What I really wanted to do was to go a short distance along the autobahn and use an emergency phone to tell Ferris what had happened, so that he could pass it on to London. It was only reasonable: they'd knocked another hole in the fabric, first Lovett and now Benedikt, and London would expect a report on that, however brief. Then I wanted to peel off and take a minor road south-east and then make east for Neueburg.

Now things had changed and I could do a U-turn and go back the way I'd come, but they would certainly cling on and wait for an opportunity and then use it: the dark winding road would give them an advantage. In any case it wasn't what I really wanted to do.

They hadn't got on to me by luck. They must have driven out of the parking area (I had seen their lights) and waited by the side of the road in case I were going to scarper. If I'd stayed at the motel they would probably have arranged it that the end came for me peacefully in my sleep, though it seemed less likely. There were several pointers to a single supposition: their orders were to make it look like an accident. Otherwise they could have dropped me with one careful shot as I crossed from the motel to the car.

The man came out of the building.

' Vierzig-funfzig-sechzig.'

I put the change away.

They'd gone in quickly for Lovett. It had been an emergency: a leak had been exposed. The best they could do was to fancy it up as a suicide. They'd worked as fast with Benedikt the moment they'd seen the light. He had been the leak itself. But with me they could take their time and make it look like an accident. Benedikt might have told me the lot or nothing: they weren't to know. But whatever I now possessed they were going to arrange that it would shortly amount to no more than a pattern of memory-traces fading on the surface of a dead cortex.

I looked once towards the Mercedes. Its shape was a black glitter under the glare of the floods and behind the screen their faces were white in contrast with their dark overcoats. The car was very clean and they were dressed with the correctness of pallbearers. They sat without moving, upright on the seats and with the patience of those who await a ritual.

I looked the other way along the perspective of the autobahn, a tapering ribbon of frost-grey under the moon.

They would have more speed than I and they were heavier but I got in and started up because this was the only road to where I had to go.

'Ferris? I'm somewhere along the autobahn.'

He wouldn't say anything.

'I made contact. But it was no go.'

'Why not?'

'They broke the shepherdess. But I suppose London ought to know. Ought to be told.'

'Let me have the facts.'

'Well they went in quick for him and she's one thousand two hundred and ten kilos dry-weight, lighter than the 300, not critically but it's no use comforting yourself. They did it with some wire.'

'Where are they now?'

'I don't know. You can work the whole thing out to a formula and that's what I did. I don't mean when they went in for him. I mean when they came for me. And heavy. It was the heaviness that I didn't like.'

'Give me some more.'

'Are you listening, Ferris?'

I subscribe to Coue, Maltz and the Frenchman who said si tu veux tu peux. They all make the same point but Coue put it quite well: in any contest between the imagination and the will, the imagination always wins.

We've tested this out in training sessions using alcohol, electric shock techniques, artificially induced fatigue states and varying degrees of auto-hypnosis. An example would be: if the ship's been sunk under you and it's a ten-mile swim to the shore you'll stand more chance of getting there by using imagination instead of willpower. You can grit your teeth and will yourself to do it but the command is conscious and your subconscious is on board for the trip and it can be a lead weight if it's left to its own little games: once it starts brooding about the black silent fifty-fathom void below your body the will-power is going to lose a lot of steam. But if you bring in the subconscious to work for you it means the imagination will be programmed in and in the place of a lead weight you've got yourself a propeller. Feed it the key-image 'shore' and you're there already, prone as a log and coughing up water but safe and alive.

Maltz confirms that the nervous system can't tell the difference between a real and an imagined experience. If this weren't true they could never produce a burn-mark on the back of the leg with an ice-cube by convincing the subject that it's a red-hot poker and they do it every day at St George's as a change from making tea.

The trick isn't fool-proof because so many other factors are in play: your personality patterns, state of mind, so forth. It only works with some people some of the time.

It didn't work with me when I took the N.S.U. away from the Esso station. My 'shore' was a telephone call to Ferris somewhere along the autobahn because if I ever made that call it would mean I'd ditched the bastards first. The one factor against my using the scheme was the situation,itself: you've got time to spare in a steady crawl-stroke but with the RO-80 pitching it up through the gears and the arithmetic to work out it didn't give the imagination a one-track focus: imagination was needed to help size up the mechanics of the thing and that was why technical considerations kept merging in my mind with the telephone call to Ferris.

I let it go. The nervous system was going to have to do it the hard way instead of just homing in on a Ferris-sensitive target by preconditioned reflex. It was going to have to do what it was bloody well told to do, I could feel — actually feel in my stomach and on my hands and the back of my neck — what the imagination was doing, or that part of it that I didn't need for mechanics. It was being frightened. And in an odd way.

I was less afraid of the chance of imminent death or hideous injury than of abstract things: blackness, heaviness — the surrealistic identities of the people behind me in the night. I was being hunted not by two men in a motor-car but by the dark-coming hounds of hell. Perhaps it was because they had looked so inhuman sitting there correctly on their seats, faceless in funeral clothes, nameless but for a number-plate. To put it more finely, this was not quite fear. It was dread.

They should have picked him up, sat him against the wall or something, not left him sprawled out staring at the bits of broken china. It had been indecent.

Their headlights came on suddenly in the mirror and I knew what was happening because I'd worked out the formula: the formula for survival. The basic data for the N.S.U. RO-80 included weight and speed figures: 1210 kilograms with a dry tank, 180 kilometres per hour. The gears were automatic and the front wheels did the driving. The time-lag was about the same with the automatic as with a manual shift and so it didn't make any difference. The superior traction of front-wheel drive wasn't likely to affect things even on the fast curves north of the mountains because there would have to be a curve that had to be driven round if the N.S.U.'s cornering advantages were to be brought into play.

The Mercedes 300 weighed 1560 kilos and the top speed was 190 k.p.h. Gear control was optional and I didn't know which this one had. The rear wheels did the driving.

First findings: all factors being equal the Mercedes could overhaul me by 10 k.p.h. and give ms a 350-kilo nudge into the tree-trunks when it was ready.

Unknown data: the precise weight of the two men and the amount of fuel they had on board. There was nothing to be done about this. Give a man eighty kilos with shoes and overcoat: they had an extra 430. Assume their tank was close on full: it took them past 450. But it would need a slide-rule to decide the balance: how much their extra weight was going to cost them in acceleration and maximum speed, how much it was going to help them nudge me off the road.