by Adam Hall
There was a parking area with twenty or thirty vehicles in it, all of the same type standing in rows, the nearest one with a crest on it, City of Berlin, street maintenance department. I moved between them and then stopped and checked the environment for the last time to make certain.
Flying glass and I dropped flat.
14: RUN
Headlamp.
The spotlight swept the ground, the vehicles. I didn't move, lay flat. I was in shadow.
The shot had gone into a headlamp close to where I'd been moving and there was blood on my face from the flying glass.
A rifle, nothing smaller; a long-distance shot that hadn't made any noise. He was using a silencer.
The tags had been called off and this was why. For the whole of the long afternoon they'd kept me in sight and waited for the right time and the right place, which was here, which was now. The two attempts to kill me had been made on impulse, a chance taken on the wing in the hope of an easy kill and the kudos it would bring. But this had been the predetermined operation and now it had begun.
The smell of oil as I lay with my face close to the ground over a patch of crankcase droppings. Very little sound; no traffic; there was no checkpoint here, nothing between Oberbaumbrucke to the north and Sonnen Allee to the south. A wash of reflected light came from the concrete sweep of the Wall itself but the rotating beam was infinitely more intense and the shadows between the vehicles in the parking area were black in contrast.
It wouldn't have been a single attempt. He would run through a whole ammunition-belt if he had to. He wouldn't have to; it would be a question of time, of number, the number of shots required.
He'd be in no hurry; he had from now until dawn. But he wouldn't of course be alone; there'd be others in the environment, stationed strategically so that I couldn't make a headlong run for it and with luck survive. I couldn't see them from where I lay. All I could see were wheels to the right of this position, dark rounded blobs below the vehicle that sheltered me. On my left there were the others in orderly rows, parked for the night. More of them were ahead of me, and beyond them the lights of a street. Behind me there was another street but I was cut off from that; the sniper was in that direction, posted on a height of some sort, in the window of a building or on a fire-escape. He would be comfortable; he would take his time.
And I would take mine.
The air was perfectly still and very cold. Sounds would carry clearly when they came. There'd be no change in the light value unless traffic passed along the street behind me or the street on the far side; the glow of the Wall was constant and so was the intensity of the rotating beam. I suppose it was cheaper than putting up a whole battery of spotlights; and there was a sinister aspect to this constantly moving finger that brought everything it touched into fierce relief. Its purpose was to deter.
Cone:
Yasolev's going to ask you how you'll be planning your access to Volper. Will you tell him?
No.
Do you know?
Yes.
Are you prepared to tell me?
You wouldn't like it.
How much protection are you going to need?
None.
My job is to get you through Quickstep with a whole skin. I'd rather you didn't make it difficult for me.
Look, it's out of our hands. Put it this way: they went for Scarsdale and they got him. They thought it'd warn me off but it didn't, so now they'll go for me. And that's the only access we've got, and I'm going to use it. Don't worry, they won't be long.
That had been four days ago, and this night would be the last.
Impact and I jerked my head and listened to the ricochet as the shell ripped through the metalwork of the vehicle in front of me and skated across the ground under dying momentum. It was a heavy projectile, I would say from a carbine or magnum with anything up to twelve shots in the magazine and fitted with a high-magnification night scope and silencer. It wouldn't be expected to drive a hole in a human skull; it would blow it apart.
There was no smell of the gun. It could be a quarter of a mile away. I closed my eyes and let the scene come in as it would look from the sniper's position: a rectangular area of flat tarmacadam dotted with dominoes, regularly spaced, with the shadows of the swinging light shifting constantly at precise intervals. And within this circumscribed pattern, a man.
A man for the moment motionless. To lie here until dawn was a temptation, to lie here and use the dark hours to review my life so as to leave it with a feeling of something accomplished, not a lot but something. But I would also have to review the mistakes I'd made, the instances of gross incompetence incurred by pride or too much faith in the self's abilities, and the unwitting betrayals, the lapses in manners, in loyalty, in the concession to mercy when its need cried out. And that, my good friend, could not be countenanced; it would not look well in the reckoning. Besides which, I wasn't going to give up after the first two shots, or after the first two hundred if he'd got that many. One must be true to one's principles, so forth, but the terror was on me and I could smell it as the cold sweat broke out: it's not the thought of death that makes us afraid, you know, it's the thought of dying, of reaching the point of no return, of being too late; everything in life has always been reversible, hasn't it, or tolerable, manageable — there's always been time left in which to put one's house in order, to clean up the worst of the mess and say you're sorry; and then suddenly we're caught in the headlights, frozen in mid-stride, and there's nowhere to go any more except there, into the unknown.
Finis.
Exactly, my good friend.
Impact and the breath came out of my body as if the shell had blown it out. But it hadn't; it had crashed into the side window of the vehicle where I was sheltering, and the fragments fluted through the air in a dying chorus of notes as the vehicle moved on its springs by a degree and was still again.
Amusing himself.
The rotating light swung, sending the shadows of the vehicles' shifting from left to right in a circling crossword puzzle. He was amusing himself: I hadn't moved and he knew where I was but he couldn't reach this side of the vehicle unless he changed his position and he didn't want to do that; he was too comfortable, too well-placed. So he'd fired another shot to keep his eye in, to keep his eye in and to put the fear of Christ in me because the impact of a shell that size in the silence of the night is enough to shatter the nerves.
I lay flat, relaxing, trying to shift into alpha waves if only for a few seconds because the sound of the bullet was still reverberating through the system. It hadn't been loud but it had been sudden, and had expressed appalling power, enough power to fell an ox on the hoof. Relax, and let the body sink against the cold tarmac, the cheek resting on the back of the hand, the nose filling with the crude, heavy reek of engine oil. In a moment I would have to move; all through the night I would have to move and go on moving if I could, if one of those shells — the fifth or the tenth or the fifteenth — didn't blow apart the delicate array of intelligence inside the skull.
Alpha, and the sense of letting go, of the slackening of the nerves to the point of ephemeral euphoria, until confidence came back like a lost friend and touched my hand; and then I moved, crawling over the ground and underneath the vehicle, finding the crankcase and wiping my hands across the underside and smearing the blackened oil on my face and the back of my hands, doing it carefully, attending to the eyelids and the lobes of the ears. I couldn't tell if it were going to be enough and I wouldn't be taking it for granted: I'd use more oil from the next vehicle if I ever reached it.
My suit and sweater were dark and my shoes black, but I took off my watch and pushed it into a pocket. Then I began crawling again, pulling my body forward across the ground, flat as a lizard, until I was lying in front of the vehicle on the blind side to the sniper's eye.
And waited.
I couldn't try to go back to the street behind me because it'd mean moving straight into his line of fire. There were buildings on
each side of the car-park and they offered no shelter because they were fully exposed. The only place I could try to reach was the street in front of me, more than a hundred yards away, and the only hope I had of doing It was by moving from the shelter of one vehicle to the next and using their moving shadows for visual cover as the rotating light swept the area. It amounted to a suicide run but there was no choice.
I began counting.
The first move was going to be the most difficult to make; not difficult In terms of timing and distance because the vehicles were in orderly rows and equally spaced, but difficult in terms of willpower. Later there'd be the factor of familiarity as an aid, on the principle that the more you do something the easier it gets, but as I lay waiting I couldn't be certain that I wouldn't get halfway to the next vehicle and lose faith and stumble and go down and offer a motionless target that he'd see the moment the light swung across my prone body.
Three, four.
Counting.
The light swung, spreading the black-and-white crossword in front of me.
The only sound was of traffic to the northeast along Treptower Park. To the west there was the deep silence of the Wall, where nothing moved but the guards, who made no sound.
Five, six.
It had taken the light six seconds to sweep from this vehicle to the next and that was the amount of time I had available to make the crossing and it would have to be done at a fast run so I pulled my shoes off, reverting to the primitive animal in order to deal with this primitive situation: the need to survive. Without shoes I could run faster and although they were black they were polished leather and could pick up light, barely a glimmer but possibly all he'd need, the sniper, to pick me out of the dark.
Waiting.
The next vehicle wasn't immediately in front; there was one each side of the gap between them and I chose the one to the left because the right leg is stronger in the right-handed and it would give me extra thrust as I pushed off, by however small a degree.
Waiting.
The light swung, brightening the zone in front of me and then leaving it dark and I hadn't been ready, hadn't wanted to be ready: I needed the rhythm of the light's movement to establish itself in my mind.
Waiting as it swept and then I took a breath and blocked it and went for it, going through the sprint starting position and driving with my feet and plunging through the dark with the bright beam swinging towards me from the left and the area becoming deadly with each passing second as I ran, feeling the touch of the terror I'd known I'd feel because of the inexorability of that moving light, because of the knowledge that whatever happened it wouldn't stop, if I stumbled or lost my speed or veered too far to the left or lost my nerve it wouldn't stop, it would find me, flooding across the ground and drowning me in its glare and reaching the retina of the eye of the man who would fire the gun, shadow down, the terror alone driving me now, run run run with the adrenalin alone keeping me mobile, keeping me alive but the shot came and I heard the shell striking the tarmac on my right side, run run run as if nothing had happened but there were chips of tar and stone flying up as the light swept nearer, nearer, faster than I'd believed it would as I ran headlong and he fired again and the impact was closer and I'd heard the windrush of the shell as it had flashed past my head on the left side, the side where the light was coming, strengthening as it came, filling the receptors at the edge of the vision field as the darkness in front of me grew to a lightening grey as I ran ran ran with the terror still with me, with the scalp crawling as the nerves waited for the hit, for the bursting open of the skull as the last thought sprang there — over now — flashing across the synapses before it was blown into oblivion.
Dive.
Dived as the light came flooding and my hands went forward to break the fall and I dropped flat in the shadow of the vehicle and the next shot smashed into the bodywork with a scream of metal against metal and I lay with my face on my spread hands and my breath coming in shock waves from the lungs, letting my eyes close and feeling the inevitability of the next shot.
It didn't come.
Rest, rest now. It's over for a time.
Cone:
Immediate plans?
I'm going to see if I can get them interested.
The ground cold under my hot body, grit under my hands, the smell of oil, the smell of rubber, nothing natural here in this civic hunting-ground, no tree, no leaf, nothing but hard surfaces and the inhospitable furnishings of stone and metal and concrete, the habitat of man.
Holding his fire.
I don't suppose for a moment he'd run short of ammunition: there'd been planning done. They may not have known I'd head in this direction, though I'd been moving south from the cafe, east and then south, but they'd assumed I'd reach some area where I'd be trapped and couldn't get out again. This site wasn't ideal because of the light's movement but at least I was cut off from the street behind me and on both sides by the buildings, and the man with the gun could bring me down before I could find effective cover and make an escape.
Light washing across the ground where I lay but not reaching me, the vehicle above my head and its shadow shifting from right to left as the light swung left to right.
Get them interested, yes. Signal to London: the executive has managed to get the interest of the opposition, which was his intention. Brief report on success; interim objective achieved, so forth.
Not really.
More realistically: doubts as to the executive's survival for more than another ten minutes are such that I advise replacement if possible or termination of mission.
Alas, poor Yasolev.
Move. Move now. We've got to do it again.
Silent night, unholy night, with only the faint sound of the late traffic along Treptow and the harsh sawing of my breath as the organism drew in oxygen for the muscles. I wasn't ready yet. I would wait.
Or termination of mission, yes, with Holmes over there in the signals room getting some more coffee with his eyes on no one because the news wasn't good on the board for Quickstep, not terribly good. Where's Mr Shepley? Pick up a phone. You think we should get him? The last signal on the board: executive attempting to trap opposition agent and interrogate. Or words to that effect; I couldn't be at all sure, not knowing Cone enough to get into his mind. He might have been talking to Yasolev the whole evening for all I knew. I'm sorry, but my agent has virtually gone to ground and thrown off my support people and at the moment I don't know where he is, though I do know he's in danger, so forth. They could be in signals with London in the hope that somewhere they could find a shadow willing to work with Yasolev, someone Yasolev could approve of.
Or Cone might be tougher than I knew, with enough nervous stamina to go on working with an executive who had so far run wild at every turn and deliberately gone solo. Anything was possible; even that Shepley knew I'd have to work like this and had told Cone to put up token protests but let me run and put smoke out if I needed it or get me to a hospital if I needed it, just keep Quickstep running and by the millionth chance bring it home and bring me home with it.
Academic, yes: this is entirely academic, my good friend, you're absolutely right. Thing is to move on, isn't it, put up a show, go out with the blood hot and one small ray of hope shining in the night before the winds of chance blow it away.
Move, then. It is necessary.
Countdown: six, five, four as the light came sweeping from the left. I let its rhythm move into my mind again on the subconscious level while I reached up and wiped more oil from the crankcase and smeared it over my face and hands again, this stuff stinks, but only because the stomach is queasy, only because you'd rather smell roses, wouldn't you, in your last few minutes on earth.
Three, two, one.
Crawl forward, crouch in front of the vehicle, wait. Its shadow had begun darkening on the right as the searchlight flooded the buildings on the left of the car park and then reached the ground, sweeping towards me. Wait. Sweeping nearer, creating shadows to
the right of the vehicles in front of me, brightening their bodywork, reflecting from the windows. Sweeping nearer — starting position — nearer, flooding over the vehicles and moving on — go for it.
Chasing the light, lost in the darkness it was leaving behind it — flat out, you've got three more seconds — the scalp crawling on the right side, the side where the shell would come if I faltered, stumbled, fell — run run run — the light from the next beam coming behind me and catching up, catching up fast as I ran ran ran and pitched headlong into the shadow of the next vehicle in the row ahead, lie flat, lie flat, do nothing, A sheet of light spreading across the ground and then flooding the vehicle as I shut my eyes and rested, the heartbeat thudding inside the rib cage and the breath sawing, the nerves sending a cascade of coloured light across the retinae until the tension slowly came off and the organism started returning to normal.
Light dying away.
Ten minutes. I would give it ten more minutes before I moved again. There was no hurry, though the dog might make a difference.
There'd been no shot this time; either he hadn't seen me or he was letting me run, toying with me, certain I could never make the next two rows of vehicles and reach the street. He could be giving me respite, giving me hope, playing on the nerves — a sniper would be liable to do that; they're a special breed, cold-blooded, subtle and meticulous, their egos geared to the intricate and finely-balanced mechanism of the guns they use.
'Aus mit dich!'
I hadn't seen it because my eyes were shut; I'd heard it snuffling, and when I'd looked up it had been coming through the gap between the next two vehicles ahead. I'd kept absolutely still but it had scented me: that was what it was doing here. It was a Doberman, big but not yet mature, and it was standing within three feet of me, watching.