The Untouchable (15 page)

Late by ninety-five minutes into Zagreb, they had missed the connecting flight to Sarajevo, and been told that the following flight in the afternoon was cancelled.

They had to be in Sarajevo that night, Joey had said.

Then he should go and hire a car, she'd replied tartly.

He'd done it. He'd picked her up outside the terminal in a small Ford. She'd gone and bought a road map of Croatia, and the look on her face said this was Mickey Mouse and more of what she was not used to. They'd driven away from Zagreb, caught the Sisak road and gone through the ghost town of Petrinja. She'd had the wheel and he'd navigated off the map. It was only when he'd missed a turning that he realized an apology wasn't necessary because she'd caught it. She knew the road. Then he'd sulked and tossed the map over his shoulder so that it fell on to her metal-sided case on the back seat. Two miles after the first signpost to Dvor, she had swung the car abruptly off the road, bumped up a track into a wood and not stopped before they were hidden from other motorists' view.

He'd watched. His help was neither asked for nor offered. She stripped out the back seat, with the metalwork under it and the door panels, then opened the heavy case. There were probes, terminals, a variety of light sockets, power units and gear he could not recognize. He'd thought he'd seen everything of surveillance equipment in the room used by Sierra Quebec Golf, but some of what he now looked at was smaller and more compact, and the rest he had never seen before. It all went into the door handle and under the back seat, then she rebuilt the car. Last, she took half of her clothes from the soft bag and casually dumped them into the case. He saw, before the case was closed and locked, a couple of cocktail dresses, items of underwear, and a pair of heavy walking boots, and they'd driven on. He carried only his camera, with the 300mm lens, and that could be explained. He had no paperwork with him.

The border was a line in the river between Dvor and Bosanski Novi. The bridge over it was military, an iron frame and rattling planks. The old bridge was collapsed and unrepaired from the precision of a USAF strike five years earlier. They crossed and were waved down. As she braked she asked for his passport.

She snapped out of the vehicle. She took charge.

She flourished the passport and a packet of cigarettes had emerged from her handbag, then another, as if they were loaves and fishes. The Customs men, who had been bored and lounging and smoking, were around her. She was their honeypot. She flashed smiles, and the cigarettes slipped into clawing hands.

She spoke their language and they laughed with her. She marched a man with sergeant's stripes back to the car, flicked open the case and her bag, then Joey's bag, and there was more laughter as she rolled her eyes when her underwear was exposed. She went into a dismal wood-plank shack. He wondered how many languages she spoke and where she had been, and he knew, in truth, that he had just not thought through the question of going into a Customs check.

When she came out, holding the passports, she offered her hand to the sergeant. He took it formally, slobbered a kiss on the back, and they were gone.

'Well done,' Joey said gruffly.

'Thrilled, I'm sure, to be honoured with praise.'

'You've been here before?' It seemed a pointless question.

'Where do you know best?' she asked.

'Nowhere, not abroad . . . ' He thought his answer confirmed that he was low grade. 'Workwise? Well, bits of London. On my team it would be Green Lanes, but the last three years I've hardly been out of the Custom House. Yes, it would be Green Lanes, that's north from Stoke Newington and south from—'

'Yes, yes . . . There's a dozen places I know best. Here's one, and you don't need to know the others.'

She drove fast. Twice he closed his eyes as, late, she swerved out of a lorry's path. She'd have seen that he flinched, and that hurt. She seemed not to care about the pot-holes in the tarmac.

It was dismal country, pocked with isolated farmhouses, and he saw women doing the subsistence work and digging in fields. His mind raced. Serb territory, and the atmosphere was of poverty from which there was no recall and helplessness. They went past gaudy, ghastly roadside bars, painted to grate on the eyes, and lonely little fuel stations. He thought he was in the land of the abandoned where the people paid a collective price for their crimes.

Coming towards Prijedor they skirted villages where weeds grew inside roofless houses and rake-thin dogs chased the car's wheels. No living person moved in these villages, which were being overwhelmed by undergrowth. He had seen these places on television, when it had happened, but he had not seen them since they were destroyed. Brambles and thicket bush survived where people had not.

She said quietly 'The north-west and the south-east were the worst for cleansing. That's their word, used in their army manuals. The word is
ciscenje,
to clean -

as in minefields, barricades, enemy positions. They merely transferred it to people. They surrounded these villages, one at a time, and told the Muslims they were leaving. First they made them sign away their property rights and took all evidence of property possession from them, then they separated them. The women and children went into UN camps over the Croat border. The men were taken to camps close to here. They killed as many of the men as they could, by beheading, beating, disembowelling - you name it -

and they bulldozed the cemeteries, poisoned the wells and blew up the mosques. They involved a lot of people in the cleansing and the killing so that the guilt was shared round. The guilt's collective, that was the skill of the leaders. The other part of the skill was the destruction of the heritage of those forced out. But remember, always remember, there were no saints among the warlords, whatever side we're talking about, only sinners. I don't suppose you feel hungry.

You can go off food here, easily.'

'I'm not hungry,' joey said.

She told him that outside Prijedor had been the worst of the camps, source of the skeletal human images on the television, where there had been the worst of the killings.

'Could we have done that?' Joey blurted. 'Could we have done those things in the camps, you and me?'

'Of course we could,' she drawled. 'It's about environment, a sense of survival and propaganda.

And it's about wanting to humiliate an enemy. Scratch anyone's skin and you'll find an abscess of beastliness hidden away. Where there's an obsession of hatred, where the loathing is targeted, where there's a desire to prove supremacy, any of us can get to act like that.

Go to Germany, stand in a queue with the pensioners, dear old folks, and ask them.'

He felt the growing sensation of an awesome helplessness, more acute than when they had first driven through the ravaged villages. On the road near to Banja Luka, high above the town, he saw a great metal-fabricated complex, which she said had been an old steel works. He could make out the tanks, armoured personnel carriers and troop-carrying twin-rotor helicopters, and she told him it was the headquarters of the British army contingent attached to SFOR in Bosnia, and explained that was Stabilization Force. She drove hard. Beyond Banja Luka the road deteriorated. It was hairpin and cut out of a rock wall beside a fast river. There were stones in the road that she swung the wheel to avoid, and crashed vehicles that teetered on the cliffs above the water torrent. He had thought there might be pride in rebuilding a country after war, but he saw none of that. There was a lake where the river was dammed and men fished among a debris of floating bottles and rubbish bags. He must have shaken his head, must have shown his bewilderment.

'You don't just pack up after a war, Joey, like nothing's happened. Nobody escapes, everyone is scarred. Because you don't read about it any more, that doesn't mean the scars have gone. All it means is that the rest of the world, which once cared, has got bloody bored .. . Can't actually say that I blame it.

God helps those who help themselves, if you're with me. They don't know how to help themselves.'

The light was slipping as they skirted Jajce. They bypassed the town, which was dominated by a medieval fortress perched on a rock crag, and she said

- with the casualness of a tour guide handing down morsels - that the place had been a Second World War headquarters for Tito's partisans, where the German forces had not been able to reach him. More history, as if she too thought history as important as the academic had the night before. They had the heater on in the car but the cold was creeping in. He had started to shiver, through tiredness, hunger and a bright sliver of fear. Headlights speared them. Out of the Serb territory, into Croat and Muslim-controlled land, the road climbed. It was a better surface, but there was ice on it. There were oases of light, which they sped through - Donji Vakuf, Travnik and Vitez, with shadow figures walking nowhere on dull pavements, the blocks of old socialist architecture and closed-down factories.

When she stopped at a roadside cafe there were foul toilets round the back. They were the only customers, but the atmosphere made them feel intruders. Three men and a woman lolled on the cafe counter, eyed them and never spoke or moved other than to agree the order, then bring them coffee and a Coca-Cola chaser. There was a broken ceiling fan above them, short of a spoke, and around them were faded pictures of Grand Prix cars. He noted that she didn't speak their language to them, but English.

Their eyes never left her. She smoked a long, dark-wrapped cigarette, and he muttered that she could have lit up in the car had she wanted and she said that it was to cut down that she hadn't smoked, not out of consideration to him. Did she want him to drive, and she'd laid her small precise hand on his and told him it was better for her to drive . . . The road away from the cafe ran towards a mountain pass. The ice glistened on it and there were snow heaps at the side.

Four times he saw places where the crash-barriers had been pierced by skidding vehicles. Each time the wheels slipped momentarily on the ice he felt the further fraying of his nerves. They came round a corner, low gear and struggling, and ahead of them and far below a long finger was illuminated and laid out. She pulled into the side of the road, opened her door and stepped out. The blast of cold air jolted him and he followed her, his feet crunching in the drift.

'That's it,' she said. 'That's Sarajevo.'

The cold settled on his nose and lips, and the wind hit him. He felt far from home, ignorant and uncertain. She must have read him. She tucked her hand into his arm. 'I hope he's worth it, your man.'

He was tired, stressed, and the hand on his arm irritated him. 'Can I just say something? Please, and I'm asking you pleasantly, don't patronize me . . . I've never worked with your crowd, I don't know whether you're good or bad or indifferent at what you do, I have to take you on trust. Why did they send me?

Because they assess me as being inside the target's skin. I hope that's enough of an explanation.'

She squeezed his arm. 'I stand chastized. What's the immediate priority?'

'We work inside a legal system. I don't know about you, what you normally do, but for us the legal system is the Bible. As a Customs officer I can't just swan in here, without local authority, and poke about at what is called "intrusive surveillance". I need permission. If I don't have that permission then anything I discover - sorry,
we
discover - on Target One would be ruled as inadmissible in court, as would anything that leads from initial information gathered here.

Without authority, I would be bounced so hard when I get back that my feet won't touch before I'm standing at Dover, in uniform, poking into holiday suitcases. In addition, if I - that's we - show out and get lifted by the local police, and there's not a signature on a piece of paper, we're dead in the water.'

'Who's the "local authority"? Who signs?'

'A local judge, a magistrate . . . '

She was laughing at him, mocking. 'Don't you know anything about this place?'

'Bugger all,' Joey said.

'It's bent, corrupt. You're not telling me you believe judges and magistrates, here, are independent.

They're owned.'

He gazed down at the myriad dancing lights around which, confining them, were the darker expanses of towering snow-covered mountains.

'Then I have to find one who isn't. It's all I need -

just one . . . You asked if the target was worth it?' He could see the first photograph he had filed of Mister.

Mister wore brown shoes, fawn slacks and a blue polo shirt. He could hear the first tape he had transcribed of Mister's voice. Mister had been on his doorstep and had been going over, item for item, the shopping list for the supermarket given him by the Princess. And, the cruellest cut, the rest of them in the old Sierra Quebec Golf hadn't even thought to warn him that the case was going down and Mister would walk. 'He is - maybe not to you, but to me, yes, well worth it.'

Cruncher was cremated, gone. By now the few flowers would have been dumped or taken to a hospital. A hole had appeared and needed filling.

Would Abie Wilkes's boy slot into it? It was a big decision to make, but young Solomon was well spoken of. Even Cruncher had said good things of Sol Wilkes, and had used him.

A different man from Mister would have

floundered at the disruption of his business life. Men at the fringes had been discarded. But the inner circle had lasted the course. They were either family or from the estate where Mister had grown up, or they were trusted contacts from the Pentonville experience.

They were all long-term on the team.

Before he went to a rendezvous with young Sol Wilkes, Mister travelled alone into central London to open up the safety deposit boxes, the contents of which had been known only to him and to Cruncher.

There were four locations for him to visit. Since he had heard of Cruncher's death, Mister had ordered a surveillance operation mounted on the four buildings where his boxes were lodged. He had been assured that none of the locations was watched, and he had also had the streets in which the buildings stood scanned for the type of radio communications watchers would have used. He was now convinced that Cruncher had left nothing behind in the home that investigators could find. The other set of keys, not Mister's, would have been placed in the care of a solicitor, not in the Eagle's safe.