(2005) Rat Run (28 page)

'I don't have to answer that,' Malachy murmured to himself. 'I take what I find.'

Voices from the darkness of the parking bay, his and the one from the masked mouth inside the car.

'You did well, you don't have to do more.'

'You don't know what I have to do.'

'You've been as far as you can go.'

'Wrong. You cannot understand.'

'I know about you, read it in files. I have the picture of it.'

'Wrong. Paper doesn't tell it.'

'Three strikes, all well done. It's enough.'

'Wrong. Doesn't purge it.'

'The next step is too far, Malachy. It's what I'm telling you, too bloody far.'

'Wrong. Nothing's too far if you've been where I have.'

'Walk away. You've done all that was asked of you, and some. Forget it.'

The darkness of the parking bay swamped him and around him was the new quiet of the Amersham. In the afternoon he had heard the same voice, now muffled by a face covering, then by a thin adjoining wall. He had unlocked his door, closed it after him, gone fast down the steps and waited at the bottom of the stairwell. He'd heard, faint and far above him,

'You look after yourself, Millie, you take care. I'll see you.' He had waited. The heavy shoes had clipped down the steps and when the detective had stepped off the last, Malachy had stood in front of him. 'Call me, please call me,' Malachy had said, and the detective had walked by him, no response on his face, as if nothing had been said. He had gone to his car and had not looked back, and Malachy had climbed the steps, put the bolt back, turned the key and waited.

Three rings late in the night, then silence, then three more rings pealing in the room.

'What is the next level?'

'The next level, pal, would put you way out of your depth. For sure, you'd sink.'

'I sank once.'

'At the next level, they kill. Last one was dumped over a cliff, went down into the sea, but he didn't drown . . . Was dead already, tortured and then dead.

Late on his payments - only this isn't being late on a credit agreement for a living-room suite and getting a rap from the finance company. The repossession order is a sentence of death. Every bone in his body was broken, and that was before he went over the cliff.

Scrub it out of your head.'

'When I sank I hadn't the courage to end it. They took everything from me. Any self-respect and I'd have put myself away. They didn't leave me

anything.'

'I helped you, Malachy. Don't look for more.'

'A dealer feeds the pushers. A supplier feeds a dealer. Who's next up the ladder?'

'We know who the corpse over the cliff defaulted on.

Know who killed him, having tortured him. I know, my inspector knows, my superintendent knows.'

'Who feeds the supplier?'

'We know the name, but we don't know where to look for evidence. What I said, forget it. It's big league, beyond your reach. Be satisfied.'

'I'm going up your pyramid. Who sold to George Wright?'

'Tell me, old friend, what is it you need to lose?'

'Disgust, what you can't imagine, shame. All of them queuing up to belt me ...'

'Just self-pity, like a jerk-off.'

'You weren't there - you only read it in the file.'

'Then tell me, Malachy, what it is you need to get?'

'Ability to live, to walk, to laugh. Something of that.

You started me, put the ladder there. Don't take it from me. Please, I'm asking you - who sells to the supplier? It's not to do with Millie Johnson, it's for myself . . . please.'

From deep in the car there was a long, hissed sigh.

A ballpoint clicked. He heard the scribbled writing. A sheet was torn off a pad. Through the open top of the window a gloved hand passed the scrap of paper. He took it. A thin torchbeam shone on the scrap. He read a name and an address. Then the gloved hand

snatched back the paper and the torchbeam was cut, replaced by the flash of a cigarette lighter and a little guttering flame.

'It's big boys' league. The importer sells to the supplier. Malachy, you watch yourself. Don't do anything if you haven't looked it over good and proper.

Take time.'

'Thank you.'

'Was it that bad, what was done to you?'

'It was bad.'

14 January 2004

When the sun was up, past eight, Dogsy limped to the lorry.

Fran, his friend, who was going to ride shotgun, reached
down from the back to give him a hand up. Dogsy milked
the moment, all his weight on his right boot and none on his
bandaged left foot, and let out a little groan, not stifled, as
he came on board.

He settled at the tail end of the bench, opposite Fran.

Inside the lorry, under the canvas, it would get to be rotten
hot on the journey, but by the tailgate there would be air. He
stretched out his left foot. Fran made a play of kicking it and
Dogsy gave him a finger. The dust swirled, and the convoy
moved off from Bravo.

It was because of personal hygiene that Dogsy had a seat
on the lorry, and a bandaged left foot. The previous night,
the stink of his boots had caused enough aggravation for
them to be chucked out of the room where 2 Section of
Salamanca platoon slept. In the morning, when they'd
dressed for the lift operation, he'd gone in his socks, cursing,
to retrieve them, and had stepped on a feckin' scorpion.

Little bugger had a bloody great sting in its tail. Dogsy had
missed the lift: the corporal medic had bandaged him, and he
had the ride back to Battalion and a look-over from the
medical officer.

They had armour, Warriors, in front and behind for fire
power. No chopper available. The lorry whined for power
and the personnel carrier behind them gave a sort of
comfort. It was a feckin' awful road back to Battalion - a
sniper alley, and RPG-missile alley, a buried-bomb-at-the-end-of-a-control-wire alley. But the heat, feckin' awful,
calmed him.

It was the smell, worse than his feckin' boots would have
been. He looked inside the lorry. 'You know what, Fran?

One of them's shat himself.'

'Which one?'

He looked up the line of men, five of them, on the bench
opposite, beyond Fran. Each had his ankles roped to the
bench stanchions, wrists manacled behind them, and each
was blindfolded with sticking tape. How would Dogsy
decide which of them had fouled himself? He leaned forward
so that he could check the men on his bench. Four more men
with ropes, manacles and tape blindfolds - and another. At
the lorry's bulkhead, up against the driver's cab, without
restraints, was an officer.

'Hey, Fran, is that him?' he whispered.

'What you say, Dogsy? You got to shout. What?'

He did. 'Is that the Rupert?' he yelled.

'That's him.'

'The Rupert that Baz said was feckin'yellow?'

'Bottled out. That's him, Dogsy.'

'How could a guy do that, Fran - an officer?'

'Couldn't hack it. The section had a good fight, used up
juice like no tomorrow, did slots, but the Rupert didn't stay
around to see it.'

'What'll they do to him?'

'God knows .. . Who cares? I don't, you shouldn't.'

He stared up the swaying length of the lorry. They had
been shouting questions, yelling answers. The officer's head
shook against the bulkhead and he did not seem to feel pain,
as if he was in deep sleep, and his body moved with the
lorry's lurch when the wheels hit potholes . .. Poor bastard.

Not that, to Fran, Dogsy would have uttered sympathy for
the man called a coward. He looked away, back at the nose
of the following Warrior. •k
* *

Polly did lunch with Ludvik. She had booked

the table at the restaurant over the Vltava from the embassy. It would not come cheap but would be on expenses, authorized by Justin Braithwaite. 'I want to take you out and show you my thanks, up close and personal, for the co-operation and professionalism at Kostecna,' she'd said, when she'd rung him - and, like an afterthought, 'Oh, by the by, something that's been hanging around on my desk for weeks. I'm sure it's not important, but I've a phone number. I need to know whose it is, what they do. Got a pencil?' She'd let him order - grilled carp and salad, after local soup, and fine beer. She'd waited, made small-talk, rolled her eyes at him and played at being fascinated by what he said.

During the salad, he'd let his knee nudge her thigh.

When she'd struggled to fillet the carp, he had leaned across the table, head close, hands near hers, to work the flesh expertly off the bone. Too much looking earnestly into the eyes around which she'd smeared the makeup. Thought he was in with a chance, didn't he? Thought the afternoon might end up at his apartment or hers, hadn't he? Then coffee, strong. It was what she had done with Dominic, end up at his flat, when she'd had a day off and the Foreign and Commonwealth wouldn't miss him, and they'd taken a bottle with them to bed . . . but that was all long gone.

She left it late, then slid in the question. 'That number, any luck?'

First, she was told what she knew - wasn't bloody stupid: the number was at Ostrava, near the Polish border.

'Oh, did you find whose it was? The office dumped me with it last month.'

She was given a name. She had her pencil out of her bag and scribbled what she was told on the back of a torn-open envelope, which she thought was an indication of the matter's minimal importance. Gaunt's favourite mantra was about trust: don't. His second favourite was about sharing intelligence with an ally: never, if it can be avoided. If it could not be avoided it should be economical in the extreme. He reached across the table, almost shyly, but far enough for his fingertips to brush against her hand, holding the envelope.

She smiled, in what she thought was a warm, caring way, then shrugged. 'Don't know why the office wanted i t . . . God, some of the work I get loaded with is dross. Anyway, what does he do in Ostrava?'

The man with that telephone number ran a factory producing furniture for export to Germany and was a subsidiary of a larger conglomerate.

'Riveting stuff. You'd have thought, in this day and age, that my people had better things to do with their time. Whose conglomerate?'

The furniture factory was a small part of the empire owned by Timo Rahman . . .

'Never heard of him.'

'A multi-millionaire from Hamburg, an Albanian.'

'OK, OK, we don't have to overwhelm my people -

that'll do for them. I'll get a commendation for it . . . Tell me, is carp better grilled, like ours, or fried, or just put in the oven? What would your mother do?'

She paid, insisted. The bill would just about wipe away Justin Braithwaite's entertainment allowance for the week. Short rations, there'd be, in the Service's annexe.

On the pavement, his hand touched hers, then slipped into the crook of her arm.

'That was really nice, and we'll do it again,' Polly said. 'I'd have loved to spend the afternoon in a couple of churches, with you to guide me, but that's for another day Must get back. See you soon, I hope.'

'Gloria, have you ever been to Hamburg?' he shouted.

'Twice, Mr Gaunt, just the twice. I liked it, rather a civilized city.'

He had his hands together as if in prayer, fingers under his nostrils and thumbs against his mouth.

Gloria would have come to the door behind him, would be leaning against the jamb. She would allow his thought processes, without interruption, to stutter out, as if that were part of her duties.

'Perhaps "civilized", yes. Quality prostitutes, quality bankers, quality scenic views. Bravo, Hamburg. But it's where it all started, isn't it? While we were faffing over Baghdad, pushed by those bloody politicians, the eye was off the ball - our eye, the German eye and the American eye. Saddam's legacy - don't you know, Gloria? - was to be the fox that led the trail away from the den, where the vixen was and the bloody cubs.'

'Quite apposite, Mr Gaunt,' she said drily, but she would never be impertinent. 'You should use that allusion in a report.'

'Eye off the ball and not seeing the supreme target.

In Hamburg.'

'It wasn't just you, Mr Gaunt. There was an AQ

desk.'

'Everybody's eye off the ball. While we were wet-ting ourselves waiting for the next download of satellite imagery from some God-forsaken heap of sand in Iraq, the threat was incubated in Hamburg.

What was the name of that wretched place?'

'Harburg, across the Elbe river.'

'And the name of that wretched street?'

'Marienstrasse, Mr Gaunt.'

'And the spores are still in the bloody pavements of your "civilized" city. It's where they were, where that horrendous plot was hatched, nine/eleven, where war was declared, the ultimate attack - and we knew nothing. Now, little Wilco sends her signal... A man resists torture - and his interrogators were well trained - to protect a notepad on which a telephone number was written. I'm getting there, Gloria. The telephone number is that of a factory that exports furniture. To where? To bloody "civilized" Hamburg.

Hamburg
again.'

'Do you not think, Mr Gaunt, that you should rest for an hour or two?'

'God, and wouldn't it be easy if we had some proper equipment to turn on them - a squadron of tanks, a battery of artillery, a brigade of paratroops I can deploy against them? Then I'm laughing. But this is a city that is "civilized". Hamburg is where they plot, plan, then launch from. Once a month I go to a lecture where an academic tells me I have to get into the mind of an enemy. How? I am white-skinned, middle-aged, middle-class, a little Englander. I have no chance . . . '