ADAM HALL - The Scorpion Signal

He'd begun to blur in front of me, swaying back and then forward. I got into focus again and he stopped. This was one of the classic techniques: interrogation sessions alternating between friendliness and hostility to get you so confused you started blurting things out. And you always believe it'll never work because you're too bloody smart.

'That,' he said with quiet charm, 'is the problem.'

'Problem?'

'We would require your co-operation, if we were to make things easier for you.' He stood away from the chair and took a pace or two, deliberating, coming back. 'If you could overcome your hesitation, you see, we might arrange something to our mutual advantage.' Another rueful laugh: 'I'm sorry to have to beat about the bush like this, but I can't trust you until you trust me.' He sat on the chair backwards, just as I was sitting, as if in sympathy.

Not in sympathy.

'Arrangement?' I asked him.

Kept having to refocus.

'Yes.' His honey-coloured eyes played directly on to my own for a moment as he deliberated again. 'You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to take a risk, to show we can be just as sincere as I know you would really like to be. I'm going to trust you.' He sat back a little, regarding me with open candour. 'Now how does that sound?'

I allowed an appropriate period of hesitation before I spoke.

'Generous.'

He sat back and slapped his big square hands together, pleased as a boy. 'I'm delighted you think so, I really am delighted. Yes, I'm being generous, I freely admit it.' With his head tilted slightly, as if he'd suddenly seen me in a new light: 'You know, I was certain we'd find a way of putting our heads together, if we tried. Now this arrangement…' he hesitated a fraction, then went on, 'I'm going to put it to you quite frankly. There's someone we want to find, very badly, and if you were able to tell us where he is, we'd bring him in and exchange him for you. We'd let you go.' He leaned forward confidentially. 'His name is Schrenk.'

I tilted my chair back, watching him. He was waiting for me to say something, but I didn't want to commit myself without thinking it over, and he got impatient and stood up and whirled his saber — 'Slovo o polku Igoreve! You said you always admired it, remember?' He threw out his chest and began singing, his voice -

'Wake up! Wake up!'

I jerked my head back.

'Sorry.'

Blinding light.

'You must stay awake. '

'Yes. I'll do that.'

I sat straighter on the stool and let my head go back against the wall. He knew what I was doing, but it was all right because I had to keep my eyes open, so he'd know if I dozed off again. With my head back, the light was fierce, a burning disc that wavered at the rim, as if I were staring into the sun; but at the same time I could slip into a kind of half-sleep, somewhere between the alpha and theta waves, without losing too much awareness. They'd let me take off my jacket, and I was sitting with my arms resting on my thighs, with the sweat trickling down to the elbows: I was soaked with it, because of the lamp's heat and the stress going on in the organism. My head was a ball floating in the sea of light, drifting and bobbing, with the images going on inside it.

His name is Schrenk. That threw me, yes. Threw me completely. So they hadn't got him. So where was he? I think it was okay, the way I reacted, I mean by not reacting. Shook my head, don't know him. But threw me, really. Bracken ought to know. Vader, old boy, mind if I use your blower?

No idea of what time now, day, night, anything. Maybe night now, it seemed worse, diurnal rhythms very slow, cortical vigilance down, way down, down -

'Wake up! Wake up!'

Shouting in the glare.

`Sorry. Wake now.'

Reticular formation lagging, yes, the process thoroughly understood, tell you everything you need to know at Norfolk, bloody place, wish I, was wish I, was there. Dogs barking somewhere, hate those bloody things. I'd begun hearing them same time when I'd seen the fish swimming in the light, all colours of rainbow, swimming round and round and round and -

'Wake up! Wake up!'

Oh shit.

I straightened up again and felt for the wall with the back of my head and then took it off again because I had to do some thinking. I was leaving it late now. I knew they'd got me. They were going to trot me along to Vader again and I wouldn't be able to take any more, I'd just go to sleep and they'd keep on waking me up and finally they'd bring on the clowns and I'd start talking without even knowing what I was doing, blow London, no go.

Capsule.

But that was down the drain so I'd have to do it the other way, bite through the median cubital artery and wait sixty seconds, finis, Lorenz had done it in Chile when the terror squads had strung him upside down from a swing in a children's playground, he didn't want to play any more, messy but then he wasn't going to have to clear it up, finito. One little problem though: they never left me alone. Even when I asked for the lav they stood there with the door open in case I shoved my head in. Never left me alone. Watching me now, man up there with his eyes in the hole behind the hot bright light, bastards, lea' me alone, lea' me alone you bastards, all I want is sixty seconds, bite and then spurt, spurt, spurt and London safe.

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.

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.