Gerald Seymour: Rat Run

In front of him now, brought to him by his faithful PA – and he'd have sworn she had the same caring eyes as her spaniel – was Wilco's latest message. The Albanian was a cafe owner and prosperous. Records showed he also owned a third-floor apartment in the Old Quarter of Prague, and the unpronounceable name of a street was listed. He began to wolf his sandwich, gulping it down, then swilling his mouth with the water. 'Satisfied?'

'It's only you I'm thinking of, Mr Gaunt.'

She could have called him Frederick or Freddie – she had been with the Service for twenty years, fifteen of them running his desk at home and abroad – but she was never familiar. Without her, his professional life as a senior intelligence officer would have been so much the poorer. He said, 'I'm going off to see the ADD, dear Gilbert, to tell him I want to run with this.

Meantime, message Wilco that I'm controlling it, and all signals come to me, please.'

He was up and scraping sandwich detritus from his shirt, then buttoning his waistcoat, reaching for his suit jacket from the hanger.

'Shouldn't I wait till you've received the Assistant Deputy Director's confirmation?' She seemed to tease.

'Take it as read. They're all callow youths and girls on AQ (Central Europe). He'll be glad to give it to someone who knows his butt from his arm. Oh, and say something nice to Wilco.'

He strode away, noisy on steel-heeled shoes.

Terrorists in bed with criminals made for formidable copulation.

He walked up the street with a plastic bag dangling heavy from his hand. It was the last time that Muhammad Iyad, the bodyguard, would need to collect food from the halal butcher in the market behind the Old Town Square, salad vegetables and bread. By the following evening they would have started on another stage of the journey.

Because this was his work and why he was respected, he tried to be as clear-headed and alert as his reputation demanded. Among the few who knew him, it was said that he was the most suspicious, most cunning of all the men given the task of minding the precious and highly valued operatives of the Organization. Coming back to the apartment on the top floor of the building in the narrow alley behind Kostecna, Muhammad Iyad used all the techniques that had long become second nature to him.

Three times between the Old Town Square and

Kostecna, he had broken the slow ambling pace of his walk, had darted round corners, then stood back flush to the doors at the entrance of old buildings and waited the necessary minute to see whether a tail would come after him. Twice he had stopped in front of women's clothes shops and positioned himself so that the reflection showed the street and both pavements behind him. Once, on Dlouha, at the entrance to the pizzeria, he had abruptly turned on his heel and gone back a hundred metres, a fast stride that would have confused men who followed him, and they would have ducked away, would have shown themselves to him, the expert. From the doorways and shop fronts and by the pizzeria, he had seen only a fog wall of tourists' bodies, local kids, striding office workers and meandering women. But that day, his mind was clouded.

He knew the man he guarded as Abu Khaled… but his thoughts were not on him and his security. On pain of death, or on the worse pain of disgrace, he would not have told the man of what he had done while they had travelled and of the reward it had won him. The man did not know that a necklace had been purchased in the gold market of Riyadh. The money to buy it had been from the banker who handled transactions for the Organization. He himself, Muhammad Iyad, had chosen the necklace of thick, high-quality links, and the banker had promised that it would be delivered by courier to the address in Quetta – not by mail because that would have been unreliable and would have endangered his safety. If it had been known what he had done, he would never again have been entrusted with taking a man of importance towards his target. The message had come back to him two days before. 'Gift received. Love, gratitude and always my prayers.' He had rejoiced. The image of her, and the little children, had filled every cranny of his mind. He could see her, touch her, hear her. It had been wrong of him to make the gift – it was against every law laid down by the Organization – but the weakness had come from long years of separation.

His love of the Organization was shared with his love for his family, for the woman who had borne his children. He did not know when, if ever, he would see her again. The net around the Organization was tighter, more constricting. It seemed at times – worst when he tried to sleep – to suffocate him… so, walking towards the alley behind Kostecna, between narrow streets and old buildings of brick and timber, he attempted to maintain his habitual alertness, but the picture of her, with the necklace he had chosen, competed.

He was certain of it. He would have sworn to it on the Book. There was no tail.

Fully focused, as he was not, Muhammad Iyad might have noticed that the no-parking sign at the end of the alley, on Kostecna – which had not been obscured when he had passed it at the start of his shopping trip – was now covered with old sacking bound tight with twine.

He had been two months with Abu Khaled, moving and minding and watching over him. He had collected him in secrecy from a lodging-house in the Yemen's capital, Sana'a. They had travelled overland, north into Saudi Arabia – the home of the swine who danced to the tune of the Great Satan's whistle – had skirted the desert and gone up the Red Sea coast, then cut back towards the desert interior and into Jordan.

All of the Organization's planning had been, as always, without flaw. From Jordan into Syria, then Turkey. At each stage safe-houses, transport and documentation had met them. Then across the sea by ferry and to Bulgaria… and the change that had first unsettled Muhammad Iyad.

They were in the hands of Albanians. The common language was broken English or halting Italian; they were Muslims but without the dedication to the Faith that was his and Abu Khaled's, but those were the arrangements made by the Organization. He could not, and he had tried to, fault them – but he did not trust them. From Bulgaria, via Plovdiv and Sofia, to Romania. Overnight stops in Romania at Brasov and Satu Mare, then into Hungary. More documentation and new cars waited for them at Szeged and Gyor before they had slipped over the frontier and into Slovakia.

If they had used airports his face and that of Abu Khaled would have been caught on the overhead cameras, and their papers would have been copied and stored; the cameras were dangerous because they could recognize a man's features. Whether he wore spectacles or a beard the computers could identify him. The borders they had crossed were always remote, not the main routes where the Customs men had been trained in techniques by the Crusaders.

They had come, after sleeping two nights at Prievidza, out of Slovakia and into the Czech Republic and had been taken to a cafe in Prague, then driven to the safe-house, an apartment high in an old building. The word given him, and he could not doubt it, was that with each step towards the destination greater care was required.

They had been five nights in Prague while the detail of the final stages was finalized. In each car or lorry they had been moved in, under the back wheel in the trunk or stowed behind the seats in the cab, was the black canvas bag that he was never without.

Against his body, at each border crossing in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey, a snub-nosed pistol, loaded and in a lightweight plastic holster, had gouged into the soft inner flesh of his right thigh. At every stop point his hand had hovered on his lap and his belt had been loosened so that he could reach down for it and shoot. He would never be taken, and it was his duty to ensure that a prized man such as Abu Khaled was not captured alive – too many had been; too many had talked to their interrogators. The first bullets would be for those who questioned them at a border crossing, the last two would be for Abu Khaled and himself.