next hour will get a bullet through it … And you,’ he said, looking down at Cano. ‘I ever see your face again I’m going to slit your throat open like a goat’s.’
A second later he was gone.
Cano reached behind him with a shaking hand, removed the bloody lump of explosive and rolled onto his back, keeping his legs straight, gritting his teeth in an effort to ride the stinging pain. It was the humili ation that hurt more than the wound: he silently vowed the same throat-slitting threat against the English soldier as the sergeant had made to him and could only pray that one day he would meet him again in more favourable circumstances.
Cano’s men let him be, knowing better than to try and help him – they knew they would only get abuse or worse for their troubles. It was more than a week before Cano was walking normally and a couple more before he could pass solids in the toilet without pain.
Several months later, as Cano was preparing for an ambush beside his old haunt, the Pristina-Podujevo road, he received word that the West was planning to set up a war-crimes tribunal for Albanians as well as Serbs. He learned that his name had made it to a list of persons wanted in connection with ethnic cleansing. Obviously he needed to leave Kosovo if he was to avoid imprisonment so he accepted the unexpected assistance of a distant member of his family and made his way into Albania.
A few days later the same family member invited Cano to meet the man who had given him the ori ginal warning as well as helping him to get out of Kosovo. (The money necessary for his escape had been channelled via the distant relative.) The man was Skender, whom Cano had never met although he had heard of him. His reputation for brutality as well as for generosity to his family was legendary. Shortly after submitting his curriculum vitae, most of which Skender was in any case familiar with, Cano was enlisted into the vast crime organisation.
There was plenty of work for a man of Cano’s skills. Although he had expected to operate from Albania, Skender had bigger plans for him. Two months after arriving in Albania Cano was sent to Turkey to ‘cleanse’ a section of Skender’s trade route that was having minor problems with local bandits. Eleven months later and after more than five hundred suspected bandits and members of their families had simply disappeared he was moved on to Russia where, to his complete surprise, he was given a new identity – or an old one, depending on how you looked at things: it had once belonged to a vacuum-cleaner salesman who no longer needed it after he mysteriously disappeared.
Skender had already earmarked Cano for his forthcoming Pacific Rim operation and a year later he arrived in America, travelling as ‘Ivor Vleshek’. It had been remarkably easy getting a visa to travel to America. All that was required was payment to a crooked judge in Russia, of whom there were plenty, to provide a detailed profile and an affidavit for the visa application. It was practically impossible for the FBI to investigate the information over the head of a senior Russian official and, as in so many cases, the Feds had little choice but to grant the request.
Two years after leaving Kosovo, Cano, or Vleshek, was a legal resident in the US and as long as he remained gainfully employed as a ‘Specialist Interpreter for Albanian/American Businesses Opportunities’ he could stay in the country indefinitely. Within three months Cano married an American woman whom he met only once and two years later, a year before the woman met with a fatal car accident while driving under the influence of alcohol, he received his Green Card along with an application form with which to apply for full citizenship after three more years of residence.
Cano stared at Stratton as the memory of the day when he’d been defiled back in Kosovo lingered. He hoped that such a bizarre coincidence was possible and that this was one of the men who’d humiliated him, though as far as his memory served there was no resemblance. The man was old enough to have been one of the SAS men and certainly looked as if he could once have been a soldier. But even Cano was aware that he was clutching wildly at straws. It was of no real consequence anyway since Cano didn’t need an excuse to be brutal and the man was, after all, English.
‘You ever been to the Balkans?’ Cano asked anyway.
‘Where?’ Stratton answered.
Cano gave it up. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, sitting back.
‘I’m on holiday.’
Cano took a cigarette packet from his pocket, removed one and offered the pack to Stratton.
‘No, thanks.’
Cano put the cigarette in his mouth and the packet back in his pocket. ‘Why’d you come to LA for a holiday?’
‘I’ve never been here before.’
Cano lit his cigarette with a gold lighter and blew a long line of smoke into the passenger cabin.
‘You here alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘You always go on holiday alone?’
‘Sometimes,’ Stratton said, glancing at Klodi and the lump in his jacket that revealed where his pistol was.
‘You a fag?’
‘You got something against gays?’
Cano shrugged. ‘I just wondered. There’s a lot of fags in this city. A single man comes here on holiday, you gotta figure, the guy must be a fag.’
If Cano was trying to wind Stratton up he obviously had little experience of the English who were the wind-up masters of the world. ‘Well, don’t knock it unless you’ve tried it is what I always say.’
Cano looked for an insult in Stratton’s expression but could not see one. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked as he drew on the cigarette.
‘John Stratton.’
‘You can prove that? You got ID?’
‘Why do I need ID? You want to tell me what this is about?’
‘You’re not in a position to demand anything,’ Cano said. ‘Show me some ID.’
Stratton was waiting for a moment that he could use to his advantage. What that might mean he had no idea and he would only know when the moment presented itself. Until then he would play along. As he reached into his shirt’s breast pocket Klodi moved surprisingly fast for a fat man, grabbed his hand and reached into the pocket. He pulled out a passport and handed it to Cano.
Cano opened it, compared the photo to Stratton in the flesh, then flicked through the pages. ‘You don’t travel too much.’
‘That’s a new passport,’ Stratton told him. He’d been through more than a dozen since working for the intelligence services.
Cano kept hold of the passport and stared intently at Stratton once more. ‘What do you do for work?’
‘I’m a diver.’
‘See, Klodi?’ Cano sneered, looking at his thug. ‘Aren’t divers all gay?’
Klodi, who looked as if he had the IQ of a fish, nodded in solemn agreement.
‘A deep-sea diver,’ Stratton emphasised. ‘Oil platforms.’
Cano was uninterested. ‘What were you doing at the DA’s office?’
‘I was curious about maybe getting a job here and I wanted to see what I had to do to get a visa.’
‘That’s Immigration, not the DA’s office.’
‘That right? Maybe you could give me some advice.’
Cano did not appreciate Stratton’s attitude: his dislike for the Englishman was increasing by the second. He took a puff of his cigarette, put it out in the ashtray on the drinks cabinet and removed a large, shiny bone-handled knife from a sheath inside his jacket.
Stratton’s gaze flicked to the blade. He watched as Cano put the tip on the carpeted floor and, balancing the knife in the vertical, spun it while he thought.
Stratton could feel the seconds ticking closer to the moment when he would have to do something. His heart was starting to beat a little faster and his breathing grew shallower as his body began to pump adrenalin through him in preparation for something that he knew he had to do. Precisely what and how, though, he could not decide
