Rat Run

Chapter Eighteen

The tide had turned to reveal the wide depth of the beach, and the gulls wheeled while searching for washed-up crabs and shells.

And they ate.

From the rucksack she had taken a tin of chicken in white sauce, another of rice, and one of peach slices in syrup. They passed the tins between them and scooped with their fingers at the meat, the rice and the peaches, licked the sauce and syrup off themselves.

Malachy felt the sand grains clog in his throat as he swallowed, and once she coughed hard and spat to clear her mouth. At the bottom of the bag, there was a small, collapsed burner and tablets in a sachet for lighting under it, and a rack the size of a palm for fastening over it, but the wind was too great and the rain too hard for them to try to heat the chicken or the rice – and the smell would have carried on the wind, with smoke that was a signature.

He made a rhythm for himself. With the binoculars he watched the skyline, where the white caps met the cloud, tracked the lenses over the dunes to the west and to the east, followed the flight of the ducks when they dived to feed, then back to the horizon, the roll of the waves and the clouds' chase. Each time he saw her, lingered on her, he thought she took longer to lick her fingers and nails, then her palm. Her face was pale and her lips; sand crusted her cheeks and settled on her glasses. All of her animation was in her tongue, working meat scraps, fruit, rice, sauce and syrup from her hand, licking and sucking. She sat with her shoulder pressed against his. When he lifted the binoculars, his elbow lurched against her arm. When he dropped them on their neck strap and reached to scoop from the tins, his elbow pressed against her chest and softness beneath the weatherproof coat, but he kept to the rhythm he had constructed and watched the sea, the beach and the dunes.

The tins were emptied.

She had her boots and the over-trousers inside the zipped-down sleeping-bag and he felt, through his elbow, the shiver of her body.

Through the lenses he saw the break of the waves far out and the spray leaping above the surf, but no darker shadow of a boat coming towards land. The gulls, in soft focus, were distorted, closer to him.

She shook in little convulsions. Malachy had reason to be there, huddled in soft sand and with bent grass stems around him, all that survived in the dunes. He had a purpose and she did not – should not have been there. Hunger took him back to the tin that had contained meat and sauce. For the last traces of it, his elbow against her chest, he pressed his forefinger, grimy and coated with sand, down into the tin and scraped its sides, his nail against the bottom. The skin caught the top edge, serrated with tiny teeth from the ripping out of the lid. Blood ran. No pain, but blood from a small wound spilled on to the can's base. She took his hand in hers, lifted it.

She gazed at him. Tiredness swelled the rims of her eyes at the limits of the frames of her spectacles, and hair, damp, limp, fell over them, but the eyes had brightness and light. Blood came from his cut and smeared her hand. Not looking away from him, not breaking her gaze, she slipped his finger between her lips and closed round it.

He felt her suck, swallow, and her tongue moved on the wound.

There was, at first, sweetness, gentleness – then the tongue brushed his finger with more force and the lips held it tighter.

She said, muffled, because her mouth held his finger and her tongue took the blood from it and closed the wound, 'I can't think of anything to talk about.'

The warmth from his finger ran in his hand.

'We could, if you wanted to, talk about the weather,' she said. 'Is it going to rain much longer? I think it's getting brighter in the west, don't you? The wind's not dropping, is it? Do you want to talk about the weather?'

Her tongue licked his finger and she swallowed his blood.

'If you won't talk about the weather, you could talk about damn hypothermia – or you could do something about it.'

With her free hand she pulled down a little more of the bag's zipper, but she held his finger in her mouth, and she wriggled to the side. He slipped into the bag, pushed into it the old brogue shoes and felt them run against her legs, then against the bag's bottom stitching and heaved his weight against her.

She grimaced. 'I've never done it like this before – get sand in me and I'll kill you.'

She reached behind him and dragged up as much of the zip as she could, and they were pressed together.

He felt the hardness of the pistol barrel gouge at his skin and the angles of the binoculars; he took his finger from her mouth and kissed her. He held her head, and her eyes did not close – as if the moment were too vital to go unseen – and his lips found hers and he tasted her breath and his own blood. He remembered what she had said to him, on a bench in a park of spring flowers: Do it like you mean it… Don't get any bloody ideas. He had done as he was told. It had not entered his mind that she had kissed him, under the blossom and watched by the search party, from affection. She squirmed in the bag.

'God, aren't you going to help? Do I have to do it all?'

There were zips and eyelets, buttons, belts and hooks, and they writhed together to free themselves.

He did not think it was love… but need.

'I don't have one, don't suppose you do – not to worry, not that time of the month. I can feel that bloody sand.'

The need was bred on emptiness, Malachy recognized it. The void of his life and a corresponding chasm in hers. Each of them with an unspoken loneliness burdening them. He felt her skin, its coldness, had his hands under her waterproof coat, her sweater and blouse, and his fingers moved with wonderment, as if privilege was given him, and she caught the hand where the wound had been and forced it lower. Their loneliness made it desperate. He heard the zipper of the bag torn open as he came across her. They clung to each other, and she stroked him and he buried himself in her, and then the motion calmed. She moaned. She bucked under him. It was as he had never known it before. She cried out, piercing, as the gulls did over them and he felt the ecstasy of it… It was for need, hers and his, and they fell apart. She had said: Do it like you mean it. He had, and he cradled her head. He thought it took them nowhere.

He crawled out of the bag. She swivelled on to her side and her back was to him. He did up the zips and buttons, reefed in his belt. He did not know of any future, only that emptiness must be filled. He lifted the binoculars, scanned and tracked.

'What can you see?'

He said, 'Only the waves and the clouds and the birds – but they'll come, I know i t… Thank you.'

'Crazy, isn't it? You being my friend, me not being your enemy. Mad, isn't it? If you saw me where you come from, whatever place it is, I'd be your enemy – and if you'd just pitched up in Bevin Close I wouldn't be your friend. But we're here.'

The voice dripped in his ear.

'Your thing is killing people… What's mine? I'm not bloody proud -1 do heroin from Afghanistan, and cocaine from Venezuela… Dean, have you been in Afghanistan? Sorry, sorry, not for me to ask. Forget that. We're friends and we don't ask, don't need to know. I often wonder what Afghanistan's like. It comes on the TV but that shows you nothing, just ruins and old tanks and kids without shoes and women who cover themselves. I tell you, straight up, I've made big money out of Afghanistan, five times the money I make out of Venezuela. I'm not hating you because you kill people, and you're not judging me for what I do.'

The voice rambled, incoherent. He let him talk. He understood most of what Ricky Capel said, and he tolerated it. He took help where he could find it, and when the usefulness of the help was finished he discarded it. He had put the fool's socks against the skin of his crotch and let them dry out against his body warmth, and then he had peeled them on to the feet he had massaged, then put the shoes back on the idiot's feet, pulled the laces tight and knotted them for him. It was critical to him to have the imbecile's help.

The voice droned.

He remembered Iyad, the true friend, who had given up his life that time could be bought, a proven fighter who never bragged. On their journey there had been long hours between them of valued silence.

'You must be thinking, Dean – natural you would – can Ricky Capel keep his mouth shut? You have no worries. Back home, we got police and they don't get a sniff on me. Up where I am, and I reckon I'm big enough, we have the spies that are supposed to go after high-value targets – they got bugs and tracker sensors and cameras so bloody small you can't see them. What they haven't got is me. Why? Because I'm sharper than them. They've never had me… Never been charged. All of that lot queuing up, after me because I'm a high-value target, and they haven't ever been able to lay a charge against me. I was in once, three years back, and was held for forty-eight hours, and a good half of that was in the interview room. I never said nothing. Four sessions, maybe six hours each. I took an eyeline on the floor and one on the ceiling, one on the table, one on the door. I said nothing, never spoke, but had a different eyeline each time. You should have seen them, Dean, and they were going fucking spare, believe it… You can rely on it, I don't talk, and I don't reckon you would – it's why we're friends, can depend on each other.'

In his mind, irritated by the voice, he recalled codenames given him and addresses too sensitive to be written down, and the words of the Book that he would use and the responses that would be made.

'You want to know anything, Dean, about sensors and bugs, cameras and audio, or phones – me, I never use them – then I'm your man to ask. I got a guy, clever little sod, and I pay him well, and he's ahead of their game – better than the spies. I know everything they put against me and how to block it. Didn't have an education but I'm not stupid – you've seen that. I aim to stay safe and anyone who's my friend will stay safe. It's why we've got the boat coming. An old trawler flogging around the fishing banks and putting in to port often enough for it to be familiar, clever that.

You're all right with me.'

He thought of the places he had been – while the voice nagged at him – and of the young men and the young woman, all martyrs, whom he had sent out on the road to Paradise, and their cheerfulness to him and their gratitude that they were chosen, and he had been long gone from Taba, Cairo and Riyadh when their pictures were put in newspapers with the images of what they had done.

'What I like about you, Dean, is that you show respect for me. And I'm telling you, it's two-way. I don't mean respect because I'm a big man. Most who give me respect back home, it's because they're frightened of me. Men I do business with, most of them, they give me respect because of fear. I'm not afraid of you, you're not afraid of me, but there's respect because we're equals and friends. Right now, when I get back there's a matter of respect – it's disrespect – to be sorted. That old bastard, Rahman, he didn't give me it, and he has a nephew, a flash little prick, and he's ready for a lesson in respect. Off the boat and I'll be working on i t… I got my cousins, I got people who watch my back, and will watch it when I sort out disrespect…'

He suggested, softly and soothing, that it might be the right time to make the radio link with the boat, and reached out, took a cold hand and squeezed it in reassurance – because he was the equal of Ricky Capel, his friend – and felt no guilt at the deceit.

'If you didn't know it, the weather out here is foul,'

Harry shouted at the microphone. The trawler shook, then cascaded into the trough. Walls of water climbed higher than the wheel-house windows, then hit a solid, ungiving mass, and the Anneliese Royal seemed to stop. 'About as foul as I've known it.'

For a moment she was dead in the sea and lurched to port. He clung, white-knuckled hands, to the wheel, and for endless seconds she seemed to go over, then the stabilizers dragged her upright. But at the limit of the trough a wave made a cliff face and she collided with it. He heard the boy, his grandson, cry out behind him in stark fear. Now Harry saw nothing beyond the windows as sheets of spray covered them, and rivers of the damn stuff would be sluicing on to the decks, weighing her down, and he could hear the roar of the weather and the engine's howl, and the distorted voice of Ricky Capel, and the questions coming more frantic… When was he going to be there? What time? Why so long? A rogue wave could come as one in ten or one in a hundred. A rogue wave could not be ridden by a trawler.

They went on through it and the wheel-house seemed to go dark, seemed as though night came, of blackened blue and green. Then they burst clear. Light where there had been darkness and the Anneliese Royal steadied and Harry knew he would not be pitched over on to the wheel-house plank floor. He loosened his hold on the wheel, and the sweat spilled down the nape of his neck and on his throat. He looked behind him, and the boy hung in misery from the rail round the wheel-house's sides, and the door to the deck had come unfastened in the impact and hammered backwards and forwards. The sea came in and cleaned some of the boy's sickness. Harry tried to smile, to find confidence for the boy, took a hand off the wheel and gestured that his grandson should get the door closed. Maybe it would be the last time he went out of harbour for Ricky Capel, maybe…

He depressed the switch.

'Don't know where you are, Ricky. Where I am it's force ten and gusting up to force eleven and sometimes it's cyclonic… Right, when are we getting there? I'm reckoning to be in the approach channel for German Bight and turning into Jade Approach at approximately twenty hundred hours local, and that'll put me off shore around twenty-two thirty – if the old girl's still holding together. It'll be a dinghy pickup, which'll be no picnic. I don't want any more radio traffic before twenty-one hundred, don't want the world to know, and I'll want a light signal from twenty-two thirty for the dinghy… Oh, Ricky, I'll have the guest suite ready… and, Ricky, I won't be hanging about, so you'll need to paddle out quick for the pickup – like I said, no picnic. Over. Out.'

'Give it to the Germans? Good God, no… absolutely not.'

The meeting was chaired by the assistant deputy director, Gilbert.

'Let the Germans in on the act – I can promise you

– and it will be pain and tears.'

He presided at the end of the table in a room set aside for conferences on the ground floor.

'If the bloody Germans are involved, their lawyers will demand access to every slip of paper, intelligence material, that we have. No way, not to be considered.'

Sandwiches, coffee, nibbles and jugs of fruit juice were at the side, and plates, cups and glasses had been brought to the table.

'We all know the German style. It's endless court cases, appeals that'll go into the next century, and weak-kneed determination to see it through. Forget them.'

Behind the assistant deputy director, sitting on six straight-backed chairs, was a line of stenographers.

Each was there to write up the contribution of their own man, and later it would be polished in that man's interests.

'Scrub the Germans out of it, and let us do our own thing.'

Present, four on one side of the table and facing Freddie Gaunt, were Dennis from the Security Service; Trevor of Special Branch in the Metropolitan Police; Jimmy, who was senior in the Norfolk Constabulary and would also watch over the Suffolk brief, and Bill, who did liaison between Special Forces at Hereford and Poole with Vauxhall Bridge Cross. All of them, on arrival, had chimed complaints about the short notice given them, and all had let it be known with force that they expected the inconvenience to be softened by a matter of genuine importance.

The meeting had started tetchily. The assistant deputy director had sketched through a picture of a co-ordinator, who was believed to be travelling to the United Kingdom, only believed, and was now probably, only probably, on the German island of Baltrum on the Frisian coast. The ADD had then asked: Should the German agencies be informed?

Should their help be sought?

'I think I have the general drift of opinion/ Gilbert said. 'I think you have all made clear a lack of enthusiasm for that course. Any final thoughts before we close on it?'

Dennis, of the Security Service and irritable because he had walked over the bridge from Thames House, been caught in a shower and had sodden trouser ankles, said, 'They'd flood the target area with goons, pick up this man who is probably there and believed to be significant and any chance of control is lost to us.

Look at the last two cases to go through their courts, in Hamburg and Mainz – enough said.'

'Yes, yes… I'd like Freddie, now, to tell us what he knows. The ball's in your court, Freddie.'

It would be, of course, a turf war. Each of them, opposite him, would fight a corner for primacy. He started with the story of a war being fought in distant mountains in a distant time. He saw a pencil twisting, a demonstration of impatience, in Dennis's hands.

'Please, could we have something of today, not of times before I was born?'

He spoke of Ricky Capel, drugs importer from south-east London, and of alliances that facilitated the movement of class-A narcotics into Britain, and saw boredom on the face of Trevor, the fidgeting at his cufflinks.

'I hardly think, Freddie, that we have been dragged round here for a lecture on how cocaine and heroin end up on our streets. We're supposed to be flushing out al-Qaeda operatives, not mincing round the drugs problems.'

He talked of a trawler that was, in foul weather, somewhere out in the North Sea, and said that he thought it would be used for a rat run across the water and back to British shores, and saw the first light of interest settle in the eyes of the Norfolk policeman, as if everything said before had been dross.

'Well, there's your answer. Seems simple enough to me, Freddie. I've excellently trained firearms officers ready to be deployed, and so have Suffolk. We're not yokels out there. We have experience, we've done the exercises. We follow the trawler, radar and all that, back over the North Sea, and we have my people – and Suffolk's – on standby along the coast. Soon as they're ashore we've got them. Open-and-shut business. Not that we need it, but do you have any more for us?'

He said that the trawler did not have a regular home port, and he could not promise where it would come into harbour, and the Special Forces liaison, Bill, seemed alerted to the opportunity. All of the others round the table wore suits, but this man had obviously reckoned his different status should be recognized by his faded cord trousers and heavy cable-knit sweater.

'With the greatest respect to our country cousins, I don't think this is up the street of Norfolk and Suffolk.

This is a job for us. I'm putting my weight behind a joint team, Hereford and Poole – which keeps both of them happy – and taken to sea tonight in a coastguard cutter, or anything that's got the legs on a trawler, and an interception in international waters. It's the sort of operation that should be left to professionals, and that's us. We're discreet and dynamic… It's for Special Forces, my people. I really don't think there's room for debate.'

He described the island. He talked of Polly Wilkins, out on the dunes, who would give a warning when the trawler came inshore. With some pride, Gaunt spoke of the achievement of this young woman, on her first overseas posting, and of the doors she had prised open since a fire and a death in Prague. He saw overplayed incredulity snap at Dennis's face.

'Am I hearing you right, Freddie? Are you telling us that you have, on the ground, in a situation of this importance, a rookie? A slip of a girl just off your induction course? Is that it? I'll say it to your face, Freddie, if this all goes sour, and it's down to your young woman's failure, I would not imagine – as far as government service goes – your feet'Il touch the ground. You'll be out on your arse, Freddie, and damn well rightly so. It is, and I'm sorry to say it, a cavalier road you're following. Not that it's for me to criticize the actions, procedures and operational decisions of a sister organization but I reckon it hard to credit that we're going to be dependent on the skills of one young woman, a rookie, a raw recruit.'

He ploughed on, led with his chin. He had learned well, at the break-up of his old unit, that when dogs circled him he could expect no help from his own, no protection from the assistant deputy director. He anticipated the sneers and inevitable derision. But, without enthusiasm, he described Polly Wilkins's companion on the island, and his past, the information he had provided. When he drew breath a babble broke round him – after the quiet and the shock.

'Are you levelling with us? You've dragged in a bloody vagrant for back-up?'

'Am I getting this correctly? A man who is disgraced with the stain of cowardice in the field has been taken on to your pay-roll?'

'Are you short of bodies, or just a sense of priorities? What's going on here, Freddie?'

He shuffled together his papers. Everything except the photograph of Anwar Maghroub went back into his briefcase. The case was his pride and gave him the small sense of belonging to the Service, little enough of it. It had been bought for him by his wife on his first birthday after their marriage. A technician down in the basement of a former building had, for cash in hand, put the gold stamp of EIIR on the case's flap

– worn and faded now, the edges were curled from use. He felt old, tired and useless, and each barb of their contempt had hurt a little more than the last… but the worse hurt was that he had not defended with resolve the efforts of Polly Wilkins and the man with her on the far-away dunes. He said, with a trifle of dignity, that he did not think he could be of further help.

'Well, that's it, then. Most grateful to you, Freddie,' the assistant deputy director intoned. 'I'm sure that the comments of colleagues were in no way meant as personal, not as reflections on your very satisfactory summary of where we are… That's the past. Our concern now is where we should be in the future, the next few hours.'

He hardly listened. Gaunt could have written the script.

'We are the providers and you, gentlemen, are the customers, and I think – bar some small blemishes – we have provided well. It seems to me that the point at issue is whether to intercept at sea-'

'It should be at sea,' Bill, the liaison man, said. 'At sea is where my people have expertise.'

'-or whether we should go for the land option.'

'So much tidier if it's us doing it,' Jimmy, the assistant chief constable, said. 'On land and done by us or Suffolk.'

Dennis was asked, did he have a dog in this fight?

He shrugged. 'Doesn't matter to us, we'd be easy with land or sea.'

Watching his Almighty, who had descended from an upper-floor firmament, Gaunt saw the lips purse and the forehead of the assistant deputy director furrow. He could predict the judgement, as if from Solomon's seat. Divide the baby, chop the little beggar in half and then there would be two parts to the corpse. Special Forces to shadow the trawler and watch for a drop-off short of the coast, with constant readiness for intervention and a cordon of guns from the Suffolk and Norfolk forces to be on the quayside at whatever port on the East Anglian mainland the trawler docked. It was theatre but it would be compromise. The Almighty, or Solomon, held his hands together in front of his mouth and pondered, the prayer gesture, and took the deep breath. Gaunt knew what he would say, could almost recite it.

'I believe a median solution will see us where we all want to be. I suggest that-'

'Excuse me.'

Gaunt flashed a glance at the source of the interruption, the Special Branch officer.

The assistant deputy director flicked a tongue -

Gaunt thought it a snake's strike – across his lips. 'Yes, Trevor?'

Not lifting his head, speaking with a gentle Welsh accent, Trevor said, 'Excuse me, but I think you miss the essential.'

'Do we, Trevor? Well, that's a late but interesting contribution. We are all busy men, so perhaps you could enlighten us. How do we "miss the essential"?

You have the floor.'

Gaunt thought it that sort of moment when men in waders stand in a wretched stream and identify the reward, a trout, and prepare to cast a fly over it… but a damn great cormorant comes from the clear blue sky and nicks the fish. His mood lightened and he anticipated amusement.

Trevor said, 'We are missing the essential. I tell you what is our fear in the Branch, and the same fear will be mirrored at Thames House. That fear is the "sleep-ers". Each time we go out on an arrest job I feel little elation. The fear is not bred by what I know, but what I don't know. I am in ignorance of the sleepers. How many? Where are they located? What are their common factors? I will answer each point. There might be ten sleepers, a hundred or a thousand, I don't know. They are located anywhere you choose to put a pin in a map, in any major city or in any provincial town. The common factors are that they swim unrecognized in our society, are normal and ordinary in every outward facet of appearance – and they hate us and all that we in this room seek to defend. I go further in explanation of us missing the essentials, with due humility. We are told that a resourceful and valued man, a co-ordinator of attacks, is seeking covert entry to Britain. Such a man does not waste his time, and hazard his freedom, if the individuals he will work with are of second or third grade. He will only travel if he believes he will meet young men or women of dedication and skill – and the purpose of his journey is to wake them. Who are they? I don't know. How do I find them? I can't. What is my assessment of their worth? A team of sleepers can inflict, guided by a strong hand, damage to us not equalled since the blitz bombing of the 1940s. We have to find them.'

He paused. Gaunt reflected that any of them round the table could have made that speech – perhaps not with such Celtic flourish – and hit the same nails… but none had. No chair scraped, no pencil was twirled, no fist masked a yawn. The Branch man used his hands as if he spoke of something of childlike simplicity, outstretched them. Said it, like it was obvious to an idiot.

'He takes us there. Arrest him at sea or in port and we will gain little because he will carry no laptop, won't have a convenient and uncoded address book.

He leads us to this disparate cadre. The new leaders are trained in counter-interrogation methods, trained well, and I doubt he would talk even without fingernails and with his testicles wired to the mains.

His is the road we follow. Lift him at sea, or on a dock-side, and we would have the empty shell of a body and not his mind's contents. I suggest we permit him to land and we are with him… Under close and expert surveillance, we let him run.'

The silence, into which only the Welsh voice had intruded, broke.

'By God, that's high-octane stuff.'

'Exciting, fascinating, challenging – a cell block filled with little scrotes.'

'Sends a signal to whatever cave that bearded bastard's in that we're on top of him, crushing him.'

The assistant deputy director smacked the palm of his hand on the table. 'I congratulate you, Trevor.

Original thinking where we were lacking – we let him run. First class. What I like, everybody is involved.

Special Forces shadow at sea. Suffolk and Norfolk are at the landfall, creating a sanitized perimeter. The Service, Dennis, are singing off the same hymn sheet as the Branch, Trevor, and will do the clever stuff, the surveillance in co-operation. I would like to suggest, if there are no dissenters, that I should chair a daily meeting of principals – I think noon as good a time as any. We're a big family and so much the more effective when we pull together. "We let him run". Brilliant.

Let's get it in place, gentlemen. Let's do the detail.'

Gaunt stood, and it seemed not to be noticed. The photograph of Anwar Maghroub lay on the table, and the women who did the shorthand had the details of Ricky Capel's life, and of the trawler that was called the Anneliese Royal, and of the island. He thought he had no longer a part to play. He turned to Gloria and, almost imperceptibly, raised an eyebrow, then flicked a glance at the door. He saw her smooth her skirt and drop her pad into her bag.

Around the table there was a sudden explosion of voices. A call to Hereford and the alerting of the section on stand-by, done staccato, then Poole notified. A barked demand to Constabulary Headquarters for firearms officers to be pulled off all other duties – no, not Sandringham. A full muster of Thames House guys and girls, A Branch people who did surveillance and bugs, to be made ready. Special Branch teams to be put together that afternoon. Gaunt moved towards the door, Gloria alongside him. He saw, from the corner of his eye, the look on her face of suppressed fury, her man put down, then hung out to dry – unwanted. He stepped aside to let her go through the door before him.

A voice, Dennis's, piped behind him: 'When you next call your island out-station, Freddie, tell the rookie we want the departure time, nothing more.

Imperative that she does not show herself – no intervention – just sits on a sandcastle a mile back.'

Then Bill, the bloody man booming as if he were on a survival run in the Brecons, 'And tell her to keep old White Feather clear – not that he sounds like a hero – right out of it.'

They went up together, and the lift was full. Neither spoke, but in the corridor he said quietly, 'They didn't want a doubter, did they? Didn't want a Thomas, a sceptic. Such excitement, such certainty

… What happens if they bloody lose him, or never bloody find him? What happens if we let him run screws up. I think, with our man across the water, you get one chance, and not to take it is a criminal act, but they didn't want to hear that. And they didn't want to hear what the professor up north told me: "Eradicate from your mind the due process of law – kill him." It'll rub off, always does, the gloss of excitement, and you and I will then be behind a big high wall of sandbags. Ah, well… time to say it was all right when it left us. We let him run. I wouldn't have but my opinion was not requested. What I think we need is a good strong cup of tea, with sugar.'

Inside his office, his sanctum, he dropped his briefcase as if he had no more use of it, dialled the number, heard the ringing, then her voice, the far-away wind and the cry of gulls.

Polly sat apart from him.

The phone was now back in her pocket. When it had rung she had crawled away from him and gone down a gully where the wind couldn't reach her. She had listened to Freddie Gaunt's faint voice and thought she heard his exhaustion. She had been left with the sense of a beaten man.

His back was to her. He tracked and scanned with the binoculars over the dunes and the beach, and watched the horizon; the swing of his head behind the eyepieces was the only movement he made. She did not know what the sex in the sleeping-bag meant to her, or what it meant to him. And always the bloody wind was on her, and the bloody rain… She did not know. She steeled herself, came and eased down beside him, but his hands stayed on the binoculars and he did not loop his arm round her.

Polly said, 'My people have decided what they want, Malachy. I don't know how it'll fit with you but it's the way it's going to be.'

She saw that his eyes followed the waving of the coarse grass stems on the dunes.

'You are – without belittling your achievements – outside the loop. They're all grateful in London, of course. We've moved on – there's a plan in place. It does not include you. I'm sorry, Malachy, but the concept of the plan is in concrete.'

His head tilted and she could follow the lenses' aim.

She saw the stark, empty beach, and thought he followed the flight of the gulls.

'We have the name of a beam trawler, when it left and which port it sailed from. We have the identity of the boat's skipper, and his link to Ricky Capel, the detail of the debt between the Capel family and the Rahman clan in Blankenese… More than that, we can put a face and a biography to a big player in the international game, terrorism: he's the package to be lifted off here by the trawler. We accept that parts of the jigsaw were put in place by you, but that's history.

If it sounds brutal it is not intended to – I'm just telling you how the facts play.'

The binoculars were lifted. She followed them and saw the mist haze among the furthest white splash of the waves and the grim, grey line of clouds where the horizon met the water. She had thought, before Gaunt's call, that she would go back to the swamp in the island's centre and try to make a peace with the old lunatic, the recluse who had jarred her with the story of a concentration camp and victims, and pump him for what he had seen during the day but now, after the call, she had no need of him – or of Malachy.

'Under no circumstances am I to intervene in the pickup, that is a very clear order. I watch and I report.

I do not go near them and I do not alert them. I am told they should board the trawler, however many there are, and not know they are under observation. I see, at a distance, the lights and I communicate that to London. The plan drops into place, and my role in all this is complete – your role, Malachy, is already finished – and I'm on my way home. The trawler will be tracked across the North Sea, will be under surveillance, and will be allowed to drop off our target. He's to be permitted to run – in the greater interest of national security – and lead the appropriate agencies, God willing, to those he would hope to meet and work with… I don't wish to be cruel, Malachy, but you should feel free to go back to the ferry, get to the mainland, take a shower and eat a meal, and start again on whatever life it is you want to make for yourself. Those are my instructions.'

A shaft of sunlight, low, narrow, golden, broke the cloud and fashioned a corridor over the surge of the sea, ran to the whipped sands and the grasses and lit them. His shoulders swung and he looked to his right, away from her, to the dunes.

'Damn you, Malachy… I'll not forget you, or what you've done and who you are… Can you not say something? He's to be permitted to run, we don't intervene. I have to watch and report. Isn't it enough for you, what you've already done? Have you nothing to say, nothing for me?'

She saw his forehead knitted, his concentration on the sands and grasses that made the dunes.

He was deep in holiday-leave charts, the bane of the life of a senior officer – and waiting for him were over-time dockets – when he heard the stampede of feet in the corridor. Johan Konig saw his door snap open, no knock, of which his rank should have assured him.

A detective panted, a step inside his room, and hadn't a voice, but beckoned him.

He took his time, killed the computer page, pulled his jacket from the hook and turned his back on the picture of the egret perched on a hippopotamus. He locked the door after him. He did not scurry down the corridor. It was not, in the book of Konig, good for juniors to see a ranking officer run, but he felt a rising excitement although he had no idea of its source. The detective led him to the new communications room he had demanded for his unit. His whole team, twelve men and two women, were crowded inside and their attention was on a black-and-white monitor screen.

None saw him come, and none made way for him. He elbowed his way through, pushed forward.

He saw her, a small figure. The focus was poor from the camera in the roof of the neighbouring house.

He had only seen photographs of Alicia Rahman, taken covertly for her husband's file and showing her with her children at the school gate.

He peered forward, blinked to see better. She was high on the roofing tiles of the house and her arms were looped round the width of a chimney stack. The curtains of an open window flapped below. She wore a robe, at which the wind tore, but either the buttons and the belt had not been fastened when she had come through the window and climbed or they had been ripped undone. He saw her naked body and the scars, which were vague on the picture but recognizable; long, darkened marks on her chest and on her stomach, close to the dark hair mass and on her thighs. The men and women around him – all chosen for his unit because of hardened experience – cursed what they saw.

'Goddamn animals – bastards.'

'Worse than animals, barbarians.'

'They've scraped her, flayed the skin off her.'

He turned away – he had seen enough. He tapped the shoulders of Brigitte and Heinrich, told them they would come with him and asked for a car, a van of uniformed officers, an ambulance and a fire appliance with a crane and cradle. He remembered the man on the fence, his hands bleeding from the wire and their flight up the side path, the silence of the man in the cells, and his release into the care of the agent he had trusted.

'Rahman, for all his skills, has allowed himself to be provoked into making a mistake, and the mistake will bring him down,' Konig said quietly, then swung on his heel.

'Cover yourself.' Timo Rahman cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted. 'Hide yourself.'

He heard, in the distance, sirens in the streets of Blankenese. The Bear was at the kitchen table, his head in his hands, sobbing. The aunt leaned uselessly out of the open window. He had not seen them but he imagined, beyond the thick hedge and the high gates

– from the far side of the street – his neighbours gathered to grandstand and stare. What he could see was her legs – long, slim, bare and wounded – and the hair – where he and she had made two daughters

– and her stomach, the raw strips on her skin where blood seeped.

Timo Rahman yelled again, 'Come down. You have to come down. Come down to the window.'

The sirens closed on him at speed. Not when he had been stabbed, not when he had been shot had he felt that sense of catastrophe surging round him, developing as fast as the sirens' approach.

'Get to the window. Get inside. It is my order.'

She stayed. Her feet scratched for a grip on the tiles and he could see the hair and her stomach and a breast hung clear of her robe, but her arms had a grip on the chimney. Not a man or a woman, since he had come to Hamburg, had refused an order of Timo Rahman. The scale of the catastrophe facing him leaped in his mind: he saw the collapse of an empire…

He heard the crash and wrench of metal, turned from her, and saw the front of the fire engine burst the gates. The crane on it pulled down the branches of trees and snapped them carelessly. He thought, high over him and showing her nakedness to the world, displaying what he had instructed should be done to her – to clean her – that her lips moved, but the sirens destroyed the sound.

The last time, and the shriek was desperation: 'Get back in the house. Come down. You want the world to see you, see Rahman's wife?'

The world did. And what Timo Rahman saw was the fire engine's crane rising with men and women in the cradle. A policeman's gun covered him, as the Bear and the aunt were brought out of the house under escort. The cradle reached his wife, and a blanket, for modesty and warmth, was wrapped round her. A man walked towards him and swung handcuffs on their chain. He recognized him. The crane lowered the cradle.

He saw the shine of the handcuffs as they closed on his wrists. With kindness, his wife was helped into the ambulance and he watched it drive away between the flattened gates… His world was broken.

He was led to the car. He had thought, if this moment ever came – hands gripping his arms and handcuffs biting at his wrists – that the chief man among them, whom he had thought to be only a tax investigator, would wear on his face a mask of gloating satisfaction. .. but there was only impassive coldness. A hand wrenched down his head so that his scalp would not hit the top of the car door, and he was pushed inside. If the man had shown triumph, a little of Timo Rahman's dignity would have survived. He sat low in the back seat and humiliation swam over him.

The consul general took the call. 'What can I do for you, Dr Konig?… I'm sorry, that name again, please

… Miss Polly Wilkins? I don't believe I know her…

She was here? Well, I never saw her and I've never heard of her. There is, and I can emphatically state it, no one of that name at my consulate… I see, I see.

Well, Dr Konig, I suggest you contact our embassy in Berlin… I can't imagine where the confusion arose but I regret, sincerely, that I am unable to be of assistance… Miss Wilkins is not on my staff, is not here, and I have no idea who or where she is… If she were to arrive on my doorstep, is there a message for her?… Timo Rahman is under arrest, is that it? If I ever meet her, I will assuredly tell her. Good day, Dr Konig.'

He rang off. He gazed bleakly through the window and out over the lake. The thought in his mind was of betrayal, promises broken, contacts thrown to the winds. He detested the presence on his premises of what he referred to as 'the shadows people'. He thanked his God that she had gone, good riddance, from the upstairs and permanently locked room to which he had no access, and wondered where she was

… He was buzzed and warned his next appointment had arrived – and he erased her, and her business, from his mind.

He was drawn back, as if a rope pulled him.

Oskar circled them.

He had been at the platform through the afternoon, had cleared away the eider's carcass and had watched the birds' renewal of confidence. With death gone, they had fed and preened – but he had known that he would go back. Late, as the sun's shafts dipped and fell on the birds, and made a brilliance of their plumage, he had moved. He had thought it, as he had approached them and heard one dripping voice, a small matter that he had done already. The destruction of the light, he had felt, was of minimal importance. He had looked for a larger gesture, an act that would mitigate the shame on his family and the poison in his blood.

He saw the weapon, and the steel case, which was open and showed him the dials below an extended antenna.

Moving on his stomach, so slowly, through the scrub and never pulling when a thorn caught him, Oskar was undecided as to whether to steal the radio or the firearm from the strangers who violated his paradise. He did not know which was more vital to them, the weapon or the radio. Their backs were to him.

To take either, he must crawl from the scrub's cover.

If he had either the radio or the weapon, he would go in the dusk, the darkness, to the home of the island's policeman, who thought him a malcontent, a trouble-maker – who would be confounded and would offer fulsome gratitude. He had to expose at least his arms, head and shoulders if he were to stretch far enough to snatch away the weapon or the radio.

One talked – not a tongue that Oskar Netzer knew – and the other, taller, lay close to him and was on his side, seemed not to respond and might have slept. The blackness of the evening was fast coming.

He did not feel the brittle twig blown away long before by a storm that was dry from the cover of the scrub. Oskar did not feel it against his stomach and through the thickness of his outer coat. He wriggled to go closer. He knew that from exertion his old lungs croaked for breath that rattled in his throat, and he tried to suppress the wheeze. His fingers were, perhaps, ten centimetres from the weapon, but more than twenty from the radio. With what he believed to be the greatest caution he brought a knee forward, and felt a creaking pain in his joint, then squirmed forward. He saw the gap, his fingers to the weapon, shorten. He heard the twig snap.

He was going back.

Thorns caught him.

He struggled to plunge deeper into the cover.

The crescendo of gunfire burst over him, and he felt numbing shock in his arm, his shoulder, his hip.

He went deep into the thorn thicket. He heard shouting. Men blundered in the scrub but had only the small beam of a torch to guide them.

The wetness of his blood was in his hand.

He lay as if dead.

Malachy had jerked upright.

The sound had come on the wind. Three single shots, not on automatic.

When he started to move – into darkness – towards where three shots had been fired, she clung to his coat.

'It is nothing to do with us,' she hissed. 'We do not intervene.'

With both hands she held his coat, fists buried in it.

He listened, heard the surf break and the whine of the wind.