When I went in she was wrapped in the sheepskin coat and gazing into the glass. The room smelt of pear-drops.

'I've done some invisible mending.'

It was a perfect fit. The milky glow of her body was hidden by the scarecrow folds and she was shapeless: but the metamorphosis had meaning. It was the gesture that fitted so precisely. She had wrapped the coat around herself without thinking: not for comfort or warmth but to invest herself with the magic powers of its owner, just as the fledgling warrior girds himself in the lion-skin of a warlord in the ritual of his initiation, drawing into his sinews the strength of the mighty. Nitri, half-disguised, had become Nitri naked: lost, afraid, vulnerable to the threat of a bell's ringing and to the far explosion she would hear a hundred times before she heard it once.

'It looks new again,' I said.

'Did you talk to Paul Dissen yesterday?'

'Yes.'

It was a peach-tinted glass and her amethyst eyes were darker, indigo.

'Did you find out anything?5 'Quite a lot.'

'He'll never do that.' She meant Franz would never bale out.

'He'll never have to.'

She let the coat fall away. 'You're finding things out all the time.'

'We all are.' The crash-analysis engineers, the aviation psychologists, the people with the magic power to stop Franz getting killed.

I didn't think much of my chances. The mission had only been running three days and we'd been blocked twice and all I'd managed to snatch out of the limbo was a name on a map. Neueburg.

She helped get my left hand through the sleeve and made me a tourniquet out of a scarf. The top of the nail-varnish bottle had fallen and I picked it up and she stuck it back although the bottle was empty: there'd been five or six gashes in the sheepskin.

'I want to see you again,' she said.

'You'll see me again.'

It was one of those buildings without a soul, a sorting-house for displaced persons, its design so modern that it set a trend that would never be followed: there is something already old-fashioned about black-and-teak matt mouldings and mushroom chairs. Glass is a precious material that can make a palace of a cave, playing with light and casting it into shadowed places, but there is no real point in constructing an entire building of it to prove that here we have open minds and hold no secrets.: the purpose is defeated by over-exposure and the result is that here we must shut our faces since we cannot shut our doors.

People moved through the place as if through the cross-section of a termitarium under glass. But they were very efficient.

The Frau Doktor i/c night-hours casualties was a big-boned lesbian with flat expressionless eyes and hands like a mechanical grab. She put in seven sutures and ordered anti-tetanus but that was as far as I would go with her: the capsules were livid-hued and presumably anti-bacterial and coagulation agents and I slipped them into my pocket when her head was turned and just drank the water which was refreshing. She obviously hadn't heard about indiscriminate sensitization and I didn't bother to tell her that I could produce enough antibodies to stop a mad horse given a fair chance.

They wanted me to fill in forms before discharging me because I still looked like an accident case and the Polizeidirektion would expect details so I asked if I could sit down while I filled them in and then edged out to the street when they were busy rubbing antennae with some remote inmate via the automatic switchboard.

It had cost me forty-five minutes but my hand would have been useless with the wound still open and the delay had to be written off as an investment. First light was an hour and a half away and even if they'd found Benedikt by now they probably wouldn't notice the remains of the N.S.U. until morning.

I had told Ferris to leave his 17M in the Marienwerdestrasse because it was just round the block from the hospital and it saved me having to walk back to the Lister-Platz. I slipped the match from under the wiper and got in. The keys were in the ignition and the tank was full and it only took half a minute to find the envelope under the back carpet. It was a big one, quarto.

Karl Ernst Rodl, Hamburg, Herrenhauserstrasse 15 geboren Hamburg 1924, Automechaniker.

I hadn't had to tell Ferris I needed German-national papers: he knew they'd be looking for an Englishman. The rubber stamping bore faint segments and the photograph was sufficiently unlike my face to be natural but the Automechaniker bit was off key because my nails weren't normally split or ingrained. They slipped up sometimes in Credentials and Ferris would be on to that: a blast would already be working its way through his particular pipeline.

There was also a folder inside the envelope. Chronological and Geographical Statistics Breakdown on Pattern-Crashes and Background Information on Dead Pilots. All neatly typed and typical Ferris: he'd never use 'Stats' or 'Info'. It was what I'd asked him for last night and I put it straight into a pocket because if I ever had to leave the 17M as fast as I'd left the N.S.U. there wouldn't be time to clean up inside for inspection and the Kriminalpolizei wouldn't expect Karl Ernst Rodl to interest himself in Striker-crash statistics in English.

A pencilled note was at the foot of the folder. Did you see what happened to Field Marshal Stockener and Minister of Interior von Eckern? Watch this space!

I got out and reached under the back of the car and scraped the nails of my right hand over the final-drive casing and got back in and wiped the worst off the finger-tips on the underside of the carpet. Then I started the engine.

So the Feldmarschall hadn't just skidded and the Bundesminister hadn't just taken a boy into the cloakroom. Benedikt had known: 'They are toppling in high places.' And Ferris had known: This time it's a rather big show.' And of course Parkis had known. The only one who hadn't known was the ferret down the hole and now he was being told.

I wondered why. It wasn't just a giggle behind the hand: Ferris would only tell you what he thought you needed to know. But he was running true to form and giving it to me in homeopathic doses and I wasn't going to think about it now: there were more pressing considerations and while the engine was warming I looked them over.

Findings: (1) It must have been the two men at the motel, the hot operatives who had gone into neutralize Benedikt. They must have tagged me from there as far as the autobahn and then had a go on the long dark sectors where no one would hear any shots. They would certainly have stopped when they saw the N.S.U. smashing up and they would have tried to go down among the trees to finish me off if I were still breathing but I'd got away from the wreck so fast that they couldn't find me: it may well have been a matter of seconds. (There had been headlights across the higher branches so they had probably been going so fast that they'd had to turn back.) (2)A passing motorist might have seen me crash and stopped to see if he could help in which case he would have kept the adverse party away. If they hadn't been able to look inside the wreck they would now believe I was dead or so badly creased that I was out of the running. But this assumption had so little value as to be dangerous: a passing motorist would have telephoned the autobahn police patrols and they'd be called in anyway as soon as it was light enough for someone to notice the mess in the trees. The Bonn Telex would be putting out Mystery-Driver-Vanishes-from-Crashed-Car signals before noon today, nationwide. It was safer to assume the adverse party believed I was alive or would be informed at any time. They would continue to look for me and the police hunt would be thrown in as extra.