Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

The young man was near the monument. He had stopped and hesitated, and looked around him. The circling glance was supposed to be casual. ..

The tracker had lost his target. The monument was a fallen lion, or a sleeping one, and the inscription that was hard to read was in German. The tracker eyed the monument, as if to display his innocence, and kept his head movement minimal but his eyes traversed the posts and the graves. Mister watched.

He looked like a student. Mister had never travelled abroad on work before, but he had been to Spain often enough with the Princess for sunshine breaks and he'd have prided himself that he could spot the stereotypical characteristics of foreigners. He thought the tracker was British. The spectacles were the give-away. They weren't a fashion accessory, styled, they were functional: he could see the big lenses that flashed in the last light as the head was gently twisted. .. A policeman wouldn't have passed Hendon with eyesight needing such assistance. Low on the wet dirt earth and puddles of slush water around his knees, his viewpoint gave him the narrowest of corridors between the posts.

All the way up the hill, a route chosen at random, he had never looked back. He had not doubled on himself or used the reflection of shop doorways.

Ahead of him had been the cemeteries, the locked-up sports stadium, and the hospital high on the furthest hill. The upper sloping cemetery had seemed to give him the best opportunity. He waited and watched…

He searched for more of them. Down the slope, beyond the monument, were the railings, the pavement and the road. He looked for men in raincoats or leather jackets, for women who had no purpose in being there. All he saw was old women, old men and a few children walking slowly to graves, or sitting on seats and reflecting, or hurrying away because the evening closed on the city. He did not identify a team.

The realization came quickly. They had sent one man. That was lack of respect. He knew all the women and men from the police Crime Squad, from the police intelligence, from Customs' Investigation Service who were prominent in tracking, trailing, following him.

He knew their rank, their addresses and their families' names. He knew about their kids, their cars and their holidays. With the Eagle he had walked past them at the Old Bailey on his way to the side door, had gone past their misery and their sourness. He did not know this one young man who now stood confused close to the monument.

A heavy rain had begun to fall.

He saw only the whiteness of the stones, the little clumps of flowers and the dark grey slabs of the monument. The lion, shrapnel-pocked, slept. It was a memorial to the German soldiers killed in a long-ago war. Joey felt the chill of the place, and the rain that was carried in the growing wind beat on his back and against his trousers. In some of the stones, set in shallow recesses, nested photographs of the dead – young men, from the carved dates of their lives. He did not know whether they were soldiers or civilians, whether they had died in combat or been killed by shell splinters or by snipers. Some would now have been his age, or younger. Dreaming… and the wrong place to dream.

Joey Cann was the loser. While he had stood near to the monument around him the cemetery had emptied.

Joey, the footman, had lost the eyeball.

He turned away. The rain ran on his spectacles and he dragged them off and wiped them hard; without them the white posts were jagged blurs. He did not know whether he had shown out or whether he had fouled up. He could not say that he had been seen, or whether the bulk of the monument – the sleeping artillery-shredded lion – had masked Mister as he'd walked out of the cemetery's far side and disappeared into the network of small streets above it. There was a story written into the history of the Church of the day when twenty executive officers and higher executive officers had been deployed to follow a Colombian from a bank meeting in the City of London. Five lost the target in the first Underground station. More had been scattered as the target had changed trains on his journey. Three out of twenty had reached Heathrow with him. No one in authority could blame him for being dropped by his target, but he blamed himself.

He left the cemetery. The rain was sprayed in headlights, spattered off the glistening road, and soaked his trousers.

Going down the hill, first on Patriotske liga and then on Kosevo, he walked fast. Then, abruptly, he crossed a small park that separated Kosevo from Alipasino. He went past the fortress of the guarded American embassy, could see only the roofs of the buildings behind the high walls. The flag above them was limp and the floodlights burned brightly. Guards eyed him, a camera swivelled to train on him. Joey was trained in footman surveillance, not in the counter-culture. He had passed the tests, flying colours and praise from the instructors, in following, not in being followed. The sense of failure overwhelmed him. The failure, an itch in his mind, shut out a cooler response. Tears smarting in his eyes, he did not wave down taxis, didn't jump on buses. His nightly report would list Mister's movements, the tourist trail around old trenches above Sarajevo and lunch in a fish restaurant above Pale, and his drive to the meeting with Ismet Mujic and the unloading of more boxes that had been taken into the apartment. It would not speak of failure. He remembered how it had been in the room occupied by the new men and women recruited to Sierra Quebec Golf; Gough's harsh, staccato introduction, the hostile suspicion of the eyes that had glared at him, the interloper.

With the rainwater dripping off him, he stamped into the hall of his hotel, didn't respond to the friendly inquiry from the reception clerk as to whether he'd had a good day, and hurried for the stairs, his room and dry clothes. He never looked back, never saw the reaction of the snubbed clerk.

A hand palmed a banknote across the table to the value of one hundred German marks. It represented a quarter of the monthly wage paid to a hotel reception clerk, and won an answer. 'Joey Cann, room 239, from London.'

Another banknote, another hundred marks, slipped into the clerk's hip pocket and the name was fed into the hotel computer. Abill was printed out then passed over the desk. It was scanned. A name, a passport number, no address beyond London SW17, no occupation given, itemized food and coffee, one call made on the room's telephone.

A final question, and another banknote: was Mr Cann alone? He was travelling with a woman, separate rooms, a very smart woman – a lady. Hands were shaken, smiles were exchanged.

Mister walked out into the rain and the falling darkness.

The number of the mobile telephone was known only to its owner and its owner's paymaster. Three calls were made from it that evening.

The trigger for the calls was a simple request for information. As soon as the bleep and vibration heralding the call had cut into the conversation in the crowded Italian restaurant in Victoria, its owner had left the table and gone to the toilets. He was never without that phone, pay-as-you-go. He had listened to the brief message left against a rumble of background traffic.

His first call was to the night duty officer at the National Investigation Service of Customs amp; Excise.

He identified himself as the father of Joey Cann, and asked to speak to him. He was patched through to an extension number, and repeated himself. He was told, curtly, that Cann was abroad and apologized with humility. Buried in the workings of the mobile was an attachment that scrambled its number, preventing it being traced, placed there by a three-man electronics company from the east of London.

His second call was to a British Telecom engineer's home. The engineer worked in a building in central Bristol considered sufficiently sensitive to be un-publicized. From the building, telephone taps and the inquiries of covert law-enforcement organizations were handled. Among its many prized facilities was the ability to feed a number into a computerized system and receive back the name and address of the subscriber.