They lost me once and came up broadside-on by luck at the north end of a block, and once they hit something in a slide and the sound echoed between the walls of the narrow street. They were getting worried, certain now that I must be heading for a destination that had to be kept secret.

The mount of the Kreuzberg was ahead of us and I swerved right by Flughafen station and then back-tracked because we were getting too close to the Hotel Prinz Johan and I wanted them to keep thinking I was going somewhere else, somewhere important, before I made an all-out effort to lose them and leave them guessing.

Their lights were close behind me at the Alt-Tempelhof and Tempelhofer-damm crossing and then I saw them flick out. There was no tyre-squeal because of the slush; there were only a few long seconds of comparative silence before the sound of the crash filled the buildings like an explosion. I was placed in a slow drift for a right-angle when I heard it, and brought the nose round full-lock with the kerb for a cush. The impetus of the DKW had sent it back across the street in a ricochet and I saw it hit a parked Opel broadside-on in a smother of slush and debris. Then it took fire.

My half-spin had brought me to a halt alongside the kerb so I doused the lights and sat there. A man was screaming. The doors of the car didn't come open. I think if I'd tried I could have sprinted those thirty yards and got a door open and a man out before the flames took hold. I didn't try.

Because they were the enemy. In war, even in war, when death is the object of all human enterprise, there are small acts of chivalry when a man, being gentle in himself despite the orders to kill, performs a gentlemanly deed and redeems by a little the monstrous stupidity of his kind. But the soldier is not alone. He has the brotherhood in arms of a whole regiment behind him, and be they nowhere near at hand they are in his mind.

We are alone. We are committed to the tenets of individual combat and there is no help for him who falls. Save a life and we save a man who will later watch us through the cross-hairs and squeeze the trigger if he gets the orders or the chance. It's no go.

The car burned and the man screamed and I sat watching.

We are not gentlemen.

That was the first of the small signs that we were in business. The second manifested itself not long after dawn the next morning. It was nearer home.

The light in the Schonerlinde-strasse was pale grey. Mist covered the airfield, rising from earth sodden from the thaw. There had been no aircraft movement for the last two hours: I had woken at half-past five and there had been silence from Tempelhof. The beacon was still flashing, its rays becoming fainter on the ceiling as the daylight strengthened.

I'd been thinking about Inga, and realised it, and threw her out of my thoughts. The living mustn't haunt; the dead were quite enough.

But I would try to see Rothstein. She had mentioned him.

The air in the room was cold, like metal against the face. I shut the window, and saw the second small sign. It was a twin glint. The street was empty but for a cruising taxi and I remembered I must take care today: they'd missed their target against that wall and might be waiting to do a better job for their vanity's sake. (Had it been meant for her, that time, or me? I still wasn't sure. Another thing Phoenix might be no better integrated than any other big organisation, and the right hand in big organisations doesn't always know what the left hand's doing. Top orders were to keep me on ice, or I'd have been dead by now; but some thick-ear minion with a stolen taxi might be out for blood on his own account or even for revenge because of the man who'd screamed.

The taxi turned the corner and the street fell quiet again but for the bang of my window. The twin glint had been framed by a window opposite. It doesn't matter how far back you stand in a room; a stray reflection may sometimes be caught across the fieldglass lens. It might have been the bright roof of the taxi. There is always something you can do about being followed: you can flush the tag once you have seen him. There is nothing you can do about being watched. You can draw the curtains but that won't help you when you go down the steps into the street.

I dressed, listening to the radio. The morning Bourse announcement gave only the call-sign: QFT and a gibberish of figures. There was a seven o'clock special delivery to Eurosound because they ran three quiz programmes a week and an audience research team, and certain schedules were dependent on the mail. So our man would have just got my letter and they'd decided on a pained silence in answer to my bleat.

It took twenty minutes to locate Dr. Solomon Rothstein in the new-subscriber addendum of the directory. I hadn't meant to see him right away because I would be in Berlin another month; but it would be more difficult later when they closed in on me and we were at grips. I didn't want him harmed, after all that had gone before.

Then I went down the steps into the street.

It may have been subliminal fear that had kept me so long at the directory. The id, alarmed by the plans of the ego (to go down those steps), had put up defences, tricking me into missing the name the first time and leading me into a series of delaying errors, hoping that we might call the whole thing off. No go. I had made up my mind to see Rothstein, and that meant the steps. The only other exits from the hotel were via the kitchens and the main fire-escape. Neither could be used unless I was in trouble.

There were seven steps. They had been swept free of the melted snow and sand had been laid. It was gritty beneath my shoes. After the first two steps I was fully exposed to that window across the street, and my breath came short, involuntarily. It happens when you wade into cold water it catches your breath but you wade on deeper and deeper because you know the feeling will pass. You know that it's only the cold.

They are only field-glasses.

With luck. But look what happened to Kenneth Lindsay Jones. Five steps, six, seven. Too late now for them to do anything even if they wanted to because I was moving at right-angles along the pavement and they would have fired direct into me on the steps if they'd meant to. The street seemed achingly silent in contrast with what my ears had been listening to subconsciously: the shot.

I was annoyed with myself. There wasn't a president of any republic in the world who didn't have to walk through that kind of risk whenever he showed himself in the open. I was annoyed more by my admission of the fear than by the simple fact of its existence. It is always present, all the time; without it we should all die young. But I was thinking about it, consciously, and I didn't like that. Six months' hard in strict hush had left the nerves exposed.

There was sweat on me before I turned into the gates to the lock-ups and I thought: You poor bastard, you're getting old.

The Volkswagen ran through flooded streets. Rothstein had a laboratory in the Zehlendorf district, on the top floor of a building in the Potsdamer-strasse. He was alone when I called, and for an instant he didn't recognise me. Then his eyes changed.

"Quill…" He took both my hands.

"Hallo, Solly."

We'd met in Auschwitz and had seen each other only once since then, almost by chance, with no time to ask of our affairs. So this was the third meeting and I was always to remember it, because if I had not called on him that day he might have lived.