On the final page, Father Daniel had written out the Salve Regina, the prayer recited for the final bead of the rosary:
Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Mercy,
Hail our life, our sweetness and our hope.
To thee do we cry,
Poor banished children of Eve;
To thee do we send forth our sighs,
Mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.
Turn then, most gracious advocate,
Thine eyes of mercy towards us;
And after this our exile,
Show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
As a boy of nine or ten I had been required to recite this prayer daily. Kneeling on a waxed wooden pew in the school chapel with the gritty reek of incense smoke in my mouth, I chanted the fulsome words and felt their stifling melancholy. I lived in a vale of tears. The mourning and weeping was mine. I would weep and weep until the moment when the blessed fruit was shown unto me. Did I have to look? Would I be ready? I asked one of the monks what it meant.
‘Stupid boy,’ he replied scornfully. ‘It means you are dead.’
Reading it here, written out in Father Daniel’s book of corruption, the prayer seemed like an excuse. We’re all in exile, we’re all filling the heavens with our sighs and cries. In a sinful world, sin is inevitable. The headquarters of the Order of St Hugh in Northampton came back to me in a swirl of polished parquet and sweetly perfumed sherry. I pushed the papers away across the floor, overwhelmed by a taint both vile and familiar, like a mouthful of vomit.
After a few minutes, I realised I must leave. I stuffed the torn-out pages into an envelope and retrieved what I had come for from the steel box in the wardrobe – my Sig Sauer P228 and a couple of spare clips. I was more used to the Browning but the Sauer was easier to conceal. If only I’d kept the gun I’d taken off the man in Syrna Street, I could have spared myself this. Was anything Father Daniel had told us true? He’d tricked me into delivering Katarina to Syrna Street. He’d sat opposite Anna and feigned shock when told that Bryan Harley was implicated in child trafficking. He’d wrung his hands over the fate of the children in his care. He was nerveless and cold as a snake.
I left by the back stairs, which had a fire exit into the alley behind Maria’s restaurant. I was in no fit state to leap from buildings or swing on fire escapes. How did their operation work? Groomed at the refuge, given a foretaste of their new lives by a sadistic priest. He runs a few background checks in case they’ve accidentally acquired a child with connections, a child who is not utterly helpless and alone. Bryan Harley prepares the paperwork. They’re taken across the border and handed on to Haclan Adjani. A bony-breasted woman locks them in cubicles at the rear of the Vegas Lounge. They crouch by their assigned beds, the sickly stink of scented wax in their nostrils.
I ran back to Eleni’s apartment. When I arrived, I would kill Father Daniel. No. First, I would make him get down on his knees before Anna and confess what he had done. Then I would kill him. In Eleni’s apartment? Take him somewhere else. On foot – or in Anna’s car. Suppose she objected? Father Daniel must surely know something that would help us find Katarina.
My pace slowed. I felt like a child deprived of a treat. The sense of disgust returned, sour and all-pervasive: disgust with the priest, and with myself. I arrived at Eleni’s building and leaned against the wall by the door. Dawn was reaching along the tops of the houses, coaxing a little colour from clay-tiled roofs, from painted sills and curtains drawn over bedrooms where ordinary people slept. What could I tell Anna now? I handed Katarina back to her abuser, but it’s OK because I’m going to take him away in your car and kill him. Should I even tell her what he had done?
I let myself into the apartment, knowing that I would succumb to whatever compulsion came over me when I saw Father Daniel asleep on Anna’s bed. But when I opened the door to the bedroom, Father Daniel had gone.
I sat in the kitchen for an hour and considered my plan. In the end I decided that nothing had really changed. I opened the door to the sitting room and leaned against the doorway. The soft, warm smell of the sleeping women made me doubt myself, and for a moment I wanted very much not to wake them and explain what I had in mind. I stood a while longer, watching a strip of sunlight meander over the parquet floor beneath the curtains over the door to the balcony. The events of the night had left me in shreds. I shouldn’t have been deciding anything.
But Haclan wasn’t going to wait sportingly on the sidelines while I sorted myself out. I went back to the kitchen, made tea and brought it to them. They sat up, Eleni bleary and indignant, Anna immediately alert, as if sleep were merely wakefulness with your eyes shut.
‘What is it?’ said Anna. ‘James, what’s happened?’
‘Do you know where Father Daniel went?’
‘He’s gone?’
‘Never mind. We’re going to get Katarina back.’
37
I went out and paid a taxi driver to take the pages torn from Father Daniel’s book to Maria, along with a letter explaining what they were and asking her to deliver a copy to the UNHCR. I said I was sorry I hadn’t been to see her, but if she looked out of her window and saw two bored men sitting in a small pile of takeaway remains, she would understand why. Then I bought a roll of gaffer tape, two pre-pay mobile phones, a spare battery, a micro screwdriver set and a soldering iron, went back to the apartment and settled down at the kitchen table to build the tracking device I had in mind. The tiny articulations needed to locate the flimsy wires and deposit the microscopic blobs of solder were unfamiliar employment for hands that had spent the last two weeks engaged in various acts of violence, and I found the job unexpectedly calming.
Eleni had spoken to a colleague in the Social Sciences Department whose speciality was the history of gangs in the south Balkans.
‘The Adjanis are like Mafia,’ she told me, jabbing the table with her elbow so that I made an inadvertent weld. ‘Catholics, from the Mirditë region originally – they often have a cross tattooed on their chests so they get a Christian burial. They are widely feared for their brutality. This branch has three brothers. Vasilis, who was at Rambouillet. And Haclan – there is plenty to know about him, none of it good. They say he has operations in Skopje, Athens and Istanbul, and they traffic girls from all over. These are the people to whom you delivered Katarina. But I see in your face that you already know this. I hope you will be good enough to tell us everything soon, Captain Palatine.’
‘What about the third brother?’ I asked, to distract her from demanding that I do so immediately.
‘Peter. My friend did not know about him. There may have been a family feud. Anyway, Peter does not seem to be associated with the family now. Perhaps he is just an ordinary man.’
Suppose they’d already taken Katarina to Athens or Istanbul? I saw now why they’d gone to the trouble of procuring the forged UNHCR documents from Bryan Harley. The border with Macedonia was barely even marked, but other crossings would not be so easy to make without official paperwork.
I couldn’t worry about that now. Eleni went out to hire a van – Anna’s Fiat was too distinctive for what I had in mind. Anna was searching through her conference papers for the sheet of paper she’d got hold of at Rambouillet which had contact details for each of the Kosovar delegates. She was sure she still had it. . . Sighs of frustration issued from the sitting room; and then she decided it must still be in the car and went out. Twenty minutes later she returned, brandishing a folded sheet of paper.
‘You found it, in your car?’ I said. ‘It’s a miracle.’
‘Tidy people like you see only mess, James, but I promise you my Fiat Frightful is very highly organised. Even the ice-cream tubs have a purpose.’
‘Which is?’
‘They are a calendar. I know I had ice cream on this day, therefore that paper which I was reading when I ate it must be nearby. There. Such a thing would never even occur to you, admit it.’
I didn’t admit it beca
use I was looking at the document she’d located in the Fiat. There were photos of each of the delegates. Colonel Vasilis Adjani was the cigar-smoking man I’d punched in the Vegas Lounge. Clive Silk’s watchers would have seen him go in, and MI6 would have worked on the assumption that I’d seen him there – and knew who he was, or might find out. Another reason for keeping me holed up in Norfolk while the peace talks took place: I had actually sat opposite a member of the Kosovar delegation to Rambouillet in a brothel that hired out underage girls.
‘What is it, James?’ Anna came and looked over my shoulder. ‘That’s him, near the bottom. The second number is his personal cellphone.’
‘I hope he goes for it,’ I said.
‘He’s clever. No, he’s cunning. You must be careful not to say too much.’
She took a map of Skopje into the sitting room, while I downloaded the software I needed to her laptop and set about the configuration, working my way through a long list of pointless parameters which the hacker who had coded the GPS controller must have hoped would one day prove how far-sighted he had been.
‘Why has Father Daniel run off?’ Anna said, rushing into the kitchen. I could feel her stark eyes fixed on my forehead. ‘There was something odd about him. I don’t think it was just bruised kidneys he was suffering from. Surely he could have tried harder to contact me when Katya was at the refuge?’
I’d asked myself the same question. Well, I knew the answer now. ‘I guess we got all we could from him, anyway,’ I said, pretending to focus intently on a screen full of function calls. ‘Maybe he’s gone off to try something of his own.’
‘I hope so, because I don’t think our plan will work,’ she said, her voice dipping into despair. ‘It’s too complicated. So many things can go wrong.’
‘If it fails, we’ll try something else.’
‘He’s not answering his mobile. Eleni rang them in Northampton again. They said they hadn’t heard from him for months.’
Eleni came back then, and saved me from further participation in the pretence that Father Daniel was just an oddball priest with a heart of gold. I worked on, and a few hours later had a pair of matched GPS devices: send a blank text to one, and the other would wake up, return the coordinates for its current location, then go back to sleep. My main concern was power: GPS is hungry and I wasn’t sure how long the tracker would hold out. But with the extra battery, I thought it would last for three or four days. I left the tracker on the balcony and went out into the street to test it. The master unit refused to send a blank text – some operating system wrinkle designed to make the phone more user-friendly.
I found the line of code that called the function and remarked it out, checked that it all worked correctly, then left the batteries to charge while I downloaded a geographical information database I’d used when preparing for the operation in Kosovo. It covered most of the Balkans and, among other things, enabled you to show long-lat coordinates on a map. It didn’t take kindly to Anna’s laptop, so I uninstalled as much as I could and eventually got it up and running. The display was maddeningly slow to refresh, but I thought it would do the job.
I left the apartment and followed Eleni’s directions to the nearest call box. On the way, I practised Clive Silk’s voice: a flat, slightly pinched delivery, on the verge of a whine. Don’t push it, I told myself, it’s not the voice but the details only Silk could know that will make this credible. I loaded the coins and dialled Colonel Adjani’s cellphone. He was still at Rambouillet, but from what I’d read in the papers in Leicester Central Library, the cellphone ban was being ignored.
‘Tjeta,’ said a gruff voice.
‘We spoke at Rambouillet about the activities of your brother Haclan,’ I said.
‘Who is this?’
‘You haven’t acted on my advice. Perhaps you weren’t listening properly.’
‘Perhaps I no speaking English,’ said Colonel Adjani.
‘The interpreter wasn’t needed at Rambouillet and she isn’t needed now. Haclan is still active. More than active. This cannot continue.’
‘Haclan, Haclan. Forget about Haclan. He is not your concern, MI6 man.’
‘The priest from the refuge in Kosovo is preparing to speak to the International Police Task Force in Skopje. If this happens, we cannot stop them arresting your brother.’
‘So, make it not to happen.’
‘He’s meeting them at six this evening, at their offices above the Kisela Voda police station. Warn Haclan. Do it now.’
‘You people, you flap and you squawk like old hens.’
‘A colourful metaphor for a non-English speaker,’ I couldn’t resist saying. ‘There will be no further warnings.’
I hung up. I shouldn’t have goaded him, but I thought I’d got away with it. Anyway, the message had been delivered and I was sure Colonel Adjani would pass it on to his brother. Haclan would have his doubts about the story, but I didn’t think he’d have any reliable means of checking it out: informants in the regular police would be part and parcel of his trade, but he surely couldn’t have penetrated the IPTF. He might reason that the priest would not report what he knew for fear of incriminating himself – but the priest was a strange man, and who could say he had not been stricken with a bout of bad conscience and decided to come clean? Why take that risk, when all they need do was watch the police station in case he showed up?
More than anything, I was counting on the fact that Father Daniel had been Haclan’s prisoner the previous day. They’d turned on him for some reason, beaten him, then allowed him to escape. Here was an opportunity to get him back.
I hurried back to the apartment and snatched a few hours’ sleep. When I woke, the hairs on the nape of my neck were bristling. I joined Anna and Eleni in the sitting room.
‘Let’s look at the route.’
‘You don’t have to do this,’ Anna said. ‘You can change your mind.’
I said nothing. I did have to do it. We laid the map out on the table. I decided it would be safe enough to wander a little when, disguised as Father Daniel, I reached the streets around the Kisela Voda police station. It was vital that they spotted me, preferably not too close to my purported destination, either, whose proximity might unnerve them. But they didn’t know which direction their quarry would be coming from, so they too would be circling Kisela Voda. It was a district of wide boulevards and official buildings. There were several good escape routes and the streets would not be thronged with pedestrians. That was perfect for them.
Anna had the more difficult job: she had to follow in the hired van, which would mean stopping frequently along the way to allow me to catch up. We chose a route without one-way streets and with plenty of places where it would be easy to pull over.
‘Won’t they drive away very fast after they have attacked you?’ asked Eleni.
‘Then we will drive fast, too,’ said Anna.
‘Why don’t I go in Anna’s Fiat – so we have two cars to chase them?’
‘You’d need to be able to communicate with each other,’ I said. ‘Even then, it’s a difficult thing to do. Better you watch where their vehicle goes so Anna can concentrate on driving.’
‘If they do capture you, James, they’ll discover you are not Father Daniel. Then they will hurt you, won’t they? Or even kill you?’
‘Please, Eleni!’
‘Well, won’t they?’
‘I’ll just have to make sure they don’t.’
Anna cut my hair short at the sides and made it flop forward over my forehead like Father Daniel’s. Her hands were gentle and deft against my scalp, but when she stood back to study the effect of her work, they began to tremble. I changed into the plain black suit, grey shirt and dog collar Eleni had bought while out hiring the van.
‘We should all bring our passports. And I ought to have a hat.’
My JCB logo baseball cap was not the kind of headgear Father Daniel would wear, so Eleni went through the chest in the hall and came up with a wonky affair in blac
k felt with a broad brim. If I tilted my head forward, the hat hid most of my face. I inspected myself in the mirror. It was good that we were doing this after dark because to me the disguise looked superficial to the point of absurdity.
‘I could not tell you two apart,’ said Eleni. ‘It makes me feel quite odd, as if I am looking at a ghost.’
Anna gave her a look of vexation, then caught sight of the Sauer I had tucked into my waistband.
‘I don’t want you to get killed on our account. It won’t help at all.’
‘I promise not to. Please bring these spare clips for the gun.’
‘You can’t promise anything,’ said Anna, putting the ammunition in her bag. ‘Just don’t think you have to be heroic – it will only distract you.’
‘They’re expecting a frightened priest and they’ll get me. It’s nearly five o’clock – we have to get started.’
38
We drove down Kemal Sejfula and they dropped me just south of Nikola Karev, about fifteen minutes from the river.
I walked fast, the brim of the hat pulled down over my face. I kept to the right-hand pavement, walking in the same direction as the stream of traffic beside me, so that Anna and Eleni would be facing the same way as the gang’s vehicle when, once they’d finished with me, they took off. I couldn’t turn and check every car that came idling up behind me, and I felt horribly exposed.
It won’t happen here, I told myself. Too soon.
I practised listening to engine noises, discounting big diesels and anything that sounded too decrepit to make a good escape vehicle. It didn’t rule much out. We entered the old town, where the streets were narrow and thronged with people. I slackened my pace and turned onto Boulevard Philip II, which led directly down to the river. I guessed they’d have spotters on the bridges, with their vehicle or vehicles parked close to the police station, in case I arrived by cab.
Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2) Page 25