Rat Run

by Gerald Seymour

  In his reply, exhausted and rambling, he tried to explain why he had done it. It was hard for him to be rational, coherent. He spoke of the man and the files that the National Criminal Intelligence Service computers had trawled up for him. He told of the devastation to a man's self-respect, personal esteem. A man on the floor who wanted to drag himself up and stand again.

  'But you gave him Capel's name. You sent him after Capel. Almighty God – he could be killed – killed and dumped, killed and disappeared. Tony, have you no conscience?'

  The struggle to describe the smile and the light in the eyes, then slamming down the mug, splashing the cloth on the table. Recalling the battering of the questions. Where to in Hamburg? To meet whom?

  Spilling out the answers that Intelligence had produced – and the name of Timo Rahman.

  'I know that name. You could rot in hell, Tony.'

  His explanation, yelled, that he had lost control of the man. It was what the man needed, what the man demanded. He was now only the vehicle for the journey. His wife stood by the cooker and saucepans bubbled behind her. Her arms were folded tight across her chest, and her face was set, stern. The question was inevitable.

  'Your man, Malachy Kitchen, would he know when to back off? Where he's gone, would he have the nous to recognize the impossible and step back?'

  No answer necessary, but he shook his head.

  She beat on the wall with her stick, hammered at it.

  Behind Millie Johnson, in her little kitchen, the kettle whistled, and beside the hob was the teapot with the bags in it and a plate on which she had placed biscuits

  – the sort she thought he liked.

  Her impatience was curbed only when her bell rang.

  She struggled from her chair, used the stick to move towards the door and unlocked it. On the far side of the barred gate was the social worker, not him.

  Because she felt it, there must have been – like a murmur of it – disappointment on her face. Twice that day, and twice the day before, she had beaten on the wall and hoped he would come.

  'Only me, Millie,' Ivanhoe Manners said. He pulled a face, his teeth flashed, and he shrugged. 'Second best, am I?'

  'Did he go?'

  'Dropped the keys in – no note, nothing – left the place clean like he was never there. Gone, as if he was finished with us. What I came to say, you have new folk next door from tomorrow. A mother and her daughter, from Sudan. I thought you should know…

  Did he not say goodbye to you?'

  She said gruffly, 'You'd better go and make the tea, and you can have a biscuit.'

  She slumped back in her chair. She heard the rattle of the cups, then the kettle's whistle was cut and water poured.

  'I'll let it stand a minute,' he called to her. 'Did you learn anything about him?'

  'He didn't tell me – told me nothing – but he'd been a soldier. I tell you, believe me, he was a soldier.'

  'Nothing about where he was going?'

  She looked out of her window, down over the plaza and up to the blocks and flat roofs of the Amersham.

  She felt frail and the pain was in her arm. She felt aged and alone, and she remembered what Dawn had said to her about the High Fly Boys and about the dealer at the lamp post. His kiss was on her forehead.

  She said tartly, 'I have one and a half sugars…

  Going to do? What soldiers do, I imagine, find somewhere to go and fight.'

  He played chess. Victory was assured because Frederick Gaunt competed against himself.

  The train thrashed north at speed and the roll of the carriage on the track bumped his knees against those of the man opposite. Other passengers beavered over work files or peered at the screens of their laptops, but Gaunt had his chess, and the man who obstructed his leg room and had joined the train at Rugby had his newspaper. After each move, Gaunt rotated the pocket set. He could not have brought work files or a laptop with him: in these times, it was damn near a capital offence to lose either on public transport.

  There was a grunt across the table but Gaunt was not sure if it had been obscenity or blasphemy. He pondered the moves of the little plastic figures on his board and thought of the futility with which he wasted his journey time: did it matter if a blue bishop was lost or a red knight?

  Perhaps…

  Perhaps it mattered greatly…

  Perhaps it mattered more than his mind could articulate.

  He studied the positioning of his kings and queens, bishops and knights, the pawns. Was Wilco a pawn?

  Most certainly the minder who had died in Prague, burned, had been a pawn. Was Timo Rahman a knight? Was the co-ordinator, who had escaped them, a bishop? Was the city where he lived, worked, the queen that must be protected? He began to move the pieces. Pawns were lost, removed. A knight fell. A bishop moved against a queen… Not a bloody game.

  Quite deliberately, he kicked out his leg and his toecap caught the ankle of the man opposite. He smiled sweetly.

  When he played against himself, he always won – but it was not a bloody game when Polly Wilkins, the pawn, was on the board, and not a bloody game if the queen could not be protected by the bishop's move. He was quiet, hunched, and his eyes did not leave the board and the plastic pieces. He felt cold, as if he were intimidated. She was not the only pawn: the bishop, too, had them and would sacrifice them, the sleepers.

  He did not know the codename that had been given him. He worked in the Fast Friar food outlet in the conurbation of Hounslow to the west of London. It was nineteen months since he had last been to the mosque. Then he had been told what he should study and that he should not return there for worship.

  Neither did he know that his true name and the address of the Fast Friar, where he scrubbed the cooking surfaces and cleaned out the frying vats, were spoken of in caves in the mountain landscapes of the tribal areas of Pakistan and in safe-houses in a town of eastern Yemen; and that they were in the mind of a man who travelled ever closer. He was a few days short of his twenty-first birthday. He lived with his parents and two sisters a bus ride from the Fast Friar, and nineteen months before he had, as instructed, taken down from his bedroom wall the posters celebrating the jihad in Iraq and pictures of mujahidin fighters in Chechnya. He was on no list – as he would have been had he continued to attend the mosque – of potential activists compiled by the Security Service or the Special Branch or the Anti-terrorist Unit of Scotland Yard, In nineteen months he had not seen the imam who had recruited him, but he harboured in the depths of his mind the promise made and the instruction given him. His family, second-generation immigrants from Karachi, had no access to his mind.

  The promise made him was that one day – at a time not known – a man would come to him, would seek him out, would use him. The instruction given him was that he should spend every waking hour, when he was not at the Fast Friar, down the A4 road at Heathrow airport. He had gained, because of his dedication, a near encyclopedic knowledge of the perimeters and their wire defences, the patterns of the patrols, and dead ground on the flight paths for landings and take-offs, and his friends who worked inside never realized they were gutted for information. He did not go to the mosque, did not worship with his family, but his concept of faith burned bright in him and what he would do for his God. A man would come one day to his home or to the Fast Friar and would lead him to the side, beyond the earshot of his family or his employer, and would quote from the Book, 2:25: 'And give good news to those who believe and do good deeds… ' And he would answer: '… that they will have gardens in which rivers flow.' It would happen, and everything he knew of the airport would be told.

  The door to Eternal Paradise would be opened to receive him.

  Polly listened – had little choice – as she climbed the stairs and followed the woman.

  'You'll enjoy it here, of course you will. Such a lovely building, so impressive. Dates back a hundred and sixty years. We're so fortunate to be here but – I'm being frank – after all the downsizing, we five Brits, and I'
m not counting the locally employed staff, we rather rattle around here. It's so good to have a visitor and an excuse to open a bit more up.'

  She was at 8a Harvestehuder Weg, the seat of the British Consulate in Hamburg. The taxi had dropped her outside a white stucco-fronted building that was indeed magnificent, opulent. The woman escorted her to the top floor where there would be a door reinforced with steel plate and behind it a room available to the Service.

  'A shipping magnate built it, then sold it on to a Chilean family who were in the saltpetre trade, but they went under in the great Stock Exchange crash of

  'twenty-nine. In 1930 everything inside was auctioned off – quite extraordinary, among the items under the hammer were three hundred pairs of antlers and, would you believe?, four and a half thousand bottles of wine of best vintage going back nearly forty years.

  Then it was headquarters for an SS Gruppenftihrer.

  Very convenient, because Kaufmann, who was top Nazi for the city, was just a few doors down, where the Americans are now. It missed all the bombing – a providential wind blew the Pathfinder marker flares away from this district. The annexe was built by concentration-camp inmates from Neuengamme.

  Anyway we came, got our feet under the table, and have been here ever since. We're very lucky.'

  She knew she was escorted by a junior member of staff because the consul-general would not want to be within spitting distance of an officer from the Service.

  Her own ambassador down in Prague, if they met in a corridor, always found papers to put his head into or a window to look out of for fear of contamination.

  They were at the door and the woman gave her the keys. Polly unlocked it. A darkened room, and a musty smell, confronted her, like a mausoleum. She saw a table, an armchair and a straight chair, a rack of communications equipment, and the familiar red telephone that would give secure speech contact to London, to Gaunt, and a camp-bed with blankets folded on it. There was a shower in one corner, a small partitioned unit beside it with access to a lavatory, and a small cooker over a fridge on the other side of the shower. She could make herself at home, she thought, maybe take a holiday on Harvestehuder Weg.

  T hope you'll be all right. Just sing out if there's anything you need. We usually gather for sherry with the CG at about five on Fridays, in the salon, what was the ballroom – if you're still here, you'd be very welcome.'

  Polly said that she had just a few 'bits and bobs' to sort out and didn't know how long that would take, whether she would be finished by Friday or not.

  Alone, the door shut behind her, she rang the number of the organized-crime section of the Hamburg police, her starting point, and wondered if he was here yet, in the city, the man she was tasked to hunt for.

  'It is Sami…'

  He heard the silence, then a gasp, then a hiss of shock, then something clattered in his ear as if she had dropped a cup or a plate that she carried, then the silence. The first time he had rung, from the Hauptbahnhof, the phone had not been picked up. He had walked for many hours, first doing great circles round the square in front of the station, ever increasing, then taken the S-Bahn through the docks area and over the river. He had left it at the Wilhelmsburg stop.

  There, he had rung again, and the coin had dropped when the phone was answered, and the crisp voice had answered, 'Yes, this is Else. Who is that?' He had given the name she would know, from five years before. He imagined her standing with the phone at her ear, eyes wide, mouth gaping.

  'We should meet.'

  A pause of many seconds, then a choke, then, 'I don't know i f.. . '

  The voice – each cadence the same as he had known it – faded. She was, in his adolescent and adult life, the only woman he had loved. In all the years since he had been in Hamburg, he had remembered the telephone number of the apartment high in the concrete block. At first, when he had left, the memory of her had been in his mind each day and each night, but the years had tripped on and the memory had slipped to once a week, but was always there. Of course, if a recruit given to him to mould to the state of grace, readied to wear a martyr's belt, had made such a contact with old life and old love, he would have castigated him, rejected him and exorcized him from what he planned. But she was Else Borchardt, and he had come back to her city: she was his weakness.

  'No – everything is possible. We should meet.'

  'Where are you? I don't think…'

  'I am close. I will come.'

  He put down the phone. The wind thrashed around him. Cigarette packets, empty and discarded, scattered in front of its force. He thought the wind came over the flat lands from Bremerhaven and Buxtehude to the west, or from Luneburg to the south.

  When it reached the blocks of Wilhelmsburg, the concrete towers, it eddied in their shelter or was funnelled between them. He had many names. His given name at birth in the Egyptian city of Alexandria was but the first. To those he served, he was Abu Khaled. On the passports he had used on his journey, each carried a different name. For the German documentation shown at the crossing between Liberec and Zgorzelec, with his place of birth listed as Colombo in Sri Lanka, he was Mahela Zoysa. In Hamburg, eighteen months as a student, he was Sami to his lecturers, his friends and his lover. She was sharp in his mind: five years after he had slipped from her bed, gone into a dawn and left her asleep, everything of her face and body was clear to him.

  It was where they had lived. He passed an arcade of shops with nameplates in Arabic or Turkish characters, and from them they had bought their food.

  He stopped to watch the football game on a dirt surface enclosed with mesh wire, where he had played and she had watched him. He walked on.

  Ahead was the statue. Made from weather-darkened bronze, the figure showed a diving 'keeper – what he did on the dirt surface behind the wire – horizontal but with a groping arm and a ball that hugged the fingertips. Nothing had changed in Wilhelmsburg in the five years since he had gone. She would not have changed.

  He came to the doorway.

  The blocks were where the city put immigrants and students and those without work, far from its wealth, distanced from its prosperity by the Elbe river. She had said, 'I don't know i f… ' on the phone, and had said, 'I don't think… ' He could not believe that Else Borchardt's love for him was lost, but he hesitated in front of the bank of names and bells, and he scanned the list but did not find her name. Within, perhaps, two minutes, a child elbowed past him and rang a bell and there was the click of the closed door being unlatched. He followed the child inside. She was on the twelfth floor of fourteen. He took the stairs. At each landing, as the breath spurted in his lungs, the certainty that had brought him to Wilhelmsburg diminished, a fraction of confidence at each flight, but he pressed on. When he came to the door on the twelfth floor, when his finger hovered over the bell button, he saw that the name typed on paper in the slot beside it was not Borchardt. It was five years since he had closed that door on his back, quietly so that she should not wake. He killed the doubts, pressed the button, kept his finger on it and heard the bell ring out.

  She stood in front of him.

  He saw no welcome, but fear.

  She was heavier than the image of her he had carried in his mind, thicker at the hips, and her waist sagged on the belt of her jeans. There were lines at her mouth and eyes where there had been none, and she wore lipstick that before she had despised. Her hair hung loose and was not kept tight against her scalp by the scarlet bandanna of protest she had always worn.

  He had thought, climbing the stairs, that she would gasp, then melt, then hold out her arms to grasp him, as she had always done, but the arms were across her chest and folded tight over her blouse, not the T-shirt of Guevara's face that she had worn each and every day. Past her shoulder an electric fire burned and in front of it was a rack on which a baby's clothes dried.

  He looked above the fire and saw the print of a watercolour view, popular, of the castle at Heidelberg, and the same print had been in a corridor off the entrance
to the college where he had been enrolled and where she had studied to be a teacher, and which all of them had regarded with derision. Five years back, there had been in that place above the fire, a poster to com-memorate the sacrifices of the Palestinian people.

  Everything he saw, he thought was betrayal.

  There was a chest beside the fire.

  A framed photograph was on the chest.

  In the photograph she stood with her baby and a uniformed man – Caucasian white – was beside her, an arm round her shoulder.

  She said, 'We have been married for three years. He is from Krakow, but now he has citizenship. He is a good man and a good father. It was a long time ago, Sami.'

  'What does he do?' The question had an innocence.

  'He is on the Bahn-Wacht – sometimes he works at the Hauptbahnhof, sometimes on the U-Bahn, sometimes at the Dammtor. In two years he hopes to join the city's police, it is his ambition… It was too long ago, Sami. We change. It was the old life, we were young – everything is changed. You went, I cried for a week. I thought you would come back, I promised myself that you would come back… Then the planes hit the towers, and everything changed.'

  His voice was a whisper: 'Did you ever speak of it?'

  'Of who we knew? No. Whom we met? No… But I changed my life and hid what had been.' She looked into his face. 'Did you change, Sami, move on? Or do you still belong to the struggle? Have you left them or are you a part of them?'

  He should not have come, and he knew it. It played in his mind. The man from Krakow returned in the evening from his work shift, pulled off his tie, loosened his uniform tunic, waited for food to be set before him, had his baby sit on his knee and asked if she had had a good day. And he had ambition to be a policeman. How better to achieve ambition? She would tell him that a man, from her past, had arrived at the door without warning and who he was and who his associates had been at the college. And he would telephone to the police or the BfV – and ambition would be realized for an immigrant from Krakow… and he knew also that his weakness must be covered.

  The baby had begun to cry and she turned to go to it. He stepped inside the room and reached out.