‘We may have to try again on foot,’ said Anna, when we’d covered every street at least once. ‘Or maybe cover a bigger area. What do you think?’
‘We should do the whole route again in reverse, so we approach every street from a new perspective. We’ll see things we missed first time.’
Different things that were more of the same. Hiding places. Hidden places. Locked-up places. Dogs too hungry to wait out the sleet, sniffing at drains and gullies choked with sodden debris. A boy on a bicycle that was too large for him, lifting his feet up as he freewheeled through a puddle of melted slush. The search area was too precise, too optimistic. There were many reasons why you might avoid this or that junction and take a less obvious route – for instance, to stop for petrol or food. Or because you’d seen that small white van and the two women inside it enough times to make you suspicious.
‘I don’t think we will find the car on the street,’ said Anna decisively. I could sense her dismay, picking away at the kernel of hope which all the accumulation of facts and inferences had so far failed to crack apart.
‘Let’s finish our route, then decide what to do next.’
We finished. We drove back to our starting point in silence, then started again. I was staring through the side window, feeling drained out by the pitch and yaw of the long, grim day, when I saw a shape that was somehow familiar. A certain curve. Polished chrome shining from the gloom, blunt rubber cap. There was something about that curve of chrome which demanded to be recognised.
‘Stop.’
‘What is it, James? What did you see?’
‘I don’t know. Back up a bit.’
Polished chrome. An inch or two. Above the line of glass chunks embedded in the wall.
‘Wait here, Anna. It’s probably nothing.’
I crossed the road and walked along the wall to a pair of wooden gates. There was a gap between the gatepost and the wall and I peered through into a big yard with a pair of prefab huts and a couple of vehicles hunched in the gloom. The gap was narrow and I couldn’t see much to either side. I pressed my cheek against the brickwork and got the angle I needed to see why that unexceptional shape had set off such a strident alert in my head.
I ran back to Anna. ‘There was a vehicle at Father Daniel’s refuge, a Mitsubishi camper van with a ladder on the back. It’s in that yard. The top of the ladder is poking above the wall.’
‘How do you. . . ? Are you sure, James?’
‘Not a hundred per cent. I’ve never seen another vehicle like that one. It’s too much of a coincidence.’
‘Katarina may be inside it. We must call the police, they can surround the place so they can’t get away.’
‘I don’t think we should – not yet.’
‘Those monsters have got my daughter!’
‘What can we say? That we’ve seen a Mitsubishi camper van parked in a yard? They’re not going to stage a full-on assault just because we tell them to.’
‘The police can’t just pretend it isn’t happening.’ I could see in her face that she knew they could do just that. ‘Suppose they drive away?’
I wasn’t going to say so to Anna, but I knew that an operation like Haclan’s would have a line into the Skopje police. If she called them, Anna might inadvertently be reporting our presence to Haclan. There’s a small white van, parked right outside your den. . . Deal with it!
‘I’m frightened for Katya. I’m so frightened for her. What can we do if the police won’t help us?’
‘If they try to take the children anywhere else, they’ll use the Mitsubishi. Let me get my tracker in place. Whatever happens, we’ll know where they are.’
‘Children?’
‘We have to assume it isn’t just Katya.’
‘Yes. OK. Do that, James. Go. Quickly.’
‘I need to scout the place. Don’t wait here – we can meet. . .’ I pulled out the map and we found a parallel street. ‘Give me twenty minutes. If you think they’ve seen you, drive away and call me when you’re clear.’
I felt uneasy leaving her. If I didn’t do something, anything, right now, I felt I might start to tick like the timer on an unexploded bomb. Anna, meanwhile, was going to sit alone in a dark street and wait. While she waited, she would have to endure the knowledge that her daughter might be less than a hundred yards away, in the hands of child traffickers. I reached out and touched her arm, and when she turned her eyes on me it was like being picked out by a searchlight.
‘Don’t fail me, James. Or Katya. Don’t.’
I gave her arm what was intended to be a reassuring squeeze, but there was so much adrenalin sluicing through me that the hold I took on her was not far short of an act of violence. My clumsiness broke the tension, and she gave a smile full of fortitude and grace.
‘Ow. I can’t drive if you break my wrist.’
‘Sorry. Call Eleni, tell her what’s happened.’
I got out and walked back along the street, heard the van pulling away smoothly behind me. I have never felt so much respect for someone as I did for Anna then. I would not fail her. Or Katya.
The sleet had eased and the street hissed and plinked as the meltwater sluiced away down the gutters. I took off the fancy overcoat and hid it under an overturned dustbin – the neighbourhood was sporadically lit at best, and with the black polo neck and the watch cap pulled down tight over my ears, I could hide in any patch of darkness. I started at the gates I’d peered through earlier, kneeling on the pavement and scanning the derelict yard again. I could climb over in a matter of seconds, but that would land me directly between the two prefabs to the right and the vehicles to the left. The wall was a couple of feet higher than the gates and I’d have to negotiate the broken glass; but at least I could pick my spot. There were lights on in both huts and the windows of one were steamed up – from cooking, I guessed. I couldn’t see anyone outside, but the light faded rapidly twenty yards in, and Haclan was well organised – it would be second nature to post a couple of guards while he sat down to his dinner.
I carried on round the block. Haclan’s yard was sandwiched between brick-built warehouses, four storeys high, with their windows boarded up and the front gates close-fitting and secured with padlocked chains – it wasn’t what you would call a salubrious neighbourhood. In the parallel street, I found the entrance to a narrow archway that had been blocked off with two sheets of corrugated iron nailed to a timber frame. The nail heads were rusty, and when I tugged at one corner of the barrier the whole construction creaked. I checked the street, then wrapped my watch cap over the bottom edge of one of the sheets and worked my hands underneath it. The sheet bent reluctantly upwards, creasing at the lowest nail. It took me four or five minutes to work the corrugated iron back and forth and lever out the nails at one edge until I had an opening wide enough to climb through.
It was pitch dark at first. I edged along the damp brick wall for ten yards, then emerged from the back of the building, where a little ambient light filtered down from the sky and was sucked in by a stale fog that hung over the ground. To my left, the brick wall continued for another twenty yards, then ended in a section of fence the same width as the alley. On the other side of the alley was a wire fence, beyond which were seven or eight teetering stacks of empty pallets.
I pulled the watch cap down low and crept forward. The icy mud slid and crunched beneath my feet. A few paces from the end, I stopped and found myself looking directly into the back of Haclan’s yard – I could see the lights from the huts about thirty yards away. The Mitsubishi should be straight ahead, but my view was blocked by a low breeze-block shed. There was a gate in the section of fence at the end, secured by a padlocked sliding bar. The fence was high and too flimsy to climb – and given that the Mitsubishi was over on the far side of the yard, there didn’t seem to be any advantage in breaking in from here. I watched the yard for a while longer, mapping its layout in my head.
The door to one of the prefabs swung open and a man stepped out, flicked on a to
rch and started across the yard. I lay down along the angle of the wall, and the wetness seeped into my sweater. Without warning – I hadn’t even noticed the cold until now – I started to shiver. The oval of torchlight zigzagged along the ground towards me and I got ready to run in case it fell on some part of my shivering body. Another torch beam swung out from just behind the wall I was lying against, not more than three yards away. The man holding it stood up and walked over to the front of the shed. Now both men were hidden from view and I was able to retreat to a less exposed position in the alley.
They had a brief argument, their grumbling voices muffled by the damp air, then one of the torch beams set off for the prefab and the other flicked off. I guessed they were taking it in turns to go for their dinner. I stole back to the street and folded the corrugated iron back over the gap, then continued round the block.
There was a vacant lot on the last section, but too far away to offer a third access point to Haclan’s yard. Barbed wire had been wrapped roughly round the top of the wooden palings that fenced it off from the street. I unpicked a length and took it back to the alley. Lying prone in the mud, I wrapped the barbed wire round the post and the leading edge of the gate. My fingers were stiff with cold, but I got the wire looped three times round and then twisted the ends together and tucked them into the final loop.
I watched the yard for a few minutes more, but all I discovered was that the man on guard duty had a racking cough. I slunk back to the street and went round the front, retrieved my coat and moved the dustbin against the front wall – roughly adjacent to where the Mitsubishi was parked. Then I went back to Anna – ten minutes later than agreed. She looked strung out beyond endurance, fraying under the strain of keeping both hope and hopelessness in check.
‘We need a diversion in the alley at the back,’ I said. ‘It’s dangerous, though. I’ve wired the gate shut, but it won’t hold them for more than a minute or two.’
‘What do I do?’
‘I’m going to tie the Sauer to the fence, then run a line back to the archway so you can operate the trigger from there, where it’s dark. I need to find a length of wire or string, or something—’
‘Don’t be stupid, James. That will take forever. I’ll just go down to the end and fire.’
‘It’s too dangerous.’
‘Everything is too dangerous. Mostly it is too dangerous for Katya. Did you see her there? Was there any sign or. . .’
I shook my head. ‘It’s very dark – impossible to know. I’m sorry.’
‘That’s all right. Shall we go now?’
I didn’t persist with my idea. It probably wouldn’t have worked. I showed her how to use the gun, told her to fire once by the gate, retreat down the alley and fire again, then get out.
‘Don’t run,’ I told her. ‘It’s slippery.’
‘How should I walk, do you think? Maybe putting one foot in front of the other?’
‘Just be careful,’ I insisted. ‘And don’t wait longer than three seconds before the second shot.’
A single, unexpected gunshot is difficult to locate in an environment like that: the report would bounce around the walls of the warehouses or rattle into the gaps between stacks of pallets, leaving just a confused echo in the ears. I needed the second shot to get Haclan’s men homing in on the alley at the rear, well away from the Mitsubishi. But was I expecting too much of Anna? As far as I knew, she’d never even held a gun before, let alone fired one in a fog-choked alley.
‘It’ll kick hard so hold it in both hands. And keep your elbow bent. If it jams, just get out of there, OK? If anything at all goes wrong, in fact—’
‘You sound like Eleni. Maybe you should fire the gun and I’ll go over the wall.’
‘I’m trying to anticipate, that’s all. Don’t try and go through the gate, will you?’
‘I’ll do anything to get Katya back. That doesn’t make me completely crazy.’
‘Sorry. If I thought we could handle them, then. . . But we can’t.’
I unpicked the components of the tracker and rearranged them so the little package would fit in one of the uprights of the ladder, then taped it together again. Anna watched me impatiently.
‘Can you call Eleni and see how she’s getting on? I could do with one of her uncle’s coats.’
Anna spoke to her friend, who had just arrived at the apartment, then we drove in a wide circle to the archway on the far side of Haclan’s yard. I showed her the gap in the corrugated-iron barrier and gave her the gun.
‘Hold me for a moment, James.’
‘Better put that down first.’
She dropped the Sauer into the pocket of her parka, then reached across and clung to me and I felt her heart beating. I remembered holding Katarina against my thudding chest during our flight from Kosovo, and I had that same feeling that fate had brought us together so we could save each other from the different kinds of darkness that had fallen over our lives. Then she released me and I got out of the van and ran round to the wall of Haclan’s yard. I took off my overcoat, looked up at the wall I was going to climb, and waited for the gunshots.
The first – shockingly loud in the dank air. I climbed onto the dustbin, keeping my head below the wall, started counting.
One. . . I threw the coat over the palisade of broken glass, positioned my hands at either edge.
Two. . . Levered myself up until the ridge of the wall was level with my chest.
Three. . .
No shot.
Two men running from the prefab. Still no second shot. Jammed. Dropped. Or they’d worked out where the first shot had come from and caught her in the alley. A third man jogged over towards the back gate. The second shot came and he stumbled, doubled over and cried out in shock. I swung over the wall, pulled the overcoat down and out of sight, and ran the few paces to the Mitsubishi. Gunshots hammered out from the breeze-block shed and I feared for Anna fleeing down the dank alley.
I climbed the first rung of the ladder fixed to the rear and pulled the rubber cap off the top of the upright. Over the roof of the Mitsubishi I could see someone unlocking the front gates. A car ignition fired. The tracker was too fat for the chrome tubing. I squeezed and massaged the layers of gaffer tape, eased it back into the tube, but it jammed in the bend and I had to prise it out and try again. I wanted to feel movement inside the camper, but there was no sign that anyone was inside.
They weren’t firing any more, but I couldn’t see what was going on. I heard Haclan giving orders in his flat, cold voice, and for a split second the urge to kill him ripped through me. Take him, there and then, no matter what. Perhaps I would have done so if the tracker hadn’t just then slid obligingly into place. I put the rubber cap back on and climbed down and crouched behind the Mitsubishi. The grey Passat saloon was idling at the gates, its only occupant sitting in the passenger seat, checking his gun. The driver’s door was open, a scrap of red from the car’s interior lights cast on the dirt below.
Two men were kneeling by the injured man, two more staring towards the alley from the cover of the breeze-block shed. Haclan stood outside the prefab with the steamed-up windows, facing my way, giving orders to a tall, hunched man loading a pump-action shotgun. If I climbed back over the wall now, Haclan would see me. Better to run for the open gates. Fifteen or twenty yards to cover, then I’d be out on the street. The dark, empty, locked-up street, with a carload of armed men on my tail. They could be looking for Anna, too.
I moved to the front wing of the Mitsubishi. Where would the first bullet come from? The man in the Passat, most likely. A scream from the wounded man – they were carrying him to the prefab. I got to the wall in three paces, ran low towards the Passat’s lights. Through the side windows of the vehicle, I saw the tall, hunched man turn and walk away from Haclan. I was ten yards from the car. Haclan walked up the steps to the door of the prefab, his head rising above the roof of the Passat. He swung round and our eyes met.
I sprinted for the open door and dived. Th
e gun swung towards me but he was too slow and I thrust his hand aside. The shot cracked out, filling the interior with pulsing noise and the choking reek of the charge. I drove the heel of my hand up into the gunman’s nose and his head thumped back against the headrest. I felt the cartilage give, and shoved again until the ridge of his nose collapsed into his face. A snap on the rear window and a thousand cubes of glass pattered onto the back seat. I swung my legs into the footwell and hit the throttle and the clutch at the same time.
The car shuddered on its springs, exhaust jetting smoke. A bullet smacked into the fascia six inches from my hand. Someone yanked open the door behind my seat. I jammed the gearstick forward and released the clutch. The Passat surged forward, grit peppering its undercarriage. The driver’s door walloped the gate-pillar and slammed shut. The man behind me was half inside the car. No time to get the rest of him in. No time to bail out, either. The steel skin of the door screeched against the brickwork, and the vehicle shunted sideways. His ribcage probably took the brunt of it. The door came clear of the pillar, and in the rear-view mirror I saw him totter sideways as the Passat slewed out into the street.
40
I drove for a kilometre in a fast, straight line, then took a corner and pulled up. My passenger was still holding the gun, but he was shuddering and his eyes said he thought he was dying. I took the gun and checked the clip: nearly full. I hauled him onto the pavement and sat him up against a wall, then drove on for another five minutes and pulled up outside a Chinese takeaway.
I called Anna, and heard myself sigh with relief when she answered. I gave her the address. There was nowhere to hide the car, so I carried on for a few minutes until I found a quiet cul-de-sac. I dropped the keys down a drain and let down the front tyres, then walked back to the takeaway.
I took the opportunity to order a dish of noodles and sat on the bench beneath the window to wait. A woman came in with two girls in their early teens who squabbled over the menu, then tore it in half and were hustled outside and ticked off at length. One of the takeaway’s brown paper bags flopped along the pavement like a species of urban tumbleweed.
Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2) Page 27