Deathlist (33 page)

Porter settled their hotel bill in cash. Twenty-five thousand Serbian dinars. A hundred and fifty quid. For six people, for three nights in a shoddy hotel with no heating. The woman behind the desk didn’t wish him a pleasant trip. Didn’t raise so much as a smile. Hospitality in Serbia was about the same as the rest of eastern Europe. It didn’t exist. Something to do with all those years living under Communism, Porter figured.

They drove west in the rented Skodas. Retracing their route to the Serbian border with Bosnia. Two and a half hours later they nosed the Skodas into the long-stay car park at Sarajevo airport and debussed. The team had agreed in advance to split up at Sarajevo. Bald, Porter, Devereaux and Coles would head on to Geneva to hunt the Tiger. Ophelia and Evelyn would return to London.

‘This is where the hard part begins,’ said Bald. ‘It’s time for the lads to take control. Shame you lasses won’t be around to watch the fireworks.’

‘Tragic.’

Bald grinned. ‘At least you got to see a real man at work, eh? Not like those suits back in London.’

Ophelia rolled her eyes. ‘You can’t imagine.’

‘I’ll be seeing you around.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You really won’t.’

With that, the two spies gave their backs to the operators and sauntered off towards the departure gate. Bald admired the view for a little while. The he turned to Porter and winked. ‘Reckon I’ve got a shot at that when we get back, mate.’

Porter laughed. ‘Yeah, Jock. In your dreams.’

Once the spies had thinned out the rest of the team paced over to the SwissAir desk and checked for the next available flight out of Sarajevo. There were no direct flights to Geneva from Bosnia so they bought four tickets to Zurich and paid using Porter’s credit card. They could rent a motor at the airport and hammer it down to Geneva in a few hours. At 1325 they boarded the Airbus A320 bound for Zurich and settled into their seats.

Twenty-four days after the attack on Selection, they were going after the last name on the deathlist.

Radoslav Brozovic.

THIRTY-FOUR

Geneva, Switzerland.

1803 hours.

They arrived in Geneva in the fading winter light and rented a Honda Civic from one of the long line of car rental desks outside the terminal. Before they’d flown out of Sarajevo, Porter had located a bank of payphones in the departures hall and put in a call to the antique dealership in Berlin. He left a message for the Firm on the answerphone, explaining that they were heading to Geneva and that the team had int on the whereabouts of Radoslav Brozovic. He checked in on the payphones once again at Zurich, calling the numbers station in Austria. There was a new message waiting for him. Porter listened and then decoded the sequence of numbers. It simply said,
Message received
.

Geneva was a three-and-a-half-hour ride south-west on the A1 motorway, a three-lane stretch of blacktop as smooth as polished glass. The sky was cloudless and the sun was bright and cold and crisp. They shuttled past Bern and Lausanne and Nyon and hit Geneva a little before six o’clock in the evening. Porter steered the Civic south on Rue de Lausanne, motoring past the Palace of Nations and the Parc Mon Repos. Past the train station at Cornavin they arrowed onto the promenade running parallel to Lake Geneva and crossed over the Pont du Mont-Blanc bridge leading to the southern side of the city. They slid past the Jardin Anglais and took Rue d’Italie south for a hundred metres, then hung a right onto Rue de Madeline. At 1821 hours they pulled up outside the Hotel Dauphin.

The hotel was located opposite a designer clothes store, a hundred and fifty metres south of the Promenade du Lac and the Jet d’Eau. It looked just like every other street in Geneva. Grey and cold and spotless. More like a showroom than a place where people actually lived. Bald and Porter checked into a twin room using their aliases and paid using Porter’s company credit card. Devereaux and Coles paid for rooms at the Hotel Lafarge, two hundred metres further to the west. They would sit tight wait until Porter heard back from the Firm.

The twin room looked like every hotel room they’d stayed in, but cleaner. There was a TV so big Stephen Hawking probably had a theory about it, and a mini-bar stocked with miniatures of Jim Beam and Smirnoff and Johnnie Walker Black Label. A few weeks ago I’d have been all over that, Porter told himself. I’d have cleaned that bloody fridge out. now the craving was gone

Maybe when this is all over I’ll crack open a bottle, he thought. Celebrate with a few measures of Bushmills.

If we ever make it that far.

He put on a pot of coffee to take his mind off the booze. Then he sparked up a cigarette and flicked through the maps of Geneva they’d purchased from a souvenir shop at Zurich airport. Genthod was a wedge of luxury mansions located four miles north of the Hotel Dauphin and less than a half a mile east of the French border. The school Ninkovic had mentioned was eighteen miles further to the north of Genthod, on the outskirts of a small town called Rolle, on the banks of Lake Geneva.

One look at the map told Porter this op was going to be tricky. First, they were going to have to get through whatever layers of security Brozovic had. Second, they would have to breach the Serb’s fortress and slot the target. And they would have to do it all inside a built-up area a stone’s throw from downtown Geneva. The Swiss cops wouldn’t fuck about either, Porter knew. That was the deal in Switzerland. You could be a criminal or a mafia don, you could commit fraud or traffic weapons, and the Swiss would welcome you with open arms as long as you had money to burn and you didn’t cause any trouble. But if you stepped out of line, the cops would be all over you like flies on shit.

Ninety minutes after they’d checked in, the phone rang.

Porter picked up the receiver. Thinking,
This must be
Templar’s local contact
. The team had a list of stuff they would need to source before they made an attempt on Brozovic. Cars, weapons, safe houses. He pressed the receiver to his ear and said, ‘Yeah?’

A husky voice came down the line and said, ‘John. We need to talk.’

Porter froze and felt a coldness rising in his guts. Cecilia Lakes. The warmth drained from his head to his toes. Porter gripped the phone tightly and thought,
How the fuck has Lakes got our hotel number? And why is she reaching out directly to us?
The standard method of comms had been through the coded messages left on the numbers station. Lakes had never reached out to them over the phone before.

‘John?’ Lakes asked again. ‘Are you there?’

‘Yeah,’ he said after a beat. ‘I’m here.’

‘Don’t act so surprised. Listen. I’m in town. We need to speak. In person.’

He felt a familiar dread rising in his guts.
Why the fuck have the Firm dispatched their agent to Switzerland at a moment’s notice?
he wondered. Something was going on here. Something he didn’t like.

‘I got on a plane as soon as we received your message,’ Lakes explained matter-of-factly. ‘I just landed. Look, I can’t say any more over the phone. For obvious reasons. Come and meet me.’

‘Where?’ Porter asked.

‘The jetty next to the Jet d’Eau,’ she said. ‘Thirty minutes.’

2029 hours.

The jetty was mostly deserted by the time Porter and Bald made their way down Quai Gustave-Ador past the Jardin Anglais. Coles and Devereaux stayed back at the hotel, studying maps of the city and waiting to hear from Templar’s local fixer. Darkness was muscling in on the city and the Jet d’Eau was lit up neon blue against the fading light. Out on the side of the lake a huge fountain of water spurted up a hundred and forty metres above the rows of moored yachts and sail boats, hissing like steam escaping a hole in a pipe. It was early February, the sky was dark and gleaming like a slit throat, and the air had a mean bite to it as Porter strolled towards the jetty. It was the kind of cold that felt like someone was scraping the blade of a rusted knife across your face.

Cecilia Lakes sat on one of the benches under a tree near the fountain. A group of Chinese tourists mingled around the stone jetty, posing in front of the huge fountain of water jetting into the sky. There were a few restaurants and coffee shops further down the promenade doing a brisk trade. A bunch of swans were feeding on scraps down by the water’s edge. Porter glanced around then made his way over to the bench and pulled up a pew next to Lakes. She was dressed in a long woollen coat with a belt over her pencil skirt and she had a scarf wrapped around her neck. She was blowing out cigarette smoke and glancing up at the fountain, pretending to give a shit about the view.

‘You’ve done well,’ Lakes said. Her voice was barely audible above the hissing noise coming from the water fountain. That was deliberate, Porter figured. That was why she’d chosen the fountain as the meeting point. The noise would conceal their chatter in case anyone was listening in.

‘Very well indeed,’ Lakes went on. ‘Everyone at Whitehall is delighted with the results you’ve been getting. Four targets killed in less than a month is quite remarkable. Better than we could have expected. The Prime Minister’s asked me to convey his thanks. You’d be heroes back home, you know.’ She pulled on her cigarette and smiled slightly. ‘If it wasn’t for the fact that you’re both officially retired, of course.’

‘Spare us the back-slapping, love,’ Bald said. ‘What do you want?’

Lakes took a final drag on her cancer stick then stubbed it out beneath her knee-length heeled leather boot. She stood up, pulled the coat tight around her and tipped her head at the jetty.

‘Walk with me.’

The two operators stood up and paced alongside Lakes as she wandered down the jetty. A sharp breeze picked up and blew in from the lake, seething drops of water across the stone walkway. Lakes reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a fresh pack of tabs. She tore off the cellophane and the foil wrapper and sparked up another smoke. She looked stressed, Porter thought. Tired. Like she’d aged five years in the past month.

‘I’m afraid I can’t stay for long,’ she explained quickly. ‘Really, I shouldn’t even be here. I’m being vetted right now.’

‘Vetted for what?’

Lakes sucked on her smoke and said, ‘Chief of Six. Pettigrove’s stepping down at the end of the month and I’m on the shortlist to succeed him.’ She paused then added, ‘It’s a very short list.’

‘At least someone’s doing well out of this,’ Bald muttered.

‘We’re singing from the same hymn sheet, John.’

‘That’d be a first.’

Porter gritted his teeth and said, ‘Just tell us why you’re here.’

Lakes hesitated. She brushed back her scarf and stopped in her tracks. They were halfway up the jetty. The water from the fountain spattered the ground a couple of paces ahead of them.

She said, ‘It’s about the last target on the list. Radoslav Brozovic.’

Porter said, ‘What about him?’

‘We need him alive.’

THIRTY-FIVE

2039 hours.

There was a long pause. Porter said nothing. He listened to the seething hiss of the fountain and the sharp whip of the breeze sweeping in from the lake, rocking the boats either side of the jetty. A young couple strode past them and ambled up closer to the fountain, taking snaps on their digital camera and laughing as they got soaked. Bald just stared at Lakes. His expression shifting from puzzlement to full-blown anger.

‘You want us to spare Brozovic?’ he snapped quietly. ‘Why the fuck would we do that?’

Lakes pursed her lips. She had one eye on the foreign couple and waited for them to wander further along the jetty. Then she turned to Bald. She had a cold, impenetrable look on her face.

‘How much do you know about Brozovic?’

‘He’s a paramilitary leader,’ Porter answered. ‘One of Milosevic’s thugs.’

‘And he’s the tosser who bankrolled the Selection attack,’ Bald added in a low growl.

Lakes tipped ash onto the jetty and kind-of nodded. ‘True. But that’s not the whole story.’

‘The fuck’s that supposed to mean?’ Bald asked.

‘After the war ended, most of the other warlords went back to being small-time criminals. But not Brozovic. He was different. He was a national icon with an army of devoted foot soldiers willing to serve him. So he took the veterans from the Red Eagles and turned them into a highly organised criminal network. A network that stretches from Belgrade to Amsterdam. It has deep links with the Camorra in Italy and the Russian mafia. It’s one of the most powerful organisations in Europe.’

‘So?’ Bald shrugged.

‘Even in exile, Brozovic is a big deal. He has more power and influence in his little finger than any Serbian politician. Including Milosevic. He has half the security service in his pocket, and a good number of politicians too.’

There was a touch of admiration in Lakes’s voice as she spoke. Porter thought back to what Ninkovic had said.
Brozovic stood up to the Muslims. He dared to make a stand against the enemy.

‘Nothing happens in Serbia without Brozovic knowing about it,’ Lakes went on. ‘He knows where all the bodies are buried. And it’s therefore likely he knows the whereabouts of the other warlords. There are thirteen of them, all with outstanding warrants served up by the ICTY. Arresting them would be a major coup. If we take Brozovic alive, there’s a chance we can find out where the other warlords are hiding and arrest them.’