10 : Rage

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. Sleep. Don't take any - London. Remember London. My head came up a fraction and I was warned: it had been dropping, degree by degree, as the soporific wave had crept over me despite the shock of his voice. London, yes. 'Do you understand?' The voice of a bull, roaring out of the barrel chest and drumming in the room. Think about what has to be done. It has to be done in the next sixty seconds, or I won't have the strength left. I don't want to die. Shuddup. I had to take him down, and I had to do it with all the speed I could manage, and with all the force. Standing here thinking about it, I could believe I would never do it; but I knew from experience what the mind can make the body do, if enough depends on it. I wasn't worried about that. Vader was mine, unless he'd had my specific style of training. The enemy was in myself, in my emotions, in the undisciplined tides of feeling that can stifle logic and inhibit action. Moira. Is that your own code? Five hundred roses for Moira. To be delivered only after she has been informed by the Bureau. Where was she now? The tides of feeling, yes, that would have to be ignored, because they were irrelevant, and dangerous. Take him down, and with as little force as necessary, so that I would find the strength. Let him come close first. 'I have given you every possible chance of co-operating! And you have refused !' He began walking, dropping his boots squarely on the worn parquet, walking towards me. 'Do you happen to enjoy the kind of interrogation you will receive at the Serbsky Institute? M'm?' He stopped within three feet of me. It wasn't close enough. 'Are you a masochist?' Sleep. Dear God let me sleep. He was blurring again in front of me, his thick body swaying gently backwards and forwards, sending me to- wake up, come on, wake up. 'Answer me!'