He was only a tag: there wouldn't be any action unless I did something busy. If they'd wanted to neutralize me they'd have used two men: one with the wheel, one with the gun, the rear tyres first to slow me and then the rear window. picking at the bottom left-hand corner while I couldn't duck any lower without losing sight of the road.

He only wanted to know where I was going.

The rdv was twelve minutes from now and I didn't want to turn up late for Chirac so I started a slow routine, using the sand to slide on and flicking the lights out at the fast end of a right-angle turn and doubling in the dark and slipping him twice before he worked out the score and decided to keep so close that I could see his eyes in the mirror. No go.

Kaifra isn't a big place and it's surrounded by desert and that made it difficult for me: there wasn't much choice of terrain. I suppose he'd got his air-conditioning on and that made me fed-up again so. I thought I should go and stare him out somewhere along the desert road to South 4.

I've only done it twice before and I don't like it because there's a touch of Russian roulette about it and that's inconsistent: in order to complete a mission you have to stay alive.

If Loman had known what I was going to do he would have had the shits and I tried not to let this reinforce my decision to do it. He would have argued that it was the duty of an executive not only to protect himself against obstructive action by the opposition but also to avoid resorting to tactics that could hazard the mission, so forth.

On the other hand my chances of getting out of the present situation alive weren't too high either: the man in the 404 realized that I was going somewhere exclusive because I'd been trying to throw him off. We could keep this up for half the night and if we went anywhere near his base he might decide to bring in some support to finish me off and if you start running with one an the tail and another one closing in from ahead of you the chances get progressively disappointing until they move in for the kill.

So I turned left twice and then right and found the road that ran through fifteen miles of dunes to the South 4 camp. The massed palms blocked most of the starlight but we didn't go on to heads and he kept coming up very close every time I jabbed the brakes and when he got used to the rhythm of the thing I broke it and started drifting across his bows and he didn't like that either because we couldn't see much on parking lights and I suppose he didn't want to switch his heads on because it would have looked so amateur.

Brakes: drift. Another drift and sand flew as the tyres scattered it. Brakes: oh very close and I cleared it because I didn't want to leave any paint on him.

Drift. Brake — drift and he got nervous and hit something, trunk of a palm, and then I gunned up and he spun a lot and I lost him and swung into the long desert road and went all the way up through the gears on the automatic and crossed the hundred mark with the power still coming on, no lights yet in the mirror but they'd be there soon.

Ravines both sides.

Not deep ones but the engineers had followed the natural lie of a bedrockgassi and then raised the roadway high enough to stop the south-blowingGhibli from burying it under permanent drifts of sand.

Coming now, yes.

Faint lights in the mirror. Headlights, faint.

It would be all right out here. The setting was classic: sand, stars and the highway leaning across the desert to the horizon, a fallen column. There was nothing complicated.

You can do it by first putting a critical amount of distance between your own car and theirs. You can do this either by relying on superior acceleration and maximum speed to take care of the distance-factor or by taking them through a series of feints and passes to slow them up before you go out for the kill.

The 220 had the edge on the 404 but it would have taken twenty miles to build up the degree of distance needed and I didn't have the time and that was why I'd made a point of slowing him in phase 1: it had brought the time-factor right down with a bang and the whole thing would now be over within the next thirty seconds and if I were still all right I could go back and keep the Chirac rdv more or less on time.

It was veryimportant not to touch him. Loman could do quite a lot to keep me out of official trouble because his cover provided him with the required diplomatic immunity and the Embassy had been asked to give immediate support in the event of a signal, but things could get tricky despite precautions and two years ago when Proctor had just finished setting up final penetration for a first-class cipher-break in a Curtain-state consulate he blew the mission because he'd left his car parked on a pedestrian-crossing and London got very upset.

Tonight there was going to be an accident and if it was the 404's and not mine I wasn't going to report it and everything would be all right so long as there weren't any marks on the Mercedes.

The power was full on and I left it for five seconds while I worked out the odds. It depended on the kind of man he was: it depended totally on that. And I didn't know him. He could drive all right and didn't chuck it in when things got rough but it didn't tell me much about the one factor that would finally decide the issue: his breaking-point.

No data.

It raised the risk but it was a calculated risk and the odds looked fair so I kicked the brakes and watched the needle because in the starlight the swinging parallax of the dunes didn't make for a good enough reference and it was safer to drive on instruments. Patch of sand and we lost traction and I got it back and wrapped the friction round again, slowly through ninety, seventy, fifty with the lights in the mirror getting brighter as the distance,closed.

Fabric getting hot: normal. Maximum deceleration-curve right out of the book and very effective but now I began wondering if I'd allowed the correct distance: all I'd had for a reference was the time he'd taken to come back into the mirror and the brightness of his headlamps when he'd turned them on.

Twenty.

Ten.

Zero and I used the last of the momentum to swing the 220 into a fast U that brought us facing the way we'd come and then I gunned up by leaving my foot just where it was and letting the automatic send the needle up progressively.

His headlights seemed rather bright even allowing for the fact that I was now facing them and I started wondering again whether I'd judged things right but there was a rising fifty on the clock by now and everything was shaping up well enough; I think it was only the primitive animal brain starting to worry: the organism didn't like the look of this at all, up on its back legs and bloody well whining.

Ignore.

Speed now 70.

His estimated speed: 80 plus.

Minimum impact figure if things went wrong: 150.

I didn't put the heads on yet because I wanted to save that till later: three or four seconds from now. At the moment he wouldn't be absolutely sure what I was doing: he would have lost my rear-lamps but that could mean I'd simply turned them off; he would have picked up my parking lights but he wouldn't necessarily identify them: with an eye-level horizon the big North African stars seemed to be floating on the dunes and this would confuse him.

I had to wait for the instant when he realized that I'd turned round and was coming at him on a very fast collision-course: then I'd start making him nervous in the final few seconds in the hope that he'd see the point.

Bloody well whining. Brain-think had partially gone and the organism was snivelling about the risk: we wouldn't be here tomorrow, no more women, no more anything, so forth. His headlights very bright in my eyes, almost blinding. The dunes streaming past, the warm air rushing at the windows. Clock: 85.