Mittenacht Ein, Mittenacht Zwei… Why two midnights, two deadlines – if they were deadlines.

Flareout, and the nose came up a little, the cabin tilting. The first of the runway markers began flashing past the windows.

There's only one man here who's going to have a grandstand seat.

Klaus? Why only Klaus? Or someone else here' on board this plane? Maitland himself? Khatami, the pilot? Why only one man?

We're going to make the headlines, you know…

Because they were going to use what they thought was a live nuclear warhead? No. And you've made quite a contribution yourself, Herr Mittag – the icing on the cake.

The Miniver thing would be a dummy but they'd still have the 'cake', and that alone was going to make the headlines for them.

Somehow I'd have to reach a telephone, signal London, stop them sending in a whole army to the delivery point, to the rendezvous, because they'd never take Dieter Klaus that way, he wouldn't be there, he was a former Stasi officer, KGB trained, and he knew that a rendezvous always carries a risk, any rendezvous, carries a risk of exposure, can be a trap, can turn out not to be a rendezvous after all but an ambush, he knew that, so he wouldn't be here tonight at Maintenance Hangar 5, he'd just send some people with me to make the exchange, some people he could afford to lose if I weren't just an arms dealer, if I were there to blow Nemesis. And if the SAS and GSG-9 and the Algerian counterterrorist units came out of the shadows and made the snatch then I'd be dead, because those would be his orders, the orders from Klaus: in the event of any surprise, shoot Mittag, get him out of the way – and the operation would proceed as planned, exactly as planned, and tomorrow there would be headlines, because I wouldn't be there to prevent it.

First bump, and the cabin flexed.

So I must somehow telephone London, warn them off, let me do it, this is a job for one man on his own and right on the inside where Klaus can be reached, can be taken, can if necessary be killed.

Second bump and then the hot kiss of the tyres on the runway as we settled, then a burst of sound as the jets were reversed and the brakes came on and we swung towards the terminal, sand against our faces as we left the aircraft, the sirocco was blowing, someone said.

Chapter 17: VIPER

Until the thing with the snake it had looked like a scene out of a travel brochure, one of those pool-side parties. There'd been a fountain here once, I suppose, in the middle of the shaded courtyard, and then they'd put the pool in for tourists. It was out of place; it must have been charming before, with the tall eucalyptuses brushing the sky above the white stucco walls and the olive trees framing the archways, one of the smaller palaces that in Europe would have been a country house.

Klaus was in the pool. I watched him sometimes from below the left lens of my sunglasses; I was sitting in a deck chair not far from the edge of the pool at the deep end, near the telephone. It had rung three or four times since we'd arrived here, and Klaus had always been the one to answer it; if he weren't near enough to hear the bell – the girls were making a lot of noise in the water – one of the guards would call him over. He'd answered in monosyllables every time, but I had the impression that the calls were from different people, that they were reporting in and he was co-ordinating things.

The sun was lowering through the afternoon hours, still warm on the skin. Tangerines and black olives lay rotting under the trees, and eucalyptus leaves floated on the surface of the pool. Inge and Dolores were making all the noise, diving from the board and giving little girlish screams as they splashed each other, vying for attention from Dieter Klaus, who wasn't interested. Helen stayed by herself, turning on her back sometimes to float with the sun on her face and her eyes closed. I watched her often, trying to share the calm she brought to the scene.

My guard had been changed; the new one was an Arab, not tall, but slender-looking in his kaftan; there didn't look room for a gun but that was an illusion. Klaus's bodyguards were dispersed around the courtyard, still in their black tracksuits, four women and two men. They moved very little, sometimes bouncing on the balls of their feet, swinging their hands together, never looking at one another, looking only towards the archways and the big redwood gates that led to the palace grounds. Two of them had gone with us to the Banque d'Algerie on the way here from the airport, where Geissler had wired funds to Intercom-Londres in the amount of US $500,000.

I first noticed the snake soon after Klaus took the third telephone call; it was moving very slowly along the bottom of a wall, half-lost among the leaves and the fallen tangerines. It wasn't very big; I would have said it was a horned viper, a native here.

'Are you asleep?'

Helen was watching me, hanging onto the tiled rim of the pool, her slim body rising and falling in the water.

I said I wasn't, no.

'Isn't it nice here?'

I said it was. She was so different from the other two girls, apart from her quietness. Inge sported her rich blonde body-hair, lifting her arms a lot and shaking the water from her head, laughing into the sun as the models do in Vogue and Elle; Dolores was less active but swam with studied grace, her long muscles moving under the dark skin, her eyes sleepy as she looked across at Dieter Klaus. But Helen was just thin, bobbing in the water with one shoulder-strap of her black costume hanging down and her slight breasts hardly noticeable. It was her innocence – even of this, the loose shoulder-strap – that glimmered with a sexuality the other girls could never hope to express; and when she smiled it was heart-breaking, or so I found; what turns me on most in a woman is her unintended invitation to my tenderness.

'I expect I look rather gawky,' she said, 'in a bathing costume.'

'Not really.'

'It's something I shall always remember my father saying.' The sun was in her eyes, and they were narrowed to slits of shimmering light as she watched me. 'He was in the garden, trying to bend a croquet hoop straight, and I was going to tell them tea was ready in the summer-house, and I heard him say to my mother, 'Here comes that gawky girl of yours.'

'Quite a lot of fathers are like that,' I said. 'It's a kind of birth defect.'

'You don't think I look gawky then?'

'I think you look rather like the goddess of willow trees, though a bit younger perhaps.'

A flush came to her pale face – and this is what I mean, she could still be moved by the clumsiest compliment – and she looked down, letting her long pale fingers slip from the tiles. 'I think that's going rather far,' she said, and swam away, not meaning it, hoping it might be just a little bit true. Beyond her I saw the snake move again.

Servants brought us things during the long hours of the afternoon, boys in kaftans and sandals, bringing us trays of tangerines, slices of ginger, kab el ghzal, mint tea', whatever we fancied, it was rather pleasant, he was a man of style, Klaus, regaling us with the fruits of the earth as the sun lowered towards the evening and the rendezvous and Midnight One. He couldn't do anything about the sand: it was everywhere, brought in by the light sirocco, gritty under our feet and the deck chairs when we moved them and even between our I teeth, forming a pink film across the copies of El Moudjahid and the London Times and the International Herald Tribune.

The telephone was getting on my nerves, not because it rang sometimes but because it was there, near the edge of the pool and almost within reach. Klaus had always answered it on the spot: he hadn't taken it out of earshot or lowered his voice, and I knew why. It wasn't that he trusted me; he knew I was safe, because if I had any reason to report to anyone, at any time, on anything I'd overheard this afternoon, I'd never be able to. I looked like a guest here, but I wasn't. I was a captive.