(2005) Rat Run (45 page)

intolerable.'

'Of course.'

Rain laced on the window and the desk light failed to lift the gloom.

'It just cannot be countenanced, Freddie.'

'I'm on board. Bodies crammed in morgues,

mutilated victims stacked on corridor trolleys waiting for doctors, the shock and trauma of blood on the pavements. Without reservation, I accept that a major atrocity in our cities is not acceptable. No argument.'

He saw a splash of surprise on his superior's face, then annoyance that the obvious drift of the argument had not been interpreted.

'No, no, Freddie - take that as read.' He leaned forward and jabbed his finger for emphasis at the moving target, Gaunt striding. 'I am talking - don't you follow me? - about the effect of a new failure on
us.
Difficult times we live in. It is as if we are under siege. The reputation of the Service is at stake. There are corners of Whitehall in which our efforts, first-class efforts, are derided. There are, Freddie, enemies at large and they wait for one more cock-up - forgive me - on the scale of Iraq. We are perpetually scrutinized. Surely, Freddie, you see that? If there were to be a new failure, it's
we
who would be the victims. I don't exaggerate, there would be another weeding out and we would face desperate times.'

'Oh, yes.'

There was a shrill laugh from the desk. 'You know, Freddie, for a moment I didn't think you understood the true seriousness of the danger to the integrity, dignity, of the Service. Forgive me. Have you all you need?'

'Computer time at Menwith, too low on the priority list. Do I want a galley-load of young Turks bustling around me? No. Do I want Berlin in on the act? No. Do I want a full charabanc sent from London to sit on Polly Wilkins in whom I have complete faith? No.

What I want is luck, buckets of it.'

'That is hardly a satisfactory shopping list. Freddie, very frankly, are you up for this one?'

Was he? Wasn't he? He wondered briefly whether selfishness and a personal pride in his ability caused him to reject the battalions of help on offer. Word of any section's success always eddied through the building, crossed the need-to-know fences erected for internal security, and the men and women responsible for secret triumphs achieved an heroic status, and rank envy - damned if he would pass up the chance, damned if he would share.

Gaunt said airily, 'Never been more confident, Gilbert. It's falling nicely into place.'

'But you promised me, with the Prague business, you talked of a rat run that you'd interrupt—'

'Just a blip,' Gaunt said. He turned for the door, then paused. 'I anticipate we will finish this one in good shape.'

In the corridor, he found that sweat dribbled on his skin. Deer were culled by rifle shots, foxes by poison and rats by gas, birds of prey by the teeth of post traps. He mopped his forehead with his breast-pocket handkerchief, and pondered it: how would they cull old warriors who had failed to protect the Service's reputation? Dump them on the street and let them walk away up the Albert Embankment with the

carriage clock or decanter or a presentation box of tools, airbrush them out of history and sweep them to retirement? God, he needed luck, sacks of it.

He led the way into the office block and down the corridor. Inside each room that he passed, which had the door open - Administration, Sales, Accounts - the staff snapped to their feet. He went through the swing doors and into the warehouse.

Trailing Timo Rahman was the Bear. Far behind the Bear, ignored, was the mouseboy. His feet rapped across the concrete flooring as he went down the wide aisle between towers of cardboard-wrapped flat-packs. At the aisle's far end was the door to a store room, where mops, buckets and the chemicals for cleaning toilets were kept.

He had wasted an hour at the Ohlsdorf cemetery, to humour the mouseboy, and more minutes than he had anticipated had been taken up in the search for names on stones. A little of his certainty was gone as he pushed open the store-room door - and the image of his wife danced before him, as it had all the time in the cemetery, and what she had done to him.

The man sat on the plastic seat of a chair.

He looked up.

There was a calmness about him, a presence. Timo Rahman saw it, recognized it. The man put his hand on the table, on which lay a cleaned plate and half-full plastic water-bottle and pushed himself to his feet.

The face of a man short of confidence would have cracked, Timo knew, with relief, but this one did not.

The man bowed his head gravely - not in deference but in a gesture of courtesy to an equal. Timo introduced himself, murmured his name, but was not given a response. Instead, the man moved the half-pace forward and kissed his cheeks. Questions were asked softly, without preamble.

When would he move on? Soon, one day or two.

Was the transport in place? Arriving, about to start its journey.

Was the transport secure? As secure as was possible.

A lesson Timo Rahman had learned over many

years was that conversation, idle and unnecessary, between men of stature was beneath dignity. He said that bedding would be provided, that the location provided safety and secrecy. Nothing more.

He left the man, and the Bear closed the door. Then he saw the mouseboy's gaping eyes, and his sleeve was pulled.

'Is that him?'

No man snatched the sleeve of Timo Rahman's

shirt. His life was myriad compartments, each sealed from the other, each carried in his mind. Behind him, the door had closed on a compartment and another replaced it. The new compartment was his wife, his home, an intruder, a lover . . . For a flashed moment there was a blurred line between the compartments.

He squeezed hard on Ricky Capel's hand, held it in his tightening fist, removed it from his sleeve, then let it drop. He thought then that the mouseboy was too stupid to recognize that anger.

'It is.'

'We're bringing the boat over for that one man?'

'He, that man.'

'What is he? An Arab?'

'He is the passenger on your boat.'

'We're talking big money - he doesn't look big money.'

'I am paid to move him, as you will be.'

He started to walk away down the aisle of the warehouse, and ahead of him were the swing doors to the corridor and the offices of Administration, Sales and Accounts. Again the fingers, because the mouseboy was stupid, held him - at the wrist, where the gold-chain bracelet was.

'What I'm asking, Mr Rahman, who is he?'

'You need to know nothing of him, you have only to transport him.'

'For you, Mr Rahman, I move a gang of girls, get them to Enver, or a lorry full of Chinese, Kurds, whatever . . . but one Arab, a boat coming for one man, that's different.'

'You will do what you are paid to do.' Timo softened his voice, the better to hide his anger. 'It is not a difficulty.'

'I'll tell you why it's different. He's a scumbag, not a businessman - not anything normal that I move for you. Why's he so important that we're not taking him through Dover or Harwich? Why's he not going into Heathrow or Manchester? Why's he got a bloody boat coming just for him? An Arab, dressed like a wreck, I know why he's important.'

'It does not concern you, Ricky.'

Like a fly that flew at his ear, the pitch was more shrill. 'A packet, no problem. A packet and you've no problem with me, money on the nail. Good dealing between us. This, Mr Rahman, is out of order. You saw those headstones this morning, I saw them, laid flowers for them. It's my country. An Arab, can't go through an airport or a ferryport, has to have a boat sent to bring him - you think I'm a right fool, Mr Rahman? That scumbag's a terrorist. I don't want to know, not about shifting a terrorist.'

He pushed open the swing doors into the corridor.

It was the skill of Timo Rahman, the core of his success as he believed it, that problems were anticipated and fall-back positions were in place. He swung his arm, like a friend, round the mouseboy's shoulders - could have kicked him, there, half to death - could have broken his neck with the heel of his hand.

Said quietly, 'I ask nothing of you, Ricky, that you are not at ease with. I do not pressure you, but I listen to you. We are comrades, Ricky.'

'As long as that's understood.'

'Everything is understood.'

They went out into the rain, and all the time Timo Rahman's arm was, like a friend's, round Ricky Capel's shoulders.

He thought she had waited with patience for the story to run its course. Malachy ploughed on to its end. 'I didn't have petrol. Didn't have a weapon - didn't have a plan. I was just driven forward. I went right up to the house ...'

The yawn split her face.

.. and they were talking about a shipment. Drugs, I suppose.'

She stifled it, but the yawn's last heave muffled her voice. 'I think I'm there . . . I'm sorry, Malachy, for what happened to you but it's not my corner to stand in.' 'Drugs movements, they don't interest you?'

'I don't do drugs - half a hundred agencies do, but it's not why I'm here.'

'They're going to ship them out from an island - it's called Baltrum, don't know where it is. I'll find a map.

They've a boat coming.'

'You go careful.'

'It's the finish of the road for me. I reckon there I can screw the man - the importer - and then I'm about through with it.'

'Will you have gone far enough along the road?'

'Don't know, to be honest with you, don't know whether it is.' He said weakly, 'I think it's all I have.'

'Well, I'll be getting along,' she said brusquely, and she stood and looked down at him. 'If you reckon that buggering up one shipment of heroin or cocaine is the dog's bollocks I'll not argue with you. What does that add up to? A tenth of one per cent of the capital's supply for a month? About that? You tell yourself that you've made a difference and get back to the real world, Malachy. Good luck.'

She walked away.

He watched her as she slipped to the path and the heaviness of her sodden coat seemed to bow her. She walked on the carpet of fallen blossom and through the puddles, and the wind threw back her hair. He thought the roughness of her last words was a veneer: she, too, was fragile. He sensed that, at the last, frustration had spilled through her. She had given him most of a day, had brought him out of a police cell, had snatched him away from the home of Timo

Rahman, and her reward had been a mumbled

location for a transfer of drugs. Peering after her, on his feet, he saw her as a diminishing figure under the prison wall at the boundary of the gardens. Yes, as vulnerable as him - and he felt her tongue and the warmth of her.
I don't do drugs.
Her time with him had been wasted, and before he finally lost sight of her, her stride had lengthened - and then she was gone.

He went to find a map that would tell him where the island was.

He walked and could have dropped. Without the strength and tread of his shoes, he would long ago have stopped and sunk down to a bench beside a pavement. He had a sandwich in him, sausage and chilli, and the bulk of a map bulged his hip pocket. He had gone east from the city.

Behind him were the proud places of the city, and its shamed corners - the outer and inner Alster lakes, the
Rathaus,
the New City and the Old City, the warehouse quarter and the former docks where cranes now lifted building materials for apartment blocks, over bridges and alongside canals, and through satellite communities housed in high towers, under
autobahn
routes using threatening pedestrian tunnels.

But at Kirchsteinbek, with the map unfolded and his finger tracing the route, he turned south - and he thought the danger of the city receded. Ahead of him now were scattered villages, small towns and fields, drainage channels excavated geometrically across them. The map guided him.

Bare poplar trees, tops bent in the wind, made aisles for him along straight roads. He passed a modern gaol wall, set back on his left, and the light had gone down enough for the arc-lights to shine out brilliantly. The map told him that soon he would swing his course to the west. There was a memorial stone set in the grass short of the prison perimeter but his eyes were too exhausted and his attention too dulled for him to read its inscription. In the growing darkness, beyond the gaol, a track led to low buildings, and beside the road, set among the poplars, was the sign: KZ -

Gedenkstatte Neuengamme, and below it was a second sign directing visitors to a museum and

exhibition centre. Before the prison there had been traffic on the straight, endless road, but none after it.

The buildings, what remained of a concentration camp, seemed isolated. Malachy went faster,

struggled to lengthen his step, and his shoes stamped out on the road's Tarmac. He wondered who came here, and why. Were there still lessons for learning?

Hallucinations delved in his mind. Did men in vertical striped pyjama suits, which hung on fleshless bodies, watch the tramp of a lone figure on the road?

Did he smell the smoke that curled from a high brick chimney? Did he hear the trap of a gallows sprung, and the rattle of shots? If he could have run he would have. He did not have it in his limbs to hurry and the sights and sounds of the fantasy played in him till he was far beyond the shadows of the place.

Malachy Kitchen lived. Ghosts had died there -

starved and died, fallen from exhaustion at a work site and died, had been dragged to a noose and had died, or had been forced down to kneel in a grave pit and had died. He saw no self-pity and heard no cry for mercy.

He lived.

Far away, behind his back, was the evening glow of a city with orange light bouncing off low clouds, where men searched for him.

At the end of the road was the Elbe river and a bridge. Across it was a bus shelter where two elderly ladies waited. They eyed him with acute suspicion.

The stubble was on his face, his clothes hung wet on his body, his breath came in pants and he sagged down on to a seat beside them. They shifted from him as far as was possible and held their handbags tight in their gloved fists. He thought of the young woman who, to save him, had kissed his mouth, and he thought of the last young woman he had tried to kiss: she had turned away from him, flinched from him.