(2005) Rat Run (23 page)

In that basement cell, where the cafe's owner had been beaten, where nothing of value had been recorded on the interrogation tape, only Polly Wilkins had registered the spots of white paint on the man's hands. Had it not been for the black-and-white images of his crumpled body and bruised knuckles, she might not have seen them. In the cell, when she'd held the hands, the spots had been more indistinct, but they were there.

Chaos in the cafe bar. Every table turned over, most of the chairs broken, a carpet of smashed cups, plates and glasses, and the chrome coffee machines split open. She thought it pure vandalism - and unnecessary, stupid. If a forensics team had followed inside the men who had broken down the door they would have found nothing, everything contaminated.

She looked around her. Pictures of mountains hung askew on the walls or had been ripped off their hooks and lay smashed on the floor. Posters for last year's rock concerts in Albania were shredded. Photographs of a football team survived behind the bar counter; she noted them. It was all about detail, not about the most that could be broken, ripped, smashed,

shredded. Her flat shoes crunched glass and china as she went through the cafe bar to the back. Every door of the ovens left open, every pot and every pan dropped, every cupboard searched through and the contents scattered. When she cabled Gaunt, when she had something to signal him, there would be one tetchy paragraph about the need for a new item on the courses for the BIS: search procedures and good housekeeping. The walls in the kitchen were lime green, but dumped out from under the sink was a small tin of paint: white. She moved on. She had seen from the street, before she had used her little-girl-lost eye-flutter on the policeman, that there was a side door beside the cafe entrance with two bells. Above the cafe were three floors. Simple to deduce. The floor immediately above was part of the cafe's premises; the two top floors were separate.

She climbed the stairs, difficult because the carpet had been pulled from its nails. There was a living room, a bathroom and a bedroom. More devastation.

From the landing she glanced briefly into the living room, but the walls were pink. Yellow-painted walls in the bedroom, of no interest to her. The bathroom had white walls. A picture of the sequence played in her mind. A dishcloth hung out above an alley behind Kostecna. A man comes, perhaps the cafe owner himself, and notes it. Inside the cafe, time racing, a frantic effort to hide evidence. A stash point is made, filled, hidden. She roved over the toilet, the stained old basin, the shower cubicle with the collapsed screen, then saw the fractured mirror, and the smear of new paint at its side.

She put her fingers behind the weakened fastenings of the mirror and heaved. It came away and plaster spattered from the screw holes.

The paint behind the mirror should have been grey-white, but it was pristine. Not so good, not so smart.

Everybody told her, when they bent her ear, that the Albanian crime gangs were the most sophisticated in Europe . . . but not with a paintbrush. She ran her fingers over the white patch, felt its slight tackiness, and could smell it. She could not see a join - that, at least, was clever. She made a fist with her hand and hit the patch hard with the heel. Her hand came back and she yelped with pain.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, she found a hammer.

Back in the bathroom, Polly swung her arm back and belted the whitened patch where the mirror had been. Hit it again, and again.

Paint cracked, a wood screen splintered, a brick was loosened.

With the hammer's claw she prised it out. She grinned: she was Carnarvon in the pharaoh's tomb.

She slipped on plastic gloves from her shoulder bag, and made ready a clutch of plastic bags. She reached inside. First, she extracted the money, euros and dollars, maybe five thousand in all-denomination notes and put them into the first bag. Then she lifted out four passports, one from Argentina and one from Lebanon, one from Syria and one from Canada; she flipped the pages of the visa and immigration stamps.

Syria and Argentina were a pair; Lebanon and Canada matched them. She could follow the trail of two men.

Saudi, Jordanian, Syrian and Turkish stamps in two passports; Bulgarian, Romanian and Hungarian in the Argentine and Canadian documents. No Czech visas.

She would have bet on it that one passport was charred and unrecognizable in the debris of the top-floor apartment, and that another was in the inner pocket of the man who had slipped through the cordon's net. She flipped back the pages. In those from Syria and Argentina she found the photograph -

easy to match from the files sent by Gaunt - of Muhammad Iyad, dead because of a present to his wife. She stared at the photograph in the passports of Argentina and Canada, and whooped in excitement.

They went into another bag. Last out was a cheap stationer's notepad, bound with a wire coil. The writing, she knew it but could not read it, was in Albanian
Tosk,
page after page of scribbled accounts, notes and phone numbers, but before the blank pages, shreds of paper were lodged in the coil as if the last sheet used had been torn out. The notepad went into a third plastic bag. She put all the bags at the bottom of her shoulder bag, then covered them with the makeup sack she never used, her spectacle case, her mobile, her headscarf and, finally, her purse. She replaced the mirror, used her thumbnail - swore when she broke it - to tighten the screws and cover the hole she'd hammered, then kicked the debris on the floor to the far side of the bathroom.

She thought of Gaunt. Poor old Gaunt, who had had his share of slings and arrows, who had had to tramp up to the top floor and tell the weasel, the ADD, that a storm assault had failed to net the prize. She would have him singing. She went down the stairs, steadying herself on the rail so she did not slip on the uprooted carpet, left the hammer in tire kitchen. She emerged into the light, but the policeman looked away from her evasively.

Ludvik leaped out of a car parked on the far side of the street. He hurried to her. 'What was your business there?'

'Like I told you, just "to get a sense of where we're at". That's all.'

'Did you find anything?'

'Of course not. Your people had searched with impressive rigour.' Innocence, no sarcasm.

Did she want a lift? No. She thanked him. Trust nobody, Gaunt had told her when she'd gone to work for him. 'Not your best girlfriend, Polly, not the man you sleep with, not your mother. Only trust yourself.'

The savaging of the WMD team, Gaunt's fall and her shuffled out of sight - others drifting to shamed retirement - had shown her the truth of it. She went back on the Metro to her office in the embassy, clinging to the strap of her bag.

Gaunt had said on the phone, 'I'm not fucking about, Dennis, don't have time to. I'm the opposition and I'm trying to hurt us - who's the man that's most important to me? Who, above all others, do I protect? I think I know but I want confirmation.'

There were three police at the first checkpoint. A handsome woman, her figure set off by her uniform, fair hair protruding from under the back of her hat, looked at his offered ID, then checked for his name on her list and ticked it flamboyantly. The other two police were dour, with Heckler & Koch rifles slung from straps across their flak-jackets. Gaunt did not queue with the riff-raff, but drove to the head of the next line, was again scrutinized, was again passed through. There were more guns on the approach road, more on the perimeter fencing, and on top of the building ahead he saw the dark uniforms and jutted shapes of marksmen's rifles. Dennis had said he would be at the magistrates' court that morning. If Gaunt wanted advice, counselling - maybe a shoulder to snivel on - this was where he had to come. Behind the court building were the high walls of HMP

Belmarsh.

Gaunt had never been here before, far out to the east of London. The drive had taken him an hour and he was late and irritable, but he needed the answer.

The prison and the magistrates' court were set on the flat, reclaimed land of Plumstead Marshes. It would take more than sunshine, he thought, to brighten the place.

More checks, and inside the building's hallway he had to pass through a metal detector, empty his pockets on to a tray and put his briefcase through the scanner.

He and Dennis had been at Officer Training School together, then done time as junior cavalry officers - a unit of Lancers - before they reached the rank of major. Both had been washed up, having failed to make the promotion grades, and both had gone the civilian route; the difference was that Gaunt had taken a position in the Secret Intelligence Service, while Dennis had entered the Security Service. In Gaunt's mob, Dennis's crowd was regarded as junior, second best - not that he would show it that morning, whatever the provocation.

Having produced his ID for the fourth time, he was issued with a clip-on card, then led by a clerk to the canteen.

Dennis was there. 'Good to see you, Freddie. Been so long. Tell you the truth, I was quite surprised to get your call. You know, we hear things. I'd assumed, what with the spring-clean in your lot - the WMD

people - that you'd have had the chop. So, you managed to avoid the cull. Well done.'

'Just need a spot of your wisdom . . . Never believe what you hear, Dennis. I'm alive and still beavering.'

'The little woman, is she well?'

'I think so. Last I heard she was ...' He could have made a reference to Dennis's obvious weight increase, could have suggested he might consider going to a consultant about the lump on the left side of the nose, could have asked about the recent leapfrog advancement of younger officers over the man opposite him.

He did not. 'It's good of you to make space for me.'

'You're looking a bit peaky Freddie.'

'Pressure of work.' His smile was affable. 'You're busy, I'm busy. I have a question for you. Who is a jewel? Who, in an AQ operation, is the man who must be protected? You'll understand, of course, if I'm sparse with detail. Who gets a bodyguard? Who is worth dying for to buy time for escape?'

'In our neck of the woods?'

'Not yet - sorry, can't expand on that - in Europe, and he's on the move.'

'Come on.'

Dennis stood, left a tip on the table that was barely decent and led him to a guarded door at the far end of a corridor. They were passed through, and Gaunt was eyed with suspicion. More guns, more flak-jackets.

Down a staircase flanked with white-tiled walls, then into the cell block. A food trolley was wheeled noisily in front of the doors and plates of meat, congealed sauce and rice were pushed on to the shelf space set in each door. In turn, Gaunt saw hands come to

the shelves and take away the plates. Then the flaps fell.

'They're having early lunch. Some damned delay in the paperwork, so they won't be up till afternoon. I worked on it, and that's why you had to flog yourself down here. There are eight of them on remand. Take a look for yourself.'

Gaunt did. There was a spy-hole in each cell door.

The interiors were brightly lit. Some ate, picky and choosy; some had put the plate down beside them on the thin plastic-coated mattress and stared blankly at the food but did not touch it; one wept silently; one sobbed noisily and his shoulders shook. Gaunt estimated their ages at between eighteen and mid-twenties. They were all Asian. He assumed they were of Pakistani ethnic origin. Above his jeans, one wore an Arsenal football top, and another's T-shirt advertised Suzuki motorcycles. Trainers were common to them all. He remembered, now, on the far side of the canteen from where Dennis had sat, the families in the dress of Rawalpindi, Peshawar or Karachi, and the lawyers huddled with them. At the seventh cell door, when the guard stepped aside to allow him to get to the spy-hole, he saw a youth who was different - not by his clothes but by his face. All the others had seemed broken and bowed down, whether they cried or whether they stifled their misery. This was a boy, not yet a man, whose attention lay in the computing magazine he read, who had an alertness the others lacked. He checked the eighth door.

Halfway down the block, Dennis leaned comfortably against a tiled wall. 'Seen enough?'

'I suppose so.'

'They're the haul from Operation Angurvadel - not my idea of a moniker by the way, down to a bright spark on the AQ desk who did Scandinavian studies at Lancaster. It's a sword in Norse mythology that burns bright in war and goes dull in peace. Anti-terrorist and the Branch had a terrible problem with it, and most of us. Anyway, al-Qaeda and the warrior's, Frithiof's, sword came together. We hauled them in.

They're foot-soldiers, from east London, west London, Luton and Bedford. Look at them. Do they seem threatening to you? Of course they don't. Some would label them the Enemy Within. I tell you, Freddie, they were all out of their depth. We had taps on them through their mobiles, we had their homes bugged, we had them under surveillance for weeks before the arrests. Actually, they were quite harmless.

There was "chatter" among them that was enough to get us interested. They did not have detonators, or commercial or military explosive, but the "chatter"

was sufficient to spell out their intention. We have lines into most of the mosques where the hot air's shouted. Put simply, they never had a chance - and they'll probably get ten years each, for being naive, gullible and subject to the indoctrination of a recruiter.

Still with me?'

'So, they're not jewels?'

'None of them has been near an AQ training camp in Afghanistan or Yemen. Nearest they've been to the sharp end is watching videos of atrocities and fire fights in Chechnya, Saudi and Iraq. That doesn't mean they wouldn't have been prepared to detonate a bomb in the centre of London or at Cribbs Causeway or at Glasgow airport, and go up with it. No lack of courage, just a lack of expertise . . . which is what's holding them back and why we are still, most of the time, winning.'

'What are they short of?'

'Please, Freddie, patience. What they have in common: they were all born in the UK, they all come from respectable families, none of them has a police record. We pick them up because when they get faith in a large dose they've headed for a mosque and an imam who is talking
jihad.
They read a manual that details the methodology of "blessed strikes". But that's not sufficient. What if there are foot-soldiers who don't go to a radical mosque and we don't pick up because they're not close to a firebrand imam?