What he understood was his growing fondness for the man sitting in the car behind him, talking in the quiet voice — showing his own loneliness and isolation, and starting to give that precious thing, trust. And, in his blurred mind, he valued the man’s confidences.
The city prided itself on the title ‘Gateway to the World’. It boasted the most advanced container port ever built. Hamburg, in northern Germany, was sited on the Elbe river, sixty-five land miles from the estuary spilling into the North Sea. From its docks flotillas of cargo vessels sail on journeys to all points of the globe.
The Crow had flown from Belgrade to Munich, then taken a taxi to the railway station there, paid cash for a ticket to Cologne and taken the night train to Hamburg. Dawn was breaking. A low mist slowed the morning light, and the rain spotted his shoulders, but he walked well, not furtively. Instructions and directions had been given to him, and a schedule, and he followed them exactly. They took him away from the Hauptbahnhof, and across an empty square where the first flower-sellers and traders in fresh fruit and vegetables were setting up their stalls and erecting canopies to catch the rain. He went on to Steinstrasse, then took the left turning as instructed.
There was little traffic that early and he was able to hear the call to prayer, the first of the day. He saw the minaret of the mosque, topping chimneys and the roofs of office blocks. The tower was a beacon for him. He thought for a moment of those who had been in that mosque, had worshipped there, and flown the aircraft into the Twin Towers and into the Pentagon building, of their commitment to their faith and their cause. He was humbled by them, but dismissed it. The world had moved on, and a new war had developed. Many had died and many more had been taken to gaols and torture rooms. He followed a route given him. His focus was on the memorized instructions and directions. He came to a door.
The Crow pressed the third from the top of seven buttons.
He heard a guttural cough, then the request that a stranger identify himself.
The Crow gave the word he had been told to use, in Arabic, spoke it to the microphone hidden by the grille.
He heard the lock click open.
The Crow climbed three flights of stairs.
He stood on a landing and waited until a door was opened and he was admitted.
The Crow was asked, hesitantly, by an older man, if he had had a good journey.
He said it had been satisfactory and ducked his head in appreciation at the courtesy of the question.
The Crow was told of the arrangements in place, confirmed by this hawaldar, for the transfer of a bond valued at one million American dollars to a bank in Leipzig, and the coded number that would release it for transfer to accounts in Greek Cyprus specified by Oleg Yashkin and Igor Molenkov, both Russian citizens. Then it was confirmed to him that a further sum of ten million American dollars was now available for payment to the Russian citizen Reuven Weissberg, and it was understood that such payment would be overseen by another Russian citizen, Josef Goldmann.
He confirmed, of course, that payment for purchase and sale depended on safe delivery and verification of the capabilities of the item under negotiation.
The Crow added that such necessary verification would be carried out by a qualified expert.
They shook hands, then hugged, kissed briefly, and he was on his way out into the morning mist that rose from the Binnenalster lake, the Oberhafen canal and the Elbe waterway.
He was exhausted, had not slept. With a swaying, shambling step, Sak walked from the Hauptbahnhof. The British passport in the inside pocket, against his chest — it had been shown on the Brussels-to-Cologne leg of the journey — was in the name of Steven Arthur King. The previous evening, he had left the St Pancras terminus on a Eurostar connection to Brussels and had used a Pakistan-issued passport giving his identity as Siddique Ahmed Khatab. He saw stalls of bright flowers, fine fruit and the best vegetables, and the rain dripped from the striped awnings protecting them.
He could have caught a direct flight from Birmingham International to Hamburg-Ohlsdorf, but that had been forbidden by those who had planned his journey. Sak had taken the last train of the evening from London, then sat alone and fearful in the Brussels station to wait for the night connection to Hamburg. The great station had been darkened while the hours had eased past. Under the one pool of lights was a cluster of seats and he and other nightbird travellers had waited there. He didn’t understand fully why he had not been permitted to fly. The lit area seemed to him an oasis of safety. He had joined a few students and a few grandparents and had sat up through the rest of the night in a carriage with dimmed lights and hard seats.
In the dawn, with rain running ribbons down the window, the night train had brought him to Hamburg.
The worst part of the whole journey, he would have said if asked, was the walk from the train door along the platform, up the long flight of steps, and the length of the bridge over the tracks towards the dull light of morning, the stalls and the taxi rank. What caused the fear was the halting memory of boasts made. The boasts had been of his importance in the structure of the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in the Thames Valley, and had tripped easily off his tongue in the garden of a villa on the outskirts of Quetta. He had been listened to with respect in that garden, and the enormity of the betrayal he had suffered had seemed irresistible in the telling. Walking the last few strides towards the light and the traffic roar, seeing the spread of the square in front of him, Sak realized his liberty was now in the hands of others: those he had met in Quetta, those who had spoken his name in communications, those who had put forward his name, those who had staked out the pavement between the school and his home, the young woman — not robed but in hipster jeans, a T-shirt and a Puffa anorak, with lipstick on her mouth and highlights in her hair — who had given him the tickets, had accosted him by the machine that measured blood pressure, and those he had not yet met. So many knew his name and had decided on his journey.
The fear made him shiver until he was out of the railway station and into the heart of the square, but he was not felled from behind and there was no gun barrel against his neck and no handcuffs on his wrists. He began, then, to control the trembling.
As he had been told to, Sak took a bus to the west of the city, up the Elbe estuary, and in his mind was the address of the car-rental company he must get to. With the shivering not eradicated but lessened, self-esteem returning slowly, the old arrogance and bitterness coming back to roost within him, he could not imagine how an operation of such sophistication, of such extraordinarily detailed planning, could be obstructed or by whom.
Mikhail came off the highway, did the half-circle on the roundabout, then braked abruptly. A lorry slewed away from behind them, and there was a fanfare of a horn’s protest. Mikhail, as if it were his privilege on a roundabout to change his mind, swung the wheel and went round again.
Carrick play-acted the game, used the passenger side mirror and the central mirror.
It was the old and familiar one of checking for a tail — as old and familiar as doing shop-window reflections. Nothing crossed Carrick’s face, no sardonic amusement at the manoeuvre. He wore the Makharov in the pancake on his belt. It was loaded now and he had checked the mechanism. The safety was depressed and the weapon could not be fired without that lever being moved … but he carried an illegal firearm and it was loaded with illegal ammunition. He seemed not to care over what line he had strayed.