He was half out of his mind and needed protecting from himself: he was mixed up with a bunch of wildcat dissidents planning some kind of protest that was going to land him inside Lubyanka again or flat on his back in the street with his head in the gutter and the young po-faced militia men standing arrogantly over him, kicking him idly with their polished boots until the transport arrived. You have to use every means to complete a mission and the object of Scorpion was to get this man out of Moscow and I could do it without any problem, without lifting a finger, yes I accept the deal and you've got my word on it. The rest would be up to Bracken and his team and they wouldn't have any problem either, once Schrenk was subdued and in their care; Croder had lined up support facilities that would get them across the frontier at an hour's notice: Bracken had told me so.
'The thinking,' Schrenk said heavily, 'is for you to do, not me. But I haven't got a lot of time, quite frankly. I'm going to give you another minute. Sixty seconds. I think that's fair.'
The gun was aimed at my forehead. He was a first class shot and could drop me where I stood without any pain. He was a humane man. Sixty seconds. That was a long time, more time than I really needed. A generous man.
I heard the tick of the clock. We all heard it. The other two hadn't understood anything of what we'd been saying but they could sense what the silence meant: we'd both stopped talking and he was holding the gun perfectly still. I looked at it carefully; it was a 9mm Smith and Wesson and would carry eight shots in the magazine. Schrenk would only use one.
Tick… tock.
The idea occurred to me that if I remained staring into the barrel of that thing I would perhaps see the nose of the bullet travelling towards me in the final microsecond of life, as young Chepstow had possibly seen it when he'd been sitting at the cafe table drinking his last cup of coffee in Phnom Penh a couple of years ago, thinking perhaps it was a bee.
Tick… tock.
Schrenk was very pale now, and there was something coming into his eyes, a kind of blankness. I suppose he was having to blank out his mind and leave it clear of any philosophical considerations that might finally get in the way of what he had to do, which was to squeeze the first nicotine-stained finger of his right hand by a simple command to the motor nerves.
Tick… tock.
How long had he said? Sixty seconds. But he wouldn't fire without some kind of warning. He wouldn't expect me to know when the sixty seconds were up. Perhaps he was counting. Was I expected to count, as well? Schrenk. Do you want me to count?
Because it was no go. If I gave him my word I would have to keep it. It didn't matter if he were half out of his mind and needed protecting from himself, so forth: those arguments were rational but not admissible. It wasn't for me to judge him now. He'd worked damned hard for our people and kept us safe, all of us, Leningrad and London, all of us, while they'd been trying to break him in Lubyanka, and he'd earned our trust, my trust.
Tick… tock.
I really do wish you'd get that bloody thing. What I was not going to do was walk out of here and tell Bracken I was aborting the mission and ask him to give me safe passage back to London with my tail between my legs. Wish you'd get that bloody thing to tick evenly. It's getting on my nerves. Call it pride, would you, not enough guts to face the fact that for the first time in my life I'm failing a mission, I don't give a damn what you call it, it's none of your bloody business. Must I suppose be up by now, sixty seconds aren't long.
Tick…
Flickering. Left eyelid flickering. Sweat running down, wet on the palms. The face wound throbbing, the pulse rate high. Small round barrel and I suppose, I suppose that if in point of fact I finally glimpse the pointed lead nose of the bullet it's going to look quite large, two inches from the centre of my forehead, large enough to blot his whole face out of sight.
Tock.
'I'd say that's about it, Q.' I took a breath.
'All right. No deal.'
His eyes widened slightly. 'Why not, for God's sake?'
'That's none of your bloody business.'
He went on staring for another second or two. 'I didn't think you'd be such a bastard. Making me do a thing like this.' His tone had gone dead.
'You should have thought of that before.'
In a moment he nodded, and kept the gun on me while he felt for the drawer of the writing-desk with his left hand, and found it, and took the thing out, the thing I'd seen before. It was a silencer and he fitted it to the gun.
The distance was still something like fifteen feet, almost the width of the room. The window was obliquely behind him and the door was three or four feet to my left and out of sight. Ignatov was over by the wall and the girl was on the other side near the kitchen area. The only thing in the centre of the room was the short velvet-covered settee. There was nothing in the environment I could use for survival in the half second it would take Schrenk to fire. Nothing.
'No hard feelings, I hope.' I hardly recognized his voice. He stood there with his body twisted and the left shoulder down, the sweat shining on his thin agonized face as he stared at me — not at my eyes but slightly above them, making no contact, giving me the chilling idea that I was a lifeless object, nothing he could communicate with.
'It's your own conscience,' I told him. 'That's all you'll get.'
'All I expected. Mind turning round?'
'You mean you haven't got the guts to do it while I'm looking at you?'
I seemed to be breathing cold air in the warmth of the room, my lungs gradually contracting, my body shrinking. I didn't watch Schrenk any more: I wanted to forget him, if I could, in the last instant. I watched the heavy shape of the silencer.
'I'm not going to shoot,' he said. 'I just want you to turn round.'
Of course I could refuse but the organism was thinking for itself and I had the instinctive knowledge that if I didn't turn round he'd have to shoot anyway. So I turned round.
'Pyotr,' he said.
I heard Ignatov moving away from the wall. 'Yes, Viktor.'
'Take this gun,' I heard the strange voice saying in Russian, 'and go outside with him. Keep the gun in the pocket of your coat, so that no one else will see it.' The voice stopped, and I heard the effort he was having to make to go on with what he was saying. 'This man is extremely clever, and he will take risks, because his life is at stake. You must keep a good distance between him and yourself. Take him out to your car and when he is inside it, shoot him dead.' There was another pause, and when Schrenk spoke again there was anger in his voice, as if he had to work up some kind of resentment against me to go through with this. 'Drive him as far as the river. If you want to, ask Boris and Dmitriy to go with you, but I'd prefer you to go alone. You don't have to use any weights, in the river. All you have to do is to make sure he is found a long way from here. You understand?'
'Yes, Viktor.'
A change in Ignatov's voice, too: it sounded strong now, and deeper. He said to me: 'Open the door.'
The senses had become acute. I heard Misha whispering, so softly that I didn't catch the words. Some kind of prayer? I was quite moved, and had a sudden hatred of Schrenk for doing this in front of her, for being so coarse: he could have sent her out. Slightly short on good taste, I thought as I opened the door, and wondered who had said that, where I'd heard it.