This would be the long gun they'd used for the breaking of Fyson's nerve and this time they wanted to kill with it and there wasn't anything I could do except keep all four wheels on the road and hope to survive.

He wasn't an international. He was trained and experienced because the target was now traversing at right-angles at twenty feet per second and the only lighting was back-glare from the headlamps and there were trees at intervals across his field of fire but if he'd been an international the first shot would have neutralized: there's a conceit among the top-flight professionals like Molinari and Kuo and Tomlinson that they only ever use one bullet for each assignment.

This man'sforte was fast use of the automatic reloader: by the dull thump of the last shell after the ricochet had left it almost inert I'd say he was using something like a.44 Magnum, a brush-country weapon with enough power to drive its ammunition through a six-inch pine tree in full sap, and he'd been firing with a controlled rhythm that had kept him on the target throughout the period of three or four seconds following his first shot. I couldn't tell how long he'd be able to maintain fire and I didn't want to give myself any false hopes because it could be anything up to a twelve-shot rotary magazine and he was working at roughly one per second and if he had nine shells left he'd be using the last one while I was still in murderously close range at a hundred and eighty feet.

A hole appeared in the scuttle three inches forward of the windscreen and both the aural and visual effects resembled those from a blow with a pickaxe and it confirmed what I'd thought about the size of this gun: it was really quite big.

He'd overcorrected but this time the error was dangerously narrow: the third shell had hit the rear window approximately forty-eight inches from my head and this one had drilled the hole in the scuttle eighteen inches in front of me and it would have worried me but there were so many factors in play and one of them was the possibility that he hadn't seen where the shell had gone in because it hadn't made so much of a mess as the one that had smashed the window.

I could feel him thinking.

We were very close, he and I. Not close friends but close enemies. The total energy of his brain was devoted to the intricate equations governing our shared situation: speed of target in traverse, speed and extent of movement laterally as the target wavered, horizontal angle of fire, vertical angle of fire and the incomputable factors presented by the configuration of the palm-trees and the movement of the light from the headlamps, so forth. And the result of this mental energy was being expressed by the flight of the cylindrical objects whose accuracy was linking us closer and closer together, moving us nearer the point at which there would come profound personal involvement as the intention in this man's brain exploded in my own.

The more difficult phase of this operation is getting you to the jump-off point without attracting surveillance or obstructive action.

Put it like a schoolmistress but when it came to the crunch the terms were simpler: flesh and blood and a bullet, the will to live and the urge to kill, the moment of truth.

Oh Christ he was close and I felt the air-wave across my eyes and the force smashed the facia and sent splinters whining past my face as we drifted badly because of the shock and I tried to pull her straight and for the first time cursed him, being afraid and needing to diminish him by names. The trees swung and the lights sent their shadows lurching as the tyres lost their hold on the sandy surface and the back end broke away and I brought it straight and used the throttle for traction and got it and piled it on.

Five.

He'd brought down the error from forty-eight inches to less than one and he'd done it in two shots and I sat waiting for it, listening to the whistle of the wind through the can in the screen and watching the dips and hollows of the road as the lights pooled shadows there and then swept them away, his image in my mind, a dark face pressed to the gun, its eye brilliant in the light on the road ahead of me that was gathered by the telescopic lens and focused on the pupil, thrown on the screen of the retina for interpretation by the brain: higher and to the right — fire.

Six and the impact and a ricochet and fine glass fragments shivering in the air from the instruments and then a shoulder-blow as the shell doubled and I took the last of its inertia and the wheel jerked and I lost it, the lot, spinning once over the loose sand and rocking across the edge of the macadam with the vibration shaking the granules from the frame of the screen and the windrush sending them past me in a stream of flying hail as the flank of the 220 struck across a tree-trunk and we pitched the other way and found the road and bounced there with a tyre bursting and a headlight blacking out.

Lost it again and we spun with the last of the screen fragments shaking awayand falling across me while I dragged the manual into low to kill off the rest of the speed but the front end wouldn't respond and a palm-trunk ripped a wheel panel off and left the front fender creased backwards and howling on the tyre with its shrill note rising as I got traction in low and brought her back on to the road and shifted the lever and took the speed up again through the early range with the stink of heated rubber fouling the air.

The howling noise was very loud, marking my passage through the night, but if I slowed he'd take his time and set up the final shot and I kept up the speed, drifting crabwise with the burst tyre dragging and the one headlight slanting away from the road. Something important was trying to get my attention but brain-think was at a discount and the oasis road came up before I realized that it was a six-shot and he was changing magazines.

Half a kilometre from the Mosque Hamoud Pasha the front tyre melted through and burst and a lot of the howling stopped but the steering was very awkward now and it was really a question of howlong it would take him to get into his car and come up on me with a full magazine.

The dark oblong shape of the Renault was standing under the palms, glow of a Gauloise, threw my flight-bag in and pulled the door shut.

'Go very fast, will you?'

I set the door-lock and got the belt adjusted.

He glanced at me.'Ca va?'

'Ca va.'

I suppose I was bleeding again.

He swung through the main intersection and accelerated hard along the South 4 highway and I pulled down the passenger visor and angled it to line up the mirror, negative.

Chirac flicked the stub through the window.

'I heard some shots just now.'

'So did I.'

He laughed cannily and shut the window and pushed the vents open and there wasn't so much noise.

'Do you expect we shall be followed?'

'It's on the cards.'

'Comment?'

'C'est possible.'

Two of the stars on the south horizon were beginning to glow red and I watched them.

'Do I go fast enough?'

'Not if you can go any faster.' There was 140 kph on the clock and the engine was running at peak. with valve-bounce creeping in. 'How long will it take to reach the airstrip?'

'Maybe ten minutes, a little more.'

London was panicking but I didn't have to try cutting actual seconds off the schedule: it was just that if the man with the gun had got into his car he might have seen the Renault when we'd left the Mosque.

Mirror negative.

I could see now that the two red lights were stationary ahead of us and if it was some kind of breakdown I hoped it wasn't blocking the road because we wanted a clear run. There were three lights now and when I'd considered all the other possible explanations I voted for the idea that there were two vehicles halted on the road about a mile in front of us: a few seconds ago I'd felt my weight shifting slightly to one side and my elbow had been pressed gently against the door panel so we must have taken an almost indefinable curve and the visual effect had been to reveal one of the second vehicle's rear-lamps by parallax.