Neat skirts, blouses, cardigans and sensible shoes were left behind in the hotel wardrobe. She was in black jeans and wore a loose black roll-neck sweater and a black headscarf over her hair. She had been a small, darting shadow when she had gone to the Toyota four-wheel drive, had ducked down and levered herself underneath it on her back. With a small penknife, she had scraped mud sludge, crusted salt and the paintwork off the bottom of the vehicle.
She had made a square of clean metal that was large enough to take the magnet of the device. She called the device, in her own jargon, an OTTER. It would send a beacon signal for two kilometres in a built-up area, and up to three kilometres in countryside. It was One Time-Throw Away equipment, not meant to be retrieved. When the assignment was completed, she would have to pick up the probe bug in room 318 of the building towering above her, but the beacon would be abandoned.
Already she had learned from her earphones that Target One did not use his hotel telephone, nor did he hold meetings in the room.
She heard him shower, dress, whistle to himself, and she heard him snore when he catnapped on his bed. The only time she had heard his voice was when he thanked, and tipped, the maid for the return of his laundry. She was wasting her time and wished she were at home, with colleagues who mattered to her and with work that had a grain of importance. She thought that Joey Cann – slight, intense, his pebble spectacles hiding half of his face – would not have moved past the first-interview stage for recruitment into her world.
She heard Target One cough to clear his throat, then the room's door closing, then the silence.
First, Mister read the document prepared by the Eagle and printed out on his laptop. 'That'll do,' he said.
He passed it back, and the waiter came to take their order. He had again refused Atkins's offer to go out and find a restaurant away from the hotel. He gave his order, let the others tell the waiter what they'd have, then flicked his fingers impatiently at Atkins, ready for the papers to be passed him. He scanned the trans lated witness statements and reflected that they were conveniently tidy.
'You got your street map?'
Atkins unfolded his large-scale map of the city and spread it over their laid places. Mister pointed to the third witness statement, and the address of the discharged and disabled soldier. Atkins turned over the map and ran his finger down the street index; he said that the street, Hamdije Kaprazica, was in the Dobrinja district. 'It's about where I showed you from the plane when we came in. That's the old front line.'
'Could you find it for me?' Mister asked.
'Yes – what, in the morning?'
'Tonight. According to his statement, he was the last man to see Cruncher alive.'
The Eagle spluttered on his bread roll.
'You got a problem?'
'No problem, Mister, if that's what you want.'
'I'd like to see him and hear how it was with Cruncher just before he went into the river. He was a good friend.'
The waiter carried the tray to their table.
'I lost my leg in the war. It is taken off at the knee. The amputation was not done well. It was the circumstances of the operation. I cannot have an artificial one. The stump does not allow it. We were fighting here to hold the tunnel entrance at the airport. Do you have money for me?'
The room was a pit of filth. There was no electricity, no fire. In the brutal light of Frank's torch beam he could have been thirty or fifty. The face was sunken and pale, the hair was thinned through, and the hands shook perpetually. He was propped up on a bed of sacking, newspapers, and pillows that had no covers and leaked feathers. There was a stink of old faeces and urine. When the torch beam had roved across the room, searched for him, it had skipped over three syringes. Joey watched him and Frank translated: 'I have to have money. You want to know what I saw?
I say nothing without money.'
He held a crutch across his chest, as if to protect himself. His eyes were dulled in their sockets. His sleeves, both arms, were pulled up. Joey thought, from what he knew of pincushion arms, that the man would be finding it hard by now to get a fix on the veins. Joey pulled money from his pocket and handed it to Frank. The little wad of notes was tossed into the torchlight and onto the man's lap, above the stump.
Joey saw the money counted and there was a flash of what he thought was cunning in the lustreless eyes.
The notes were slipped under the bed of sacks and newspapers.
'Sometimes I go into town to buy. If I buy here, because I cannot defend myself, because I have a stump, sometimes I am attacked, for my money. I go to the old quarter. It is more expensive there, but I am not attacked. Also in the old quarter I can ask for money from foreigners. There are many foreigners there and sometimes they are kind… You want to know what I saw? And more money when I have told you…? You are gentlemen, I think you will be kind.
I told the police what I saw. He was on the bridge. He was leaning over the rail, and sick. I thought it was alcohol that made him sick. He could hardly stand, and when his grip on the rail failed he nearly fell over it. The river was very high that night. I looked away.
Someone came and I went to them to ask for money. I was refused. I looked again for him, I didn't see him.
He must have gone into the river. Someone else came and they gave me money. I went to buy. It was two days later, when I was back at the bridge that the police stopped me and asked if I had seen anything, and they showed me the photograph of the man.'
The hands shook harder on the crutch.
Joey said icily, 'Will you ask him, please, what unit he was with when he lost his leg?'
The reply came through Frank. 'I was with the fighters led by Ismet Mujic. We had to hold Dobrinja, we-'
Joey swung on his heel. There had been a teacher at school who had tried to reintroduce Latin into the curriculum. Joey had been in the small class. Little of it remained with him. Julius Caesar had crossed the Rubicon river and had said: 'Iacta alea est. ' And they had translated Suetonius, who had quoted Caesar:
'Let us go whither the omens of the gods and the iniquity of our enemies call us. The die is now cast.'
The step was taken and there was no drawing back from its consequences. And in English classes they had read Shakespeare's Richard III: 'I have set my life upon a cast, / And I will stand the hazard of the die.'
He went down the staircase.
There was light snow falling, but not heavily enough to settle.
Frank passed him and went to the back of the small truck. Its windows were painted over. His hand was on the door's handle.
'It's what you want?'
'It's what I want.'
'It breaks every rule in my life… '
'And mine,' Joey said. 'Just get on with it.'
Frank opened the door. Four men scrambled out.
They wore drab blue overalls and their faces were masked by balaclavas. Frank talked to them briefly.
None seemed to look at Joey, as if he were un-important. They went towards the block's entrance, with purpose. He had not been introduced to them, dark, silent, smoking shapes in the back of the van, when Frank had collected him and they had driven into Dobrinja.
Frank had said they were on an unmarked frontier.
The blocks on the far side of the street were rebuilt, holes plugged, had new plastic windows and street- lights. The lights didn't carry the width of the street but died in the central grassy reservation. They stood in dank darkness. Frank told him that when they had drawn the map lines at Dayton that ended the war and provided the new ethnic boundaries, they had used a blunt pencil. The pencil's marking, on the map, was fifty metres wide: the east side of Hamdije Kaprozice was left in a no man's land, unclaimed by either the Muslim authorities or by the Serbs. Small gangs of men floated past them. In Britain, Joey never had as much as a truncheon when he was out on surveillance late in the night, only a long-handled torch.
