Now that I'd been sighted and was under permanent observation they wouldn't waste any time and it was going to be very difficult to do what I wanted to do: make a switch. But it was all that was left to me and I now had the material I needed to work with.
A switch is an operation easy to describe and in many cases impossible to bring off. When followed, one has to vanish and then follow one of the opposition to his base. I have only done it twice, in Istanbul and Prague, and in each case it had taken me half a day; tonight I had less than four hours, and if I chose the wrong man I might not be led to his base, to Volper, but to any one of a dozen stations in the network. But when there is nothing else to do, the impossible seems less difficult.
Two blocks, three, going northwest and crossing Spandauerstrasse and Karl Marx Allee with two more cars making strategic loops as the others kept mobile watch and we began meeting the first of the trucks coming in with produce for the markets and police cars became more in evidence as early traffic started moving from the suburbs into the city's centre.
Then they began making rushes, first the Audi and then the Mercedes, one of them bumping the rear end and swinging me against the kerb, the other coming from in front and cutting across and forcing me into a swerve because its headlights were on full beam and I was blinded. A truck loomed at a cross-street and the Fiat behind me made impact and pushed me forward against the brakes with the wheels locked and the tyres shrilling over the surface and the truck grazing across the front end and taking away a headlamp, the driver shouting and his voice snatched away as his vehicle thundered on.
I don't think they were hoping to smash me up in the car because it's not that easy if the driver knows what he's doing; I think they were trying to get me out of the car and on the run and that was when they would close right in and get me into the centre of a concerted rush and make the kill with their guns or their hands or however they chose, once having me trapped.
I hadn't thought it would be easy to make the switch. I had thought it would be like this, and I settled down to the business of keeping them off and staying alive and trying to manoeuvre the Merc I was driving into a last-ditch crash that could give me room to run before they were ready, and by now the pace was so fast that a lot of the driving had become instinctive as the images flashed across the retinae and clamoured for attention, the streets merging into a lurching continuum, a brick and concrete channel cut through the city between earth and sky and flowing past and behind me in a dizzying stream of lights, vehicles, intersections and trucks — always the huge and monolithic shapes of the trucks with their horns blaring as someone cut across their path, one of them lurching past me with its wheel wrenched over and ripping away the doors, while the mind began shifting focus under the stress of the constant demands on the intellect to base its judgement on the torrential rush of feedback coming in from the environment.
I no longer knew which streets we were running through or which direction I was going but the object of the operation was to let them hound me until I could leave the car and get to cover and vanish and hope to sight them, one of them or more than one, and wait until they believed I was clear and went back to their base.
A long shot, oh yes indeed it was a very long shot and for the first time I wondered if this had been the only way to shift Quickstep into the end-phase and get to the target in time, but the left brain was almost shut down by now and my hands moved the wheel of their own accord as the eyes sighted and the brain interpreted and instinct triggered the motor nerves and we hit a wall and bounced and ran on with torn metal screaming against a tyre while headlights swung in and blinded me time after time and I drove unseeing, with memory trapping the last image and the brain taking me through an opening and getting me to the far side where vision came in again and the kaleidoscope of the street's perspective was broken into a semblance of order and I hit the throttle and braked and swung the wheel and used the kerb to kick me straight and the corners to get me clear until the police sirens began and the flashing of lights coloured the night.
Then they came for me and I wasn't ready for it but there was nothing I could have done as a Mercedes came up very fast in the mirror and swung out and drew alongside and I felt the impact of something against my leg and heard it thud to the floor and knew what it was and hit the brakes and wrenched at the wheel to roll the car over and use its underside for a shield as the explosion came and its force blew glass and metal in a hot wind across the street and I was pitched headlong across the pavement as the fuel tank went up in a burst of orange light and the heat came against my back like a blowtorch and I got up and tripped and pitched down and got to my feet again and ran, ran anywhere, just away from the inferno in the street behind me with the sirens coming in, wailing and dying as the first patrol car slammed on its brakes and backed off as the black smoke billowed between the buildings.
A truck halted at the intersection as the driver saw the blaze and I dropped and slid underneath it and reached the other side and clambered onto whatever I could find that gave a hand grip and lay flat across the top of the huge fuel tank as the truck backed, bumping with its twin rear wheels across the kerb and then moving forward again, swinging full circle away from the heat, so that I had to drop and crawl underneath again to the other side because there'd be Volper's people in the area watching for me: if they were professionals they wouldn't assume the grenade had finished me before the Merc rolled over.
A Fiat went past the truck on the other side and I saw its reflection in a store window as it reached the street where the Merc was burning and hit the brakes and slewed sideways as a Vopo patrol waved it back.
They'd be moving in, all of them, the whole of the opposition hit team, and they'd be looking for me. Nothing could have survived in that inferno and there was no question of the police or fire crews trying to pull a body out, dead or alive, and none of the hit team could get close enough to find out if I were still inside the Merc or not.
Black Audi going very fast towards the blaze, underestimating its closeness and braking hard and slamming against a sandbin and bouncing off and spinning and getting control and coming back past the other side of the truck. I twisted on top of the fuel tank until I was lying with my back to the street, a black polythene and fabric bundle in the half-dark as the truck lumbered through its forced detour and another came up alongside, one of the drivers shouting something to the other.
A police car neared from the intersection with its lights splashing against the buildings and I waited until the truck was moving close to a wall and pulling up and then I dropped and rolled underneath, reaching for a handhold on the cruciform chassis beams, heaving myself up and hanging on as a wash of light flowed across the road surface And the wheels of a private car rolled past at a walking pace and then halted and turned as one of the Vopos shouted.
I shifted over as the big propeller-shaft of the truck began brushing my arm but the handhold was too smooth and I had to cling on to a brake cable, swinging with both feet lodged against a cross-member. The truck slowed again and turned between two rows of wooden platforms, coming to a halt as a man dropped from the cab; all I could see were his legs. The wheels of another truck were rolling to a halt behind us and I hung there taking slow shallow breaths as the diesel gas clouded from the exhausts.
Dropped, crawled under the platform and lay there among a litter of crates, pulling the nearest ones around me for cover.