Matthew Dunn - Spycatcher

Harry looked around quickly and then returned his gaze to Will’s eyes. “That’s the problem. I was supposed to meet Kljujic this morning before I traveled here. But he never showed up, and since then his cell phone’s been switched off. He’s disappeared.”

It was 4:00 A.M. and very cold and dark as Will trudged over fresh Bosnian snow toward the urban house on Bulevar Branioca Dobrinje in Sarajevo. As he neared the property, he stopped and took shelter within the doorway of another house on the same street but across the road. He stood hidden in the unlit entrance and carefully examined his surroundings. Widely spaced lamps lined one side of the street, casting a dim yellow light over patches of the route. Some cars were parked near the properties, and judging by the snow cover on them, none had been driven for several hours. Will scanned the area of snow around the front door of Kljujic’s house but could see no sign of footprints or indeed any disturbances over the snow. He listened carefully but could hear nothing out of the ordinary. He looked directly at Kljujic’s property. It was part of a terraced complex and appeared quite modest from the outside. There were six windows on the facade, and all were dark, with wooden shutters closed behind glass. Will placed his hands inside his overcoat and waited for thirty minutes while analyzing every house that could overlook the target property. It seemed to him that the street was asleep.

Finally he walked quickly across the street to Kljujic’s front door. He pressed the buzzer a total of five times, waiting fifteen seconds between attempts. He glanced up to look for lights being switched on, but there were none. He repeated the ritual, waited another twenty seconds, and strode back up the street, counting the number of houses on his left as he went. When he reached a small alleyway, he cut through the place so that he was facing the rear gardens of the properties on Bulevar Branioca Dobrinje. He counted again as he walked alongside the backs of the houses until he knew he was standing directly behind Kljujic’s house.

The garden before him had wooden fencing that Will estimated was ten feet high. He leaped up and swung his body over the top of the fence before dropping down into a crouch within the garden. He’d been hoping that the place around him would contain at least one feature or item that could help him with his task, but instead the garden was bare. He looked at the six windows on the rear of the house and saw that those on the ground and first floors had external bars to protect the property from forced intrusion. But the windows on the top floor had no such bars, although the wooden shutters behind the glass were clearly shut. Will made some quick mental calculations, breathed in deeply, and sprinted forward. As he neared the house, he jumped to place one foot on the sill of the ground-floor window, thrust upward so that he could grab the bars of the second window, and then pulled up so that his other foot was on that window’s sill. When both his feet were on the first-floor sill, he released his grip from the bars and allowed himself to fall backward a few inches before again thrusting both legs to jump up and grab a metal overhang above the top-floor window. The overhang moved a little with his weight, but he quickly fixed his feet into position on the top-floor sill so that his weight was now accommodated. He stayed in this position for a moment while listening. He heard nothing and quickly punched his fist into the glass. The sound from the strike carried down the windless street, and Will held his breath as he again listened, glancing left and right. He placed his gloved hand into the hole and started gradually and quietly breaking away pieces of glass. Within a minute he had stripped the window of all its glass. He placed both hands back onto the overhang and kicked hard into the center of the closed shutters. It took two attempts before they gave way and swung inward. He climbed into the house and total darkness.

Will turned and pushed the broken shutters back so that they were as closed as they could be. Then he pulled out his flashlight, cupped a hand over the top of it to minimize its glare, and switched it on. He was in a bedroom, and the place was a mess. Sheets were half pulled off an empty mattress, and a table lamp lay smashed on the floor by its side. Two chests had all their drawers pulled out, and clothes were strewn everywhere. He spent a minute looking around the room before moving into the floor’s adjacent bathroom. A frameless mirror had been wrenched off its wall, and shards from it had fallen into a sink and toilet. He moved slowly back into the intervening corridor and took careful steps down to the first floor. To his right was a room that appeared to be a guest bedroom. A mattress had been lifted off the bed, upended, and sliced vigorously with a sharp object so that stuffing and springs were exposed. He moved to the other room. It was clearly a study of sorts. It contained a desk and office chair, metal filing cabinets, and bookshelves filled with books and file boxes. This room was much neater, although upon inspection Will noted that all of the file boxes were empty and that there were a corresponding number of piles of loose papers stacked on the floor. He moved his light over the desk and spotted nothing except a small cradle and a connecting cable. He lifted the cradle and saw that it was an electronic battery charger for a digital camera. Next he swung his light up to look at the books. Most of them were architectural or construction manuals, and upon opening some of them Will saw that they had been well thumbed. Below the bookshelves the beam of his flashlight flickered over an array of framed photographs that had obviously once been positioned upright on the side table they occupied but were now lying scattered there with the backs of the frames torn away. Will looked at the photographs; they seemed to be mostly business-related, and it was clear that Dzevat Kljujic had no family-or if he did, their images were apparently not deemed worthy of being framed in this study. Will’s flashlight stopped over one photograph that looked older than the others. It showed two young men dressed in jeans and quasi-military jackets. They were standing in wooded hills and smiling. Will picked up the photograph and brought it closer to his eyes. He did not recognize the man on the left, but the one on the right was certainly the Harry he knew, although the picture showed him to be around two decades younger. He pulled the photograph out from its frame and stuffed it into one of his pockets. He then set to work and spent the next ten minutes rapidly going through the stacks of paper to find and remove any reference to his agent Lace.

With more papers secreted on his person and his task complete, Will moved downstairs. Once there, he could smell what seemed like sour milk, and the odor was strong everywhere. He walked into the room on his left and saw that it was a kitchen. Cupboards were flung open, and some broken crockery lay fragmented across surfaces and on the stone floor. A fridge door hung ajar, and the light from the fridge was cast over a dining table and a half-full bottle of vodka. He left the kitchen so that he could see the last room in the house.

It was a lounge area, and as Will moved his flashlight around, it produced snapshot images of the place. He saw three dining chairs that were positioned to face the middle of the room; he saw a side table containing three plates with remnants of bread and meat on them; he saw three tumblers; he saw pictures that had been pulled off the walls and now lay broken over the floor; he saw a small television that looked as though it had been kicked onto its back; he saw a man hanging from the ceiling in the center of the room.

The smell of sour milk grew stronger as Will moved closer to the suspended body. He ignored the dead-flesh odor and looked at the rope around the man’s throat. It had been tied professionally and was threaded through a metal loop in the ceiling that was out of place in this room and next to a lampshade; the fixture had obviously been screwed into one of the room’s beams. The rope then traveled diagonally downward to a corner of the room where a similar metal loop had been inserted by the baseboards. Will looked around the three positioned chairs and saw cigarette and cigar butts on the floor by their sides, as well as ash. He picked up one of the tumblers from the side table and placed its lip against his nose. He went back to the body and looked at the face. Judging by its expression, the man had been hanged in such a way as not to snap the neck but instead exhaust his body of air while his three executioners had sat in the chairs and eaten meat, drunk vodka, smoked, and watched him slowly die.