God! Did the daft, dumb, sweet boy never look at the traffic in front of him? He had turned to her, teeth shining as he grinned. 'That'll be the signal. People who would never, pain of death, use a phone. A signal that they are threatened. We have the squad readied, we'll go tonight. You want to watch, Polly, want to be there?'
'Thank you.'
More than rubbernecking on a storm squad going in, watching from long distance, she wanted to get her hands on the prints off the digital camera, wanted them on the airwaves to Gaunt. She'd had his signal that he was taking charge. He was, almost, a parent to her. At the end of Kostecna, half on the pavement, were two more closed vans, like the green one they had used and the black one, and she assumed that that was where the storm squad waited. It would be a coup, a triumph for him.
She had time to get a download of the pictures, get to the embassy and secure communications, send the signals, then be back to grandstand the storm squad.
She giggled. She thought of Gloria bringing in her signal, with the good close-up photograph of the man with the shopping, and the long-lens image of two men at the window. She could imagine old Gaunt's shoes jerking off his table as he hunched to read what she had sent.
'Why do you laugh?' Ludvik called from the front.
'Classified/ she said, mock-haughtily. 'UK Eyes Only.'
The shoes, brightly burnished, swung from his desk and tipped a file on to the floor. Gaunt leaned forward and peered down at the photographs. Little gasps of pleasure slipped from his lips. He had a magnifying-glass out of the drawer by his knees, and bent lower so that his head was close to the top pictures, black and white, blown up to plate size.
Without ceremony, Gloria retrieved the file from the carpet. He asked her, not looking up, if she would be so kind as to cancel dinner that night with the deputy director general – a merciful relief but the excuse was cast iron – and to ring Roman Archaeology (Fourth Century) at the British Museum and postpone with apologies his lunch date for the next day. The second set of photographs was more problematic: a face at the end of a telephoto image, grained and difficult, and the same face half masked by a pair of pocket binoculars, then a second face behind it but in shadow and indistinct.
Almost with reluctance, as if it were a distraction, he reached for his telephone. He dialled internally, was connected to the assistant deputy director's aide and asked – steel in his voice, not for negotiation – for an appointment, soonest, like in five minutes. Gloria hovered. Would she, please, signal Wilco with his congratulations and thanks.
Tie straightened, waistcoat fastened, jacket on, files scooped up and tucked under his arm, he headed for the top floor and the ADD's eyrie.
The assistant deputy director was Gilbert. His office was at the start of the corridor leading from the lift.
Promotion, for which Gilbert strove, would take him further down the corridor and ultimately to the double doors and the suite of rooms at the end.
Gilbert had survived the earthquake that had destroyed careers in Weapons of Mass Destruction.
He had presided over the dismantling of the desk and the shuffling away to side eddies of the victims. He was always guiltily awkward in Frederick Gaunt's company. Yet Gaunt's approach to him was one of magnanimity and scrupulous deference, with the intention of exacerbating the guilt.
'It is Muhammad Iyad, that is confirmed.
Muhammad Iyad is a bodyguard, a minder. He watches the backs of principals and moves them in safety. That he set up this flawed chain of messages to get a gift to his wife, and then to hear back from her of its safe arrival is – and with your experience you'll know this better than me – quite extraordinary. In the past he has escorted high-value targets into and out of Afghanistan, into and out of Saudi Arabia, et cetera, et cetera… You know all that, of course you do. Now – and it is a present from heaven to us – we have him in Prague. I venture, and I'd appreciate your opinion on this, that he is currently bringing an HVT into western Europe. I would hazard that such a high-value target, an individual of such importance that Muhammad Iyad has been given responsibility for him, would be a co-ordinator, not a foot-soldier or a bomb-layer, not even a recruiter. What I think we're looking at – and I hope you'll feel able to confirm my thought – is an Albanian-organized rat run for al-Qaeda. Isn't that the phrase all the suburbanites bitch about? Use of side-streets, alleys, lanes for the school run. In this case, the rat run avoids all but the remotest border crossings, only goes where there is least scrutiny. Anyone being brought through, with that degree of effort, can only be an HVT. I guess that we're looking at a co-ordinator. There's a face here.. . '
He shuffled the photographs on the ADD's desk, then laid on top of them the sequence showing the minder with the binoculars and the blurred, indistinct image of the partially hidden face behind.
'I suggest that there is our co-ordinator, and – if you agree – I'd like to run it through the boffins. This evening, our friendly Czech sisters will arrest Iyad and this unidentified man, and Polly Wilkins will be on hand to fight our corner. They're bottled up – the BIS are only waiting for darkness. It should be quite a coup, Gilbert. You'll smell – deservedly – of roses.
You'll be toasted in Langley – the Americans are outside the loop at the moment – when we care to announce it, with trumpets.'
He was going out carrying his files, was at the door.
'May I say, Freddie, that I much admire your attitude – you know, to life, so very professional.'
'Thank you. Kind words are always appreciated.'
A blurt. 'I was very sad at what happened to you. I moved mountains to block it but was overruled from on high. It wasn't me.. . '
'Never thought it was, Gilbert. I'm grateful for your friendship. A co-ordinator will be a good catch, and he'll be all yours.'
He strode off down the corridor towards the lift. It was said throughout the lower floors of Vauxhall Bridge Cross that the assistant deputy director had saved himself only by an excess of brown-nosed diligence – but it made Frederick Gaunt happier to hear the cretin squirm. But true happiness would be the capture of a co-ordinator and the breaking of a rat run.
He stood naked in front of the wardrobe and sang to himself a song of the mountains, a fighting man's song. His fingers ran over the material of the suit jackets hanging in front of him. His voice reached a crescendo as he made his choice. There were ten suits from which Timo Rahman could select the one he would wear, and twenty ironed and folded shirts were in the wardrobe drawers; on the rail inside the left door were forty ties. At his father's knee he had first learned the words of the song and the lilt of its tune.
The suit he took from its hanger was expensive but not ostentatiously priced in the shop overlooking the waters and the needle fountain of the Inner Alster.
The shirt had been bought for him by Alicia in the Monckebergstrasse, where she liked to go, where the Bear accompanied her. The tie had been a present from the girls for his last birthday, his fifty-third. What he would wear that evening had quiet class, he thought, but would not have cost as much as what would be worn by any of the three men who would entertain him for the concert and then for business over a late dinner. They were bankers: they could show the finery and demonstrate the wealth of their profession… Timo Rahman, and it was the basic rule of his life, never courted attention. The mirror, on the right door of the wardrobe, as his song died from its peak, reflected his body. In the flesh at the side of his chest was a puckered, still angry scar, the width of a pencil, the result of a. 22-calibre bullet. On his muscled belly, near his navel, was a second scar, five centimetres in length, where a knife had slashed but had not penetrated the stomach wall. That evening the bankers would see neither the bullet nor the knife wound. They were from many years back. It was eighteen years since Timo Rahman had left his father, left the mountains north of Lake Shkodra, and had been one more Albanian making the trek to the German city of Hamburg in search of success. He had found it. The evidence of it was that he would be the guest of three bankers for a concert at the City Hall and would be taken to the Fischerhaus, a private room, for dinner, where they would scrabble for his investment cash. The days when he had fought were long past. Success was his.