(2005) Rat Run

by Gerald Seymour

  Without ceremony, Gloria retrieved the file from the carpet. He asked her, not looking up, if she would be so kind as to cancel dinner that night with the deputy director general - a merciful relief but the excuse was cast iron - and to ring Roman Archaeology (Fourth Century) at the British Museum and postpone with apologies his lunch date for the next day. The second set of photographs was more problematic: a face at the end of a telephoto image, grained and difficult, and the same face half masked by a pair of pocket binoculars, then a second face behind it but in shadow and indistinct.

  Almost with reluctance, as if it were a distraction, he reached for his telephone. He dialled internally, was connected to the assistant deputy director's aide and asked - steel in his voice, not for negotiation - for an appointment, soonest, like in five minutes. Gloria hovered. Would she, please, signal Wilco with his congratulations and thanks.

  Tie straightened, waistcoat fastened, jacket on, files scooped up and tucked under his arm, he headed for the top floor and the ADD's eyrie.

  The assistant deputy director was Gilbert. His office was at the start of the corridor leading from the lift.

  Promotion, for which Gilbert strove, would take him further down the corridor and ultimately to the double doors and the suite of rooms at the end.

  Gilbert had survived the earthquake that had destroyed careers in Weapons of Mass Destruction.

  He had presided over the dismantling of the desk and the shuffling away to side eddies of the victims. He was always guiltily awkward in Frederick Gaunt's company. Yet Gaunt's approach to him was one of magnanimity and scrupulous deference, with the intention of exacerbating the guilt.

  'It is Muhammad Iyad, that is confirmed.

  Muhammad Iyad is a bodyguard, a minder. He

  watches the backs of principals and moves them in safety. That he set up this flawed chain of messages to get a gift to his wife, and then to hear back from her of its safe arrival is - and with your experience you'll know this better than me - quite extraordinary. In the past he has escorted high-value targets into and out of Afghanistan, into and out of Saudi Arabia, et cetera, et cetera . . . You know all that, of course you do. Now -

  and it is a present from heaven to us - we have him in Prague. I venture, and I'd appreciate your opinion on this, that he is currently bringing an HVT into western Europe. I would hazard that such a high-value target, an individual of such importance that Muhammad Iyad has been given responsibility for him, would be a co-ordinator, not a foot-soldier or a bomb-layer, not even a recruiter. What I think we're looking at - and I hope you'll feel able to confirm my thought - is an Albanian-organized rat run for al-Qaeda. Isn't that the phrase all the suburbanites bitch about? Use of side-streets, alleys, lanes for the school run. In this case, the rat run avoids all but the remotest border crossings, only goes where there is least scrutiny. Anyone being brought through, with that degree of effort, can only be an HVT. I guess that we're looking at a co-ordinator. There's a face here . . . '

  He shuffled the photographs on the ADD's desk, then laid on top of them the sequence showing the minder with the binoculars and the blurred, indistinct image of the partially hidden face behind.

  'I suggest that there is our co-ordinator, and - if you agree - I'd like to run it through the boffins. This evening, our friendly Czech sisters will arrest Iyad and this unidentified man, and Polly Wilkins will be on hand to fight our corner. They're bottled up - the BIS are only waiting for darkness. It should be quite a coup, Gilbert. You'll smell - deservedly - of roses.

  You'll be toasted in Langley - the Americans are outside the loop at the moment - when we care to announce it, with trumpets.'

  He was going out carrying his files, was at the door.

  'May I say, Freddie, that I much admire your attitude - you know, to life, so very professional.'

  'Thank you. Kind words are always appreciated.'

  A blurt. 'I was very sad at what happened to you. I moved mountains to block it but was overruled from on high. It wasn't me . . . '

  'Never thought it was, Gilbert. I'm grateful for your friendship. A co-ordinator will be a good catch, and he'll be all yours.'

  He strode off down the corridor towards the lift. It was said throughout the lower floors of Vauxhall Bridge Cross that the assistant deputy director had saved himself only by an excess of brown-nosed diligence - but it made Frederick Gaunt happier to hear the cretin squirm. But true happiness would be the capture of a co-ordinator and the breaking of a rat run.

  He stood naked in front of the wardrobe and sang to himself a song of the mountains, a fighting man's song. His fingers ran over the material of the suit jackets hanging in front of him. His voice reached a crescendo as he made his choice. There were ten suits from which Timo Rahman could select the one he would wear, and twenty ironed and folded shirts were in the wardrobe drawers; on the rail inside the left door were forty ties. At his father's knee he had first learned the words of the song and the lilt of its tune.

  The suit he took from its hanger was expensive but not ostentatiously priced in the shop overlooking the waters and the needle fountain of the Inner Alster.

  The shirt had been bought for him by Alicia in the Monckebergstrasse, where she liked to go, where the Bear accompanied her. The tie had been a present from the girls for his last birthday, his fifty-third. What he would wear that evening had quiet class, he thought, but would not have cost as much as what would be worn by any of the three men who would entertain him for the concert and then for business over a late dinner. They were bankers: they could show the finery and demonstrate the wealth of their profession . . . Timo Rahman, and it was the basic rule of his life, never courted attention. The mirror, on the right door of the wardrobe, as his song died from its peak, reflected his body. In the flesh at the side of his chest was a puckered, still angry scar, the width of a pencil, the result of a .22-calibre bullet. On his muscled belly, near his navel, was a second scar, five centimetres in length, where a knife had slashed but had not penetrated the stomach wall. That evening the bankers would see neither the bullet nor the knife wound. They were from many years back. It was eighteen years since Timo Rahman had left his father, left the mountains north of Lake Shkodra, and had been one more Albanian making the trek to the German city of Hamburg in search of success. He had found it. The evidence of it was that he would be the guest of three bankers for a concert at the City Hall and would be taken to the Fischerhaus, a private room, for dinner, where they would scrabble for his investment cash. The days when he had fought were long past. Success was his.

  Timo Rahman was the pate of Hamburg. At police headquarters, far out to the north of the city at Bruno-Georges-Platz 1, they would refuse to accept the presence of a godfather in the city. But he ruled it: the city was his.

  As he dressed, the girls came to him, brought by their mother. They chattered to him of their day at school, in Blankenese, and what they would be doing the next day. They could have walked to school from the villa, but that argument was long over. They did not walk the five hundred metres to the school with their friends: they were driven by the Bear. It was his rule, and beyond dispute. Their mother, Alicia, knew it but the girls did not. A man of Timo Rahman's prominence in the world of organized crime had many enemies. They drove to school, and the Bear was always armed - and the pistol, listed as being for target practice, was legally held.

  The girls had holidayed in Albania, his country and Alicia's, but they would grow up as Germans

  and would know nothing of the source of their loving father's wealth. They chattered about school outings, sports events and music lessons. He was straightening his tie, listening to them and indulging them, and he turned.

  Both the girls had their backs to the picture on the dressing-room wall.

  They never noticed it now, had not spoken of it since they were small.

  He looked past them, listening to them but without attention. Timo Rahman could have bought any painting in any gallery in the city of Ha
mburg. Financially, no work of art, oils or watercolour, was beyond him.

  On the wall behind the girls, in his dressing room, was the picture of which he was most proud. Once black and white, now sepia-tinted, with little tears at the sides and a line across it diagonally where it had once been crudely folded, it had written on it in faded writing in the English language: 'For Mehmet Rahman, A worthy comrade in arms and a most loyal friend, Affectionately, Hugo Anstruther. (Lake Shkodra, April 1945)'. It showed a hillside and a cave and in the foreground was a smoking fire with a cooking tin on it. Three men sat cross-legged near the fire.

  Anstruther was the tallest, head and shoulders above Mehmet, Timo's father, and the squat, cheerful little man who was Percy Capel. Behind, nearer to the cave's entrance, were five of his father's followers, all draped with ammunition belts and proudly displaying the weapons dropped for them. On the day of his father's burial, near to that cave, his mother had given Timo Rahman the picture from his father's bedroom.

  It was still in the plastic frame, bought in Shkodra fifty years before. It was an icon for him, and his daughters never spoke of it, as if the privilege of youth in Blankenese, in the villa up the dead-end private road, in Hamburg, had erased any interest in it.

  Each time he sang that song he thought of his father and gazed at the valued photograph. And the link lived on . . . but he had no time that evening to reflect on it.

  Timo Rahman kissed the girls, told Alicia - not that it was her business - he would be late back.

  The Bear, who would have died for him, drove him into the city.

  'No, no, don't turn your back on me. I want to know.

  How did you twist him?'

  She was Tony Johnson's wife. Every senior officer at the National Crime Squad said she had had a better future than him, would at least have made inspector and might have gone as high as commander. But she'd jacked it in and now worked in an antiques shop and said it had taken years off her, getting out.

  'Come on, come on. Spit it out.'

  When he had come back last night she had been asleep, and had still been asleep when he had gone to work that morning. He'd done the day, then a crash conference had been called without notice in the evening on his specialist work area, organized-immigration crime. He hadn't had the car with him, and a points failure had held up the trains. They were in bed and he was desperate for sleep . . . No way he could treat her as Need To Know; if she hadn't packed it in he'd have been calling her 'ma'am' by now. She knew everything he did about the life and times of Malachy Kitchen. He told her what he'd said in the parking area.

  'You never had a mate who fell through a roof and did his spine.'

  He shrugged.

  'You've never told me you'd been to Stoke

  Mandeville hospital - have you?'

  He shook his head.

  'You invented the whole bloody thing - right?'

  He nodded.

  'Is he up for it? They're vicious little creatures. What is it they're called? Yes, right scumbags and you told me - the High Fly Boys. They'll be fine for a start. Can he do the business?'

  He kissed her, reached over and switched off the light on her side, then swung himself away from her.

  'All right, I haven't seen Millie and you have. But this is heavy stuff. I only hope you're comfortable with i t . . . '

  The High Fly Boys ruled that corner of the estate.

  Their territory was blocks eight, nine, ten and eleven.

  The Rough Track Boys had different ground, over towards the Old Kent Road, and the Young Walworth Boys had the blocks on the west side of the

  Amersham. The High Fly Boys kept to their own patch, which had fair pickings, and if there were no sales they could smash in a car window for its radio, or run keys down its side, then demand cash for its future protection, or break any sheet of glass that was not reinforced with mesh, or jostle a mother with her pram. The police never caught them. No one on the estate ever dared to inform on them. They ran free.

  They pushed wraps of brown. They bought from the Amersham's main dealer, sold on to the vagrants, took their share and strutted the streets, alleys and walkways of the part of the estate that was theirs.

  Their uniform, shoplifted or gained by threats from a store manager who didn't need hassle, was a sleek leisure suit, Adidas or Nike trainers that were top of the range, gold chains, and they talked a code patois that coppers couldn't crack. Each, in the High Fly Boys, had his own tag.

  Danny Morris's was Cisco. He was mixed race, from a one-night stand between a white American USAF technician and his West Indian mother. He led the High Fly Boys. He rode a £550 mountain bike, stolen. If there was war he had access to a pistol, hired by the twenty-four hours. If it was normal he carried a switchblade knife. He had no fear of what police or the courts could do to him. He could barely read, but knew the telephone number of a solicitor, and understood enough arithmetic to work out his cut from what he sold. He knew by heart all of the regulations governing stop-and-search by police officers, all of the custody legislation. A probation officer had once told him he was 'arrogant and in denial of your unacceptable behaviour', and he had spat in the man's face. He was eighteen years old and had no comprehension of the next week's horizon. He took a pitch, each evening, near the door of the Pensioners' Association and waited for instructions from the dealer on the night's trading.

  Already there, his bike against the wall, was Leroy Gates. Leroy's tag was Younger Cisco. His ethnic mix was Italian father, whereabouts unknown, and West Indian mother. He was sixteen, could neither read nor write, and stammered when stressed. Excluded from mainstream education at fourteen, after four suspensions, he was classified in a confidential social-services report as 'effectively outside parental and institutional control and . . . locked in a culture of despair, he refuses to believe that worthwhile opportunities other than petty criminality are open to him'.

  His angelic face and sad eyes were hidden by a ski mask when he thieved. He was the hard one of the gang.

  Last to the corner by the Pensioners' Association doorway, shuttered and locked, was Wilbur Sansom, aged fifteen, with the tag Younger Younger Cisco in the identifying style of the gangs roaming the estate. It was probable, from the colour of his skin and the structure of his face bones, that he was of north African and Arabic origin; it was not known. At a few weeks old, he had been dumped in a telephone box in Deptford, then fostered. For the courts, and in the past for school registers, he had the family name of the proxy parents, Sansom; his first name had been allocated to him by a nurse at the hospital he had been brought to from the telephone box. He was a disappointment to teachers, foster-parents, police and social workers. Younger Younger Cisco - he would not answer to anything else - could read well and write with a strong hand. A child psychiatrist had rated him as having above average intelligence. He was slight in build, and seemingly unthreatening, so the Sansoms had given him a mobile phone for his fourteenth birthday, so that he would feel more secure when he was crossing the estate to and from school or the youth club.

  The Rough Track Boys had beaten him more than was necessary to steal his phone. It had been replaced by his foster-parents, but within a week he had come home, mouth bleeding, without the second phone, courtesy of the Young Walworth Boys. He had offered himself to Cisco's gang for protection. As a visible member of the High Fly Boys he was no longer a target for violence. He never went to school, was known to the police, had collected four court cautions and was threatened next with an Antisocial Behaviour Order. He cared nothing. With his gang he was safe. His value to Cisco and Younger Cisco was simple. He could read the instructions written on cigarette paper by the dealer for pick-ups and drop-offs; he was their eyes.

  Later, as the night closed down on the Amersham, they would move to a black hole in a fence behind which block eight's big rubbish containers were stored, and shadowy figures would flit towards them

  - the vagrants they despised, clutching money and ready to buy. Everyone
who wanted wraps and craved brown knew where to find them. For the three teenagers it was a night the same as any other, and cold rain spattered the shoulders of their leisure suits as they waited for the early buyers.

  It was like the first steps on an ice-covered pond.

  Malachy laid out in front of him what he had bought: rope from the hardware shop on Walworth Road and a penknife to cut it, parcel-binding tape from the stationer's in the side-street off the market, and a plastic toy from a stall. He also had the clothes from the bin-liner that had been under the bed.

  He checked the purchases and the clothing, as he had before. It might have been kit and weapons for an exercise on Salisbury Plain, the Northumbrian moors or a patrol in a sprawling Iraqi village. He went through each stage of the plan that had fastened in his mind.

  He could rely on what he had seen done.

  He had been at the depot for recruits, a week short of the end of fifty-six days' Basic Training. Before he had left home, his father had told him, 'You're pig stupid to have gone this route. I wash my hands of you. All I can say is, remember that a lion pride rejects a weak cub. Drop short of your platoon's standards and the rest of them will be merciless. The private soldier turns into a ruthless thug when punished collectively for the failure of one of their number . . .

  but it's your choice.' He'd gone. No letters from the retired brigadier, and none written to him or to Malachy's mother. One recruit was useless - should have gone for premature voluntary release - but hadn't quit. That recruit had been half dragged and half carried, in full kit, on the half-mile road run. He had been covered-for when he had lost his beret. His final act had been the making of his barrack-room bed: wrinkles in the hospital corners of the blanket.

  An officer doing the inspection with the platoon sergeant had commented on it snidely. After escorting the officer out of the barracks room, the sergeant had come back and gone nose to nose with that recruit and had bollocked him with a spittle-dense volley of obscenities, then barked the punishment: the sergeant had been shown up in front of the officer and had gone for the top-heavy punishment, collective. The platoon was 'confined to barracks' for five days, with extra duties and doubled inspections. Malachy had stood at the back, not spoken, not intervened and had not taken part when the platoon took its revenge on that recruit. In flat thirteen, on block nine of the Amersham, he remembered the revenge of the platoon.