Rat Run

by Gerald Seymour

  You like to call it the War on Terror, but your mentality is still that of a policeman: gathering evidence to arrest, convict, imprison. Too ponderous, too cumber-some, and he will skip round you. Victory in war comes from the destruction of your enemy. Eradicate from your mind the due process of law – kill him.'

  Gaunt strode away. At the far distant double doors of the canteen he turned to wave a final farewell, but the professor was bent over his plate, working a finger round it. Gaunt ran down corridors and out into the night, and hurried to the car park where his taxi waited. He had learned, from his long journey north, that he had cause to be afraid of the havoc a new man, bred in hate, could achieve. He saw the face that smiled from passport photographs but could not travel into the depths of those eyes.

  Nothing had altered. Everything was as he remembered it when he had been Sami, student of mechanical engineering, lover of Else Borchardt, friend of heroes.

  He had taken the S-Bahn on from Wilhelmsburg, route S31, which terminated at Neugraben, as far as the stop for Harburg Rathaus. He had walked past the Rathaus, through the shopping area and past the new building that housed the social club for Muslim men who were far from their ethnic homes. He had paused outside the police station where posters requested information on missing women and required help in murder investigations. He had noted one that showed photographs of three men he did not know who were identified as hunted terrorists. When he had been here

  – with Muhammad, Said and Ramzi – he had walked past the police station every day, and officers coming to their cars had ignored him, had never second-glanced any of them.

  Another narrow street to cross, and he reached Marienstrasse. Still he would be within the view of any officer or detective who stood in the police station and looked out through its wide plate-glass windows.

  It was as if he came back to where – carrying the name of Sami – he had been born again. The cafe was on the corner. He had drunk coffee there with Muhammad, who had flown into the north tower, and with Ziad, whose aircraft had crashed in the fields of Pennsylvania, and with Marwan who had piloted the jet-liner against the south tower, and with Said, who was the logistics man and provided passports and money, and with Ramzi. All were dead or in the hands of the Americans, except Said who was hunted in the mountains of Pakistan. When he had had the name Sami, all of them had drunk coffee with him in the cafe on the corner, and there they had talked about the nothingness of football, about their courses at the college in Harburg, and then they had gone up the street where the women had cooked for them.

  He walked that pavement. The darkness fell around him but he moved sharply between the light pools thrown down on him.

  It was as if he made a pilgrim's journey.

  Being there strengthened him.

  On the opposite side of the street was number fifty-four. Curtains were not drawn to mask the ground-floor room. He saw two young men in the room of the age to be students as he had been, but they had blond hair and one was crouched over a computer screen. The other stood in the centre of the room, as if without purpose, and smoked a cigarette.

  Else had been there with him. When she had talked love to him and had promised that she would embrace Islam, when she had gone to the tutorials for women at the al-Quds mosque and had given up the T-shirt of Guevara for a headscarf, she had been in that room with him. Of course, the plan for the taking of aircraft had not been spoken of in his presence or in hers, but he had been in that room when wills were witnessed and he had seen the tickets for the flights to the United States. He went on up Marienstrasse's gentle incline. The laughter of that room rang in him, and he seemed to regain the sense of brotherhood.

  Before he had known Else Borchardt and had lived in her apartment in the tower block at Wilhelmsburg, he had slept on the floor of number fifty-four, and he had known he was with great men, with the finest.

  He thought it fuelled his courage, being here.

  Out in the back kitchen of the apartment, standing with his back to the window that overlooked the yard, Heydar had told the student, Sami, in a voice pitched so low that he had strained to hear him, that he should be a Warrior of jihad and glory in his work. He had been dismissed from that kitchen, sent away. Five years before, without hugged farewells but with a ticket for Sana'a in the Yemen, he had gone out through that door, on to the pavement and had walked away. He had gone back to Wilhelmsburg, had slept part of the night with the woman he loved and had not woken her, had left her. He had heard it said that Heydar Zammar, with the pebble glasses, the uncut beard and the voice of icy quietness, was now in a Syrian gaol and would have been tortured but had not broken. If he had, the name of Sami, sleeper of al-Qaeda, would have been on the Internet images of the Americans' most-wanted fugitives.

  He remembered all of them. He must be worthy of them.

  He passed the cafe halfway up Marienstrasse, which they did not use, then saw the window on the street beside him of the shop where shoes could be repaired – Marwan had been there with his most comfortable pair for new heels and the room at number fifty-four had cascaded with laughter that he had the shoes repaired and did not buy new ones. He would have worn those shoes, with the new heels from that shop, when he had taken the aircraft against the south tower.

  The pilgrimage was done. The smallest doubt was lost. He thought himself ready to resume his journey to a destination where foot-soldiers slept, and waited for him.

  He had no knowledge of the codename by which others, so few of them, identified him.

  He lived in a students' hall of residence in the east of the capital city and it was a five-minute walk for him to go from his bedsit room to the minor college under the administrative umbrella of the University of London. He was enrolled to study advanced computer sciences, and if he finished his course with a half-respectable degree he would be qualified for work in any of the myriad departments of the civil service where statistics were analysed. I f… He was twenty years old, now approaching the end of his second year. His parents and extended family lived in the West Midlands, were originally from the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi. His father drove a taxi in Dudley, one of his brothers was unemployed and another was a waiter in a curry house. To his father, mother and brothers, and to a network of aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces and cousins, he was an object of pride for having won a place to gain a university qualification.

  His father's one complaint concerning his son was the lapsing of his devotion to the faith.

  As an eighteen-year-old living at home he had regularly attended the local mosque. In London he did not. It was the one blot on his father's enjoyment of his son's success. Instead of going to a mosque, their student son – when he was not at compulsory lectures or engaged in specific coursework in front of his screen – roamed the trains and stations of the capital's underground system. He knew the depths of stations, knew the junctions where carriages packed tight with commuters passed each other, knew the signalling cables' locations, knew where the main power wires were laid, knew the times when platforms were most densely filled. He was a wraith-like figure, unseen and unnoticed, who gained new knowledge from every journey he made. The sole frustration in his life was the direct order made to him that he should not fill a hard disk or a three-and-a-half inch floppy with what he learned.

  Everything was stored in his mind. He did not know if he would finish his course before a man came and sought him out, perhaps in the hall of residence, perhaps as he walked to the college, perhaps in the library or the corridors. A man would come and would say: 'Those who have disbelieved and died in disbelief, the earth full of gold would not be accepted from any of them if one offered it as a ransom.' And he would look into the eyes of the man and he would answer, perhaps with a faltering voice: 'They will have a painful punishment, and they will have no helpers.' The words from the Book, 3:91, were as crisp in his mind – what would be said to him and what he would reply – as any of the detail of the London Underground network.

  He had
dedicated himself to his faith and knew the man would come.

  'There has been no liaison, Miss Wilkins. There has been no contact between your Service and ours. There has been no introduction from your consulate, Miss Wilkins… Should I escort you from the premises?'

  'I don't think that would help either of us.'

  She could play, when she judged it right, feminine and gamine. Little-girl-lost was an act at which Polly was adept – also, she did tough well.

  'There are procedures laid down.'

  'And times when procedures should be bypassed,' she said brusquely. She was dressed in the one black executive trouser suit she had travelled with. The blouse under the jacket was buttoned at the throat.

  She had brushed the styling out of her hair.

  'Explain to me, Miss Wilkins, why I should ignore the liaison procedures.'

  'For mutual advantage.'

  Bizarre, she thought it, their conversation and sparring. She spoke to him in fluent German and he replied to her in fluent English, as if both put down a small marker of superiority. From the moment she had been escorted into the office of assistant deputy commander Johan Konig, she had known that begging favours would fail. She had come to police headquarters by taxi with the confidence to send away the driver, not ask him to wait for her in the eventuality of rejection. At the desk, late in the evening, she had spoken with the bark of authority and had claimed an appointment with the senior official specializing in organized crime, a name gained in her telephone call from Harvestehuder Weg. He, of course, was long gone. Then, to a junior sent down to the reception area, she had played magician and uttered the name to which there would be a reaction: Timo Rahman. Her skill was in avoiding obstruction.

  She had been led to the third floor of the A wing of the building, and had met Konig.

  'What is the "mutual advantage" on offer to me?'

  'That depends on the help given to me. Imagine a set of scales.'

  'Scales must be balanced, Miss Wilkins, if they are to perform satisfactorily.'

  'You share with me on matters affecting Timo Rahman, and I will share with you.'

  'But, Miss Wilkins, I am a police officer and you are an intelligence agent. In the matter of Timo Rahman, I do not think our paths cross.'

  She sought to jolt him. 'Then your thinking is wrong.'

  His head jerked up and his eyes flashed away from the desk. None of its surface was visible under the mass of files, papers, bank statements and photographs that littered it. She liked him well enough

  …

  He seemed to her so tired, bagged eyes that wavered in their attention and slouched shoulders. She understood the loneliness of the zealot. His accent told her he was a Berliner, the strewn papers told her he was reading his way into the life of a target. The clock on the wall showed a few minutes to ten o'clock – the end of a day, the building quiet, but for the skeleton night staff. Dedication had kept him – as if he was handcuffed – at his desk. No photograph of a family was set in a frame on the desk, the window-ledge or bookcase, or on the cavernous safe against a wall.

  'My intention is to put Timo Rahman, the pate of Hamburg, through the courts and into the Fuhlsbuttel gaol for so long that he is a senile invalid when released, and to have sequestered from his investments sufficient monies to render him a pauper.'

  'I'll help you.'

  'He believes himself an untouchable in this city.'

  'Then we'll touch him. I'd like to read his files, and I'd like to see his home.'

  'What do we share?'

  'We link him with human trafficking.'

  'Of whores, yes – but he distances himself from the basic dirt of involvement.'

  She threw her card, the big play that Gaunt always preached against except at a time of last resort. 'No, Johan, not tarts for the pavements, but human trafficking in politicals. We are into an area that will not be shared with your authorities, only between ourselves. Mutual advantage. Timo Rahman is on uncharted territory. He is moving a political.'

  A grim, dry response. 'For this co-operation I could be hung up from a meat hook. We will go, Miss Wilkins, to the suburb of Blankenese – because, against all the laws of good sense, I trust you.'

  The Bear served her husband and his guest at the table. Alicia had cooked for them and had eaten in the kitchen with her girls and her aunt. The girls were now upstairs in their rooms, and the aunt had washed up the plates that the Bear had brought out. Now the crockery was stacked clumsily in the rack on the draining-board and the aunt sat by the stove in the kitchen to read an old magazine from home.

  In her home, Alicia felt herself a prisoner – with prisoner's rights.

  On the left side of her gaol-home was the family that owned outright the second largest holiday travel agency in the city; on the right side the family had the controlling interest in a company selling building materials. Alicia knew the wives by sight, occasionally spoke to them on tiptoe over the garden fence at the back and across the footpath that separated the properties, and the wire and the sensors, sometimes met them at the Blankenese shops when she was with her aunt, saw them at the school gate when she was driven by the Bear to drop or collect the girls. She had no link with the wives who were her neighbours; she was shy and nervous of them. From what little she knew of them, they were smart, sleek and careless with their wealth – everything she was not.

  She thought her aunt too engrossed in the old magazine to notice what she did.

  Alicia was stifled in the kitchen, hurt by the thought of her neighbours' wives, who were a part of their husbands' lives, and she slipped towards the kitchen door. By the door, on a unit, was a small television set

  – not showing a noisy game show but the silent black-and-white image of the drive where the Bear had parked the Mercedes. Above the set, screwed to the wall, was the console board of pressure buttons that each had a single red light, bright and constant. She pressed two buttons, to nullify the beams covering the back garden. She turned the door key. She was halfway outside, and the chill of the night was on her face, the suffocation of the kitchen's heat and her sense of rejection lessened, when the voice grated behind her: 'Where are you going?'

  'Out,' she said. 'To walk.'

  'You'll catch your death.'

  Who would notice? If she caught a chill that sent her to bed, who would care? She said meekly, 'I will be a few minutes.'

  She closed the door after her.

  Alicia headed for her summer-house, her refuge.

  She could never leave, could never go home. Not one man or woman in her family, back at the village in the mountains north of Shkodra, would welcome her or risk the inevitability of the blood feud – the hakmarrje

  – with the Rahman clan. She had no existence away from the house in Blankenese, and was as much a prisoner there as the women who worked on their backs in the brothels owned by her husband on the Reeperbahn or the Steindamm. She skirted the light thrown on to the lawn from the dining-room window, saw her husband and his guest standing but bent as if they studied papers, and the Bear with them. She reached the summer-house, her place of safety.

  Settling among the cushions on the bench, nestled in the darkness, Alicia shivered and clasped her arms round her for warmth. An owl called, broke the night's silence.

  From where she sat Alicia could see the men in the dining room.

  He had found the path. Its entrypoint off the side road was some thirty yards along the thick-growing hedge from the closed steel-shuttered gates. Malachy groped down it in darkness, and thought it an old right-of-way track now used by dog-walkers. He was sandwiched between the two fences: he held out his hands and felt the rough wood of the planks on either side. He came to the end of the Rahman garden. The property behind it had a security light on a high wall that flooded a lawn. He stopped, reached up and wrapped his fist over the top of the Rahman fence, above his head. His hand grip tracked along the top of the fence till it reached the obstruction of a concrete post, where he judged the fen
ce to be strongest and most able to take his weight.

  He breathed in, deep into his chest. He had no plan but felt calm. Malachy steadied himself.

  He heaved himself up. The fence rocked but held against the post. He struggled but finally he had worked his knee on to the sharpness of the plank tops.

  He saw the light that spilled from a ground-floor room on to the grass, and more light that came through a blind's slats at the end of the house. In a room on the first floor a child gazed out as she undressed. In the ground-floor room, his view of it broken by branches, he saw the shapes of three men with their backs to him. He balanced, wavering on his perch as the wood gouged into his knees. He found what he expected to find. They ran from a hidden stanchion off the upper part of the post: layers of barbed wire. Below the upper strand, with the needle-sharp points, was a smooth length that was narrow but tautened: a tumbler wire.

  Brian Arnold had talked about them. On a quiet afternoon at Chicksands, Brian Arnold liked to reminisce about old Cold War days. Behind his back, most of the young officers and sergeants would make mock yawns, dab their hands over their mouths and offer any excuse to quit his presence. Malachy had not: he had sucked in the anecdotes. The Inner-German border stretching from the Baltic to the Czech frontier, six hundred miles of it, had been fenced with barbed wire and with the tumbler strands that activated sirens. If the fugitive, usually a kid with a dream of the greener grass of capitalism, had hiked from Leipzig, Halle or Dresden, and had circumvented the trip-wires, minefields, dogs and guards, he reached the final fence with barbed wire to snag him and the tumblers to bring the border troops, who shot to kill.

  The way Brian Arnold told it – from the memory of a young Intelligence Corps officer based at Helmstedt – the tumblers had cost young men their lives.

  He crouched with the heels of his shoes on the top of the fence, coiled himself – swayed and prayed that he would not fall – balanced, kicked and launched. As he fell, his shoe brushed the top strand, the barbed wire, but did not snag. His heavy coat billowed out when he was in free fall, then he thudded down and the branches of a bush arrowed into him. The breath was knocked out of him. He stayed still for a full minute until his breathing softened, his nose and face in earth and old leaves. He moved forward on his stomach, wove his way through the bushes.