'Thank you. Yes, in Bangkok.'

'I was there once.' Hunched over a loaded Husqvarna with a man's head in the sights, showing faintly in the aureole of the temple across the square.

'My family is there,' she said softly. 'One of my sisters is a dancer, with the Royal Thai Junior Ballet.'

'You must be very proud.' An exchange of the niceties, while the car ploughed through the flooded streets. How can I get close to Mariko Shoda, can you tell me that? Not really.

'Yes,' she was saying later, 'but tomorrow we shall have sunshine again, though it will be humid, of course.'

'Sticky.'

She gave a little laugh, covering her mouth. 'Sticky, yes!'

I leaned forward again. 'Driver, the Siam Garden's in Mosque Street.'

'Yes, sir, but the direct way is flooded tonight. Always problem with storm drains there.'

We swung left, going south.

'You live in England, Mr Jordan?'

'In London, yes.'

'I have seen picture-cards. I would very much like to visit London.'

'You'd feel at home - it rains like this most of the time.'

The streets were narrower here, and the car stopped for a cyclo blocking our way.

'You are here in Singapore for long time, Mr Jordan?'

'Just a few days. It's an interesting -'

I broke her wrist like a dry stick but the knife had come close, ripping into my jacket and shirt and cutting the flesh before I'd caught the glint of steel in the gloom. Both rear doors came open and I shifted to my left because I was right-handed and could bring the force of my hip and shoulder against the attack from that direction but a hand locked round my throat from behind and I used a four-finger eye-shot across my shoulder and connected and heard a squeal of pain. I couldn't see much detail but there was the figure of a boy or a woman silhouetted in the open doorway on the left side and I got purchase for my hands on the pile carpet and thrust upwards with my right leg, feeling resistance and then the release as the target fell away. Kaleidoscopic glimpses of the interior of the car flashed across my retinae - the face of the driver above the seat-squab and the play of light through the open door from a street lamp and the eyes of the woman Yasma, as bright as the blade that was rising again, this time in her left hand. The only sounds were the voices of women, two of them in pain and another spitting out a vicious tirade in what sounded like Khmer as I blocked the knife and curled my wrist and got a grip on Yasma's hand and turned it, forcing the point of the blade into her small shadowed face and feeling it meet bone and then go through to the hilt as something flashed above me and I twisted on the floor and rammed my body against the rear seat and felt a slash of pain burning into my ribcage from the side.

The driver was angled across the front seat-squab and lunging down at me and I used a heel-palm with a lot of force and drove his nose-bone upwards into the brain and then twisted again and thrust my body through the doorway on the left side, hitting shallow water and stone and lurching clear of the car and starting to run, but they blocked me, two of them, their fine-boned faces etched against the lamplight as they came for me in their black track-suits, their hands bright with steel and their breath hissing, the bitter-sweet scent of blood on the air and a man standing a little way off, shouting something in English, the shuffling of feet as people hurried away, the slam of a door in the distance.

My hands were wet with blood, theirs and my own, theirs because I knew I'd killed, my own because the pain in my ribs was flaring as the air got to the wound. I had time to see a knife driving upwards at my face and time to block the woman's arm and force a strong flattened half-fist into the throat, seeing her pretty mouth come open and the lamplight glistening for an instant on her bright curved tongue as her eyes opened very wide to stare into the face of death as she came down like a puppet with the strings cut.

The other woman had turned and was running and I staggered up, slipping and lurching forward against a soft wave of resistance like deep water, my eyes losing focus and finding it again, seeing the woman's shadow fluttering along the wall this side of the street-lamp as she moved through the pool of light and merged with the darkness beyond. I kept going, driving my legs against the rising tide of resistance, my ears filling slowly with the high single note of a violin string, kept on going because I wanted to know who she was, who they were, and if I could catch her I'd make her tell me, but it was no go because the rising wave and the endless singing of the string were bringing information to me, blood loss, information that faded from my brain as the dark wave leapt and brought me down.

'Phone for you,' Lily said.

'I'll come down.'

They don't have telephones in your room at the Red Orchid, nothing so fancy.

I picked up the receiver in the bar and said hello.

'What sort of condition are you in?'

I froze. Pepperidge.

In a moment I asked him, 'Horn did you know?'

Some people came into the lobby and Al went to meet them. I checked them through the archway: two middle-aged Europeans with slept-in clothes and Air France tags on their luggage.

I checked everyone now. Things had changed.

'I told you," Pepperidge said, 'I'd keep tabs on you from here. The thing is, are you -'

'What was your source?'

Paranoia, perhaps. So be it. They'd come close to wiping me out.

'The High Commission, of course.' He sounded pained.

'The High Commission doesn't know a thing about it. Singapore put out immediate smoke - there was nothing in the press and nothing on the air.'

Short silence, then, 'You're not thinking, I'm afraid.'

Perfectly right. The Thai Embassy and Singapore had got in touch very fast because of the dead driver's uniform, and there'd been a British national taken from the scene to the hospital so they'd automatically signalled the High Commission.

'The thing is,' I heard Pepperidge saying, 'what sort of condition are you in?'

Stink of antiseptics.

'I'll need a few days.'

You had some luck. Dr Robert Yeo, surgeon. You had some luck, you know.

Good or bad? Lost on him.

They reached the radial artery. It was a good thing you were found and put into an ambulance in time.

Otherwise she would have picked up the telephone when it rang and they would have told her: It has been done.

Shoda.

The worst thing was the self-anger. Thrown into a hospital, for Christ's sake, with half my blood left behind me in the gutter before I'd even accepted the mission. It was just because this wasn't a fully-urgent five-star Bureau operation right off the planning table with all the pieces in place: access, communications, liaison and a director in the field like Ferris. I'd have been on my toes if London had set it up, I'd have been locked in to the approach phase with my nerves already running at mission-pitch - no, that was just an excuse and that was how far gone I was, making excuses for the inexcusable.

Anger seething in my blood. Major-general Vasuratna: This organisation is extremely capable of defending itself. The first of our agents was dropped off the tailboard of a truck outside the gates of the presidential palace, full of bullets. The second was dumped outside police headquarters with signs of having been mercilessly tortured. We have not found the body of the third agent, but his head was delivered to my office in a cardboard box.

But this time there'd been some luck, or the fourth man would have stayed there with the rest of his blood pumping into the storm drain and the ambulance wouldn't have used its siren on the way to the hospital.

Shoda. An eligible antagonist, certainly, for someone Kityakara had called 'of the highest capability', for someone who might one day get back on his feet and find enough savvy to give him a single chance in hell of getting anywhere near her, anywhere near Shoda, rocking a bit, I could tell by the way the ceiling was tilting, rocking a bit, You must expect to feel a little weak for a while, I could see his point, yes.

Lean against the bar.