The Templar Succession

by Mario Reading

  Hart threw open the car door. After a final, weary glance at Amira, he started across the road. He reckoned the chances of the Captain choosing just the moment he was approaching the motel room to come out searching for ice were pretty remote. Still, just to be on the safe side he cut round the rear of the motel and approached what he assumed was the Captain’s room from the side opposite the road.

  When he was twenty feet shy of the room, he ducked into the shadows at the edge of the building and inched towards the first of the room’s two windows. He could see Rider and Amira monitoring his progress from their car, fifty yards away across the main road.

  Hart hunched down near the windowsill and duck-walked the last few feet. It was then that he heard the sound of raised male voices from inside the room. Speaking what he was pretty sure was Serbian.

  Two men? Two men in the room? Where the hell had the second man sprung from?

  Hart thought swiftly back to what the German major had told him. Yes, the major had confirmed that the Captain was one of two Serbs currently serving with the FFL. One an officer and one not. The major had been oddly coy about talking about them. He had mentioned the second man just a few moments before he had accused Hart of being a spy. And then he had never mentioned him again. Maybe this was him? Maybe the Captain had warned his mate that both their covers were blown? It would make perfect sense. But it set the cat amongst the pigeons in terms of their plans. Busting into a room in the middle of the night and taking two men prisoner – and two highly trained soldiers at that – more than doubled their chances of failure. It meant the odds rose exponentially.

  Hart eased his way to the edge of the window. The curtains were tightly shut. He listened for Biljana’s voice, but he could only make out the sound of the two men going at one another. Maybe they were arguing over her? Maybe – and here his heart turned over in his chest – maybe one wanted to kill her and the other didn’t? If not, why were they arguing?

  Hart crept towards the second window. There was a crack between the curtains in this one. But the crack was high up. Nearly eye height.

  Hart tried to work out in his head whether easing his way up close to the crack, or distancing himself from it to gain some perspective, was the better thing to do. Distancing himself, he decided. But then he would see next to nothing. No. He would have to get up close and personal. Maybe he could adjust his angle of vision so that he wasn’t instantly visible? He wished he’d had time to practise somewhere. It would have been such an easy thing to do. Pull shut a pair of curtains, leaving a peephole. Then look through it, with someone positioned on the other side to yell out the instant you became visible to those in the main room. He should be so lucky, he told himself. Life, he decided, had a way of serving you blinders when you least expected them.

  He edged up to the gap in the curtain and looked through it at an angle. He could see a man. Not the Captain. The man was gesticulating. All his attention was on his interlocutor.

  Hart craned his neck so that his head was a little closer to the gap. He froze. Laid out on the nearest bed were three pistols, an assault rifle and a sawn-off shotgun. He could also make out Biljana’s feet on a second bed. He knew the feet belonged to her because he recognized her pink-and-white striped ankle socks. She had bought them in Paris. At the Monoprix Saint Paul in the Marais. As he watched, the feet moved. So she was alive. Thank God.

  Hart could no longer help himself. He needed to know her exact condition.

  He stepped across to the gap, hoping that the sudden, fluid movement, would not capture anybody’s attention.

  Biljana was sitting on the bed staring at the two men. Her arms were tied. But apart from that she seemed okay. No bruises. Hair all over the place, but then that was to be expected. Hart knew Biljana well enough by now to be able to read her body language. It was clear from her expression and the position in which she held herself – skewed to one side and tense with apprehension – that the men were arguing about her, and that she was scared.

  From his position at the window, Hart could take in Biljana, the unknown man, and the guns. But he couldn’t see the Captain. As he watched, Biljana’s eyes met his.

  She opened her mouth, then closed it again, damping the words she had been about to utter. But it had been enough. The curtains were torn apart.

  Hart sprinted away from the window and towards the car. He heard the door of the motel room being thrown open behind him.

  Right. The two of them are now going to shoot me, he told himself. And it will be my fault entirely. They are going to shoot me in the back and in the head and God knows where else and I shall plunge into the dirt and that will be the end of the matter.

  Hart reached the car without a shot being fired. Rider had the door already open waiting for him.

  Hart turned round.

  The Captain was standing in the full glare of the light emanating from the open door of the room. The second man was standing next to him. Neither of them was carrying a gun.

  As Hart watched, the Captain grinned and curled his right hand into the shape of a pistol. He raised it and pretend-fired it three times, almost as you would ring a handbell. Then he smiled again and shrugged his shoulders as if, what the hell, it wasn’t a personal thing, this future killing of Hart and his companions. Simply routine.

  Hart eased himself backwards into the car. His eyes never left the Captain’s.

  When he was inside, Rider engaged first gear and they pulled away.

  The Captain and his friend watched them all the way up the street.

  SIXTY-SIX

  ‘Leave your car behind,’ said the Captain. ‘We travel together from now on in.’

  ‘Why not take mine then?’ said Danko.

  ‘Because it’s built like a lean-to,’ said the Captain. ‘The usual French tat. And we’re going to need a four-wheel drive where we’re going.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ said Danko, as he hustled Biljana into the back seat.

  ‘Not in front of the girl, you idiot. Some of these trackers can pick up conversations. And then she could relay what I just told you in English.’

  ‘Trackers?’ said Danko.

  ‘Yes. There must be a tracker in the car. How else could they have followed us without our being aware of it? The minute we get a spare moment we truss the girl up and we go over the vehicle with a toothcomb. Before that we keep stumm. Or only talk in Serbian. If the girl tries to speak English, knock her out.’

  ‘Surely that’s another reason to take my car?’ said Danko.

  ‘Don’t be absurd. Didn’t you ever stop to think that the tracker might be in your car, not mine? No. Leave your car open. Keys inside. My guess is that in this place, it won’t even last the night. The local Mafiosi will have the Djibouti plates off and Ethiopian plates on it in no time. It’s an even better way of getting rid of it than burning the damned thing. We wouldn’t have got much for it anyway. The crate’s been clapped out for years.’

  Biljana huddled onto the back seat. She composed her features into a neutral, submissive mask so that neither of the two men would notice that she was taking in every word that they said. But beneath the beaten exterior, and the clearly visible apprehension she was manifesting as to what might happen to her, she remained alert.

  So the Captain was wise to the tracker, was he? She would have to deal with that before he had a chance to inspect the car. Her one big advantage was that he had already searched her. Unless he was hyper-vigilant, he would probably not feel the need to search her again, especially now that she appeared to be so frightened and broken down. Biljana decided that she would make good use of this fact.

  She let her mind begin to range a little. The relationship between the man called Danko and the Captain was a fascinating one. For some reason, even though Danko was cut from precisely the same cloth as the Captain, she didn’t fear him in the visceral way that she feared her
father. There were moments when they mimicked each other’s tone in the way men with a long history of partnership seemed prone to do. At other times Danko defied the Captain, and tried to rein in the tyrant’s worst excesses. The difference in behaviour fascinated her.

  Just before the disturbance at the motel, for instance, the Captain had been threatening to resort to torture to find out the names of whoever had travelled with her and put her up to the Djibouti trip. Danko had noticed the horror and revulsion reflected on her face, and had made a point of arguing openly against the use of more violence. Almost as if he wished to pass her a subliminal message. At one point it had even looked as though the two men were set to come to blows over her. Then Hart had appeared at the window and she had given him away with her surprised face.

  Nothing escaped the Captain. He was always alert. Like a feral cat. A puma maybe. Or a lynx.

  Danko struck her as more like a former Macedonian neighbour’s neutered Maine Coon.

  ‘So who were those people?’ said Danko.

  The Captain snorted. It was half a laugh, half an expression of mild astonishment at his own stupidity. ‘The man at the window was the Englishman you and I followed from the rape house in Kosovo all those years ago. The one who freed Lumnije Dardan and the three other bovines. I shot him in the back an hour or two after you left us. But the bastard has the luck of the devil. My bullet deflected off the telephoto lens on one of his cameras. He survived to shoot me back. I then spent a day and a half as his prisoner. I’m hardly likely to forget the cunt’s face, now, am I?’

  ‘Why did you never tell me about this? We all wondered where you’d gone. And when you came back all those days later you were silent as the grave. We reckoned you’d found a woman some place and gone to ground. We never thought you’d been bushwhacked by a Britannia and taken prisoner.’

  Danko was on the verge of laughing out loud until he caught sight of the Captain’s expression. This was clearly no laughing matter as far as he was concerned. Danko switched tone as smoothly as the automatic gear change on a Rolls-Royce. ‘Are you seriously telling me that this is the same man who freed this girl’s mother?’

  The Captain darted a glance at the back seat. ‘Yes. This little cocksucker’s mother.’

  Danko couldn’t help himself. ‘For pity’s sake, man, can’t you control your language? We’re not in barracks now. The girl is only fifteen.’

  ‘Then she probably knows better than you what a cocksucker is. What do you think she is? A virgin?’

  ‘I am a virgin,’ Biljana declared in a shaking voice from the back seat. ‘And I’d appreciate it if you did what Danko says. Your language is disgusting.’

  The Captain lunged at her, but Biljana was too quick for him. The fact that he was trying to drive at the same time as hitting her didn’t help matters.

  The car fishtailed across the road. The Captain righted it with a single wrench of his shoulders. ‘You’ll regret that. You’ve got a belt coming. The minute we stop I’m going to give it to you. You won’t walk straight for a week.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ said Danko, with surprising intensity. ‘We’re a team. And this girl’s our trump card. Yours and mine. You’ve got to leave her alone from now on. She’s only useful to us if she’s undamaged goods.’ He glanced pleadingly at Biljana, making sure the Captain didn’t see him. ‘I’m sure she’ll open up now. She has no reason to hide anything any more, has she?’ He narrowed his eyes encouragingly. ‘We know we are being followed. And by whom. So the cat’s already out of the bag. No point shoving it back inside again, is there?’

  The Captain jerked his chin in Biljana’s direction. ‘Well? Come on then, Joan of Arc. Cough up. Who were the other people in the car your mama’s friend was running towards? And what’s the bastard’s name anyway? I don’t think he ever got round to telling me back in Kosovo.’

  Danko grinned reassuringly. He dipped his head as if he would have liked to have given Biljana an emboldening nudge with it.

  Just like horses do when they get impatient, Biljana thought to herself. Or when they’re after carrots. The man is a complete mystery. Why is he always so explicitly trying to protect me? Have they worked out some sort of nice man, nasty man routine between them? That would be just like the Captain. Strangely enough, though, in her heart of hearts, Biljana was tentatively inclined to trust her initial instincts about Danko. Maybe he really did mean her well? She could do with an ally. Each time she talked back to the Captain it cost her more than she cared to think of in terms of Dutch courage.

  ‘Hart,’ she said at last. ‘His name is John Hart.’

  ‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ said the Captain. He seemed ridiculously pleased with himself. As if he really believed that his threats of physical violence were hitting home. ‘On to the nitty-gritty. It looked to me like there were two more of them in the car, sitting there waiting for him. A man and a woman. Come on. Spit their names out.’

  Biljana havered for a moment longer. Then she decided that, just as Danko was always implying, there was no real harm in telling the Captain at least a part of the truth. It might even force him to control himself a little. To ratchet down the tension. She was privately frightened that he would lose his temper one time and really kill her.

  ‘They’re journalists. British journalists. One’s called Rider. That’s the only name I know him by. The woman is called Amira Eisenberger.’

  ‘I should have known,’ said the Captain, hammering the steering wheel. ‘I should have bloody known. That Hart bastard who kidnapped your mother was a journalist, too, wasn’t he? Festooned with cameras like a paparazzi.’ He flicked his front tooth with a fingernail. ‘Is that what he is? A fucking paparazzi?’

  ‘You should be so lucky,’ said Biljana. ‘No. These are real journalists. And they’ve got a file on you a foot thick. They are going to make sure you are imprisoned for war crimes. You’ll probably be banged up for the rest of your life. It’s a shame they no longer have the death penalty where you are going. That would even things up a bit. For my grandmother and my grandfather. For my uncle. For my mother.’

  The Captain made a disgusted sound with his lips, like someone tasting sour milk.

  ‘Do they have a file on me too?’ said Danko, in a vain attempt to ease the atmosphere. To distract the Captain from responding in his usual way whenever the girl defied him.

  ‘Of course they fucking do,’ said the Captain. ‘What do you think? That you somehow managed to waltz through two wars, raping and torturing and killing like Genghis Khan, without anybody fucking noticing?’

  Biljana stared at Danko. This was new. Danko came over as such a reasonable, tolerant man. So unlike the Captain. It was hard to see him as a murderer and a rapist.

  ‘Did you really do those things the Captain says?’ she said to Danko, before she was able to stop herself. ‘Did you rape and torture too? Did you rape my mother?’

  Danko shrank back against the dashboard like a frightened dog. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out.

  ‘I’ll answer that,’ said the Captain. ‘Your mother was mine. Exclusively. So you’re my little brat whether you like it or not. And Danko? Yes. He did all those things and more. Didn’t you, Danko?’

  Danko stared at Biljana. She stared back.

  Finally, infinitely slowly, Danko nodded his head. ‘Yes. I did do them. I was young. And I thought the war gave us the right. I’m ashamed of who I was then. Of what I did. I would like to take it all back. But I can’t.’

  ‘Your victims must be gambolling about in their graves,’ said the Captain. ‘Desperate to climb out and get on with their miserable lives again. If it wasn’t for the unfortunate fact that you killed them all stone dead.’ The Captain lipped a cigarette from his pack and lit it. ‘Listen, my little pudding. Danko is the sort of man who will always bleed with pity after the event. But remember. I’ve seen him in acti
on. You haven’t. Don’t think for a moment that all this mild talk of his – the sticking up for you – the worrying about my swearing – is the real Danko. Far from it. The real Danko raped six women in one day. I saw him do it. He headed round the room doing one, then the other, desperate to break Fat Anda’s record. Didn’t matter how many times they’d been raped already. Danko still chalked them up on the blackboard.’ He blew cigarette smoke at the rear-view mirror. ‘I’ve seen him kill unarmed civilians too. I saw him kill an innocent old man once, six hundred yards away, just to prove the value of a looted sniper rifle he wanted to sell on to one of his war buddies. Is that the man you recognize sitting here? Is it?’ The Captain spat what remained of his cigarette out of the car window. ‘If I left you alone with him, he’d probably rape you too. Old habits die hard, you know?’ The Captain brushed a strand of tobacco from his lip with the back of his hand. ‘Well, at least you’re safe from all that stuff with me. I’m your father. And daddies don’t rape their little virgin daughterkins, though, do they? Not unless they are made very angry indeed.’

  Biljana stared in horror from one man to the other. Danko would no longer meet her gaze. The Captain turned round and leered at her as though he’d just won a chess game in record time.

  Biljana bent forwards at the waist as if she was crippled with grief. But there was a cold edge to her crocodile tears. The Captain’s diatribe had freed her from feeling even the slightest vestige of sympathy for either of the two men in front of her. Disguising the movement with her body, she felt under the passenger seat with her right hand. When she encountered the tracker she levered it first to the left and then to the right. She knew exactly how it would be attached to the seat, because Rider had shown her.

  When she had the box safely in her hand she threw herself backwards and curled up on the seat, still sobbing. When she was sure that the Captain was bored witless with her outpourings, and that she was no longer being monitored by either of the men, she slipped the tracker down the front of her jeans.