They were right - Pepperidge, Katie. This was a major breathrough. My target for the mission was Mariko Shoda and in the temple in Thailand I'd been close to her physically for the first time and now I was listening to her voice - as it issued orders to one of her army commanders.

There was massive data coming in for questioning and analysis and I'd have to take it in stages.

One: Johnny Chen's place was bugged.

But I'd have to get the answers from Cho with infinite care because he'd come close to killing me five minutes ago when he'd opened the door and found me outside. God knew how , he'd sensed me there, but he lived in the wild and was junglesensitive. He hadn't been startled, and his head had turned slowly to sight me, and in his one eye there was the light of rage. His body was also moving, subtly, his breath drawing deeply from his abdomen as he gathered force, his right shoulder lifting by degrees as he brought the arm back, preparing the vector that would bring the edge of his sword-hand slicing against the carotid artery in my neck. I'd initiated this blow often enough to recognise its preparation.

He was ready now and when I spoke I think it was within a half-second of my death.

'Sempai, Funakoshi watches you.'

I waited.

I'd run through the whole gamut of options open to me and none of them would have worked: I knew that. But I'd remembered something that had got through to him when he'd seen me here for the first time and was ready to attack me for my flagrant intrusion: I'd addressed him punctiliously as my sempai, my respected superior in the sacred tradition of Shotokan, and it had given him pause.

I went on waiting. Movement in him had ceased and his mind alone was active, its dark side, ravaged and traumatised and vengeful, willing his body to destroy this creature, this threat to his sacrosanct privacy, while the light of reason flickered also within him, a candle's flame beset by the wind. Then it was over, and his head turned to face me.

'Come in. I want you to see my communications centre.'

The tension went out of me and as the left brain began functioning again I noted that whenever this man's mind returned to reason, he had no memory of his lapse into psychosis.

The room was small but walled on three sides with dials, signal-strength meters, switches, charts and time-schedules. It must have been the original receiving-transmitting studio, and it had escaped the worst of the bombing. Cho went to the ripped vinyl chair on the dais in front of the main panel and began running the tapes, ignoring me as the signals came through again. There were cassettes everywhere, stacked on the shelves and along the console, with boxes of blanks bearing the Sanyo shipping label.

Then the voice of Shoda came again, its sibilants lingering, the consonants frank and articulated.

Cho turned his head. 'That was monitored some days ago. She was giving instructions for the British agent named Jordan to be brought to his death.'

'Really.'

'You are a fortunate man.'

He went back to his editing, and when signals came in English, French or Russian I listened to them: when they were in a language unknown to me I worked on the data that was still coming in.

Two: Chen's place was bugged. By whom?

Not by Cho. I'd noticed that whenever an English signal came through he stopped it short, even though one of the dialogues had been on a high level politically, mentioning the British prime minister.

Chen's place could have been bugged by one of his competitors in the drug trade but I doubted it: he wasn't big-rime, running a whole network. Leave it for now.

Three: Who had bugged Shoda's communications?

Sayako?

'Sayako-san,' I'd asked her over the telephone at the Red Orchid, 'are you in Shoda's organisation?'

'I have access to information.'

Sayako, then; yes, it was logical. This could have been the signal she'd picked up just before she'd warned me - the one I'd just heard, 'giving instructions for the British agent named Jordan to be brought to his death'.

Another signal was coming through in English, and I listened to it before Cho cut it short. It was from the flight deck of a North-West Orient jet, the accent Japanese.

Not a bug.

I began listening the whole time now as Cho made notes and fast-forwarded some of the signals, running others back to monitor again. I'd have said at this stage that he was searching for specified transmissions and I could have been right, but I was beginning to realise that there was no order in this material, no sequence. He was picking up bugs in four languages but among a whole range of random signals, a lot of them aircraft, some of them hams, two of them radio-taxis in Singapore. What worried me was that he didn't edit out the garbage.

He should be doing that.

And wasn't.

He looked up suddenly, fixing me with his eye. 'He is always late, that one.'

Taxi-driver.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

'Late?' I asked him.

'Yes. They will fire him soon, you mark my words.'

He turned back to the console and listened to a signal in French, Chinese accent, aircraft to base, while I tried to think how to get out of him what I had to get, because he was just listening at random, picking up whatever signals he could find as he turned the dials - and he was just as interested in what some bloody taxi-driver was talking about in Singapore as he was in what Shoda was giving him.

Check that.

'Where is the bug, Colonel, on Mariko Shoda?'

He flinched at the name and I expected him to react as he had before, but it was all right this time: we could talk about her now. 'I am not sure. I think in one of her limousines, or perhaps an aircraft. The wavelength tells me nothing.' There was some speech in what sounded like Laotian in the background and in a moment he said without changing his tone, 'This man is drug-running, but he is an amateur. It is a bug placed by the narcotics branch. It will be amusing, won't it, when they catch him? The spider and the fly?'

No. Not in the least amusing. This poor bastard's mind was like the console here, filled with random signals dial had no pattern. When that sabre had swung down and cleft his face it had turned his brain into a mental kaleidoscope.

All I could do was put questions.

'Have you any idea, Colonel, who placed the bug in Shoda's communications system?'

'No.' But I didn't think he'd heard that, or understood.

'Do you think it could have been a woman named Sayako?'

His hand stopped moving the dial and his body became totally still.

He didn't turn his head, didn't look at me, just sat there. I didn't know what I'd started in him; I was ready for anything. No movement in him for what seemed minutes, then his head lowered and something fell onto the chipped, grimed shelf of the console, glinting in the light. It was something so extraordinary to issue from such a man that I felt the strangeness of compassion, the stirring of a mood in me that I believed was long ago buried within the shell of indifference demanded by the life I'd chosen. And so we sat there in the cramped, cluttered room in the Laotian jungle, a foreign agent and a former chief of intelligence, while on the console the human tear made a dark patch that had already begun drying.

Colonel Cho turned his head at last and looked across at me, his riven cheek glistening.

'No,' he whispered, 'it was not Sayako.'

At first light I woke with a jerk of the nerves but there was no threat that I could see. It was simply that I'd slept with me subconscious awareness that my host might at any time go pitching over the edge of his fragile sanity and come for me.

In the hours of the morning he spent his time hacking at the creeper and writing in his journal, and towards noon he went into the radio room and talked into one of the microphones at the transmitter console, speaking sometimes in his own tongue, Laotian, and sometimes in one of the Chinese dialects. I stayed near the open door, and once went in, to ask him if I could take a message with me when I left here.