The Templar Succession

by Mario Reading

  Hart glanced at Biljana. She looked as though she’d just been tasered. ‘You can trust Amira,’ he mouthed. ‘She’s straight. It’s our only chance.’

  ‘But I get to see him first? Alone?’ she mouthed back. Her face was sheet white, like that of a cancer patient suffering from platelet collapse.

  Hart cleared his throat. ‘Biljana gets to see him first. Alone. Agreed?’

  ‘We can do that. As long as she doesn’t interfere when we grab him.’

  Hart raised an eyebrow at Biljana. She gave a curt nod.

  ‘It’s a deal,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.’

  Amira somehow managed to talk and exhale her pent-up breath at the same time. ‘I knew you’d see it our way. Rider’s already on his way out to you. He’s got all the kit. All we need is to find ourselves a safe house close to the French camp. Then we watch the comings and goings. You’ll recognize him, won’t you? The Captain?’

  ‘Unless he’s had a facelift, yes. For certain. His physiognomy is – how shall I put it? – memorable. We spent a fair amount of time together, remember? Time I won’t forget in a hurry.’

  ‘So it’ll be like a reunion of old friends?’

  Hart glanced across at Biljana. ‘Amira. I somehow don’t think Biljana shares your sense of humour.’

  FIFTY-THREE

  Rider rented a two-bedroom apartment overlooking the entrance to the French Foreign Legion HQ. The only problem was that the FFL did most of their training way out of town, in a camp situated off the main road. Which made observation of that aspect of the Legion’s routine almost impossible.

  So they concentrated most of their efforts at night. Rider, Hart and Amira took it in turn to cruise the clubs and bars of the old town on the off chance that they might encounter the Captain on one of his evenings off. It was during one of these forays that Hart found out that the main rump of the 13th Demi-Brigade had recently decamped from their headquarters at the Quartier Général Monclarin to somewhere in the UAE, at Abu Dhabi, leaving only a minor detachment back in Djibouti town to clear up.

  ‘Chances are the Captain will have gone with them, I’m afraid. We’re on a hiding to nothing here. And Abu Dhabi is not like Djibouti. Women can’t walk around freely. The military nightclubs are in closed environments, not available to tourists. If he’s not here, we don’t find him, it’s as simple as that.’

  But still they persisted.

  On the twelfth day Hart made friends with a German major. They swapped drinks and stories. Hart said he was preparing a piece on what Foreign Legion soldiers did in their spare time. The major, already deep in his cups, was mightily amused. Hart asked him about his experience of the Legion. Who were the best soldiers? Who were the worst? The German was paternalistic. Old School. Claimed to stay back with his men at Christmas time because most of them had no homes to go to any more. Still. He had opinions. And wasn’t shy of giving them.

  ‘Let’s start with the worst then. That will be the Chinese. All they want to do is cook. Next worst are the Americans. And you British, of course. Forever complaining about living conditions. You are soft. Given half a chance you will desert. No wonder you’ve lost all your recent wars.’ He thought for a moment. ‘The Koreans are the best soldiers amongst the Asians. The French themselves? They are crazy. Flaky. Like pastry mixed with too little sugar and butter. Best of all are the Brazilians. They even keep themselves and their billets clean.’

  ‘You get many Serbs?’

  ‘Serbs? No. Not any more. But we got a shedload after the Kosovo War. Tough as hell.’

  ‘I was in Kosovo,’ said Hart. ‘I did my first major piece on that war. You got anyone with you from that time?’

  The major laughed. ‘Yes. We got two. But they won’t talk to you. They won’t talk to anyone, if you take my meaning.’

  ‘Officers?’

  ‘One is, one isn’t.’

  ‘You’re holding something back, major. I can tell by your face.’ Hart was into his sixth beer by this time. The German had probably sunk eight, each accompanied by a schnapps chaser.

  ‘Too fucking right I’m holding something back.’

  ‘Can’t you tell me?’

  ‘Why do you want to know? Are you a spy?’ The German’s face had changed from inebriated vacancy to a sort of drunken suspicion.

  Hart slapped his press pass down on the table between them. ‘I’m no fucking spy. Look. All you have to do is Google me. You’ll see the sort of stuff I do. I’m just trying to chisel a story out of nothing. It’s how I make my living. It’s a sort of bum’s rush. With me as the bum, and the newspaper doing the rushing.’

  The German seemed, temporarily at least, placated. ‘Don’t go near the Serbs, then. That is my advice. I’ve heard them boasting of what they did in Bosnia and Kosovo. The Captain is not a good man.’

  ‘The Captain?’

  ‘Yes. One of them is a Captain. The other is a brigadier – what you would call a corporal.’

  ‘Do you know the Captain’s name?’

  ‘Aha. That wouldn’t do you any good. The Serbs give themselves new French names the moment they sign up. Part of the deal is that they have to learn French. Respect the hierarchy. Toe the line. Their past is used to turn them into good soldiers. We do the rest. The Captain started out as nothing. A trooper. He worked his way back up the hierarchy. There are people in this life whose destiny it is to command. The Captain is one of them. Within two years he had all the shitheads and the crazies – and trust me we’ve got a few – eating out of his hand. If you believe half of what he says he’s done, you wouldn’t want to stay in the same room with him for five seconds. He’d skull fuck your grandmother for ten euros. The man’s a self-proclaimed war criminal. If he wasn’t protected by the Legion, they’d have locked him up years ago. Prison is the best place for filth like that, as far as I am concerned. I disagree with the Legion on that one point. Fighter or no fighter, a man who abuses civilians puts himself beyond the pale.’

  Hart couldn’t disguise the look on his face.

  The German shook his head in wonder. ‘You know him, don’t you? This man I am talking about? All this Schweinerei about building a story out of nothing. You’ve already got your story, haven’t you? You’ve been feeding me beer and schnapps with one hand, and milking the hell out of me with the other. Is that how to treat your friends?’

  Hart let his head drop onto his chest in feigned submission. It wasn’t difficult with the amount of beer he, too, had on board. Added to which Hart had never found it easy to lie. It was why he took photographs. Journalists revealed their biases every time they wrote copy, but photographs always told the truth. One particular truth, at least. It was the nature of the beast.

  ‘Yes. I lied. And no. It’s not the way to treat your friends.’

  The German shrugged. ‘You know something? I’m too damned drunk to take offence. What’s more I like you.’ He cocked his head to one side as though listening for distant drums. ‘So. Are you going to tell me? Are you going to be honest? Are you going to – what do they call it in England – play cricket?’

  Hart told the German major everything. From the beginning. He could see the officer falling in and out of drunkenness again, like a man trying to clear his eyesight after having a drink dashed in his face.

  ‘Jesus Christus Gottes Sohn!’ the German said at last. ‘You are crazier than a shithouse rat. Isn’t that the expression you Brits use? You should not let a fifteen-year-old girl anywhere near that bastard. Even you…’ The officer shook his head emphatically and made a poking motion with his forefinger. ‘Even you should steer well clear.’

  ‘But I’ve promised. Promised the girl that I would arrange for her to confront her father.’

  The German slapped the table angrily with his hand. A few of the other drinkers turned round to look. But it was a military bar. People were used t
o sudden outbursts of sozzled logic. ‘Look. You listen to me. The Captain is posting out to Abu Dhabi in six weeks’ time. I know this because I prepared his orders myself. I am going too. The Legion are closing up shop here for good. Why not lie to her? Tell her he’s already gone. Even she can’t be so crazy as to imagine that she’ll be able to go over to Abu Dhabi and run the man to ground out there. Abu’s not a piss-hole like this is. It’s one of the richest cities on earth. The FFL will be kept well out of town, this I can promise you. To protect the tourists, the carpet-buyers and the gold-purchasing mothers-in-law from being outraged by our riff-raff. He goes there, you’ve lost him.’

  ‘And here? Will I be able to find him here?’

  The German half-closed his eyes. ‘You’ve not listened to a word I’ve said, have you?’

  ‘I’ve listened to everything,’ Hart assured him, with what passed for honesty in a drunken man. ‘Every fucking word. I promise you that.’

  ‘Well, you are truly making a very good try at forcing me to think otherwise.’

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Hart took Biljana on a visit out to Lake Assal, using as his pretext that they needed an outing. Lake Assal was situated seventy-five miles west of Djibouti City, and purported to be Djibouti’s answer to the Dead Sea. At 509 feet below sea level, it was both the lowest point in Africa and the world’s largest salt reserve. When seen from outside the protection of the tourist coach, it seemed to Hart both beautiful and horrifying at the same time. The water colour was of an incredibly vibrant blue, but the lake itself was surrounded by an ugly mass of volcanic detritus, sludge, pumice and God alone knows what else, and was subject to seemingly endless storms. Real scalp-lifters.

  As the major had told Hart during one of their drunken, rambling conversations, ‘…thanks to the high salt content it would be the ideal place to get both proscribed and preserved simultaneously. It is why the Legion trains there. We like places that resemble hell on earth. It makes us feel at home.’

  ‘So you’ve finally run him to ground? My father?’ said Biljana, as she hunched forwards against the wind.

  ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘The binoculars.’ She pointed to his chest. ‘And the fact that Rider finds it utterly impossible to keep a secret.’

  Hart shook his head in despair. Rider was known as Radio Free London amongst his journalistic peers. Add to that the fact that Rider and Biljana had become firm friends in the past week or two, with Rider acting as her mentor in all things journalistic, and the chances of Rider keeping his mouth shut must have fallen to about nil.

  ‘We know where he is. Yes.’ Hart held his hand up in front of his eyes in a vain attempt to protect them from the eternally shifting sand. ‘Thanks to a German major I met who feels the same as I do about war criminals.’

  ‘And can I see him?’

  Hart took Biljana by the shoulders. He lowered his head in an attempt to seem less intimidating. ‘Listen to me, princess. The major has described your father to me in detail. Both physically and in terms of his behaviour. In the fifteen years you have been present on this earth, the Captain has got worse, not better. I know you don’t want to believe this about him, but I am not making it up. The only thing that has controlled him all this time has been the Legion. The fact that he belonged to a bona fide army unit that was happy to use his undoubted skills and not bother themselves overmuch as to where and how he acquired them. The Captain, in his turn, needed the protection of the Legion to escape from his persecutors – all the decent people who would love to bang him up for war crimes committed during the Bosnian and Kosovan wars. And whatever you say about the Legion, they do protect their own. So he is still free. And likely to remain so unless we actively intervene. But – and this is of crucial importance – he has been contained. Do you understand what I am telling you?’

  ‘That he is like a piece of ammunition that has not yet gone off?’

  ‘Something like that.’ Hart couldn’t help smiling at Biljana’s ability to cut a direct path through all his guff. ‘No. Come to think of it he is more like a booby-trapped barrel bomb that might still have a few nasty surprises left after a devastating initial detonation.’

  ‘So why have you brought me out here then?’

  Hart smothered a sigh. ‘I have brought you out here so that you can take a look at him safely and from a distance. Under cover of all these tourists. But not to speak to him. Yet. I want you to see him. Weigh him up. And only then tell me whether you still want to continue with this madness. Or whether you will allow Amira, Rider and me to intervene with the Legion authorities and have him taken into custody. Because even the Legion can’t argue when proof of a man’s true identity and his past outrages is slapped onto the table in front of them.’

  ‘So he is here at the lake? As we speak?’ Biljana couldn’t mask the excitement in her voice.

  ‘Yes. The Legion are training out here. The major tells me that today they will be formally parading near the salt flats. It is customary for tourists to watch the parade. The Legion considers it good PR, apparently. So we’ll be safe inside the crowd.’

  ‘But you. The Captain, my father, knows you well, doesn’t he? He will recognize you, surely?’

  ‘I will wrap a keffiyeh about my head. With this wind it won’t seems such a strange thing to do. Even my mother wouldn’t recognize me dressed like that.’

  ‘And where will the Captain be?’

  ‘As the most senior officer present, he will be running the parade. So we’ll have no problem in identifying him. Personally, I remember the bastard as if it was yesterday. He can’t have changed that much.’

  Biljana was silent for a while, digesting both this new information and the tone of Hart’s comments about her father. ‘And we will really be safe?’

  ‘As safe as anywhere. He can’t do anything in a public place.’

  ‘All right then.’

  Hart shook his head forlornly. The words of the German major kept echoing and re-echoing through his head. ‘Daughter or no daughter, you should not let a fifteen-year-old girl anywhere near that monster.’

  Hart felt as if he were walking on eggshells. On one side lay his present loyalty to Biljana. On the other side his memories of her mother and his historical duty towards her. But surely Lumnije had abrogated all her rights when she committed suicide on her child’s fifteenth birthday? It had been a dreadful act. No wonder Biljana was not showing the sort of sympathy towards her mother that the grotesque details of her conception might presuppose.

  Biljana and Hart passed the hours until the midday parade admiring the salt sculptures on sale near the edge of the lake. All the time the wind howled and the salt and the sand beat at their unprotected faces. Hart put on his keffiyeh, and wrapped a hijab, which he bought from a roadside stall, around Biljana’s head to protect her eyes, ears and mouth from the saline dust.

  ‘This place is hell on earth,’ said Biljana.

  ‘That’s what my German major told me. But try down on the Red Sea shore,’ said Hart. ‘It will be even worse down there. Part of the tourist deal I’ve bought today is that we have lunch down on the beach near the L’Île du Diable after the parade. You’ll be lucky if your plate doesn’t take off and skitter along the sand pursued by seagulls. With you windmilling along behind it with your tongue flapping out.’

  Hart’s levity fell on stony ground.

  At dead on twelve o’clock the Legionnaires assembled for the parade. About a hundred stricken tourists, from three separate coaches, gathered to watch them. The Legionnaires were wearing desert-sand camouflage and white kepis on their heads, with the officers wearing black kepis with red tops. Even the fifty battle-hardened types present on parade appeared to wince as the salt and sand granules picked holes through their specially designed clothing.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Hart. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘You’ve seen h
im?’

  ‘Yes. I was expecting it, but it still comes as a shock after all these years. He’s the one wearing the three gold bars. With the black cap and the red top with all the gold braid in front. It’s absurd. He doesn’t look a bloody day older than he did back in Kosovo.’

  ‘That’s my father? The one standing alone?’ There was an edge of yearning in her voice.

  ‘Strictly speaking, yes. But anyone less like a father than the Captain would be hard to find. Just please, please, don’t go building any illusions about him. He’ll shatter them as soon as look at you.’

  ‘Do you think he has any other children?’

  Hart could feel himself colouring beneath his keffiyeh. Biljana’s comment had caught him catastrophically off guard. It had never occurred to him to address this other aspect of the Captain’s life. ‘I believe he is – or at least was – married. And with a child. A son, I understand. Or so your mother told me.’

  ‘So I have a half-brother?’ Biljana took hold of Hart’s sleeve. ‘Why have you never spoken of this before?’

  ‘Hell, Biljana. Because I never thought about it. And what did you expect to do if I had told you? Wander up to his wife – whose whereabouts we don’t know and who may not have survived the war – and trill, “Hey, I am your husband’s rape child. I just thought I’d pop by and pay you both a visit”?’

  Biljana fell silent. She stood beside Hart and stared at her father, fifty metres away. The Captain, who must have been about the same age as Hart, looked hard and fit, with no excess fat. He had the sort of physique you get from hard running – not pumping iron in a gym and popping steroids.

  ‘Can I have the binoculars, please?’

  Hart grunted and handed Biljana the binoculars.