ADAM HALL - The Scorpion Signal

The speed at this time wasn't much less than the eighty kph I'd seen on the speedometer just before I began moving, and the roll took us through most of the deceleration phase and lasted until the rear end hit a street lamp and the windscreen blew out in a shower of glass. Someone had begun screaming and it took me a little time to realize it was the man who'd put a stranglehold on me: I'd broken his thumb to make him release it. It was soon after this that I saw the gun in someone's hand but I wasn't worried because he couldn't use it: we were in the middle of a storm and the car was still moving fast enough to kill the lot of us if it hit another street lamp at the wrong angle. It was sliding on its side at this time and the front end was coming round in a flurry of snow as it ploughed the surface, and I'd have to wait before I tried getting clear because I could get an arm or a leg trapped between the bodywork and the road. Someone was yelling something about not letting me get away and I used his voice as a guide and found his throat and used a half-fist with a short thrust and felt it break the cartilage.

At this stage I began noticing blood, quite a lot of it, shining with an odd purplish colour because of the neon lights: someone must have been trapped by the weight of our bodies against the glass of a window as it shattered on impact with the road. It would be the man who'd been yelling.

Inside the storm of the vehicle there was the storm of Vader's rage: he was in first class condition and had kept most of his orientation when the car had rolled and he was the worst thing I had to contend with because it depended a lot on chance whether any of us got out of the wreck, but Vader wanted to kill me and he knew how to do it and he knew where I was. Conscious imagery was sporadic and the sequence of events so fast that the brain had to select and analyse as best it could: I'd actually glimpsed Vader's face three or four times but there'd been no particular expression on it until now, when I suddenly saw it very close and immediately above me. Part of my mind was occupied with data to do with the engine, which had been screaming under full throttle with the gears knocked into neutral; the scream was now dying away as the fuel emptied from the carburettor and the cylinders began starving. I could smell the stuff and was alerted: if the car caught fire I would get out without waiting for the speed to decrease. The main cerebral area was occupied with the split-second sight of Vader's face as he in turn saw mine and recognized it.

His was totally animal, as I suppose mine was: teeth bared and the eyes luminous, the nostrils wide and the scalp drawn back, totally primitive. I only saw him for this small fraction of a second before the car hit something again and we were tumbled, all of us, into a different order; but his hands knew where I was and they came for me, working for my throat and doing it so fast that I wasn't ready: I used a four-finger eye dart with both hands but missed and tried again and missed again and felt softness close to me and went for that with one knee and got it right. His hands came away and I waited but he couldn't find me again because the car was rolling for the last time and the rear window burst and sent glass flying against our faces.

There was nothing he could have done to me in any case.

Nothing.

Listen, I want you to understand something: they were taking me to the Serbsky Institute to throw me into another cell and put me through the most exquisite physical and mental agony that has ever been devised by modern neurotic man and I was frightened of that but I wasn't frightened enough, because there's always release from agony and it's certain: the organism finally seeks to be insensate, in death. So I don't think the fear of what they were going to do to me was enough to give me the incentive and the speed and the strength and the manic force I needed to take the action I did. It was humiliation, working through rage, that committed me to taking that action in one instant of explosive dementia that had been building up in the psyche since he had come into my cell and said what he did. So there was nothing he could have done to me. I would have stopped him.

He shouldn't have said that.

I think I shouted at him as the car pitched against a kerb stone and rolled again. I think I tried to tell him what had happened, that he had said something wrong, that I was a sensitive man and quick to take offence. I heard my voice shouting something, and it was to him, so perhaps that was what I was saying. Then the car rolled again and I could smell the petrol fumes and feel them pricking against my eyes, so I looked for the space where the windscreen had been. My hands were sticky with blood and they slipped on the edge of the instrument panel as I used it for purchase, but I managed to kick back against the seat squab and get the momentum I needed.

The car was still in motion when I slid across the bonnet and grabbed the windscreen pillar to save myself as it bounced for the last time and turned over on to its side. This was when I caught a glimpse of Vader's face again: he'd got out through one of the side windows and timed it badly because of the rolling movement, and went down with his legs still inside and his hands trying to stop the impact as the car turned over on him. His head was just in front of the rear wheel and there was still a certain amount of forward motion. Perhaps he'd been trying to follow me out, I don't know.

I began running.

'I'm getting out,' I said and he stopped dead and stood there watching me under the trees.

'You can't do that.'

I came back to him, hands in the pockets of the torn coat, bruises all over me, the blood on my face sticking to the woollen scarf I'd put on under the fur hat, my nerves still on the jump even after ten hours' sleep if you could call it sleep, jerking my eyes open every five minutes because I could still hear that bastard yelling at me from the panel over the door, and now Bracken trying to tell me what I could do and what I couldn't do. `This isn't my field,' I told him, 'I need to work alone.'

There'd been two signals for me when I'd got back to the safe-house, one in cypher, one in code: they'd been worried stiff because I hadn't reported, so I'd called Bracken by silent line at the Embassy asking for an rdv — that was four o'clock this morning and now it was six at night and I was shaking with bad dreams and no use to London any more, only a danger. He'd have to understand that.

`What do you mean?' he asked me, 'you need to work alone?'

`There are too many people involved. One of them blasted me off the street.'

I'd never seen him so still. In the car last night he'd been like a cat in a sack and I'd thought it was because he was nervous, maybe I didn't know him very well, he wasn't moving a muscle now and he must be half out of his mind after what I'd just said.

'What happened?' he asked me.

I told him about Ignatov and he stood thinking about it while I listened to those bloody children on the far side of the trees: I'd seen them on my way into the park, making a slide on the snow. Their voices unnerved me: it sounded as if they were screaming.

'Ignatov,' Bracken said quietly, not really to me.

'He's a Judas. Someone who knows me. You'd better find who he is before he does something else.' I wished Bracken would start walking again but he just went on standing there under the black winter trees, appalled. I felt sorry for him: he'd been thrown out here at a minute's notice just as I had and he didn't know half the contacts who were working for him, he couldn't do, this wasn't his field either, he directed penetration operations through foreign embassies, he wasn't Moscow.