'Tessa's gone to sleep,' I said.
'Something good had to happen,' said Teacher. 'It's the law of averages.'
'Don't bet on it,' I said. The wipers squeaked and squealed at the rain. Teacher reached for the radio switch but seemed to have second thoughts about it.
We came up behind a line of heavy trucks, the wind whipping the covers of the rearmost vehicle, and stayed there for a bit. 'Keep awake. We'll check all the exits,' said Teacher. 'The message may have got it wrong.'
'No comment,' I said.
These East German Autobahnen were in poor condition. Little had been done on this stretch since it was first built in Hitler's time. Subsidence here and there had caused wide cracks, and hasty patches of shoddy maintenance had failed to cure the underlying fractures. All over Europe the motorways were poxed with signs, and littered with the equipment of construction gangs, as the Continent's roads succumbed to an arterio-sclerosis that had every sign of proving fatal.
There had been roadworks at several places along the route, but after the turn-off for Brandenburg – a town that forms the centre of a complex of lakes to the west of Berlin – the westbound side of the Autobahn was reduced to single-lane working. Teacher slowed as our headlights picked out the double row of plastic cones, some of them overturned by the gusts of wind that accompanied ceaseless heavy rain.
The road curved gently to the left and began a downward gradient. From here I saw ahead of us the ribbon of highway marked by pinpoints of light that climbed like a file of insects and disappeared suddenly over the distant hill only just visible against the purple horizon.
This section of the Autobahn was being widened. Lining the road were colossal machines: bulldozers and towering power shovels, spreaders, graders and rollers, the bizarre toys of a Gargantuan world.
'Look there!' I said as I spotted a car parked amongst the machines, its parking lights just visible through the downpour.
'That's them,' said Teacher, the relief audible in his voice. He swung the wheel. We bumped off the edge of the roadway and down on to the mud, picking the way carefully past metal drums, steel reinforcements, abandoned materials, broken wooden fencing and other undefinable debris. We were about fifty yards from the other car when Teacher judged us close enough. He stopped and turned off the engine: the lights died. The noise of the rainstorm was suddenly very loud. It was dark except when passing cars, coming round the curve, swept the site with their headlight beams. The light came swinging across it like the revolving rays of a lighthouse. There was no movement anywhere.
'Careful,' I said. 'When you open the door we'll be lit up by the interior light. We'll be sitting targets.' I slid into the back of the van, opened the suitcase and rummaged to find the ammunition and the pistol. I loaded it carefully. It wasn't the sort of thing you could tuck into the waistband of a pair of cheap trousers so I kept it in my hand.
'I'm getting out,' said Teacher. 'You two stay here.'
'Whatever you say.'
It was no time to start a row, but as he opened the door and got out of the driver's seat I slid out the back and into the darkness and pouring rain. Outside there was the sort of stink that roadworks always exude, the smell of disturbed earth, faeces and fuel oil. But the road here runs through a tall forest and the felling of the trees had added sap to the medley of odours. The rain soaked me to the skin before I'd taken more than two steps through the sticky mud. I kept the gun under my coat and out of sight, and watched the dim figure of Teacher walking cautiously towards the car. Some traffic swung past, driving carefully along the prescribed lane, their beams dulled by the steady rain.
While Teacher moved forward, someone got out of the car which I could now recognize as a Wartburg. The other side had taken the precaution of taping up the interior light switch. The Wartburg's interior remained dark, and the glare of the parking lights was enough to make it impossible to see whether it was a man or a woman standing there. Nearer to me – and directly behind the nearest of the big yellow machines – there was a barrier. It fenced off the deep excavations where the foundations were being extended.
'Please walk forward, one at the time,' I heard Teacher call, his uncertain German evident from only those few words.
Suddenly the full beams of the Wartburg came on. This light was hard and brilliant. It came cutting through rain that shone like glass beads, and exposed Teacher as an absurd and soaking wet gorilla. Teacher was alarmed and jumped aside into the darkness but I could still see his outline.
From the bulldozer closest to me I heard a movement, a soft metallic click that might have been the safety catch of a gun. A figure had shifted position from behind the bulldozer's tracks in order to see where Teacher had gone. I moved closer to the line of earth-moving machinery which would provide me with the sort of cover that the other side had taken advantage of. Now I could see more clearly in the darkness. There seemed to be a woman standing by the Wartburg and possibly others still inside it. The metallic sound I'd heard had come from someone standing near the barrier. It was a man holding a gun with a long silencer attached. All their attention was on Teacher.
It was like watching a performance on a fully lighted stage, its backdrop the tall trees of the immense forest while to one side there were the twin lines of traffic – one red one white – flickering away into the far distance. Now I could see Teacher, but he couldn't see the figure with the gun who was silhouetted against the mud and puddles which shone like silver in the beams of the Wartburg's headlights.
I heard a shout – almost a scream – a woman's voice, and there was someone running through the squelching mud behind me. I turned to see but our Transit van was in my field of view. Then came the first shot: the sort of soft plop you only get the first time from a gun with a brand-new silencer. It wasn't Teacher. The woman called again. She was shouting, 'Do as you were told!' In German, Berlin German.
Then came another shot, a loud report from an unsilenced gun and the smashing of glass. It was a single shot from somewhere to the left of me. Now came a confusion of darkness, pierced by pistol shots and the sudden beams of passing headlights. Traffic rumbling past gave light enough to show that the Wartburg had suffered a broken windscreen, its shattered glass scattered around like hail. In that brief flicker of light I saw Teacher standing crouched with a pistol held at arm's length, the way actors stand in TV movies about cops. I couldn't be sure whether he'd fired the shot. Had he I wondered tried to hit someone inside the car, and if so had he succeeded?
Then something came fluttering out to make a glowing pattern between me and the light of the Wartburg headlights. Until that moment I thought Tessa was still in the back of the Transit van, but there could be only one person who would go whirling through the mud, twisting and turning, oblivious to the rain and the gunfire.
Whoever shot her was standing near the front nearside wheel of the Wartburg. She was very close to the gunman when she was hit and lifted in the air. Bang. Bang. Two rounds from a shotgun floated her through the headlight beams with her skirt and draped sleeve shining and translucent yellow. As she fell back to earth she metamorphosed to crimson and the cloth wrapped round her like some beautiful flying insect that in fast playback becomes a twitching chrysalis. Illuminated by the headlights she lay full-length in the mud. The rain beat down. She moved again and then was still.