Adrian Magson: Retribution

This one had gone well. Yet he felt a strange sense of disappointment. Something told him that Orti had not understood what was happening, even at the end. The eyes had been too clear to be mistaken. He had not known why Kassim was there.

He bought a ticket for Brussels, the next stage of his journey, and found a seat at the rear of a carriage and sat down, tucking his rucksack under his legs. He did not trust to leaving the bag out of his reach for a second. The Makarov was in the bottom, unused, wrapped in a towel with the hunting knife. There had been no sense in leaving them behind, as it saved him acquiring others later. He checked the right sleeve of his jacket, where he had earlier noticed small spots of blood. He had scrubbed at them with a damp cloth before leaving Orti’s apartment, and the brisk walk to the station had helped the material to dry. Now the stains were almost invisible.

He stared through the window at the empty tracks, running over the killing in a series of flickering snapshots: going through the door, pushing Orti in front of him and trussing him like a goat, ready for the kill. The shock of surprise had generated a rush of adrenalin, helping him overcome the soldier in the first few seconds. It was a tactic learned in the training camps, then at first hand in various fields of combat.

Yet he had no sense of pleasure at taking the man’s life. It had been a task accomplished, nothing more.

Most of Kassim’s killing had been done on the hilly battlefields of Afghanistan, where personal contact was rare and death was meted out at a distance. Occasionally he had used the night to cloak his attacks, overcoming guards with a knife to ensure silence. But always he had managed to move on, brushing aside the dreams that later came to haunt him by telling himself there had been no other way.

This time, though, had been different. He had used Orti’s own blade, seen his eyes up close; had felt the other’s body warmth, sensed his final breath on his cheek; seen the flicker of something desperate in Orti’s face in the moments before he went.

But that wasn’t all. There had been a need to mark the killing for those who would understand. His trainers had been emphatic about that. He had closed his mind to what had followed, like a surgeon from his patient, and with a few swift cuts of the knife, his task was complete.

As the train slid almost noiselessly out of the station, Kassim felt relieved. He was not clear yet, but every second took him beyond the reach of any random police activity.

He slept most of the hour and a half it took to reach Brussels, lulled to sleep by the warm air and the hum of the engines. His dreams were vivid and random, a kaleidoscope of scenes from long ago, when life was very different, and those from more recent times. And among them, the image of Orti’s face swam up like a fish coming to the surface of a pool, staring up at him. He sat up with a jerk, wondering if he had said anything in the quietness of the carriage. But when he looked round, nobody had noticed.

‘Harry?’ It was Deane’s voice, dragging him out of a restless sleep permeated with jagged images of narrow mountain roads, snow-covered slopes and war machines. And Paulton’s face. That never went away completely.

Harry swung out of bed, the phone clamped to his ear. ‘Yes.’ He checked his watch. It was just after six. Too early to be anything good. ‘You gave me until noon.’ Deane had finally relented, seeing that Harry wouldn’t be pushed.

‘I know. But our situation just got worse. Marble Arch, thirty minutes?’

Harry debated telling Deane to go jump in front of traffic. He had a hospital visit to make. But he knew it would merely be delaying the inevitable. He was going to say yes in the end, and they both knew it. He gave his assent and put down the phone, then got washed and dressed and went out to find a cab.

Deane was standing near the giant Fiddian-Green horse’s head sculpture, sipping at a mug of coffee. He handed a second mug to Harry.

‘Sorry about this, but I got an alert from my office just over an hour ago.’ He led Harry away from a group of early-bird tourists planning their day. ‘Yesterday you mentioned one of the CP team. Orti?’

‘Yes. French Foreign Legion. What about him?’

‘I said this man — the Afghan — was coming.’ He stared out over the park. ‘Well, I think he’s already made his first move. Orti’s dead.’

If the coffee didn’t blow away the cobwebs, this bit of news certainly did. Harry had seen death enough over the years, as a soldier and an MI5 officer, to have developed a reasonably pragmatic view of it. For men like Orti, it went with the job, especially in an elite Special Forces outfit like the Foreign Legion. Even so. .

‘How?’

‘He was tied up and knifed late last night.’

‘Where?’

‘In his sister’s apartment in Paris. She was away and he was using it to bed down while on leave. He’d just got back from a bar in the same street, where he’d been drinking coffee. There were signs he’d been exercising in the apartment — he was due to report back today and was probably sweating off a hangover.’

‘Nobody saw anything?’

‘No. It was professional and quick — and no signs of robbery. The local cops think Orti must have pissed someone off, maybe an Algerian from way back; someone who recognized what he was and decided to get one back for old times’ sake.’

‘So what’s wrong with that?’ There was something in Deane’s voice and manner that showed doubt.

‘You were in Kosovo. . you saw what they could do to each other.’

Harry nodded. He knew all right. If every story had been reported in full, they would have had readers throwing up their cornflakes. He had seen the grim results of ethnic cleansing and the terrible revenge attacks by the Kosovars and ethnic Albanians. Gruesome failed to describe the horrors perpetrated on all sides in the name of nationalism and religion. Amid the killings, rapes and beatings that happened daily, there were numerous examples of torture, amputations and live burials.

‘There was that thing some of them did,’ Deane continued, his voice thick. ‘They’d leave a calling card, to show they weren’t going away.’

Harry remembered. It hadn’t been widespread, but it had occurred often enough to be noticed. One group had cut off the noses of the people they killed; another carved a cross on the forehead. Either way, it was another form of terror, a symbol of the undying hatred on either side and the lengths to which they would go to induce fear in their enemies.

‘And this one?’

Deane’s eyes looked bleak. ‘Orti had the letters “UN” carved into his chest. Throw in the rumours about the kid’s murder, it doesn’t take much to figure out who the killer had a grudge against — and it wasn’t the French Foreign Legion.’

Harry felt a tickle on the back of his neck. Deane was right. It was too pointed, too deliberate.

‘If Orti wasn’t still attached to the UN, how did you hear about the killing so quickly?’

‘A fluke of European manners. A customer in the bar told the police that Orti was with the Legion and had once been with the UN in Kosovo. They meant KFOR but my office was copied in on the news as a courtesy. My deputy ran Orti’s file to see who he was. . and up popped Mitrovica.’

‘And that rang alarm bells.’

‘You bet. It could be a coincidence thing, something in Orti’s background with the Legion. But I don’t think so.’

Harry didn’t, either. He tried to picture the man, but having known him for such a brief time didn’t help. Running a short-term CP team wasn’t the ideal way to get to know anyone; more time is spent looking outwards than in, watching for threat, not judging the character defects of the man next to you.