Deathlist (30 page)

Bald shrugged. ‘Just saying. If he is in there, he’s being fucking quiet.’

‘I agree with Jock,’ said Coles. The South African and Devereaux had climbed into the back of the Corolla a few minutes ago to take over their OP duty from Bald and Porter. ‘Something ain’t right. This is a good location. Discreet. Not many tourists. No darkies. He wouldn’t abandon it. Not without a bloody good reason.’

Porter nodded and thought some more. They had a simple choice. Stay put, carry on observing the apartment and hope for some movement. Or go proactive and check out the place for themselves. There were risks attached with going in through the front door. They might alert Stankovic. Or they might be walking into a trap. But there was no point staking out an empty gaff. One way or another, they had to know if the target was in there or not.

He looked to Bald. ‘Grab the snap gun, Jock. Let’s check it out. Davey, Mick. Wait here.’

They stepped out into the street. Bald retrieved the snap gun from the boot of the Corolla. He’d carried it with him from the job in Valletta, in case the team needed to break into a room or a house belonging to one of the other targets. Now it was going to come in handy. He followed Porter across the street towards the apartment block. It was dark outside, the bright winter sun replaced by the sickly apricot glow of city streetlamps. A putrid smell of piss and sewage wafted across the air, violating Porter’s nostrils. They hit the block and stepped through the entrance leading to the ground-floor foyer. It was cool and damp inside. The cheap fluorescent lights flickered on and off. Porter smelled detergent. He could hear dripping from somewhere close by. There was no elevator inside the block, presumably because money was tight under the old regime. Or maybe the Communists didn’t believe in elevators. Maybe there was more solidarity in walking.

The operators climbed two flights of stairs and hits a dimly lit landing with damp on the walls and a mosaic floor with half the tiles missing. Bald and Porter moved down the landing until they reached the door to number 12. Bald took out the snap gun from his jacket pocket and gave the door the once-over. Plain green, no spyhole. Deadbolt lock. Not Yale, but something cheaper. More cost-effective, but easier to break. Bald took out the snap gun. It was a small metal thing about the size of a pocket pistol. Like a drill that had been shrunken down in the wash. Bald took the tension wrench from his jacket pocket and inserted it into the bottom of the door lock. Then he adjusted the striking speed by rotating a wheel on the back of the snap gun. Porter stood to the side of the door while he worked, watching the landing. He kept his right hand resting on his shoulder-holstered PA-63 semi-automatic in case of trouble. He could hear voices from the bottom of the stairwell. Kids screaming. A parent shouting at them.

‘Hurry up, Jock.’

Bald drove the screw-needle mounted at the end of the snap gun into the lock just above the tension wrench. Then he pulled the trigger. The snap gun made a loud clapping noise, striking the pins inside the lock and jolting them up, applying tension until they hit the shear line. Using a snap gun was faster and less complicated than the old method of raking the pins individually. But the gun sometimes needed to be fired several times before it could bypass the lock. The voices in the stairwell were getting louder. Bald kept pressing. The snap gun kept snapping. After maybe a dozen clicks the lock sprang open and the operators stepped inside the apartment and closed the door behind them.

A vicious smell hit Porter as he entered the hallway. The odour of rotting flesh and expunged gasses.

He lowered his gaze.

Saw the body.

Froze.

Stankovic was lying face-down with a hole in the back of his head big enough to sink a golf ball into. Porter recognised the Serb from the description Petrovich had given them. He had a curved cross tattoo on the side of his neck. The same one he’d seen on the other gunmen. A puddle of blood had formed beneath Stankovic. His body was puffy and bloated. Like someone had pumped him full of air. There was no smell of cordite in the air. Porter guessed the guy had been lying there for at least a day.

‘Shit,’ said Bald.

‘Looks like someone got here before us.’ Porter glanced around the apartment. Nothing out of place. Nothing obviously missing or stolen. No sight of a struggle. No forced entry. No casing.

This was a professional hit.

He pointed to the door. ‘Whoever did this job, Stankovic must have known them. He just went ahead and let them walk straight in. He didn’t think they were a threat. Then he turned his back on them and they popped him in the back of his head.’

Bald glanced at the door. Looked from the door to Stankovic. ‘Who would have slotted him?’

Porter frowned, said nothing. He didn’t know. Maybe a freelance killer? Another kill team the Firm hadn’t told them about? But whoever it is, he thought, they’re one step ahead of us. And that could only mean one thing.

We’re not the only ones after the names on the deathlist.

Three days later. Zlatibor, western Serbia.

1439 hours.

‘Its definitely him, mucker,’ said Porter.

Bald looked down at the black-and-white photograph clipped to the front of the manila folder. They were standing in the middle of a chintzy room at the Hotel Aventinus, a four-storey concrete edifice on Zlatibor’s equivalent of Main Street. Bald, Porter, Devereaux and Coles, plus Ophelia and Evelyn. There was a rotary-dial telephone on a dusty bedside table and cigarette burns on the floral carpet, and a single window overlooking a derelict yard outside. The radiators in the room didn’t work and they were all wearing their outer layers.

A dozen colour snaps were spread out on the lumpy bed in front of them. The photos been taken the previous morning, and they all showed the same thing: a portly man in his fifties dressed in a parka and frayed jeans, sitting on a wooden jetty by a lake. The man had a shock of grey hair tied back in a ponytail and a long white beard and thick-rimmed spectacles. He looked like a cross between a hardline Islamic cleric and Santa Claus.

Dusan Ninkovic.

Bald swung his gaze back to the black-and-white shot. A note below the pic said it had been taken in 1994. Five years ago. The guy in the photograph looked very different from the Santa Claus lookalike in the snaps laid out on the bed. He didn’t have glasses or a beard, for a start. His hair was cut short and in the old photograph he was staring determinedly into the cameras, his jaw set firm and his eyes glancing up beyond the camera, as if preparing to address a large crowd. About the only similarity between the two sets of pictures was the eyes, thought Bald. They were heavy-lidded and black, and set deep into his face. Like a pair of bullet holes in a paper target. There was no mistaking that they belonged to the same person.

The team had arrived in Zlatibor eighteen hours after leaving Budapest. Bald, Porter, Coles and Devereaux had flown back to Istanbul to RV with Ophelia and Evelyn at the Marriott. Then they’d bought six tickets on a Turkish Airlines flight to Sarajevo. The sanctions against the Milosevic regime were still in place and commercial air travel direct to Belgrade was all but impossible. So they took the scenic route. From Sarajevo the team had stocked up on travel guides and rented a couple of Skoda Octavias. Then they made the two-hour drive east towards the Serbian border. Ophelia and Evelyn were staying on with the team to help with their cover story. Four middle-aged blokes entering Serbia would look suspicious. Throw in a couple of girls and they suddenly looked like a group of tourists on a trip to check out the local ruins and health spas.

From the border it was a forty-minute ride to Zlatibor. They checked into the Aventinus, the only hotel in small town, and split into two teams. Ophelia and Evelyn headed north to Belgrade to meet with a Firm handler at the British Embassy. They would get their hands on whatever int was available on Ninkovic and Brozovic. At the same time Porter, Bald, Coles and Devereaux started running an OP on the log cabin.

The place wasn’t difficult to locate. There were only a few isolated cabins along the route Petrovich had described. The one they were looking for was much bigger than the rest, and the only one that had heavies guarding the approach. It was the size of a hunting lodge and situated roughly three miles south of Zlatibor on the banks of Lake Ribnica, in a clearing surrounded by a dense forest of mountain pines. The only access route was along a rocky trail that led up from the main road for seven hundred metres up a steep incline. Two bodyguards patrolled the grounds of the lodge at all times, meaning the team couldn’t do a drive-past without getting spotted. Instead they carried out a 360-degree probe, getting as close as possible on foot to get eyes on the target. They worked in teams of two, in four-hour shifts. Devereaux and Porter took the first shift. Then Bald and Coles moved into position and took over.

For the past forty-eight hours they’d observed the guards from a clump of rocks by the edge of the lake, two hundred metres away from the cabin. They’d noted the movements of the bodyguards and the changeovers between the BG teams. The target himself rarely showed his face, and whenever he did he was accompanied by a couple of heavies. Porter had taken several snaps of the guy with his Nikon F90X 35mm SLR camera. Then they’d returned to the Aventinus and developed the film in the bathroom using a ‘press kit’ of powdered chemicals, a thermometer and a glass funnel. Then it was simply a case of comparing the developed photographs with the snap of Ninkovic attached to the folder Ophelia and Evelyn had been given.

‘Christ, mate,’ Bald said as he studied the two sets of pictures. ‘He’s changed his fucking appearance a bit.’

‘More than a bit, actually,’ Ophelia put in. ‘Ninkovic has got himself a whole new identity.’

Bald shot her a puzzled look. She took the folder, parked her bum on the edge of the mattress and turned to the first page.

‘Dusan Ninkovic. Born in Pale, Bosnia in 1947. Enlisted in the military at the age of seventeen and swiftly became one of the youngest commanding officers in the Yugoslav army. In the seventies and eighties he rose steadily through the ranks, but didn’t exactly tear up any trees. When the war broke out in 1992, Brozovic issued a rallying cry to all those who wanted to defend the motherland against the Muslims. Ninkovic quit the military and was given command of one of the Red Eagles brigades. Turns out he was a lot better at killing civilians than he was at working his way up the military food chain. According to the indictment served up by the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague, Ninkovic’s brigade was responsible for burning dozens of villages and murdering thousands of Bosniaks. He’s a real piece of work.’

‘Could do with a few guys like that in South Africa,’ said Coles. ‘Put the darkies in their place.’

‘What’s he doing here?’ Porter asked.

Ophelia brushed her hair back. She was a brunette again now. Both Evelyn and Ophelia had radically altered their appearances after the Valletta op, going back to the PhD student look.

‘Laying low,’ she said. ‘After the indictments were served, the warlords and their lieutenants went to ground. The big cities like Belgrade are out of bounds. Too many cameras, too many spies. But out in the country, the situation is different. The people here are broadly sympathetic to the paramilitary units. That includes the local police. Even if they’re aware that they have a war criminal in their midst, they’re not going to report him.’

‘Plus he’s good at hiding,’ Evelyn added. ‘As you can see from the photos, Ninkovic has changed his appearance. He has a different name and profession. He’s also fed a lot of misinformation to the press. Seems like every month there’s been another reported sighting of him somewhere in Europe. We think Ninkovic is behind those reports. Or someone close to him.’

‘To throw the authorities off the scent?’ Bald asked.

Ophelia nodded. ‘Besides, NATO aren’t exactly pouring a lot of resources into hunting Ninkovic. They’ve got bigger bad guys to catch. Such as Brozovic and the other Serbian warlords. Finding a 2i/c who’s off the radar isn’t a big political win. Whitehall wants the celebrities. The bad guys who’ll grab the headlines and earn them promotions, not their lesser-known subordinates.’

‘So that’s it?’ Bald asked, incensed. ‘He just lives freely here, and no one gives a fuck?’

‘That’s about the size of it,’ Evelyn said. ‘Plus, the Red Eagles still have a lot of clout around here. Putting up your hand and saying you know where to find Ninkovic is like signing your own death warrant.’

‘Basically,’ said Ophelia, ‘Ninkovic is safe here as long as he doesn’t venture out into the wider world. It’s sort of like a drug lord going to prison. His movements are restricted, but he’s still running the day-to-day business.’

Porter cocked an eyebrow at the spy. ‘He’s still operational?’

‘As far as we can tell. But the Eagles’ modus operandi has shifted. According to our intelligence, they’re more like a mafia unit now. Drug smuggling, illegal guns, counterfeit cigarettes. That sort of thing. They also receive donations from wealthy Serbs.’

Evelyn said, ‘Brozovic needs someone to administer his empire while he’s off the grid. Obviously. From what we know, Ninkovic is the one who oversees the day-to-day running of the organisation. Anyone who wants to do business with Brozovic has to go through Ninkovic. Brozovic is more the big-picture guy.’

‘So this Ninkovic fella is likely to be in contact with Brozovic?’ Devereaux asked.