'Look,' Pollock said, 'Miki's brilliant at PR work and he's a showman. He's also got a great deal of savvy and a great deal of courage. I think he might have told Talyzin to go ahead.'

'Whose idea was Cat Baxter?'

'That was mine.' Pollock looked rather pleased. 'Just making a gap in the Wall wouldn't do it. We had to get world-wide attention and we needed a symbol, in a big way. Like ten thousand East German rock fans climbing over the rubble and crowding through the Wall and dancing in the streets with the West Berliners. They — '

'Not escaping,' Cone said.

'Oh no — that wasn't the thing at all. Germany reunited — that was going to be the message. Cat Baxter jumped at it, as you can imagine. What a role to play… Joan of Arc at the barricades with banners waving, leading the faithful through. Talk about promotion…'

Mr Ash, she'd said to me, will you be at the concert?

I hope so.

Try and make it. It'll blow your mind.

Cone glanced at me again. He thought Pollock was mad. So did I. But I remembered Einstein. No new idea will ever succeed unless at first it sounds crazy.

'You'd be forewarning the media?'

'I'm ready to send the same message,' Pollock said, 'to every major TV news network and every newspaper and magazine world-wide: warn your camera crews and reporters in East Berlin to stand by for a major story. There'd be instant replay.'

'What about the police? Casualties?'

'The HUA would be willing to turn their backs on the scene when Cat goes through the Wall, with a request direct from Moscow. They — '

'From Talyzin.'

'Yes. They want a united Germany themselves. They'd be asked to evacuate the area around the projected breach on the excuse that toxic chemicals are escaping from a crashed truck. A warning would go to West Berlin, with the same story. I don't have to tell you the planning that's been necessary.' A shrug, and no bright smile. 'You've got to tell London? Now that you know the project?'

'They'd have my head,' Cone said, 'if I tried to keep this dark.'

Another shrug. 'Then I can only hope I'm right in thinking that Talyzin has sounded Gorbachev out. Then if Thatcher calls him, it won't change his mind.'

He lit another cigarette, and I remember thinking it looked like a slow fuse burning.

'If we can't nail Horst Volper,' Cone had said, 'there won't be any point in bombing the Wall.'

He'd shut the recorder down and got onto his feet.

Leaden light was seeping over the sky from the east, casting a metallic sheen across the landscape and the distant buildings. There was no sound in the area, no traffic; Dollinger had told me that a redevelopment scheme had been started and then become stalled, leaving two or three square miles of no-man's-land.

07:49.

Twice I thought I heard a sound from the derelict hotel, but it had been without identity — not the closing of a door or footsteps or a voice. It could have come from the airport.

He will be there alone.

Then he'd waited, forcing me to use more pressure, to drain the blood from his face and bring sweat springing.

But where will he attack the target?

Waited again, forcing me to induce a degree of pain that I had to share with him, to identify with, so that my own face was bloodless as I brought the nerve to breaking point.

I don't know. I don't know.

07:50.

Nothing moved inside the hotel. The car still stood there, half-concealed. There was no sound in the immediate area.

A spark came into the sky to the north and gradually broke into two as the landing lights of the plane grew brighter and it lowered towards the runway, passing directly overhead and landing within half a minute, reversing thrust as the brakes came on.

And then I knew that Volper was not going to leave the hotel at all and that I'd left it too late.

26: TUPOLEV

Smell of death.

I climbed to the next floor. The elevators were not working. The electric power had been cut off months ago. On the next floor I waited again, listening.

The smell of the death that this building was going to die when the men came again with their demolition tools, the smell of damp plaster, mildew, decay along the corridors and on the stairs. The glass had gone from most of the windows, and some of the balconies were sagging. This was the sixth floor, below the roof-garden I'd seen from the car, with its collapsed trelliswork and dead plants and the remains of a flag shredded by the wind.

I had seen tracks on some of the floors below, but they might not be his; workers had been here, disturbing the thick patina of dust and grime along the passages. Some of the doors had been left wide open, and the strengthening light of the morning came into the windowless rooms, pooling along the corridors, innocent, shadowless.

I stood perfectly still, breathing tidally, projecting my sense of hearing across the environment, desperate now to pick up any sound that would give him away.

Silence.

I moved again, crossing the corridor and going into an open room, keeping clear of the window until I'd studied the components of the view: three windows in the other wing of the building and a section of the rubble-strewn courtyard below. Then I moved nearer, keeping to the side, looking across and down. I had made this survey on each floor from the second level upwards, and I suppose the angle of reflection in the broken pane of glass on the opposite wall hadn't been right, as it was now, because I hadn't seen movement before.

It was very slight: the broken pane was only a few inches across and it was dirty; but the movement was there, and I watched it, stilling the breath and listening to the blood coursing past the tympanic membranes. It still wasn't definable; it was still no more than movement, except that it didn't seem to be made by a rat or a bird, because there was a glint to it, like a watch would make on a moving wrist.

At this angle the source of the reflection must be on the floor below, the fifth floor, and from the room next along from where I was standing. I could hear sounds now, small ones, some of them identifiable as metallic or hard wood, hard plastic, an object or objects not moved about by rats or birds.

When I looked at my watch it showed four minutes to eight o'clock and when I looked down at the balcony below and to the left I judged it to be five feet to the side and nine feet down, a total distance of ten feet. The balcony was sagging, like most of them, with the railings broken away. The one outside the room where I stood was in much the same state, with the railing on the left end rusted and buckled.

He was, then, ten or twelve feet away from me.

Volper.

07:57.

Yes indeed, when I'd been waiting in the car below and suddenly realised the truth, I could have driven as fast as possible to the nearest telephone and called the airport and told them to warn the General-Secretary's plane and divert it to an alternate but there would have been no point in it — divert his plane, who is speaking — this is Colonel Heidecker of the HUA and I tell you it is imperative that you warn the pilot that — Wait a minute, please, where are you speaking from — so forth, and yes I could have driven as far as the airport itself but time would have been dangerously shorter and I would have met with the same suspicion because a hoax is a hoax and I was wearing a ripped coat and there was stubble on my face and after the bomb thing and the nightmare with Dollinger I didn't look like your standard respectable policeman so that was the choice I'd been faced with and this was the one I'd made because I'd known by the way Dollinger had given his information that he hadn't been lying and this was where Horst Volper had to be, a floor below in a room with a rotting balcony and a sixty-foot drop into the courtyard if I got it wrong.