Switch on and go.

4:07.

I drove to the British embassy, two miles distant. This had to be the initial step: to make contact.

He would be arriving, the General Secretary of the USSR, in almost exactly four hours from now, direct from Moscow. I didn't know how long Horst Volper would need — had apportioned — for the final stage of his project to remove the General-Secretary from the world scene, but the incident might be scheduled for any time from his arrival on German soil, and I would assume that the assault would be made at the earliest moment, from the moment when the target came down the steps from his plane.

West along Unter den Linden, past the Palace of the Republic.

But I didn't believe that Volper would attempt the kind of shot that had succeeded in Dallas; it was too chancy. Oswald had had luck, at that distance and with that rifle. Volper would use a superior weapon if he had it in mind to use one at all; but the visitor would be arriving under very close protection and no one would even get near any building where a sniper could set up his post.

The Hotel Unter den Linden on the right, with lights burning in the foyer.

There was the chance that if I gave it enough thought, and if I could put myself in Volper's position with effective enough verisimilitude, I could find out the exact method he would use. I would try to do that, in the next four hours, if there were time; but the possibilities were countless, from a close shot into the motorcade to a black olive laced with cyanide at this evening's reception.

Crossing Friedrich-strasse with the red just flicking to green.

The moon was at three-quarters and I noted it as a matter of routine. We would be working within the close confines of the city, where there would be bright artificial light; but even if this weren't so, I couldn't predict at this stage whether moonlight would help me find my way or render me fatally discernible as I crawled from cover to cover. Nothing, in these few imminent hours, was predictable.

Grand Hotel on the left.

I felt quite good, now, quite contained. The brief period of meditation had calmed the nerves, and besides, I was in control of the moment as I took my foot off the throttle and moved it to the brake. I was to precipitate the action, and that gave me the advantage. Later, things would be different, but it didn't come into the reckoning as I slowed the car and stopped outside the furrier's next door to the British Embassy.

Above the street lights the sky was black, its stars lost in the city's albedo. There was no movement in the street: these were the dead hours before the dawn.

There were reflections in the windows of the shops on each side, the street's facade repeating itself in mirror images. In the show window of the embassy, photographs of Stratford-upon-Avon, Kenneth Branagh as Henry V, Anthony Sher as Richard III. Beyond it, a clothing store, and in the distance the massive Soviet embassy and the Brandenburg Gate, with a taxi crossing the intersection at Otto Grotewohlstrasse. The French Cultural Centre was dark, and so were the headquarters of the Party Youth Movement opposite the British Embassy, but there was a car standing on the far side of Neustadtische Glinkastrasse, a dark-coloured Audi.

At that distance I couldn't be sure whether there were anyone sitting in it or not, but I believed there would be. In my driving-mirror there was another car, a Mercedes 280 SE, standing not far from the Komische Oper building. It was closer, and there was a man sitting at the wheel.

I didn't turn my head to look at the car directly; that would have been hamming it, and Brannagh would have been appalled. Scenario: I'd come here to visit the embassy or leave something there, but I'd noticed the two cars and decided not to get out of my own. I wasn't to regard it as a trap; I had simply moved into a surveillance operation that I hadn't expected, and the only thing to do was get out if I could.

04:15. Executive has made contact with opposition surveillance and is moving away.

It would have been interesting for them to make periodic changes to the board during these last hours of the night, if I could have signalled progress to Cone. Perhaps, an hour from now, two hours, I would in fact be able to call him from some phone box or other, to tell him I'd got a fix on Volper or had dealt with him and in time or was trapped and totally unable to get clear, my apologies to Bureau One, so forth, as the blood pooled at my feet or they came for me at a run or their headlights swung suddenly and caught me in the glare and the first shots centred in the ribcage and Cone flinched, hearing them over the phone.

But one mustn't be anxious; one must not, my good friend, anticipate the worst; let it come, if it should, unheralded, like a thief in the night, to pluck away dear life.

I got into gear and drove as far as the second intersection at Otto Grotewohlstrasse and turned north, and after half a block I'd got the Audi in the mirror. At the next street I'd got the Mercedes and a Fiat within view, taking up stations at a distance and moving at my own pace. I had expected this much attention from the moment I'd entered the surveillance area, because at this stage Volper would have given orders to make a certain kill. There would be other cars standing on other streets in the hope of seeing me, especially near the hotel: they hadn't specifically expected me to visit the embassy; it was simply a place where I might appear at any time and they'd staked it out as a routine.

Now that I'd been sighted and was under permanent observation they wouldn't waste any time and it was going to be very difficult to do what I wanted to do: make a switch. But it was all that was left to me and I now had the material I needed to work with.

A switch is an operation easy to describe and in many cases impossible to bring off. When followed, one has to vanish and then follow one of the opposition to his base. I have only done it twice, in Istanbul and Prague, and in each case it had taken me half a day; tonight I had less than four hours, and if I chose the wrong man I might not be led to his base, to Volper, but to any one of a dozen stations in the network. But when there is nothing else to do, the impossible seems less difficult.

Two blocks, three, going northwest and crossing Spandauerstrasse and Karl Marx Allee with two more cars making strategic loops as the others kept mobile watch and we began meeting the first of the trucks coming in with produce for the markets and police cars became more in evidence as early traffic started moving from the suburbs into the city's centre.

Then they began making rushes, first the Audi and then the Mercedes, one of them bumping the rear end and swinging me against the kerb, the other coming from in front and cutting across and forcing me into a swerve because its headlights were on full beam and I was blinded. A truck loomed at a cross-street and the Fiat behind me made impact and pushed me forward against the brakes with the wheels locked and the tyres shrilling over the surface and the truck grazing across the front end and taking away a headlamp, the driver shouting and his voice snatched away as his vehicle thundered on.

I don't think they were hoping to smash me up in the car because it's not that easy if the driver knows what he's doing; I think they were trying to get me out of the car and on the run and that was when they would close right in and get me into the centre of a concerted rush and make the kill with their guns or their hands or however they chose, once having me trapped.

I hadn't thought it would be easy to make the switch. I had thought it would be like this, and I settled down to the business of keeping them off and staying alive and trying to manoeuvre the Merc I was driving into a last-ditch crash that could give me room to run before they were ready, and by now the pace was so fast that a lot of the driving had become instinctive as the images flashed across the retinae and clamoured for attention, the streets merging into a lurching continuum, a brick and concrete channel cut through the city between earth and sky and flowing past and behind me in a dizzying stream of lights, vehicles, intersections and trucks — always the huge and monolithic shapes of the trucks with their horns blaring as someone cut across their path, one of them lurching past me with its wheel wrenched over and ripping away the doors, while the mind began shifting focus under the stress of the constant demands on the intellect to base its judgement on the torrential rush of feedback coming in from the environment.