THE HEART OF DANGER (45 page)

the

evidence quickened their pace up the track through the trees. There

was a light rain falling in the trees and heavy cloud coming from

beyond the hill, and Milan could see the rain, later, would be

heavier.

He was at the head of the column and walked immediately in front of

the

leader of the irregulars. His own people were behind him and he could

not see their faces and he did not know what their enthusiasm for

the

work was. It was where the Headmaster had said it would be, the cave

entrance between the two large rocks, and in the worn mud close to

the

entrance was the boot print squashed over the lighter traces. Milan

could smell her .. . There were many torches crowded into the narrow

cleft of the cave's entrance, and the beams caught her. There was

laughter behind Milan. The torches found her cringing back at the

far

wall of the cave, like a trapped rat. There was more laughter behind

Milan. Milan turned. He called forward Milo who had the scratches

on

the cheeks of his face, and he gestured forward Stevo who had the

bruised privates. There were many pressing behind him to see the

trapped rat that was Katica Dubelj who had fed him and most of them

with their lunches at the school .. . She was the trapped rat and

her

mouth seemed to snarl at the torch lights, and she had no teeth, and

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she was the evidence. He knew that the man had not been found, and

he

knew that a lorry with failed brakes had crashed the checkpoint at

Turanj, and he knew that his name was on a file in Karlovac, and on

another file made by the Political Officer at Topusko, and the trapped

rat was the eyewitness. He wondered if he would tell Evica .. .

The hand of the leader of the irregulars was on his shoulder, pushing

him into the cave.

"You're not telling me, in honesty, that you wrote it up .. . ?"

"Of course I wrote it up, Arnold, I wrote up what you told me."

"Georgie, it was in confidence .. ."

Georgie Simpson didn't like to face him. Not that he would have

described Arnold Browne as a friend, not really possible for Six men

to

be friends with Five men, but he was almost fond of the man. They

had

nothing in common, not hobbies, not holidays, not career paths, but

he

had come rather to enjoy their weekly session and weekly lunch. That

would all be behind them now, the sessions and the lunches, there

would

be different men given the job and few enough confidences exchanged

then .. . He didn't like to face him because Arnold Browne made no

attempt to hide his quite positive anguish.

"I'm not proud, and I'm not a happy man. I put a memorandum in, I

reported our conversation .. . This morning, Arnold, and I might face

a

firing squad for telling you, this morning I was summoned on high.

I

was instructed to telephone you, arrange an extraordinary meeting,

I

was to pump you, Arnold. You said your man was "dogged" .. ."

"You reported my confidences back, you should know what I said."

Georgie Simpson ignored the sarcasm, no citations to be won here,

best

ignored. "You said your man would go to the end of the road .. .

We

have a listening post at Zagreb airport. We monitor Serb radio

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traffic

principally. We have 2,500 troops in Bosnia, we have to know what's

planned. Please don't interrupt me, Arnold, please don't. The

radios

are monitored twenty-four hours, but obviously we're not wasting our

time interpreting whether General Mladic wants express delivery of

new

loo paper, soft tissue. We have trigger words. When a trigger word comes up then the transmission gets classified Immediate for

analysis.

Obviously their tongue-twisted version of "British" is a trigger.

It's

been pretty shambolic transmission, but we picked up "British spy"

and

"British investigator", captured then escaped, and the transmission was

coming out of a village called Salika, and there was a name .. . What

I'm telling you, Arnold, in confidence, is that Salika is adjacent

to

Rosenovici, and the name of the spy, investigator, is Penn .. ."

He thought he might have smacked poor Arnold Browne across the bridge

of the nose, to make his eyes water.

"What are you going to do?"

"Your people are out of their depth, Arnold. They are meddling in

matters beyond their remit .. . Our station officer, Zagreb, if your

dogged Mr. Penn gets safe back to base, will pick him up by the scruff

of his neck and throw him on the first plane to Heathrow. And your

lovely lady will be told by my hairy-arsed director to cease

interfering. Your Penn is a busted flush, I'm afraid, and we'll be

taking his legs off at the knees .. . Sorry, Arnold, but it's a sharp

game, ours, and that's the way it'll always be .. ."

corner.

Penn dictated and Ulrike typed and Ham whined away in the corner.

He

was rambling, contradicting himself, coming to stand behind her and

reading what she had down on paper and changing it. It was full of

errors because it was an old stand-up typewriter that she had begged

from reception and the arms were forever sticking because it had been

on the floor of the back office and was clogged with muck. Ham was

muttering to himself, wallowing in his own pity, and they ignored

him

265

except for when he filled the glasses.

"No, I need what Alija said before I have what Sylvia said, and what Alija said should be in direct quotation, because she is the more

important eyewitness. "The women who were with me, they said she

was

so brave. The women said she was an angel .. ."I want that in direct quote."

"So, where then does Maria go, does she go after the American? You know what this will do, Penn, when it reaches them? It will break

them, you know that .. . ? Right ... for the top copy, Maria and

then

Alija and then Sylvia, and then your journey .. ."

Ham said, splashing the drink from the bottle, "Get it down you,

squire, 'cause you bloody earned it, and don't leave yourself short

of

credit. Take the bloody credit for what you did. We never got the

bloody credit for what we did, the Internationals, when we held those

fuckers at Sisak. If they'd broken us at Sisak, where Billy and Jon

Jo

were zapped, where Herb who was A.W.O.L. from the Guards was fragged,

where the big Oz guy went, they'd have been in fucking Zagreb for

tea.

Didn't give us any bloody credit .. . You make double bloody certain,

squire, those posh smart arses know what you did .. ."

Slow going in the hotel room, the writing of Penn's report.

And what it would do to them, that was not his problem.

Because Mrs. Chadwick had the flu, Mary worked in the kitchen alone.

Most times, when there was dinner for friends, Mrs. Chad-wick came

in

to help. Mary was happier alone actually .. . Other friends, of

course, had daughters still at home who would flick the recipe pages

and find the outrageous and get the exotic into the Aga. The sun

was

going down, slanting through the window and onto the wide pine table

..

. She hadn't a daughter .. . She worked briskly at what she did best,

boring food. She had the clock on the wall to guide her, and if she

worked briskly then everything would be in place, and there would

still

be time for her in the last light to walk the dogs through the village

266

to the church .. . The report was two sheets, closely spaced typing,

and there were Penn's last notes handwritten in the margin. He

glanced

down at the two sheets, and the words were a jumble for his eyes.

There

was precious little left in the bottle, and there was precious little

down on two sheets of typing paper .. . precious little to tell of

eleven days. They were all allocated their lines, and they had caps

for the typing of their names. He should have felt an elation, should

have felt proud and strutted the length of the room. But there was

only an emptiness ... He should have wanted to share his pride. He

had

no conceit. It did not seem significant to him that he had made the

march, learned, and ultimately broken clear from the certainty of

death

... He had been close to Dorrie and he thought that he had joined

the

queue of those who had failed her. In his terms, her life was worth

just a report. It was the measure of how she had driven him, mocked

him, that his best effort was just a report. It was as if, in his

mind, she had given him the one chance of his life to walk alone from

the herd, to walk tall above the herd, and he had failed to take that

chance. He felt a failed man, not a changed man. The old

disciplines

were supreme. A clear and brief report sent immediately, a fuller

report to follow, just what he would have done after a week's session

in the surveillance team, what he would have done for a client of

Alpha

Security ... He would never forget her, and now he would turn his

back

on her. He would go back to the office above the launderette, and

the

maisonette that was too small. People liked to say there was one

bloody chance in this bloody life and they were probably bloody well

right. He glanced down at the sheets of paper and Ulrike looked up

at

him and she waited for him to nod his satisfaction. He wondered

whether the report would be read in the kitchen or taken to the old

elegance of the sitting room, whether she would take it upstairs to

Dorrie's bedroom. Just a mass of words now, blurred by the Scotch,

but

the names with the caps were highlighted. Three lines for the

Croatian

war crimes investigator, seven lines for the American Professor of

Pathology, five lines each for Maria and Alija and Sylvia, four lines

for the Croatian Liaison Officer .. . Three lines for Ham who had

267

gotten him there, four lines for Benny Stein who had taken him out

of

there .. . fifteen lines for the Headmaster, twenty-one lines for

Katica Dubelj, and on the lower half of the second page were

twenty-five lines that quoted the words and described the body and

face, and the village, of Milan Stankovic. Under the long paragraph

concerning Milan Stankovic, killer of Dorrie Mowat, there had been

room

for Ulrike to type his name. Penn nodded. He was satisfied. He

took

the room's gratis biro and he scribbled his signature above his own

typed name, and then he wrote the fax number with the international

code at the top of the first sheet. It was his report and he was

finished. He put his hand, momentarily, on Ulrike's shoulder, and

he

felt the hardness of her bones, and he took his hand away in shyness

because he could remember the soft fingers that had dabbed the iodine

into the cuts on his face. The road had turned. At the point that

the

road had started she had been a horrid young woman, and he could see,

the last time that his tired eyes speed-read across the two pages,

the

words 'courage' and 'bravery' and 'love' and 'angel' ... He hoped

that

she would read it in the bedroom, alone, where she could not be seen

..

. Just bland bloody words that filled two pages of a report and they

did no justice to so many, and they short-changed the Headmaster and

Katica Dubelj .. . just a bloody inadequate report. No place for

the

fear, no space for the terror .. . Just a report, something that money

could buy when it was thrown at a problem. He hoped she would read

it

in the bedroom, alone, because his report might just break Mary

Braddock. "You still with us, squire?" Ham slurred. "Still with you,

Ham." "Let me give you my advice. Good advice from real combat ..

."

Ham belched, and he was rolling across the room, and the last of the

bottle was going on the desk and on the typewriter's keys. "It's

just

a fucking job, squire .. . What you need, squire, is a little of the

old home comfort, a lot of the old bottle .. . You need to get well

pissed, have a bit of a cuddle, forget it because it was just a fucking

job .. ."

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He saw the kind care of Ulrike, different to the stand-off mischief

love of Dorrie. Perhaps it was 'old home comfort', perhaps it

promised

'a bit of a cuddle'. Probably it was getting 'well pissed' .. . He

might ring Jane in the morning, and he might not. He might get a

plane

in the morning, and he might wait until the afternoon .. . The city

moved noisily below the window of the hotel room. It would be a long

time, Penn thought, before he heard again a silence like that of

Rosenovici village, and the lane past Katica Dubelj's house to the