A Most Wanted Man (34 page)

I’m offering you the way out, for God’s sake! he screamed at the pack of them in his mind. Do this my way, nobody will even know! Or maybe I should turn this whole thing in, and helicopter up to Berlin and explain to you fellows just what
five percent bad
means out there in the real world that you’re so diligently protected from: slaughterhouse blood washing over your toe caps, and the hundred percent dead scattered in five percent bits over a square kilometer of the town square?

But his worst fear was the one that he scarcely dared express, even to himself: it was of Martha and her kind. Martha who observes and doesn’t take part, as if that were ever a role she would settle for. Martha who is Burgdorf’s neoconservative soul mate. Martha who laughs aloud at the Felix operation as if it were some fancy European party game mounted by a bunch of liberal German dilettantes. He imagined her now in Berlin. Was the cutthroat Newton at her side? No, he’d stayed behind in Hamburg with the ash-blonde. He imagined Martha in the Joint ops room, telling Burgdorf what was good for him if he wanted the top job. Telling him how Langley never forgets its friends.

“No green light, sir,” Maximilian confirmed. “Stand by till advised.”

She was his lawyer and she knew nothing but her brief.

And her brief, imposed on her by Issa’s desperate situation and rammed home by Erna Frey, was to bring her client to the table, let him sign over his money and get him his passport to freedom.

She was not a judge like her mother, or a diplomatic bigot like her father. She was a lawyer and Issa was her mandate and whether this gentle Muslim sage was right, wrong, innocent or guilty, was no part of that brief. Günther had said he did not intend to harm a hair of his head and she believed him. Or so she was telling herself as the four of them descended the fine marble staircase of Brue’s bank, with Brue leading and Abdullah following—why so shaky suddenly?—and Issa and Annabel bringing up the rear.

Issa was leaning backwards, trailing his right arm for her to take hold of, but only the cloth, only ever the cloth. She could feel the heat of him through it, and she fancied she could feel his pulse beating, but it was probably her own.

“What’s Abdullah
done
?” she had asked Erna Frey yet again at lunchtime, hoping that the imminence of action might loosen her tongue.

“He’s one small part of a big untidy boat, dear,” Erna the impassioned sailor had replied enigmatically. “A bit like a cotter pin. And if you don’t know your way round the boat, about as difficult to find. And about as easy to lose again.”

Peering past Issa, she could see Dr. Abdullah’s white skullcap bobbing precariously six stairs below her: one small part of an untidy boat.

The door to the cashier’s office stood open. Brue, father to Georgina, was standing over the computer. Could he work it? If he needs my help, he’ll get it.

In the van, Bachmann and his crew of two were gripped by the same silence that had descended over the group of four gathered in the cashier’s office. One camera set in the end wall of the cashier’s office provided the fish-eye master shot, a second the close-up of Brue seated at the keyboard, laboriously typing with two fingers the sort codes and account numbers supplied from a printout by Dr. Abdullah and scanned by a third camera that was concealed in the overhead light fitting. On a separate screen relayed from Joint in Berlin, the same list was being reproduced to the faltering rhythm of Brue’s typing. Charities not included in the group that Dr. Abdullah had already submitted for Issa’s approval were highlighted in red.

“For God’s sake, Michael,” Bachmann pleaded over the direct line to Axelrod. “If not now, when?”

“Don’t get in your taxi, Günther.”

“We’ve nailed him, for fuck’s sake! What are they waiting for?”

“Stay where you are. Don’t go any nearer to the bank till I personally give you the word. That’s an order.”

No nearer to the bank than who? Arni Mohr? Lantern and his unidentified passenger? But Axelrod had once again rung off. Bachmann stared at the screens, caught Niki’s eye and looked away. An order, he had said. An order who from? Axelrod? Burgdorf? Burgdorf with Martha whispering into his ear? Or a consensus order from a committee that was at war with itself and lived in a capsule where the smell of warm blood never entered?

His gaze returned sharply to Niki. A black, incongruously old-fashioned telephone that sat on a ledge above the screens was ringing out its homely tone. Niki’s features didn’t flicker. She didn’t raise her eyebrows to him in question, or exhort him or join him in his hesitation. She let the phone go on ringing out, and waited for a sign from him. Bachmann nodded to her: take it. She tipped her head, waiting for the spoken word.

“Take the call,” he said aloud.

She lifted the receiver and spoke in a brisk, half-singing voice that was relayed over the van’s speaker system. “Hansa Taxis! Thank you for calling. Pickup where, please.”

Sounding more relaxed than they had heard him all evening, Brue spelled out the bank’s address at dictation speed.

“Phone number?”

Brue gave it.

“One second, please!” Niki sang and, making a pause to indicate that she was consulting her computer, put her hand over the mouthpiece of the black phone while she again waited for Bachmann’s instruction. For a moment longer, he deliberated. Then, standing up, he picked the seaman’s cap from the hook on the door and clapped it on his head. Then the workman’s jacket, sleeve by sleeve. Then a last tug to make it sit tight on his shoulders.

“Tell him I’m on my way,” he said.

Niki took her hand from the mouthpiece.

“Ten minutes,” she said, and rang off.

From the door, Bachmann took a last look at the screens.

“It’s just
go,
” he said, to Maximilian and Niki both. “If the green light comes through, that’s all you have to say to me.
Go.
”

“What if it doesn’t?” Niki asked for both of them.

“Doesn’t what?”

“Doesn’t come through. If the green light doesn’t.”

“Then you don’t say anything, do you?”

Brue hated the very sight of the cashier’s office with its wall-to-wall high-tech toys, and not only for reasons of his own incompetence. One of the saddest moments of his life had been standing before the bonfire in his garden in Vienna with his first wife, Sue, one side of him and and Georgie the other, watching the fabled Brue Frères card index go up in smoke. Another battle lost. Another past destroyed. From now on, we’ll be like all the rest.

Dr. Abdullah smells of baby powder, he noticed as he laboriously touched in one set of figures. Back there in his house, Brue hadn’t noticed it. Perhaps the old boy had put on a double dose for the occasion. He wondered if Annabel had noticed it; when this was over, he’d ask her.

Abdullah’s white shirt and skullcap were burning bright under the strip lighting, and he was leaning into Brue, nudging up against him with his shoulder while he obligingly pointed with his index finger, now a sort code, now the amount of cash to be electronically transferred.

To be honest, Abdullah was getting a bit too much into Brue’s airspace for his liking, what with the body contact, and the baby powder and the heat inside the room. But Arab men, Brue had read, made nothing of it: perfectly happy to walk down the street or sit in cafés holding hands with each other, and they can be the butchest chaps on the block. All the same, he wished Abdullah would ease off a bit, he was putting him off his stroke.

Ismail. Why was he thinking of Ismail suddenly? Maybe because he’d always wished he’d been able to provide Georgie with a brother. That was some boy. If I’d looked like that at his age, I’d have cut quite a swath. Or perhaps I
did
look like that, but failed to cut a swath. Way it goes. Fatima, off to—where was it?—Balliol?—London School of Economics, that’s it. Georgie never ascended to those heights. Bright as paint, see through you in a flash, nothing gets past old Georgie, but not the kind of mind you can educate.
Born
educated in a lot of ways. But not a learner in the formal sense, not Georgie.

Another waft of baby powder. Abdullah was pressing in on him. Next thing I know, he’ll be sitting on my bloody lap. And all those small ones—three? Four? Plus one in the garden? Must be an extraordinary thing, to breed like that. To breed without thinking, practically. Just hammering away, doing God’s will.

Abdullah’s index finger had slipped down a couple of lines. Some shipping company in Cyprus. What the hell has
that
got to do with anything? One minute a world-renowned Muslim charity with headquarters in Riyadh, and the next some Mickey Mouse shipping company in Nicosia. Partly to escape Abdullah’s proximity, and partly for reassurance, Brue swung round to Annabel.

“This one okay for you two?” he asked in German. “Doesn’t seem to have a tick against it. All I’ve got is the amount. Fifty thousand U.S. The Seven Friends Navigation Company, Nicosia.”

“Ah. Now this one would be very essential for the afflicted of Yemen,” Abdullah explained to Brue before Annabel could put the question to Issa. “If your client is concerned to distribute medical relief throughout the Umma, this is a most efficient means of achieving his objective.”

His hands resting either side of the keyboard, Brue listened to Annabel’s translation into Russian: “Dr. Abdullah says the people of Yemen are greatly afflicted by poverty. This trusted shipping company has long experience of getting assistance to them. Do you want to do this one, or not?”

Issa deliberated, now yes, now no, now a shrug. Then enlightenment came to him. “In my Turkish jail there was a Yemeni who was so sick he died! Now this will not happen again. Do it, do it, Mr. Tommy!”

Obediently, Brue typed in the shipping company’s particulars, and in his imagination followed them into the ether: first to the clearing bank through which Frères was obliged to make its transfers—in precomputer days, the name Brue alone would have been enough—then to Ankara, then to some flea-bitten Turkish-Cypriot bank in Nicosia that probably looked like an outside toilet with a lot of mangy dogs sunning themselves on the doorstep. Annabel was tapping his shoulder. Other than a handshake, she had never touched him before.

“That’s an ampersand. You’ve put a slash.”

“Have I? Where? Good lord, so I have. Too stupid of me. Thanks.”

He put an ampersand. He had done his job. Fourteen bloody banks and one pissy shipping firm. All he needed to do now was press the
GO
tit.

“Have we done the deed then, Frau Richter?” he asked jovially, his hand hovering over the keyboard, his middle finger protruding.

“Issa?” she inquired.

Issa gave a distracted nod and returned to his musings.

“Dr. Abdullah, no worries?”

“Thank you, sir, I am naturally most content.”

All hundred percent of you? Brue wondered.

Still peering down at the
GO
key, he deliberated what gesture he should make, and what mood his face should be expressing as he touched it.

Was he a happy banker because he was about to unload twelve and a half million dollars’ worth of his bank’s assets? Scarcely.

Was he happy to be performing a service for the son and heir of a long-standing client of the bank?

Or happiest to be rescuing Annabel from a god-awful jam and Issa from endless incarceration and worse?

Actually the last, but for safety’s sake he put on his boardroom face and in his anticipated relief hit
GO
harder than he meant to.

Bang goes the last Lipizzaner. Good-bye, Edward Amadeus, OBE. And good-bye Ian Lantern and God help you and all who sail in you.

He had only one more duty to perform.

“Dr. Abdullah, sir. Allow me to call you a taxi at the bank’s expense.”

And without waiting for the good doctor’s answer, dialed the number that Lantern had given him for this moment.

Driving through the invisible cones of Mohr’s exclusion zone, past mysteriously immune cars at street corners, and burly pedestrians with nothing to do but look innocent and engineers with night lamps toiling unpersuasively at junction boxes, Bachmann parked his taxi in the raised forecourt of Brue Frères Bank, pulled up the collars of his workman’s jacket and, like any waiting cabbie, settled down to listen to his radio and stare vacuously through the windscreen—and less vacuously at the satellite navigation panel discreetly flickering low down on his dashboard. He had image, but at the last minute Mohr’s technicians had screwed up, and failed to provide him with sound.

No sooner had he parked his taxi than his two watchers parked their Audi in the street half a level below. They were there for the unwelcome eventuality that Signpost did not take kindly to being hijacked to an unfamiliar destination. Their remit, drummed into them by Bachmann, was to remain inside their car until he called on them. No muddling with Mohr’s men on pain of excommunication.

Bachmann made a covert survey of the houses up and down the row and was horrified to discern two shadowy figures on a rooftop and two more at the opening to a cul-de-sac running up from the Binnen Alster shore. The silent pictures on his navigation panel showed Annabel and Felix dawdling in the hall while Brue first escorted Signpost to the downstairs cloakroom, then went upstairs, presumably for the same purpose, or maybe he needed a quick drink.

On-screen Annabel and Felix are facing each other two yards apart and laughing a little fixedly. It’s the first time Bachmann has seen Annabel in a headscarf. It’s the first time he has seen her laugh. Felix spread his arms, raises them above his head and performs a little jig. Bachmann assumes it is a bit of Chechen dance. Annabel in long skirt cautiously partners him. Dance ends before it has begun.

Bachmann closed his eyes and opened them, and yes, he was still here, still waiting for the positively last green light, still in direct default of Axelrod’s orders, but Günther Bachmann was a famous chancer and nothing was ever going to change that. The man on the ground knows best: Bachmann’s Law. But why oh why the delay, and more delay, why, why? Unless Berlin had fucked up—which admittedly was always entirely possible—Abdullah was compromised to hell and back and the operation was a triumph. So why wasn’t the orchestra playing full blast, and why wasn’t he getting the green light with only minutes to go?