That rationalization only carried him so far, however. The deal ensured Gazi’s money would never reach his family. All Hammond had left to cling to was the hope that the tapes would prove he had not been complicit in Gazi’s decision to order Kate’s murder. Uželać had agreed to supply a lawyer of Hammond’s choosing with a transcript of the tapes in due course, which was something, though not much. There was also the chance Gazi would conclude, once his money had been seized by the Serbian authorities, that carrying out his threat against Hammond was pointless. Maybe the wily old Wolf was just bluffing. Maybe.
But Uželać was not bluffing. He had Hammond and Piravani exactly where he wanted them. As yet, however, Piravani did not know that. And Hammond was still wrestling with the problem of whether he should tell him or not. It was easy to imagine the Italian insisting Uželać could not be trusted, calling off the break-in and fleeing the country. He had adjusted to the life of a fugitive long since. But Hammond had not and did not intend to start. To restore the order and normality his existence had until recently hinged on, he needed to deliver the tapes to Uželać. And only Piravani knew where they were hidden. In the final analysis, telling him was surely too risky.
‘Are you always truthful with your patients, Edward?’ Kate had once asked him.
‘I certainly don’t lie to them,’ he had replied.
‘But you might keep certain things back?’
‘If I thought it was in their best interests.’
‘So, it’s all down to your judgement?’
‘Yes. I suppose it is.’
‘What took you so long?’ was Piravani’s greeting when Hammond reached the apartment. ‘I was starting to worry.’
‘I got a little lost between Kalemegdan and the bridge,’ Hammond answered, slumping down in one of the utilitarian armchairs.
‘No detours to the Inter-Continental or the Hyatt Regency?’
‘None.’
‘Glad to hear it. So, how did the meeting go?’
‘According to plan. Plessl will cut the power just before one a.m.’
‘Good.’
‘Did you buy everything we need?’
‘Oh yes. We’re fully equipped. Don’t worry.’
‘Hard not to.’
‘True. But …’ Piravani held a copy of that morning’s Politika. ‘You’ll be pleased to know there’s still no mention of you in connection with Guido’s murder and the death of Branislav Jeličić.’
‘I’m hoping it’ll stay that way.’
‘No reason why it shouldn’t, doctor. If everything turns out well tonight, the question of who killed Jeličić will soon slip to the bottom of their agenda. We’ll stop in Lugano on our way to The Hague and I’ll transfer Gazi’s money to Ingrid’s account. Then you’ll be in the clear.’
‘You make it sound very simple.’
Piravani smiled. ‘That’s because it will be.’
They spent the rest of the daylight hours penned in the apartment. Piravani had bought plenty to eat and drink, along with a couple of DVDs for them to watch. Steven Seagal and Sylvester Stallone wreaking assorted mayhem did not constitute entertainment as far as Hammond was concerned, but Piravani, fuelled by numerous bottles of beer, found them uproariously amusing. He slept for several hours after the film show and Hammond tried to do the same, without success. The break-in was no longer quite the foolhardy enterprise it had originally promised to be. In a sense, it was now officially sanctioned. But he was dreading the moment when Piravani realized what was really going on. One way or another, the night was bound to end badly.
Piravani surfaced from his siesta to a mug of strong coffee and several cigarettes, then announced he was going out – alone – for an hour or so.
‘There’s something I have to check,’ he explained, thereby explaining nothing at all. ‘Stay here, OK? I’ll be back long before we have to leave.’
He was back, in fact, well within the hour. Hammond’s gentle enquiries about what he had been doing were just as gently deflected. He was surprisingly relaxed as the evening advanced, checking through the tools and other kit he had bought with calm meticulousness.
They headed out, wearing identical black boilersuits and gloves, just after midnight. A fast drive along the expressway took them across the Gazelle Bridge and into Dedinje. By 12.45, they were in position in a side-road near the Villa Ruža. Whatever surveillance Uželać had arranged was discreet to the point of invisibility. If he had not known better, Hammond might have thought they had a chance of pulling off the break-in and getting clean away afterwards. But appearances, as he knew, could be deceptive. One of the numerous parked cars or vans they had passed presumably contained a police team ready to pounce when the time came.
‘I’m impressed, doctor,’ said Piravani, as he smoked a cigarette while they waited for the nearest streetlamp to go out. ‘I never thought you’d go through with this.’
‘Neither did I. But you left me no choice.’
‘True. But if you lose your nerve … you lose it.’
‘You convinced me the risk was worth taking.’
‘We’ve been lucky. If the villa was occupied …’
‘But it isn’t.’
‘No. So, maybe we really can get what we want.’
‘I believe it, Marco. Don’t you?’
Piravani gave a low chuckle. ‘Sure, I believe it.’
A disused service alley, colonized by weeds, some as big as bushes, made larger still by encrustations of snow, led off the side-road between the rear boundary walls of adjacent villas. The first few yards of it were illuminated by the feeble sodium gleam of the widely spaced streetlamps. When they faded and died a few minutes before one, darkness descended like a cloak. And Piravani murmured decisively, ‘We go.’
The night was marginally milder than the day had been. The wind had dropped and sundry drippings and tricklings hinted at a thaw. Piravani shouldered the rucksack in which he had stowed the gear and led the way along the alley. The snow was knee-deep in places and the footing uneven. Haste was out of the question. But such moonlight as there was, heavily filtered by cloud, was reflected off the snow, revealing their surroundings in dim gradations of black and white.
After five minutes or so, Piravani called a halt. They had reached the rear wall of the Villa Ruža. It was partly concealed by the tangled shoots of a rampant thorn bush. Piravani used wirecutters to clear a path, then rigged a rope ladder to climb to the top of the wall, where there were three strands of barbed wire to be severed. He managed the whole thing with greater athleticism than Hammond would have judged him capable of.
Hammond’s own ascent was slow and painful. But at length they were over the wall and wading through a snowdrift to reach the shrub-fringed edge of a lawn. Beyond it, on a terrace of higher ground, was the house. Piravani steered a direct path towards it across the lawn, hardly seeming to care about the footprints they were leaving in the snow. If not in a hurry, he was certainly a man with a mission. An alarm tripped by the power cut was wailing somewhere in the middle distance, which Hammond caught himself reckoning was better for their purposes than silence. It had set a dog barking as well, adding more useful noise to disguise any they made. But their stealth, as he well knew, was in vain. They were not going to get away with anything.
They reached the terrace and Piravani veered to the left, where a single-storey wing could just be made out in the shadow of the main house. He paused for a moment to orientate himself, then proceeded cautiously across snow-covered gravel to a door, next to which stood two dustbins beneath an uncurtained sash window. He shone his torch into the interior and muttered ‘OK, OK’ to himself in evident satisfaction.
‘Everything as you remember it?’ Hammond whispered.
‘Looks to be, yes. Break the glass and we’re in. I’m not sure where the nearest movement sensor is, but I’ll trigger the alarm before I reach the control box for certain. You wait here until it’s dead. Clear?’
‘Clear.’
&n
bsp; ‘Good.’ Piravani took off the rucksack and reached into it for a hammer. He rolled the closer of the two dustbins on to its side and positioned it beneath the window. Then he knocked a hole in one of the panes of glass, stretched in to raise the latch and pushed the window up. ‘Easy, hey, doctor?’
‘Just be careful.’
‘OK. Hold on to the bin.’ Hammond held it in place as Piravani hopped up and clambered through the window, then vanished into the darkened interior. A moment later the alarm started beeping. According to Piravani’s own estimate, that gave him thirty seconds to disable it before it went off.
He did not set about his task hesitantly. Hammond saw flashes of the torchbeam inside, then heard a door being wrenched open, followed by a jumble of indecipherable clunks and rattles. Next came several loud hammer blows and the sound of wood or plastic splintering.
The alarm cut in with an ear-splitting yowl, but was almost immediately cut off again. The house was quiet once more. Piravani reappeared at the window. ‘Come on in, doctor,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the place to ourselves.’
Hammond passed the rucksack through, then scrambled in after it, holding his breath to minimize the pain in his ribs. They were in a scullery, the squat shapes of a dishwasher and a couple of washing machines dimly visible among the shadows.
‘Follow me,’ said Piravani. Keeping his torch trained on the floor ahead, he piloted them along a passage running past a couple of similar rooms and the kitchen before emerging into a corner of the main hall. They moved towards the big front door, weak moonlight glimmering milkily through the extravagantly curlicued fanlight above it, then turned at the foot of the broad marble-balustraded staircase and headed up it.
Piravani chose which room to enter off the landing without hesitation. They stepped into a large, square room with windows looking out to the rear of the house. Various items of furniture were shrouded in dust-sheets, one of which had slipped off, laying bare a huge widescreen television. A few murky oil paintings adorned the walls.
‘Close the curtains,’ said Piravani, setting down the rucksack and unzipping it. Hammond pulled the curtains across and turned to find his companion shining a torch at one of the paintings. It showed a stag being torn to pieces by hounds on some heavily impastoed mountainside. ‘Already I dislike the owner,’ Piravani growled. ‘It’ll be a pleasure to run up a big redecorating bill for him.’
He unhooked the painting and tossed it into the dust-sheeted lap of an armchair, then pulled a pick out of the rucksack and started at the wall with a will. The plaster cracked and fell away in ever larger fragments as he struck it, the blows echoing like thunder in the empty house. Soon a stretch of brickwork beneath was laid bare.
‘Shine the torch on the bricks,’ he panted.
Hammond did as he was told. Piravani stepped back and squinted at the wall as the torchbeam ran slowly along the exposed courses.
‘There,’ he said suddenly.
‘What?’
‘The newer mortar. It’s a lighter colour.’ Peering closer, Hammond saw that over an area about two feet square there was indeed paler mortar between the bricks than elsewhere. ‘That’s where the safe is.’
They took a hammer and chisel each and began gouging out the mortar. It was a slow, laborious exercise. There was nothing slipshod about Gazi’s bricklaying. Nearly ten minutes passed before they dislodged the first brick. But they were rewarded by the sight beneath of the dimpled metal of the safe.
With one brick removed, it was possible to use a crowbar to loosen those around it. They fell away, one by one, and there, in front of them, was the door of the safe. Hammond had expected something bigger. But it had obviously been big enough for Gazi’s purposes.
‘I bet he’s lain awake a few nights at Scheveningen worrying about whether anyone would ever find this,’ said Piravani. ‘Well, he can stop worrying now. About that, anyway.’
‘You do know the combination, don’t you, Marco?’
‘Oh yes. His son Nikola’s date of birth. Twenty-two eleven eighty. Shine the torch on the dial.’
Hammond watched as Piravani rotated the dial to register the numbers. At the last turn, there was a decisive click. He pulled the handle down and eased the door open.
A shoe box filled the interior of the safe, with hardly any room to spare. Piravani lifted it out, flicked a dust-sheet off a nearby coffee table and set it down. As he removed the lid, Hammond trained his torch on the contents: stacks of audio cassettes, held together with rubber bands. Piravani lifted one stack out and took off his glasses to study the tiny pencilled note on the label of the topmost cassette, then did the same with another stack and another after that.
‘The labels show the dates covered by each cassette,’ he explained. ‘They run from December ninety-five to March two thousand. Every conversation Gazi had here in that period that he wanted a secret record of. This is the complete set.’ He replaced the lid and stowed the box in the rucksack. ‘We have what we came for, doctor.’ The torchlight gleamed on his teeth and spectacle lenses as he smiled. ‘Good work, hey?’
‘We can congratulate each other later, Marco. Shall we get going?’
‘Sure. But … there’s a small change of plan.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Doctor, doctor. Do you think I’m a fool?’ Piravani clicked his tongue reprovingly. ‘You were picked up by the police when you left Kalemegdan. Plessl told me all about it. He didn’t actually want to double-cross me, you see. The police forced him to. They had their eye on him as a former Gazi stooge long before I contacted him. Now, the only reason you could have for not mentioning your run-in with the policija is that you did some kind of deal with them. I don’t blame you. They probably didn’t leave you much room for negotiation. But you should have told me. You really should. Because they’ll be waiting for us back at the van, won’t they? Waiting – to relieve us of the tapes. Well, I’ve no intention of letting that happen. Which is why we aren’t going back to the van.’
‘Listen to me, Marco. I only—’
‘Don’t bother, doctor.’ The voice that cut in was not Piravani’s. It came from the landing. Instinctively, they both turned towards it. ‘He’s quite right. You’re not going back to the van.’ Then recognition struck Hammond like a fist. The voice belonged to Radmilo Uželać.
A torch more powerful than either of theirs suddenly flooded the part of the room they were standing in with light of a dazzling intensity. Of Uželać all they had caught was a glimpse – a dark shape silhouetted in the doorway. Now even that was gone.
‘I have a gun and I’ll shoot if either of you moves towards me. Is that clear?’
‘It’s clear,’ hissed Piravani, shielding his eyes as best he could.
‘You never said anything about coming into the house,’ Hammond protested, ashamed by his stupidity in trusting the man. ‘In fact, you said … ICEFA weren’t allowed to take such action.’
‘What I said isn’t important. What I’m saying now is. I want the tapes.’
‘I not we,’ growled Piravani. ‘Don’t you see, doctor? This isn’t a police or ICEFA operation. This guy works for Todorović.’
‘I work for myself.’
‘OK. You plan to sell the tapes to Todorović. Like you sold him the information that got Guido killed. It makes no difference in the end.’
‘Just give me the tapes.’
‘Why don’t you come and get them?’
‘Because I don’t have to. Take the box out of the rucksack and slide it across to me. If you don’t, I’ll shoot you both. Then I’ll come and get them.’
‘You’re going to shoot us both anyway. Otherwise we’ll blab to your bosses that you’ve sold out.’
As Piravani said it, Hammond realized he was undoubtedly right. This was where the deal he had struck had always been heading. The two policemen and the driver of the car were all in on a cut of whatever Uželać could extract from Todorović. ICEFA had never known about the break-in. And they wo
uld never know about the tapes either.
‘The only reason you haven’t shot us already,’ Piravani went on, ‘is that you haven’t actually seen the tapes with your own eyes. You want to be sure, don’t you? Just in case I’m playing some kind of trick. You want to be completely certain.’
‘Give me the box.’
‘You do it, doctor,’ sighed Piravani. ‘I couldn’t bear to do it myself.’ He urged Hammond forward with a gentle push in the back, as if admitting the game was up.
Hammond stepped slowly across to the rucksack and bent over it. He opened wide the half-closed zip and lifted out the shoe box containing the tapes.
And then the first shot was fired.
NINETEEN
Hammond dived for the floor as noise exploded in the room. One shot, then another, then a third, fourth, fifth – in rapid succession. Uželać’s torchbeam swivelled crazily across the walls and ceiling, then something heavy thumped down close to Hammond, the boards bouncing beneath him. A moan came from behind him. Rolling round, he saw Piravani kneeling by the coffee table, his hands braced on the rim. All light was at floor level now, casting gigantic, swollen shadows.
Hammond pointed his torch at Uželać. The Serb lay on his side, legs drawn up, clutching a wound with one hand as with the other he reached for his gun a few feet away.
‘Finish him,’ gasped Piravani. ‘Quick.’
Self-preservation is a potent instinct. It cleansed Hammond’s mind of panic and doubt and left only kill-or-be-killed ruthlessness in their place. He grabbed the hammer, jumped up and took two stooping strides across the room.
Uželać was beneath him, still stretching for the gun. Hammond kicked it out of his reach and only then noticed the pool of blood he was standing in. It was spreading fast, and blood was bubbling from the Serb’s mouth as well, his breath coming in desperate heaves of his lungs. Hammond was startled by the realization that he would have used the hammer if he had needed to. That was clear to him. But he did not need to. Uželać was dying in front of him.
Blood Count Page 16
