I didn't expect miracles either.

From where I sat I could see the digital clock on the softly-lit dashboard of the Mercedes, between the shoulders of the two hit men who sat facing me. The time was now 6:49: twenty-six minutes to the rendezvous, to the flashpoint. The airport at Dar-el-Beida is 20 kilometres from the city, and we were now nearing the motorway. Since I could see the clock I wouldn't have to look at my watch. I didn't want Ibrahimi to know I was interested in the time. The hit men sat watching my hands. I didn't know if they spoke or even understood French, but it was unlikely. Ibrahimi wouldn't need to give them any verbal instructions. If I made a wrong move they'd go for me: they were robots with guns, knee-jerk reflexive. I didn't move my hands; I left them folded on my lap. If I were going to move them with malice aforethought I'd need to do it very quickly.

The limousine accelerated onto the motorway, its headlights sweeping over the moonlit landscape. There were twenty-four minutes to go. One thought kept obtruding as I looked over the options that were left: that fix I'd overheard couldn't be the target for Midnight One. 26°03' north by 02°01' west must be somewhere in the Sahara desert, because London was the zero east-west meridian and almost due north of Algiers, and Baghdad was somewhere about 30 degrees latitude. Klaus hadn't mounted this operation to blow up a lot of sand. It would be nice to look at a map, one of the maps in the leather pocket at the back of the driver's seat, but I couldn't think of any excuse to ask for one.

Khatami, the Iranian pilot, had been quite insistent on the telephone at the poolside, making sure the caller got the fix correct and asking him to write it down and repeat it, even telling him to synchronise watches. But it couldn't be the target for Midnight One. Then was it the location of Midnight One? In the middle of the Sahara desert?

There was a telephone set into the walnut console between the jump seats. It would also be nice to use the telephone, as well as a map, but I didn't think Ibrahim! would let me.

The only viable option I had left was to pre-empt the flashpoint: move into some kind of action that could get me clear with a whole skin and leave Solitaire running. It would have to be calculated but it was going to be messy: that was unavoidable. One scenario seemed attractive.

There were five men with me in the limousine and they were armed, three with guns and two – I was going to assume – with knives. My immediate target would be Ibrahimi, and the technique would be an elbow-strike to the throat, and lethal. To do it effectively and with the certainty of a kill I'd need to work up the optimum degree of catapult tension in the arms to lend added momentum to the strike. At the moment my hands were lying loosely on my lap and I'd have to move them a little and quite naturally, settling them again with my left hand holding my right wrist. I must then change the hold into an actual grip, tightening it and pulling my arms against each other to the point where the maximum tension was reached before muscle fatigue set in. Then I would release my hands, and the time it would take for my right elbow to reach the throat of Muhammad Ibrahimi would be in the region of one-fifth of a second. This is the figure we've recorded in practice at Norfolk, where a lot of work has been done on this particular technique because it's quite often that an executive finds himself sitting captive in the back of a car.

Through the windscreen I could see a big jet sloping towards Dar-el-Beida with its strobes flashing against the deep indigo' sky. By the clock on the dashboard we were now nineteen minutes to the flashpoint.

So at any given time Ibrahimi could be sitting beside me with a smashed larynx and the blood flowing into his lungs: this is a death, oddly enough, by drowning. But the two hit men would also be fast. Their hands were resting on their thighs, a matter of inches from their guns, and I'd have to reach their eyes to blind them and inflict diversionary pain before they could fire, and that would take time, perhaps a full second, a second and a half, while my arms rebounded from the strike to Ibrahimi and I turned my hands into a four-finger eye shot as I drove them forward. It wouldn't be difficult: these men were facing me and even if they saw my hands coming and flinched or moved their heads I could change the eye shot into a claw hand with their eyes still the target and if they had time to reach their guns at all they'd have to fire blind and I'd be into a double outward rake to drive their hands away.

But there was a risk. He was the man up front with the driver.

The big jet was flattening out for the approach, floating above the black frieze of the date palms to the south.

'Have you known Monsieur Klaus,' I asked Ibrahimi, 'For very long?'

I didn't expect him to tell me. I wanted to know how far he was simply prepared to talk, because soon I was going to talk to him and it would involve London. He wouldn't know that.

'I have known him,' Ibrahimi said, 'some time.'

Meant nothing.

The jet melted into the palm trees, vanished. The speedometer stood at a steady 100 kilometres per hour, the speed limit on this stretch. At 100 kph a lot of things would happen if the driver lost control. He was no obstacle to me, the Arab at the wheel: his hands were tied and he must watch the road. But even supposing I could control the two hit men in the back of the limousine there was the third man sitting in front and he was a real hazard because I'd have to hit the seat-belt buckle release before I could reach him and in a car this size it was a long way from the back seat to the front and any initial momentum I could get from the upholstery wouldn't be enough to pitch me forward with the necessary speed to do anything effective: there wasn't the leverage. The third man would hear the action going on behind him the moment I started work and I wouldn't be halfway through what I needed to do with the other two before he span round with his gun drawn and fired at the skull to drop me with a single shot. The timing, as it concerned that man in the front there, was brutal, impossible.

Rule out the idea, then, of pre-empting the flashpoint. There was nothing I could do before we reached the airport at Dar-el-Beida, before we reached the rendezvous.

I could feel the adrenalin flowing into the bloodstream again, the resonance along the nerves as the digital clock flicked to 6:58 at seventeen minutes to the flashpoint. There wasn't a lot of time and I didn't see a single chance of doing anything even when we got there, anything effective. The most I could do would be to take Ibrahimi with me, Ibrahimi and the two men in the rear of the car, simply as a matter of principle. But if I could do anything at all it would have to be in a clear field with no disturbance: it was the only way I could work at the brink. So I'd better phone London, tell them to leave me alone, get their CT units out of Dar-el-Beida before we arrived.

'I've only known Monsieur Klaus,' I told Ibrahimi, 'a few hours.'

I shifted on the seat a little, half-turning to look at him, and the hands of the two men jerked.

'Relax,' I told them in German. 'I'm not going to hurt you.'

They'd hate that, did it for a giggle.

'What did you tell them?' Ibrahimi asked straight away.

'I told them to relax. They're fidgety.' His face was turned towards me, his black beard jutting, his eyes on mine in the shadows, a shimmer of black in the pale olive skin. 'Only a few hours,' I said. 'I met him only last night, as a matter of fact, about this time. But I know he's difficult to deal with, as I'm sure you've discovered yourself.'

He turned his face away from me, stared through the windscreen again, a glint coming into his eyes as headlights brightened from ahead of us in the opposite lane.