Rat Run

Chapter Twelve

Hours had passed. The rain had come on heavier, then eased, but the wind was fierce. The rain had penetrated the material of his heavy coat and the wind pushed the damp deeper. But in the park, where he sat on the bench and shivered and the cold caught at his bones, night had fallen. Malachy stood up, then stepped out.

Why? That there was no clear reason for the actions he had taken, merely a higher step on the ladder, seemed of small importance to him. He had little conception of what it would mean to his life if he teetered on the top rung… but he did not believe he could escape it. A kaleidoscope of images sped in his mind, the faces of those who had been kind, generous to him: old Cloughie at school, Adam Barnett, war studies tutor at the military academy, Brian Arnold, his guide into Intelligence at Chicksands… All would now have rooted for him. Then he heard the sneers, jibes, cruelty of those who had denied him…

Best foot forward, Malachy, and fast, before courage was lost.

He left the park and walked up into the village of Blankenese. There would have been communities like this one in Surrey, Berkshire and Cheshire. He passed the dim-lit windows of shops for antique furniture, imported clothes and food, and restaurants with candles at the tables and laughter, rows of parked Mercedes and BMW high-performance cars. He went through the village, and thought that prosperity oozed from it and comfort. He reached across a low, newly painted white wicket fence and grabbed a handful of earth from a hoed bed, then bent and smeared it on his shoes. He pulled his wool hat lower on his forehead and lifted the collar of his overcoat higher. He paused at a crossroads, took bearings from the signs, then headed on. He was hungry, thirsty, chilled, but the combination made his senses keen.

Alert, he saw the camera.

The stanchion to hold it was on a high street-light on the main road inland from the village. Branches from a tree wove a trellis of obstructions round the post at a level lower than the camera and the light. Its position surprised him, not right for monitoring traffic in a road leading out of a village centre. A hundred metres past the light, the camera, was the side road leading off to the right. He went towards the camera, under it, and its lens would only have caught the dark mass of his coat and hat, not registered his face.

Opposite the side road was a narrow entrance into a garden. A hedge had been clipped around the doorway, which was recessed in the beech leaves that the winter had not stripped. He was in shadow when he crouched on the step, and he tucked his dirt-stained shoes under himself; a man or woman with a dog would have been beside him before he was noticed.

He could see up the side road, and there were distant lights behind trees and hedges, above fences and walls. He settled.

He did not know yet which was Timo Rahman's home. He did not know where Timo Rahman would meet Ricky Capel. Where else to be, what else to do?

He could not have gone to every hotel in Hamburg, stood at the reception desks and asked if Ricky Capel, importer of narcotics to the United Kingdom, stayed there. This was the only place to begin his vigil.

Cars sped along the main road but their lights did not find him. He was protected by the hedge and the shadows. The cold racked him. He huddled.

It happened very quickly, as his head was clouded with thoughts, all useless.

A car coming down the main road, big headlights powering in front of it. A car coming up the road and braking hard, indicators winking for a turn to the right. The Mercedes was stationary and the approaching lights speared through its windscreen.

He saw the face, the smooth skin that was almost juvenile. The face had been above him. The headlights of the oncoming car lit the eyes. The Mercedes swung into the side road.

Malachy watched the track of its lights, then saw it turn in, and lost it.

He pushed himself up – his hips and knees ached – then walked forward.

The gates closed behind the car.

Ricky looked around him. The security lights showed him the house, their beams spilling out on to lawns and beds of shrub; it was a big pad, impressive, but not a mansion, not like some of the places they had passed on the drive here. The driver had not spoken a word that Ricky had understood. At the reception desk, the skinny bitch who had rung up to his room and called him down had led him to the swing doors, pointed to the parking area and the Mercedes and told him it had been sent to collect him. Half a day and half an evening he had been stuck in his bloody hotel room, and at the end of it there was no Timo Rahman to meet him personally, and to apologize that he had been left for nine hours to kick his heels; just a driver he couldn't understand, who had gripped his hand, shaken it and half crushed his fist.

He was not one to hang about: first, he'd find out where the little shit-face was, where Enver, who had dumped him, had gone, and why; second, he'd get the business done, whatever; third, he'd ask for the arrangements to be made for his flight home in the morning. He waited in the car for the driver to open the door for him, and waited

… The bastard didn't: he was at the front door, beckoning him to follow, like he was dirt. His temper was high and the blood pounded in him, as it had all through the hours in the hotel room – disrespect was shown him.

The front door was open. He saw a short, squat little beggar, slacks and an open-necked shirt, in the hall.

He had never met Timo Rahman but instinctively knew him. All the deals with the Hamburg end for the shipment of packages had been handled by Enver, the nephew. All the loads of immigrants brought in on the lorries he'd brokered had been dealt with by Enver. He felt uncertain, rare for him, and alone – awkward because he wore a suit and a tie. The man in the hall, Timo Rahman, flexed his hands in front of his groin, then slid them behind his back. Ricky had the message, and didn't like it. He chucked the car door open, climbed out, slammed it shut, stamped across the gravel and came to the step. He looked into Timo Rahman's eyes – Ricky wasn't tall, but he was taller than the man. Ricky backed off from no one. But he saw the eyes. The hall lights shone in them. Ricky wiped from his mind what he was going to say about the shit-face, Enver.

His shoulders were grasped, he smelt the lotion, he was kissed on each cheek and the lips – cold as bloody death – brushed his skin.

In accented English. 'You are welcome, Ricky Capel.'

'Good to be here, Mr Rahman.'

'And your journey was satisfactory?'

'No problems, Mr Rahman.'

'I am grateful you were able to find time in your busy life to visit me.'

'A pleasure, Mr Rahman.'

The eyes never left Ricky's. Years back, when he was a kid and when Mikey wasn't away, they had gone as a family, with the girls, to the zoo up in London, and they'd taken in the reptile house, and there had been snakes, most of them curled up and asleep, but a cobra had had its head up, had hissed and shown its fangs at the glass, and its eyes had watched them. He couldn't hold Timo Rahman's gaze and he was looking down at the carpet and saw that his feet shuffled, like he had nerves. His arm was gripped at the elbow.

'I want to show you something that is precious to me, Ricky.'

'Anything, Mr Rahman.'

He was led across the hall and up a wide staircase.

At the landing he heard TVs playing behind two closed doors. A door into a bedroom was opened for him.

On through the bedroom, into a dressing room where a wall was lined with a wardrobe. He didn't understand.

'Look, Ricky Capel.'

The pudgy finger pointed.

It was the picture his grandfather had. Black-and-white, the same. Different frame, plastic and cheap, but the same handwriting scrawled across it. A mountain background, a cave with a narrow entrance, five men tooled up and standing in a line. A fire with a cooking tin on it, and three men sitting cross-legged with the smoke blowing against them. There was his grandfather, and the tall guy whose funeral his grandfather had trekked north to attend, and the one that his grandfather called Mehmet.

'We got that,' he said.

'My father, your grandfather and Major Anstruther, comrades.'

'He's dead, Anstruther is. Grandfather went to his funeral. We got that same picture.'

'Comrades, Ricky Capel. They fought together, fought for each other. Each of them would have died that the others would live. Joined by blood, all men of value. Heroes, fighters, brothers. So, Ricky Capel, your family and mine are bound together in loyalty to them.'

'We do business, yes.'

'In the mountains, in the snow of winter, they lay together to give warmth that one of them should not freeze. In combat they gave covering fire that one of them should not be a target. Your grandfather and my father, they bound our families in loyalty. It is more than business – their blood ran together, as does ours.'

It was a quiet, gentle voice and Ricky had to strain to hear it. He looked, mesmerized, at the photograph.

Sharon, his mum, said the picture spooked her. Mikey, his dad, dismissed it as sad, but said old men needed a memory to hang on to. Percy, his grandfather, never talked about the war and what he'd done, lost up there in those bloody mountains.

'I suppose so, yes.'

'They were men of honour. Whatever the one asked, the other would give. They lived together, they killed together.'

'I see what you mean, Mr Rahman.'

'Do you have, Ricky Capel, your grandfather's loyalty?'

'I hope so. I… ' He checked himself. 'Of course I do.'

He was led from the dressing room, from the bedroom and down the stairs into a dining room of heavy, gloomy furniture – wouldn't have entertained any of it – where two places were laid. Wasn't offered a drink, was told they would eat and then work at their business.

The night had closed on him and the storm had grown. Oskar Netzer reckoned it now at force eight, and worsening. He had laboured into the dusk. Only when the drill bit had nicked the finger steadying the screw, and drawn blood, had he decided he could no longer continue strengthening the viewing platform.

It was not for visitors that he sought to repair it but for himself. A part of paradise for this old and troubled man was to be on its deck and gaze down at the small waterscape, and see the eiders. It would be bad that night, but the forecasts for the next week that were pinned up by the harbour told of worse to come. As he blundered back along the sand path through the dunes and the scrub, he prided himself that he knew every step of the way from the viewing platform to the cemetery at Ostdorf where the nearest street-lights were.

When he reached them he stood in their pool, leaned on the closed gate and told Gertrud what he had been doing, and how he had let the drill's bit cut into his finger. He thought he heard her voice: 'You are an old fool, Oskar, nothing but an old fool.' Then he went on home, and the wind sang in the wires, and he thought of what he would eat for his meal, and of his book that he would read afterwards… But the meal and the book soon slipped because he worried more about the fierceness of the storm gathering out in the North Sea. The worst of the gales were always in the days and nights before Easter.

He passed the harbour, brightly lit, and saw the Baltrum ferry moored, and every boat the islanders owned seemed to be corralled in the shelter of the groyne, finding safety from the sea – and a new worry surged: would the wind take tiles off his roof? So much to worry about, so little peace.

'You people are wrong, Freddie, about as mistaken as it is possible to be.'

He was not the first and most certainly would not be the last. Gaunt had taken the train north to this provincial university to hear heresies and listen to unpalatable opinions.

'Osama has been made, by you and the Agency, into an icon – it was a grievous error at your doors to have done so,'

The man across the Formica-topped table from him was of around his age but that was the only similarity between them. Gaunt was groomed, wore his three-piece suit with a quiet tie and had a polka-dot handkerchief sprouting from the breast pocket. His shoes were highly polished and he'd burnished them in the last minutes of the journey with the cloth from his briefcase. The professor wore scratched sandals over loud socks, shapeless cord trousers held up by sagging braces, a check shirt frayed at wrists and collar, topped with a stained self-knotted bow-tie, his white hair sprang from the sides of his scalp and made a halo round his head.

'First you set him on a pedestal and gave him an undeserved value, then you compounded the fault by failing to topple him. You lifted Osama to a position where he became the equal to the heads of government of your coalition. I have told your colleagues, so many times, of that error, and their response has been to wring their hands and whine that it is the demand of their masters. You should have stood up, been counted, refused to travel on that road.'

As chair of Islamic studies at the university, the professor had a rightful place of merit in academic circles, but to the Service he was more valuable. Living, working outside the bubble of the Service at Vauxhall Bridge Cross and the Whitehall ministries across the river, he offered opinions that grated with the normal well-oiled meshings of government's gears. At a time of crisis, it was predictable that Frederick Gaunt would have used up precious hours and gone north.

'So, you believe a man is coming, perhaps with a destination of the United Kingdom. You show me a photograph. He looks pleasant enough. You have gauged his importance by the fact that another was prepared to give his life and meet death in agonizing circumstances; a life sacrificed that a more valued person, whom you believe to be of the rank of co-ordinator, should have time to make good his escape.

You ask me to penetrate the co-ordinator's mind.

First, forget Osama bin Laden, who – I venture – is irrelevant now, other than as a carved, painted totem.'

They sat in the far corner of the canteen in the students' union building. They ate. Gaunt picked at a stale salad of tomato, chives and lettuce, and had a bottle of gassy water. The professor had had a mountain of chips with wrinkled sausages floating on a brown sauce lake, and drank from a can of

Chardonnay. A few minutes before, when a pair of girls had come close with their trays, Gaunt had imperiously waved them away.

'We live in a top-down society. Decisions are made at the top and passed down, but the top demands that authority is guarded most jealously… It is impossible for Osama to ape that act. I assume he is in a cave, on the snowline of a mountain, worrying more about his rheumatism and kidney problems than the progress of your co-ordinator. In that cave, with four or five men as company and security, he would probably not know the name of the co-ordinator, would not have met him, would not know the target in Europe – or in the United Kingdom – that your man will strike against. There can hardly be a courier column beating a trail through the mountains to the cave. I don't see the tracks used by wild goats being tramped flat by men with messages in their minds or taped between the cheeks of their arses. Every satellite the Agency can launch has lenses aimed at that trifling mountain range. There are operations in the detailed stages of planning on every continent of our earth. If Osama did top-down, he would need a highway for the couriers and the cameras would find them, heavy bombs would fall on the cliff face, wherever it is, and seal the mouth of the cave, leaving him to death by suffocation. I said he was the icon you have made, no more than that. An inspiration, an example, but not a decision-taker. You have created that inspiration and that example, and you pay for it in the dedication it has created for the new men.'

A flashed glance. Gaunt looked at the face of his watch. In his mind was the time of the evening's last train to London.

'The new men want only from Osama that inspiration and example – not just for themselves but, more importantly, for their foot-soldiers. They need those who will wear the martyr's belts, those who yearn for entry to Paradise. The new men are already hardened and they have learned from the stupidities of the first generation of Osama's supporters. Your co-ordinator, Freddie, will use a telephone of any sort only with extreme caution. He will not carry a laptop with plans, localities, biographies stored in the hard disk. Lessons have been learned. The new men are more careful, therefore more deadly.. . Must you leave, so soon?'

Gaunt pushed back his chair, and stood. He asked his first question since the professor had launched his monologue. 'The new man, where is his weakness?'

The last chip was swallowed, and a belch stifled with the dregs of the Chardonnay. 'He is human.

However much he attempts to suppress weakness it must, in time, manifest itself. I suggest you quarter the field of arrogance. A man who lives such a life will have supreme self-confidence. If confidence tips to arrogance you have weakness – whether you identify the arrogance and can exploit it, well, that is your profession. I venture the suggestion that you consult with colleagues in Cairo – that pleasant face has, to me, the mark of Egyptian nationality, merely a suggestion and humbly given… A thought to travel with, Freddie.

You like to call it the War on Terror, but your mentality is still that of a policeman: gathering evidence to arrest, convict, imprison. Too ponderous, too cumber-some, and he will skip round you. Victory in war comes from the destruction of your enemy. Eradicate from your mind the due process of law – kill him.'

Gaunt strode away. At the far distant double doors of the canteen he turned to wave a final farewell, but the professor was bent over his plate, working a finger round it. Gaunt ran down corridors and out into the night, and hurried to the car park where his taxi waited. He had learned, from his long journey north, that he had cause to be afraid of the havoc a new man, bred in hate, could achieve. He saw the face that smiled from passport photographs but could not travel into the depths of those eyes.

Nothing had altered. Everything was as he remembered it when he had been Sami, student of mechanical engineering, lover of Else Borchardt, friend of heroes.

He had taken the S-Bahn on from Wilhelmsburg, route S31, which terminated at Neugraben, as far as the stop for Harburg Rathaus. He had walked past the Rathaus, through the shopping area and past the new building that housed the social club for Muslim men who were far from their ethnic homes. He had paused outside the police station where posters requested information on missing women and required help in murder investigations. He had noted one that showed photographs of three men he did not know who were identified as hunted terrorists. When he had been here

– with Muhammad, Said and Ramzi – he had walked past the police station every day, and officers coming to their cars had ignored him, had never second-glanced any of them.

Another narrow street to cross, and he reached Marienstrasse. Still he would be within the view of any officer or detective who stood in the police station and looked out through its wide plate-glass windows.

It was as if he came back to where – carrying the name of Sami – he had been born again. The cafe was on the corner. He had drunk coffee there with Muhammad, who had flown into the north tower, and with Ziad, whose aircraft had crashed in the fields of Pennsylvania, and with Marwan who had piloted the jet-liner against the south tower, and with Said, who was the logistics man and provided passports and money, and with Ramzi. All were dead or in the hands of the Americans, except Said who was hunted in the mountains of Pakistan. When he had had the name Sami, all of them had drunk coffee with him in the cafe on the corner, and there they had talked about the nothingness of football, about their courses at the college in Harburg, and then they had gone up the street where the women had cooked for them.

He walked that pavement. The darkness fell around him but he moved sharply between the light pools thrown down on him.

It was as if he made a pilgrim's journey.

Being there strengthened him.

On the opposite side of the street was number fifty-four. Curtains were not drawn to mask the ground-floor room. He saw two young men in the room of the age to be students as he had been, but they had blond hair and one was crouched over a computer screen. The other stood in the centre of the room, as if without purpose, and smoked a cigarette.

Else had been there with him. When she had talked love to him and had promised that she would embrace Islam, when she had gone to the tutorials for women at the al-Quds mosque and had given up the T-shirt of Guevara for a headscarf, she had been in that room with him. Of course, the plan for the taking of aircraft had not been spoken of in his presence or in hers, but he had been in that room when wills were witnessed and he had seen the tickets for the flights to the United States. He went on up Marienstrasse's gentle incline. The laughter of that room rang in him, and he seemed to regain the sense of brotherhood.

Before he had known Else Borchardt and had lived in her apartment in the tower block at Wilhelmsburg, he had slept on the floor of number fifty-four, and he had known he was with great men, with the finest.

He thought it fuelled his courage, being here.

Out in the back kitchen of the apartment, standing with his back to the window that overlooked the yard, Heydar had told the student, Sami, in a voice pitched so low that he had strained to hear him, that he should be a Warrior of jihad and glory in his work. He had been dismissed from that kitchen, sent away. Five years before, without hugged farewells but with a ticket for Sana'a in the Yemen, he had gone out through that door, on to the pavement and had walked away. He had gone back to Wilhelmsburg, had slept part of the night with the woman he loved and had not woken her, had left her. He had heard it said that Heydar Zammar, with the pebble glasses, the uncut beard and the voice of icy quietness, was now in a Syrian gaol and would have been tortured but had not broken. If he had, the name of Sami, sleeper of al-Qaeda, would have been on the Internet images of the Americans' most-wanted fugitives.

He remembered all of them. He must be worthy of them.

He passed the cafe halfway up Marienstrasse, which they did not use, then saw the window on the street beside him of the shop where shoes could be repaired – Marwan had been there with his most comfortable pair for new heels and the room at number fifty-four had cascaded with laughter that he had the shoes repaired and did not buy new ones. He would have worn those shoes, with the new heels from that shop, when he had taken the aircraft against the south tower.

The pilgrimage was done. The smallest doubt was lost. He thought himself ready to resume his journey to a destination where foot-soldiers slept, and waited for him.

He had no knowledge of the codename by which others, so few of them, identified him.

He lived in a students' hall of residence in the east of the capital city and it was a five-minute walk for him to go from his bedsit room to the minor college under the administrative umbrella of the University of London. He was enrolled to study advanced computer sciences, and if he finished his course with a half-respectable degree he would be qualified for work in any of the myriad departments of the civil service where statistics were analysed. I f… He was twenty years old, now approaching the end of his second year. His parents and extended family lived in the West Midlands, were originally from the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi. His father drove a taxi in Dudley, one of his brothers was unemployed and another was a waiter in a curry house. To his father, mother and brothers, and to a network of aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces and cousins, he was an object of pride for having won a place to gain a university qualification.

His father's one complaint concerning his son was the lapsing of his devotion to the faith.

As an eighteen-year-old living at home he had regularly attended the local mosque. In London he did not. It was the one blot on his father's enjoyment of his son's success. Instead of going to a mosque, their student son – when he was not at compulsory lectures or engaged in specific coursework in front of his screen – roamed the trains and stations of the capital's underground system. He knew the depths of stations, knew the junctions where carriages packed tight with commuters passed each other, knew the signalling cables' locations, knew where the main power wires were laid, knew the times when platforms were most densely filled. He was a wraith-like figure, unseen and unnoticed, who gained new knowledge from every journey he made. The sole frustration in his life was the direct order made to him that he should not fill a hard disk or a three-and-a-half inch floppy with what he learned.

Everything was stored in his mind. He did not know if he would finish his course before a man came and sought him out, perhaps in the hall of residence, perhaps as he walked to the college, perhaps in the library or the corridors. A man would come and would say: 'Those who have disbelieved and died in disbelief, the earth full of gold would not be accepted from any of them if one offered it as a ransom.' And he would look into the eyes of the man and he would answer, perhaps with a faltering voice: 'They will have a painful punishment, and they will have no helpers.' The words from the Book, 3:91, were as crisp in his mind – what would be said to him and what he would reply – as any of the detail of the London Underground network.

He had dedicated himself to his faith and knew the man would come.

'There has been no liaison, Miss Wilkins. There has been no contact between your Service and ours. There has been no introduction from your consulate, Miss Wilkins… Should I escort you from the premises?'

'I don't think that would help either of us.'

She could play, when she judged it right, feminine and gamine. Little-girl-lost was an act at which Polly was adept – also, she did tough well.

'There are procedures laid down.'

'And times when procedures should be bypassed,' she said brusquely. She was dressed in the one black executive trouser suit she had travelled with. The blouse under the jacket was buttoned at the throat.

She had brushed the styling out of her hair.

'Explain to me, Miss Wilkins, why I should ignore the liaison procedures.'

'For mutual advantage.'

Bizarre, she thought it, their conversation and sparring. She spoke to him in fluent German and he replied to her in fluent English, as if both put down a small marker of superiority. From the moment she had been escorted into the office of assistant deputy commander Johan Konig, she had known that begging favours would fail. She had come to police headquarters by taxi with the confidence to send away the driver, not ask him to wait for her in the eventuality of rejection. At the desk, late in the evening, she had spoken with the bark of authority and had claimed an appointment with the senior official specializing in organized crime, a name gained in her telephone call from Harvestehuder Weg. He, of course, was long gone. Then, to a junior sent down to the reception area, she had played magician and uttered the name to which there would be a reaction: Timo Rahman. Her skill was in avoiding obstruction.

She had been led to the third floor of the A wing of the building, and had met Konig.

'What is the "mutual advantage" on offer to me?'

'That depends on the help given to me. Imagine a set of scales.'

'Scales must be balanced, Miss Wilkins, if they are to perform satisfactorily.'

'You share with me on matters affecting Timo Rahman, and I will share with you.'

'But, Miss Wilkins, I am a police officer and you are an intelligence agent. In the matter of Timo Rahman, I do not think our paths cross.'

She sought to jolt him. 'Then your thinking is wrong.'

His head jerked up and his eyes flashed away from the desk. None of its surface was visible under the mass of files, papers, bank statements and photographs that littered it. She liked him well enough

…

He seemed to her so tired, bagged eyes that wavered in their attention and slouched shoulders. She understood the loneliness of the zealot. His accent told her he was a Berliner, the strewn papers told her he was reading his way into the life of a target. The clock on the wall showed a few minutes to ten o'clock – the end of a day, the building quiet, but for the skeleton night staff. Dedication had kept him – as if he was handcuffed – at his desk. No photograph of a family was set in a frame on the desk, the window-ledge or bookcase, or on the cavernous safe against a wall.

'My intention is to put Timo Rahman, the pate of Hamburg, through the courts and into the Fuhlsbuttel gaol for so long that he is a senile invalid when released, and to have sequestered from his investments sufficient monies to render him a pauper.'

'I'll help you.'

'He believes himself an untouchable in this city.'

'Then we'll touch him. I'd like to read his files, and I'd like to see his home.'

'What do we share?'

'We link him with human trafficking.'

'Of whores, yes – but he distances himself from the basic dirt of involvement.'

She threw her card, the big play that Gaunt always preached against except at a time of last resort. 'No, Johan, not tarts for the pavements, but human trafficking in politicals. We are into an area that will not be shared with your authorities, only between ourselves. Mutual advantage. Timo Rahman is on uncharted territory. He is moving a political.'

A grim, dry response. 'For this co-operation I could be hung up from a meat hook. We will go, Miss Wilkins, to the suburb of Blankenese – because, against all the laws of good sense, I trust you.'

The Bear served her husband and his guest at the table. Alicia had cooked for them and had eaten in the kitchen with her girls and her aunt. The girls were now upstairs in their rooms, and the aunt had washed up the plates that the Bear had brought out. Now the crockery was stacked clumsily in the rack on the draining-board and the aunt sat by the stove in the kitchen to read an old magazine from home.

In her home, Alicia felt herself a prisoner – with prisoner's rights.

On the left side of her gaol-home was the family that owned outright the second largest holiday travel agency in the city; on the right side the family had the controlling interest in a company selling building materials. Alicia knew the wives by sight, occasionally spoke to them on tiptoe over the garden fence at the back and across the footpath that separated the properties, and the wire and the sensors, sometimes met them at the Blankenese shops when she was with her aunt, saw them at the school gate when she was driven by the Bear to drop or collect the girls. She had no link with the wives who were her neighbours; she was shy and nervous of them. From what little she knew of them, they were smart, sleek and careless with their wealth – everything she was not.

She thought her aunt too engrossed in the old magazine to notice what she did.

Alicia was stifled in the kitchen, hurt by the thought of her neighbours' wives, who were a part of their husbands' lives, and she slipped towards the kitchen door. By the door, on a unit, was a small television set

– not showing a noisy game show but the silent black-and-white image of the drive where the Bear had parked the Mercedes. Above the set, screwed to the wall, was the console board of pressure buttons that each had a single red light, bright and constant. She pressed two buttons, to nullify the beams covering the back garden. She turned the door key. She was halfway outside, and the chill of the night was on her face, the suffocation of the kitchen's heat and her sense of rejection lessened, when the voice grated behind her: 'Where are you going?'

'Out,' she said. 'To walk.'

'You'll catch your death.'

Who would notice? If she caught a chill that sent her to bed, who would care? She said meekly, 'I will be a few minutes.'

She closed the door after her.

Alicia headed for her summer-house, her refuge.

She could never leave, could never go home. Not one man or woman in her family, back at the village in the mountains north of Shkodra, would welcome her or risk the inevitability of the blood feud – the hakmarrje

– with the Rahman clan. She had no existence away from the house in Blankenese, and was as much a prisoner there as the women who worked on their backs in the brothels owned by her husband on the Reeperbahn or the Steindamm. She skirted the light thrown on to the lawn from the dining-room window, saw her husband and his guest standing but bent as if they studied papers, and the Bear with them. She reached the summer-house, her place of safety.

Settling among the cushions on the bench, nestled in the darkness, Alicia shivered and clasped her arms round her for warmth. An owl called, broke the night's silence.

From where she sat Alicia could see the men in the dining room.

He had found the path. Its entrypoint off the side road was some thirty yards along the thick-growing hedge from the closed steel-shuttered gates. Malachy groped down it in darkness, and thought it an old right-of-way track now used by dog-walkers. He was sandwiched between the two fences: he held out his hands and felt the rough wood of the planks on either side. He came to the end of the Rahman garden. The property behind it had a security light on a high wall that flooded a lawn. He stopped, reached up and wrapped his fist over the top of the Rahman fence, above his head. His hand grip tracked along the top of the fence till it reached the obstruction of a concrete post, where he judged the fence to be strongest and most able to take his weight.

He breathed in, deep into his chest. He had no plan but felt calm. Malachy steadied himself.

He heaved himself up. The fence rocked but held against the post. He struggled but finally he had worked his knee on to the sharpness of the plank tops.

He saw the light that spilled from a ground-floor room on to the grass, and more light that came through a blind's slats at the end of the house. In a room on the first floor a child gazed out as she undressed. In the ground-floor room, his view of it broken by branches, he saw the shapes of three men with their backs to him. He balanced, wavering on his perch as the wood gouged into his knees. He found what he expected to find. They ran from a hidden stanchion off the upper part of the post: layers of barbed wire. Below the upper strand, with the needle-sharp points, was a smooth length that was narrow but tautened: a tumbler wire.

Brian Arnold had talked about them. On a quiet afternoon at Chicksands, Brian Arnold liked to reminisce about old Cold War days. Behind his back, most of the young officers and sergeants would make mock yawns, dab their hands over their mouths and offer any excuse to quit his presence. Malachy had not: he had sucked in the anecdotes. The Inner-German border stretching from the Baltic to the Czech frontier, six hundred miles of it, had been fenced with barbed wire and with the tumbler strands that activated sirens. If the fugitive, usually a kid with a dream of the greener grass of capitalism, had hiked from Leipzig, Halle or Dresden, and had circumvented the trip-wires, minefields, dogs and guards, he reached the final fence with barbed wire to snag him and the tumblers to bring the border troops, who shot to kill.

The way Brian Arnold told it – from the memory of a young Intelligence Corps officer based at Helmstedt – the tumblers had cost young men their lives.

He crouched with the heels of his shoes on the top of the fence, coiled himself – swayed and prayed that he would not fall – balanced, kicked and launched. As he fell, his shoe brushed the top strand, the barbed wire, but did not snag. His heavy coat billowed out when he was in free fall, then he thudded down and the branches of a bush arrowed into him. The breath was knocked out of him. He stayed still for a full minute until his breathing softened, his nose and face in earth and old leaves. He moved forward on his stomach, wove his way through the bushes.

Away to his left was the dark silhouette of a summer-house, in front of him the house with the half-lit lawn. He assumed there would be security beams, but there were woods at the back and he assumed also that foxes lived there and would roam to hunt, and predatory cats: security beams, safe to bet on it, would be set to catch the waist of a walking man to give foxes and cats free passage at a lower level.

Malachy crawled from the shrub bed.

He went on his stomach, hugging shadows, pressing himself low, as if he was a slug.

As a focus point, Malachy took halfway between the window with the slat blinds and the window from which light poured. Down on his stomach he could no longer see the men, but as he came closer he heard low, indistinct voices. There was winter-dead creeper, maybe a clematis, climbing by the window where the curtains were open and when he'd reached the wall he edged towards it, eased up off his stomach and on to his knees, then stood and flattened himself against the brickwork. He heard the voice he remembered: 'I say so, Dad… Get rid of him, Davey.' Then his ears had been ringing from the impact of the kick. 'We don't want people like that in our close – and I'm surprised you let him get this far.' The voice was a murmur to him.

'What's it called?'

'Baltrum.' A quiet growl marked the difference of a second voice. 'It is called Baltrum. I think it suitable.'

'You got co-ordinates for it, what the skipper'll need?'

'Yes… Are you cold, Ricky? It is cold, yes?'

The curtains were snatched at and drawn across the window. Light died on the grass, and the voices were lost. But, Malachy had only the frail outline of a plan, not thought through but made on the hoof. No rope, no binding tape, no plastic toy and no canister. He slid away. Past the slatted window was a lock-up shed, and he thought it would be where a lawnmower was kept, shut away for the winter, and where there would be fuel for it. He reached the shed door and his fingers found a smooth hasp, no rust or weakness on it, and a heavy padlock. There was the summer-house. Oil, rags – would they be in a summer-house? No plan.

It was only reconnaissance. He needed control.

Control was calm. There was the darkened summer-house as a place for a lie-up, a sangar from which to watch the building. For a moment, hand on the padlock he had felt a winnow of disappointment, but it was now wiped. He crawled on his belly round the edge of the grass then came to the decking ledge in front of the summer-house. His chest, his belly, his groin and his knees went up two steps and his fingers found the opened door.

He was inside.

He could watch from here, learn of the movement of the house. The house, the home of Timo Rahman who was the godfather of the city of Hamburg, was the last step of his journey. He crawled on old dried wood and… There were short pants of terror. His movement across the floor made a rumbling creak on the boards and the pitch of the breathing grew more frantic. He had been long enough in the darkness to see in the gloom. The pants came from the outline of a body, the head softened by a mass of hair. A girl or a woman… She was whispering to him but Malachy did not understand the words. If she screamed… Yes, Malachy, yes – what? If she screamed, if she brought the men from the house, if she screamed and he had to jump at the wires strung from the stanchions – what?

He had never, in violence, touched a woman. If she screamed… What price his journey, what price his crusade? The voice had gone, replaced by a whimper of tears. A hand caught Malachy's shoulder. He went to tear it clear and realized in that moment that its grip did not threaten him. He felt the hand, a jewelled ring and a smooth ring. It held his, but not to restrain him. The woman sobbed softly and he loosed his hand from hers.

He backed away, scraping his body across the boards.

Outside, at the back of the summer-house, he chose his exit route. He reckoned he could jump from the roof of the building, could clear the wires that were linked to the stanchions. No other way. He clawed his way up, then slithered on the sloped roof and old leaves cascaded down. She did not scream. A woman had wept, had held his hand, and Malachy's thoughts blurred. Too soon, he jumped. Too soon because he should have allowed time to regain concentration. He scrambled to gain leverage and his shoes kicked air but he was short of the fence and the barbs held him.

His fingers, grappling, caught the tumbler wire. His body swung. Brian Arnold had described it: the fugitive on the wire, the alarms screaming, the guards coming and the scrape of an automatic rifle being cocked. The wire held his coat, and he felt panic – so long since the last time, but as bad. He heard a door behind him snap open and the scream.

The aunt hitched her skirt, shouted over her shoulder and ran.

The light on the console by the door winked angrily on red.

She thought her shout loud enough, from the kitchen, to be heard in the dining room, that it would bring the Bear lumbering, but fast, after her. She knew every button on the console and charged towards the sector of the fencing where the wire had been tripped.

With a rolling stride, from her stiffened old joints, she crossed the lawn and as she came to the summer-house she saw, behind its low, sloped roof, the figure of a man struggling to free himself.

She yelled again to the Bear.

She was a tough woman, past sixty, but muscled.

An upbringing in a mountain village bringing water from wells, heaving stones to make fields' walls, walking to a distant road where a bus sometimes came, enduring the harsh conditions of childbirth, burying a husband, had given her strength. Her years in Blankenese, watching over her niece, had not dulled her determination. She had no fear. At the wire, shoes flailed on a level with her head.

She reached up, caught a shoe, lost it, then held the ankle. For a moment she clung to it, then it was torn away. She caught the hem of the long coat.

The heel of a shoe banged against her forehead, dazed her. A toecap caught her mouth, split her lip, and she spat away the broken tooth cap. She clung to the coat. She heard the voice of the Bear. Her fingers clawed into the coat, and the man inside it writhed – and then he was gone.

She had the coat, which sagged down and swamped her. It was a blanket on her head. As she threw it off, the aunt saw the body – a sharp moment

– astride the fence and then he jumped. She stamped in fury, frustration.

The assistant deputy commander broke the fall, and the breath squealed out of him.

Polly grabbed the man's arm and pulled him up, her grip loose from blood spilling out. She heard Konig, cursing, follow her up the path between the fences.

Slithering, stumbling, they reached the side road.

The man she held started to struggle as if his own fall, on to Konig, had first winded him but now he fought for his life. Not in time. The arm she held at the elbow was dragged back and she heard the metallic click of handcuffs closing, then the belt of a fist into the man's head. They careered down the side-street and towards the lights of the main road.

Konig gasped, 'There's a firearm, legally held, in the house. If we're found we're fucked – no questions – we're dead.'

'Don't you carry a weapon?'

'What? Use it in defence of a thief, an intruder?

Grow up, child.'

'A thief?'

'An idiot.'

They passed the gate and lights now shone down on the garden and the front of the house and she heard the confused yells behind the steel plates and the thickened hedge. Between them, they pulled the man, each holding one of his arms and he was limp.

His shoes scraped on the pavement. What had happened coursed in Polly Wilkins's mind.

Konig had parked his unmarked car at the main road. He had pointed out to her the camera half hidden by branches, on his orders in place for three days, and had murmured wryly that it was 'for statistics of traffic analysis, and in no way contravening the Human Rights of Timo Rahman by-intrusion', had explained that to go to an investigating judge for authorization would have risked involvement with a corrupt official. They had been in front of the house, walking briskly, when they had heard the first shrill shout. They had found the path between the fences and been drawn down it towards the yelling and screaming. When the struggle was at the far side of the fence they had stopped. He had come over, clothes ripping, had been on top of the fence, outlined against the night, then had dropped on to Konig. What she recalled most clearly of the man as she had lifted him was the smell of old, stale dirt.

They reached the main road, turned the corner, and behind them heard the scrape of the gates opening.

Doors zapped as they ran to the car. They pitched the man on to the floor space between the seats, and Polly went in after him. From the car's roof light, she saw the man's face, then Konig's door slammed shut and they accelerated away.

She grinned. 'Not much of a return for all the drama, Johan. Your catch looks and stinks like a damn vagrant.'

Dazed and numbed – as he had been once before -

Malachy lay prone, not in a gutter but on the carpet of a car's floor.

Against his face, holding down his head, was the smooth, warm, stockinged ankle of the woman. He did not know what havoc he had left behind him or what chaos lay ahead.