A Spy's Life (54 page)

Harland reached the fence first and looked back. The truck had vanished into the dark of the airfield in the east. He indicated that they should make for the terminal which was about 300 yards away. They passed a padlocked fence, then a single-engine Cessna whose wings were tethered to the ground, and continued along the fence until they were fifty yards from the concrete apron in front of the terminal building. All hell had broken loose. Troops had disgorged from the building and were rushing to their vehicles, while what seemed to be the entire staff of the airport were milling about, watching the fire.

No one noticed Harland approach and look through one of the windows. The terminal was a rudimentary affair, in fact little more than a large warehouse with its guts on display. Heating and wiring ducts were in the process of being installed and the customs and immigration posts looked more like ticket booths. Neither was manned.

He turned and waved the others forward. They walked smartly through the door and past the immigration post and in no time at all found themselves in a deserted car park on the other side of the building. Because the last of the commercial flights had landed there were no cabs to be found. They stamped their feet in the cold and searched each other’s faces.

‘You’re a member of the UN staff,’ exclaimed The Bird, eyeing a row of white four-wheel drives, each emblazoned with a UN crest. ‘And you are on an important mission for the Secretary-General.’

They moved quickly along the line of cars until they came to an Isuzu with its sidelights on and the keys still hanging from the steering column. The driver had obviously left in a hurry to see what was happening on the airfield. They got in without a second thought and drove sedately from the compound into a desolate, ill-lit boulevard flanked by burned-out buildings.

They found a hotel in a street named Kulovića in the old part of the city and parked the Isuzu in a covered area at the rear, tipping the attendant more than his month’s salary to watch the car overnight. They checked into the hotel but avoided having to leave their passports at the desk when The Bird deftly palmed another large tip to the young manager.

Half an hour later they all went to a restaurant near to the hotel where they ate from a menu of home comforts aimed at Western aid workers. As they walked the few yards back to the hotel, The Bird abruptly announced he was going to see someone and strode off down the street, hands thrust into a dark green jacket, scenting the wind like a lurcher.

Strung out and exhausted, Harland and Eva went to their room, where Eva went straight to bed. Harland drew back the curtains and looked down on a confusion of dwellings and terraces and arrested construction. Ahead of him was a pockmarked minaret lit by a single arc light. He thought unsentimentally about the trajectory that had brought him to this strange, persecuted little city, and the two spies who had danced a distant quadrille down the years – Walter Vigo and Oleg Kochalyin.

He went through the steps in his mind. The first involved his own ensnarement in Rome. But Kochalyin, the instigator if not quite the architect of this embarrassment – for that was all it was – had himself been lured by SIS to sell the secrets of the East. There followed the collapse of the Communist system. Kochalyin lured members of SIS into arrangements which began as convenient exchanges of information in a world which SIS was struggling to make sense of, and ended in the total corruption of at least one individual – Miles Morsehead. In response, Vigo had hired Eva to find out as much as she could about each new incarnation of Oleg Kochalyin.

At that point they were even, but then came Vigo’s move against his colleagues, a superb piece of footwork which eliminated Kochalyin’s allies in SIS and left Vigo the uncontested heir, the saviour of the service.

Harland knew, however, that any ideas of pattern in all this were simply false. Everything was temporary and fluid. The moment it suited Vigo and Kochalyin they would join hands in a fleeting partnership. They had done so before and there was nothing to stop them doing it again.

That brought him back to the question that had hovered over their little party at the restaurant. How had Kochalyin learned of their imminent arrival at Sarajevo airport? Had he lured them using the bait of satellite pictures, or was someone in London keeping him informed?

He turned from the window, gazed at Eva for a few chilly seconds, and slipped into bed beside her.

They slept in each other’s arms. At some point during the night, a bell rang out in the city of victims. They stirred and made love, almost in their sleep.

31

A NAMELESS MOUNTAIN

Eva was in the shower and Harland already dressed when he heard a knock at the door. The Bird looked strained. The skin around his eyes was taut and his optimistic manner had vanished.

‘We should leave soon,’ he said quietly. ‘Let’s try and get out of the city by six-thirty.’

He was holding a tray with bread rolls and a jug of white coffee that he had spirited from the hotel kitchen with the night manager’s aid.

‘Come on in,’ said Harland.

Outside there was a steady dripping from the gutters and the lights were haloed with moisture. A thaw was setting in.

Harland downed a cup of coffee in a few gulps and looked at The Bird.

‘What’s up?’ he asked. ‘Where’d you go last night?’

‘To a bar the manager told me about. It’s where the diplomatic people hang out in the Old Town. I found a chap there who does the security for the British residents. I had a feeling I’d bump into somebody. Macy and I have been trying to get this fellow to work for us.’

Again Harland wondered dimly about the exact nature of Harp-Avocet’s business.

‘What did you find out?’ he asked.

‘That the attack on our plane is the only thing anyone’s talking about. All the men involved are dead and it goes without saying that the pilot was killed. The good news is that we weren’t seen at the airport.’

‘That’s something. What about the car?’

‘No mention of it. I gather that vehicles are nicked here then sold back to the dear old UN bit by bit as spare parts. Premature recycling, they call it.’

‘What’s eating you, Cuth?’ asked Harland, focusing on The Bird’s manner again.

‘The same thing as you, Bobby, the same thing as you. Who the fuck told them we were coming?’

‘Maybe nobody did. Maybe it was a set-up from the start,’ said Harland. ‘Maybe the business out there in the mountains is all designed to draw us here so we can be finished off. Maybe it was fixed from the very moment Reeve sent me those satellite pictures. After all, he got them from the CIA – the Americans are just as compromised by this affair as our lot and just as hot under the collar. They don’t want my report circulated any more than Vigo does because it will add weight to Tomas’s allegations.’ He paused and thought. ‘The alternative theory is a phone tap at Century House. I’m pretty sure that Vigo has been kept up to speed with my calls and e-mails which means he knows exactly what Reeve has been sending me. He knows I’ve learned the exact location of the site, and it wouldn’t take a genius to pass our intention, together with the time of departure, to a man that half SIS have been talking to for the last twenty years.’

The Bird’s eyes narrowed. ‘Vigo’s a cunt, but is he that much of a cunt?’

‘He’s desperate. They all are.’

‘Yes, but it would have been a lot cleaner if they’d let you get out to the mountains before bumping you off. I mean, what the hell was the point of that mess at the airport last night?’

Harland didn’t answer and instead poured more coffee.

Eva emerged from the bathroom, still drying her hair.

‘It’s simple,’ she said, without looking up. ‘We know that Oleg wants us dead and we know that would suit the British SIS. They both have equal motive. Therefore it’s possible they are both trying to kill us – separately or together.’

‘So the rocket attack was organised by Vigo?’ said Harland. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

‘And made it appear like some kind of terrorist incident,’ said The Bird.

‘It’s possible,’ she said.

Harland thought again.

‘Look, we’ll work on the assumption of maximum jeopardy, which means that we take it for granted that both parties want us out of the way. In those circumstances it’s sensible that only one of us goes – me. I will take pictures and if necessary bring back bones and then we’ll get the site officially excavated – or at least guarded until they can get a team there.’

The Bird shook his head.

‘Very noble, Bobby, but it’s not on. Leave Eva if you want, but I’m coming. Besides, I’ve already fixed up a sort of driver-cum-guide. He only goes if I go.’ He produced the keys of the Isuzu from his pocket and waved them in front of Harland to underline the strength of his position.

‘We will all go,’ said Eva.

Ibro stood waiting for them in the lobby, chatting to the night manager. His proportions revised the known limits of the human body. He was short – no more than 5' 2" – with a torso of near unimaginable breadth and strength. Harland saw that he had no neck to speak of and that he was compelled to hold his arms out at forty-five degrees because of the size of his chest muscles and biceps. His head poked out from the upturned collar of an old US airman’s jacket. He smiled as they arrived in the lobby and wiped crumbs of pastry from a black chin.

‘This is Ibro,’ said The Bird, as though they were old friends. ‘He speaks a little English and a lot of German.’ They all shook hands. ‘You are meeting quite a legend – one of the heroes of the siege of Sarajevo. He tells me he used to re-aim cannons by lifting their tow bars. Then he became the prime minister’s personal bodyguard and now he’s the hotel driver.’

They set out at six-twenty and travelled eastwards along the Miljacka River. Ibro pointed out sites on the way – the shelled-out National Library and a cemetery on the hill where some comrades were buried.

‘
Weil Ich war
,’ he recited, ‘
wie ihr wart und ihr werdet sein, wie ich
.’

‘Come again,’ said The Bird, trying to disentangle the German words from a thick Balkan accent.

‘For I have been what you are now, and you will be what I am now,’ said Eva. ‘It’s an inscription from a gravestone – a message from the dead to the living.’

‘
Memento mori
,’ murmured Harland.

Climbing out of the city, they passed a line of civil-war trenches, then a truck halt called Café Dayton, at which point they plunged into a tunnel that led them to the Republika Srpska – the Serb part of Bosnia. Dawn was breaking in the east. They were now moving through a softer, more rural landscape with well-tended smallholdings. The houses and barns along the way were no longer burned out. Nothing stirred.

They skirted the unremarkable town of Pale, the Bosnian Serb capital where the mass executions of 1995 were planned, and headed for the barren regions in the east. The road surface was broken and streaming with rivulets of snow melt. At a place called Rogatica they swung north, into the mountains. Harland began to feel they were getting near and once or twice he thought he glimpsed the range from the video still. They stopped the car in a wild, lonely place overlooking a valley and examined the map and satellite images again. Harland estimated they were five kilometres from the place where a road branched left and would take them to the site.

‘What do we know about this place?’ said The Bird.

‘Not much. There’s a small gorge at the top, which was the actual place of the massacre. A track leads past it and down the other side of the mountain. It’s large enough to take trucks and a sizeable loader.’ For a moment there was silence while The Bird pored over the map with Ibro, who at length gave his opinion that the road had been built as a short cut and that it would descend near a settlement on the other side of the mountain.

They continued on their way in silence until they reached a wooded area where they began to see clods of soil on the tarmac. Here and there they noticed evidence of the mud stuck to the snow banks either side of the road. Eva asked Ibro what the weather had been like over the last two days. He replied that temperatures had not risen above freezing for the past thirty-six hours.

Harland knew what she was thinking. The heavy frost explained why there was no change in the satellite pictures. They hadn’t been able to work the ground.

They rounded a bend and came to the track exactly at the moment Harland expected. It was obvious from the marks on the road that the trucks had descended from the mountain, bringing the mixture of snow and soil with them. Ibro stopped, peered upwards and shook his head. The track was churned up and there were wheel ruts which would be too deep for the light Isuzu. They agreed to split up. Harland and Eva would climb the track, while The Bird and Ibro would drive round the mountain and look for another way up. If they failed to meet at the top they would rendezvous at this place in two hours’ time.

As Harland opened his door, The Bird jumped out of the front seat and came round to meet him. He handed him a camera and then from his jacket pocket produced a Glock pistol which he placed firmly in Harland’s hand. He gave a black CZ75 to Eva, remarking that it was appropriately a Czech-made weapon. It seemed Ibro came with a small arsenal of handguns.

They set off up the track, all the while seeking signs that trucks had passed that morning. They guessed not, since it was only just past eight-fifteen. Gradually the surface became firmer and they were able to make good progress. The mountain range in the distance came into view and they could see the track snake up the incline then skirt left of a rounded summit. They walked on. The landscape was very still. The only noise came from a pair of large ravens cavorting lazily in the updraft from the valley.

At the top there was a longer hike than they’d expected. They paused for breath and looked out across the grey and white mountain scenery. Eva touched him on the face with the back of a gloved hand and they continued on their way. Fifteen minutes on, the track climbed sharply for about fifty yards then took a sudden turning to the left by a large protrusion of rock. They found themselves on a plateau bordered by two walls of rock that rose twenty feet above them. The place looked like an old quarry and it had the acoustics of a natural auditorium. Every sound they made reverberated around them.