Rat Run

by Gerald Seymour

  He and Dennis had been at Officer Training School together, then done time as junior cavalry officers – a unit of Lancers – before they reached the rank of major. Both had been washed up, having failed to make the promotion grades, and both had gone the civilian route; the difference was that Gaunt had taken a position in the Secret Intelligence Service, while Dennis had entered the Security Service. In Gaunt's mob, Dennis's crowd was regarded as junior, second best – not that he would show it that morning, whatever the provocation.

  Having produced his ID for the fourth time, he was issued with a clip-on card, then led by a clerk to the canteen.

  Dennis was there. 'Good to see you, Freddie. Been so long. Tell you the truth, I was quite surprised to get your call. You know, we hear things. I'd assumed, what with the spring-clean in your lot – the

  WMD

  people – that you'd have had the chop. So, you managed to avoid the cull. Well done.'

  'Just need a spot of your wisdom… Never believe what you hear, Dennis. I'm alive and still beavering.'

  'The little woman, is she well?'

  'I think so. Last I heard she was…' He could have made a reference to Dennis's obvious weight increase, could have suggested he might consider going to a consultant about the lump on the left side of the nose, could have asked about the recent leapfrog advancement of younger officers over the man opposite him.

  He did not. 'It's good of you to make space for me.'

  'You're looking a bit peaky Freddie.'

  'Pressure of work.' His smile was affable. 'You're busy, I'm busy. I have a question for you. Who is a jewel? Who, in an AQ operation, is the man who must be protected? You'll understand, of course, if I'm sparse with detail. Who gets a bodyguard? Who is worth dying for to buy time for escape?'

  'In our neck of the woods?'

  'Not yet – sorry, can't expand on that – in Europe, and he's on the move.'

  'Come on.'

  Dennis stood, left a tip on the table that was barely decent and led him to a guarded door at the far end of a corridor. They were passed through, and Gaunt was eyed with suspicion. More guns, more flak-jackets.

  Down a staircase flanked with white-tiled walls, then into the cell block. A food trolley was wheeled noisily in front of the doors and plates of meat, congealed sauce and rice were pushed on to the shelf space set in each door. In turn, Gaunt saw hands come to the shelves and take away the plates. Then the flaps fell.

  'They're having early lunch. Some damned delay in the paperwork, so they won't be up till afternoon. I worked on it, and that's why you had to flog yourself down here. There are eight of them on remand. Take a look for yourself.'

  Gaunt did. There was a spy-hole in each cell door.

  The interiors were brightly lit. Some ate, picky and choosy; some had put the plate down beside them on the thin plastic-coated mattress and stared blankly at the food but did not touch it; one wept silently; one sobbed noisily and his shoulders shook. Gaunt estimated their ages at between eighteen and mid-twenties. They were all Asian. He assumed they were of Pakistani ethnic origin. Above his jeans, one wore an Arsenal football top, and another's T-shirt advertised Suzuki motorcycles. Trainers were common to them all. He remembered, now, on the far side of the canteen from where Dennis had sat, the families in the dress of Rawalpindi, Peshawar or Karachi, and the lawyers huddled with them. At the seventh cell door, when the guard stepped aside to allow him to get to the spy-hole, he saw a youth who was different – not by his clothes but by his face. All the others had seemed broken and bowed down, whether they cried or whether they stifled their misery. This was a boy, not yet a man, whose attention lay in the computing magazine he read, who had an alertness the others lacked. He checked the eighth door.

  Halfway down the block, Dennis leaned comfortably against a tiled wall. 'Seen enough?'

  'I suppose so.'

  'They're the haul from Operation Angurvadel – not my idea of a moniker by the way, down to a bright spark on the AQ desk who did Scandinavian studies at Lancaster. It's a sword in Norse mythology that burns bright in war and goes dull in peace. Anti-terrorist and the Branch had a terrible problem with it, and most of us. Anyway, al-Qaeda and the warrior's, Frithiof's, sword came together. We hauled them in.

  They're foot-soldiers, from east London, west London, Luton and Bedford. Look at them. Do they seem threatening to you? Of course they don't. Some would label them the Enemy Within. I tell you, Freddie, they were all out of their depth. We had taps on them through their mobiles, we had their homes bugged, we had them under surveillance for weeks before the arrests. Actually, they were quite harmless.

  There was "chatter" among them that was enough to get us interested. They did not have detonators, or commercial or military explosive, but the "chatter" was sufficient to spell out their intention. We have lines into most of the mosques where the hot air's shouted. Put simply, they never had a chance – and they'll probably get ten years each, for being naive, gullible and subject to the indoctrination of a recruiter.

  Still with me?'

  'So, they're not jewels?'

  'None of them has been near an AQ training camp in Afghanistan or Yemen. Nearest they've been to the sharp end is watching videos of atrocities and fire fights in Chechnya, Saudi and Iraq. That doesn't mean they wouldn't have been prepared to detonate a bomb in the centre of London or at Cribbs Causeway or at Glasgow airport, and go up with it. No lack of courage, just a lack of expertise… which is what's holding them back and why we are still, most of the time, winning.'

  'What are they short of?'

  'Please, Freddie, patience. What they have in common: they were all born in the UK, they all come from respectable families, none of them has a police record. We pick them up because when they get faith in a large dose they've headed for a mosque and an imam who is talking jihad. They read a manual that details the methodology of "blessed strikes". But that's not sufficient. What if there are foot-soldiers who don't go to a radical mosque and we don't pick up because they're not close to a firebrand imam?

  What if they're directed by a man who understands the acquisition of explosives, detonators, who understands our capability of electronic surveillance and how we can make mobile phones dance to our tune?

  Then we're in trouble. That's the nightmare that gets me to my desk before half seven, and I don't leave that desk before ten in the evening – a group of foot-soldiers we've never heard of, a recruiter we haven't identified, and they're controlled by a man whose safety is worth dying for.'

  'Who is that man?'

  'Don't you know, Freddie? I'd have assumed you did.'

  The cell block seemed to close round him. He could smell the food, the toilets, the sweat of the guards in their protective vests. The corridor lights shone down dully on Dennis's face. Suddenly Gaunt was cold and bile rose in his throat. He choked it out. 'That would be a co-ordinator?'

  'If you knew, why did you bother to trek over here?

  He comes in, organizes at a level of quality, then is well gone before the "blessed strike". They accounted for all of the Madrid train crowd, except the co-ordinator. The co-ordinator is your jewel, Freddie. If a co-ordinator had had his hands on that lot…' Dennis waved expansively towards the cell doors '… they wouldn't be here, and we'd have been shafted – good and proper.'

  'Thank you.'

  Halfway up the stairs, going towards clean air and clean light, he turned and caught Gaunt's sleeve. 'If you get the whisper that your man's coming near, you'll tell me, won't you? Give me chapter on it and verse – or it's explosion time and fucking catastrophe.

  You will?'

  'If I get the whisper. If…'

  Outside, Gaunt sat in his car for a full ten minutes.

  His hands shook and he waited for them to calm.

  Nothing in his life – Cold War warrior, Iraq war warrior, organized-crime war warrior – had prepared him for what he had seen, young men who were pitiful in defeat and slumped in cells, and for what he had
heard. He thought of Dennis, pompous and point-scoring, hurrying to Thames House each morning before the throb of the capital city beat on the masses, and the nightmare that engulfed him.

  He drove away through the blocks and past the guns. The image of the co-ordinator, free and running loose, stayed with him all the way to his desk, and the hideous problem: if the Prague trail went cold, where to bloody look for him.

  The policeman watched Timo Rahman with the closeness of a hunting fox.

  He was Johan Konig. It was the start of the second week of his attachment to the Organized Crime Division. He had come from Berlin, seconded as assistant deputy commander. On bogus credentials he sat in on the meeting. Probably his presence in the offices of the Special Investigation Unit of the Revenue – and the deception used to put him there – violated Rahman's human rights. He was forty-seven, short and barrel-chested, and his hair had thinned.

  Inside the close circle of men and women in Berlin with whom he had worked, Konig had achieved a reputation as a detective of stubborn persistence.

  What had brought him from Berlin to Hamburg was this target: a true prize.

  Rahman had not spoken since the meeting had begun. On his side of the wide, shiny table, the Albanian was flanked by three accountants who talked for him. Konig was at the end of a line of four Revenue men. Carafes of water and glasses, not used, stood in front of each team with bundles of files. The meeting had been called, so the notification to Rahman's accountants had stated, to discuss routine general matters. Each question from the Revenue men was directed to Rahman personally, and each answer came back from whichever accountant covered that particular issue.

  The man fascinated Konig, who spoke fluent

  Albanian. He had been on the anti-corruption team of the International Police Task Force sent to Pristina in Kosovo. He had learned there of the ruthless qualities of Kosovar Albanians, their endemic criminality, cruelty, secretiveness and power. His transfer from Berlin to a city where he was unknown was for the express purpose of bringing the pate before the courts and convicting him. Konig was intrigued by his target's bearing – for the first half-hour of the meeting he had thought Rahman's demeanour was almost of indifference.

  Indifference? Few men, when their investments, property portfolios and interest on deposits ran to millions of euros a year and they were examined by a Revenue team working only on special investigations, displayed indifference.

  The man's skill impressed him too. The file Konig had read stated that Rahman spoke good German and read it well. But each time a question was asked him in that language he gave no sign of understanding.

  That was clever. He looked blankly at his accountants, left them to answer.

  Formidable.

  Rahman, as Konig knew it, dominated the sex, narcotics and human-trafficking trades in the city. He controlled them. He was the leader of the wealthiest fis in western Europe. He had the power to kill, corrupt and intimidate, yet he appeared to be a humble businessman with no ambition other than, through his accountants, to pay his dues in taxes.

  Konig thought it the performance of a master.

  The Revenue men on his side of the table did not know Konig's position. He had been introduced to them as an investigator from Berlin's tax unit; he was there for experience, they had been told, on an exchange visit. He had no need to intervene, was as quiet as the target he watched. Always, if it were possible, Konig wanted to see a target – close up – to watch his hand movements and see if his fingers fidgeted, sense whether he was nervous and note if sweat came to his neck. Did the tongue flick over his lips to moisten them? Did he shift in the chair? Was he too friendly and agreeable, or too hostile? To gaze into the eyes… The meeting would soon be over. Konig had not looked long into the eyes.

  Had not dared to.

  There were Russian gangs in Berlin, Polish mafiya, the cold little bastards from Vietnam who ran the cigarette trade, pimps from all over eastern Europe, and Albanians. He would have looked into any of the eyes confronting him across an interview table in the interrogation block and not been fazed. An experienced police officer, twenty-nine years of service behind him, a spell at Wiesbaden with Intelligence, and time in New York on secondment, he had never before failed to look deep into the eyes of a target.

  Something in the eyes of Timo Rahman – and he could not have explained it – unsettled him. He would have thought himself without fear. He found that each time Rahman glanced along the length of the table and at the men opposite him, he looked away. Never before.

  His mind had drifted. Sunlight made zebra stripes on the table from the blinds, sharp lines, formed patterns on Rahman's face. The man scratched his head, then looked down at his watch.

  Indifference? Johan Konig understood.

  Preoccupation. Wants to be somewhere else, handling another situation.

  Extraordinary… Timo Rahman, with his accountants, was having his wealth dissected by a body of the Revenue endowed with sanctions and his mind was elsewhere. What could be more important than the business at the table? Every minute he had sat in the room now seemed to Konig to be justified. A weightier problem exercised the pate… From problems came mistakes. The policeman felt his confidence surge. He looked into the eyes.

  Chilled, bright, the eyes met his. He did not look away. He held the Albanian's glance. That was a victory. The meeting broke up. The Revenue men, at the door, shook hands with the accountants in turn, and with Timo Rahman. Konig stayed at the table. A problem he could learn about, a mistake he could exploit.

  As the door closed on them, he tilted back his chair to gaze at the ceiling and wondered what, or who, would explain it.

  ***

  As Malachy finished his meal – a meat pie, boiled potatoes and beans – then wiped the plate with bread, he heard them coming along the walkway

  There was a deathly hush on the Amersham that day and the sounds drifted to him clearly

  Wheels squeaking, a heavy footstep, shuffled shoes approached, then passed his door and stopped. He gulped the last of the bread and listened. Keys turned and there was the scrape of the barricade gate opening.

  A big voice, familiar. 'Home now, Millie, where you should be. Dawn'll get you to bed and then you rest.'

  The next door shut and the gate clanged to. A moment of quiet, then a rap on his own door. 'Heh, Malachy, you there? You there, man?'

  He pulled down the bolt and turned the key. The great bulk of Ivanhoe Manners filled the doorway.

  'I was by here. Seemed right to call on you. I do driving for the hospital when I have the time – you know, a day off. Brought Millie Johnson home, and her friend. She's in a wheelchair for the moment, but she's strong in spirit. Her guts, they should be an example to those who lock themselves away.' He stared keenly at Malachy. 'Are you going to leave me standing here?'

  Malachy stood aside. 'Whatever you want.'

  'I want to see how you are. Are you standing on your own feet, or are you leaning, or are you on the floor?'

  'I'm managing,' Malachy said softly.

  'Are you ready to move on?'

  'I don't know.'

  'You got work, you looking for work?'

  Malachy shook his head, then hung it.

  'There's work out there for those who look for it.

  With work you could pay a proper rent, and free up the unit. Eight months here, right? I've a queue that needs units. You tell me, Malachy, what's happening on the Amersham, what gives?'

  He saw the social worker gaze around him. He would not notice anything different from the day he had been brought here – same table, same chairs, same TV and settee, same carpet – would not know that through a door and under the bed, in the bag with the vagrant's clothes, were the last of the tape and the rope and a plastic toy. But Ivanhoe Manners missed little.

  'You done well on the shoes. That's good polishing.

  They're the right shoes to wear if you go for a job. They show purpose, like you're climbing back. I asked, what giv
es on the Amersham? Police don't know, and we don't know.'

  Malachy shrugged, like he avoided events beyond his bolted and locked front door.

  'I'm asking, Malachy. Three of the High Fly Boys strung upside down off a roof and their authority finished, that's happening. A class-A dealer roped to a post, that's happening. I have this gigantic and massive confusion, man. Help me.'

  'I don't think I can.'

  'You please yourself… I don't support what happened to the boys or the dealer, no sympathy for it from me. A gesture, but it's the way to anarchy. Where did the spark for it come from?'

  'Nothing for me to say that would help you.'

  The big man went back to the door, opened it, and his smile beamed white teeth at Malachy. 'Get on the road, man. You done your time here. Get walking in those fancy shoes. You need your life back, and sitting like a cat in a cage won't do it for you. Do it soon. Each day you're here – whatever was in your past – that's a wasted day. I'm offering advice and it's meant kindly.

  You should feed off that little woman's courage. Get living again.'

  'Thank you for calling by – I'll go when I'm ready.'

  He closed the door after the social worker, locked it and pushed up the bolt.

  Chapter Eight

  The train rattled across country on a slow, stopping line.

  In a few days the clocks would go forward and the evenings would stay brighter. Dusk hovered over the carriages and the track, and weak pinpricks of light marked remote homes set among the grey of the fields, hedges and woodlands. It was a complicated journey for Malachy, the longest he had made since coming to London: one leg from the Amersham estate to Victoria, by bus, the next on a fast train south to Redhill and the last on the line that stopped every-where, at Marlpit Hill, Penshurst, Paddock Wood, Mardon and Headcorn. His journey was nearly complete.

  The carriages were filled with schoolchildren, their bags and noise, with shop workers and shoppers, with the first of the office commuters to get away from their desks. He wore the old clothes and his shoes were caked with mud from a litter-strewn garden in the play area. He stood in the rocking space between two of the carriages – he smelt and knew it. His woollen hat was low on his head and the collar of his coat was turned up to mask his face. As passengers passed him, to board the train or get off it, they hurried by because of the smell that came from the plastic bag gripped in his fist. He never put the bag down but kept it tight against his leg. Malachy knew that at every station there were cameras, and that cameras were now routinely fitted inside train compartments. An old world returned to him: he recalled lectures from long ago. Care ruled him, and he had regained a long-lost cunning. His ticket, expensive but not wasted money, was for Folkestone, far beyond his destination; it would act as a confusion if his route was traced. The clatter of the train soothed him and the map given him and memorized, then destroyed, was loose in his mind. In a few minutes, as dusk fell, he would reach the stop they had chosen.