'They're having early lunch. Some damned delay in the paperwork, so they won't be up till afternoon. I worked on it, and that's why you had to flog yourself down here. There are eight of them on remand. Take a look for yourself.'
Gaunt did. There was a spy-hole in each cell door.
The interiors were brightly lit. Some ate, picky and choosy; some had put the plate down beside them on the thin plastic-coated mattress and stared blankly at the food but did not touch it; one wept silently; one sobbed noisily and his shoulders shook. Gaunt estimated their ages at between eighteen and mid-twenties. They were all Asian. He assumed they were of Pakistani ethnic origin. Above his jeans, one wore an Arsenal football top, and another's T-shirt advertised Suzuki motorcycles. Trainers were common to them all. He remembered, now, on the far side of the canteen from where Dennis had sat, the families in the dress of Rawalpindi, Peshawar or Karachi, and the lawyers huddled with them. At the seventh cell door, when the guard stepped aside to allow him to get to the spy-hole, he saw a youth who was different – not by his clothes but by his face. All the others had seemed broken and bowed down, whether they cried or whether they stifled their misery. This was a boy, not yet a man, whose attention lay in the computing magazine he read, who had an alertness the others lacked. He checked the eighth door.
Halfway down the block, Dennis leaned comfortably against a tiled wall. 'Seen enough?'
'I suppose so.'
'They're the haul from Operation Angurvadel – not my idea of a moniker by the way, down to a bright spark on the AQ desk who did Scandinavian studies at Lancaster. It's a sword in Norse mythology that burns bright in war and goes dull in peace. Anti-terrorist and the Branch had a terrible problem with it, and most of us. Anyway, al-Qaeda and the warrior's, Frithiof's, sword came together. We hauled them in.
They're foot-soldiers, from east London, west London, Luton and Bedford. Look at them. Do they seem threatening to you? Of course they don't. Some would label them the Enemy Within. I tell you, Freddie, they were all out of their depth. We had taps on them through their mobiles, we had their homes bugged, we had them under surveillance for weeks before the arrests. Actually, they were quite harmless.
There was "chatter" among them that was enough to get us interested. They did not have detonators, or commercial or military explosive, but the "chatter" was sufficient to spell out their intention. We have lines into most of the mosques where the hot air's shouted. Put simply, they never had a chance – and they'll probably get ten years each, for being naive, gullible and subject to the indoctrination of a recruiter.
Still with me?'
'So, they're not jewels?'
'None of them has been near an AQ training camp in Afghanistan or Yemen. Nearest they've been to the sharp end is watching videos of atrocities and fire fights in Chechnya, Saudi and Iraq. That doesn't mean they wouldn't have been prepared to detonate a bomb in the centre of London or at Cribbs Causeway or at Glasgow airport, and go up with it. No lack of courage, just a lack of expertise… which is what's holding them back and why we are still, most of the time, winning.'
'What are they short of?'
'Please, Freddie, patience. What they have in common: they were all born in the UK, they all come from respectable families, none of them has a police record. We pick them up because when they get faith in a large dose they've headed for a mosque and an imam who is talking jihad. They read a manual that details the methodology of "blessed strikes". But that's not sufficient. What if there are foot-soldiers who don't go to a radical mosque and we don't pick up because they're not close to a firebrand imam?
What if they're directed by a man who understands the acquisition of explosives, detonators, who understands our capability of electronic surveillance and how we can make mobile phones dance to our tune?
Then we're in trouble. That's the nightmare that gets me to my desk before half seven, and I don't leave that desk before ten in the evening – a group of foot-soldiers we've never heard of, a recruiter we haven't identified, and they're controlled by a man whose safety is worth dying for.'
'Who is that man?'
'Don't you know, Freddie? I'd have assumed you did.'
The cell block seemed to close round him. He could smell the food, the toilets, the sweat of the guards in their protective vests. The corridor lights shone down dully on Dennis's face. Suddenly Gaunt was cold and bile rose in his throat. He choked it out. 'That would be a co-ordinator?'
'If you knew, why did you bother to trek over here?
He comes in, organizes at a level of quality, then is well gone before the "blessed strike". They accounted for all of the Madrid train crowd, except the co-ordinator. The co-ordinator is your jewel, Freddie. If a co-ordinator had had his hands on that lot…' Dennis waved expansively towards the cell doors '… they wouldn't be here, and we'd have been shafted – good and proper.'
'Thank you.'
Halfway up the stairs, going towards clean air and clean light, he turned and caught Gaunt's sleeve. 'If you get the whisper that your man's coming near, you'll tell me, won't you? Give me chapter on it and verse – or it's explosion time and fucking catastrophe.
You will?'
'If I get the whisper. If…'
Outside, Gaunt sat in his car for a full ten minutes.
His hands shook and he waited for them to calm.
Nothing in his life – Cold War warrior, Iraq war warrior, organized-crime war warrior – had prepared him for what he had seen, young men who were pitiful in defeat and slumped in cells, and for what he had heard. He thought of Dennis, pompous and point-scoring, hurrying to Thames House each morning before the throb of the capital city beat on the masses, and the nightmare that engulfed him.
He drove away through the blocks and past the guns. The image of the co-ordinator, free and running loose, stayed with him all the way to his desk, and the hideous problem: if the Prague trail went cold, where to bloody look for him.
The policeman watched Timo Rahman with the closeness of a hunting fox.
He was Johan Konig. It was the start of the second week of his attachment to the Organized Crime Division. He had come from Berlin, seconded as assistant deputy commander. On bogus credentials he sat in on the meeting. Probably his presence in the offices of the Special Investigation Unit of the Revenue – and the deception used to put him there – violated Rahman's human rights. He was forty-seven, short and barrel-chested, and his hair had thinned.
Inside the close circle of men and women in Berlin with whom he had worked, Konig had achieved a reputation as a detective of stubborn persistence.
What had brought him from Berlin to Hamburg was this target: a true prize.
Rahman had not spoken since the meeting had begun. On his side of the wide, shiny table, the Albanian was flanked by three accountants who talked for him. Konig was at the end of a line of four Revenue men. Carafes of water and glasses, not used, stood in front of each team with bundles of files. The meeting had been called, so the notification to Rahman's accountants had stated, to discuss routine general matters. Each question from the Revenue men was directed to Rahman personally, and each answer came back from whichever accountant covered that particular issue.
The man fascinated Konig, who spoke fluent
Albanian. He had been on the anti-corruption team of the International Police Task Force sent to Pristina in Kosovo. He had learned there of the ruthless qualities of Kosovar Albanians, their endemic criminality, cruelty, secretiveness and power. His transfer from Berlin to a city where he was unknown was for the express purpose of bringing the pate before the courts and convicting him. Konig was intrigued by his target's bearing – for the first half-hour of the meeting he had thought Rahman's demeanour was almost of indifference.