Rat Run

by Gerald Seymour

  Of course he would join the army: his small act of rebellion, and it had taken bottle, was to decide – himself – when and where. And then the puce-faced, spluttering reaction of his father when he announced that he'd enlisted, that afternoon, and been passed through by a Birmingham recruitment office, to be a private soldier and bottom of the heap. 'Silly little bugger,' Walter had called him, and Araminta had said quietly to her husband, 'Not to worry, darling. It never lasts when middle-class boys go slumming it.'

  All the sounds, that evening, of the estate had wafted up to his room: music and screams, the wail of the sirens, then the intermittent flashes of blue emergency lights.

  The memories came round as if in a loop, as they always did. He was in childhood, father away and mother out. Too awake to sleep. No escape possible.

  He heard the stampede of feet, the thud of them, then the hammering on his door.

  Malachy felt the fear catch his body He crawled away across the floor towards the far wall. The beating on the door was ever more insistent, and there was the cry of Dawn's voice.

  It came in a torrent when he finally opened the door. If he had interrupted, it would not have halted her. She was in her night clothes. No slippers on her feet. Incoherent and with tears welling.

  'It's Millie… What happened to Millie? Do you not know? The bingo. She went. I got flu. I can't go to the bingo. I tell her. I say to get you to walk her, or not go.

  Did she get you? She went on her own. I told her not to. Nobody ever goes to bingo alone and comes back alone. She did. They got her, the vagrants got her.

  She's mugged. You know what she has in her bag? She never has more than five pounds, that is before the bingo starts. They went for her bag. After the bingo and a cup of tea there would be two pounds only. She didn't give it. She hung on to it for two pounds. They dragged her. She fell. She is an old lady. She hit her head, and then they took her bag.'

  He rocked, felt himself cringe. He did not say what her nephew's opinion of him was: a loser and a failure. Malachy could not tell her that Mildred Johnson would not have asked him to walk her to and from bingo because he had said that a story of a catastrophe was nobody's business but his, that he was the last man from whom the proud, obstinate little lady would have begged a favour.

  'She's in the hospital. The police had found her bag, without two pounds. In the bag is my name and my flat number. In my bag is her name and her number. I cried when the police told me… Why, Mr Malachy, did she not call you to take her and to bring her back?

  Why? You were her friend. Why did she not ask you?'

  Chapter Two

  'How is she?'

  The nurse looked up. She had been hovering over the bed. 'Are you a relative?'

  'No – no, I'm not. Just a friend.' Malachy held the flowers beside his leg and the water off them ran down his trousers.

  'How close a friend?'

  'I live next door to Mrs Johnson.' He was supposed to have been, once, an expert in interrogation. With the tables turned, now, the questioning unsettled him.

  He shuffled his feet. The nurse's body blocked his view of Millie. It was the furthest he had been away from the Amersham since he had come to live there the previous autumn. It had been a big journey for him to get to the sprawled complex of St Thomas's Hospital. That morning, Dawn had come again to his door. She must have been on her way home after the early cleaning shift in Whitehall. He had thought of Millie, and the guilt had seared him.

  'I suppose that'll do… ' The nurse had a freckled face and bags under her eyes, seemed half asleep with tiredness and spoke with an accent that was west of Ireland. 'She was knocked out. We thought about Intensive Care but there wasn't a bed. She got the best we could give her, but it wasn't IC, with pulse, blood pressure and pupils checks every half-hour, and we didn't think there was inter-cranial bleeding… That's why she's in General Medical. So, it's serious bruising to the head and a broken arm – not a complicated break. Always the same with the old folk – they hang on and don't let the bag go. Silly, but that's them for you.'

  The nurse moved, started to smooth down the bed.

  Millie, to him, looked so small. She was half sat up against a pile of pillows. She wore a loose-fitting smock, several sizes too large for her. Her face, usually proud, independent and haughty, was a coloured mass of bruises, and the right side of her grey hair had been shaved away above the ear. He could see the two-inch-long gash with the stitches in it. Her right arm was across her small chest, enveloped in a sling.

  She seemed to stare at him, baleful and defensive. He did not know whether he was recognized, if that was the stare she gave to anyone approaching her bed. The nurse slipped a thermometer into her mouth, which was puffed, with distorted lips.

  'She'll be in two or three days, because she lives alone and there's no one to look after her. Problem is that we might ship her out today, and if she starts vomiting or goes to sleep, we've an inquiry to worry about. When the swelling's down on the arm it'll be pinned or plated – and she'll have to manage. That's the way it is, these days.'

  'There's a friend next door to her, a good lady. She'll be there.'

  'And you said you were a neighbour.' The nurse put down the thermometer, then fixed Malachy with her eye. 'I expect you'll give her a hand – or do you go to work?'

  'I'll do what I can,' he murmured. 'I don't suppose you have a vase?'

  He had gone to the East Street market. He had considered how much he could spend. The benefit he was entitled to, after deductions, left him with eighty pounds to last for two weeks. Divided up that gave him spending money of five pounds and seventy-one pence each day. He had asked the woman on the flower stall for the best she could do with five pounds.

  It was a good display of bright chrysanthemums that he had brought to the hospital.

  The nurse reached to the bottom cupboard of the cabinet beside the bed and took out a man's urine-sample bottle, grinned, filled it with water from the basin, and took the flowers from Malachy. As if she'd made the judgement that he wasn't capable of flower-arranging, she did it for him and settled the stems in the bottle. 'The vases all get nicked,' she said. 'It's the best I can manage. Don't stay too long. You shouldn't tire her.' She left him.

  Malachy sat on the end of the bed beside the little bump her feet made. He did not know what to say, or whether it was right to say anything. He tried to smile encouragement. She had turned her battered head enough to see the flowers. He felt his inadequacy.

  When he was with the dossers, sleeping in the underpass on and under cardboard, drinking with what he had made from begging, and knowing he could not fall further, he had not felt this low. The silence nagged between them.

  Maybe an hour passed. She slept and he sat dead still so as not to wake her.

  The question cracked in his ear. Brusque. 'What's a piece of shit like you doing here?'

  The nephew was behind him. He carried a large, varied bouquet in one hand and a clear plastic bag in the other, packed with apples, pears, bananas, peaches, a pineapple and grapes.

  'Why are you here?'

  He was shivering. His whisper was a chatter in his teeth: 'I came to see if I could help.'

  'Oh, that's good, "help". Didn't "help" enough to walk her there and back – no, no.'

  Malachy stammered, 'She didn't ask me. If she'd asked me… '

  'No fool, Aunt Millie. Wouldn't have reckoned you up to it, walking her there and back.'

  'She didn't ask.'

  'You came down from a great height – right? Hit the bottom – right? I know who you were and what you did. I know what they called you. Fancy phrases from the medics, but the truth from the jocks. I know.'

  His head drooped into his hands. He sensed the nephew go past him and he heard the kiss placed on Millie's forehead, would have been where the bruises were. More sounds. The splash of water, then the thud in the tin waste-bin, the crackle of the Cellophane wrapping on the bouquet.

  He kept his hands tight on hi
s face, could feel the stubble on his palms.

  'What I don't know, my friend, my little piece of shit, is where you're going. Are you going to go on failing? That's easy, isn't it? I don't know if the only road you're comfortable with, my friend, is the easy one… Take your bloody hands off your face. Look at her! Does that take guts, looking at an old lady who's been done over for her purse? Look at her and remember her.'

  He did. He saw the slightness of her and the bruises in their mass of colours, the thin upper arm in its sling. And he saw the stems of his flowers upside down in the bin, and the glory of the bouquet on the cabinet. He pushed himself up from the bed and turned for the aisle that ran through the ward.

  'There's an easy road and a hard one – most, when they've fallen like you have, take the easy one.'

  Out of the hospital, he walked on the embankment.

  The river seemed sour and dirtied. Rain ran down his face, was not wiped away. He walked on and did not know where, walked until a massive cream and green building – an architect's dream – blocked his path.

  Then, he turned, retraced his steps and headed back to the Amersham where he could hide behind a door that was locked and bolted.

  Had Frederick Gaunt looked out through his fifth-floor window, reinforced and chemically treated glass that could withstand bomb blast and electronic eavesdropping, he would have seen a man walk on the Albert Embankment towards the wall that blocked further progress to the building where he worked, then loiter and drift away. But there was more on Gaunt's mind that lunchtime than the aimless advance and retreat of another of the capital's work-shy low-life – that would have been his description if he had seen the loafer. His sandwiches were untouched and his bottle of mineral water unopened.

  Gaunt's room in Vauxhall Bridge Cross, the monolith occupied by the Secret Intelligence Service, was in an isolated corner of the building. Nominally, eight per cent of the Service's budget was devoted to the investigation of organized crime, but the resources made available to this section of the fifth floor's open-plan areas, cubicles and rooms had been pared down to meet the demands of Iraq and the burgeoning al-Qaeda desks. Gaunt did Albania. On another man's back it would have been a hairshirt, an irritation that required continued scratching without relief, but he knew the way the system worked and would have reckoned bloody-minded sulking to be vulgar.

  The lunch was uneaten and the water undrunk.

  Little that normally landed on his desk, dumped without ceremony by Gloria, required more than dutiful attention. Albania's organized crime was the trafficking of narcotics, firearms and people. His CX reports were carefully crafted, always readable, and painted a clear picture of a society wedded with enthusiasm to criminality. Most could have been drafted when he was half asleep – not the one that now turned in his mind.

  'You haven't touched them – you have to eat.'

  Gloria put down a further file on his desk, already crowded with seven paper heaps. 'No breakfast, no lunch, and I'll wager nothing proper last night.'

  He grimaced. She scolded because she cared about him. The first of the files had arrived the previous morning and the heap had built through the day. Most of the pages now referred to telephone traces sucked down by the farm of dishes on the Yorkshire moors.

  Once he had been on the cusp of the Service's investigations – before he was moved aside: a victim of the Service's need to produce scapegoats after its greatest ever, and most humiliating, intelligence failure. Now he was again at the centre. Little, irrelevant, corrupt, fourth-world Albania was top of the tree. He chortled to himself. He had been at his desk till ten o'clock last night, back in at a few minutes after five that morning, and would be there that evening long after the day shifts had finished.

  'I really do insist that you eat.'

  It had been the day when al-Qaeda came to Albania: what he had lived and dreamed for. He thought they must have almost forgotten, down on the AQ desks, that Frederick Gaunt still inhabited a little corner of their space. A link was made – and he'd have admitted it was a tortuous one – between the kings of the terrorist war and the barons of European criminality. Happy days, happy times.

  'Please, Mr Gaunt – please, eat something.'

  'What never ceases to amaze me, Gloria, is that they still use the old telephone. God, will they never learn?'

  One file listed an address in the city of Quetta in west-central Pakistan, in the foothills of the mountains that straddled the Afghan border – probably close to where the venerable Osama was holed up in a damp cave – with an estimated population of 200,000, and among them was Farida, wife of Muhammad Iyad: listed occupation, bodyguard. She lived there with the kids, but he was long gone.

  The second file was of the life and times of Muhammad Iyad: more important, whom he guarded, all choice items.

  The third file comprised a security report from Islamabad of a surveillance team's witnessing of a gift-wrapped parcel being hand-delivered to the house. Included were black-and-white still-frame images of her showing her mother a gold chain necklace. Anyone close to her would have passed the gift to her in person. Who other than a husband in hiding somewhere would have sent a married woman an expensive present? Records, attached, showed it to have been her wedding anniversary when she received the gift.

  The fourth file listed a telephone call made on the landline from the house to a number in Dubai, in the Gulf. The transcript of the brief call listed, no names, her 'love, gratitude and always my prayers'.

  The fifth file was slim. The only overseas call made from the Dubai number – no transcript provided – was to a satellite phone in southern Lebanon.

  The sixth file, again a single sheet of flimsy paper and again no transcript, recorded a call from the satellite phone located inland from the city of Sidon to a number in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic.

  The seventh file, courtesy of the BIS in the city, identified a message received in Prague on a number that was tapped. The transcript was one line: 'Gift received. Love, gratitude and always my prayers.' The number in Prague to which the message had been sent was monitored because it was used by an Albanian national, believed involved in the organized-crime racket of moving Romanian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian girls to northern Europe for prostitution. The warmth of his smile spread because Wilco's signature was on the cover note.

  In front of him now, brought to him by his faithful PA – and he'd have sworn she had the same caring eyes as her spaniel – was Wilco's latest message. The Albanian was a cafe owner and prosperous. Records showed he also owned a third-floor apartment in the Old Quarter of Prague, and the unpronounceable name of a street was listed. He began to wolf his sandwich, gulping it down, then swilling his mouth with the water. 'Satisfied?'

  'It's only you I'm thinking of, Mr Gaunt.'

  She could have called him Frederick or Freddie – she had been with the Service for twenty years, fifteen of them running his desk at home and abroad – but she was never familiar. Without her, his professional life as a senior intelligence officer would have been so much the poorer. He said, 'I'm going off to see the ADD, dear Gilbert, to tell him I want to run with this.

  Meantime, message Wilco that I'm controlling it, and all signals come to me, please.'

  He was up and scraping sandwich detritus from his shirt, then buttoning his waistcoat, reaching for his suit jacket from the hanger.

  'Shouldn't I wait till you've received the Assistant Deputy Director's confirmation?' She seemed to tease.

  'Take it as read. They're all callow youths and girls on AQ (Central Europe). He'll be glad to give it to someone who knows his butt from his arm. Oh, and say something nice to Wilco.'

  He strode away, noisy on steel-heeled shoes.

  Terrorists in bed with criminals made for formidable copulation.

  He walked up the street with a plastic bag dangling heavy from his hand. It was the last time that Muhammad Iyad, the bodyguard, would need to collect food from the halal butcher in the market behind the Old
Town Square, salad vegetables and bread. By the following evening they would have started on another stage of the journey.

  Because this was his work and why he was respected, he tried to be as clear-headed and alert as his reputation demanded. Among the few who knew him, it was said that he was the most suspicious, most cunning of all the men given the task of minding the precious and highly valued operatives of the Organization. Coming back to the apartment on the top floor of the building in the narrow alley behind Kostecna, Muhammad Iyad used all the techniques that had long become second nature to him.

  Three times between the Old Town Square and

  Kostecna, he had broken the slow ambling pace of his walk, had darted round corners, then stood back flush to the doors at the entrance of old buildings and waited the necessary minute to see whether a tail would come after him. Twice he had stopped in front of women's clothes shops and positioned himself so that the reflection showed the street and both pavements behind him. Once, on Dlouha, at the entrance to the pizzeria, he had abruptly turned on his heel and gone back a hundred metres, a fast stride that would have confused men who followed him, and they would have ducked away, would have shown themselves to him, the expert. From the doorways and shop fronts and by the pizzeria, he had seen only a fog wall of tourists' bodies, local kids, striding office workers and meandering women. But that day, his mind was clouded.