Fast as a lightning strike, Tallis’s hand flew to the bucket, withdrawing the Glock and shooting the minder twice at point-blank range. Bilal, on his feet, face contorted, pulled out a knife and hurled. Tallis dived through the gap, the blade missing him by millimetres and sticking fast in the window frame. Alerted by the clamour, the third man and driver powered into the room firing a sub-machine gun, spraying the apartment with a volley of steel that shattered the windows. Caught in an imbroglio of glass and brick and bullets, Tallis telescoped his body, flattening himself to the carpet, shooting along on his elbows, a coffee table providing temporary sanctuary. As the gunman prepared for another round of pray and spray, Tallis leapt to his feet, took aim and, with one cool shot, dropped the driver, the resulting round from the machine gun peppering the ceiling with metal. Immediately, the dynamics changed. With a mighty roar, Bilal launched himself at Tallis, knocking the air out of his lungs and sending the Glock flying. His opponent was strong, but Tallis was stronger, his strength predicated on a ruthless determination to find those he deemed ultimately responsible for Charlie’s death.
Slammed into the wall, Bilal fought back with a series of incapacitating jabs and blows, three finding their mark and sending shock waves of pain through Tallis’s body. Tallis retaliated in kind, slugging it out, skin breaking, blood oozing and spittle flying. That close, Tallis read the cruelty and hatred in Bilal’s face, got a glimpse of the mindset created by Enver Hoxha’s cruel oppression of several generations, a people forced to live for too long without religion, morality or a reason to live or hope and, consequently, spawning a nation of psychos. Christ, Tallis raged, another blinding blow rattling the teeth in his jaw.
Grasping Bilal round the throat, Tallis snatched at his windpipe and squeezed hard, stepping up the pressure. The pain, he knew, was extreme but not enough to cut off Bilal’s consciousness and kill him. The Albanian valiantly scrabbled to release Tallis’s iron grip, but it was no use. Now Tallis had the upper hand he wasn’t letting go. Bilal’s mouth dropped open.
The snake-green eyes rolled. His body juddered with strain at the sudden steep drop in oxygen until, weak, he collapsed to the floor, legs splayed apart.
Twisting away, Tallis scooped up the gun and trained the muzzle of the Glock on Bilal, who spluttered and urged and tried to breathe. Tallis wondered how long before the sirens sounded and the cops arrived. He stood up.
‘Fuck you,’ Bilal croaked in German, his mood unimproved by the sudden rush of air to his brain.
‘Not a good start. You speak English?’
Bilal cocked his head, cunning sharpening his features. ‘Who are you?’
‘You got this all wrong, Bilal. I ask the questions. You give me the answers. If you don’t I kill you.’ Tallis’s eyes briefly drifted to one of the smoking corpses.
Bilal scowled and rubbed at his neck with a hand the size of a small dinner plate. ‘What do you want?’
‘I’m looking for two girls.’
A sly smile parted Bilal’s lips. ‘You did not need to go to so much trouble,’ he said, glancing at the ruins of his apartment. ‘You ask nicely and I give you girls for special price.’
Tallis flicked a chill smile in return. ‘One of them is Bosnian.’
‘Filth,’ Bilal spat.
‘Her name is Bina.’ Tallis’s jaw grinding: ‘You recognise the name?’
‘Bina? You mean Sabina?’
‘Could be,’ Tallis said.
‘How should I know?’ Bilal spat. ‘Bina, Sabina, they are all the same.’
‘No, this one had a friend, Anna.’
Bilal’s eyes swivelled in his head.
‘You have two seconds to think about it,’ Tallis growled.
Bilal cast a chill smile. ‘Ah, the bitch, Anna. Fucking cunts, both of them.’ As if to illustrate the point, Bilal pressed his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose and ejected a gobbet of phlegm on to the floor. ‘What’s their business with you?’
‘Uh-huh.’ Tallis shook his head. ‘What did they do to you, Bilal?’
‘Fucked me over, killed one of my best men.’
‘Why?’
‘To escape.’
‘You trafficked them?’
‘Escorted them. It was a business proposition,’ Bilal said, swagger in his voice.
‘When?’
‘I forget.’
‘Remember.’
Bilal lazily scratched his groin. ‘I picked them up maybe 1995 or ‘96. Maybe later,’ he said, deliberately vague, Tallis thought.
‘From where?’
‘Tuzla. Many refugees there.’
‘What? You just walked in and collected them?’
‘Of course not,’ Bilal sneered. ‘We had help, a contact who paid officials.’
‘What sort of officials?’
‘United Nations.’ Bilal flashed a grin.
‘Then what?’ Tallis said, another part of the picture slotting into place. Simultaneously he heard the distant sound of a siren. Could be police, could be ambulance. Trouble.
‘We took Anna to London. Sabina to Berlin.’
‘But they escaped,’ Tallis prompted.
‘Anna gave one of my men the slip,’ Bilal said through half-closed eyes. ‘She is very devious, very cunning. Mad bitch hitched her way to Germany.’
‘And helped Sabina to escape?’
‘To kill,’ Bilal said, eyes suddenly open, alert. ‘Valmir was one of my best men.’
‘You already said. When was this?’
‘Two thousand and three.’ No hesitation at all. Tallis calculated that the women had been kept as prostitutes for possibly up to eight years. No wonder they were murderous.
‘Where are they now?’
‘How the fuck should I know?’
‘If they returned to Bosnia where would they go?’
‘Same answer.’
‘Any idea from where they originated?’
Bilal looked at him as if he were mad. ‘Such things are not important.’
‘They never mentioned anywhere?’ Tallis persisted.
Bilal shrugged. ‘Their job was to fuck, not talk.’
The sounds from the street grew louder. Bilal stuck out his jaw, clearly thinking that the arrival of the polizei spelt he was a trigger-finger away from eternity. ‘Maybe I know some place.’
‘You have my full and complete attention,’ Tallis said, eyes boring into Bilal’s shaved head.
‘I did not hear this from the girls. It was information I extracted from a source.’ A feral look entered his green eyes. For extracted Tallis read tortured.
‘When was this?’
Bilal gave another lazy shrug of his huge shoulders. Blood seeped from his nose and mouth. The skin around his eyes was swollen and bruised. Other than that, he looked unscathed. ‘A couple of years later. When you run a business corporation it can take a little time to tie up loose ends.’
Tallis nodded for him to continue.
‘The village of Lukomir,’ Bilal said.
Meant nothing to Tallis. And if Bilal was so certain, why hadn’t he hunted them down? The Albanians were big on retribution. Made the Chechens look like insurance salesmen. He posed the question.
Bilal shrugged. ‘I sent one of my men there.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing.’
Thanks for the tip, Tallis thought, dejected. He was running out of time, the clamour of emergency services growing louder. He made to go.
‘Hey, you find them, you let Bilal know first.’
‘So you can torture them?’
Bilal turned his dead eyes on Tallis, his expression insolent.
‘I heard what you did to the girl in the boatyard,’ Tallis said, his voice low and chill.
Bilal’s thick lips twisted into a smile. ‘Which one?’
Tallis stared, the temptation to administer rough justice strong. He’d be doing the world a favour. Nobody would miss a man like Bilal, not even his own mother. His grip tightene
d on the Glock’s trigger.
‘Are you going to kill me?’ Bilal goaded.
Tallis hesitated, then turned and headed for the balcony. ‘Waste of a good bullet,’ he called over his shoulder.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
On the flight to Sarajevo that evening Tallis studied the map of Bosnia and Herzegovina and located Lukomir, a mountain village, the highest in the country at over fourteen hundred metres. Its isolation, hidden in the ridge of the Rakitnica Canyon, made it an excellent place in which to lie low. But, according to Bilal, the girls had never showed there. As for Sabina, unless she’d sprouted wings, she was probably hiding out in the UK. This mattered less to him because he was still intent on finding Clay.
Yet still the girls gnawed away at his thoughts.
Of the information he’d extracted, what struck him most was the close relationship between the women. Anna had literally clawed her way through countries and borders to find her friend and rescue her. To murder Sabina’s pimp took nerve and steel of unimaginable proportions. He could only guess at the cruelties and indignities the two had suffered to turn them into such successful killing machines. But how and why had they made the transition to international terrorism?
He reeled back through his interrogation of Bilal. Valmir was killed in 2003, Bilal’s source, as he coyly referred to him or her, in around 2005. In the intervening years, the girls’ paths must have crossed with someone else. He scratched his head, trying to force connections. He realised, then, that he had very little to act upon. He hoped Clay was luckier. Tallis believed that his own interests would be better served by trying to find him first, rather than embarking on a wild-goose chase to Lukomir, a place Bilal’s men had already checked out and found empty.
The plane made its sharp descent to the newly renovated airport. As soon as he stepped on to the tarmac he experienced the same haunting sensation that had assailed him on the streets of Berlin.
Someone was watching again.
He glanced round at his fellow passengers. In the gathering darkness none stuck out from the crowd, certainly no face that seemed familiar. He walked on, intent on getting out of the concourse with as little fuss as possible. Something else struck him, more diffuse but definitely there: a feeling of unease, of tension and anxiety. He read it in the shadowed faces of the baggage handlers, in the Customs officers, in the check-in staff.
From the airport he took a cab, changing twice to disrupt anyone on his trail, his destination Ilidza, a picturesque town of parks and thermal springs a little over three kilometres west of the capital. By now it was after ten o’clock. He asked the cab driver where would be best to stay cheaply at that time of night. The driver took him to a rundown hotel in a rundown street that, even at that late hour, looked as if it hadn’t changed much from Tito’s Yugoslavia. Unsurprisingly, the hotel had rooms.
He paid a modest amount for bed and breakfast, and was shown through a maze of cavernous corridors with greenish paint that was trying to throw itself off the walls. Probably looked cool forty years ago, he thought, looking around his bedroom, eyeing the lumpy-looking bed and tired and dirty drapes at the window. Dumping his bags, he wandered through to a bar where several men openly sporting weapons were gathered. At first he thought they were gangsters, but quickly realised his mistake. Only Serbs would brandish their pistols with such flagrancy here. Tallis had heard it said that they regarded men who did not know how to use a weapon as not really men at all.
One, a tall slim man in his forties with silver-grey neatly cut hair and gold-rimmed spectacles, had the distinct bearing of a sophisticated military man. The rest, with their weather-beaten features and square set jaws, resembled farmers. As he crossed the room seven pairs of eyes followed him. There was no dip in conversation. No effort to conceal what was spoken. The talk was of Karadzic and Mladic, the unfairness of the West against men they regarded as heroes, the rise of new ‘bastard’ Muslim paramilitary outfits, the need to retake Bosnia again. Clicking his tongue as Tallis passed, the silver-haired man made a derogatory remark about Germans. The others joined in with a jeer.
Tallis ordered a soft drink. He had the impression that everything spoken was delivered through the prism of the past, their entire point of reference the former conflict.
‘You’re Croatian,’ the silver-haired man uttered in surprise.
‘British,’ Tallis said.
‘Ah, not so good.’
‘At least I’m not German.’ Tallis flicked a smile. Fundamentalist Serbs hated Germans on account of their stout refusal to support their claims during the last hostilities.
‘Or American,’ the man said with a cultured smile. ‘My name is Josif,’ he said, extending a slim hand, which Tallis took and shook.
‘Stjepan,’ Tallis lied. ‘I’m half Croatian.’
‘And that’s why you speak so fluently. Forgive me, but I could tell no difference at all,’ Josif said, a congratulatory note in his voice. ‘You have relatives here?’
‘In Sunja.’
‘Near Sisak. I know the place,’ Josif said, the lenses of his glasses catching the manufactured light.
Tallis nodded. He idly wondered whether Josif’s knowledge was based on a current familiarity with the area or whether his slightly hawkish expression alluded to the vicious fighting that had erupted there almost two decades previously. Sisak had been economically important because of its oil refinery. The Serbs had gone all out for it. ‘And you, Josif?’ Tallis sipped his drink. ‘Where are you from?’
‘Originally, Sarajevo. My family were kicked out by Muslim paramilitaries in the early ‘90s, our apartment requisitioned and all our belongings confiscated. Since then I’ve lived in various places. Tell me, did you fight in the war?’ Josif momentarily turned to the others, who had fallen silent and were slavishly following the conversation.
Tallis flinched. This was not a standard opening gambit in those parts. Talk of the war among strangers, indeed anyone, was generally discouraged. To his mind, Josif behaved like a teacher giving practical instruction to a party of schoolkids. Tallis didn’t much care for being the main topic of Josif’s brand of history lesson.
‘I was serving elsewhere with the British army.’
‘No matter,’ Josif said, clicking his tongue again. ‘You were with us in spirit. Your people did a good job of pounding the Muslims in Mostar.’
The others joined in with spontaneous applause. Tallis flickered a polite smile. Inside he felt a chill. He could have said that the Serbs had done a good job pounding his people in Vukovar, but he refrained from saying so. The Balkan conflict more than any other he’d encountered was defined by shifting and split loyalties. ‘And you?’ It wasn’t a question he’d usually ask, but as Josif had introduced the subject he thought he might as well try to work it to his advantage.
‘I joined the JNA,’ Josif said. The Yugoslav People’s Army, a pro-Serb militia with orders from Belgrade, Tallis registered. ‘And fought for Knin.’
Tallis sipped his drink. Croatian forces had devastated Knin, forcing an exodus of thirty thousand people. Many spoke of the cruelty of the Serbs throughout the war. Few spoke of the cruelty of Croatians towards the Serbs. Tallis bleakly remembered Dario’s infamous role. Even now, the surrounding area decimated by the ‘Jokers’ was filled with ghost towns. ‘Then I moved on to northern Krajina,’ Josif continued.
Tallis met the other man’s eyes. He saw nationalism and vengeance in them. ‘So what are you doing here?’
‘Waiting.’ An enigmatic smile that contained no hint of warmth flickered on Josif’s
full-lipped mouth. Tallis frowned, inclined his head. ‘Dark forces threaten to destabilise the region,’ Josif explained. ‘The Muslims have always maintained a strong presence. In the aftermath of war, they flooded it with their own. Now Islamic fundamentalism funded by Muslims from Iran is on a steep and steady rise.’
‘You know that for a fact?’ Tallis was thinking about Clay.
‘It’s the truth,’
a large-boned man called Dusan burst out, obviously unable to contain himself. He had dull waxy features and hair the colour of crushed biscuits. ‘Iranians are everywhere, especially in the industrial areas, Zenica, for instance.’
Tallis wanted to pursue this but Josif wasn’t finished. ‘Only unity can save the Serb people. We will not tolerate the world’s condemnation for a second time, not from the United Nations, not anyone. This time we will do the job properly,’ he said with chilling conviction. ‘We have the funds and the means,’ he said, casting a threatening look. Tallis had lost count of how many times he’d come up against people with opposite value systems, who were blinded by prejudice, and totally disconnected to the desires of ordinary people in the real world. An almost seductive air of violence hung round the man. Josif seemed reasonable and yet Tallis suspected he could be very unreasonable indeed. Maintaining a mask of neutrality, he wondered whose cash was fuelling the renewed desire for nationalism by this small yet vocal group of crackpots. But, if what Dusan said was true, what next for the region? He didn’t care for the Iranian connection. It smacked too much of the possibility of conflict. Lost in gloomy thought, he almost missed Josif’s question.
‘And what are you doing here, Stjepan?’
‘Looking for someone, an American.’
Josif inclined his head. ‘Goes by the name of Clay,’ Tallis added.
Josif looked at the others. Every face registered vacancy. ‘We cannot help you,’ Josif said with what seemed genuine regret. He explained that he and his men were heading further north to eastern Bosnia. ‘We could give you a lift but…’
‘Thank you, but I’ll be fine,’ Tallis said. Travelling with a bunch of armed militia to God knew where to do God knew what held no appeal.
‘I warn you to be careful in your search.’ Josif wagged a finger. ‘Things have changed.’
‘What things?’
‘Checkpoints. Militia, ours and others.’
Resolution to Kill Page 22
