‘Not all that many, now the UN’s pulled out. But I run across them in the Food Services and the church missions and the Red Cross, places like that, all volunteers, of course.’

  ‘Would you imagine,’ I asked carefully, ‘that any of them could be undercover intelligence people?’

  ‘Brits?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Specifically, DI6. If they were operating out here they wouldn’t be likely to tell the Bureau.

  ‘Search me,’ Tucker said. ‘I mean, how would I know, if they’re undercover?’

  ‘Some people aren’t too careful. Like the man in the Piper Seneca.’

  ‘Right, but there’s nobody,’ he said, giving himself time to think, ‘who comes across as a shadow, to my mind.’

  I watched the patches of sugar-palm jungle slipping below us, wondering where Tucker had picked up that particular word. Not many people outside the intelligence services use it - no one I’ve ever met.

  ‘You talk to a lot of Brits?’ I asked him.

  ‘We’ve got one or two in Mine Action, of course. Volunteers again, along with some French and Italians, Germans, Aussies, Yanks, you name it, people left over from the UN forces. I dropped out of the Royal Engineers myself, thought I’d put my training to a bit of good use out here where it’s wanted. Never thought I’d make Cambodia my field, but life’s full of surprises, isn’t it?’

  ‘How very true.’ Because that was another word - ‘field’.

  Standing on its own it didn’t amount to much - scientists had fields, doctors, lawyers. But coupled with ‘shadow’ it was more interesting. The problem with another intelligence service working the same field is that we can sometimes trip over each other’s courier lines; it’s not even unknown for an agent to find himself on another’s terrain, especially at night, when a lot of the work is done - and that can be dangerous. Feldrake was operating a photo-reconnaissance assignment in Iraq at the end of the Gulf War and crossed paths with a DI6 agent in a night action, and they surprised the hell out of each other and Feldrake took the DI6 man for an Iraqi shadow and put him down, and there are still representations going on with the prime minister aimed at liaison between the two services. But it couldn’t ever work: the Bureau doesn’t officially exist, and it’s got to stay that way. All we can do is check out the field as we go in, to see if there’s anyone else in the shadows.

  ‘When do we land?’ I asked Tucker.

  ‘Half an hour.’ He looked at me deadpan. ‘But if you want to get into signals, you can use the radio.’

  ‘You bastard,’ I said and he exploded into a laugh. ‘Get into signals’ was strictly Bureau-speak.

  ‘Think I was DI6 or something?’ Deadpan again, the tone indignant.

  ‘Are you still active, Tucker?’

  ‘No. I played it too wild, got sacked, went into the REs for a bit, worked on bomb disposal, more fun, less bullshit. But I can still spot a shadow when I see one. After Pol Pot, are we?’

  ‘I’m after information.’

  ‘On that bastard? You must be off your fuckin’ rocker - you like life short and sweet, is that it?’ He reached for his headset and put it on, calling up the tower in Pouthisat.

  The flat white waters of the Tonle Sap lake were already spread diagonally across the plains ahead of us, and we came down with the sun three diameters high above the east horizon and the air already heating up as we crossed the dusty apron from the plane to the freight sheds.

  ‘You need a hand with those mine detectors?’ I asked Tucker.

  ‘Nope, there’ll be a crew coming. But you’ll want some wheels, right?’

  ‘Yes. All terrain.’

  ‘We’ll go and see Jimmy. And leave the talking to me, okay? He’ll have the skin off your back if he doesn’t know you.’

  Jimmy was an energetic young Vietnamese, holed up in a huddle of tin-roofed sheds on the airfield perimeter track, a flash of gold teeth and lots of nodding as Tucker spoke to him in his own language, then switched to English.

  ‘Jimmy, this guy’s a friend of mine, you know what I’m saying?’ He turned to me. ‘Jimmy says he doesn’t understand the Queen’s English, but that’s just so he can screw you on the deal - hey, Jimmy, your flies are undone - there he goes, see what I mean?’

  ‘All new here,’ Jimmy said, blushing, ‘all new vehicles, cost me lot of money to buy them, what you looking for?’

  ‘We’re looking for a jeep, Jimmy, four-wheel-drive, new tyres - what about that one?’

  ‘If it’s in good shape,’ I said. It had camouflage paintwork and the springs looked even and the headlamps still had glass in them but that didn’t tell us anything about the big ends or the rocker arms.

  ‘Start her up, Jimmy,’ Tucker said, and we listened to the engine and I rocked the front wheel bearings and bumped the shocks and looked under the crankcase for leaks.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ I said.

  ‘Okay, Jimmy, the gent’s going to take it, so I’ll tell you –’

  ‘Hundred thousand riel,’ Jimmy said, flashing gold, ‘for day.’

  ‘So I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ Tucker said. ‘We’ll give you fifty thousand for the first two days in cash right now and we’ll make it twenty thousand a day after that, start with a tankful and that tidy little dent in the rear wing, and if –’

  ‘Hundred thousand,’ Jimmy said, flashing his gold assets, ‘for day.’

  ‘And if you can’t meet those terms,’ Tucker told him pleasantly, ‘I’m going to bring in the drug enforcement guys and they’ll go through this place with sniffer dogs and you’ll spend the rest of your life in the torture cells in Phumi Prison and you’ll wish to Christ you’d said yes to our handsome offer of fifty the first two days and twenty thereafter, you want me to repeat that do you, Jimmy?’

  I paid in cash.

  There were two canvas water-bags slung outboard on the jeep but I drove round to the front of the airfield terminal and picked up half a dozen sealed plastic bottles of Evian water from the concession and stowed them behind the driver’s seat. I didn’t know where I’d be going today, or how far, and at noon the sky would be a hot brass dome across the city and the plains.

  By nine o’clock the sun was already over the mountains south-east by east of the town, and the heat waves were spilling molten silver across the airfield. In the distance the sugar palms leaned along the horizon like a broken palisade, and I saw egrets on the wing, black against the blinding sky.

  There was no shade for the jeep that wouldn’t block out my view of the landing strip and the tower on one side, the freight sheds and the hangars on the other. But the canvas top was up and I had my sunglasses on against the glare. The runway slanted across my vision field, broken away at the edges and streaked with black rubber, and I saw a rat as big as a pig darting across it, God knows whence or on what errand.

  I began watching the sky to the south.

  10 : LEOPARD

  It was an hour before a black splinter floated into the glare above the horizon, the sun flashing on it as it began turning into its descent, becoming an aircraft, drifting on its flight path above the foothills to the south-west with its strobe sparking in the saffron haze as the landing gear came down and its profile tilted as it settled towards the runway, a Czechoslovakian-built L 410 Turbolet flying the Trans-Kampuchean insignia at the tail.

  It was a passenger plane, so I started the jeep and moved round the perimeter track to the terminal building and parked near the bus station and walked across to the arrivals wing, finding adequate cover on the far side and well clear of the car rental desks and the newsstand and the baggage console and the toilets.

  Fourteen passengers came through, one of them Pringle, none of them Colonel Choen. I had never seen Choen, but I would know him when I did.

  Pringle wasn’t looking around for me, wouldn’t expect me to be here, wouldn’t expect me to approach him even if I were.

  I went back to the jeep and took up station again halfway between the terminal building and the freight sheds.

  The rising heat shimmered like a lake across the runway, and I sat with my eyes closed now behind the sunglasses to protect the retinae from the glare, checking the south horizon at intervals through the slits of my lids.

  Eleven-ten, but this one wasn’t coming in: it was a Beriev Tchaika amphibian, lowering across the east towards the Tonle Sap.

  Noon minus twelve and a Skyvan 3M came rumbling out of the south like an elephant, and I started the jeep again and moved towards the freight sheds and was there when the crew came off, three Caucasians, one of them limping, all of them lighting cigarettes as they walked across to the office.

  At noon I opened the first bottle of Evian and drank half, holding it like a trumpet and seeing beyond it the helicopter moving in from the south, lower than the other aircraft had been, tracing its path across the mountains to the south-east now and turning, making its approach, fifteen degrees high. I put the cap back on the bottle and stowed it with the others, not taking my eyes off the chopper, noting the camouflage paint, the absence of any insignia, simply the identification letters, F-KYP, the strobe flashing, the fronds of the sugar palms waving under the downdraught from the twin rotors, a Kamov KA-26, touching down within fifty yards of the freight sheds as I started up again and found cover between a hangar and the loading dock as a camouflaged staff car with the fabric top raised came in from the perimeter road and pulled up, two men in battle fatigues dropping to the ground and going towards the helicopter as the rotors slowed and the cabin door came open.

  I could hear his voice already, barking an order to the pilot, and his walk was as I’d expected, a militarily-correct parade-ground strut as he crossed the apron, snapping back a salute to the two men and swinging himself into the staff car on the front passenger’s side, barking again as the driver got in and asked him something and nodded quickly and started the engine.

  Colonel Choen.

  Access - of a sort. Access to General Kheng and finally to Pol Pot, if I got it right.

  ‘Your first objective,’ Pringle had told me at Phnom Penh airport, ‘is to gain information on that man.’

  So I waited until the car was through the gates and halfway round the perimeter road and then took up the tag.

  I watched the mirror.

  Thirty-five minutes ago the staff car had stopped outside a white two-storey building next to a temple, its walls bullet-scarred and covered with faded slogans. Colonel Choen and one of his escorts had gone into the building. The other man, the driver, was leaning against the car, smoking his third cigarette.

  An hour and fifteen minutes ago I should have telephoned Pringle at the Hotel Lafayette, but that was when the helicopter was landing, and I’d had no chance since. The traffic in Pouthisat was the same as in Phnom Penh: motorized vehicles with native drivers ploughed through everything else on the narrow streets - cyclos, oxen, pushcarts, bikes, dogs and chickens, and it had been difficult to keep track of the staff car without moving in too close.

  Now I sat watching the mirror.

  It would have been nice to fish out the half-bottle of Evian from behind the seat, but I wanted to keep movement to the minimum. I was parked facing away from the building Choen had gone in, with the jeep tight against the wall of a storage shed. The plastic rear window, scratched and yellowed, wasn’t wide enough to let the Khmer driver see anything of my silhouette unless I moved, even if he took any interest. He was a rebel soldier, not an espion; if he’d been in our trade I couldn’t have parked the jeep here at all.

  The heat pressed down, and instead of thinking about the bottle of Evian I thought about Salamander. It was beginning to look like a full-blown mission, despite the fact that we had no signals board in London, no contacts or couriers in the field. We had, at least, access of a sort: I was keeping surveillance on an officer in Pol Pot’s forces and it might not turn out to be totally a waste of time. He might well come out of that building and get into his car and be taken back to the airfield and the helicopter: the driver had been told to wait for him. But if so, I at least had a fix on the building itself and could make a night reconnaissance, given the absence of guards, or the absence of guards difficult - in terms of number - to silence and subdue.

  It was beginning to seem conceivable that Flockhart, my control in London, wasn’t totally out of his mind. He needed - for whatever reason - information on Pol Pot, and the only way he could normally expect to get it was by forming his own little army of military. intelligence troops and sending them in - and they would have to be Asian, ideally Cambodian or Vietnamese. But the Bureau hasn’t got any Asian troops, nor is it equipped to recruit any, administratively, economically or politically.

  The driver was lighting his fourth cigarette from the butt of the third, dragging the smoke in deep and holding it, not a man, you would say, with enough oxygen available to his muscles to afford him much endurance, if he were, for example, attacked.

  But then of course he had his Chinese-made assault rifle, if you were slow enough to let him use it.

  The Bureau, moreover, hasn’t got even one Asian on its shadow executive staff, or he would have been the obvious choice for Salamander. All Flockhart had had when he dined with me at the Cellar Steps was a standard model ferret bored out of his gourd after six weeks without a mission, someone who would take anything on simply to keep his nerves in tune.

  And Holmes had known that, when we’d sat in the Caff drinking Daisy’s undrinkable tea.

  You know Mr Flockhart? He’s quite good. Some people find him a bit on the enigmatic side, doesn’t give much away. He also comes and goes, runs a mission or two and disappears for a while.

  For a control like that - senior, with the ability to pick and choose - I had been the perfect choice: seasoned enough to work an operation where a single shadow could conceivably get through to the objective while a whole battalion might fail, and desperate enough to take it on.

  So I found it comforting, as I watched the Khmer driver chain-light his fifth cigarette in the mirror, to realize that Flockhart might not simply have chosen to set me running in a manifestly doomed mission just to find out if I had a chance in a thousand of bringing it home.

  We seek comfort, my good friend, we the stalwart ferrets in the field, where we can find it.

  The sun’s weight pressed down on the canvas top of the jeep; its light shimmered along the bonnet and sent reflections fanning against the wall of the storage shed; the day staggered under the burden of the afternoon sky. No one was moving in the narrow angle of the street that was all I could see through the windscreen.

  Three women had passed, minutes ago, their sarongs clinging to their stick-like bodies, their faces dark and featureless in the shade of their raffia hats as they pushed their cart along, piled with junk - to them, presumably, treasure, the sum of their worldly goods. People were leaving the cities, Gabrielle had told me, hoping to find safety in the countryside, in the mountains, in the rice fields, before whatever was to happen to Cambodia cut short their lives.

  A cyclo driver had followed them, minutes later, bowed over his rusting handlebars half-comatose, a gaunt dog lurching after him, one eye lost beneath a black cluster of flies.

  The Khmer driver lit another cigarette, took a turn, kicking the baked mud of the street with his boot, hitching his assault rifle higher, took a turn back, then looked suddenly up at the steps of the two-storey building.

  One fifty-seven, and Colonel Choen came down to the street with his escort and climbed into the car.

  Sweat cooled on my shoulders as I sat up straight and put my fingers onto the ignition key, watching the mirror, waiting. The staff car was facing away from the town, from the airfield, and if it was going to turn back it would take the next side street and turn left again and come past the storage shed. That was all right: I wouldn’t by then be visible below the windscreen; there would simply be a jeep standing here.

  If the staff car kept on going in the same direction I. would need to catch up, but at a distance. That was all right too, but less easy: it would need noisy bursts of acceleration in the silence of the siesta hours.

  I started up and waited for thirty seconds, forty, fifty, heard the sound of the staff car fading and moved off and took a right and a right and a left and saw it ahead of me, bouncing across potholes in the distance, and we settled down at five hundred yards, heading out of the city and then taking a road south with the foothills forming along the horizon and the sun high and in front of us, casting short shadows.

  There was no other traffic and I dropped back, letting the staff car increase the distance to a mile and checking the mirror, hoping for moving cover, but there was nothing coming up behind.

  A bullock cart lay on its side near the road, the beast still harnessed, lowing and kicking; I couldn’t see the driver. Egrets crossed the skyline in a black skein against the glare of the sun, dipping towards water somewhere. A girl sat on a pile of rice bags near a track to a farm, nursing an infant, her round raffia hat shading it from the sun. A snake, crushed by wheels, lay across the road in the shape of a question mark.

  In fifteen kilometres we were among the foothills and I closed the distance between us, reaching behind me for the bottle of Evian and draining it in gulps and dropping it back behind the seat as the road began twisting between outcrops and I had to close up again, this time to within three or four hundred yards of the staff car, less, too close, too close for comfort, dropping back again, letting its profile shrink into the distance.

  Potholes suddenly, and the jeep shuddered, the tyres skating across the surface, and I had to let the speed die, couldn’t touch the brakes. The sun swung to the right, to the left, to the right again and then steadied as the road straightened and I saw it running ahead, empty now, no staff car.

  I didn’t think they’d seen me and increased their speed. They wouldn’t do that. If they saw me and wanted to know why I was on this road behind them they’d just slow and block my path and stop and ask questions; these were the Khmer Rouge.