees, I'd try a little flutter on Kinross Lad in the fifth race, I think Ismail's riding and it'll be soft going after the rain.

15:34 and Pepperidge hadn't phoned so I went upstairs and got on with the good work and put him out of my mind because I didn't know what time it would be when it would become, across the span of a single second, too late for him to phone, too late for me to set up the last-chance thing.

I took sightings again and saw that two of them had gone, to be replaced by a slight woman in a track-suit with International Fitness Clubs printed across the front and a male European, Teutonic, very cool, adept at the sweeping glance that took in everything.

Still only five. They thought that was enough, and of course it was, because there'd be a dozen more in the background waiting to move in and man the mobile trap if I tried to leave the hotel.

This time you mill please ensure that he does not survive.

Shoda.

I mean, it's feasible, plausible, that a woman like that, vicious and powerful and so on, could easily have been that kind of child - resourceful and adaptable and savage. Wouldn't you think?

There was nothing in my room or any of the vacant rooms that would make any kind of weapon better than my hands, but what made me nervous was the idea of looking for weapons at all: I couldn't remember doing it before, even when things were touching the brink of extinction. My hands were lethal and I knew that.

It was the first hint that my nerve had started to go.

It wasn't the waiting. I'd waited before, in Moscow and Bangkok and Tangier, waited for hours, for days, and kept the nerves intact, operational. It was Shoda. She kept coming into my thoughts, the memory of her face with its high cheekbones and its wide, luminous eyes, the clear brown under the night-black hair, the face of the angel of death.

Someone asked her how she could have possibly managed to survive seven months in the jungle at that age, and she said it was easy, once you became an animal.

Voodoo is real. It exerts its influence all over the world, not just in places like Tahiti. It is the stage, insidiously reached, where fear becomes belief.

What the hell is that bastard Pepperidge doing?

Where fear begins to ask questions like that, questions that shoot into the mind through the defences you thought were impregnable.

Why hadn't he phoned?

Like bullets coming into the brain, already there before you even hear the shot.

Because if he didn't phone before nightfall I knew there wasn't a chance left for me - I knew now.

She watched the monkeys, and ate only the berries and things they ate, so as not to get poisoned. She killed a tiger.

Shoda.

Her name was voodoo.

So, all right, the nerve was going and something would have to be done about it and I set up a whole tactical scenario from one end of the building to the other and from top to bottom, creating a dozen situations where he could come for me, Kishnar, and I could get clear and survive or engage with him and kill him and survive, but it was an intellectual exercise to keep panic away because I knew what the deadline was now, the deadline for Pepperidge to call before it was too late for me to set up the last-chance thing: it was the time, the hour, the minute, when Manif Kishnar landed in Singapore.

Unless, of course, for some reason unknown to me he hadn't been sent for yet. That had been an assumption on my part and assumptions are always dangerous and sometimes lethal. He could still be taking his time, leaving Bangkok the day after tomorrow, not hurrying, confident, perfectly confident, knowing I was in a trap and held ready for him.

That would mean I'd have two more nights and a day to work something out and surely to God I wouldn't need more than thirty-six hours to set something up that could get me away from this bloody place with its doors and passages and windows and stairs and skylights and blind spots and escape routes spinning around in my mind with the nerves rubbing raw while I soaked in my sweat and listened, listened the whole time for the sound of the phone down there.

'Mr Jordan?'

Lily Ling.

I went to the staircase.

'I'm here.'

'Telephone, please.'

'Thank you.'

16:21.

Pepperidge. I went down the stairs, the nerves going slack like the cut string of a cello, the legs without any strength in them, where the hell had he been all this time?

I picked up the phone and said hello.

'Mr Jordan?'

'Yes.'

'This is Sayako. Kishnar has just left Bangkok.'

Three hours' flight.

Countdown.

15 WHISTLING.