I'd come here to give her that chance.
There was movement in the cabin doorway. Another officer in khaki uniform stood looking down at me for a moment; then they both moved back. They'd be the two military officers Loman had seen earlier from the car. She'd got her own little army, Chen had said.
Another bumping noise and the steps appeared in the doorway, sliding and angling down, the rail rising on the stays until the bottom of the steps reached the tarmac and the movement stopped. Then one of the officers came down, came down steadily, uniform immaculate, short tropical sleeves, polished belt, the shirt open at the neck, a knife sheathed at the hip on the side opposite from the revolver, a short figure, even slight.
Shoda.
She stood for a moment on the bottom step, watching me, her eyes shadowed by her peaked cap. Then she came onto the tarmac.
I stood with my hands by my sides, empty. At the edge of my vision, above her, I noted figures, faces in the cabin doorway. She'd ordered them to stay on board.
Sounds faded, or seemed to fade, and silence fell across us both, containing us, enclosing us, bringing intimacy.
I could see they were all officer rank, by the uniform. Johnny Chen. Then I put a few things together, the location of the camp and the obviously elite performance going on, and then I got it. That tiny little guy was Mariko Shoda, because, believe me, there isn't another female colonel in this neck of the woods.
I'd expected her to be sheathed in silk, sinuous, feline, seducing me into the shades of Lethe with the kiss of her bright blade. But despite the uniform she looked as she had when I'd seen her in the temple, her small face fragile, ivory-skinned, the cheekbones sculpted, noble, her dark eyes luminous, her short hair night-black under the cap.
'You are not armed?'
A light voice, but with the note of harshness I'd heard before, on the tapes, and now something else, a tone of disbelief. Understandable.
'No.'
She moved her right hand, a delicate, fine-boned hand, a hand you would want to touch your lips to, and rested it on her gun.
I hadn't expected a gun.
She was looking over my head now, scanning the background for snipers, still disbelieving.
'You have no support?'
'No.' I was aware of feedback, and heard that my voice was totally calm. 'I don't need arms, and I don't need support."
Totally calm, even though I hadn't expected a gun. There was a trace of panic in the organism that I could detect; it was tuned by its awareness of mortal danger to a pitch where it would have the speed and the strength to save itself if there were a chance.
I didn't think there was one, now. Because of the gun. I'd need to take her through rage before she'd break, and in her rage she'd shoot me.
Sounds coming back, fading in, the high thin whistling of the jets overhead as the tower ordered them into a holding pattern, waiting to land.
Shoda spoke.
'But surely you must realise that I shall kill you now.'
Looking at me with her dark eyes shimmering, the eyes of a woman in love, in love with what she was going to do.
But there was something here on the positive side – oh, a bare degree, of course, Christ yes, what can we expect with her hand on that bloody gun, sweat running now, cooling the skin, but at least a degree, a sign of something positive. She wasn't thinking straight. If she'd been thinking straight she'd have realised that a professional agent wouldn't just come here and bare his neck for nothing. He'd come with some kind of bargain to offer, a gesture of tit for tat, you get off my back and I'll get off yours, so forth. But she hadn't even asked why I'd come to her, alone and unarmed. She was too full of her obsession, too eager to rid herself of the one obstacle in her path to Armageddon to think of anything else.
Or I was whistling again, maybe, in the dark.
'There'd be no point,' I said, 'in killing me.'
'Why is that?'
Throw in the first one and watch the reaction.
'Because you've lost the Slingshot.'
Without that missile – Pepperidge – she's finished. Without the Slingshot she'd struggled from her agonising childhood through the jungles of the Golden Triangle to seize the almost infinite power she'd needed as an antidote for her innermost pain; but now she'd gone beyond that, creating a dream of all Asia in flames, and to make it real she needed a real weapon: the Slingshot. And now she couldn't go back from there, from the heights of her megalomania, to the life of a tawdry narcotics tycoon. She'd have to go on, or break.
I watched the reaction, a faint gold spark in the depth of her eyes: a hit, a direct hit. But what I'd said had shocked her, that was all; she couldn't let herself believe it.
'The shipment has landed,' she said, 'in Prey Veng. I was informed.'
'Yes. It landed at 21:14 hours, on schedule. But your agents are checking the containers now, and there are no missiles. We removed them.'
Her hand hit the holster and pulled the clip and drew the gun and I tensed but she half-turned, calling something to the people in the cabin doorway in Thai and I didn't understand but it was obviously something like, Signal our unit in Prey Veng and ask what's in the containers.
Then she swung back to face me and now I could see the fear in her eyes, the fear that it was true.
I took the tension off a degree because I needed the calm to work through the project, the end-phase. We'd got the timing right: we'd worked inside the five-minute bracket and that was over now. There wouldn't have been a single chance of breaking Shoda if she'd already heard she'd lost the Slingshot.
II had been essential that I tell her myself, It would give me the power I needed to break her. The news she feared most had to come from this man standing in front of her, unarmed, unassailable, omnipotent. We were to use – it had been agreed by Loman, by Pepperidge, by Croder himself- the psychic chemistry of voodoo.
She waited. She'd do nothing, say nothing. I knew, until she received the signal from Prey Veng, telling her whether I was right or wrong, whether she'd won or lost. That would be the moment when she'd start to break.
Or shoot me dead.
I didn't know the weaponry in Asia all that well but it looked like a regulation Japanese army 9mm Hitaki, either five or six shots, I couldn't tell, because the chamber was polished and highlighted with not much shadow in the grooves. But I saw she'd been trained in gun-handling: her index finger was flattened against the barrel, pointing at the target, and her middle finger was inside the trigger-guard. I couldn't tell if she'd already got pressure on the primary spring but I didn't think it was likely. When the time came she'd do it execution-style, formally, order me to turn my back and kneel, a single shot in the head.
I could hear voices in the near-distance, from inside the jet, one of them distorted, sounding from a speaker on the flight-deck.
She was listening too.
The whistling of the aircraft drifted from the night sky as they circled in their holding-pattern, other flights joining them over the minutes.
Sea-birds still called from the waters beyond the perimeter road, wakeful in the artificial light. Perhaps they were still fishing, closing their wings and plunging through the surface to pierce the sweet flesh of the prey with their stiletto beaks, one must live, my friends, one must survive.