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Perhaps the Russians had big radio speakers up there on the Unter den Linden pavement-for even above the whistle-chorus of the wind he could hear the pounding chant of les parasites. He did at least feel anonymous out here in the rubbled, gravelly dark-there was no sensation of big attention being paid to him.
He hurried to a fallen pillar, and peered over it-and then didn't move, for the two figures he had been following were crouched behind a broken wall just twenty feet in front of him. Keeping his white face down in the shadows, he looked left and right, and to his left he saw the tall crane swaying against the dark sky as its platform rolled slowly northeast, toward the gate from the western side. The warm rain tasted oily and salty in Hale's open, panting mouth.
Hale was having trouble focusing his eyes on the twisting rain funnel over the boat. The space it occupied in the perceived landscape didn't change, but at one moment it seemed to be rushing directly away from him and increasing in size, and at the next seemed to be shrinking rapidly and flying straight into his eyes.
And the inorganic articulated roaring was clearly coming from it. Its sinuous form curled in the rainy air, and he found himself momentarily seeing vast shoulders, or an outcropping hip, or long flowing hair, in its contours. The noise it made was like the throbbing of a bomber's engines now, but Hale was unhappily sure that it was forming the syllables of some language-and though it was made of nothing but wind and water and smoke, he was sure it was female.
You were born to this, Elena had told him in Paris.
The truck carrying the boat shuddered visibly as it was shifted into gear, and then it was rolling slowly west toward the Brandenburg Gate as if to meet the crane there, and the ever-more-solid-looking whirlwind moved with it like a living tower; another flatbed lorry accelerated up from the south to pace it, and on the bed of this one Hale could see a gray rectangle with a bump on the top that might have been a loop.
The parasites roar was recognizably musical now, though conforming to no human scale, and Hale's first thought was a paraphrase from the King James Book of Job: When the midnight comets sang together.
The clouds overhead flickered with interference fringes, illusionary flashes of red and gold in the moire patterns where the whirlwind's veils and tresses overlapped and seemed even to brush the contours of the underlit clouds-Hale's thoughts fragmented into conflicting moods and half-phrases and one alien but complete sentence: Zat al-Dawahi, Mistress of Misfortunes, look favorably upon our sacrifice!-and then one of the figures twenty feet in front of Hale stood up from a crouch and aimed some sort of handgun up at the churning column of storm. Hale fell back into the shadow of his own concealment, horrified that this person was about to draw attention to this area.
Bang. Hale saw a reflected flashbulb wink of muzzle flash, and then the ringing night seemed to erupt in shouts and thudding boots. He crouched lower behind the broken pillar, not even breathing at all, his hand gripping the pistol in his pocket.
He heard scuffling, and then he heard a woman's voice cry out in angry pain-and he stood up, for the voice was Elena's.
Figures were struggling against the broken wall, but closer to him two Russian soldiers had wrestled someone to the pavement, and Hale saw that they were trying to pry a gun from a woman's clenched hand; and it seemed to Hale that the woman was trying desperately hard to turn the gun on herself rather than toward the soldiers.
Kill herself, flashed a horrified thought through Hale's mind, sooner than go back to Moscow.
"Elena!" he screamed as he yanked the Walther out of his pocket and pointed the muzzle at the broad back of the closest soldier, "wait!"
The other soldier hitched around toward Hale, reaching for a holster, and Hale swung the muzzle toward him and pulled the resistant trigger.
The hard pop! of the gunshot battered his ears and the muzzle flash dazzled him, but Hale simply crouched to make sure of not hitting Elena and then blindly fired another shot, upward toward the man wrestling over her.
He could see past the flash-glare in his retinas now, and he raised the barrel of his pistol as Elena rolled to her feet and fired her own gun once at the man Hale had just shot at, and then a second time toward the figures rolling along the irregular wall.
Another gunshot flared and cracked close at hand, and then through the ringing in his ears Hale heard Cassagnac's voice: "Is it Lot? We must run north, look."
Cassagnac nodded behind, toward the hollowed buildings to the south, and when Hale looked back that way he saw silhouettes with rifles jogging this way.
Elena grabbed Hale's arm and yanked him forward, after Cassagnac, and then the three of them were simply running north across the shadowed, rubbled lot, hopping over chunks of stone and skidding in puddles. Hale glimpsed her face under the flying white hair-dark blood slicked her mouth, but her teeth were bared in what might have been at least partly a desperate grin.
The lorry with the gray rectangular stone in the bed of it had sped up, and now rocked to a halt right next to the Brandenburg Gate columns on the eastern side; and on the western side the crane had been driven up to within a hundred feet of it. Through the hot rain Hale could see men carrying the end of a cable east between the columns.
Hale saw a man briefly tumble through the air as the roaring whirlwind moved out across the pavement away from the boat, toward the gate; its droning inhuman syllables shook the air and seemed to rattle Hale's teeth even at this fifty yards' distance, and bits of stone were falling from the gate's high pediment.
Though Hale and his companions were being pursued from the south, none of the Soviet soldiers around the lorries appeared to have noticed the intrusion yet-their attention was doubtless focused on the stone and the crane and the living tornado, and certainly radios wouldn't work correctly on this night.
But a jeep at the west end of the square had started forward, and though it halted at the edge of the lot, the driver was backing and filling to keep the headlamp beams on the three fugitives who were running toward the Unter den Linden pavement and the Arab boat, and Hale could hear the jeep's horn honking out the old Rote Kapelle radio code for danger, danger.
And now to the east he saw headlamps moving north along the boulevard that passed Hitler's Chancellery; and from somewhere out there a searchlight beam swept the lot in a moving fan of long black shadows on white-lit pavement, and after passing Hale and his companions once, it swung back and fixed on them.
Cassagnac hopped and skidded to a halt, crouching, and Hale and Elena stopped beside him and stood bent forward with their hands on their knees. They were within sprinting distance of the north edge of the lot now, with the gleaming lanes of Unter den Linden beyond.
Cassagnac's wet face seemed to have been carved out of granite in the harsh white light. "They," he panted, "won't shoot-into the Western sectors. But the soldiers-will be here-in moments. You," he said to Hale, "can surrender. Elena and I-must not be captured."
Hale permitted himself a glance at Elena. Under the sopping white hair her youthful face was drawn and pale, with blood at her lips; and too he considered the fact that he had just shot two of the soldiers who were trying to capture them. "I'll die with you," he panted dizzily.
"Good," Elena gasped, reaching out to squeeze his hand briefly. "We must get-in the boat. The soldiers must be afraid-of the monster, and perhaps won't-chase us there."
"Let us all die on the boat," agreed Cassagnac with a jerky nod.
The thing Elena had described as the monster was a whirling, flexing tower of concentrated wind and rain against the Brandenburg Gate pillars, and now with a grinding of gears the crane arm hitched strongly upward, and the rectangular gray stone was swinging in wide arcs on the western side of the gate columns. The whirlwind crashed in eddying spray against the pediment at the top, seeming to rock the whole battered structure.
