Read The Human Pool for Free Online Page B

offered people a freedom of movement not normally available, he said. Reading between the lines, what he was suggesting was that the Neos were into people smuggling as a growth industry. The Neos were into commodity, and the black economy was an expanding market.
    Siegfried showed a fan’s enthusiasm for his subject. Hungary was the main road route into Austria. Budapest was good for Chinese because of a large local community. Chinese tourists—‘tourists’ was what he called them—flew more now. I mentioned the woman who had lost her travelling companions. He was familiar with the problem. There were different transit points even when destinations were the same. The difficulty was supply in the final stages, by which I understood him to mean lorries.
    One of the models had her jaw clamped in an effort not to yawn. Siegfried, oblivious, said that a problem in Rotterdam was causing a knock-back effect. Rotterdam was a major dispersal point in the final stage of the process but was temporarily closed because of ‘technical difficulties’. This had resulted in congestion further down the line, hence the location I visited that evening.
    The women looked bored enough to fuck.
    I was slow to appreciate why the Neos should want to get into trafficking racial inferiors into Germany. Siegfried shot me a sneaky look. The tourist business was not only profitable, he said, it was directional. Thanks to their involvement, Germany was not a destination. Germany was transit only. They made sure everyone got shipped on. To England mainly, Siegfried added with a joyless grin. The women were looking around for better company. Siegfried didn’t care. He was saving his wad for the political orgasm. I rather regretted their going.
    After that, Siegfried withdrew into a mysterious silence and left alone. I drank several black coffees. It was half one, half midnight in London. I left a message for Dora saying I would catch the first flight and be home for the day. She and I lived on recorded messages—cryptic blips from undercover, Morse code of the heart, SOS and Maydays combined, the last gasp of a relationship, or whatever it was that we had had, past tense. We would, of course, remain friends, as we moved on, she to fuck my employer, Dominic Carswell.
    I left a message for Carswell, too. Charismatic Dominic Carswell, former television correspondent—Dominic Carswell, News at Ten, reporting from Beirut/Belfast/West Berlin/Afghanistan—fencing champion, a youthful fifty, trademark lock flopping across his brow, making him a little less earnest, a little more boyish. Carswell to me: ‘I hear you’re the best at what you do.’ Sincere Carswell, so well informed. He’d got the voice, the smooth delivery that could do one-to-one.
    I did undercover well enough to have worked on a couple of TV series. Sometimes I got recognised in Safeway. Usually they thought I was a friend of a friend. I had the face of a friend of a friend. The website stuff I had showed the Neos was for a programme I researched but never filmed on U.K. football hooligans/the far right/website racism.
    Carswell had been willing to pay an absurd fee for a couple of weeks’ stealth in Germany. He would pay in cash, he said, which meant I wouldn’t have to declare it to the Revenue. He told me he was rich and bored. His company produced what he called ‘innocuous pap for the Middle East market’, wildlife documentaries that earned him a pot of money, and left him hankering to return to hard news.
    Target One: Siegfried, the yuppie Neo, considered by some a future national leader, the acceptable face of the far right, repackaging extremism for the mainstream. Target Two: the old Nazi who, according to Chinese whispers, was contemplating going public. My job was to persuade Strasse that I was his sympathetic ear. As for Siegfried, Carswell would turn up later, and together with our hidden cameras and tape