Rat Run

by Gerald Seymour

  He knew the man he guarded as Abu Khaled… but his thoughts were not on him and his security. On pain of death, or on the worse pain of disgrace, he would not have told the man of what he had done while they had travelled and of the reward it had won him. The man did not know that a necklace had been purchased in the gold market of Riyadh. The money to buy it had been from the banker who handled transactions for the Organization. He himself, Muhammad Iyad, had chosen the necklace of thick, high-quality links, and the banker had promised that it would be delivered by courier to the address in Quetta – not by mail because that would have been unreliable and would have endangered his safety. If it had been known what he had done, he would never again have been entrusted with taking a man of importance towards his target. The message had come back to him two days before. 'Gift received. Love, gratitude and always my prayers.' He had rejoiced. The image of her, and the little children, had filled every cranny of his mind. He could see her, touch her, hear her. It had been wrong of him to make the gift – it was against every law laid down by the Organization – but the weakness had come from long years of separation.

  His love of the Organization was shared with his love for his family, for the woman who had borne his children. He did not know when, if ever, he would see her again. The net around the Organization was tighter, more constricting. It seemed at times – worst when he tried to sleep – to suffocate him… so, walking towards the alley behind Kostecna, between narrow streets and old buildings of brick and timber, he attempted to maintain his habitual alertness, but the picture of her, with the necklace he had chosen, competed.

  He was certain of it. He would have sworn to it on the Book. There was no tail.

  Fully focused, as he was not, Muhammad Iyad might have noticed that the no-parking sign at the end of the alley, on Kostecna – which had not been obscured when he had passed it at the start of his shopping trip – was now covered with old sacking bound tight with twine.

  He had been two months with Abu Khaled, moving and minding and watching over him. He had collected him in secrecy from a lodging-house in the Yemen's capital, Sana'a. They had travelled overland, north into Saudi Arabia – the home of the swine who danced to the tune of the Great Satan's whistle – had skirted the desert and gone up the Red Sea coast, then cut back towards the desert interior and into Jordan.

  All of the Organization's planning had been, as always, without flaw. From Jordan into Syria, then Turkey. At each stage safe-houses, transport and documentation had met them. Then across the sea by ferry and to Bulgaria… and the change that had first unsettled Muhammad Iyad.

  They were in the hands of Albanians. The common language was broken English or halting Italian; they were Muslims but without the dedication to the Faith that was his and Abu Khaled's, but those were the arrangements made by the Organization. He could not, and he had tried to, fault them – but he did not trust them. From Bulgaria, via Plovdiv and Sofia, to Romania. Overnight stops in Romania at Brasov and Satu Mare, then into Hungary. More documentation and new cars waited for them at Szeged and Gyor before they had slipped over the frontier and into Slovakia.

  If they had used airports his face and that of Abu Khaled would have been caught on the overhead cameras, and their papers would have been copied and stored; the cameras were dangerous because they could recognize a man's features. Whether he wore spectacles or a beard the computers could identify him. The borders they had crossed were always remote, not the main routes where the Customs men had been trained in techniques by the Crusaders.

  They had come, after sleeping two nights at Prievidza, out of Slovakia and into the Czech Republic and had been taken to a cafe in Prague, then driven to the safe-house, an apartment high in an old building. The word given him, and he could not doubt it, was that with each step towards the destination greater care was required.

  They had been five nights in Prague while the detail of the final stages was finalized. In each car or lorry they had been moved in, under the back wheel in the trunk or stowed behind the seats in the cab, was the black canvas bag that he was never without.

  Against his body, at each border crossing in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey, a snub-nosed pistol, loaded and in a lightweight plastic holster, had gouged into the soft inner flesh of his right thigh. At every stop point his hand had hovered on his lap and his belt had been loosened so that he could reach down for it and shoot. He would never be taken, and it was his duty to ensure that a prized man such as Abu Khaled was not captured alive – too many had been; too many had talked to their interrogators. The first bullets would be for those who questioned them at a border crossing, the last two would be for Abu Khaled and himself.

  Nor did he take note of the green-painted delivery van, cab empty, without side windows, that was parked where every other day it was forbidden to stop by the sign that was now covered.

  The following night they would cross the frontier into Germany, in the hands of the Albanians… The pistol was now in his waistband, at the back, under his jacket and the coat he wore against the cold. At the street door, he swung round, gazed back up the alley.

  No one followed him. No man or woman turned away quickly, or ducked their face to light a cigarette, or snatched a newspaper from a pocket and opened it.

  Cars, without slowing, sped past the green van on Kostecna.

  He went in, closed the door behind him. The next evening they would start the last leg of the journey. It would end far away on a northern coastline, and there he would hug his man, kiss his cheeks and pray that God walked with him… He began to climb the stairs.

  The plaster had flaked from the walls with damp and the light of the alley had been extinguished by the shut street door, but he thought only of his wife…

  The Organization had ordered that he should leave his man, his work done, on that seashore.

  He lived in paradise but it brought him little comfort.

  All his waking hours, worry squirmed perpetually in Oskar.

  As the light failed, the rain off the sea thickened and the wind whipped the white caps behind him, Oskar Netzer sat on the bench in the low watch-tower among the island's dunes. At his back, four or five hundred metres behind the tower's wooden plank wall, was the North Sea. What he studied through the tower's hatch window was a lagoon, a bog of rank water and marsh, reeds and the eiders.

  The island was at the centre of what would have seemed, if seen from a high aircraft, the long-cleaned vertebrae of a great mammal but one that, in the moment of death, had tucked its legs into its body.

  The islands formed an archipelago a few kilometres north of the Frisland coast of Germany. The head of this fallen beast was Borkum island, the base of the skull was Memmert, and Juist was the neck. The shoulders, the largest of the islands, was Norderney.

  Then came a bump on the spine: Baltrum. Baltrum was the jewel. The long backbone continued, broken by a channel between Langeoog and Spiekeroog. The creature's drooped tail was Wangerooge, the tip Minsener Oog. Together they acted as a sea wall that protected the mainland from the worst of the winter storms blowing in off the North Sea. The islands had been created over centuries by the tides and currents pushing together displaced mounds of seabed sand.

  They had shifted continuously, their basic shapes surviving only when the seeds of the tough dune grass had taken root and bound the sand grains together. They had no soil that could be cultivated and the greenery that had sprouted was only the coarse grass, thick low scrub and occasional weather-bent trees. The upper point of all the individual islands was never more than twenty-four metres over the high-tide sea level. The smallest and the most beautiful, Baltrum, was five thousand metres long and a maximum at low water of fifteen hundred wide.

  Baltrum was Oskar Netzer's home.

  He was sixty-nine, and five years ago he had watched his wife's coffin lowered into the sand of the small cemetery in Ost Dorp, overlooking the low-tide mudflats and the mainland, after forty-one years of marriage. He
loved no other human being and was himself unloved by all of the five hundred permanent residents on Baltrum. He was unloved because he struggles, every day and with every breath, to block the march forward that he was told was necessary if the island's community was to survive. He was wiry, without a trace of fat on his stomach. His cheeks, always seeming to carry three days' bristle, were mahogany-coloured from sun, rain and wind. He wore that day – as all days whether the sun baked or the chill wind cut – a pair of faded blue fishermen's overalls and stout walking boots, with the cap, half rotted, of a Frislander on his silver hair.

  A third of his island, his home, was now covered with the little red-brick homes of those who came only in the summer and of those residents who let rooms for the wasp swarms of summer visitors. It was argued by the island's mayor, and the elected council, that visitors needed facilities. Oskar fought each one with passion. The latest, which he would fight that evening at a public meeting, was an application to expand the floor space of an existing Italian-owned fast-food pasta and pizza outlet.

  From the tower, he watched the eider ducks feed in the lagoon, preen and sleep on its banks. They were elegant, peaceable and so vulnerable. Each development, he believed, eroded their place on the island.

  His anger at development burned in him as he sat on the bench and muttered the arguments – not so loud as to disturb the eiders below him – that he would use later against the intrusion of more strangers. The season for visitors would not start till Easter week; there was still a month before they came. The quiet was around him, and the rumble of the sea far behind him. He would fight because without him the island's calm was shorn of defence and he did not care whose march he blocked.

  ***

  The note was on the floor just inside the outer door.

  Malachy had been in the kitchen cooking sausages and chips. Without the TV's noise through the common wall – and his own was not switched on – it had been deathly quiet in flat thirteen with only the whir of the microwave and the bleep of its bell, but he had heard nothing, no footsteps padding along level three's walkway and no rustle of paper as it was inserted between the bottom of the door and the carpet. He had brought in the plate, with the sausages and chips, and put it on the table. As he had pulled out his chair he had seen the note.

  He went to it and bent to pick it up; it was folded in half. His first thought was that it was from Dawn, a report on Mildred Johnson's progress… No, she would have knocked on the door. He lifted it, opened it. Once, handwriting was something he had known about. In the first days at Chicksands, years back, they had spent half a day learning the points to be recognized from handwriting: ill-educated writing, intelligent writing, disguised writing. The hand of this note had formed large, clumsy characters in ballpoint on a sheet from a notepad. The pressure of the point and the size of the letters told Malachy that a right-handed person had written with their left hand.

  Your phone will ring three times, then stop. A minute later it rings three more times then stops. After 30 minutes be in the parking area under Block 9, bay 286.

  He shivered. Far out over the estate he could hear music played loud and shouts of argument, but around him was silence. He crumpled the paper, then let it drop. He turned to go to the table where the food waited for him, then hesitated and retrieved the note.

  This time he ripped it into fragments, carried them to the toilet and flushed them – as if that might help him forget the demand made of him.

  An intruder had broken into his world.

  He sat at the table and ate his meal. The telephone was on a low table of stained wood. The room's furnishing was basic, battered: a table and two upright chairs, of which only one would safely take his weight, a two-seater settee whose coarse covering was worn on the arms by age and previous tenants, a bookcase with empty shelves. A single picture hung on one wall, a fading print of flowers beside a river; the glass was cracked at the upper left corner. A light with a plastic shade hung from the centre of the ceiling. And there was the low table with the telephone. It was the same as the day on which Ivanhoe Manners had brought him to the Amersham. He had done nothing in those months to stamp his character on the room. In fact, it mirrored Malachy Kitchen. It was as if he had determined to show nothing of himself, as if he were frightened to display himself. What there was he kept clean, but did not add to it.

  As the hours passed, Malachy sensed his life had changed again, but he did not know whose hand controlled him. Maybe he should pack his clothes into a black bin-bag, go out through the door, close it behind him and walk away. Go down the stairs from level three, turn his back on block nine and head off into the night… But he sat on the carpet where he could see the telephone. The demons came again, and what had been said to him and of him, the squirming sense of shame. There was no one he could have turned to.

  Ricky felt the excitement, always the same when he took delivery.

  He wore plastic gloves. He counted out the packages, in the light thrown by a battery lamp, and the contents of each weighed one kilo. With a knife he had slit one open, had seen the dark powder and sniffed it.

  He would not open any of the other twenty-four tightly bound packets of brown – no need to, not where they had come from. The last divisions of the load coming to him had been made in Germany and he would have trusted that source with his life. Ricky was in a derelict factory on the north side of the Peckham Road. Once, it had produced cheap leather coats but that market had now gone to Turkey, and he rented the premises. He had realized long ago that it was a waste of his money and dangerous to own the property where the twenty-five-kilo or fifty-kilo parcels were split. Around him, but with cut-offs for security, was a loose network of experts and facilitators. He wanted a driver for a shipment: he hired one. He wanted enforcers, such as the Merks: he went outside for them. He wanted premises: he rented them. He wanted information: he bought it.

  He wanted a chemist: he went into the market-place

  … It was his way of operating, and he believed it to be the safest.

  Security was everything with Ricky Capel.

  Little details missed sent men down for the big bird stretches. The men in the A Category gaol wings had all missed little details, and would do fifteen years for the mistake. He despised them.

  Each packet was checked, after the one that had been opened, to be certain that the sealing had survived the immersion in the North Sea – but he wore gloves and out in the yard, between the building and the high wall, a brazier was already lit. He wore gloves so that fingerprints would not be on the oilskin wrappings or the taping, but his sweat would line the interior of the gloves, and DNA traces could be taken from a plastic glove. The gloves would be burned, and where he and Charlie had walked on the factory floor would be hosed down as they left so that their foot-prints were washed away.

  The checking in the factory was the only time that Ricky Capel would be hands-on with the packages.

  Charlie had driven the parcel up from the east coast – still with the smell of the sea on it and the stink of fish.

  Davey and Benji would move the single-kilo parcels on to the drop-offs: more labyrinthine arrangements and more gloves for burning. Of course there were risks – everything about life was risks – but they were kept minimal. His success in achieving this was why Ricky was not in Category A, why he created fear, why he was worth – so Charlie told him – more than eighty-five million pounds. Yeah, yeah, not bad for a young 'un still short of his thirty-fifth birthday.

  And the factory was always swept for bugs, camera and audio the day before a package was brought for splitting.

  Ricky dragged off his gloves. Charlie had the parcels: he was splashing them with water from the hose, washing away the smell of fish and the sea, then walking them to the doorway. Outside, Davey and Benji were in the wheels, a jobbing builder's van and a pick-up with a sign on it for garden clearance. He never moved the stuff in a Mercedes, or in a Beemer, not in anything that would be noticed.

&
nbsp; The van and the pick-up drove away. He dropped his gloves into the fire, then heard the hose water on the floor behind him. He knew all the stories, because Benji told him, of the mistakes men had made and the details that had been missed. The latest in Benji's list: the guy who did cocaine, and was bringing in 160 kilos when he was lifted. He ran racehorses and had called one of the nags by the name of the top 'tec who'd done the Krays, which was just pathetic and shouted from the roofs for attention. He'd got fourteen years. Another guy stole a dog, a bull mastiff, off a kid, kept it as his own and let it ride in his car, then killed a punter he was in dispute with, put the body in the car to dump it and there were dog hairs on the body that were matched to the dog he'd nicked, and it was life with at least twenty-one years. His granddad didn't do details and had been third rate. His dad had missed the obvious and was fourth rate. Not the boy, not Ricky Capel.

  Charlie's gloves went into the fire.

  'You OK, Ricky?'

  'Never been better.'

  He watched the gloves disintegrate. Later that night, fifteen suppliers would have the twenty-five packets – and would have paid for them. Where they went after that, cut down, divided and sliced up across south-east London, was not his concern. The trade on estates, in back-street pubs and from unlit corners was beneath Ricky Capel's interest.

  'I'm feeling good.'

  The room was a mess of shadows. When it rang, the telephone was faintly lit by the street-lights below the window, filtering inside. At first, Malachy started to crawl forward to pick it up, but before he had reached it, the bell had gone three times and then the silence startled him. He did not know who played with him. His hand dropped and he slumped. He could have reached out and lifted the receiver, then let it hang from its cable and drop to the carpet; had he done so, the telephone's bell could not have pealed again. Instead, he cringed, left it in its cradle. The bell screamed for him, seemed to shatter the room's quiet.

  Half an hour later, Malachy closed the outer door behind him and padded down the walkway. It was near to midnight. Over the railing, he could see the little clusters of figures, where they would have been when Mildred Johnson came back from the bingo. On the last flight of the stairs he had to scrape himself against the graffiti to get past two vagrants hunched down: one had the sleeve of his coat rolled up and a syringe poised above the skin; the other was probing with his fingers for a vein in the back of his leg, contorting himself and cursing at the effort. He could smell them. They seemed not to notice him. He thought the first would use the syringe and then, if the other had found a vein, it would be used again. When he was past them he stumbled down the last flights of the steps, then leaned against the street wall and panted. To go on or turn back? If he turned back he would have to retrace the route past the vagrants with the needle.