in Sarajevo. The rest of the world has lost patience with them, is trying its damnedest to forget them. The place lives on a myth and the sooner they recognize that the better. As for you, go home.'
Joey said doggedly, like a stubborn kid, 'I am involved in a major investigation, as is Miss Bolton.'
'You want some excitement, young man, go down to Montenegro, that's where you'll find it by the bucketful. Serif? He's like everything else here, minor league. We may not like the way Sarajevo ticks, but at least we have the measure of it. Then in comes a little joker – you, Mr Cann – and maybe upsets the cart and that makes my life harder. Walk away. Do your investigation some place else.'
'I have the full authority for intrusive surveillance, by Miss Bolton and myself, in this city from Judge Zenjil Delic. I'm legal, and-'
At the name, Benjie – Benjamin – seemed to jerk up on the sofa seat where he sat close to Maggie. It was as if everything said before had been for amusement. His glance stabbed at Maggie. 'Is that why you wanted that bloody name? It was all games, wasn't it, you clevei little bitch?' He mimicked her voice. ''Bet there's not one straight judge in this city, bet there isn't, bet each last one of them's bent.' And I gave it you… ' He stared at Joey. 'And you've conned him into signing on the dotted line. Jesus. He is gold dust.
He's for a rainy day when something actually matters, he's not for some piffling fucking drugs inquiry. Have you compromised him? I'll wring your bloody head off your bloody shoulders if you have. You haven't, have you, compromised him?'
Joey walked heavily to the door.
The grated voice followed him. 'Get out of this city.
You understand nothing.'
'The Eagle says you bottled out/ Mister said calmly.
He'd had an hour to prepare his response. Atkins had taken Mister and the Eagle back to the Holiday Inn, had dropped them there, then followed the new procedure. He'd driven the Mitsubishi, with the slight dent on the front nearside fender, to the warehouse compound, had been let inside and left it there, then walked up to the road and waved down a taxi to return him to the hotel. He'd thought his job was to escort the missile launchers and the communications equipment into the city, demonstrate their capabilities, and act as the trusted interpreter. Killing had not been in the brief. At the hotel he joined Mister and the Eagle in the coffee-shop. The Eagle gazed ahead of him, past Atkins's shoulder.
Atkins blurted, 'I don't know how he can give an opinion. He was crapping himself and had his eyes closed.'
'He was only telling me what he thought. I pay him to tell me what he thinks.'
'I did not bottle out.'
'Very pleased to hear that, Atkins.'
Atkins couldn't read the man. There was no menace in the voice, no inflection that would create fear Mister spoke as if in gentle conversation. He thought of himself as being in an interview room alone with two detectives, and a tape-recorder's spools turning.
The detective who led would have said, 'It was an attempt at murder, an attempt to kill a member of Her Majesty's Customs and Excise. If you didn't like the idea, weren't on board, why didn't you refuse?' The detective at the back would have slapped a fist into a hand for emphasis and said, 'Don't give us bullshit about coercion.' Maybe those detectives, maybe everybody else, had never heard Mister speak quietly
… Mister's eyes were mesmeric. He could not escape them. He said feebly, 'I did the best I could.'
'Wasn't a very good best, was it?'
He blustered, 'I had him all lined up, I was going for him. Then beside him was this woman with a pram. He dived towards her. The cowardly shit used her to cover himself. I don't kill women or babies. If I'd gone after him I'd have hit the woman and the pram with the baby.'
'Did she come out of a manhole – push the cover up and lift the pram through it? Was there a manhole in the pavement? She popped up?'
'I didn't see her coming. I was just looking for him.
I didn't have any help from Eagle. If his eyes had been open – and he hadn't been busy wetting himself – he could have called the woman and the pram for me.
I hit the target, just a glance but a hit, if it had been a full hit, head on, then I would have taken out the woman and the pram. I'm not having killing women and babies on my conscience.'
'I'll look after your conscience, Atkins. I look after a lot of people's consciences.'
'It's the way it was.' Atkins's voice was a shrill whine.
'Do I criticize you? Calm down. Have a biscuit.'
He didn't want a biscuit, but he took one, held it in his hand and trembled. It cracked in his grip. He didn't want to look into Mister's eyes, but he couldn't look away. There was no light in the eyes; they had the quality of death. He knew that one day he would stumble through an explanation to two detectives in an interview room, and they would not believe him, and they would ask, again and again, why he had not walked away. He was Mister's toy, and toys could be thrown away… He was expendable. Napoleon had said, to Metternich, in 1810: 'You can't stop me. I spend thirty thousand men a month.'
'I'm sorry,' Atkins said, and despised himself.
'You sent that?'
'Two things, and you'd better remember them, Joey. I don't work for your crowd, and it's not my intention to go home in a box.'
'You said it would be 'interesting'. Do I quote correctly?'
Maggie bridled. 'And I was wrong. I'm not so arrogant that I can't admit when I'm wrong.'
She switched off the small screen. He felt betrayed.
She wound back the tape. The picture on the screen – she'd marched him from his room to the van and made him squat in the back, beside the bucket, and watch it – was good quality. It was now, he believed her, in London. It would be watched, each second of it. The white Mitsubishi, reduced to monochrome, veering out of the slow lane, heaving onto the grass cutting a line towards Joey, a woman and a pram, him throwing himself at her, and…
She said, 'You shouldn't worry. They'll all say you're a proper little hero.'
She asked him for Frank Williams's number and he gave it to her, didn't question why she wanted it.
'I'm going to find a bar.'
'That is being utterly pathetic,' Maggie accused.
He slammed the van door shut on her.
A biker couriered the tape across the Thames and along the Embankment, from Ceausescu Towers to the Custom House. The package was delivered into the hands of the PA to the chief investigation officer.
The instruction was given that there should be no interruptions, and the cassette was fed into Cork's VCR.
He settled in a comfortable chair and watched the screen.
Gough had been called from the Sierra Quebec Golf room. The meeting into which the summons had broken had reached the detailed stage where personnel were allocated to the raids he planned.
Search warrants had been drafted in preparation for submission to a magistrate for approval. Large-scale Ordnance Survey maps, fastened with tacks to the walls, reproduced the streets of the Fulham district of west London, an area of the Surrey countryside and a section of roads immediately to the south of the capital's North Circular. But the call had come from on high, and the meeting was suspended.
He'd stood behind the comfortable chair. Cork said he had already seen the relevant part of the tape twice, but had not told him what it showed. Gough had his pipe, unlit, in his mouth.
Watching the picture gave him a curious sensation of non-involvement, of distance. It was a feeling Dougie Gough always experienced when he viewed surveillance tapes. He was not a footman, never had been. He was an organizer, an administrator, a decision-taker and a strategist. His skills were considered by his superiors too great for him to pound pavements or idle in cars. He sent men and women out, and he listened to and read through their reports when they came back from the field, and he felt – would never have shown it – envy… He peered hard at the screen. The tape was mute. Far from the camera, Joey Cann sat on a rubbish bin and his heels kicked its concrete sides. He remembered the young man, hesitant yet defiant, but committed. The camera's eye pitched Gough half-way across the mass of Europe to a wide road that ran between tower buildings and walled warehouses. He had no concept of Sarajevo but he was carried there by the lens and it seemed to him that he
