Adrian Magson: Retribution

As he took his seat, he put his hand in his pocket and felt for the piece of soft blue material that accompanied him everywhere he went. As he did so, he muttered a soft prayer and made a firm vow to succeed.

All the talking, the schooling, the training and testing — and the years of fighting — had been aimed at this moment.

He was on his way.

Harry Tate stared at the text on his mobile phone. It had bleeped seconds ago. He was trying to ignore it; calls when he was on a job were a distraction. Calls from the person who’d been trying to contact him for two days now, leaving voicemail messages, were even more so than most.

Harry. Plse make Grosvenor Square tomorrow at 18.30? Urgent. Remember Mitrovica. Ken Deane.

For no good reason that he could determine, Harry felt a ripple in his gut. Ken Deane and Mitrovica; the combination wasn’t good. Nor was being asked to remember the things he’d seen there. And if Ken Deane was still working for the UN, as he had been when they first met, it was the last thing he wanted. Take on a contract with the UN and you could end up somewhere hot, remote and deeply unfriendly.

He looked up at the door of the house they were watching as a thickset man with ginger hair stepped outside. His name was Terry de Witt. He was supposed to be in hiding.

‘He can’t be,’ Rik Ferris muttered in disbelief, and reached for the door latch of the Audi.

Harry put a hand on his sleeve. ‘Forget it. We’re too late.’ He nodded towards the end of the street.

A black Range Rover had appeared, ghosting along the line of empty cars. To outward appearances just another luxury Chelsea tractor looking for a parking slot, it was nothing of the sort. Three men and the driver, Harry noted.

He knew what would happen next: the car would stop alongside de Witt, and the driver would ask for directions, friendly but puzzled. De Witt would pause and move closer, even though he knew this area of Primrose Hill in north London as well as he knew the far side of the moon. But his naive side, the side which had got him traced in the first place, would come to the fore in spite of several warnings to stay inside, no matter what.

Sure enough, the two side doors opened and two of the men got out. They were big and moved swiftly, hauling de Witt inside. It took seconds, with no exchange of words. Give it an hour or two, Harry knew, and de Witt, South African numbers man to an Albanian arms dealer, would be overseas and gone for good. Or dead.

‘Do we stop them?’ Rik asked.

‘Only if you want those boys to put some dents in your nice car. Follow at a discreet distance.’ Harry dialled the contact number for the security company paying the bill for this job. When the call was picked up, he gave the registration of the Range Rover, descriptions of the occupants and the direction of travel. This was strictly an observe-only assignment and not worth the grief he figured would accompany that particular car with those three men if he and Rik tried to get in their way.

‘So what was the message?’ Rik was trying not to look disappointed at missing the chance of a hot pursuit through the city streets. He started the car and settled in a block behind the Range Rover, allowing a taxi to overtake to act as a screen.

Harry read out the text. ‘That’s all I know. Something to do with Mitrovica in Kosovo. He’s persistent, I’ll give him that.’ Three voicemail messages and a text so far. It must be important.

‘Grosvenor Square?’ Rik swerved to avoid a cycle courier. ‘That’s the US Embassy. What’s Kosovo got to do with them? Is Deane CIA?’

‘Not unless he had a better offer since I last saw him.’

‘When was that?’

‘Pristina, Kosovo in ’ninety-nine. He was the UN’s local field security rep. So he said, anyway.’ He switched off the phone and watched the Range Rover. He had no reason to think Deane had been playing a dual role in Kosovo, but he wasn’t going to enter the US Embassy unless he had to. Deane could come and talk to him out in the open.

‘Has he seen us, d’you think?’ Rik asked. The driver of the Range Rover didn’t seem in any great hurry, and was drifting along the street, matching the traffic flow.

‘If he has, we’ll soon find out.’ If they had been spotted and the occupants of the other car wanted to get away, they would wait for their moment, then use the traffic to pull out and be gone. And there wasn’t much Harry and Rik could do to stop them. On the other hand, maybe a deal had been worked out with someone that would allow de Witt to be taken out of the country and beyond the reach of the courts.

It wouldn’t be the first time.

The Range Rover pulled on to the Marylebone Road and turned west, putting on speed. West was Heathrow. Heathrow was a flight out. Harry dialled the number again and gave them an update.

‘Wait one,’ came the reply.

Harry wondered how many cases like de Witt ended up dropping quietly between the floorboards, when they had all the attributes of a High Court showpiece. The accountant had conspired to commit fraud on a massive scale, ruining many lives and ending some prematurely. But certain individuals would see his freedom as a relatively cheap price to pay in order to get the men above him — the Albanians and others who were the planners and executioners. The dealers in death.

‘Discontinue surveillance.’ The instruction was without drama; a female voice, thirty-ish, by the sound of it, confident and precise. Probably government trained and brained. ‘They’re free to leave. This assignment is over. Thank you for your time.’

Harry acknowledged and switched off. At least she had nice manners, which was better than most. As he’d suspected: somebody had worked out a deal.

‘Let’s go to your place,’ he said. ‘I need you to run a check for me.’

‘On Deane?’

‘Yes. Find out what he does now, where he lives, everything you can.’

Rik glanced across. ‘He’s not a mate, then?’ Harry would know, otherwise. And going into a meet without knowing something about your contact was risky. Standard operating procedure: find out all there was to know first, avoid surprises. ‘You don’t sound keen.’

‘I’m not. He’s not enough of a mate to be calling me after all this time.’ Their first encounter had been twelve years ago, when Harry had been part of the NATO-led peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. A KFOR unit had been called in when heavily armed Serb militias had tried to commandeer UN trucks to move their troops and armaments into Albanian-held territories. Deane, then the local field security representative for the UN, had been in a tricky situation: risk a fight the lightly armed UN force might not win, or back down and allow the Serbs to take the trucks, thus setting a dangerous precedent.

Harry and his colleagues had been able to defuse the situation, but it had been a close-run thing. Shortly afterwards, he’d been assigned to lead a close protection team in the area. A UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights had flown in unannounced for a whistle-stop tour, demanding a protection squad to accompany him. Ignoring advice from KFOR personnel on the ground to stay away, the official had dug his heels in. Keen to show openness and transparency, the UN had pressured KFOR to select a multinational squad, and Ken Deane had remembered Harry’s name.

Now, it seemed, he’d remembered it again.

Four days after beginning his long journey, Kassim stepped off a Pakistan International Airlines flight at Paris Charles de Gaulle, and took a shuttle bus to the stop at Etoile. It was six o’clock in the evening.

Before leaving him at the bus stop in Peshawar, the driver had handed Kassim an envelope containing a passport, money and tickets, and visa documents to enter the United States. Kassim did not ask how these papers had been produced; he knew only they would be genuine for someone, although not himself. He noted that he was now named Zef Haxhi, a student of dry land agriculture travelling on field studies, jointly funded by the University of Rawalpindi and the American University of Kosovo. The subject was sufficiently boring to keep anyone from questioning him too closely, and with the magic addition of the word American, it should stand up to scrutiny.