Back on that track. Fascinating. 'How the hell should I know?' I asked him. 'I was following him to find out who he was !' 'I don't have to accept that !' You bloody well do. He started walking again, from wall to wall. He must have seen a lot of this place, look at that table. 'Why did you want to find out who he was? Who put you on to him?' It was difficult because we didn't really have a topic for conversation. He knew I was some kind of agent because we get to recognize the signs in one another: my behaviour in this room, confined with a KGB colonel who was ready to flay me alive, was totally different from the behaviour of an innocent tourist who'd slipped on the snow and got snatched by mistake because he'd injured his face - you can't do this to me, I want my lawyer here, I'll have you charged with wrongful arrest, so forth. This man knew I was an agent but as an agent I couldn't tell him anything and he understood that, and he was annoyed because he was trying to build a reputation as a red hot interrogator who could get information out of anyone they sent to him and without having to throw him to the clowns to work over, because that takes a lot of time if you want to go after all the information he's got in his brain: you can't rush things, it's no good just poking a red hot needle into his urethra and saying now talk because he'll either pass out or scream unintelligible things and the most you can do is get one word out of him at a time, one name, one target, one key to one code; you've got to spend days at it, with some of them. Vader stopped walking and picked up the belt. He'd lost a lot of his colour and the sweat was drying on him and there was foam at the corners of his mouth. 'I will ask you one more time. Who are you?' 'Kapista Kirov. I told you, the computers have gone on the blink.' It wasn't a lie and it wasn't the truth and he knew that; it was all I was going to tell him, nothing, like saying it looks as if we're going to get some more rain again. 'Very well!' The belt hit the table and the sound went round the walls like an explosion. 'You realize we shall get this information from you in the end, don't you? Of course you do. We shall use every method available to us, every technique, every refinement. We shall show you no mercy. You understand me?' 'Yes.' 'Very well.' Bring on the clowns.