All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.
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First published in 2012 by Rough Diamond: www.roughdiamond.co.uk
RESOLUTION TO KILL Copyright Eve Seymour 2012
For Ian
RESOLUTION TO KILL
PROLOGUE
The Lasva River Valley, Bosnia, April 1993
The resolution to kill was passed during the night at a hotel restaurant near Vitez. By the small hours soldiers were on the move, travelling in trucks under the mutual cover of silence and darkness. Some wore masks. Some wore black shirts. They carried automatic weapons in their hands, hatred in their hearts. As dawn stained the sky they surrounded the first village.
There was no warning. At 0530 hours, the first mortars were fired, raining red-hot fragments of burning metal. Simultaneously, along the valley, other villages were hit by surprise attacks. Mosques fell. Homes shattered. Barns and crops, torched, burst into flames. Rocket- propelled grenades, messengers of death, hissed and whooshed through the charred air. Panicked villagers fled to the woods in their nightclothes and were cut down by enemy fire. Those who followed screamed their distress and pain as they, too, were hit in a second wave.
Then the soldiers, who belonged to a paramilitary unit known as the Jokers, closed in and the massacre began in earnest.
Among the Bosniaks, Muslims who lived in Bosnia, nobody and nothing was spared, not the old, the young, or even the animals. Livestock were shot where they stood, dogs and cats gunned down or dispatched with a blade. If the soldiers could kill the birds in the sky they would have done so. Only the Croatians were spared. Some, fuelled by fear and nationalism, and egged on by their military brothers, turned on their former neighbours and friends and took part in the ‘cleansing’.
The commander, a man with a baby face and bright laughing eyes, swaggered like a
modern-day Lucifer. His boys adored him. Would have followed him anywhere to do anything. And so it was amid the devastation and carnage of those hit in the first wave of mortar rounds that he led a unit of men house-to-house. Villagers cowering inside were beaten, humiliated and slain in an orgy of violence; some in their own homes; some in the open. Under the commander’s orders, a flaxen-haired child, no more than three years of age, was dragged screaming from its mother’s arms, doused in petrol and set alight. Girls were raped. Teenage lads and boys mutilated and murdered. Black laughter gilded the air. Blood ran in the gutters. It didn’t matter that a UN-British peacekeeping force gathered only kilometres away.
‘Powerless fools,’ the commander proclaimed to his men with a sneer. In the absence of witnesses, he intended to blame the Serbs for the destruction.
Only when the streets were littered with the bodies of the dead, when the village was ablaze, were the soldiers given the order to move on.
And a frightened little girl crouched in the ashes of her home.
CHAPTER ONE
Nineteen years later
Tallis didn’t know that he was one phone call away from disaster. Didn’t know how different his life would have been had he failed to take the call that morning. Oblivious to unseen forces
hell-bent on taking hold of him, turning him upsidedown and giving him a good shaking, he sat at the bottom of the garden outside his bungalow, hands clamped over his ears, face turned to a blaze of late-May sunshine while, inside, the phone blared. To make matters worse, his
next-door neighbour hammered and banged and drilled for Europe. Each time Tallis popped his head over the fence, he expected to see a theme park, not a load of crappy decking.
By ignoring his cellphone he guessed he was behaving in an unprofessional manner. Zoned out after the last mission in Chechnya, he realised it had been a mistake to register his availability for work. Optimistic by nature, he’d expected to feel better by now. He didn’t. Not only was he wasted and worn out, he was wary. Since a new British government had come to power, there had been a radical security shake-up. While Five’s sphere of operation was counterterrorism, the SIS dealing in more sensitive international intelligence, in the current restructure and due to the success of Tallis’s last mission, Asim’s covert band of ‘off-the-books’ spooks were scheduled to have their field of operation increased. Depending on whom you believed, Chinese whispers suggested there was to be more accountability, which, in Tallis’s humble opinion, would not work. Conversely, word on the street insinuated that those dealing in the dark arts of espionage were looking for a new brand of spy. He smiled grimly. Was this subtext for assassin? Exactly how much more expendable could a man like him actually be? Obviously not enough, he groaned, as the noise from next door ceased, his cellphone stopped, then his landline kicked into action. Had to be Asim, his handler, he glowered. The man didn’t deal in negatives.
Tallis jumped to his feet, sprinted across the grass, barrelling inside, and snatched up the receiver.
‘Look, how can I put this nicely? Can you please fuck off and leave me alone!’
‘Paul?’
‘Mum,’ he spluttered. ‘I’m so sorry. I thought…’
‘I know what you thought.’
Chastened, he was suddenly a thirty-five-year-old man in a six-year-old boy’s body. ‘I’m so sorry. It’s just…’ How on earth could he explain the inexplicable?
Silence resonated down the line, threatening to burst his eardrum.
‘Are you all right?’ his mother asked at last, her concern plain.
‘Tired,’ he mumbled. Wiped out, more like. He burbled something about needing a break. Bearing in mind he had no visible means of gainful employment, this was a bit of a stretch, especially for his mother, who compared his apparent lack of steady work to being permanently on vacation.
‘That’s sort of why I’m calling,’ she said, vague. Tallis frowned. His mum didn’t do ‘sort of’ anything. She was purposeful, practical and direct. ‘As you have time on your hands,’ she explained without further explanation. Clearly she’d been wrong-footed by his opening salvo. None of this was making sense, he thought, scratching an ear.
‘Something wrong, Mum?’
‘It’s Dario.’
‘Jana’s husband?’ Tallis had no aunts or uncles, but Jana was as close to an aunt as he could imagine. Care of his mother, he had dual nationality and a whole family of ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’ on the Croatian side of the family. It had been several years since he’d last visited them.
‘He’s gone missing,’ she said.
‘Missing?’
‘Dario left for work, but never arrived.’
‘When was this?’
‘Two weeks ago.’
He flexed his shoulders, trying to relieve the tension. ‘Maybe he’s taken a holiday.’
‘Without telling Jana? Don’t be flippant, Paul.’
He wasn’t. ‘Has Jana contacted the police?’
‘In Zagreb, but they’re useless.’
Tallis suppressed a smile. In another life, when he was a police officer, he lost count of the times relatives of victims accused the police of incompetence.
‘They probably think he’ll turn up. People go missing all the time, often of their own accord.’ Especially if they’re blokes, he wanted to add. Currently it seemed an appealing prospect. ‘Maybe he needed space.�
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He could hear his mother sucking on her teeth. She didn’t hold with the need for personal freedom argument. She believed that people should put up and shut up. Because she had lived with Tallis’s father until he had died, Tallis could understand the philosophy. It was a form of self-preservation.
His mother was speaking again. ‘You’re not suggesting he’s had some kind of breakdown, are you?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Rubbish.’
And from what he knew of Dario, his mother was probably right. The sort of man who never let things get on top of him, Dario was always laughing, always cracking jokes. Dario’s default position was jolly. ‘Another woman?’
‘Paul,’ his mother protested.
‘I’m only looking at all the angles. Any police officer worth his salt will be doing exactly the same.’
‘He only has eyes for Jana.’
‘All right.’ He backed off. ‘Did he have money problems?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said doubtfully, ‘but he will if he doesn’t hurry back soon. A butcher’s shop doesn’t run itself.’
‘What does Jana think?’
‘She’s frantic, of course.’
‘If you like I could call the police, have a word.’ He didn’t think it would play well. Croatian cops were not British cops.
‘Can’t you fly out there? If you take a personal interest they’ll take more notice.’
‘Not sure,’ he began. Then he thought, What the hell? He could do with some focus. Getting involved in something uncomplicated might jettison him out of his current unholy frame of mind. Might even make him feel better. ‘All right, Mum, I’ll give it my best shot.’ Asim would have to wait.
Two days later Tallis arrived at the airport at Pleso, around seventeen kilometres south of Zagreb, the most elegant of cities and the shopping capital of Croatia. From there he collected a Nissan 4x4, pre-arranged, and drove to his aunt’s house, unarranged, and for no other reason than he wanted to gauge the situation as it was and not as his mother, from thousands of kilometres away, described it. He didn’t think she was exaggerating, but sometimes people copped hold of the wrong idea, ran with and dramatised it.
Taking the fast Zagreb to Belgrade motorway, he headed east, leaving behind historical towns, then south in the direction of Sisak. Beyond lay the villages of the Lonjsko Polje Nature Park, a genuine slice of rural Croatia. Traffic was light, the weather great: sunny and twenty-three degrees Celsius, according to the reading on the climate control panel.
He kept the speedometer at a steady hundred and twenty kilometres per hour. Idly glancing in the rear-view mirror, he noticed a navy-coloured four-door Volkswagen Passat estate, the same car he’d spotted on his tail earlier in the journey. Automatically, he indicated and pulled over into the middle lane and killed his speed. The Passat dropped back. Might be something. Might be nothing, but his default setting was primed for trouble. At the first roundabout after leaving the motorway, he circled it slowly, indicated right and, without drama, veered left. The Passat disappeared.
Off the main route, the roads were slower, tractors and farm machinery the main reason for the delay. Travelling at a snail’s pace, he had a clear view of his surroundings. Sunshine lent a strobe effect to the waters of the River Sava. Fields of wheat waved in the breeze. Whitewashed buildings with turrets studded the landscape. Stalls along the route sold home-grown vegetables. Amid the rural idyll it was impossible to avoid the scars of war. Although a fair amount of reconstruction had taken place, there were still damaged and abandoned buildings, like the water tower pockmarked by shrapnel, the block of flats only partially intact, that particular scent of desolation on the breeze, and so redolent of his last mission in Chechnya. Suddenly he felt as if his life was defined by death and conflict and wondered if he would ever escape it. He guessed it came with the job description. Too frequently he was required to make the kind of choices most wished to avoid.
He pressed on to Sunja, a small town around ten kilometres from Sisak, where Jana and Dario’s home lay on the outskirts. During the war Sunja had come under fierce attack by Milosevic and his invading armies in their bid to take Zagreb. The little railway station had been blown to bits, although a new one had now been built. Although Tallis had not visited since he was a teenager, he instinctively knew the route to the cottage. That afternoon, bathed in late sunshine, streaks of light glancing through the trees, it looked smaller than he remembered.
Tallis pulled up on the gravelled drive, cut the engine and stepped out. Straightening his
six-foot-two-inch frame, he took a deep lungful of air that felt fresh after the stale confines of the jeep. At once, the front door was open, Jana standing on the threshold. In her early fifties, she appeared to have aged a great deal since he last saw her. Small in stature, she was carrying more weight and there was definitely a sag in her shoulders. Her hair, once a lustrous chestnut colour, was thin and almost totally grey. Her skin, too, seemed to have lost its vigour and had coarsened. There was no sparkle in her blue eyes. From the knowing expression on her face as she stepped down the three wooden steps from the veranda to greet him, his arrival was no surprise.
‘Hello, Paul.’ She smiled, tipping up on her toes and kissing him on both cheeks. ‘Sanja said you were coming.’
He hugged her, spoke in her native tongue. ‘Is it all right? You don’t mind?’
‘Of course I don’t mind, but I fear you’ve had a wasted journey.’
Tallis looked over her head, half expecting Dario to lumber out behind her. ‘He’s turned up?’
‘I’ve heard from him.’
‘And?’ Tallis said, expectant.
‘He had some urgent business to attend to.’
That it? So urgent he couldn’t let you know? A bit lame, Tallis thought. ‘Right,’ he said, unable to mask the dubious note in his voice. He wondered why Jana, usually so open, refused to meet his eye.
‘So you see, a lot of fuss over nothing,’ Jana said, briskly slipping her arm through his. ‘Now come,’ she said, as if it were the end of the matter. ‘You must be hungry after your journey.’
Over Tomislav, a dark beer from Zagreb, Tallis tried to draw Jana on Dario’s mysterious disappearing act. She murmured vaguely about him having an interest in an export/import company.
‘What type of business?’
‘Cigarettes.’
‘And it’s legal?’
‘But of course.’ Jana’s eyes flicked to the side, darting out of reach of Tallis’s enquiring gaze.
He got a bad vibe. The distribution of tobacco could be an iffy business. Organised crime was rife in Croatia. It had taken hold in the aftermath of the war years. The international embargo placed by the United Nations on the former Yugoslavia during the War - Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in particular - meant that many with criminal intent turned to smuggling. To be fair, it had been the only way to sneak in armaments for the Croatians, Serbia already at a significant advantage in the weapons stakes. Criminals of the past had become ‘businessmen’ of the present. And now that they had made their squillions they didn’t mind how they hushed up enquiring minds. Recently there had been a number of murders of prominent newspaper journalists and businessmen. Two had been blown up in car bomb attacks. So, Tallis asked himself, was Dario safe, and what kind of business was he really mixed up in? Had he got involved in something he shouldn’t? And of what was Jana afraid? Because there was absolutely no doubt in his mind that she was afraid of something. Every time he asked a question her answers mismatched the expression in her eyes.
They ate prsut, cured ham, and cobanec, rich goulash with noodles.
‘Have you been in the wars, Paul?’ Jana leant across the table and traced the line of an old wound.
The mention of the word war made him flinch. Memories of a bleak battleground in Chechnya, young men cut down, the dull crump of mortar fire, rattled through his brain. Since his return, ghosts seemed to be in a perpetual clamour at the
fringes of his mind. This didn’t make any kind of sense to him. If he were going to experience problems he thought it would be confined to the immediate aftermath, not now and with such renewed vigour. Just as well he worked outside the box, he thought. Had he been officially on the payroll, he’d have failed the mandatory psychological assessments. The scar on his cheek, however, belonged to another era.
He flicked a smile. ‘Got into a scrap with a woman.’
‘You don’t change,’ she protested with a laugh.
Tallis smiled back, let her believe the lie. Inside, he felt something deep shift.
‘And Dan?’ Jana said, serious now, sensing his mood maybe.
‘I don’t visit,’ he said. His older brother could rot in prison for all he cared.
‘A terrible business. Your poor mother.’
Tallis agreed and changed tack. He enquired about other members of the family. On safer ground, and always one for gossip, Jana brightened, became almost chatty.
‘Ivan and Natasha have just had their fourth, another boy.’ She pulled a face in mock despair. ‘And you remember Tomas’s daughter?’
Last time he’d seen Marija, she was on the cusp of womanhood, a beauty in the making. He nodded.
‘Modelling in Europe.’
‘And Goran?’ Tallis said, remembering Dario’s younger brother. ‘Still making wine?’
Jana nodded enthusiastically. ‘It’s going well. Fortunately he’s been able to lend a hand in Dario’s shop - as a temporary measure,’ she added quickly.
‘So when do you expect Dario back?’ The question was precision timed.
Jana opened her mouth, then exchanged whatever was on the brink of tumbling from her lips for a clipped expression. ‘Soon,’ she said in stiff response.
Bullshit, he thought. He leant towards her, placed his hand over hers. ‘Is everything all right, Jana?’
Her eyes shot wide. She pulled away as if he’d placed a steam iron on her bare skin. ‘Of course.’ Standing abruptly, she gathered up the plates. It was an awkward moment, the shared bond of family and friendship shattered and suddenly in pieces.
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