"Then for God's sake," said the Ambassador, "get him for me on another line."

The girl in green came through again with a file of papers, catching the toe of her lizard-skin shoe in the frayed silk rug but saving herself, dropping a loose paper and picking it up and going on into the Ambassador's room. They'd left the door open: there was no point in shutting it with all these people wanting to see him.

"Then tell him to ring me back."

He dropped the phone and another one rang and he picked it up. "Metcalf here."

The Chief of Police came through again from the main entrance, a small man, hurrying, with an officer trying to catch him up.

"Then tell him to hold the plane." The Ambassador dropped the phone and looked up. "Who are you? Oh, yes, come in."

Another reporter tried to get through the main entrance and I saw the Chinese guard pushing him back with surprising strength for such a small man. The two people from the Xinhua News Agency were still talking to a girl in the room on our left and getting nowhere: she spoke rapid Cantonese with a lot of emphasis.

Night was falling outside the tall windows overlooking Kuang Hua Lu Street, and there was no sound of traffic. We'd been told that the Ministry of the Interior had ordered a curfew throughout the city beginning at ten o'clock; that was a few minutes ago. Checkpoints had been set up along the roads out of Pekin and there were long lines at the railway stations and the airport as passengers were put through an emergency screening. Half a dozen political agitators of high rank had been arrested but their names hadn't been publicised.

I got up and started walking about again, feeling the draught of the slow ceiling fans. Ferris was aggravatingly calm, sitting at his ease on the wicker chair with one arm hooked over the back and his legs crossed, a foot dangling. But that was what he was for: to be calm, to keep his head while I went on fuming. "This isn't a mission," I'd told him when we'd come into the Embassy, "it's just a mess they've got themselves into over here and Croder's thrown me in to see what happens."