The Untouchable

Chapter Fourteen

The neighbour knew Bruce James was away. He had been gone nearly a week; she'd seen him go with his bags. She had heard the footsteps tramping on the stairs, then the landing off which she lived, then going on up the last flight. Very few people called to visit him at any hour of the day or night, but she could not remember when anyone had come at a quarter to six in the morning. She thought there were four or five of them, and all men from the weight of their tread. She went to her door and listened as they walked up the final steps Her nose wrinkled; she could smell pipe tobacco.

She liked Bruce James. She thought him courteous and well mannered. Her own grandson was in the navy, an engineer on board a frigate, serving in the Gulf. Sometimes he brought up her post and then they'd talk, and he'd tell her of his own days in the army. She kept an eye on his small flat at the top of the stairs, under the building's eaves.

She heard a jangle of keys, then metal scrapes, and low – spoken obscenities. At the moment she realized that four or five men were attempting to unlock the door to Mr James's rooms, she heard the thud then the splintering of breaking wood.

She hurried to her telephone. Programmed into the set were the numbers she considered most important and among them was that of Hammersmith police station. She used the phrase she'd heard on television:

'Intruders on the premises'.

She heard the dragging of furniture above her ceiling and the movement of feet. It was a thin ceiling.

Mr James was exceptionally considerate and never had his music loud. She waited. She heard the siren of the approaching police car.

She met them on her landing, a young police constable and an older policewoman. She pointed up the last stairs, at the door off the hinges. The noise seeped through the doorway, and the voices. They told her to close her door and lock it, and she saw them take their truncheons off the belts, and the little gas canisters; she knew about the gas from the television programmes. She thought them very brave.

She locked her own door, bolted and chained it.

Joey slept in. When he woke his body ached, but his head was worse. There were the few seconds when he could not place where he was and he lay in the gloom of his room, but the pain in his head, his body and his feet lurched him alert. The curtains were drawn, but carelessly. A strip of gold light came between them and made a shaft on to his bed. He saw the time on his watch, swore and rolled out of the bed. He doused himself in the shower, let tepid water run over him.

He was half wet, half dry, as he dressed. He pulled on the same trousers he'd worn the day before, with the same mud on the knees, and the same shirt. He couldn't find clean socks in his bag, only used pairs, and he had to go down on the floor to find those he'd worn yesterday and which he'd scattered when he had undressed with the whisky in him. He didn't shave, didn't look in the mirror. He went out of his room and stopped at her door. He knocked. There was no reply from Maggie Bolton, just the stale stink of the cigarettes, and no man on the landing. He took the stairs two al a time.

They were in the far corner of the breakfast room. It was a quarter past nine.

'Good of you to show up,' she said.

'Why didn't you wake me?'

'Wild horses wouldn't have.' She grinned. 'You young, things have no stamina.'

He slouched into a chair. All of the Sreb Four were smoking. The cigarettes were as much part of their uniform as the jeans, boots and cheap leather jackets.

To get to the chair he had had to step over two sports bags. He couldn't see their guns and assumed that the machine pistols were in the bags. Frank Williams was beside her and seemed to smile at Joey, without mercy. He poured himself coffee from the jug, into her cup, and turned it so that he didn't drink from the side marked with her burgundy lipstick. The coffee dispersed the ache in his head. He snatched a bread roll off a plate and broke it, crumbs scattering on the cloth as he wolled it. She passed him a sheet of flimsy paper.

From: Endicott, Room 709, VBX

To: Bolton (Technical Support), Sarajevo

Subject: Organized Crime/AWP

Timed: 02.27GMT 19.03.01

Security Classification: Secret

Message Starts:

If you determined to play the wild goose/aka silly bugger, good luck. We insist you have serious protection – arrange it. You are not, repeat not, to put your personal safety at risk. We require your wrap-up within 48 hours, and then your immediate return UK. Remember at all times that we are the senior Service; you do not take instructions from the C amp;E junior.

Don't go native,

Endicott

'Am I supposed to thank you?'

'It's not compulsory. I don't mean to be personal, but actually you stink. I hope you filled a laundry-bag.'

Joey had finished the roll and the coffee. He tried to sound firm, decisive, but thought he failed. 'Can we, please, sort out the priorities of the day, and then I'll do my laundry?'

She asked, innocently, what he meant by

'priorities'.

He was too tired and too flustered to recognize the trap she laid for him. He said, 'Well, we need wheels.

We need to assess the targets and recce them, decide whether we can return to intrusive surveillance, then how we're going to divide up areas of responsibility.'

Her small hand hovered in front of her mouth as if to mask a yawn. Williams, the bastard, straight-faced, whispered a translation into the ear of the Sreb Four man on his right side and the message was passed between them. They were impassive and told him nothing of the trap.

'Well, isn't that the professional approach to take?'

Joey flared. 'Have yon a better idea? I was once called an "obstinate, arrogant sod", but I don't compete.

You're light years ahead.'

She turned in her chair and reached to the Venetian blind covering the window. She depressed one bar and lifted another, made a slit. The window faced on to the hotel's rear car park. He leaned forward, over the cups and the plates. He saw the blue van. The sun reflected from the new hub caps and glanced on the new tyres. He settled back in his chair and wrapped his arms around his chest.

She said, 'Waste not, want not, that's what my mum always told me, still tells me. I rather liked it. The van sort of felt like home. I'm sorry you lost my bucket.

Frank and two of the boys, Muhsin and Salko, went to retrieve it this morning, and borrowed the new wheels. While they were doing that, I went with the other boys to track down that Mitsubishi they tried to run you down with. There's now a beacon on it. It was easier than I thought it'd be. There were two guys asleep, pissed like you, in a shed at the side. The boys were good with the dog, made a proper friend of it – it's all in the body language, isn't it? I'm good on locks, so we checked out the warehouse, then went back the way we'd come, over the wall. Had the time of my life – big strong hands holding me where they shouldn't have, lifting me up and helping me down.

Anyway, then we popped down to the old quarter.

They took me up over the rooftops, to a place they knew. Bloody damn slippery the tiles were, and bloody great rough fingers on my waist, steadying me

– quite a compensation. From there I had a line of sight into Ismet Mujic's apartment, and I unpacked one of my choicest little boxes of tricks. It's the infinity transmitter. Across the street from my box is his window and behind his window is his phone. My box does the leap. It uses the phone's microphone to transmit the room's conversations. We have another ralay in the box and that goes to a room the boys have rented, and there's a tape-recorder turning there, voice-activated. Quite clever, yes? We didn't wake you because we thought you'd be tired. Sorry about that.'

He attempted civility. 'What do you suggest I do with my day?'

'If you don't mind me saying so, the way you look I'd reckon you're no use to man or beast. Take the rest of the day off – after you've done your laundry and shaved.'

'Thanks very bloody much.'

'Please excuse me, I've work to be getting on with.

Put your feet up, Joey. Come on, boys.'

She smiled sweetly at Joey as he crumpled. They followed her out of the breakfast room, carrying their bags, and formed a phalanx around her. The big men's boots padded around the clatter of her heels. Frank Williams was last up from the table. Joey caught his arm, pulled him close. 'I didn't think you'd be part of it.'

'Part of what?'

'Humiliating me – her showing off, at my expense, in front of "her boys".'

'Take the day off. The way you are, you're useless.'

He prised Joey's hand off his sleeve, and leaned closer.

'You know what she said to me? She said you'd lost the sense of fear, and without fear you'd get hurt – so she turned round. She's gone on a limb for you, and I have, and the boys. You've earned it, take the day off.'

Frank Williams ran to catch her.

Gough had taken the Underground to Tooting Bec. He sipped a good strong cup of tea, sat in the old chair, and listened.

'I wondered if someone would come to see me, but I hoped they wouldn't. I knew that if someone came and asked that question it would be to assess how well, or how badly, he would stand against the pressures ol extreme stress – because he was in danger I know him better than anyone, you see, better even than young Jenifer. He used to come in here in the evenings, late, and sit where you're sitting, in Perry's chair, and tell me about his day. Don't think me conceited, please, but I believe I'm as well briefed as anyone on that awful man, Packer. Perry was in the Diplomatic Corps and before that I was an army wife.

I've seen what stress can do to young people… It started as dedication. There seemed to be a sense of – may I use a word that's out of vogue in these times? duly. I thought it was keenness. I'd seen plenty of that in young, officers and young second secretaries. To me, keenness, duty, dedication are all admirable. You were hunting for evidence against Packer, and Joey was working all hours, and he seemed utterly happy.

He'd a girlfriend, a sweet soul, and he was making an adult life for himself, and was proud of what he did.

Then it all changed. I didn't recognize it at the time, but I can see it now. He was in that chair, where you are, it was near to midnight, and he told me that a surveillance operalion had identified Packer in a car with those ghastly drugs, and it was enough to warrant his arrest. It wasn't dedication any longer, it was more obsession. Give a child a toy, a favourite toy, then tell the child that at the weekend it will be taken from him. After Packer was arrested the light seemed to go from his life. He was brooding. I used to hear him in his room reading aloud the surveillance and evidence statements, and late at night he'd be playing the tapes of telephone intercepts, and I'd hear him striding around his room and asking the questions of the people interrogating Packer. Packer had become the reason for his existence. Packer had the power, even in his prison cell, the authority. Joey started to feel worthless, and that was when the dedication went and the obsession came. I don't want to speak ill of him, but I began to think of Joey as a hollow shell, as if he couldn't live without Packer. It is rather frightening, isn't it, obsession? It changes people. It brutalized Joey. It bred a sort of cruelty in his character, and I'd never seen it before, a quite unpleasant cruelty – he became savage with Jennifer, and she'd done nothing to deserve it. It is like a dark cloud on the sun – you don't often see it but when it's there it chills you. Is he still in Bosnia, still trailing Packer? He'll fight foul to win, to achieve whatever it is that drives him, he'll fight very dirty. I had a distressing thought the other night, it quite upset me. When he comes back, if he's won, if he's destroyed Packer, then he won't be the sort of young man I want to know… Will he stand up to the stress? He will, very well – the cruelty will sustain him.'

Gough laid down the cup and saucer, and made his excuses. It had been more of what he had hoped to hear.

The detective chief inspector wandered out of the entrance. Within sight of the front-desk security people, he lit up a cigarette. Half of the building, home of the National Crime Squad, slipped outside during a working day for a drag, cough, gasp. Round the corner, in the small length of pavement where the high cameras were blind, he reached in his pocket for the pay-as-you-go mobile. There was a clipped answer and he heard traffic in the background. He reported what he knew. He suggested what he would do next and it was sanctioned.

When the camera picked him up again, the mobile was back in his pocket and his cigarette was nearly smoked. He returned through the security check and took a lift to the fourth floor.

He stood in front of a grey-suited commander. His life was lived at the edge, walking a tightrope that was razor fine, and precarious. His bank accounts, held in customer confidentiality in the Channel Islands, proved it. He had known the commander for twenty years of police service, he was trusted and a friend, but was always correct.

' I thought you should know something, sir.'

'Cut the "sir" crap – what is it?'

'Hammersmith had a call, "intruders on premises", from a member of the public. They went to this address and found it stuffed with the Church, doing the place over, warrant and all. The property is the home of Bruce James, a security consultant and ex-military. He is also, which makes him interesting, listed as an associate of Packer. We are, as I understand it, supposed to be fully appraised of any Customs operation mounted against Packer. Wasn't that laid down, agreed? Nothing's come across my desk. It's not a situation I'm happy with, sir, if we're sharing with them but they're not sharing with us. Put frankly, it makes life bloody impossible and it's a slur. We're not to be trusted. I can't see you, sir, taking that lying down… Just thought you should know.

He pushed the wheelchair. He had changed into cleaner clothes, filled in the laundry list and dumped the bag outside his room. Then he had shaved, and walked to the Ministry of Justice, where he had searched out her father's courtroom. He had gone inside, tiptoed between the public's benches and the lawyers' desks, moved past a stenographer and the accused. He had gone to the raised desk where her father sat, walked under his nose to the side of the dais. He had slipped off the chair's wheel locks and pushed her out of the courtroom. Nobody had spoken, the case arguments had continued, nobody had intervened. He had wheeled her out into the sunshine.

On the pavement, Joey had said, 'It's my day off, that's what I'm told. I'm a stranger in need of a guide.'

Jasmina had said, 'Rules of engagement forbid discussion of the past, the war – of the present, the criminals.'

'To see the sights,' he'd said, 'which way do we go?'

It was an hour since they had set off. He protected the wheels from the broken pavements as best he could, and steered her across streets where the lights were with them but the traffic screamed to a threatening halt close to them. She showed him the locked doors of the old Orthodox church and took him inside the twin-towered cathedral; they looked across the Miljacka river to the synagogue and she told him that all the Jews were gone from the city. She waved for him to stop propelling her when she'd picked a view of the Ali-Pasina Dzamija, and she said that that mosque was the finest example of Islamic sacred architecture in Europe. There were libraries, public buildings, Olympic sites, and the bridge where an assassin had killed an archduke.

They did not speak of the war, or of the present.

There was nothing she showed him, and no story she told him, that could make them laugh. What was unsaid was all around them. The broken buildings and the grinding squeal of the wheelchair were allies in his despair.

He bought her flowers.

She sat in the chair and her hands gripped the stems that made the posy.

They were in a park. She pointed to old gravestones from medieval times and said they were called stecaks and recited to him as if she were his tour guide. 'It is taught us that the stecaks are the monuments of a period of our history not penetrated by understanding, by light. They are secret-keepers to us. If you do not know the stones then you do not know us. An epitaph is carved on one: "I stood praying to God, meaning no evil, yet 1 was struck to death by lightning." We can be a sad people, and we live in darkness, fortune does not shine on us, Joey. We have little to offer strangers, only our misery. You want to laugh, I want to laugh. What can we find to laugh at?'

The sun beat on them. He looked at the old stones.

'Why did you come to get me, Joey, today?'

'To be with you,' he said simply. 'Because I wanted to be with you. I'm not meaning to patronize you. It's not that I feel sorry for you. I just wanted to be here, close to you.'

He saw her fingers tighten on the flower stems. Do you have a girlfriend, Joey, at home?'

' I did.'

'Did she stop loving you, or did you stop loving her?'

' I came here. What I did here has hurt her. Because of me she has been through pain. After what I have inflicted on her, I doubt she'll love me again.'

'Don't pity me, Joey, because that would be worse for me than anything you brought to your girlfriend.

Would you take me back to my father?'

They were the opposites, Jen and Jasmina. He pushed the chair and contrasted them in his mind with each other. One was fit, healthy, the other was crippled, pale. Whatever the physical comparisons, one had a future, the other had a past. He felt an awful shaming, gnawing, consuming guilt. He had bought a girl flowers, he had killed his time with her, given her the charity of his company. He would climb on his plane. He would go up the steps where a wheelchair could not follow. She would be an ever fainter memory until she was brushed from his mind.

They reached the Ministry of Justice.

Joey said, ' I don't know how far we have gone but without your father's help, and yours, I would not have been able to start on that road.'

At last she smiled. It was a thin, fleeting, wan smile, and he thought it lovely. She wheeled herself away from him and up the ramp into the building. Before the gloom of the Ministry's interior engulfed her, he saw the final brightness of the flowers on her lap.

'Hello, Commander, were you trying to get a moment with me?'

The minister basked in the memory of the applause.

He had been the last speaker before the lunch break.

The audience had been police, editors, social-services executives and education experts. It had been his drugs speech – a velvet hand of sympathy offered to the abusing victims of the trade, a mailed fist to the architects of the misery. He had told his audience that he spoke for a government committed to helping the exploited and crushing the exploiters… and they, he'd said, would face the resources of the law-enforcement agencies, united and dedicated. He had clasped his hands together at that moment of his speech to represent the unity of purpose of the agencies. He had quoted, a favourite line when talking about inter-agency unity, from Ezekiel 37: 22, ' I will make them one people', and he'd said that had been his promise to the Prime Minister when he was honoured, privileged, to be given the appointment.

Evil men, he had said, would find they could run but not hide when hunted by agencies that were, in purpose and deed, united.

He was informed of the search that morning of the apartment belonging to Bruce James, and his temper surged.

'It's because they don't trust us, Minister, that they blunder in without sharing – it's divisive, bloody insulting and, worst of all, it runs in utter contradiction to the theme of your excellent speech, and government policy. If you want results, then they've to be reined in. Can I leave it with you?'

'Damn right you can.'

July 1999

'It was a PMA2. That's the most common mine that was laid. It's anti-personnel and designed to wound not kill. It has one hundred grams of explosive detonated by five kilos of pressure.'

'But you miss the point, Herr Barnaby.'

In his Portakabin room, in the mine-action centre, in the Marshal Tito barracks, in Sarajevo, the Englishman thought it was against the German woman's nature to allow him to complete a sentence of explanation.

Barnaby – he never made it clear whether that was a given name or a family name – was experienced in deflecting the bullying tactics employed by the executives of international charities. Just as he never hurried when cleaning a minefield, so he never raised his voice or lost his temper. 'What point do I miss, Frau Bierhof?'

'You miss the point that the woman, the Bekir woman, was the last to be hurt – that is thirteen months ago.'

'The point continues to evade me.'

'Nothing has been done in thirteen months.'

Frau Bierhof, do you have any idea of the scale of the problem?' He asked the question without point-scoring rhetoric. Frau Anneliese Bierhof, Barnaby thought, was a woman unused to detailed rebuttal. As the director (Field Operations) of World in Crisis, from Hamburg, with millions of DMs to spend, she was a powerful hitter. He imagined her bludgeoning her will through endless committee meetings, dictating policy over the hesitations of those unfortunates who feared the jab of her pen at them or her gimlet glance.

She was a large woman with shoulders accentuated by the padding of her jacket. 'Allow me, please, as they appear in this office, to tell you the facts of life that must be taken into consideration.'

' I know the fact of life, Herr Barnaby. You will hear the "fact" that I acknowledge. In Germany today we have twenty-three families from the Muslim village of Vraca, and we have eighteen families from the Serb village of Ljut. The stabilization force of NATO reports to Berlin that the Bunica valley is peaceful and does not suffer inter-ethnic tension. Our government wants these people returned to their domicile. They refuse to return while there are still mines in the locality. The mines must be cleared. A start must be made. It is thirteen months since Frau Bekir was disabled, and that start has not been made. World in Crisis has the money in place, waiting to be spent, for the repair of their homes and the infrastructure of their villages – such as the electricity – but we must know that the mines have been removed. When will it happen? Why has thirteen months been allowed to elapse?'

He said quietly, against the rising crescendo of her voice, 'Because there are other places that have a higher priority.'

'That is not an answer that is satisfactory.' She paused, sipped at the bottled water she had brought with her.

Well, satisfactory or not, it was the answer she would have to accept. From his Portakabin, he co-ordinated the work of fifteen hundred de-miners, but the computer database held the locations of many thousands of minefields… Barnaby had worked a lonely life in minefields for most of the last twenty years. The only easy work in those twenty years had been the clear-up in Kuwait a decade before. Nice straight lines of anti-tank mines, TMMs, TMAs and TMRPs, laid with the exactness of potatoes in a flat field; find the end of a line and keep going until dusk.

Kuwait was the only place it had been easy, and in Kuwait there had been no shortage of money, If Frau Bierhof had been less confrontational, less antagonistic, he might have sympathized with her predicament. He knew, because the evidence of it littered his desk each day, that the pressure was on to expel the refugees from the European havens and send them whence they came.

It was thirteen months since a mine, what he classified as the 'nuisance' variety, a PMA2, had been detonated under the right foot of Lila Bekir, in her seventy-third year, and it was eleven months since he had been to the valley and seen her. She had been home from hospital a week. And she had been lucky

… If a woman of that bulk, of that weight, had come from anywhere in Great Britain and had lived the soft life, she would have died. She had hobbled to meet him on her crutch, had insisted on making coffee for him, and had served him a sweet cake filled with grated almond. She had told him, disparaging the men who had been there, that she had shouted at them that they should not come forward to help her, should not put their own lives at risk. After the blast, she had put the child on her back and had crawled to the safety of the fence. She had told him that she had reckoned her body would protect the child if she had detonated a second mine. She was as tough as an old boot. It was a miracle, from his experience, that gas gangrene had not set in. The calcaneus, the heel bone, was destroyed at the talus, where the tibia and fibula meet, and she would never walk unaided on that foot. The doctors treating her had decided against amputation at the mid calf. They had not believed a woman of that age would cope with a prosthetic leg.

There had been a wheelchair in the corner of her kitchen, but from the shiny newness of the frame and the clean tyres he had realized it had not been used, and he didn't think it ever would be. There had been no compelling reason for him to go and see the family, but his memory of the beauty of that valley had drawn him back. She was one of a few more than eleven hundred killed or wounded by mines since the guns had gone silent.

'Have you actually been there, Frau Bierhof?'

' I am familiar with the situation there.'

' I'm sorry – have you stood on the safety of the track that links Ljut and Vraca, and viewed the valley?'

' I don't have the time to stand in each ruined village. Every minute of my day is spoken for.'

He did not tell Frau Bierhof that the budget for de-mining, which he co-ordinated for the government of Bosnia-Herzegovina, was above twenty-five million American dollars. Nor did he tell her of the numbers of 'accidents' to the men who worked at his direction, who were careless, who would have no worthwhile pension; nor did he tell her of the men killed or maimed in 'incidents' – the pleasantry used to describe suicidal attempts to end the stress of the work. He went to his filing cabinet and pulled out a sheaf of photographs. Like a card-dealer he flicked them, blown-up and in monochrome or colour, across his desk.

He told her about the Bunica valley.

Each time she interrupted him, he made a little gesture with his finger, tapped his lips, then went on.

He talked until she no longer interjected, brought the valley into the steaming heat of the Portakabin, and his voice was quiet against the murmur of the arching fan on the window shelf beside his desk.

He talked until she reached into the pocket of her shoulder-padded jacket, took out a handkerchief and dabbed her eyes.

He said, There are a thousand such valleys. I play God. I preside over committees that decide the order in which they should be cleared. Some are disgustingly ugly and ruined with factory complexes, some are as beautiful as this one. What they have in common is that they are all destroying lives… When I can justify it, the valley will be cleared.'

'Testicles were pinched, Mr Gough, and it hurt.'

' I'm sure it did, Mr Cork.'

'One to one with the minister – whatever thoughts we have of the relevance of our political masters – is not a happy experience. It was like being in the middle of an incendiary bomb attack. He was powerfully angry. Unity is his text for the day.'

'What does the minister want, Mr Cork? Does he want togetherness, or does he want Packer behind bars?'

'He wants a report.'

'We searched the property, of course, and didn't find anything of importance but, then, we didn't expect to… Tell him, Mr Cork, in your report that it's about flushing foxes from cover, driving them on to the guns.'

'The only fox he'll ever have seen will have been on Wandsworth Common.'

'What you don't tell him is what I'm asking you to do. I want a total trawl to identify any call on a mobile this morning from the Pimlico district of London to Sarajevo. Shouldn't be that difficult, but I need the help of your old crowd, and GCHQ and the National Security Agency.'

'Are we moving from foxes to rotten apples?'

'Jarring them up, Mr Cork, creating mistakes.'

' I'll do that – and what do I tell, because I don't have time on my side, my esteemed minister?'

'Give him your word that there will be, in the future, total co-operation between the Sierra Quebec Golf team and the National Crime Squad.'

'Starting when? I have to tell him when.'

'Before Christmas.'

'Dammit, today's the nineteenth of March!'

He heard Dougie Gough's fulsome chuckle from the door, and then the chief investigation officer was alone in his room. For a full minute he paced the carpet. Images raced in his mind.

Dennis Cork had never been to the Ardnamurchan peninsula, but he knew Mull, Morvern and Moidart.

He saw dark hills set with granite escarpments and rough slopes. The guns waited. Old farmers and post-men, estate labourers, crab fishermen and Dougie Gough, with his pipe lit, made a picket line. They were out on the hillside to kill the vermin that took the lambs. Down the hill came the beaters with their dogs running free. With the beaters was the young man with the heavy-lensed spectacles, struggling to keep up… Cann. The big dog fox sprang from a peat ditch and tried to double back through the beaters, but the spaniels, Labradors and lurchers turned it. The mistake of the dog fox was to run towards the guns. It was a fine animal, strong and healthy, a lamb-taker. Now Cann was first among the beaters chasing it. The dog fox was a bright colour on the dark slope of crushed bracken. Dougie Gough had the shotgun up to his shoulder, aimed, fired, and Packer fell. The beaters and the guns did not bother to retrieve the carcass They left it as carrion for the crows.

The images were gone.

Dennis Cork dialled the number of room 709 at Vauxhall Bridge Cross. He played the old boys' network and asked for the trawl to be tasked through GCHQ and on through the Americans' National Security Agency listening post at Menwith Hill on the Yorkshire moors, where the great dishes sucked in the pulses of mobile-call transmissions. He pleaded priority for the precious resources of the computers.

He walked an uncertain line.

He was exposed. He made a second call, to the minister's principal private secretary. Powerful enemies faced him. He promised that full co-operation with the National Crime Squad would begin soon.

He relied for the survival of his career on the dour Gough and the young man, Cann, and events in a far-away place over which he had no control.

' Is it all right?' The Eagle sought reassurance.

' It's fine.'

' Is he all right?'

'He's grand.'

'Did you tell him that, Mister?'

' I told him.'

Not in these days, of course, but a long time ago, when the Eagle had been at boarding school and showing an interest in law, classics masters preached the value of the study of Latin and Greek, talked about 'expansion of the mind' and 'intellectual discipline'. The Eagle, then sixteen years old, had embarked on a two-year study of which, now, little was remembered. The fighting had been the most interesting part to a teenager, the description of warfare, and the generals who directed it. A Greek general and historian, writing four centuries before the birth of Christ, had identified the surest way to win loyalty.

Xenophon had written: 'The sweetest of all sounds is praise.' The old Greek warlord and writer had been ahead in man management, and Mister had learned the same art.

'… I told him he was indispensable. I gave him all the smarm he needed.'

'You should watch him, Mister.'

'He doesn't fart without me knowing it. Yes, I'm watching him.'

'He's not one of us.'

'Leave it, Eagle. I hear you. You're "one of us", aren't you?'

'You know I am. You… '

It was Mister's way, the Eagle recognized it, to win from the disciples, the acolytes, blustered, spluttered declarations of loyalty. It demeaned them, it gave him power over them. He looked into Mister's dull eyes as he made his protestation. His voice died. The Eagle had been left at the street corner above the house while Mister and Atkins had driven on up the hill to the open ground where they'd found the line of sight the day before. Now Mister had walked back, leaving Atkins, the Mitsubishi and the launcher there.

The dusk was settling on the city.

Mister said casually, 'His place was turned over this morning – Atkins's place was done by the Church.'

'He told you?'

'He doesn't know.'

' Is he going to know?'

'Not sure… '

'Who told you?'

'Crime Squad – there's white heat between Crime Squad and the Church. The Church isn't sharing.'

' I don't want to know about "friends" in Crime Squad, but when did they tell you?'

'A lot of questions, Eagle… I heard this morning.'

'Shouldn't you have told me? I am your legal adviser, Mister.'

'What you going to do about it? You're here, they're there. It'll keep.'

'Mister, I am telling you, as your trusted adviser, we have been away too long. Be careful.'

'You worry too much. I pay you to worry, but not to overdose on it.'

The lights sprinkled below them were cut by the dark line of the river, which in its turn was bisected by the shafts of headlights criss-crossing the bridges.

With the evening came the cold, but it was not the cold that made the Eagle shiver. The dark line was the abyss into which the Cruncher had fallen. Never could the Eagle have said or thought that he was fond of the Cruncher. Sometimes he'd said, to himself, that the Cruncher was a barrow-boy, sometimes a low-life little shit. The Cruncher had always competed with him, had intervened in matters that were not his. A contract was drawn up, but Cruncher wanted to check out each paragraph and each sub-section. Days of damn work and Mister would tear it up, because of the poison fed into his ear by the Cruncher. The Eagle had never had Mister's ear the way the Cruncher had. But that had not stopped the Cruncher from disappearing into the dark line that was the river cutting through the lights of the city below. He heard a distant squealing of wheels, the scrape of unoiled metal pieces. He shivered hard. He remembered the Cruncher the last time he'd seen him, in the Clerkenwell office over the launderette, and his feet as always on the Eagle's desk, his heels resting carelessly on files, his body tipped back in a chair, the monogrammed cigarette in his hand, and the scent, the conceit as he'd talked about his plan for Mister's future in Sarajevo, his vision: You're a businessman, Mister… any businessman who's top of the tree in the UK expands his interests, goes abroad, doesn't sit on his hands, goes looking for wider horizons. The Cruncher had been in the river for half a night and a day and another whole night, like a drowned mongrel, before he'd been pulled out. It had been a dog's death.

'When are you going to do it, Mister – do something about the Cruncher?'

'You think I'd forgotten about the Cruncher?'

' I didn't say you'd forgot-'

'You think I'm scared to do something about the Cruncher?'

' I didn't say you were scared.'

'You ever known me forget anything about disrespect? You ever seen fear in me?'

' I only asked when.'

' It'll happen, Eagle, when I'm ready. What I said, Eagle, you worry too much. A man with your brain, your brilliance, you don't have a call to worry.'

The wheels' squeal came closer, was beyond the pool of light thrown down by the only high lamp on the street. The sweetest of all sounds is praise. He was not a man of violence; his own weapon was in his supreme understanding of the law… And yet he had made the devil's bargain. He had never hit a man in his life; he had reduced a grown man, an experienced surveillance executive officer – through the ammu nition given to the QC – to a muttering shambling wreck, destroyed him more effectively than if he'd been hit with a pickaxe handle, broken him. With his forensic intellect, it was the Eagle who had sprung Mister from the trial. But… but… but, for all his scruples, the violence inherent in Mister was strangely mesmerizing to the Eagle. He had a place there, beside the bully. He was sheltered by the bully. And it fascinated him. When he thought of the violence, he sweated hot excitement. He wanted to see the launcher fired, because that was Mister's response to a judge who had dared to stand against them… and he had the brain, knew it because Mister had told him so, and the brilliance. They came up the hill, into the pool of light, and the city was below them. Mister had seen them.

The squeal of the wheels came with them.

The Eagle doubted it was a labour of love, thought it a labour of duty. He didn't think he, with his weight, his stomach and his heart, could have pushed the wheelchair up the incline. They stopped on the nearer edge of the pool and the man leaned on the handles while the woman hung on to the wheels as if she feared she would slip back down the slope. There was a wheeze in the man's chest. If he didn't have a car it was because he was a fool. The Eagle didn't know a judge at the Bailey, or at Snaresbrook, Belmarsh, or at Uxbridge Crown Court, who treasured principles more than a black car and a driver. He saw the wheels hit a stone and the chair rocked, but it came on, came closer to them. And he didn't know a judge who would have lived in a hovel as the price of guarding his principles – certainly not his own bloody father, for whom the status, the robes, the bloody protocol were all that mattered.

When they were level with their house, what there was of it, and half lit by the one street-lamp, the Eagle felt the punch of a fist in the small of his back, and Mister stepped from the shadows. The Eagle did not have to follow him. He was the voyeur, a mere observer.

'Judge Delic?' Mister asked affably. ' I understand you speak English, that's what my friends say. And you're Miss Jasmina Delic? I'd like a word, please.'

The judge stiffened. His daughter cringed, then straightened herself and her jaw jutted. The Eagle couldn't see Mister's face, but he would have been smiling. He always smiled when he pitchforked his way into people's lives.

'What about? Who are you?' The words were almost obscured by the panting from his exertion.

There was pride there, and spirit, but no strength.

'One question at a time, Judge. About the past and the present… I am Albert Packer, Mr Packer, Mister.

I am the subject, authorized by you, of an intrusive-surveillance order issued to Joey Cann of the Customs and Excise in London, and it has caused me serious inconvenience. That's what it's about and that's who I am.'

Always the voice was quiet, and they would have had to strain to hear him, as the Eagle did, and in spite of the smile they'd have thought themselves locked in a ferret's gaze. There were no cars on the street, no other workers hurrying home, and they'd have known it. Mister walked to them, not hurrying, measured stride.

'What do you want with us?'

The Eagle thought the judge tried to marshal his courage. Mister, in his overcoat, would have seemed huge to them, and they'd have seen the size of his hands, and Cann would have told them the case history. They would know all about this man, the importance of the Church's Target One… Mister reached out to them. The Eagle saw his hands drop to the chair's armrest, and grip it. The chair shook, rocked gently by Mister. It would be so easy for him to tip it over, to spreadeagle her onto the street, and he would have been smiling.

'I'd like you, Judge, and Miss Jasmina, to come for a short walk with me – nothing too far, only take a few minutes.'

'Do we have the choice?' she asked.

' I wouldn't want you to feel threatened, that's not my intention, sincerely… Come on, Eagle, come and lend a hand.'

With Mister, he pushed the chair on up the hill and into the blanket of darkness. The street went parallel to the side wall of the Jewish cemetery. Above them was a black tree-line topped by clear evening skies and a scattering of stars. There were no lights in the ruined buildings they went past, no ears to hear him if he screamed for help. The judge could not protect his daughter, nor would he leave her. They went meekly together. Mister and the Eagle propelled the chair but the judge walked close behind it, had reached his hand forward and she held it. He wondered at their dignity, that neither shouted or struggled, however hopeless it was to shout, to struggle If Mo knew what he did, she would leave him, be gone in the hour, as would the girls. He smelt the sweat of the long-worn clothes on the judge's body, and the urine in his daughter's bag. They reached the small patch of level ground, where a shed had stood, where the Mitsubishi was parked. The shed's wooden walls were gone, blown away when the house was holed, but its concrete base remained.

The sidelights of the vehicle were switched on and threw enough light for them to see Atkins standing beside the launcher, slung low on the tripod. Mister and the Eagle bumped her onto the concrete, wheeled the chair to the launcher.

'Everything ready?' Mister asked.

'All in place, Mister,' Atkins replied.

Atkins's coat was neatly folded behind the launcher. It was what made Mister special, everything was thought through with care, was planned, down to a kneeling mat. Mister didn't have to say anything more, but tapped the judge's shoulder and pointed to the folded coat. Atkins steadied him as he dropped on to it. The view-finder was infra-red / image intensifies The judge would be looking at a monochrome image of the roof of his home. The detail of the view-finder would be sufficient for him to see each tile, the bricks of the chimney, the sagging guttering. The judge was whimpering, rattling words in his own tongue to her.

It was a snapshot of all they owned: the half-house and each other. She was trying to push herself up from the chair, and couldn't achieve it. Mister caught at the judge's coat, pulled him back, marched him to the chair and turned him so that he faced his house.

'Get on with it, Atkins.'

Atkins crouched behind the launcher. One hand rested on the tripod, the other threw switches. There was a slight but piercing whistle. The Eagle covered his ears.

They were lit in the moment of the firing, then the fire flash was gone. A bright line, with a thunderclap of sound, burst from the fire. The line travelled down the hill, cleared two broken buildings, then impacted.

The roof fragmented below them.

As if he were on duty, showing his paces and playing at a war game, Atkins dismantled the launcher, the spent tube and the tripod, and heaved them into the back of the vehicle.

'You'll be all right from here with Miss Jasmina, won't you, Judge Delic?' Mister asked quietly. 'It's all downhill from here.'

The air around them stank from the cordite firing charge. Atkins drove, Mister beside him, and the Eagle sat in the back clinging to the holding strap. The wheels crackled over the broken tiles that were debris on the street. At the bottom, where it joined the main road, two black Mercedes passed them and sped on up the hill.

'Well done, Atkins,' Mister said. 'Expert and professional.'

She read the message back.

Dear 'Mister'(!),

I have to go to Gorazde tomorrow morning. I am driving myself (my driver is sick, the other drivers are already allocated). If your business work allows it, would you consider accompanying me?

It would be interesting and perhaps fulfilling. I apologize for the short notice. I will call by the Holiday Inn tomorrow at 8 a.m.. and I will look for you in the lobby. It is not possible please do not have concern for me.

With good wishes, Monika (Holberg).

PS: I very much enjoyed my day at Visnjica.

She threaded her way from the table in the atrium, through the mass of people, to the overwhelmed clerks on Reception A woman broke away from attending, to the queue waiting to register, took her message, thrust it into the room's pigeon-hole, gave her a harrassed smile, and returned to filling in the cards.

Skirling the X-ray machine and the metal detector arch, she walked out through the swing doors.

Monika had heard the explosion, but there were often explosions in a Sarajevo night.

It had taken more than forty minutes for the SFOR troops, Italians to find the source of the explosion.

Some of those they asked said it came from inside the Jewish cemetary, some said it was in the tree-line above, some said they had heard nothing and had slammed doors in the troops' faces. The local police knew of no explosion, it had not been reported to the local fire brigade, no local ambulance had been called.

Eventually their Jeep found a ruined house at the half-way point up, steeply canted street. They saw two Mercedes limousines parked, and found an old man and a young woman, who was in a wheelchair, and a group of men. One of those men – shaven-headed, black-dressed, a gold chain heavy on his throat – explained courteously to the mareschallo that the street had been the front line in the war, that munitions were habitually stored in the roofs of such building, but were then, sadly, forgotten. It was possible that the roof beams had shifted and in doing so had detonated a mortar bomb. The old man and the young disabled woman had not spoken. The mareschallo was thanked for his attention to the matter, but was told with polite firmness that his presence was not required. The jeep drove away.

Joey had heard it. The windows to his room were double-glazed, but the force of the explosion from up the hill across the Miljacka river was insufficient to rattle the glass panes. The sound was muffled, more of a stuttering clap than a crisp detonation. He drifted back to sleep. Maggie had forbidden him to go to the Holiday Inn, sit in the van and watch. It was as if, he thought, for a day he had stepped back over the line, retrieved the die, worn the uniform, forgotten Mister, who was his Target One… He thought of Jasmina, she was the dream in his mind as he drifted, and the faint words carved in the stecak stone five centuries before: 'I stood, praying to God, meaning no evil, yet I was struck to death by lightning.' His fingers had flickered over the lichened grooves of the writing. The words on the stone were as a talisman to him.

Whatever a man or a woman did, however well they lived their lives, the lightning could strike, burn them.

There was a light rap on his door. His name was called.

'Coming, Maggie.' He opened the door.

'You're still a sight, Joey, but it's an improvement.'

'I feel better… What sort of day have you had?'

'I've heard the Welsh hero's life story. I think he wants to get his hand up my skirt. He's rather sweet

… His wife chucked him out. His kids are pining for him. Both sets of parents are on Megan's side of the fence. Yes, sweet and sad, but I think his hands are getting itchy Most of what I'm hearing is that young man talking with the dogs, or down on the floor playing with them and cuddling them. There was some sort of rendezvous tonight that took Ismet Mujii and his gorillas out, but there wasn't an explanation then, going to be a meeting the day after tomorrow I don't know where. Sounds like the big meeting, where the territory's cut. An Italian's coming.

All the talk's in a code.'

'Diry talk? " 'She raised her eyebrows – 'talking dirty' in the Church vernacular was conversation with criminal involvement, talking social' was about going to the supermarket or the corner shop for fags, or about telling the wife that the new hairpiece suited her. 'Code talk is criminal talk, right?'

' I think an Italian's coming, and there are others. I think it's the meeting that matters.'

She'd kept the meat to the last, had teased him. If the meeting, was the day alter tomorrow, somewhere, then she was inside the time limit set by her own people She thought that she was out on a parapet, over a precipice, as much as he was; if she fell it would be his, Joey Cann's, bloody fault.

'Thanks.'

'Sleep well, Joey – oh,'she dropped it as if it was an afterthought, 'do you know much about the Italians?'

He grinned ruefully. 'No, not a hell of a lot.'

She thought she was safe, thought it because a belief in her survival made life easier, but it was now two years since she had rejected the vita blindata and dismissed her police bodyguards. She had rejected the protective screen and had said to her husband, 'When the Mafia is intent on revenge it will always find a way.' She always made a joke with her husband. Who would want to pay for sex with a woman of forty-nine who was fat, had heavy, dropping breasts, and gross ankles? But last night the word prostituta had been daubed in paint on the white exterior wall of their house.

She was Giovanna. She was in her second term as the sindaca of the mountain village of San Giuseppe Jato on the western side of the island of Sicily. It was the women's vote that had elected her, again, to the mayor's office. When her deputy, Luciano, had found a bomb lodged under the front wheel hub of his car he had resigned, and she had not been able to find a man to replace him. Her ticket for re-election had been: the Rejection of the Cosa Nostra Path of Violence and Death. She did not give herself sufficient importance, if she were murdered, to be listed as an 'illustrious corpse', but she believed, had to, that she irritated the Family who controlled the village. She irritated them enough for a polio squartato to have been left on her doorstep four months before. She had found the disembowelled chicken, picked it up, and walked with it down the main street. Women had shouted to her from their windows, 'Brava, Giovanna', and she had placed the bleeding bird carefully on the step of the fine house near the church that was the principal residence of the Family. That gesture, more than anything else she might have done, ensured that women came to her, talked to her of the secrets of the Family.

She was told that evening, in a whispered telephone call, that the Family's most trusted nephew, Marco, was entrusted with a mission of importance by his uncle, had gone with a packed case to the airport at Messina, was travelling to a meeting of significance.

Giovanna thought Marco a handsome boy and im-porlant to the family's future, a boy of intelligence but trapped by the poison in the f amily's bloodstream, a boy with a life wasted a boy who might, one day, kill her.

Mislter had gone a dozen paces past the end of the line ol black station wagons, all with smoked-glass windows, past the knot of gossiping drivers, when he jerked to a stop. He was facing the swing doors of the hotel. The noise of a hundred voices, nasal and loud, billowing and American, buffeted him. His eyes narrowed. He peered through the doors. He turned in one swinging movement and faced Atkins. He reached in his belt, took the pistol from it and palmed it to Atkins.

'Leave it in the vehicle,' he said, 'and yours, and get the vehicle down the warehouse – now.'

He waited until Atkins had driven away.

'Right, Eagle, let's see what the party's for.'

They went through the door, shrugged out of their coats and laid them on the conveyor belt feeding the X-ray machine. They went through the metal detector, and were bleeped, because of the coins in Mister's pocket and the metal-lined case for the Eagle's spectacles. By the machine and the arch stood men with cropped haircuts and long, shapeless coats, with flesh-coloured wires coiled between their shirt collars and their ears. They were passed through. Every seat in the atrium bar was taken. Every table was littered with ashtrays, beer glasses, coffee cups and Pepsi cans. At the far end of the bar a woman addressed the little forest of microphones. Cameramen climbed on the soft-cushioned seats to see better. There was bedlam.

At the desk they collected their keys, and Mister was given a note from his pigeon-hole.

Eagle asked the receptionist, 'Who are all these people? What's going on?'

She told the Eagle that the American Secretary of State was due at the hotel in two hours, on a leg from Paris and Vienna, last stop before returning to Washington. This was only the advance party.

Mister heard what she said, but hardly listened. He read the note again and felt a small sensation of excitement, better than when the launcher had fired.

The Eagle repeated what the receptionist had told him.

'Yes, yes – I heard it the first time…' He laughed quietly. 'Would have been choice if I'd gone through without thinking… '

'But you always think, Mister, don't you?'

Mister was smiling. 'Tomorrow's not busy, not till the evening, and it's the day after tomorrow that matters. Anyway, I'll be out of town on a little trip.

You and Atkins can lose yourselves, can't you, till the evening?'

'Buckets to do here,' the Eagle said. 'Buckets of fun to be had.'

He thought there was a brittle snap in the Eagle's voice. If it hadn't been for the message he might have kicked the Eagle's shin, but he'd read it. They walked to the lift. The Eagle, as always, pushed the outside button for him and stood aside to let him enter first, then pushed the inside button for their floor. Mister was slow to recognize sarcasm: it was too far back in his life for him to remember the last man who had been sarcastic to his face.