'Too-shay.'

'I heard some shots down there, earlier. What was happening?'

'Well, sometimes one o' the coolies or the freight-handlers or the mule-drivers gets on a bummer - you know, has a bad trip? - and they can just take off and go crazy all over everybody, so the troops or the cops shoot 'em down, because we can't have that kinda thing around a place like that, you know, everyone's so nervous and it could start something. Or I guess it could've been some dealer on the cheat and the supplier wouldn't stand for it or the buyer got pissed off, you know - it isn't too different from the Wild West with the gold rush on, except the money that changes hands in the Triangle is about a thousand - make that a million - times as much on any given day. It's a jungle, see. You think that's a jungle down there? It's just a daisyfield.'

We levelled off at ten thousand feet with the heading southeast.

'How long do you plan to stay in the trade?'

I was talking partly to keep him awake. He'd looked dog-tired when he'd brought this plane in three hours ago and he couldn't have had more than two hours' sleep, given thirty minutes to bring the wall down, three in a bed. We were flying a petrol tank and the fumes were no help.

'How long do I what?'

'Plan to keep working?'

'Give it another couple o years, maybe around that. By then I'll have stacked up three or four million bucks an' I guess I'll be ready for Acapulco or Monte-Carlo for a while, ease off a little.'

'Is there much rivalry between you actual pilots?'

'Not usually. Get personal feuds, sometimes, but we don't often try and cheat each other out of trips.'

'You wouldn't bug each other, say.'

'How's that again?'

'You wouldn't slip a bug into a rival's communications.'

'Guess not. We all kinda know who's goin' where, an' we keep our asses clean. Bugs? Nope, I never heard o that.'

Noted.

We came down from our ceiling at 05:14 over South Vietnam and called up the tower in Nah Trang. There was cloud cover across the coast, topped with a gilding of light from the east, and we dropped through it into the dark again.

'Johnny said you'd get me through the barriers, is that right?'

'Sure. Don't show your Thai papers, okay? Gets too political.'

He left me on the terminal side of the tarmac at 05:52 with a wind rattling the shutters on the cafeteria and the heads of the palm trees rustling, shining under the floodlights.

'You want another ride, Marty, check with Chen. I'm always around.'

'I'm much obliged. And I hope you make it.'

'Make what?'

'Two more years.'

He gave a shrug and a wave and left me, a cloud of smoke across his shoulder as he walked away.

I'd need some secure transport when I landed in Singapore so I went to the line of telephones and called the British High Commission but she wasn't there, Katie. Then I gave I the operator the routing code for Cheltenham but the phone went on ringing and I hung up at twenty.

If it's any help, old boy, I'm marking hard at this end and I'm in constant signals with people in London and the field.

All right, but who the hell were the 'people in London' and who were his contacts in the field and why couldn't he get that bloody phone manned near the mast in Cheltenham, for God's sake, because I needed direction and I needed it now - as well as a safe-house in Singapore because there was nowhere else I could use as a base that'd let me keep the mission running, and the police could have identified Veneker by this time and if it went into the news media the Shoda team would be on the watch for me again and Kishnar would close in. Chen's place was hazardous now because we weren't certain that Sayako had bugged it and if it were someone else they could have mounted surveillance on it as soon as they'd found out the bug had died.

There was a Malaysian Airline flight out of Nah Trang at 16:58 and I booked on it and tried Cheltenham five times while I was waiting and drew blank again. That bloody man was as much use to me as a dead duck.

We were ten minutes late on take-off but landed early on a tail wind at 19:47, the moon behind clouds and puddles on the tarmac after rain, the air humid and scented with blossoms. I used my Thai papers and they didn't hold me up with any questions and I used a side exit marked Airport Personnel Only and found myself in an alleyway and came round to the rear of the taxi station and began looking for cover, man in a raincoat stepping from a doorway 'Excuse me.'

Not quite sure of me in the pilot's cap and sunglasses. Then he nodded.

'Good flight?'

Pepperidge.

'Yes. What-'

'First thing is to get you off the street, come on.'

He took me to a car with smoked windows and diplomatic plates, Katie at the wheel.

Style, give him that.

22 THE CLINIC.

'What did you try?'

'I tried to overdose on Valium.' Thin, pale, hollow-eyed, still young, thirty-odd. 'But you can take a whole bottle of that stuff and it won't work for you.'

'That was the last time?'

Two male nurses zeroed in on a man going towards the door and got hold of him gently.

'Yes.'

'How long ago?' I asked him.

'A week. That's why they sent me here.'

Wife and two kids killed in a car smash. He'd just picked up the phone and the police clerk had said, 'Is that Mr David Thomas, please?'

How do people stand it?

'Feel any better?' I asked him. 'Any different?'

'I suppose so. Thing is, when I get out of here, and go back to the house where we all -' He couldn't go on.