A minicab pulled up beside him.
Most of the drivers working that part of Dudley, in the West Midlands, were known to Sak, but he didn’t recognize this driver.
The window was wound down. He was asked his name by the driver, whom Sak thought to be north African, perhaps from Algeria or Morocco. At the school where he worked as a laboratory technician he was Steven King. The name he gave to the minicab driver was Siddique Khatab.
‘Repeat that.’
‘Siddique Ahmed Khatab.’
‘And your father’s name?’
He gave it. The light was failing and the street was a crowded bustle of kids and parents surging away from the school’s gates towards the estate. On the far side of the estate was the guesthouse his father and mother owned. It was used by sales representatives and lorry drivers on long hauls and those coming to the town for weddings or funerals. He understood the wariness of the approach, as careful as the message that had woken him: the arrests of the last two years had shown the futility of using telephones, analogue or digital, and email links. The driver accepted what he was told, grinned as if he enjoyed the sense of conspiracy, and reached into the glove compartment. An envelope was passed to Sak.
He took it, folded it quickly, thrust it into his hip pocket. He gulped. The minicab drove away. It would have seemed to any who hurried by him on the pavement that he had given a driver instructions on a destination.
Where there were longer shadows, and the crowds walking with him had thinned, Sak took out the envelope. He examined the tickets and the dates on them, returned them to their envelope and the envelope to his pocket.
There was a reason for him having been woken.
From university, in 1997, he had gone to work in the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston. There, he was Steven Arthur King, BSc, involved in low-level work but it had interested him. He had felt a part of a great team involved in the far frontiers of science. He had lived in a hostel for single professional and qualified staff. He had revelled in it, had taken time to read in the library of the early giants of the laboratories and test-beds, and had felt he belonged to an élite. After five years, he was outside the main gate for the last time — no appeal permitted — his access card withdrawn.
On the train home, returning in ignominy to the West Midlands, he had dropped his head on to his arms and wept, such was the humiliation he felt.
The anger had been born.
A man came to the Portakabin where the Crow worked. The door was rapped. He opened it. A package was given him. He closed the door. He had not seen the courier’s face, and was confident that once the man had left the site, under the huge crane, the entry pass given to him would be destroyed.
Inside the package he found airline tickets, a passport issued by a Canadian agency and a map of the rendezvous point where he would meet a brother and the criminals. There was a contact address for the hawaldar in the German city of Hamburg. He would provide the funds to be paid to the criminals. He had no love of such people, but times were hard and survival ever harder.
Too many were now arrested, were in the gaols of the Americans. Too many networks had been broken into, too many plans, near to execution, had been disrupted. But this would be a great strike, the greatest, and the Crow’s part in it — though small — was of prime importance. He must work and deal with criminals, pay them for what they delivered in American dollars supplied by the hawaldar, though they were kaffirs. It was necessary to buy from whoever could supply, even from unbelievers.
The hate in his heart was undiminished by the years that had gone by, was fresh and keen. He locked the package and its contents in his floor safe. To work with unbelievers — to achieve a great strike — was justified, as it was to buy from criminals.
He returned to his work and quantified how many tons of cement mix were needed for the coming week, but he would not be in Dubai to oversee its delivery. He would be with mafiya men whom he despised.
Reuven sat quietly in the shadows. This part of the warehouse was Mikhail’s territory.
Back in Perm, in the early days, he and Mikhail had owned expensive pedigree dogs, two Rottweilers and a German Shepherd. They were vicious beasts and controlled only by Mikhail and him, but gentle with his grandmother. She could handle them and they slobbered at her whisper, all of them, but the dogs created terror. Reuven thought Mikhail more violent and more sadistically cruel than the dogs at their worst. When they had left Perm, moved to Moscow, he had asked his grandmother what should be done with the dogs, to whom they might be given. She had said, ‘Shoot them. You want a dog, put a collar on Mikhail.’ She had walked away and the dogs were not spoken of again, but she had stroked their heads, had bent her small head low so that they could lick her face, and she had condemned them.
Two weeks before, the chair had been taken by a Bulgarian who had tried to muscle into the Kurfürstendamm trade in girls. The stains were still on the concrete floor, with the dirt that had been thrown over the wet blood. Those who already ran strings of girls on the Kurfürstendamm paid for the protection of their businesses, and two weeks before, the competition had been removed. They would have thought their investment in a roof was money well spent, and they would have seen the reports in the Morgenpost newspaper and on television after the Bulgarian’s body was discovered on the banks of the Tegeler See. Reuven had been away, reconnoitring the Bug river, but he had seen what Mikhail had done, and what his clients would have read and watched, and knew they would be satisfied.
In the chair now was an Albanian.
The Albanian, an immigrant from the Kosovo city of Priština, had tried to sell passports. Not good passports, inadequately forged ones, but they competed with those sold to non-European Union men who had come across frontiers to Germany and needed legitimacy, and who would pay ten thousand dollars for a passport, however poor. But Reuven Weissberg provided the roofs for a Russian and a Romanian who sold better passports. The day before he went to Poland he had visited the Albanian and had spoken calmly of the need for this man to transfer his business to Dresden, Rostock or Leipzig, anywhere other than Berlin, but the man had spat in his face.
That evening the Albanian was brought — having been lifted off the street when walking his daughter, the child abandoned to find her own way home — to the old warehouse in the Kreuzberg district between the canal and the Spree. Tied down in the chair, where the Bulgarian had been, the Albanian had again spat defiance, but then had seen what was his fate.
A cable brought the power from the wall. Among the multiple plugs at its end was the lead for a power drill. On a table beside the drill was a small chain-saw, a welding burner, lit, and a loaded pistol. A message was about to be sent to the two traders in passports who would read the Morgenpost and see the city news on television.
The chair was screwed down to the floor. The Albanian was tied fast to it. His shirt was pulled back and the marks of the flame disfigured his body. He was not gagged and not blindfolded. He could see what would be used on him next, and could scream, but no one came to that warehouse. It was as it had been in Perm, to enforce the roofs, and in Moscow … This, of course, was only minor business in the empire of Reuven Weissberg. He had links in Sicily and Milan; he could arrange protection for any American business looking to exploit the new wealth of Russia; he could transfer cash sums, suitcases and boxes of it, to London where it was handled by Josef Goldmann. But the small detail of insignificant contracts — the protection of men running girls or selling passports — excited him.