Miloš lunged with the knife, missing his intended victim, but striking Zineta instead with a deep thrust somewhere around the waist. She cried out and fell. Patrick fell with her, but rolled clear and scrambled up, blocking Hammond’s path. Hammond dodged round him as Miloš stooped over Zineta, swivelled the knife in his hand and plunged it down into her.
Hammond fired at the same instant that the second stab struck home. The gun jolted in his grasp as he pulled the trigger two or three more times. One bullet entered Miloš’s neck. He gasped and pitched away from Zineta. Then another gouged a bloody cavity out of his nose, before a third pierced his skull and he dropped to the floor.
Hammond was possessed now by instincts he barely recognized as his own. He bent over Miloš and pressed the gun to his temple. He felt sure the man was already dead, but his need for certainty on the point was overriding. He fired two more shots. Bone splintered and blood sprayed. Miloš did not move.
Only then did Hammond turn and kneel beside Zineta. And only then did he realize just how much blood she was losing. It was gouting out of her. ‘Call an ambulance,’ he shouted at Patrick.
‘One one two,’ said Patrick numbly. It was clear shock had finally overtaken him. And small wonder. The pool of Zineta’s blood was spreading fast towards him.
‘Call for one. Now.’
Patrick belatedly turned and ran towards the study just as his mother stepped out if it, still holding the phone, the cable stretched out behind her. Her mouth fell open as she took in what she saw.
‘Ambulance,’ Hammond roared. ‘Fast.’ Then he looked down at Zineta. She was lying doubled up on her side, her face locked in a grimace of pain. He tried to turn her on to her back, so that he could see exactly where the blood was coming from, but she wailed in agony. His guess, based on where her hands were pressing the wound, was that the knife had punctured the femoral artery. Miloš had stabbed her twice, so there had to be a second wound in the same area. But the arterial injury was the more serious – and the more life-threatening. Blood was pumping out of her with horrifying speed.
‘I’m going to try and stop the bleeding, Zineta,’ he said, unfastening her jeans and searching for the pressure point in her groin. ‘Hold on. Just hold on.’ He was a doctor. Surely he could save her. He knew what to do. With enough force applied in the correct place, he could stem the blood loss until the paramedics arrived.
But it was immediately obvious to him that the pressure point was itself the location of the tear to the artery. And it was a big tear. He could not trace the artery above it. There was another wound in the abdomen impeding him. And there was so much blood. He was kneeling in a small lake of it.
‘I feel … cold,’ Zineta moaned.
‘Don’t worry. That’s natural. I just need to— Oh God.’ As he eased her hands away, he saw how hopeless the task was. The injury was simply too severe. Nothing was going to work. He understood that very clearly. She was going to die. And he would not be able to prevent it.
‘Will Miss Perović be all right?’ Patrick called from the doorway of the study.
‘Get some towels,’ Hammond shouted back, searching ever more desperately for a viable pressure point. He glimpsed Mary Bartol in the hall, clutching Patrick by the hand.
‘Fetch them from the bathroom,’ she said, releasing Patrick and pushing him towards the stairs. He started up them, his feet pounding on the treads.
‘Is Monir … unharmed?’ Zineta asked weakly. She was terribly pale now, her face sheened with sweat.
‘Your son is fine,’ Hammond replied.
‘Thank you … for calling him that.’
‘There’s an ambulance on its way.’ He glanced up at Mary, who nodded in confirmation. But her expression told its own story. She knew the ambulance would arrive too late.
And so did Zineta. ‘I’m sorry, Edward. I’ve caused you … much trouble.’
‘You’ve nothing to apologize for.’
She clasped his arm. ‘If you get the tapes back … listen to the ones for … March and April … ninety-six. They’ll help you prove … you didn’t ask Gazi …’
‘Forget the tapes. All that matters is saving your life.’
She smiled feebly. ‘I know you would … if you … could.’
Patrick came racing back down the stairs. Mary stopped him as he reached the bottom. Hammond sensed rather than knew the struggle was over – and in vain. He looked down into Zineta’s eyes.
‘Ask Monir … to hold my hand … Please.’
Hammond beckoned Patrick forward. Mary came with him. In her gaze there was a signal of understanding – and consent. Hammond took Patrick’s hand and pressed it into Zineta’s cupped palm. She curled her fingers around it.
‘Doviđenja,’ she murmured. ‘Good—’
Then nothing. But a dying sigh.
TWENTY-NINE
However bad things had been during the previous eleven days, Edward Hammond had kept assuring himself that with luck, effort and honesty they would improve; that there was a way through the troubles he was caught up in, not just for him, but for others whose lives had been blighted by Dragan Gazi. Zineta Perović, he only now realized, was the acid test of those assurances. And they had been shown to be worthless. Because Zineta Perović was dead.
‘Did she mean a lot to you?’ Mary Bartol asked him at some point, as they waited for the police and ambulance to arrive. And his answer had framed itself almost independently of him. ‘More than I ever knew.’ He had thought he could rescue her from an existence crippled by her dealings with Gazi. But unfortunately what she had ultimately needed him to do was what, as a doctor, he was uniquely qualified to do: save her life. And he had failed.
His struggle to right some of the wrongs he had unwittingly contributed to by saving another life – Gazi’s – was made a mockery of by her death. It seemed to him now to have been a hollow enterprise from the first: a squalid salvage operation to protect his reputation. Only thanks to Zineta and Marco Piravani had it been diverted to serve nobler ends. And what were they worth if Zineta – and quite possibly Marco as well – had to die in the pursuit of them? It was too much for too little; it was altogether too much.
*
His state of mind – at once detached and despairing – evoked first sympathy, then tight-lipped tetchiness, in the Luxembourg police officers who found themselves dealing with four violent deaths in the normally peaceful setting of Forêt Pré. For his part, he could not seem to impress upon them the urgent need to rescue Vidor from Todorović’s clutches. In the end, he had to leave most of the explaining to Mary Bartol. And she it was who conveyed to him the bewildering news, passed on from Police HQ and officially confirmed, that three men, one of them believed to be Branko Todorović , had been arrested at the Gare Centrale in Luxembourg City, and that Stevan Vidor was alive and well.
‘How?’ he asked.
But she had no answer for him. She was as confused as he was.
Confusion mounted when Émile Bartol arrived. He had already been en route from Brussels at the time of his earlier phone call, in response to a message from Mary reporting a family emergency. That emergency had escalated in the course of the call and he was understandably beside himself with worry. But his relief at finding his wife and son unharmed, at any rate physically, did not prevent him bombarding Hammond with demands for a clear account of his role in events – something he was presently incapable of supplying. Even the police seemed to understand that. Émile was eventually persuaded to accompany Mary and Patrick to hospital. By then Patrick was exhibiting symptoms of profound shock.
Hammond was also in shock, but not of a kind medical attention could help him cope with. He agreed to be transported to Police HQ for questioning. As he was driven away, the first of the body bags was carried out of the house. He did not know if it contained Zineta. But he did know that the irrevocability of death had never seemed starker to him.
The police supplied him with replacement clothing. His own was sa
turated with blood and his overnight bag was still in Vidor’s car. He was left in a windowless waiting room with assurances that someone would be along soon to take a statement – someone who would be able to clarify the circumstances of Todorović’s arrest.
‘Soon’ turned out to be a loose concept. More than an hour elapsed in a solitude that Hammond would have found both disturbing and exasperating if he had been in firmer control of his thoughts. As it was, time drizzled through his fingers as he stared at the blank walls and watched the events leading to Zineta’s death wind, unwind, rewind and agonizingly coalesce in his fixed and horrified memory. Where shock ended and grief began he could not have said. Both were equally disabling.
He had experienced death before, of course, personally as well as professionally. But not even Kate’s murder had affected him like this. He had not been with her at the time. He had not seen her blood, or heard her dying words. And he had not been the same man he was now. That truth dawned slowly on him in the bland blue Luxembourg police waiting room. The previous eleven days had changed him. He could never go back to what he was before. He had become an exile from himself.
At last the door opened. And the surprise of recognition seeped into Hammond’s awareness. The ‘someone’ was Stevan Vidor.
They shook hands, stiffly and self-consciously, as if neither was quite able to take stock of the alterations he saw in the other. Hammond was puzzled, though it took him a moment to realize why. Vidor’s demeanour was not that of a man who had just lost the woman he loved. Nor was it that of an innocent caught up in events beyond his control. Clearly, he was neither of those things. As to what he was …
‘I’m sorry, Edward,’ he said. ‘I thought we’d be able to get you all out safely.’
‘We?’
‘I work for ICTY, like I told you, but not as a translator. I’m a UN special investigator, liaising with the police in The Hague and here.’
Hammond knew he should have been angered by the misrepresentation Vidor was admitting, but the emotion was beyond him. ‘Are you saying … the police knew what was going on all along?’
‘Not exactly. But they knew I was hoping to flush Todorović out. They had a squad waiting for him at the train station. I made the arrangement at the airport, while you were in the terminal waiting for Zineta’s flight. I couldn’t risk the police following us from there in case Todorović spotted them.’
‘So we just had to take our chances?’
‘There was no certainty he’d show up.’
‘But if he did …’
‘When Zineta played me the tape, I realized we had a unique opportunity to net Todorović and enough evidence to convict him. It looked as if we’d blown it when she disappeared, but thanks to you we got a second chance. I couldn’t let it slip. We don’t know yet what we’ll get from the tapes, but they could prove to be one of our biggest breakthroughs.’
‘And Zineta?’
‘I really am very sorry. I reckoned the men Todorović left at the house would surrender once they realized he’d been arrested and we had them surrounded. That was how it was supposed to work. But operations like this are never completely predictable.’
‘You’re right there.’
‘I’ve been told she bled to death.’
Hammond sighed. ‘The gash to the artery was too big. I couldn’t …’ He looked away. ‘I couldn’t save her.’
‘I’m sure you did everything you could.’
‘Everything I could, yes. But not enough.’
‘I don’t know, of course … how close you were to her.’
Hammond shook his head mournfully. ‘Neither do I.’
‘She died trying to save her son’s life, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘And she succeeded.’
‘So she did.’
‘It’s a fine way to be remembered.’
Hammond looked Vidor in the eye. ‘I’d rather she was with us now.’
‘Me too.’
‘You could have levelled with me.’
‘Too risky, Edward. Sorry.’
‘Yet you expected me to trust you at the Bartols’ house.’
‘That was an extreme situation.’
‘Yes. It certainly was.’
‘I’ll make sure the police go easy on you. Minimal questioning. Fast-tracked paperwork. There’ll be no … complications.’
‘Thank you,’ Hammond said flatly.
‘It’s not just for your sake. I’m hoping you’ll agree to help us … with something else.’
Something else? How could there be more? Was he never to be done with Gazi? He sat down. ‘You’d better tell me what it is.’
‘Trapping Todorović was a bonus, Edward. I was originally interested in Zineta because she was Gazi’s former mistress. We thought she might be involved in a conspiracy we’ve picked up rumours about. It turns out we were on the wrong track. She had nothing to do with it. But—’
‘What kind of conspiracy?’
‘A plan to break Gazi out of prison.’
Hammond looked up at Vidor incredulously. ‘Surely not.’
‘It seems incredible, I know. Security at Scheveningen is state-of-the-art. But recent intelligence that’s reached us suggests there’s a serious plan, involving serious people, just waiting for the green light.’
‘What are you going to do about it?’
Vidor sat down slowly in the chair opposite and leant forward, hands clasped together. ‘That’s where you come in.’
‘What’s any of this got to do with me?’
‘Haven’t you guessed? The organizers, whoever they are, won’t move until they’re paid. They’ve been in negotiation with Gazi’s daughter, Ingrid. The money she’s promised them is in a Swiss bank account, controlled by Gazi’s former accountant, Marco Piravani. But no one, including Ingrid, seems to know where Piravani is.’
So, at last, the truth. Ingrid did not want the money to featherbed herself and her relatives for the rest of their lives. She wanted it to buy her father’s freedom. Hammond remembered pleading with Piravani back in London to pay her and have done with it. ‘What does it matter if his family have his money to spend?’ he had asked him. ‘What does it really matter?’ And now here was the answer. It could hardly matter more.
‘Ingrid realized we were keeping her under surveillance and decided she couldn’t risk contacting Piravani directly. Until I met you in The Hague, we had no clue as to how she meant to communicate with him. I suppose blackmail must feature in this somewhere, because you’re the same Edward Hammond – Doctor Edward Hammond – who gave Gazi a liver transplant in March 1996, aren’t you?’
Hammond gave a dismal nod. ‘Yes. That’s me.’
‘The details don’t matter to us. But I’d guess you and Piravani both had good reason to go after the tapes and he obviously wanted you to be able to control the money if anything went wrong for him in Belgrade, as evidently it did.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘I don’t control the money, Stevan. I know that.’
‘But you do. Our enquiries indicate Piravani changed the access terms for the account at the end of last week, giving you the same rights as he has.’
The reason was instantly clear to Hammond. Piravani had not known what the money was really intended for. Otherwise he would not have offered to transfer it to the Cayman Islands in return for Hammond’s help in retrieving the tapes. He had decided to ensure their deal could be honoured even if only one of them made it out of Belgrade.
‘The issue is this, Edward. We want the people behind the break-out plan to show themselves. They’ve probably bribed staff members at the prison or even ICTY. If so, we need to identify them. The only way to do that is to get the plan put into practice. Whatever they try, we’ll be ready for them. But they won’t try anything unless they are paid.’
‘And that’s what you want me to do – pay them?’
‘Exactly. I can arrange for
us to fly to Lugano tomorrow morning. Then we go to the bank and transfer the money. They’ll need to be certain you’re the Edward Hammond Piravani nominated, but your passport will prove that. It’s simple. But only you can do it.’
Suddenly, thanks to Piravani, Hammond was a powerful man. He did not feel it. He had, in truth, never felt less powerful. He tried to marshal his thoughts. He knew he was in a position to dictate the terms of his cooperation, but he hated himself for doing it. ‘Are you sure this is the best way to catch these people?’
‘In our determination, it’s the only way.’
‘Then I’ll do it. But I need something from you in return.’
‘Name it.’
‘Copies of the tapes covering March and April 1996.’
‘No problem.’ Vidor nodded thoughtfully. ‘That’s the period of the liver transplant.’
‘Yes.’ He said no more. And Vidor did not press him to.
‘Well, I can have the tapes ready for you by the morning.’
‘Thank you.’
‘That’s settled, then?’
‘Yes. But, tell me, what will happen to Todorović?’
‘Extradition, in due course. A comfortable cell at Scheveningen. And a long, scrupulously fair trial at ICTY. Like Gazi.’
‘Who won’t escape?’
‘Not a chance.’
‘And Zineta?’
‘The police will contact her family in Belgrade. I guess they’ll want her body sent back there for burial. It could take some time to arrange.’
‘She has a brother. I have a phone number for him. I’d like you to contact him and explain as much as you can of what’s happened. How she died. Why she died.’
‘OK. But … wouldn’t you prefer to speak to him yourself?’
‘No.’ Hammond bowed his head. ‘I don’t think I could bear to.’
THIRTY
Vidor was as good as his word where the Luxembourg police were concerned. Hammond was given an easy ride by the officer who interviewed him, in correct but stilted English. The particulars of the four deaths at Forêt Pré were punctiliously recorded, though perhaps no more punctiliously than if they had happened in a road accident. Vidor’s UN status seemed to confer a degree of immunity on Hammond. He would be required to return to the Grand Duchy at some point for a formal examination by the judge appointed to the case, but he was meanwhile free to leave with Vidor. Indeed, his departure was positively encouraged. ‘The Todorović arrest will cause much media interest, doctor,’ the officer explained. ‘It would be best for everyone if you … were not here.’
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