Man screaming next door. Me screaming? No. Other man.
Shuddup screaming, can't stand it.
Sweet Jesus I want to sleep.
Wake up and think. Think about London, it's the last chance. But they won't lea' me alone, watching me all the time, I could do it in sixty seconds but they keep going round and round and rainbows round and -
'Wake up! Wake up!'
'Yes. Yes. Wake now.'
Sleep. Softly go… sleep
London
What? Yes, all right, do it in the room with the table. Only the two of us. Vader and me. Energy of rage and finish him off and then bite the artery, bite, bite before anyone comes, can do that, yes, can do that.
`Wake up!'
'Yes. Wake up, yes.'
Remember London.
10: RAGE
So this was the place was it.
I'd thought it was going to be some other place, so often: the street outside the Hotel Africa in Tunis when the car had gone up, or ten fathoms down at Longitude 114° and Latitude 22° in the waters off Hong Kong, or in that hot stinking room on the Amazon when she'd found me there and gone on squeezing the trigger. No. Not in any of those places.
Here. In a city under snow, in a bleak green-painted room twelve feet by fourteen with a door two feet eleven inches wide and a window five feet three inches high and nothing in it but a lamp and two chairs and a table and the man: the last man I would ever see, the man who didn't know I was the last man he himself would ever see. We had a lot in common.
I don't want to die.
Oh it's you is it. Snivelling little organism starting to panic. Shut up, it won't hurt.
We can get out of here if we try.
Oh really.
The light shone down. This wasn't the table with the smooth top; it was the one with the narrow marks on it. The two guards had only just gone out, shutting the door. Vader was standing under the window, watching me with the blank stare of the predator that contemplates the prey without emotion, his honey-coloured eyes unblinking and his big square hands hanging by his sides, his booted feet set in a balanced stance ready for instant movement. He was a strong man, and young for his rank. The room was so quiet that I could hear the faint rustling creak of his leather belt as he breathed.
'My patience is exhausted !' All on one note and with the words drawn out, his mouth moving like a trap. The sound went into my head and beat there, hammering. I hadn't been ready for it, and my nerves weren't too good: it made me blink and he noticed it, I saw it in his eyes, the satisfaction of the victor in the presence of the vanquished.
Sleep. Don't take any -
London. Remember London.
My head came up a fraction and I was warned: it had been dropping, degree by degree, as the soporific wave had crept over me despite the shock of his voice. London, yes.
'Do you understand?'
The voice of a bull, roaring out of the barrel chest and drumming in the room.
Think about what has to be done. It has to be done in the next sixty seconds, or I won't have the strength left.
I don't want to die.
Shuddup.
I had to take him down, and I had to do it with all the speed I could manage, and with all the force. Standing here thinking about it, I could believe I would never do it; but I knew from experience what the mind can make the body do, if enough depends on it. I wasn't worried about that. Vader was mine, unless he'd had my specific style of training. The enemy was in myself, in my emotions, in the undisciplined tides of feeling that can stifle logic and inhibit action.
Moira.
Is that your own code?
Five hundred roses for Moira. To be delivered only after she has been informed by the Bureau.
Where was she now?
The tides of feeling, yes, that would have to be ignored, because they were irrelevant, and dangerous.
Take him down, and with as little force as necessary, so that I would find the strength. Let him come close first.
'I have given you every possible chance of co-operating! And you have refused!' He began walking, dropping his boots squarely on the worn parquet, walking towards me. 'Do you happen to enjoy the kind of interrogation you will receive at the Serbsky Institute? M'm?' He stopped within three feet of me. It wasn't close enough. 'Are you a masochist?'
Sleep. Dear God let me sleep.
He was blurring again in front of me, his thick body swaying gently backwards and forwards, sending me to- wake up, come on, wake up.
'Answer me!'
Yes. Keep him talking. Keep him close.
'I can't think straight, that's all. Too tired.' I heard the words slurring, couldn't quite recognize the voice.
'Too tired ! And you think that is all that's going to happen to you? Do you?'
Rehearse. A preliminary shankutsu, my left foot behind his right heel, with a spinning nagashi at the jodan level, my right fingers hooking for the eyes. Then the hand-edge to the throat, half an inch above the khaki serge collar. Then the work on myself, at the median cubital artery. Rehearse.
'No. I know what's going to happen to me.'
Rehearse. Shankutsu, nagashi, eyes and the hand-edge.
'Then why do you refuse to co-operate?'
Shouting at me as if I were fifty yards away, his voice roaring inside my skull.
'Told you,' I said. 'I'd betray a friend.'
'Friend!' He pulled one of the chairs away from the table and sent it crashing into a corner of the room, one of its legs flying off and hitting the barred window. 'What friend?' He came closer, his amber eyes staring into my face. 'You mean Schrenk?' He came right up to me. 'Do you mean your friend Schrenk?'
He was close enough and I shifted my left foot and got the nagashi spinning and in the next tenth of a second I saw surprise beginning in his eyes as he started pitching back with my foot blocking his heel before I formed the claw-hand and raked at his face. He wasn't off balance yet but his arm swung up and he lost the last of his equilibrium and the strike missed my head and he fell hard, harder than I was ready for, with my fingers too far from his eyes and my hand going flat and moving fast to bridge the gap and swing down for the throat with enough force to kill, but something crashed and I was on top of him and striking much too short as the door hit the wall and they took me from behind, pulling my arms back and locking them so that I had to stop moving, no go, it was no go.
Rage burning inside my skull. Rage and the hot bright light.
My head had been dropping on to my chest and at first I had pulled it up again from habit to avoid that bloody man's voice up there where the light was; then I had let it rest there, my head, and nothing had happened, he hadn't yelled at me to wake up. I might even have slept, but I didn't know for how long. Not long: the urge to drop my head again and sleep and go on sleeping was overwhelming, but I couldn't do that: I had to work.