I went back twice to the blue Dodge Charger and moved it a few yards, taking half an hour to work out the optimum station and going on foot from the corner of Broadway and West 69th Street to the next intersection south. I was very restricted because I had to move around without being seen by the two peeps or seen too often by the cop on the beat, but even at this pre-dawn hour there were one or two bums on the street and a group of winos lying in a doorway thirty yards south of the hotel entrance. I don't think it would have been possible to find an effective station without this degree of camouflage.

With the amount of sleep I'd taken in transit from Taiwan to Washington I was good for at least twenty-four hours before performance diminished, and the concussion in Phnom Penh had left me with no after-effects. The only difficulty about the take-over would be to signal Ferris that I was in control of Zade and that could only be done when he stopped moving again. Until then I'd have to run the surveillance in conjunction with the other two people and try not to let them see me.

That could be extremely sensitive and of course dangerous.

Ferris wouldn't normally have gone after a disinformation ploy: it was an ideal, not an essential. But Kobra was running hard and determined to drive any surveillance into the ground before they made their rendezvous: they'd killed three men and put a fourth into hospital and brought Control to the point where he was being pressured to call off the mission and Ferris had been brought in from Tokyo to do two things in New York.

One: to lock me on to Satynovich Zade and keep me with him all the way to the rendezvous.

Two: to let it be thought that the two people now surveying him had lost him beyond any hope of picking him up again.

This was logical. In given circumstances one man can stay with the objective more easily than a dozen: his image is smaller. At the point of locking on the final surveillance Ferris wanted to make it seem that the reverse had happened:.that all surveillance had now stopped. The disinformation component was a refinement: the take-over zone was extremely hot and one of us could be picked up and killed out of hand as in Milan, Geneva and Phnom Penh: but at any phase the Kobra people could try a straight snatch and grill whoever they took, and the disinformation would come up during the interrogation: Zade had been irretrievably lost.

05:43.

First light was touching along the roofs of the buildings.

A work gang had gone past in a truck two minutes ago and I prepared for a sudden rearrangement of the set-up because the VW would have to move off when the road works started up for the day.

The telephone I'd picked was on the other side of a small drug store near the end of the alley, two minutes' walk from die Lulu Belle Hotel. Ferris had told me to signal at ten minutes past each hour, leaving the exact hour interval for the other two.

The cop was still the same one, working die midnight-to-eight.

There was no sign of the opposition.

But they were here.

The deadline for the Kobra rendezvous was close. They hadn't run this far and this fast as a delaying action: they'd done it in an attempt to run our surveillance into the ground. They would zero in to the rendezvous the moment they were satisfied that the field was clear and when Ferris called off the last of the tags and left me in control, it would look like that.

05:49.

Two men.

They hadn't been there before.

I was at the Broadway end of the alley that ran alongside the hotel and I saw them when I checked the south vector. They were keeping to the dark where they could: in the patches of shadow thrown within doorways and in the cover of the hoardings where building was going on in the daytime. They moved about quite a lot but after five minutes I saw they had a focus.

Note. Review. Formulate.

Formulate what action to take if and when they came Work out escape lines. Control the situation to the point where there was nothing they could do without counteraction or a get-out.

That was ideal but of course you can't always do it because you don't always know the terrain well enough to use it for your defence and you don't always know what support they can call on when you select an escape line and find it blocked It was a good suit I'd bought for the interview at the White House and in this area it looked a little incongruous and they could be a couple of muggers.

I didn't think so.

There was a slight problem because the obvious escape lines were along Broadway and 69th Street but if I moved towards them from the alley I would have to cross exposure zones and I'd been avoiding them for the last thirty minutes These zones were the open areas directly opposite the front of the hotel, where anyone in the street could be seen from any one of its windows.

The danger was that the two men could in fact be a couple of muggers. If I could be certain of this, there was no problem. I was ideally placed for a lure situation and if they followed me down the alley I could deal with them out of sight But I couldn't be certain, and if I assumed they were not muggers but hit-men from a Kobra cell I could take escape action that would expose me to actual Kobra surveillance in the area and that was what I'd been taking so much trouble to avoid.

It was a question of identity.

They were still moving.

But nothing had changed: I was their focus.

I waited.

Half a minute later the cop passed between their station and mine. He didn't check them and that could mean they were local and would therefore have nothing to do with Kobra. It was a clue to their identity but not reliable and I began worrying.

Milan. Geneva. Phnom Penh, Gut-think: discount.

The darkness was composed partially of light. The actual sources of the light — the street-lamps — were blinding to the eye and left the shadows almost black in places where doorways were deep and the hoardings threw an angular pattern. I had sufficient cover to use but couldn't reach it without showing my direction.

A Yellow Cab passed between the buildings, sending a wash of light along the walls. The two men turned their backs until it had gone. This was quite a professional move but not all that sophisticated: it was a street-crime skill and it didn't identify them as trained operators.

They were facing forward from the doorway again and watching me. I didn't think there was much chance of identifying them until they came close and if they came close it could be too late because if they were operationally trained they'd know how to kill.

Harrison. Hunter. Chepstow.

Gut-think: ignore.

They moved again, one going north and one south along me opposite pavement. In ten seconds they were out of sight because I was a few yards into the mouth of the alley and was therefore blinkered beyond a thirty-degree vector, I listened for them, Nothing.

Nothing close.

The rattle of a cab.

A Ship on the Hudson, Silence again.

Then their footsteps.

I walked halfway down the alley and turned round.

From this position I could assess their approach and if I thought they were professionals I could turn again and get out of the alley at the other end.

They became visible, their silhouettes moving against the back-lighting of the street behind them. They came quickly but were not running. There was a certain discipline in the way they walked. I couldn't see any sign of a weapon and certainly neither of them was holding a gun: their silhouettes were sharp and I could see their hands swinging freely as they walked.

They looked confident and I now assumed they were professionals. Their quick footsteps were taking on a strange echo and it alerted me: they were closer than they looked. I turned and began my run but stopped dead when I saw the two other men coming the other way.