The meeting had started tetchily. The assistant deputy director had sketched through a picture of a co-ordinator, who was believed to be travelling to the United Kingdom, only believed, and was now probably, only probably, on the German island of Baltrum on the Frisian coast. The ADD had then asked: Should the German agencies be informed?
Should their help be sought?
'I think I have the general drift of opinion/ Gilbert said. 'I think you have all made clear a lack of enthusiasm for that course. Any final thoughts before we close on it?'
Dennis, of the Security Service and irritable because he had walked over the bridge from Thames House, been caught in a shower and had sodden trouser ankles, said, 'They'd flood the target area with goons, pick up this man who is probably there and believed to be significant and any chance of control is lost to us.
Look at the last two cases to go through their courts, in Hamburg and Mainz – enough said.'
'Yes, yes… I'd like Freddie, now, to tell us what he knows. The ball's in your court, Freddie.'
It would be, of course, a turf war. Each of them, opposite him, would fight a corner for primacy. He started with the story of a war being fought in distant mountains in a distant time. He saw a pencil twisting, a demonstration of impatience, in Dennis's hands.
'Please, could we have something of today, not of times before I was born?'
He spoke of Ricky Capel, drugs importer from south-east London, and of alliances that facilitated the movement of class-A narcotics into Britain, and saw boredom on the face of Trevor, the fidgeting at his cufflinks.
'I hardly think, Freddie, that we have been dragged round here for a lecture on how cocaine and heroin end up on our streets. We're supposed to be flushing out al-Qaeda operatives, not mincing round the drugs problems.'
He talked of a trawler that was, in foul weather, somewhere out in the North Sea, and said that he thought it would be used for a rat run across the water and back to British shores, and saw the first light of interest settle in the eyes of the Norfolk policeman, as if everything said before had been dross.
'Well, there's your answer. Seems simple enough to me, Freddie. I've excellently trained firearms officers ready to be deployed, and so have Suffolk. We're not yokels out there. We have experience, we've done the exercises. We follow the trawler, radar and all that, back over the North Sea, and we have my people – and Suffolk's – on standby along the coast. Soon as they're ashore we've got them. Open-and-shut business. Not that we need it, but do you have any more for us?'
He said that the trawler did not have a regular home port, and he could not promise where it would come into harbour, and the Special Forces liaison, Bill, seemed alerted to the opportunity. All of the others round the table wore suits, but this man had obviously reckoned his different status should be recognized by his faded cord trousers and heavy cable-knit sweater.
'With the greatest respect to our country cousins, I don't think this is up the street of Norfolk and Suffolk.
This is a job for us. I'm putting my weight behind a joint team, Hereford and Poole – which keeps both of them happy – and taken to sea tonight in a coastguard cutter, or anything that's got the legs on a trawler, and an interception in international waters. It's the sort of operation that should be left to professionals, and that's us. We're discreet and dynamic… It's for Special Forces, my people. I really don't think there's room for debate.'
He described the island. He talked of Polly Wilkins, out on the dunes, who would give a warning when the trawler came inshore. With some pride, Gaunt spoke of the achievement of this young woman, on her first overseas posting, and of the doors she had prised open since a fire and a death in Prague. He saw overplayed incredulity snap at Dennis's face.
'Am I hearing you right, Freddie? Are you telling us that you have, on the ground, in a situation of this importance, a rookie? A slip of a girl just off your induction course? Is that it? I'll say it to your face, Freddie, if this all goes sour, and it's down to your young woman's failure, I would not imagine – as far as government service goes – your feet'Il touch the ground. You'll be out on your arse, Freddie, and damn well rightly so. It is, and I'm sorry to say it, a cavalier road you're following. Not that it's for me to criticize the actions, procedures and operational decisions of a sister organization but I reckon it hard to credit that we're going to be dependent on the skills of one young woman, a rookie, a raw recruit.'
He ploughed on, led with his chin. He had learned well, at the break-up of his old unit, that when dogs circled him he could expect no help from his own, no protection from the assistant deputy director. He anticipated the sneers and inevitable derision. But, without enthusiasm, he described Polly Wilkins's companion on the island, and his past, the information he had provided. When he drew breath a babble broke round him – after the quiet and the shock.
'Are you levelling with us? You've dragged in a bloody vagrant for back-up?'
'Am I getting this correctly? A man who is disgraced with the stain of cowardice in the field has been taken on to your pay-roll?'
'Are you short of bodies, or just a sense of priorities? What's going on here, Freddie?'
He shuffled together his papers. Everything except the photograph of Anwar Maghroub went back into his briefcase. The case was his pride and gave him the small sense of belonging to the Service, little enough of it. It had been bought for him by his wife on his first birthday after their marriage. A technician down in the basement of a former building had, for cash in hand, put the gold stamp of EIIR on the case's flap
– worn and faded now, the edges were curled from use. He felt old, tired and useless, and each barb of their contempt had hurt a little more than the last… but the worse hurt was that he had not defended with resolve the efforts of Polly Wilkins and the man with her on the far-away dunes. He said, with a trifle of dignity, that he did not think he could be of further help.
'Well, that's it, then. Most grateful to you, Freddie,' the assistant deputy director intoned. 'I'm sure that the comments of colleagues were in no way meant as personal, not as reflections on your very satisfactory summary of where we are… That's the past. Our concern now is where we should be in the future, the next few hours.'
He hardly listened. Gaunt could have written the script.
'We are the providers and you, gentlemen, are the customers, and I think – bar some small blemishes – we have provided well. It seems to me that the point at issue is whether to intercept at sea-'
'It should be at sea,' Bill, the liaison man, said. 'At sea is where my people have expertise.'
'-or whether we should go for the land option.'
'So much tidier if it's us doing it,' Jimmy, the assistant chief constable, said. 'On land and done by us or Suffolk.'
Dennis was asked, did he have a dog in this fight?
He shrugged. 'Doesn't matter to us, we'd be easy with land or sea.'
Watching his Almighty, who had descended from an upper-floor firmament, Gaunt saw the lips purse and the forehead of the assistant deputy director furrow. He could predict the judgement, as if from Solomon's seat. Divide the baby, chop the little beggar in half and then there would be two parts to the corpse. Special Forces to shadow the trawler and watch for a drop-off short of the coast, with constant readiness for intervention and a cordon of guns from the Suffolk and Norfolk forces to be on the quayside at whatever port on the East Anglian mainland the trawler docked. It was theatre but it would be compromise. The Almighty, or Solomon, held his hands together in front of his mouth and pondered, the prayer gesture, and took the deep breath. Gaunt knew what he would say, could almost recite it.