'Get in!"

Treader, dragging me to the car and hustling me into the back, slamming the door and getting behind the wheel and starting up and moving off, someone hysterical in the crowd just here where the woman was lying, the woman and the man, their blood pooling in the moonlight.

Rage, fierce rage.

And these are my views.

Let them stand.

'You saw it happen?' I heard Ferris asking.

'Yes. I saw it happen.'

Get in control. It was nasty but the executive in the field is reporting to his director and there is the need for control, for decorum, you understand, there is no room here for personal feelings.

'How did it happen?'

You're perfectly right, how indeed did it happen, they'll want it for the signals board in London. 'A chopper took off from the pad here and came across the car park and someone opened the door and used a submachine gun at a range of fifty feet.'

In a moment, 'Where were you?'

'Not that close. They weren't making any mistake. It was a straight, accurate hit.'

We moved forward, slowed again. The cars were jamming at the stop sign where the Yacht Club drive met the main road. Police whistles blowing – they were trying to clear the exit roads but it was difficult because a lot of people had obviously stopped their cars to see what had happened, some of them standing on the roof.

'They didn't know you were there,' Ferris said. 'The chopper didn't shift its -'

'No. This was just for her.'

We'll go to my apartment and I'll show you what I'm talking about. It's actually on paper, duplicated. You know what I'm saying? A whole brief, do you understand?

The product. Mission completed.

Not now.

'All right.' Ferris sounded a touch over-controlled, very cool, his articulation precise. We had come, after all, so very close to wrapping this one up and going home. 'Your instructions are to -'

'Listen,' I said, 'her phone must have been tapped. They picked up her call to Nassau tonight.'

'You think so?'

'She'd been on the yacht and she asked me along to the club to meet Stylus von Brinkerhoff and said it was very important for me to meet him. She also named Proctor. We were bugged. We must have been.'

'It didn't cross your mind,' Ferris asked carefully, 'at the time?'

'All that crossed my mind was that she could be trying to trap me.'

Scared for my own skin, it doesn't do, you know, it doesn't get you anywhere except on the bloody slab, but the problem was that I was still scared because I was still in a red sector and we were jammed solid in a pack of cars and if one of Toufexis's hit men had seen me leaving the club and going down to the car park they'd come for me and it wouldn't do any good keeping the doors locked because they'd just smash a window with the muzzle and start pumping.

Control, yes. There must be a modicum of clear thinking. 'Listen,' I told Ferris, 'this won't wait for debriefing. There's an international syndicate called the Trust, and von Brinkerhoff is a member. Their objective is to "buy America and sell it to the Soviets" – I quote.' I gave him the other names she'd told me, and filled in the details. 'She said she'd got it all on paper, a whole brief, she called it, at her apartment. So if you can get permission to go and look around -'

'Someone broke in there, half an hour ago.'

Merde.

'How do you know?'

'I had some people stationed there in case it was in fact some kind of trap. Two patrol cars arrived and they followed the police inside the building and said they were reporters. The doorman told them he'd been attacked and tied up, fifteen minutes before. They found Cambridge's door open, with the lock smashed.'

The place ransacked, every drawer pulled out, the pictures dragged off the wall to find the safe, the bedding all over the floor, the mattress ripped, and in the end they'd found it, the brief, they must have, because she hadn't even thought about checking for bugs on the phones in her flat or the phone in her car, she wasn't intelligence, she was political, didn't understand things like cover, had probably just dropped the brief onto the coffee table or somewhere and they'd looked right past it at first and then they'd seen it and there was nothing we could do about it now.

We were moving suddenly, free of the jam, going north-east along Bayshore Drive.

'It could have been Proctor,' I said.

'That is our thinking.' His and Croder's. 'He was seen landing from the yacht's cutter.'

'When?'

'Earlier tonight, just before eleven.'

Slight jolt to the nerves.

'They lost him?' They must have, or Ferris would be telling me where Proctor was now.

'Within minutes.'

Support people are exactly that: they are troops in the field and they lack the refined, exhaustive training of the shadow executives. Even if I'd tagged Proctor myself he would have made it difficult for me because he was on my own level, competent and seasoned.

So Proctor was off the Contessa and back in the streets of the city and he'd probably conducted the break-in himself because he was very good at it and he'd been looking for a vital piece of product. He had also cut right across the potential end-phase of Barracuda and put us back onto square one.

'If he landed at 10:45,' I said, 'that was about an hour after Cambridge phoned me in Nassau. It would've taken him about an hour to reach land from the Contessa. That call must have been bugged and Proctor himself could have been listening in.'

The thought of it gave me another jolt. 'Hold on,' I told Ferris. 'Treader, how far are we to the safe-house?'

He half-turned his head. 'Ten minutes, bit more.'

'Don't go any closer. Keep on the move but don't circle that area.'

'Got it.' I saw him checking the outside mirrors.

'Is Hood with us?'

'Two cars behind.'

12:41 on the digital clock.

I said to Ferris, 'She must have taken that brief without their knowing – they wouldn't have given it to her. There would have been several copies, and they didn't know that copy was missing until she phoned me in Nassau over a bugged line. Then Proctor knew.'

'We considered that.' His tone still had its cutting edge. I'd heard it before, in Mandarin, in Northlight, when the mission had gone dangerously off track. He wasn't of course furious with Proctor tonight; he was furious with himself for letting it happen, furious with his own incompetence, as competent people often are when a wheel comes off. 'We also considered that it might have been Stylus von Brinkerhoff who'd shown her a copy of the brief. He was at the party tonight.'

That's possible. She said he was attracted to her.'

'I would think most men were.'

'Where's von Brinkerhoff now?' I asked him. Perhaps we could turn him.

'We're watching for him to take the cutter back to the yacht. Monck suggests that if Cambridge wanted you to meet von Brinkerhoff, he might be ready to back out of the project, or even blow the Trust. We've sent someone to Quay 19 to wait for him and offer your apologies for not being in time to meet him at the Yacht Club, and see what he says, see if he's ready to take it further.'

Treader went through some lights on the yellow and checked the nearside mirror. 'There's a Corvette moving up on us,' he said. 'I've been trying to lose it.'

'It he right behind?'

'No, there's a Buick right behind but the Corvette's buzzing it.'

There is the moment when you are sitting comfortably in a sumptuously-appointed limousine with a telephone in your hand and a cocktail cabinet in front of you and pile carpet under your evening shoes and there is the moment when you are suddenly aware that you have become prey to a hunter not far behind you who seeks your death, and aware also that you cannot hope to run fast enough to escape him, and the contrast between these two moments is so violent as to numb the mind, because in this instant the trappings of civilised life are stripped away to leave you in a different world, a different creature, crouched barefoot on rough ground with the hackles raised and the teeth bared as the terror courses like cold fire through the blood.