decide to take someone with me, a half-fist into the thyroid with enough force to kill, a matter of .5 seconds and nothing they could do in time to save him. Watch that too. Emotion was dangerous because they'd got a red lamp over a board marked Scorpion in London and the executive in the field for the operation was holed up in a disorientation cell in Lubyanka prison and he'd have to get out and if he couldn't even control his emotions he'd never make it so start thinking with the brain instead of the gut, this is life or death. Bolts drawing back. Two men. One of them beckoned. 'You will come with us.' They walked on each side of me along the green-painted corridor, and stopped outside a door halfway along. Assume clowns now.

'Won't you sit down?' Different room. 'I'd rather stand. I need some exercise.' Id est: I am not sleepy. Different room or just a different table, this one with a plain surface with no belt marks on it. Need to observe more efficiently: I ought to know whether this is a different room or only a different table. 'I expect you do,' he said apologetically. 'I'm not responsible for everything that goes on here, you must understand. Otherwise - ' he spread out his hand - your accommodation would be different.' He waited for me to say something, but I couldn't think of anything. I had to detach myself from him and work out my own game while he worked out his, making contact only when I needed information. I had to start thinking, and if possible, acting. The emotional phase was over: they'd taken me quite a long way into sleep deprivation and produced an initial reaction - childishness, the urge to attack them. They were probably going to take me much deeper: they hadn't started using this particular technique with the intention of stopping halfway. But from now on I would have to work out the necessary defences. 'I'm afraid I rather lost my temper,' Colonel Vader said. 'I do hope you'll forgive me.' He paused but I didn't say anything. 'We people have too lively a sense of the dramatic, perhaps, make a lot of noise -' with a rueful laugh - 'let off a lot of steam, m'm? Look at our music, look at our grand opera, you see what I mean?' He stepped rhythmically from wall to wall, declining to sit down, since I wouldn't. He had manners, give him that. I began pacing too, for the exercise and because it would express freedom of movement; but I went from left to right, while he went from right to left: it would look ridiculous if both of us went the same way. 'Prince Igor,' I said. 'Always admired it. Lot of fire.' 'That's exactly what I mean !' he said in relief, and turned to me with a laugh of understanding. 'As a matter of fact I don't remember much about what I said to you, and all I hope is that it was nothing too offensive.' He spread his hand again: 'Put it down to an unseemly outburst of Russian temperament, m'm?' As if speaking to a non-Russian. Noted. 'Bit hard on the table,' I said and he laughed boyishly, deep from the chest. We went on walking, like two prisoners in an exercise yard, talking to each other across an invisible wall. He walked neatly with his hands folded behind his back and his polished boots clumping down solidly on the parquet floor, heel and toe together. 'It's difficult for you,' he said, and stopped suddenly, swinging the chair on his side halfway round and resting one boot on it, facing me with his intelligent amber eyes. 'And quite frankly, you know, it's difficult for me too.' I went on walking, but turned to look at him from time to time. He was being quite civilized, and that quiet murderous rage I'd felt in the detention cell had evaporated. 'Why don't you make it easier?' I asked him, not meaning to be funny. A full colonel must carry quite a bit of clout in this place. 'My dear fellow, I only wish I could. I say that quite sincerely.' He'd lowered his voice, and I had to stop walking to listen. I had the strange urge to swing my chair halfway round and rest one foot on it, but that too would be ridiculous, as if there were only one of us here, and a mirror. 'The problem,' he said quietly, 'is that I would need your co-operation. And you're proving - how shall I put it? - rather hesitant.'