“And you’re happy to work for a man like Ming?”

She stared at me in genuine surprise. “To work for Ming?” There was even a laugh in her voice, a harsh and terrifying laugh. “I thought you’d guessed! I don’t work for him. He works for me now. It took me less than a month to persuade him that my brains are better than his, that I can offer him more than he can offer me. And in that time, our output’s tripled, did you know that? The Turkish fields have quadrupled their yield. We’ve doubled our sales force, and we’re on the way to bigger and better things. Before I die, Mr. Cain, I’m going to put this enterprise into the top market. It’s going to make General Motors look like a one-man business. I’m going to make every government in the world realize just how powerful the poppy is when someone with my brains waves it around. Do you realize that this racket is made up entirely of hoodlums? The ignoramus who dropped out of school when he was twelve years old, the punk with no learning who’s picked up what he has to know and has gotten where he is because he is tough...Do you realize what the addition of a little true erudition can do to a setup like this? I learned how to learn in the best schools in the world, and I’ve got something they can never acquire. I’ve got learning.” She said again: “And every government in the world is beginning to jump to the sound of it.”

I said quickly, searching for hope: “To make them fight the harder? A kind of suicide? Is that your subconscious hope?”

The fire went from her at once, and I caught a glimpse of the honest, intelligent woman she once had been. She said slowly: “Keep your dilettante psychiatry to yourself, Mr. Cain, and don’t try to impute altruistic motives to me, not any more. Not any more, Mr. Cain. I’m god, an evil god, with all the power in the world in my hand, and I’m going to push it till the whole damn thing blows up. And I don’t give a damn what happens when it does.” She sank into silence for a while, and then said thoughtfully: “No, not to make them fight harder. To wallow in the only thing I know about. The poppy field. A child running through the pretty flowers with bare feet, with the dew still shining on them, crimson poppies and scarlet, and the green-brown hills...”

She broke off and was silent. So was I. How do you tell a sad, mad woman that everything has gone?

There was one thing I had to know. I asked her: “Tell me how your ex-husband comes into all this? He’s not somehow the kind of man I’d pick for you. And yet...”

Her voice was full of loathing. “Him! Almost the only mistake I ever made in my adult life.”

“But you went back to him.”

She was genuinely surprised. “Went back to him?”

“At least, you were corresponding.”

“Of course! I had to find out where Ming was. After I’d told him who my father really was, I was pretty sure that he’d tell Ming about that, once the great Markle Hyde had ruined him. That’s the kind of man he is. So I used him. And, having used him, I just dropped out of his sight along with everyone else’s. A nasty piece of work, Mr. Cain, not worthy of your attention, or mine.”

“Yes. Yes, I’d noticed that.” It was good to hear her talking sense again.

There was still no sound, but Mai was in the room. I did not want to turn my head or even flicker my eyes, but I knew she was there, directly behind Sally and to my right, up against the wall somewhere. I knew that she was sizing up the position, since she too realized that time might be running out. I knew she wanted to urge me to get moving, to get out of here fast while the fates were still with us.

And she was right, of course.

I said heavily: “Sally, it might be too late, I don’t know, but I’m taking you back to your father. He’ll know what to do for you.”

The moment of sadness had gone, and there was a dreadful sardonic anger there instead. “Take me back? To begin all over again?”

“No. To try to end it.”

“No hope, Mr. Cain. And you can’t take me back either. I’m going to shout for help.”

A woman who is going to scream doesn’t tell you all about it first; she wanted to know what I would do if she did.

I said calmly: “Go ahead. I’ll have you out of here before the sound has gone six inches.”

“Through the lights?” I waited, and she said: “You must have somehow jumped through them. I told them it could be done, but they thought the cliff...But try and drag me through there and see what happens.”

I thought we could face that problem when we came to it. Less than two minutes to get back to the vent and out onto the face of the cliff, thirty seconds to secure the rope, twenty seconds to climb down, in under three minutes I’d be whistling for the boatman. And then? Three minutes for him to row ashore, with guns covering him if necessary.

I was about to stand up and tell her: Let’s get going; and then, the door with the green drapes opened and Ming was there. I’d heard the sound a fraction of a second before the fact, not long enough to do much more than whip out the Luger and aim it.

He stood there with a look of shocked surprise on his face—he was already in the room before he realized I was there. A shadow behind him moved, and it was another man, too vaguely seen to be more than a nebulous menace moving back out of the line of fire, stepping back with an instinctive movement of alarm.

I had to fire. There was nothing else I could do, though it was something I had badly wanted to avoid.

I saw the shadow crumple, and when it fell into the patch of light that was cast on the floor, I saw it was one of the Northern Chinese that Ming liked to keep around him. He was grabbing at his shattered shoulder and yelling his head off. The time for silence had gone. Mai had already dashed to the doorway we had used and was holding it open, her little gun leveled at Ming. She said, quite quietly: “I’ve got him. Carry her.” She seemed to know exactly what to do, and she was right.

I swooped over Sally and scooped up her featherweight in my arms. She was even lighter than I had suspected, and I let her scream as I ran with her out of there, fast. There was just time to see the surprise go quickly from Ming’s face, to hear him call out mockingly: “A cadaver, Cain, before you’ve gone fifty yards.”

Mai slammed the door shut behind me and stood there coolly and said: “I’ll hold it. Move.” I ran as far as the doorway with the lights, stopped, looked back at Mai who was standing there waiting for someone to open the door, and I called out: “Now!”

Not waiting a split second, she turned and ran towards me, and I said quickly: “Both of us through this thing together, just in case.” Side by side, we ran through it.

And then, all the expertise, the efficiency, the mechanical know-how that was implicit in an operation like Ming’s—like Sally’s—came rushing into immediate action. Somewhere, a bright light went on ahead of us, a searchlight that cast its strong beam all down the corridor. I put it out with my first shot, and a bell was ringing, and there was already the sour stench of chlorine in the air.

I yelled: “Gas!” and we ran like hell for the stone stairway. More lights were coming on, and I was glad of them; it would have been impossible to move so fast in the darkness with the struggling bundle under my arm that was showing a surprising burst of desperate strength. Sally was kicking her legs wildly and trying to ram a heel into my face, and I swung her round with her arms in front of me, and that was worse, because she promptly grabbed me in a very sensitive place and squeezed hard, so I swung her back again and yelled at her: “Cut it out!”

The gas was behind us, on the other side of the lights, where we’d have been if we’d set off the alarm going in instead of coming out; but it was seeping along the corridor and even finding its way slowly up the stairs. But it meant one thing: there’d be no one behind us unless hampered with a gas mask. The lights were everywhere now, small bulbs, mostly, set inside cutouts in the granite roof, too many of them to try and shoot out once we were on the upper level and knew where we were going.

We headed fast for the vent, and there was a guard there, running up and unshouldering a Bren gun as he ran. Mai fired once, and he fell, and then I dropped my angry bundle on the floor and said to her: “I need both hands, do I have to hit you?”

I didn’t wait for a reply, knowing that for one reason or another she’d lie where I put her. I hoisted Mai by the ankles as she held herself stiff and straight, and she grabbed the overhang of the vent and pulled herself up, and then the rope came snaking down and I heard her call: “Behind you!”

I spun round just fast enough to see a thin Chinese pull back round the corner of the passage, fast enough to see his submachine-gun cradled just so, with the sling over his shoulder and the barrel leveled.

Mai called down: “I’ll cover. Hurry.”

I wrapped an end of rope round Sally’s middle and told her, speaking fast and urgently: “This will hurt. Don’t fight it.” But she did. She struggled as Mai pulled her up, tried to kick herself free of the rope, tried to pull at the slipknot as it bit into her frail bones. I heard her screams, and then she was over the edge and suddenly silent.

Mai called: “All right, you’re still covered.”

I fired a quick shot at the angle of granite, just to let them know I was still awake, grabbed the thin rope, and swarmed up it. A burst of gunfire sounded, and I saw the bullets make an upward-moving arc over the walls and roof as the gun ran away from a dead gunners dead hands; I hadn’t heard Mai’s shot in the frightful maelstrom of gunfire in the confined and hollow rock, but there was the man out from under cover and lying dead or dying on the ground with his gun still running away till the magazine was empty.

Sally was up there, lying still and silent and showing no sign of whatever it was that Mai had done to her. Mai slipped along the passage ahead of me, dragging the rope (she never missed a thing, that girl!), and I followed with Sally’s impossibly thin wrists in my hands. And a moment later, we were both sliding down the rope to the rocks of the beach.

I looked up at the top of the cliff. There, silhouetted against the lightening sky of the dawn, were ten, twelve, fifteen men, strung out like soldiers and peering out towards the sea.

But of Theo’s junk, there was no sign at all.

CHAPTER 13

The bullets started coming a moment later.

It was as though the whole of Red China had erupted into sudden and well-accustomed violence. I threw myself at Mai as the rocks chipped noisily right beside our bodies, and I forced her tight into the overhang of the cliff face, knowing that the same bluff that had given me so much trouble on the climb would now be our salvation. In the noisy, bullet-whining darkness, I took out at last the walkie-talkie I’d brought. I flicked it on and said: “All right, Theo, where the hell are you now that I need you?”

His voice came back, calm yet excited, soothing yet distant. He said: “Senhor Cain? Run to the north, five hundred yards. You do this for me, you make me very happy man.”

I said: “Me too, brother Theo,” and switched off.

Sally was coming round, her eyes opening in the darkness, open enough to glare at me with a terrible savagery; I was hoping that the time might have come for complete resignation, but this wasn’t a resigning kind of woman. She echoed Ming’s words and said: “All right, another fifty yards, so you measure your life in the distance you can travel?”

Her wrist in my hand was a painfully fragile stick as we ran along the shore, stumbling over the wet boulders, listening to the roar of the waves. From up on top of the cliff, the bullets were coming fast, but we were close in under its protection. At an open space where the protection was gone, I sent the two girls on ahead while I turned and fired a few rounds from the Luger, glad of the weapons long range. They were following us along up there, running along the top of the cliff as we scooted along at the bottom; somewhere, I was sure, there’d be a way down. I saw one man in the moonlight, trying to make the difficult descent alone, his gun slung over his shoulder; I could only admire his courage, but this was hardly the time for mercy; he fell, yelling, when I fired.

We stepped now into deep water, and Sally screamed; Mai was there immediately to help, though it wasn’t at all necessary. Ahead of us, up against the sky, a rope ladder was being thrown over the steep cliff, a suicide mission if ever I saw one, and as we rounded a curve in the broken shoreline, there was the silhouette of the junk against the cold red-bronze of the eastern horizon. I could still see the lights of Macao, impossibly close and impossibly far away. I was ready with the Luger for the first sign of anyone on the top of the ladder, but then a frightening booming sound crashed out, and there was a sheet of fire shooting out from the junk. I heard rocks shattering, mixed in with the twanging sounds of metal on granite, and I said “For God’s sake!” It was as though a great bomb had blown up on board the junk, but I knew that it was something else; it was hard not to laugh.