Authors: Gerald Seymour
Quietly, matter of fact - because panic was never his
- Muhammad Iyad said, 'We are watched. They have observation on us.'
'Did you get it?'
'I did.'
She had heard the rattle of the camera's shutter. He eased the camera down from the aperture. It was on his lap and she strained forward to see the screen. The images flickered.
'What do you think happened up there?' Polly asked.
'First he was looking down the street, then he had binoculars. I think he was studying us. Then another man came - look, there is the second man, difficult to identify. Then movement, and both are gone.'
'It's a bastard, isn't it?'
'Any show-out, Polly, is a bastard.'
'I think, Ludvik, that we should back off.'
He raised his eyebrows high. 'Because you want to piss, or you do not like Czech cigarettes, or because we have shown out?'
She punched his arm. Polly Wilkins shared the interior of the black van with Ludvik, who was middle-ranking, mid-thirties, middle ambition and opinions, in the Bezpecostni-Informacni Sluzba. He fancied her. No way was she going to get herself involved in a relationship, on the rebound, with a Czech counter-intelligence officer, even if she had been dumped by email. And this was not a place for a relationship to flourish. She was desperate to pee but there was no bucket in the van. No bucket, but a mountain of squashed-out cigarette butts between their feet. Relationships had not been on her mind since she had received Dominic's new year email.
'I think we should get out. Leave them undecided, not sure.'
'You are the boss, the representative of the expert in such procedures.' He seemed to laugh at her.
As well he might. Polly Wilkins was big on Iraq, could have bored to gold-medal standard on
weapons-of-mass-destruction evaluation, but was now on a fast learning curve on the Czech Republic, people-trafficking across porous borders, Albanian criminality and al-Qaeda movement. There weren't enough hours in the day, or the night, to satisfy the steepness of the curve - which was good, meant Dominic's bloody email, the hurtful bastard, from Buenos Aires was getting to be history. She reckoned Ludvik laughed at her because he thought she was wet behind the ears and knew precious little of nothing about stake-outs and surveillance, and what would happen next.
'And I want the pix printed up.'
He wriggled into the front. She looked back a last time, through the hole, at the upper window and a dishcloth now hung from it, as if to dry - but there was rain in the wind. He drove away fast, leaving her to fall about in the back and cling to the camera. She told him about the dishcloth and he swore. Down Kostecna he was shouting into the microphone of his headset.
God! Did the daft, dumb, sweet boy never look at the traffic in front of him? He had turned to her, teeth shining as he grinned. 'That'll be the signal. People who would never, pain of death, use a phone. A signal that they are threatened. We have the squad readied, we'll go tonight. You want to watch, Polly, want to be there?'
'Thank you.'
More than rubbernecking on a storm squad going in, watching from long distance, she wanted to get her hands on the prints off the digital camera, wanted them on the airwaves to Gaunt. She'd had his signal that he was taking charge. He was, almost, a parent to her. At the end of Kostecna, half on the pavement, were two more closed vans, like the green one they had used and the black one, and she assumed that that was where the storm squad waited. It would be a coup, a triumph for him.
She had time to get a download of the pictures, get to the embassy and secure communications, send the signals, then be back to grandstand the storm squad.
She giggled. She thought of Gloria bringing in her signal, with the good close-up photograph of the man with the shopping, and the long-lens image of two men at the window. She could imagine old Gaunt's shoes jerking off his table as he hunched to read what she had sent.
'Why do you laugh?' Ludvik called from the front.
'Classified/ she said, mock-haughtily. 'UK Eyes Only.'
The shoes, brightly burnished, swung from his desk and tipped a file on to the floor. Gaunt leaned forward and peered down at the photographs. Little gasps of pleasure slipped from his lips. He had a magnifying-glass out of the drawer by his knees, and bent lower so that his head was close to the top pictures, black and white, blown up to plate size.
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 Hamburg. 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.