Die Twice

by Simon Kernick

  ‘Yeah, I’d love one,’ I said, getting myself comfortable and lighting a cigarette of my own.

  I watched as she breezed out of the bedroom, thinking that this time in a week I’d either be the happiest man on earth, or dead. And if I was dead, none of it was going to matter anyway. High stakes, yes, but then that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? That’s what made it all the more exciting. I remembered a phrase someone had quoted to me when I was out in Africa. It was something a French general had said to his men back in the nineteenth century when they were defending a town from the British. ‘The enemy have vastly superior numbers. They are coming at us from three sides. Soon their encirclement will be complete. Our right flank is collapsing, casualties are high, our forces are in retreat. Situation perfect. Attack.’ And that’s the thing. Half the joy is facing superior odds and winning. I might have thought I wanted the quiet life, but in the end, like all true soldiers, I longed for that old call to arms. Even better when there was a pot of gold at the end of it that would set me up for ever.

  When Elaine returned with the beers, I had a grin on my face the size of China.

  Friday, nine days ago

  Gallan

  I was in court all Friday afternoon giving evidence in the case of a child molester. He’d been accused of abusing young boys at the swimming club he helped run for inner-city kids with limited access to leisure facilities. It was something I’d worked on months before but, as everyone knows, the wheels of justice turn incredibly slowly. The defence barrister gave me as hard a time as possible in the stand, taking full advantage of the fact that forensic evidence was limited and that most of the case against his client rested solely on the words of children, several with learning difficulties, who could easily be lying. But I’m no pushover and I held my ground firmly and with barely concealed contempt for the man in front of me. The defendant already had three previous convictions for exactly this type of offence – not that the jury were aware of that – so, as far as I could see, the defence barrister had to be pretty damned sure the man he was defending was guilty. In which case, he was helping to put a dangerous man back on the street so that he could continue to prey on the kind of people least able to stop him. You can couch it how you want it, spout all this bullshit about everyone being entitled to a proper defence, but it was still wrong. As far as I was concerned, to put the rights of someone who abused children for his own enjoyment above those of the same children to live their lives free from these kinds of assaults was probably the single most perverted aspect of the British justice system, and one of the few things that made me doubt my own role in upholding the law. That well-educated, supposedly respectable men and women were paid sums of money vastly out of proportion to their talent to help keep this situation going, and from the public purse as well, only served to spawn that doubt.

  The best way to combat this, however, is to beat them at their own game, and in that particular battle I knew I’d done just that, constantly staring my enemy down and using just the right levels of sarcasm in my answers to make him look foolish in front of the jury. It was a small victory – after all, the lawyer still went home with a nice fat sum of money for his efforts, if you can call them that – but it was a victory nonetheless, and I felt confident that a conviction was on the cards which, ultimately, was the most important thing.

  So I was in good cheer when I escaped at just after five (the wheels of justice are not only incredibly slow but also work, with rare exceptions, to office hours) and took the DLR south of the river to pick up my daughter for the weekend. I hadn’t seen her in close to a month, so I was looking forward to it, and so it seemed was she, still being of the age where she can appreciate her dad’s company. We travelled back by Tube and I took her to the Pizza Express on Upper Street for an evening meal during which I caught up with everything in her life: school, fashion, friends, boyfriends, all that hair-raising stuff that makes you think kids grow up far too fast these days, while at the same time being careful to avoid the topic of her mother and the boyfriend. She mentioned him once, telling me about some clothes he’d bought her, but I changed the subject. I really didn’t want to hear about him. In the early days after I’d left, Rachel would ask me when I was going back home, and would say how much she missed me. She’d tell me how much she disliked Carrier and how he could never take my place, and it used to break my heart because I could do nothing about it. Over time, though, she’d complained about him less and less, and, although she always said she missed me, and would always give me an enthusiastic hug whenever we met, she talked less and less about me going back there, as if she’d finally got round to accepting the situation, and Carrier had finally got round to convincing her that he wasn’t such a bad bloke after all. Even though the bastard was.

  During our meal that evening she talked just like a happy, well-adjusted kid leading a happy, well-adjusted life. It seemed I’d become somewhat surplus to requirements.

  We didn’t get back to my flat until quarter past nine, and it was gone ten by the time I finally shut the door to the bedroom and left her sleeping. I’d forgotten how tiring kids can be.

  I wanted to sit down and veg out in front of the TV but things were still bugging me on the case, and I’d promised myself I’d try a new angle, so I cracked open a beer and booted up my rarely used PC. It was time to see what the Internet had to offer as an investigative tool.

  First of all I went through the ritual of checking my emails, which didn’t usually take very long as I rarely received any, and immediately saw that there was one from Malik entitled ‘Information as requested’ which came with a load of attachments. It appeared to have been sent that morning and had been copied to my PC at work.

  The first set of attachments comprised photographs, mostly surveillance ones, and short biographies of known or suspected associates of Neil Vamen. There were nine of them in all and they included Jackie Slap Merriweather and several others I recognized. The biographies contained the criminal records of the nine, which encompassed a whole variety of offences with a particular emphasis on ones of violence, and a summary of each of their relationships with Vamen. I blew each photo up to full size and printed them off one by one so they could be shown to the neighbours of Shaun Matthews and Jean Tanner, in the hope that they might be familiar.

  The second set of attachments contained details and photographs of three women suspected of being Vamen’s mistresses. One of them, as suggested by McBride and missed initially by Malik, was Jean Tanner. According to the records, Vamen had been seen visiting her home in Finchley on a number of occasions. He’d also taken her for a long weekend to his luxury apartment in Tenerife back in March with one of his other mistresses in tow. The report confirmed that she was a prostitute with two previous convictions, but said nothing else of note. Out of curiosity, I looked at the files on the other two mistresses and was vaguely interested to see that both women were very different. The one who’d accompanied Jean and Vamen to Tenerife was a glossy-looking nineteen-year-old former dental nurse, now full-time plaything, while the other was an attractive forty-six-year-old psychotherapist who’d fallen for his charms while she’d been reviewing his progress during his only stint in prison (drugs and weapons offences). They’d apparently been enjoying an on–off relationship for the past twelve years, ever since he’d been released, and I wondered idly if she was pleased with the way he’d come on.

  But nothing really stood out, so I sent a quick message back to Malik, thanking him for his help, and moved on to the net proper. I started by finding a search engine and typed in the words ‘snake poison’, which I thought ought to give me some hits. It did, far too many, most of which were totally irrelevant. I tried different search engines, then narrowed the hunt down, putting in ‘venom’, ‘snake venom’, ‘elapid venom’ and, finally, ‘viper venom’. I reeled through the dozens of hits I picked up, switched search engines constantly, and went back over Boyd’s notes on the subject, all the time racking my brains for i
deas that could actually move me forward.

  I’d been at it well over an hour, and was already beginning to agree with Boyd’s assertion that the Internet was a hopelessly overhyped means of uncovering information, when something caught my eye. The intro line read: ‘Snake Venom part of Mujahidin Arsenal’ and referred the reader to what looked like an eastern European media website. I yawned and double-clicked. Outside, I could hear the rain tumbling down, and the ominous rumble of thunder.

  The article from which the intro line came had been written in October 1995 and concerned the so-called mujahidin, foreign Islamic fundamentalists who were fighting alongside fellow Muslims in Bosnia Herzegovina. It seemed they had become an integral part of the conflict, being both well organized and well financed, with extensive backing from a number of Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia. According to the article, they were also using some interesting weapons in their fight, one of which was snake venom. Vials of venom from the Egyptian viper, or asp, had been used by their spies within the enemy camps to poison senior enemy officers. In one cited instance three Bosnian Croat officers, including a colonel, had had the venom slipped into their food by a female Muslim cook posing as a Croat (an easy thing to do since they were essentially the same ethnic group) and all had died before the plot had been uncovered. The article didn’t say what had happened to the cook but stated that the poisons definitely existed and had originated with the mujahidin and, in particular, an Arab officer with the nom de guerre Tajab.

  At last I had something. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. Malik had mentioned Bosnia as a supply route used by the Holtzes to bring both drugs and illegal immigrants into western Europe and, ultimately, Britain, although the connection was a tenuous one. There was a list of related articles on the left-hand side of the screen and I scrolled through them, skim-reading about the role the fundamentalists had played in what was described, quite accurately it seemed, as the bloodiest European conflict since 1945. Ruthless in battle, they were a formidable fighting force, their infamy far outweighing their actual numbers. So much so that, according to one of the articles written in January 1996, the United Nations demanded their removal as part of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement between the warring parties. The next article, written later that month, continued in the same vein, this time citing a claim made by the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic that mujahidin had attacked Serb positions north-west of Zenica, and that, in separate ceasefire violations, Iranian military advisers and British mercenaries were continuing to train Muslim forces in bases east and south of Sarajevo.

  The British connection again. Still tenuous, but there all the same. I made some notes, then left the website and typed in ‘mercenaries in Bosnia’ in the search-engine box. Plenty of hits came up, as expected, and once again I began the long trawl.

  As I looked, I began to wonder whether this man Karadzic was making things up. After all, all wars contain plenty of lies and propaganda. But then I found an article in the New York Times, dated October 1995, which covered the story of foreign involvement in the war, stretching back to its beginnings in early 1992, and contained information about who’d been involved. There’d been the usual suspects: the mujahidin; the occasional middle-class Western boys who’d been so sickened by the atrocities being visited on the Muslims that they’d gone out to try to help; the adventure seekers and nutters who for some reason are always attracted to the world’s troublespots; and there’d been a company called Contracts International, based in London, who’d been supplying former British soldiers to help train Muslim forces in a variety of military techniques, including guerrilla warfare. The spokesman for Contracts International was Martin Leppel, a former captain in the Parachute Regiment. In the article, he admitted that some of the firm’s employees were in Bosnia but declined to comment any further. The writers stated that no fewer than twenty-one of the company’s operatives were there, and that it was almost certain they were being bankrolled by senior members of the Saudi Arabian royal family.

  I noted the name of the company and its representative, then checked to see if they had a website. Not surprisingly they didn’t, so I did a search on Contracts International and discovered a number of newspaper articles about the company. Founded in 1991 by Leppel, and with a full-time staff estimated at two hundred, they’d been involved in conflicts all over the world, but I concentrated solely on Bosnia. From what I could gather, there was nothing untoward about their activities in the region. You could even say, depending on your point of view I suppose, that they were actually providing a service, since the Muslims were so hopelessly outgunned. But the other warring parties had demanded they leave after the Dayton Accord because their presence was seen as provocative, although there was evidence that some had stayed behind to continue their work in breach of the treaty.

  It was getting close to midnight when I opened an article from Der Spiegel, dated September 1997, in which the words Contracts International appeared. I was too tired to take in the fact that it was written in German, but something immediately caught my eye. It was a black and white photograph of two men walking towards a camera along what looked like a mountain road. One of the men, the younger of the two, was dressed in military fatigues, the other in a dark suit. They appeared to be talking to each other, and neither was looking at the camera. In fact, it looked as if they were unaware their picture was being taken.

  The one on the left, the soldier, looked familiar, but I couldn’t work out from where. It wasn’t a particularly good shot of him, but I knew I wasn’t mistaken. I’d definitely seen the man before.

  As for the one in the suit, he was even more familiar. But then he would have been. Not only had Malik supplied me with his photograph: I’d run into him only days earlier.

  It was Neil Vamen’s man, Jackie Slap Merriweather.

  Saturday, eight days ago

  Iversson

  The rain came down like a tropical monsoon. A month with none and then the whole lot arrives at once, just like London buses. It was difficult to see out of the car window, there was so much of it, but I suppose in a way that was useful. At least no-one would be paying me too much attention as I sat parked across the road from the flash-looking four-storey townhouse where the Heavenly Girls brothel was based.

  For the hundredth time that night, I looked at my watch. 1.15 a.m. I’d been there close to two hours now, watching and waiting, seeing how much activity there was, wondering if that pervert Krys Holtz was going to turn up. A steady flow of cabs had been pulling up and spitting out their male passengers, mainly of the suited and booted variety, all looking like they had the cash to pay the sort of prices this place apparently asked. Elaine had told me she’d heard that thirty or so women worked for them but only about ten were there at any one time, in keeping with the intimate atmosphere. I reckoned that those ten were being kept pretty fucking busy if tonight was typical, and there’d probably be as many as twenty-five bodies in there when we hit the place. This meant we were going to have to move extremely fast. With that many people and that many rooms, it would be impossible to secure everyone, so you had to guess that one of them was going to be able to get a call in to the police. The Met were never the speediest bastards in the world, but if the person on the other end of the blower sounded desperate enough, they’d probably pull their finger out. That would mean a five- or six-minute initial reponse time, which didn’t give us a lot of leeway.

  But things were coming together, and that was the main thing. Johnny Hexham, a man always in pursuit of money, had already stolen the first car, the one I was in now, and was currently hunting down a van to use as transport for Holtz. Joe, acting as a businessman in pursuit of some much-needed recuperation, had made a verbal agreement to hire one of the farmhouses I’d seen on a one-month let, starting the following day, and was scheduled to go down there in a few hours’ time to put down the money and pick up the keys. Johnny was on driving standby every night the following week, and the rest of the team were together, a
lthough I still hadn’t met the jeweller’s brother, Kalinski. If all went according to plan, I’d get to give him the once-over the following night when the four of us, minus Johnny, met to discuss the final details.

  A black Toyota Land Cruiser pulled up outside Heavenly Girls and stopped, engine rumbling, by the side of the road. A couple of seconds later a big bloke, at least six four, probably more, stepped out. This was Fitz, if Elaine’s description was correct. Another bloke, only slightly shorter and with the same build, came out the other side. Big Mick. And then the man himself, Krys Holtz, emerged from the front passenger side and stepped onto the pavement. Krys was a lot shorter than the other two, probably no more than five ten, but again he had the big build. He was no fucking oil painting either, and you could understand why he had to pay for it a fair amount. He dressed well, in an expensive dark suit and leather coat, but his face was all fat and jowly, like someone had lived in it too long, and his haircut – a big black Elvis-style quiff that had gone out of fashion when the King was still below fifteen stone – was all over the shop. He was only meant to be thirty but he looked at least ten years older. I was surprised that the sight of him didn’t fill me with rage. Instead, I watched him calmly, knowing that I’d be getting even shortly.

  Krys hurried up the steps to the house, flanked by the other two, then the door opened and a very satisfied-looking Tugger Lewis stepped out. Tugger moved aside, avoiding the group, who walked through the space he’d just occupied as if he wasn’t there. He made his way over to the car and, after turning round to check that Krys and his men had entered the building, got in the passenger side. I started the engine and pulled away from the kerb. It was 1.25 a.m.