The others would have heard him, and would have started running by now. I suppose I had fifteen seconds, twenty, but no more than that, to do what I could to stay alive. A thought floated into my head and out again… Ferris, you'll need a replacement… before the man stopped withdrawing from the plexus strike and came in again, blocking my wrist and swinging one elbow in a curving blow for the chin and nearly connecting but losing the force that would have snapped my neck as I felt it whipping past my cheek before the momentum died. It left his body open and it was here that I would have to work like a surgeon, remembering the charts and the wire-and-rubberbag dummies and the long nights in Norfolk where Mashiro and Yamada and Dr Dietrich had shown us that in dealing with a terminal confrontation one must try to move away from the kinetic action and concentrate on the body itself, feeling for its weak areas and worming one's way into the nerve-centres and the major vessels and the vital organs where even a finger can stun or shock to death, given applied force.
His body was still open to me during the next few microseconds and I went for the seventh intercostal area to the left of the celiac plexus with a centre-knuckle strike that connected and penetrated as far as the main fist profile before he doubled and broke its force; but I knew I must have reached the spleen and started internal bleeding because of the depth I'd achieved: he'd started to regurgitate and his breath was blocked off, and he had to come back at me without thinking, moving directly into Zen and using me as a reflection of his own body, hooking one foot into a sweep and bringing me down with one hand saving me and the outline of his bare foot filling my vision as he drove down with the force of a swinging axe against my face in the instant before 1 rolled and heard the air rush past my ear. He was now balanced on one foot and I wrenched at the knee, jack-knifing it and bringing him down beside me.
Vision had been partially phased out by now; there was nothing to look at; we were fighting blind. I was aware of spinning shapes and colours in the background, that was alclass="underline" the glint of a yellow eye, the angular silhouette of the roofline against the stars, the lintel of a doorway. Sound had closed in, to become intimate: the soft fierce inhalations as our breath was forced into our lungs, the rustling of his clothes as he span sideways to break his fall, hooking a claw-hand across my face without preparation. Our sense of touch was heightened to an exquisite awareness, because the need for sight and sound had almost gone; we had to feel our way into the citadel and lay it waste in the silence and the dark, blindly and with deaf ears; but there was no sensation of pain, since pain works against the organism in hazard, distracting it from the effort needed to survive; blood from a wound somewhere was shining along his forearm, but I felt nothing.
Time had lost its meaning and I had no idea how soon the others would reach here, but it would be in a few seconds now. They'd have started running the moment they heard his call, and the distances involved were short. They didn't all need to get here at the same time: the first one here would finish me off, if I were still alive when he came.
I'd have to move faster but my opponent was working for a hold now, knowing that it was all he had to do until the others arrived; he'd turned his body to lie across my legs while he flung one hand in a curve for my neck, aimed at the carotid sinus; I saw the strike in progress and jerked my head away but not fast enough: the hand connected and coloured light burst in my skull as the baroreceptors brought the blood pressure down, draining the brain and leaving me in a kind of twilight. Fear came into me at once and triggered a flow of adrenalin and the twilight brightened and I saw his hand again as it came towards my face and I knew that if I didn't stop this strike I was done for and the last thing I would see in my life would be the dirty-nailed hand of an unknown Chinese boy in a darkened alley, and it seemed illogical and unnecessary.
Thoughts were shut off and I began working again, blocking the hand and catching the thumb and snapping it and hearing a hiss of breath. The stunning effect of his carotid strike was still slowing me but I could hear footsteps now, someone running in the quietness of the street, and the adrenalin was forced into the bloodstream and I wrenched sideways and found his throat and put pressure there as he began using his knee in a reflex action, striking again and again at my groin but not connecting because he was too worried now by my hand on his thyroid cartilage: I was using my finger and thumb as a clamp and he began jerking his whole body to shake me off but that was no good because I didn't want to die and I would do a great deal to prevent it, but so would he and I rocked sideways as he went for the carotid artery again and the thought flickered in the shrinking mind, Oh Christ it's no go, this time it's no go, and I lay there at his mercy with the nerve-light flashing through the numbing dark as the footsteps came closing in, their echoes hollow against the buildings, this time no go and nothing left, only a rose for Moira…
I suppose if the boy could have done anything more to me it would have ended there, but he was dead.
The cartilage had been crushed in the clamp of my finger and thumb, and the soft tissue of the thyroid area had haemorrhaged, closing his windpipe; those were the sounds I'd heard in the last few seconds as he'd struggled for breath.
There was a transition period when my body had moved for itself, and memory started recording again only when I was flinging myself along the alley with my hands outstretched to fend off obstacles and my feet driving me forward with the sensation that the energy was coming from somewhere else, streaming into the organism and leaving it galvanised and frantic for life. Footsteps filled the alley but the walls echoed and re-echoed them in the narrow confines and they might only have been my own. The first of them had stopped, perhaps, to check the dead body on the ground, giving me time to get clear, as if the boy had reached out from whatever cosmic field of consciousness sustained him now, and chosen to offer me grace.
7: Spur
The monsoon was blowing in Seoul when I landed, and the evening sky was dark with rain over the mountains to the east: we could smell it, and the warm air was clammy against our faces as we crossed the tarmac at Kimpo and went into Customs and Immigration.
I was already noting the people around me. Ferris had booked me to Singapore by Cathay Pacific with a room at the Taipan Hotel and told the desk clerk at the Beijing Hotel to forward mail there, before using a pay phone and switching me to Seoul by Korean Airlines with a reservation at the Chonju and getting me aboard the late afternoon flight without asking the Chinese for security; but the opposition would be watching for me now and I could have been followed across.
"You have your smallpox vaccination certificate?"
I gave it to the immigration officer.
After the terminal confrontation in the alley I hadn't been near the Embassy: I'd called Ferris from the clinic where they were patching me up and told him to get me out of Pekin and he'd done the rest, but I was nervous because those three hit-men would be hunting for me and if they picked up my trail they wouldn't let me go free a second time.
"What is your business in Korea, please?"
"I'm a travel agent." I went through the details of the new cover Ferris had given me: Clive Thomas Ingram, a representative of Travelasia visiting Seoul to open up a tour programme for Western Europe; references Barclay's Bank and British Airways.
Most of the passengers around me were Chinese, with one or two Japanese and Americans; others were still coming through the doors, letting the warm wind blow in and ruffle the papers on the desks.
"You have currency, please?"
I declared 100,000 won and asked where I could change pounds sterling, watching the young Korean in the dark blue jump suit leaning on the barrier by the exit; I thought I'd seen him on the tarmac outside.