power and the personnel carrier behind them gave a sort of comfort. It was a feckin' awful road back to Battalion – a sniper alley, and RPG-missile alley, a buried-bomb-at-the-end-of-a-control-wire alley. But the heat, feckin' awful, calmed him.
It was the smell, worse than his feckin' boots would have been. He looked inside the lorry. 'You know what, Fran?
One of them's shat himself.'
'Which one?'
He looked up the line of men, five of them, on the bench opposite, beyond Fran. Each had his ankles roped to the bench stanchions, wrists manacled behind them, and each was blindfolded with sticking tape. How would Dogsy decide which of them had fouled himself? He leaned forward so that he could check the men on his bench. Four more men with ropes, manacles and tape blindfolds – and another. At the lorry's bulkhead, up against the driver's cab, without restraints, was an officer.
'Hey, Fran, is that him?' he whispered.
'What you say, Dogsy? You got to shout. What?'
He did. 'Is that the Rupert?' he yelled.
'That's him.'
'The Rupert that Baz said was feckin'yellow?'
'Bottled out. That's him, Dogsy.'
'How could a guy do that, Fran – an officer?'
'Couldn't hack it. The section had a good fight, used up juice like no tomorrow, did slots, but the Rupert didn't stay around to see it.'
'What'll they do to him?'
'God knows… Who cares? I don't, you shouldn't.'
He stared up the swaying length of the lorry. They had been shouting questions, yelling answers. The officer's head shook against the bulkhead and he did not seem to feel pain, as if he was in deep sleep, and his body moved with the lorry's lurch when the wheels hit potholes… Poor bastard.
Not that, to Fran, Dogsy would have uttered sympathy for the man called a coward. He looked away, back at the nose of the following Warrior. •k**
Polly did lunch with Ludvik. She had booked the table at the restaurant over the Vltava from the embassy. It would not come cheap but would be on expenses, authorized by Justin Braithwaite. 'I want to take you out and show you my thanks, up close and personal, for the co-operation and professionalism at Kostecna,' she'd said, when she'd rung him – and, like an afterthought, 'Oh, by the by, something that's been hanging around on my desk for weeks. I'm sure it's not important, but I've a phone number. I need to know whose it is, what they do. Got a pencil?' She'd let him order – grilled carp and salad, after local soup, and fine beer. She'd waited, made small-talk, rolled her eyes at him and played at being fascinated by what he said.
During the salad, he'd let his knee nudge her thigh.
When she'd struggled to fillet the carp, he had leaned across the table, head close, hands near hers, to work the flesh expertly off the bone. Too much looking earnestly into the eyes around which she'd smeared the makeup. Thought he was in with a chance, didn't he? Thought the afternoon might end up at his apartment or hers, hadn't he? Then coffee, strong. It was what she had done with Dominic, end up at his flat, when she'd had a day off and the Foreign and Commonwealth wouldn't miss him, and they'd taken a bottle with them to bed… but that was all long gone.
She left it late, then slid in the question. 'That number, any luck?'
First, she was told what she knew – wasn't bloody stupid: the number was at Ostrava, near the Polish border.
'Oh, did you find whose it was? The office dumped me with it last month.'
She was given a name. She had her pencil out of her bag and scribbled what she was told on the back of a torn-open envelope, which she thought was an indication of the matter's minimal importance. Gaunt's favourite mantra was about trust: don't. His second favourite was about sharing intelligence with an ally: never, if it can be avoided. If it could not be avoided it should be economical in the extreme. He reached across the table, almost shyly, but far enough for his fingertips to brush against her hand, holding the envelope.
She smiled, in what she thought was a warm, caring way, then shrugged. 'Don't know why the office wanted i t… God, some of the work I get loaded with is dross. Anyway, what does he do in Ostrava?'
The man with that telephone number ran a factory producing furniture for export to Germany and was a subsidiary of a larger conglomerate.
'Riveting stuff. You'd have thought, in this day and age, that my people had better things to do with their time. Whose conglomerate?'
The furniture factory was a small part of the empire owned by Timo Rahman…
'Never heard of him.'
'A multi-millionaire from Hamburg, an Albanian.'
'OK, OK, we don't have to overwhelm my people – that'll do for them. I'll get a commendation for it… Tell me, is carp better grilled, like ours, or fried, or just put in the oven? What would your mother do?'
She paid, insisted. The bill would just about wipe away Justin Braithwaite's entertainment allowance for the week. Short rations, there'd be, in the Service's annexe.
On the pavement, his hand touched hers, then slipped into the crook of her arm.
'That was really nice, and we'll do it again,' Polly said. 'I'd have loved to spend the afternoon in a couple of churches, with you to guide me, but that's for another day Must get back. See you soon, I hope.'
'Gloria, have you ever been to Hamburg?' he shouted.
'Twice, Mr Gaunt, just the twice. I liked it, rather a civilized city.'
He had his hands together as if in prayer, fingers under his nostrils and thumbs against his mouth.
Gloria would have come to the door behind him, would be leaning against the jamb. She would allow his thought processes, without interruption, to stutter out, as if that were part of her duties.
'Perhaps 'civilized', yes. Quality prostitutes, quality bankers, quality scenic views. Bravo, Hamburg. But it's where it all started, isn't it? While we were faffing over Baghdad, pushed by those bloody politicians, the eye was off the ball – our eye, the German eye and the American eye. Saddam's legacy – don't you know, Gloria? – was to be the fox that led the trail away from the den, where the vixen was and the bloody cubs.'
'Quite apposite, Mr Gaunt,' she said drily, but she would never be impertinent. 'You should use that allusion in a report.'
'Eye off the ball and not seeing the supreme target.
In Hamburg.'
'It wasn't just you, Mr Gaunt. There was an AQ desk.'
'Everybody's eye off the ball. While we were wet-ting ourselves waiting for the next download of satellite imagery from some God-forsaken heap of sand in Iraq, the threat was incubated in Hamburg.
What was the name of that wretched place?'
'Harburg, across the Elbe river.'
'And the name of that wretched street?'
'Marienstrasse, Mr Gaunt.'
'And the spores are still in the bloody pavements of your 'civilized' city. It's where they were, where that horrendous plot was hatched, nine/eleven, where war was declared, the ultimate attack – and we knew nothing. Now, little Wilco sends her signal… A man resists torture – and his interrogators were well trained – to protect a notepad on which a telephone number was written. I'm getting there, Gloria. The telephone number is that of a factory that exports furniture. To where? To bloody 'civilized' Hamburg.
Hamburg again.'
'Do you not think, Mr Gaunt, that you should rest for an hour or two?'
'God, and wouldn't it be easy if we had some proper equipment to turn on them – a squadron of tanks, a battery of artillery, a brigade of paratroops I can deploy against them? Then I'm laughing. But this is a city that is 'civilized'. Hamburg is where they plot, plan, then launch from. Once a month I go to a lecture where an academic tells me I have to get into the mind of an enemy. How? I am white-skinned, middle-aged, middle-class, a little Englander. I have no chance… '
