'A pleasure, Mr Rahman.'
The eyes never left Ricky's. Years back, when he was a kid and when Mikey wasn't away, they had gone as a family, with the girls, to the zoo up in London, and they'd taken in the reptile house, and there had been snakes, most of them curled up and asleep, but a cobra had had its head up, had hissed and shown its fangs at the glass, and its eyes had watched them. He couldn't hold Timo Rahman's gaze and he was looking down at the carpet and saw that his feet shuffled, like he had nerves. His arm was gripped at the elbow.
'I want to show you something that is precious to me, Ricky.'
'Anything, Mr Rahman.'
He was led across the hall and up a wide staircase.
At the landing he heard TVs playing behind two closed doors. A door into a bedroom was opened for him.
On through the bedroom, into a dressing room where a wall was lined with a wardrobe. He didn't understand.
'Look, Ricky Capel.'
The pudgy finger pointed.
It was the picture his grandfather had. Black-and-white, the same. Different frame, plastic and cheap, but the same handwriting scrawled across it. A mountain background, a cave with a narrow entrance, five men tooled up and standing in a line. A fire with a cooking tin on it, and three men sitting cross-legged with the smoke blowing against them. There was his grandfather, and the tall guy whose funeral his grandfather had trekked north to attend, and the one that his grandfather called Mehmet.
'We got that,' he said.
'My father, your grandfather and Major Anstruther, comrades.'
'He's dead, Anstruther is. Grandfather went to his funeral. We got that same picture.'
'Comrades, Ricky Capel. They fought together, fought for each other. Each of them would have died that the others would live. Joined by blood, all men of value. Heroes, fighters, brothers. So, Ricky Capel, your family and mine are bound together in loyalty to them.'
'We do business, yes.'
'In the mountains, in the snow of winter, they lay together to give warmth that one of them should not freeze. In combat they gave covering fire that one of them should not be a target. Your grandfather and my father, they bound our families in loyalty. It is more than business – their blood ran together, as does ours.'
It was a quiet, gentle voice and Ricky had to strain to hear it. He looked, mesmerized, at the photograph.
Sharon, his mum, said the picture spooked her. Mikey, his dad, dismissed it as sad, but said old men needed a memory to hang on to. Percy, his grandfather, never talked about the war and what he'd done, lost up there in those bloody mountains.
'I suppose so, yes.'
'They were men of honour. Whatever the one asked, the other would give. They lived together, they killed together.'
'I see what you mean, Mr Rahman.'
'Do you have, Ricky Capel, your grandfather's loyalty?'
'I hope so. I… ' He checked himself. 'Of course I do.'
He was led from the dressing room, from the bedroom and down the stairs into a dining room of heavy, gloomy furniture – wouldn't have entertained any of it – where two places were laid. Wasn't offered a drink, was told they would eat and then work at their business.
The night had closed on him and the storm had grown. Oskar Netzer reckoned it now at force eight, and worsening. He had laboured into the dusk. Only when the drill bit had nicked the finger steadying the screw, and drawn blood, had he decided he could no longer continue strengthening the viewing platform.
It was not for visitors that he sought to repair it but for himself. A part of paradise for this old and troubled man was to be on its deck and gaze down at the small waterscape, and see the eiders. It would be bad that night, but the forecasts for the next week that were pinned up by the harbour told of worse to come. As he blundered back along the sand path through the dunes and the scrub, he prided himself that he knew every step of the way from the viewing platform to the cemetery at Ostdorf where the nearest street-lights were.
When he reached them he stood in their pool, leaned on the closed gate and told Gertrud what he had been doing, and how he had let the drill's bit cut into his finger. He thought he heard her voice: 'You are an old fool, Oskar, nothing but an old fool.' Then he went on home, and the wind sang in the wires, and he thought of what he would eat for his meal, and of his book that he would read afterwards… But the meal and the book soon slipped because he worried more about the fierceness of the storm gathering out in the North Sea. The worst of the gales were always in the days and nights before Easter.
He passed the harbour, brightly lit, and saw the Baltrum ferry moored, and every boat the islanders owned seemed to be corralled in the shelter of the groyne, finding safety from the sea – and a new worry surged: would the wind take tiles off his roof? So much to worry about, so little peace.
'You people are wrong, Freddie, about as mistaken as it is possible to be.'
He was not the first and most certainly would not be the last. Gaunt had taken the train north to this provincial university to hear heresies and listen to unpalatable opinions.
'Osama has been made, by you and the Agency, into an icon – it was a grievous error at your doors to have done so,'
The man across the Formica-topped table from him was of around his age but that was the only similarity between them. Gaunt was groomed, wore his three-piece suit with a quiet tie and had a polka-dot handkerchief sprouting from the breast pocket. His shoes were highly polished and he'd burnished them in the last minutes of the journey with the cloth from his briefcase. The professor wore scratched sandals over loud socks, shapeless cord trousers held up by sagging braces, a check shirt frayed at wrists and collar, topped with a stained self-knotted bow-tie, his white hair sprang from the sides of his scalp and made a halo round his head.
'First you set him on a pedestal and gave him an undeserved value, then you compounded the fault by failing to topple him. You lifted Osama to a position where he became the equal to the heads of government of your coalition. I have told your colleagues, so many times, of that error, and their response has been to wring their hands and whine that it is the demand of their masters. You should have stood up, been counted, refused to travel on that road.'
As chair of Islamic studies at the university, the professor had a rightful place of merit in academic circles, but to the Service he was more valuable. Living, working outside the bubble of the Service at Vauxhall Bridge Cross and the Whitehall ministries across the river, he offered opinions that grated with the normal well-oiled meshings of government's gears. At a time of crisis, it was predictable that Frederick Gaunt would have used up precious hours and gone north.
'So, you believe a man is coming, perhaps with a destination of the United Kingdom. You show me a photograph. He looks pleasant enough. You have gauged his importance by the fact that another was prepared to give his life and meet death in agonizing circumstances; a life sacrificed that a more valued person, whom you believe to be of the rank of co-ordinator, should have time to make good his escape.
You ask me to penetrate the co-ordinator's mind.
First, forget Osama bin Laden, who – I venture – is irrelevant now, other than as a carved, painted totem.'
They sat in the far corner of the canteen in the students' union building. They ate. Gaunt picked at a stale salad of tomato, chives and lettuce, and had a bottle of gassy water. The professor had had a mountain of chips with wrinkled sausages floating on a brown sauce lake, and drank from a can of
Chardonnay. A few minutes before, when a pair of girls had come close with their trays, Gaunt had imperiously waved them away.
'We live in a top-down society. Decisions are made at the top and passed down, but the top demands that authority is guarded most jealously… It is impossible for Osama to ape that act. I assume he is in a cave, on the snowline of a mountain, worrying more about his rheumatism and kidney problems than the progress of your co- ordinator. In that cave, with four or five men as company and security, he would probably not know the name of the co-ordinator, would not have met him, would not know the target in Europe – or in the United Kingdom – that your
