it with his tumbler, sipping at the whisky.
'It would be too easy, too simple, to use your enormous powers,' Oleg said. 'Like swatting flies. The problem is, the squashed flies remain on the window-pane or the white wall, marking it.'
'I don't need a lecture in caution. This is your test for me — I shall pass it.' He saluted his companion with the tumbler, and drank again as the tic recommenced.
He would swat them — if they knew, any or all of them, rather than just guessed or suspected or were blundering around, blindfold at the party and trying desperately to touch someone they could not see. If they knew, then he would swat them. If they knew, or acted upon knowledge, at any time, then he would have them eliminated — Massinger, Margaret, Aubrey, Zimmermann, Shelley, Hyde. The whole little gang. Every one of them. He would have to be careful, of course. If they behaved, they had to be allowed to live because their deaths would be a messy and unnecessary complication…
But if they
Dead.
'Another dead one,' he said, picking up the bottle of whisky and finding it empty.
Zimmermann inserted his key in the lock, and the door swung open at once, before he had turned the key. Immediately, he knew he had been burgled. There was no one in the corridor, he had passed no one on the stairs, no one had been using the lift…
He listened. Nothing. Silence. The smell of liquor, of broken bottles. He stepped into the hall and felt for the switch. When the light came on, he could see the door of the lounge ajar. Furniture was overturned — a small piece of Meissen broken near the door, a headless shepherdess — and the smell of the broken whisky and gin bottles increased. Still he heard nothing.
He hurried now. The lounge was a shambles, and the wide-open door of the bedroom as he passed it revealed the tumbled bed and the drawers hanging open like shocked mouths. His clothes were strewn about the room.
He saw immediately that the silver pieces were gone, and the porcelain. The paintings had been cut from their frames, the photographs — there was one from his own past, in the uniform in which Aubrey had captured him in 1940, grinning from beneath his peaked cap — had been smashed or ground underfoot. The drinks cabinet had been emptied — yes, a bottle of whisky and one of gin neckless, the liquor soaking into the carpet.
He saw that the small wall-safe hung open, the picture frame askew that had concealed it. The files were gone, each and every one of them, together with his savings books, his chequebook, his other credit cards, his will and the rest of his papers. And the two thousand marks in notes he always kept there.
But it was the files, of course. The damned files…
He was galvanised rather than numbed by shock. He looked out of the window but the Audi that had followed him was not to be seen in the street. He crossed to the telephone, rescuing it from its entanglement with a rug, finding the receiver itself hanging over the back of the sofa. He dialled the Konigshof Hotel. He had no wish for a restorative drink — the spilled whisky was oppressive and heady. He was angry at the damage — the professional entry clumsily disguised by modern vandalism. Very angry.
He requested Massinger's room number.
'Come on, come on…'he murmured, then: 'Ah, Paul, my friend. I apologise for waking you at this hour.'
'Wolfgang? What is it?'
'I appear to have been burgled. The files have been taken. I'm sure they were the object of the burglary. I am calling you to advise extreme caution tomorrow and for all the days that follow.'
'Burglarised — God…'
'Please be careful — I will not caution you not to go, because you would not listen. But, watch your back, my friend. You may need old instincts, old training. And hurry back. I — we need each other's help, of that I am certain.'
'Yes, yes I will. A couple of days, no more—'
'Good night, then.'
He flung the telephone onto the sofa, as if to allow it to remain an integral part of the ransacked room. He rubbed his forehead, his other hand on his hip as he paced the stained and littered carpet. He appeared professorial, and on the point of beginning some abstruse line of argument. His thoughts, however, were clear and simple.
KGB. Moving to protect, moving to remove proof. Carrying away on large farm forks the dungheap concealing the diamond. Protecting…
It had to be. Babbington. At once, they had moved to a position of aggressive defence on his behalf.
It meant caution. Extreme, almost somnolent caution, if he were to proceed. Especially, it meant doing nothing to arouse their suspicions until he had Massinger back with him from Vienna.
It also meant, he thought suddenly, scrabbling for the telephone, it also meant that Frau Margarethe Schroder might, just might, be in some immediate danger. Picking up the telephone, he began dialling the prison in Cologne, his eyes roaming over the littered, broken remains of his furniture and ornaments with a weary gleam of wisdom and cunning.
He was running into the low, newly risen sun, wintrily-red, his shape black against it for those pursuing, his shadow thrown long behind him. His shadow was palpable to him, even though he could not see it. To his heightened, exhausted, almost hallucinatory senses, it dragged behind him like a lure for hounds. He was an easy black target against a red disc. He could hear the noise of the MiL gunship as it prepared to swoop once more, and he scanned the rocks for cover.
Finesse, you bastards, finesse, finesse…! he had silently screamed at the helicopter, over and over, as he had reached the narrow, twisting floor of the steep valley and began running as the dead winch-man was retrieved by the crew of the MiL. He wanted them to toy with him, play cat-and-mouse. That way, he might survive.
The snow had drifted in places in the narrow knife-cut of the valley. It restrained and trapped, caused him to stumble in his fear and haste and weariness, then it was a thin, powdery skin and he ran more easily from rock to rock, dodging, sprinting, bending low then running upright, head back like an athlete. It was perhaps no more than four miles long, and he would reach the border in less than a mile—
That was what he had announced to himself, between the few quick, deep, preparatory breaths he had taken at the foot of the tumbled, boulder-strewn slope, the Russian helicopter still above and behind him.
Less than a mile—
It was meaningless, of course. The border wasn't even drawn at that point, it did not exist. Pakistan lay at the other end of the valley, and Parachinar, which he had to avoid. And somewhere was the army and the people who would be waiting for Miandad, under instructions that the dead Pakistani officer had never divulged to him.
Less than a mile—
And he had begun running. Random, fast, hesitant, bent over, upright, apparently directionless. There were one or two shots which faded on the dry, cold morning air, their bullets well wide. It was not Kalashnikovs he had to avoid, but cannon fire, machine-gun volleys, grenades, anti-personnel mines… all the weaponry of a MiL-24 gunship determined to make a kill.
Half a mile, surely half a mile by now, he pleaded with his judgment as he heard the MiL move from the hover to the approach as if it were a bird of prey stooping. The noise clattered in the thin dry air, bouncing off the rocks. The modern Stuka, he heard some irrelevant part of his awareness remark in the tone of the bar-room bore, passing out his platitudes like helpings of crisps or peanuts.
The image grew, and he amputated it. He turned, and watched the MiL. It was flying cautiously — no, not cautiously, tauntingly was the right description. One change of acceleration, one dip, and it could cover him like a cloud or a coffin-lid in perhaps no more than six or seven seconds. But it wanted to play cat-and-mouse because its crew were so enraged and so confident. Make him sweat—
Terror, advancing up the narrow valley, dragging its wake of deafening, reverberated sound behind it. Terror. It minced slightly, from side to side, swaying as if grotesquely miming a woman's walk. It moved towards Hyde's shadow, which had seemed to prostrate itself at the helicopter's approach. Hyde felt his body quivering uncontrollably.
