Ibrahimi told the driver, 'Go to the hangar over there, the second from the end. Hangar No. 5.'
We moved away, leaving the shadow of the freight building. I could see another vehicle on the move now, a dark-coloured van. It was going towards Hangar No. 5, as we were. London is very good with timing, very reliable.
'That will be the van,' I told Ibrahimi, 'with the warhead.'
'It is good,' he said.
The moonlight flashed on the star mascot as the big Mercedes turned.
'Here,' Ibrahimi told the driver. 'Stop just here.'
We were at the north-east corner of the hangar, not far from one of the big freight planes and a stack of crates with ropes across it. The tyres whimpered again on the smooth tarmac, and we stopped.
The clock flicked to 7:15.
Fifty yards away, in the shadow of the hangar, the dark van halted.
Silence came in.
You should make your peace with Allah.
But I would rather stop the presses, stop the headlines.
Try.
'One thing worried me,' I told Ibrahimi, 'when I was talking to my contact in London. He warned us that we'd have to watch out for the airport police. Do you remember?'
He turned his face to me. 'Yes,' he said.
'I think he had a point. We're still not certain we can get through this rendezvous successfully. There could still be a trap.'
I waited.
No one was getting out of the van over there.
'I'm thinking,' I said to Ibrahimi, 'of your personal welfare, at this point. There's no need for you to get out of the car yourself.'
Across the airport a commercial jet came in, nose up and then flattening as the smoke rose in puffs from the tyres. The sound hadn't reached us yet.
My hands were folded on my lap. The two men could see them in the moonlight that struck obliquely through the window. My hands were not folded with the left one holding the right wrist, gripping it. That technique couldn't work now, because these two had their guns out, didn't have to draw first. If I went for the elbow strike to Ibrahimi's throat it wouldn't connect with the tissues before the bullets came: they had their fingers inside the trigger guards, and like me they'd be feeling the adrenalin and would be fast, touchy.
The sound of the jet came in with a soft roar as it reversed thrust.
Ibrahimi had done his thinking.
'Order the man in front,' he told me, 'the German, to go across to the van and receive the warhead.'
I'd known it would be the man in front he would send out there, not one of the men in the back of the car, because they were watching me, protecting him.
I'd wanted the man in front to leave the car for two reasons. He was out of my reach, unlike the two in the rear, and Ibrahimi could conceivably walk across there into a hail of shots if in fact there were some people still hanging around here despite the call from London – and I wanted Ibrahimi to stay alive in case Allah was good to me and threw me a chance in a thousand and let me interrogate him. He was the last link I had with Nemesis, and might give me some information I could work with.
'He might speak a little French,' I told Ibrahimi, 'in which case you could give him the instructions yourself.' I called in German to the man in front, asking him if he understood French. He turned his head and stared into my face.
'Nein.'
So I told him that Ibrahimi's instructions were for him to get out of the car and go across to the van. When he was halfway there, I said, someone would come out of the van and deliver the consignment into his hands.
He looked several times at Ibrahimi, who nodded to confirm what I was saying. When I'd finished he hit his seat-belt release and snapped the door open.
'Jawohl!'
'Wait,' I said. 'You will tell them you are here on behalf of Herr Ibrahimi. Mention his name: Ibrahimi. You will also give the password, which is in English. It is the word Mushroom. Pronounce it for me.'
He tried.
'No,' I said, 'listen again. Mush – room. Repeat that.'
He frowned, angered because he hadn't got his sums right, would have liked to put a bullet straight into my head. 'Mush – room.'
'Good. Say it to yourself a few times as you walk across there. Now get moving.'
He slammed the door and the echo came back from the mouth of the hangar like a gunshot. We watched him walking across the tarmac, his right arm not swinging, not visible: his gun, like the others', would be left-side bolstered under his coat. He didn't trust the people in the dark-coloured van. He didn't trust his own mother.
I slowed my breathing, made it deeper, bringing down the tension in the muscles because there was sweat coming, and sweat is slippery on the hands, can make a critical difference in any kind of action.
But there wouldn't be any: the odds were too stacked and the timing was prohibitive: I couldn't reach those guns from this distance and hope to smash them away before they fired, not even with a double wave strike or downward blocks.
There were no options left, then. None.
The feeling of lightness came into me again, a kind of floating. I've known it before: I think it's when the conscious mind realises that death is inevitable and allows the psyche free rein to survey the data on a subconscious level, where there may perhaps be insights, inspiration, where the spirit may redeem the flesh, offering a means of survival.
I gave myself to it.
Through the windscreen I saw a door of the dark-coloured van coming open and a man getting out, then another. Between them they carried an oblong crate with rope handles. It looked heavy.
The German approached them, and when he was within a few feet of them they all stopped, and seemed as if they were talking. The German would be giving them the name of Ibrahimi and the password, Mush – room, and I suppose they were pointing out to him that this thing was too heavy for one man to carry, something like that, but then the whole scene turned silver in a flood of blinding light and the figures of men came running from the mouth of the hangar and two jeeps came swerving into the foreground with their tyres screaming and Ibrahimi shouted something in Arabic and our driver hit the throttle and the Mercedes began slewing under the wheelspin until the treads found traction and we grazed the nearest jeep and rocked and steadied and got under way with a surge of acceleration that took us clear of the hangar and across the tarmac with the rear tyres still whimpering under the acceleration.
Lights in the mirrors, bright lights, dazzling.
Ibrahimi was shouting to the driver again in Arabic. I didn't know what he was saying. The two guards hadn't reacted very much, were still watching me with their guns out, perfectly trained. Ibrahimi was turning sometimes to look through the smoked rear window, his face grey in the light coming through the tinted glass. He looked at me once, his eyes burning.
'Did you know of this?'
'No. But I warned you it could happen – and you're still a free man.'
He looked away. The lights in the mirrors were coloured now and flashing, and sirens began sounding. We kept a straight course until a fuel tanker came into view as a dark rectangle crawling across the taxiway, then we swerved and hit gravel and tore a radar scanner away from its base and straightened again with the automatic shift kicking down and giving us another surge of acceleration from the huge 5.6-litre engine, the sirens behind us howling and shots coming now as we crossed the central apron in front of the terminus with the digital speedometer moving through 150 kph, 160, 165 and the lights from behind us losing their glare and the sound of the sirens fading by a degree. But the shots were still coming and a rear tyre burst and we slewed badly and then corrected, the huge shape of a commercial jet looming and swinging past as the tyre was torn away from the rim and we began settling on the off-side like a ship taking on water.