'Hello, Reverend, how did it go?'
'Well, we could have done with a few more there.
But I think those who did attend valued the occasion.'
' I regret not being with you.'
'Difficult times, Mr Packer. There was a wretched photographer hiding in a car - looking for you, I suppose, no sense of decency or occasion - and one man I didn't recognize who neither the family nor the boys acknowledged.'
The funeral's stranger was described, and the vicar said he had not been dressed like a policeman, but as if from the country: he had had the appearance of a rural vet. Then he dropped his voice and grimaced. 'A miserable-looking vet, the sort who'd put down a family dog and not console you. But he sang well, knew all the words of the hymns I'd chosen, never looked at the hymnal.' If the Eagle's court strategy had not accomplished the halting of Mister's trial, the vicar had been lined up, ready to take his place in the witness box and swear firmly to 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth', and say that on the night Mister was alleged to have been in the car he had in fact been in the sacristy discussing further fund-raising for the repair of the rotting roof.
'I'll be away for a bit,' Mister said casually.
'Somewhere nice?' The vicar was discarding his vestments, darkened at the hem by the rain.
'Doubt it's nice, don't know whether it's warm. I've a bit of business in Sarajevo.'
'Where poor Mr Dubbs died.'
'He was setting up a deal - too good a deal to let go.
That's the trouble with business, these days, you've got to run fast just to stand still.'
'I wouldn't know . . . but I read that Sarajevo is an unhappy place, quite brutalized by that awful war I'll be concerned for you, Mr Packer.'
Mister stood up and wrapped his coat around him
'Don't worry about me. I can look after myself.'
David Jennings had taken home the carriage clock two years ago. He'd have preferred his farewell from the Custom House, from the Sierra Quebec Golf team, to have been marked with a crystal decanter, but they'd given him a clock. It didn't work now and the jeweller he'd taken it to had said repairs would cost more than it was worth.
Enforced retirement had been a bitter blow to him: one day an experienced executive officer working on heroin importation then targeting Albert Packer, the next thumbing through conservatory leaflets and estimating what a new back patio would cost. At first his wife had said that it was wonderful to have him home and around to help with the shopping, but that had palled. An increasingly testy marriage was kept alive by off-peak sunshine holidays.
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 wit
h 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 & 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.
There was a little window of independence, while they were at war and being carved up, but now - as you'll find - a new foreign power sits on them. Just don't expect to be welcomed as a liberator.'
It was past ten o'clock. In Tooting Bec Jen would be waiting for him at the bed-sit, and his bag would need packing. He had been told by Gough that it was an instruction from the chief investigation officer, that he should ring the number and beg an appointment, whatever the hour. He had beaten a retreat from the first meeting of the new Sierra Quebec Golf team and had done as he was told. The meeting had been bizarre and hurtful. He'd felt himself regarded as an intruder, the only survivor from the old disbanded and disgraced unit. The team, assembled that afternoon, arriving with small bags off trains and in their cars, had been recruited from the north-west of England, the west, the Midlands, the north-east, from Scotland, and one was from Belfast. Gough had told them that incompetence, intimidation and corruption had combined to win Albert William Packer his freedom. They were all older than him, the nine men and one woman, and Gough had said that each had been selected for their skills, their lack of fear and their integrity; then the eyes had fixed on him, as if he were the least solid of the chain's links, to be treated with suspicion, tolerated because he was the archivist.
After the preamble, Gough had made him get up, talk through the cartwheel, and give a detailed biography of Mister. At the end the eyes fastened on him seemed to wonder if he was the weak link. When he'd finished his stumbling address, Gough had taken him out into the corridor and told him in clipped, sparse sentences where he was going that evening, and where he was travelling to in the morning . . . He listened and wondered what was the relevance of it.
'Take a map, look at it. The geography is of spines of mountains and valleys cut by impassable rivers.
The common phrase of today would be "bandit country". That's not something they've learned recently. Back in the reign of King Stephen Tvrtko they'd achieved a semblance of discipline, but after he'd died, 1391, and things slid, a French pilgrim wrote: "They live purely on wild beasts, fish from the rivers, figs and honey, of which they have sufficient supply, and they go in gangs from forest to forest to rob people travelling through their country."
'And right from those days, honour and sticking to one's word were seldom important. A Turkish janissary serving in Sultan Mehmet's invasion army, that's 1463, wrote of the flight of King Stephen Tomasevic to a fortress at Kljuc, in central Bosnia, where he did a deal and surrendered on the promise of safe passage: "When the king's servants who were in the fortress saw that their lord had surrendered, they gave themselves up. The Sultan took possession of the fortress, and ordered that the king and all his companions should be beheaded. And he took the entire country into his possession." Be wary of criminals, Cann, and be doubly wary of promises.
'Oh, and be most wary of the women. Two
thousand years ago silver was mined by the Romans at Srebrenica. The Roman garrison's barracks have long disappeared, but you can still find there a medieval castle, in ruins, on a high hill south of the town. It was built by Jerina, a warlord's widow, with slave labour. When she'd occupied the castle it was her habit to have a slave brought up to her bedroom each night, and every following morning an exhausted slave was precipitated to his death from the castle walls . . . Summary: a history of oppression, violence, plague and thieving, ruthless cruelty and utter dishonesty.'
They were seated in a hot little room in a Gower Street second-floor flat. The only light shone on the desk where the lecturer sat. A baby was crying in another room and a woman's voice tried to soothe it.
The coffee he'd been given was too bitter for him and was now cold. The light shone on the map. The lecturer chain-smoked.
'So you're telling me that a major figure in organized crime in the UK is going to Bosnia, and you don't know why. Let's begin with a tasty quote. The present-day foreign occupying power, operating under various names that add up to United Nations, was headed a couple of years back by Elisabeth Rehn, UN Special Representative of the Secretary General.
She said: "If we fail to do something, this country will become an Eldorado for criminals." Normally, that wouldn't matter. Take a look at that map again. Look at Bosnia's position. It used to be called "the Balkans route". It is a crossroads, a junction. It is the natural melting point for the roads linking the Middle East, the mediteranean, Central Europe and the northern countries of the continent. People using that crossroads were rather inconvenienced by forty-five months of fighting, but that's over now and the lorries are rolling again. Whatever it is that you want to bring into Bosnia, once you have brought it there you have many options as to where you ship it to. Nothing was done, and it's now Eldorado . . . Do I need to say more?'
Joey assumed that the chief investigation officer -
God t
o him, a distant figure he had never met and only seen in a presentation speech - had activated a contact from his former home, the Secret Intelligence Service. He stirred.
'You don't need to say any more. You'll excuse me, I've got to pack, an early start.'
'Do you not have a feel, Mr Cann, for the worth of academic history?'
'I'm only an executive officer, five years' service with the Investigation crowd, and I'm going away -
forty-eight hours or seventy-two hours - to watch a man, write reports and come home. They're sending me on sufferance .. . I'm grateful for your time.'
'I apologize for delaying you, Mr Cann. Forgive me, but having time to pack is the least of your problems. I've tried to give you three or four snapshots, postcards, from Bosnia. Violence and treachery, a hatred of foreigners and a culture of smuggling are as ingrained in that society as mineral iron in granite rock. Don't forget that. Bosnia is not Bognor, it is not Birmingham, not Brighton. Watch your back, Mr Cann.'
He felt the shiver in his body and ground his fingernails into his palms to halt it. He stood up and said weakly, 'It's nothing serious. If it were a big deal then it wouldn't be me they'd have sent.'
Chapter Five
'You call me each day - I need to hear from you every evening.'
Gough was awake, alert. Joey reckoned him the sort of man who didn't need sleep.
'I want a total log of where he goes and who he sees. They don't protect themselves away like they do at home. They get sloppy. I've a team put together that has to be fed, got to have something to bite on. I want everything and anything.'
Himself, he was dead to the world, and the last thing he needed was Gough nannying him at Heathrow, with the unlit pipe in his mouth and the smell of it on his breath.
'It's in the balance, Joey. If you find us material to work off I can hold the team together, can't if you don't. The Church is like any organization in these sad days - results, fast and furious, justify the balance sheet. If it's taking too long, if it's going to be too expensive, if there isn't a knock in sight and handcuffs, then we'll be wound up.'
The Untouchable Page 10