‘The bringing to justice by a UN court of one of the most notorious perpetrators of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia went badly awry here in The Hague this morning,’ the blonde-haired reporter breathlessly announced. ‘An armoured van carrying six defendants from nearby Scheveningen Prison to the International Court building about a kilometre from here was intercepted and stopped by an armed gang who overpowered the guards using CS gas, killed two of them in an exchange of fire and set the prisoners free. The van is still where it came to a halt, a little way down the street behind me.’ The camera panned round to focus on the UN-marked van standing at the side of the road about fifty yards away. Its rear doors were open and white-boilersuited figures could be glimpsed inside. ‘Five of the prisoners, named by the authorities as Milorad Ivković, Sretko Lubarda, Dušan Melka, Srdjan Nešković and Ninoslav Rajković, fled on foot, with little apparent assistance from the gang. Lubarda and Nešković later gave themselves up and Melka and Rajković were picked up by the police at the central train station just a few hours ago, leaving Ivković, a former commander of Croatian forces in Bosnia, still on the run, along with the sixth prisoner, Dragan Gazi, undoubtedly the most famous, or infamous, of the lot. His escape appears to have been the gang’s main objective. Witnesses say he was driven away in a dark SUV-type automobile, although there are also reports he may have boarded a helicopter that touched down briefly next to the van before flying away towards the coast. That’s only about two miles from here and there’s all kind of speculation about whether he might have transferred to a speedboat or larger craft offshore. Either way, Dragan Gazi is currently a free man. The former leader of the Serb paramilitaries known as the Wolves, who terrorized Bosnia and later Kosovo in the 1990s, was arrested less than a year ago after eight years in hiding. His capture then was hailed as a triumph for the judicial process. That triumph turned sour today on this normally quiet street in this normally quiet Dutch city.’
‘So, a major embarrassment for the International Court, Janice,’ the anchorman cut in.
‘Absolutely, Gavin. Worse than an embarrassment – a disaster, unless Gazi is swiftly recaptured.’
‘And what are the chances of that?’
‘Hard to say at this stage, Gavin. The gang that carried this out were certainly ruthlessly efficient. Witnesses speak of a short but ferocious fire fight with the guards escorting the van. As we know, two of those guards were killed and one other, we’re hearing, was seriously wounded. But there don’t appear to have been any casualties on the gang’s side, maybe because the guards were partly disabled by the CS gas fired into their cab. Their assailants were obviously well-prepared and well-equipped. It was clearly a meticulously planned operation. So, I guess we can assume they have an equally meticulous plan for keeping Gazi out of the UN’s clutches now they’ve freed him. That won’t be easy, though. The Dutch and UN authorities will spare no effort in the search for him. We can expect—’
Hammond pressed the off button on the remote and the television blanked out, leaving him with silence and his distorted reflection in the screen. A meticulous plan? Yes, it was certainly that. He knew, because he had been part of it. He pointed an accusing finger at his reflected self and murmured, ‘What next, doctor? What treatment would you suggest now?’
He would go back to The Hague. It came to him as a single clear thought in a fog of anguish. He would go to ICTY and tell them everything. Ingrid had painted a grim picture of what would happen to him if he did that, but what would happen to him if he did not seemed certain to his mind to be grimmer still.
There would probably be an early-morning flight from Lugano to Amsterdam, but passing another night at the Principessa was a prospect his raw nerves could not bear. He persuaded the receptionist to check if there was an overnight train he could catch. And there was. He checked out and headed straight for the station.
Amsterdam Centraal station, early on a cold, dank Friday morning. The underpass was a swarm of commuters, students and laden travellers. Hammond bought a paper at the news-stand and stared at the front-page headline. Gazi ontsnapt, blared De Telegraaf. And Hammond had little doubt what ontsnapt meant. There was a photograph of Gazi in military fatigues, dating from his years of terror in Bosnia, and another of him, looking older but no less wily, in his ICTY mugshot. There was a photograph of the bullet-scarred prison van as well, along with pictures of the two guards who had died and a map of The Hague, with a helicopter superimposed over the North Sea shoreline.
Hammond went up to the platform where the next train to The Hague would leave from and sat down on a bench beside a man reading another paper with Gazi’s face on the front page, under the headline De Wolf is vrij. Hammond sighed and looked away.
He had had ample time to think during his largely sleepless journey from Lugano. Horror at the situation he found himself in had given way eventually to several bleak but unarguable pieces of logic. Ingrid had said telling the authorities everything he knew would be ‘inconvenient’, but if inconveniencing her was all he could do, so be it. The effect of such revelations on Alice, not to mention the rest of his family and friends, hinged on the extent of their trust in him. Perhaps it was high time he found out what that was. Doing so involved landing Piravani in a lot of trouble, but that could not be helped and Hammond suspected Marco would actually have urged him on if he could. Then there was Vidor, who might be intending to stay in his UN post, at least for a while, in order to avoid attracting suspicion. That plan was only viable if Hammond kept his mouth shut, of course. Vidor was relatively small fry in the conspiracy to free Gazi, but he might be a source of valuable leads. And bringing him down would give Hammond some satisfaction to set against the exposure of his folly to official scrutiny.
The result of that scrutiny was the big imponderable, by which he knew he should be more worried than he was. Would the authorities believe him? Or would they treat him as a willing and well-rewarded hireling of Gazi’s? If the latter, then he was in the process of digging his own grave.
The train rumbled into the station, drowning the announcer’s voice just as she reached Den Haag Hollands-Spoor in her recital of where it would stop. Hammond stood up, leaving his newspaper on the bench, and moved towards the slowing carriages.
From Hollands-Spoor station he could have taken a taxi or a tram to ICTY. Instead he decided to walk and, realizing how close he was to Zineta’s apartment, found himself choosing, without properly understanding why, a route that passed it.
There was nothing to see, of course, except her name on the card beside her bell. PEROVIĆ. Just that, in neatly inscribed capitals. He retreated to the edge of the pavement and looked up at the attic windows. They were closed and uncurtained, reflecting a grey slab of flat Dutch sky. For some reason, he thought of Zineta’s rubber plant, and wondered if anyone would water it.
The media were out in force at ICTY, the concourse in front of the building jammed with vans sprouting aerials and spewing tangled snakes of cable, engineers scurrying around while reporters and cameramen gossiped and smiled and slurped cardboard-cupped coffee. They generally looked more gratified than appalled by Gazi’s escape.
As he threaded a path between them, Hammond heard one man shout into his mobile: ‘They’ve definitely got Ivković. He made it as far as Rotterdam, apparently. But still no sign of the big fish. Looks like he slipped through the net.’
The security staff were grimmer-faced than Hammond recalled. The man behind the counter announced the courts were closed in a fractious tone that suggested the massed media folk and sundry sensation-seekers had already tried his patience.
‘I don’t want to sit in on any of the trials,’ Hammond explained. ‘I—’
‘We are closed to the public today, sir.’
‘You don’t understand. I—’
‘We expect normal business to resume next week.’
‘I’m here about Dragan Gazi.’
‘Obviously his trial will not resume this week.’
‘I have information about his escape.’
‘You can telephone the communications service if you wish, sir. Their number is—’
‘I have important information.’ Hammond’s raised voice succeeded in silencing the man and commanding his attention for the first time. ‘Believe me, your bosses will want to hear it.’
THIRTY-THREE
They believed him in the end. But the end was a long time coming. From his arrival at ICTY that Friday morning in late February to his release from custody without charge – though hardly, in the more traditional summations of guilt and innocence, without a stain on his character – was a period of nearly five months.
During those months Hammond was lodged, by the deepest of ironies, in the very same detention unit at Scheveningen Prison as Gazi had been. Giving himself up to the UN rather than the Dutch police had been a smart move, according to his lawyer, though of course it had in no sense been a calculated one on his part. The lawyer was an old schoolfriend, David Ashton, who would not have been equipped to represent him in the Dutch legal system. The cosmopolitan English-speaking world of ICTY was a different matter, however, and though, theoretically, the Dutch authorities might choose to prosecute him on their own account, Ashton thought it highly unlikely. ‘My understanding is that they’ve agreed informally to cut through the jurisdictional issues by letting the OTP decide whether you’re basically a witness or a suspect. So, if the OTP signs off on your case, you’ll be home and dry, old man.’
The OTP was the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Tribunal. After Hammond had made a full statement of his involvement in the Gazi affair, and been questioned about it, and re-questioned, and then re-questioned again, he was consigned to Scheveningen to await their conclusions. Ashton travelled from London once a week or so to brief him on progress – or the lack of it.
It was from Ashton that he learnt of the significant stages of the investigation. Vidor had never returned to his post at ICTY. It seemed he might have been a better judge of Hammond’s likely response to the position Ingrid had put him in than Ingrid herself. One of Hammond’s principal objectives was therefore vitiated from the start. Vidor had vanished as effectively as Gazi, leaving no clue to his whereabouts. Ingrid shuttled between Buenos Aires and Madrid, issuing haughty denials of all Hammond’s claims and deploying an army of lawyers to fight her corner. It soon became apparent that evidence of her involvement in the escape amounted to little more than Hammond’s word against hers. The money trail from Lugano to Liechtenstein via Grand Cayman petered out in a maze of anonymous accounts. That Hammond had authorized the transfer of Gazi’s funds was clear. But establishing precisely where and with whom they had ended up was, according to Ashton, like trying to untangle spaghetti. ‘And by the time they’ve finished, old man, it’ll be stony cold.’
Investigators were dispatched to Belgrade to question Piravani as soon as he regained consciousness. He was reported to be recovering well and it was not long before a message from him reached Hammond via Ashton. ‘Tell the doctor it was my choice to move against Todorović and to give him access to the Gazi account. I don’t blame him for any of the consequences and I intend to do everything I can to help the UN track down Gazi. And thank him for getting me such good treatment here, would you? He probably saved my life.’ What Piravani failed to mention was that he intended to negotiate immunity from prosecution by ICEFA – for helping Gazi plunder Serbian state funds – as the price of his cooperation. News that he had gone back to Italy to continue his convalescence confirmed he had been successful in this. His next message to Hammond – ‘Wish the doctor luck’ – had a distinctly valedictory quality to it.
Piravani’s hopes of seeing Todorović answer for his crimes at The Hague were in the end frustrated by the Luxembourg authorities, who preferred prosecuting him and his surviving underlings for the murder of Marcel Delmotte. The magistrate in charge of the case travelled to The Hague twice to examine Hammond and assured him Todorović would not be treated leniently. ‘He will spend many years in prison, monsieur. I can assure you of that.’
The tapes Hammond and Piravani had gone to such lengths to procure were thus rendered irrelevant, of value to ICTY only if and when Gazi was recaptured. The chances of that happening seemed to dwindle by the day. Evidently, Ingrid really had hired the best. Her father had disappeared without a trace. Reported sightings cropped up for a while, but they all proved false and as the case slipped out of the headlines they steadily diminished, then stopped altogether. Ashton suspected this came as a relief to ICTY. It meant their embarrassment over the affair faded from public attention. Security for prisoner transport was tightened and a dedicated band of investigators sustained a worldwide search for Gazi. But their search received little or no publicity. And they probably preferred it that way.
The consensus of opinion at the Scheveningen detention unit was that Gazi had fled to South America. Paraguay was commonly suggested as a bolthole, though for no particular reason other than its reputation as a safe haven for Nazi fugitives in times gone by. Hammond was regarded by the other inmates as some kind of hapless dupe suckered into assisting Gazi to escape, which was, he had to concede, an accurate enough judgement. To his surprise, no one showed him the least hostility. This was, he came to realize, a reflection of how Serbs, Croats and Bosnians who had once been at war with one another, and were accused in many cases of extreme acts of barbarism, contrived to coexist peacefully under one roof in the Netherlands. They were all in the same boat. And rocking it made no sense.
Physically, conditions at the unit were as comfortable as anyone could reasonably expect, if not more so: a cell to oneself, with a shower, toilet, writing desk, computer, radio and TV; communal games rooms, library, kitchen and gymnasium; a $25 telephone card per month and unlimited visiting rights. Het Oranje Hotel, it had been dubbed by local residents, and Hammond could certainly recall staying in worse hotels in his youth. But he had been able to book out of those, of course. And there had been no bars at the windows.
Ashton reckoned he could successfully challenge ICTY’s right to detain Hammond, on the grounds that it exceeded their remit to investigate war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. But he feared the Dutch authorities would then immediately arrest Hammond to stop him leaving the country before ICTY had concluded their investigation of his case. ‘There’s a real prison right next door, old man. Trust me. You don’t want to go there.’
So Hammond remained where he was, a semi-voluntary detainee, secretly grateful for a place to hide from the world, surrounded by people who had far more to be ashamed of than he had. He learnt to cook such Balkan delicacies as Black George’s schnitzel and to speak rudimentary Serbo-Croat. He played chess and gave English lessons to those who asked for them. He also became many inmates’ first port of call for medical advice, thereby earning the gratitude of the unit’s doctor for reducing his workload. He read voraciously and kept fit as best he could. He attuned himself to the unit’s rhythm of life. He adapted. He adjusted. He settled in.
His gravest concern throughout was how his relatives, friends and colleagues in general – and Alice in particular – would feel about him in the wake of what was by any analysis a spectacular fall from grace. He was glad neither of his parents had lived to see the day St George’s Hospital suspended from duty the doctor assorted tabloid newspapers portrayed as either foolish or corrupt or both. There were hints in the press, fuelled by belligerent quotes from Alan Kendall, that he might be something even worse – a man who had traded his surgical skills for his wife’s murder.
Alice visited him three times during his detention. The first of those visits was by some way the most harrowing for both of them. She was frightened and confused. She did not believe he had asked Gazi to arrange Kate’s murder, but she did not quite disbelieve it either. He told her what Zineta had said about the way Gazi’s mind worked and explained how deeply he regretted taking the job in Belgrade that had cost Kate her life. He explained how dee
ply he regretted many things. But, when she left, he had no idea whether she would ever trust him again.
Her second and third visits demonstrated, painfully and tentatively, that she would. She had talked the situation through with her new boyfriend, Jake, a young man who sounded like a heaven-sent embodiment of good sense. ‘He asked me whether I seriously thought you’d have come forward now, when you didn’t need to, if you really had done such a horrible thing. I realized you wouldn’t have, of course. And I think I realized I’d known that all along. I was just … so angry with you, Dad. I still am. But you know what? I’m a little less angry every day.’
The same, alas, could not be said of her uncle. Bill Dowler had reluctantly admitted to Alice that Hammond was almost certainly telling the truth. That did not mean he absolved him of responsibility for Kate’s death, however. ‘Your mother would still be alive if he hadn’t gone chasing a fat fee in Serbia.’ There was no denying that. Bill was right. So were the two Scotland Yard detectives who came to interview Hammond as part of their review of the evidence in the case. ‘You haven’t come out of this too well, have you, doctor?’ No. He had not.
But at least he was alive, unlike Zineta, whose brother Goran came to see him and broke down in tears while describing the grief-stricken condition of his elderly father. ‘He thought she had made it through the bad times. He thought she would be there to hold his hand when he died. Now … he waits for death without her.’ An apology was all Hammond had to offer by way of consolation. ‘I’m so sorry I couldn’t save her, Goran – sorrier than I can say.’ And that was absolutely true.
Zineta was survived, of course, by her son. But Patrick Bartol was also Dragan Gazi’s son, making Gazi’s escape a cause of nagging anxiety in the Bartol household, as Mary Bartol admitted when she paid Hammond a visit. ‘Will he come for our boy one day, do you think? Patrick has had so much to cope with these past few months. He watched Zineta die. And now he knows she was his mother, not me. That would be bad enough. That we could … manage, I think. But a monster for a father – a monster who is out there somewhere, hiding, waiting, watching, planning – is too much to bear.’ Yet bear it they had to, as she was well aware. ‘I wondered … if you could come to Luxembourg when all this is settled, and … speak to Patrick … about Zineta … and Gazi … and …’
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