The Untouchable (48 page)

The sidelights of the vehicle were switched on and threw enough light for them to see Atkins standing beside the launcher, slung low on the tripod. Mister and the Eagle bumped her onto the concrete, wheeled the chair to the launcher.

'Everything ready?' Mister asked.

'All in place, Mister,' Atkins replied.

Atkins's coat was neatly folded behind the launcher. It was what made Mister special, everything was thought through with care, was planned, down to a kneeling mat. Mister didn't have to say anything more, but tapped the judge's shoulder and pointed to the folded coat. Atkins steadied him as he dropped on to it. The view-finder was infra-red / image intensifies The judge would be looking at a monochrome image of the roof of his home. The detail of the view-finder would be sufficient for him to see each tile, the bricks of the chimney, the sagging guttering. The judge was whimpering, rattling words in his own tongue to her.

It was a snapshot of all they owned: the half-house and each other. She was trying to push herself up from the chair, and couldn't achieve it. Mister caught at the judge's coat, pulled him back, marched him to the chair and turned him so that he faced his house.

'Get on with it, Atkins.'

Atkins crouched behind the launcher. One hand rested on the tripod, the other threw switches. There was a slight but piercing whistle. The Eagle covered his ears.

They were lit in the moment of the firing, then the fire flash was gone. A bright line, with a thunderclap of sound, burst from the fire. The line travelled down the hill, cleared two broken buildings, then impacted.

The roof fragmented below them.

As if he were on duty, showing his paces and playing at a war game, Atkins dismantled the launcher, the spent tube and the tripod, and heaved them into the back of the vehicle.

'You'll be all right from here with Miss Jasmina, won't you, Judge Delic?' Mister asked quietly. 'It's all downhill from here.'

The air around them stank from the cordite firing charge. Atkins drove, Mister beside him, and the Eagle sat in the back clinging to the holding strap. The wheels crackled over the broken tiles that were debris on the street. At the bottom, where it joined the main road, two black Mercedes passed them and sped on up the hill.

'Well done, Atkins,' Mister said. 'Expert and professional.'

She read the message back.

Dear 'Mister'(!),

I have to go to Gorazde tomorrow morning. I am driving myself (my driver is sick, the other drivers are already allocated). If your business work allows it, would you consider accompanying me?

It would be interesting and perhaps fulfilling. I apologize for the short notice. I will call by the Holiday Inn tomorrow at 8 a.m.. and I will look for you in the lobby. It is not possible please do not have concern for me.

With good wishes, Monika (Holberg).

PS: I very much enjoyed my day at Visnjica.

She threaded her way from the table in the atrium, through the mass of people, to the overwhelmed clerks on Reception A woman broke away from attending, to the queue waiting to register, took her message, thrust it into the room's pigeon-hole, gave her a harrassed smile, and returned to filling in the cards.

Skirling the X-ray machine and the metal detector arch, she walked out through the swing doors.

Monika had heard the explosion, but there were often explosions in a Sarajevo night.

It had taken more than forty minutes for the SFOR

troops, Italians to find the source of the explosion.

Some of those they asked said it came from inside the Jewish cemetary, some said it was in the tree-line above, some said they had heard nothing and had slammed doors in the troops' faces. The local police knew of no explosion, it had not been reported to the local fire brigade, no local ambulance had been called.

Eventually their Jeep found a ruined house at the half-way point up ,steeply canted street. They saw two Mercedes limousines parked, and found an old man and a young woman, who was in a wheelchair, and a group of men. One of those men - shaven-headed, black-dressed, a gold chain heavy on his throat -

explained courteously to the mareschallo that the street had been the front line in the war, that munitions were habitually stored in the roofs of such building, but were then, sadly, forgotten. It was possible that the roof beams had shifted and in doing so had detonated a mortar bomb. The old man and the young disabled woman had not spoken. The mareschallo was thanked for his attention to the matter, but was told with polite firmness that his presence was not required. The jeep drove away.

Joey had heard it. The windows to his room were double-glazed, but the force of the explosion from up the hill across the Miljacka river was insufficient to rattle the glass panes. The sound was muffled, more of a stuttering clap than a crisp detonation. He drifted back to sleep. Maggie had forbidden him to go to the Holiday Inn, sit in the van and watch. It was as if, he thought, for a day he had stepped back over the line, retrieved the die, worn the uniform, forgotten Mister, who was his Target One . . . He thought of Jasmina, she was the dream in his mind as he drifted, and the faint words carved in the stecak stone five centuries before: 'I stood, praying to God, meaning no evil, yet I was struck to death by lightning.' His fingers had flickered over the lichened grooves of the writing. The words on the stone were as a talisman to him.

Whatever a man or a woman did, however well they lived their lives, the lightning could strike, burn them.

There was a light rap on his door. His name was called.

'Coming, Maggie.' He opened the door.

'You're still a sight, Joey, but it's an improvement.'

'I feel better . . . What sort of day have you had?'

'I've heard the Welsh hero's life story. I think he wants to get his hand up my skirt. He's rather sweet

. . . His wife chucked him out. His kids are pining for him. Both sets of parents are on Megan's side of the fence. Yes, sweet and sad, but I think his hands are getting itchy Most of what I'm hearing is that young man talking with the dogs, or down on the floor playing with them and cuddling them. There was some sort of rendezvous tonight that took Ismet Mujii and his gorillas out, but there wasn't an explanation then , going to be a meeting the day after tomorrow I don't know where. Sounds like the big meeting, where the territory's cut. An Italian's coming.

All the talk's in a code.'

'Diry talk? " 'She raised her eyebrows - 'talking dirty' in the Church vernacular was conversation with criminal involvement, talking social' was about going to the supermarket or the corner shop for fags, or about telling the wife that the new hairpiece suited her. 'Code talk is criminal talk, right?'

' I think an Italian's coming, and there are others. I think it's the meeting that matters.'

She'd kept the meat to the last, had teased him. If the meeting, was the day alter tomorrow, somewhere, then she was inside the time limit set by her own people She thought that she was out on a parapet, over a precipice, as much as he was; if she fell it would be his, Joey Cann's, bloody fault.

'Thanks.'

'Sleep well, Joey - oh,'she dropped it as if it was an afterthought, 'do you know much about the Italians?'

He grinned ruefully. 'No, not a hell of a lot.'

She thought she was safe, thought it because a belief in her survival made life easier, but it was now two years since she had rejected the vita blindata and dismissed her police bodyguards. She had rejected the protective screen and had said to her husband, 'When the Mafia is intent on revenge it will always find a way.' She always made a joke with her husband. Who would want to pay for sex with a woman of forty-nine who was fat, had heavy, dropping breasts, and gross ankles? But last night the word prostituta had been daubed in paint on the white exterior wall of their house.

She was Giovanna. She was in her second term as the sindaca of the mountain village of San Giuseppe Jato on the western side of the island of Sicily. It was the women's vote that had elected her, again, to the mayor's office. When her deputy, Luciano, had found a bomb lodged under the front wheel hub of his car he had resigned, and she had not been able to find a man to replace him. Her ticket for re-election had been: the Rejection of the Cosa Nostra Path of Violence and Death. She did not give herself sufficient importance, if she were murdered, to be listed as an 'illustrious corpse', but she believed, had to, that she irritated the Family who controlled the village. She irritated them enough for a polio squartato to have been left on her doorstep four months before. She had found the disembowelled chicken, picked it up, and walked with it down the main street. Women had shouted to her from their windows, 'Brava, Giovanna', and she had placed the bleeding bird carefully on the step of the fine house near the church that was the principal residence of the Family. That gesture, more than anything else she might have done, ensured that women came to her, talked to her of the secrets of the Family.

She was told that evening, in a whispered telephone call, that the Family's most trusted nephew, Marco, was entrusted with a mission of importance by his uncle, had gone with a packed case to the airport at Messina, was travelling to a meeting of significance.

Giovanna thought Marco a handsome boy and im-porlant to the family's future, a boy of intelligence but trapped by the poison in the f amily's bloodstream, a boy with a life wasted a boy who might, one day, kill her.

Mislter had gone a dozen paces past the end of the line ol black station wagons, all with smoked-glass windows, past the knot of gossiping drivers, when he jerked to a stop. He was facing the swing doors of the hotel. The noise of a hundred voices, nasal and loud, billowing and American, buffeted him. His eyes narrowed. He peered through the doors. He turned in one swinging movement and faced Atkins. He reached in his belt, took the pistol from it and palmed it to Atkins.

'Leave it in the vehicle,' he said, 'and yours, and get the vehicle down the warehouse - now.'

He waited until Atkins had driven away.

'Right, Eagle, let's see what the party's for.'

They went through the door, shrugged out of their coats and laid them on the conveyor belt feeding the X-ray machine. They went through the metal detector, and were bleeped, because of the coins in Mister's pocket and the metal-lined case for the Eagle's spectacles. By the machine and the arch stood men with cropped haircuts and long, shapeless coats, with flesh-coloured wires coiled between their shirt collars and their ears. They were passed through. Every seat in the atrium bar was taken. Every table was littered with ashtrays, beer glasses, coffee cups and Pepsi cans. At the far end of the bar a woman addressed the little forest of microphones. Cameramen climbed on the soft-cushioned seats to see better. There was bedlam.

At the desk they collected their keys, and Mister was given a note from his pigeon-hole.

Eagle asked the receptionist, 'Who are all these people? What's going on?'

She told the Eagle that the American Secretary of State was due at the hotel in two hours, on a leg from Paris and Vienna, last stop before returning to Washington. This was only the advance party.

Mister heard what she said, but hardly listened. He read the note again and felt a small sensation of excitement, better than when the launcher had fired.

The Eagle repeated what the receptionist had told him.

'Yes, yes - I heard it the first time . . .' He laughed quietly. 'Would have been choice if I'd gone through without thinking . . . '

'But you always think, Mister, don't you?'

Mister was smiling. 'Tomorrow's not busy, not till the evening, and it's the day after tomorrow that matters. Anyway, I'll be out of town on a little trip.

You and Atkins can lose yourselves, can't you, till the evening?'

'Buckets to do here,' the Eagle said. 'Buckets of fun to be had.'

He thought there was a brittle snap in the Eagle's voice. If it hadn't been for the message he might have kicked the Eagle's shin, but he'd read it. They walked to the lift. The Eagle, as always, pushed the outside button for him and stood aside to let him enter first, then pushed the inside button for their floor. Mister was slow to recognize sarcasm: it was too far back in his life for him to remember the last man who had been sarcastic to his face.

Chapter Fifteen

Henry hadn't left a contact address. He'd been vague, infuriatingly obtuse, about where he could be reached when he was abroad. 'May be in and out of several hotels - I'll be on the move. It wouldn't really be a good idea for you to call me or me to call you - it's only for a few days.' It had never been Mo Arbuthnot's habit to quiz her husband on his work, and she'd let it go. He'd kissed her cheek and said he'd ring from Heathrow when he was back in the country.

Three hours before, while she and the girls had slept, the cars had crunched onto the pepper-coloured gravel of the drive. The dogs in the kitchen had woken first, had disturbed Mo, and she'd seen in a half-awake haze the headlights against her bedroom curtains. She'd heard the dogs' barking and the chorus of birdsong in the garden's trees, the slamming of doors, the scrape of feet across the gravel, and the peal of the bell. She'd gone down the stairs, shrugging into her dressing-gown, and peered through the front door's spyhole. They'd activated the security lights.

They were well lit: a cluster of men, and one woman, on the step; one face was masked by a plume of pipesmoke. She'd called out that they should identify themselves and small cards were held up to the spyhole. She'd opened the door. Four of the men and the woman had pushed past her, no word said, but the one with the pipe, the eldest, biting on its stem, puffing like a damned chimney, had intoned the text of the authorized warrant to search her home then handed her the sheet of paper as if she might want to check that an error had not been made. She hadn't bothered to read it, but she had claimed, had insisted, that there had to be an error. ' I doubt it,' the older man had growled. 'We make very few errors, ma'am.' A police car was parked behind their cars, but the two uniformed men stayed in it, as if this was not their business. She had demanded the names of the intruders, and had been ignored. When the older man had stepped sideways in the hall to go by her she had proclaimed, with all the haughtiness she could muster, that she did not permit smoking in her home.