The Untouchable

Chapter Ten

Joey Cann trudged up the steep street. For the life of him, he could not understand why Mister had walked out of the inner city and taken the street up the hill. It was a lesson learned long ago by Joey, heard at the feet of experts, that where a target went a footman followed. The task of the footman was merely to stay in touch, stay unseen, but to hold the link.

At first, going up the street, past small guest-houses and smaller shops with barely filled shelves, he thought of himself as a predator and Mister as his prey. As a child, on the estate where his father was the factor, he had been taught a stalker's arts by the gamekeeper. The keeper had been young, just out of agricultural college, from the Exmoor countryside, and had been – so his father said – the best that the estate owner had ever employed. Joey, a teenager, and the keeper, early twenties, in late summer mornings had stalked fallow deer, and he'd watched the keeper shoot them with a rifle. At different times of the year, when killing was not the priority, their game had been to creep close, and Joey had known that flushing excitement from being so near and unobserved. Then he had felt himself the predator and thought of the deer as his prey. The man ahead of him took the prey's role, showed no awareness and no fear, and strolled.

The keeper had gone when the new owner had taken the estate, too expensive for the new money. A syndi-cate from Bristol had bought the shooting rights and employed a part-time man who had neither the time nor the inclination to take a youngster out with him.

Joey's stalking talent had lain dormant until now.

He had said he was the loser and Mister was the winner. But the loser tracked the winner. Elation surged in him. He felt the power of the predator.

His mind was focused on the roll of the shoulders in front of him and the bob of the curly uncombed hair. He did not think of Jen, or of Dougie Gough who had given him the chance, or of why Mister wandered towards the outskirts of the city. He had a bounce in his stride.

Ahead of him, the sunshine of the afternoon was slipping to dull dusk, but low light snatched at the stunted little concrete posts of vivid white that rose from the dirt earth. Why would Mister come to a place of the dead? On the hill above Patriotske lige, and on the slope below, were the densely packed white grave-posts, not in ordered lines, not set with geometric precision, but squeezed in, forced together too close for decency.

Where Mister led him, he followed. Above the railings and below them, women and men and children moved with sad duty and carried little bunches of posies, a gift to the graves. Joey had not comprehended the scale of the Sarajevo slaughter. He remembered, fleetingly, the stories of the radio and in newspapers, of night-time funerals so that mourners would not have inflicted on them the shell and mortar fire of their enemies. Snuggled against the lower side of the twin cemeteries was an earth and shale soccer pitch, not blessed with a blade of grass, and he remembered, too, hearing and reading that a sports field had been used as an overspill graveyard.

Looking through the railings on the upper side of the cemetery, flush to the pavement as if the corpses had been squashed short to fit the space given them, were five white stones, same family name and same date of death.

The pavement ahead of him was empty.

Joey cursed for allowing a graveyard, the war dead, to break his concentration.

His eyes raked the desolation around him.

He saw Mister, and breathed hard. The moment's tension slipped from his muscles. Mister walked among the dead's marker posts. They reached to his hips. Some had fresh-cut flowers resting against them, some had sealed glass bowls protecting artificial flowers, some had flowers long dead, some were abandoned. He should have asked why, and did not.

Mister went slowly towards a great grey stone monument that sprouted above the posts, dark against light and dominating. He seemed to have time, not to be worrying. Mister did not look at his watch, as any man would have done if he had made a rendezvous there.

Mister walked past the monument and out of Joey's view.

'I'll deal with it,' he'd said.

Mister was wearing his best suit and good, lightweight shoes. Mud and snow slush clung to the knees of his trousers, was caked on his shoes. He knelt. He was behind haphazard rows of white posts and away to the right of the monument. It was the first time he'd seen him.

He would deal with it because that was his way. At stake was respect. To have been in debt and under obligation to Ismet Mujic was unthinkable to Mister.

The young man was near the monument. He had stopped and hesitated, and looked around him. The circling glance was supposed to be casual. ..

The tracker had lost his target. The monument was a fallen lion, or a sleeping one, and the inscription that was hard to read was in German. The tracker eyed the monument, as if to display his innocence, and kept his head movement minimal but his eyes traversed the posts and the graves. Mister watched.

He looked like a student. Mister had never travelled abroad on work before, but he had been to Spain often enough with the Princess for sunshine breaks and he'd have prided himself that he could spot the stereotypical characteristics of foreigners. He thought the tracker was British. The spectacles were the give-away. They weren't a fashion accessory, styled, they were functional: he could see the big lenses that flashed in the last light as the head was gently twisted. .. A policeman wouldn't have passed Hendon with eyesight needing such assistance. Low on the wet dirt earth and puddles of slush water around his knees, his viewpoint gave him the narrowest of corridors between the posts.

All the way up the hill, a route chosen at random, he had never looked back. He had not doubled on himself or used the reflection of shop doorways.

Ahead of him had been the cemeteries, the locked-up sports stadium, and the hospital high on the furthest hill. The upper sloping cemetery had seemed to give him the best opportunity. He waited and watched…

He searched for more of them. Down the slope, beyond the monument, were the railings, the pavement and the road. He looked for men in raincoats or leather jackets, for women who had no purpose in being there. All he saw was old women, old men and a few children walking slowly to graves, or sitting on seats and reflecting, or hurrying away because the evening closed on the city. He did not identify a team.

The realization came quickly. They had sent one man. That was lack of respect. He knew all the women and men from the police Crime Squad, from the police intelligence, from Customs' Investigation Service who were prominent in tracking, trailing, following him.

He knew their rank, their addresses and their families' names. He knew about their kids, their cars and their holidays. With the Eagle he had walked past them at the Old Bailey on his way to the side door, had gone past their misery and their sourness. He did not know this one young man who now stood confused close to the monument.

A heavy rain had begun to fall.

He saw only the whiteness of the stones, the little clumps of flowers and the dark grey slabs of the monument. The lion, shrapnel-pocked, slept. It was a memorial to the German soldiers killed in a long-ago war. Joey felt the chill of the place, and the rain that was carried in the growing wind beat on his back and against his trousers. In some of the stones, set in shallow recesses, nested photographs of the dead – young men, from the carved dates of their lives. He did not know whether they were soldiers or civilians, whether they had died in combat or been killed by shell splinters or by snipers. Some would now have been his age, or younger. Dreaming… and the wrong place to dream.

Joey Cann was the loser. While he had stood near to the monument around him the cemetery had emptied.

Joey, the footman, had lost the eyeball.

He turned away. The rain ran on his spectacles and he dragged them off and wiped them hard; without them the white posts were jagged blurs. He did not know whether he had shown out or whether he had fouled up. He could not say that he had been seen, or whether the bulk of the monument – the sleeping artillery-shredded lion – had masked Mister as he'd walked out of the cemetery's far side and disappeared into the network of small streets above it. There was a story written into the history of the Church of the day when twenty executive officers and higher executive officers had been deployed to follow a Colombian from a bank meeting in the City of London. Five lost the target in the first Underground station. More had been scattered as the target had changed trains on his journey. Three out of twenty had reached Heathrow with him. No one in authority could blame him for being dropped by his target, but he blamed himself.

He left the cemetery. The rain was sprayed in headlights, spattered off the glistening road, and soaked his trousers.

Going down the hill, first on Patriotske liga and then on Kosevo, he walked fast. Then, abruptly, he crossed a small park that separated Kosevo from Alipasino. He went past the fortress of the guarded American embassy, could see only the roofs of the buildings behind the high walls. The flag above them was limp and the floodlights burned brightly. Guards eyed him, a camera swivelled to train on him. Joey was trained in footman surveillance, not in the counter-culture. He had passed the tests, flying colours and praise from the instructors, in following, not in being followed. The sense of failure overwhelmed him. The failure, an itch in his mind, shut out a cooler response. Tears smarting in his eyes, he did not wave down taxis, didn't jump on buses. His nightly report would list Mister's movements, the tourist trail around old trenches above Sarajevo and lunch in a fish restaurant above Pale, and his drive to the meeting with Ismet Mujic and the unloading of more boxes that had been taken into the apartment. It would not speak of failure. He remembered how it had been in the room occupied by the new men and women recruited to Sierra Quebec Golf; Gough's harsh, staccato introduction, the hostile suspicion of the eyes that had glared at him, the interloper.

With the rainwater dripping off him, he stamped into the hall of his hotel, didn't respond to the friendly inquiry from the reception clerk as to whether he'd had a good day, and hurried for the stairs, his room and dry clothes. He never looked back, never saw the reaction of the snubbed clerk.

A hand palmed a banknote across the table to the value of one hundred German marks. It represented a quarter of the monthly wage paid to a hotel reception clerk, and won an answer. 'Joey Cann, room 239, from London.'

Another banknote, another hundred marks, slipped into the clerk's hip pocket and the name was fed into the hotel computer. Abill was printed out then passed over the desk. It was scanned. A name, a passport number, no address beyond London SW17, no occupation given, itemized food and coffee, one call made on the room's telephone.

A final question, and another banknote: was Mr Cann alone? He was travelling with a woman, separate rooms, a very smart woman – a lady. Hands were shaken, smiles were exchanged.

Mister walked out into the rain and the falling darkness.

The number of the mobile telephone was known only to its owner and its owner's paymaster. Three calls were made from it that evening.

The trigger for the calls was a simple request for information. As soon as the bleep and vibration heralding the call had cut into the conversation in the crowded Italian restaurant in Victoria, its owner had left the table and gone to the toilets. He was never without that phone, pay-as-you-go. He had listened to the brief message left against a rumble of background traffic.

His first call was to the night duty officer at the National Investigation Service of Customs amp; Excise.

He identified himself as the father of Joey Cann, and asked to speak to him. He was patched through to an extension number, and repeated himself. He was told, curtly, that Cann was abroad and apologized with humility. Buried in the workings of the mobile was an attachment that scrambled its number, preventing it being traced, placed there by a three-man electronics company from the east of London.

His second call was to a British Telecom engineer's home. The engineer worked in a building in central Bristol considered sufficiently sensitive to be un-publicized. From the building, telephone taps and the inquiries of covert law-enforcement organizations were handled. Among its many prized facilities was the ability to feed a number into a computerized system and receive back the name and address of the subscriber.

He waited in the toilet, left his wife and three colleagues, and their wives, at the table.

He was a detective chief inspector, on attachment to the National Crime Squad. A recent paper that he had read, 'Police Corruption Vulnerability Profiling', had offered a solid description of him, but he went unidentified and trusted because it was not the nature of the squad actively to search for culprits. He had known Mister since 1973 when he had been a probationer beat constable out of Caledonian Road and had taken the first small 'donation'. Now he was three years from retirement and had a record, with commendations, of distinguished service and a high detection rate. He was well regarded by colleagues and had successfully served in drugs, serious crime and robbery teams; he seemed to have a nose for guilt.

He was regarded by those alongside him as arrogant and brash, with justification. The woman at the table, waiting for his return, represented his third venture into marriage; his income from the Crime Squad, paid monthly, was divided between what he kept and what he paid to the two women from the failed relationships. He was secretive about his policing methods, seldom shared, rejoiced in the title of 'a copper's copper'. It was whispered of him that he bent regulations, but that had never been proven. He should have been made detective superintendent but promotion had been denied him for no articulated reason. It was likely that it had been blocked because he seldom hid an overweening contempt of his superiors and their dogma of political, sexual, ethnic and legal correctness; he was a 'thief-taker' and what the bosses wanted was a 'socialist pedagogue who was black and had a law degree in criminal sociology' – this was his familiar refrain when he bought the big drinks rounds for the juniors. Without the money Mister paid him he would have been as impoverished as a stray dog.

He had no fear of being unmasked. His seasoned experience meant that he knew the system of internal investigation and covered his tracks with care. Most recently for Mister he had identified the location of a prison's Protected Witness Unit, and the PWU number given to a prisoner, and had named a technician at a Home Office Forensic Laboratory to which incriminating fingerprints had been sent.

For a quarter of a century, his arrangement with Mister had been mutually beneficial; he had received information on Mister's rivals and lifted them, always with evidence to convict. He had earned the right to promotion by his successes. Its denial had added a hatred of the system he served, he had no qualms about what he did – and the money kept coming.

His telephone bleeped, tickling the palm of his hand. He listened and wrote down what he was told, for the sake of accuracy.

He made his third call. He heard the distant traffic.

'Joey Cann works at NIS, the Church – he's abroad right now. The subscriber on that number is Jennifer Martin, address is Ground Floor Flat, 219A Lavenham Road, London SW18. Got it?' The connection cut in his ear.

The piece of paper, torn into many pieces, was flushed down the pan. He returned to the table to resume as its life and soul.

He looked around, saw nobody who he thought watched him, and lightly rapped the door at the back of the van. 'Me,' Joey said.

He was let in. He scrambled into her territory. There was a dull light inside, like a photographer's dark room. Maggie was squatting on her stool in front of her console. He avoided the bucket, saw that it was a quarter full. Beside it were her sandwich wrappings, two apple cores and an empty Pepsi tin. He looked at the screen. The camera, trained on the hotel main door, was bolted on to the dashboard top and was covered in yesterday's newspapers.

She grimaced. 'God, you smell nice – going somewhere I don't know about?'

'Got soaked, had a shower, changed.'

'Bloody marvellous – I'd give an arm right now for a shower and clean tights.'

The log, written in her neat copperplate hand, recorded that Target Two and Target Three had returned one hundred and eighty-five minutes earlier, that seventy minutes earlier Target Three had exited and driven away in the Toyota, that sixty-six minutes earlier the beacon signal had been lost, that fourteen minutes earlier Target Three had been dropped back at the hotel by a taxi.

'Is he back?'

'I thought you were supposed to know.'

'What I'm asking – is he back?'

'Steady down – yes, he's back. Didn't I log it? His door was unlocked eighty-four minutes ago.'

'Do I have to ask twice every time? Make something complicated where it should be bloody simple.

"Is he back?" "Yes, he's back." Thank you. Now we've established he's back, please tell me what he's doing.'

'Who bit you this evening?'

'Second time – what's he doing?'

'Don't know – so you don't have to ask twice, I don't know what he's doing.'

'God… What do you think he's doing?'

'I'm never a pessimist – if you were to ask me to tell you, not on oath, I'd say he's moving the furniture round. Before that he was tapping the walls and the ceiling.'

'Shit.' Joey mouthed it.

'Take a listen for yourself…'

She passed him the earphones. It might have been a chair dragged across the carpet, or drawers pulled out from the chest and dropped, or wood being torn from its holding glue.

Maggie wrenched the earphones off his head. 'You lost him, didn't you?'

He said, tried to summon defiance, 'Contact was broken, yes.'

'You bloody showed out, didn't you?'

After a little more than an hour and a half of searching, Mister found the bug. He had gently tapped his way round the walls of the room, and stood on a chair to tap the ceiling. It had been a methodical, close search. He had taken all the pictures off the wall and had unscrewed the ventilation grilles and the power points. He had satisfied himself that the walls, ceilings, grilles and electric fittings were clear, then he had taken the back off the TV set, stripped down the bedside radio, prised the cover off the telephone and had unplugged it at the wall socket to break the link of an infinity transmitter using the receiver's microphone.

He had turfed the sheets, blankets, pillows and coverlet off the bed, then heaved off the mattress and minutely examined the legs, headboard and base.

He had taken the drawers out of the desk supports, stripped his clothes from them. He had gone through the bathroom with the same precision, looked under the bath, looked at the shaving and hair-dryer plug points, had removed the bath's side cover, stretched his hand into the space and lit it with his pencil torch.

He had turned his attention to the wardrobe. His suits and best shirts were on the floor, and his shoes. He worked from the bottom of the wardrobe to the top.

In the east of London, at Romford, was a three-man business with whom Mister had an association.

Thoughtfully, and with an eye for the future, he had provided start-up funds for their business, but Mister's connection with them was well buried and did not appear on their company paperwork. His small initial investment had paid handsomely, but he had never called in the debt. The business, run from a shabby and unprepossessing industrial park, supplied state-of-the-art bugs, cameras, homing beacons, scanners and recording equipment to a smartly appointed shop in the West End's Bond Street.

It sold its goods mainly on the Middle Eastern Gulf market; the best money-spinner was the lightweight beacons attached by princes, sheikhs and emirs to the ankles of their hunting falcons. The shop gathered in the money, and the three men in the industrial park each worked seventy-hour weeks to satisfy demand.

Mister had never asked to be repaid his investment: what he demanded was to be kept up to date on the latest, most sophisticated devices that could be used against him. From his continuing contact he knew of most of the equipment available to the Secret Intelligence Service, the Security Service, GCHQ, the National Crime Squad, the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the Church… what was on offer, and where it could be hidden.

Because he stood on the chair and was close to the woodwork at the top of the wardrobe, because his torch beam played on the joins at the angles of the wood screen, he saw the faint scrape where the join had been loosened. The wood creaked and small splinters fell from it as Mister dragged it apart.

It was smaller than anything the men in the industrial park at Romford had shown him. He grinned to himself. The bug, he thought, was the most recently developed and most miniaturized, and it had been used against him. The grin was because he felt that respect was being shown him. His anger slackened. He looked at the box, the wires and the listening probe slotted into the wood, and he considered… There were options open to him. He could leave it where it was and feed false information into it, get the Eagle in and talk riddles, discuss bogus travel movements, but no message would then be sent. He could go down the third-floor corridor, take Atkins's radio, put the volume to full, hold the radio beside the probe's microphone, throw the on switch, and blast the ears that would be listening under headphones, but that would not send the message he wanted.

He could swear down the link, blasphemies and obscenities, and laugh raucously, but that would lessen the message.

He left it in place.

He put his room back together, undid the chaos of his search.

He stripped out of the suit with the mud wet on his knees, scraped the caked clay off his shoes, then took a long shower and dressed for dinner.

Standing on the chair, he took down the box, the wires and the probe, then used the flat of his hand to hammer the joins on the wood screen back into place.

He took the bug out of his room and walked briskly down the corridor, down three flights of stairs, across the atrium hall, through the swing doors and out into the spitting night. He hurried because he did not want his clean suit and clean shoes to get wet from the rain.

They watched the screen. The bright lights of the hotel's porch roof flared the picture and burned out the face of Target One, but as he came forward the picture compensated. He was whistling to himself, amplified and tinny over the van's speaker.

Maggie tilted the joystick control and the camera tracked with him.

Joey breathed hard. He was against her back, could feel the warmth of her, peered over her shoulder.

He went into the centre of the car park. A taxi flashed him with its headlights, but he smiled and gestured that he didn't need it. Mister looked around him and saw what he wanted. The camera followed him towards a rubbish bin at the edge of the car park.

He never looked around or hunted for them, as if they weren't important, as if he knew they were there. He was beside the bin, his arm moved, and the box, the wires and the fine probe dropped at his feet. The carried its clatter. The box had bounced on the gravel but was still now and the twisted wires lay on of a polished shoe was raised. Mister stamped twice on the box. The speaker reverberated once, then the silence was around them. Mister bent, picked up the pieces of the box and the wires that had detached from. He snapped the probe in half, and dropped it into the rubbish bin. He wiped his hands, rubbed the rain off his hair, turned for the hotel's door, and disappeared inside.

'Well, go on… ' she said.

Joey looked blankly at her.

'Didn't your mother ever tell you, "Waste not, want not"? I can rebuild it, so go and get it.'

He thought she enjoyed the moment.

'You were the one who showed out, remember – so just get it.'

Joey said feebly, 'I don't know where or when. I just don't understand at what moment I showed out.'

' "Winners and losers", as I recall. It's quite simple.

You weren't good enough. You overvalued your capability. Please, just go and get it.'

Joey slipped out of the back of the van and went towards the rubbish bin. He had never felt so miserable, so worthless – not when the letter had dropped into the box of his parents' tied cottage to tell him his exam results had been inadequate for a college place, not when the Sierra Quebec Golf team had drifted in from the Old Bailey. Always, before, he could have blamed others. This time, only he carried the blame

… He retrieved the pieces from the rubbish bin and carried them back. In the van she examined them.

He had not brought everything: he had missed the snapped-off head of the probe. He was told what he had missed. He went a second time to the rubbish bin, groped in it and couldn't find the length of the broken probe. He pulled the wire frame out of the bin, shook it out and crawled among the debris until he found it.

He brought the piece back to her, and left the rubbish scattered.

She smiled, winked at him, and put it into a bag with the box and the wires. She closed down the camera, switched off the audio console and climbed into the van's driving seat. She offered no explanation as they drove along Zmaje od Bosne then on to the Bulevar Mese Selimovica.

They sat in silence, and he nursed the hurt. The rain had lifted a shallow mist off the road, the warehouses and darkened factories. At first the beacon was faint.

The light on the screen and the bleep drew them. They reached the junction for the turning to the airport. The building on the corner had had a massive tower that was collapsed now in huge concrete shapes. The beacon was stronger. The van's headlights found an encampment of caravans, lorries and bell-tents. They drove off the road and onto a mud track. The wheels spun, but she had control and edged past the camp.

The light on the screen and the bleep intensified. He saw the fire engine, men with hoses and a crowd of dancing, leaping urchin kids. The smoke from the burned-out skeleton of the Toyota sagged in the wind.

She gazed at the scene.

'Not bad, eh? Still working.'

He tried to summon the pith of sarcasm: 'I suppose you want me to go and retrieve it?'

'It's otter, didn't I tell you? That's One Time -

Throw Away. What a star, still going after that sort of fire.'

'Are we on a test-to-destruction exercise?'

'We are merely confirming that you showed out, that the targets know of our surveillance – cheer up, look on the bright side.'

'Does it get worse?'

'Doubt it. You showing out should make it all the more challenging. It could be, at last, interesting.'

February 1997

He already wore his heavy calf-length underpants under his pyjamas, a vest and thick woollen socks. He crawled from his bed onto the floor. The bed legs had been unscrewed and burned for warmth. He reached the solid old table that he would never chop up for the fire, heaved himself upright, went to the door and lifted down his heavy coat. Dragan Kovac would never be parted from that coat, which was twenty-five years old and a symbol of his past. Most of its front buttons were still in place; they were dulled but still, if he squinted at them, he could see the rampant eagle head embossed on them. The coat reminded him of the days when he had been a man of importance, the police sergeant, just as the table reminded him of the blessed days before his wife had been taken from him.

There had been an explosion in the night.

Without the help of the Spanish soldiers it would not have been possible for him to move back into his house. They had strung a great canvas sheet over the roof tiles that kept out the rain but not the damp. They had sealed the windows with planks, had replaced the broken chimney stack with a tube of silvery metal, but it smoked if the winter gales came from the east or the south. They brought him the basics of food, and paraffin oil for his lamp, and nagged that it was not a fit place for an elderly man to live on his own. But, he was back, and he would not shift before his Maker took him. Then he would be buried in the graveyard above Ljut beside his wife, below a rough-chiselled stone cross. The family with whom he had been force-lodged in Griefswald had packed his bags for him a full forty-eight hours before the mini-bus had come to collect him.

The crisp sun lit the valley.

From the door, looking down, he saw Husein Bekir with his fundamentalist son-in-law. Dragan Kovac spat a gob of mucus onto the concrete path that led from his front door. If they wore that uniform, camouflage markings and forage cap, they were fundamentalists and war criminals. He had no doubt of it. It was his surprise that a decent man like Husein Bekir – avaricious for land and money, but decent – allowed the man his daughter had married to flaunt that killers' uniform. He would speak to Husein about it when the fundamentalist criminal had returned to his unit… The uniforms, he had been told in the transit camp before he had returned to Ljut, were the cast-off clothes of the American army, and the weapons with which they were issued were

American; their instructors were American, and they would have American advisers when, finally, they attacked the defenceless Serb people and drove them from their homes. It was what he had been told and he believed it. He believed, also, that this criminal soldier would have killed Serb babies and Serb women without mercy; he had been told it.

Husein and his son-in-law were at the far riverbank, away from the ford.

Since he had come back, Dragan Kovac had spoken twice to his neighbour. The Spanish soldiers had told him, repeated it, drilled it into him as though he were an idiot, that he should not step off the track that went down to the ford or up to the village. They had asked him where the mines were laid, but his memory was hazy and he could not remember what type had been sown, in what quantities, or where. Dragan had walked twice down to the ford, on the hard track, and they had shouted across the river to each other. How was Husein? He was fine. How was Lila? She was fine. How was the house? It was fine… That was the first time. The second time they had shouted over the water about the weather, about the volume of the rain-fall and that it was worse than any year since 1989, and about small things, and about his friend's hope of being given a new tractor… No politics, and nothing about the mines. When the water level fell, when it was possible for Husein Bekir to cross the ford, he would come and they would play chess, and Dragan had promised to cook for Husein and fill him with brandy while they played.

The previous day, the son-in-law had slung a rope with a grapple-hook tied to its end over the river and dragged it tight till the claws caught fast in a withy clump then knotted his own end to an alder's roots.

Perhaps Husein's memory was better than his own, or perhaps the son-in-law was merely lucky and had the arrogance of youth. Hanging from the rope, the young man had hauled himself over the river. Even at that long distance, Dragan had observed the fretted anxiety of Husein as the son-in-law searched for the mines. They were the ones on stakes that were fired with trip-wires. Much of the grass was still thin from the fire Husein had lit before Dragan's return. The son-in-law found four of what the Spanish soldiers called the PMR3 fragmentation mines, which they said were the most dangerous. The fire would have burned the nylon wires, but the mines had survived the fire. Dragan had thought it crass stupidity, but the son-in-law with the four mines had gone along the bank of the river and he'd lost sight of him where the wood came down to the water. An hour later he had come back without the mines… He watched the young man cross the river on the rope then walk along the riverbank towards the tree-line.

There had been the detonation in the night, then silence.

He put on his boots, tied them loosely, and stamped off down the track. He shouted for Husein to join him and wove towards the ford. He kept to the centre of the track. He felt good now, but he thought Husein walked less steadily than he remembered, and Husein was a year and seven months younger than him. He waited until Husein reached the ford and felt satisfaction that he walked less well than himself. And Husein, also, had poorer hearing, so Dragan had to shout above the tumble of the water to be heard.

'What's h e… ' Dragan spat into the river and saw his phlegm bobble before being carried away '… what's he doing?'

'Yesterday he picked up four of the mines and moved them.'

'That's the job of a fool.'

'He said we should eat meat – that we eat too much of the soya and pasta shit that the military brings.'

'I heard a mine in the night,' Dragan replied sourly.

'The soya and pasta is good enough for me.'

'But not for my son-in-law. He took four mines from the field to the trees and looked for the tracks of deer. He moved the mines to kill a deer.'

'Has he killed a deer?'

'He's gone to see what he has killed. If it's a young deer it's good. It is God's gift. If it is a fox then the risk he took was wasted – he says we should eat meat.'

Dragan, with the pomposity given him by his police overcoat, said, 'It is better to have a life and limbs than to have meat.'

'He says he knows about mines.'

'Then he's a fool – you should eat pasta and soya.'

'Only once have we had fish since we came back.

We need more than pasta and soya, the children must have meat if they are to grow… It is because of your people that we have the mines in my fields.'

'The mines were put in the ground to protect us from barbarian criminals – like your son-in-law. Our officer called them "defensive mines".'

Husein Bekir had spread his arms, waved them as if to call on God as a witness, and raged, 'You shelled us, you fired on our homes.'

'You came and slit our throats in the night. You would have killed me.' The veins bulged in Dragan Kovac's throat as he bellowed his riposte.

'You fired shells on us, on our women and our children.'

'Enough, Husein Bekir, enough – can you not recognize that it is over, the war is finished?'

'How is the war over when your mines are still in my fields?'

Dragan laughed. 'I know the war is over when you are at my house and we play chess, and the brandy is on the table – and I will beat you on the table, and I will still be sitting when you are on the ground, drunk.'

'You have no skill at chess, you cannot hold liquor.

Never had… never could… never will.' The laughter cackled across the water. And over the laughter was the crack of the explosion.

His friend, Husein, with the poorer hearing did not hear the blast. He still laughed. Dragan Kovac, the powerful man who had been in authority, cringed.

The only time in his life he had ever run from the responsibilities of his position in Ljut was during the attack, and he had suffered – his God knew he had suffered – been imprisoned in the tower block in Griefswald as punishment for running. He had vowed then, many times, he would never flee his obligation again. He pointed to the wood. He stabbed at the wood with his finger. Husein Bekir's eyes followed the jabbing hand, laughter gone.

A narrow column of dark, chemical smoke rose from the heart of the trees, and above the smoke, crows circled and screamed.

Dragan saw Husein crumple. He said hoarsely,

'You cannot go there, friend. You have the children to look after, and Lila. You must not go.'

He had to strain to hear the voice. 'What if he is not dead? You said yourself…'

'Believe he is dead.' It was the nearest, spoken with gruffness, that Dragan could get to kindness. 'Believe it was quick.'

He watched as Husein turned and started up the track for his home. In the far distance he could see Husein's wife, daughter and grandchildren at the dour of their ruined house, and others in the village were running to them.

The minefield was active, spawning, and its reach had spread because four mines had been moved by his friend's son-in-law, and two had exploded, but two more were now placed in new ground, where none had been before.

He thought the valley, cut by the river between the villages of Vraca and Ljut, was damned.

The wind caught the trees in Lavenham Road.

Jen heard the cat-flap go, snapping in the kitchen door.

She couldn't sleep. She missed him, that was God's honest truth. She hadn't needed the landlady, Violet, to tell her that she missed him. If she hadn't needed to get back to her two-room flat to feed the cat she would have slept in his bed. It would have been better to have been alone in his bed than alone in her own. Her cat, Walter, was a big black long-haired neutered male.

He was a tie, demanding, and precious little affection from him repaid what she spent on his food. The cat never slept on her bed. He'd have been welcome enough but with the independence of his species he never took up the invitation.

Jen's flat was the whole of the ground floor of a narrow terraced house; she shared the front door with a couple with a baby who rented the floor above, but they were away and there wasn't the crying of the child to disturb her. Jen would have liked the reassurance of the cat on her bed and the crying from upstairs. It was the quiet of the house that disturbed her. The wind was in the trees and it sang high-pitched in the telephone wire from the pole to the house, and it scudded a carton down Lavenham Road that bounced erratically, noisily.

Cleaning Joey's room had been a waste of her time, but being there had been a comfort. Of course he'd be

'all right'… She heard the creak of the fence at the back of the house, loud enough to carry through the length of the building, and then there was a sharp, shrill cry, but very brief, as if Walter fought with a rival. She hadn't thought the wind fierce enough to shift the back fence. She snuggled further down in the bed. She had responsibility for the fence. She used the garden. A fencepost or a section of paling would cost a fortune. She started the big debate that usually ended in sleep. Would he ask her to marry him?

Would she accept if he asked? If he didn't ask, by next Christmas, or in a year's time, would she ask him to marry her? Her mother sniped about it, talked about her neighbours' joy in their grandchildren, said she'd soon be too old, said it was wrong for babies to be born out of wedlock. The wind had come on harder.

She heard the singing, creaking. The front bell rang, persistent and loud. The hands of her watch told her it was half past midnight. The finger stayed on the bell button. She staggered from the bed. Could it be Joey?

Could he be back, silly beggar, and not carrying his mobile? Could he have gone to Tooting Bec, then come on here, for her? She was out of bed and into her dressing-gown. The bell was a siren. It couldn't be Joey, he'd have rung her from Tooting Bec, from the telephone in the downstairs hall. She was into the hall, switched on the ceiling light. Through the frosted glass on the upper half of the door was the outline of a figure. The bell yelled for her. Then the silence, and the figure was gone from the far side of the door.

The door was on the chain. She opened it. She heard, didn't see it, a car driving away. There was a cardboard box on the mat.

Jen took the chain off, opened the door and lifted the top flap of the box. Then she screamed, howled at the wind.

Dougie Gough wondered whether he had expected too much of a young man without the necessary bedrock of experience. Another couple of days and he might, probably would, pitch Cann home. He read the report a second time.

From: SQG12/Sarajevo, B-H

To: SQG1/London

Timed: 00.10 16.03.01

Message Starts:

Para One – Observed, with Box 850, Target One / Two / Three on drive round former city battlefields, presumably time-killing.

Para Two – Observed, with Box 850, Target One/Two/Three visit apartment of IM. Boxes were carried into the apartment but cannot say what they contained.

Para Three – Target One visited Lion cemetery, then returned to hotel.

Message Ends

He thought it pretty damn thin. He rocked with tiredness. He had stayed on alone in the Sierra Quebec Golf room for two full hours after the last of the rest of the team had gone home, stayed for nothing.

He started for his bed in south-west London. He did not know, because he hadn't been told, that a call had come through that evening for Cann and that Cann's father had been informed that his son was abroad. He marched with a good stride for the bus. stop on the all-night route. Nor did he know, had no reason to, that Jennifer Martin lived a dozen streets, across two main roads, from where he would sleep.

At the bus-stop, Dougie Gough lit his pipe and waited – and wondered what in Sarajevo's day had been kept from him.

The guests at the City livery-hall dinner – black tie and stag – finished the last of their brandy and their port and hurried for their chauffeurs and taxis.

Cork had lost count of the times the minister had tried to catch his eye from the top table. He'd thought himself safe as the dinner broke up because the minister was surrounded by well-wishers. On the step, looking for a taxi, he was trapped.

'A lift anywhere, can I drop you?'

'Out of your way, I'm afraid – a taxi'll be along.'

The minister's car waited, the door open.

'I don't wish to press but the Secretary of State's taken an interest. Billy wanted to know where we were with Packer-'

'We never use names on the pavement, Minister.'

'So I told him you had assured me this creature was getting maximum effort – Billy's own constituency, two days ago, came out two from the top of the country's worst heroin-addiction areas, of course he's concerned, he has voters' complaints littering his surgeries – with maximum resources.'

'About spot on. I think I also warned you against high hopes of quick fixes. If I didn't, I should have.'

'I may call him "this creature", yes? Billy sees him as an affront to the government's whole law-and-order policy. Is he still in Sarajevo?'

'Not locations on the pavement, please.'

'Billy said it was intolerable that a man like – er -this creature could beat the justice system. I'm to be called in next week to say where we are, to give assurances. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure you understand the priority of this.'

'Of course… Sorry, must go.'

He saw the taxi's light a full hundred yards up the street. He ran. He bounced off guests who were nearer to it and waving for it. He was in the taxi. Through the window, as it pulled away, he heard the curses of those he'd queue-jumped. He'd do it in the morning, beat the ear of Gough – the privilege of rank. Had he been right to force the issue, to have the youngster, Cann, sent to Sarajevo? The clock ticked. Perhaps he'd drunk a little too much, perhaps he was too casual with the prescribed tablets for his blood pressure, but he sweated as the taxi speeded him home. Gough talked of patience… but that was a damned luxury.

'Do you know what he's done, what's "deal with it myself"?'

'Well, we've all changed rooms – we've lost our vehicle, or you have, and he has thrown a sophisticated listening device into a rubbish bin. That's what I know.'

Atkins needed to talk. He felt isolated. Dinner had been strained. As Mister had talked, a rambling monologue, he had also felt frightened. The Eagle had eaten his food, sipped his Perrier and, with the regularity of a metronome, every minute or so, had nodded his agreement to what was said. Going into the hotel restaurant, Mister had asked casually if the new rooms were satisfactory, and had not referred to the surveillance again.

He'd found the Eagle sitting in a corner of the atrium bar, half hidden by pot plants, alone in its late-night emptiness.

'Is that all of it?'

'I wouldn't have thought so.'

'It seemed a bit tame, what's happened at this end.'

'There's nothing tame about Mister, or haven't you learned that?'

At the Royal Military Academy, Atkins had enjoyed the classes on military history He remembered.

On the wall of one classroom was a reproduction print of the retreat from Moscow. He'd listened to the monologue, and seen the gloom and defiance of Napoleon. It had been a campaign too far, he should never have travelled. The worm ate at him…

Sarajevo was Mister's Moscow. Von Goethe had written, and the lecturer had repeated it, of Napoleon:

'His life was the stride of a demi-god, from battle to battle, and from victory to victory.' At dinner, Mister had talked easily about the state of the aid programme going into Bosnia and the volume of charitable boxes needed, the numbers of lorries required to ferry them, the opportunities provided. It was grand talk. He gave them a vision of a future where the lorries of Bosnia with Love criss-crossed the country, brought in dross and took out 'product'. Goldwin Scott had written, of Napoleon: 'If utter selfishness, if the reckless sacrifice of humanity to your own interest and passions be vileness, history has no viler name.' He seemed to have no care.

'He's under surveillance. He's targeted with an audio device. That's heavy… I didn't expect that – not here, anyway. You're close to him, much closer than me – surely you need to know what action he's taking.'

'I wouldn't ask and I wouldn't listen if I were told, it's called "accessory before the fact" or it's "accessory after the fact", depending – I don't need that. As a legal professional, my advice to you is to maintain a similar indifference.'

'It's not going well, is it?'

'What do you think? Good night.'

Mister had switched from the lorries and their trade to the wider horizons. He was above the small, confined world of London. He was going to an international stage. Electronically moved monies went too fast to be tracked. Commodities were needed on the global scale, and would be paid for without the petty restrictions of Value Added Tax and levied Customs duties. The vision was of a centre controlling a network of assets. The centre was Untouchable.

Napoleon had said, 'The bullet that is to kill me has not yet been moulded.' Atkins had remembered the quotation, and been frightened. Mister talked of power, talked with arrogance, and neither he nor the Eagle dared contradict him. It wasn't going well and Mister didn't recognize it. He was a messiah but had only the Eagle and Atkins with him to play his disciples.

Atkins ordered another beer, swallowed it, and ordered another.

Joey said, 'She was hysterical, she couldn't put a sentence together, she was gone.'

Maggie was wiping sleep dust from her eyes. 'Start it again – start it all over again.'

'When she opened the box there was a plastic bag in it. On top of the box was a piece of paper. Written on it was my name, the room number, and the hotel's phone, even the international dialling code for Sarajevo.'

Maggie pushed herself up in her bed. She was hunched with her knees against her chest. He had been banging, frantic, at her door.

'In the plastic bag?'

'Her cat.'

'Oh, God. Tell me, come on.'

'The cat's called Walter.'

'Fuck its name – what had they done to it?'

'They must have caught it in the garden. It had only just gone out, it's a hunter. It goes out and-'

'Spare me the soundbites.'

'She loves the cat, the cat is-''

'We all love cats. Everyone loves cats, except dogs.

What had they done to the cat?'

He sat on the end of the bed. She had draped a blanket over her shoulders. She noted, at that moment, a calm came to him. The choke in his throat was gone. There was no longer any emotion in his voice.

'She took the plastic bag out of the box and opened it. Her cat was in the bag. I don't know which they had done first. They had cut its head off and also sliced its stomach so its bowels were hanging out. She opened the bag and its entrails and blood went over her hall floor. The blood was still warm, and so was the cat's body. They knew who she was. She's a teacher, she's just my girlfriend, for fuck's sake. If they'd killed Jen, then I'd just have felt blind bloody anger and they'd have known – he would have known that I'd have gone to the end of the earth to follow him. He enjoys inflicting pain. This is all about pain, not about elimination. She will never forget her cat was killed because of me, what I do – he'll have broken us. She was yelling for me to come back, first flight. She said that Packer wasn't worth it. It's how he destroys people… Jen's never been to the Custom House, she doesn't do the socials there with me, nobody's ever heard of her – how did he know about Jen?'

'Have you rung her from here?'

'On the first evening, when we'd just checked in, I-'

'On the room phone?'

Joey nodded. It hurt too much to admit the responsibility out loud. His head dropped. She didn't sneer at him, didn't hit him with sarcasm.

'Where is she now?'

He said, 'I told her to go to a friend's house, ring school in the morning, and stay away sick.'

'Has she spoken to the police? Can't she get protection?'

'I told her not to speak to the police, and not to ring the Church.'

'How did you explain that?'

'Gave her some crap about informers, touts – about leaking sieves, shit about not knowing who you can trust. She wasn't thinking straight enough to argue.'

She took his hand. 'Why did you do that, Joey?

Why did you tell her not to ring the police or your people at the Custom House?'

'They'd call me home,' Joey said simply He let her hold his hand. 'If they knew I'd showed out and that I was identified by name, they'd call me home.'

'You'd better sleep in here with me, but you're on the floor.'

She threw him a blanket and watched him settle on the carpet. She switched the light out.