The Hit List (39 page)

The extraction was carried out by a special team seconded from the RAF. The flight had not been cleared with the French authorities, but then neither

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Operation Firewall -- hardly surprising given that |,had cost the French arms industry many billions of

cs in lost business. |$y midday Andreas's body had been cremated and a ificate issued to the effect that he had died of heart are . His ashes were returned to an address in South ion, from where they were collected by Debbie. Jlcommon with the other members of the Cadre, he

no immediate family.

Slater had been dropped off by the van at a small flat jind the British Embassy in the Rue du Faubourg St lore, where a service doctor had dressed his wound I strapped his broken ribs, administered a single dose folterol, and put him to bed. two days later he had been pronounced fit and en to the Gare du Nord, where with the aliments of the MI6 station chief he had been ed a first-class Eurostar ticket and -- with the pliments of the doctor - a half bottle of Laphroaig

'to help him sleep'.

|e had been met at Waterloo by Eve, who drove fc back to his flat. They barely spoke during the two drive, but as soon as they were behind closed he dropped the bags and reached for her. She sponded hungrily for a moment but then had disengaged herself.

ten days,' she told him, placing a finger on his i. 'For the next ten days it's going to be all work. f that, though, there's going to be a week's leave, len we can . . . escape. How would that be?'

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A little unwillingly, Slater had agreed that it would be fine. He wanted her with every nerve and sinew in his body, but he also knew that she was right -- that the only way things would work between them was if their relationship remained deep-frozen while they worked together. Any other arrangement would be destructive of the subtle dynamics of the team. They could not allow themselves to be more concerned for each other than for their colleagues, and they could not allow their colleagues to think that this was a possibility. There would be leave-periods, and there would be the odd night at weekends, but for the time being that would be the limit of it.

Slater agreed. Having thought that he had lost her altogether, he was prepared to wait for her.

'It'll be special,' she'd promised him with a small smile. 'But for the next ten days I'm not even going to think about it. And you mustn't either.'

'That's a bit of a tall order,' Slater had said.

'Well, I expect you've taken a few of those in your time. And let's face it, a covert relationship has definitely got its sexy side. Neither of us would be in this line of work if we weren't at least a little bit addicted to secrecy, would we?'

Slater had laughed, then winced and touched his ribs. 'I'm not telling you,' he said.

At Vauxhall Cross, the team had been debriefed both individually and as a whole by Manderson. The general feeling, apart from regret at Andreas's death, was that Operation Firewall had proved a great success.

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Balkan desk were beside themselves with joy. toine Fanon-Khayat was dead, as was the Ondine Any chance of its resurrection by Belgrade had scuppered by the elimination of the entire RDB : tasked with identifying Fanon-Khayat's contacts, ftth the potential embarrassment of the Cambodia jres eliminated, what was more, Radovan Karadjic id now be tried for war crimes at the Hague in the I glare of publicity. It would look good, it would feel and mainland Europe - with the possible jtion of France -- would be properly grateful to in.

len, Manderson had politely enquired of Slater i'-'his return from Paris, did he think that the disc it be reaching them? Slater had shrugged. He told iderson that he had taken a stamp and a small ed envelope from Miko Pasquale's desk -- not to guess what those pocket-size envelopes were lly used for, given Pasquale's profession - stuck the i inside, addressed it, and slung it into a postbox on pvay back to the car. That had been on the Monday ling, after picking up the Uzis with Leon, and now iras Thursday. The European post was generally slow - chances were it wouldn't arrive until ' the weekend.

anderson had nodded, supposing that Slater was It. Typical French, of course. Quick enough to cise 'slow' British trains, but when it came to Bering a letter within seven days . . . st as a matter of interest, Manderson had

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continued, why had Slater gone to the trouble of posting the CD? Why hadn't he just pocketed it with a view to carrying it back to London?

Slater had shrugged. 'At that stage,' he'd explained, 'the RDB had Eve, and we knew that they weren't going to give her up lightly. If we had come off worst in that firefight, and I hadn't survived, the CD would have been in Belgrade by now. It seemed safer to trust it to the post.'

Manderson had nodded slowly. 'You did well, Neil,' he said, extending a congratulatory hand. 'Bloody well.'

On the Friday night, fully debriefed, the Paris team plus Debbie and Ray had gone out to celebrate and, m their own way, to bid goodbye to Andreas. By tradition, each member of the Cadre kept a 'stag night' account in which a few hundred pounds was permanently invested. Should he or she die in the field, this money was used by the others for a giant piss-up.

These memorial evenings, Slater discovered, invariably took place in a private room in a pub in Waterloo. Only Guinness and champagne were drunk. The room was booked for a stag night, in order that the ensuing drunkenness, singing, fighting, shouting and tears should come as no surprise to the landlord.

They had arrived at the Green Man early, stayed late, and drunk a very great deal. In retrospect the details of the evening were a little blurred, but it was generally agreed that Andreas's send-off had been every bit as spectacular as Ellis's. Afterwards - again in

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cordance with Cadre tradition - Debbie had poured ireas's ashes into the river from Waterloo Bridge, they had wished him safe journey. It was the time he had spent with the dying Branca had confirmed Slater's suspicions that the disc tttained more volatile material than they had been ^wn. Embarrassing though the Cambodia pictures -- and one of Slater's early instructors who had en part in the operation had once let slip that 'some of : Khmer lads could get a bit excitable when prisoners i their way' -- the limited damage that they could do kitish interests could not begin to be balanced against political advantage of having 'fast-balled' Radovan djic to the Hague. No, there had to be more on the : than that, and given that Slater had seen his own and ^colleagues' lives placed on the line, he was buggered : was going to be lied to about it. le had decided on a course of action which, if Covered, would have seen him expelled from the rice. As he had told Manderson, he had indeed i a padded postbag and a postage stamp from Miko juale's desk, and he had indeed sealed, stamped and sed the envelope with the CD inside it. But he I't posted the package at the Bastille, as he'd told aderson - instead he had stuffed it into the side itet of his combat-pants. If it looked like Eve was to be killed as a result of the Cadre's refusal to the disc over to the RDB, Slater had resolved to it over to them himself, and bollocks to the equences.

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But they had rescued her, and so he had posted the CD shortly before leaving Paris. Not to the Cadre's office at Vauxhall Cross, however, but to an accommodation address in Kingsway, a short walk from Holborn underground station. In return for a modest monthly charge paid to a newsagent, and anticipating frequent changes of address, Slater had used the service since his departure from the Regiment.

On the Saturday following his return to London he had collected the package -- which had in fact arrived a mere two days after posting - taken it back to his flat, and run it through the laptop. It was password protected, but some thoughtful soul -- FanonKhayat at a guess'--had slipped a piece of paper bearing an 8letter place-name inside the CD case. Armed with the means of entry, Slater had accessed the images inside.

There were six of them, and as he had suspected they were nothing whatever to do with SAS activity on the Thailand-Cambodia border. The images were much older than the ones that had been projected at the Firewall briefing, and while obviously historically interesting had meant nothing to Slater.

He sincerely hoped that they would mean more to Aleksandra Marcovic -- whoever she was. Branca had told him nothing about the woman except her name and the fact that she lived near Brighton. There hadn't been time for more, but before Branca died Slater had made a solemn promise that he would find Aleksandra Marcovic and show her the photographs on the disc.

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At a randomly chosen data service centre in Vie had had a copy made of the CD. He had arned the original to the envelope with the ParfJS st-mark. He had previously sealed it with a single' pie, but now he peeled away the protective strip, ick the flap down in the normal way, and restapled : at the same point.

He had disguised the detour that the package had ten by removing the label with the Kingsway address it. Beneath it he had written the Vauxhall Cross ress, and with nothing to indicate that it had not straight from Paris the envelope was now ready adding to the next morning's mail-drop. 'i This was not difficult -- shortly after each delivery ic into the building the Cadre's letters were placed > locked box outside the office. Making sure that he ived before the first delivery, Slater had slipped the ckage into the box, and when Ray emptied it half an ir later, the package was among a sheaf of other

Shortly afterwards Manderson had emerged from his

ice waving the CD. 'Bloody French!' he mouthed srfully to Slater, who was sitting at his terminal vly and dyslexically bashing out a report. To Slater's siderable relief he then dropped the envelope into

iredder without checking the date it had left Paris, had been a long week. Detailed report-writing not Slater's forte, and his slowly healing ribs and alder had not made the task any more enjoyable.

kt the report-writing had to be done if anything was

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to be learnt from the operation, and each of them was engaged in a similar task. The consoling factor was that the promised week's leave awaited them - on Friday evening they would be going their separate ways.

Slater had resolved to visit Aleksandra Marcovic on the Saturday morning.

Slater knew he shouldn't really have been driving - a breathalyser test would probably have shown a unit or two of alcohol in his blood from an end-of-week drink hosted by Manderson the night before. On the other hand he had never felt more alert, more alive. A posttraumatic stress reaction would be stalking him in the wake of the slaughter in Paris - and there was no chance of escaping the Darklands after a bloody fiesta like that - but it hadn't yet declared itself. Even the pain lancing through his ribs and shoulder served merely to remind him that he was alive - that he had stood eyeball to eyeball with death and walked away.

He was on the crest of the Downs now, and the grass, defiant of the wind, was flattening itself against the chalky hillside. Far below him was the long sprawl of Brighton and its satellites -- Portslade, Have, Kemp Town, Rottingdean.

Aleksandra Marcovic lived between the two easterly suburbs of Rottingdean and Saltdean. She was not on the telephone but it turned out that she was one of the hundreds of thousands of British citizens known to the security services, having been settled in the UK as a refugee after the Second World War.

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ater had been given a number of tutorials by bbie in the use of the ATHS desktop network used ccess MI6's computerised archive, and had found covic without difficulty in the course of an after; data-surfing session. Her file, which was marked j,'EYES alpha and so cleared for all security service annel, indicated that she had been born in 1933/4 Serbian family near Kutina, Yugoslavia. At the i of her registration as a refugee in 1946 her parents ^two sisters were believed dead as a result of inter anal strife following the 1941 German invasion, jithe subsequent creation of the Independent State Croatia (ISC). Settled post-war with a family in an, Marcovic had married one Vernon ley, a solicitor, in 1953. Widowed in 1986, she f

passing Brighton, which he calculated would be with visitors on a warm summer's day, Slater s past Kemp Town racecourse and cut southwards Saltdean. Soon he was driving past caravan Stod rows of identically gabled 1930s villas, and I smell the sea and the salt on the air.

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Philomena Avenue was the easternmost of several roads flanking a line of seafront shops. Number 54, a small, pebbledashed villa fronted by a spray of Pampas grass, was the end house in the row. Climbing from the car, bracing himself against a sharp wind which worried its way between the net-curtained villas, Slater rang the bell.

The door was answered by a tall, gaunt-faced woman in a candlewick dressing gown, who regarded him for a long moment in silence.

'Aleksandra Marcovic?' he asked her.

She said nothing, and Slater noticed that beneath the bluish perm her ears were curiously deformed - little more than stumps. Perhaps, he thought, she was deaf.

'I've come on a rather unusual errand,' he continued uncertainly. 'My name--'

'I know who you are,' she said flatly. 'You're a man of death. I've known people like you all my life. Does your name matter?'

Slater stared at her, stunned. There was, as she had said, a kind of recognition in her eyes. Did a familiarity with violent death truly mark you in some way?

'My name doesn't matter. I was given your name by Branca Nikolic.'