Rat Run Read online

  'What's the priority?'

  The question came from a line manager, who lived his working life in a complex surrounded by thousands of yards of fencing and razor wire, protected by armed guards, built on moorland in north Yorkshire, west of Scarborough on the coast and north of Malton. At Menwith Hill – officially an outpost of the British listening spies at Cheltenham – the National Security Agency, headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland, called an American tune. The majority of the budget for the intercept databases on this wind-scarred, remote ground of bracken and heather, was in dollars.

  He who pays the piper calls the tune.

  At Menwith Hill, great white golfball shapes rise above the moorland, sometimes glittering in sunshine and sometimes misted by low cloud. The balls protect the scanning dishes that suck in millions of phone communications every day. Then computers, operating at speeds of nano-seconds, interpret what has been swallowed into the stomach of the beast.

  Hundreds of NSA personnel have made this corner of the United Kingdom into a little piece of the Midwest of America. American needs, in the War on Terror, dictate how the computer time is allocated. British technicians must accept the reality, however unwelcome, of being the subordinate partner.

  So, the line manager demanded clarification of the priority level of the request from London. 'I'm sure you'll appreciate, Mr Gaunt, that matters related to Pakistan, Egypt, Yemen and the Saudi Kingdom take most of our time – and that's all linked, as you know well, to US requirements. Prague isn't high, no. If you were to tell me that by monitoring all satphone and mobile links out of Prague to wherever in Europe, I would be meeting a category-four priority level – you know, life and death, Mr Gaunt – then I might be able to play with a bit of machine-switching, might… and I'd have to know, Mr Gaunt, in what language we'd be most likely dealing, and what the trigger words are. I think that if I had your assurance, and I'd need a back-up signal of authorization that this was category-four minimum, then I might, might, be able to help. Are you there, Mr Gaunt?… Albanian language, that's not easy. Oh, might be Arabic, or a Chechen dialect, oh… No trigger words?… All I can say, Mr Gaunt, is that I'll do my best – say three or four days. Yes, Mr Gaunt, and we're pushed at this end too… '

  The screen gave Polly a black-and-white image of the interior of the cell.

  Ludvik, at her shoulder, asked her remotely, 'Do you not approve?'

  'Not for me to have an opinion,' she murmured. 'I just have to hope that what you're doing is effective.

  Whether I like it or not is irrelevant.'

  Yes, old matters of ethics and morality took a back seat in the new war. She saw a bucket lifted and the water from it was thrown so that it splashed on to the face and head of the man she knew to be a cafe owner from the east of the Old City, out by the Florenc bus station. The water ran down his cheeks and chest, and blood sluiced off the injuries inflicted on him. She thought, momentarily, that this was a return to days long gone when Stalin's purges had filled these same basement cells, and before that as Gestapo interrogators had gone to work to extract the names of the assassins of Reichs-Protector Heydrich.

  'It is necessary.'

  'You did not hear me say it was not,' Polly said softly.

  The cells, dark little cubicles with high, barred windows of dirty glass that looked out at boot level on to the interior square of the police barracks, were where Communist and Nazi torturers had been. They could similarly have justified the pain and brutality of what they did. Now it was the turn of the democrats to use that cell and to beat, slap and kick, deprive a man of sleep, make him scream in agony, and to hide behind the wall of 'It is necessary'. As the water dripped to the floor, the man's head lifted and his bruised face focused again on the ceiling, the work resumed. Short-arm, closed-fist punches to the face, booted kicks to the kidneys and when the cafe owner's head dropped again, his grey hair was caught and held up so that the target remained accessible. There was no high horse on which Polly Wilkins could have sat and played indifference. Over the last two years men and women from the Service had trooped in and out of interrogation rooms at Bagram in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo Bay and at holding camps in Iraq – her people, her colleagues. No bleat from the Service then about ethics and morality. Of course, her hands and their hands stayed clean because they let surrogates do it and could then claim ignorance. And others were shipped, in the name of the War on Terror, to cell blocks in Damascus or Cairo, and transcripts were sent back – with no bloodstains on them – that drove forward investigations.

  'What has he said so far?'

  'Nothing of importance.'

  'Perhaps that's because you have hit his face so often that he cannot talk any more/ she said drily. 'Do you think he might talk better if you hit his face less often?'

  'Do you want information or do you want your conscience to be comfortable?'

  'Oh, for fuck's sake… ' She turned away from the screen. If her mother and father – both teachers in an insignificant country town in Wiltshire, both thrilled that their daughter worked for the Defence of the Realm – had known what their daughter watched on a TV screen they might have vomited. But, far from home, it was the reality of what she did. She looked back at the screen, then blinked and peered harder at it. If they had not held the cafe owner's grey hair, his head would have fallen on to his soaked chest, but they did, and his hands rose briefly and feebly to protect his face – fingers over his eyes and mouth – before they were ripped away and another punch landed.

  'Can you zoom in?'

  'No, it is a fixed lens.'

  'I want to go in there.'

  'Because we do not understand the skill of interrogation? Do we need another lesson from SIS?' The sarcasm hit her. 'Why?'

  'Just put me in there, dear friend, because, by your own admission, you have learned nothing. Good enough?'

  She was taken down a flight of stone-flagged steps and along a corridor where men lounged on hard chairs, read newspapers without interest, smoked and stripped her with their eyes. Down more stairs and into the basement. She walked boldly and with purpose, wanted only confirmation of what she had seen, in black and white, on the screen. The door was opened for her. Bright light speared from a lamp into the cafe owner's face. The men turned from their work and stared at her. The head was permitted to fall.

  She went close to the chair on which he was propped, then knelt in front of him. Her body masked what she did. She took the cafe owner's hands. The man's fingers clawed at hers, as if he believed she was his salvation, his release. She was not there for kindness. She examined the hands quickly, then let them drop on to his lap, which was wet with water and urine. She stood, turned her back on him, and walked out of the cell into the corridor.

  'What was that for?'

  No reply from Polly Wilkins as she swept by

  Ludvik. She went out into the inner square of the building where Communists and Fascists had been, and felt herself dirtied. She thought of the shower she would take, endless and soapy – and drove away.

  Of the many companies owned by Timo Rahman, all doing legitimate business, one shipped furniture to Hamburg from a factory at Ostrava in the extreme east of the Czech Republic. The tables and chairs, side-boards, chests and wardrobes would be inexpensive in Germany and Timo had identified a good market for those made from beech wood. The company's offices, warehouse and showroom were in the

  Hammerbrook district.

  The message was brought from Hammerbrook by a young Albanian boy – a good, clean, intelligent worker – who was the son of a second cousin of Timo.

  Because the boy was gjak, a blood relation, he had been entrusted with the message by the company's manager who was from the miqs, a relative by marriage. Nothing had been written down, and the message was in the boy's memory – the telex from the factory at Ostrava was now in slivers, having passed through the company's shredder.

  That evening Timo was the guest at a restaurant of a Rathaus functionary who dealt with the prov
ision of care homes for the elderly – an area he had decided was promising for expansion. The city's government, near bankrupt and bumping along on empty, needed private capital for investment in the homes to fulfil an election promise. Late in the meal, the Bear came to Timo's shoulder and whispered in his ear. Apologies were made. Timo slipped from the table, out of the restaurant and on to the pavement where the boy waited.

  Timo saw the boy's nervousness and confusion. He had heard of him but had never met him – his job in the office was a reward for the cousin's loyalty. He smiled with warmth and hugged the boy to reassure him. Then the message was stammered out against the noise of passing traffic and the music that spilled from a discotheque.

  'This is what I am to say, from the shipping section of Home Furnishing. "Regret cargo load 1824 has not been forwarded. Our local agent is indisposed. Also half of the cargo is damaged and cannot be sent, and the remainder, which comprises the more valued items, is missing. We await further information." That is all. The telex was signed by the director at Ostrava.

  I apologize for disturbing you on such a minor matter, but that is what I was instructed to do.'

  If he felt a frisson of anxiety, Timo gave no sign of it.

  He asked quietly, 'Would you repeat the message?'

  He was told it again.

  The boy was hugged and sent away into the night.

  Timo murmured to the Bear that he would need ten minutes to extract himself from the functionary's table, then they would drive.

  An hour later, he stood in a car park far out to the west of the city, beyond his home at Blankenese and stared down at the quiet dark flow of the Elbe's estuary. He watched a freighter coming downriver and pondered. Whenever a difficulty obstructed him Timo came to that viewpoint, near the village of Hetlingen, and the Bear stayed in the car. It was where he scratched his mind for solutions when problems reached crisis point. It was indeed a difficulty. The coded message gave him the extent of it. The local agent – the cafe owner – was a unit leader, a kryetar, of a clan, a fis, to which Timo was allied, and

  'indisposed' was the cover word for 'arrested'. A half of the cargo was 'damaged' and could not be sent: the lesser man of the two was dead. The second half of the cargo, the part that contained the 'more valued items' was missing: the man he had been paid, handsomely, to move on from Hamburg was in flight. He did not know what evidence had been found, what the interrogation of the kryetar would throw up, what link could be made between himself and the fugitive.

  He seemed to see, as he stood in the darkness and watched the river traffic, the walls and roof of the maximum-security wing at the Fuhlsbuttel gaol. The extent of the difficulty – he would never have acknowledged that crisis had hit him – was that, for once, Timo Rahman did not know how to protect himself.

  More rain in the late afternoon came with the wind that battered the island. He would not intervene.

  Oskar Netzer could see a frightening beauty in the shape and lines of the circling marsh harrier, the killer.

  He knew all of the harriers on Baltrum. Of the three pairs who nested and bred there, two had gone south for winter migration and were not yet back, but one had stayed. He watched the male bird hunting; an hour ago he had seen the hen hover over a reed bed with lichen in her talons for nest-building. Against the darkened clouds, the harrier's upper body feathers and wings made an almost black silhouette. Earlier it had shouted its kee-yoo cry, but now it was silent, dangerous and beautiful.

  In the lee of a dune of low scrub, sheltered by the base of the viewing platform of weathered timber, he watched the killer quarter the marshland and knew that when its patience was exhausted it would come over the sand, the bushes and the little stagnant lake.

  Oskar could recognize the beauty of the harrier, which was the enemy of those he loved. Sitting there, with a little rain splattering his back, the swirl of the wind in his hair, and the cold on his face, he could recall the birds of beauty that had come high over him when he had been a child and terrified by the havoc they had brought. The Fortresses during the day, silver specks in front of their vapour trails, the Lancasters and Halifax bombers at night, sometimes caught in the cones of searchlights, had cruised elegantly over the city and had made the Feuersturm below them. They had taken the lives of his father and more than forty thousand other citizens of Hamburg. He knew about beauty and about death flying high for a target. He had no right to intervene in the ways of nature, but the pain was in him.

  The harrier in front of him had a wingspan of a metre. He knew it would come to kill and feed. The wind strength changed. It swung and slackened.

  The reeds beyond the little lake where the eiders gathered were no longer bent and flailing. So fast…

  The fate of a duck, one among them, was sealed, but he would not intervene. Earlier the wind had blown the harrier away from the lake with its green weed covering. The bird, of course, could cope with wind speeds to storm level, but now it would be easier for it to circle, select and dive. It was a lottery as to which of the gentle eider ducks would be chosen. It had been the same lottery that had killed his father when the wall of a blazing building had collapsed and other men on the hose had survived.

  He spat, but not noisily enough to disturb the quiet around the lessening whistle of the wind and the rain.

  It was their island: it was home as much for the marsh harriers as for his eiders. As the bombs had, when he was a child, the bird plummeted. One moment, peace

  – the next, the chaos of panic. He heard the kok-kok-kok shriek of a male eider, and half of its brilliant white winter plumage was buried under the killer's weight.

  The struggle was brief. The harrier began to rip at the chest feathers, where white became black. They floated up in the lighter wind, and red flesh was exposed. Oskar was aware, then, as the harrier feasted, of little calls of excitement.

  He looked up.

  There were six of them, three couples. They were festooned with binoculars and cameras with jutting lenses, and wore heavy waterproof clothing. They seemed, to Oskar, to rejoice in the images their cameras trapped, and when they were satiated on photography they replaced cameras at their eyes with the binoculars and magnified their view of the slaughter. Then they were bored, and moved on.

  The marsh harrier was a third of the weight of its kill. It could not lift the carcass of a male eider and fly with it to where the hen built the nest in the reeds. It would fill its crop, then fly to its partner and regurgitate her food.

  The male eider, ravished, was left in the mud among a snowfield of feathers.

  He pushed himself up. It was Oskar Netzer's habit to follow visitors who came into the territory of Baltrum's wildlife haven. He could stalk as well and as silently as the hunting harrier. He skirted the lake where, already, the surviving birds returned and clattered into the water. He took the path that the photographers had. He did not look ahead at their receding backs but kept his eyes on the ground beaten down by their walking boots. He followed to find fault – and purge his anger. Grim satisfaction settled at his mouth.

  He bent and picked up the Cellophane wrapping of a boiled sweet that rested on the most recent indent in the mud of a walking boot, and a scrap of the shiny paper that had been around a chocolate bar, then three discarded matches. Further along the path, he retrieved the squashed filter tip. He quickened his stride. When he reached them, they were sitting on the crest of a dune and overlooked the sea channel between Baltrum and Langeoog islands. They had a Thermos open and drank coffee from plastic beakers.

  When he came towards them, they looked away from the white crest waves and smiled a welcome at him through the rain.

  He attacked. Oskar opened his palm and allowed to drop close to their feet what he had picked up. A sweet wrapper, a piece of chocolate paper, matches and a filter tip.

  'You come here, where you are not wanted, and you desecrate the place. Go away and take your rubbish with you.'

  They stared at him in growing amazement. />
  'Go home. Scatter your filth on your own ground.'

  Their faces flushed. He thought, was pleased by it, that he had destroyed their pleasure in photographing and watching the marsh harrier rip apart the duck. He turned and strode away.

  Behind him a chorus of voices erupted, which he ignored.

  'What a fucking idiot… No, just some sad fool…

  Must live here. The isolation's turned his mind

  … Wrong. Not the isolation, has to be something more and something deeper… Probably his whole life is seeing what's different each morning. I doubt a flea moves here without him knowing, the fool.'

  He heard the laughter but kept walking. He felt better for the spat. He believed it his self-appointed duty to keep the paradise of Baltrum pure. He went back to the lake where he could watch the eiders. The harrier, fed, would not kill again for three or four days but the carcass was there, to be seen and to hurt him.

  From the shadows of the fenced hedge that surrounded the sheds where the Amersham's maintenance staff kept their tools, Malachy watched the ground-floor door of the pensioners' units. He learned the rhythms of the dealer's evening and night.

  He was tucked away, hidden and hunched down, with his back pressed into the thickness of the hedge.

  Old thoughts and old lessons stirred in him. At Chicksands, he had been a student in surveillance classes. The instructors, hardened and bland from time in the Province, had tried to drill into him and others from the corps what they had practised during months in south Armagh's hedgerows and west

  Belfast's ghetto streets. Sheep, 'because they're so bloody curious', and dogs, 'always the worst because they have that damn gene of suspicion', were to be avoided. An itch could do for a man because it made movement, and movement in a lie-up sangar was dis-covery, or-a fly up the nose.

  The classes had run for a month, two hours every Thursday afternoon for four weeks, and they'd seemed so inappropriate to Malachy as he prepared for his posting to the military attache's office at the embassy in Rome. He dug deep to remember more of what he had been told on those Thursdays when his mind was clouded with the statistics of the Italian armed forces and NATO strengths. 'If it's a one-man lie-up, and it has to be sometimes, you'll feel isolated.