(2005) Rat Run (19 page)

They'd done the meeting, had shaken hands on a deal, and then there had been food in the club. The girl had stood at the back and her eyes had never been off him.

Christ, he'd wanted her, like he'd never wanted anything. Bought her, hadn't he? Bought her for cash, peeled it out of his pocket, and told Enver that there'd be no more bloody customers for her, and he'd collect her when he'd got premises. In a careful life, it was the wildest thing that Ricky Capel had ever done -

bought a tart out of a brothel off an Albanian.

The way she grunted on him, the whole of that building at Chelsea Harbour, through concrete floors and concrete walls, would have heard her. Bloody, bloody - God - marvellous, and he clung to her breasts.

In his third or fourth meeting with Enver, long after he'd taken delivery of her, Ricky had told him, sort of casual, that his grandfather had been in Albania in the war. What was his grandfather's name and where had his grandfather been? Percy Capel, up in the north -

and he'd struggled to pronounce the place name

- with a Major Anstruther. Next time they'd met, him and Enver, Ricky had been given an envelope. In it was what he'd paid for the girl. Enver had giggled and told him why the money had come back. Enver's uncle was in Hamburg, Germany. The uncle's father was Mehmet Rahman, who had fought with Major Hugo Anstruther and Flight Sergeant Percy Capel against the Fascists in the mountains north of Shkodra. Small world, small bloody world.

She was coming, crouched over him, bellowing, like he was the best shag she'd ever had.

He did not rate the risk she represented. The Albanians, from that distant link between a grandfather and the father of an uncle, were his partners -

well, not real partners because he controlled it all. He called the tune, Ricky did. He was never backed into a corner. He bought off them and used Harry's trawler to bring in the packages. He used his network of knowledge for haulage companies to help them get the girls, from Belarus, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Romania, into the country. He hired them - his cousin Benji called them 'the Merks', the mercenaries - for heavy punishment if a man showed him disrespect.

He had no cause to sweat on the arrangement: he had not lost control, never would - and the money rolled in for Charlie to wash, rinse, scrub clean.

She came, then him. Ricky sagged on the bed and she rolled off him. She peeled off the condom, and went to make him tea. Always tea, never alcohol.

He lay back and gasped. She was his best, his most precious secret.

Mikey Capel always watched little Wayne, Ricky's boy, play football for the under-nine team of the junior school, St Mary's.

He was on the touchline in the park area. There were no trees to break the force of the wind and he was huddled among the young mums and other

grandparents. In a mid-week afternoon there were few fathers. He was at ease, liked the gossip among the men of his own age and a quiet flirt with the mothers. He enjoyed those afternoons. Little Wayne wasn't good, only useful, and he was hidden away by the teacher in charge on the left side of midfield where the kid's shortcomings in talent had least effect on the side's efforts; little Wayne was always picked by the teacher because his father, Ricky, had provided the team's shirts, knicks and socks, the same colours as Charlton Athletic, who used the Valley down the road. Maybe 'useful' was putting it strong, but it was fun for Mikey to watch him . . . He knew, that afternoon, where Ricky was and with whom, why he

wasn't on the touchline.

Actually, the game against Brendon Road Junior was absorbing enough for him not to notice the powerfully built man, perhaps five years older than himself, with an erect bearing, sidle to his shoulder.

The noise around him had reached fever pitch. The ball was with a little black kid, might have been the smallest on the pitch but tricky like a bloody eel, and he was wriggling down his team's right touchline and the St Mary's left side and was coming right up against the faded white markings of the penalty box. The black kid had skill.

'Go on, Wayne, fix him!' Mikey yelled, through his cupped hands.

The little black kid, the ball seeming stuck to his toe, danced round little Wayne.

'Don't let him, Wayne! Block him!'

Oh, Jesus! The ball was gone, and the kid nearly gone, when little Wayne shoved out his right boot -

most expensive that Adidas made for that age group

- hooked it round the kid's trailing leg and tripped him. Oh, Christ! The Brendon Road mums and grandfathers howled for blood - red-card blood - and the whistle shrieked. Oh, bloody hell. But the referee didn't send him off. He merely wagged his finger at the sour-faced child.

A rich Welsh accent rang in Mikey's ear: 'I suppose his dad's bought the referee. Chip off the old block that one, vicious little sod - proud of him, Mikey? I expect you are.'

He swung. Recognition came. 'It's Mr Marchant, isn't it?'

'And that's Ricky Capel's brat, right?'

'That is my grandson. I thought he tried to play the ball and - and was just a bit late in the tackle.'

'About half an hour bloody late. Like father, like son. I always reckon you can tell them, those that are going to be scum.'

'There's no call for that talk, Mr Marchant.' But there was no fight in Mikey's voice.

His mind clattered through the arithmetic of it.

Would have been nineteen years since he had last seen Gethin Marchant, detective sergeant, Flying Squad - a straight-up guy and civilized, never one to make a show. The Squad had come for Mikey, half six in the morning, and the afternoon before they'd done this factory pay-roll and all gone wrong because a delivery lorry had blocked in the get-away wheels and they'd done a run with nothing. Mr Marchant had led the arrest team, nothing fancy, and the door hadn't been sledgehammered off its hinges before Sharon had opened up. Even given him time to get out of his pyjamas and dressed. And allowed him to kiss Sharon in the hall so that the neighbours wouldn't have too much to tittle over, and Ricky had come out of his bedroom and down the stairs, like a bloody cyclone, and thrown himself at the arresting coppers. Barefoot but he'd kicked at shins and kneed balls, and then he'd jumped up more than his full height and head-butted a constable hard enough to split the man's lip, flailing with his fists. It had taken three of them, and his mum, to subdue the thirteen-year-old Ricky, and the girls at the top of the stairs had been weeping their bloody eyes o u t . . . Proper upsetting it had been.

'Where's Ricky now? Doing his scum bit?' The Welshness lilted, but there was contempt in the hard voice of the retired detective sergeant. 'God, I'd hate to think I'd fathered that sort of creature, and that there was another coming along, same vein. What encourages me, it'll all end in tears because it always does . . . Sorry, sorry. Nice to have met up with you again, Mikey - got to go.'

Mikey saw Gethin Marchant scurry, as best he could at his age, on to the pitch. The little black kid was down, in tears, and the foul had ended his afternoon's football. When the game restarted, while the detective sergeant held the little bundle of the boy on his shoulder on the far touchline, the Brendon Road kids scored, and then the referee blew his whistle for full time.

Little Wayne came to him. 'We was bloody robbed.

We—'

'You were shit,' Mikey, the grandfather, snapped back. 'Next time your father can watch you. It won't be me.'

No, Ricky wouldn't be there to watch little Wayne, because Ricky was screwing on those afternoons when St Mary's had matches. He had a good mate, been inside with him and shared a cell with him, who now drove a mini-cab for a company at the bottom end of the King's Road. They drank together some Tuesday nights. The mini-cab driver had been waiting for a fare at Chelsea Harbour when he'd seen Ricky with his bottle-blonde tart, her big boobs and long legs. Mikey had never cheated on Sharon. He remembered, looking down at little Wayne, what the retired detective had said.

He grabbed the sulking child's hand. 'Come on, let's go home.'

What had been said, which he believed:
It'll all end
in tears because it always does.
He strode away across the grass and the mud, dragging the kid behind him.

'What's the priority?'

The question came from a line manager, who lived his working life in a complex surrounded by

thousands of yards of fencing and razor wire, protected by armed guards, built on moorland in north Yorkshire, west of Scarborough on the coast and north of Malton. At Menwith Hill - officially an outpost of the British listening spies at Cheltenham - the National Security Agency, headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland, called an American tune. The majority of the budget for the intercept databases on this wind-scarred, remote ground of bracken and heather, was in dollars.

He who pays the piper calls the tune.

At Menwith Hill, great white golfball shapes rise above the moorland, sometimes glittering in sunshine and sometimes misted by low cloud. The balls protect the scanning dishes that suck in millions of phone communications every day. Then computers, operating at speeds of nano-seconds, interpret what has been swallowed into the stomach of the beast.

Hundreds of NSA personnel have made this corner of the United Kingdom into a little piece of the Midwest of America. American needs, in the War on Terror, dictate how the computer time is allocated. British technicians must accept the reality, however unwelcome, of being the subordinate partner.

So, the line manager demanded clarification of the priority level of the request from London. 'I'm sure you'll appreciate, Mr Gaunt, that matters related to Pakistan, Egypt, Yemen and the Saudi Kingdom take most of our time - and that's all linked, as you know well, to US requirements. Prague isn't high, no. If you were to tell me that by monitoring all satphone and mobile links out of Prague to wherever in Europe, I would be meeting a category-four priority level - you know, life and death, Mr Gaunt - then I might be able to play with a bit of machine-switching,
might..
. and I'd have to know, Mr Gaunt, in what language we'd be most likely dealing, and what the trigger words are. I think that if I had your assurance, and I'd need a back-up signal of authorization that this was category-four minimum, then I might,
might,
be able to help. Are you there, Mr Gaunt? . . . Albanian language, that's not easy. Oh, might be Arabic, or a Chechen dialect, oh . . . No trigger words? . . . All I can say, Mr Gaunt, is that I'll do my best - say three or four days. Yes, Mr Gaunt, and we're pushed at this end too . . . '

The screen gave Polly a black-and-white image of the interior of the cell.

Ludvik, at her shoulder, asked her remotely, 'Do you not approve?'

'Not for me to have an opinion,' she murmured. 'I just have to hope that what you're doing is effective.

Whether I like it or not is irrelevant.'

Yes, old matters of ethics and morality took a back seat in the new war. She saw a bucket lifted and the water from it was thrown so that it splashed on to the face and head of the man she knew to be a cafe owner from the east of the Old City, out by the Florenc bus station. The water ran down his cheeks and chest, and blood sluiced off the injuries inflicted on him. She thought, momentarily, that this was a return to days long gone when Stalin's purges had filled these same basement cells, and before that as Gestapo interrogators had gone to work to extract the names of the assassins of Reichs-Protector Heydrich.

'It is necessary.'

'You did not hear me say it was not,' Polly said softly.

The cells, dark little cubicles with high, barred windows of dirty glass that looked out at boot level on to the interior square of the police barracks, were where Communist and Nazi torturers had been. They could similarly have justified the pain and brutality of what they did. Now it was the turn of the
democrats
to use that cell and to beat, slap and kick, deprive a man of sleep, make him scream in agony, and to hide behind the wall of 'It is necessary'. As the water dripped to the floor, the man's head lifted and his bruised face focused again on the ceiling, the work resumed. Short-arm, closed-fist punches to the face, booted kicks to the kidneys and when the cafe owner's head dropped again, his grey hair was caught and held up so that the target remained accessible. There was no high horse on which Polly Wilkins could have sat and played indifference. Over the last two years men and women from the Service had trooped in and out of interrogation rooms at Bagram in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo Bay and at holding camps in Iraq - her people, her colleagues. No bleat from the Service then about ethics and morality. Of course, her hands and their hands stayed clean because they let surrogates do it and could then claim ignorance. And others were shipped, in the name of the War on Terror, to cell blocks in Damascus or Cairo, and transcripts were sent back - with no bloodstains on them - that drove forward investigations.

'What has he said so far?'

'Nothing of importance.'

'Perhaps that's because you have hit his face so often that he cannot talk any more/ she said drily. 'Do you think he might talk better if you hit his face less often?'

'Do you want information or do you want your conscience to be comfortable?'

'Oh, for fuck's sake . . . ' She turned away from the screen. If her mother and father - both teachers in an insignificant country town in Wiltshire, both thrilled that their daughter worked for the Defence of the Realm - had known what their daughter watched on a TV screen they might have vomited. But, far from home, it was the reality of what she did. She looked back at the screen, then blinked and peered harder at it. If they had not held the cafe owner's grey hair, his head would have fallen on to his soaked chest, but they did, and his hands rose briefly and feebly to protect his face - fingers over his eyes and mouth -

before they were ripped away and another punch landed.

'Can you zoom in?'

'No, it is a fixed lens.'

'I want to go in there.'

'Because we do not understand the skill of interrogation? Do we need another lesson from SIS?' The sarcasm hit her. 'Why?'