Authors: Gerald Seymour
Mister left the Eel, a Makharov in his anorak pocket, to mind the lorry, and stepped out into the streets of Sarajevo to put right the matter of an insult.
' I still don't see why I have to do it.'
'You're doing it because that's what I'm telling you to do, and you'll do it just like I've told you to,'
Maggie Bolton said decisively.
'It doesn't make sense.'
'Everything, just like I've told you.'
Joey shrugged and sighed so that she could read his annoyance and took the case from her hand. They did a last check on her button microphone and his earpiece, then on his microphone, clipped to his undershirt, and her earpiece. Folded in his shirt pocket was the authorization for intrusive surveillance signed by Judge Delic, typed by his daughter - if it was needed, if he showed out, at the Custom House they would feed him to the rats on the Thames mudflats. She had a copy run off on the hotel's machine. He'd argued all through breakfast, and all through their walk from their hotel to the Holiday Inn, and she'd taken not a blind bit of notice, and had carried on with her briefing detail of where in the room the bug should be placed.
She was quiet, businesslike. The speech microphones were press-to-talk. If speech was not possible then the crash-out code was the repeated click on the button.
The atrium area of the hotel was empty now. The ashtrays had been filled by the delegates to a foreign-donor conference but they'd started their meeting, and the lethargic staff had not yet stirred themselves to clear up.
The pot plants were dying slowly. Outside, through the plate glass of the picture windows, were the two black Mercedes saloons, and the hoods; they weren't lounging as they'd been at the airport but were agitated, smoking hard, shouting into mobiles.
'It's not my job. This isn't my area of expertise.' He knew the argument was lost.
'Can we go to work, or shall we just carry on squabbling? Be a dear boy, stop messing.'
He'd argued because he was frightened, could neither help it nor hide it.
He walked towards the lift with the bag. He turned once and looked back at her. She winked, gave him a little wave then headed for the revolving glass door.
From where the van was parked, closer than last night, she'd have a clear view of the door and anyone who went through it, if they used the revolving door and not the coffee-shop entrance. The lift took Joey to the third floor. He'd stood back, when they'd arrived at the Holiday Inn, and she'd gone to Reception. She was a travel agent from London, handling business packages. She booked flights and hotels in the commercial sector. She was checking through accommodation facilities in Zagreb, Podgorica in Montenegro, Pristina in Kosovo, and in Sarajevo.
Could she please inspect a room? Were all the rooms the same? Businessmen, she had learned, were happiest on the third floor, not too high if they had a vertigo problem, not too low to be disturbed by a hotel's bars and the street traffic. She had been shown, Joey trailing her, unintroduced, the bag carrier, a room on the third floor and assured that the rooms were all the same, exactly the same, as was the policy of the hotel. For a few moments, Joey and the woman from Reception had been together in the bathroom and he'd made a little point of examining the bottles of shampoo and bath foam, and had seen the Polaroid's flash from behind the nearly closed door. When they'd come out Maggie had thanked the woman profusely and told her they were excellent rooms, then moved on to rates and credit-card acceptability. Over coffee in the atrium they'd studied the photographs and she'd told him what he should do, and where the bug should be placed. He went in the lift to the third floor.
She'd shown him, at their own hotel, how to open a hotel room with a plastic bank card.
Room 318. He closed the door behind him. The maid had been in and the room was clean, the bed made. Pyjamas were folded on the pillow. The wardrobe doors were closed. A suitcase was on a rack.
A pair of shoes was underneath it. He felt the room was a trap. He did not know how long he had, only that the opportunity might not come again. He must hurry, but not so that he made errors. He had the photograph to guide him. The telephone was too obvious, she'd said, the first place that would be checked if the room were searched for bugs - the light and power sockets would be the next. He took a towel from the bathroom, laid it on the upright chair from the desk, carried the chair to the wardrobe and kicked off his trainers. He stood on the towel, no shoes so that he would not dirty it, and the towel so that he would not indent the chair. Maggie had identified the waste space above the wardrobe, below the ceiling, as suit-able housing. With a screwdriver he prised back the wardrobe's upper fascia board. Into the space behind went the power unit, a black box the size of a paper-back book. He used the fine-needled spike she'd given him and pressed it in sharply, drove it in until he could feel the pressure on the front against his finger.
He made a tiny hole in the outer stained wood, threaded the microphone, a pinhead, into the hole and worked it until the head was flush with the hole. He threw a switch in the control, saw the green light glow, and held the board in his hand.
Joey whispered, 'Testing - two, three, four -
testing...'
In his ear. 'You close up?'
'Right beside it.'
'Is it back together?'
'Not yet.'
'May need a volume tweak. Before it goes back together, try it from the window, then from beside the phone.'
'Will do.'
He put the board crudely into place and slipped down from the chair. He went to the window and looked down to the pavement a full hundred feet below. There was no balcony. He saw a taxi swing off the road and then disappear under the flat roof sheltering the main door.
Joey said, 'I'm by the window. This is normal speech level - two, three, four, testing from the window . . . Give me the OK, then I'll go to the phone position.'
Silence in his ear.
'Maggie, I'm at the window. Have you got me at the window? Come in, Maggie.'
A plaintive voice shrilled in his ear. 'Oh, Christ.
He's back. I bloody missed him. Gone through the door. Get out, out,
out.
Target One is through the door.
I missed him.'
He froze. His trainers were on the floor by the desk.
The chair was by the wardrobe, with the towel on it.
The fascia board was still loose, out of place, unfastened and cables were visible above it. In an act of will, he had to throw, almost, one leg in front of the other to get himself moving. He lurched across the room towards the door. The board was priority.
Board, chair, towel. .. He was on the chair, using the heel of his hand to batter the board back into place.
Maggie was screaming in his ear. He could see the pinhead hole in the board, and with his palm he made the last adjustment, looked at it, and jumped. Towel into the bathroom. He slapped it on the rail, but it slipped off. More of the precious seconds were used hanging it as neatly as a maid would have. Out of the bathroom. He ferried the chair to the desk. He turned for the door and his toe, right foot toe, stubbed the chair leg . .. No shoes, no bloody shoes. He shovelled on the shoes.
The voice in his ear, calm now, said, 'You ran out of time, Joey. He's on the landing outside the room.'
There were voices in the corridor. He knew the one voice from the hours of the tapes and the earphones.
The door was the only way out. The bed was too low on the floor to slide under. He heard the room card go into the door lock. He went to the window where there was the drop that would kill him and insinuated himself behind the curtain. There was silence in his ear, as if there was nothing more she could tell him, no more help she could offer. The door opened, then the inner bathroom door. He heard Mister urinate, then the flush. The creak of the wardrobe door being pulled open. Mister was whistling. Joey found himself trying to recognize the tune, and couldn't. Mister belched.
Looking down at his feet Joey saw that one of the untied laces would be protruding from behind the curtain, would be in view . . . From the files, he knew of every killing attributed to Mister, knew the details of every death. All the killings featured pain before death, were never quick. He was bursting to wet his trousers.
He heard the door close and the footsteps retreat.
Joey counted to fifty, tied his laces, then let himself out.
Down the corridor, into the lift, down in the lift, into the atrium. He thought she'd have been there, waiting, but she wasn't.
The two black Mercedes cars were pulling out of the hotel parking area and into the traffic flow of Zmaja od Bosne. There was a piercing horn blast.
He ran towards the blue van, which had been driven onto the forecourt. He fell into the passenger seat.
'Did you hear him whistling?' he asked.
'Like a nightingale,' Maggie said. She drove fast towards the road.
'What was the tune? What was its name? I couldn't remember its bloody name,' Joey said flatly.
'It was Elvis, come on - or are you too young?
"Wooden Heart", recorded during his army service -
weren't you born then? It was clear as a bell. Are you all right?'
'I was actually about to piss in my trousers. I suppose you're too important to put your own bugs in place. Give the job to the boy.'
'Who would have checked the gear, seen it was working? You?'
It was icily said; he hadn't thought of it. He subsided. She was in touch, just, with the second Mercedes. He was thinking dully of the fear he had felt, and he had not even seen the man. He had feared the whistling closeness, and did not know how to confront the fear.
He let the anger burst. 'You were bloody damn late on the warning. I could have been killed because you were late. I had fuck-all time to get the room back in place because of you. He
kills
people, do you know that? He
hurts
people before he kills them. This isn't some bloody game with diplomatic bloody immunity.
You said it yourself, "I bloody missed him." You couldn't have given me less warning if you'd bloody tried. Miss fucking Superior, who the fuck do you think you are?'
Maggie Bolton had a soul but precious few could find it. Her father hadn't. A Ministry of Defence quality-control engineer at the aerospace factory at Preston in Lancashire would admit to colleagues and relations that he could not reach close enough to touch the emotions of his daughter, christened Margaret Emily.
Eight years back he had gone to the crematorium, two months after being declared redundant, still not knowing her. Proud of her, yes, but not understanding. Her mother, too, was kept at arm's length, had been there through Maggie's childhood, young womanhood, and was there still as her daughter drifted into middle age, was phoned once a week if it was convenient, was sent postcards if Maggie was away and it did not breach security, but was not confided in. There had been no schoolfriends who had lasted into adult life. A bachelor uncle had taught at a minor public school in the West Country, and since the school was short of girl entrants had arranged a bursary for her. She had taken no interest in sport as the other girls had, and had devoted her time to the physics and electronics laboratories. She had won a place at Sussex University to study electronic engineering, the only female in that year's intake on the course. At the end of three years her exam results had disappointed her lecturers: she had taken only a lower-second degree. She had spent too much of her last academic year working on a programme of research and development hived out to her department by technicians from the Secret Intelligence Service - routinely such organizations looked to the universities to upgrade their equipment into state-of-the-art standards. Afterwards, regardless of her poor degree, the SIS managers had snapped her up. The secrecy of intelligence work suited her: it was a wall behind which she could live. She could even justify her lack of communication with her parents: they were not on the 'need-to-know' list.
As a new recruit, she was in the basement workshops of the building they called Ceau§escu Towers, below the waterline level of the Thames. In the evenings she spent hours with the master technicians of Imperial College's laboratories after the lecturers and students had gone home. No one in her life was allowed close to her. At parties, home or away, her prettiness, laughter, trim figure and ringless finger ensured that she was a central attraction, but although she flirted shamelessly in public, she was alone in bed.
Her fingernails were the giveaway to her skill, clipped back to the quick. The fingers were small and firmly boned, perfect for the precision of her work with microphones, infinity transmitters, tracking beacons, and fish-eye pinhead cameras. In the basement work-
shops and in the university's laboratories she was admired. A foreman at Imperial had once said, 'She could get a probe bug up a crocodile's bum and he wouldn't even know his sphincter was being tickled Her research was focused on two specific areas, both equally critical for SIS operations: the downsizing of equipment and the clarity of reception.
It was not on her file, but she had only loved two men in her forty-seven years.
In the summer of '88, she had gone to Warsaw, travelling on a diplomatic passport and with her gear in a diplomatic bag. The contact, introduced to her by the station officer, was a young male clerk working in the Polish Ministry of Defence, with access to the permanent secretary's office. She had provided the bug, he'd put it in place. She was then thirty-four and a virgin, and he was eleven years younger, frightened witless at what he had agreed to do. It had been a sort of love, more in the mind than in the muscle, furtive kisses and hands held briefly in the clandestine night meetings. The bug was the best she had ever made; its low transmission of power signals ensured it defeated the monthly scanning of the permanent secretary's office, and intelligence flowed to the antennae on the roof of the British embassy. Six months later, long after she had gone home, she was told that the clerk had been arrested, tried in camera, for treason, and hanged in the central prison. When she was told - she had been offered, and had accepted - a pink gin. Her composure had not flickered.