A rose for Moira.
Through the windscreen I could see a twin-engined jet taking off, its splinter-sharp profile aslant against the brilliant haze of the starfields above the airport; it looked very like the company jet we'd flown from Berlin this morning. We'll be taking off at seven, George Maitland had told me at the palace. He and Dieter Klaus. Destination unknown, unknown at least to me.
You should make your peace with Allah.
It would be delivered to Moira, as specified in my will, a single rose, so that she should know.
7:11 on the dashboard clock, but what did it signify? That I should make my peace with Allah.
The driver took the Mercedes in through the gates to the freight area, showing the guard a piece of paper. He waved us through. A line of hangars made a black frieze against the horizon, and five or six aircraft stood at angles, big ones, freight carriers.
I couldn't see any ground crews, any vehicles on the move.
7:12. It was three minutes to the rendezvous. Ibrahimi was checking his jewelled wrist watch.
'Wait,' he told the driver in French.
The tyres whimpered on the tarmac as the big car was turned towards the wall of a freight shed, and we stopped in its shadow. The three-quarter moon was twenty or thirty degrees high, bright in a clear sky; the sirocco had died away towards evening as the air had cooled. There was traffic on the move near the main runway, the strobes of small planes flashing as they rolled.
The two hit men watched me from their jump seats. They hadn't put their guns away after I'd finished my call to London. They were aimed at me now, at the heart. The two men weren't watching my hands any more; they were watching my eyes. They were well-trained, and I knew from this slight but significant shift in their observation that they were expecting me to make some sort of attack on them, or on Muhammad Ibrahimi, very soon now, if at all. So perhaps they understood a little French, had heard what Ibrahimi had told me, and knew from experience that when the subject of an execution nears the moment of truth he tends to panic and strike out in a final attempt to save himself.
I haven't seen Moira for a long time, several months. She travels a lot, making those terrible movies, and of course I travel quite a bit too. I hope she is well.
Croder must have got his signals through extremely fast, but then we expect it of him: he has the attributes of a vampire and will draw blood in the instant if you cross him but when you're out in the field and he's in the Signals room you've got infinitely more chance of bringing the mission home than with anyone else. I didn't know what units he'd sent in to the rendezvous or how many there were, but he'd cleared them out in nine minutes flat, phoning them direct or phoning their coordination unit and telling them the rendezvous was cancelled, cancelled or postponed or moved or whatever. Of course they could still be parked in one of the hangars over there or behind the freight shed. Nothing was certain.
He'd done a good job, Croder, and it looked as if I had an absolutely clear field for whatever last-ditch attempt at salvation I might try. This was what I'd wanted, asked for and got, but at that time I'd thought there'd be something I could do at the flashpoint, turn the car over or go for these people, these monkeys, these stinking monkeys, steady, you'll have to watch it, there's no room for emotion, no room for panic here, it's too dangerous, thought there'd be something I could do at the flashpoint, yes, but in fact there wasn't, take some of them with me of course but that was all, an eye for an eye, but what shall it profit a man when the mission is over before its time, what precisely is the point in taking life out of spite? Pride, yes, but that's no answer.
The mission had ended when that plane had taken off just now. My objective had been to infiltrate Nemesis and stay within it until I'd learned enough to be able to destroy it and get clear, but there hadn't been a chance and Klaus was airborne for Midnight One and tomorrow there would be headlines. Nothing would have changed if I'd let London spring their trap: they'd have got Ibrahimi, that was all. They'd hoped to get Klaus, thought he'd be at the rendezvous. Nothing would have changed.
7:14.
One minute.
Adrenalin coursing through the veins, through the heart where the bullets would go. A feeling of lightness, of time slowing down, feelings that were familiar to me.
Ibrahimi told the driver, 'Go to the hangar over there, the second from the end. Hangar No. 5.'
We moved away, leaving the shadow of the freight building. I could see another vehicle on the move now, a dark-coloured van. It was going towards Hangar No. 5, as we were. London is very good with timing, very reliable.
'That will be the van,' I told Ibrahimi, 'with the warhead.'
'It is good,' he said.
The moonlight flashed on the star mascot as the big Mercedes turned.
'Here,' Ibrahimi told the driver. 'Stop just here.'
We were at the north-east corner of the hangar, not far from one of the big freight planes and a stack of crates with ropes across it. The tyres whimpered again on the smooth tarmac, and we stopped.
The clock flicked to 7:15.
Fifty yards away, in the shadow of the hangar, the dark van halted.
Silence came in.
You should make your peace with Allah.
But I would rather stop the presses, stop the headlines.
Try.
'One thing worried me,' I told Ibrahimi, 'when I was talking to my contact in London. He warned us that we'd have to watch out for the airport police. Do you remember?'
He turned his face to me. 'Yes,' he said.
'I think he had a point. We're still not certain we can get through this rendezvous successfully. There could still be a trap.'
I waited.
No one was getting out of the van over there.
'I'm thinking,' I said to Ibrahimi, 'of your personal welfare, at this point. There's no need for you to get out of the car yourself.'
Across the airport a commercial jet came in, nose up and then flattening as the smoke rose in puffs from the tyres. The sound hadn't reached us yet.
My hands were folded on my lap. The two men could see them in the moonlight that struck obliquely through the window. My hands were not folded with the left one holding the right wrist, gripping it. That technique couldn't work now, because these two had their guns out, didn't have to draw first. If I went for the elbow strike to Ibrahimi's throat it wouldn't connect with the tissues before the bullets came: they had their fingers inside the trigger guards, and like me they'd be feeling the adrenalin and would be fast, touchy.
The sound of the jet came in with a soft roar as it reversed thrust.
Ibrahimi had done his thinking.
'Order the man in front,' he told me, 'the German, to go across to the van and receive the warhead.'
I'd known it would be the man in front he would send out there, not one of the men in the back of the car, because they were watching me, protecting him.
I'd wanted the man in front to leave the car for two reasons. He was out of my reach, unlike the two in the rear, and Ibrahimi could conceivably walk across there into a hail of shots if in fact there were some people still hanging around here despite the call from London – and I wanted Ibrahimi to stay alive in case Allah was good to me and threw me a chance in a thousand and let me interrogate him. He was the last link I had with Nemesis, and might give me some information I could work with.
'He might speak a little French,' I told Ibrahimi, 'in which case you could give him the instructions yourself.' I called in German to the man in front, asking him if he understood French. He turned his head and stared into my face.
'Nein.'
So I told him that Ibrahimi's instructions were for him to get out of the car and go across to the van. When he was halfway there, I said, someone would come out of the van and deliver the consignment into his hands.
He looked several times at Ibrahimi, who nodded to confirm what I was saying. When I'd finished he hit his seat-belt release and snapped the door open.
'Jawohl!'
'Wait,' I said. 'You will tell them you are here on behalf of Herr Ibrahimi. Mention his name: Ibrahimi. You will also give the password, which is in English. It is the word Mushroom. Pronounce it for me.'
He tried.
'No,' I said, 'listen again. Mush – room. Repeat that.'
He frowned, angered because he hadn't got his sums right, would have liked to put a bullet straight into my head. 'Mush – room.'
'Good. Say it to yourself a few times as you walk across there. Now get moving.'
He slammed the door and the echo came back from the mouth of the hangar like a gunshot. We watched him walking across the tarmac, his right arm not swinging, not visible: his gun, like the others', would be left-side bolstered under his coat. He didn't trust the people in the dark-coloured van. He didn't trust his own mother.
I slowed my breathing, made it deeper, bringing down the tension in the muscles because there was sweat coming, and sweat is slippery on the hands, can make a critical difference in any kind of action.
But there wouldn't be any: the odds were too stacked and the timing was prohibitive: I couldn't reach those guns from this distance and hope to smash them away before they fired, not even with a double wave strike or downward blocks.
There were no options left, then. None.
The feeling of lightness came into me again, a kind of floating. I've known it before: I think it's when the conscious mind realises that death is inevitable and allows the psyche free rein to survey the data on a subconscious level, where there may perhaps be insights, inspiration, where the spirit may redeem the flesh, offering a means of survival.
I gave myself to it.
Through the windscreen I saw a door of the dark-coloured van coming open and a man getting out, then another. Between them they carried an oblong crate with rope handles. It looked heavy.
The German approached them, and when he was within a few feet of them they all stopped, and seemed as if they were talking. The German would be giving them the name of Ibrahimi and the password, Mush – room, and I suppose they were pointing out to him that this thing was too heavy for one man to carry, something like that, but then the whole scene turned silver in a flood of blinding light and the figures of men came running from the mouth of the hangar and two jeeps came swerving into the foreground with their tyres screaming and Ibrahimi shouted something in Arabic and our driver hit the throttle and the Mercedes began slewing under the wheelspin until the treads found traction and we grazed the nearest jeep and rocked and steadied and got under way with a surge of acceleration that took us clear of the hangar and across the tarmac with the rear tyres still whimpering under the acceleration.
Lights in the mirrors, bright lights, dazzling.
Ibrahimi was shouting to the driver again in Arabic. I didn't know what he was saying. The two guards hadn't reacted very much, were still watching me with their guns out, perfectly trained. Ibrahimi was turning sometimes to look through the smoked rear window, his face grey in the light coming through the tinted glass. He looked at me once, his eyes burning.
'Did you know of this?'
'No. But I warned you it could happen – and you're still a free man.'
He looked away. The lights in the mirrors were coloured now and flashing, and sirens began sounding. We kept a straight course until a fuel tanker came into view as a dark rectangle crawling across the taxiway, then we swerved and hit gravel and tore a radar scanner away from its base and straightened again with the automatic shift kicking down and giving us another surge of acceleration from the huge 5.6-litre engine, the sirens behind us howling and shots coming now as we crossed the central apron in front of the terminus with the digital speedometer moving through 150 kph, 160, 165 and the lights from behind us losing their glare and the sound of the sirens fading by a degree. But the shots were still coming and a rear tyre burst and we slewed badly and then corrected, the huge shape of a commercial jet looming and swinging past as the tyre was torn away from the rim and we began settling on the off-side like a ship taking on water.
The driver was doing what I would have done: we'd got superior speed but not too much manoeuvrability at over two tons so he was relying on putting all the distance he could behind us while the going was good, and we were closing in on some hangars at the other end of the airport and could even reach them and get into shelter and ditch and run if that was what Ibrahimi ordered.
Another vehicle was coming in from the side with its coloured lights flashing and the siren going – it had seen the Mercedes and the speed it was doing and was coming across the tarmac to intercept, but either our driver had lost too much steering because of the rear wheel or he decided to make an oblique attack, because we swerved to the left and hit the vehicle at the front end and I saw it start rolling and the mirror on that side was lit up suddenly with an orange light and a second later we heard the dull thump of the explosion.
Shots from somewhere, from behind or from a new source of attention, and another tyre burst and the tread began howling against the underneath of the wing and the stink of burning rubber came into the car and as we swerved again and hit something and span full circle the whole thing took off and I smashed my hand down on the gun to my left and it roared and I felt for the man's throat and made the kill as the other man brought his gun up and fired wild and I went in very close and used a heel-palm and drove the nose bone upwards into the brain as Ibrahimi screamed something and I saw the flash of a blade and blocked it and started forming a tiger claw but the car was barrelling now and everything span across the vision-field and we smashed into something again and the doors burst open and I hit ground and rolled with Ibrahimi on top of me, forced him away and began dragging him clear as the tank went up and the whole of the night caught fire.