She stood for a moment or two in a pool of darkness between streetlights considering what she was about to do. It was too soon, she hoped, for anyone to be waiting for her at the hotel. However, the moment she walked in covered in blood to ask for her key, she knew that the desk staff would call Public Security—probably about the same time as the taxi driver, who had watched her so carefully in the rear-view mirror all the way across town. But she desperately wanted to change her clothes, and to pick up her passport. When she went hammering on the door of the American Embassy at this hour of the night, she wanted to be able to identify herself without difficulty.

She wondered briefly about Li, what had happened, what his uncle had advised. And she felt sick at the thought that he would only have two years left before the rice virus would start destroying his life. And not just Li. Everyone in this country, and millions more beyond. She could not imagine how the hospitals and doctors would cope. They couldn’t. It was a nightmare, beyond visualisation, beyond comprehension. She looked at the traffic, the cyclists passing in the street, lights in the windows of apartment blocks. All these people. They had no idea that they had already eaten the seeds of their own destruction.

The burden of that knowledge weighed almost unbearably on her. She desperately wanted to shed and share it. But who would want to know? She had no words of comfort, could hold out no possibility of hope. The secret she wished to share with others was the intimation of their death.

Bitter tears burned her face as she turned towards the lights of the hotel and walked determinedly in the direction of its floodlit forecourt. As she passed beneath the shadow of the hoardings that marked its boundary, heading for the steps, a figure moved out of the darkness to block her way and whisper her name. She almost fainted with fright. The man stepped forward and his face was caught in the light cast by a distant streetlamp. It was Ma Yongli. He was clearly shocked by her appearance, and looked at her in open-mouthed amazement. “What has happened to you? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” She had difficulty controlling the urge to fall into his arms and weep. “I have to change and get my passport.” Her brain, it seemed, was only capable of following a single track. Any deviation to left or right might allow other thoughts to crowd in and overwhelm her. Her voice sounded strained and very polite. She was hanging on by a thread and said, absurdly, “I have to get to the American Embassy. Do you know where it is?”

“You cannot go into the hotel,” Yongli said. “The police are waiting in there.”