RAT RUN GERALD SEYMOUR

by Gerald Seymour

  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 shout
ed. '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.

  Chapter Nineteen

  He no longer pulled against her grip. He could have struck out, could have broken free. Malachy did not struggle and he could feel her fingers clenched in the sleeve of his coat. If he had thought it necessary, but he did not, he could have swiped at her face with his other hand.

  He allowed her to hold him and controlled his breathing. He thought she would believe that he had given up on the struggle, unequal, against her. It was three, four minutes since they had heard three shots fired. She would not have known it but all of his studied concentration was on the memory of where the gunfire had come from. One shot would have been hard for him to make the equations of the direction but three were sufficient.
In his mind, as he relaxed his arm and let it sag for her, a line was drawn to his right. He estimated that the shots had been fired at a little more than a quarter of a mile from him, and perhaps three hundred yards back from where the soft sand marked the end of the dunes and the scrub, the start of tire drop to the beach. He reckoned that he lulled her.

  'I'm not blaming you,' she said, a small voice against the wind. 'You have to see, Malachy, the big picture. It's beyond you now. Don't think, after what you've done and where you've been, that I'm not sympathizing. But - and I've told you - you have to let it go. The big picture is supreme.'

  He knew it. There was a slackening in her fingers'

  grip. He thought that what she had said - no blame, her sympathy - was utterly and clearly genuine. The darkness seemed to Malachy to have come fast, sun sunk, clouds heavier, and he could see only the outline of her face, but he had felt on his skin little sharp pants of breath as she had spoken of the big picture's supremacy.

  'You have to bottle it down, swallow it. Hear me . . .

  You've done more than anyone could have asked of you. I only know the bones of your history, Malachy, but I am telling you that no one could have done more to get back what you've lost. If you say that you don't know what happened in that shit place, in Iraq, I am believing you. Already you have the right to walk tall - God, that sounds crap. Now, forget what's personal and see the wider scape.. . You're not a fool, Malachy, you're not a selfish man.'

  One of her hands now rested on his sleeve. The fingers had straightened out and were no longer deep in the material. It would have hurt him to hit her. He could make out the upper point of the dune crest behind him but the gully beside it was lost. Locked in his memory, he had the imagined line that would take him to a point - where a weapon had fired three single shots - where Ricky Capel was. He had no doubt of it: Ricky Capel was at the extremity of the line in his mind. She lifted his arm, and he let her, and her lips brushed the skin at the wrist, then she lowered his arm. He made no resistance.