'How close do you want him?' Fitzalan murmured.

'That's not your problem.'

I would need to see Fogel from a distance of a few yards and I would need to see him in circumstances where he couldn't see me and that wouldn't be easy and it could take till morning. I wasn't going to hurry it because I hadn't needed a specific directive to tell me that if Fogel saw me, just for a second, the Rome phase would be blown.

Egerton hadn't sent me here to blow anything.

Fitzalan was standing perfectly still.

The plain-clothes men had seen Fogel and were immediately interested in him but were not approaching him. The captain of the carabinieri had seen him and was leading his unit steadily on.

'Fitzalan.'

'Yes?'

'We use the window now.'

He turned round and we looked at the skier.

'You know the form,' I said, 'Yes.'

'Let's recap.'

I didn't know what briefing he'd received.

'You'll stay with him till you've got close enough to identify him. I'll follow up. If you lose him, I'll keep him.'

'All right.'

The rest of the situation was covered by routine procedures:' from the moment we left this rendezvous we wouldn't acknowledge each other; there would be no obligation to make any signal at any given phase; if we felt the need for a further rdv it would be made in the house of the Bureau's agent-in-place, Rome: the Villa Marco Polo in the Piazza Piccola. Finally, Fitzalan was aware that he could expect no support from me if he got into any kind of trouble because each of us was in effect operating solo with a common objective: Fogel.

The figures moved against the slope of dazzling snow: Fogel coming alone from the exit gates, the carabinieri walking steadily towards him. The plain-clothes men stood perfectly still. A few of the other passengers were looking at the carabinieri, wondering what they were doing here.

The captain halted his men.

It was then that I decided to turn round because it looked as if Fogel was the passenger they had come for and he wouldn't have time to check for surveillance before they met aim. He wouldn't see me, and he wouldn't see Fitzalan. He would see only the officers.

At this instant he was isolated, with the nearest passenger ten or twelve feet away. They were spreading out and he was one of the few people without a companion. He had seen the carabinieri but was not reacting.

The captain took a sidestep to block his path, and his white-gloved hand came up in a salute.

Fogel stopped.

The captain was saying something to him.

Fogel listened. His expression and attitude were those of a law-abiding passenger arriving in Rome by air. The captain appeared to be asking for his passport.

Fogel used his right hand to double the officer, pushing the blow upwards into the diaphragm while his left hand went for the captain's holster and wrenched the gun out. He worked very fast and he was armed and ready to fire before any of the party could reach for their own weapons.

The first shot smashed the glass of a show-case a few feet from where Fitzalan and I were standing and I couldn't tell if Fogel had aimed at the carabinieri and the shell had passed between them, or if it had been meant as a warning shot. They were diverted for a second or two and the captain was still doubled up on the ground as Fogel broke away and began running, colliding with a group of passengers and leaving one of them sprawling as the carabinieri began shouting for him to stop. He saw the flash of the emergency light through the glass doors and swerved to his left, running fast and steadily and thinking his way out of the building and past the obstacles that threatened him: mostly the groups of people in the check-in area.

At this moment the carabinieri began firing as they ran: their officer had given the order. I saw plaster chipping away from the wall beyond where Fogel ran, at a height of some ten feet: there were too many people about for them to try 'hitting the fugitive and I assumed the purpose was to warn him to stop and at the same time to alert the driver of the emergency vehicle outside.

As Fogel reached the glass doors at the end of the check-in area I was a dozen yards behind him, running at the same speed and ready to swerve the instant he began turning round to fire into his pursuers. I could hear Fitzalan's shoes thudding behind me and slightly to the left. The situation worried me because I believed Fogel would fire back into the carabinieri before he went through the doors: it would be logical and of course feasible, costing him something less than two seconds and gaining him anything up to five or six as the soldiers scattered. The thing that worried me was that there was no close cover for me or Fitzalan: the people in this area were now frozen into immobility and there were no central stands or pillars and I would 'have to rely mostly on speed as I hurled myself obliquely at the row of glass doors and smashed one open before his gun fired.

The whole set-up was impromptu and I didn't like that either: a penetration agent gets into comfortable habits and he likes premeditated action, preferring to set a trap rather than run a man down, preferring the dark to the light. It's rather like assembling a small but intricate bomb, step by step, dovetailing the components until they become potent, then setting it ticking. This was a totally undisciplined situation where anything could happen and I was uneasy because Fogel would see me as his most immediate threat and would possibly fire at me instead of into the soldiers. I believed I could be quick enough to get out of the way but a certain amount was going to depend on chance and that made the situation dangerous and untidy, Fogel reached the doors.

I was watching him the whole time.

Fitzalan had dropped back or was taking cover across the check-in counter: I couldn't hear him any more. The check-in counter was no use to me because it would waste a lot of time: Fogel was getting clear of the building and I had to be out there with him to see where he went. No active involvement wasn't a finite directive: it had been in part countermanded by the last order,which was to identify Heinrich' Fogel. Ideally I would stay with him, get close enough to identify, and withdraw. It could be done, even now, but I was going to need luck and that was the thing I didn't like, because my job is to arrange for certainties.

Fogel's weight hit the glass door and I saw his right shoulder begin turning and that was all I waited for because this was the time when he was most likely to fire. There were two shots with almost no interval and I heard fane of the shells ricochet, whining to silence as I smashed into the nearest door and pitched through the gap as it swung open while part of the forebrain registered an item of data: Three shells fired, three left.

The situation now became dangerous: he would have seen me and taken me to be a passenger trying to help the forces of law and order and he would drop me without a thought if I looked like stopping him. We were both on the pavement now and the driver of the emergency vehicle was liable to open fire on Fogel and hit me instead if I began running again. This kind of thing had happened to Harrison in Milan and to Hunter in Geneva and the action was now in Rome and it didn't look any more promising, so I went down head-long and rolled over with the soles of my shoes towards Fogel and lay without moving.

Three shots banged out of a repeater rifle from the opposite direction and I assumed it was the driver. I could hear Fogel running again.

Someone screamed.

I had a key in my hand.

In very fast action a lot of the work is done on the sub-conscious level, with a certain amount of reasoning responsible for decision-making: Fogel had knocked into a group of people and a woman among them had screamed as he dragged at the door of their car; they saw his gun and held back. He was still working fast and very efficiently but any physical action is slower than thought and the key in my hand was the one they'd given me at Hertz. I knew where the dark blue Fiat 1100 was: they'd shown me.