Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

'He cannot do the meeting this morning,' the young man, Enver, said. 'He is sorry if that makes an inconvenience for you.'

The Eagle's response was curt. 'Mister Packer is not only an important man, he is a busy man.'

'The meeting will be in the afternoon, at four o'clock. I think he has interesting news for Mister Packer.'

'I speak for him – he'll be there.'

They'd been on a final cup in the coffee shop. The young man had found them there, bringing the dogs with him. The Eagle reckoned that in any other coffee shop, in any other city, the boy and his dogs would have been thrown out. One of the dogs had lunged at the cake trolley. It was disgusting, unhygienic. The Eagle had left Mister and Atkins at their window table, had gone to intercept Enver. He'd had a bad feeling about it the previous night, and the meeting's postponement had ratcheted it up. He never saw the enforcement side of Mister's business, was insulated from it, but the sight of the addict's pulped face had unsettled him. Between three and five years back, Mister had run a small side-show of enforcement business. A middle-rank figure was in debt to another middle-ranker who did not have the muscle strength to get himself paid. Mister bought out the debt, less twenty per cent, and sent the Cards round. The debt was paid – before or after the fists, coshes or a shotgun was used – and Mister's profit margin was one pound in five, or ten thousand in fifty thousand. The Cruncher had liked to call it 'diversification', but Mister didn't do it any longer because ten thousand pounds was chickenshit. The druggie's bloodied face had been the Eagle's sleeping companion, and his temper was on a short fuse.

They've put you off again, Mister, they're giving you the runaround. Do we sit much longer in this hole? That's what I'm asking myself. Personally… '

Mister asked softly, 'Are they suggesting another time?'

'Four o'clock in the afternoon.'

'That's not a problem, then. That's when it is, fine.'

'So, we've a day to kick our heels.' The Eagle snorted, and sat down, confused. He had expected, been damned certain he'd see, Mister's snarled anger at the slight… but everything was fine. He did not understand. Earlier, the Eagle had been explaining cash-flow and the notice required to move substantial money orders, then the need for decisions on the conversion of a Caymans account from dollars into euros, and the further movement of funds into an Israeli bank.. . and he'd given up because he hadn't had Mister's attention.

Mister said to Atkins, 'You know this place. We've half the morning and half the afternoon. Show me round. We'll do the sights.'

The Eagle was left worse than confused. He was bewildered.

'You want me to drive?'

'I'm quite capable – don't mind me saying it, you're a right misery today.'

'Is that so?'

'Lighten up, you're piss poor company About lasl night?'

'Forget i t… It's not your business.'

She ripped through the gears. The transmission from the Toyota's beacon was a continuous strong bleep. A light flashed, with constant reassurance, on the screen she'd bolted under the dash. He'd spelled it out last night, after he'd returned to the hotel and sent his signal. He'd come to her room and she'd had to clear a chair of her underclothes so that he could sit down. He'd told it in a monologue of fifteen minutes.

All the time he'd talked he'd never looked at her or her underclothes as she'd sat on the bed with her robe round her shoulders. He'd stared at the drawn curtain. She'd sent him to his own room after telling him that everything, always, seemed better in the morning. There had been a man in Ceau§escu Towers, old guard, who'd clung with his fingernails to employment because there was nothing else in his life, who had been a rookie youngster on the team running Oleg Penkovsky, the best source ever out of Moscow.

She'd been with him in Beirut and she'd asked him how it was in the Century House building, home before the Towers, when they heard first that the Russian had been arrested, and then when they'd heard he'd been executed. He'd said, over king prawns and a bottle from the Beka'a, 'It's like when you've a good dog. As long as it's able to retrieve for the guns it's special. When it can't pick up birds you tell the keeper to get on with it. You hear the shot behind the stables, and you don't even blink. Hard things happen, and that's recognized by any man worth half a peck of salt.' She'd heard that the old warrior had died six months after they'd finally burned him out of the building… She'd taken what he said as a mantra ever since.

He was white-faced, had been since they'd met. All the time they'd watched and followed the lorry to lower A, his fingers had been knotted tightly together.

'I can see my room from here.' Mister was crouched close to the firing position, and Atkins heard the tremor in his voice.

'They used the fort for artillery spotting,' Atkins said. 'They couldn't have hit your room, not at this range, with a sniper rifle, but they could have put a tank shell through it.'

He had brought Mister and the Eagle to the strongpoint, high and south of the city, past a modern memorial of slate-coloured marble that was set into snow-spattered flagstones then walked into the old fortress. He didn't think the Eagle cared a damn for it, but Mister's fascination was obvious. In front of a two-storey barracks building of off-white hewn stone blocks was a small parade area, closed in by the lower wall with the gun slits. The slits each had two shutters that closed on rollers. They were made of intimidating black-painted metal and were bullet- and shrapnel-proof. All the time Atkins had been in Sarajevo serving on the general's staff and wearing the blue beret, he had cursed the strongpoint and its view down on to Snipers' Alley, the Holiday Inn and every damn building that mattered. The city was laid out as a peaceful tableau and made benevolent by the snow.

He remembered ruefully what he had thought then, that the spotters for the guns had the power of life and death, could see the panicked groups at the water stand-pipes, the groups round market stalls, and the schoolchildren, and could decide on which to call down the shells of the heavy guns.

'You couldn't hide from it, could you?' Mister said.

'Only if you'd done a deal, Mister.' Atkins remembered how much the blue beret men had hated the warlords – Caco, Celo and Serif. 'Some could, because they did deals. Serif, yes, he'd fight one day a week, and six days a week he'd be trading across the front line, particularly before the tunnel was dug. Drugs, ammunition, jewellery if they could steal it, food, alcohol, they all went back and forth across the front line. That was the other side of the war… '

'Am I hearing you right, Atkins, ammunition?'

'The Serb warlords sold the Muslim warlords – the likes of Serif – ordnance that was fired back on their own men. They achieved power by holding the line, and made themselves rich by trading.'

Mister had straightened up and he stared hard at Atkins. 'You're telling me not to trust him?'

'Not as far as you can kick him, Mister. Here, you trust nobody.'

'Ink on paper?'

'Worthless… Nobody.'

Atkins saw, first time he'd seen it, a pensive scowl cutting Mister's face. He had engineered the occasion.

They could have gone to monuments in the city to the Ottoman time of greatness and seen mosques and galleries that were half a millennium old. They could have gone to the Imperial coffee-house, the interior unchanged since Austro-Hungarian rule. Instead, he had taken them to see the front line and had prepared the message he wanted to pass on. Mister was thinking.

They were walking back from the barracks' parade-ground, away from the gun slits and the view of Mister's bedroom far below. The Eagle wandered ahead of them then veered off the flagstones, his shoes sinking in the snow as he went to examine the marble of the memorial. Atkins had told them when they'd arrived that the memorial was for Tito's fighters killed in the world war.