Rat Run

Chapter Two

'How is she?'

The nurse looked up. She had been hovering over the bed. 'Are you a relative?'

'No – no, I'm not. Just a friend.' Malachy held the flowers beside his leg and the water off them ran down his trousers.

'How close a friend?'

'I live next door to Mrs Johnson.' He was supposed to have been, once, an expert in interrogation. With the tables turned, now, the questioning unsettled him.

He shuffled his feet. The nurse's body blocked his view of Millie. It was the furthest he had been away from the Amersham since he had come to live there the previous autumn. It had been a big journey for him to get to the sprawled complex of St Thomas's Hospital. That morning, Dawn had come again to his door. She must have been on her way home after the early cleaning shift in Whitehall. He had thought of Millie, and the guilt had seared him.

'I suppose that'll do… ' The nurse had a freckled face and bags under her eyes, seemed half asleep with tiredness and spoke with an accent that was west of Ireland. 'She was knocked out. We thought about Intensive Care but there wasn't a bed. She got the best we could give her, but it wasn't IC, with pulse, blood pressure and pupils checks every half-hour, and we didn't think there was inter-cranial bleeding… That's why she's in General Medical. So, it's serious bruising to the head and a broken arm – not a complicated break. Always the same with the old folk – they hang on and don't let the bag go. Silly, but that's them for you.'

The nurse moved, started to smooth down the bed.

Millie, to him, looked so small. She was half sat up against a pile of pillows. She wore a loose-fitting smock, several sizes too large for her. Her face, usually proud, independent and haughty, was a coloured mass of bruises, and the right side of her grey hair had been shaved away above the ear. He could see the two-inch-long gash with the stitches in it. Her right arm was across her small chest, enveloped in a sling.

She seemed to stare at him, baleful and defensive. He did not know whether he was recognized, if that was the stare she gave to anyone approaching her bed. The nurse slipped a thermometer into her mouth, which was puffed, with distorted lips.

'She'll be in two or three days, because she lives alone and there's no one to look after her. Problem is that we might ship her out today, and if she starts vomiting or goes to sleep, we've an inquiry to worry about. When the swelling's down on the arm it'll be pinned or plated – and she'll have to manage. That's the way it is, these days.'

'There's a friend next door to her, a good lady. She'll be there.'

'And you said you were a neighbour.' The nurse put down the thermometer, then fixed Malachy with her eye. 'I expect you'll give her a hand – or do you go to work?'

'I'll do what I can,' he murmured. 'I don't suppose you have a vase?'

He had gone to the East Street market. He had considered how much he could spend. The benefit he was entitled to, after deductions, left him with eighty pounds to last for two weeks. Divided up that gave him spending money of five pounds and seventy-one pence each day. He had asked the woman on the flower stall for the best she could do with five pounds.

It was a good display of bright chrysanthemums that he had brought to the hospital.

The nurse reached to the bottom cupboard of the cabinet beside the bed and took out a man's urine-sample bottle, grinned, filled it with water from the basin, and took the flowers from Malachy. As if she'd made the judgement that he wasn't capable of flower-arranging, she did it for him and settled the stems in the bottle. 'The vases all get nicked,' she said. 'It's the best I can manage. Don't stay too long. You shouldn't tire her.' She left him.

Malachy sat on the end of the bed beside the little bump her feet made. He did not know what to say, or whether it was right to say anything. He tried to smile encouragement. She had turned her battered head enough to see the flowers. He felt his inadequacy.

When he was with the dossers, sleeping in the underpass on and under cardboard, drinking with what he had made from begging, and knowing he could not fall further, he had not felt this low. The silence nagged between them.

Maybe an hour passed. She slept and he sat dead still so as not to wake her.

The question cracked in his ear. Brusque. 'What's a piece of shit like you doing here?'

The nephew was behind him. He carried a large, varied bouquet in one hand and a clear plastic bag in the other, packed with apples, pears, bananas, peaches, a pineapple and grapes.

'Why are you here?'

He was shivering. His whisper was a chatter in his teeth: 'I came to see if I could help.'

'Oh, that's good, "help". Didn't "help" enough to walk her there and back – no, no.'

Malachy stammered, 'She didn't ask me. If she'd asked me… '

'No fool, Aunt Millie. Wouldn't have reckoned you up to it, walking her there and back.'

'She didn't ask.'

'You came down from a great height – right? Hit the bottom – right? I know who you were and what you did. I know what they called you. Fancy phrases from the medics, but the truth from the jocks. I know.'

His head drooped into his hands. He sensed the nephew go past him and he heard the kiss placed on Millie's forehead, would have been where the bruises were. More sounds. The splash of water, then the thud in the tin waste-bin, the crackle of the Cellophane wrapping on the bouquet.

He kept his hands tight on his face, could feel the stubble on his palms.

'What I don't know, my friend, my little piece of shit, is where you're going. Are you going to go on failing? That's easy, isn't it? I don't know if the only road you're comfortable with, my friend, is the easy one… Take your bloody hands off your face. Look at her! Does that take guts, looking at an old lady who's been done over for her purse? Look at her and remember her.'

He did. He saw the slightness of her and the bruises in their mass of colours, the thin upper arm in its sling. And he saw the stems of his flowers upside down in the bin, and the glory of the bouquet on the cabinet. He pushed himself up from the bed and turned for the aisle that ran through the ward.

'There's an easy road and a hard one – most, when they've fallen like you have, take the easy one.'

Out of the hospital, he walked on the embankment.

The river seemed sour and dirtied. Rain ran down his face, was not wiped away. He walked on and did not know where, walked until a massive cream and green building – an architect's dream – blocked his path.

Then, he turned, retraced his steps and headed back to the Amersham where he could hide behind a door that was locked and bolted.

Had Frederick Gaunt looked out through his fifth-floor window, reinforced and chemically treated glass that could withstand bomb blast and electronic eavesdropping, he would have seen a man walk on the Albert Embankment towards the wall that blocked further progress to the building where he worked, then loiter and drift away. But there was more on Gaunt's mind that lunchtime than the aimless advance and retreat of another of the capital's work-shy low-life – that would have been his description if he had seen the loafer. His sandwiches were untouched and his bottle of mineral water unopened.

Gaunt's room in Vauxhall Bridge Cross, the monolith occupied by the Secret Intelligence Service, was in an isolated corner of the building. Nominally, eight per cent of the Service's budget was devoted to the investigation of organized crime, but the resources made available to this section of the fifth floor's open-plan areas, cubicles and rooms had been pared down to meet the demands of Iraq and the burgeoning al-Qaeda desks. Gaunt did Albania. On another man's back it would have been a hairshirt, an irritation that required continued scratching without relief, but he knew the way the system worked and would have reckoned bloody-minded sulking to be vulgar.

The lunch was uneaten and the water undrunk.

Little that normally landed on his desk, dumped without ceremony by Gloria, required more than dutiful attention. Albania's organized crime was the trafficking of narcotics, firearms and people. His CX reports were carefully crafted, always readable, and painted a clear picture of a society wedded with enthusiasm to criminality. Most could have been drafted when he was half asleep – not the one that now turned in his mind.

'You haven't touched them – you have to eat.'

Gloria put down a further file on his desk, already crowded with seven paper heaps. 'No breakfast, no lunch, and I'll wager nothing proper last night.'

He grimaced. She scolded because she cared about him. The first of the files had arrived the previous morning and the heap had built through the day. Most of the pages now referred to telephone traces sucked down by the farm of dishes on the Yorkshire moors.

Once he had been on the cusp of the Service's investigations – before he was moved aside: a victim of the Service's need to produce scapegoats after its greatest ever, and most humiliating, intelligence failure. Now he was again at the centre. Little, irrelevant, corrupt, fourth-world Albania was top of the tree. He chortled to himself. He had been at his desk till ten o'clock last night, back in at a few minutes after five that morning, and would be there that evening long after the day shifts had finished.

'I really do insist that you eat.'

It had been the day when al-Qaeda came to Albania: what he had lived and dreamed for. He thought they must have almost forgotten, down on the AQ desks, that Frederick Gaunt still inhabited a little corner of their space. A link was made – and he'd have admitted it was a tortuous one – between the kings of the terrorist war and the barons of European criminality. Happy days, happy times.

'Please, Mr Gaunt – please, eat something.'

'What never ceases to amaze me, Gloria, is that they still use the old telephone. God, will they never learn?'

One file listed an address in the city of Quetta in west-central Pakistan, in the foothills of the mountains that straddled the Afghan border – probably close to where the venerable Osama was holed up in a damp cave – with an estimated population of 200,000, and among them was Farida, wife of Muhammad Iyad: listed occupation, bodyguard. She lived there with the kids, but he was long gone.

The second file was of the life and times of Muhammad Iyad: more important, whom he guarded, all choice items.

The third file comprised a security report from Islamabad of a surveillance team's witnessing of a gift-wrapped parcel being hand-delivered to the house. Included were black-and-white still-frame images of her showing her mother a gold chain necklace. Anyone close to her would have passed the gift to her in person. Who other than a husband in hiding somewhere would have sent a married woman an expensive present? Records, attached, showed it to have been her wedding anniversary when she received the gift.

The fourth file listed a telephone call made on the landline from the house to a number in Dubai, in the Gulf. The transcript of the brief call listed, no names, her 'love, gratitude and always my prayers'.

The fifth file was slim. The only overseas call made from the Dubai number – no transcript provided – was to a satellite phone in southern Lebanon.

The sixth file, again a single sheet of flimsy paper and again no transcript, recorded a call from the satellite phone located inland from the city of Sidon to a number in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic.

The seventh file, courtesy of the BIS in the city, identified a message received in Prague on a number that was tapped. The transcript was one line: 'Gift received. Love, gratitude and always my prayers.' The number in Prague to which the message had been sent was monitored because it was used by an Albanian national, believed involved in the organized-crime racket of moving Romanian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian girls to northern Europe for prostitution. The warmth of his smile spread because Wilco's signature was on the cover note.

In front of him now, brought to him by his faithful PA – and he'd have sworn she had the same caring eyes as her spaniel – was Wilco's latest message. The Albanian was a cafe owner and prosperous. Records showed he also owned a third-floor apartment in the Old Quarter of Prague, and the unpronounceable name of a street was listed. He began to wolf his sandwich, gulping it down, then swilling his mouth with the water. 'Satisfied?'

'It's only you I'm thinking of, Mr Gaunt.'

She could have called him Frederick or Freddie – she had been with the Service for twenty years, fifteen of them running his desk at home and abroad – but she was never familiar. Without her, his professional life as a senior intelligence officer would have been so much the poorer. He said, 'I'm going off to see the ADD, dear Gilbert, to tell him I want to run with this.

Meantime, message Wilco that I'm controlling it, and all signals come to me, please.'

He was up and scraping sandwich detritus from his shirt, then buttoning his waistcoat, reaching for his suit jacket from the hanger.

'Shouldn't I wait till you've received the Assistant Deputy Director's confirmation?' She seemed to tease.

'Take it as read. They're all callow youths and girls on AQ (Central Europe). He'll be glad to give it to someone who knows his butt from his arm. Oh, and say something nice to Wilco.'

He strode away, noisy on steel-heeled shoes.

Terrorists in bed with criminals made for formidable copulation.

He walked up the street with a plastic bag dangling heavy from his hand. It was the last time that Muhammad Iyad, the bodyguard, would need to collect food from the halal butcher in the market behind the Old Town Square, salad vegetables and bread. By the following evening they would have started on another stage of the journey.

Because this was his work and why he was respected, he tried to be as clear-headed and alert as his reputation demanded. Among the few who knew him, it was said that he was the most suspicious, most cunning of all the men given the task of minding the precious and highly valued operatives of the Organization. Coming back to the apartment on the top floor of the building in the narrow alley behind Kostecna, Muhammad Iyad used all the techniques that had long become second nature to him.

Three times between the Old Town Square and

Kostecna, he had broken the slow ambling pace of his walk, had darted round corners, then stood back flush to the doors at the entrance of old buildings and waited the necessary minute to see whether a tail would come after him. Twice he had stopped in front of women's clothes shops and positioned himself so that the reflection showed the street and both pavements behind him. Once, on Dlouha, at the entrance to the pizzeria, he had abruptly turned on his heel and gone back a hundred metres, a fast stride that would have confused men who followed him, and they would have ducked away, would have shown themselves to him, the expert. From the doorways and shop fronts and by the pizzeria, he had seen only a fog wall of tourists' bodies, local kids, striding office workers and meandering women. But that day, his mind was clouded.

He knew the man he guarded as Abu Khaled… but his thoughts were not on him and his security. On pain of death, or on the worse pain of disgrace, he would not have told the man of what he had done while they had travelled and of the reward it had won him. The man did not know that a necklace had been purchased in the gold market of Riyadh. The money to buy it had been from the banker who handled transactions for the Organization. He himself, Muhammad Iyad, had chosen the necklace of thick, high-quality links, and the banker had promised that it would be delivered by courier to the address in Quetta – not by mail because that would have been unreliable and would have endangered his safety. If it had been known what he had done, he would never again have been entrusted with taking a man of importance towards his target. The message had come back to him two days before. 'Gift received. Love, gratitude and always my prayers.' He had rejoiced. The image of her, and the little children, had filled every cranny of his mind. He could see her, touch her, hear her. It had been wrong of him to make the gift – it was against every law laid down by the Organization – but the weakness had come from long years of separation.

His love of the Organization was shared with his love for his family, for the woman who had borne his children. He did not know when, if ever, he would see her again. The net around the Organization was tighter, more constricting. It seemed at times – worst when he tried to sleep – to suffocate him… so, walking towards the alley behind Kostecna, between narrow streets and old buildings of brick and timber, he attempted to maintain his habitual alertness, but the picture of her, with the necklace he had chosen, competed.

He was certain of it. He would have sworn to it on the Book. There was no tail.

Fully focused, as he was not, Muhammad Iyad might have noticed that the no-parking sign at the end of the alley, on Kostecna – which had not been obscured when he had passed it at the start of his shopping trip – was now covered with old sacking bound tight with twine.

He had been two months with Abu Khaled, moving and minding and watching over him. He had collected him in secrecy from a lodging-house in the Yemen's capital, Sana'a. They had travelled overland, north into Saudi Arabia – the home of the swine who danced to the tune of the Great Satan's whistle – had skirted the desert and gone up the Red Sea coast, then cut back towards the desert interior and into Jordan.

All of the Organization's planning had been, as always, without flaw. From Jordan into Syria, then Turkey. At each stage safe-houses, transport and documentation had met them. Then across the sea by ferry and to Bulgaria… and the change that had first unsettled Muhammad Iyad.

They were in the hands of Albanians. The common language was broken English or halting Italian; they were Muslims but without the dedication to the Faith that was his and Abu Khaled's, but those were the arrangements made by the Organization. He could not, and he had tried to, fault them – but he did not trust them. From Bulgaria, via Plovdiv and Sofia, to Romania. Overnight stops in Romania at Brasov and Satu Mare, then into Hungary. More documentation and new cars waited for them at Szeged and Gyor before they had slipped over the frontier and into Slovakia.

If they had used airports his face and that of Abu Khaled would have been caught on the overhead cameras, and their papers would have been copied and stored; the cameras were dangerous because they could recognize a man's features. Whether he wore spectacles or a beard the computers could identify him. The borders they had crossed were always remote, not the main routes where the Customs men had been trained in techniques by the Crusaders.

They had come, after sleeping two nights at Prievidza, out of Slovakia and into the Czech Republic and had been taken to a cafe in Prague, then driven to the safe-house, an apartment high in an old building. The word given him, and he could not doubt it, was that with each step towards the destination greater care was required.

They had been five nights in Prague while the detail of the final stages was finalized. In each car or lorry they had been moved in, under the back wheel in the trunk or stowed behind the seats in the cab, was the black canvas bag that he was never without.

Against his body, at each border crossing in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey, a snub-nosed pistol, loaded and in a lightweight plastic holster, had gouged into the soft inner flesh of his right thigh. At every stop point his hand had hovered on his lap and his belt had been loosened so that he could reach down for it and shoot. He would never be taken, and it was his duty to ensure that a prized man such as Abu Khaled was not captured alive – too many had been; too many had talked to their interrogators. The first bullets would be for those who questioned them at a border crossing, the last two would be for Abu Khaled and himself.

Nor did he take note of the green-painted delivery van, cab empty, without side windows, that was parked where every other day it was forbidden to stop by the sign that was now covered.

The following night they would cross the frontier into Germany, in the hands of the Albanians… The pistol was now in his waistband, at the back, under his jacket and the coat he wore against the cold. At the street door, he swung round, gazed back up the alley.

No one followed him. No man or woman turned away quickly, or ducked their face to light a cigarette, or snatched a newspaper from a pocket and opened it.

Cars, without slowing, sped past the green van on Kostecna.

He went in, closed the door behind him. The next evening they would start the last leg of the journey. It would end far away on a northern coastline, and there he would hug his man, kiss his cheeks and pray that God walked with him… He began to climb the stairs.

The plaster had flaked from the walls with damp and the light of the alley had been extinguished by the shut street door, but he thought only of his wife…

The Organization had ordered that he should leave his man, his work done, on that seashore.

He lived in paradise but it brought him little comfort.

All his waking hours, worry squirmed perpetually in Oskar.

As the light failed, the rain off the sea thickened and the wind whipped the white caps behind him, Oskar Netzer sat on the bench in the low watch-tower among the island's dunes. At his back, four or five hundred metres behind the tower's wooden plank wall, was the North Sea. What he studied through the tower's hatch window was a lagoon, a bog of rank water and marsh, reeds and the eiders.

The island was at the centre of what would have seemed, if seen from a high aircraft, the long-cleaned vertebrae of a great mammal but one that, in the moment of death, had tucked its legs into its body.

The islands formed an archipelago a few kilometres north of the Frisland coast of Germany. The head of this fallen beast was Borkum island, the base of the skull was Memmert, and Juist was the neck. The shoulders, the largest of the islands, was Norderney.

Then came a bump on the spine: Baltrum. Baltrum was the jewel. The long backbone continued, broken by a channel between Langeoog and Spiekeroog. The creature's drooped tail was Wangerooge, the tip Minsener Oog. Together they acted as a sea wall that protected the mainland from the worst of the winter storms blowing in off the North Sea. The islands had been created over centuries by the tides and currents pushing together displaced mounds of seabed sand.

They had shifted continuously, their basic shapes surviving only when the seeds of the tough dune grass had taken root and bound the sand grains together. They had no soil that could be cultivated and the greenery that had sprouted was only the coarse grass, thick low scrub and occasional weather-bent trees. The upper point of all the individual islands was never more than twenty-four metres over the high-tide sea level. The smallest and the most beautiful, Baltrum, was five thousand metres long and a maximum at low water of fifteen hundred wide.

Baltrum was Oskar Netzer's home.

He was sixty-nine, and five years ago he had watched his wife's coffin lowered into the sand of the small cemetery in Ost Dorp, overlooking the low-tide mudflats and the mainland, after forty-one years of marriage. He loved no other human being and was himself unloved by all of the five hundred permanent residents on Baltrum. He was unloved because he struggles, every day and with every breath, to block the march forward that he was told was necessary if the island's community was to survive. He was wiry, without a trace of fat on his stomach. His cheeks, always seeming to carry three days' bristle, were mahogany-coloured from sun, rain and wind. He wore that day – as all days whether the sun baked or the chill wind cut – a pair of faded blue fishermen's overalls and stout walking boots, with the cap, half rotted, of a Frislander on his silver hair.

A third of his island, his home, was now covered with the little red-brick homes of those who came only in the summer and of those residents who let rooms for the wasp swarms of summer visitors. It was argued by the island's mayor, and the elected council, that visitors needed facilities. Oskar fought each one with passion. The latest, which he would fight that evening at a public meeting, was an application to expand the floor space of an existing Italian-owned fast-food pasta and pizza outlet.

From the tower, he watched the eider ducks feed in the lagoon, preen and sleep on its banks. They were elegant, peaceable and so vulnerable. Each development, he believed, eroded their place on the island.

His anger at development burned in him as he sat on the bench and muttered the arguments – not so loud as to disturb the eiders below him – that he would use later against the intrusion of more strangers. The season for visitors would not start till Easter week; there was still a month before they came. The quiet was around him, and the rumble of the sea far behind him. He would fight because without him the island's calm was shorn of defence and he did not care whose march he blocked.

The note was on the floor just inside the outer door.

Malachy had been in the kitchen cooking sausages and chips. Without the TV's noise through the common wall – and his own was not switched on – it had been deathly quiet in flat thirteen with only the whir of the microwave and the bleep of its bell, but he had heard nothing, no footsteps padding along level three's walkway and no rustle of paper as it was inserted between the bottom of the door and the carpet. He had brought in the plate, with the sausages and chips, and put it on the table. As he had pulled out his chair he had seen the note.

He went to it and bent to pick it up; it was folded in half. His first thought was that it was from Dawn, a report on Mildred Johnson's progress… No, she would have knocked on the door. He lifted it, opened it. Once, handwriting was something he had known about. In the first days at Chicksands, years back, they had spent half a day learning the points to be recognized from handwriting: ill-educated writing, intelligent writing, disguised writing. The hand of this note had formed large, clumsy characters in ballpoint on a sheet from a notepad. The pressure of the point and the size of the letters told Malachy that a right-handed person had written with their left hand.

Your phone will ring three times, then stop. A minute later it rings three more times then stops. After 30 minutes be in the parking area under Block 9, bay 286.

He shivered. Far out over the estate he could hear music played loud and shouts of argument, but around him was silence. He crumpled the paper, then let it drop. He turned to go to the table where the food waited for him, then hesitated and retrieved the note.

This time he ripped it into fragments, carried them to the toilet and flushed them – as if that might help him forget the demand made of him.

An intruder had broken into his world.

He sat at the table and ate his meal. The telephone was on a low table of stained wood. The room's furnishing was basic, battered: a table and two upright chairs, of which only one would safely take his weight, a two-seater settee whose coarse covering was worn on the arms by age and previous tenants, a bookcase with empty shelves. A single picture hung on one wall, a fading print of flowers beside a river; the glass was cracked at the upper left corner. A light with a plastic shade hung from the centre of the ceiling. And there was the low table with the telephone. It was the same as the day on which Ivanhoe Manners had brought him to the Amersham. He had done nothing in those months to stamp his character on the room. In fact, it mirrored Malachy Kitchen. It was as if he had determined to show nothing of himself, as if he were frightened to display himself. What there was he kept clean, but did not add to it.

As the hours passed, Malachy sensed his life had changed again, but he did not know whose hand controlled him. Maybe he should pack his clothes into a black bin-bag, go out through the door, close it behind him and walk away. Go down the stairs from level three, turn his back on block nine and head off into the night… But he sat on the carpet where he could see the telephone. The demons came again, and what had been said to him and of him, the squirming sense of shame. There was no one he could have turned to.

Ricky felt the excitement, always the same when he took delivery.

He wore plastic gloves. He counted out the packages, in the light thrown by a battery lamp, and the contents of each weighed one kilo. With a knife he had slit one open, had seen the dark powder and sniffed it.

He would not open any of the other twenty-four tightly bound packets of brown – no need to, not where they had come from. The last divisions of the load coming to him had been made in Germany and he would have trusted that source with his life. Ricky was in a derelict factory on the north side of the Peckham Road. Once, it had produced cheap leather coats but that market had now gone to Turkey, and he rented the premises. He had realized long ago that it was a waste of his money and dangerous to own the property where the twenty-five-kilo or fifty-kilo parcels were split. Around him, but with cut-offs for security, was a loose network of experts and facilitators. He wanted a driver for a shipment: he hired one. He wanted enforcers, such as the Merks: he went outside for them. He wanted premises: he rented them. He wanted information: he bought it.

He wanted a chemist: he went into the market-place

… It was his way of operating, and he believed it to be the safest.

Security was everything with Ricky Capel.

Little details missed sent men down for the big bird stretches. The men in the A Category gaol wings had all missed little details, and would do fifteen years for the mistake. He despised them.

Each packet was checked, after the one that had been opened, to be certain that the sealing had survived the immersion in the North Sea – but he wore gloves and out in the yard, between the building and the high wall, a brazier was already lit. He wore gloves so that fingerprints would not be on the oilskin wrappings or the taping, but his sweat would line the interior of the gloves, and DNA traces could be taken from a plastic glove. The gloves would be burned, and where he and Charlie had walked on the factory floor would be hosed down as they left so that their foot-prints were washed away.

The checking in the factory was the only time that Ricky Capel would be hands-on with the packages.

Charlie had driven the parcel up from the east coast – still with the smell of the sea on it and the stink of fish.

Davey and Benji would move the single-kilo parcels on to the drop-offs: more labyrinthine arrangements and more gloves for burning. Of course there were risks – everything about life was risks – but they were kept minimal. His success in achieving this was why Ricky was not in Category A, why he created fear, why he was worth – so Charlie told him – more than eighty-five million pounds. Yeah, yeah, not bad for a young 'un still short of his thirty-fifth birthday.

And the factory was always swept for bugs, camera and audio the day before a package was brought for splitting.

Ricky dragged off his gloves. Charlie had the parcels: he was splashing them with water from the hose, washing away the smell of fish and the sea, then walking them to the doorway. Outside, Davey and Benji were in the wheels, a jobbing builder's van and a pick-up with a sign on it for garden clearance. He never moved the stuff in a Mercedes, or in a Beemer, not in anything that would be noticed.

The van and the pick-up drove away. He dropped his gloves into the fire, then heard the hose water on the floor behind him. He knew all the stories, because Benji told him, of the mistakes men had made and the details that had been missed. The latest in Benji's list: the guy who did cocaine, and was bringing in 160 kilos when he was lifted. He ran racehorses and had called one of the nags by the name of the top 'tec who'd done the Krays, which was just pathetic and shouted from the roofs for attention. He'd got fourteen years. Another guy stole a dog, a bull mastiff, off a kid, kept it as his own and let it ride in his car, then killed a punter he was in dispute with, put the body in the car to dump it and there were dog hairs on the body that were matched to the dog he'd nicked, and it was life with at least twenty-one years. His granddad didn't do details and had been third rate. His dad had missed the obvious and was fourth rate. Not the boy, not Ricky Capel.

Charlie's gloves went into the fire.

'You OK, Ricky?'

'Never been better.'

He watched the gloves disintegrate. Later that night, fifteen suppliers would have the twenty-five packets – and would have paid for them. Where they went after that, cut down, divided and sliced up across south-east London, was not his concern. The trade on estates, in back-street pubs and from unlit corners was beneath Ricky Capel's interest.

'I'm feeling good.'

The room was a mess of shadows. When it rang, the telephone was faintly lit by the street-lights below the window, filtering inside. At first, Malachy started to crawl forward to pick it up, but before he had reached it, the bell had gone three times and then the silence startled him. He did not know who played with him. His hand dropped and he slumped. He could have reached out and lifted the receiver, then let it hang from its cable and drop to the carpet; had he done so, the telephone's bell could not have pealed again. Instead, he cringed, left it in its cradle. The bell screamed for him, seemed to shatter the room's quiet.

Half an hour later, Malachy closed the outer door behind him and padded down the walkway. It was near to midnight. Over the railing, he could see the little clusters of figures, where they would have been when Mildred Johnson came back from the bingo. On the last flight of the stairs he had to scrape himself against the graffiti to get past two vagrants hunched down: one had the sleeve of his coat rolled up and a syringe poised above the skin; the other was probing with his fingers for a vein in the back of his leg, contorting himself and cursing at the effort. He could smell them. They seemed not to notice him. He thought the first would use the syringe and then, if the other had found a vein, it would be used again. When he was past them he stumbled down the last flights of the steps, then leaned against the street wall and panted. To go on or turn back? If he turned back he would have to retrace the route past the vagrants with the needle.

It had been the intention of the architect responsible for the Amersham's design that residents should park their cars and vans under the blocks, but for the last fifteen years, no man or woman had dared to leave a vehicle in the garage spaces: smashed windows, stolen radios and tyres, vandalized paintwork had cleared the cavern areas. Interior lights, set in the support pillars, were broken and only the street-lights reached under the low concrete ceilings. The residents who had cars left them out on the street now, under the high lights: they could come out from their barricaded front doors, peer down from the walkways above and check them.

Between distant pillars, a small fire guttered.

Shadows flitted round it and he heard low voices.

Above him was a sign, paint flaking, detailing the numbers of the parking bays. He looked for the number he had been given, then breathed hard and stepped into the interior. He had on the rubber-soled trainers from the charity shop, but however lightly he attempted to walk, his tread seemed to shout his advance. Sometimes his feet crunched on broken glass, and once he stepped and slid in fresh faeces. He could just see some of the numbers on the pillars, enough to guide him towards the far wall. The outline of a car loomed in front of him. He felt the weakness in his gut and at his knees, then the hiss of a window being electrically lowered. He tried to see inside and could make out a head in a balaclava.

The voice was muffled through the wool. 'Is that you?'

'It is me.'

'Wanted to hear your voice, know it was you.'

He knew the voice. 'What's a piece of shit like you doing here?' and 'You look after that lady… Watch out for her.' He said curtly, 'I know your voice and we do not need, for whatever your purpose, this crap in the middle of the night.'

'Fighting talk from a big brave boy. Understand me, I am not here, I was never here. Ever get the idea that I was here and shout about it, and it'll be your word against mine – and your medical history against the busload of people who will stand up and swear on the Bible, good and firm, that I was elsewhere. Forget it. Those are the rules. I am not here and you never met me here. You got hold of the rules?'

'If you say so.'

'I say it. I said that I'd find out about you-'

'You did.'

'Don't interrupt me, doesn't make me happy.' A pencil torch flashed on in the car, and the beam shone down on a file of papers. 'You are Malachy Walter Kitchen?'

'I am.'

'Son of Walter and Araminta Kitchen, born 1973?'

'Yes.'

'On leaving school, a year's teaching in Krakow, Poland?'

'I cannot see that that is relevant to anything.'

'Everything of you, to me, is relevant.' The papers on the lap were turned. 'You joined the army. Your father was a senior officer, now retired. You were recruited into the ranks. Basic Training, then Germany, Logistics Corps. I suppose it was a gesture

– a poor one, and it did not last. Right?'

'I'd have thought you had better things to do with your time than pry into my past.'

'Easy, Malachy, easy, there's a good fellow.' There was a stifled chuckle. 'You were pulled out. There's a letter in the files from your father. A request was made to friends to give you a hand up.'

He ground his teeth. 'I didn't know. If I had I wouldn't have accepted the offer.'

'That's convenient – always good to keep the pride.

So, you went to Sandhurst, to the Royal Military Academy, to be made into an officer. Not much of one, only "fair" ratings for team work. Described as a

"loner" – but they're down on numbers, these days, and they pass through what they've got.'

'My academic work was graded "above average". I was good enough for what I wanted to do.'

'Absolutely right. You were accepted into the Intelligence Corps in '96. Dad couldn't complain about that – it was respectable. You were at the corps' base at Chicksands for three years. Your assessments give no indication of what will happen. It is said of you that you show aptitude for working under pressure on your own. You were one of those solitary people who makes a virtue of not needing company.

Where I am we have a few. They've slipped through the net, and they're arrogant, opinionated, not good work colleagues. Once we've spotted them they're out. Do you recognize yourself?'

'I recognize nothing. It's your game.'

'You married Roz in '98. Wasn't clever but you did.

Daughter of a warrant-officer instructor at Sandhurst.

You set up home in married quarters at Chicksands.

But that's not my business.'

'That is not your bloody business.'

'Not my business except when I can see I'm pouring salt on to a raw wound. Trekking on, you're then posted to Rome to be on the military attache's staff.

That must have been nice, bit of a doddle, I'd have thought. Cocktail parties, NATO exercises and updating the Italian army. Heavy stuff.'

'I did what was asked of me.'

'Back to Chicksands. Working to Major Brian

Arnold. Rarefied long-range guessing on the agenda.

What do we know about the Iraqi order of battle?

How mobile is a Republican Guard armoured division? Who are the personalities in command of Iraqi units? Where have they been trained? What is the quality of Iraqi logistics and support arms? War is getting closer, work hours longer – earlier away from the little woman and later back. Immersed in work, head never above the parapet… Am I getting it right?'

'If you want to believe it, you can believe it.'

'Don't get shirty with me, Malachy. I'm the one with a home and family to go back to. You've neither. The war starts. All those clever papers you've written, they're all proven crap. The Yanks slice through the defences, which was not in your predictions. No, you hadn't got that right. Hardly time to blink and the fighting war's over, and it's peace. You are one of many, suddenly sitting on your hands and looking at the sun shining down on Chicksands. Your trouble, though – and it's the same trouble for all the work-obsessed geeks – is that you don't do hobbies.

Nothing to fill your days, and nights. Not going well with the lovely Roz, eh? Then Major Arnold drops his bombshell. You're off to Iraq.'

He understood. It was as if a rope had tightened round his throat. He said hoarsely, 'There was work, worthwhile work, to be done there.'

'That's better. Now we're singing from the same hymn sheet – excellent. And the excreta's in the fan.

Supposed to be mission accomplished, but it's not.

The time for rose petals chucked under the tracks of tanks is a memory. It's about terrorism and about improvised explosive devices and law-and-order breakdown and the assassination of collaborators, and a dream that's as sour as old milk. First you get to Brigade in Basra. I expect they get the message – another junkie from Intelligence, boasting brain power over brawn and telling the brigadier where he's doing it wrong – short-cut to getting popular, eh?'

'I was coming with a different viewpoint.'

'Soon as they could get rid of you, Brigade did the business and packed you off to a battalion of Jocks, somewhere out in the sand. That must have been a thrill. They're real soldiers, getting their arses shot at, and now on their territory is a guy from outside their ranks. I expect you didn't hesitate – with the full weight of your Intelligence Corps expertise – to point out to the commanding officer where they were going wrong. I read a little note from someone at the HQ: a gathering in the officers' mess and everyone's yapping about what should be done, but the I Corps officer reckons they're talking shit and can't keep his mouth shut, says, "My opinion, anyone who thinks he knows the short-fix answer to southern Iraq's problems is ill informed." I'll bet that went down as well as if you'd pulled the pin and dropped a hand grenade. So, they sent you-'

'All I did was tell them what I thought.'

'Back to the old self-opinionated stubbornness – couldn't let it go then and can't now. They sent you up to a company base, codename Bravo. I'd hazard that there were a fair few at Brigade, Battalion and Company who'd have raised a cheer if they'd known you were going to fall on your face. You went out on patrol-'

'That's enough.'

'Not good listening, eh? Getting sensitive, is it?'

'It wasn't like anyone said.'

'What did they call you, Malachy, after the patrol?'

'I don't have to listen.' He was shouting.

'What was their description of you, Malachy?'

'Go fuck yourself.'

'A bit of spirit, Malachy – that's what I want to hear.

I think we're progressing. You don't want me to say what they called you, all right, how they described you, all right, you haven't forgotten. It's hung round your neck. I said you were a failure – a man can live with that. But a man can't live with what they called you. Am I right, Malachy?'

'Cannot.'

'Anyone stand your corner, speak for you? I don't think so. Think of topping yourself, Malachy, ending it?' 'Thought of it.'

'And you fell – no work, no wife, no family, no friend. Collapse, booze, mind broken… You were lucky you ended here.'

The fire beyond the pillars flared and there was a shriek of laughter that echoed through the car park, across the empty bays.

'What did you lose, Malachy?' The voice had softened. 'What replaced personal pride, self-esteem, respect? Shall I answer? Would it be shame?'

Malachy whispered it: 'Disgust.'

'What's it like? I don't know.'

'It's demons. It's always with you. It's a torture chamber. There's no time in the day or the night that it's not with you.'

'Let me tell you a story, Malachy, and listen well.

I'm a young copper. I'm with a mate and it's the middle of a balls-freezing night and we get this call in Hackney. Intruder on the roof of a warehouse. My mate goes up on the roof, and I'm tracking along on the ground. My mate goes through the roof. I saw him in Stoke Mandeville when he hadn't been there – the spinal injuries unit – more than two days. He was weeping his eyes out, couldn't have been consoled because he was diagnosed as near quadriplegic. I made a big effort, because it had cut me right up, saw him again in a month, and when I went into the ward I could hear his laughter. It was food time and he was learning to eat and it was all over his front and his face, just like everyone else had it. He said to me, quiet, "What you learn in here, there's always someone worse off than yourself." A good sob story, yes?

Last I heard of him he was doing a job, from a wheelchair, in police communications. Being called a cripple

– that's not as bad as what they called you, but it's down that road. He was thought of as useless. Are you useless, Malachy?'

'I don't know,' he said simply.

'Do you want to find out?'

A ripple of panic caught him. He sensed that everything was choreographed. 'What if there's no road back?' he blurted.

'Always is, you have to believe that – otherwise stop fucking about and living like a goddamn recluse.

Walk on to the bridge and bloody well jump. But you have to believe it. Malachy, get something in your mind.'

'Tell me.'

'You saw her. Bruises, broken arm, violated like they'd raped her.'

'I saw her.'

'There's a road back, Malachy.'

Through the open window a slip of paper was passed to him by a hand gloved in black leather. He saw the glint of the eyes through the balaclava's slit as the man reached across. There was no light to read what was written on the paper and he pocketed it.

'What do I have to do?'

'Don't have to do anything, Malachy. The vagrants steal to buy the wraps. With the money they steal, from an old lady's purse, they buy. The dealers sell to them. You do what you want to do, Malachy. You do what you think is right, and maybe that'll make a ladder for you. Goodnight, keep safe.'

The window was raised, and the engine was gunned to life. Without headlights, the car reversed sharply and swung, squealed tyres, between the pillars and out into the lit street. Malachy stood rooted, his mind pounding confusion.