Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

'There's nothing tame about Mister, or haven't you learned that?'

At the Royal Military Academy, Atkins had enjoyed the classes on military history He remembered.

On the wall of one classroom was a reproduction print of the retreat from Moscow. He'd listened to the monologue, and seen the gloom and defiance of Napoleon. It had been a campaign too far, he should never have travelled. The worm ate at him…

Sarajevo was Mister's Moscow. Von Goethe had written, and the lecturer had repeated it, of Napoleon:

'His life was the stride of a demi-god, from battle to battle, and from victory to victory.' At dinner, Mister had talked easily about the state of the aid programme going into Bosnia and the volume of charitable boxes needed, the numbers of lorries required to ferry them, the opportunities provided. It was grand talk. He gave them a vision of a future where the lorries of Bosnia with Love criss-crossed the country, brought in dross and took out 'product'. Goldwin Scott had written, of Napoleon: 'If utter selfishness, if the reckless sacrifice of humanity to your own interest and passions be vileness, history has no viler name.' He seemed to have no care.

'He's under surveillance. He's targeted with an audio device. That's heavy… I didn't expect that – not here, anyway. You're close to him, much closer than me – surely you need to know what action he's taking.'

'I wouldn't ask and I wouldn't listen if I were told, it's called "accessory before the fact" or it's "accessory after the fact", depending – I don't need that. As a legal professional, my advice to you is to maintain a similar indifference.'

'It's not going well, is it?'

'What do you think? Good night.'

Mister had switched from the lorries and their trade to the wider horizons. He was above the small, confined world of London. He was going to an international stage. Electronically moved monies went too fast to be tracked. Commodities were needed on the global scale, and would be paid for without the petty restrictions of Value Added Tax and levied Customs duties. The vision was of a centre controlling a network of assets. The centre was Untouchable.

Napoleon had said, 'The bullet that is to kill me has not yet been moulded.' Atkins had remembered the quotation, and been frightened. Mister talked of power, talked with arrogance, and neither he nor the Eagle dared contradict him. It wasn't going well and Mister didn't recognize it. He was a messiah but had only the Eagle and Atkins with him to play his disciples.

Atkins ordered another beer, swallowed it, and ordered another.

Joey said, 'She was hysterical, she couldn't put a sentence together, she was gone.'

Maggie was wiping sleep dust from her eyes. 'Start it again – start it all over again.'

'When she opened the box there was a plastic bag in it. On top of the box was a piece of paper. Written on it was my name, the room number, and the hotel's phone, even the international dialling code for Sarajevo.'

Maggie pushed herself up in her bed. She was hunched with her knees against her chest. He had been banging, frantic, at her door.

'In the plastic bag?'

'Her cat.'

'Oh, God. Tell me, come on.'

'The cat's called Walter.'

'Fuck its name – what had they done to it?'

'They must have caught it in the garden. It had only just gone out, it's a hunter. It goes out and-'

'Spare me the soundbites.'

'She loves the cat, the cat is-''

'We all love cats. Everyone loves cats, except dogs.

What had they done to the cat?'

He sat on the end of the bed. She had draped a blanket over her shoulders. She noted, at that moment, a calm came to him. The choke in his throat was gone. There was no longer any emotion in his voice.

'She took the plastic bag out of the box and opened it. Her cat was in the bag. I don't know which they had done first. They had cut its head off and also sliced its stomach so its bowels were hanging out. She opened the bag and its entrails and blood went over her hall floor. The blood was still warm, and so was the cat's body. They knew who she was. She's a teacher, she's just my girlfriend, for fuck's sake. If they'd killed Jen, then I'd just have felt blind bloody anger and they'd have known – he would have known that I'd have gone to the end of the earth to follow him. He enjoys inflicting pain. This is all about pain, not about elimination. She will never forget her cat was killed because of me, what I do – he'll have broken us. She was yelling for me to come back, first flight. She said that Packer wasn't worth it. It's how he destroys people… Jen's never been to the Custom House, she doesn't do the socials there with me, nobody's ever heard of her – how did he know about Jen?'

'Have you rung her from here?'

'On the first evening, when we'd just checked in, I-'

'On the room phone?'

Joey nodded. It hurt too much to admit the responsibility out loud. His head dropped. She didn't sneer at him, didn't hit him with sarcasm.

'Where is she now?'

He said, 'I told her to go to a friend's house, ring school in the morning, and stay away sick.'

'Has she spoken to the police? Can't she get protection?'

'I told her not to speak to the police, and not to ring the Church.'

'How did you explain that?'

'Gave her some crap about informers, touts – about leaking sieves, shit about not knowing who you can trust. She wasn't thinking straight enough to argue.'

She took his hand. 'Why did you do that, Joey?

Why did you tell her not to ring the police or your people at the Custom House?'

'They'd call me home,' Joey said simply He let her hold his hand. 'If they knew I'd showed out and that I was identified by name, they'd call me home.'

'You'd better sleep in here with me, but you're on the floor.'

She threw him a blanket and watched him settle on the carpet. She switched the light out.

They were getting out of the car, off the main road, in front of steel-shuttered gates, when the klaxon sounded behind them. The lorry had slowed but kept going.

Mister turned, saw Bosnia with Love on the side, and the Eel in the cab waving to him, before the lorry accelerated away down Bulevar Mese Selimovica, going away from the city. He waved back. It was the last time that the lorry would return to London empty.

The next time the lorry rolled for the frontier it would be carrying 'product'; this time it carried, in a pouch fastened to the base of the driver's seat, a short, affectionate letter to the Princess, and instructions to young Sol for the transfer of monies from a Cayman account to a Cypriot bank in Nicosia.

For a moment, deep inside himself and hidden from the Eagle and from Serif, he felt a small sensation of loneliness. For that moment he almost wished himself into the cab beside the Eel and going home to what was familiar.

They walked to the gate and one of Serif's men produced the keys that unfastened a rusting padlock. The heavy chain was freed, and the gates scraped open. It would be his Sarajevo base, the site from which he would launch his new career. It was the heart of Mister's grand design. He was told that it had once been the transport headquarters of the nationalized electricity company. He stepped through the gate after Serif, followed by the Eagle, then looked around him.

The compound was enclosed by high walls that were concrete rendered except where shell fire had hit them. The holes were filled with crudely placed cement blocks or sheets of old corrugated iron. The walls were topped with weathered coils of barbed wire. They were high enough, and the surrounding buildings low enough, to prevent the compound being overlooked. There were three steel-sided warehouses at the far end, and a small brick shed. The warehouses had been burned out and were charred black, but the shed had survived without a direct hit.