Rat Run

Chapter Eleven

Music blared from high loudspeakers, pounded at Malachy Kitchen.

He stepped from the train that had brought him from Cologne. The Hauptbahnhof of Hamburg echoed with Beethoven. Something of it lifted him and he stepped out along the platform, carried by the swell of passengers, as if a little of his purpose was regained – he knew what he would attempt to achieve in that city, but not why. The Amersham was behind him and after ten hours of travel from Waterloo International to Brussels, from Brussels to Cologne, from Cologne to Hamburg, the estate had already faded in his mind. He no longer felt its pulsebeat. He stepped on to the escalator and was carried up to the concourse. He heard announcements in a mass of languages, the arrivals and departures of trains from and to all of Europe. His stride was bolder than at any time since he had come down the tail ramp, exhausted and sweating, in the heat's blast off the Hercules aircraft that had done the corkscrew descent on to the runway at Basra. But the road had been long, so damn long, into what was unknown… It was as if he clutched at the pride so that he should not lose hold of it. The concourse was scrubbed clean, and high above it, like a cathedral's arched roof, was the great shape of glass and iron. He held, tight in his hand, the black plastic sack containing all the clothes he owned that were not on his back, and among the smells of the quick food stalls was the whiff of the petrol still embedded in the heavy coat. He saw police with guns and unarmed men in uniform with the flash of the Bahnwacht on their sleeves. He crossed the concourse and saw nothing that threatened him. He walked to the exit for taxis and in front of him were stalls of cleaned vegetables, piled fruit and cheerful flowers; above them, the wind tickled the multi-colours of the awnings. At the tourist kiosk Malachy asked in halting German, learned at Chicksands, for a tourist map of the city and was told where he could find a cheap room near to the Hauptbahnhof. The smartly dressed girl behind the kiosk counter curled her lip in disdain at his appearance, and drew a line on the map down a street – that was where the inexpensive rooms were.

For politeness, he said, 'It's a fine station – and I enjoyed the music.'

'The music is not for your enjoyment,' she responded curtly.

'I don't understand. Why, then, is it played?'

'Psychologists told us to – narcotics addicts hate classical music broadcast loud. It's why they are not here. The music makes the station free of them. We have in Hamburg a big drugs problem, and you should be careful in the city, most careful where accommodation is inexpensive… We are cursed by immigrants and the crime levels they bring, most particularly the Albanians. Enjoy your visit.'

He went out into a brittle midday sunlight. The wind trapped his hair and scoured his face. Beyond the stalls, when he reached the edge of the big, wide square that burst with traffic, he paused, opened the map and took his bearings.

He had come to destroy a man, but did not know how and would have been hard put to articulate why

– except that breaking the man was the only road sign posted to him as a way back for his pride.

After he had crossed the square and had started out down a wide street, he understood why the woman in the tourist kiosk had curled her lip when he had insisted on a cheap room. So little money had been given him that he must husband it. She had sent him to where rooms were inexpensive, on the Steindamm.

He passed shops that sold sex videos and sex gear, and by cafes where Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians or Afghans lounged on plastic chairs, and by doorways where hookers – young and old, heavy-hipped and skeletal thin – waited, smoked and eyed him. He saw the sign for rooms to rent. He stopped.

A woman, African, stared at him. Her chest bulged in a halter-top and her thighs were bare below the short, tight skirt. She sucked at her cigarette, then blew the smoke at him but the wind snatched it away.

He smiled, but shook his head. The recruits in Basic Training had talked sex – talked sex, described sex, gloried in sex. Had sat around the TV while the videos played sex, had boasted sex. Malachy Kitchen's first sex had been with a girl from a farm, in a barn, on the edge of the Devon village where his parents had moved to. Second sex had been with a corporal's wife, and he'd washed for a week afterwards, had scrubbed himself and prayed there wouldn't be a rash to show for it. Third sex had been with a girl at the end of a ball at the Royal Military Academy: he hadn't known her name, had been half-cut and it had been under a tree across the grass from the Old Building. Fourth sex had been with Roz. He gestured, he hoped politely, to the prostitute from Africa that he wanted to pass by her and she moved aside with reluctance. He went inside and there was a man at the counter, small, wiry, with plastered hair, and he asked in the correct German, as taught him, for a room.

'For one hour or for two hours?'

He shook his head.

'For a half-day?'

He said he wanted a room to stay in, and sleep in – alone.

'For how many nights?'

Malachy was about to say that he did not know, but that seemed inadequate. For three nights. He was given a price. No haggling, no dispute. The key was handed to him, and then, as an afterthought, a residents' book was opened on the counter and a pen pushed forward.

He thought of giving the name Ricky Capel, and the address Bevin Close. He shook his head, heaved the black plastic sack on to his shoulder and started to climb the stairs. On the first landing, in one of the rooms that would have been hired for an hour or two he heard a bed's springs whine. On the second landing a man came by him still pulling up his zip. He was wondering how long it would be before the African girl took a client to the first or second floor. He went on up.

The room allocated to Malachy was bare but for a bed, a basin and a faded print of a mountain scene. He crossed a worn rug over linoleum and dropped his sack.

He was there because of what had been said to him, and said of him – none of it yet wiped.

14 January 2004

'Is it a crisis? That's what I'm asking.'

'Way outside my loop of experience. What I can tell you, he's not a mark on him.'

'I've got a gunshot wound, a PI category, and a road-traffic accident casualty – and a Jock with a scorpion sting.

Where in that does Kitchen figure?'

'For God's sake,'Fergal said, 'I'm the adjutant. You're the MO. You want my judgement – pretty far down, propping up the heap, I'd say

… From what they said at Bravo, maybe a bit lower than propping it up.'

The medical officer was bent over the trolley. The gunshot victim was dosed with morphine. It was an ugly wound, but a challenge for him. He had to stabilize the man before he could be shipped out by helicopter. Not much else he could do. What struck him, as he probed to get the worst of the detritus from the wound – fragments of the bullet, fragments of the camouflage trouser material – was the consummate bravery of the young guy. Not a whimper, not a scream, not a shout. Trust in his watering eyes… A damn good soldier. And alongside him, flat out on the second trolley and waiting patiently for his turn, was the casualty from the road-traffic accident. Oh, God – and there was the I Corps captain, who stood remote from them in the doorway and had not spoken since Fergal had brought him to the aid post.

'What's the latest on that bloody chopper – or are the blue jobs on a day off?'

The adjutant peered over his shoulder. 'You wouldn't think so much stuff could get in there… Extraordinary.

They had a dust storm back at Brigade, but the RAF are up now. The chopper's ETA is just down from thirty minutes.

Is that going to be time enough?'

The medical officer growled, 'Have to be, won't it? For both of them.'

As a captain, the MO had the qualifications of a general-duties doctor. He had trained at medical school in London and had then thought that any future was better than an inner-city practice so he'd joined the army and been posted to the Scottish regiment. The work gave him swagger and was not demanding. Back in the UK, at the regiment's barracks, he spent his time patching up injuries from training and sports. In Iraq, his duties varied between extremes: from gunshot wounds to the complicated childbirth problems of local women. He was accepted: his skills were admired from Sunray down to the youngest soldier, and he revelled in it.

With minute tweezers he lifted clear threads of cotton cloth matted in the blood. He stood to his full height. 'Not much more I can do.'

'There's a surgical team on the chopper,' the adjutant said.

He asked his orderly to cover the gunshot wound, then peeled off the gloves and went to the basin. Disinfectant soap and water. He sluiced his hands together, and when he looked up he saw the man, Mai Kitchen, still in the doorway, still silent. He turned to Fergal. 'What's the story about him?'

'Varnished or unvarnished?'

'Plain bloody truth will be good enough.'

The adjutant hesitated. 'It's all hearsay, of course.'

'Don't fuck me about, what's being said?' He dried his hands with vigour and went to the second trolley, the road-traffic accident. He was worried now – this patient might be a more serious casualty than the gunshot wound.

He boomed, 'Spit it out.'

While he worked, the medical officer listened.

'It's pretty unpleasant… Here goes. He went on patrol yesterday, familiarization with the ground before a lift this morning. He was in place to assist with interrogation and screening of prisoners. The patrol was hit. Two or three rifle positions and an RPG was fired. He was somewhere near the back of the stick when it started. What I'm hearing from Bravo's people is that Kitchen did a runner.'

'You are joking? What -just flipped out and left them?'

'There, and then not there. Gone. The corporal thinks he's been hit. Goes back – puts the whole section at risk, but Jocks don't leave a man who's down – and retraces the ground covered in the ambush site. He's nowhere to be found. Hits the panic button. Then they find his helmet in the street – and his flak-jacket. Bravo's gearing up for a major search-and-rescue operation, loading the Warriors, the full works. Then he's found. He's walking back to Bravo, but without his weapon. Two questions, natural enough.

What happened? Where's his weapon? No answer. Not a word out of him. Up at Bravo, they say he's yellow.'

'Christ Almighty – you serious?'

'Personally, I couldn't stand him. So, does he classify as a medical case?'

'Well, he doesn't get to slide under white sheets, if that's what you mean. I don't call him a patient. This is a patient.'

His fingers moved with extreme gentleness over the ribcage of the casualty. He yearned to hear the thudding of an approaching helicopter's rotors. Sandwiched, long ago, into courses on the treatment of gunshot wounds, shrapnel injuries and debridement infection caused by clothing fibres and lead particles, there had been a bare hour on the recognition of what the lecturer had called 'battle shock'.

The medical officer had been with commanders and seconds-in-command, and none had taken seriously what they were told.

He looked up. Maybe anger caught him. Maybe the growing pallor on the casualty's face frightened him. Maybe the helicopter would be delayed too long. He shouted at the man in the doorway: 'Don't just bloody stand there like a spare part. Move yourself Do something. There's a mop. Orderly, give him a mop and bucket. Give him a broom to sweep with. Clean the place.'

When the time came, when the two Jocks on their trolleys were wheeled out from the aid post, the man – Kitchen – still, with mechanical movements, swabbed the floor with the mop and squeezed it out into the bucket.

Later, the medical officer walked briskly back with the adjutant, his pistol bouncing against his thigh, and said,

'I'm not taking responsibility for him. Sunray'll have to see him. He's not mine. Yellow's not a colour I fancy. Kitchen's nothing to do with me.'

Benji met Charlie and together they sipped coffee.

'So, he's up and away, Ricky is.'

'Did he tell you, Benji, what for?'

'Told me, big surprise, nothing.'

'You happy, Benji, with nothing?'

'I tell you why it's nothing – because he doesn't know nothing. He didn't tell me why he was going to Hamburg because he didn't know. I'm straight with you. He got the call and he jumped – and I don't like it. The Albanians are bad news. Does he listen? Does he hell… You heard me, I've told him. I told him two years back' and a year back and six months back that he shouldn't be in bed with those people. Does he listen?'

'You told him, Benji, and I heard.'

'Doesn't listen to us, but listens to them. I take him to the airport. I think he's going to talk plans. He talks about his brat's football. Not till we're there, going through the tunnel into the airport, does he start chattering about the big guy he's going to meet. What worries me, they'll eat him.'

'Worry you bad, Benji?'

'They don't share, the Albanians, they don't do equals. All co-operation until they're ready. They get inside you, a worm in your gut, and the worm bloody kills you when they're ready. Everybody had a share of Soho and King's Cross till they were ready. Now nobody's in Soho or King's Cross except them. Right now, he thinks he's the big number and Timo Rahman wants to share with him.'

'You thinking of bugging out, Benji?'

'Be great. I got enough put away, you have – Davey has… Where to? Nobody bugs out. Sort of on a rope, aren't we? And the rope's got a bloody knot on your ankle and mine. That shit-face, little Enver, he's at the airport door to meet us. He's out of the car and the shit-face takes his bag, like he's Ricky's bloody porter, and they're off and gone. I'd trust the shit-face as far as I could kick him, wouldn't let him carry my bag. You just get that feeling, don't you, when it's all going to finish in grief?'

'You heard, Benji, what Davey said. Petrol.'

'On the dosser's clothes in Bevin Close, the stink of petrol. I heard what Davey said. And petrol done George Wright's place… I don't know what's happening – used to, but I don't now. He went off all trusting, Ricky did, with his bag carried for him, and what I'm thinking about is the claws stuck in him – and I didn't tell him, and I never do and you don't

– and grief.'

'No, Mr Capel, he is not in the hotel. I am sorry. I have paged him and he is not in the restaurants or in the bar. You heard yourself the paging announcement for Mr Enver Rahman, and he has not come. He is not here.'

He sagged. He gazed at the tall, leggy woman behind the desk, who wore the hotel's uniform, its logo sewn over a shallow breast. Nothing that had happened was what he had expected. No answers when he had pumped on the flight as to what business he would be doing with Timo Rahman; questions brushed aside like he was a kid and talking too much and would find out when elders, betters, decided. No chauffeur at the airport to meet them, but Enver had gone to Avis who had held a car for them. No explanations as they had driven into the city. The hotel was a tower of glass and concrete, not in the city centre, and they'd come past gardens to get there; the sort of hotel that did conferences, twenty-six floors of it. He'd checked in. Enver had said that he had phone calls to make and they'd meet up later, had to do the arrangements. No suite for him, no flowers, no bowl of fruit: just an ordinary room. He'd kicked his shoes off and lain on the bed because the one easy chair was dead hard, and he'd flicked the zapper and the channels were all German except one that was American news. Who gave a fuck for American news?

Not Ricky Capel… And he'd waited… and waited some more. .. had waited for the phone to ring and it had not. Maybe he'd dozed off on the bed. Then he'd woken, had worked the phone buttons and called down, had asked to be connected to the room of Enver Rahman, and a dumb cow had told him there was no gentleman of that name resident in the hotel, and she'd checked, and she'd repeated it. It was like he'd been dumped. He'd just assumed that Enver was booking in after he'd gone to the elevator. It wasn't respect. The disrespect was on the plane, was a hire car, was a hotel that was shit, was him being abandoned and Enver bugging out. What wound up Ricky Capel tightest was disrespect. He believed nothing, nobody.

He strode away from the desk, went to the swing doors, pushed them open violently, didn't care that they battered into the back of a man manoeuvring his bags inside, and walked out into the forecourt. He could see where Enver had parked the green VW

Passat that had been his lift from the airport. There was a BMW 5 series, black, where the Passat had been.

He strode back inside and anger pounded in his head

… All disrespect. There was a family now at the desk, in tracksuits: that sort of hotel, short breaks, cut rate, for bloody families. He pushed past them and imposed himself in front of her.

He demanded that she look for any message left him. She left the desk and walked elegantly away, but slowly – he reckoned that deliberate, like she thought he was shit. He turned and saw the faces of the family, kids and adults, all staring sourly at him, like they thought the same of him as she did. She returned, a folded sheet of notepaper between her fingers. He snatched it.

No smile on her face, but she pissed on him. 'You can read German, Mr Capel?'

He felt the blood run in his face.

'Would you like me to translate for you, Mr Capel?'

He nodded.

'It says, "Ricky, you will be collected later. Have a good stay in Hamburg, Enver." That is all.'

'What's it mean, later?' He was Ricky Capel. He was big. He ran an area of south-east London. He was He blurted, 'What does that mean?'

The skinny bitch said, 'I think, Mr Capel, it means that you will be collected later.'

He stood on a great dyke and gazed out at the sea. The Bear had stayed in the car, on the road on the land side of the barrier built to hold back flood tides. Timo Rahman knew about the life throb of cities and the demands of men for the titillation of the shows provided by his clubs and the requirement of the young for heroin, cocaine and pills, which he sold, but he knew nothing of the coast and its wildness.

The tang of the salt was in his nose, and the wind ripped at his hair and tugged his coat tight against his chest and flapped it away from his legs, and there was the spit of rain in it. He stared out over the white crests of the waves and watched seabirds ride on them in the shelter of inlets. He had looked at the motoring-book map in the car, had searched for a place on the coast where there were fewest roads, had seen the line of islands and had made his decision. It would be here that the man would be brought, then shipped to the island and taken on board the trawler. Because he had no knowledge of the sea, it seemed to Timo Rahman to be a simple matter.

If he braced himself against the wind's power, held his hand across his forehead to divert the rain and squinted, he could make out the faint line that was the island's shore facing him. It was remote, isolated.

Always Timo Rahman went with the instinct that his gut gave him. .. From his car, before they had driven along the road behind the dyke, he had watched the ferry go, with fewer passengers on it than he had fingers on his hands.

He had seen what he needed to see. He turned away. Beyond the road and the Mercedes, a solitary tractor ploughed a field of dark earth, and further back, shielded by trees, was a farm with brick out-buildings, and on that horizon, inland, were the towering wind turbines that turned briskly. Mud splattered his trousers at the ankles and smeared his shoes as he went down the dyke's slope, and reached the Bear.

He asked if there had been a call but the Bear shook his head.

Timo Rahman said quietly, 'He will come, I have no doubt of it, and it is from here that we will send him on.'

Malachy left them his key and went out into the afternoon light. Time to kill till darkness. He cut down towards the Hafen City of modern-built apartments on reclaimed land, then left behind the two big church spires, like markers for him, and found the pavement that led him west along the Elbe. He would walk the whole way. Walking was best for soaking up the atmosphere of a city never visited before: time spent walking, his mentor at Chicksands had said, was never time wasted. He had no plan, only the determination that he would manufacture one when the evening came, when he was in place. He walked well, with brisk purpose, and his only stop was at the Landungsbrucken where he parsimoniously pecked coins from his pocket and bought himself a burger and an ice-cream. There was no weapon for self-defence or attack in his pocket, but he was without fear: nothing worse could be done to him than had been.

He was home for lunch. One night in every three weeks on his roster, Tony Johnson did a thirty-hour shift, worked through the night, then came home for a meal and sleep. He was dead beat.

'You actually did that – God, I can't believe it.'

He had no secrets from her. While she cooked, he had sat at the table, with the coffee mug in his hands, which shook, and told her what he had done.

'You bought his ticket, you gave him money, you sent him to Hamburg? I find it hard to credit.'

He hung his head, then lifted the mug, both hands, and slurped the coffee.

'Have you any idea of what you've done? To him?'

In his reply, exhausted and rambling, he tried to explain why he had done it. It was hard for him to be rational, coherent. He spoke of the man and the files that the National Criminal Intelligence Service computers had trawled up for him. He told of the devastation to a man's self-respect, personal esteem. A man on the floor who wanted to drag himself up and stand again.

'But you gave him Capel's name. You sent him after Capel. Almighty God – he could be killed – killed and dumped, killed and disappeared. Tony, have you no conscience?'

The struggle to describe the smile and the light in the eyes, then slamming down the mug, splashing the cloth on the table. Recalling the battering of the questions. Where to in Hamburg? To meet whom?

Spilling out the answers that Intelligence had produced – and the name of Timo Rahman.

'I know that name. You could rot in hell, Tony.'

His explanation, yelled, that he had lost control of the man. It was what the man needed, what the man demanded. He was now only the vehicle for the journey. His wife stood by the cooker and saucepans bubbled behind her. Her arms were folded tight across her chest, and her face was set, stern. The question was inevitable.

'Your man, Malachy Kitchen, would he know when to back off? Where he's gone, would he have the nous to recognize the impossible and step back?'

No answer necessary, but he shook his head.

She beat on the wall with her stick, hammered at it.

Behind Millie Johnson, in her little kitchen, the kettle whistled, and beside the hob was the teapot with the bags in it and a plate on which she had placed biscuits

– the sort she thought he liked.

Her impatience was curbed only when her bell rang.

She struggled from her chair, used the stick to move towards the door and unlocked it. On the far side of the barred gate was the social worker, not him.

Because she felt it, there must have been – like a murmur of it – disappointment on her face. Twice that day, and twice the day before, she had beaten on the wall and hoped he would come.

'Only me, Millie,' Ivanhoe Manners said. He pulled a face, his teeth flashed, and he shrugged. 'Second best, am I?'

'Did he go?'

'Dropped the keys in – no note, nothing – left the place clean like he was never there. Gone, as if he was finished with us. What I came to say, you have new folk next door from tomorrow. A mother and her daughter, from Sudan. I thought you should know…

Did he not say goodbye to you?'

She said gruffly, 'You'd better go and make the tea, and you can have a biscuit.'

She slumped back in her chair. She heard the rattle of the cups, then the kettle's whistle was cut and water poured.

'I'll let it stand a minute,' he called to her. 'Did you learn anything about him?'

'He didn't tell me – told me nothing – but he'd been a soldier. I tell you, believe me, he was a soldier.'

'Nothing about where he was going?'

She looked out of her window, down over the plaza and up to the blocks and flat roofs of the Amersham.

She felt frail and the pain was in her arm. She felt aged and alone, and she remembered what Dawn had said to her about the High Fly Boys and about the dealer at the lamp post. His kiss was on her forehead.

She said tartly, 'I have one and a half sugars…

Going to do? What soldiers do, I imagine, find somewhere to go and fight.'

He played chess. Victory was assured because Frederick Gaunt competed against himself.

The train thrashed north at speed and the roll of the carriage on the track bumped his knees against those of the man opposite. Other passengers beavered over work files or peered at the screens of their laptops, but Gaunt had his chess, and the man who obstructed his leg room and had joined the train at Rugby had his newspaper. After each move, Gaunt rotated the pocket set. He could not have brought work files or a laptop with him: in these times, it was damn near a capital offence to lose either on public transport.

There was a grunt across the table but Gaunt was not sure if it had been obscenity or blasphemy. He pondered the moves of the little plastic figures on his board and thought of the futility with which he wasted his journey time: did it matter if a blue bishop was lost or a red knight?

Perhaps…

Perhaps it mattered greatly…

Perhaps it mattered more than his mind could articulate.

He studied the positioning of his kings and queens, bishops and knights, the pawns. Was Wilco a pawn?

Most certainly the minder who had died in Prague, burned, had been a pawn. Was Timo Rahman a knight? Was the co-ordinator, who had escaped them, a bishop? Was the city where he lived, worked, the queen that must be protected? He began to move the pieces. Pawns were lost, removed. A knight fell. A bishop moved against a queen… Not a bloody game.

Quite deliberately, he kicked out his leg and his toecap caught the ankle of the man opposite. He smiled sweetly.

When he played against himself, he always won – but it was not a bloody game when Polly Wilkins, the pawn, was on the board, and not a bloody game if the queen could not be protected by the bishop's move. He was quiet, hunched, and his eyes did not leave the board and the plastic pieces. He felt cold, as if he were intimidated. She was not the only pawn: the bishop, too, had them and would sacrifice them, the sleepers.

He did not know the codename that had been given him. He worked in the Fast Friar food outlet in the conurbation of Hounslow to the west of London. It was nineteen months since he had last been to the mosque. Then he had been told what he should study and that he should not return there for worship.

Neither did he know that his true name and the address of the Fast Friar, where he scrubbed the cooking surfaces and cleaned out the frying vats, were spoken of in caves in the mountain landscapes of the tribal areas of Pakistan and in safe-houses in a town of eastern Yemen; and that they were in the mind of a man who travelled ever closer. He was a few days short of his twenty-first birthday. He lived with his parents and two sisters a bus ride from the Fast Friar, and nineteen months before he had, as instructed, taken down from his bedroom wall the posters celebrating the jihad in Iraq and pictures of mujahidin fighters in Chechnya. He was on no list – as he would have been had he continued to attend the mosque – of potential activists compiled by the Security Service or the Special Branch or the Anti-terrorist Unit of Scotland Yard, In nineteen months he had not seen the imam who had recruited him, but he harboured in the depths of his mind the promise made and the instruction given him. His family, second-generation immigrants from Karachi, had no access to his mind.

The promise made him was that one day – at a time not known – a man would come to him, would seek him out, would use him. The instruction given him was that he should spend every waking hour, when he was not at the Fast Friar, down the A4 road at Heathrow airport. He had gained, because of his dedication, a near encyclopedic knowledge of the perimeters and their wire defences, the patterns of the patrols, and dead ground on the flight paths for landings and take-offs, and his friends who worked inside never realized they were gutted for information. He did not go to the mosque, did not worship with his family, but his concept of faith burned bright in him and what he would do for his God. A man would come one day to his home or to the Fast Friar and would lead him to the side, beyond the earshot of his family or his employer, and would quote from the Book, 2:25: 'And give good news to those who believe and do good deeds… ' And he would answer: '… that they will have gardens in which rivers flow.' It would happen, and everything he knew of the airport would be told.

The door to Eternal Paradise would be opened to receive him.

Polly listened – had little choice – as she climbed the stairs and followed the woman.

'You'll enjoy it here, of course you will. Such a lovely building, so impressive. Dates back a hundred and sixty years. We're so fortunate to be here but – I'm being frank – after all the downsizing, we five Brits, and I'm not counting the locally employed staff, we rather rattle around here. It's so good to have a visitor and an excuse to open a bit more up.'

She was at 8a Harvestehuder Weg, the seat of the British Consulate in Hamburg. The taxi had dropped her outside a white stucco-fronted building that was indeed magnificent, opulent. The woman escorted her to the top floor where there would be a door reinforced with steel plate and behind it a room available to the Service.

'A shipping magnate built it, then sold it on to a Chilean family who were in the saltpetre trade, but they went under in the great Stock Exchange crash of

'twenty-nine. In 1930 everything inside was auctioned off – quite extraordinary, among the items under the hammer were three hundred pairs of antlers and, would you believe?, four and a half thousand bottles of wine of best vintage going back nearly forty years.

Then it was headquarters for an SS Gruppenftihrer.

Very convenient, because Kaufmann, who was top Nazi for the city, was just a few doors down, where the Americans are now. It missed all the bombing – a providential wind blew the Pathfinder marker flares away from this district. The annexe was built by concentration-camp inmates from Neuengamme.

Anyway we came, got our feet under the table, and have been here ever since. We're very lucky.'

She knew she was escorted by a junior member of staff because the consul-general would not want to be within spitting distance of an officer from the Service.

Her own ambassador down in Prague, if they met in a corridor, always found papers to put his head into or a window to look out of for fear of contamination.

They were at the door and the woman gave her the keys. Polly unlocked it. A darkened room, and a musty smell, confronted her, like a mausoleum. She saw a table, an armchair and a straight chair, a rack of communications equipment, and the familiar red telephone that would give secure speech contact to London, to Gaunt, and a camp-bed with blankets folded on it. There was a shower in one corner, a small partitioned unit beside it with access to a lavatory, and a small cooker over a fridge on the other side of the shower. She could make herself at home, she thought, maybe take a holiday on Harvestehuder Weg.

T hope you'll be all right. Just sing out if there's anything you need. We usually gather for sherry with the CG at about five on Fridays, in the salon, what was the ballroom – if you're still here, you'd be very welcome.'

Polly said that she had just a few 'bits and bobs' to sort out and didn't know how long that would take, whether she would be finished by Friday or not.

Alone, the door shut behind her, she rang the number of the organized-crime section of the Hamburg police, her starting point, and wondered if he was here yet, in the city, the man she was tasked to hunt for.

'It is Sami…'

He heard the silence, then a gasp, then a hiss of shock, then something clattered in his ear as if she had dropped a cup or a plate that she carried, then the silence. The first time he had rung, from the Hauptbahnhof, the phone had not been picked up. He had walked for many hours, first doing great circles round the square in front of the station, ever increasing, then taken the S-Bahn through the docks area and over the river. He had left it at the Wilhelmsburg stop.

There, he had rung again, and the coin had dropped when the phone was answered, and the crisp voice had answered, 'Yes, this is Else. Who is that?' He had given the name she would know, from five years before. He imagined her standing with the phone at her ear, eyes wide, mouth gaping.

'We should meet.'

A pause of many seconds, then a choke, then, 'I don't know i f.. . '

The voice – each cadence the same as he had known it – faded. She was, in his adolescent and adult life, the only woman he had loved. In all the years since he had been in Hamburg, he had remembered the telephone number of the apartment high in the concrete block. At first, when he had left, the memory of her had been in his mind each day and each night, but the years had tripped on and the memory had slipped to once a week, but was always there. Of course, if a recruit given to him to mould to the state of grace, readied to wear a martyr's belt, had made such a contact with old life and old love, he would have castigated him, rejected him and exorcized him from what he planned. But she was Else Borchardt, and he had come back to her city: she was his weakness.

'No – everything is possible. We should meet.'

'Where are you? I don't think…'

'I am close. I will come.'

He put down the phone. The wind thrashed around him. Cigarette packets, empty and discarded, scattered in front of its force. He thought the wind came over the flat lands from Bremerhaven and Buxtehude to the west, or from Luneburg to the south.

When it reached the blocks of Wilhelmsburg, the concrete towers, it eddied in their shelter or was funnelled between them. He had many names. His given name at birth in the Egyptian city of Alexandria was but the first. To those he served, he was Abu Khaled. On the passports he had used on his journey, each carried a different name. For the German documentation shown at the crossing between Liberec and Zgorzelec, with his place of birth listed as Colombo in Sri Lanka, he was Mahela Zoysa. In Hamburg, eighteen months as a student, he was Sami to his lecturers, his friends and his lover. She was sharp in his mind: five years after he had slipped from her bed, gone into a dawn and left her asleep, everything of her face and body was clear to him.

It was where they had lived. He passed an arcade of shops with nameplates in Arabic or Turkish characters, and from them they had bought their food.

He stopped to watch the football game on a dirt surface enclosed with mesh wire, where he had played and she had watched him. He walked on.

Ahead was the statue. Made from weather-darkened bronze, the figure showed a diving 'keeper – what he did on the dirt surface behind the wire – horizontal but with a groping arm and a ball that hugged the fingertips. Nothing had changed in Wilhelmsburg in the five years since he had gone. She would not have changed.

He came to the doorway.

The blocks were where the city put immigrants and students and those without work, far from its wealth, distanced from its prosperity by the Elbe river. She had said, 'I don't know i f… ' on the phone, and had said, 'I don't think… ' He could not believe that Else Borchardt's love for him was lost, but he hesitated in front of the bank of names and bells, and he scanned the list but did not find her name. Within, perhaps, two minutes, a child elbowed past him and rang a bell and there was the click of the closed door being unlatched. He followed the child inside. She was on the twelfth floor of fourteen. He took the stairs. At each landing, as the breath spurted in his lungs, the certainty that had brought him to Wilhelmsburg diminished, a fraction of confidence at each flight, but he pressed on. When he came to the door on the twelfth floor, when his finger hovered over the bell button, he saw that the name typed on paper in the slot beside it was not Borchardt. It was five years since he had closed that door on his back, quietly so that she should not wake. He killed the doubts, pressed the button, kept his finger on it and heard the bell ring out.

She stood in front of him.

He saw no welcome, but fear.

She was heavier than the image of her he had carried in his mind, thicker at the hips, and her waist sagged on the belt of her jeans. There were lines at her mouth and eyes where there had been none, and she wore lipstick that before she had despised. Her hair hung loose and was not kept tight against her scalp by the scarlet bandanna of protest she had always worn.

He had thought, climbing the stairs, that she would gasp, then melt, then hold out her arms to grasp him, as she had always done, but the arms were across her chest and folded tight over her blouse, not the T-shirt of Guevara's face that she had worn each and every day. Past her shoulder an electric fire burned and in front of it was a rack on which a baby's clothes dried.

He looked above the fire and saw the print of a watercolour view, popular, of the castle at Heidelberg, and the same print had been in a corridor off the entrance to the college where he had been enrolled and where she had studied to be a teacher, and which all of them had regarded with derision. Five years back, there had been in that place above the fire, a poster to com-memorate the sacrifices of the Palestinian people.

Everything he saw, he thought was betrayal.

There was a chest beside the fire.

A framed photograph was on the chest.

In the photograph she stood with her baby and a uniformed man – Caucasian white – was beside her, an arm round her shoulder.

She said, 'We have been married for three years. He is from Krakow, but now he has citizenship. He is a good man and a good father. It was a long time ago, Sami.'

'What does he do?' The question had an innocence.

'He is on the Bahn-Wacht – sometimes he works at the Hauptbahnhof, sometimes on the U-Bahn, sometimes at the Dammtor. In two years he hopes to join the city's police, it is his ambition… It was too long ago, Sami. We change. It was the old life, we were young – everything is changed. You went, I cried for a week. I thought you would come back, I promised myself that you would come back… Then the planes hit the towers, and everything changed.'

His voice was a whisper: 'Did you ever speak of it?'

'Of who we knew? No. Whom we met? No… But I changed my life and hid what had been.' She looked into his face. 'Did you change, Sami, move on? Or do you still belong to the struggle? Have you left them or are you a part of them?'

He should not have come, and he knew it. It played in his mind. The man from Krakow returned in the evening from his work shift, pulled off his tie, loosened his uniform tunic, waited for food to be set before him, had his baby sit on his knee and asked if she had had a good day. And he had ambition to be a policeman. How better to achieve ambition? She would tell him that a man, from her past, had arrived at the door without warning and who he was and who his associates had been at the college. And he would telephone to the police or the BfV – and ambition would be realized for an immigrant from Krakow… and he knew also that his weakness must be covered.

The baby had begun to cry and she turned to go to it. He stepped inside the room and reached out.

She recoiled when his fingers found her neck. He remembered the softness of the skin, where his fingers had played patterns. Then she had snuggled closer to him, had slipped undone the belt of her jeans and lifted up the T-shirt with the face of Guevara. He tightened his fingers and no scream came from her throat, just a choke. He pressed harder. When she no longer struggled, when she was limp and he supported her weight, he dragged her into the bedroom. He left her on the bed, beside the cot where the baby cried.

At the door, before he quietly, carefully, closed it, as he had five years before, he paused and used the back of his hand to smear away the wetness from his face.

He had trekked up the long hill of the Elbchaussee, had left the river behind him. Malachy came to Blankenese and by the station he found a board with a street map. Nothing written down, everything remembered. He searched for the name and found a side turning that was scarcely visible on the map. But the dusk had not yet come, and he walked in the opposite direction towards parkland, away from the side turning, sat on a bench and waited for darkness.