The Untouchable

Chapter Seven

'A good journey?'

'No problems, Mister,' the Eel said. Jason Tyrie had driven for Mister for sixteen years, and his uncle before him. 'I did the border at Bihac. It was two fifty DMs on the Croat side and seven fifty for this side's crowd. The warehouseman is one fifty a week. You can buy anyone here.'

The Eel had been in a column of lorries bringing supermarket food over the frontier from Croatia. The sums he'd paid out to Customs, on both sides of the line, had been the going rate for avoiding inspection and duty, and getting the documents stamped. All the drivers carried wads of German notes. The lorry, 'Bosnia with Love' painted gaudily on its sides, was parked in the shadowed rear of the warehouse. The Eel had left the bonnet up, had scattered tools on the concrete floor. The inquisitive, or the prying, would have thought it was there for repairs. The warehouseman, minding his own business, was out in the cold morning air hosing vehicles clean and sweeping away the lakes of water into the drain.

'Right,' Mister said. 'Let's get to work.'

He had the Eagle, the Eel and Atkins to help him.

Atkins had been up early and had been to a vehicle dealer. The Toyota four-wheel drive, smoked-glass windows, had been bought for cash. The papers that went with it, which made a pretence of a legal purchase, were economic with its history: they made no mention of its former ownership by the OSCE. The Toyota had been stolen from outside a hotel in Vitez used by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, had been resprayed and the plates had been changed – close examination would have shown the OSCE logo on the doors, but Atkins had said that didn't matter. No one was looking for such things. They made a tunnel into the back of the lorry, Mister and the Eel passing boxes down to the Eagle and Atkins. They burrowed towards the bulkhead, shifting only enough of the clothes and toys collected by the charities to give them access. Far to the back of the lorry were the heavier boxes. Mister was in charge and revelling in it. The Eagle was sweating, had taken off his coat, loosened his tie, and when he thought Mister wasn't watching him he left Atkins to take the workload. Atkins stacked the boxes. The ones they were after were bulkier, more awkward to push and lift, though the contents had been stripped down to the minimum.

The first of the bigger boxes came down, passed to the Eagle who sagged under its weight. Atkins used a penknife to slit the adhesive tape holding it shut, and lifted out the first launcher.

Mister watched him. He felt warm pride. To cut down on the weight and the bulk, the launchers had been transferred from the slatted-wood boxes and put into cardboard containers: the Eel had been told not to drive fast and to keep clear of rutted road surfaces.

Atkins had it on the concrete floor, knelt beside it and threw a small switch. There was a faint humming sound, and a red light showed at its rear.

Good old Cruncher.

While Mister had been in Brixton, Cruncher – with Atkins's help – had given six months of his life to getting his hands on four of the medium-range Trigat launchers. There had been an exercise in northern Finland. While Mister had languished in his cell, Cruncher and Atkins had done the deal with a major on a Lapland range. For fifty thousand American dollars in high-denomination notes, the major responsible for driving the four launchers back from the range where they had been tested in minus 18 degrees C, not allowing for windchill, had dropped back in the convoy on the iced road. He had made easy excuses for his driver to travel in one of the lorries ahead. At a carefully chosen point, where the road between the range and the barracks wound above a sheer cliff that fell to a deep, ice-covered lake, the jeep had skidded off the road – as the official report stated – plummeted down, fractured the ice and would have come to rest among jagged rocks some two hundred metres below the frozen surface. The Cruncher and Atkins had collected the four launchers and the twenty missiles, taken from the jeep before the 'accident', and driven them away. Before they left, Atkins had beaten up the major, giving him injuries consistent with being thrown clear from the jeep as it had started its descent.

The major had been abandoned in a state of theatrical shock to walk eight kilometres to the barracks. The pride of the Finnish military determined that the manufacturers – Euromissile Dynamics Group of Fontenoy-aux-Roses in France – were given an horrific picture of the road mishap. The loss was forgotten, the launchers and missiles were written off.

They had been loaded onto a lorry carrying pulped timber, driven by the Eel, known to his mother as Billy Smith. They had reached a British port a week after the scarred, trembling major had shown investigators the tyremarks on the packed snow and the scars in the ice below.

Well done, Cruncher.

Seven weeks before the start of his trial Mister had been told by the Eagle that the launchers and missiles had reached safe haven, and he'd nodded, as if he'd never doubted they would. Three of the boxes were manhandled by Atkins and the Eel into an inner room at: the extreme rear of the warehouse, after a handgun had been taken from each. Before the fourth box was loaded into the Toyota, a map was spread out on it.

In magnified detail, it showed the streets of the old quarter of the city. As he outlined what would happen, Mister saw the way the Eagle craned forward over Atkins's shoulder to listen and watch his darting fingers; he noted how the Eagle hated all of it and could not help himself. The map was folded away. A small, loaded PPK Walther went into the back of his own belt and two filled magazines into his jacket pocket. Atkins drove away with the box, with a Luger pistol in the glove compartment. He told the Eagle that they would walk and find a taxi, didn't bother to offer him a firearm.

Mister left the Eel, a Makharov in his anorak pocket, to mind the lorry, and stepped out into the streets of Sarajevo to put right the matter of an insult.

' I still don't see why I have to do it.'

'You're doing it because that's what I'm telling you to do, and you'll do it just like I've told you to,'

Maggie Bolton said decisively.

'It doesn't make sense.'

'Everything, just like I've told you.'

Joey shrugged and sighed so that she could read his annoyance and took the case from her hand. They did a last check on her button microphone and his earpiece, then on his microphone, clipped to his undershirt, and her earpiece. Folded in his shirt pocket was the authorization for intrusive surveillance signed by Judge Delic, typed by his daughter – if it was needed, if he showed out, at the Custom House they would feed him to the rats on the Thames mudflats. She had a copy run off on the hotel's machine. He'd argued all through breakfast, and all through their walk from their hotel to the Holiday Inn, and she'd taken not a blind bit of notice, and had carried on with her briefing detail of where in the room the bug should be placed.

She was quiet, businesslike. The speech microphones were press-to-talk. If speech was not possible then the crash-out code was the repeated click on the button.

The atrium area of the hotel was empty now. The ashtrays had been filled by the delegates to a foreign-donor conference but they'd started their meeting, and the lethargic staff had not yet stirred themselves to clear up.

The pot plants were dying slowly. Outside, through the plate glass of the picture windows, were the two black Mercedes saloons, and the hoods; they weren't lounging as they'd been at the airport but were agitated, smoking hard, shouting into mobiles.

'It's not my job. This isn't my area of expertise.' He knew the argument was lost.

'Can we go to work, or shall we just carry on squabbling? Be a dear boy, stop messing.'

He'd argued because he was frightened, could neither help it nor hide it.

He walked towards the lift with the bag. He turned once and looked back at her. She winked, gave him a little wave then headed for the revolving glass door.

From where the van was parked, closer than last night, she'd have a clear view of the door and anyone who went through it, if they used the revolving door and not the coffee-shop entrance. The lift took Joey to the third floor. He'd stood back, when they'd arrived at the Holiday Inn, and she'd gone to Reception. She was a travel agent from London, handling business packages. She booked flights and hotels in the commercial sector. She was checking through accommodation facilities in Zagreb, Podgorica in Montenegro, Pristina in Kosovo, and in Sarajevo.

Could she please inspect a room? Were all the rooms the same? Businessmen, she had learned, were happiest on the third floor, not too high if they had a vertigo problem, not too low to be disturbed by a hotel's bars and the street traffic. She had been shown, Joey trailing her, unintroduced, the bag carrier, a room on the third floor and assured that the rooms were all the same, exactly the same, as was the policy of the hotel. For a few moments, Joey and the woman from Reception had been together in the bathroom and he'd made a little point of examining the bottles of shampoo and bath foam, and had seen the Polaroid's flash from behind the nearly closed door. When they'd come out Maggie had thanked the woman profusely and told her they were excellent rooms, then moved on to rates and credit-card acceptability. Over coffee in the atrium they'd studied the photographs and she'd told him what he should do, and where the bug should be placed. He went in the lift to the third floor.

She'd shown him, at their own hotel, how to open a hotel room with a plastic bank card.

Room 318. He closed the door behind him. The maid had been in and the room was clean, the bed made. Pyjamas were folded on the pillow. The wardrobe doors were closed. A suitcase was on a rack.

A pair of shoes was underneath it. He felt the room was a trap. He did not know how long he had, only that the opportunity might not come again. He must hurry, but not so that he made errors. He had the photograph to guide him. The telephone was too obvious, she'd said, the first place that would be checked if the room were searched for bugs – the light and power sockets would be the next. He took a towel from the bathroom, laid it on the upright chair from the desk, carried the chair to the wardrobe and kicked off his trainers. He stood on the towel, no shoes so that he would not dirty it, and the towel so that he would not indent the chair. Maggie had identified the waste space above the wardrobe, below the ceiling, as suit-able housing. With a screwdriver he prised back the wardrobe's upper fascia board. Into the space behind went the power unit, a black box the size of a paper-back book. He used the fine-needled spike she'd given him and pressed it in sharply, drove it in until he could feel the pressure on the front against his finger.

He made a tiny hole in the outer stained wood, threaded the microphone, a pinhead, into the hole and worked it until the head was flush with the hole. He threw a switch in the control, saw the green light glow, and held the board in his hand.

Joey whispered, 'Testing – two, three, four – testing…'

In his ear. 'You close up?'

'Right beside it.'

'Is it back together?'

'Not yet.'

'May need a volume tweak. Before it goes back together, try it from the window, then from beside the phone.'

'Will do.'

He put the board crudely into place and slipped down from the chair. He went to the window and looked down to the pavement a full hundred feet below. There was no balcony. He saw a taxi swing off the road and then disappear under the flat roof sheltering the main door.

Joey said, 'I'm by the window. This is normal speech level – two, three, four, testing from the window… Give me the OK, then I'll go to the phone position.'

Silence in his ear.

'Maggie, I'm at the window. Have you got me at the window? Come in, Maggie.'

A plaintive voice shrilled in his ear. 'Oh, Christ.

He's back. I bloody missed him. Gone through the door. Get out, out, out. Target One is through the door.

I missed him.'

He froze. His trainers were on the floor by the desk.

The chair was by the wardrobe, with the towel on it.

The fascia board was still loose, out of place, unfastened and cables were visible above it. In an act of will, he had to throw, almost, one leg in front of the other to get himself moving. He lurched across the room towards the door. The board was priority.

Board, chair, towel… He was on the chair, using the heel of his hand to batter the board back into place.

Maggie was screaming in his ear. He could see the pinhead hole in the board, and with his palm he made the last adjustment, looked at it, and jumped. Towel into the bathroom. He slapped it on the rail, but it slipped off. More of the precious seconds were used hanging it as neatly as a maid would have. Out of the bathroom. He ferried the chair to the desk. He turned for the door and his toe, right foot toe, stubbed the chair leg… No shoes, no bloody shoes. He shovelled on the shoes.

The voice in his ear, calm now, said, 'You ran out of time, Joey. He's on the landing outside the room.'

There were voices in the corridor. He knew the one voice from the hours of the tapes and the earphones.

The door was the only way out. The bed was too low on the floor to slide under. He heard the room card go into the door lock. He went to the window where there was the drop that would kill him and insinuated himself behind the curtain. There was silence in his ear, as if there was nothing more she could tell him, no more help she could offer. The door opened, then the inner bathroom door. He heard Mister urinate, then the flush. The creak of the wardrobe door being pulled open. Mister was whistling. Joey found himself trying to recognize the tune, and couldn't. Mister belched.

Looking down at his feet Joey saw that one of the untied laces would be protruding from behind the curtain, would be in view… From the files, he knew of every killing attributed to Mister, knew the details of every death. All the killings featured pain before death, were never quick. He was bursting to wet his trousers.

He heard the door close and the footsteps retreat.

Joey counted to fifty, tied his laces, then let himself out.

Down the corridor, into the lift, down in the lift, into the atrium. He thought she'd have been there, waiting, but she wasn't.

The two black Mercedes cars were pulling out of the hotel parking area and into the traffic flow of Zmaja od Bosne. There was a piercing horn blast.

He ran towards the blue van, which had been driven onto the forecourt. He fell into the passenger seat.

'Did you hear him whistling?' he asked.

'Like a nightingale,' Maggie said. She drove fast towards the road.

'What was the tune? What was its name? I couldn't remember its bloody name,' Joey said flatly.

'It was Elvis, come on – or are you too young?

"Wooden Heart", recorded during his army service – weren't you born then? It was clear as a bell. Are you all right?'

'I was actually about to piss in my trousers. I suppose you're too important to put your own bugs in place. Give the job to the boy.'

'Who would have checked the gear, seen it was working? You?'

It was icily said; he hadn't thought of it. He subsided. She was in touch, just, with the second Mercedes. He was thinking dully of the fear he had felt, and he had not even seen the man. He had feared the whistling closeness, and did not know how to confront the fear.

He let the anger burst. 'You were bloody damn late on the warning. I could have been killed because you were late. I had fuck-all time to get the room back in place because of you. He kills people, do you know that? He hurts people before he kills them. This isn't some bloody game with diplomatic bloody immunity.

You said it yourself, "I bloody missed him." You couldn't have given me less warning if you'd bloody tried. Miss fucking Superior, who the fuck do you think you are?'

Maggie Bolton had a soul but precious few could find it. Her father hadn't. A Ministry of Defence quality-control engineer at the aerospace factory at Preston in Lancashire would admit to colleagues and relations that he could not reach close enough to touch the emotions of his daughter, christened Margaret Emily.

Eight years back he had gone to the crematorium, two months after being declared redundant, still not knowing her. Proud of her, yes, but not understanding. Her mother, too, was kept at arm's length, had been there through Maggie's childhood, young womanhood, and was there still as her daughter drifted into middle age, was phoned once a week if it was convenient, was sent postcards if Maggie was away and it did not breach security, but was not confided in. There had been no schoolfriends who had lasted into adult life. A bachelor uncle had taught at a minor public school in the West Country, and since the school was short of girl entrants had arranged a bursary for her. She had taken no interest in sport as the other girls had, and had devoted her time to the physics and electronics laboratories. She had won a place at Sussex University to study electronic engineering, the only female in that year's intake on the course. At the end of three years her exam results had disappointed her lecturers: she had taken only a lower-second degree. She had spent too much of her last academic year working on a programme of research and development hived out to her department by technicians from the Secret Intelligence Service – routinely such organizations looked to the universities to upgrade their equipment into state-of-the-art standards. Afterwards, regardless of her poor degree, the SIS managers had snapped her up. The secrecy of intelligence work suited her: it was a wall behind which she could live. She could even justify her lack of communication with her parents: they were not on the 'need-to-know' list.

As a new recruit, she was in the basement workshops of the building they called Ceau§escu Towers, below the waterline level of the Thames. In the evenings she spent hours with the master technicians of Imperial College's laboratories after the lecturers and students had gone home. No one in her life was allowed close to her. At parties, home or away, her prettiness, laughter, trim figure and ringless finger ensured that she was a central attraction, but although she flirted shamelessly in public, she was alone in bed.

Her fingernails were the giveaway to her skill, clipped back to the quick. The fingers were small and firmly boned, perfect for the precision of her work with microphones, infinity transmitters, tracking beacons, and fish-eye pinhead cameras. In the basement work shops and in the university's laboratories she was admired. A foreman at Imperial had once said, 'She could get a probe bug up a crocodile's bum and he wouldn't even know his sphincter was being tickled Her research was focused on two specific areas, both equally critical for SIS operations: the downsizing of equipment and the clarity of reception.

It was not on her file, but she had only loved two men in her forty-seven years.

In the summer of '88, she had gone to Warsaw, travelling on a diplomatic passport and with her gear in a diplomatic bag. The contact, introduced to her by the station officer, was a young male clerk working in the Polish Ministry of Defence, with access to the permanent secretary's office. She had provided the bug, he'd put it in place. She was then thirty-four and a virgin, and he was eleven years younger, frightened witless at what he had agreed to do. It had been a sort of love, more in the mind than in the muscle, furtive kisses and hands held briefly in the clandestine night meetings. The bug was the best she had ever made; its low transmission of power signals ensured it defeated the monthly scanning of the permanent secretary's office, and intelligence flowed to the antennae on the roof of the British embassy. Six months later, long after she had gone home, she was told that the clerk had been arrested, tried in camera, for treason, and hanged in the central prison. When she was told – she had been offered, and had accepted – a pink gin. Her composure had not flickered.

In '94, she had manufactured the tiny microphone bug to be fitted into the mobile phone of an Iraqi official of the Mukhabarat who travelled to meet fellow secret intelligence officers in Tripoli, Libya. The beauty of the device was that it could be activated to monitor both telephone transmissions and voice conversations that did not involve the phone. She had spent five days in Malta with the Libyan police bodyguard who had been turned and had the task of inserting the bug in the target's phone. It had worked, she was told, like 'a dream'. And she was told, also, two months later that the bodyguard – sweet, charming, courteous, vulnerable, and loving on evenings on the hotel veranda overlooking the sea – had been held, tortured and shot. Again the gin had been offered her, again her composure had held. If she cried, it was only in the silence of her tiny flat.

She was a part of the old world, a Cold War warrior.

She had protested viciously when her line-manager had assigned her to Sarajevo, told that her annual assessment interview would be postponed, given to understand that the latest rate of per diem expenses should not be exceeded unless she was prepared to stump up the excess herself. Yes, she had been to Sarajevo in the war, but with her own people, and in a time before the line-managers had taken control of Ceaucescu Towers, a time before assessments were de rigueur for experienced experts, when expenses were passed without quibble. There had been bugs in the President's office, and in the UN general's operations centre, and nearly – if there had been another week to work on it – in Ratko Mladic's headquarters. As far as she was concerned this assignment was vulgar plod work, a waste of her time.

She was damned if she would easily give a sight of her soul to Joey Cann.

'Forget it,' Maggie said. 'It's in the past.'

'Is that all you've got to say?'

'Too right, that's all you're getting.'

He'd subsided into silence and let her drive. She'd been on the courses run from Fort Monkton at Gosport. From the old strongpoint built to deter Napoleonic ideas of invasion, on the Hampshire coast overlooking the English Channel, she'd learned to drive surveillance cars through the close Portsmouth city streets, in country lanes, and up the motorway towards London. She knew what she was doing, but it was hard in the clogged traffic to hold the link with the Mercedes, and she didn't need his righteous scared anger.

'You don't know as much as you think, do you?' she said.

' W h a t…?'

'You say you know everything about the target, but you don't – you didn't know he liked Presley for starters. It's only small, but it's the small things that matter. In my experience, the better people in this game have humility.'

He brooded. She didn't regret chipping away at his arrogance.

She braked. They were in the old quarter. The cars were parked half on the pavement a hundred yards ahead. She saw Packer, Target One, and the gang of the hoods, and Targets Two and Three, and then she saw Serif.

Mister said, 'You've been kept waiting, I do apologize.

I had business to attend to – it's so annoying, isn't it, when business holds things up?'

Mobile to mobile, Sarajevo to London, Cruncher had reported to the Eagle that Serif spoke good English.

Serif said, 'And I should apologize to you, Mr Packer, because my business prevented me from meeting you at the airport yesterday.'

'That's fine, no offence – and that's the apologies out of the way. Good.' Other than to his mother, who was dead, and to his father in Cripps House, Mister never apologized and meant it.

'I am happy, and I welcome you – as I welcomed your associate, Mr Dubbs.'

'Very sad, what happened to Mr Dubbs. He was a trusted friend.'

'A great loss to you, and a great hurt to me that such a tragic accident should happen in my city.'

'We'll talk about it… First, I'm going to ask a favour of you, Serif – if I may call you that? I'd be gratified if you'd accompany me. Something of a bit of a surprise for you.' Mister never asked favours and seldom expressed gratitude.

Predictably, Serif hesitated. Mister smiled guile-lessly at him. They were standing on the pavement outside the guarded staircase that led to Serif's apartment in a district of narrow streets and alleyways of traditional jewellery stores, little restaurants, coffee-houses and bookshops, all dominated by a slender mosque tower. Mister's smile, calculated, and the gentle way he took the sleeve of Serif's jacket made it difficult for the man to refuse. It was as he had intended.

They rode in the two Mercedes. He shared the back seat with Serif, and the Eagle was sandwiched between them, his shoulder in Serif's armpit, and the impression of the holstered weapon digging into him.

Mister saw the nervous flutter on the Eagle'', face. Mister's PPK Walther was against his buttocks.

It was fourteen years since he had fired a handgun in anger, across a street and into the upper thigh of Chrissie Dimmock; it was eleven years since he had fired in vengeance, point blank into the back of the skull of the Yardie, Ivanhoe Pilton. Chrissie Dimmock and Ivanhoe Pilton had disputed territory with him. If the roles had been reversed, if the Bosnian had come on to his turf, he would have shot him, and left the Mixer to dispose of him, washed himself down and gone to have a good lunch or dinner… The road climbed past the crumpled-down pylon of a ski-lift.

They stopped on a piece of wasteground. At its furthest edge he saw the tall, upright Atkins. There were kids, who watched over a few skinny goats, looking at the cars.

Mister stepped from the car, the Eagle at his side, sealed to him as if they were Siamese. He waved for Serif to catch him up and walked towards Atkins. Behind him, a voice at the kids and they ran. At a sharp pace, he crossed the wasteground to where the medium-range Trigat launcher squatted on the ground, its tripod legs set in the earth, a sheet of plastic behind it, beside Atkins's feet. It was aimed back over the city, into the indistinct mass of roofs and windows. Atkins nodded to him briskly. Mister thought Atkins brought class with him.

Mister said, 'A little present, Serif, something that expresses my goodwill. You got a mobile?'

'I have a mobile.'

'You got someone in your address?'

'I have a friend there.'

'You should ring your friend and tell him to open the front window, the big one, then stand there.

Please, could you do that for me?'

The call was made.

Mister said, 'Since this is going to be yours, Serif, I expect you'd like to know about it. Mr Atkins is your man.'

Atkins said, as if he was an instructor at a class,

'This is the Trigat, a multi-mission medium-range system for infantry. It's designed for use against tanks, helicopters and reinforced bunkers. The range is two hundred to two and a half thousand metres, and at two thousand metres the missile flight time is under twelve seconds, when it will have reached a speed of one hundred and fifty kilometres per hour. The aim point is the hit point, and cannot be affected by counter-measures, with a double charge for maximum penetration. It will come into full service production next year. It will work equally well at minus thirty-five degrees or plus forty degrees. It's the best…

Would you like to see what it can do?'

'What, here? In the city?' Serif giggled.

Mister said, 'Perhaps you'd like to see, Serif, what Mr Atkins chose as a target. Take a look through the sight.'

He thought it would have been obvious to Serif, but the man knelt and then lay on the plastic sheet, his eye to the aperture. The view through the sight, times ten magnification, would carry Serif over the rooftops, over the river and the bridges, over more roofs, to an open window where the curtains blew in the wind, where a man in a black shirt and black jeans stood, and behind him the most prized possessions of Serif, low-life hood. If the missile were fired, its bright flame exhaust fizzing across the city, it would explode iinside that room.

Mister flicked his eyebrow, the slightest movement, but it was picked up by Atkins – a good man, alert.

Atkins crouched beside Serif and depressed the main system switch. There was the sound of a bee's drone.

He said easily, without malice, 'It's live, Serif, just press the tit and you'll see how good it is. Only destroys the target, everything around the target's OK. You up for it?'

Serif wriggled back on the plastic sheet as if he were frightened that any slip, any clumsy movement against the launcher might trigger its firing.

Mister grinned. The detective chief inspector he owned, in the Crime Squad, had once quoted to him the remark of the detective superintendent then leading the hunt for evidence against him: 'Always watch his eyes. The rest of his face can be all sparkling and laughing. Never his eyes, they're fucking evil eyes.'

He'd stood, the night he was told that, in front of the mirror, and had stared into his reflection. He'd not told the Princess how the detective superintendent had described his eyes. He reached out with his hand to help Serif up, and Atkins switched off the Trigat.

He held Serif's hand, and with the other he slapped the man's back. 'You'll find me a good friend, Serif.

I'm not the sort of little man who takes offence when I'm stood up at the airport by a guy who has more important business than meeting me. It's yours, because you're my friend, and there's four warheads to go with it. And there's more where it's come from for you, for when we've done trading. And there's different presents as well. When you're with me, you'll feel like it's your birthday every day. Let's meet tomorrow, and I'll see that nice apartment of yours.

It'll be my pleasure.'

'What is it?'

'It's an anti-tank launcher,' Maggie said, as she took the binoculars back from him. She slung their strap around her neck, against the gold chain and the hanging St Christopher. Half a roll of film had been exposed in her camera.

'Bloody hell,' Joey mouthed.

He thought he could see, without the binoculars, the launcher being loaded into the boot of the second Mercedes. She had turned the van round so that it faced down the hill and away from the wasteground.

She said softly, 'I wonder if our friend Ismet knows the expression, "Beware of strangers bearing gifts."

There's going to be tears if his mother never told him that.'

They left. As the second Mercedes boot was closed down, they drove away. They were too exposed where they had parked.

'What would that thing do?' Joey asked.

She was thoughtful. 'It's not about what it can do.

Possession of it gives a man power, but not as much power as goes to the man who provides it. That's a big play, for serious business. .. '

'Am I not obliged to report that, tell the authorities, the International Police Task Force? Shouldn't I?'

'Don't be ridiculous,' Maggie said. 'Don't make me wish you'd stayed in your pram.'

They went back to the Holiday Inn, parked within sight of the main door, and Maggie crawled into the back of the van and settled with her earphones and tape decks while Joey went to look for sandwiches.

Summer 1994

He was called 'Rado'. The new men stationed in the village of Ljut called him by that name because the previous unit had, and the unit before them. Each morning, they had watched him wander purposefully from the ruins of the village opposite, down the track to the ford across the river, which was now low, and wade across, then seen his stride quicken as he stampeded out of the water and settled for his day's feeding in the overgrown grasslands of the grazing meadows. In the evening, when the sun dipped, he reversed his route and went back to a lonely sleep in the byre near the well of Vraca village.

During long days, Rado was the men's only sight of movement in the fields to the front of them, their only source of interest. They bet on his survival as had the unit before them and the unit before that. The soldiers were little more than boys, from villages where their parents had farms and, far from home, they took comfort from the sight of Rado each day because he represented something familiar. His story was handed down on the day each unit was relieved…

On New Year's Day, nineteen months before, the fundamentalists had abandoned the village across the river and the livestock had been turned out to fend for themselves. Rado, then unnamed, was a recently castrated bull calf of Limousin stock. The dairy cows had died in trumpeting agony because they were not milked. The sheep had been scattered by a wolf pack.

Some had been hunted down and some had fled to the high woods behind the village. The chickens and geese had been the prey of foxes. The heifers, dominated by the one bull calf among them, had come down to the ford in the spring fifteen months before, when the river's pace slackened and its depth dropped. They would have scented the good new grass ahead of them and had crossed; each, in spo-radic and haphazard turn, had stepped on, disturbed or shifted a mine. Last summer all but three had been killed. They went back, these survivors, each evening to the byre over the river where a dog waited for them. The autumn had come, the river had risen, and the three heifers and the bull calf had been blocked from coming over. Then it was spring again, and they were back. They had returned for their daily feeding in the grass meadow in the first week in April. By the third week of April, after two dulled smoke-rising explosions, there had been only one heifer to walk beside the bull calf; lost, sad, mooning lovers. On the last day of April the ground had erupted in a mess of noise and upthrown turf sods, and the bull calf had been alone.

The story handed down to each successive unit occupying the bunkers flanking Ljut village was that the bull calf had stayed with the maimed heifer all that day, that it had steadily licked the heifer's head, hour after hour, had quietened her screams of agony, had stayed with her until death and release. Then, as the evening had come on, he had gone back to the ford and crossed to sleep alone.

Through May, June and July, into August, the daily return of Rado was watched by the troops, and he was given his name.

It was the familiar abbreviation of Radovan, the given name of their leader, Karadzic, to confer respect and admiration.

The sector was at peace, there was no fighting in the valley. On the orders of their sergeant, the soldiers manned the two bunkers every morning for the hour before and after dawn, and every evening from the hour before and after dusk. Then they had no duties other than cleaning the bunkers, their sleeping quarters and their weapons. Rado was the attraction.

The betting started at the time he was named.

In the grazing fields, among the weeds of the unploughed arable fields and between the fallen posts and sagging wires of the vineyard, lay the skeletal outlines of the heifers. Rado seemed not to notice the upturned weather-whitened ribcages. Occasionally, not more than once a day, he would raise his massive neck, throw his huge head high and bellow for company. He was doomed, all the soldiers knew it, and they bet on which hour, which day, which week, his great hoofs would wrench the trip-wire of a PROM mine, or brush the post holding a PMR3 mine, or drop his weight onto the squat antenna points of a PMA2 mine. He seemed immune, invulnerable, so they watched him, fascinated, from the high ground, and the bets were laid.

The sergeant was their bank and issued the betting slips. A thoughtful man, he had realized that unpayable debts between his soldiers would increase tension among them. He had ordered that all bets should be of not a pfennig more than a single German mark, the only currency they valued, and that no soldier could wager more than twice a day. He set the odds, collected the money, and left enough in a plastic sack to pay out a winner, using the profit margin to buy little luxuries in the market in the town – cigarettes, vegetables, cooking utensils, blankets.

Long, hot, fly-blown days followed one another.

While the soldiers slept, ate, smoked, read magazines or wrote to their homes, one man was always deputed as sentry, but his real job was to watch Rado.

There was a full-canopied ash tree between the grazing fields and the arable fields. It was ten minutes to two o'clock. The sentry in the bunker saw Rado rise from the tree's shade, first by extending his rear legs, then kneeling on his front legs before straightening them. His tail flicked his back to clear the flies.

He looked around him and sniffed. Perhaps he needed water from the river or to eat. Rado went slowly. The long grass was pushed aside by his lowered muscled belly, and flattened by his hoofs.

Each step he took, pressing with such weight on the ground, seemed deliberate and purposeful. The sentry watched, and the sound of the flies droned in his ears. Through the shimmer of the heat, Rado's progress, proud, strong and tall, was the only movement in the valley.

There was a flash of firelight… then a puff of grey chemical smoke… then the rush of the explosion…

The fire was gone, the grass and earth fell b a c k… the smoke started to d r i f t… then quiet and stillness.

The great beast keeled over. For a moment its four legs were upright, visible above the tall grass, then they were thrashing. The cry of the castrated bull rang out across the valley. The sentry was leaning against the hot metal of his machine-gun, his hands covering his eyes so that he could not see, but he could not shut out Rado's call for help. The tears flooded his face.

The others had heard the explosion, had broken from their meal or their siesta. The bunker filled with soldiers. He was pulled aside. From the earth floor of the bunker he saw the sergeant lock the butt of the machine-gun against his shoulder. In the sentry's mind was the desperate kicking of Rado's legs. A single shot for aiming, then the burst of fire and the bunker was filled with cordite stench and with the rattle of the ejected bullet cases. The weapon was made safe. The sentry dared to stand and look through the firing port.

There was nothing to see, no movement in the grass near the river.

He did not know it, none of them could have, but the bullets that ended the pain of the animal would be the last fired in the war over the fields of the valley.

'Hello, didn't expect to see you in here… I went for a walk. My room's too h o t… will you have a drink?'

Atkins had come in from the street, had gone to the atrium bar, bought a beer, and had seen him. It was still short of eleven o'clock and Mister was in his room. The bar of the eight-storey hotel was deserted except for them and a bored waiter. The Eagle sat, disconsolate as a reformed alcoholic, with a half-consumed orange juice in front of him. He was lonely, sad, and had been thinking of home, wrapped in the thoughts of the Chiddingfold house and the stables, of Mo and the girls.

'Fine as I am, thank you.'

'May I join you?'

'Be my guest.'

He knew little of Atkins, except that Mister valued him. It was the way of Mister that life and business should be boxed, kept apart. A policeman, over lunch, had once told him that the Irish terrorists used a cell system to cut off an information leak if one cell should be arrested. It was the same principle. He knew as little of Atkins as he did of the Mixer or the Eels or the Cards. The only one he knew, because he drew up the legal contracts for the deals, was the Cruncher who was dead. Atkins ripped off an anorak and a fleece then dumped them beside the chair. Low music played through loudspeakers.

Atkins looked directly at him. 'If you don't mind my saying so, and I don't mean to be impertinent, but you don't seem totally on board.'

'Is it that obvious?' He was too tired for denials.

'Funny thing, when I was here before, twice, at this time of year we lived like Eskimos. We were wrapped up in every coat we could fit on, Tuzla and Sarajevo.

There wasn't the heating-oil. Your nose was half frozen when you woke up, you could get frostbite, or damn near it, in bed. Doesn't seem right to be here and cooked. I've turned the thermostat down and opened the window – seems pretty obvious to me.'

'I do what I'm asked to do and when I have a role to play I'll play it,' he said wearily.

Atkins pressed. 'What's wrong with the concept?'

The Eagle was careful. 'That's a leading question -

I might rule it inadmissible.'

'I'm not a blagger – I suppose that's the vernacular of your clients. I hold my drink, my water and my secrets. You're an educated, intelligent man, a professional…'

He interrupted sharply. 'Don't ever underestimate him because he hasn't a conventional career training.

He is a very clever man.'

After a lifetime of living with it, the Eagle understood every facet of questioning and interrogation. He could recognize when he was being pumped for opinions and those questions that came from personal confusion.

'But you're not on board. It's there for anyone to see that you don't approve. Does anyone ever stand up to him?'

'It's not that simple. I give advice when it's asked for. I keep my mouth shut when it's not asked for.'

The question was asked again. 'But does anyone stand up to him?'

'A few have. They're either dead, maimed or living their lives behind locked doors. Do you need to know?'

'That was high risk today. It was fun but it was taking a hell of a chance. I wouldn't have done it, but

– I'm not ashamed to say it – I hadn't the balls to tell him. He doesn't know this place, has no idea about these people.'

'I told him that, and my opinion wasn't asked a second time. The grave took the only person who I've known to stand up to him – his mother.' The Eagle would not have said that in his office, in his home, wouldn't have said it anywhere that was familiar. In the great cave of the atrium bar, he felt, in truth, so goddam lonely. He spoke quietly and Atkins had to hunch forward to hear him. 'We're in this together, you and me. If we ever get out of this bloody place, Cruncher didn't, and get home and I thought that you'd repeated this conversation, then I'd see to it that you needed crutches to walk on. .. '

'His mother?'

'She stood up to him.'

Incredulity splashed Atkins's face.

'He idolizes the memory of the woman.' He should have stopped and talked about the weather. But he was drawn forward, did not stop. 'She was a good, decent, salt-of-the-earth working-class woman. I am not patronizing. It all came out when she died. The only time he's been maudlin. I had to endure an hour of self-pitying shit. It was the usual grubby little story.

1981 was the year. He'd just started to buy heroin in Green Lanes, off the Turks, and he was pushing into an existing dealer's territory to sell it on. There are few surprises in this life, and that dealer was not a happy man. He came looking for our lord and master. He was shot in the stomach. The only thing the dealer said to the detectives at his bedside was "No comment", said it again and again. I was down at Caledonian Road with Mister. He's very good when being interrogated, a legal adviser could not ask more of a client. Nine questions out of ten he would say nothing and stare at the ceiling, but at the tenth he would speak. "On the advice of my solicitor I cannot answer your question at this stage." It can't be used in court then that he refused to co-operate, the blame for it shifts to me. He doesn't answer questions because he'd have to lie, and lies are caught out. The detectives hear a lie and move on, then jump back to it twenty minutes later from a different line of questions. Lies don't work. The police knew he was responsible for the shooting, but they hadn't forensics, hadn't a victim's accusation, and hadn't a lie. It was two years before he was married and moved out of Cripps House. The police searched the flat. It was, my words at the time, "a vindictive and destructive search".

They wrecked the place. Anything that could be broken was broken. It was an act of frustrated vandalism. He came back from the police station, cocky and free. His father was at work, but not his mother.

'She turned on him, laid into him, that's what he told me. And he hit her across the face with his fist.

Blacked her eye and split her forehead. She wouldn't go to the surgery for stitches, she told his father that she'd walked into a door. She carried the scar on her eyebrow, the hair never grew on it again, for the rest of her life. His father isn't a fool – he'd have known a door didn't make that sort of injury. It was never referred to again. He tried to buy his way out of the guilt, but they didn't want a retirement home at Peacehaven or Brightlingsea. They stayed in Cripps House, maybe as a reminder. They could have lived like millionaires, but they wouldn't have it. There's a pretence in his life that his mother and father always supported him, never criticized him, that they took the line that "the Old Bill just got lucky" and it was the

"bad company that led him on", and "deep down, he's a decent boy", the usual old crap. That's not true.

His mind is compartmentalized, and hitting his mother is ringfenced and excised from memory. It was only the shock of her death that brought it back, for an hour, on my bloody shoulder. He pumps money into the hospice where she died and into the church where they had the funeral, but that's as far as it goes. No one else ever stood up to him.'

'Why are you here?'

'Try greed, young man. Try that for a reason.'

'That's two of us, I suppose,' Atkins said softly. He gathered up his anorak and fleece and wandered to the lift.

The Eagle had a house in the country with horses, all paid for; Atkins had a two-bedroom flat in Fulham that could go on the market for half a million. The Eagle had a 7-series BMW coupe in the drive and a top-of-the-price-list Range Rover for Mo to drag the horsebox; Atkins had a Lotus sports, soft top. Without Mister, the Eagle would have been a struggling lawyer dependent on legal aid pickings; without Mister, Atkins would have been another failed ex-soldier struggling on the consultancy circuit, bullshitting for a living. Of course it was greed, for them both… If the gravy train hit the buffers it would be here, because Mister was off his territory. Did Atkins know that, or was Atkins a fool? Too tired to make an answer, the Eagle went to his room. He was guilty for having talked, but Atkins, too, was guilty, for having listened. God, he wished he could drink, but he dared not.

'I just want to hear the statement, not the story, and then I want to get out,' Joey said.

The story, translated in full by Frank, no edit, was of the daily life in Sarajevo under siege. 'It's better you hear it. You won't understand the truth unless you hear the story,' Frank answered him from the side of his mouth, a murmur on his lips. 'I think you should let me handle it, my way.'

They were close to what Frank called the Jewish cemetery. He said it was where there had been the worst fighting, where the Muslim infantry had sustained the worst casualties. Frank told him that the cemetery was still stuffed with mines, ordnance, unexploded grenades and bodies, and hadn't yet been cleared, but there wasn't too much of a hurry because all the Jews had gone to the death camps sixty years earlier. From the layout of the windows, there would have been eight apartments in the building. Only two of the windows had lights on. The rest of the building, Joey thought, was too damaged to be lived in. It was a bare room. The largest feature in it, more dominating than the bed, the cooker, the washbasin and the plastic garden table, was a metal bookcase. It could have held more than five hundred hardbacked books, and it was empty. A small, thin man with cavernous cheeks and bad, gapped teeth sat on the bed. His hair was wispy thin, and his hands were locked together as if to stop them shaking. The fingers were gentle and thin.

'It was a living death. We had no electricity, no water except from the river, no sewage system, no food, no transport, no work. To look forward to, we had only the escape of death. We existed alongside death for month after month. There were some in my block who for three years did not go outside their front door, never went out. There were some who put on a tie each day and a filthy shirt, then walked into the city, never running, as if it were normal. There were others who ran everywhere… The ones who stayed in, they could as easily have been killed by a tank shell. The dogs did well. If you were killed and not picked up, if it was too dangerous to retrieve you, the dogs had you, would feast on you. They ate better than us. In the winter, when there was snow and rain we had enough water. We would boil it up and put in grass or nettles or leaves, and that we would call a Sarajevo soup. To heat the water, we burned books. I had many books, I could make many fires. I am a musician. To make a better fire one day, to heat my soup more quickly, I burned my violin.'

The man unlocked his hands and reached for a glass of water, which slopped to the floor on its journey from the table to his lips and back.

'I was lucky. A restaurant opened in a basement, a safe building, and I was taken on to play for the diners. There were restaurants open, for foreigners to eat in, where the food had come through the tunnel under the runway at the airport. I was lucky to be chosen as a musician there because the kitchen allowed me to eat what was left on the plates, but that was in the last year of the war.'

Joey listened, stone-faced. He could remember nothing of the war. If it was on television at home his father had broken off from whatever he was talking about and muttered his contempt for people of such savagery. If his mother had the remote, she flipped channels. The war had not registered with him. It had been far away and someone else's problem.

'They were not interested in hearing me play a violin even if I could have found another one. I played the electric guitar. I did not complain. I would have preferred to play Mozart, the violin concerto, K216, Allegro, but I preferred more to eat, so I was the backing to the chanteuse singing Elton John and Eric Clapton. It was survival… In war, sacrifices must be made.'

Joey asked of Frank, 'Where did he play?'

The question was put and answered. Frank said,

'He says he played at the DiscoNite, and he still plays there.'

'Ask him what he saw.'

Frank recited. 'I have been shown a photograph of the face of the dead man. He was drunk. He was alone and staggering. I saw him cross the Obala Kulina Bana and then he went to the wall above the river. He was leaning on it and swaying. I had the impression he might have been vomiting over the wall. The last thing I saw of him, he was heading towards the bridge. That is all I can tell you.'

Even across the barriers of language, Joey could recognize a rehearsed speech; there was no attempt at disguise.

Frank said ruefully, 'It is the same, verbatim, as his statement.'

'Who owns the DiscoNite restaurant?'

'Same man as the Platinum City.'

Joey shrugged. Yes, he knew, but he had needed to hear it. There was no banknote for the violinist who did not bother to hide a lie. They went out, closed the outer door after them.

Joey said, 'If I were to threaten to break his hands, to smash his fingers, so that he would not play again a violin or an electric guitar… '

Frank looked at him, shook his head. 'Forget the illegality, right? They have been through the war.

They are hardened to any cruelty that you or I are capable of inflicting. You wouldn't be able to do it, nor me.'

Joey was a farm boy. His father was the factor of a landowner's estate. He had seen rabbits dying in snares, and enmeshed in nets when fleeing from ferrets. He had seen huntsmen dig out vixens and their cubs from the dens and toss them to the hounds.

He had seen badgers choked in sealed setts. He had seen, when beating for the owner's shoot, the fluttering fall of winged pheasants before the dogs caught and shook them to death. He had hated what he had seen. 'I know.'

'You said last night, "When I find out how he was murdered and why he was murdered then the door begins to open for me." You said that.' Frank's voice was hoarse as if he realized he walked on an unmapped road. 'If it's that important, if – and your hands and mine would stay, sort of, clean – then their own people could do it.'