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"The Russians," said Cassagnac loudly in his ear, "have certainly fallen back, for dread of this. Start the truck, and take Elena away." And he climbed one-handed over the rope-topped gunwale and pulled the resistant ankh down with him to the truck bed. Hale stumbled to the gunwale, but he could already see Cassagnac jogging strongly away across the boulevard pavement toward the Western sectors, holding the ankh over his head like a heavy torch.
"He's buying our lives," Hale shouted to Elena. "Get in the truck cab."
Elena cast one long, wide-eyed look after the running figure of Cassagnac-and once again, but with obvious deliberateness this time, she made the sign of the cross-then she bit her bleeding lip and nodded, turning away to grip the starboard bow gunwale and swing one leg over it.
Hale climbed down to the cab, and he was gripping his pistol when he pulled open the left-side driver's door, but any driver there might have been earlier had long since fled. The truck was vibrating, already idling in neutral, and after Elena had hoisted herself in beside him and pulled her door closed, Hale pressed the clutch to the floor and clanked the gear-shift lever into first gear.
He let the clutch up, and they were rolling, and he steered toward the curb and the flattened masonry beyond the north side of the Brandenburg Gate. No one was shooting at them yet, and he stamped on the accelerator pedal.
Hale glanced out the window to the south, and through the whipping veils of hot rain he saw Cassagnac plodding heavily, desperately, toward the western side-but sheets of water were being blown away from the pavement in all directions around the laboring figure, and the whirlwind was slowly bending down over him. Cassagnac lost his footing for a moment, touched the pavement with his knee and free hand as the wind slid him sideways around the compass of the ankh in his fist, and then he was up again, crouching low and thrusting himself forward with each contested step.
Impulsively Hale shouted out the window, "O Fish, are you constant to the old covenant?"-and in the same moment he shifted up into second gear and again tromped the accelerator pedal flat against the floorboards.
As he had shouted the words at the roaring wind-thing that leaned down out of the sky, he was giving pictures to the ideas behind the words-the Devil fish in the old stained-glass window in Fairford, and a row of soldiers standing resolute, and the boxy litter shape of the Ark of the Covenant as it had appeared in his school textbooks-but a moment later he wasn't sure he had shouted in English.
In any case he had drawn the attention of the storm away from Cassagnac and onto himself and Elena. He clung to the truck's steering wheel as his weight increased and the Brandenburg Gate pillars swung from left to right beyond the streaming windscreen, and the engine was roaring as the rear wheels spun free of traction in the air.
But their momentum was still westward, and when the truck crashed back down onto its wheels it was on the rubbled raised pavement at the north end of the gate, uprooting bushes and exploding bricks and broken stones in all directions; the back end was sliding around to the right as the truck rocked down off the west side of the raised pavement in a hail of leaves and mortar fragments, and the windscreen was abruptly crazed with a white spiderweb pattern of cracks as the boat's bow crunched a dent into the steel roof over Hale's head, and in the driver's mirror he glimpsed the boat's toppling mast and upturning keel as the vessel rolled heavily off of the truck bed.
He whipped the steering wheel to the right and shifted back down to first gear, and when he hit the accelerator, the truck shuddered and coughed, then ground forward across the western Charlottenburg Chaussee lanes, thumping and shaking on at least two flat tires. The crane stood off to their left, apparently abandoned in place over the hole where the man had been shot that afternoon. Hale and Elena were now west of the place where the anchor stone had been installed.
And so was Cassagnac, now. As Hale spun the wheel to steer south, staring out the open side window back toward the Unter den Linden lanes beyond the Brandenburg Gate, he saw a closer figure, running west-and when Hale trod on the brake pedal and tapped out the Rote Kapelle here code on the horn, Cassagnac slanted his course toward the truck.
Cassagnac was waving both empty hands, and on the whipping wind Hale heard snatches of the man's shouting voice: "Alibi-go back there-all evening, dinner-I'll-tomorrow-"
Hale waved acknowledgment, and he switched off the headlamps as he steered the laboring truck back to the right, leaning his head out of the window into the rain to see where he was going. Figures scattered away in the darkness, but he couldn't tell if they were Soviet soldiers or civilians.
When he had driven the wrecked truck more than halfway across the distance to the skeletal dome of the Reichstag, he stamped on the brake. None of the anonymous pedestrians had followed them.
"Now we go back to where we had dinner," he said breathlessly as he levered open the driver's-side door. "We want to establish that we never left."
"Incredible," said Elena as she climbed out on her side.
Hale led Elena back through the kitchen entrance into the smoky restaurant, so that they wouldn't be seen to have entered through the street door; and the table at which they had sat earlier was still unoccupied. Both of them were soaked, dripping on the stone floor, but many of the dozen other diners were nearly as wet. Hale was at least profoundly glad to look around the long room and see that Philby was no longer present.
Hale paid for a plate of Sturdy Max with a cellophane-sealed pack of Chesterfields, and when he had carried the plate across to their table and sat down, he discovered that he was in fact very hungry.
Elena apparently was not. When the same old aproned waiter came to the table, she just ordered another brandy, frowning and speaking almost too quietly to be heard, without looking at him or at Hale; and Hale curtly told the man to make it four brandies.
Elena had taken off her long woolen coat and laid it with unnecessary care on the bench beside her; the long-sleeved blue sweater she'd had on underneath it was not obviously wet, and she had pulled her white hair back over her shoulders. Hale's sport coat glistened with moisture, but he didn't take it off because his clinging shirt would look worse.
He wasn't eager to speak, either. He could still vividly recall the heavy inertia of the dagger-ankh in his right hand, and in his mind he saw again the whirlwind bowing to one side and then the other as he had swung the ankh back and forth. And the thing had heard him, had responded, when he had called to it the old challenge from his dreams. He knew that soon he might discount these recollections, but he could not do that yet, and the realization that he had seen the supernatural tonight kept him chilly and shaking even in the warm, sauerkraut-scented air of the candlelit restaurant.
The old waiter brought over a tray with four glasses on it, and Hale and Elena each took a glass and gulped it at the same instant, without looking at each other. Then for a minute or so Hale just stared down at his plate and chewed his ham and eggs and black bread, and carefully sipped his second glass of brandy.
Figures in dripping macintoshes entered by ones and twos through the street door, and soon Hale could hear the phrases "Brandenburger Tor"-as well as "boot" and "Teufel," boat and devil-in the louder conversations from the other tables.
But no one was sitting close to them, and he needed to at least refer to the events of the evening, so he leaned forward-Elena looked up at him warily, and after a moment's hesitation he said in French, "We wound up wrecking the monster's boat."
She didn't stop frowning, but a nervous smile kinked her swelling mouth, and in spite of her white hair she looked very young. "That's right," she said in a low voice. "It wasn't still on the truck, at the end."
Hale took a deep breath. "The thing in the sky-" he began.
"Don't speak of it!" She shook her head and then took a noisy sip of brandy, wincing at the alcohol on her cut lip. "We will speak of worldly things only. Claude-Cassagnac-he would not have told you about the Shihab meteor-bullet, if he had thought we might survive."
Hale sighed. "Well, the meteor-bullet didn't work, in any case."
"No," she said bleakly, "it did-not-work." She looked straight into his eyes then, and suddenly he felt the warmth of the brandy. Her voice when she spoke again, though, was brisk. "And on the same assumption he told you that we are working for the French DGSS. I would venture to declare," she went on, using the French infinitive declarer, "that you are working for the British secret service now...?"
