Rat Run

Chapter Five

Feverishly, Malachy polished.

Back from his walk, the door locked and bolted behind him, he had gone to his bed, knelt and taken the shoes from the black sack.

They were his most valuable possession. His mother had said, T know it's all sand and donkey poo down in Basra, dear, but there'll be times when you need to be smart. Your father found that in Aden when he was a sprog subaltern and you were just a star in my eye. You should never be short of a good pair of shoes. I always say that a man's character is judged by his shoes.' Roz hadn't gone with him to Devon for that last lunch before he'd flown from Lyneham to Iraq. She wouldn't have gone if elephants had been dragging her – not after his father had refused to attend his son's wedding to a girl who wasn't 'suitable'. Over sherry before lunch his mother had produced the gift-wrapped parcel with a ribbon round it. When he'd opened the box, the shoes had gleamed at him, and they'd fitted to perfection. He'd gone back with them that night to Alamein Drive and had not shown them to Roz, but he'd worn them on the flight down, and all the days that he was in Brigade before his transfer to the Scottish-based battalion… and he'd worn them when they had flown him out.

Roz had hovered above him in the bedroom at the quarters. He had packed a rucksack and a suitcase, everything he would need except the helmet, the flak-jacket and the Browning 9mm, which would be issued to him the next evening when he landed. The evening sun had lit the bed. She had stood over him while he had transferred the neat piles of clothing into the rucksack and the case, and had not helped him. He had sensed the attack was coming and had not known what would trigger it. The shoes had. The strings of the sack were fastened. The photograph of her that he loved most – he had taken it at the Colosseum in Rome, the light bright on her hair and on the walls behind her, happiness on her face – in a silver frame that her parents had given them went into the suitcase and he zipped it shut. He had laid out the starched uniform he would wear on the aircraft, and then he had gone to the wardrobe and taken out the box and the shoes. The attack had gone through sarcasm to anger then on to a sneer when she had seen his mother's note and the crosses for kisses. 'Oh, that's nice. Only the best good enough. What did they cost – two fifty? Where did you find two fifty to spend on a pair of shoes? Isn't there anything here that needs two hundred and fifty quid spending on it? Sorry, sorry, a present from Mum. How touching. Be sure to send her a postcard from sunny Basra and tell her you're wearing Mummy's shoes and keeping them nice and shiny.' Her father had retired as a warrant officer (Instructor) at the Royal Military Academy; his father had retired with the rank of brigadier – he'd thought it didn't matter, and had been wrong.

He polished hard – as hard as he had worked on the boots issued him for Basic Training before his father had pulled strings and opened the gates of Sandhurst for him. Malachy sweated as he rubbed the cloth over the toes and was frenzied at his work.

When he had left Chicksands, when he had tried to find work as a civilian, he had worn those shoes. His mother had never seen them on him; his mother and father had declined to meet him. And he had worn the shoes when he had taken the train to London, when he had laid out his money on the counter of the off-licence opposite Marylebone station and had bought the two four-packs of Special Brew, then found a bench and had started, for the first time, to drink away the demons. Midnight, with nowhere to go, and he'd ended up with the derelicts – without a blanket and without cardboard – and he'd seen the eyes covet his shoes. He never took them off. If he had taken them off, that night or in the nights of the weeks that followed, they would have gone. In the hostel he had slept with them under his pillow. His watch had gone, a twenty-first birthday present from a godfather, and his wallet, and his money from begging, which had been in a cheap little purse on a bootlace round his neck, with his tags, but his shoes had stayed on his feet.

Now it was as if Malachy tried to polish away the scars, on the shoes, of his life. With ferocity he burnished the toecaps. They shone – he could see his face in the brogue patterns. More polish. He gripped the left shoe and worked the cloth over it.

He heard the knock at his door and Dawn's voice called to him.

He turned the lock and drew down the bolt. She did not look at his face but stared at the shoe. She said distantly, eyes never off the shoe, 'I am going to the hospital. I want to be there when they take Millie to theatre, and then I will stay till she is awake again. It will be late when I come back. I am going to have to walk from Walworth Road, from the bus. Would you, please, meet me from the bus? I would like that.'

'Of course I will.'

'There is a cafe by the bus stop. Can we say at eleven o'clock?'

'Yes.'

'Am I silly to be frightened of walking in the Amersham that late, even after what happened to the boys?'

'I don't think so. I'll be at the cafe by the bus stop at eleven o'clock.'

The siege was over. The firemen's tenders blocked Kostecna, and a lacework of hoses ran down the alley that was too narrow for them to pass. Ladders were thrown up against the building's walls and water dripped. Wisps of smoke filtered up between the tiles where, hours before, there had been flames and billowing black clouds. No more gunfire from under the roof, and the last grenade explosion was a distant memory. It had a finality about it. Hard for Polly Wilkins to recall the excitement of being in the different vans that had kept the street entrance under surveillance, and the frustration of being held back while the storm squad had gone in, and the emotion of seeing the bloodied casualties brought out.

She was at the alley's entrance, where it joined the street, and from there she could smell the charred roof timbers on which the hoses played. Every five minutes, sometimes less, she demanded of Ludvik when she would be permitted to climb the stairs and see the scene for herself; each time she was offered only a shrug. Of course Ludvik did not know. What had been dramatic in its unpredictability now had a dreary certainty. Polly understood why her station chief, Braithwaite, had gone back to his office and had stayed there. She shivered as the evening's cold settled on her – not that it mattered, but that night there might be one of the year's final frosts. The last time she had phoned Braithwaite to complain about the slowness of the fire crews and the further delays in her getting up the stairs to see where they had made their stand, he had said to her, with annoying plausi-bility, 'You can put a kettle on the stove, turn on the gas and light it, but shouting at the kettle won't make it boil faster.' She detested that sort of banal logic.

All around her, she heard the cursed protests of residents whose apartments were unaffected by the fire but who were still prevented from returning to their homes. They seemed unable, unwilling, to comprehend the scale of the threat that had settled among them in the top-floor apartment. Bombs, killing, mayhem, catastrophe – the face of al-Qaeda.

Two men of al-Qaeda were dead – not an arm or a hand or fist of the Organization, little more than the tip of a fingernail.

She swore aloud and Ludvik turned sharply to look at her.

Polly wouldn't explain. So few did. Dominic had not understood. He was Foreign and Commonwealth Office, had a future, and had bought her an engagement ring with a double diamond twist; the wedding had been talked of vaguely for 'some time next year' and they'd lived together at his Battersea flat, not her Wandsworth pad. He had been posted to Buenos Aires. 'You'll like it there, darling, fascinating culture.

You don't want to hang around that place where they kicked you.' What about him chucking in the FCO and coming out to Prague? 'You're not serious, darling, are you? What? Throw up my career?' Was the work of the Secret Intelligence Service of less importance than tramping a cocktail circuit in Argentina? Two months after she'd arrived in Prague and a month after he'd bedded down in Buenos Aires, the email had come: 'Don't think this is going to work.

Sorry about that but you made the bed and you'll have to lie on it. Please send the ring, at your convenience, to my parents and they'll know what to do with it. No hard feelings but better to cut and run. I wish you well, Dominic.' The end of the great affair of Polly Wilkins's life… because he didn't understand.

Only Frederick Gaunt understood. Al-Qaeda, and what it could do – the importance of a co-ordinator – dominated her life, left no room for love… damn it.

She waited, with Ludvik, to be called forward, and wondered how it had been for the two men in the top-floor apartment during the last moments of their lives.

Flush against the road, bright as a temple of light, was the gaol wall. They cruised down Artillery Lane.

Ricky Capel did not know how many hundreds of men were held in HMP Wormwood Scrubs. Truth was, he knew little about the prison. He knew about HMP Brixton, about Pentonville and Wandsworth because – as a kid, with his sisters – his mother had dragged him to them and in through the big gates to see his father. What he could remember was that he had screamed and fought and she had held his arm, vice-like, and each time he had seen his father brought through a far door into the visits area, with the screws pressed round him, he had gone quiet and buried his head in his mother's shoulder. He had never looked into his father's face, had never spoken. Out of the big gates, each time, he had run like the wind to the bus stop and not looked back at the walls. But he didn't know Wormwood Scrubs because his father had never done time there.. . He thought his grandfather had, but that was before he was born.

'Go right,' Ricky said, from the back seat.

His cousin Davey drove, and his cousin Benji was beside him. His cousin Charlie was next to Ricky in the back. They turned into Ducane Road. Davey was a harder enforcer than Ricky, didn't care a fuck about the blood he drew and the pain he inflicted. Benji was a clearer thinker than Ricky, scratched at an idea till there was a plan to execute it. Charlie had more comprehension of money and how to move it than Ricky, how to wash and rinse and scrub it clean. But the decision-taking was Ricky's, and he brought together their differing talents. When Ricky, the youngest of them by five clear years, said what would happen there was no disagreement. His leadership was accepted.

The gaol, brilliant under the high arc-lights, fascinated Ricky. He had never been in prison. Few secrets existed between Ricky and the cousins; but his fear of prison was one of them. It was not something he would confide to them, to Joanne, his parents or his grandfather. He kept the secret close, but it lurked in his mind as he peered up at the height of the walls.

Only the top floor of the nearest wing was visible, lights behind small barred windows, some of which had washing draped outside. Inside the car, even with the window down and straining to listen, he heard nothing. However many hundreds of men were there, and staff, and however many barred gates there were to slam shut, no sounds came from the place.

'Go right again.'

'There's cameras on us,' Benji murmured.

'I said, go right again.'

'Sure thing, Ricky.' Davey eased the wheel, took them into Wulfstan Street, and past the quarters for prison staff. A curl of contempt licked at the side of Ricky's mouth. Two screws were walking on the pavement, anoraks over their uniform shirts, each carrying a plastic supermarket bag with the possessions they took home from their shift.

'Then right again – isn't this the place, Benji, what you were talking about?'

'Braybrook Street, spot on, Ricky.'

'Tell me about it, like you did.'

They left behind the north-west corner of the prison's perimeter and Davey slowed to a crawl.

Behind them were the walls, the lights, the wire and hundreds of men – Ricky twisted a last time to see – then, to the right, was a great open mass of darkness, football pitches, open parkland and the floodlights of a running stadium. On the left, behind a line of parked cars, were semi-detached homes like the one where Ricky lived with Joanne and Wayne.

'It's Braybrook Street, late sixties, sixty-six or

– seven. There's three guys in a car and they've got shooters and they're parked up and killing time before a job's ready. A police car, three blokes in it, comes by and doesn't like them sitting there. They're going to do a check on the vehicle.'

'Like it will be if we don't keep moving. Go on, Benji.' It was as if Ricky were an addict, needed the fix of hearing the story again now that he was here, a gawper in the shadows between the street's lights and half hidden by the parked cars.

'One of them in the vehicle's Roberts, Harry Roberts. The first copper leans through the window and starts with his questions. Roberts shoots him, then gets out, shoots the second copper in the street. I think that's the story, and the third one's shot in the police wheels. Two of them's gone, but Roberts is still inside, or was last time I read about him. Thirty-some-thing years he's done.'

'Mad, wasn't he?'

'It was just after they'd finished with the rope. A few months earlier and they'd all have hanged.

Roberts didn't get hanged but he's done thirty-eight years and-'

'OK, OK, I heard you.' Ricky didn't need the story any more. 'Wasn't smart, was it?' In unison, the cousins nodded agreement. 'Right, let's get on back – what's the business?'

They drove away from the gaol. •

Charlie said, 'The big new growth area is behind that wall and behind that wire. Class-A stuff is what they want when they're banged up. They want brown and they want coke, and I reckon it's Es as well. What I hear, eight out of ten who go down are showing traces of class-A stuff when they have the check on arrival. That's a heavy market, which is not tapped into. There's no organization for regular supply and that presents an opportunity too good to miss out on.

The key thing is "regular", and there's no exploitation of the market yet. There's useful money to be had and it's where we should be.'

Ricky sniggered. 'What you'd call a captive market…'

The cousins all laughed, always did at Ricky's humour.

'How do we get it in?'

Benji said, 'Three ways I've identified. First, quite simply, you chuck it over the wall. The price is going down, the street price is depressed because of supply and demand – supply's terrific – and you get some joker with a good arm and he lobs the packets over, and you accept the screws'll find two out of every three, but if you time it for exercise hours the chance is that you'll win with thirty-three and a third per cent. Tennis balls are good, split open, stuff inside, then taped up, and they're fine for chucking. They do that up in Manchester I've heard. Second, you use visitors. Do all the orifices, know what I mean? If there were proper detailed searches on visits there'd be uproar, a mutiny, and not half the people would get inside to see the people. But that's getting harder because there are more dogs and more scanners that sniff the class-A stuff. It's also dispersal of effort. To get good quantities in you have to use too many mules who're swallowing and stuffing – and clogging up the visitors' toilets. Third, you find a screw with a problem – debt, sick kiddie, girlfriend who likes the good life. One screw for one gaol, and he goes in once a week and he has one distributor on the inside.

The screw's not going to turn himself in, and the distributor doesn't have to know where it's coming from – so there's a cut-out.'

'How do you get the payback?'

Davey said, 'That's the distributor's problem whichever way you go, Ricky. It's for him to organize.

Every taker he sells to has to make the arrangements for payment outside, and the distributor's responsible for getting the cash together. If he's messing you, Ricky, then he's walking a fine line. Bad things can happen to him inside. And bad things can happen to his family outside, and he knows that.'

He had the outline for the enterprise from his cousins. His decision. None of them would have presumed to tell him what that decision should be. They were in the late-evening traffic on the Harrow Road, heading for London's central streets.

'We'll set up the Scrubs first, and if that works we'll go for Wandsworth – I'm not touching Pentonville or Brixton. We'll create a weekly guaranteed supply to one distributor. We find a screw, or a workshops-supervisor guy to take it in. That's how it's going to be.'

Davey grunted assent.

'Good thinking, Ricky,' Charlie said.

A little irritant anxiety broke in Ricky Capel. Would they ever tell him he was wrong? Then a mirthless chuckle came into his throat and a smile cracked the smoothness of his face. He was never wrong. His father had been, not Ricky, and his grandfather had made enough mistakes to get himself inside more than he was out. Davey would drive them across London and they'd pick up the old man, who'd have had a gut full, and bring him home.

In a corner far from the bar, Percy Capel sat with his cronies. The British Legion, its members former servicemen, was home from home. He was a legend there and he bathed in the glory of the story, which was enhanced by his refusal to talk detail.

Inside the Legion building, tucked away from the bar – to which he seldom went for drinks but allowed others to fill his glass – it was well known that he had been behind enemy lines in the Second World War for months, and should have had a medal for it.

At those November ceremonies in front of rain-swept memorials – as the retired squadron leader, their chairman, intoned his address – he and the others present, at awkward attention, wore the medals given them. Percy Capel should have had the Military Medal for his service in Albania: Major Anstruther had been given the Military Cross. What they all knew in the Legion bar was that Percy had been flown back to Alexandria, and the medal citation had gone up to the Gods for ratification – and that Percy had then been nicked by the Redcaps for stealing the petty cash out of a staff officer's bedroom while the bugger slept there. The way he told it, Percy had the cash off the dressing-table and was on his way out when the bedroom rug had gone walkabout under his weight, slid on the polished marble floor, and he'd gone arse over tit and wrecked his ankle. He'd scarpered down a drainpipe and been lifted while he was limping back to barracks. Two years in the glass-house at Shepton Mallet after repatriation in close arrest. When he told that story and the refills of his glass came thick and fast – 'Oh, don't mind if I do' – laughter bellowed the length and width of the bar. But he never talked, for a pint or a laugh, about Albania.

Some tried and failed.

His reply was always the same: 'Saw things done there, my friend, that would make your hair stand-not things for talking of in company.'

Could have talked about the major, the greatest man he'd ever known. Major Hugo Anstruther, who was lined up to inherit thousands of Highland acres, and a titled wife, had taught Percy Capel – his batman, handyman and donkey-minder – everything a man needed to know in the arts of safe-blowing and burglary, and everything a man did not need to know, except in Albania, about how to slit a sentry's throat silently and plant explosives on a bridge that would be detonated under a convoy, sending men, screaming, to death. On the flight out, after the Huns' surrender, Major Anstruther had said to him, 'I think, Percy, you'd be wise to forget most of what you learned with me or at best you'll spend most of the rest of your life locked up and at worst you'll go to the gallows.' He'd seen the death notice for the major, nine years ago, in a newspaper. That night he'd gone on the overnight sleeper to Fort William, taken a bus, then walked four miles and reached a little stone church as they were lifting the major's coffin from the hearse. He'd stood at the back. Anstruther had had the full works: medals on the coffin, piper to play him out, estate workers in their best clothes and enough children and grandchildren to fill a charabanc.

Nobody had spoken to Percy. They'd just walked by him like he was a dog turd. Rain coming down heavy, and him in his one suit that he'd wear next at Winifred's funeral, and then at his own.

When they'd all left, just the gravedigger left to smack his spade into the lumps of sodden clay and fill the pit, he'd gone close. The gravedigger had been young and a self-rolled fag hung on his lip. Percy, drenched, had said that he had fought with the major in Albania. 'Where's that?' Water streaming down his face and through his suit jacket, Percy had said he and the major had been comrades in arms. 'When was that?' He'd walked back four miles, had waited two hours for a bus, and caught the night sleeper to London. He had a week in bed with the shivers from his soaking.

They didn't need to know, in the Legion bar, about Major Anstruther and the gang in the cave led by Mehmet Rahman.

Percy Capel didn't buy drinks. Could have done.

He had his war pension and his old-age pension, and he lived for free with his son and daughter-in-law and wanted for nothing, and he had the hundred a week in cash that Ricky gave him. Ricky knew about Albania and Mehmet Rahman, and had traded on his grandfather's war. Percy hated his grandson but still took his money.

He was in full flight. 'I was doing this job, a real big property down in Esher – that's a bit off my beat but I'd read in the paper who these folk were – and I'm upstairs and pocketing the stuff and a bloody dog, sounding like a wolf, is up and roaring at the closed door. I'm doing a double-fast runner, down the drainpipe, when…'

Ricky stood at the far end of the bar. Hand up, finger beckoning.

'Sorry, guys. Got to go. My round next time. Doesn't like to be kept waiting.'

He shuffled towards the door, leaving the laughter stifled and his drink unfinished. The talk at home, over the years, about Major Hugo Anstruther and Mehmet Rahman, the little case of mementoes under his bed, had launched the little piece of vermin. He was responsible in part for the empire of his grandson

… God, it weighed on him.

'Coming, Ricky. Good of you to collect me.'

Everyone danced to Ricky, just as Percy Capel did.

Harry, who was Sharon Capel's brother, danced any way that Ricky wanted him to dance. By dancing, he kept the dream alive.

He was in the wheelhouse and rocked gently in the skipper's seat as the Anneliese Royal swayed at its mooring ropes. She was ready to sail, except for the ice. Before dawn they would be gone. In an hour Billy and young Paul would drive up to the quay, the ice would be loaded, they would slip the ropes and be gone into the night. Billy had monitored the forecast and told him that for this week weather conditions were predicted as good, not the week after.

He read and he dreamed, and the dream was his sole escape from Ricky Capel.

The dream was of finding a Brixham-built trawler, a boat from the south Devon yards of eighty years ago.

It might be up a creek in the south-west, or tied up and forgotten on the Hamble, or left to rot on the mudflats outside a port in Scotland or on the Isle of Man. If after all those years of inactivity – because the diesel engine had taken over from sail power by the late 1940s, which had dictated the dumping of the old trawler fleet – he could discover a trawler with a sound hull and a good keel, Harry's dream would be launched. In his retirement, free of Ricky Capel, he would potter on the carcass of the boat and hope that, before his death, he would have resurrected it, placed in it a new mast, scrubbed the decks and varnished them till they shone, and could put to sea, move across the water at a crisp seven or eight knots in a south-westerly with the full red sails that were the colour of Devon earth – and be in heaven.

He had an hour to read before they brought the ice on board.

But dreams needed paying for. Without Ricky's money, the dream would die.

The book – reminiscences and anecdotes of life on the old powered trawlers – was faded, frayed and had stains on the pages from fingers that had dripped with the fluid of fish stomachs.

When he finished a favourite passage, he locked away the book and waited for the pickup's headlights to spear across the quay. They would fish for five days

– without having to navigate towards a marker buoy off Cuxhaven or the rock outcrop of Helgoland to collect a waterproof package – then come back and moor in harbour during the length of the forecast storm, and maybe go to the west and home.

Finally, she had been permitted inside.

Past midnight, and Polly had climbed the stone staircase and had allowed Ludvik's hand to remain on her arm as she stepped over the debris left by the firemen.

A mass of floodlights used by the police and men of the BIS played over the interior. The rain came through the ceiling where the fire had destroyed the roof and pattered on her head. From the doorway, four ladders were laid out over the exposed floor beams because the planks had gone. Two had been placed so that they gave access to either side of the charred heap that had been left untouched by the fire crew.

She shuddered. The smell of the burning, which had been doused by the hoses, then damped by the rain, caught in her nose, but overriding it was a stronger stench, sweet and sickly. She had never been close up to it before, but instinctively she knew it.

Quite deliberately, not brooking argument, she pushed Ludvik aside, then sharply tapped the shoulder of a man in front of her and gestured for him to move out of her path. He shifted, and the lights dazzled her through her steel-rimmed, unfashionable spectacles. She shoved her hair out of her face and hitched her skirt high over her knees; if her tights laddered that was of no importance. She slipped plastic gloves over her hands. She had authority because the BIS, the successor to the former Communist regime's StB, had been trained in modern counter-intelligence techniques by agencies from the United Kingdom. She knelt on the ladder to the left of the heap, steeled herself, then reached for a further rung and began to edge out over the open beams.

She was slight but the ladder creaked under her weight, and the cold snatched at her bared legs. She came closer to the source of the stench, and called over her shoulder: 'Has anything here been touched or moved?'

Ludvik answered her: 'Only by the fire, not by us.'

The lights stayed on the heap and the stench drew her forward. She reached out towards the growing clarity of the shapes. Nearest to her was the machine pistol, scorched and lying among burned bedding. At the Fort, above the coast outside Portsmouth, she had done weapons training with the bland instructors who thought all recruits were idiots. Polly had been one of the few who had listened… She lifted the barrel, held it pointing to the rainclouds between the beams and passed it behind her, careful that the trigger did not snag. It was taken. She found five blackened magazines and knew from their weight that their bullets had been exhausted. As her hands groped closer to the largest unrecognizable shape in the pile, a sharp, wounding little memory came back to her. She had been driving with Dominic to Scotland for their first week away after they had met. They had been near the border and had stopped to picnic but a cloud had come dark over them from Longtown, made by the funeral pyre of the animals slaughtered to contain the epidemic of foot-and-mouth. They had hurried on but the stench had stayed in the car, even with all the windows open. Dominic was gone, but not the memory of the stench.

She held a hand.

There was a gasp behind her, then nervous titters.

The lights were on the gloves she wore and the black bones of a hand in hers. The clothing was gone, and much of the flesh. She thought she might vomit. She put down the hand, detached from the wrist because the muscle had burned. She felt the shape of the arm, then the torso and her fingers flickered up to the skull.

A jawbone, an open mouth, eye sockets. It seemed to her that she learned more from the touch than from the glare of the lights on the face. They had called him Muhammad Iyad. She wondered how it had been for him in the final spasms of his life, his mouth wide with agony. Had his faith in God sustained him, or the love of his woman, or had he died in terror – cursing those he served? Her head bobbed, and she shook the thoughts from her mind. Her fingers dismantled the heap and found nothing more.

'Right,' Polly said briskly, to the men behind her.

'That's one of them. Where's the other?'

A murmur of voices behind her, then Ludvik's hang-dog response. 'They have found only one cadaver.'

'You had the building sealed, you told me.'

'Only one body was found.'

It was as if she were a child, and a present in gaudy wrapping was offered her, and when she reached for it the present was snatched away. The prize was gone.

She turned and started to crawl back along the ladder. With the time differential between Prague and London› it would now be 10.35 p.m. at Vauxhall Bridge Cross, and Gaunt would be waiting. With the certainties of night following day, and spring following winter, she knew Gaunt would be at his desk with his shoes up on it, and waiting for her signal.

Polly Wilkins swore obscenely, and came off the ladder.

Frederick Gaunt read the latest epistle from the whey-faced creature who had written the report, now heavily circulated, on the Service's future.

The in-tray left for him by Gloria was empty, its contents either gone to the shredder or dumped on her desk in the outer office for filing. He had done his emails through the evening. Nothing remained for him to read except the report – The Secret Intelligence Service in 2010 (Confidential) – which made his lips curl in irritation.

It was crap.

In five years the Service would 'understand customer and partner requirements'. What was the Service? A division of the bloody London Underground?

He was old school and regarded 'jargon-mongers' with contempt… Maybe he should have gone when the knife hacked through the team responsible for the weapons-of-mass-destruction analysis. Could have gone then, on full pension as a sweetener, and joined the happy ranks of the Whitehall discards. Could have busied himself with his great love of Roman archaeology, set out his stall in a tidy guest-house, like the one at Bradford-on-Avon, and been within walking distance of the excavation, spent his days chipping with a light hammer, digging with a hand trowel, brushing at the mud and stone, letting out little whoops of pleasure as the villa gave up its secrets.

Walking away, he had realized long ago, took courage: perhaps more courage than flowed in Frederick Gaunt's veins. No wife: she'd gone with that hairy-faced beggar to a smallholding in Herefordshire to live like a Balkan peasant. No children: their mother had poisoned their minds against him and contact was lost. No friends: an officer in the Service was adept at avoiding commitment to people outside his tunnel of work. No prizes to bask in: the war went on, different enemies but the same endless threat. When he left he would be one more of the old farts who was unable under the strictures of the Official Secrets Act to say boldly from a bar stool: 'Do you know who I used to be?' He would be another senile bore, with Roman artefacts for company and a guest-house for home.

He stayed on and endured the crap of the jargon-mongers. And he waited… And he forced the pages of The Secret Intelligence Service 2010

(Confidential) into the teeth of the shredder… And around him the building was hushed. He did not know whether Wilco would come through on a secure phone line or use the encrypted teleprinter. He would not nag her. Polly 'Wilco' Wilkins was the best girl he'd ever supervised, and the most loyal, and the most unlucky in the twin fall-out of the WMD analysis and love. It would have been an unspeakable crime to pester her for news. He knew that the storm squad had gone in, had been halted in its assault, that fire had ravaged the building and nothing more.

All of it real. He doubted that the author of The Secret Intelligence Service 2010 (Confidential) – the purveyor of crap – had the smallest comprehension of real Service life. Men's lives on the line, body-to-body fighting, dying in combat as duty for their country or for their faith: real life.

He drank the final splash of coffee and grimaced.

He could see a barge progress, west to east, down the Thames and past Parliament. He was wondering if its driver was heavy on 'understanding customer and partner requirements' when the teleprinter against the wall behind him began its shrill chatter.

He read.

Gaunt,

Bloody disaster. One, repeat one, body on premises.

Body is badly burned but I believe forensics will identify Muhammad lyad. Your co-ord slipped the net early and MI bought him a start of up to 24 hours. So, no identification of co-ord and all internal DNA traces obliterated by fire (my estimate).

Will be chasing loose ends in the morning. The bastard is that BIS promised me the area had been secured. You told me once: (quote) Life's unfair, always has been and always will be (end quote). Right now, I believe you.

Love,

Wilco

He had said that to her when she had poured out to him on the phone that Dominic in Buenos Aires had ditched her. A wry, sad smile crossed Gaunt's face. It seemed to matter more to her than losing her fiance that a potential co-ordinator of al-Qaeda had been mislaid, was loose in Europe with a full day's time bought him. He signalled her.

Wilco,

If life were easy, everybody would be doing it. Sleep tight.

Gaunt

He closed down his desk, switched off the light and left darkness behind him. Frederick Gaunt, bowed by disappointment, went along the silent corridors, down in the elevator, across the hall, where he failed to notice the greetings of Night Security, and home to the loneliness of his flat. He felt himself to be in a maze of uncertainty and did not know where his path would lead or who would walk with him in similar ignorance. But Frederick Gaunt was not a quitter, and the loss of the trace on the co-ordinator would bring him to his desk early and back to the trail.

He whistled to himself as he walked across the bridge.

13 January 2004

Taking charge: that was the talent of Hamish McQueen.

As the company's senior sergeant, he ran Bravo.

'What the hell happened, Corp? What sort of shambles was that?'

The section's corporal told him. A patrol, routine. An ambush, not routine but handled. 'Actually, we did well, Sarge, really well. We had three incoming fire positions and we did good neutralizing on them, and we have at least one confirmed kill. Everything was brilliant. We did good hard target, did it at speed, didn't give the hostiles anything to hit. They took punishment and they broke off. Did you stop the ambulance?'

'We stopped the ambulance. One dead and one likely to corpse. Both males. No women or kids, which means the best fire control. I'm not criticizing the response, which I'd consider entirely appropriate, that's not the shambles.

What's the story with him?'

In front of McQueen, the corporal seemed to duck his head away, evasive, as if he did not want to answer. McQueen gestured, thumb raised, to his right, where the officer sat on one of the plastic-seated chairs outside the operations room where men from the bunker took a soft-drink break or a smoke: he was staring forward and his shoulders seemed to tremble.

Across the yard, the crews of the Warriors, the quick-reaction team, had been stood down and McQueen saw that men from the patrol were at the centre of little knots, pouring out their tale, and that all eyes were on the officer.

'I'm struggling, Sarge…'

'Well, struggle a bit bloody harder. What am I going to report to the major? No one's going to bite you. What's the story?'

T was up forward – I was trying to handle a bloody firefight'

'Say what you've got to say.'

'We did the hard-target bit at speed, then doubled round the back of the mosque and didn't stop till we were by the school. That was when we realized he wasn't with us.'

McQueen pressed without mercy: 'Spill it. You realized then that Mr Kitchen was not with you. We've got your radio call on that – it's logged. What did you do?'

'Doubled back. Went back the way we'd come… You know where we found him.'

'You got his helmet and his flak-jacket, not his personal weapon. I am not criticizing you because there's no cause for that. I'd say you did bloody well. You've got to understand there was a right panic here – that is, serious panic.

I'm moving on. Who was closest to him?'

'Baz was. Baz says he lost him when we were doing the hard-target stuff.'

'How do you rate that boy?'

'Good kid. A bit lippy, but a good kid. Their chief guy, Baz dropped him, and with him down, the rest quit. We were in shit till Baz slotted their main man. He did well.'

McQueen's gaze raked from the officer, still sitting and still alone like he had some plague affliction, across the yard from where the private soldier, Baz, stood at the heart of a cluster and was holding forth. Hamish McQueen had been with this Scottish regiment for eighteen years, and when the vacancy opened up he stood the best chance of any of the company sergeants to get the nod and promotion to regimental sergeant major. Better than most, he recognized a minefield. As if he walked among trip wires and pressure plates, he considered where he stood now, and its implications.

For the sergeant there had been enough soft talk. 'Are you telling me, Corporal, that Mr Kitchen did a runner?'

'He was with us, then he wasn't with us – can't say different,' the corporal said evasively. 'We found his helmet and his flak-jacket dumped, didn't find his weapon. There was kids following and jeering at him, but they weren't a threat.'

'For fuck's sake, Corp, did he do a runner?'

'What else? Can you see a mark on him? I can't. What we reckon – yes – he ran. That's what we reckon. Yellow bastard, feckin' quit on us.'

'You talking? Baz talking?'

He saw the section corporal suck in a deep, deep breath.

'All of us talking… There's not a mark on him, and his helmet's gone and his flak-jacket and his gat. Where's he going? Back to Bravo. It's all of us bloody talking.'

'But you never saw him turn and run… Tell me.'

'For Christ's sake, I was in a firefight, then trying to do extraction. You tell me, Sarge, what else fits? Far as I know, first incoming and he's gone, that's the RPG and it was way high.' The corporal blurted: 'It's not my faidt, I'm not to blame if he's a yellow bastard, a Rupert who couldn't hack it.' 'Leave it there, Corp. Go get yourself and your boys a brew. I'll take it on.'

He turned away and strode towards the sandbagged operations room. As he took the few steps, his webbing clanking across his chest, Hamish McQueen reflected that his report in the bunker would be the hardest he had ever made to his company commander. Too damn right.. . He passed the man who still sat on the chair and whose gaze was void of expression. For a company sergeant major, who had ambitions to take on the role of regimental sergeant major, it was high risk to denounce an officer for running from combat. He would play it straight, take the white line down the middle of the road, and report what he had been told. Others, higher up the chain, could play God, but not Hamish McQueen. He would relay only what had been said to him. He didn't look down at the man as he passed him – he could think of no greater disgrace for a man than to be labelled a coward who had done a runner under fire – but hurried inside the bunker.

Deciding on what shirt, what trousers and giving a last shine to his shoes had eaten into the minutes of the schedule that Malachy had set himself. The shirt was not ironed but it was the best that had come from the charity shop, and the collar was not frayed. The trousers were not pressed but had only been worn once since their wash in the launderette. Clean socks on, and the shined shoes. Then Malachy stood in front of the little bathroom mirror, smoothed his hair into shape and used a finger to etch out a parting. The shoes set him off; he looked better than he had since Ivanhoe Manners had brought him to the Amersham.

It was twelve minutes to eleven and, beyond the windows, thick darkness blanketed the estate.

He would have to run down the stairs, sprint through the plazas and jog the length of the streets coming into Walworth Road. He'd cut it fine, but he would be there for eleven o'clock at the bus stop. He thought he had enough money to spare.

Buying rope, packaging tape, the plastic toy and the multi-blade penknife had eaten into his fortnight's benefit money. He had the drawer open and counted out what he could spare: enough for a port or a sherry for Dawn and a Coke for himself – there would be a pub in the road open till late. He slotted the drawer shut, slipped the pound coins into his pocket, and started for the door.

Suddenly he was late. He unfastened the lock and reached for the bolt.

The telephone rang. He had the bolt down and the door open, and the bell cut after its triple ring.

Then the silence clamoured behind him. To get to the bus stop, as he had promised, Malachy Kitchen would now have to push himself. His breathing came hard and his finger rested on the light switch by the door. Breaking a promise or keeping a promise? You do what you think is right, and maybe that'll make a ladder for you. To escort an old lady from the bus stop, after a hospital visit, back through the dark shadows of the estate? The minute had gone. The phone rang again.

To let her meander alone, clutching her bag, through the alleyways of the Amersham and into the blackened stairwell where a smashed light had not been replaced? The quiet fell round him after the third ring.