Crossing at Midnight
真夜中の越境
By the fourth day, London's patience had run out and the watchers had found his safe flat.
Hale saw them from a cafe window: two men reading the same newspaper far too slowly.
There was only one direction left to run, and it was the one no one expected.
West of the wall, every door was closing; east of it, no one was yet hunting him.
The idea was madness, and it was precisely its madness that might keep him alive.
He chose a used by old women and coal trucks, where the guards grew bored by midnight.
With his papers forged by a friend long retired, he joined the slow, grey .
His heart hammered, yet his face stayed as dull and tired as every other face there.
Never had a hundred metres of wet road seemed so long or so brightly lit.
A guard took his documents, studied the photograph, and looked up into Hale's steady eyes.
Only when the man waved him through did Hale allow himself to breathe again.
Not until he had walked fully into the eastern shadows did his hands finally stop shaking.
With the wall behind him and the enemy's city ahead, he felt a strange, cold calm.
In the West he was a traitor to be caught; here he was merely an unknown man.
His own service could not touch him now without a border they dared not cross.
It was a bitter joke that safety, for him, lay in the very heart of the enemy.
Hale walked with his up and his hands deep in his pockets, memorising streets.
Every poster and every armed reminded him of how alone he had become.
He had one left in the East, a name he had kept secret even from Crane.
It was a name he had sworn, years ago, that he would never use again.
With no other card to play, he now had no choice but to break that promise.
The woman he was about to find had once been his lover and his enemy at once.
She served the other side, and yet she was the only person he still half trusted.
Not once in five years had he written to her, though he had wanted to often.
Now, hunted by his own, he would place his life in her hands.
With the snow beginning again, Hale turned toward the district where she used to live.