The UN policemen finished their drinks and moved away, and Kassim realized they had been watching the arrivals board. Simultaneously, there was a growing commotion among a small group of press cameramen gathered near the arrivals door, hoisting their equipment ready to capture footage of whoever was about to emerge.
Two of the policemen went to stand in front of them, while the third joined a couple of troopers from an American infantry regiment standing by the main exits. Outside, two more troopers in full battledress stood watching the approach road and car park, their Hummer vehicle standing a few yards away.
Kassim sipped his tea and yawned deliberately, turning to check the arrivals board. As he’d expected, the UN envoy was going to be heavily guarded while he was here, with a very visible security presence.
And it wasn’t going to do him a single bit of good.
FORTY-SEVEN
The compound near Mitrovica hadn’t improved at all over the years since Harry had last seen it; it seemed smaller than he remembered, with fewer containers and the concrete base pitted and cracked, weeds sprouting towards the grey daylight. The floodlights high on the gantry looked battered and weather-beaten, and the gantry itself had a line of rust running its length like dried blood. Most of the Portakabins had been burned, and one only had to turn and look at the surrounding mesh fence with a roll of razor wire along its top, to gain the feeling that this was a ghost camp long overshadowed by the spectre of what had happened here.
Archie Lubeszki, the UNMIK security man, unlocked the gate and led the way inside. They had left his white UN vehicle on the road with a driver standing guard. The atmosphere was damp and sour, like an old garage long unused, and a lingering whiff of burnt wood hung in the air. In the remaining Portakabins, the electrical fittings had been torn from the walls, the wires left hanging bare, and whatever else had been salvageable had gone.
‘Locals,’ Lubeszki explained. He was a stocky Canadian in his fifties with a beard and thick glasses. ‘They broke in a week ago without warning and trashed the place.’
‘If it had been me,’ said Rik with feeling, ‘I’d have done the same.’
Lubeszki nodded. ‘I guess. But it’s been here a while, so why now?’ The last part was rhetorical.
Harry walked across to the huts and along what had been a linking corridor, his footsteps drumming on the warped and rain-soaked floor. A soulful hum sounded as the wind passed through broken windows, and a length of wallboard flapped like a funereal drumbeat. He shivered and tried to get some feeling from the place. . some sense of memory. But it was too cold, too insulated now by time and events. Whatever badness had happened here had leached out of the place long ago, leaving nothing but a sense of failure.
Lubeszki led them round to the rear of the buildings. The perimeter fence stood less than thirty feet away. Beyond the mesh a stretch of rough grass and weeds ran into a thick belt of trees. The interior looked dark and forbidding, a shifting mass of shadows, and a dread hush hung over the place as if all life had been stilled along with the girl who had died here.
High on the fence was a scrap of pink ribbon. It was knotted in a bow and secured by a piece of wire.
‘They say that’s where her dress caught on the wire,’ Lubeszki explained. ‘As she went over.’ His voice was neutral, neither confirming nor denying that he believed it. He pointed through the mesh to a spot on the ground beneath the piece of material, and the small wooden stake Harry had seen in the photograph. It had been replanted with a bunch of flowers; fresh and colourful, they looked recent. ‘And that’s where she was found, right there.’
Rik stared up at the top of the wire and blew out some air. ‘Strong,’ he murmured, ‘to do that.’
There was no arguing with that. The fence here was at least ten feet high. Harry couldn’t recall if the roll of razor wire had been in place back then, but it would still have taken muscle to throw the girl over. Bikovsky could have done it; Pendry, Broms and Carvalho, too. Orti would have lacked inches, but he’d been a tough character. But not Koslov.
Lubeszki seemed to be reading his mind. He said, ‘She wouldn’t have weighed more than a scrap. Folks here lived on what they could find and everyone was undernourished. Come on — I’ll take you to see the woman who knew her.’ He turned and led them out of the sad compound, locking the gate behind him. ‘Don’t know why I bother doing this,’ he grunted, snapping the lock into place. ‘Nobody’s coming back here, not since the news broke and they trashed the place.’
That will change, Harry wanted to tell him. If Kleeman is the man, all hell will break loose and this place will become the most photographed symbol of failure on the planet.
The woman Lubeszki had found lived in a decaying ruin of a cottage halfway up a steep mountain track. Scattered piles of bricks showed that there had once been a huddle of houses here; too big for a hamlet, too small for a real village. But a community nonetheless. Hers was the only one still in use. Harry wondered aloud how she survived. And why.
‘She’s still here because she refuses to move,’ Lubeszki replied softly. ‘Beats me why, after everything that happened here. But I guess it’s all she’s got.’
He knocked respectfully on the warped wooden door. It opened to reveal an old woman in a black headscarf and a grey dress. She had a face lined by the elements and too much sorrow, her eyes dull and devoid of expression. Her cheeks were contoured by a lack of teeth, and she eyed the three men one by one, studying their eyes.
Lubeszki spoke gently, indicating Harry and Rik. The woman nodded and invited them in.
It was a tiny room piled with ancient, tired furniture that had long lost its bloom, a storeroom of effects that Harry thought probably reflected the old lady’s life. She indicated a bench for the three to use and sat down on a hard-backed chair, and waited.
When they were seated, Lubeszki spoke again at length. The old woman turned her head and stared at Harry for a few moments, her eyes suddenly alive, but dark. Then she began speaking, and Lubeszki translated.
‘The girl’s family lived up among the trees, over there.’ Lubeszki pointed towards an area described by the woman, who did not turn to look, but merely gestured over her shoulder as if it would be bad luck to face the spot. ‘They arrived two years before, she does not know from where, and kept to themselves. The man was a mechanic. He worked wherever he could. There were two children and the mother. The family name might have been Tahim but she cannot be certain; they had an accent and besides, she did not care because they were nice enough, so what does a name matter?’ He waited as the woman talked on. ‘One day Serbs came in trucks. They were heavily armed and drunk, looking for men and boys to kill. The father was taken away and shot. The mother was violated then hung from a tree. The house was burned down. She thinks the children were in the forest at the time, collecting wood, and stayed hidden. She herself was too old so the Serbs ignored her. The children learned to fend for themselves, coming down only to get food. They were small for their age. . undernourished. But tough. They hid out for weeks.’ The old lady talked on, gradually finding a rhythm with Lubeszki and filling the gaps.
Her face softened at one point in the narrative. ‘The girl would come down in the night and I would give her what I could. It was not much. She was so pretty. . an angel among the ugliness of this place. Then she was taken.’
‘Taken.’ Harry leaned forward. ‘You mean killed?’
Lubeszki nodded. ‘Back then, it meant the same thing.’ He listened again as the woman spoke. ‘Her body was found near the wire, like a piece of discarded rubbish.’
Harry said softly, ‘Does she know the girl’s name?’
Lubeszki asked her. ‘It was Aisha. A beautiful name for a beautiful child, she says. But nobody was surprised that she got caught; she took too many chances, trying to look after her brother, who was sick.’ He asked the woman something and she explained briefly. ‘The boy was badly beaten one evening by a Serb militiaman. He was kicked unconscious, but he was l
ucky: the militiaman was alone and too drunk to finish him off, and fell over. The girl, Aisha, helped her brother get away, but he was never very strong after that.’
‘What happened to him?’ Harry asked. The odds sounded less than slim. Already sick and weakened through malnutrition as he was, the weather out in the woods would have been fatal to him.
‘She never saw him again. Probably in a hole in the trees, like so many others.’
Harry began to turn away. Then, for no reason he could think of, he said, ‘What was the boy’s name?’
Lubeszki asked the question and the woman replied.
‘Selim, she says. It means “Peaceful”.’ The woman chattered on and Lubeszki added, ‘But the boy didn’t like the name. He chose another one instead — one he said meant “Protector”. It wasn’t a meaning she had ever heard, but he was just a boy.’ He echoed her shrug. ‘He was small for his age and weak, but at sixteen, every boy thinks he can take on the world.’
Sixteen in 1999, seventeen if the Russian file was correct. Either way, it would make him twenty-eight years old now. If he’d survived.
‘What name did he choose?’
‘Kassim. He took the name Kassim.’
FORTY-EIGHT
They thanked the woman for her help and walked back down the slope in silence. Harry’s mind was in a whirl. Kassim. The same name cropping up twice in connection with the same time and place; what were the odds?
It had to be the same person. The youth picked up by Russian forces and recorded in Chechnya ten years ago. . formerly Selim, the brother of the dead girl, Aisha. . now a killer on the rampage. It all made sense. For whatever reason, the boy had stayed silent over the years, maybe traumatized by what he had seen. Leaving his homeland and drifting, then surfacing in Chechnya and briefly held before disappearing into God alone knew where.
Had Chechnya been the youth’s training ground, learning the art of guerrilla war and taking it elsewhere? A legacy born of a senseless and brutal act hundreds of miles and many years away? They would probably never know, no more than they would ever know who was behind him.
Harry wondered at the people who had somehow fastened on and used Kassim’s past. It must have been like a gift from heaven, plucking a damaged young man out of whatever hole he was in and training him, grooming him to become a fixated, relentless killer. Because one thing had been clear from the start: Kassim was no amateur revenger on the loose; he was as skilled as any soldier and had clearly received top-level schooling to get him this far. His controllers must have worked hard on him, preparing him for travel across the west, teaching him to blend into the background and move around undetected, feeding him with the motivation to keep himself going against all odds. And those odds must have been formidable. Yet a young man with little formal education, a wealth of hate and trauma and nothing to look forward to, had overcome them.
In the end it would have been too tantalizing to miss: the opportunity to kill a high-level UN envoy with history to justify their actions. They couldn’t possibly know whether he was guilty or not, any more than Harry did; but they would have seen the opportunity it presented. He would be guilty by association and judged accordingly in the public eye. The publicity from the girl’s murder was already gaining ground, and once confirmed, would explode on to the world scene as effectively as any bomb, nullifying the reputation of the UN in one hit. The fallout would echo around the globe, dragging down tainted member nations by implication, especially America.
And Kleeman’s death would be the crowning triumph, seen by many as a just result.
Harry almost admired the men who had brought Kassim this far. They had done well, gaining his trust, drawing his story out of him and using it to give him a focus after so many years of — what? He didn’t like to think. Whoever Kassim had been and now was, he was a tough individual mentally and physically. His trainers would have spotted that early on. It was the kind of thing that set men apart. He wondered what had come first — the individual or the plan?
Lubeszki dropped them at a city centre hotel where they could freshen up, with a promise to come back later and take them to the National Library. There was a heavy security presence, with military and police vehicles everywhere, and Harry asked him if this was for Kleeman’s visit.
‘Not really. There have been flare-ups of violence between various factions, mostly because of lack of jobs and infrastructure, as well as ethnic tensions. The government decided to bring in heavy re-inforcements to put a dampener on it. Some of the trouble is purely crime-related, some religious. Kleeman’s holding talks with government officials and business leaders here in the city, and he’s scheduled to perform an official opening of a new room at the library tomorrow. It’s a glad-handing exercise and photo opp, but shouldn’t take more than an hour. He’ll come in by car from the residence where he’s staying, then straight out again, on to a helicopter and away.’ He grunted non-committally. ‘We got him to keep it short because of the trouble, but his office insisted that the talks with government officials were pre-arranged and non-negotiable.’
‘What are the security arrangements?’
‘He has three security men, plus half a dozen locals, and Deane’s arranged for a team of UNMIK personnel in uniform,’ he told them. ‘We’ve circulated pictures of Kassim, but Kleeman will have wall-to-wall visible cover. It’d take a mouse to get through.’ He nodded and left the two men to it.
‘A mouse would be easy,’ Harry murmured drily. He looked at Rik. ‘Can you call up some details of the library? I don’t really want to wait to see what we’re dealing with.’
They went to the room Lubeszki had booked and Rik opened his laptop. First he trawled for details of Kleeman’s travel plans to Kosovo to see what was already public knowledge. So far there was very little save for an announcement about the inauguration of an International Studies room at the National Library, but with no timetable announced.
Harry gave it a brief look and shook his head. ‘It’s already public. Kassim won’t have missed that.’ He wondered where Kassim was right now. Something told him he couldn’t be very far away. He’d always stayed on the move so far, never allowing himself to get boxed in, and there was no reason to suspect that was going to change.
Rik pulled up maps of the library and the surrounding area. He whistled softly. ‘I don’t fancy Kleeman’s chances much if Kassim goes for a long shot.’
Harry looked at the map filling the screen. It showed an irregular mass that was the National Library, sitting on a patch of land open on all sides, in the middle of a box formed by roads. Two of the roads ran north-south on either side, one of them linking up with the main M9 leading south-west to the airport eighteen kilometres away. The other two roads ran east-west either side of the library site, completing the box.
‘Show me some photos,’ Harry said.
Rik hit the keys and a photo of the library sprang into view. It was a startling sight, resembling a space-age version of a beehive on heavy concrete blocks, a knobbly structure covered in a metal latticework, more a citadel than a place of information and learning. Paved footpaths approached from all sides, leading over open grass and sandy ground, with no obvious cover.
Any target being dropped off would have to be driven right up to the building, but would have to stop short because of the structure of the plinth-like base. From there a walk in the open was unavoidable. A helicopter would have to stand further out, presenting an even greater danger.
Either way, a sniper would have a clear shot.
Kassim had finally found what he was looking for. After leaving the airport, he’d cruised the city’s back streets until he found a group of young Albanians, aimless and angry through lack of jobs and direction. Here was where information could be bought for a packet of cigarettes. Carefully phrasing his questions, he was finally directed to a shell-torn bar where he sat over an apple drink for twenty minutes, watching the street. Eventually a nervous youth slipped through the door and beckoned him
outside.
‘You want guns,’ the youth said. It wasn’t a question; people came here for two things: weapons and drugs.
Kassim nodded and showed the youth a ten-dollar bill, as a sign of good intent. He told him what he wanted. The youth nodded and used a cellphone to make a call. He spoke briefly, then beckoned Kassim to follow.
Two minutes later the youth stopped outside the ruins of a house in the Old Town and pointed to a sagging doorway leading to a cellar. When he held out his hand, Kassim gave him the ten dollars and watched him scuttle away down the street.
Before entering, Kassim picked up a short length of lead pipe. He knew better than to walk unprepared into a meeting place like this. He also had a wheel wrench tucked inside his coat, just in case. Stepping over a pile of rubble, he descended the stone steps, feet crunching on a scattering of gravel. At the bottom he passed through a door and found two men standing behind a heavy table in what had once been a kitchen, with a recess for a fire and a broken stone sink. The atmosphere was cold and damp and smelled like a pig farm.
One of the men had his hands behind his back. Kassim ignored him and dropped some money on the table. It was his opening bid or a deposit, depending on how they wished to play it. Their eyes told him nothing, not even bothering to check the money, and he guessed they were wondering if he had more money on him and whether they could take it. He was under no illusions about the danger of the situation, and guessed they were also dealers in drugs, petrol and whatever else they could trade. Killing him if they chose to was probably a matter of whim.
The men listened to his request without expression. In Afghanistan, Kassim reflected sadly, there would have been an offer of refreshment and talk before getting down to business. But not here. Maybe it was better this way. One of the men turned and disappeared through a brick archway at the rear of the room, and returned moments later lugging a heavy wooden box, which he placed on the table.
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