(2005) Rat Run by Gerald Seymour Read Free Book Online Page A

to be vulgar.
    The lunch was uneaten and the water undrunk.
    Little that normally landed on his desk, dumped without ceremony by Gloria, required more than dutiful attention. Albania's organized crime was the trafficking of narcotics, firearms and people. His CX reports were carefully crafted, always readable, and painted a clear picture of a society wedded with enthusiasm to criminality. Most could have been drafted when he was half asleep - not the one that now turned in his mind.
    'You haven't touched them - you have to eat.'
    Gloria put down a further file on his desk, already crowded with seven paper heaps. 'No breakfast, no lunch, and I'll wager nothing proper last night.'
    He grimaced. She scolded because she cared about him. The first of the files had arrived the previous morning and the heap had built through the day. Most of the pages now referred to telephone traces sucked down by the farm of dishes on the Yorkshire moors.
    Once he had been on the cusp of the Service's investigations - before he was moved aside: a victim of the Service's need to produce scapegoats after its greatest ever, and most humiliating, intelligence failure. Now he was again at the centre. Little, irrelevant, corrupt, fourth-world Albania was top of the tree. He chortled to himself. He had been at his desk till ten o'clock last night, back in at a few minutes after five that morning, and would be there that evening long after the day shifts had finished.
    'I really do insist that you eat.'
    It had been the day when al-Qaeda came to Albania: what he had lived and dreamed for. He thought they must have almost forgotten, down on the AQ desks, that Frederick Gaunt still inhabited a little corner of their space. A link was made - and he'd have admitted it was a tortuous one - between the kings of the terrorist war and the barons of European criminality. Happy days, happy times.
    'Please, Mr Gaunt - please, eat something.'
    'What never ceases to amaze me, Gloria, is that they still use the old telephone. God, will they never learn?'
    One file listed an address in the city of Quetta in west-central Pakistan, in the foothills of the mountains that straddled the Afghan border - probably close to where the venerable Osama was holed up in a damp cave - with an estimated population of 200,000, and among them was Farida, wife of Muhammad Iyad: listed occupation, bodyguard. She lived there with the kids, but he was long gone.
    The second file was of the life and times of Muhammad Iyad: more important, whom he
    guarded, all choice items.
    The third file comprised a security report from Islamabad of a surveillance team's witnessing of a gift-wrapped parcel being hand-delivered to the house. Included were black-and-white still-frame images of her showing her mother a gold chain necklace. Anyone close to her would have passed the gift to her in person. Who other than a husband in hiding somewhere would have sent a married woman an expensive present? Records, attached, showed it to have been her wedding anniversary when she
    received the gift.
    The fourth file listed a telephone call made on the landline from the house to a number in Dubai, in the Gulf. The transcript of the brief call listed, no names, her 'love, gratitude and always my prayers'.
    The fifth file was slim. The only overseas call made from the Dubai number - no transcript provided -
    was to a satellite phone in southern Lebanon.
    The sixth file, again a single sheet of flimsy paper and again no transcript, recorded a call from the satellite phone located inland from the city of Sidon to a number in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic.
    The seventh file, courtesy of the BIS in the city, identified a message received in Prague on a number that was tapped. The transcript was one line: 'Gift received. Love, gratitude and always my prayers.' The number in Prague to which the message had been sent was monitored because it was used by an Albanian national, believed involved in the organized-crime