He knew how to drive: he was a courier. As we reached stretches of open road he veered toward the centreline and chose a late apex on the right-hand turns, losing ground on the way in but gaining speed on the way out. The BMW was keeping well up on him and I began getting worried that Brekhov would use the late-apex technique when the BMW was close because it had more power, and if it were right on the Mercedes' tail when it went into a right-hand turn it could overhaul him alongside and force him into a crash.

A lot of what we were doing was instinctive rather than planned because the wipers weren't getting the rain off the windscreens fast enough even on high speed and we couldn't see much more than a blur in front of us. The headlights of vehicles coming the other way turned the rain haze into a burst of dazzling glare and left our retinae light-shocked for seconds on end. The speedometer needle on my facia was swinging between 90 and 110 kph and I didn't like it because if we were going to get out of this one it would have to be by science and not chance, and high speed was a hazard.

They knew I was supporting Brekhov by now: I'd kept up with them too long. I hadn't seen the Porsche since we'd lost it on the gateswing turn but it didn't mean it wouldn't find us again: it was a much faster machine.

The rain hit the top of the bonnet and whipped across the screen, slowing the wiper blades before they could move it away; with both windows shut the heat of the engine was bringing a lot of warmth into the interior and I was sitting in my sweat because if Brekhov came unstuck on a turn or the rain blinded him and he hit a curb at the wrong angle or tried some kind of technique that didn't work there might not be a chance for me to get to him before the two men in the BMW dragged him out of the wreckage. They'd have guns and that would make a critical difference at close quarters.

We were in the Weissensee district now and I knew Brekhov wasn't trying to reach anywhere: he was simply trying to outrun them by pulling every trick in the bag and hoping that just one of them would work. But they were very efficient and I began wondering whether I could get close enough to the BMW to do anything useful. If the Porsche.

In the mirror. It had picked us up again by luck or by making a grid search with its superior speed and gaining on us along the straight stretches and through the turns. It was only a smudge in the mirror with its lights dazzling until I flicked to night vision but it couldn't be anything but the Porsche because there were no police lights flashing and no one else would close the distance on me at 100 kph in this kind of rain.

There was no point in waiting things out if I could at leas; reach one of them and I could reach the Porsche so I did that, sighting ahead for a clear stretch of road and then pulling to the left and hitting the brakes and bringing it right alongside before the driver could react. It was a smaller car but I didn't use my front or rear end to swing at it; I waited till he braked on the rebound and then closed in with the mid-point of the SSL's chassis locking with his offside front wing and working at it as hard as the wet surface would let me: he was steering into me now and although he didn't have the weight necessary to move the greater mass of the SSL at the mid-section he could push back hard enough to cost me a lot of friction on the front tyres.

Then his wing buckled and I was pushing directly against his front wheel and it angled over slightly, the tyre shrilling against the metal and sending a smell of burnt rubber into my compartment. Nothing very much was happening now: at close on 90 kph we were just locked together with our treads sliding across the wet road surface independently of the steering line. We were on a straight Stretch but there was a curving sheen of light ahead of us reflecting from the curbside as the road turned to the left. It wouldn't do any good unless I could burst one of his tyres by insisting with every ounce of the mass I had available against him until his nearside front wheel began scraping along the curbstones and tore through the rubber.

Then I saw some kind of dark rectangle breaking up the curve ahead of us and when the wipers got the screen clear for an instant before the rain smothered it again I saw it was a side street opening to our right, and that was all I needed and the other man knew it but couldn't do anything about it because the speed was too high and he didn't have more than three or four seconds to try using his brakes and he was much too late because we were into, the turn and I kept up the pressure against him until I felt the Porsche give way suddenly as its front wheel met the gap in the curb and lurched sideways. Things were very close because he was out of control now and there was suddenly no more pressure against the SSL and even though I was ready for it there wasn't a lot of time to pull out: at this speed there was too much centrifugal force to let me get away with it cleanly. The front end tried to follow the Porsche into the side street but I managed to pull over soon enough to stop hitting the corner of the curbstone; the SSL began swinging out of control and I damped things down by touching the brakes and releasing them until we found direction and steadied with the speed coming down, and as I began using the throttle again I heard the Porsche hit the corner building with the hollow sound of a bomb and then there was just the drumming of the rain on the bonnet and the roof as I drove clear.

The brake lights of the BMW flashed once and went out again: the driver had probably taken a glance behind him when he heard the crash. I was closing the distance well enough because Brekhov had slowed ahead of us through a right-angle turn. The wail of a siren was coming from somewhere now — I'd been waiting for that because you can't do this speed through the streets of Berlin for too long before a police car takes an interest. This was going to make-Blinding headlights suddenly and I put a hand up to shield my eyes while I kept the car in a straight line but the BMW was slowing down hard and I had to brake while I tried to work out the score and there was only one answer possible: Brekhov had used the right-angle turn to do another gateswing while the hunter was still on the blind side, and it had been the Mercedes that had passed me in the opposite direction.

I got around faster than the BMW by using the curbstone as a cushion for the rear wheel, swinging the whole thing round and getting enough acceleration to keep Brekhov in sight with the BMW behind me in the mirror, but it was no go because there was a truck turning the corner and Brekhov had to swerve and then the whole thing was over, finis.

'Have you got the product?'

'Yes.'

There was a pause on the line.

'Why are you making contact?'

To tell you I've got it, that's all.'

'Fair enough.'

They've got no bloody imagination.

'There was a bit of trouble,' I said.

'Ah. What happened?'

Stink of burned clothes in the close confines of the phone-box.

'They got onto him, somewhere along the line.'

'In Germany?'

'No. On the other side.'

'Tell me what happened, then.' This was Kinsley and he'd started to humour me, because in the ordinary way I wouldn't need to make contact at this stage: I'd just get the product back to London the quickest way.

'Look,' I said, 'I'll be bringing the thing over in a matter of hours. It's just a question of what plane I can get.' I listened to the police sirens coming in from all over the place. 'I didn't want you to pick up a freak signal from their network about our getting unstuck, that's all.'

'I understand.'

'They got onto him on the other side but too late to stop him crossing the frontier. They just signalled their people in Berlin to take care of things. We walked into a trap and had to drive out of it. I'm clear now.'