'If your operation,' he told Pollock, 'weren't such a whizz-bang, I'd probably leave you to it. But there's going to be an awful lot of fallout, and I don't want to be in it.' Into the phone: 'Viktor, you can take these people now. Yes. Did he? Yes, a van would do nicely.' He told Yasolev how to get here and put the phone down.

Melnichenko said without much conviction, 'But you have no authority.'

'I know. You'll be the guests of the KGB.'

Cone stood in the car park watching the van turning onto the street, arms folded across his chest against the cold.

'If they can do it,' he said, 'it's going to shake a lot of things up.'

'If the KGB lets them.'

'It won't be up to them. Ask me, Thatcher's going to get on the phone to Gorbachev just as soon as Mr Shepley's told her the score. It'll be decided at that level.'

'You think they'll let Trumpeter go ahead?'

'God, how do I know? I'm just half-hoping they will and half-hoping they won't.' He got the keys of the car. 'It scares me to think how close we are to making history. I prefer a good game of darts, actually, down at the Whistle.'

We got in and he fished in the glove pocket and gave me a hotel envelope and I opened it.

'Just in from London. The one marked B is the latest, taken three months ago.'

Two photographs, 10 x 8, of Horst Volper, one without any grain at all, or at least not much. From this one alone I could recognize him, or perhaps it was because I'd looked at the others so often that his face had become familiar.

'These'll help,' I said, and put them away.

'Good show.' He didn't start the engine.

'All I can do,' I told him, 'is whatever I can.'

'I know.'

The conversation was Pinteresque, loaded with all the things that couldn't be said. He'd been worrying the whole time we'd been down there in the cellar.

The clock on the dashboard showed 3:57.

'Four hours,' I said, 'is quite a long time.'

'It is?'

Mikhail Gorbachev's Tupolev was due in at 8:05. 'It won't take me any time to start things.'

'No?'

Just letting me talk.

'They'll start themselves. It's a fast-burn fuse.'

'What makes you think,' he said, 'you're going to have any better luck this time?'

'It won't be a question of luck. Volper knows he's only got four hours, too, and he's going to throw the whole thing at me. He's got to, or I'll get in his way.'

The windscreen was starting to mist over because of our breath. The engine ticked sometimes, cooling down. Cone still had the keys in his hand, as if when he started the engine he was going to blow something up. I sat with my hands inside the chest-pockets of my padded jacket, not wanting to move.

'And there's nothing you need from me?'

'No,' I said. He meant support. 'Nothing.'

'How big,' he asked in a moment, 'is the risk?'

Shepley had asked me the same thing, in the underground garage in West Berlin, and now I gave Cone much the same answer. 'If I measured the risks, I'd never take them. Go back and sleep. But sleep by the phone.'

He started the engine then, and drove out of the car park. 'Where d'you want to go?'

'Find a cab station, will you? I'll need this car.'

'All right. She's three-quarters full.'

I'd already checked the gauge. 'I don't suppose I'll be going far.'

'I got you a BMW,' he said. 'It's at the hotel. You said you wanted something fast.'

'This'll do me.'

There were three taxis outside the S-Bahn on Unter den Linden and Cone pulled up and left the engine running and got out and I shifted behind the wheel. He leaned in at the window.

'What shall I say, exactly?'

I thought about it, not wanting to give a false impression.

In a moment I said, 'Tell them the odds are fair.'

'They'll want something more precise than that.'

I gave it some more thought. 'Tell them to keep the board clear. If Shepley can be there for the next few hours, I think it'd be wise, in case you need to flash anything that could help us. I'm in active condition, good morale, ready to go.'

'No actual plan?'

'I'm going to try doing a switch.'

He was looking at the ground, or maybe the door-handle or whatever, I mean he was looking down, not at me. 'All right,' he said. 'That's what I'll tell them.' Then he looked up quickly before he turned away. 'See you.'

24: TRUCKS

The car was quiet. I'd watched his cab into the distance, and turned off the engine, and since then I hadn't moved.

It was like being frozen in glass, in a heavy glass paper-weight, the way they do it with coins and things. It was as if the billionfold nerve impulses investing the system had reached the synapses and couldn't make the leap and had shut down, leaving the organism in a state of suspended animation.

I just needed a minute, that was all, perhaps a few minutes. It was a form of meditation, of seeking the self within the self and consulting with levels of wisdom beyond the norm. It was necessary because when I started the engine again, a minute from now, or perhaps a few minutes from now, I would be breaking through into the end-phase for Quickstep and nothing could stop it until they put one of two things on the signals board, mission accomplished or shadow down.

They were busy now, in London, burning the midnight oil.

'I really can't say, sir. He sounded, I don't know, depressed.'

'That's not like Cone.'

Shepley, his washed-out eyes looking quietly into infinity while his brain went through a hundred scenarios, a thousand, trying to take an intuitive leap and find the best thing to do, the best way of guiding Quickstep through the end-phase with a shadow executive who had requested him to stand by the board 'for the next few hours', who had reported that 'the odds were fair', whose morale was good and so on but who had no actual plan in mind to bring the mission home between now and eight o'clock, Berlin time.

'Cone has plenty of support for him?'

'Yes, sir. He said he didn't need any.'

Holmes, going to get himself another cup of coffee and then not drink it, let it get cold.

The other voices at other boards, quiet under the focused glow of the lamps, with people drifting in to take a look at the one for Quickstep, because the Chairman of the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet was involved.

And finally one of them would take the bit of chalk and scrape it across the board. Executive at point of initiating end-phase, no details.

Executive, actually, sitting in a black and rather dirty 230 SE — it's very difficult to get a car washed this side of the Wall — and looking along a deserted stretch of Unter den Linden with three-quarters of a tankful of petrol and his nerves shut down because he was staring at the brink; and even though he'd seen it before it still had the power to make him afraid, afraid to go forward.

Is that really what's happening?

Probably.

You're not just trying to get your nerve back?

Well yes, that too. Give me a break, for Christ's sake.

Not often you ask for charity. You -

Shuddup and leave me alone.

I could actually feel everything shutting down again and giving me a kind of peace as the brainwaves slowed into alpha, touched theta perhaps, lulling the mind into the green and gentle domain of not knowing, not-fearing, until with brilliant clarity I understood the process and my desperate need for it, for these few minutes of oblivion and surrender before I let consciousness take over again and calculate the needs of the moment and tell me to switch on the engine.

Awareness, as if at a great distance, of the hum of the digital clock on the dashboard, of the creak of the upholstery as the muscles went into deep relaxation, of a man's voice from the taxi-rank behind me, of a jet lifting from Tegel on the far side of the Wall, awareness of all three things and then, by infinite degrees, the surfacing of consciousness and the return to the beta rhythm and the sharpness of what we are conditioned to believe is reality, with the harsh and angular perspective of the street under its garish lights and the hard plastic and glass and metal surfaces of the interior of the car and the small black-covered Ignition key jutting from the lock.