Simon Kernick - The Murder Exchange

But nothing really stood out, so I sent a quick message back to Malik, thanking him for his help, and moved on to the net proper. I started by finding a search engine and typed in the words ‘snake poison’, which I thought ought to give me some hits. It did, far too many, most of which were totally irrelevant. I tried different search engines, then narrowed the hunt down, putting in ‘venom’, ‘snake venom’, ‘elapid venom’ and, finally, ‘viper venom’. I reeled through the dozens of hits I picked up, switched search engines constantly, and went back over Boyd’s notes on the subject, all the time racking my brains for ideas that could actually move me forward.

I’d been at it well over an hour, and was already beginning to agree with Boyd’s assertion that the Internet was a hopelessly overhyped means of uncovering information, when something caught my eye. The intro line read: ‘Snake Venom part of Mujahidin Arsenal’ and referred the reader to what looked like an eastern European media website. I yawned and double-clicked. Outside, I could hear the rain tumbling down, and the ominous rumble of thunder.

The article from which the intro line came had been written in October 1995 and concerned the socalled mujahidin, foreign Islamic fundamentalists who were fighting alongside fellow Muslims in Bosnia Herzegovina. It seemed they had become an integral part of the conflict, being both well organized and well financed, with extensive backing from a number of Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia. According to the article, they were also using some interesting weapons in their fight, one of which was snake venom. Vials of venom from the Egyptian viper, or asp, had been used by their spies within the enemy camps to poison senior enemy officers. In one cited instance three Bosnian Croat officers, including a colonel, had had the venom slipped into their food by a female Muslim cook posing as a Croat (an easy thing to do since they were essentially the same ethnic group) and all had died before the plot had been uncovered. The article didn’t say what had happened to the cook but stated that the poisons definitely existed and had originated with the mujahidin and, in particular, an Arab officer with the nom de guerre Tajab.

At last I had something. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. Malik had mentioned Bosnia as a supply route used by the Holtzes to bring both drugs and illegal immigrants into western Europe and, ultimately, Britain, although the connection was a tenuous one. There was a list of related articles on the left-hand side of the screen and I scrolled through them, skim-reading about the role the fundamentalists had played in what was described, quite accurately it seemed, as the bloodiest European conflict since 1945. Ruthless in battle, they were a formidable fighting force, their infamy far outweighing their actual numbers. So much so that, according to one of the articles written in January 1996, the United Nations demanded their removal as part of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement between the warring parties. The next article, written later that month, continued in the same vein, this time citing a claim made by the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic that mujahidin had attacked Serb positions north-west of Zenica, and that, in separate ceasefire violations, Iranian military advisers and British mercenaries were continuing to train Muslim forces in bases east and south of Sarajevo.

The British connection again. Still tenuous, but there all the same. I made some notes, then left the website and typed in ‘mercenaries in Bosnia’ in the search-engine box. Plenty of hits came up, as expected, and once again I began the long trawl.

As I looked, I began to wonder whether this man Karadzic was making things up. After all, all wars contain plenty of lies and propaganda. But then I found an article in the New York Times , dated October 1995, which covered the story of foreign involvement in the war, stretching back to its beginnings in early 1992, and contained information about who’d been involved. There’d been the usual suspects: the mujahidin; the occasional middleclass Western boys who’d been so sickened by the atrocities being visited on the Muslims that they’d gone out to try to help; the adventure seekers and nutters who for some reason are always attracted to the world’s troublespots; and there’d been a company called Contracts International, based in London, who’d been supplying former British soldiers to help train Muslim forces in a variety of military techniques, including guerrilla warfare. The spokesman for Contracts International was Martin Leppel, a former captain in the Parachute Regiment. In the article, he admitted that some of the firm’s employees were in Bosnia but declined to comment any further. The writers stated that no fewer than twenty-one of the company’s operatives were there, and that it was almost certain they were being bankrolled by senior members of the Saudi Arabian royal family.

I noted the name of the company and its representative, then checked to see if they had a website. Not surprisingly they didn’t, so I did a search on Contracts International and discovered a number of newspaper articles about the company. Founded in 1991 by Leppel, and with a full-time staff estimated at two hundred, they’d been involved in conflicts all over the world, but I concentrated solely on Bosnia. From what I could gather, there was nothing untoward about their activities in the region. You could even say, depending on your point of view I suppose, that they were actually providing a service, since the Muslims were so hopelessly outgunned. But the other warring parties had demanded they leave after the Dayton Accord because their presence was seen as provocative, although there was evidence that some had stayed behind to continue their work in breach of the treaty.

It was getting close to midnight when I opened an article from Der Spiegel , dated September 1997, in which the words Contracts International appeared. I was too tired to take in the fact that it was written in German, but something immediately caught my eye. It was a black and white photograph of two men walking towards a camera along what looked like a mountain road. One of the men, the younger of the two, was dressed in military fatigues, the other in a dark suit. They appeared to be talking to each other, and neither was looking at the camera. In fact, it looked as if they were unaware their picture was being taken.

The one on the left, the soldier, looked familiar, but I couldn’t work out from where. It wasn’t a particularly good shot of him, but I knew I wasn’t mistaken. I’d definitely seen the man before.

As for the one in the suit, he was even more familiar. But then he would have been. Not only had Malik supplied me with his photograph: I’d run into him only days earlier.

It was Neil Vamen’s man, Jackie Slap Merriweather.

Iversson

The rain came down like a tropical monsoon. A month with none and then the whole lot arrives at once, just like London buses. It was difficult to see out of the car window, there was so much of it, but I suppose in a way that was useful. At least no one would be paying me too much attention as I sat parked across the road from the flash-looking four-storey townhouse where the Heavenly Girls brothel was based.

For the hundredth time that night, I looked at my watch. 1.15 a.m. I’d been there close to two hours now, watching and waiting, seeing how much activity there was, wondering if that pervert Krys Holtz was going to turn up. A steady flow of cabs had been pulling up and spitting out their male passengers, mainly of the suited and booted variety, all looking like they had the cash to pay the sort of prices this place apparently asked. Elaine had told me she’d heard that thirty or so women worked for them but only about ten were there at any one time, in keeping with the intimate atmosphere. I reckoned that those ten were being kept pretty fucking busy if tonight was typical, and there’d probably be as many as twenty-five bodies in there when we hit the place. This meant we were going to have to move extremely fast. With that many people and that many rooms, it would be impossible to secure everyone, so you had to guess that one of them was going to be able to get a call in to the police. The Met were never the speediest bastards in the world, but if the person on the other end of the blower sounded desperate enough, they’d probably pull their finger out. That would mean a five-or six-minute initial response time, which didn’t give us a lot of leeway.