Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

She talked.

Joey's eyes roved round the room as he listened to Frank's translation.

He was trained to notice, listen and suck in the relevance of what he heard and saw.

'… It is what I have already told the police who came to see me. I can only say the same because that is the truth. I can tell you what I saw and nothing more. I am truthful, I have always been truthful. You want me to repeat it, I will repeat it. It is hard in They went out into a dark, empty street, the gloom clinging to them. Joey said what should happen the next day. He had his street map and he thought he was only a few minutes' walk to his hotel. He was about to drift away when his shoulder was caught and he was spun round.

The lilting softness was gone from Frank's voice.

'You do understand that's a powerful man, as powerful as they come in this city.'

'What do you suggest I do? Go home?'

'A good journey?'

'No problems, Mister,' the Eel said. Jason Tyrie had driven for Mister for sixteen years, and his uncle before him. 'I did the border at Bihac. It was two fifty DMs on the Croat side and seven fifty for this side's crowd. The warehouseman is one fifty a week. You can buy anyone here.'

The Eel had been in a column of lorries bringing supermarket food over the frontier from Croatia. The sums he'd paid out to Customs, on both sides of the line, had been the going rate for avoiding inspection and duty, and getting the documents stamped. All the drivers carried wads of German notes. The lorry, 'Bosnia with Love' painted gaudily on its sides, was parked in the shadowed rear of the warehouse. The Eel had left the bonnet up, had scattered tools on the concrete floor. The inquisitive, or the prying, would have thought it was there for repairs. The warehouseman, minding his own business, was out in the cold morning air hosing vehicles clean and sweeping away the lakes of water into the drain.

'Right,' Mister said. 'Let's get to work.'

He had the Eagle, the Eel and Atkins to help him.

Atkins had been up early and had been to a vehicle dealer. The Toyota four-wheel drive, smoked-glass windows, had been bought for cash. The papers that went with it, which made a pretence of a legal purchase, were economic with its history: they made no mention of its former ownership by the OSCE. The Toyota had been stolen from outside a hotel in Vitez used by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, had been resprayed and the plates had been changed – close examination would have shown the OSCE logo on the doors, but Atkins had said that didn't matter. No one was looking for such things. They made a tunnel into the back of the lorry, Mister and the Eel passing boxes down to the Eagle and Atkins. They burrowed towards the bulkhead, shifting only enough of the clothes and toys collected by the charities to give them access. Far to the back of the lorry were the heavier boxes. Mister was in charge and revelling in it. The Eagle was sweating, had taken off his coat, loosened his tie, and when he thought Mister wasn't watching him he left Atkins to take the workload. Atkins stacked the boxes. The ones they were after were bulkier, more awkward to push and lift, though the contents had been stripped down to the minimum.

The first of the bigger boxes came down, passed to the Eagle who sagged under its weight. Atkins used a penknife to slit the adhesive tape holding it shut, and lifted out the first launcher.

Mister watched him. He felt warm pride. To cut down on the weight and the bulk, the launchers had been transferred from the slatted-wood boxes and put into cardboard containers: the Eel had been told not to drive fast and to keep clear of rutted road surfaces.

Atkins had it on the concrete floor, knelt beside it and threw a small switch. There was a faint humming sound, and a red light showed at its rear.

Good old Cruncher.

While Mister had been in Brixton, Cruncher – with Atkins's help – had given six months of his life to getting his hands on four of the medium-range Trigat launchers. There had been an exercise in northern Finland. While Mister had languished in his cell, Cruncher and Atkins had done the deal with a major on a Lapland range. For fifty thousand American dollars in high-denomination notes, the major responsible for driving the four launchers back from the range where they had been tested in minus 18 degrees C, not allowing for windchill, had dropped back in the convoy on the iced road. He had made easy excuses for his driver to travel in one of the lorries ahead. At a carefully chosen point, where the road between the range and the barracks wound above a sheer cliff that fell to a deep, ice-covered lake, the jeep had skidded off the road – as the official report stated – plummeted down, fractured the ice and would have come to rest among jagged rocks some two hundred metres below the frozen surface. The Cruncher and Atkins had collected the four launchers and the twenty missiles, taken from the jeep before the 'accident', and driven them away. Before they left, Atkins had beaten up the major, giving him injuries consistent with being thrown clear from the jeep as it had started its descent.

The major had been abandoned in a state of theatrical shock to walk eight kilometres to the barracks. The pride of the Finnish military determined that the manufacturers – Euromissile Dynamics Group of Fontenoy-aux-Roses in France – were given an horrific picture of the road mishap. The loss was forgotten, the launchers and missiles were written off.

They had been loaded onto a lorry carrying pulped timber, driven by the Eel, known to his mother as Billy Smith. They had reached a British port a week after the scarred, trembling major had shown investigators the tyremarks on the packed snow and the scars in the ice below.

Well done, Cruncher.

Seven weeks before the start of his trial Mister had been told by the Eagle that the launchers and missiles had reached safe haven, and he'd nodded, as if he'd never doubted they would. Three of the boxes were manhandled by Atkins and the Eel into an inner room at: the extreme rear of the warehouse, after a handgun had been taken from each. Before the fourth box was loaded into the Toyota, a map was spread out on it.

In magnified detail, it showed the streets of the old quarter of the city. As he outlined what would happen, Mister saw the way the Eagle craned forward over Atkins's shoulder to listen and watch his darting fingers; he noted how the Eagle hated all of it and could not help himself. The map was folded away. A small, loaded PPK Walther went into the back of his own belt and two filled magazines into his jacket pocket. Atkins drove away with the box, with a Luger pistol in the glove compartment. He told the Eagle that they would walk and find a taxi, didn't bother to offer him a firearm.

Mister left the Eel, a Makharov in his anorak pocket, to mind the lorry, and stepped out into the streets of Sarajevo to put right the matter of an insult.

' I still don't see why I have to do it.'

'You're doing it because that's what I'm telling you to do, and you'll do it just like I've told you to,'

Maggie Bolton said decisively.

'It doesn't make sense.'

'Everything, just like I've told you.'

Joey shrugged and sighed so that she could read his annoyance and took the case from her hand. They did a last check on her button microphone and his earpiece, then on his microphone, clipped to his undershirt, and her earpiece. Folded in his shirt pocket was the authorization for intrusive surveillance signed by Judge Delic, typed by his daughter – if it was needed, if he showed out, at the Custom House they would feed him to the rats on the Thames mudflats. She had a copy run off on the hotel's machine. He'd argued all through breakfast, and all through their walk from their hotel to the Holiday Inn, and she'd taken not a blind bit of notice, and had carried on with her briefing detail of where in the room the bug should be placed.