Resolution to Kill

by E. V. Seymour

  Colours like he’d never seen before, vivid, tropical, all the hues of the rainbow beyond and in between flashed in front of his eyes. He felt strangely alive, euphoric. If he could only touch the colours, he thought, stretching out his arms, he would be safe. The colours would protect him. Even fear, he decided, had its own shade and hue.

  They vanished.

  Surrounded by thick, inky darkness, scarab beetles scuttled over his bare feet. The walls moved and closed in. Couldn’t breathe. Buried alive. The more he struggled, the less space he had. Panic gripped him. Rigid with fear, he tried to wriggle his way out of his imagined confinement. Caught in a tunnel, he had inches above him and the way ahead narrowed. Soon he would be stuck. Soon he would run out of oxygen. Banging in his head now. Loud, like the clash of a million drums. Hyperventilating. Tell them anything, he thought. He’d sell his soul had he one to sell. Easy, just spill his guts to Kamil: United Nations, terrorist threats, girl with the sad eyes, who cares? Let me go. Let me live. Let me breathe…

  Coming to a dead end, earth covering his eyes, nose and mouth, Tallis threw back his head, opened his mouth and screamed.

  We went to the university. After a week in hiding, living on our nerves, we were glad to breathe fresh air, yet terrified of who might see us.

  Bilal was cunning. There was every chance he’d heard of the meeting, that representatives of the UNHCR were attempting to repatriate refugees back to their homeland. The thought of him and what he would do to us if he found us made my stomach loose. For Sabina’s sake, I hid my fear. Since fleeing the apartment she had become quiet and morose. It made me sad. When I looked at Sabina, the blank terror in her eyes, I saw flashes of her younger self, the lost girl in the refugee camp with blood on her skirt.

  We were herded into a room, and that unnerved me a little. I do not remember how many of us, although I had the impression officials outnumbered refugees. We were given cups of tea and were told to sit down. It was not what I expected. I thought we would queue to pick up papers, go through the formalities, be given an allowance and directed to an airport. None of that happened.

  A woman spoke first with warm words of welcome. I think she was from one of the UN agencies, but I might be wrong. She gave a fine speech assuring us that it was now safe to go back home, that our country needed us and that it was our right to return. She told us that houses had been rebuilt, our water supply systems restored, and that basic education and health facilities were established. She talked of taking a holistic approach to our problems. I looked around the room. Many were nodding and smiling their gratitude.

  Next up, a fleshy-faced man. He was German. He said that, thanks to the Government Assisted Repatriation Programme, refugees were to be given travel assistance and a travel allowance as an incentive to return. He also said that if we did not go back the government had the power to enforce deportation. A ripple of shock echoed around the room. The message was clear: we were a burden to the state, a political problem to be got rid of. He did not say such things, of course, but I know when I’m not wanted. Another person started talking from another agency, I think to take the sting out of his words. She smiled and emphasised that UN peacekeepers would ensure we had a safe and dignified passage, that the various militias keen to prevent our repatriation would be controlled. I caught Sabina’s eye. She shrugged and let out a huge, disappointed sigh.

  My mind wandered. Somebody spoke about the importance of economic and social reintegration. When one of the refugees interrupted and asked what jobs and homes we were to be given, papers shuffled, throats cleared, eyes cast to the ground. It wasn’t, apparently, as simple as that.

  I drew my own conclusions. It seemed to me that assistance was limited, that there were too many agencies with competing roles, not one of which took the lead. The point of the evening, it seemed, was to plant the idea of return firmly into our heads. Perhaps they wanted us to make our own way back. Perhaps they wanted us, according to Christian tradition, to walk on water. I did not know.

  Most stayed behind afterwards, hoping, I suppose, to avoid forcible deportation. They were assured that the registration process would proceed as soon as procedures to establish identity and nationality were completed. I suspected it was a trap. We made for the door. Glum, uncertain of our future, I felt bitterly disappointed. That’s when we met the woman who was to change our lives.

  I liked her immediately. Some people have warmth and she had warmth like the sun. She asked our names and where we were from, just two simple questions. And that was the start of it all. Sabina and I have often talked about that moment. Neither of us can remember how the conversation rolled, how our stories came to be told. However it happened, she made it easy. She gained our trust. Our pain was her pain for she, too, had been at Tuzla. She had worked there, helping people like us. It was, indeed, a strange coincidence that our lives had crossed. I thought it was fate that they should overlap for a second time. She spoke of her work and how she had fallen in love with our country and its people. You cannot imagine what joy this gave us. She shared her story with passion, and told us of a particular man, an interpreter assigned to make her job easier. His name was Izet Zukik. He was shy and charming, a good man, she said. When she talked of him I noticed her voice softened. I think I saw a tear in her eye. I knew then that she loved that man as she did our country.

  ‘Did you marry him?’ Sabina burst out. Sometimes she could be a little gauche.

  The woman shook her head slowly. ‘If I had I might have been able to save him.’

  I looked away. I sensed what was coming next.

  ‘One night he disappeared,’ she said simply. ‘He was abducted, tortured and killed by a Croatian paramilitary group. I know the name of the man responsible. He has a wife and family and is currently living in his home town in Croatia.’

  Sabina said, ‘I am very sorry for your loss.’

  I said, ‘It is not right. He should pay for his crime.’

  ‘Yes,’ the woman said with a caged smile. ‘Which is why I need your help.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Stinking and filthy, Tallis was released from his shadowy and imaginary world for no other reason than that it was time to interrogate him once more. This time Kamil adopted a different, more general approach.

  ‘Tell me about your past, places you visited, the nature of your missions.’

  Tallis blinked back, stupefied. Weak from thirst and hunger, disorientated, he was coming apart.

  Kamil slapped him twice hard across the face. Tallis let out a dull groan, shook his head, tried to force connections between one thought and another. Strangely, the past seemed more important than the present, and he toyed with telling Kamil about his time in the mountains fighting for the Chechens. Perhaps it would take the heat off him and impress Kamil. Then again, Kamil would discover that he’d only fought because he’d no choice, because it was his sole means to conceal his cover. No, Kamil would not regard him favourably. He would view it as an excuse to further interrogate him until the whole damn truth unravelled and he told Kamil about the threat to the UN, and to Isolde Chatelle in particular. It might even put the idea of abduction into the sick bastard’s mind.

  ‘My name is Paul Tallis,’ he mumbled. ‘I no longer work for the security services.’ According to Beckett, he was a maverick and now a rogue agent but, whatever he thought or said, he’d never betray the nature of his work in Bosnia. He’d never betray his country.

  They beat him fairly badly after that, stripped him and chucked him back into the windowless room, baking by day, chill by night. Water crept down the walls and he licked the drops to satisfy his thirst. To compound his misery, Alia paid a personal visit. He stood there grinning. He held a sack in his hand.

  ‘We thought you’d like company,’ he said, swinging it and dumping it down near Tallis’s bare feet. Wary, Tallis eyed the unwanted gift, not moving a muscle. Whatever was inside stank like rotten meat. ‘Open it,’ Alia commanded.

  ‘No.�
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  Alia let out a dry, taunting laugh, then left.

  Tallis eyed the bag for some time then, wary, crawled towards it, every sinew, muscle and tendon screaming. Stretching out, he felt the object through the sacking. It was round like a football, like a...

  Sickness and terror swept over him. He shut his eyes tight, hoping against hope that he was wrong, knowing deep inside that he was right. Gingerly he picked at the fabric, put his hand inside, a scrub of wiry hair brushing against his fingers. As he peeled back the material, Clay’s severed head emerged, his dead half-closed eyes staring eerily back.

  Numbed, mesmerised by the macabre spectacle, Tallis gagged and reeled back, pressing his bony spine hard against the wall until the skin broke. The message was clear: you are next.

  Instinctively he glanced around the chamber, checking once more for anything he could use as a weapon. Nothing. All he had was a sack. In theory, he could use it to hang himself. A grim smile spread across his hollow features. No way was he going out like that.

  He guessed they’d probably have one last crack at breaking him. If he could remain silent about everything he knew, everything, then whatever those bastards did to him, he’d won. In the meantime he attempted to sleep, to gather his strength. Then the noise started.

  He hitched himself up. Bone-cold, everything hurt. At first it was nothing more than the constant, irritating beat of a football repeatedly kicked against a wall. Something louder and far more compelling replaced it. He listened, trying to identify the source of sound, like the clatter of heavy machinery. It was coming from the floor below. Impossible to sleep, he tuned his ears to the note and the distinctive metallic din of metal clashing against metal. Steelworks, he realised. That’s where they were holding him.

  No matter how much he tried to drown out the clamour, it was impossible to escape. When they finally came for him he felt a strange surge of relief. Soon it would be over.

  Under Kamil’s supervision, one of the most burly-looking men and the one called Samir lugged him out. Tallis tried not to think about the detail of what they were going to do even though Kamil was keen to explain to him in lavish detail that they were each going to fuck him first then behead him.

  ‘But we give you a chance, yes?’ Kamil’s deep-set eyes looked empty.

  They dragged Tallis painfully down the metal steps. The noise grew to a deafening din. It was blisteringly hot, which after the intense cold was a shock. Ahead, a furnace that belched flames and smoke into which steel was being fed and discharged. Immediately he was assailed by a distant childhood memory of his mother repeating a tale from the Bible, the Book of Daniel, about three young men with strange-sounding names thrown into a furnace by King Nebuchadnezzar. Like all good stories, the three had emerged unscathed afterwards. Fairy tales, he thought, swallowing hard, trying to distract the remains of his shattered mind, trying to contain the growing sense of panic and terror. Helplessly mesmerised, his frightened eyes snapped to the thick heavy chains that moved the metal across on to a set of rollers, like a giant mangle, flattening the steel before chopping it into six-metre lengths and shunting them via a cradle on to a cooling bed, where the steel was gathered into one-tonne bundles. He imagined what such a contraption could do to a human body.

  Both men nudged him forward, closer to where Alia stood casually by the entrance to the great wall of fire. He wore thick leather gauntlets, in which he held long-handled tongs, the pincer ends gripping a metal rod that glowed white-hot. Tallis tried again to contain his imagination and his panic. Sweat swelled the pores in his skin. Every nerve in his body constricted, his muscles screaming pain. He glanced around him, noticed a machine gun idly propped against a piece of machinery, tantalisingly out of reach. Two of the captors dragged him closer still. Washed in heat, his eyes burnt in the sockets. Heart hammering against his broken ribs, he bucked and reared, roaring profanities. He sensed what they were going to do. If he didn’t act quickly they would sharply drag him aside, bend him over double and kick his legs roughly apart. Tallis gasped in anguished anticipation. Amid cries of ‘Allah Akhbar’, Alia swung round, the rod a sabre dancing in the light.

  ‘This time the truth,’ Kamil roared in his ear. ‘Tell me about Fitz. Tell me about the hostages. Tell me…’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Tallis cursed. ‘And fuck the god you pretend to serve.’ He faked a stumble, taking his captors with him, off-balancing them. Straining every sinew, he extended one leg back and swept it to the side in a single orchestrated movement, the men’s legs torn from underneath them, creating a domino effect as their bodies piled into Kamil and knocked him off his feet. Freed, Tallis forward rolled, snatched up the machine gun, flicked off the safety, twisted round and sprayed the room with automatic fire, Alia’s body jerking, peppered with bullets, swiftly followed by the others. Triumph in the face of adversity brought him back to his senses. Taking a deep breath, he coolly surveyed Kamil’s bullet-ridden body, smoking near the open jaws of the furnace, then went in search of something to wear.

  He stood outside in early-evening sunshine, moved by the sight of blue sky and cloud. His clothes hung on him like shrouds. Since his incarceration, his weight had dropped dramatically. What bothered him most was his mind.

  He’d retrieved his rucksack and the little money he’d taken with him and helped himself to a Serb-manufactured pocket pistol from the Iranians’ cache of weapons. He had no idea for how long he’d been held. Remembering Josif’s warning and how it chimed with Kamil’s assertion of a nation unravelling and the Muslims’ readiness to resist, he realised that the situation might have changed markedly in his absence. Immediately, he wondered whether Chatelle was safe.

  In his weakened state, seventy kilometres to Sarajevo was a long distance to travel – but a necessary undertaking, so he decided to head for the railway station. During the next two and a half hours he hitched a lift, paid for a ticket, bought coffee, rolls and pastries and boarded a train to the main city. He hunkered down and, while waiting for the train to leave, ate and stared blankly out of the window, feeling as if he didn’t know who he was any more, as if he’d fallen through a time warp and lost his identity. In his head he was back in Chechnya, in the mountains, warring parties on all sides, mortars and grenades going off.

  The train, which was old, finally started off on its slow, trundling journey. Against every effort, his mental confusion continued. He didn’t know whether he was awake or asleep, what was true or false, real or unreal. Everything appeared to him in visions of black and white. Places in ruins. Massacred landscapes. Pitiless faces. A country of freshly dug graves. Or was this how things really were now? Not some figment of his broken mind but a sign of the changing times? Without foundations, without a solid plan, an ordinary man would have fled the country. For Tallis, it wasn’t an option, for he had nowhere to go, nobody to whom to run. He had one goal: find the architect behind the kidnappings and, indirectly, the murder of Charlie Lavender.

  With a slow, unsure gait, he stepped on to the platform. Everywhere, strained faces and eyes that refused to meet his. He moved slowly among them like a newly arrived ghost, and was amazed to travel through the station concourse, in the centre of Sarajevo, without being stopped, arrested or shot.

  Gone nine o’clock, he drifted towards a cab and asked to be driven to the old quarter. The streets were deserted apart from Mafia-looking types standing around smoking and sporting machine guns.

  ‘I take you this far,’ the driver said, clearly nervous, unwilling to drive further.

  Tallis hauled himself out, paid and stumbled through a maze of cluttered, cobbled streets. He was hot and nauseous and found it difficult to stay upright. At last he found the restaurant and, above, the office of Hope International. A light shone in an upstairs window. He experienced a brief surge of hope.

  He went inside, took the stairs, each step jarring his cracked ribs and making him giddy. Before he’d had a chance to knock, Stella Diamond came to the door, her face first a picture of sh
ock, then confusion.

  ‘I need your help,’ Tallis muttered before, darkness overwhelming him, he passed out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The news was grave. ‘Chatelle was last seen in Bodrum, Turkey,’ Asim told Beckett.

  ‘With no security detail?’

  ‘Apparently it’s not that unusual for the secretary general to travel without security when on leave.’

  ‘But given the current crisis…’ Beckett flashed with anger. ‘Is the woman mad?’ Asim met Beckett’s eye and said nothing. ‘All right, what’s the current status on the ground?’

  ‘Cops scouring the area working alongside security services,’ Asim reported.

  ‘Hush-hush?’

  Asim nodded. ‘I don’t know for how long. Depends on how quickly we locate her.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Beckett said, steepling his fingers and touching his chin.

  ‘This changes things,’ Asim said with a level look.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We were wrong.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’ Asim’s expression was sharp and penetrating.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Beckett said, his thin lips twisting with impatience. He said nothing for a moment. ‘Truth is, we don’t yet have enough information. It rather hinges on what happens next.’ He looked away, processing what he’d just heard. ‘Strange place for her to select for a holiday,’ he murmured.

  Asim raised a questioning eyebrow.

  ‘Noisy, laser lights over the harbour, crammed with beer-swilling Brits, not my idea of fun. What’s the Turks’ take on it?’

  ‘Apart from being scared witless at the possible international fallout? Boxing in the dark. There were definite signs of a struggle. Evidence of shots fired. No evidence of blood.’