Colonel Cho's eye was still sighting; I didn't look at him directly, but watched him at the edge of my vision.
'What else have you heard about me?' The tone silky.
'Very little, Colonel. Only that you were an exceptionally gifted intelligence chief and a loss to the rebel forces."
He didn't answer for so long that I looked at him directly. The mood-phase was over: his head was turning back and now he was looking at the rat.
'But how flattering. And of course true.'
His movements in the kata had been very swift and it was over before I actually saw what was happening — he brought a sword-hand down with great speed and perfect control and the neck of the rat gave a delicate sound as it snapped.
'So we have meat today,' Cho said, and took his knife and skinned the rat and sliced into the small bright body and worked there, bringing out the liver, offering it to me.
There's always some kind of joke we can take back to London if we get through the mission, and pass around in the Caff.
'Thank you, Colonel, but I'm a vegetarian.'
They'd love that one.
'Then I shall profit from your preferences.' He put the tiny liver into his mouth and broke one of the delicate bones in the rat's neck, slicing it into short lengths and eating it slowly. 'I feed as the tiger feeds, first the Vitamin A and then some calcium. They are synergistic.'
I don't know why the hell I wasn't sick. The thing's skin looked strange, lying there empty on the table.
'And how am I to know,' he asked me, 'that you are not here in order to spy on me for Mariko Shoda?'
'Should I lie to my sempai?
That got through. He looked down, considering, wiping the rat's blood from the corner of his mouth. I followed up without waiting. 'I've told you the name of the company I represent in England, and you could verify that.' I left it to him to find out how, from the depths of the jungle. 'Shoda has already tried to have me killed – she set some of her women on me in Singapore, with their knives.'
He watched me closely, his eye calm now, intelligent. 'And who came to your aid?'
'No one. I killed four of them.'
'Indeed. You did well.'
'Shoda didn't think so.'
He was watching me intently. 'I can well imagine. Such a thing would have incensed her, as a personal affront. What action did she take?'
'She put her top hit-man onto me.'
He put his bloodied knife onto the table, carefully, without taking his eyes off me. 'Kishnar?'
'Yes.'
'When?'
'Three or four days ago.'
Short silence. 'Yet you are still alive. Do you know that is remarkable?'
'He didn't get a chance to close in.'
'But he will.'
'He'll try.'
He looked away at last and slipped into one of his contemplative phases; I was beginning to know him. We had some fruit and he cleared the table and told me to sit with him in the corner where the rugs were, and some half-wrecked chairs.
'I begin to see why you expect to succeed in your mission,' he said quietly, 'where others have failed. A mission of this order is not new to you.'
'Not really.'
'You make a formidable antagonist.'
'I've upset a few people in my time.'
'And you would make a formidable ally, if I decided to take you into my confidence. An ally against Shoda.'
'As I told you, Colonel, that's why I came.'
'Quite so.'
Making a bit of progress, but oh, Christ, I wasn't at all sure of that because his head was turning again and all I could see was that one eye sighting me from behind what he believed was cover, and I thought I knew what was happening: these relapses of his into psychosis weren't haphazard; they happened when he was suddenly afraid he'd made himself vulnerable. It didn't seem to make sense that he'd just offered, virtually, to let me become an ally, and then suddenly retreated; but in fact it did. He felt he'd put too much trust in me, and it could be dangerous.
I waited, because I couldn't do anything else. If I said a wrong word it could make him enraged, violent, and in this place I wouldn't stand a chance.
His head came back to face me, and my nerves felt a chill. He was two people, this man, and one of them potentially deadly.
'We shall see,' he said, and got up from the frayed rug where he'd been sitting and left me, his bare feet padding across the earth.
He didn't talk to me for the rest of the day, except for an occasional word in passing. He spent his time hacking at the creepers that were threatening to smother the doorways and a window, and I helped him, getting the machete that I'd left outside with the gear I'd dropped with. In the late afternoon he wrote at the long redwood table; it looked like a journaclass="underline" the book was as big as a telephone directory and leather-bound. Two or three times I turned to find him sighting me, even though we hadn't been speaking; it was obvious that he was giving me a lot of thought, and that some of his thoughts led him to distrust me. I didn't find it easy to turn my back on him; his bare feet wouldn't make a sound on the earth.
What I had to think about before anything else wasn't to find a way of getting information out of him, information on Shoda, but to find a way of leaving this place alive. I had absolutely no protection here. Cho had kept himself in regular training and from the kata I'd seen was totally capable of killing me, and not by stealth; and even if I managed to placate him the whole time and not let a wrong word slip out, the dark side of his personality could suddenly decide that I was here to betray him, and then he'd come for me.
And even if I could kill him in self-defence, if he came for me, there were the dogs: they'd smell death, and seek the carrion, and find me here.
When night came he lit oil lamps and we had supper, but he said nothing about Shoda. It was as if she'd never been mentioned, and it occurred to me that as well as his intense bouts of paranoia he might experience lapses in memory, and lose its content, wholly or partially. I wanted to test this out, but it was too dangerous. The first time I'd spoken Shoda's name he'd reacted violently. For all I knew, he might have completely lost the conversation we'd had earlier in the day.
In the end I decided to sleep on it. He was behaving now as a dutiful host, showing me where the running water was to be had, and explaining the system he had of catching it from the heavy rains and directing it into a reservoir. There was no bed here, he apologised, but he himself slept on a straw mattress, and gave me one to use. When he doused the lamps I curled up in a corner of the room with the machete underneath the edge of a rug and within easy reach.
'We shall talk tomorrow,' was all he said, and this confirmed my assumption that he'd spent a lot of his time thinking about me and what I'd told him. He'd got the data, and needed time to assess it.
That was fair enough, but I had no way of knowing that he might not decide at some time in the dark hours that I was too much of a danger to him and slaughter me out of hand, as he'd done with the rat.
Not easy to lie there, uncertain; not easy to sleep. It was the same out there in the jungle; its creatures slept always at the brink of death, and knew it, and knew what it meant when a scream came suddenly, close or distant: the remorseless cycle of life was going on, red in tooth and claw under the rising moon.
I didn't know what time it was when I woke, disturbed by sounds. I'd chosen this corner of the enormous room because it was on the opposite side from the wall of creepers where the snake had hung, and dropped. A rat had moved across my legs, earlier, and I'd jerked them and it had gone. There'd been a cry of a night bird soon afterwards, and I'd been brought awake with my skin crawling, coming out of a dream that I didn't remember except for a lingering visual trace of coils and shadows. Now it was different, the sounds coming to me from across the room; they were human.