when he was not at compulsory lectures or engaged in specific coursework in front of his screen – roamed the trains and stations of the capital's underground system. He knew the depths of stations, knew the junctions where carriages packed tight with commuters passed each other, knew the signalling cables' locations, knew where the main power wires were laid, knew the times when platforms were most densely filled. He was a wraith-like figure, unseen and unnoticed, who gained new knowledge from every journey he made. The sole frustration in his life was the direct order made to him that he should not fill a hard disk or a three-and-a-half inch floppy with what he learned.
Everything was stored in his mind. He did not know if he would finish his course before a man came and sought him out, perhaps in the hall of residence, perhaps as he walked to the college, perhaps in the library or the corridors. A man would come and would say: 'Those who have disbelieved and died in disbelief, the earth full of gold would not be accepted from any of them if one offered it as a ransom.' And he would look into the eyes of the man and he would answer, perhaps with a faltering voice: 'They will have a painful punishment, and they will have no helpers.' The words from the Book, 3:91, were as crisp in his mind – what would be said to him and what he would reply – as any of the detail of the London Underground network.
He had dedicated himself to his faith and knew the man would come.
'There has been no liaison, Miss Wilkins. There has been no contact between your Service and ours. There has been no introduction from your consulate, Miss Wilkins… Should I escort you from the premises?'
'I don't think that would help either of us.'
She could play, when she judged it right, feminine and gamine. Little-girl-lost was an act at which Polly was adept – also, she did tough well.
'There are procedures laid down.'
'And times when procedures should be bypassed,' she said brusquely. She was dressed in the one black executive trouser suit she had travelled with. The blouse under the jacket was buttoned at the throat.
She had brushed the styling out of her hair.
'Explain to me, Miss Wilkins, why I should ignore the liaison procedures.'
'For mutual advantage.'
Bizarre, she thought it, their conversation and sparring. She spoke to him in fluent German and he replied to her in fluent English, as if both put down a small marker of superiority. From the moment she had been escorted into the office of assistant deputy commander Johan Konig, she had known that begging favours would fail. She had come to police headquarters by taxi with the confidence to send away the driver, not ask him to wait for her in the eventuality of rejection. At the desk, late in the evening, she had spoken with the bark of authority and had claimed an appointment with the senior official specializing in organized crime, a name gained in her telephone call from Harvestehuder Weg. He, of course, was long gone. Then, to a junior sent down to the reception area, she had played magician and uttered the name to which there would be a reaction: Timo Rahman. Her skill was in avoiding obstruction.
She had been led to the third floor of the A wing of the building, and had met Konig.
'What is the 'mutual advantage' on offer to me?'
'That depends on the help given to me. Imagine a set of scales.'
'Scales must be balanced, Miss Wilkins, if they are to perform satisfactorily.'
'You share with me on matters affecting Timo Rahman, and I will share with you.'
'But, Miss Wilkins, I am a police officer and you are an intelligence agent. In the matter of Timo Rahman, I do not think our paths cross.'
She sought to jolt him. 'Then your thinking is wrong.'
His head jerked up and his eyes flashed away from the desk. None of its surface was visible under the mass of files, papers, bank statements and photographs that littered it. She liked him well enough
…
He seemed to her so tired, bagged eyes that wavered in their attention and slouched shoulders. She understood the loneliness of the zealot. His accent told her he was a Berliner, the strewn papers told her he was reading his way into the life of a target. The clock on the wall showed a few minutes to ten o'clock – the end of a day, the building quiet, but for the skeleton night staff. Dedication had kept him – as if he was handcuffed – at his desk. No photograph of a family was set in a frame on the desk, the window-ledge or bookcase, or on the cavernous safe against a wall.
'My intention is to put Timo Rahman, the pate of Hamburg, through the courts and into the Fuhlsbuttel gaol for so long that he is a senile invalid when released, and to have sequestered from his investments sufficient monies to render him a pauper.'
'I'll help you.'
'He believes himself an untouchable in this city.'
'Then we'll touch him. I'd like to read his files, and I'd like to see his home.'
'What do we share?'
'We link him with human trafficking.'
'Of whores, yes – but he distances himself from the basic dirt of involvement.'
She threw her card, the big play that Gaunt always preached against except at a time of last resort. 'No, Johan, not tarts for the pavements, but human trafficking in politicals. We are into an area that will not be shared with your authorities, only between ourselves. Mutual advantage. Timo Rahman is on uncharted territory. He is moving a political.'
A grim, dry response. 'For this co-operation I could be hung up from a meat hook. We will go, Miss Wilkins, to the suburb of Blankenese – because, against all the laws of good sense, I trust you.'
The Bear served her husband and his guest at the table. Alicia had cooked for them and had eaten in the kitchen with her girls and her aunt. The girls were now upstairs in their rooms, and the aunt had washed up the plates that the Bear had brought out. Now the crockery was stacked clumsily in the rack on the draining-board and the aunt sat by the stove in the kitchen to read an old magazine from home.
In her home, Alicia felt herself a prisoner – with prisoner's rights.
On the left side of her gaol-home was the family that owned outright the second largest holiday travel agency in the city; on the right side the family had the controlling interest in a company selling building materials. Alicia knew the wives by sight, occasionally spoke to them on tiptoe over the garden fence at the back and across the footpath that separated the properties, and the wire and the sensors, sometimes met them at the Blankenese shops when she was with her aunt, saw them at the school gate when she was driven by the Bear to drop or collect the girls. She had no link with the wives who were her neighbours; she was shy and nervous of them. From what little she knew of them, they were smart, sleek and careless with their wealth – everything she was not.
She thought her aunt too engrossed in the old magazine to notice what she did.
Alicia was stifled in the kitchen, hurt by the thought of her neighbours' wives, who were a part of their husbands' lives, and she slipped towards the kitchen door. By the door, on a unit, was a small television set
– not showing a noisy game show but the silent black-and-white image of the drive where the Bear had parked the Mercedes. Above the set, screwed to the wall, was the console board of pressure buttons that each had a single red light, bright and constant. She pressed two buttons, to nullify the beams covering the back garden. She turned the door key. She was halfway outside, and the chill of the night was on her face, the suffocation of the kitchen's heat and her sense of rejection lessened, when the voice grated behind her: 'Where are you going?'
'Out,' she said. 'To walk.'
'You'll catch your death.'
Who would notice? If she caught a chill that sent her to bed, who would care? She said meekly, 'I will be a few minutes.'
She closed the door after her.
Alicia headed for her summer-house, her refuge.
She could never leave, could never go home. Not one man or woman in her family, back at the village in the mountains north of Shkodra, would welcome her or risk the inevitability of the blood feud – the hakmarrje
– with the Rahman clan. She had no existence away from the house in Blankenese, and was as much a prisoner there as the women who worked on their backs in the brothels owned by her husband on the Reeperbahn or the Steindamm. She skirted the light thrown on to the lawn from the dining-room window, saw her husband and his guest standing but bent as if they studied papers, and the Bear with them. She reached the summer-house, her
