'Shoda didn't think so.'

He was watching me intently. 'I can well imagine. Such a thing would have incensed her, as a personal affront. What action did she take?'

'She put her top hit-man onto me.'

He put his bloodied knife onto the table, carefully, without taking his eyes off me. 'Kishnar?'

'Yes.'

'When?'

'Three or four days ago.'

Short silence. 'Yet you are still alive. Do you know that is remarkable?'

'He didn't get a chance to close in.'

'But he will.'

'He'll try.'

He looked away at last and slipped into one of his contemplative phases; I was beginning to know him. We had some fruit and he cleared the table and told me to sit with him in the corner where the rugs were, and some half-wrecked chairs.

'I begin to see why you expect to succeed in your mission,' he said quietly, 'where others have failed. A mission of this order is not new to you.'

'Not really.'

'You make a formidable antagonist.'

'I've upset a few people in my time.'

'And you would make a formidable ally, if I decided to take you into my confidence. An ally against Shoda.'

'As I told you, Colonel, that's why I came.'

'Quite so.'

Making a bit of progress, but oh, Christ, I wasn't at all sure of that because his head was turning again and all I could see was that one eye sighting me from behind what he believed was cover, and I thought I knew what was happening: these relapses of his into psychosis weren't haphazard; they happened when he was suddenly afraid he'd made himself vulnerable. It didn't seem to make sense that he'd just offered, virtually, to let me become an ally, and then suddenly retreated; but in fact it did. He felt he'd put too much trust in me, and it could be dangerous.

I waited, because I couldn't do anything else. If I said a wrong word it could make him enraged, violent, and in this place I wouldn't stand a chance.

His head came back to face me, and my nerves felt a chill. He was two people, this man, and one of them potentially deadly.

'We shall see,' he said, and got up from the frayed rug where he'd been sitting and left me, his bare feet padding across the earth.

He didn't talk to me for the rest of the day, except for an occasional word in passing. He spent his time hacking at the creepers that were threatening to smother the doorways and a window, and I helped him, getting the machete that I'd left outside with the gear I'd dropped with. In the late afternoon he wrote at the long redwood table; it looked like a journal: the book was as big as a telephone directory and leather-bound. Two or three times I turned to find him sighting me, even though we hadn't been speaking; it was obvious that he was giving me a lot of thought, and that some of his thoughts led him to distrust me. I didn't find it easy to turn my back on him; his bare feet wouldn't make a sound on the earth.

What I had to think about before anything else wasn't to find a way of getting information out of him, information on Shoda, but to find a way of leaving this place alive. I had absolutely no protection here. Cho had kept himself in regular training and from the kata I'd seen was totally capable of killing me, and not by stealth; and even if I managed to placate him the whole time and not let a wrong word slip out, the dark side of his personality could suddenly decide that I was here to betray him, and then he'd come for me.

And even if I could kill him in self-defence, if he came for me, there were the dogs: they'd smell death, and seek the carrion, and find me here.

When night came he lit oil lamps and we had supper, but he said nothing about Shoda. It was as if she'd never been mentioned, and it occurred to me that as well as his intense bouts of paranoia he might experience lapses in memory, and lose its content, wholly or partially. I wanted to test this out, but it was too dangerous. The first time I'd spoken Shoda's name he'd reacted violently. For all I knew, he might have completely lost the conversation we'd had earlier in the day.

In the end I decided to sleep on it. He was behaving now as a dutiful host, showing me where the running water was to be had, and explaining the system he had of catching it from the heavy rains and directing it into a reservoir. There was no bed here, he apologised, but he himself slept on a straw mattress, and gave me one to use. When he doused the lamps I curled up in a corner of the room with the machete underneath the edge of a rug and within easy reach.

'We shall talk tomorrow,' was all he said, and this confirmed my assumption that he'd spent a lot of his time thinking about me and what I'd told him. He'd got the data, and needed time to assess it.

That was fair enough, but I had no way of knowing that he might not decide at some time in the dark hours that I was too much of a danger to him and slaughter me out of hand, as he'd done with the rat.

Not easy to lie there, uncertain; not easy to sleep. It was the same out there in the jungle; its creatures slept always at the brink of death, and knew it, and knew what it meant when a scream came suddenly, close or distant: the remorseless cycle of life was going on, red in tooth and claw under the rising moon.

I didn't know what time it was when I woke, disturbed by sounds. I'd chosen this corner of the enormous room because it was on the opposite side from the wall of creepers where the snake had hung, and dropped. A rat had moved across my legs, earlier, and I'd jerked them and it had gone. There'd been a cry of a night bird soon afterwards, and I'd been brought awake with my skin crawling, coming out of a dream that I didn't remember except for a lingering visual trace of coils and shadows. Now it was different, the sounds coming to me from across the room; they were human.

Voices, I believed. They were faint, but I could hear their rhythm changing, and their tone. There was more than one person speaking; it had the sound of dialogue.

Or it was a dream and I waited for some kind of data to come in, lying so still that my own breathing was inaudible. Moonlight was striking softly across the earth floor; it came in rays, filtering through the creepers on the far wall; in it I saw something on the move, small, longer than a rat, some sort of stoat, a predator, its thin tail held stiffly behind as it darted suddenly and made its kill, with nothing more this time than a scuffling, the teeth going into the throat before the cry could come.

The voices didn't stop, and for a time I lay listening to them and at last surfaced through the twilight zone and knew for certain I was now awake and that the voices were still going on.

Cho had lain down in the corner where he slept, beneath the picture of Funakoshi; he wasn't there now. I got up and moved to the centre of the room and turned slowly until I got the direction of the sound; then I went over there, to the door in the south wall that I'd never seen open. The voices were louder here, and the words audible.

Radio.

No. There was no consistency: it wasn't a programme.

... But I told him there was absolutely no certainty of that. So what was his reaction? He simply said we would be going ahead in any case, since the ambassador wanted to.

Yes, radio, then, but taped. These were tapes I was listening to, being played over to check the contents.But I'm damned if I'm going to give in to him. The prime minister's quite adamant on that score - we dig our heels in, she told me, and tell them -we're not going to budge. All right, sir, what it I tell Blakeney? Tell him to go to hell. The real issue Et je vous assure, M'sieur le Consul, que nous aliens faire tout le necessaire pour produire le resultat que nous cherchons. C'est tout a fait impossible de faire autrement, en consideration des nouvelles de Paris, surtout - As I guess you know. But if there's anything that sounds urgent, call me. Will do. When did you eat? God knows. Let's have a snort!

20 THE RAT.

This time it was a woman's voice on the tape. Colonel Cho was watching me intently. 'Do you know who is speaking?'

'No.'

'It is the voice of Shoda.'

The sibilants were silky and drawn out, emphasising certain words, but the tone of her voice was harsher than I'd imagined, carrying a deep energy, filling the small studio, commanding, authoritative.

There was a break in transmission, and Cho stopped the recorder.

'Do you understand Cambodian, Mr Jordan?'

'No. What was she saying?'

'She was ordering one of her army chiefs to hold back the mobilisation of his forces until the shipment arrives. She also told him that it was essential for him to remain in close liaison with her other forces, to avoid a precipitate action.'