I began listening carefully. 'What deal?'

I think Ignatov must have moved at this point, though he was outside my vision field. Schrenk said to him sharply: 'Pytor, stay where you are. If you move any closer he'll try to use you as a shield, can't you see that? Stay exactly where you are.'

In English he asked me: 'Are you interested?'

'I don't know yet.'

'Pretty simple. If you agree to abort the mission I'll let you go home.'

`It's not on.'

'Always so bloody obstinate,' he said in annoyance. `Don't you know the alternative?'

'Yes.'

'You think there's a chance?' He shook his head. 'I'm not going to have you picked up again, you know that. It's too risky — you might get away as you did before. You know what I've got to do.'

He was losing his colour, and there was a certain stiffness coming into his body, as if he were readying himself to do something that would need a lot of effort on his part, a lot of determination. I could feel my eyelid flickering again and wondered if it showed: it's always been an embarrassment.

'Spell it out for me,' I told Schrenk. 'We don't want any misunderstandings.'

'You're so right. All I want you to do is to go back to London without telling them where I am, or even that you found me. I want to be left alone.'

In a moment I said: 'You'd take my word?'

He looked surprised. 'Of course.'

'You think you know me that well?'

'Oh yes. I'm not risking anything.'

I thought about it. 'Yes, you are. They could pick me up again and grill me, and I know where to find you.'

Concerned, he asked quickly: 'Haven't you got a capsule?'

'Yes.'

'Then you'd have to use it. That would be part of the deal.'

He waited impatiently.

I watched him, trying to read the truth in his eyes, in his face, in the set of his angular body, in the steadiness of the hand that held the gun. I believed he meant what he was saying. I was certain he did.

'You know what I'm offering you,' he said quietly.

`My life.'

'Yes.' His face was bloodless now. At least it was going to mean something to him when he finally had to pump that thing and watch my body go reeling back in a series of jerks.

I'd at least have an epitaph to go out with: Someone cared. But that didn't have to happen. I could take him at his word and walk out of here and report to Bracken and have the cell move in: there were six of them, fully trained, and they could take Schrenk and get him out of the country and put him back into a clinic and go on working on him, the best specialists, the best attention, until one fine day he could walk without hobbling and stand up straight and go and see that girl in Brighton again, take her out in his Jensen Interceptor and then one day, one day say to me, you broke your word to me that time in Moscow and it's a bloody good thing you did or I wouldn't be here now.

He was half out of his mind and needed protecting from himself: he was mixed up with a bunch of wildcat dissidents planning some kind of protest that was going to land him inside Lubyanka again or flat on his back in the street with his head in the gutter and the young po-faced militia men standing arrogantly over him, kicking him idly with their polished boots until the transport arrived. You have to use every means to complete a mission and the object of Scorpion was to get this man out of Moscow and I could do it without any problem, without lifting a finger, yes I accept the deal and you've got my word on it. The rest would be up to Bracken and his team and they wouldn't have any problem either, once Schrenk was subdued and in their care; Croder had lined up support facilities that would get them across the frontier at an hour's notice: Bracken had told me so.

'The thinking,' Schrenk said heavily, 'is for you to do, not me. But I haven't got a lot of time, quite frankly. I'm going to give you another minute. Sixty seconds. I think that's fair.'

The gun was aimed at my forehead. He was a first class shot and could drop me where I stood without any pain. He was a humane man. Sixty seconds. That was a long time, more time than I really needed. A generous man.

I heard the tick of the clock. We all heard it. The other two hadn't understood anything of what we'd been saying but they could sense what the silence meant: we'd both stopped talking and he was holding the gun perfectly still. I looked at it carefully; it was a 9mm Smith and Wesson and would carry eight shots in the magazine. Schrenk would only use one.

Tick… tock.

The idea occurred to me that if I remained staring into the barrel of that thing I would perhaps see the nose of the bullet travelling towards me in the final microsecond of life, as young Chepstow had possibly seen it when he'd been sitting at the cafe table drinking his last cup of coffee in Phnom Penh a couple of years ago, thinking perhaps it was a bee.

Tick… tock.

Schrenk was very pale now, and there was something coming into his eyes, a kind of blankness. I suppose he was having to blank out his mind and leave it clear of any philosophical considerations that might finally get in the way of what he had to do, which was to squeeze the first nicotine-stained finger of his right hand by a simple command to the motor nerves.

Tick… tock.

How long had he said? Sixty seconds. But he wouldn't fire without some kind of warning. He wouldn't expect me to know when the sixty seconds were up. Perhaps he was counting. Was I expected to count, as well? Schrenk. Do you want me to count?

Because it was no go. If I gave him my word I would have to keep it. It didn't matter if he were half out of his mind and needed protecting from himself, so forth: those arguments were rational but not admissible. It wasn't for me to judge him now. He'd worked damned hard for our people and kept us safe, all of us, Leningrad and London, all of us, while they'd been trying to break him in Lubyanka, and he'd earned our trust, my trust.

Tick… tock.

I really do wish you'd get that bloody thing. What I was not going to do was walk out of here and tell Bracken I was aborting the mission and ask him to give me safe passage back to London with my tail between my legs. Wish you'd get that bloody thing to tick evenly. It's getting on my nerves. Call it pride, would you, not enough guts to face the fact that for the first time in my life I'm failing a mission, I don't give a damn what you call it, it's none of your bloody business. Must I suppose be up by now, sixty seconds aren't long.

Tick…

Flickering. Left eyelid flickering. Sweat running down, wet on the palms. The face wound throbbing, the pulse rate high. Small round barrel and I suppose, I suppose that if in point of fact I finally glimpse the pointed lead nose of the bullet it's going to look quite large, two inches from the centre of my forehead, large enough to blot his whole face out of sight.

Tock.

'I'd say that's about it, Q.' I took a breath.

'All right. No deal.'

His eyes widened slightly. 'Why not, for God's sake?'

'That's none of your bloody business.'

He went on staring for another second or two. 'I didn't think you'd be such a bastard. Making me do a thing like this.' His tone had gone dead.

'You should have thought of that before.'

In a moment he nodded, and kept the gun on me while he felt for the drawer of the writing-desk with his left hand, and found it, and took the thing out, the thing I'd seen before. It was a silencer and he fitted it to the gun.

The distance was still something like fifteen feet, almost the width of the room. The window was obliquely behind him and the door was three or four feet to my left and out of sight. Ignatov was over by the wall and the girl was on the other side near the kitchen area. The only thing in the centre of the room was the short velvet-covered settee. There was nothing in the environment I could use for survival in the half second it would take Schrenk to fire. Nothing.