'Fade. They won't be interested in you after that.'

I sensed his hesitation as he stared at the name on the envelope, Harrison, J. MacKenzie. He was wondering why I was doing a drop in a public place and involving other people, and what would happen when the surveillance team asked for the envelope.

But they wouldn't.

'Okay, sir. Do I report back to Cheltenham?'

'I'll do that.' I checked my watch. 'You've got less than two minutes. Leave the bag here.'

He put it down. 'Do I go out by -'

'No, this way.'

I took him past the kitchen and into the courtyard at the rear. Rain in the lamplight, falling straight down, smelling of steel.

'Use that door in the wall across there. The car's on the other side.'

Toyota.'

'Right.'

He slipped the envelope into his mac and gave me a sudden straight look. 'You be all right, will you?'

'Never say the.'

He nodded and ducked through the rain towards the door.

I turned back into the hotel and went along the passage, picking up his bag and putting it behind the desk, and that was when the heavy booming sound came and the slats in the shutters were lit with a white flash and I stood with my eyes squeezed shut - no, oh no, Mother of God forgive me.

17 CRUCIFIX.

Rain on the roof. Underneath its sound I listened to the silence, tuning the rain out, listening to the silence. But even then I was picking up small sounds that came into the silence and faded: a distant voice on another floor of the hotel; a door shutting; the far faint note of a ship's siren from the river.

It was necessary, vital, to keep the steady drumming of the rain tuned out and to identify every small sound in the undertow of the silence, because he would come for me barefoot, and my only chance, here on the fifth floor, would be the ability to catch any slight sound he might make: the creak of a floorboard, the rustle of his sleeves as he brought his arms up in the final instant, the jerk of his breath.

Dark - pitch dark.

The lights had been burning when I'd reached here, halfway along the corridor, a minute ago, four dim bulbs under dusty silk shades with burn-marks on them. Now they were dark. The switch was not in the corridor, but round the corner by the stair well. That was how I knew he was there: he needed the dark.

Dead man's shoes.

In the last few seconds I suppose he'd make a rush and all I'd know about it would be the sudden change in the air pressure and the breath blocking in his throat and the hot sharp bite of the wire before I could She moved.

The rain drumming, louder here than in the other place, would Al find the bag behind the desk?

In a dead man's shoes, dear Mother of God.

Stirred beside me.

He came at me in a flash and I screamed The hands of a child, still.

'Fuckee, fuckee?'

Her small pointed breasts against me, the smell of her as she moved close and held onto me, not held me, held onto me, there's a difference.

'No,' I said and drew a long breath and lay still, listening to the only sound that had crossed the bridge of nightmare into reality: the rain on the roof, louder here because it was falling on corrugated iron, and maybe that was why she was frightened, and would also be frightened of thunder.

So I put my arms round her, bring her child's body curving into the arch of my own. She mistook me and opened her legs and began moving, and I whispered, 'No, Chu-Chu, no fuckee.'

'No?'

'You must sleep,' I said. She stopped moving and held me now in a different way, not dutifully like a prostitute but almost tenderly, for her: there'd been no tenderness for her to receive or express for a long time, I suppose, in the refugee camp, unless Chen had thought it necessary to teach her again, in between the fuckee.

At some time in the next few minutes she fell asleep, her head in the hollow of my shoulder, and I forgot about her and the rage came back, the self-rage, scalding, because when I'd walked out of the Red Orchid it had been in a dead man's shoes: Veneker's.

I hadn't been thinking.

It was like a dog-pack tearing at my throat, the guilt, I couldn't shake it off. Sleep was the only anodyne, and even then I saw it again, the white flash in the slats of the shutters, heard it again, the dull booming, and Al's voice, startled, what was that, for Christ's sake?

Veneker.

You be all right, will you?

He'd been thinking of me, of my welfare, knowing that I was in the middle of massive surveillance and knowing from Pepperidge that I was up against Shoda - he'd hesitated, hadn't liked leaving me there on my own, Veneker, a man used to helping people out, getting them through if he could, I'd known men like that and he was one of them and it was my honour, my everlasting privilege, and all I'd done for him was send him straight into a booby-trap and let him get blown apart, oh Mother of God have mercy on my soul.

Chen had seen the rage, felt it. 'So what happened?'

'Wheel came off.'

He'd told me to come in, shut the metal door and reset the alarm. 'A wheel came off?"

Bureau idiom. 'Someone got killed.' Very intense, and he stared at me with his lidless eyes and decided not to say anything more. He was tense himself, shut-faced, and I said, 'Sorry about your friend.' The co-pilot of Flight 306.

'You went out there, didn't you?'

'Yes.'

'What was - I mean did he look -' and I waited, then he said, 'what the fuck difference does it make? Come on upstairs.'

In the huge cluttered room he asked me, 'What did you come here for, Jordan?'

'Shelter.'

'From the rain?'

'From people.'