Loman was still staring at me with his pale glass eyes.

'Look, if I start thinking in terms of life-and-death percentages it's going to sabotage my confidence. The thing is this. We've still got a mission running and the only way I can finish it is to get close to Shoda and this is the last chance we've got.'

Waited again.

I hate waiting.

The air was still like steam in here because they'd let the whole place run down and there wasn't any air-conditioning but there was a chill creeping through me as if winter had come.

They 're right. You shouldn't take the risk.

Now don't you start.

End-phase nerves. Normal, ignore.

You do in fact know what your chances are.

Shuddup and fuck off.

Then Loman said, 'I think this is for Mr Croder to decide.'

'If it doesn't take all day to get him.'

'He is near the signals console at all times.' Loman got up and gave his shoes another scrutiny. 'Will you talk to him or shall I?'

I thought that was nice of him. A top control in the field from London doesn't normally leave it to the ferret to contact the C of C and take part in the decision-making.

'Let me phone him right away,' I told him, and the feeling I had when I made my way round the chairs and tables and into the smoking-room was split right down the middle between total assurance that I could pull off a five-star spectacular and a numbing certainty that this was the day when I was going to the brink for the last time, and right over.

I asked for C of C.

'Yes?'

'Red Lotus, executive.'

I told him what I'd got in mind and he asked me to repeat it and I did that.

He said no.

'Sir, let me put it this way. If I come unstuck, you're not going to lose the mission, just the executive. My replacement's fully briefed and ready to take over.'

'He can't.'

I pictured Croder, thin, his face cut out of flint with a battle-axe, his black eyes showing nothing but the reflection of the telephone in his articulated metal hand.

'But he's the replacement, sir.'

No names.

'Yes, but from the information I've been given, you are in these circumstances unreplaceable. Your personal influence over the opposition is a special case.'

Voice like a knife being sharpened.

'That's my original point. I think it's strong enough to bring her down. Look, this isn't just a last desperate throw. I've given it a tremendous lot of thought. And you know my record, sir.'

Waited.

The thing was, this was something new. If I'd said I wanted to infilitrate a KGB operation or blow a checkpoint or bring a top-level defector across a frontier he'd have let me. But there was an exotic, untried element to the end-phase of Red Lotus, and its name was voodoo.

'Tell your control I'd like to talk to him.'

So I got Loman in and left him at the phone and went back into the salon and stood there with my arms folded and the chill seeping along the nerves because if Croder finally said no I'd lose the day and those snivelling little clerks in the records room would take a pen and fill in the blank space at the end of the operations report, mission unaccomplished, and if Croder finally said yes I'd have to go out there and face Shoda, alone and with no backups, no shields, no support and no escape route, no chance of getting out alive except the one I was ready to take and God knew what it was worth.

I could hear Flood, over by the stained-glass windows, whistling between his teeth. Katie was somewhere behind me; I didn't know what she was doing, I just knew what she was thinking. Pepperidge was standing quite still with his hands in his pockets, head down for a time; then he took a couple of steps towards me and stood close and said softly, 'Whatever we go into, old boy, I'll give you full measure.'

'I know.'

He turned away and gave me room, left me space to move in if I wanted to. I could hear Loman out there on the phone and thought, Jesus Christ, I should've stayed with him and insisted on him selling Croder my plan. On the other hand Loman would try and do that anyway because he wanted this mission finished so that he could take a plane back to London, of course the executive didn't have a chance of pulling it off until I vent out there, bloody tin medal for his sparrow's chest, he's always - no, that's unfair, he does a good job, don't needle the poor little bastard.

Nerves, last chance nerves.

'Would you stop that?'

I was looking across at Flood, didn't really know I'd been going to say it, whistling between his teeth, got on my nerves.

'Sorry, sir.'

But of course he'd got a lot to think about too because if I came unstuck he could be pushed into this mission within a matter of hours.

'Can I-'

Katie, close to me, somewhere behind me, but I never heard what she'd been going to say. Could she what? Get me anything, a drink? Could she ask me something and if so what, at a time like this? I never heard it all, would never hear it all, because Loman came in just then and we turned and looked at him.

'We have Mr Croder's approval.'

That was at 15:14 hours with the mid-afternoon sunlight slanting through the stained-glass windows, and we began waiting.

I went through the whole thing in my mind God knows how many times, testing it for faults and unnecessary risks and over-sanguine assumptions, testing it for possible surprises and unpredictable situations, breaking up the overall picture into bits and pieces and changing them around and putting them together again.

Long afternoon, it was a very long afternoon, with Flood manning the phone again, taking periodic calls from our people in the streets, the bell ringing in my guts every time, jangling along the nerves because we were now on a collision course with the deadline and the deadline was 21:14 plus a minute, two minutes for them to radio Shoda with the news that the Slingshots had landed in Prey Veng.

Tea, we had some tea, it revives you, nothing like a good hot cuppa, so forth, even in this stinking heat.

Then at 18:09 when the sun's light began dying in the stained-glass windows we got the signal from the second unit to say they'd flown to Phnom Penh and switched the contents of the twenty crates for obsolete typewriters and at 20:46 they signalled again to tell us the freighter was airborne on schedule from Phnom Penh and at 21:14 we got the final signal telling us it had landed on schedule in Prey Veng and seven minutes later our contacts in Saiboo Street reported that Shoda was leaving the house in a limousine with two escorts.

End-phase running.

31 END-PHASE.