The Untouchable

Chapter Six

'I'm not coming.' she'd said.

'Please yourself.' He must have sounded crest-fallen.

'I don't trail around after you. I've my job to do.'

'Which is?'

'Dock in the hire car, rent a van – and finish my breakfast.'

Joey had said when he would meet her, and what time the flight was due in, and hesitated… 'I don't suppose I take anyone from the embassy with me.'

'I don't suppose you do. Just make sure you're wearing your charm boots.'

She'd gone back to her breakfast. Joey had left her there, surrounded by rolls, jam, cheese and coffee. She hadn't even wished him luck.

He'd never worked alone before.

But what little Joey Cann knew of judges was that you didn't make appointments – you pitched up early in the morning. The room was high in the Ministry of Justice building. The lift was occupied, groaning slowly above him. He hadn't waited, but had gone up ever-narrowing flights of stairs to the floor under the roof. The building was damaged. Damp ran on the walls, and the ceiling above him had been crudely plastered. The floor at either side of the judge's door was piled high with cardboard file folders that were held tight with string and elastic bands. He steadied himself. If he were thrown out on his neck, had the door shut in his face, then he was in trouble, deep. He needed the legality of authorization. He rapped on the door and breathed hard. Maggie had said, dismissively, that she wasn't an interpreter, and that any judge spoke English. He heard a light squealing sound, metal on metal without oil, before the door was opened.

Inside, the room was chaos. It was a disaster area of failed organization, a home for lost files. A dull single bulb, without a shade, hung from a ceiling that was a trellis of cracks. What he could see of the walls, above the piled files, showed more cracks but wider ones.

There was a desk at the far end and, half hidden by more files that formed a barricade to mask his chest, a small man peered at him over half-moon spectacles.

Above the man, behind him, was a faded framed photograph, spider's web lines in the glass, showing the man in younger days, a handsome woman and a girl child, with pretty hair and in a party frock, holding flowers. Near to the photograph, hanging from a nail, was a calendar with last year's date on it, now being recycled because there were fresh ink notes in the days' boxes. At the side of the room, under a narrow window that was smeared on the inside where failed attempts had been made to clean it, and opaque on the outside, was a smaller desk dominated by an old computer screen, something from the Ark or a museum. From the ceiling to the floor, from the crack lines and the dim light to the worn apology for a carpet, the boards that needed staining and the electric fire where a single bar glowed dismally, he took in the scene. The man wore an overcoat and the smell of damp and dirt clogged in Joey's nostrils.

'Zdravo… Da?'

Maggie had told him what to say. 'Zovem se Joey Cann. Gavorite li engleski, molim?'

'Yes, I speak English, a little. My daughter speaks it better.'

Joey heard the squealing sound. He turned his head sharply. The young woman had been hidden by the open door. It was the wheelchair that needed oil. He would not have recognized her but he knew in-stinctively that it was her face in the photograph. Her complexion was so very pale and there was a desperate tiredness in her eyes. He felt ashamed of staring at her. Her thin blonde hair was tied loosely behind her head, and he saw the power of her shoulders, which would have strengthened to compensate for her disability. The smile was radiant.

'I am Jasmina. You have come to see my father, Judge Delic. We do not have much time before court.

How may we help, Mr Cann?'

'I'll try not to waste your time.' He remembered what he had been told. 'I'm an executive officer of British Customs and Excise. I work in the section that's called the National Investigation Service. Our work deals with the most serious cases of organized crime involving the importation into Great Britain of class A drugs. When we go abroad, in order that any evidence we obtain should be legally admissible in our court, we must have the appropriate permission from a local person in authority, who can be a judge.'

He breathed out, tried to relax.

'I was given your name. I need your help. In the UK we have a Target One, Albert William Packer. He is first among equals for trafficking in class A narcotics.

He would regard himself as an untouchable. We are clutching at straws, having most recently failed to convict him. He arrives in Sarajevo this afternoon. We don't know why he is coming here, what he is attempting to set up, or who he will meet. Our experience has shown us that when our major criminals are abroad they behave with greater confidence. It's when they make mistakes. I have to say that Packer makes mistakes rarely. He may open a small window for us, and he may not. We need the authorization for what we call "intrusive surveillance". I'm asking you for that authorization.'

Maggie Bolton had told him that a judge who co-operated with the Mafia drove a big car and lived in a big apartment – and that a judge who did not co-operate was machine-gunned or car-bombed.

'He's a bad man, sir. His place is in prison with the key thrown away. His wealth, from the drugs trade, is estimated at around one hundred and fifty million American dollars. We regard him as a prime enemy of our society. If I had done this properly, by the book, the Justice Ministry of Bosnia-Herzegovina would have been contacted by our embassy and – being frank with you, sir – the probability is that I would have been shuffled into the office of a senior civil servant, given cups of coffee, and put off while bureaucracy slowly turned over, and there would have been requests for more information, and I'd have kicked my heels and our Target One would have done his business and gone home. I accept, sir, that we have taken a liberty in involving you. I am in your hands.'

And Maggie had also told him that one judge was useless, insignificant, did not get involved, lived in squalor, and was a judge to trust.

'Last week, the day that our case against Target One failed, the body of his financial associate was taken from the river in Sarajevo. He would have been preparing the ground for his chief man. At the time the associate flew here, Target One was on trial, but his network of intimidation and corruption in Britain guaranteed that he would be freed. This is, possibly, a considerable opportunity for us.'

The voice of the judge growled at him. 'What was the name of the associate?'

'Duncan Dubbs. If you refuse me, then I quite understand. I'm poorly informed on Sarajevo but informed enough to appreciate the difficulties I'm creating for you. There is no threat to me in the UK. I have never felt in personal danger. You will not see me standing in judgement if you tell me that you cannot help and do not wish to be implicated in an investigation of this sort. I have to assume that our Target One will meet, deal with, a principal figure in this city's organized-crime network. That makes for involvement. I'll be going home. I won't be here if there are consequences.'

'An authorization for surveillance from me?'

'That's what I'm asking for, sir.'

Joey didn't know whether he had won through or whether he had failed. He felt the silence in the room press around him. If a judge had come to London from Sarajevo or Zagreb, Budapest or Bucharest, Sofia or Prague, he would have been passed round the Foreign and Commonwealth or the Home Office, pushed into obscure corners of New Scotland Yard or the Custom House, would have been treated with the dignity accorded to an unwelcome blow-in. Judge Delic, wearing the deep frown of a troubled man, ferreted among the papers on his desk. Then came the persistent and rhythmless tapping of his pencil point on the desk top. He looked at his daughter. Joey heard the scrape of the wheels behind where he stood. Then she propelled herself to her father and handed him a file. Joey did not dare to hope. The judge's face was expressionless as he opened the file, but Joey saw her face and the way her jaw jutted out as if in a demonstration of defiance. The piece of paper in the judge's hand was small enough to have been torn from a notepad, and it was encased in a cellophane sachet.

He looked at the piece of paper for a long time.

She asked, 'Da?… Ne?'

Joey had said that he would be going home and would not be there to see the consequences. He thought he had asked too much.

Judge Delic nodded. 'Da.'

She said, 'My father says yes. I will type it for you, Mr Cann, and my father will sign it, the authorization.'

'Thank you.'

She wheeled herself to the small desk by the window, switched on the computer. After an age while it warmed, the machine clattered under her fingers. Joey had nothing to say. The judge never raised his eyes, but he shivered under his overcoat.

Joey stared at the floor, following the lines of the carpet's trodden-down threads, and thought of the man due to arrive in Sarajevo, who reckoned himself an untouchable.

She worked the printer and brought the pages to him. He leaned over the desk and wrote his and Maggie Bolton's names in the spaces provided, then she gave them to her father and he signed each sheet briskly, before pushing them away as if they were a nagging dream that might wound him. She put the stamp on the document of authorization.

'Thank you, sir.'

'To be used with discretion.'

'Of course, sir.'

Joey Cann's promise of discretion was worth nothing. If evidence were found, if Target One were held, then the authorization would be in the public domain in open court. There were telephone lines, fax lines, e-mail lines between London and Sarajevo. With his scrawled signature, Judge Delic had compromised himself, and would have known it. The promise was empty. The judge had turned away and was staring up at the photograph of a family. Jasmina told Joey of the telephone number on the pad beside Duncan Dubbs's hotel bed, that the number had been answered by Ismet Mujic, and she gave him the list of three eyewitnesses and copies of their statements to the local police. He felt he was a stormcloud settling on their lives.

At the door, Joey said, 'I'm grateful to you, sir – and to you, miss – very grateful for involving yourselves.'

The judge said, flat-voiced, 'I have broken a rule of my life. The rule says that to survive here you must remain unnoticed. The rule was given me by my mother, because of my father's death. I was one and a half years old when my father died. My father, in the difficult times of the world war and the German occupation, thought it right to involve himself in the fight against the Tito partizans. He was recruited into the Handzar, which was the 13th SS Division, all Muslims

– the word is the Turkish one for the curved dagger of our people. He was proud of his involvement and the uniform they gave him. He was trained in Germany and France. A little later, Tito formed the 16th Muslim Brigade. My father had joined the wrong side; it would have been better for him to remain unnoticed.

He was shot after the war.'

'Then why, sir, did you break your rule?'

'From the claim of blood, because of blood that was spilled – from stupidity. Not a story to be told to a stranger. Be satisfied with what you have.'

She opened the door for him. Joey ran down the flights of stairs, through the cavern of the hallway and out into the street. If he had not checked himself, he would have punched the fume-filled air in triumph.

The aircraft bucked. Mister wondered whether the Eagle was going to throw up. Sitting beside him, clutching the seat's arms, choking and coughing, the lawyer's face was green-white. On the other side of him, Atkins was looking out on the dense grey mass of cloud. They were in powerful cross-winds and the plane was thrown sideways, forced down, climbed again, then plunged down further. The Eagle's dis-comfiture made Mister feel good and took away any anxiety he might have felt.

'Is this the way you used to come in?' What he liked about Atkins was that the former soldier never spoke unless it was required of him.

'In all weathers, Mister, and the rougher the better.

This isn't bad. Worst was good weather, no cloud.

We're on approach now. We used to call the RAF flights, C130 transports, "Maybe Airlines". Over the mountains and then the "Khe Sanh drop-down" – Khe Sanh was an American fire base in Vietnam where they had to come in against Triple A, anti-aircraft artillery. The pilots' technique was to corkscrew from twenty thousand feet, a little disturbing on the bowels. In good weather they'd shoot, particularly if they were pissed. In bad weather they couldn't see you.'

'Wasn't there any response?'

'Blue beret time, Mister, take it on the chin. One day I'll tell you about United Nations soldiering.'

They hit a bigger pocket. The Eagle gasped. Mister felt better than good. 'Do you know what we're doing here, Atkins?'

'I don't, but you'll tell me when you're ready to.'

His voice was faint against the thunder of the engines. 'Right now, I'm ready. I can't suffer boredom, Atkins, can't abide it. I was going nowhere, I was doing what I'd done three years before. What I needed was challenges – new scene, new drills, new business.

The Cruncher put up the idea. The Afghans produce the stuff, and the Cruncher said they'd get X amount, and that wasn't negotiable. The Turks pick it up and ship it across Europe then get it over to the UK and they charge Y. I sell it on and that's Z. Three factors in the street price. X is beyond my reach, and Z is my money anyway, so it's Y that I'm going after. The Turks ship it through here. My proposition

Cruncher's – is that I buy for delivery into Bosnia for Y minus forty per cent, or Y minus fifty per cent, then I ship onwards. I run the transport organization from Bosnia. I go into an international league… and that, Atkins, is big bucks. We'd have been here earlier if I'd not been away. Got any cold water?'

The aircraft kicked a last time, then broke through the cloud ceiling. Light flooded into the cabin. He steadied the tray as they banked sharply. He had a clear view of the mountains and the snow streaks between the pine-forest plantations.

'Not for me, Mister, to pour cold water on anything you put up.. . The Triple A was up there and this was when they'd hit you, the bastards, when you were helpless and steadying to come in… If you can get the Turks on board you've done well, if you can get the Bosnian low-life on board then you've done better than well. But you know that.'

'I pay you to tell me what I should know.'

'Who are we dealing with, from the low-life?'

'He's called S e r i f… '

The undercarriage slipped down. The aircraft yawed. Atkins was pointing through the porthole window. Apartment blocks slipped by. It took Mister a moment to realize why they had been pointed out.

He squinted to see better. The buildings were empty carcasses: they had been devastated by artillery, great holes punched in the walls; they had been ravaged by fire, scorched patches around the gaping windows; they had been pocked by small-arms bullets and shrapnel, disease-ridden and spotted from the volume of it.

Atkins said to him, 'There was a tunnel under the runway from Butmir on the far side to Dobrinja, where we're looking. It was the Muslim lifeline and the Serbs couldn't break in to close it. Serif was instru-mental in defending the link. The army brought their supplies in through the tunnel, and Serif brought in the black-market stuff. He made serious money out of it, and he sealed his deals with government. Don't ever forget, Mister, Serif is protected from the top of government down. He's hard – and if the Cruncher was around that's what he'd tell you. He's a dangerous man, not to be taken lightly.'

They hit the runway hard.

Mister laid one hand over the Eagle's fist clenching the armrest and with the other he punched Atkins. He said, against the thunder of the reverse thrust, 'We'll eat him. You see if we don't.'

An old blue Japanese-made van was at the back of the airport car park. From where it was parked the driver and his passenger had a clear view through the wiped windscreen of the two black Mercedes saloons that had stopped directly in front of the outer arrivals door. Joey was behind the wheel. Maggie talked in terse code into the microphone clipped to her blouse.

'They're in place,' Cork said.

'You're lucky to have her.' Endicott's smile was superior. 'She's bloodstock.'

Dennis Cork, chief investigation officer, had stalled the meeting to answer his mobile call in the Home Office minister's private room. Giles Endicott had been his desk chief at the Secret Intelligence Service before the transfer to Customs amp; Excise. The transfer had brought Cork a substantial increment in salary and in civil-service grading so that he now ranked as equal to his former master, but old habits died hard: he remained, in Endicott's book, a junior.

Cork responded tetchily, 'I am merely reporting that my man is in place.'

And i merely observing that he has a first-class operator up alongside him,'

The minister intervened: 'I made a speech last week you may or may not have picked it up – in which I spoke of the devastation caused by the drugs trade.

I said: "In every city, town and village children are in danger of being ensnared by drugs and crime." You both know that an election's looming. An essential part of this government's battle plan is our determination to break the link between drugs and crime. I went on to say, "Addicts ruin more than just their own lives, they mug, burgle and steal to pay for their next fix. Every year heroin users criminally take more than a thousand million pounds to feed that disgusting habit – the equivalent of sixty pounds from every household in the country." We want action, gentlemen, we need visible action. Bickering over minor scraps of turf is not the action I'm looking for. I, the government, demand results – require arrests and convictions so that these foul narcotics are cleaned from our streets. In the case of Packer, what's happening?'

'We've sent a man -'

'- with a first-class operator alongside him.'

The minister, the supplicant, clasped his hands together in a prayer of frustration. 'Don't you see, dammit, what I'm trying to say? A criminal waltzes from the Old Bailey a free man. The response of the law-abiding community is to send a man after him who you tell me is twenty-seven years old, therefore inexperienced, earning the rate paid to people at the bottom of the ladder, the minimum response because you plead the strictures of expense and the un-certainty of success. You send, along with him, a woman with a box of tricks. I want results that are high-profile, I want people to read in their morning newspapers – all of those people who are scared witless that their children and grandchildren will be caught up in this ghastly life-threatening trafficking, and who vote for us – that we are doing something.'

Endicott asked coolly, 'Doing something worthwhile, Minister, or doing anything?'

Cork said, a little sadness in his voice, 'If, when Packer has sealed whatever business deal he's gone to make, he were to return and fall happily under the wheels of a number seventy-three bus the effect on the availability of heroin on the streets of London would be less than negligible… That is a fact.'

'That's not good enough.'

Endicott said, 'We are not, Minister, soldiers in a holy war.'

Cork said, 'We deal with the real, and unpleasant, world.'

'I need, require, success.'

Cork said, 'It's not the way things work, I'm sorry to say. It's slow, tedious and undramatic. He's called Joey Cann. He may, with considerable luck, put one building brick in place and that's only one – but it's ridiculous to assume he can win you those headlines, bring Packer down.'

The meeting broke up.

They went together from the minister's room out onto the pavement and into brittle spring sunshine.

They paused before parting.

'Even for a politician, that fellow's not the full shilling,' Endicott said.

'If I thought Cann and Bolton were going for Packer's jugular with a hacksaw, were going to endanger themselves in that snake-pit, they'd be on the first plane home.'

Joey's eyes were on the arrivals door, fastened on it.

He saw Mister between the Eagle and Atkins. He edged the gear from neutral.

'That them?' she asked.

'That's Target One and the fat one's Target Two. The younger one's Target Three.'

'Happy days,' she said, and her camera's shutter clicked beside his ear.

The photographs he'd seen, scores of them, were good: he had recognized Mister immediately and watched him with fascination. For the first time the man was in front of him, flesh where before there had been only monochrome images. The greeting party lounged against the two waiting cars. He saw Mister's head incline towards the Eagle's and saw his lips move. It was a private moment of exhilaration. He could not have explained it to Jen. There might have been an opportunity the previous summer, when Finch had put together the arrest team, for him to have piped up and asked to be included. He'd hesitated – the team might have laughed at him, he might have had to stutter why it was important to him, their archivist and the bottom of the tree, to be there when the handcuffs went onto Mister's wrists – and the moment of opportunity had gone. That night, alone in his room and knowing what was to happen at a quarter to six in the morning, he had beaten his pillow in frustration. Yet those who might have refused him or laughed at him were all gone. He had survived. The moment was his.

'He needs to know, this Serif, who's the boss. Polite and firm, but it's understood from the start. We are big players, he's a small player, that's what he should be learning now.'

He was about to start forward but Atkins's hand was on his arm. 'They're big on pride, Mister. They think they won their war – they didn't, it was won for them, but it's what they like to believe.'

'I hear you.'

The Cruncher should have been back to London to brief him and should have been with him for the return, not the Eagle. Across the paving from them were four men, their weight against the doors and bonnets of the cars, in a uniform of black windcheaters, shaven heads, black shirts, tattoos on their necks, black jeans, gold chains at their throats, black boots, cigarettes. Mister wore a suit and a white shirt.

The Eagle carried a businessman's attache case and was dressed in a blazer, slacks, collar and tie and a maroon-brown overcoat. Atkins was the officer boy, in brogues, chocolate corduroys, sports jacket, and was loaded with the three bags. A cigarette was thrown down, then three more. The back door of the front car was opened.

'Which one's Serif?' Mister murmured.

'He's not here,' Atkins said, 'if I remember him right.'

'Shit,' the Eagle muttered. 'That's one hell of a good start.'

A policeman, with a heavy pistol slung from a waist holster, approached the cars. Gold rank on his tunic, he slapped shoulders, gripped fists, and was given a cigarette from an American pack, as if he was meeting friends, and then he was gone. Mister wondered whether it had been arranged to send a message. The boot of the front car was opened, the bags taken from Atkins and lifted inside. A pudgy hand, with gold rings on it, gestured to the car's back seats.

'Where is he?' Mister asked Atkins.

Atkins asked. Mister saw them all, in unison, shrug.

' They're saying they don't know.'

There was a sigh from the Eagle. It was the nearest he ever came to saying there were always consequences when his advice was ignored. 'I told you so' would have been too bold for the Eagle to utter.

They were pressed together on the back seat of the Mercedes, a driver and a minder in the front, the second driver and second minder in the car behind.

They were jerked against the leather as the car powered away. The sign they swept past proclaimed that the airport's new terminal had been built with Dutch money. They went past the guarded entrance to a French military camp. The driver didn't slow as he approached the barrier at the perimeter but hit the horn. The bar was lifted, the car accelerated, a policeman waved a greeting. Apache gunships, American, flew over them in formation, and Mister craned to watch them before their disappearance into the cloud.

Ruined buildings confronted them as they swung onto the main road – the close-up mayhem wreckage of what he had seen in the aircraft's final approach.

For a moment he was unsettled, a slight toll of his confidence taken by the absence of the man due to meet him, the closeness of the police officer to the escort, the scale of military power, the extent of the war damage. Atkins looked at him, queried with his eyes.

Did he want a running commentary? He shook his head. He was absorbed.

He had never seen anything like it. Whole streets were burned, shot away, roofless. Kids played football in the roads where snow-covered debris was bulldozed to the side. And people lived there

… In the wrecked homes, people existed, as if the houses were caves. There were sagging skewed balconies on which limp plants were stacked and from which washing-lines hung taut under the weight of sheets, shirts, skirts. It was five years since the war – why hadn't it been rebuilt? He didn't know, and didn't want Atkins to tell him. The loss of confidence had been momentary. He was here because it was what he had wanted.

At a junction stood a massive collapsed building. It looked as if it had been dynamited at the base. It was five bloody years. What did these people do? Why didn't they clear it up? But he didn't ask Atkins. They drove into the dense streets of the city. His first impressions, and Mister always thought them the best, were that the place was a grade A dump, a tip. They hit a long, straight road. On the plane, Atkins had told him they would come into the city on Buleva Mese Selimovica, eight lanes, that merged into the Zmaja od Bosne, which had been called Snipers' Alley. At high speed, they passed a building whose roof was festooned with aerials and satellite dishes, and he thought it must house the telephone headquarters.

Behind it he glimpsed a dispersed mess of Portakabin huts with signs leading to them for the International Police Task Force, but he knew nothing of what they did. Then a lorry park was on the left, and another and another. He saw rows of cabs, trailers and containers, more rows, and warehouses, some intact and some destroyed. The Cruncher's last message from Sarajevo had given the address, the number of the warehouse in a lorry park in Halilovici, where the charity lorry should arrive. He wondered if it was there; it should have been there that morning, or the night before, tucked from sight in the warehouse.

They hammered over a bridge. He saw the murky earth-brown water, foaming on the weirs, running fast. He'd always been fond of the Cruncher. He'd never feel for Sol Wilkes what he'd felt for the Cruncher.

'I want to know where it happened, where the Cruncher went into the river. I want to go there, I want to see it.'

Atkins spoke to the driver. There seemed to be surprise on the man's face, but Mister couldn't tell whether it was at what was asked, or that he should be told what to do. The Eagle sat bolt upright and clutched his attache case as if he believed it might be wrenched from his grip… Drab streets, drab people, drab shops. Kids waved to the cars as they went by, and where there was a traffic block they headed into the oncoming lane and sped past. Once, a car had to swerve onto the pavement to let them by. At a junction, a policeman held up the right-of-way vehicles and they overtook jeeps loaded with armed Italian soldiers, whose drivers seemed not to notice them. When they braked hard they were level with a restaurant whose doors and windows were surrounded by silver aluminium. The sign said it was called Platinum City. Opposite was a narrow, ancient footbridge over the river. The cars stopped, the doors were opened. Mister pushed out the Eagle, then followed him.

There was a low wall between the pavement and the riverbank, and a waist-high railing on the bridge.

An old woman in black squatted beside buckets of tired flowers. He saw that men and women in threadbare clothes stepped off the pavement, risking the road traffic to stay clear of the minders. Mister pointed to the flowers. Atkins spoke to the minder from the front of their car. The man went to the old crow, dropped banknotes into her lap and her face lifted in gratitude. He took a single bunch from her buckets, and she offered more for what he had paid, but he shook his head curtly. The blooms were handed to Atkins, a half-dozen drooping smog-encrusted chrysanthemums. Atkins gave them to Mister, who walked to the centre of the bridge.

He was a man to whom sentiment came rarely. He looked down at the rushing water. He was not troubled by history. He did not know that he was close to where Gavrilo Princep had held a hidden pistol and waited for an archduke and archduchess in an open car, and what had been the consequences of the shots that he had fired. Neither did he know that the bridge on which he stood was a monument to the skill of Ottoman architects now dead for centuries.

Nor did he realize that had he stood on that bridge, looking down on the water, seven years earlier, or eight or nine, a sniper's 'scope would have magnified him in the seconds before he was shot. He held the flowers. He sensed the cold and the power of the river's currents. Neither Atkins nor the Eagle had followed him. He was not aware that the space and quiet around him were not accidental and did not see that the minder from the second car had crossed to the far side of the bridge and diverted pedestrians away.

His mood lightened. People died, didn't they? i mm her had died, hadn't he? Could have been a Ira I lie accident, could have been slipping in the shower, could have been a rent-boy's knife, could have been pissed and fallen into a river. Life goes on, isn't that right, my old friend? Life goes on, with new challenges. It was the nearest Mister could grope towards feeling sentiment at the death of a friend. He threw the flowers into the river and watched the muddy waters suck them down. There was a flash of colour, then they were gone. Had he looked around him at that moment, turned sharply, and not stared into the flow of the Miljacka, he would have seen the faces of the drivers and the minders. He would have seen amusement and the curl of contempt at their mouths.

He walked briskly back to the cars.

He was driven the reverse way along Snipers' Alley to a square block of gaudy yellow topped with the logo of the Holiday Inn.

'When do I get to see him?'

Through Atkins he discovered that Serif was busy at the moment, but when he was free he would see his respected guest.

The cars drove away. They picked up their bags and walked into the lobby.

The Eagle said, 'That, Mister, is out of order. It is plainly insulting.'

Atkins said, 'It's his patch, Mister, and he'll think crude pegging you back will make him a bigger man.'

Mister smiled cheerfully. 'He'll do it once, he'll not do it again. That's my promise to him and I'm good on my word… Doesn't seem too bad a place, considering the rest of it.'

Across open ground where the concrete was holed ankle deep by artillery explosions was a line of sparsely filled shops and bars where a few men and youths desultorily made their coffee last. Above the shops and bars were apartments that had been repaired with a patchwork of bricks and cement. In front of the long building a blue van, paint scraped, unremarkable, was parked in a position that gave its driver and passenger good sight of the front door of the Holiday Inn hotel.

'It may be a slow old trade,' Maggie said, 'but at least we're legal.'

'That's right,' Joey answered. 'Ink on paper.'

'I thought you had a chance, b u t… '

'He was good as gold, the judge.'

'I think it's the first time I've ever been legal – is that a cause for celebration or tears? Don't know… Tell you what I also don't know – why. Why did Judge Delic sign? You didn't break his legs, did you? You didn't drop him a couple of thousand dollars, did you?'

'I didn't ask. He signed, I ran with it.'

She eased back in her seat, the camera settled on her lap. Behind her, in the van's interior, the workshop of her trade was neatly laid out, cosseted with foam and bubble-wrap.

'It'll be from something out of the past – don't take too much credit for it.'

He said coldly, 'You'd know about that because you worked in dirty corners that are now history. You won't mind me saying it, but the Cold War was utter shit, irrelevant, perpetuated by spooks to keep themselves on the payroll. This is something that matters.'

'I worked with men, I was at the cutting edge, I was 189 with real men,' she flared. 'All this business about legal, it's pathetic. They were real men, the best and the finest.'

'Dust in the past,' he said.

He disliked so much of her, and didn't know where to focus the beam of his dislike. There was the crimped care of her makeup and her dress, and the crispness of her accent, and the fact that she had been there before and knew it all when he knew nothing, and the academic precision of her kit in the back of the van. There was the sense of class, privilege and superiority in her every speech and movement.

For Joey, being in Sarajevo and close to Target One was the sweet pinnacle of his short career. For her, as she showed him, it was a tedious spell of tacky work to be endured.

'God help your lot,' she said, 'if you're the best they've got.'

Silence cloaked them. She smoked. The evening descended around them. When she dragged hard and the tip glowed he could see her face. Utter calm contentment. She should have been, was meant to be, offended by his rudeness. He thought a test had been set for him, a provocation to make him expose himself, as if then she could calculate his value, his competence. He eased himself out of the van's cab.

Before he closed the door after him, Joey asked ruefully, 'You'll be all right?'

'Course I will,' she said. 'Why not? This is Bosnia.'

Spring 1993

Two old men, though they were far away from it, dreamed of the valley. They remembered only the best times, when the first of the year's warm days heated the soil and the flowers came and they could hear the river flowing over the ford, and a friendship of more than half a century

The new home of Husein Bekir, his wife and grandchildren was a bell-tent in a camp on the edge of the town of Tuzla, some three hundred kilometres to the north-east of the valley. She had taken the small ones to the queue for bread baked from the flour brought by the United Nations convoys. He shared his home with two other families and it was an existence that was a living hell to him. When she had stood in that queue for perhaps three hours she would bring back the bread, and then she would go away again to queue with the children to fill the plastic buckets with water from the tanker that was also provided by the United Nations. With the sun on his face, Husein sat outside the tent, too listless to move, and tried to scratch from his mind the detail of the colours and contours of the valley fields. The camp was a place of filth and in it there were early signs of epidemic disease. Increasingly frequent warnings of the risk of the spread of the typhus bacteria came from the foreign doctors. It was only by struggling to recall the valley, more blurred now than the previous month, more hazed than in the winter, that Husein stayed alive. There were others, who had come from similar valleys and been displaced, as he had, who had given up the fight to remember and were now buried or lay on the damp mattresses against the tents' walls praying for death. Husein had promised himself that he would return, with Lila and the grandchildren, to the valley. He heard nothing on the radios that blasted through the avenues between the rows of tents that gave him cause to believe his pledge could be redeemed, but his fierce, awkward determination kept him alive…

… A wind came off the Ostsee and beat at the high windows of the block.

With two other families, Dragan Kovac had been dumped in a twelfth-floor apartment on the outskirts of the town of Griefswald. All day, each day, he sat by the window and stared out. That morning he could see little because the wind carried loose flakes of snow from dark low cloud. The arthritis in his knees, worse through lack of exercise, would have made it hard for him to walk outside, but he yearned, even with the pain, to stumble forward into clean air so that he could better remember his home and the village of Ljut. He was trapped in the building. The twelfth floor was his prison. It was forbidden for him, as it was for the other refugees housed in the block, to leave it.

From his vantage-point he could see the police car parked across the street from the front door. Engine fumes spewed from its exhaust. A police car was always there now. The food they needed was brought to them by earnest social workers. The imprisonment of Dragan and the other refugees in the block of the Baltic town had begun five weeks before when the crowd had gathered under cover of darkness. Rocks had been thrown to break the lower windows, then lighted petrol bombs had rained against the walls, and there had been the shouted hatred of the young men with the shaven heads, the screams of old slogans. He had thought that night – as the yelling of the skinhead nazis had beat in his ears – and every day since that it would have been better to have died in his village when the 'fundamentalists' had attacked, better never to have left his home. But he had not stayed: he had been one of the few who had escaped.

He had lumbered as fast as his old legs would carry him, flotsam with the flight of the soldiers, away from his valley, without the time to pack and carry with him even the most basic of his possessions. He had been put with many others onto a lorry that rumbled into Croatia, then onto a train that had wound, closed and with the blinds down, across Austria and into Germany then had traversed the length of that huge country. His home was now – and he had little understanding of great distance – some three thousand kilometres to the north-west of the house with the porch and the chair, and the view to the farm of his friend. The two families who shared the apartment with him showed him no respect, and said he was lazy and a fool and that he, the former police sergeant, was responsible for what had happened in their land.

Tears ran down his cheeks, as the snow melted and slithered down the glass of the window. It was so hard for him to remember the valley, but he thought – trying to see the image of it – that it would still be a place of simple beauty.

Neither of these old men, abandoned to live as statistics, sustained by grudging charity, protected from the fascist gangs, knew of the harsh realities of the valley that was their talisman of survival.

Neither remembered where the mines had been sown; neither could have imagined that those little deathly clusters of plastic and explosive would have shifted. They remembered only the good times, before the mines had been laid, when the valley felt the sun and was a bed of bright flowers, and the Bunica river was low enough to be crossed and they could meet and talk. Good times before the madness had come.

They used the hotel restaurant. Atkins had asked Mister if he wanted to go out, said Reception would recommend a restaurant, but he'd shrugged away the suggestion. It was a slow meal, poorly cooked and ineptly served, but that didn't matter to him. He'd ordered mineral water with his food and the Eagle had taken his cue from him, but Atkins had a half-bottle of Slovenian wine. He didn't have to tell them that he was tired, had no interest in talk. The restaurant was on the mezzanine, three floors below his bedroom, and close to empty. He used the meal-time to think about a riposte to the insult he had received from a man too busy to meet him. It was not in Mister's nature to turn the other cheek. Weakness was never respected. Atkins told the Eagle about the hotel's history in the war: it had been the centre for journalists and aid workers, it was continually hit by artillery fire; only the rooms at the back were safe for occupancy; for weeks at a time there was no power to heat the building, but it stayed open, staff and guests living a cave-dweller existence. Pointing out of the big plate-glass windows and down at the wide street that had been Snipers' Alley, to the dark unlit towers of apartment blocks beyond the river, Atkins told the Eagle about the marksmen who had sheltered high up there and fired down on civilians going to work or queuing at bread shops and water stand-pipes, trying to get to school or college, and the callous disregard of it. The Eagle's face showed that he wished he was anywhere other than in that restaurant, in that city.

Mister ate only what he thought was necessary for sustenance. Each plate brought to him was taken away half finished. The insult, and what he would do about it, consumed him. Out of an insult, and its answer, came strength. The insult provided an opportunity for him to demonstrate his strength. When he was twelve years old, a teacher had called him 'an evil little swine, a thief' in front of the class; he had followed that teacher home after school, put on a balaclava, punched the man to the ground and kicked him again and again; charges could not be brought, the teacher could not make an identification; he had become king, much feared, among the twelve-year-old kids. As he'd grown older he'd left a trail of the same fear behind him, in gaol and on the streets. The man running Hackney and the east when Mister was climbing the ladder's rungs had said that Mister was a Tittle shite with no future' and was now walking on sticks because pistol bullets had disintegrated his kneecaps. A man in Eindhoven, a dealer who was careless with buyers' money, had fled naked during the night with his wife and two children from a house that had cost him a million and a half Dutch guilders while the fire that destroyed it blazed around him. A man who had hacked him off in a pub, who now had no tongue and no fingers, might today have died.

Mister was experienced in answering insults. He had considered his problem, decided on his response.

He didn't wait for coffee.

In his room he felt safe, in control. He knew of nothing that should make him feel otherwise. A full day awaited him in the morning. He was soon asleep.

Under his room the city's late-night traffic prowled and did not disturb him.

'Is there anything more about that lorry?'

It was late evening and Monika Holberg was just back in her office in the UNIS building, Tower A, and she was tired, which was rare for her, and irritable, which was rarer. She had been on a field day out in the country, west of the city. She kicked off her muddied hoots and slung her heavy anorak at the door hook.

Whether she was in the city and trawling through office appointments or away in the country villages, she wore the same anorak and boots. She had no other life in Sarajevo other than her work for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. She was tired because her driver had gone sick, there hadn't been another available so she had driven herself, and on the way back – on the mountain road from Kiseljak

– the rear right tyre of the Nissan four-wheel drive had punctured, she'd had to change it herself, and the nuts had been hell to shift. She was irritated because the village she'd visited beyond Kiseljak was light years from being ready to receive and impress the visitors she would be escorting there next week. She was a driven woman. It was not in Monika's character to accept that second best was enough, whether in vehicle maintenance or visit preparation. Her secretary was on the other side of the thin partition that separated their cubicles, brewing coffee and making a sandwich.

'What lorry is that, Monika?'

'The lorry from those British people. What do they call themselves? "Bosnia with Love"? Isn't that what they call themselves? I need that lorry.'

'Maybe Ankie took the call – when I was at the meeting or at lunch.'

Monika rolled her eyes. Her secretary was not a driven woman. Her main concerns were what she was earning in salary and living allowance from UNHCR and what a sacrifice she made, and how she hated Sarajevo. She was fat on the city's back and her hair was always freshly styled. The desk was littered with small squares of sticky yellow Post-it notes, fastened where there was space among a haphazard strewn-paper sea. She was bending over her table, skipping the secretary's messages and identifying those of Ankie, the Dutch girl, who fielded her phone when it rang unanswered.

'There isn't a message from Ankie about the lorry.'

'Perhaps there was no message – can we talk about it in the morning?'

She was brought the sandwiches and the coffee.

Monika had eaten nothing since a rushed breakfast at dawn, and it was the first half-good cup of coffee. Her secretary was gone. But, she needed that lorry and its load. The village had been sullen and unresponsive.

Ambassadors, functionaries and officials from the international community were coming to the village next week. Unless the mood lightened the VIPs might be whistled, jeered at or, worse, ignored and cold-shouldered. A little man, dapper and dancing in expensive shoes, had waltzed into her office two weeks previously, come in off the street, Fra Andela Zvizdovica, and had offered a lorry full of clothes, toys, basic household goods, and talked about what he called 'jumble sales' and 'coffee mornings' and 'fete collections'. Monika Holberg spoke fluent English, as well as Spanish, German and Italian, but these were words that she could not translate from her experience of an island upbringing off Norway's coast north of the Arctic Circle. She needed the lorry and its cargo to wipe the morose depression off the villagers' faces before the visit. Donors, she had learned, wanted hope, required stoic optimism, if they were to dig again into their pockets and deeper than the last time.

She had a promise of the lorry but no word of its arrival in the city.

She wolfed her sandwiches and slurped her coffee.

She had believed the promise that the lorry's contents would be hers to distribute. Thirty-three years old, tanned, weather-beaten, blond-haired, and uncaring about her appearance, Monika Holberg was another piece of the mosaic that was falling quietly into place, and she also had no knowledge of it.

She threw the cardboard sandwich plate, and the coffee beaker, at her rubbish bin, missed, and started to rip the messages off her desk.

Joey had said on the stairs, 'We'll call him the Cruncher, Target One's accountant. He was murdered.

What you suspected is proven. When I find out how he was murdered and why, the door will begin to open for me. Then I get to know what our Target One is here for.'

'I'll do my best,' the policeman had said, and had hit the door with his fist. 'Can't do more than my best.'

There was a veneer of respectability, cigarette-paper thin, about the room and its tenant. She was middle-aged going on elderly, and her face was deeply lined, but on the dressing-table were the jars and powder tins that would have helped her shed a few years. She wore an old dressing-gown that had once been flamboyant, but which was now faded, and Joey could see the careful stitches where it had been repaired. Her hair was gathered into curling rollers.

Her hands betrayed her immediate past. She had seen better times: now they were scarred, reddened and swollen. She smoked as she talked, clamping a short cigarette-holder between yellowed teeth. She had only one room.

Her name had been the first typed on the page that Judge Delic had given Joey. He'd had no option but to call the only other official link to the killing, the policeman, Frank Williams. The policeman was involved because he had pulled the body from the river and written the report. It was against Joey's instincts to break Church ranks and confide in a policeman, even if the man was separated from the world of Crime Squad and Criminal Intelligence, sawing on a buried nail in a log. He'd been told the policeman had to clear involvement with a superior and, if that was achieved, get away when he could.

He would not have been there without the policeman, would have had no chance of finding the attic garret room, and having gained admittance he would have had no language to hear her statement. She sat on the bed from which she had been disturbed. Frank was opposite her, at the table under the ceiling light.

Beside his hand was a one-hundred Deutschmark note that was on offer but not yet handed over.

She talked.

Joey's eyes roved round the room as he listened to Frank's translation.

He was trained to notice, listen and suck in the relevance of what he heard and saw.

'… It is what I have already told the police who came to see me. I can only say the same because that is the truth. I can tell you what I saw and nothing more. I am truthful, I have always been truthful. You want me to repeat it, I will repeat it. It is hard in They went out into a dark, empty street, the gloom clinging to them. Joey said what should happen the next day. He had his street map and he thought he was only a few minutes' walk to his hotel. He was about to drift away when his shoulder was caught and he was spun round.

The lilting softness was gone from Frank's voice.

'You do understand that's a powerful man, as powerful as they come in this city.'

'What do you suggest I do? Go home?'