'That's a cheerful message to start the day.'
The night-duty man led her away along the corridor. They went down three floors in an elevator.
Down more flights of stairs. She realized then that none of the big battalions marched with her.
She had no weapon and no back-up to call on. The cell door was unlocked. He lay on the bed.
She threw the plastic bag at his head and it cannoned into his face. His eyes burst open.
'Come on/ she snapped. 'My options were shifting you out or learning more about the hygiene habits of hippopotami -1 chose you. Move yourself.'
He looked up at her, eyes glazed with bewilderment, and shook himself.
From the bag, he took the belt and slotted it into his trousers. He laced his shoes, put the watch on his wrist and hung the tags at his throat. Then she took him out into the last of the night's darkness.
His train had been delayed, a points failure on the track south of Lincoln, and the taxi queue at the station had been endless. By the time he returned to his office, the bells behind Big Ben's clock face were chiming midnight. Gaunt found the signal. Because it rambled and was strewn with typescript errors, he thought his precious Polly suffered acute exhaustion.
Most of the others of her age who had desks scattered through the building popularly known as Ceausescu Towers – but not Wilco – would have gone to their beds and then, after toast and coffee, have composed a report without errors of syntax, punctuation, spelling. She had responded, and he blessed her, to her understanding of urgency.
The signal, and he had read it four times before he unfolded the camp-bed and shook out the blankets, was a masterclass in confusion – yet there was clarity.
A clear enough link, he believed, now existed between a fugitive escaping from Prague, a co-ordinator, and a considerable player in Hamburg's community of organized crime, a high-value target.
The lights switched off, his jacket and waistcoat, shirt, tie and suit trousers over the hanger on the back of the door, his shoes neatly laid at its foot, he stretched himself out on the bed, and spread a blanket over him. God, was this not business that should be consigned to the young? Work tossed in his mind, and in his hand – gripped tight – was the sheet of paper that described a man rescued from the security fence around that HVT's property. A name, a date of birth, a six-digit service number, a blood group, an occupation of government service, a tongue that stayed silent and a British-issued passport.
Confusion, because he did not know whether Polly Wilkins had blundered on something of importance or was distracted by an irrelevance.
And no way of telling, not till dawn, not before the banks of government computers in the outposts of the ministries across the Thames sprang to life. God, was he not too old for all of it? He saw them sometimes, rarely more than often, the men and women who had taken the retirement carriage clock or the decanter and glasses set, and had handed in their swipe-card IDs for entry to the main doors of Vauxhall Bridge Cross.
All had gone out, at the end of a Friday afternoon, last day of the month, bowed with tiredness and clutching their gift of appreciation. Every one of those whom he met, on a pavement or by chance in a restaurant, seemed reborn. They were like those come-lately Christians, oozing confidence and brimming health.
'You know the best-kept secret inside that bloody place, Freddie? There's a life outside. Never knew it till I got there – outside. Haven't ever felt better. Don't mind me, Freddie, but you look a bit washed through.
When are you chucking it in, Freddie? My only regret, should have done it years back.' It frightened him, alone on the bed with the quiet of the building hugging him, that he should be gone from the place, yesterday's man, with work unfinished. 'That bloody place' was Freddie Gaunt's home… He was drifting towards a fitful sleep.. . And the enemies he hunted were his life-blood – but he could not guess where they were, could not identify them because they wore no damned uniform.
He did not know where his name was written down, what alias was used, and how many had access to it.
He travelled to work each day in his uncle's transit van, with his uncle's logo on the side, sitting with his tools and his uncle's sons. He was far from his immediate family: his parents, brothers and sisters lived in the port city of Karachi where his father and brothers broke up the steel hulls of unwanted ships for scrap metal. He had wanted more and his ambitions had led him to join his mother's brother in London. Ambition had not been fulfilled. At the age of twenty-three, he was not a laboratory scientist, not an engineer, not a scholar, but a plumber's mate. The resentment had flourished sufficiently to take him to a mosque in south London where an imam talked at Friday prayers about injustice. There was the injustice that permitted white society to walk over the aspirations of Muslim youth in his new homeland, the injustice shown to worshippers of Islam in Saudi, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Palestine. He no longer harboured resentment. Two years ago, less a month, he had been asked to stay behind as the faithful had slipped away from the prayers, and the imam had spoken to him in a hushed tone. Would he serve?
Would he wait until he was called? Did he have the strength of his faith? Was patience a virtue of his? He went now to a new mosque, in the west of the city, where an imam preached religion but did not speak of the war zones where Muslim brothers fought for the privilege of martyrdom.
He was brighter at work, did not complain about rising and dressing before the dawn's light lifted over the capital. Each morning and each evening he crossed the City of London on his way to and from work. Some days the crowded Transit van was stopped by the armed police officers at their road-blocks, but their route was always the same and they had become known. More often now they were waved through and drove away from the men with protective vests and machine-guns without being quizzed and the van's contents searched. The same applied at his place of work, where he wore an identification tag hung from a neck chain, and there also the security guards were familiar to them.
Five days a week, the van was parked in a designated bay deep in the basement of the great tower that was Canary Wharf. In those two years he had learned by heart the hidden ducts that carried the air-conditioning systems, water supplies and sewage outlets in the building that dominated the skyline and could be seen from many miles away. He thought it a symbol of the power that had denied him the opportunity to fulfil his ambitions. Each working day, he saw the surge in and out of the many thousands who had blocked him, and did not know of him. One day, he had been told, a man would seek him out, would speak to him: 'God will say, "How many days did you stay on the earth?" 'He would answer, and the words were always in his mind: 'They will say, "We stayed a day or part of a day." 'It no longer troubled him that his response, from the Book, 23:112-113, gave him the answer of the unbelievers on the Day of Judgement.
He had been promised that one day the man would come, and he believed the promise.
His primary job was to drive the forklift vehicle that moved the flat-packs of self-assembly furniture from the lorries that came from the factory at Ostrava in the Czech Republic. His secondary job was to be first at the warehouse to unlock the side gates of the yard and the main building where the offices were, flush on the street, and in the evening he was the last to leave, and fastened and checked the doors, windows and main gate.
The forklift driver walked along the street, briskly because he was late on his schedule, and saw a man on the step outside the offices' door, hunched, low and in the shadow. Few matters concerning the warehouse surprised the driver. He worked for a company owned by Timo Rahman, and knew a little of the complexities of his employer's business. He understood that, in the affairs of Timo Rahman, men came without warning and without introduction to the warehouse, and that questions were not asked and explanations were not offered. He passed the man and, because the head was bowed, did not see the face. He went on to the corner, turned into the narrow driveway that separated the warehouse and offices from the next premises. He loosed the padlock on the yard gates.