by Chris Ryan
Slater agreed. Having thought that he had lost her altogether, he was prepared to wait for her.
‘It’ll be special,’ she’d promised him with a small smile. ‘But for the next ten days I’m not even going to think about it. And you mustn’t either.’
‘That’s a bit of a tall order,’ Slater had said.
‘Well, I expect you’ve taken a few of those in your time. And let’s face it, a covert relationship has definitely got its sexy side. Neither of us would be in this line of work if we weren’t at least a little bit addicted to secrecy, would we?’
Slater had laughed, then winced and touched his ribs. ‘I’m not telling you,’ he said.
At Vauxhall Cross, the team had been debriefed both individually and as a whole by Manderson. The general feeling, apart from regret at Andreas’s death, was that Operation Firewall had proved a great success. The Balkan desk were beside themselves with joy. Antoine Fanon-Khayat was dead, as was the Ondine deal. Any chance of its resurrection by Belgrade had been scuppered by the elimination of the entire RDB unit tasked with identifying Fanon-Khayat’s contacts.
With the potential embarrassment of the Cambodia pictures eliminated, what was more, Radovan Karadjic could now be tried for war crimes at the Hague in the full glare of publicity. It would look good, it would feel good, and mainland Europe — with the possible exception of France – would be properly grateful to Britain.
When, Manderson had politely enquired of Slater on his return from Paris, did he think that the disc might be reaching them? Slater had shrugged. He told Manderson that he had taken a stamp and a small padded envelope from Miko Pasquale’s desk – not hard to guess what those pocket-size envelopes were usually used for, given Pasquale’s profession – stuck the CD inside, addressed it, and slung it into a postbox on the way back to the car. That had been on the Monday evening, after picking up the Uzis with Leon, and now it was Thursday. The European post was generally pretty slow – chances were it wouldn’t arrive until after the weekend.
Manderson had nodded, supposing that Slater was right. Typical French, of course. Quick enough to criticise ‘slow’ British trains, but when it came to delivering a letter within seven days . . .
Just as a matter of interest, Manderson had continued, why had Slater gone to the trouble of posting the CD? Why hadn’t he just pocketed it with a view to carrying it back to London?
Slater had shrugged. ‘At that stage,’ he’d explained, ‘the RDB had Eve, and we knew that they weren’t going to give her up lightly. If we had come off worst in that firefight, and I hadn’t survived, the CD would have been in Belgrade by now. It seemed safer to trust it to the post.’
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, in 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 accordance with Cadre tradition – Debbie had poured Andreas’s ashes into the river from Waterloo Bridge, and they had wished him safe journey.
It was the time he had spent with the dying Branca that had confirmed Slater’s suspicions that the disc contained more volatile material than they had been shown. Embarrassing though the Cambodia pictures were – and one of Slater’s early instructors who had taken part in the operation had once let slip that ‘some of those Khmer lads could get a bit excitable when prisoners came their way’ – the limited damage that they could do to British interests could not begin to be balanced against the political advantage of having ‘fast-balled’ Radovan Karadjic to the Hague. No, there had to be more on the disc than that, and given that Slater had seen his own and his colleagues’ lives placed on the line, he was buggered if he was going to be lied to about it.
He had decided on a course of action which, if discovered, would have seen him expelled from the service. As he had told Manderson, he had indeed taken a padded postbag and a postage stamp from Miko Pasquale’s desk, and he had indeed sealed, stamped and addressed the envelope with the CD inside it. But he hadn’t posted the package at the Bastille, as he’d told Manderson – instead he had stuffed it into the side-pocket of his combat-pants. If it looked like Eve was going to be killed as a result of the Cadre’s refusal to hand the disc over to the RDB, Slater had resolved to hand it over to them himself, and bollocks to the consequences.
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 – Fanon-Khayat at a guess – had slipped a piece of paper bearing an 8-letter 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.
At a randomly chosen data service centre in Victoria he had had a copy made of the CD. He had then returned the original to the envelope with the Paris post-mark. He had previously sealed it with a single staple, but now he peeled away the protective strip, stuck the flap down in the normal way, and restapled it at the same point.
He had disguised the detour that the package had taken by removing the label with the Kingsway address on it. Beneath it he had written the Vauxhall Cross address, and with nothing to indicate that it had not come straight from Paris the envelope was now ready for adding to the next morning’s mail-drop.
This was not difficult – shortly after each delivery came into the building the Cadre’s letters were placed in a locked box outside the office. Making sure that he arrived before the first delivery, Slater had slipped the package into the box, and when Ray emptied it half an hour later, the package was among a sheaf of other mail.
Shortly afterwards Manderson had emerged from his office waving the CD. ‘Bloody French!’ he mouthed cheerfully to Slater, who was sitting at his terminal slowly and dyslexically bashing out a report. To Slater’s considerable relief he then dropped the envelope into a shredder without checking the date it had left Paris.
It had been a long week. Detailed report-writing was not Slater’s forte, and his slowly healing ribs and shoulder had not made the task any more enjoyable. But the report-writing had to be done if anything was to be learnt from the operation, and each of them was en
gaged 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 post-traumatic 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, Hove, 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.
Slater had been given a number of tutorials by Debbie in the use of the ATHS desktop network used to access MI6’s computerised archive, and had found Marcovic without difficulty in the course of an after-hours data-surfing session. Her file, which was marked UK EYES ALPHA and so cleared for all security service personnel, indicated that she had been born in 1933/4 to a Serbian family near Kutina, Yugoslavia. At the time of her registration as a refugee in 1946 her parents and two sisters were believed dead as a result of inter-factional strife following the 1941 German invasion, and the subsequent creation of the Independent State of Croatia (ISC). Settled post-war with a family in Croydon, Marcovic had married one Vernon Smedley, a solicitor, in 1953. Widowed in 1986, she had moved to Saltdean, where she had become an active member of the Anglo-Serbian Friendship Society, a cultural and travel organisation. In April 1996 she had applied for a tourist visa to visit Belgrade, where she had spent several weeks.
Nothing very contentious in any of it. A not especially happy-sounding life, but then how many people could lay claim to a life which looked happy on paper?
Bypassing Brighton, which he calculated would be choked with visitors on a warm summer’s day, Slater drove past Kemp Town racecourse and cut southwards towards Saltdean. Soon he was driving past caravan parks and rows of identically gabled 1930s villas, and could smell the sea and the salt on the air.
Philomena Avenue was 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.
‘Tea?’ she asked him severely.
‘Please.’
He sat down and she disappeared through a curtain of plastic strips into the kitchen. Opposite him, net curtains framed a blue-brown expanse of wind-whipped sea. On the horizon he could make out the vague form of a container ship. It barely seemed to be moving.
‘So,’ said Aleksandra Marcovic, placing a loaded tray on a small dining table. ‘You know Branca.’
This lack of curiosity about my name, thought Slater. It’s almost as if she knows that she would never be told the truth, so she’s not going to bother asking.
‘I know Branca,’ he nodded, ‘and she asked me to come and show you some pictures.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘What pictures?’
‘Can I show you? And then ask you to tell me who the people in them are?’
She shrugged. ‘If that’s what Branca suggested, then I guess that’s OK.’
Slater was longing to ask her how she knew Branca but held back, knowing that he would never be able to explain how he knew her himself. Was this woman perhaps connected to the RDB in some way?
He took the laptop out of his briefcase and carried it over to the table. The machine, no larger or heavier than a London A to Z, had been assigned to him for report-writing and communications purposes, and had a specially protected hard disk. Powering it up, he slipped the copy of the Fanon-Khayat CD into the drive. The dark blue screen lit up with the words RENAISSANCE 1945 and a password dialogue box, into which Slater typed ISERLOHN. The title page dissolved, to be replaced with a half-dozen tiny thumbnail photographs.
‘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 the first 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, Dietrich, 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.
‘You know this man?’ asked Slater eventually, conscious as he spoke of the inadequacy of the question.
‘I last saw that face nearly sixty years ago,’ said Marcovic, her chest rising and falling as she caught her breath. ‘But I’ve seen it every night and every day since then. We called him Guja, which means the Snake.’ She turned to him urgently. ‘Why are you showing me this? Is he dead?’
‘I don’t know anything about him,’ said Slater. ‘He seems to be in some kind of custody, though, in this picture. Either British or American from the English date-stamp. Was that his name, Dietrich Wegner?’
‘We never knew his name. To us he was just Guja.’
‘And it was during the German occupation of Croatia, that you . . . knew this man?’
She shook her head, as if to re-establish some connection with the present. ‘First, show me the other pictures.’
A broad desk, a conference room with pillars, an iron-jawed man in a grey suit surrounded by black-uniformed SS officers. Hauptmann Dietrich Wegner just recognisable on the outskirts of the group, smiling politely.
A handsome young m
an, brown-haired, on a white horse. Beneath his hands, folded on the pommel of his saddle, a coiled whip and a sub-machine gun. At his side, holding the horse’s bridle and smiling, Wegner again. Both men’s uniforms impeccable.
The balcony of a stone-built house. Several men and 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 Toplica River in Croatia. My parents were Serbian, and had a small farm. I had two sisters, Milla and Drina.
‘In the spring of 1941, when the Germans partitioned Yugoslavia and set up the Independent State of Croatia — the ISC — I was seven. One morning that summer German troops came in a lorry and took away my father. The lorry was full of other men from the area – we knew most of them – and they waved to me and my sisters as the lorry drove away. At midday, we heard later, ten lorries full of men had arrived in the market place in Kutina. They were unloaded, lined up against a wall, and machine-gunned. Afterwards an announcement was made that they had been executed in reprisal for a German patrol which had been ambushed by partisans. The rule was that for every German wounded, fifty Yugoslavian men would be shot, and for every German killed, a hundred would be shot.