The Templar Succession

by Mario Reading

  ‘Look,’ said Hart. ‘We haven’t got much time. When IS discover the empty third boat they’ll know someone got away.’

  ‘What do you think they’re going to do then?’ said Rider. ‘Invade Kurdistan?’

  ‘Possibly. Yes. I wouldn’t put anything past them.’

  ‘So what do you suggest we do, oh mighty Templar person?’ It was Rider at his most cynical. ‘Wave a flag of truce? Offer to parley? The phones are fucked thanks to the drenching we got when we waded ashore. Your film is probably fucked too.’

  ‘No it’s not,’ said Hart.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Because I seal each memory card inside a waterproof package when I’m finished with it,’ said Hart. ‘I learned to do that on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, when the place flooded.’

  ‘Shame you didn’t think to do that with the phones before we went for our brief dip in the lake,’ said Rider, content that he’d achieved the last word.

  Hart grunted. He stood up and began walking towards the Peshmerga lines. He heard someone say ‘Oh fuck’ behind him. Rider, probably. The man swore for England.

  Hart held up his press pass in one hand and his drenched cameras in the other. They’d be watching him through infrared, the soldiers, even though it was well beyond dawn now. It gave that tiny extra edge.

  There was a burst of machine-gun fire.

  Over my head, Hart said to himself. They are not firing at me. They are firing over my head.

  He stopped and waited. If an IS sniper got him at this point he’d never know anything about it. He’d just pitch onto the track in front of him and bleed out. No luckily positioned telephoto lens like in Kosovo, sixteen years before. You don’t get that sort of a break twice in a lifetime.

  He watched the soldiers approaching him. He never moved his arms. Cameras, press pass. It was all he could think of to do. At least he didn’t look like an IS soldier in disguise. He was blonde-haired, clean-shaven – give or take a couple of days – and only lightly tanned. Not dark-haired, bearded, and wrapped up like a mummy in the Cairo museum.

  ‘Down. Flat.’ It was one of the approaching soldiers.

  Hart knelt down and slithered onto his stomach. ‘There are four more journalists behind me. Two French. Two English. One of the Frenchman is injured. We are all unarmed.’

  ‘Where?’ said the Kurdish soldier.

  ‘Fifty metres. Straight back. Can I call them?’ said Hart.

  ‘Yes. Call.’

  ‘Okay.’ Hart raised his voice. ‘Come on out. Arms high. Press passes on show. These are Peshmerga.’

  ‘What was the shooting?’ said one of the soldiers. An officer, surely.

  ‘IS were chasing us,’ said Hart. ‘On the reservoir. We escaped in boats. They used rifle grenades. And what sounded like cannon fire.’

  The soldiers exchanged glances.

  ‘Are we in no-man’s-land?’ said Hart.

  ‘No-man’s-land? No. There is no no-man’s-land,’ said the officer. ‘What do we need with no-man’s-land? You are in newly liberated Kurdistan.’

  THIRTY

  ‘What made you do it?’ Amira was looking at Hart over her cup of Kurdish tea. ‘Risking your life like that? I’ve seen you do stuff like that before. Something comes over you, you stand up, and act like a suicidal maniac.’

  ‘Someone had to do it,’ said Hart.

  ‘Yes, but why always you?’

  Hart sipped his tea. He shrugged. He looked across at the two Frenchmen. Then at Rider. Everyone was sipping their tea and eating unleavened bread and honey. Most had inane grins on their faces. Even the Frenchman that Amira had patched up. Each one knew that getting unscathed out of IS-controlled territory constituted a near miracle. The sort of thing you’d tell your grandchildren about, when they deigned to listen.

  ‘You want the truth?’ Hart said.

  ‘No, John. I want a lie. I want you to concoct the juiciest, most idiot-demeaning lie you possibly can, and then tell it to me.’

  Hart sighed. Amira was on the warpath. He’d ducked out from under her suggestion that they get back together again, and she wasn’t about to forgive him in a hurry. No woman likes her overtures spurned. Hell. He could understand that. If he’d made a similar overture, and Amira had chucked it back in his face, he’d have been livid.

  ‘I don’t know why I did it,’ said Hart. ‘But I had a sudden flashback. To Kosovo.’

  ‘Kosovo?’ Amira made a face. ‘Kosovo?’

  ‘Yeah. I was there in ninety-eight,’ said Hart.

  ‘You never told me that.’

  ‘You never asked me.’ Hart shrugged, instinctively making light of something that held a particular significance for him.

  Amira pulled the blanket the Peshmerga had provided her with further over her shoulders. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose it involves a woman?’ she said.

  ‘Collaterally only.’ Hart gave a brief nod. ‘Yes. I suppose it did.’

  ‘What do you mean collaterally only?’

  ‘I mean that the woman involved was not involved with me.’ Hart waved an impatient hand. ‘Look. This isn’t important. It happened a long time ago. I don’t know why I’m suddenly thinking of it. Maybe because I thought an IS sniper was going to take me out while I stood there like a prune waving my press pass at the Peshmerga.’

  ‘Someone shot you in Kosovo?’

  ‘Yes. A Serb war criminal they called “the Captain”. He shot me in the back. Only the telephoto lens in my backpack deflected the bullet.’

  ‘You’re kidding me?’

  ‘No.’ Hart raised his eyes to meet hers. ‘The force of the bullet knocked me about ten feet up the path I was walking on. If the bullet had hit me in the normal run of things it would have punched a six-inch hole clear through my spine. I still get twinges on thundery nights. A distinct sort of muscle memory.’

  ‘What happened to the collateral woman?’ said Amira.

  ‘I don’t know. She’d been badly treated.’ Hart hesitated. He could feel the past beckoning to be let back in. ‘Well, systematically raped, if you must know. Before that the Captain had killed both her parents and her brother in front of her eyes. I abandoned her in a Serb monastery. She was injured, you see. The abbot promised me he would look after her. The monastery was famous for protecting Albanian Muslims as well as Serb Christians. It seemed the right thing to do at the time.’

  ‘But you wrote about it at least?’

  ‘About her? No. She made me promise not to. About the rest? Yes. Someone else wrote the piece on my behalf. But the whole thing fell flat as a pancake without any personal testimony or photographs. I might as well have been making it all up.’

  ‘And – don’t tell me – you never kept in contact?’ Amira was staring at Hart as if he had just emerged from a lengthy sojourn in an insane asylum.

  ‘She fell off the ends of the earth,’ said Hart.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘A week after I left, when I finally got through to the abbot to ask about her, he told me she had disappeared. When I asked him where to, he couldn’t say. I traced her back to her village. No luck. After the war was over she never returned. Look, Amira. Some of those women who were raped were so ashamed of what had happened to them that they couldn’t face their families again. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know already. You’ve been around, same as me.’

  ‘And that was that?’ she said.

  ‘Pretty much,’ he said.

  ‘What are you not telling me?’ she said.

  Hart waved her question away. ‘Nothing. It was bad. That’s all. Probably the worst thing that’s ever happened to me on assignment.’

  ‘How old were you then? It was 1998, you said?’ Amira tried to work it out in her head.
/>   ‘Twenty-five.’

  ‘And I suppose you thought you could change the world?’

  ‘No. I didn’t,’ said Hart. ‘Not after Sarajevo. But I admit I was naïve. I did think I could make a small difference. But I couldn’t. Not really. When it came down to it, nothing had changed. Lumnije – that’s what she was called – Lumnije – she still had to deal with all that had happened to her. And the Captain was free to carry on his campaign of gang rapes and ethnic cleansing and murder until NATO finally got its act together and intervened.’ Hart sighed. ‘I might as well have spat into the Pacific Ocean and expected it to raise a tsunami for all the good I could do.’

  ‘Nice image,’ said Amira.

  ‘I thought so,’ said Hart.

  Amira eased herself across the raised carpet on which she and Hart were sitting. She opened up her blanket. ‘Cuddle? No strings?’

  Hart nodded.

  She snuggled up against him.

  ‘You’re cold,’ he said.

  ‘Somewhat,’ she said. ‘Do you actually remember what just happened to us? Or are you still loitering somewhere in Kosovo sixteen years ago with a collateral female?’

  Hart didn’t answer.

  ‘How old was she, by the way?’ said Amira.

  ‘Sixteen.’

  Amira sat back and stared at him. ‘Sixteen?’

  ‘Yes. When I got her out of the rape house, though, she looked ten years older. And she’d had it easy. Or so she said. The Captain had reserved her for himself because he didn’t want to catch the clap.’ Hart shook his head. ‘Don’t glare at me like that, Amira. That’s exactly what she told me. I’m not making it up.’ He only allowed himself to relax when he saw that Amira was prepared to accept that he hadn’t been being flippant. ‘What happened to the others doesn’t bear thinking about. Anyone who wanted to could take them. Do anything they liked. Humiliate them in whatever way they chose.’

  ‘And all this is still haunting you?’ said Amira.

  ‘It never goes away,’ said Hart. ‘Every war zone I’m in, every photo I take, I remember those girls. First they lost their families. Then they were dragged through hell and back. Then they were shamed. Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror, when I’m feeling at my most self-pitying, and I remember. And it’s all happening again. IS – or what the Arabs call the Daesh – are doing the same thing with the Yazidis and with the Kurds and with the Shia. You saw them massacring a bunch of unarmed Shia pretty much in front of our eyes. Nothing changes. The strong still dominate the weak. That’s the way of things. Sometimes we think the situation is improving. But we’re only kidding ourselves. The first chance people get to lord it over other people, they take it. We’re the world’s worst animals. Because we do it for fun.’

  ‘And this is why you get up and offer yourself to the fates?’ said Amira. ‘Put yourself in the way of danger? Play the martyr?’

  Hart looked down at Amira as she lay in the crook of his arm. ‘Maybe.’ He hesitated. ‘Yes. Maybe.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  There are days you don’t care to remember. Other days that pass you by. And then there comes a day that gets a grip on you and never lets you go. Such a day happened to Hart three days after his return to England from Iraq.

  He was winding down from his assignment. Six, seven days. It usually took that long. At first everything and everyone seems strange when you come back from a war zone. Trivial. Uncaring. You walk amongst the civilians and you say to yourself, what the hell are these people doing? People are dying out there. And here you all are, boozing and flirting and pissing your lives away.

  Then, slowly, you begin to swing with the tide again. You remember that life is for the living. Not the dead. That if you are offered precious freedoms, it is an insult not to clasp them to your breast and hug them to death.

  Hart was beginning to notice the pretty girls in their summer dresses in the London parks. The taste of a cold beer on a sunny day. The smell of coffee outside a grindery in Camden Town. He walked round the British Museum and the V&A. Admired the Ardabil carpet. Had lunch at Fernandez & Wells in South Kensington, sitting outside eating chorizo, fried eggs and sourdough bread, while he watched the world go by.

  And then he got the phone call.

  Later, when he thought about it, it had a sort of inevitability. Like when you remember an old friend you haven’t thought of for years, and he contacts you out of the blue, a few hours later, explaining that he’d found himself thinking of you at the exact same time you were thinking of him and decided to get in touch. Didn’t have your number but, what the hell, he’d looked you up on the internet and found a number for you in amongst all the dross and tack that people wrote.

  That’s what happened with Lumnije.

  Hart had changed his telephone number maybe six times in the intervening sixteen years since they had last seen each other. But she knew exactly where to find him. All she’d needed to do was to trawl through a newspaper article or two to confirm his name, and then subscribe to the BT phonebook for his home number. He’d never thought to go ex-directory. No one phoned him on his landline anyway, unless they were trying to cold call him about notional car accidents or phantom problems with his computer.

  When he heard the heavily accented voice he’d almost put the phone down with his customary ‘I’m sorry. I never take unsolicited phone calls.’ I mean, why offend people? They had tacky enough jobs as it was. People being impolite to them just added to their misery.

  But something about the voice had struck a chord somewhere. Deep in his unconscious mind. He hung, midway between slamming the telephone down and asking for more information.

  ‘John?’ she’d said. ‘John Hart? Is that you?’

  So he’d sat down with the portable house phone, looking out of his opened window towards the park, and he’d sunk back into the past.

  ‘Lumnije?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is crazy. I was thinking about you. Just a few days ago. In Iraq. We got into trouble. Bad trouble. I was remembering.’

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

  ‘Are you still there?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I’m still here.’

  Her English was better than before. He noticed that straight away. More fluent. As if she’d spent time on a course, maybe. Or been forced to use it for work.

  ‘Where are you now?’ he said. He could feel the guilt mounting to his cheeks as he mouthed the question. ‘I tried to trace you all those years ago. Called the monastery. They had no news.’

  ‘And then you gave up,’ she said.

  He watched a woman getting into her car in the street below. Her husband putting their young child into its car seat and getting in himself. Tidy. The perfect nuclear family. The answer to someone’s dream. ‘And then I gave up. Yes. I reckoned you didn’t want me to contact you.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ she said.

  ‘Oh.’

  The pause was a long one. Hart held the phone to his ears. For some reason his heart was beating uncontrollably fast. As though the Captain was still pursuing them through the Kosovo woods. As though he could hear the man’s boots closing in on the trail behind him.

  ‘I live in Macedonia now,’ she said. ‘On the shores of Lake Ohrid. Near Struga. A village called Radožda.’

  Another long pause.

  ‘Do you know Macedonia?’ she said at last.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s one of those places that has escaped me. I’m not even entirely sure where it is. The only thing I know is that it’s not in Greece.’

  She laughed. He remembered her laughing way back then. It had been a rare-enough occurrence to warrant mention. He tried to imagine what she looked like now. She’d be, what, thirty-two years old? Prime of life still. Probably married with five children. But he didn’t ask her. Men don’t ask
such questions.

  ‘I want you to visit me,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me, John. I am asking a favour of you. I have something for you. Something important. I want you to visit me and collect it.’

  ‘But I can’t just get on a plane to Macedonia…’ His voice fell away.

  ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Are you working?’

  Hart sighed. ‘No. I’m on leave. Recovering from the thing that happened in Iraq.’

  ‘Do you have a girlfriend then, perhaps? Will she be unhappy if you come to visit me?’

  Hart smiled. He remembered Lumnije’s way with the truth. She thought of a question and she asked it. No beating about the bush. ‘No. No. I don’t have a girlfriend.’

  ‘Then book a ticket to Skopje,’ she said. ‘Please. For tomorrow. Come tomorrow. I need to see you. Very much. And this thing I have for you. You will be pleased. It is important. For your work. It will make you very famous.’

  ‘I don’t want to be famous,’ he said.

  Lumnije laughed again. ‘But you are. I have been reading all about you. You are already famous. They call you the “Templar”. After what you did in Germany.’

  ‘That’s all nonsense,’ he said.

  ‘I knew you would say that. You have to say that.’ There was a catch in her voice. An odd little hesitation. ‘Come to Skopje tomorrow. I will pick you up at the airport. Take the Vienna flight. Will you do that for me? Will you, John? Please?’

  Hart closed his eyes. He could see Lumnije’s face clearly now. Remember her deadweight on his back as he had carried her, seemingly forever, with the Captain hard behind them. All thanks to his stupidity in not killing the man when he had the chance. Flashes of this, flashes of that kept coming back to him. Sixteen years wasn’t so long.

  He remembered again the pang he had felt on leaving her at the monastery. As though he were betraying her in some way. Abandoning her to the fates. Abandoning her to the Captain.

  ‘All right,’ he heard himself saying. ‘I’ll come.’

  Quietly, gently, she put down the phone.