The torch-beam flickered back to my papers and then on to my face again and I grasped at a small hope: he was less efficient than he looked because if you shine a torch full into someone's face his eyes are going to screw up and they won't be screwed up in the photograph. He might make other mistakes.

A monstrous hiss came from the long-hauler and then the brakes dragged again and there was the shunt of heavy couplings. He'd dipped now and I could see better. What I could see most was the shine on the patrolman's holster just about eye-level from where I sat. He turned as another one walked up, an older man in Hauptmann's uniform, very smart-looking and big in the body, his head like a sculpted rock. They stood looking at my papers and suddenly I was unnerved and it had nothing to do with them.

I had missed a trick and that wouldn't do, it wouldn't do at all. The subconscious had been working busily during the crisis and now it presented its findings. Cancel all probabilities: it hadn't been the motel manager or anything to do with him. It had been the adverse party and this was their third try: they'd stopped my run at this section of the autobahn as surely as if they'd set up an ambush.

The front of the long-hauler filled the mirror and the lights went out. Voices. The diesel clattered to silence. Ahead of me the group of police stood back and the Volkswagen pulled away.

They had managed to go down into the trees and look inside the wreck of the N.S.U. and when they saw it was empty they'd beaten around a bit and then gone up and used the nearest emergency phone and told the Kriminalpolizei to check on an Englander named Martin who had been staying at the motel in Linsdorf where a man named Benedikt was now lying dead in his room. They should also check up on his car which they would find alongside the autobahn. The informant's name was Schmidt and he was telephoning in the interests of justice. It had begun then.

I didn't know how much sleep I'd had in Nitri's apartment after I'd passed out: it wouldn't have been more than four or five hours and it had been recuperative and not restorative but that was no excuse for missing a trick on this scale. Instead of being so perversely content that every man's hand would soon be against me I should have assumed it was against me already: should have assumed the people who had finished Benedikt would automatically try to pull off a double by sounding the alarm before I got too far.

I should have come south from Hanover like a mouse with a cat in the room.

This wasn't very good and I sat in my sweat and watched them checking the papers. Situation: they stood about five yards from the car and they weren't looking at me and there was a flush of light rising from behind the long-hauler as someone else came homing in on the trap and in ten seconds or so they'd be dazzled by it if they looked in my direction so it wasn't a question of yards but of seconds and increasing candle-power.

The main police group was vetting the Vollmond truck in front of me, one of them climbing into the cab to have a look round: the theory they would be working on was that Martin might have thumbed a lift somewhere in the Linsdorf area after crashing the N.S.U. and might have offered the driver a fistful of deutschmarks to shove him under the seat if anyone turned nosey. The patrol with the lamp would be back there signalling the new arrival to halt: I could see his shadow stretching across the road-surface as the light brightened. Both trucks and the 17M had their engines switched off the newcomer was already producing a bit of background noise that would get louder until he stopped. No one would hear me open the door and I didn't have to slam it shut after me.

I turned my head and saw a couple of yards of empty road-margin and a line of thick brush. It was naked thorn but then they wouldn't like it either and its main value was visual: it would be like shooting through a smoke-screen.

A faint shrilling began and the shadow on the road was waving the lamp more insistently and I now had very little time to make the decision and my right hand was already reaching across to the other door because that was the way I'd be going out if I went out at all but the chances were about fifty-fifty. I knew I could get through the first of the thorn and break across open ground before they could draw and fire and the initial surprise phase would give me time to go a fair distance towards the next cover, but a loose shoe is more laming than a leg-wound and it would take up to three seconds to wrench both shoes off and a barefoot run across rough terrain would slow me critically.

And I would be committed.

The new arrival had stopped behind the long-hauler and the scene went dark. The last clear image on the retina was of the two uniformed men moving towards me, the senior holding my papers, I took my hand away from the door. It had been mostly stomach-think, not brain-think: the instinctive need of a trapped animal to free itself, the temptation to go as the hare had gone, ears flat and feet together. Brain-think had warned me. There had been a fifty-fifty chance of getting clear but my very freedom would' have comprised another trap: I would have been committed, exposed as the man they were looking for. Martin. There was still a fifty-fifty chance of getting clear by sitting here with my nerves and sweating it out and if they finally let me drive away I would be uncommitted. Rodl.

'Good-morning.' A punctilious salute, the big hand swinging to touch the rock-like head, a hand that would come down with hammer-force if it sensed a wrong move.

'Good-morning,' I said.

'Where have you come from?' The robot tone of a speak-your-weight machine.

'Hanover.'

'Where are you going?'

'Munden.'

'Why are you on the road at this hour?'

'To avoid the traffic.'

I played it dead straight, not making a joke. Anyone trying to avoid the traffic and fetching up jammed between thirty tons' worth of truckage might think it rated a laugh but he wouldn't see it that way. Making a joke is fatal unless the worst thing on your mind is a duff rear-light because if they think you're not taking them seriously they'll have your shoes off and check them for hollow heels just to show how serious they can get.

It had gone very quiet now. Last man in had been told to switch off his engine. The Hauptmann was tapping my papers on the joint of his thumb. He said:

'What is the advantage of a hemispherical head?'

I looked a bit thrown, as if I hadn't quite caught on, because being too quick on the uptake can be as suspect as making a joke.

'Well, it cuts down turbulence, and if you've got twin overhead camshafts you'll want to incline the valves anyway so a hemispherical head's almost obligatory.'

'Have you any opinions on water-vapour?'

'In the carburation? I'd say it's a help in most conventional engines, in fact Schneider make a limited suction-feed system that anyone can fit. When my friends try to argue about this I always ask them why their car seems to run smoother on a wet day.'

The sweat was on my face now and I hoped he wouldn't notice. If he were going to keep me waiting five seconds before he spoke again it was going to be five seconds of purgatory, like waiting for the exam results. He wasn't only trying to find out if Karl Rodl, Mechaniker, knew his stuff on engines. He also wanted to test my German for mistakes in technical terms because any good linguist can come unstuck on words like camshaft. And the ice had been wafer-thin: the Striker wasn't internal-combustion and I hadn't needed this kind of terminology since the Nurburgring mission and the memory had had to pull it out of some very cold storage.

Visual accommodation was improving now and in the light of their torches I could see the group by the truck talking to the driver and his mate. One of them was still in the cab. The driver was shaking his head all the time — 'Nein, nein!' The trouble with police traps is that even though they might be set up to intercept a man on the run they'll do what business is offered from an out-of-date licence to a crate of cocaine stowed under the seat and that means delay for everyone in the queue.