All the girls in the travel agency were busy, so Jennings settled himself on the bench by the window, ready to book a pre-summer break in Tenerife. He didn't have to see the Fixer's face to know him. Most times he'd seen him from the back, on buses and tube carriages and pavements. He knew him well. He'd been close up in pubs with him, close enough to count hairs on the back of his neck, trying to get 'overheards'. His last year before retirement, when the team had been expanded to a branch, kitted with body microphones, with an eyeball on the Fixer, hoping to hear him talking dirty rather than talking social, he'd spent hours, nights, weeks, months on the Fixer who was Target Six. God, and he missed it. The old life was still a microbe in his bloodstream.
When the Fixer was finished and had left with his tickets, three of them, Jennings slotted into the empty . hair in front of the girl. Former habits died hard. He was a good pump man, always had been. He asked casually where his pub friend was going, and not taking the darts team, was he, not with the quarter-final coming up.
'Funny old booking,' she said, grinning. 'Takes all sorts, b u t. .. ferry to Calais, hire car, then Amsterdam to Zagreb on KLM, and on to Sarajevo. First time I've ever booked for there.'
'He's not taking Brennie and Pete – we won't ever win anything without Brennie, please tell me it's not Brennie and Pete.'
'A Mr Packer, a Mr Arbuthnot, and a Mr James – that's the passengers' names.'
'That's not George James, surely? He's not as tasty as Brennie, but he's useful – in our second pair.'
'Bruce James.'
'When are they going, then?'
'Travelling Thursday, arriving Friday. Now do you want some help or do you want to talk about your darts team?'
He laughed, she giggled. He started to explain the hotel details of the last trip to Tenerife, and how they wanted a back room because the front rooms were too noisy, and as high up as possible because of the row from the discotheque. By the time he had finished explaining about the hotel the girl had forgotten her breach of customer confidentiality. David Jennings hadn't forgotten when the old Target One was travelling, with his Eagle and his Atkins, or when he was arriving. As he always used to tell the few who were close to him, and who put up with his former-life anecdotes, it had never been flushed out of the system. Nursing his small morsel of information he went home, his sunshine break reserved, and made a telephone call to an old chum at the Custom House.
'It's probably nothing, but I thought you'd like to k n o w… '
A message was sent from a spieler, a Turkish cafe, in Green Lanes. The cafe was sandwiched between a halal butcher and a greengrocer specializing in Near Eastern vegetables. From the long street in London that represented the heart of the immigrant Turkish population, it went by digital phone to the Bascarsija district of Sarajevo. The Turkish community in Green Lanes, and in Sarajevo, understood the value of strategic alliances.
At any time, day or night, there were in that drab street, with renovation and refurbishment yet to arrive, the parked cars and vans in which sat surveillance experts of the Church, the Crime Squad, Criminal Intelligence and the spooks.
Any of those men and women, idling away the hours, waiting for the next greasy burger and fries, watching, recording and photographing, would have known the statistic that dominated their work.
Of every ten wraps of heroin imported into the United Kingdom, nine passed through Turkish hands, and most of those hands were in Green Lanes.
The trail started in the poppy fields of fundamentalist Afghanistan. A train of camels would carry a tonne of raw produce over the porous Iranian frontier. From Iran the cargo moved by lorry, passage cased by back-handers, across the Turkish border. In Turkey the opium was refined to high-grade heroin, too strong for the human body to accept by swallowing, or inhalation, and the tonne was divided into one hundred-kilo loads, each with a final street value ol eight million pounds sterling. Hidden in long-distance transport lorries the loads were moved through the Balkans, Germany and France, and up to the choke points of the Channel ports, where the danger of discovery was greatest for the Turkish importers. Once inside the United Kingdom, the Turks sold it on to the major dealers.
Mister bought in Green Lanes.
For all of the efforts, and the quality of the surveillance equipment, the clan communities of the street of dingy shops and paint-scraped homes were almost impossible to penetrate. The culture of secrecy could not be broken into. Informers were unknown.
The spielers were regularly scanned with high-grade equipment to detect bugs and probes, and entry into a cafe by an executive officer of the Church or a detective sergeant of the Crime Squad would be noticed immediately. They sat in their vehicles and watched and waited for Lady Luck, but she called rarely.
The same routing, from the cafe to the apartment in Sarajevo's Old Quarter, had warned of the visit of Duncan Dubbs Esquire, the Cruncher, and had vouched for him.
In the early evening, a transmitted message to a mobile phone in an elegantly furnished apartment in Bosnia's capital announced the imminent arrival of Albert William Packer, with two companions, and urged that they be treated with the respect due to important players.
The entry into the terraced house was fast and brutal.
The man, Riley, was taken by men wearing balaclavas from the kitchen table where he was eating with his partner and their children and dragged out through the sagging door.
He was driven in the back of a van, chicken trussed.
He wet himself. A length of sticky tape blindfolded him.
He was taken from the van, his feet scraping the ground helplessly, and into a great echoing vault that he thought was a disused warehouse.
There seemed to him to be several men in the room.
A chair scraped, as if the man sitting on it leaned forward.
A whispered voice, and his hope died: 'People tell me, Georgie, that you've been talking about me… '
'It'll have to be the youngster,' Gough said.
'Isn't there a way round it?'A bead of sweat rolled down the chief investigation officer's cheek.
'I've a room full of people who don't know each other, let alone the target.'
'Is he up to that sort of work?'
'Have to wait and see, won't we?'
'You're a bundle of encouragement, Mr Gough. I can arrange for a surveillance expert to accompany him.'
'That'll be useful, providing they're decent.'
The CIO scribbled briskly on his pad, and passed a name and a telephone number. 'If he's flying tomorrow, he should meet this fellow tonight. We wouldn't be endangering him, would we?'
'Don't know don't know anything about the place. '
'Because he'll be close up to Packer, that animal,' the CIO breathed heavily.
Nol very close – it'll be surveillance, watching from a distance. Shouldn't be dangerous if he's sensible,'
What you've got to understand, Mr Cann, is that it is a remarkable corner of Europe – you could say that it is unique in its diversity and richness of culture.'
Cann hadn't been to university. He had left the comprehensive school in his small Somerset town, applied to join the police, and been rejected on the grounds of eyesight and physique. If the school had possessed more ambitions for higher education he might have made it, but it hadn't. He'd been mooning around the estate where his father was the factor, undecided, getting in his parents' way, a sharp stone in their lives, when a Customs amp; Excise VAT team had come to look over the estate's books. He'd seen the way the new-money owner, a bullying, blustering man, had cringed before their power; his mother, who helped with the books, had talked after their departure of the reach of their authority. Slightly built, relying on heavy spectacles, a disappointment to his father and a worry to his mother, it had seemed to Cann like some sort of answer. He'd applied and been accepted. The man who talked to him was a lecturer at the School of East European and Slavonic Studies, part of London University.
'It was created by the great empires, those of Greece, then Rome, then that of Charlemagne, and after that the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarians, and finally Communism. With the empires came the religion – western Christianity, the eastern Church, Judaism and Islam, then political atheism. Throw those origins together and you have a bed for artistic brilliance to breed in, and also ethnic hatred.
'Of course, each new regime interbred with what they found, but the Bosnian heritage is having a foreign power sitting on the territory, and hating it.
