10.37.

The estimated schedule was ninety seconds from locking the 220 to reaching the windows of Room 37 and that didn't give them time enough to rig anything.

Loman would have left the shutters closed and the curtains drawn but they wouldn't necessarily be lightproof so I stopped halfway along the corridor and took a bulb out and dropped a 100-millime piece across the contacts and blew the lot and went into 37 without swinging the door too wide.

Total dark, hit a chair, touched the curtains.

The slats of the shutters were angled at forty-five degrees and I couldn't see anything above the horizontal and this was the first floor of a five-floor building so I opened a shutter, taking a full minute to swing it wide enough to let me through on to the balcony.

Check 220: negative.

Above the wax cascade of the yucca-blooms the balconies of the east wing were ranged in unbroken lines. Most of the outside lamps were burning but the rooms were dark: the restaurant was full. The building was in the tourist-Moorish style, an elongated complex of arches and carved screens with two arabesque lamps and a tubbedorangier on each balcony and creeper climbing from the lawns below, and he was observing me from the third floor, seventh room from the left.

The lamps were lit on the two balconies on each side of mine but it didn't help because he was using binoculars and their lens-hoods would be cutting out the peripheral glare. There was almost no glint on the lenses and I might have missed them except that he'd forgotten to mask the chrome thumb-screw on the tripod.

It was difficult to judge how much light I was reflecting but the likelihood that he was able to identify me at this range was critically high. Despite this, there was a chance that he hadn't seen me so I moved my head and not my eyes because the reflective capacity of the whites is greater than that of the iris and pupil by a factor of more than double and in certain lights it can make the difference between being seen or overlooked, shot dead or only winged.

I was now directly facing the Mercedes 220 and computing the angle and the thing I didn't like was that there was no visual obstruction between the car and his balcony: he'd watched me arrive and unless I could do anything about it he would watch me leave.

Time probably 10.38.30 couldn't look.

It was difficult because I was scheduled to leave here in a minute and a half from now and there wouldn't be time to call up a taxi and I couldn't commandeer the nearest private car I found outside because those drip-nosed Agathas in London have got the whole thing written out underPublic Involvement (Standing Orders) and if you blot your copybook they'll suspend you from missions and for the next twelve months you'll pass the time breaking hieroglyphs in Codes and Ciphers or standing-in for a sandbag at the thousand-yard range in Norfolk.

He wasn't doing anything, not moving about or anything. I couldn't see a barrel coming up but of course there could be two of them and the other one could be inside the room where there was no light to pick up surfaces and my skin began crawling because at this range I wouldn't hear the detonation before the skull was blown.

They were being inconsistent.

Inconsistency is dangerous because it brings in the unpredictable: if you don't know which way the opposition's going to jump you can't tell where they'll land.

They grilled O'Brien and then they killed him.

They surveyed Fyson and then they broke his nerve across a telescopic rifle without firing a shot and they didn't wipe him out before they'd finished with him as a contact control that led to my own exposure.

With me they went straight in for the kill and when they fouled it up they didn't try again: they changed their minds and decided that since I was still alive I was worth tagging and that was so bloody inconsistent that it brought out the sweat on me because at any minute they could change their minds again and I could be standing here against the wall with my forehead coming slowly into the centre of a 3x scope while his finger took up the tension on the spring.

I'd seen all I wanted to out here but I didn't hurry because speed can be fatal if it isn't dictated totally by brain-think and this was stomach-think, this sweat on me and the crawling of the skin, I knew what Fyson had meant, the threat of a long gun can bring you to the pitch when all you can think about is the sudden air-rush, wherever you are, walking in a street or coming down some steps, the silence of the small bright beautifully-turned object as it nears you so fast that the fine tune of its passage is outstripped so that you never hear it, or driving along a road where the buildings are strange to you, their windows open, while the little cylindrical stub of lead and copper-zinc alloy spins towards you, intimately to invade the consciousness and turn it into mindless chemicals, bringing an end to all you ever were.

Slowly, my fingers behind me, finding the varnished wood of the shutter, guiding my feet until the shadow of the terrace screen came to fall across my eyes and I passed inside the room and stood filling the lungs with oxygen for the nerves while the telephone began ringing and I let it go on until I was ready to answer it.

'I am leaving now,' he said.

'All right.'

I hung up.

10.40.

He'd been punctual. It was a help. It is a help,mon ami, when you are in a spot and someone demonstrates his reliability. It gives you hope.

I left the shutter as it was, half open: there wasn't any technical advantage in closing it; on the contrary he'd pick up the movement because I didn't have the time to do it slowly. There was a slight advantage in leaving it half open because psychologically it suggested presence: you normally shut things when you leave a place. I left the curtains drawn.

Sound and I froze. Corridor: voices.

The lights, oh yes, they were wondering why they'd fused.

I picked up my flight-bag and went out. It wouldn't be a good idea to go through the kitchens again so I took the swing door to the gardens, going past the swimming-pool on the far side where there was shadow and thinking as fast as I could because the place was a trap: they wouldn't put surveillance on me from that direction alone — they'd cover the whole scene.

The hurry wasn't at this end: Chirac would wait for takeoff until I was ready to go. But London wanted me to reach Tango Victor soonest possible and that pulled the whole schedule tight and I wasn't going to accept his midnight ETD because with a bit of luck they might finish slapping the dope on before then and we could get off the ground while it was drying.

The path turned left and I took it and kept to the shadow of the oleanders until I was within thirty yards of the 220 and then I stopped because at this point I'd be moving into the surveyed area and even if he didn't recognize me from behind and above he'd know who I was when I got into the car.

I didn't want to do a thing like this without being quite certain there was no other way. Technically it looked like suicide but sometimes it has to be done: we have to move deliberately into known surveyance even when it isn't done to deceive. We have to do it for various reasons: because the schedule of the mission has become critical to the point of jeopardizing it by delay or because the threat to life is so immediate as to justify a lesser risk or because there's a fair chance of dodging mobile surveyance once we've left the immediate area.

Two of these reasons were valid for me now; if I didn't reach the wreck on the sand before anyone else got there the mission would come to nothing and it was therefore at this moment jeopardized and London would agree. There would be mobile surveyance taking over from the man on the balcony because tonight they wanted to know where I was going and the fact that one of them had got killed trying to find out wouldn't deter them since it was now obvious that I was going somewhere interesting, and I had a fair chance of dodging a mobile tag because it was something I'd learned how to do.