He heard a long, shouted moan, voices in unison, calling to him. When he looked at them, arms, fingers and fists pointed behind him.
Petar was able to hear them because for the second day he had not brought out his best tractor, the Massey Ferguson 590 four-wheel-drive turbo, but used the older and lighter Prvomajaska, which had no closed cab. Their voices carried to him above the engine noise. On the first day he had dragged a chain-link harrow over the ground and it had rooted out much of the long grass, thorn scrub and thistles that had taken hold in the nineteen years since mines had been laid in the part of his field that was against the southern bank of the Vuka river. There had been no jolting detonation under the tractor chassis and he presumed that the work of the dog and its handler had been thorough, but he was wary enough of the danger from long-buried explosives to have told the men and women from the village to keep back from the tractor’s path: he knew, as did any farmer in the old combat zones of eastern Slavonia, that mines could float, that floods and ground movements of erosion or buried aquifers could shift the mines or tilt them. The last evening, after covering the ground with the harrow, Petar had taken it off his Pvromajaska and replaced it with an old plough. It didn’t matter to him if it was damaged by an explosion.
He was at the far edge of the land that had become a wilderness and to his right was the riverbank. His wheels had, perhaps, a metre more of secure tread. He was concentrating. The river, as he remembered it, was deep here – perhaps three metres – and if the tractor slid and went down, he might be trapped by the steering-wheel. He saw them pointing, waving, and he could hear them, but their gestures were behind him and he thought it unwise to swivel in the seat or turn his head. He would not risk losing control of the tractor because, briefly, he could not see the ground over which the front wheels were about to go. Yesterday, close to here, the front left wheel had gone into a hole as a vixen had sprinted clear and he had seen, momentarily, the bright eyes of cubs against the darkness of the den. Then the heavier rear wheel had gone over the hole and the tractor had lurched but not tipped. It had hurt to kill the cubs, and for the remaining hours he had worked the ground he had seen the vixen at the tree-line beside the river, watching him. Petar had inflicted violent death, had known the agony of it, but he had felt pain at burying the cubs.
He went to the end of the furrow, raised the plough and gunned the engine for power – difficult because the Prvomajaska lacked the finesse of the Massey Ferguson. He wrenched the wheel round and was relieved to be away from the drop of the bank. Sweat had dribbled into his eyes. He wiped his face with his forearm. He could see what they pointed at and their voices were now a clamour.
An arm thrust up out of the ground.
Well, Petar thought it was an arm. It could not have been a branch with tatters of cloth hanging on it. Mladen shouted, used his weight and his voice to keep the rest back. They stood – the village community and Petar’s entire world – at approximately the point on the road that the teacher had marked with a red-crayon cross before he had taken the young men out into the dusk. His boy had gone, with Tomislav’s, because they still had strength in their arms, legs and backs. The siege of the village had lasted already more than eighty days but his boy and Tomislav’s had had enough of their strength to be in that small party, as had Andrija’s cousin.
He was almost certain that the plough blades had turned up a body and thrown it aside at such an angle that the arm – outstretched – now rose like a mast from a ship that had sunk after a collision in the river beyond the town.
The key turned, the engine died. Petar was now sixty-seven. He weighted less than seventy kilos, was below average height, and had spent most of his adult life labouring on a farm – other than when he had been fighting for his village and the few years he had passed in the torture chamber, for him, of an urban refugee camp, wooden huts, on the outskirts of Zagreb. He did not spare himself. Stiffly, he swung his legs away to the side, hung on to the wheel for a moment, then dropped on to the turned earth.
He blinked, focused. A great quiet hung over the field. Petar coughed and spat. Then he started to walk towards the arm. They had been wearing camouflage tunics that night. The tunics had come in a batch, fifty of them, with camouflage trousers, and had been brought to the village by the police at Osijek before the siege had begun. Mladen, the teacher, his own son, Tomislav’s, and Andrija’s cousin – a giant of a man from Nustar – had all worn the black, grey and duck-green outfits. He did not know if the arm raised from the earth was, or was not, his son’s. He had not seen the vixen that morning. He thought she would have moved on, accepted the death of the cubs. He wondered how he, Tomislav, Andrija or the Widow would make an identification.
The sun sapped him. He wore a hat, woven straw, with the brim pulled low to keep the light from blinding him. None of the men in the village had rings, as none of the women had had necklaces, bracelets or wedding rings by the time the teacher had led three others – with the handcart, two wheelbarrows and the pram chassis – into the darkness and down the Cornfield Road. Not a bauble, nothing that was precious and could be dropped into a canvas sack – with money and house deeds – had been missed: everything had been collected three weeks before by Andrija’s wife at the teacher’s direction. It had gone to Zagreb when Zoran had sealed the deal and returned with a promise that the weapons were coming. At that distance, Petar could not tell whether the raised arm was the left or the right.
Could he remember which undershirt his boy had been wearing? The one of the New York baseball team or the one of the Dinamo club in the capital? The arm now seemed slightly crooked at the elbow and the material was dark, the colour had no meaning. There was no flesh on the skeletal hand and the fingers climbed to the sky and the sun – as if they had been liberated from the ground.
He did not know if the arm was his son’s. He sank to his knees and wept. It was the first time in nineteen years that Petar had allowed himself to think of his son, picture him, and tears to flow.
The others came. None ran; they advanced in a line to him, and made a circle. He shook his head, almost ashamed of his weakness. ‘Bastards,’ he spat, anger and hatred bubbling on his lips. ‘Bastards.’
His father was the main reason for Robbie Cairns to avoid carelessness.
Again, he followed the man. It was the third time, and the routine was solid. Out of the house within a five-minute window, then through the gates. Along the pavement to the newsagent, then the cafe, where a small pot of tea was drunk. A stroll home. No minder trailing him. It was a street free of closed-circuit cameras. Behind Johnny ‘Cross Lamps’ Wilson, giving him space, Robbie Cairns regarded this as quality time – getting-to-know time. He was some seventy paces behind the target, had good vision on him, and could think through where he would make the approach, on which stretch of pavement, and whether it would be on the way to the cafe and maybe close to the newsagent, or going back to the house and its electronic gate. He had options, which was important: Robbie knew the value of flexibility. They always said about sport that a football team had to have Plan B for when Plan A went down the sewer. He had Plans A, B, C and D, a fistful of plans, which all covered the killing of Johnny ‘Cross Lamps’ Wilson.
The first two times that Robbie had done leg-work on this target, he had noted that the man used basic anti-surveillance tactics. Didn’t this morning. He couldn’t see there would be any difficulty in getting up close for a head shot. Might do it from behind. Might do it from the front. Might step out from a shop doorway or from the cover of the bus shelter. Might walk into the cafe – the closest point to where Vern had parked in the Mondeo – when he was pouring tea and sucking sugar lumps.
His father was ‘away’, and would be for another four years, because he had been dumb enough to spit. Had wound down the window in the supermarket car park and spat. Then the armoured van had arrived and the cameras had shown men in balaclavas running from the car, doing the necessary with a shooter and two pickaxe handles, and the security blokes had frozen. They’d run back to the car and shifted out. It’d been a Flying Squad job, Robbery Section, and they’d done over Jerry Cairns’s second-floor flat on the Albion Estate, just along the walkway from where Granddad and Grandma Cairns were. The alibi trotted out in the interview room at the Rotherhithe nick was copper-bottomed and cast iron, strong as granite: he’d been down in Kent with Dot, looking at properties to buy, just driving along the lanes, and an army of respectable folks would come forward to swear they’d seen Jerry in the motor in Kent. The DNA in the saliva had done him for a fourteen-year stretch. Robbie Cairns thought that only an idiot would have done what his father had, then gone running towards the cash wagon.
He knew more than most about DNA. Robbie Cairns knew that DNA stood for deoxyribonucleic acid, and he knew there was plenty in spit. Down the road from where he lived, in Bermondsey, DNA had done for a hit team. They’d taken a thirty-thousand-pound contract to shoot a guy who had ‘lost’ big money from a robbery he was minding. Shots to the head as the target opened up his courier business at dawn. The DNA had been on spectacles dropped by one of the team, on the filter tip of a cigarette smoked as they waited for the guy to turn up, and on the casing of a security camera they’d climbed up to shift so that they wouldn’t be on film when they moved in. And they’d used a mobile on the scene when they were looking the place over. He didn’t like people being stupid and had told his dad, Jerry, so to his face.
He watched Johnny ‘Cross Lamps’ Wilson punch the keypad, disappear inside, and the gate closing. Next time, Robbie would have a converted Baikal IZH-79 tucked into his waistband where his right hand, easily, could reach it. It had been manufactured, Robbie knew, in the Russian city of Izhevsk and built to fire tear-gas pellets. There, it had a street price of maybe thirty euros. It would have gone overland to Lithuania, a bulk order, and in the capital it would have been modified to fire live bullets, not pellets, and now it had a street value, Vilnius prices, of around a hundred and fifty euros. By the time the weapon had reached London, the value of the pistol manufactured on a production line at a huge plant like the Izhevsky Mekhanichesky Zavod – where they made the AK-47, the Kalashnikov – would have soared into the skies. For it to fire 9mm bullets and have the engineering work done, a threaded end that enabled it to be fitted with a silencer, the buyer must pay fifteen hundred euros. Robbie Cairns had had cash in hand, no names, a test firing of two bullets out on the Rainham marshes. He never used the same weapon twice. If he thought his track was covered, he’d sell it on. If not, it was dumped. Three handguns had been sold and five thrown into deep water off the Queen Elizabeth Bridge, downriver and out to the estuary.
He peeled away, went back down the street, past the newsagent and the cafe. He had seen enough. There was a walkway towards the supermarket car park and he headed into it. Four or five kids advanced towards him, walking abreast and just about filling the space. Robbie Cairns didn’t back off. He might have eased his arse against the graffiti-painted wall, dragged his stomach in and allowed the kids to pass him. He might, many would, have ducked his head, like a dog, and seem to apologise for blocking the kids, making them shift their formation. Two were black and three were either North African or Somali, and the chance was that at least some would have short-bladed knives. He did not back off. He did not make way for them. He did not offer any apology for inconveniencing them. Never crossed his mind that he should. He walked towards them, and they parted to made way for him. It was his presence. It was the roll of his gait, and the confidence of his mouth, jaw, eyes. He had not disrespected them, but they would have had a good enough look at him to realise it was sensible to give him his space. As they did so, he smiled to left and right.
His brother would have seen him come into the car park, slide the shades over his eyes and use his fingers casually to flick the hood over his head. All the big car parks had cameras. He walked the last paces with a limp and slumped shoulders.
It was Vern’s responsibility to look after the vehicle logistics: which lock-up garage and under which railway arch for the storage of a motor, and where to collect a new one, clean. That was what Vern did. The brothers didn’t entertain small-talk.
‘You know when you’ll go?’ Vern asked.
‘Same time tomorrow. We’ll go tomorrow.’ Robbie Cairns said where, when they were back over the river, he should be dropped off. He would do it tomorrow, and his grandfather would invoice the people who had bought the hit. Tomorrow would be another day at work for Robbie Cairns.
A quiet day. Would have been pleasant if the air-conditioning had not chosen it, the hottest of the month, to cough, rattle and ultimately go down. Fixing the central heating in mid-winter or the air-conditioning in high summer was a complex matter.
The teams worked out of three partitioned areas – plywood and frosted glass – and each owned sufficient wall space to display mug shots, surveillance photographs, operational maps, satellite images of properties. Bizarre, but in electronic days they still hankered after good old bits of paper and seriously vintage-style images. It was as if this corner of Serious Crime Directorate 7 couldn’t operate unless it was all there and tacked to a wall; screens were for kids.
A complex matter? Of course. Because SCD7 did not employ heating engineers, plumbers, electricians. The people who came to the building for maintenance were vetted after a fashion but weren’t chained in by the Official Secrets Act. Fixing the air-conditioner unit that made an interior working day bearable would necessitate stripping out, sanitising, the areas of all three teams. And, exacerbating the problem, not one window opened. Electric fans riffled papers but distributed no cool air between the partitions.
A quiet day. Expenses day. Time-sheets and overtime-dockets day. A day for writing up a search report with results, and another on the value of a Covert Human Intelligence Source. Mark Roscoe thought it a good day, but quiet, calm, civilised days had a way of kicking them in the teeth without warning. Actually, he’d done well and the paper mountain was shrinking ahead of and rising behind him. They were all the same on a quiet day: they beavered at the paper – time was seldom on their side.
It was the way of Mark Roscoe, his Bill and his Suzie, to value time away from the coal face. Most of the targets they sought to save were the god-awful people who organised the big cocaine shipments, kept a main residence at Puerto Banus – Costa del Sol – fell out with a dealer or a supplier and owed, maybe, a million sterling. Then word came in that the aggrieved party was not going to the High Court for justice but was hiring a gun. Couldn’t be allowed to happen; duty of care, and all the horse shit from the European Court of Human Rights. Had to jump through the hoops, do their damnedest to prevent blood, tissue, brains scattering across a London pavement. Mark Roscoe thought, was near certain, that Bill was asleep at his desk space on the far side of the cubicle area, and Suzie’s head was rocking.
At another south-west area command police station, detectives were grilling the tenant of the house searched – Roscoe wasn’t big on liberal tendencies, but while ‘grilling’ was acceptable, ‘stitching up’ was not. His dad had been a detective in the days of black eyes and facial abrasions when the accused regularly walked into doors and conveniently fell downstairs in the cell block. His father didn’t like to talk of those days, as if he was ashamed of them. He had turned his back on thirty-seven years’ service, sold up the west London family home and disappeared to the Lake District. When the tenant had been grilled, when names were on the tapes, the interrogation would begin: who was the hitman? Who paid the hitman? Who was the hitman’s target? Who did the collection and who did the drop off? He didn’t quiz his father about the ‘old days’ of policing London, but had he done so, and had he suggested to his father that it was interesting to be involved in the protection of organised players, serious players, keeping them off the mortuary slabs, the veins would have jumped on his father’s temples, his cheeks would have gone puce, his breathing would have quickened and his eyes narrowed: ‘Best thing for those animals is bad on bad, the more the better. Best place for them is in a box and going down under.’ Rare enough for Roscoe to make the long journey north, and not right that, when he did, their time should be spent bickering. Enough to say that the major work of his squad was protection of men he despised.
It was sensible to let a day go slack when little jumped in his face. Wouldn’t last – could have bet his shirt on it. The information might come from a chis, or from an undercover officer, even a member of the public – an innocent who had seen or heard something and picked up the phone – or from the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, or the spooks, or even from the listening superstars at GCHQ. When things moved, and the alarm bells clanged, it was usually at speed and without warning, what he called ‘straight out of a clear blue sky’, the worst sort of sky.
A man wasn’t going to be brought in to fix the air-conditioner because nobody would take responsibility to strip down the walls. Looking between the slats of the blinds, Mark Roscoe could see the great emptiness he loathed above the rooftops: the clear blue sky.
A police patrol car was parked back from the field as if to give space around the raised arm. A priest had come from Vukovar at the same time and his car was further down the Cornfield Road. Any of the villagers, or those who had lived in Bogdanovci or Marinci, or men and women of Croat origin from Vukovar, could tell which of the policemen was from their own ethnicity and which the Serb. Always now, in the police, a Croat and a Serb officer were together. Petar could tell which was the Serb because he had stayed in the patrol car, was reading a newspaper and did not make eye contact with the villagers. Perhaps he had an elder brother, a father or an uncle who had been here nineteen years before and… The priest moved among them and, in an officious way, tried to speak about God’s will, God’s work and God’s love, but no one wanted comfort.
Petar stood with his wife. She was a stout woman with heavy legs and a drooping bosom. She wore no cosmetics and never had in the thirty-nine years of their marriage. A few of the wives had gone before the trap snapped shut on the village, but she had not. She had been beside him for the two and a half hours since he had pushed himself from kneeling close to the arm and the others had come forward. They had made a ring of stamped earth around the arm. He and his wife did not speak or touch. She had been profoundly deaf since the howitzer shell had come through the wall of their son’s room, scattering molten shrapnel in the corridor, down the stairs and across the hallway. She had been in the kitchen – should have been in the cellar – and he had dug her out with his bare hands, moving bricks and timbers, and done it alone because every other man was required in the slit trenches and the women were with the wounded in the church crypt. Now they communicated by slate board and sticks of chalk but the board and the chalk were in their house. His hands hung slackly at his sides and her arms were folded over her chest. One finger still showed where she had once worn the wedding ring he had given her.
The Croat officer had told Mladen that a forensic specialist was on his way to the field, a man of expertise and experience. In their circle they waited, with the arm, the clawed bone fingers and the shreds of camouflage uniform. A small songbird flew over their shoulders, might have perched on the bones but Andrija’s wife threw a fistful of soil at it, and it was gone. The Croat officer said it might be another hour before the forensic specialist reached them, but they did not break the vigil.
*
‘Well, I’m not exactly top of his Christmas card list,’ Megs snorted theatrically, then shrugged.
‘But you know him?’
‘That’s what I said. More specifically, I know of him and about him. Is that clear enough? And, after a fashion, Harvey Gillot knows me – but, thank God, not as well as I know him. So, what’s on your shopping list?’
She was a regular. For Megs Behan, the coffee shop was her third space and she used it three or four times a week. She took the leather sofa and the low table in front of it in Starbucks just north of the City and came early in the morning. She didn’t move out until the under-manager rolled his eyes at her when the place was filling up with the lunch trade. The other two potential spaces were her flat – one poky bedroom and a decent-sized sitting room, which she shared with two others on the same floor – and her office. Security requirements dictated that the building had a keypad for admission and that visitors were not permitted on the third-floor landing from which Planet Protection worked. The coffee shop was comfortable, reasonably confidential, and the guests for whom she held court were expected to provide a relay of Fair Trade coffee and organic cakes – she never paid, would always make some faux -annoyed grunt and confess to having come out without the purse. Megs could not have afforded Starbucks prices on three or more mornings a week.
‘I said I was at HM Revenue and Customs.’
‘I took that on board – I assume the Alpha team. You’re Penny Laing and your point of interest is Harvey Gillot. So, let’s push on.’
‘I am Alpha team and it is Harvey Gillot.’ Penny Laing allowed herself a short sharp shock of a smile.
Megs Behan worked full time as a researcher for the nongovernmental organisation known as Planet Protection. They monitored the arms trade, lobbied for national and international curbs on the shipment of weapons by Western administrations to third-world conflict zones, and could summon up a network of similar enthusiasts and campaigners across the continent. She had not met the woman opposite her, who sat on a hard-backed chair, leaned forward over the low table between them and boasted a cleavage that was on a different Richter scale from Megs Behan’s. In the nine years she had been with Planet Protection she had met others from HMRC, but Penny Laing was new to her. ‘Are you going in after him?’
‘Can I call you Megs?… Thanks. We’re looking to update our files. Somebody must have said you were a good source. We’re looking at what I suppose we would call the first division of brokers – maybe that’s a dozen. I’ve come to see you. A colleague goes to Amnesty and Oxfam – we’re trawling. Please, Megs, don’t bridle, we all-’
She must have frowned, had probably narrowed her lips and might have let the light blaze in her eyes. The suggestion of collusion had got up Megs’s nose. True, of course, but not welcome. The woman opposite her did not do tact.
‘We all know that your extremely efficiently managed NGO is supported by charitable funds – bring and buy, car-boot jobs, jumble collections – that meet some twenty per cent or, being generous, twenty-five per cent of operating costs, and that the rest of the budget is funded by the taxpayer. It’s from us, Foreign and Commonwealth and Overseas Development. So, please, shall we hack on?’
Megs could have added that Special Branch backsides had sat on the leather sofa or the chair opposite, and spooks. Another truth, and one that Penny Laing would not have appreciated, was that humble little NGOs had better research facilities in the field than the Secret Intelligence Service, the counter-terrorist police, the civil servants of Overseas Development, the diplomats of the FCO, and the investigators of HMRC’s Alpha team, who specialised in arms trafficking and potential breaches of legislation. Megs had heard it said charity workers in East and Central Africa were the best sources for the specifics of what plane had landed at what airstrip and offloaded what cargo into the hands of what rebel group or gang of drunk militia.
‘You’ve been given Harvey Gillot?’
‘It goes without saying, if we sniff any illegality we’ll follow it. We’re looking at Harvey Gillot, but that’s not to say we already have evidence against him. I suppose you could say he’s an individual we regard as having potential.’
Almost with innocence, Megs asked, ‘Do you have experience of the arms trade?’
‘I have some, should be enough for me to be excused patronising shit. I did time in the Congo, the Kinshasa office, attached to the embassy. I haven’t just come from Luton airport and duty-free allowances.’
Megs slapped her own wrist and grinned: her little gesture of guilt. ‘So, Harvey Gillot. Funny thing, and just chance, but we had a girl from a sister group in Paris and she was out yesterday at Charles de Gaulle. Anyway, Harvey Gillot walked right past her, had come off a flight from Burgas and-’
‘Where’s that?’
She reverted back to the theatrical. ‘Where’s that? It’s a Black Sea port city in Bulgaria. Ukraine, for second-hand stuff, is about played out, and Bulgaria is the best source of last-generation weapons for the independent dealers. She identified the flight – before you ask – because he came through with a wedge of passengers who had that place’s tags on their bags, and it was the only flight down at that time. Satisfied? Harvey Gillot is alive and well and hasn’t retired to put his feet up. If he’s just been to Bulgaria, he’s buying.’
‘Big or little fish?’
‘What my kid brother would have called “specimen” size.’ Megs Behan had always enjoyed a captive audience – it seemed to her pretty pathetic that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, Alpha team, were tapping her for intelligence again. Again. She savoured it, then pointedly finished her coffee. She was brought another mug and another biscuit. ‘How long have you got?’
‘However long it takes for your insights.’
‘He was born in 1963, in Guildford, Surrey. His dad was a post-office sorting supervisor and his mother worked as a contract office cleaner. They named him Herbert but he didn’t fancy that. He did grammar school but not university and was taken on in an office equipment and stationery business, then picked up by Solomon Lieberman – American, resident in UK, big-time and amoral. That was where he learned the trade. Lieberman died in 1990 and Harvey Gillot took on the business. Company records show that the deal was for a knock-down. He’s done business since then all over except – big except – Central Africa. I’d say his prime areas are the Middle East, with interest in South East Asia. Tends to handle surplus. It wouldn’t be conscience or altruism that’s kept him off Central Africa, just that it’s a crowded market and there are other dark corners where the going’s easier…’
She talked for half an hour. She might, she reflected, be underselling the commercial capabilities of Harvey Gillot. Couldn’t quite bring herself to describe a winning smile, manners and charm, little courtesies. To describe him as good at his job would have been similar, she reckoned, to talking up the communication skills of a grooming paedophile. She said he gave an impression of affluence: he drove a big car, his suits and shirts were good. How did she know so much? She gathered trifles of information from any quarter. It was what the spooks, the Branch, the government offices and HMRC’s Alpha team could have learned, but it would have been time-consuming and they’d have pleaded ‘lack of resources’. She wound up.
‘He has a wife and a teenage kid. He lives on the south coast, on Portland, but I’ve not been there. You see, he is – nothing gilded – a trader in death, misery or destruction. The arms trade is a filthy business and an arms trader – getting fat off it – is beneath contempt. I hope you nail him.’
‘If we find something.’
‘But I doubt you’ll nail him.’ She said it defiantly, as if to provoke.
The reply, inevitable: ‘I can assure you that if we find evidence of illegality we’ll throw the book. It’s just that we haven’t looked at him closely for too long.’
Time for an argument, a brief cat scrap? Maybe it was too hot even inside Starbucks, maybe she hadn’t slept and was too tired because Lucy from next door – a clerk in a solicitors’ firm specialising in immigration-tribunal appeals – was shagging noisily half the night, maybe she didn’t believe that Penny Laing, HMRC, Alpha team, was worth the hassle.
Megs Behan walked out into a rather pleasant summer morning and felt as if she had a stone in her sandal and a pain in her gut. The image in her mind was of the man walking past the police cordon and the crash barrier, and not seeming to notice the line of her people outside the fair at the ExCeL Centre or herself. Not even in the traffic, dodging it, could she wipe out the image of Harvey Gillot.
On her phone, Penny Laing spoke to her team leader, Dermot. ‘Yes, she was quite interesting. Really rather sad. They’re out on the margins, people like her. It’s her obsession. Don’t think there is anything in her life except hanging around outside hotels, conference halls, bawling abuse and being ignored. But not entirely wasted, and I’ll follow the Paris line. I’ll see you back at the office.’
It wasn’t illegal for a UK citizen to trade in arms and broker weapons deals. It was illegal if they were not declared and cleared under the Trade in Goods (Control) Order 2003 (S-I-2003/2765), and an end-user certificate had to have been rubber-stamped. It was the area of Alpha team and they were expensive, supported by Bravo team in an adjacent office. Without hits, arrests and publicity to match, they were pretty bloody surplus to requirements. She would have liked it to be promising, but it hadn’t.
She went to catch a tube… Seemed an interesting guy, Harvey Gillot, a worthwhile target, if his security ever slipped.
He didn’t take notes in meetings: Harvey Gillot had a good memory. He did not, like so many, clutter up the hard drive of a laptop or use memory sticks to store his version of what had been said.
From the aircraft steps he walked the few paces to the bus on the tarmac.
Enough had been indiscreet. In the world of Harvey Gillot, mostly, there was spanking clean legitimacy… but – but – every few months, or perhaps every couple of years, a deal fell into his lap that was just too good to lose for the sake of an end-user certificate. Those, rare enough, were the occasions when a trail of paper, electronic messages or mobile calls could put a man in the most unwelcome places: HMP Belmarsh, HMP Wandsworth, HMP Long Lartin. Her Majesty’s Prisons were unpleasant and avoidable.
He boarded the bus.
He knew enough who had ignored the survival rules. He couldn’t understand why more hadn’t followed the diktats of Solly Lieberman. When the old man had gone and he’d cleared the office, searched the locked drawers of Solly’s desk and opened his personal safe, it was quite extraordinary how sparse the paper trail was. Enough had been left that concerned whitewash deals – those in which he bought kit, night-vision or radio-communications boxes that had come out of the old Warsaw Pact warehouses and sold them to the Ministry of Defence – and uniforms, boots, magnification optics and ammunition. But of the choice stuff there had been no trace. Brilliant man, Solly. Gillot had learned the lesson.
On this trip, he reckoned himself to have been off the radar. He had gone through Immigration at Charles de Gaulle on the passport he used for Israeli visits, and out the next morning on the one he used for Arab countries. He had laid off using the mobile and had kept no record on his phone or laptop of the purpose of his visit to Paris and the overnight stay. No reference existed in his baggage of his journey to the airport at Tbilisi, with a charter of schoolchildren, on the DC-9 aircraft of the Georgian national airline.
When he came off the bus, he allowed the kids to spurt ahead. Two men waited for him. Could have been just about any place, any airport, anywhere. Not good suits, shirts that should have gone in the wash the previous evening, shoes that needed a little care with polish and a brush, haircuts that were fierce, shades and armpit bulges. They didn’t have to hold up a sign: ‘Esteemed guest, Harvey Gillot – we are honoured.’ He nodded recognition.
He knew enough of those who had fouled up the system because they demanded that material be stored in files, in safes, or on computer chips. They were in UK gaols, US, French and German gaols. They had in common that they had all scented the big deal that would make the big bucks, and had left tracks that any half-efficient bloodhound could canter after. One guy, nice man, had even shredded his files. Hadn’t done the history lesson taught by Solly Lieberman. The old East German secret police had shredded till the machines blew up, but the new Federal authority had put together a unit, hired a warehouse, brought sacks of paper to it and set to work with rolls of Sellotape. The same exercise had convicted a guy from the south-east who was on a dodgy deal of Heckler amp; Koch machine pistols manufactured under licence in Tehran. Harvey Gillot stored nothing.
He was led to a car, a Mercedes with privacy glass.
His meeting in Paris had been at the office of the Georgian embassy’s military attache. He had listed what he could ship from Bulgaria, what it would cost, and an arrival date. Ahead of him lay a long afternoon, evening and night of detailed discussions. Why did the Georgian government want weapons from Bulgaria through the back door? Simple enough. After the mauling Georgia had received from Russian tanks and artillery in the summer of ’08, the government would have wanted to rearm on their own terms, not on American or European Union terms, and Harvey Gillot was the man they had turned to and would pay handsomely for the privilege of independent action. Not that he cared anything for the politics of East and West. It was a hell of a good deal he’d brokered.
The car went fast. A blue lamp flashed on the roof and traffic swerved to give it space. He was among people who valued him, saw him almost as a saviour, the knight in shining armour, at the top of his game. Here, far from home and his country’s law-enforcement agencies, he could savour his importance. He couldn’t at home. On trains or in aircraft he would find himself beside men and women who insisted on spilling their life stories to him, but he never reciprocated. He maintained a wall of privacy around himself. Could hardly respond, ‘Dealer in death,’ when asked what his trade was. Would have been the same for an undertaker. He didn’t recognise loneliness, but was a man alone. Maybe a blessing, and maybe a carried cross, but isolation went with the work.
Harvey Gillot felt good here, almost closed his eyes and almost dozed.
The man came in a Land Cruiser that trailed a plume of dust behind it. Petar saw it from far back. The priest was almost a stranger to them at this moment; the police already were. He thought of the Land Cruiser and its passengers as an intrusion. Tomislav had threatened earlier to walk back to the village, collect half a dozen ditching spades and start the job himself. Others had growled support and sworn they would help to excavate their own from the ground. Andrija had supported Tomislav. Petar had not known what was best or what he wanted. The priest had said, diffidently, that they should wait. The Croat policeman had ordered that no digging should be done, and had said that the field where the hand protruded was now a potential crime scene. The Serb policeman was in the patrol car but Petar had believed he smirked while the argument went on. Tomislav had not gone to get the spades. The grave had not been touched.
The Land Cruiser braked, soil flying up from the wheels. A girl climbed out of the front passenger seat and a man from the back. The villagers did not surge forward or seek introductions, and the priest caught their mood.
The girl had a good voice. ‘I’m sorry you’ve all had to wait so many hours for expert help to reach you. I’m grateful for your patience. I’m Kristina, from the Department of Pathology and Forensic Science at the university hospital in Zagreb. Under government statutes it is required that all graves from the Homeland War, those with the possibility of genocide, a crime against humanity or a war crime, must be investigated with rigour and care. I was delayed because I went to the airport and was fortunate enough to meet one of the principal experts in his field today. He was due here in two days’ time, after giving a lecture in the hospital in Zagreb tomorrow to government and media, but this situation is more important and the lecture has been postponed. He has come directly from the airport following his flight from the west coast of America. He is Professor William Anders.’
Petar saw a big man, solid, muscular, without surplus weight. He had a strong chin with two days’ growth on it. Petar had never been on an aircraft. The furthest he had travelled from the village was to the refugee camp for displaced persons near Zagreb. There were big bulges under the man’s eyes and the lower rims of his dark glasses rested on them. He wore lace-up walking boots, a creased pair of jeans, a shirt and a cotton jacket. He looked as though he had slept rough. On his head, shading his face from the sun, now low, was a wide-brimmed leather hat. As he was introduced to them he was lighting a cigar.
Smoke eddied towards them. The man spoke, the girl translated when he paused: ‘I understand. I know how you feel. There are bodies, perhaps of loved ones, and they have not been laid to rest with due dignity. Now they have been discovered and everybody says, “Hey, hold on, wait. An important man is honouring you with his skills and his presence. Be patient.” I’m going to tell you some facts, and then I want to make a promise to you.’
Petar thought his voice similar to many he had heard on programmes broadcast on Croatian TV. He noted control, authority and sincerity.
‘The facts. A judge said of the big crime down the road at Vukovar, “Silence condones. Once awareness exists it is unthinkable to remain silent.” He went on, “The families demand truth and justice.” A colleague of mine who worked here and across the border at Srebrenica liked to say, “Bones are often our last and best witnesses. They never lie and they never forget.” Maybe there was a crime and maybe there wasn’t. If there was a crime, it will be me who says so.’
The man and his translator threw long shadows.
‘I said I would make you a promise. I am now about to do that. I promise I will investigate this grave – I’m told it’s likely to hold the bodies of four local men – to the best of my ability. If there has been a crime I will discover it and search for evidence that will convict those responsible. My work is to find the guilty. Men swaggered when they had victory behind them and a loaded rifle in their hands. They murdered and believed themselves safe from justice. I tell you, those men cringe when confronted with the weight of evidence I produce. They piss their pants. You have my promise.’
He flicked ash from the cigar’s tip, let it fall to the ground. He had them all, Petar understood, in the palm of his hand.
‘I don’t know this village, but I know the town. I was there thirteen years ago. I came to Vukovar to help in the excavation of the war-crime site at Ovcara. I forget nothing. My promise then was to search for the evidence of murder. I continue to honour the promise. Better than I, you know the figures. There is a difference between the numbers taken forcibly from the hospital, when Vukovar fell, and transported to the farm at Ovcara and the numbers of bodies recovered from the mass grave. Somewhere, on that farm land, there is another grave that holds the bodies of sixty men. Because of my promise I come back each year and help to hunt for that grave. I gave my promise, the same promise I make to you.’
The shadow of the man’s hat covered Petar’s boots, had climbed towards his knees. Perhaps that was why Petar was chosen. The eyes fastened on him.
The translator asked, ‘What happened here?’
‘I drove the tractor with the plough. For nineteen years this ground has been mined. We have been told it is cleared. We looked for the bodies.’
‘You knew bodies were here?’
‘We knew that here, where it was mined, was where our men had been. They waited on the path.’
‘On the Cornfield Road that linked Vukovar to Vinkovci?’
‘They were on it.’
‘Who was there?’
‘Our schoolteacher. He had gone out three weeks before to buy weapons. We received nothing from Zagreb. We were betrayed by Zagreb.’
The priest tutted but received an acid glance from the American, muttered, hung his head and was quiet.
‘Continue, please.’
‘Everything we owned in the village was collected and given to Zoran, the teacher. He asked for our trust. What we collected was taken to a meeting and given to a supplier of weapons. A deal was made. That night, Zoran went with three others to receive the missiles and launchers that our valuables had bought. Everything was given as payment. We waited for their return. They would have been heavily burdened by the weight of the weapons. They didn’t come. There was mortaring in this area but that was near dawn and they should already have been long back. With those weapons we could have kept the Cornfield Road open. Their tanks cut it. We lost the road through the corn, we lost the village and Bogdanovci, and a week later we had lost Vukovar. The teacher had sworn to us that the man he had met and paid was honourable. We know now that the lorry with the weapons never reached the far end of the Cornfield Road. Some say it never loaded or left the docks at the harbour where they were supposed to be landed.’
As he spoke, Petar saw that Mladen, who led the community, bit his lower lip, and the Widow, in black blouse, black skirt and black stockings, with brilliant white hair, stood erect and gazed high over the American’s head.
‘How many were with the teacher?’
Petar said, ‘He had taken with him my friend Tomislav’s boy, my friend Andrija’s cousin… and my only son.’
‘If there was guilt we’ll find it, and I’ll work to name those who should face justice.’
From the back of the Land Cruiser, the professor and the young woman took long rolls of tape and circled the raised arm. The professor told the people of the village that he would sleep in the back of the vehicle and that the dead would not be alone. Petar walked back to his tractor, started the engine and led the way back to the village.
Before they had gone far they heard the chugging beat of a small generator and lights lit the place. They had a man’s promise. He could picture his son, Tomislav’s, Andrija’s cousin and the teacher. It was owed them that the guilt should be uncovered and punishment meted out.