By ten o'clock I'd gone from Treptower Park to Konigsheide and north again to Baum-Schulenweg, waiting for twenty minutes in a U-bahnhof and checking my watch, making it seem that I was so desperate for the rendezvous that I was taking risks, making three phone calls and speaking the correct lines from the scenario because an efficiently-trained tag is taught to lip-read.
I still can't throw them off, so forth, I'll make contact when I can.
And now I was in a crowd outside a bowling-alley, huddling among the people for warmth and company and the chance of a close encounter that could give me what I wanted: information.
'I don't know,' I said. 'I think there's room for fifty but they're short of bowls.'
'Well, I'm not surprised. They're always short of something.' A man in a leather jacket ripped at the shoulder, his hands dug into his pockets to keep them warm.
'They should either let us in or tell us how long we've got to wait.' A thin girl half-buried in her boyfriend's arms, her nose raw from rubbing with a handkerchief.
Another bus stopped and people got off, some of them joining us, blowing into their hands, jogging up and down on the cold pavement.
'Can't get in?'
'They said they're short of equipment.'
'Then why don't they — '
I didn't hear any more because someone had moved against me and I brought an elbow down on that side and paralysed his wrist but the knife had already gone in and I could feel the warmth oozing under my clothes. Minimal pain because the shock had brought the endorphins flooding to the site.
I hadn't expected a knife in a crowd because it'd be difficult for anyone to get clear but he'd taken the chance and we were still close together — he was in a half-crouch because of the pain in the smashed wrist-bone and the knife was on the ground. He came up at me and I'd been waiting for it and I dropped him with a jab to the carotid nerve and he sank down again with his knees folding and I began easing my way out because there was no chance of getting him away for questioning — the others would be too close.
'What are you — '
'Pickpocket — he's a — '
'Is it a heart attack?'
'Tried to pick my pocket!'
'I think he's ill — '
'I'll get an ambulance — '
'Look, there's a knife — '
Everyone fussing and it kept them busy and I got to the edge of the crowd and kept walking, pain creeping into the nerves on my right side he'd gone for the liver and it could have been penetrated for all I could tell because the effects wouldn't be immediate, just a feeling of violation for the moment, dark physical mischief: I never see action with a blade of any kind without thinking of Macbeth and his mad frenzied thrusts in the lamplit chamber because a knife is so very personal, so very intimate, a feeling of violation, then, as I walked to the corner and turned, keeping to shadow, a hand pressed to my right side, how sordid, if this were going to be the last of this lone ferret, a knife-wound received in a crowd outside a bowling-alley on a dirty winter night, felled by a chance hit and not even ready for it, shadow down, and how ignobly, but what do you expect in this trade, for Christ's make, a volley of grapeshot as you stand with breast bared beneath the tattered banner at the barricades with time for the utterance of your famous last words?
In this game you get what you pay for and life's cheap.
Not oozing any more, or I wasn't aware of it, was perhaps getting used to it, the slow letting of blood. It was venous, not arterial, otherwise I'd have been soaked by now and weakening. I tried to walk as upright as I could because they might not have been near enough, the others, to know what had happened, but they'd catch on soon enough if I looked winged and then they'd make a rush to finish me off while I couldn't defend myself, though they'd be wrong there, my good friend, you will kindly refrain from composing my bloody epitaph while I'm still on my feet, and if you've ever tried chewing on a turkey's gizzard you'll know what I mean.
Narrower streets, these, running off Treptower Park, with the Wall half a mile away, less than that, a floodlit concrete dam strong in the night, strong enough to hold back the flow of humanity that would otherwise surge to meet its kind. If only someone would blast a hole in that bloody thing and let the world get on with its business, no one behind me when I turned a corner and looked back, no one, and that was a worry because there was no reason for them to leave my tracks; even if I'd gone for the throat instead of the carotid and dropped him to a quick death they wouldn't have gone near him: casualties were to be expected on this busy night.
A patch of waste-ground with a big rubbish bin against a rotting fence, and I moved into its shadow and sat on the frosty dirt and made a wad of my handkerchief and opened my coat and pulled up my sweater and put the wad over the wound in my side and held it there until it stuck to the blood; I wouldn't see much if I tried to look: a wound is a wound and if it looked big enough to need medical attention it'd have to wait in any case until this night's work was done.
I still couldn't see them anywhere near; in the sour light from the street lamps here I would have picked out movement but there wasn't any. I was alone.
I was alone and one of two things must have happened: either I'd put too much power behind the half-fist when I'd gone for that man's carotid nerve and he'd never got up again and they'd decided that two dead in the field was enough, or Yasolev had ordered another of them snatched and they'd been called off, which was exactly what I'd warned Cone could happen, Gott strafe them, this was a solo operation and I didn't want any interference.
It was half-past ten and I moved from the shadow of the rubbish bin and crossed the street and found cover at the corner of Richterstrasse and checked the environment and it was blank, still blank. But the light was tricky because at some time or other there'd been a spate of escape attempts in this area and I was within a couple of hundred yards of the Wall and the searchlight they'd installed there was sweeping the ground and flickering across the buildings and the gaps between them with the intermittent effect of a strobe.
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.