The Hit List
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Manderson had nodded slowly. 'You did well, Neil,' he said, extending a congratulatory hand. 'Bloody well.'
On the Friday night, fully debriefed, the Paris team plus Debbie and Ray had gone out to celebrate and, m their own way, to bid goodbye to Andreas. By tradition, each member of the Cadre kept a 'stag night' account in which a few hundred pounds was permanently invested. Should he or she die in the field, this money was used by the others for a giant piss-up.
These memorial evenings, Slater discovered, invariably took place in a private room in a pub in Waterloo. Only Guinness and champagne were drunk. The room was booked for a stag night, in order that the ensuing drunkenness, singing, fighting, shouting and tears should come as no surprise to the landlord.
They had arrived at the Green Man early, stayed late, and drunk a very great deal. In retrospect the details of the evening were a little blurred, but it was generally agreed that Andreas's send-off had been every bit as spectacular as Ellis's. Afterwards - again in
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cordance with Cadre tradition - Debbie had poured ireas's ashes into the river from Waterloo Bridge, they had wished him safe journey. It was the time he had spent with the dying Branca had confirmed Slater's suspicions that the disc tttained more volatile material than they had been ^wn. Embarrassing though the Cambodia pictures -- and one of Slater's early instructors who had en part in the operation had once let slip that 'some of : Khmer lads could get a bit excitable when prisoners i their way' -- the limited damage that they could do kitish interests could not begin to be balanced against political advantage of having 'fast-balled' Radovan djic to the Hague. No, there had to be more on the : than that, and given that Slater had seen his own and ^colleagues' lives placed on the line, he was buggered : was going to be lied to about it. le had decided on a course of action which, if Covered, would have seen him expelled from the rice. As he had told Manderson, he had indeed i a padded postbag and a postage stamp from Miko juale's desk, and he had indeed sealed, stamped and sed the envelope with the CD inside it. But he I't posted the package at the Bastille, as he'd told aderson - instead he had stuffed it into the side itet of his combat-pants. If it looked like Eve was to be killed as a result of the Cadre's refusal to the disc over to the RDB, Slater had resolved to it over to them himself, and bollocks to the equences.
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But they had rescued her, and so he had posted the CD shortly before leaving Paris. Not to the Cadre's office at Vauxhall Cross, however, but to an accommodation address in Kingsway, a short walk from Holborn underground station. In return for a modest monthly charge paid to a newsagent, and anticipating frequent changes of address, Slater had used the service since his departure from the Regiment.
On the Saturday following his return to London he had collected the package -- which had in fact arrived a mere two days after posting - taken it back to his flat, and run it through the laptop. It was password protected, but some thoughtful soul -- FanonKhayat at a guess'--had slipped a piece of paper bearing an 8letter place-name inside the CD case. Armed with the means of entry, Slater had accessed the images inside.
There were six of them, and as he had suspected they were nothing whatever to do with SAS activity on the Thailand-Cambodia border. The images were much older than the ones that had been projected at the Firewall briefing, and while obviously historically interesting had meant nothing to Slater.
He sincerely hoped that they would mean more to Aleksandra Marcovic -- whoever she was. Branca had told him nothing about the woman except her name and the fact that she lived near Brighton. There hadn't been time for more, but before Branca died Slater had made a solemn promise that he would find Aleksandra Marcovic and show her the photographs on the disc.
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At a randomly chosen data service centre in Vie had had a copy made of the CD. He had arned the original to the envelope with the ParfJS st-mark. He had previously sealed it with a single' pie, but now he peeled away the protective strip, ick the flap down in the normal way, and restapled : at the same point.
He had disguised the detour that the package had ten by removing the label with the Kingsway address it. Beneath it he had written the Vauxhall Cross ress, and with nothing to indicate that it had not straight from Paris the envelope was now ready adding to the next morning's mail-drop. 'i This was not difficult -- shortly after each delivery ic into the building the Cadre's letters were placed > locked box outside the office. Making sure that he ived before the first delivery, Slater had slipped the ckage into the box, and when Ray emptied it half an ir later, the package was among a sheaf of other
Shortly afterwards Manderson had emerged from his
ice waving the CD. 'Bloody French!' he mouthed srfully to Slater, who was sitting at his terminal vly and dyslexically bashing out a report. To Slater's siderable relief he then dropped the envelope into
iredder without checking the date it had left Paris, had been a long week. Detailed report-writing not Slater's forte, and his slowly healing ribs and alder had not made the task any more enjoyable.
kt the report-writing had to be done if anything was
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to be learnt from the operation, and each of them was engaged in a similar task. The consoling factor was that the promised week's leave awaited them - on Friday evening they would be going their separate ways.
Slater had resolved to visit Aleksandra Marcovic on the Saturday morning.
Slater knew he shouldn't really have been driving - a breathalyser test would probably have shown a unit or two of alcohol in his blood from an end-of-week drink hosted by Manderson the night before. On the other hand he had never felt more alert, more alive. A posttraumatic stress reaction would be stalking him in the wake of the slaughter in Paris - and there was no chance of escaping the Darklands after a bloody fiesta like that - but it hadn't yet declared itself. Even the pain lancing through his ribs and shoulder served merely to remind him that he was alive - that he had stood eyeball to eyeball with death and walked away.
He was on the crest of the Downs now, and the grass, defiant of the wind, was flattening itself against the chalky hillside. Far below him was the long sprawl of Brighton and its satellites -- Portslade, Have, Kemp Town, Rottingdean.
Aleksandra Marcovic lived between the two easterly suburbs of Rottingdean and Saltdean. She was not on the telephone but it turned out that she was one of the hundreds of thousands of British citizens known to the security services, having been settled in the UK as a refugee after the Second World War.
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ater had been given a number of tutorials by bbie in the use of the ATHS desktop network used ccess MI6's computerised archive, and had found covic without difficulty in the course of an after; data-surfing session. Her file, which was marked j,'EYES alpha and so cleared for all security service annel, indicated that she had been born in 1933/4 Serbian family near Kutina, Yugoslavia. At the i of her registration as a refugee in 1946 her parents ^two sisters were believed dead as a result of inter anal strife following the 1941 German invasion, jithe subsequent creation of the Independent State Croatia (ISC). Settled post-war with a family in an, Marcovic had married one Vernon ley, a solicitor, in 1953. Widowed in 1986, she f
passing Brighton, which he calculated would be with visitors on a warm summer's day, Slater s past Kemp Town racecourse and cut southwards Saltdean. Soon he was driving past caravan Stod rows of identically gabled 1930s villas, and I smell the sea and the salt on the air.
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Philomena Avenue wa
s the easternmost of several roads flanking a line of seafront shops. Number 54, a small, pebbledashed villa fronted by a spray of Pampas grass, was the end house in the row. Climbing from the car, bracing himself against a sharp wind which worried its way between the net-curtained villas, Slater rang the bell.
The door was answered by a tall, gaunt-faced woman in a candlewick dressing gown, who regarded him for a long moment in silence.
'Aleksandra Marcovic?' he asked her.
She said nothing, and Slater noticed that beneath the bluish perm her ears were curiously deformed - little more than stumps. Perhaps, he thought, she was deaf.
'I've come on a rather unusual errand,' he continued uncertainly. 'My name--'
'I know who you are,' she said flatly. 'You're a man of death. I've known people like you all my life. Does your name matter?'
Slater stared at her, stunned. There was, as she had said, a kind of recognition in her eyes. Did a familiarity with violent death truly mark you in some way?
'My name doesn't matter. I was given your name by Branca Nikolic.'
The woman looked at him, looked down at the briefcase in his hand. 'You had better come in.'
Slater followed her into the pastel-coloured lounge and she indicated an armchair covered in a crocheted shawl. In the other chair an obscenely large cat snored on a newspaper.
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Pea?' she asked him severely. ?lease.'
ie sat down and she disappeared through a curtain Elastic strips into the kitchen. Opposite him, net framed a blue-brown expanse of wind?ed sea. On the horizon he could make out the �e form of a container ship. It barely seemed to be
ig
),' said Aleksandra Marcovic, placing a loaded tray ismall dining table. 'You know Branca.'
lack of curiosity about my name, thought It's almost as if she knows that she would never Id the truth, so she's not going to bother asking. I'know Branca,' he nodded, 'and she asked me to
and show you some pictures.' er eyes narrowed. 'What pictures?' >an I show you? And then ask you to tell me who aple in them are?'
shrugged. 'If that's what Branca suggested, then that's OK.'
ter was longing to ask her how she knew Branca eld back, knowing that he would never be able to how he knew her himself. Was this woman ps connected to the RDB in some way? : took the laptop out of his briefcase and carried it < to the table. The machine, no larger or heavier i/a London A to Z, had been assigned to him for t-writing and communications purposes, and had dally protected hard disk. Powering it up, he the copy of the Fanon-Khayat CD into the
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drive. The dark blue screen lit up with the words renaissance 1945 and a password dialogue box, into which Slater typed iserlohn. The tide page dissolved, to be replaced with a half-dozen tiny thumbnail phbtographs. ,
'Sugar and milk?' asked Aleksandra Marcovic.
Thanks.'
'A biscuit?'
'Please.'
With these rituals observed, she seated herself at the chair next to him, and took a pair of plastic-framed spectacles from a case. Glancing at her, he could see curiosity on the broad features. Positioning the cursor over the4irst thumbnail, he clicked.
A black and white image resolved itself.
Next to him, Marcovic froze. 'Oh my God,' he heard her whisper. 'Oh my God, no.'
On the screen was a portrait of a young, fair-haired man in his early twenties, standing smartly to attention and holding a card marked 'wegner, Dietnch, hauptmann'. A smudged date-stamp read 28 November 1945. Despite his military stance and fixed gaze, the young man was not in uniform, but wearing a tightly buttoned jacket of tweed or wool. He was" unshaven. One cheek appeared to be badly bruised. Next to Slater, Marcovic was gasping in disbelief. Her hand was across her mouth and she was shaking her head as if in shocked denial of the image before her. For several minutes she said nothing, but simply stared at the laptop screen.
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|tYou know this man?' asked Slater eventually, :ious as he spoke of the inadequacy of the stion.
last saw that face nearly sixty years ago,' said covic, her chest rising and falling as she caught her ith. 'But I've seen it every night and every day since i. We called him Guja, which means the Snake.' I turned to him urgently. 'Why are you showing me
Is he dead?'
(don't know anything about him,' said Slater. 'He to be in some kind of custody, though, in this re. Either British or American from the English stamp. Was that his name, Dietrich Wegner?' fe never knew his name. To us he was just Guja.' id it was during the German occupation of ia, that you . . . knew this man?' lie shook her head, as if to re-establish some ^tion with the present. 'First, show me the other �.'
i broad desk, a conference room with pillars, an itjawed man in a grey suit surrounded by black led SS officers. Hauptmann Dietrich Wegner cognisable on the outskirts of the group, smiling ay.
andsome young man, brown-haired, on a white Beneath his hands, folded on the pommel of his ft, a coiled whip and a sub-machine gun. At his Holding the horse's bridle and smiling, Wegner i Both men's uniforms impeccable. : balcony of a stone-built house. Several men and
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women in hiking clothes drinking and smoking cigarettes. A uniformed man lifting black bread to his mouth. Wegner, wearing a patterned sweater, pointing down to the valley below.
A badly blurred image. A man in a black apron hurrying past a low shed, carrying a knife and apparently wearing some kind of necklace. To one side of him, preoccupied, Wegner.
Four men standing beneath leafless trees by a river, talking. Snow falling. One of the men wearing the robes of a monk. Another recognisable as Wegner.
As each image appeared, something in Aleksandra Marcovic seemed to die. She started mumbling to herself in Serbo-Croat, shaking her head, endlessly repeating the same few phrases. Finally she stood up and walked several times around the small room. She was very pale.
'Where did you get these pictures?' she asked him. 'From Branca?'
Slater nodded.
'It's unbelievable,' she said. 'It's just unbelievable. After so long to see the faces of these men . . .'
Slater was silent. He reached for his tea, which had cooled and was too sweet. He crunched a biscuit between his teeth.
Aleksandra Markovic closed her eyes. Reached into the past.
'I was born in a small town - not much more than a village, really - called Dusovac, on the Tophca River j in Croatia. My parents were Serbian, and had a small
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I had two sisters, Milla and Drina. 'In the spring of 1941, when the Germans partitioned agoslavia and set up the Independent State of Croatia fthe ISC - I was seven. One morning that summer i troops came in a lorry and took away my father. ; lorry was full of other men from the area - we knew of them - and they waved to me and my sisters as lorry drove away. At midday, we heard later, ten full of men had arrived in the market place in a. They were unloaded, lined up against a wall, and pounds ine-gunned. Afterwards an announcement was that they had been executed in reprisal for a patrol which had been ambushed by partisans, rule was that for every German wounded, fifty avian men would be shot, and for every German , a hundred would be shot.
i fact, most of those executed that day were Serbs, augh there were Croatians who resisted, there many who were desperate to collaborate, and j|ed their loyalty to the Third Reich by turning the Serbs who lived among them. They burnt ^looted our schools and churches, banned our lie script, and forced us to wear patches saying fir we were. And that was just the beginning of it - arly days.
tte man set up by the Nazis as the head of the ISC lent was one of the most evil, degenerate es who ever lived -- a monster called Ante c. If you go to the second picture - there -- that's rath the SS officers.
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'Pavelic styled himself the Poglavni
k, or Fiihrer, and his followers called themselves the Ustashe. A policy was decided on - probably at that desk there, in the photograph -- whereby a third of Serbs would be forcibly converted to Catholicism, a third would be expelled, and the rest quite simply killed. Permission was given, in effect, for Serb men, women and children to be murdered at will. And hell came to Yugoslavia.
'That summer, after my father was taken away, terrible stories began to reach us. Orthodox priests were being murdered - often tortured to death - Serbian mothers and their children had been thrown over the- cliffs at Jadovno, Serbian corpses were hanging from scaffolds all the way from Kutina to Banja Luca. We were petrified - frightened beyond belief - but we didn't know what to do. We had nowhere to go; to take to the roads would have been suicide. So we stayed where we were, and mourned my father, and lived on the food we grew, and hoped that people would forget we were there.
'Then one afternoon in August we saw smoke, coming from one of the fields, and heard strange' sounds. My sister Drina and I went out to see what wa&| happening, and from the smell we thought someone! was cooking beef. But when we got near we saw .. something I cannot describe. It was a naked man, tie to pegs in the ground, and a fire had been lit on chest. He was still alive.
'We ran away. We didn't dare go near. But whe
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got near the house we saw that we had been lowed by six men in uniform. They caught up with told us to stay where we were, and went inside. |'It took them two hours to finish with my mother my oldest sister Milla, and then there were shots, men walked me and Drina to a truck. We were we were going somewhere we would be looked r. A camp -- not far away -- where we would be safe, pre would be other children there. It was called fiovac.
|f Yugoslavia under the black legions of the Ustashe * hell, Jasenovac was the inmost circle of that hell, ficruelty there was bestial, unspeakable, far beyond iing you would think human beings were capable They burnt prisoners alive, they cut their heads off , saws . . . There were children there -- thousands Jdren - but they received no mercy either. The ite, in fact.'