He was there, sitting in the car, in the black Mercedes 300E, sitting at the wheel. He wasn't reading anything; there was no light inside the car. His face was pale, square-looking in the light from the distant street lamps. His head was against the padded rest; I couldn't see where his hands were; they weren't on the steering-wheel. He was watching the house, the house where Sorgenicht lived. It's always dangerous to assume things on simple appearances, but this man's aspect and behaviour were a model of the archetypal surveillant, and I decided to go to work accordingly.
He was here, then, as I had expected, not to watch the house, but to watch for anyone who set out to track Sorgenicht when he left there. He would then keep station in the traffic stream and use his phone and call in mobile support to cut off Sorgenicht's tracker and deal with him, as they had dealt with George Maitland, and soon afterwards, McCane. That was what this man was doing here: he was watching, in effect, for me.
There was deep shadow where I stood, at the end of an alleyway joining the two adjacent streets. I was perhaps fifty feet from him, but if he turned his head he wouldn't see me. He was a quiet man, well in control of himself; he didn't fidget; he'd got up early but he didn't yawn. He wasn't smoking. He hadn't got the radio on: I would have heard it.
He was a good surveillant, first class, the kind they try to turn out of Norfolk when they're thinking straight. If I hadn't seen him here, and began tracking Sorgenicht, this man in his Mercedes would become the equivalent of a shark fin in the water, and I would be the swimmer.
I leaned my head back to rub the nape of my neck against the rough collar of my coat to ease the chill of the nerves. He wasn't a young man – I would have said close to fifty; but his head was square and massive and he was thick in the shoulder. He would not, then, be very fast, but quite strong – even, if he were trained, dangerously strong. But soon it would be getting light and there would be people about, and I didn't want to attract attention. It could also be that Sorgenicht would leave his house before dawn, though the windows were still dark. I had better do what I had to do as soon as I could.
There were soft echoes from the brick walls in the alleyway and I stepped lightly and broke the rhythm, because the regularity of footsteps is extraordinarily perceptible, the brain stem recognising the sound of another animal in the environment. I turned right when I reached the street, and right again at the T-section, and as I turned I saw a light come on in a window of the house, on the second floor. It wasn't necessarily Sorgenicht getting up: it could be his wife or his girlfriend or someone else there; but I would have to assume it was Sorgenicht himself. His car would be one of those parked in a line along the wall by the canaclass="underline" there were no garages here.
I turned again and began walking up the street to where the Mercedes was standing. The distance from here was a hundred yards or so, and it was facing me. I didn't walk quietly any more; I walked quite fast towards the Mercedes, because 'I'd overslept and was late and had to hurry. I blew into my hands: it was a cold raw morning and I didn't relish it. There was another dog over there towards the wasteground, or perhaps the one I'd seen before, scratching for scraps among some rubbish; I gave it a whistle – I was fond of dogs. My breath clouded in front of me as I passed under a street lamp, and I blew into my hands again, quickening my step; but there was a big notice in the window of an ironmonger's shop and I slowed for a moment, reading it as I went by: there was a sale on, with a 20 per cent discount on tools, well worth remembering. I noticed the Mercedes but paid no attention; you see cars parked everywhere.
I looked at my watch,' then dug my hands into my coat pockets again, leaning forward a little, my head down as I breasted my way into the rat-race of another workaday morning. The Mercedes was quite close now and I gave it another glance, and it was then that I noticed something wrong. I stopped when I reached the car, and tapped on the window, pointing.
The man inside swung his massive head and looked at me, taking his time. I pointed to the rear of the car again, and he opened the door. 'You've got a flat tyre,' I told him, and would have walked on, but he had a gun in his right hand and his finger was in the trigger-guard and it was pointing at me. I was alarmed. 'No – please don't shoot,' backing away, my hands spreading open, 'I just wanted to tell you the tyre was flat – please don't shoot me!'
He watched me with a dead stare. It hadn't looked good enough, then, natural enough, whistling to the dog and reading the sale notice, not a good enough act, too late to clean it up now, just kept my hands raised, fingers open, and then he moved.
The front tyre wouldn't have worked, because I'd had to assume he was right-handed: the chances of that were very high. So it had to be the rear tyre, and as he leaned out of the car to look at it he kept the gun trained on me and the nearest part of his body was his gun-hand and I had something like two seconds while he looked at the tyre and I used enough force to paralyse the arm through the median nerve and deaden the trigger-finger because if I'd used more it would have caused a great deal of pain and I didn't want him vomiting, I can't stand that. It was a sword-hand strike and its force brought the top part of his body down and left his neck exposed and I used the left hand before he could do anything and he sagged suddenly and I caught the Mauser before it could hit the pavement.
There was no one in the street so I snapped the doorlocks open and pulled him out and dragged him round to the passenger's side and got the door open and heaved him into the car and sat him with his head back against the rest and his hands on his lap. They were cold to the touch and his face had lost colour but I didn't think I'd overdone the strike to the occipital area: you're not going to kill anyone there unless you use enough force to break into the skull or snap the vertebrae: he'd be out for a while, that was all, and I used the ignition keys and got some jump-cables from the boot – I was hoping for some rope but there wasn't any. I lashed his wrists to his legs and shut the door and went round and got behind the wheel and saw two more lights come on in the house down there, one of them on the ground floor: I was worried now because it was possible I'd missed something- Sorgenicht's bedroom and bathroom could be at the back of the house and I wouldn't have seen the windows light up; it could have happened half an hour ago, an hour; he could be close to leaving.
I picked up the phone and touched the numbers.
It was very quiet inside the car, but I couldn't hear the man's breathing; that would be normaclass="underline" I'd pushed his blood pressure right down and his brain had shifted into a mode that in certain creatures would be hibernative. I reached for his throat and found the pulse slow but still there.
That too was normal. He was -
'Bitte?'
'Solitaire.'
'Blackjack.'
'How soon,' I asked Thrower, 'can you get support here? Only need one man.'
'Same location?'
'Close. The next street to the west of the wasteground.'