Adam Hall - Quiller Solitaire

'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.

The driver was doing what I would have done: we'd got superior speed but not too much manoeuvrability at over two tons so he was relying on putting all the distance he could behind us while the going was good, and we were closing in on some hangars at the other end of the airport and could even reach them and get into shelter and ditch and run if that was what Ibrahimi ordered.

Another vehicle was coming in from the side with its coloured lights flashing and the siren going – it had seen the Mercedes and the speed it was doing and was coming across the tarmac to intercept, but either our driver had lost too much steering because of the rear wheel or he decided to make an oblique attack, because we swerved to the left and hit the vehicle at the front end and I saw it start rolling and the mirror on that side was lit up suddenly with an orange light and a second later we heard the dull thump of the explosion.

Shots from somewhere, from behind or from a new source of attention, and another tyre burst and the tread began howling against the underneath of the wing and the stink of burning rubber came into the car and as we swerved again and hit something and span full circle the whole thing took off and I smashed my hand down on the gun to my left and it roared and I felt for the man's throat and made the kill as the other man brought his gun up and fired wild and I went in very close and used a heel-palm and drove the nose bone upwards into the brain as Ibrahimi screamed something and I saw the flash of a blade and blocked it and started forming a tiger claw but the car was barrelling now and everything span across the vision-field and we smashed into something again and the doors burst open and I hit ground and rolled with Ibrahimi on top of me, forced him away and began dragging him clear as the tank went up and the whole of the night caught fire.

'Where is it?'

He began falling again and I jerked him upright.

'Twenty-six degrees three minutes north,' I said, 'by zero two degrees one minute west. Where is it?'

He didn't answer.

The light of the burning limousine coloured the wall of the hangar. Smoke was rolling, black smoke, and the emergency vehicles were moving in it, becoming lost in it. The smell of burning rubber was on the air, a sickening smell. The limousine, the mess, wasn't close: I'd run with this bastard for what had seemed a long time, possibly minutes, dragging him sometimes when he fell, pulling him up again, running again, cursing him in French, Ibrahimi, my last link with Nemesis, with the mission, with any hope of doing something to stop the headlines.

'What?

I thought he'd said something, wasn't sure, there was a certain amount of dizziness coming and going, pain everywhere, understandable.

Centre knuckle to the median nerve.

'Where is it?

The fix.