I still couldn't see them anywhere near; in the sour light from the street lamps here I would have picked out movement but there wasn't any. I was alone.

I was alone and one of two things must have happened: either I'd put too much power behind the half-fist when I'd gone for that man's carotid nerve and he'd never got up again and they'd decided that two dead in the field was enough, or Yasolev had ordered another of them snatched and they'd been called off, which was exactly what I'd warned Cone could happen, Gott strafe them, this was a solo operation and I didn't want any interference.

It was half-past ten and I moved from the shadow of the rubbish bin and crossed the street and found cover at the corner of Richterstrasse and checked the environment and it was blank, still blank. But the light was tricky because at some time or other there'd been a spate of escape attempts in this area and I was within a couple of hundred yards of the Wall and the searchlight they'd installed there was sweeping the ground and flickering across the buildings and the gaps between them with the intermittent effect of a strobe.

There was a parking area with twenty or thirty vehicles in it, all of the same type standing in rows, the nearest one with a crest on it, City of Berlin, street maintenance department. I moved between them and then stopped and checked the environment for the last time to make certain.

Flying glass and I dropped flat.

Headlamp.

The spotlight swept the ground, the vehicles. I didn't move, lay flat. I was in shadow.

The shot had gone into a headlamp close to where I'd been moving and there was blood on my face from the flying glass.

A rifle, nothing smaller; a long-distance shot that hadn't made any noise. He was using a silencer.

The tags had been called off and this was why. For the whole of the long afternoon they'd kept me in sight and waited for the right time and the right place, which was here, which was now. The two attempts to kill me had been made on impulse, a chance taken on the wing in the hope of an easy kill and the kudos it would bring. But this had been the predetermined operation and now it had begun.

The smell of oil as I lay with my face close to the ground over a patch of crankcase droppings. Very little sound; no traffic; there was no checkpoint here, nothing between Oberbaumbrucke to the north and Sonnen Allee to the south. A wash of reflected light came from the concrete sweep of the Wall itself but the rotating beam was infinitely more intense and the shadows between the vehicles in the parking area were black in contrast.

It wouldn't have been a single attempt. He would run through a whole ammunition-belt if he had to. He wouldn't have to; it would be a question of time, of number, the number of shots required.

He'd be in no hurry; he had from now until dawn. But he wouldn't of course be alone; there'd be others in the environment, stationed strategically so that I couldn't make a headlong run for it and with luck survive. I couldn't see them from where I lay. All I could see were wheels to the right of this position, dark rounded blobs below the vehicle that sheltered me. On my left there were the others in orderly rows, parked for the night. More of them were ahead of me, and beyond them the lights of a street. Behind me there was another street but I was cut off from that; the sniper was in that direction, posted on a height of some sort, in the window of a building or on a fire-escape. He would be comfortable; he would take his time.

And I would take mine.

The air was perfectly still and very cold. Sounds would carry clearly when they came. There'd be no change in the light value unless traffic passed along the street behind me or the street on the far side; the glow of the Wall was constant and so was the intensity of the rotating beam. I suppose it was cheaper than putting up a whole battery of spotlights; and there was a sinister aspect to this constantly moving finger that brought everything it touched into fierce relief. Its purpose was to deter.

Cone:

Yasolev's going to ask you how you'll be planning your access to Volper. Will you tell him?

No.

Do you know?

Yes.

Are you prepared to tell me?

You wouldn't like it.

How much protection are you going to need?

None.

My job is to get you through Quickstep with a whole skin. I'd rather you didn't make it difficult for me.

Look, it's out of our hands. Put it this way: they went for Scarsdale and they got him. They thought it'd warn me off but it didn't, so now they'll go for me. And that's the only access we've got, and I'm going to use it. Don't worry, they won't be long.

That had been four days ago, and this night would be the last.

Impact and I jerked my head and listened to the ricochet as the shell ripped through the metalwork of the vehicle in front of me and skated across the ground under dying momentum. It was a heavy projectile, I would say from a carbine or magnum with anything up to twelve shots in the magazine and fitted with a high-magnification night scope and silencer. It wouldn't be expected to drive a hole in a human skull; it would blow it apart.

There was no smell of the gun. It could be a quarter of a mile away. I closed my eyes and let the scene come in as it would look from the sniper's position: a rectangular area of flat tarmacadam dotted with dominoes, regularly spaced, with the shadows of the swinging light shifting constantly at precise intervals. And within this circumscribed pattern, a man.

A man for the moment motionless. To lie here until dawn was a temptation, to lie here and use the dark hours to review my life so as to leave it with a feeling of something accomplished, not a lot but something. But I would also have to review the mistakes I'd made, the instances of gross incompetence incurred by pride or too much faith in the self's abilities, and the unwitting betrayals, the lapses in manners, in loyalty, in the concession to mercy when its need cried out. And that, my good friend, could not be countenanced; it would not look well in the reckoning. Besides which, I wasn't going to give up after the first two shots, or after the first two hundred if he'd got that many. One must be true to one's principles, so forth, but the terror was on me and I could smell it as the cold sweat broke out: it's not the thought of death that makes us afraid, you know, it's the thought of dying, of reaching the point of no return, of being too late; everything in life has always been reversible, hasn't it, or tolerable, manageable — there's always been time left in which to put one's house in order, to clean up the worst of the mess and say you're sorry; and then suddenly we're caught in the headlights, frozen in mid-stride, and there's nowhere to go any more except there, into the unknown.

Finis.

Exactly, my good friend.

Impact and the breath came out of my body as if the shell had blown it out. But it hadn't; it had crashed into the side window of the vehicle where I was sheltering, and the fragments fluted through the air in a dying chorus of notes as the vehicle moved on its springs by a degree and was still again.

Amusing himself.

The rotating light swung, sending the shadows of the vehicles' shifting from left to right in a circling crossword puzzle. He was amusing himself: I hadn't moved and he knew where I was but he couldn't reach this side of the vehicle unless he changed his position and he didn't want to do that; he was too comfortable, too well-placed. So he'd fired another shot to keep his eye in, to keep his eye in and to put the fear of Christ in me because the impact of a shell that size in the silence of the night is enough to shatter the nerves.