(2005) Rat Run (33 page)

Two years' work there, hard and slogging study.

Satellite photos of every corner of Iraq's deserts pored over. Defectors' statements gutted, analysed, each word weighed. Businessmen from every corner of that wretched region who travelled to Baghdad had been met in hotel bars, had money shoved at them, and been pestered for descriptions of factories and chemical plants. Phone calls and emails intercepted and transcribed. All to answer the great question: were there, in Iraq, programmes for the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction? Papers written. In Service tradition it was taught:
Capability + Intent =

Threat.
Had Iraq the capability or the intent to justify the wolf cry of realistic threat? Caution expressed, caveats and hesitations. Papers returned with red-ink scratchings obliterating the cautions that were embedded in the Service's work practices. Papers resubmitted with honesty seeping out from them.

Caveats and hesitations removed. What they wrote, by Service tradition, was supposed to exude

'provenance'. But provenance had died, and the team

- scattered to the winds - she assumed cursed themselves now for bending at the knee, for allowing valued practices -
C+I=T -
to be steamrollered and crushed.

She could remember the day when politicians, jutting their chins, had spoken of 'irrefutable proof' of the WMD programmes as justification for the tanks rolling in the sands: she had stood behind Frederick Gaunt's shoulder, had watched the television and heard his silence, and had known it would burst. So quiet when it had done, but a violence in his words she had never heard before. 'They wanted the fucking war. We gave them the fucking war - and our reward will be to be fucked by them.' The inquest, then the cull of the casualties of failure to find the weapons.

Polly Wilkins had been categorized as NBA by the investigators - No Blame Attached - and sent to Prague, but the message had been clear to her: all of the unit was contaminated by that failure. She was scarred by the inquest, poisoned by the failure. She checked her bag for her passport, ticket and euros.

She heaved it off the bed, grimaced, and went to call a taxi for the airport. Because she was the chosen one, elation gripped her.

* * *

In the city of Dresden, on their first visit to Germany, an elderly American couple waited for one of a line of public telephones in the square to come free.

That afternoon they had toured the opera house and the Kreuzkirche, then crossed the Augustus-brucke to trawl the galleries of old masters' works in the Zwinger houses. Next they would visit the Hofkirche in the Theaterplatz. They needed a telephone to ring their hotel to confirm a booking for the morning, car and driver, to travel out of the city to the Pillnitz Palace and take them later to Meissen where they would buy porcelain for shipment to Chicago.

They stood, Dwight and Janet, behind a young man. He had dialled, and now he waited for an answer. Always the difficulty at such a time, which phone to target. Which caller would take the least time? They had chosen to stand behind this young man, slight and with bowed shoulders. He spoke.

They could not hear him. But even if he had raised his voice they would have been too polite to listen

- and, anyway, their knowledge of German was scant.

She had her thumb to keep the guidebook open at the page for the Hofkirche and together they matched the view of its towering spire across the Theaterplatz with the photograph.

In front of them, the man hooked the phone back, turned, smiled politely and gestured that the booth was now available. Such a charming-looking young man . . . Her husband would not have done it -

Dwight had the shyness that age brought - but Janet was bolder. Would he, please, show them how to operate the payphone? She gave him their hotel-room card with the number they needed, and coins. He did it for them, waited until the call was connected with Reception, then passed the receiver to her. And he was gone.

It made them both feel good, as they crossed the Theaterplatz, to have met a young man so

considerate.

'Where do you think, Dwight, that guy was

from?'

'Couldn't say, could have been from anywhere.'

The office worker was brought by the Bear to Timo Rahman.

In the life of the
pate
no deals were too small, none was unworthy of his attention. He had come from the yard where he owned the fleet of haulage lorries that carried loads across Europe, legal and contraband, and had arrived at a site on the Elbe side of St Pauli where the old building had been flattened. Bulldozers worked there and shifted aside the mess of concrete, wire and rubble. He had a share, thirty-three and a third per cent, in the hotel to be built on what was now a hole. Dust swirled round him and he wore an orange hard hat jauntily. He would move on from there to the fruit, vegetable and flower market at the Hauptbahnhof where money was paid him for

the right to set up a stall. The haulage business brought him tens of thousands of euros a year; the hotel would earn him millions on completion; the stalls were only worth hundreds. Attention to details, whether big or small, was the cornerstone of Timo Rahman's life.

He stood with an architect and the site manager and watched the crawling machines eat at the debris, and he saw the Bear bring the boy. The boy, a cousin's son, would have owned only one suit, and one pair of shoes fit for an office worker, and he walked with great care through the dust clouds, and maybe his shoes would be scratched and certainly his suit trousers would be saturated with the floating dirt.

Timo Rahman broke away from the site manager and the architect.

The boy reached him, stood in his presence and the nerves showed.

Timo Rahman stared out at the bulldozers. It was not for him to show anxiety or any great interest in a messenger who was only the son of a cousin. The demand for news of the lost cargo had screamed at him in the night, had been with him in the days. His casualness was expert as he made the boy wait, then turned to him.

'Again it is you. What matter of home furnishing is there for my interest?'

The boy stuttered, could not be heard.

'Speak up, boy. Shout.'

The boy sucked the dust and air into his throat, coughed, then shouted, 'My manager in the shipping section ordered me to report to you. He has received a telephone message concerning a cargo from Ostrava, in the Czech Republic.'

'I know where my factory is. And you have no reason to fear me.'

'He instructs me to tell you that a part of cargo load 1824 is
en route
to Hamburg. The time of delivery to the warehouse is uncertain, but it will be within two days.'

'Thank you for bringing such a small matter to my attention. Sometimes you are in the showroom and sometimes in the office, and you should be a credit to the company you serve. I think your suit is damaged by coming to this place. Replace it.'

He took a note from his wallet, of sufficient value to purchase a clerk's suit and a pair of shoes in any clothing shop on the Steindamm, folded it carefully and slipped it to the boy. His generosity would be remembered rather than the message haltingly delivered. He told the boy with firmness that he should be careful when going back across the site, and dismissed him. Long ago Timo Rahman, who was the
pate
of Hamburg, had learned that a wall of fear protected him, but that kindness generated absolute loyalty among his people. He turned to the Bear.

'He comes . . . He has evaded them. Already he has proven himself to be a man of quality. If it were known that I assisted him then the wrath - anger and fury - of the world is turned against me. Why do I do these things? They would spit in my eye and break my bones if it were known what help I shall give. Why? I am a little man, I am a peasant from the mountains of Albania. I am sneered at, but not to my face. Those who know of my origins despise me . . . The time will come. My time.'

He thought the Bear understood not a word that he said, but the man's head nodded vigorous agreement.

He rejoined the architect and the site manager, wiped the dust from his forehead, listened to them, studied their plans, and a quarter of an hour later was on his way to the Hauptbahnhof to talk with the traders at their stalls. He thought little of the hotel that would sit where there was now a hole. What filled his mind was the image of a seashore where a boat would come, and the enormity of what would follow.

* * *

The ferry carried Oskar Netzer back to paradise. One day in every two months he took the boat to the mainland, to Nessmersiel, and from there a bus brought him to Norden. In the town he shopped. As a

pensioner he travelled free on the ferry and what he bought in Norden was cheaper than in the island's supermarkets. The tide was far out and the mudflats crept to the limits of the channel used by the ferry. He stood on the back deck and watched the mainland shore, all he hated, diminish.

The wind came hard off the mud, from the north-west.

They had travelled together, he and Gertrud, on that same ferryboat five years before. She could have gone by ambulance to the hospital in Norden. Oskar had refused that. He had taken her. They had stood together, her leaning on his arm for support and the blanket round her to keep the chill from her, where he stood now - where he always stood on the boat. And a week later, he had brought her back, and when the crane had lowered the coffin on to the quay at Baltrum, the crew had taken off their caps in respect for her, and he had held the horse's bridle that pulled the cart carrying her to the cemetery at Ostdorf.

Sometimes, and that day he did, he wept as he stood alone at the back of the ferry; his jaw quivered and his cheeks were wet with tears.

When the ferry swung to starboard for the approach to the island's harbour, he saw the seals on their sandspit close to the wreck. It pleased him, lightened the blackness of the mood that sat on him each time he took the ferry. Beyond the seals and the wreck, out in the North Sea, was a darkening skyline that merged into the horizon.

No goodbyes, no farewells, he switched off the lights and locked the door.

Malachy dropped the keys of flat thirteen, level three, block nine, into the hatch beside the barricaded door of the housing offices.

Its use for him was finished and he was gone from the Amersham into the night.

Music blared from high loudspeakers, pounded at Malachy Kitchen.

He stepped from the train that had brought him from Cologne. The Hauptbahnhof of Hamburg

echoed with Beethoven. Something of it lifted him and he stepped out along the platform, carried by the swell of passengers, as if a little of his purpose was regained - he knew what he would attempt to achieve in that city, but not why. The Amersham was behind him and after ten hours of travel from Waterloo International to Brussels, from Brussels to Cologne, from Cologne to Hamburg, the estate had already faded in his mind. He no longer felt its pulsebeat. He stepped on to the escalator and was carried up to the concourse. He heard announcements in a mass of languages, the arrivals and departures of trains from and to all of Europe. His stride was bolder than at any time since he had come down the tail ramp, exhausted and sweating, in the heat's blast off the Hercules aircraft that had done the corkscrew descent on to the runway at Basra. But the road had been long, so damn long, into what was unknown . . . It was as if he clutched at the pride so that he should not lose hold of it. The concourse was scrubbed clean, and high above it, like a cathedral's arched roof, was the great shape of glass and iron. He held, tight in his hand, the black plastic sack containing all the clothes he owned that were not on his back, and among the smells of the quick food stalls was the whiff of the petrol still embedded in the heavy coat. He saw police with guns and unarmed men in uniform with the flash of the Bahnwacht on their sleeves. He crossed the concourse and saw nothing that threatened him. He walked to the exit for taxis and in front of him were stalls of cleaned vegetables, piled fruit and cheerful flowers; above them, the wind tickled the multi-colours of the awnings. At the tourist kiosk Malachy asked in halting German, learned at Chicksands, for a tourist map of the city and was told where he could find a cheap room near to the Hauptbahnhof. The smartly dressed girl behind the kiosk counter curled her lip in disdain at his appearance, and drew a line on the map down a street - that was where the inexpensive rooms were.

For politeness, he said, 'It's a fine station - and I enjoyed the music.'

'The music is not for your enjoyment,' she

responded curtly.

'I don't understand. Why, then, is it played?'

'Psychologists told us to - narcotics addicts hate classical music broadcast loud. It's why they are not here. The music makes the station free of them. We have in Hamburg a big drugs problem, and you should be careful in the city, most careful where accommodation is inexpensive . . . We are cursed by immigrants and the crime levels they bring, most particularly the Albanians. Enjoy your visit.'

He went out into a brittle midday sunlight. The wind trapped his hair and scoured his face. Beyond the stalls, when he reached the edge of the big, wide square that burst with traffic, he paused, opened the map and took his bearings.

He had come to destroy a man, but did not know how and would have been hard put to articulate why

- except that breaking the man was the only road sign posted to him as a way back for his pride.

After he had crossed the square and had started out down a wide street, he understood why the woman in the tourist kiosk had curled her lip when he had insisted on a cheap room. So little money had been given him that he must husband it. She had sent him to where rooms were inexpensive, on the Steindamm.

He passed shops that sold sex videos and sex gear, and by cafes where Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians or Afghans lounged on plastic chairs, and by doorways where hookers - young and old, heavy-hipped and skeletal thin - waited, smoked and eyed him. He saw the sign for rooms to rent. He stopped.