Klaus.
'Oui. 'Tout va bien. 'Tout est en ordre.'
Khatami.
I wasn't all that far away, a dozen yards or so, and I'd heard them quite clearly. But I don't think that Klaus even realised I was there; I don't think it mattered. I was under close guard and I was going to remain under close guard until the flashpoint out there at the airport, and whether the Miniver was delivered on schedule or not, whether London had sent forces in or not, my expectations were that I would be silenced at that time and in that place. Klaus would have ordered it. So it didn't matter what I overheard, what information I might pick up: it would remain safe for all time in the chill of the shrivelling brain.
But it was interesting, academically. I had the target.
26°03' north by 02'01' west.
Much good may it do me, so forth, that man Muhammad Ibrahimi had a bullet for me and he wouldn't leave anything to chance: if he failed to carry out his orders he wouldn't survive the day. I suppose it was the tinny ghost-voice of the muezzin wailing from the mosque that was giving me the creeps, that and perhaps the killing of the dog and the boy. The psyche was in despond, and this was dangerous, though difficult to change: time had started to run short. There was no The telephone rang again and Klaus answered it at once.
'Ja. Jawohl!'
George Maitland came across from the edge of the pool and the pilots got onto their feet. They're ready' Klaus said, and his voice was charged. 'Allons-y!' He went over to speak to Geissler and then made for the building, his bodyguards with him. The Iranians followed them, hurrying, their robes flying.
I noted the time: it was 6:14.
'I'm sorry you're going to miss this,' Maitland said. His bomber jacket was hanging across his shoulder from one finger. He was smiling, if you could call it that; there seemed a kind of light on his face, in his eyes, and I thought he'd lost colour a little. Yet I'd think he wasn't a man to get excited easily. It's going to be something quite spectacular.'
'Klaus didn't invite me,' I said. 'Should I ask him?' He shook his head slowly. 'He and I are the only ones going. Not even Geissler. Some of the minions, of course, but they're just monkeys, and won't be coming back.'
I sensed Helen shiver, and she turned away. 'It's getting cold,' she said. 'I must go and get some clothes on.'
'Did you talk to her much?' Maitland asked. He watched me with his eyes shining.
'Not a lot,' I said.
'Do you think she's attractive?'
'Very attractive.'
'It's that innocence of hers… I find it extraordinarily seductive.' He turned, looking across to the archway where she was just vanishing into the palace, long pale legs among the gathering shadows. 'God knows,' Maitland said, 'what she'll think when she sees the media break. She'll know we're responsible. She likes power, you see, the kind of power she knows I can wield.'
'Or enjoys her fear of it?'
'I've never thought of it that way.'
He was dying to blurt things out; in times of great emotion we say things we know we shouldn't, can't possibly say. I think if I'd had him alone with me for a bit longer I could have got enough out of him to give Solitaire a final chance, reach a phone, bring London in. But there wasn't time, and it wouldn't get me anywhere: Klaus knew that as far as security was concerned I presented no risk, was already silenced.
Ibrahimi came across to us. 'We shall be leaving in thirty minutes,' he said in French, 'For Dar-el-Beida.'
For the flashpoint.
I went in to change.
Scorpion in my shoe and I tipped it out and it scuttled under the bed.
I held my hands out and watched the fingers. They were perfectly steady. The nerves were singing quietly in that flat inaudible monotone that is simply a vibration, palpable but discernible to no other sense; perhaps it's what happens when a violinist tightens the string infinitesimally and hears, knows, that he has reached perfect pitch.
A woman was keening somewhere below, and I could hear faint voices. Perhaps she was the boy's mother. The scent of jasmine came through the open window with its iron scroll-work, and I saw two men in flying jackets standing in the forecourt near one of the cars. They were the Iranian pilots, changed and ready and presumably waiting for Klaus.
I put on the clothes I'd worn in Berlin, where it had been cold. It would be cold here tonight, though less so.
There might conceivably be a chance of preempting the flash-point and getting clear, turning the car over as I'd done once in Moscow and taking advantage of the confusion. But I couldn't do that. It's not what we're for, the ferrets in the field. I could save my skin that way or by using some other crude but effective technique but that would mean abandoning the mission: I had got to stay with Nemesis for as long as I could in case there was the thousandth chance of blocking their operation, if possible destroying it. I couldn't simply bail out: to abandon the mission is against the most sacrosanct edicts of the Bureau, the Sacred Bull. If those bastards in London expect us to protect the mission with our lives – and they do, or they wouldn't give us capsules, they wouldn't hand out capsules like bloody Twinkies – it follows that they also expect us to stay with the mission until death do us part in the natural course of events, death from a bullet or a knife or a fifty-foot drop from a rooftop or a head-on smash or the last turning of the screw in the interrogation cell with the light blinding and the music blasting away at full volume – Brahms, they usually go for Brahms or Beethoven – death from whatever cause, then, it is in our contract, you understand, with the Reaper at our side we have said I will.
I put on my shoes. The scorpion was running inquisitively along the wainscoting, and it was in my mind to go over there and step on it, perhaps out of envy, because it was liable otherwise to outlive me; but I left it alone, reminded of Ferris, that inestimable but sometimes revolting director in the field who takes dark and perverse pleasure in stepping on beetles. With a full-blown Algerian scorpion he would have had a ball.
The guard outside my door was on the move: I heard his shoes squeaking on the marble floor -they were gym shoes, rubber-soled, making him sound athletic, impatient for me to do something wrong so that he could blow my head off and show the brains to Klaus in atonement for letting that Arab boy pull a knife. There was another guard below in the courtyard, watching the windows here.
I was beginning to sweat a little in the cool of the evening, and this worried me, and not only because sweat makes the hands slippery. I had good reason to be frightened as the minutes ran out to the flashpoint: I was almost certain by now that Klaus suspected my cover, beneath the lust in his breast to possess a real live nuke for the icing on his cake. If there was no delivery made I would be shot, but the same thing would happen if London hadn't laid a trap and the Miniver was handed over: after that I'd be worse than useless to Klaus: I'd be a danger, knowing too much.
The scent of woodsmoke was richer now as night began falling and more fires were lit and the couscous went into the beaten copper pans.