He dropped it on to the table and started walking from one wall to the other, his square-toed boots landing flat on the floor with no spring in them, his arms held slightly forward like a bear's, as if he were looking for something to break, for some kind of life to crush out. He was my height and heavier and all muscle and he could kill me in an even match but I didn't think it was even because they're exceptionally fussy at Norfolk: they don't send you into the field unless you can take on a tank and get the tracks off without a lot of deep breathing.

'Who were you following?' He swung round, hitting a fist into a palm.

Back on that track.

Fascinating.

'How the hell should I know?' I asked him. 'I was following him to find out who he was!'

'I don't have to accept that!'

You bloody well do.

He started walking again, from wall to wall. He must have seen a lot of this place, look at that table. 'Why did you want to find out who he was? Who put you on to him?'

It was difficult because we didn't really have a topic for conversation. He knew I was some kind of agent because we get to recognize the signs in one another: my behaviour in this room, confined with a KGB colonel who was ready to flay me alive, was totally different from the behaviour of an innocent tourist who'd slipped on the snow and got snatched by mistake because he'd injured his face — youcan't do this to me, I want my lawyer here, I'll have you charged with wrongful arrest, so forth. This man knew I was an agent but as an agent I couldn't tell him anything and he understood that, and he was annoyed because he was trying to build a reputation as a red hot interrogator who could get information out of anyone they sent to him and without having to throw him to the clowns to work over, because that takes a lot of time if you want to go after all the information he's got in his brain: you can't rush things, it's no good just poking a red hot needle into his urethra and saying now talk because he'll either pass out or scream unintelligible things and the most you can do is get one word out of him at a time, one name, one target, one key to one code; you've got to spend days at it, with some of them.

Vader stopped walking and picked up the belt. He'd lost a lot of his colour and the sweat was drying on him and there was foam at the corners of his mouth. 'I will ask you one more time. Who are you?'

'Kapista Kirov. I told you, the computers have gone on the blink.'

It wasn't a lie and it wasn't the truth and he knew that; it was all I was going to tell him, nothing, like saying it looks as if we're going to get some more rain again.

'Very well!' The belt hit the table and the sound went round the walls like an explosion. 'You realize we shall get this information from you in the end, don't you? Of course you do. We shall use every method available to us, every technique, every refinement. We shall show you no mercy. You understand me?'

'Yes.'

'Very well.'

Bring on the clowns.

9: RAINBOWS

The rat sat preening its whiskers.

I watched it.

It sat with its rear paws spread on the ground, their tips visible at the edge of the grey fur body. The front paws worked rhythmically, pulling each fine whisker through the toes from the root to the tip.

It hadn't seen the snake.

I watched the snake. It was rock-still, coiled in a perfect ring with the angular head slightly lifted and pointing in the direction of the rat. The distance between them was about three feet. The snake was large, and I could see that its length was quite sufficient to carry the jaws that far when it struck.

The rat was facing at right-angles to the snake. Its round black eyes reflected the environment in miniature. I think it saw the snake, in terms of light reception by the retinae, but didn't know what it was: the brain interpreted it as a rock formation, or just a pattern of light and shade. Otherwise it wouldn't be sitting there.

I detected movement now in the snake, though it was so slow that it was almost an illusion: the pointed head was drawing back, millimetre by millimetre, across the coils, the neck flexing to keep the head pointing directly at the rat. At the same time the coils were tensing, as the muscular energy gathered and flowed, preparing for the whiplash speed of the strike.

The rat was oblivious of this movement. Once, it turned its head for an instant, but away from the snake, catching some small sound that escaped me. Then it went on preening.

I watched quietly, wondering if — then the snake struck like a whip and the rat -

'Wake up!'

The rat tried to leap but -

'Wake up! Wake up!'

I swung my head up and opened my eyes and called out, 'All right, I'm awake now, why don't you bugger off?'

Blinding light.

'Are you awake?'

'Yes. Bugger off!'

The light was above the door and angled downwards, a flood bulb in it so that there was nowhere in the cell where I could get away from it. The glare hid the small sliding panel immediately below the light, so that I couldn't see him watching me. It was the third time he'd woken me up. Third, or fourth? It didn't matter, but I'd have to start counting things like that because some of them would be important. Call it the third time and start counting from there.

Bloody snake. I'd dreamed about that before; I suppose it was that long leather belt whipping through the air at the table. Where was Vader now? Sleeping? They'd taken my watch and there wasn't a window, only a ventilation grille near the ceiling, clamped across a square of darkness. That didn't mean it was night, necessarily: this was a close confinement chamber for sleep deprivation and disorientation so they would have fixed the grille accordingly. The metabolic clock pulsing in my system told me it was midnight, give or take an hour; but that wasn't reliable because I'd fallen asleep three times. Three, or four? Three. Yes.

A man screamed suddenly from somewhere close, and I sat listening to him with the sweat springing on my skin.

Ignore. Ignore and do some work.

Of course they'd started with an advantage. Today was Wednes — no, yes, Wednesday, and on Monday I'd still been in England hang-gliding over the cliffs, and from the time when Norton had escorted me to London that bastard Croder had had me on a pinball table — Berlin, Hanover, Leipzig, Moscow — and the only sleep I'd had was a couple of hours on the mountainside after the truck had crashed and a few hours at the safe-house last night — five or six hours in sixty-four, not enough, and if I'd known the rat was going to sit there I would have look out it's going to strike again -

'Wake up!'

'I am awake I Can't you tell when someone's asleep or awake for Christ's sake?'

`You were falling asleep!'

`Go and screw yourself.'

Then the man started screaming again next door and I had to listen to it until it was cut off abruptly, and all I could hear was my own breathing.

Bastards. Do some work.

Oh yes, well, the terribly interesting thing is this: they don't know my name, and they don't know Ignatov's. Unbelievable. I mean, what did he say when he phoned them: there's a man in a Pobeda tagging me, pick him up? That wouldn't have been enough to trigger all that action — a whole fleet of police cars and militia. They'd have asked him who I was, and why it was so important. But Ignatov hadn't known. He didn't know anything about me. So what had he told them? What information had he given them, to persuade them to throw all that action at me? He didn't have any information.

Sweating. I was starting to sweat, because of the cerebration and the heat of the floodlight. All right, that's one thing. Take the other. These people here don't know Ignatov's name either, or anything about him, except that he made a phone call from a public box. What had he shown that militia man, to get a salute? What name had he given, over the phone? He couldn't have given them any name, or Vader would know it: and believe me, he wouldn't have asked me for that man's name unless he'd wanted it: it wasn't part of the technique or a feint question because he was in a rage at the time, piping hot. So there you are: an unknown man rings up the security forces and tells them to pick up another unknown man and that is precisely what they do, in full force and with no questions asked. Unbelievable.