I didn’t see the van pull up. Anna rushed through the door. Her face was white as chalk and her eyes glittered with barely restrained ferocity.
‘Did you do it? Did you get the tracker on?’
‘It’s there.’
‘They tried to come after me but they couldn’t get the gate open, so they just shot at me instead. I didn’t realise until a bullet hit the bit of corrugated iron I was holding and it stung my hands.’
‘You shot one of them.’
‘Did I? Yes. . .’
She stood up, stumbled out into the street and was sick on the pavement. I went out and helped her back to the van. We drove to the other side of Alexander Makedonski and parked in a street of small, well-kept villas. A rapacious-looking power boat called Sofia sat on a trailer in front of the garage of the house beside us. The temperature had finally dropped below zero and the tarpaulin stretched over its cockpit was lightly furred with ice.
Anna called Eleni to tell her where we were. I turned on the phone linked to the tracker and waited for it to boot. Now that our assault on Haclan’s yard was over, the endorphins coursing through my veins had run dry and various bits of my body felt sore. I touched my split ear and found it had formed a large clot.
Anna finished her call. ‘Eleni’s on her way – she’s bringing you a coat.’ She handed me the Sauer. ‘I’m OK now. I didn’t mean to shoot at him. I was so angry.’
‘It was one hell of a diversion, anyway.’
‘I did call the police. The woman who answered wanted to know if I’d been drinking. Has there been an actual crime, she kept asking? Hundreds, I told her. Child prostitution, abduction, murder. She gave me a crime reference number to shut me up. We’ll send someone round as soon as possible, she said. You were right, it was completely pointless.’
‘Got you!’
‘What?’
‘It works. Look.’ I showed her the row of numbers. ‘The long-lats for the Mitsubishi. Wherever it goes now, we can find it. How long till Eleni gets here?’
‘Twenty minutes or so.’
I powered up Anna’s laptop and found the coordinates on the GIS. The Mitsubishi hadn’t moved – but I thought it would, very soon. People like Haclan have a fine instinct for absenting themselves when a messy end is in the offing. It was conceivable that he’d abandon Katarina and any other children in his charge, but what I feared most was that they’d take them in another vehicle, one we couldn’t track. Still, there was something about that big, frowsty camper van that made it ideal for transporting stolen children. You could imagine it being driven by a social worker or a teacher, but a child trafficker?
‘What do we do now?’
‘Wait. As soon as they move, we follow. They’ll think they’re safe and their guard will drop. They’ll pass through public places, town centres and suchlike, where they won’t want to show their guns. There’ll be an opportunity – we just have to be ready.’
‘I am ready. Right now.’
‘I’d like to be there when they realise all that mayhem was created by a female expert in the early years of the Ottoman Empire. Every crime boss in the Balkans will be working on a joke about it.’
‘They were men just like Haclan – marauders, exploiting the decline of the old order to build their own power bases. One empire wanes, another waxes. He would have loved it.’
‘Haclan’s is waning.’
‘Child trafficking was rife, too,’ said Anna absently. ‘They even made it official. Christian boys seized and trained up as state enforcers, underage girls pressed into the harem.’
‘Do you think they knew it was wrong?’
‘They didn’t think like that – they believed they were one step from divinity. It was right to acknowledge their supremacy, wrong to defy them. I wonder if the children’s mothers tried to get them back.’
‘I guess there were women just like you, rattling the cages of men like Haclan.’
‘I want Katya back. My God, I want her back. Where is Eleni?’
We sat for a few minutes, and then she said: ‘Will you hold me again please, James?’
Without saying much more about it, we went and lay down together in the back of the van. Snowflakes fell past the rear window and the silence deepened. The ribbed floor was cold and we sought each other’s arms and lay our cheeks against each other’s without kissing or wanting to kiss but only for the comfort of it. Her smell was faint, like a rose that has been too long without water. The cramped steel box cocooned us from the outside world and made us oblivious to it, and it seemed as if we had spun off into another dimension – a place for once devoid of choices and meaning, a place where past and future could not make their implacable demands. We were in abeyance, suspended, paused.
She unwrapped her arms from my neck.
‘Check the tracker, James.’
I rolled away from her and dialled. The numbers flicked onto the screen. Different numbers. I dialled again. Different again.
‘Anna, we’re on.’
‘We have to wait for Eleni. What can she be doing?’
‘It doesn’t matter if they get a head start. We shouldn’t follow too close, anyway.’ I checked the coordinates on the laptop. ‘Leaving town, going south. The signal’s good. Will you draw their route on the map?’
The more frequently I called for the tracker to report, the quicker the battery would die. But in the intervals between sending requests for the latest coordinates, time slowed to such a degree that I thought my heart might stop in sympathy. The Mitsubishi passed the junction with the A2, which went west to the Bulgarian border, and carried on south.
‘Where does it go?’
‘Greece – Thessaloniki.’
A border. A port. We had our passports, but if they transferred to a boat in Thessaloniki. . . The van had a towbar, and for a moment I considered hitching up the speedboat Sofia parked in the driveway next to us. And then? Pursue them across the eastern Mediterranean, to Istanbul, Izmir, Cairo. . .
‘How far to the border?’
‘Maybe three hours.’
Eleni arrived at last. I put on the navy blue fleece-lined coat she’d brought me and we piled into the Fiat. Anna drove – I knew the car to be somewhat characterful, and I didn’t trust myself not to hammer it to death. Besides, driving would give her something to focus on. As soon as we were on the move, I reached for the radio, which was hissing away as usual, and pushed my fingers into the cassette slot to get a good grip.
‘Do you mind?’ I asked.
‘Please go ahead,’ said Anna. ‘I’ve been listening to that station for years and I’ve never found it interesting at all.’
I levered the radio out of its cradle and disconnected the wiring.
‘Blissful silence,’ said Eleni. ‘What should I do with this?’
I turned to find her pointing my Sig Sauer pistol at the roof – I’d dropped it into the holdall in the rear of the Fiat when we’d swapped cars. The gun sat very easily in Eleni’s hand, I noticed.
‘Can you find somewhere to hide it?’
She swept a pile of papers aside, then picked one off the floor. ‘Dr Galica, you are weeks—No, you are months behind with your marking. Vice-Principal Ongoric will be displeased.’
‘B minus, do you think?’
Eleni produced a pen and wrote on the paper, then put it on the floor with the others. ‘Done. The Sauer can go here.’
She indicated a tear in the upholstery from which protruded a tongue of stained foam rubber.
‘There’s no manual safety, but you can decock it,’ I said. ‘Here—’
‘Very useful,’ said Eleni, flipping the lever and stowing the weapon in the torn seat, along with the spare clips.
‘You’ve handled a semi-automatic before?’ I asked.
‘Certainly. I spent two years in the Albanian Army and I was women’s multi-disciplinary shooting champion in both of them. Pistols were my best weapon, followed by rifles. Machine guns are noisy and not accurate – a
man’s weapon, do you think, James?’
‘Eleni, you never told me that,’ said Anna.
‘Well, it is not a thing to talk about in the senior common room.’
‘I’ve never even seen you in the senior common room. To make it up to me, you must do all the marking in the car. B minus for everyone!’
Anna had already proved her mettle; and the discovery that I had a latter-day Amazon marking history essays in the seat behind now made me think that our little retinue might be more formidable than it appeared. We had a pair of guns between us, too – I still had the one I’d taken from the man I had driven out of Haclan’s yard: a lousy old Excam Tanfoglio GT 380, but a gun which I knew worked because it had been fired at me.
The atmosphere in the car became almost buoyant as we rattled south along the A1. The city thinned out and the traffic eased. Lorries loomed behind their headlights, then blasted by in a rolling tumult of air. After twenty-five kilometres, the long-lats showed that we were gaining on the Mitsubishi – not very fast, but the sense of optimism was palpable. The snow stopped and a swollen ridge of cloud rolled back, leaving a bright moon in a sky as clean as wet slate.
We left the plains south-east of Skopje and started to climb into sparsely forested hills with patches of exposed rock like scrape-marks left by giant hands. The darkness was studded with lights from distant farmsteads and villages that seemed to pulse like embers exposed to a fitful wind. A hand’s-width of fresh snow lay on the road, tramlined by the wheels of vehicles ahead. One set of tracks was broad and carried the imprint of tyres with deep treads.
‘The Mitsubishi has off-road tyres,’ I said to Anna. ‘Those could be its tracks.’
‘Can we really be so close?’
‘All the farm vehicles round here will have wheels like that,’ said Eleni.
‘Quite right,’ said Anna. ‘We mustn’t get our hopes up.’
Our own tyres were narrow and almost bald – though the snow was still soft, and with three people on board the Fiat had just enough grip to proceed uphill. We stopped gaining. The gap was about twenty kilometres when we entered a long tunnel and lost GPS contact. Anna pressed the accelerator to the floor and leaned forward over the steering wheel. The fluorescent strips mounted high in the concrete walls sent shadows sliding over her arms as we raced across the wet tarmac, and I experienced again that sense of otherworldliness which had overwhelmed me when I’d lain beside her in the back of the van.
The Fiat came out of the tunnel much too fast and for seconds we were pirouetting towards the crash barrier, a gleaming slab of mountainside and the hollow, blue-black sky panning by turns across the windscreen. The back end of the Fiat thumped into some obstruction beneath the snow and sent us skidding back the other way, but the momentum was gone and we slithered to a halt, the engine clattering feebly in protest.
‘I think James might drive now,’ said Eleni.
Anna and I swapped places and we ground on. Anna was trying to get the cellphone to call for a location.
‘Fast-dial one.’
‘It’s not working.’
I cajoled her into turning off the phone and starting again. At last the tracker reported in. Still about the same distance ahead. We crossed a pass where a current of funnelled wind rattled the Fiat’s windows, then followed a long curve round the peak.
‘Is that them?’
Two sets of headlights, shovelling the darkness aside as they set out across the plain below.
‘Eleni, are we permitted to think that might be them?’
‘Permission granted.’
The descent was nerve-racking. The Fiat felt both heavy and unpredictable, responding to the wheel either not at all or with a ponderous ploughing motion that had us leaning away from the turns like amateur sailors in a heeling scow. The engine was too small to check our speed effectively, but the brakes locked up at the faintest dab. We dropped below the snowline, but the temperature had fallen again and the road was dappled with patches of ice that glistened menacingly in the yellowish haze of our headlights.
By the time we reached the plain, we were nearly thirty kilometres behind. I coaxed the Fiat up to a hundred kph, then a hundred and twenty. . . But that caused such a frantic howl from the transmission that I settled for a hundred and ten and we drove for an hour, the road taking a series of broad sweeps past Veles, Gradsko, Negotino, before entering another tunnel at the start of the passage through the mountains just north of the border with Greece.
We were less than five kilometres behind when Anna announced that they’d turned off the main road and were heading east.
‘There’s another crossing into Greece,’ she said. ‘Just south of Dojran Lake. It looks like a tiny place – I can’t even see a proper road on the Greek side.’
Tiny. . . and probably comatose. I’d been hoping we could challenge them at the border, where there’d be armed police, officials, bright lights, barriers, queues. . . In fact, I’d allowed myself to believe that within the hour we might reunite Katarina with her mother. At least I hadn’t got as far as proposing this plan to Anna.
‘Or I suppose they could carry on east, to the border with Bulgaria.’
I picked up speed, trying to suppress the feeling that the rescue of Katarina had always been a hopelessly quixotic endeavour and would now come unstuck. Haclan’s men drove east for twenty kilometres, then south again.
‘Greece it is.’
I wanted to get close enough to see them at the border, at least, and drove fast along the flanks of a series of hills. We watched the headlights of Haclan’s vehicles below us, creeping towards the border. A lake came into view, a sheet of blackness fringed with lights from the houses set round its shores. We skirted the dark water, passed through a pair of melancholy resort towns, then rounded a bend at the southern end of the lake. They were parked up in a lay-by less than three hundred yards ahead.
I took the first turning I could, a rough track shielded by a screen of trees, killed the lights, turned the car round and switched off the engine. Anna wound down her window and we could just make out the low thrum of idling engines.
Anna spoke in a whisper. ‘Now’s the time, James. Isn’t it?’
‘Let me go and check what they’re up to.’
I loped along behind the trees, veering away from the road to avoid gaps in the cover. There was an abandoned tractor on a square of dirt almost opposite their vehicles. I got in behind it. The Mitsubishi and the white Mercedes saloon I’d seen outside my apartment in Skopje were thirty yards away. A little further on, the road was spanned by an awning of corrugated iron; a plastic hut and striped barrier marked the Macedonian side of the border. An illuminated sign above the hut said Border Closed in several languages.
Five men were standing round the Mercedes, faces glowing in turn as they took drags on cigarettes. No sign of Haclan. Relaxed, chatting, stretching. This was their habitual route into Greece, I realised: a sleepy little place with underpaid officials pleased to make a bit extra by raising the barrier to a couple of vehicles passing through at dead of night. Switch off the surveillance cameras, take the cash, go back to sleep. Fine for them – but for us, a dead end.
My mind ticked frantically through the options. Buy our way through? Corrupt officials are wary, they like well-established arrangements with people they can trust not to blab – criminals with plenty to hide, for instance. If the bribe was refused, the man might warn Haclan’s gang that they were being followed, and we’d lose the advantage of surprise. Take him out, then. Tie him up and lock him in a storeroom. That wouldn’t be difficult, but there might be others. And there was still the Greek end of the crossing to negotiate – all I could see of that was a halo of arc light several hundred yards away, at the far end of a corridor of road fenced off with winking lines of razor wire.
One of the men went to the side door of the camper van, slid it open and said something. Two girls came to the door and climbed out. The man directed them to the front, where they stood
awkwardly in the glare of the headlights, watched by the semi-circle of smokers. The man gestured at the ground and one of the girls shook her head and started back to the open door. The man caught her by the wrist and slapped her across the cheek. He yelled something and raised his hand. The two girls cowered, then the one who hadn’t tried to get away pulled her trousers down and quickly squatted in the dirt. The other girl hesitated, saw the man stepping towards her, then did the same. One of the smokers said something and the others jeered, then spat at the crouching girls. It was horrible to watch.
You can take these five – they’ll be two down before they even know they’ve been attacked.
Shoot it out, with a carload of children in the line of fire?
Have to do it somewhere. . .
Eleni thought so, too. She was lying twenty yards away at the foot of a tree and her first shot had the outermost of the group of men staggering for cover with one hand clamped over his hip. I pulled the Excam and got the next shot in, and it caught the tail light of the Mercedes. Eleni hit its rear side window and a glittering cascade of glass dropped from the door frame.
Two of the men grabbed the girls and hauled them to the door of the camper van. The Mitsubishi’s lights went out, then the Mercedes’ too, and we were staring into darkness. A moment later there was a honk and a flash from the road between the border posts. The barrier by the hut cranked upwards. The Mercedes heeled out onto the road and the Mitsubishi lurched after it.
A dark figure rushed into the road near Eleni’s position. Anna. She sprinted past me as the two vehicles swept through the open barrier and accelerated towards the grainy light at the Greek end of the border crossing. Anna’s voice lashed out, screaming, scraping at the air between herself and the receding back end of the camper van. The vehicle’s rear lights came on and revealed the silhouette of a uniformed man jogging towards us between the lines of razor-wire.
Eleni caught up with Anna, wrapped her arms around her waist and managed to wrestle her to a standstill by the barrier. The uniformed man came up, flapping his arms at them and shouting. I could see Eleni’s shoulders quaking as Anna hung in her arms – or perhaps it was just the flickering of a failing tube in the fluorescent lights overhead. She faced the man and delivered an imperious rebuke. He turned his back on them with a toss of the head, and the two women walked back down the road towards me.
Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2) Page 28