Private Games

Chapter 68

SURROUNDED BY A four-day growth of orange beard, the grin on Hooligan’s face put Knight in mind of a mad leprechaun. It didn’t hurt the image when Private London’s chief scientist did a jig out from behind his lab desk, and said, ‘We’ve got a third name and, as Jack might say, it’s a whopper that set off alarms. I’ve had two calls from The Hague in the past hour.’

‘The Hague?’ Knight said, confused.

‘Special prosecutor for Balkan War Crimes Tribunal,’ Hooligan said as Jack rushed in, looking pale and drawn. ‘The print belongs to a woman wanted for genocide.’

It was all coming at Knight so fast that his mind was awhirl with disjointed thoughts. Daring and Farrell had both worked with NATO in some capacity at the end of the Balkan war, right? But war crimes? Genocide?

‘Let’s hear it,’ Jack said.

Hooligan went to a laptop computer and gave it several commands. On a large screen at one end of the lab, a grainy black and white photograph of a young teenage girl appeared. Her hair was chopped short in a bowl cut and she wore a white, collared shirt. Knight could not tell much more about her because the photograph was so blurry.

‘Her name is Andjela Brazlic,’ Hooligan said. ‘This picture was taken approximately seventeen years ago, according to the war-crimes prosecutor, which puts her in her late twenties now.’

‘What did she do?’ Knight asked, trying to match the girl’s blurry face with the charge of genocide.

Hooligan gave his computer another command and the screen jumped to an overexposed snapshot of three girls wearing white shirts and dark skirts, standing with a man and a woman whose heads were out of frame. Knight recognised the bowl-cut hairdo on one and realised he’d been looking at a blow-up of this picture. Glaring sunlight obliterated the faces of the other two girls, who had longer hair and were taller. He guessed them to be fourteen and fifteen.

Hooligan cleared his throat and said, ‘Andjela and her two sisters there – Senka, the oldest, and Nada, the middle girl – were indicted on charges that they participated in genocidal acts in and around the city of Srebrenica in late 1994 and early 1995, near the end of the civil war that exploded on the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. Allegedly the sisters were part of the kill squads Ratko Mladic oversaw that executed eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys.’

‘Jesus,’ Pope said. ‘What makes three young girls join a kill squad?’

‘Gang rape and murder,’ Hooligan replied. ‘According to the special prosecutor, not long after this photograph was taken in April 1994 Andjela and her sisters were raped repeatedly over the course of three days by members of a Bosnian militia that also tortured and murdered their parents in front of them.’

‘That would do it,’ Jack said.

Hooligan nodded grimly. ‘The sisters are alleged to have executed more than one hundred Bosnian Muslims in retaliation. Some were shot. But most were struck through the skull, and post-mortem through the genitals, with a pickaxe – the same sort of weapon that was ultimately used to kill their mother and father.

‘It gets worse,’ Private London’s chief scientist pressed on. ‘The war-crimes prosecutor told me that eyewitnesses testified that the sisters took sadistic delight in killing the Bosnian boys and desecrating their bodies, so much so that the terrified mothers of Srebrenica came up with an apt nickname for them.’

‘What was that?’ Knight asked.

‘The Furies.’

‘Jesus,’ Jack said. ‘It’s them.’

A moment of silence passed before Jack said to the reporter, ‘Karen, would you excuse us for a moment? We have to discuss something that has nothing to do with this case.’

Pope hesitated, and then nodded awkwardly, saying, ‘Oh, of course.’

When she’d gone, Jack looked back at Knight and Hooligan. ‘I have something to tell you that’s going to be tough to hear.’

‘We’ve been fired from the Olympic security team?’ Knight asked.

Jack shook his head. He looked pale. ‘Far from it. No, I just left a meeting with investigators from the Air Accident Investigative Branch, the ones looking into the plane crash.’

‘And?’ Hooligan said.

Jack swallowed hard. ‘They’ve found evidence of a bomb aboard the jet. There was no mechanical malfunction. Dan, Kirsty, Wendy and Suzy were all murdered.’