Northlight

6 EXIT

The technique of the gateswing turn is the European version of the bootlegger turn they use in the States: you bring the speed well down and pull the wheel over and stand on the hand brake until you're swinging at ninety degrees and then you release the brake and slam the power on and drive through the final vector. At this stage you're facing in the opposite direction and if you can do it right and do it fast enough you can be gaining ground while the hunter vehicle is still coming the other way and if you're doing it at night you can try a quick swing towards him with your headlights full on and hope to blind him off the road.

This is what Brekhov did and I wasn't ready for it — he was swinging wild in the path of the Porsche 944 and hitting the edge of the curb and correcting with his front end pointing straight again. I caught a glimpse of his white face in the driving window as I slowed and stood on the hand brake and went into the gateswing myself, too late for anything neat but getting it half-right and bouncing a little off a fire hydrant before I could settle into the acceleration phase with the rear tyres waltzing badly over the wet surface.

The Porsche hadn't seen it coming and we lost it but the BMW had the distance it needed because it was bringing up the rear, and it simply slowed and went into a tailslide and lost usable traction until the curb kicked it straight again. It was between Brekhov and me, accelerating hard, and I tried to damp out the rear wheelspin to the point where I could close the gap and bump him with enough off-centre leverage to push him round into some kind of crash; but the road was too wet and I couldn't get close enough. I could see Brekhov still ahead, so I settled down to watch for a chance to help him.

What he had done, because it was the only thing he could possibly have done, was to try driving out of the trap.

It had gone well at first: he was a competent actor, looking at his watch again and going across to the reception desk and leaving a verbal message and then going steadily to the main entrance and down the steps to the street, pulling his collar up and loping across to his Mercedes. It had looked beautifully natural but die agents had followed suit, two of them getting into the Porsche and two into the BMW.

I took my time, because my SSL was nearer the corner of the square, which had one-way circulation. I could let them go past me before I pulled out and took up the rear, which was the only place where I could do anything. I didn't know if Brekhov would try reaching the British Embassy or a police station or somewhere crowded like a street market where the opposition couldn't use their guns without killing other people. At this moment we had the streets almost to ourselves because of the rain: a lot of the shopping traffic had pulled in somewhere to wait out the downpour, and we were now driving on dipped headlights like the few other vehicles we saw.

Brekhov was taking us eastward all the time, maybe looking for street patterns that could get him clear: narrow places with cars parked where he might be able to swing to a stop broadside across the street and get out and run clear; or loop roads with a one-way T-section where he could make a right feint and turn left and hope the hunter car would swing out of control when it tried to follow.

He knew how to drive: he was a courier. As we reached stretches of open road he veered toward the centreline and chose a late apex on the right-hand turns, losing ground on the way in but gaining speed on the way out. The BMW was keeping well up on him and I began getting worried that Brekhov would use the late-apex technique when the BMW was close because it had more power, and if it were right on the Mercedes' tail when it went into a right-hand turn it could overhaul him alongside and force him into a crash.

A lot of what we were doing was instinctive rather than planned because the wipers weren't getting the rain off the windscreens fast enough even on high speed and we couldn't see much more than a blur in front of us. The headlights of vehicles coming the other way turned the rain haze into a burst of dazzling glare and left our retinae light-shocked for seconds on end. The speedometer needle on my facia was swinging between 90 and 110 kph and I didn't like it because if we were going to get out of this one it would have to be by science and not chance, and high speed was a hazard.

They knew I was supporting Brekhov by now: I'd kept up with them too long. I hadn't seen the Porsche since we'd lost it on the gateswing turn but it didn't mean it wouldn't find us again: it was a much faster machine.

The rain hit the top of the bonnet and whipped across the screen, slowing the wiper blades before they could move it away; with both windows shut the heat of the engine was bringing a lot of warmth into the interior and I was sitting in my sweat because if Brekhov came unstuck on a turn or the rain blinded him and he hit a curb at the wrong angle or tried some kind of technique that didn't work there might not be a chance for me to get to him before the two men in the BMW dragged him out of the wreckage. They'd have guns and that would make a critical difference at close quarters.

We were in the Weissensee district now and I knew Brekhov wasn't trying to reach anywhere: he was simply trying to outrun them by pulling every trick in the bag and hoping that just one of them would work. But they were very efficient and I began wondering whether I could get close enough to the BMW to do anything useful. If the Porsche.

In the mirror. It had picked us up again by luck or by making a grid search with its superior speed and gaining on us along the straight stretches and through the turns. It was only a smudge in the mirror with its lights dazzling until I flicked to night vision but it couldn't be anything but the Porsche because there were no police lights flashing and no one else would close the distance on me at 100 kph in this kind of rain.

There was no point in waiting things out if I could at leas; reach one of them and I could reach the Porsche so I did that, sighting ahead for a clear stretch of road and then pulling to the left and hitting the brakes and bringing it right alongside before the driver could react. It was a smaller car but I didn't use my front or rear end to swing at it; I waited till he braked on the rebound and then closed in with the mid-point of the SSL's chassis locking with his offside front wing and working at it as hard as the wet surface would let me: he was steering into me now and although he didn't have the weight necessary to move the greater mass of the SSL at the mid-section he could push back hard enough to cost me a lot of friction on the front tyres.

Then his wing buckled and I was pushing directly against his front wheel and it angled over slightly, the tyre shrilling against the metal and sending a smell of burnt rubber into my compartment. Nothing very much was happening now: at close on 90 kph we were just locked together with our treads sliding across the wet road surface independently of the steering line. We were on a straight Stretch but there was a curving sheen of light ahead of us reflecting from the curbside as the road turned to the left. It wouldn't do any good unless I could burst one of his tyres by insisting with every ounce of the mass I had available against him until his nearside front wheel began scraping along the curbstones and tore through the rubber.

Then I saw some kind of dark rectangle breaking up the curve ahead of us and when the wipers got the screen clear for an instant before the rain smothered it again I saw it was a side street opening to our right, and that was all I needed and the other man knew it but couldn't do anything about it because the speed was too high and he didn't have more than three or four seconds to try using his brakes and he was much too late because we were into, the turn and I kept up the pressure against him until I felt the Porsche give way suddenly as its front wheel met the gap in the curb and lurched sideways. Things were very close because he was out of control now and there was suddenly no more pressure against the SSL and even though I was ready for it there wasn't a lot of time to pull out: at this speed there was too much centrifugal force to let me get away with it cleanly. The front end tried to follow the Porsche into the side street but I managed to pull over soon enough to stop hitting the corner of the curbstone; the SSL began swinging out of control and I damped things down by touching the brakes and releasing them until we found direction and steadied with the speed coming down, and as I began using the throttle again I heard the Porsche hit the corner building with the hollow sound of a bomb and then there was just the drumming of the rain on the bonnet and the roof as I drove clear.

The brake lights of the BMW flashed once and went out again: the driver had probably taken a glance behind him when he heard the crash. I was closing the distance well enough because Brekhov had slowed ahead of us through a right-angle turn. The wail of a siren was coming from somewhere now — I'd been waiting for that because you can't do this speed through the streets of Berlin for too long before a police car takes an interest. This was going to make-Blinding headlights suddenly and I put a hand up to shield my eyes while I kept the car in a straight line but the BMW was slowing down hard and I had to brake while I tried to work out the score and there was only one answer possible: Brekhov had used the right-angle turn to do another gateswing while the hunter was still on the blind side, and it had been the Mercedes that had passed me in the opposite direction.

I got around faster than the BMW by using the curbstone as a cushion for the rear wheel, swinging the whole thing round and getting enough acceleration to keep Brekhov in sight with the BMW behind me in the mirror, but it was no go because there was a truck turning the corner and Brekhov had to swerve and then the whole thing was over, finis.

'Have you got the product?'

'Yes.'

There was a pause on the line.

'Why are you making contact?'

To tell you I've got it, that's all.'

'Fair enough.'

They've got no bloody imagination.

'There was a bit of trouble,' I said.

'Ah. What happened?'

Stink of burned clothes in the close confines of the phone-box.

'They got onto him, somewhere along the line.'

'In Germany?'

'No. On the other side.'

'Tell me what happened, then.' This was Kinsley and he'd started to humour me, because in the ordinary way I wouldn't need to make contact at this stage: I'd just get the product back to London the quickest way.

'Look,' I said, 'I'll be bringing the thing over in a matter of hours. It's just a question of what plane I can get.' I listened to the police sirens coming in from all over the place. 'I didn't want you to pick up a freak signal from their network about our getting unstuck, that's all.'

'I understand.'

'They got onto him on the other side but too late to stop him crossing the frontier. They just signalled their people in Berlin to take care of things. We walked into a trap and had to drive out of it. I'm clear now.'

'Yes, I see.'

Then why don't you bloody well ask me?

I edged the door of the phone-box open a fraction to let some of the stink out. The sirens were louder suddenly. I could still see the flamelight against a white building, with the rain tinged red.

'What about Brekhov?' Kinsley asked.

'He's dead.'

Every muscle in my body slackened like a broken spring and I was leaning against the side, of the box. The first need of grief is to talk about it and if you don't think we ever have time to grieve for strangers in this trade it's just that you don't understand that there aren't any strangers, really, out there on the brink.

'You're sure?'

'What?'

'You're sure he's dead?'

'Jesus Christ, d'you think I'd have left him there?'

I dropped the phone back on the hook and slumped harder against the glass panels of the box and squeezed my eyes shut arid thought it wasn't going to be any good if I let a thing like this upset me when I ought to be moving on. Two hours into the mission and you're into a KGB trap and out of it again with a dead courier, big deal, a lot of jobs go like that, you should be used to it by now.

Maybe it was because I'd had to watch him go, without being able to do anything about it. He'd tried twice to correct his line when he'd swerved to avoid the truck but the roadway was too wet and he was half aquaplaning with the front end and he couldn't bring his speed down because he was trying to get the rear wheels to drive him straight. The headlights in my mirror seemed as if they were being flashed on and off and I couldn't understand why the driver of the BMW was doing that until I realized he'd made his skid-U-turn too fast and was swinging from side to side, out of control.

The truck loomed through the rain-haze and slammed past me as I saw the Mercedes reach the end of its run, hitting the corner of a red brick wall and swinging hard round and smashing against the side of the building with all four wheels off the ground and the suspension whipping as the rear tank split and caught a spark and the whole place was suddenly a sheet of flame.

I got the wheel hard over and slammed sideways into some iron railings and ricocheted with the seat-belt cutting diagonally across my ribs; then sound and movement stopped except for the hiss of the rain and I was running for the Mercedes, Most of the fuel had been hurled rearwards but there were flames all round the car and I dragged the door open to get Brekhov out before the upholstery caught, but he was twisted sideways against the seat squab with his head at the wrong angle and I just ripped at his shirt and felt for the sticking-plaster and found it and tugged at it but couldn't break it because there were several layers round his body, so I broke a sliver of glass from the smashed driving window and used it for cutting until the small thin rectangular pack was free; then I got clear with the flames catching my clothes and the heat blinding me until I got out of range, rolling over and over in the puddles and beating at my legs till the flames were out and I started running.

There were some shots: the BMW had finished up on its side but one of the men was climbing out and using his gun. The police siren was very loud now and I broke through a hedge and kept to the cover of a row of trees until I could settle into a steady run. The shooting had stopped but I couldn't go back to the SSL: he'd be waiting for me to do that. I gave it a couple of miles before I slowed and started looking for a phone-box.

Slumped inside it, I looked down at the puddle that had formed from my soaked clothes, watching a dead match that was floating on it, until my senses got back into focus and I picked up the phone again and got the embassy.

'I was cut off from London.'

When Kinsley came on the linked radio line I just told him I'd be getting onto the first available plane.

'Do you need help of any kind?'

'No.'

A huge fire engine was thundering past as I left the phone-box, and I looked back once at the light of the flames, faint now in the distance, while in my mind the echoes of steadily running footsteps died away.