Well, we’d missed it – we would have to wait until the following day. So another day would be wasted. This wasn’t just a question of time, but a security problem: my own personal safety and the security of the secret I was carrying. My personal safety was the responsibility of a whole chain of people; I didn’t know what they were up to, but I knew that they had everything under control. Sometimes they were beside me, sometimes they were far away, sometimes they were both. In every sense of the words, they knew me better than I knew myself; before I had arrived, they knew exactly what time I would come; before I had left, they knew when I would set out. I have reason to believe that on that day at eleven o’clock, as they saw the train I was supposed to be travelling on pull out from the platform, they all went home feeling that the job had been well done, and didn’t give me another thought. Thinking like that, I gave myself goose-bumps. When people become nervous, it is hard to avoid acting hastily. I found the station guards and showed my pass, asking that they allow me to make a phone call. I wasn’t entirely clear who I was talking to, but I had been told that if I encountered some problem that needed sorting out in a hurry, I should phone that number. I started to explain the situation over the phone, but before I had got very far, the person at the other end gave me two orders:

One: not to move from my present location.

Two: someone would arrange for us to be on our way immediately.

Ten minutes later the station master was standing in front of me.

Half an hour after that the station master personally escorted us onto a special train consisting of a single sleeper carriage. The station master informed me that this train would stop specially for a couple of minutes in the middle of nowhere to allow the two of us to get off. I thought with amazement of the mysterious phone call that I had just placed. I didn’t know who I had phoned – I still don’t know today. But I could sense, and have good reason to believe, that I was talking to someone very powerful, perhaps in Zhongnanhai, perhaps in some other, even more secret place.