It was the first time I'd mentioned it, and I watched him carefully. He'd been lucid for the past hour, except for that fact that the mike he was using was dead: none of the transmission dials were registering.

'When you leave here?'

'Yes. I need to go on with my work.'

He sat looking in front of him, not up at me. 'Your work?'

'My plans to destroy Shoda.'

He turned now and faced me, his eye rational. 'So.'

I couldn't tell if he'd remembered what I'd said when I'd first come here, or whether it was something new to consider. I thought I'd follow up, with the big question.

'If you agree to let me have the wavelength of the Shoda bug, I can use it very effectively, Colonel.'

He gazed at me for a time and then looked away. 'We shall see. We shall talk of that.'

So I had to wait, and in the afternoon he took off his kimono and put on his gi, moving to face the portrait of Funakoshi and giving the ret, the punctilious bow with the head lowered and the eyes down, expressing trust in an opponent.

He then worked out for an hour and went through Kanku and Jion, allowing me the privilege of watching. For a time there was no sound but the movement of his feet through the stances, and his deep, guttural kiai. The powdered earth, churned by the kicks and turns, floated above the surface of the floor. Again I noted his great speed and strength. It didn't reassure me.

Later he motioned me to sit with him on the rugs in the corner. His eye was calm, but his head turned a little sometimes, and I sat facing him with a kind of prayer running through my head. It was the first time in any mission I'd had to deal with a deranged mind, and in a man capable of overwhelming me with his bare hands.

'You wish to leave,' he said.

'Yes.'

'Why should I trust you?'

'With what?'

He moved a hand. 'With my presence here. I have enemies who would like to find me.'

'I understand that. But you can trust me because I am your cohei, Sempai.'

His subordinate in Shotokan.

'Is that sufficient?'

'Funakoshi would think so.'

His eye flicked to the portrait on the wall.

'Even so, you would be carrying my life in your hands, if I let you leave here.'

'I understand that too. It would be an honour, Sempai, that I would respect even at the cost of my own.'

It would have sounded less formal in English but the meaning was there. What had happened, after all? I'd come here by stealth, a stranger, killed one of his dogs and entered the privacy of his dwelling uninvited; yet he'd offered me food, which is basically an offer of life itself. He had also forgiven me for looking upon his maimed, grotesque countenance that he'd hoped to keep hidden from the world for the rest of his life. That was the least I owed him: his life.

'You are persuasive,' he said.

'It's not my intention. I hope simply to reassure.'

His head began moving and I held my breath and centred. He'd been slipping into the psychotic phase less often than yesterday, perhaps because he'd learned to trust me a little; but he was now having to make up his mind to trust me totally, and his brain was in overload. I sat perfectly still and faced him, as I'd learned to do, faced his one eye as it sighted from the edge of his riven cheekbone. I still found the effect chilling, transfixing; he was so certain that he was now in hiding and watching me from behind cover that there was a degree of transference: I half-believed that this wasn't his body, but some object that concealed him.

A rat squeaked in the silence, even this slight sound bringing shock. Cho hadn't heard it, deep in his meditation; his eye didn't change expression, which was one of fierce enquiry; I could have imagined a ray of light playing on my face, searching it.

I wanted to move but couldn't, daren't.

Wait.

All I could do.

Wait.

And then I heard his breath come, releasing. The turning of his head was so. gradual that for a moment I didn't catch it After a while he was facing me again, his eye calm.

*Very well, Cohei.'

I left the next morning.

Cho gave me the wavelength of the Shoda bug, but none of the tapes. They were 'his voices', as he put it, though I wasn't quite sure what he meant, unless they peopled his self-made prison. If he'd been normal it would have been easier for me: he would have given me the Shoda tapes for editing and analysis in Singapore; they offered the kind of information that an intelligence agent would give his soul for. But there was nothing I could do about it. They were his, and I couldn't steal them or force them out of him; they were his 'voices' and his obsession, and he couldn't see the logic of letting me have them to use as a weapon for Shoda's destruction.

But the wavelength alone was a breakthrough and I'd have to settle for that.

I asked him about the reference to the arrival of a 'consignment' on the Shoda tapes, but he said he didn't know what she meant. I asked him if she'd mentioned a missile, but drew blank again. I didn't want to press it, because he'd agreed to let me leave and I wasn't keen to have him change his mind.

He took me to the door that I'd never yet seen open. Outside were the dogs.

'Don't move,' he told me.

Six of the bastards. The seventh was lying at the edge of the jungle, a skeleton; they'd found it and dragged it here and picked it clean. This was their stamping-ground, the jungle floor beaten down and littered; they'd brought other carcasses here, half of them rotting.

When they saw me they went into the attack posture at once, ears flattening and the neck-muscle rising, the dry, mangy fur bristling. They had teeth like bright knives.

Colonel Cho was talking to them in a Chinese dialect: he'd had them brought here from the village, probably. But I didn't know whether he could control them or only believed he could; he lived half his life in fantasy, and this could be part of it. He was less predictable in a way than a raving lunatic; you couldn't tell reality from the dream, the nightmare.

'Ta shih shou jen! Pieh yao t'a!

Telling them I was a friend, presumably. Yes - he was putting his arm round my shoulders to show them, and I had an instant's mad idea that in this pose we should be asked to smile.

The bastards didn't look too impressed. They backed off a little but moved in restless circles, their heads hung low and their eyes up to watch me, a concerted snarling deep in their throats, didn't care for it; I tell you, I did not fucking well care for it, in a pack this size they were sudden death and the only man in control was stark raving mad, sweat running on me, only two options left, go back and stay with him until he had a brainstorm and did me in or walk out there through the dogs and let them do it.

'They will not attack you,' Cho said, and took his arm away.

Didn't ask him if he were sure, too much bloody pride.

'Thank you, Sempai.' Took six paces, turned, gave him the ret and turned again, not looking at the dogs because that's the first rule - if you look into their eyes they'll take it as a challenge and that's all the excuse they want, kept on walking, looking straight ahead and listening to the snarls they were making, getting louder because they'd stopped circling and started to follow, closing on my heels, look straight ahead, it's a pretty view, everything green and moist with a blue haze above the trees, something to remember but not for long if they get their bloody way, it'd be like sharks in a feeding frenzy, the first taste of blood sends them crazy, and what was he doing, Cho, turning his head like that, perhaps, turning it very slowly, sighting me from behind himself, deciding once and for all that I was going to give him away the minute I reached civilisation Ta shih shou jen! Pieh yao t'a!'