'I must ask Dieter,' I said, 'why he flew in to Berlin tonight. You've got me interested.'

She looked at me. 'He might tell you. He might not.'

'I'm a salesman, Inge, and at the moment I'm selling something rather impressive. As I told you, he could take out an entire sports stadium like this one.'

She looked around her. That would be impressive, yes. That would be powerful.' Her eyes had darkened, the blue ice gathering shadows. 'I like power. That's why I'm with Dieter Klaus. He's the most powerful man in Europe. It'll be interesting to see what he thinks about you, Hans, but I must tell you something. I have a very good memory, and I've never been to one of Willi Hartman's parties in my life.'

Please check to make sure you haven't left any belongings on your seat, and be patient with children and elderly people… they may be a little slower than the rest of us.

'Wait,' Inge said.

People moved past us, and she slipped between them and went down the steps and spoke to Klaus, and for an instant he looked across at me. Then Inge turned and came back, her eyes bright as she said, Hell see you for a moment outside the stadium.'

She put a hand on my arm, and we waited until Klaus and his bodyguards moved past us to the exit tunnel. He didn't look in our direction; none of them did. It was a huge crowd but we kept up a good pace once we'd started moving.

'Then it must have been somewhere else,' I'd told her, and she'd laughed lightly and said yes, it must have been, but I knew now that when she'd phoned Dieter Klaus she might have told him that I was an arms dealer but she'd also told him that I'd pretended we'd met before and seemed suspect, so perhaps he should have me worked over.

'Did you like the game?' she asked me.

'Very much.'

Her smile was different now; it had secret amusement in it, and her eyes were cold fire. I didn't think it was the marijuana. I thought that if she could consider the idea of destroying a packed sports stadium and find it 'impressive', she'd probably feel turned on by escorting a man to his execution.

We were held back at one of the gates to the car park by an old man with a ruff of silver hair below his black wool hat; he'd dropped something, a glove, I think, and Inge brushed past him with a quick laugh – 'Don't you think that when people get to a certain age they should be shot?'

They were ahead of us, Klaus and his guards and the woman, Dolores; then they slowed as they neared a black Mercedes limousine with smoked windows and an array of antennae over the boot. A uniformed driver opened a rear door and Dolores got in; then Inge stopped me with her hand as Dieter Klaus swung round.

'What do you want to see me about?'

'I'll tell you in private.'

'Why in private?

'Because I don't talk in the presence of hirelings.'

He studied me, his hands in the pockets of his black sable-trimmed coat, his blunt head forward, his mouth tight. I couldn't see his eyes. He spoke in jerks, his whole body moving, energised by his thoughts.

'You've heard of bodyguards. I don't talk to strangers except in the presence of my bodyguards.'

'I won't hurt you, Klaus.'

I caught a soft sound from Inge. I suppose she thought I was being disrespectful to the Fuhrer.

'You say you are an arms dealer. An arms dealer.'

'That's right. If we -'

'Why should that interest me?'

I took a step forward, as if to be closer so that I could lower my voice, and the bodyguards came in very fast indeed and crossed in front of Klaus in a protective shield with their hands coming up into the Ken-po defence posture. One of them was Asian, I thought Mongol. They stared at me with the indifference in their eyes of a predator before the kill. I had needed to know how good they were.

I couldn't see Klaus any more, or at least not much of him, just the left lens of his dark glasses. I waited.

In a moment Klaus said, 'Leave him.'

They moved slowly backwards, lowering their hands.

'Klaus,' I said, 'you've been told what I've got to offer you. That offer expires at midnight. I've got an appointment tomorrow with the Soviet Foreign Minister in Geneva. My plane -'

'Answer my question. Why have you approached me with this offer?'

'Because you're a professional in your field. I like dealing with professionals. We could -'

'What do you know about me?'

'I can see you in private,' I said, 'for half an hour. But -'

'What do you know about me? '

I looked at my watch. I'm afraid you're wasting my time. I'll give you another -'

'Take him.'

They wore soft shoes and were with me almost in silence, locking my arms, and then Klaus said, 'Take him to the garage. Give him to Geissler. Tell Geissler to find out who he is and what he wants.'

I saw Inge, her eyes bright as she called out to Klaus – 'Can I be there too?

He swung to look at her. 'Yes.'

Chapter 14: STROBE

I was spinning on the wall of the vortex, spinning very fast.

The vortex had been the sea itself, and then the wind had come and the sea drew down in the centre and began whirling and I was in it, whirling on the dark wall of the vortex, a thing with its arms and legs flung out and its mouth open, screaming.

But sometimes lucidity came, like a shaft of brilliant light, and I saw myself in the chair, my wrists handcuffed to its arms, my head held back by a strap so that I couldn't lower it, couldn't look away from the light.

It was a strobe light.

Then the vortex took me down again, a huge dark wave leaping and roaring down and sweeping me with it and leaving me spinning on the wall of water, the wall of the vortex, and I began screaming again, but the other sound was louder, drowning my voice. I was in terror of the sound.

It was a piezo electric siren.

It was filling the room, the garage, with such a volume of sound that the walls would belly outwards before long and the roof crash down, surely it must happen with this monstrous volume of sound filling the room, the garage. The piezo had a faster beat than the strobe light. The flashes of the strobe were hitting my closed eyes at something like fifty or sixty per minute, but the rhythm of the siren was in the region of five oscillations a second, slicing through my head and pinning me to the wall of dark water.

Whirling and screaming in the huge dark vortex, a black hole, an other-world, death.

Lucidity again and a degree of self-awareness, enough to know that the sweat was crawling on my face and my pulse racing, the saliva springing into my mouth so fast that I had to keep swallowing: the whole of the nervous system had become galvanised.

Flash-flash-flash.

Any conception of time had been destroyed somewhere in the past'. I didn't know if I'd been here for three hours or three days. The thing was to keep the integrity of the organism unbroken, to hack out a pathway through this miasma and maintain orientation, but my brain was in theta waves and it could only surface with an effort of will, and in the theta region access to the will is diminished, dangerously diminished, flash – flash – flash - as the mind rocked, as the dark wall of the vortex reared and whirled.

Then they shut off the sound.

Silence exploded and I was left in the debris of the shock, spinning among waves of colour, powerless to reach any kind of shore where beta-wave thought could begin again, until over the minutes the colours of the waves of silence drained away, and I thought I heard a voice.

'Who are you?

My face was wet. The whole organism was vibrating: it felt like a bell, vibrating. 'What?' I heard someone say, 'What?' But that was me.