The Bach Manuscript

by Scott Mariani

  Ozzy had now been on the run for three days. There would not be a fourth, but Ozzy was as yet unaware of this fact. Just as he was unaware of the person who was, at this moment, several steps ahead of the police on his trail and very soon about to close in for the kill.

  Ozzy was holed up at the Western Hills mobile home park a few miles outside Grand Junction, the rundown single-wide belonging to a friend of his, Garth Boyle, who was currently doing a stretch for dealing amphetamines. Ten in the morning and already hotter than hell inside the cramped trailer. Having just finished off the last of the six-packs of Coors that had been sustaining him in his flight from the law, Ozzy was craving more beer. His bright green ’95 Thunderbird, which he’d stolen in Redlands, Mesa County, the previous day, was parked outside in the baking heat. Ozzy happened to know there was a liquor store less than three miles down the road. The temptation was powerful.

  Ozzy peered out of the dirty window. The trailer park was enclosed by a mesh fence. He could see the road some way the other side of it, but he could see no sign of the Grand Junction PD black-and-whites that he was certain were cruising the whole county looking for him.

  Screw’m anyway. He couldn’t stand it any longer, cooped up in Garth’s stinking asspit of a trailer, sweating like a pig with nothing to drink. He snatched his Ruger .380 auto from the rumpled bed, stuffed it in the back of his jeans under the hem of his floral shirt, and stepped out into the nuclear heat.

  He was a few paces from his Thunderbird when a woman’s voice called out, ‘Hey there.’

  Ozzy turned to look. Her tan was the colour of Tualang honey. Wild dark gypsy hair. Tight jeans, artfully ripped at the knees. A black biker jacket over a light T-shirt emblazoned with the word LOVE. All the right curves in all the right places. Ozzy liked what he was seeing. He liked it a lot.

  Ozzy broke out into his trademark big, broad smile, Jack Nicholson meets Dennis Quaid. ‘Well, hey there to you too, sweetheart. I’m Larry. You got a name?’

  She smiled back, kind of seductively, Ozzy thought. His heart was skipping beats. Zowee.

  ‘Madison,’ she replied. Nice teeth. Heck, everything about her was nice. She was well over 21, but he liked ’em a little more mature once in a while. She was eyeing him as if he was the only guy in the world. ‘That your trailer?’ she asked, pointing back at the asspit.

  ‘That? Hell no, I’m just looking after it for a friend. What about you, Madison? You live around here?’

  She cocked her head, still smiling. ‘Not really. I’m here for work.’

  ‘Here for a couple days, maybe?’

  ‘Maybe not that long. This job’s kind of over already.’

  He leaned against the side of the T-Bird, spreading himself out a little to show off his muscles. ‘That’s a real shame. What is it you do, Madison? Let me guess. You’re a dancer, right?’

  ‘You really want to know?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Well then, let me show you.’

  She reached into her jacket. Took out a black leather wallet and flipped it open to show him her seven-pointed gold star agent’s badge. Before Ozzy had time to react, and long before he even thought of reaching for his concealed .380, she’d whipped out a big custom Kimber 10mm auto and had it stuffed in his face. Next poor Ozzy knew, he was being slammed belly-down on the ground, eating dirt, relieved of his weapon, caught and helpless. The cold steel cuffs bit into his wrists.

  ‘Oswald Hale Crumm?’

  ‘Aghh! Jesus, you’re hurting me!’

  ‘I’ll take that as a yes. Nice to make your acquaintance, meatsack. I’m Special Agent Madison Cahill of the National Fugitive Recovery Agency. And you were the easiest catch I made this week.’

  By midday, Ozzy Crumm had been safely delivered into the hands of the GJPD and Madison Cahill, 37, professional manhunter, was on her way to her next assignment. This time, a personal one.

  From Grand Junction regional airport she hopped on a flight to Las Vegas, and from there caught a Hawaii Airlines connection to Honolulu International. There she rented a Jeep Cherokee and set off for the hour’s drive to Haleiwa Town on the North Shore of Oahu.

  The sky was the most perfect blue, palm trees waved in the gentle ocean breeze and the sweet-scented warm air wafted through the open windows of the Jeep, but Madison was too worried to enjoy the ride. She had left her father six messages in the last two days, with no reply. His health being what it was, and her being his only remaining family, she made a point of keeping in frequent touch with him. It wasn’t like him to fail to return her calls.

  Madison reached Haleiwa Town and took the winding little coastal road to her father’s home. The house was just a stone’s throw from the warm sand of the beach, surrounded on three sides by lush tropical vegetation. Her father had lived here alone for eight years. Madison was his only regular visitor, apart from Noelani, the nice local lady employed as a housekeeper.

  Madison wasn’t someone to flinch from the hard realities of things. She knew that, at the age of 87, Rigby Cahill probably did not have much time remaining on this earth. Yet, it was neither his advanced age nor any kind of physical illness, per se, that were killing him. The affliction that would eventually take him down was one he’d been dying of for many years. Her father had once been a great man, but he was a shadow of his old self and declining so fast she could see distinct changes in him every time she visited, which was often. The possibility of turning up at his house only to find him dead had been on her mind since yesterday.

  The terrible thing was knowing what would make him better. It wasn’t heartbreak that had made him this way: his wife Kathleen, Madison’s mother, had passed away when Madison was just a child. It wasn’t financial ruin, either. Enough of the fortune that Rigby Cahill had made during his years at the top of his profession remained to ensure that he’d die a rich man.

  No, what had burned her father out, destroyed his mind and ravaged his physical state, was an obsessive quest of discovery that had ended in failure and eaten into him like a cancer. If it hadn’t been for that one thing, Rigby would still be his indefatigable old self that she remembered from her childhood, probably still running his operation in New York, travelling the world, living out his dream and making millions.

  Madison hated his obsession, detested the part of him that could have become so fixated on it, and the way it had dominated his life for about as long as she could remember. His single-minded drive when it came to achieving his goals had been the reason for his success. That was simply his way. The obsession that had destroyed him was also the only key to saving him. Which meant that, barring a miracle, her father was doomed to live out his little remaining time mired in bitterness and defeat.

  She parked the Jeep in the carport at the side of the house and went inside. The front door was never locked.

  ‘Dad? It’s me, Maddie.’

  Her anxiety rose when there was no reply. As she went through the beach house, she was steeling herself for the sight of him dead. She had seen many corpses in the course of her work. She’d been responsible for two of them herself. But her father – she didn’t know if she could handle it. It was hard to imagine her life without him in it.

  ‘Dad? Are you there?’

  She found him sitting on the white wood veranda, motionless in his recliner, his pale rheumy fixed towards the ocean. He was alive. If you could call it that. Madison’s relief was tempered by her sadness at seeing him looking so shrivelled and sunken. He had been drinking, too. A bottle of Koloa rum stood near-empty by his feet. Koloa was his favourite, judging by the quantity of the stuff he got through in a year. Madison could have instructed Noelani to stop buying it for him, but she didn’t have the heart to take away the only comfort that remained to him.

  ‘Dad, don’t you even pick up the phone any more? I left you six messages in the last couple of days. Any idea how worried I was? No, of course not.’

  Rigby Cahill gave no response, except for a slight flicker of his eyes in he
r direction and the faintest ghost of a smile when he recognised her.

  ‘You eat anything today? How about yesterday?’

  No reply.

  ‘Anyway, I’m here to look after you now. Starting with this. I think you’ve had quite enough already.’ Madison took away the rum, put the bottle back in its cupboard in the kitchen and then went to the answerphone in the living room to delete the messages she’d left him.

  To her amazement, in addition to her half-dozen messages from the last couple of days, the display on the answer machine was showing five more that had come in within just the last few hours.

  That was very strange. Few people knew his number, and fewer still would have cause to dial it nowadays. Aside from hers, the only calls she could think he might receive would be those routed from his long-abandoned offices in New York, technically still operative but in practice nothing but an empty, sad shell where the phone hadn’t rung in years.

  And now, all of a sudden, five messages all at once, in the same afternoon?

  What was even more astounding was when Madison listened to them and realised not only who they were from, but what they concerned.

  Back in the dim and distant past, when as a girl she used to travel the world with her father and partake in his adventures, ‘Ulysses’ had been one of his most reliable contacts in the sometimes shadowy sphere in which he operated. A secretive man whose real name was an unknown. To her knowledge they had never physically met, though her father trusted him implicitly and they had enriched one another through the years. It had been so long since she’d heard him mentioned that she’d almost forgotten.

  Madison replayed the messages over. They were short, clipped and urgent, and all repeated the same information almost verbatim.

  ‘This is Ulysses. You need to call me at once. I have news. The Silbermann manuscript has resurfaced.’

  Chapter 36

  Ben walked a fast mile through the night from Blackbird Leys, then managed to flag down a taxi. He offered the happy driver a wad of cash to take him out into the countryside near Wychstone village, where he’d left the Alpina earlier that day. The BMW hadn’t been touched.

  Within minutes he was cutting eastwards towards the M40, then racing southwards down the crowded motorway towards London. He made a lightning pit stop for fuel on the M25, where he spent a moment searching online for a last-minute flight from Heathrow to Belgrade. With luck, he might not even have to step aboard a plane, if he could intercept Dragan and Lena at the airport.

  But the delay getting back to the car had cost him, as he realised when he discovered that he was going to arrive at Heathrow too late to catch the last flight. He’d have to wait until morning.

  With no longer any reason to rush things, Ben reached the airport at a more sedate pace, drove to Terminal 4 and booked himself into a hotel room for the rest of the night. All the comforts, but none that could compensate for the knowledge that Dragan Vuković and his lovely little sister were most likely already in the air and a big step ahead of him.

  In his frustration, Ben raided the mini-bar for some cheap and nasty blended scotch. There were No Smoking signs everywhere and a sensor alarm in the middle of the ceiling, ready to denounce him at the first whiff of burning tobacco. Doing his bit for militant smokers everywhere, he pulled the battery out of the alarm and stood at the window, taking alternate sips of whisky and puffs on a Gauloise while he watched the twinkling lights of an aircraft taking off from the nearby airport, and frowned and fretted and thought about what he needed to do next.

  The following phase of his plan would now take him into a very different situation. It wasn’t guesswork to figure out that the moment Dragan landed in his home country, he’d be heading straight for Zarko Kožul. From what Lena had told Ben, and Miroslav had confirmed, Dragan’s mission wasn’t to sell the manuscript but to offer it to Kožul as a tribute, hoping to be taken on as a fully-fledged member of the great man’s crew. If Dragan’s plan worked, that meant finding him was going to entail penetrating Kožul’s operation.

  That was where things stood to become serious. Tackling a bunch of wannabe gangsters in the comparatively harmless environment of east Oxford was one thing. Tackling the likes of Zarko Kožul was a different matter altogether. For one man, unsupported, without backup, virtually impossible.

  Ben liked working alone. But he also liked staying alive.

  When he’d finished his cigarette, he refilled his glass with the paltry remnants of the mini-bar whisky and sat on the bed with his phone. It was almost one-thirty a.m. in Italy, but he dialled the familiar number and waited.

  The gravelly voice of ex-sergeant Boonzie McCulloch, 22 SAS, now retired to a life of peace and tranquillity in the hills of Campo Basso with his Neapolitan wife, Mirella, answered on the fourth ring.

  ‘Ben?’

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you this time of night, old friend. I need your help.’

  Boonzie’s Glasgow accent was still as strong as it had been the day forty-five years ago when he’d left Clydeside to join the army. He was the only person Ben knew who said things like ‘och’ and ‘jings’. Boonzie’s real name was Archibald, but anyone who called him that would get their arm ripped out of its socket and beaten about the head with the wet end.

  ‘I ken ye wouldnae call if it wiznae wurth callin’. Hud on a minute.’

  Ben heard the rustling sounds of Boonzie slipping out of bed and carrying the phone out of the room so as not to wake Mirella. A few moments later, Boonzie’s voice came back on the line. ‘What’s aun your mind, laddie?’

  Ben replied, ‘Bosnia.’

  The truth was, the SAS had been much more involved in the Bosnian conflict of the mid-1990s than had ever been officially revealed. Elements of 22 SAS A Squadron had been dropped into the country early on in the war, masquerading as regular troops. Once deployed, they had quickly become involved in key intelligence roles, as well as combat initiatives against Bosnian Serb fighters, who were to prove a tough and determined enemy. As the war grew ever more intense, one classified operation had seen a five-man SAS team dropped deep behind enemy lines to snatch a prominent Serb leader and war criminal from his mountaintop hideaway and smuggle him away for interrogation. The mission had helped to turn the tide of the war.

  Boonzie McCulloch had been one of that five-man team.

  As usual, much of the work of Special Forces units in that war would have been impossible without local help. The SAS were expert in the ‘hearts and minds’ approach to warfare, cultivating contacts on the ground to facilitate infiltration and intelligence gathering. Boonzie had been in the thick of the operation, more so than his younger comrade who had only seen the end of the conflict and the later pursuit of known war criminals.

  ‘Do you think Husein Osmanović would talk to me?’ Ben asked.

  Osmanović was a Muslim Bosniak. On the morning of July 16th, 1995, Serbian troops comprising soldiers of the Vojska Republike Srpske and elements of the Serb paramilitary force known as the ‘Scorpions’ had stormed his village near the town of Srebrenica and perpetrated one of the worst atrocities seen on European soil since the Second World War. Together with other acts of butchery that claimed the lives of some eight thousand innocents over the course of just a few days that month, it came to be known as the Srebrenica Massacre. Soldiers forced the villagers from their homes and lined them up in the street. They began by executing anyone who tried to resist, then started on the women. When Husein Osmanović tried to stop the soldiers from dragging his wife and teenage daughter away, they shot him in both legs and then made him watch as they gang-raped and beat and strangled Dalila and Safija to death in front of him. Afterwards, they shot Husein four more times in the chest and laughed over what they thought was his corpse.

  Husein survived, built himself back to strength and devoted the rest of his life to revenge. The name of the fringe political organisation he founded and led, Srbe na Vrbe!, meaning ‘Hang Serbs from Willow Trees’, said everything ab
out his attitude to his bitter enemies. He and his followers had played key roles in the SAS intelligence operations that eventually helped to win the war. But Husein, like Yugoslavia, would never be the same again.

  ‘I dinnae ken, laddie,’ Boonzie said. ‘It’s bin a long time. What do ye need tae ask him aboot?’

  ‘Everything he can tell me about a Serb gentleman named Zarko Kožul. A little bird told me he was a member of the Scorpions, back in the day.’

  ‘Diznae surprise me. We never did catch all the fuckers.’

  ‘Nowadays, Kožul is an organised-crime boss in New Belgrade. A pretty powerful one, by all accounts.’

  ‘Aye, an’ I can guess the rest,’ Boonzie said with a sigh. ‘Ye’re in trouble again. Am I reet?’

  ‘You know me.’

  ‘I do, laddie.’ Boonzie paused, sounding thoughtful. ‘Where are ye noo?’

  ‘Now I’m in London. Tomorrow I’ll be in Serbia. The clock’s ticking on this one, Boonzie.’

  ‘Leave it wi’ me. I’ll see what I can do, but no promises.’

  ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, you’re a mad basturt, ye really are.’ With that line of flattery, Boonzie ended the call.

  An hour and a few cigarettes later, when the mini-bar was somewhat emptier, Ben’s phone rang. He picked up. ‘Husein Osmanović?’

  There was a few moments’ silence on the other end. Then a raspy voice with a heavy accent replied, ‘I believe you are mistaken. I have no knowledge of anyone by this name.’

  It was all part of the age-old ritual of spy games. Ben said, ‘My apologies for the misunderstanding. May I ask to whom I’m speaking?’

  ‘My name is Adnan Tatarević. We would not be having this conversation, if it were not for my regard for our mutual friend in Italy.’

  ‘I understand,’ Ben said. The man’s voice sounded like a blunt band saw cutting ironwood. You get shot four times in the chest and survive, you end up with a voice like that. Ben knew he was talking to Husein Osmanović, but he didn’t contradict him.