A Most Wanted Man (35 page)

His cell phone was ringing. Niki, speaking for Maximilian: “It’s a written order. It’s just come in.”

“Read it,” Bachmann murmured.

“‘Project delayed. Evacuate area now and return to Hamburg station.’”

“Who signed it, Niki?”

“Joint Steering. Your symbol at the top, Joint Steering’s at the bottom.”

“No name?”

“No name,” Niki confirmed.

A consensus decision then, the only kind Joint took. No matter who was pulling the strings.

“And
project, right? Project
delayed? Not
operation
delayed?”

“Project is correct. No reference to operation.”

“And nothing about Felix?”

“Nothing.”

“Or Signpost?”

“Nothing about Signpost. I’ve given you the whole message.”

He tried to call Axelrod on his cell phone and got voice mail. He tried the direct line to the Joint Committee and got engaged. He tried the switchboard and got no reply. On the screen at his knees, Brue is returning from upstairs. Now all three of them are standing in the hall, waiting for Signpost to come out of the cloakroom.

Project delayed,
they had said.

For how long? Five minutes, or forever?

Axelrod’s been outmaneuvered. He’s been outmaneuvered but they let him draft the order and he deliberately obscured the wording so that I could misunderstand.

Not Signpost, not Felix, not
operation,
just
project.
Axelrod is telling me to use my own initiative.
If you can go, go, but don’t say I told you, just say you didn’t understand the message. No repeat yes.

Issa and Annabel and Brue were still waiting for Signpost to come out of the cloakroom, and so was Bachmann.

What the hell’s he
doing
in there all this time? Preparing himself for martyrdom? Bachmann remembered the look on his face as he advanced on Issa for that first embrace:
Am I embracing a brother or my own death?
He’d seen the same expression on the faces of the crazies in Beirut before they went out to get themselves killed.

He’s out. Signpost has at last emerged from the cloakroom. He is wearing a fawn Burberry raincoat but no white skullcap. Has he left it in the cloakroom, or put it in his briefcase? Or is he telling us something? Is he saying what he has been thinking all along: Take me. I have knowingly walked into your baited trap, because how else could I reconcile myself with God, so take me?

Signpost has placed himself in front of Issa and is staring up at him, adoring him. Issa peers down at him in puzzlement. Signpost reaches out his arms and warmly embraces Issa, patting his shoulders:
my son
. Signpost strokes Issa’s face, cradles his hands, holds them tenderly against his breast while the two Westerners watch across the cultural divide. Issa is belatedly thanking and honoring his guide and mentor. Annabel Richter is interpreting. It’s becoming a long good-bye.

“No word, Niki?”

“It’s dead. Our screens, everything.”

I’m on my own, where I always am. The man on the ground knows best. Fuck them.

But Bachmann’s screen is still miraculously functioning, even if it has no sound. The hall is empty. All four have vanished. Mohr’s technicians strike again. No video coverage of the entrance lobby.

The bank’s front door opening. Cameras and screen irrelevant. Naked eye takes over at last. Overbright intruder lights illuminate the steps and surrounding pillars. First out is Signpost. Unsteady walk. He’s frightened shitless.

Issa has noticed his frailty too, and is walking at his side, one hand under the master’s arm. Issa grinning.

Annabel behind him grinning too. Free air at last. Stars. A moon even. Annabel and Brue bringing up the rear. Everybody, Brue included, grinning now. Only Abdullah looking unhappy, which is fine by me. First I’ll tell him that his worst fears have come true, then I’ll be his best and only friend in need.

They’re heading towards me. Issa and Annabel are chatting away to him and he’s smiling somehow, but he’s wobbly as a leaf.

Bachmann slowly lifts his capped head to the little group approaching his cab, a studied performance. I’m a sleepy Hamburg taxi driver, one more job and that’s it for the night.

Brue leading now. Brue the English gentleman thrusting his way ahead of the group in order to usher his departing guests.

Bachmann in his cap and shabby jacket—who only fifteen seconds earlier switched off his satellite navigation system—lowers his window and gives Brue the kind of none-too-deferential greeting that any late-night taxi driver might give.

“Taxi for Brue Frères?” Brue inquires merrily, leaning into Bachmann’s open window, one hand to the rear door handle.
“Fantastic!”
And, turning back to Signpost in the same hearty manner—“So where are we off to tonight, Doctor, if I may ask? If it’s all the way home, that’s perfectly all right by the bank. I just wish all our business could be conducted in such a friendly manner, sir.”

But Abdullah had no time to answer, or if he had, Bachmann never heard him. A high-sided white minibus had careered into the forecourt, smashing into Bachmann’s cab, skewing it sideways, starring the side window and crumpling the driver’s door. Showered with broken glass and sprawled across the passenger seat, Bachmann had a slow-motion vision of Brue leaping for safety, the jacket of his suit billowing as if floating on water. Hauling himself half upright, he saw one black-windowed Mercedes pulling up tight behind the minibus, and a second reversing at high speed and taking up a position directly in front of it. Dazed as he was by the impact and the headlights, he saw as if by broad daylight the hatchet face and ash-blonde hair of the woman seated beside a masked driver in the windscreen of the first Mercedes as it shrieked to a halt hard behind the white minibus.

First Annabel dreamed it, then she knew it was for real. She took a step and discovered she was alone. Abdullah too had stopped dead and was standing with his little feet together and turned inward, while he stared past her down the street. If he hadn’t been a great Muslim scholar she’d have obeyed her instincts and grabbed him by the forearm, because he had started swaying, and she feared he was having a seizure of some kind and was about to keel over.

But he didn’t.

To her relief he righted himself, only to go on staring down the street with a look of anguished recognition and horror on his face, the look of a man whose worst fears have come to visit him. She noticed also that his skinny head had sunk into his shoulders in a self-protective cringe, as if he imagined that someone was already hammering blows on him from behind, although there was nobody behind him to do it.

By now she was looking across Abdullah to Issa, wanting to catch his eye and refer her anxiety to him, but instead she found herself looking past him in the direction that both Issa and Abdullah were staring already, and she saw at last what they saw, although the sight didn’t immediately strike terror into her in the way it had struck terror into Abdullah.

In the course of her work at the Sanctuary, it was true, she had heard reports of men who had to be physically restrained and a few who had to be beaten to make them submit to expulsion. And the memory of Magomed waving from the window of his departing plane would stay with her till she died.

But that was about the limit of her experience of such matters, which was why her mind wasn’t quick enough to grasp the unimaginable yet entirely concrete fact: not only that the forecourt had become the scene of a complicated traffic accident involving a parked cream-colored taxi and two stray Mercedes with blackened windows, but that the white minibus that had clearly caused the accident was standing sideways to her with its doors wide open, and four—no, five—men in balaclavas and black tracksuits and sneakers were climbing out of it at their leisure.

And because she was so slow on the uptake, it was sheer child’s play for them. They had snatched Abdullah from beside her as neatly as if they were snatching her handbag; whereas Issa, being more advanced in his awareness of brute force, clung onto his mentor for dear life, binding his spindly arms round him and sagging to his knees with him, to give him extra protection.

But that was only until the four or five masked men formed a cluster round the pair of them—a kind of testudo as the Romans had called it in her Latin lessons—and dragged and carried them to the minibus, threw them inside and jumped after them, then slammed the doors on themselves for privacy.

She saw Brue come running up beside her and heard him shouting after the masked men in English at the top of his voice, and she wondered why English. Then she remembered that the masked men had spoken staccato curse words to each other in American English, which would explain why Brue chose English to shout back at them, though he might as well have saved his breath for all the notice they took of him.

And it was probably Brue’s presence beside her that enabled her to recover her wits, and set her free to run full pelt at the minibus as it pulled away, with every intention of placing herself in front of it, if only she could get between its dented bonnet and a Mercedes that had backed itself up against it.

Clawing himself out of the passenger door with his right arm, Bachmann half ran, half limped along the side of the minibus, beating its white wall with his good fist. Flopping onto the bonnet of the leading Mercedes, he punted himself feet-first across it to the indifference of two men in balaclava helmets seated in the front. The minibus was pulling away, its side doors were sliding shut, but not before Bachmann had a glimpse of standing men in black balaclavas and jumpsuits and two prone bodies spread-eagled facedown on the floor at their feet, the one in a long black overcoat and the other in a fawn Burberry. He heard screams and realized they were Annabel’s, and saw that she had grabbed a side door handle and was allowing herself to be pulled along while she yelled, “Open the door, open the door, open the door,” in English, on and on.

The chase Mercedes with the masked driver and the hatchet-faced ash-blonde in the passenger seat had pulled alongside and was trying to edge her out of the way and the minibus was accelerating but Annabel was still hanging on, shouting, “Bastards, bastards,” also in English. Then he heard her screaming again,
I’ll get you back!
—but in Russian, and realized that this time she was addressing Issa, not his abductors. “I’ll get you back if it’s the last”—and presumably she was going to say if it was the last thing she did in her whole life, but by then she was quite literally beating the air, for Brue had grabbed hold of her, and broken her grasp on the door handle. But even when he stood her on her feet, her arms were stretched out to the minibus in an effort to bring it back.

Bachmann made his way down the forecourt’s slipway to the main road, where his two watchers sat motionless in their Audi, still waiting for his call. Continuing along the pavement, he kept walking as best he could until he reached the cul-de-sac where he had spotted Arni Mohr’s control car. It had gone, but Arni Mohr was standing on the pavement under a street lamp, chatting with Newton from Beirut days. Next to them, waiting to be let in, stood little Ian Lantern, smiling as usual, so Bachmann assumed that Newton had been the unidentified passenger in Lantern’s car.

At Bachmann’s approach, Arni Mohr assumed an expression of studious detachment and needed to make a phone call that required him to walk away down the road, but Newton with his spade of new black beard stepped affably forward to greet his old mate.

“Well,
Günther Bachmann,
for Christ’s sakes! How come
you
got your nose under the wire? We thought you were Mike Axelrod’s little boy. Did Brother Burgdorf give you a ringside seat after all?”

But as Newton drew nearer to Bachmann, and saw his smashed arm and disheveled state, and the wild look of accusation in his eyes, he realized he had mistaken his man, and came sharply to a halt.

“Listen. Sorry about your cab, okay? Those hillbillies from the Farm drive like shit. Now go have that arm fixed. Ian drives you to a hospital. Now. Yes, Ian? He says yes. Go now.”

“Where have you taken him?” Bachmann asked.

“Abdullah? Who gives a shit? Some hole in the desert, for all I know.
Justice has been rendered, man. We can all go home.
”

He had spoken these last words in English, but Bachmann in his dazed state failed to get his mind round them.

“
Rendered
?” he repeated stupidly. “What’s rendered? What justice are you talking about?”

“
American
justice, asshole. Whose do you think? Justice from the fucking hip, man. No-crap justice,
that
kind of justice! Justice with no fucking lawyers around to pervert the course. Have you never heard of
extraordinary rendition
No? Time you Krauts had a word for it! Have you given up speaking or what?”

But still nothing came out of Bachmann, so Newton went on:

“Eye for a fucking eye, Günther. Justice as retribution, okay? Abdullah was killing
Americans.
We call that original sin. You want to play softball spy games? Go find yourself some Euro-pygmies.”

“I was asking you about Issa,” Bachmann said.

“Issa was
air,
man,” Newton retorted, now seriously angry. “Whose fucking money was it anyway? Issa Karpov bankrolls terror, period. Issa Karpov sends money to very bad guys. He just did. Fuck
you,
Günther. Okay?” But he seemed to feel he hadn’t quite made his point: “How about those Chechen militants he hung out with? Eh? You’re telling me they’re a bunch of pussycats?”

“He’s innocent.”

“Bullshit. Issa Karpov was one hundred percent complicit, and a couple of weeks from now, if he lasts that long, he’ll admit it. Now get out of my face before I throw you out.”

Hovering in the shadow of the tall American, Lantern seemed to agree.

A crisp night wind was whisking off the lake, bringing a smell of oil from the harbor. Annabel stood at the center of the forecourt, peering down the empty street after the departed minibus. Brue stood next to her. Her scarf had fallen round her neck. Absently, she lifted it over her head and retied it under her throat. Hearing a footstep, Brue turned and saw the driver of the smashed taxi hobbling towards them. Then Annabel turned also, and recognized the driver as Günther Bachmann, the man who made the weather, standing ten meters from her, not daring to come nearer. She scrutinized him, then shook her head and began to shudder. Brue put his arm round her shoulders where he had always wanted to put it, but he doubted whether she knew it was there.