St Vitus, so the story goes, freed the emperor’s son from an evil spirit. But because he would not recognize the pagan gods, the emperor – Diocletian, who built his palace in Split, near his old home – had him killed. At the moment of his death, in boiling oil, pagan temples in the area were destroyed by a great storm.
For the Serbs, St Vitus’s Day means the Battle of Kosovo, in 1389, when their prince led a coalition of Balkan peoples against the invading Ottomans. Given the choice before the battle, by an envoy from heaven, of the celestial kingdom or the earthly, the prince chose the former; like all proud rulers, he knew that the risk of war was better than the certainty of shame. The prince was killed in the battle, and his army was destroyed, but they stalled the invasion for a while. So the story goes.
St Vitus is the patron saint of actors and comedians. In mediaeval times, it was thought that dancing in front of the statue of the saint would bring good health. But the name of St Vitus was given to a sickness, an uncontrollable and apparently inexplicable physical frenzy.
St Vitus is celebrated on the 28th of June.
Valentine Knox walked alone through the streets of Sarajevo, the first of the light paling their pastel colours. The shadows still waited thick, in doorways and alley entrances.
The city was coming awake as he walked, with street sweepers crossing in front of him and waiters carrying tables out onto terraces and maids opening windows, the houses taking their first breaths of fresh air. There seemed to be more flags out this morning, and along the river the street had been strung with bunting. The fluttering and his solitary stride: a memory of running onto Big Side at the end of the cross-country.
He was in the second of his cafés in time to see the side door being opened to admit the cleaning woman.
The countdown had started.
In front of him the window, a shelf running along it. He saw the trench parapet, parched strands of thorn in the sand. Felt the shifting of his men beside him, felt the sun on his neck, heard the men breathing, heard himself breathing, heard his heart.
The door opened and the woman stepped out with the first of the rubbish sacks, and Knox heard a whistle and he was up and out of the trench and moving.
A casual trot to another alley, then he was sprinting hard, because these were the seconds where failure waited, first place, Knox V., slowing and out into the main street and swallowing his breaths. As he came past the front of the International Cultural Exchange, he rang the bell and strode on.
As he turned into the alley a third rubbish sack was on the ground by the door and the woman was disappearing inside. One more. One more will be enough. His jacket came off and he draped it over his shoulders and began to slump and stagger, a beggar in his natural environment, boots trudging through rubbish and slime. The doorway was five yards away, and three, and now he could see that it was open still, and a sack swung out in front of him.
If the woman saw the beggar nearby, she didn’t acknowledge it. Doorman should still be checking the front. The sound of feet in a corridor and he was pulling his jacket on properly – a breath – and he was in.
From one pocket he pulled a cap, from another a screwdriver and spanner, staring around for – and then he was bent down over a pipe. He heard the woman come and go behind him. There was a line of pegs in front of him, and beside them another door, frosted panels, and he was through it and into a lavatory.
Footsteps in the hall again, heavier. The doorman returning to lock the side door. The footsteps dwindled.
No thinking. Out fast; the coat and the cap went onto a peg, revealing a tweed jacket and a collar and tie. Trousers out of socks, and from an inside pocket a piece of paper. At every stage he had to look right enough. A breath, and he was through the door and into the corridor. At its end a more solid door, with felt on the inside. That was the border between the servants and the quality. He edged around it. Chequerboard floor, walls finished smooth, a window, and then another. This was the main hall. Another inch showed a glazed partition, and through it the front door.
He edged further, and saw the edge of a table, set back opposite the door, and then on the table a pair of legs.
Still too early for the doorman to be relieved; that might be a chance. He could rush the man, but he wasn’t desperate enough for that yet. The alternative was just to—
The bell rang. Immediately the legs swung off the table. Knox pulled back farther. The doorman came into his vision, opening the glazed partition and then unlocking the front door. Someone else? But no – the doorman was accepting something.
Postman. Knox was out into the hall and crossing it, head down into his piece of paper. Movement to his right on a staircase: the cleaning woman, coming down with a bucket. Head down and keep going; the doorman would see the woman before he saw Knox and that might… The door in front of him – no key – and he was into another corridor.
He heard the glazed door rattle shut. With his door open an inch, he saw the doorman cross the hall again and drop a pile of envelopes on the table. The woman was by the door leading to the servants’ area, and now the doorman walked over to her. He said something, and then mimed it. Are you done? The woman hesitated, nodded. Another mime? You are going now? She shook her head, pointed to the back part of the house and mimed scrubbing the floor. The doorman gestured her through her door, and she went. Knox thought: you had to be poor indeed to be a foreign immigrant in Bosnia.
Then the doorman locked the servants’ door behind her, and put the key on his table, and Knox winced. So security-conscious that they didn’t even give the servants the run of the place. More importantly, that was his escape route, should escape become possible.
The legs swung up onto the table again.
With the sense of safety disappearing far behind him, he turned. This was a mirror of the servants’ corridor running parallel along the other side of the building. But this side was smarter: tiled floor, finished walls, the doors glossy and brass-handled. Offices for junior staff? He didn’t want to risk trying every door.
Then he saw the trunking. A few inches thick, it ran from floor to ceiling beside a door at the end of the corridor. He saw it because he was looking for it: a wireless room and a transmitter mean electric cables, and electric cables installed more recently than the main wiring of the building mean trunking.
A bell rang somewhere behind him. Knox was looking through the crack again in time to see the doorman unlocking the door to the servants’ wing, and disappearing through it. A few minutes later it opened again and a different man came into the hall. It was the daytime doorman, in his uniform. He locked the servants’ door, and put the key on the table.
Knox waited for the doorman to sit, but he didn’t. Instead he picked up the envelopes from the table, and set off up the stairs.
Knox gave him a few seconds to get clear, then he was back into the hall, across to the table and picking up the key, on to the servants’ door and unlocking it and putting the key back on the table. A chance, at least.
He was halfway back across the hall when the servants’ door opened behind him.
It was the cleaning woman. He’d assumed she’d have gone, but here she was, staring up at him, alarmed. Part of Knox’s mind was noticing that she was a younger woman, handsome in her way, skin a little darker, and still she was staring. He had to trust that she wouldn’t question a man, wouldn’t question a man in a suit.
She lowered her eyes, and hurried up the stairs and, as he watched, through a door on the landing. Knox kicked himself into movement and was back through the other door and heading for the wireless room.
When Hathaway walked into the office, the whisper of a dress against the panels, eyes always considering the office as if for the first time, the old man was staring out into the park.
He didn’t turn round, or say anything.
‘It is today?’ she said at last.
‘It is today.’
She realized that he wasn’t actually looking into the park, but into the net curtain, deep into it, where its fog became a fine lattice, and then beyond.
He half turned, and gave a formal nod of greeting over his shoulder. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘there is only Valentine Knox.’
‘There could be none better.’
He turned again, a flicker of interest in the eyes. ‘I would trust your judgement on him more than most.’
‘War is passion applied to unreason. Knox, at his best, is passion applied to reason.’
The old man considered it, approved it, and merely nodded again slightly. He turned away.
‘And if he’s captured? If he fails?’
‘If he is captured, Miss Hathaway, then they will torture him. He will tell all he knows about me, about this organization; even Knox will not hold for ever.’ He was still gazing into the net. ‘If he fails, everything fails.’
The wireless room wasn’t even locked. Knox had his penknife and the screwdriver ready, but the door opened with the handle only. First he checked the door opposite – a filing room – and then he was back across the corridor and in.
Knox was familiar with wireless and had used it before, but the old man had insisted on him spending an hour in the company of a little goggle-eyed chap from the Post Office who’d told him more than he would ever need, or probably remember.
It meant that the room felt immediately familiar – the layout, the different pieces of equipment – and without having to think he was switching on the apparatus and getting the satisfying humming and glowing.
His priorities now were exact. Each second increased his chances of capture. So the maximum had to be achieved in each second. He was sitting at the transmitter, setting the frequency.
It was a simple message. The first word was a designator, to alert a man waiting in London – and, in case the transmitter here was not as strong as anticipated, men waiting in Venice and on board a cruiser in the Adriatic – that this was the message they were waiting for. He’d no need for acknowledgement; the old man had been clear that they would be there.
The message contained only three other words.
Knox adjusted the frequency so that if someone disturbed him now it would not be known. Then he was searching the immediate area around the transmitter for a list of regular frequencies. There had to be one, and an operator might leave it close at hand as a matter of routine.
But in this office, only strict security was routine. The habits of the doorman had taught him that. Which made his job harder, and capture more likely. Immediately he was up from the chair and quartering the room, just in case the list had been left on another surface. But it hadn’t, of course, which meant it had to be in the wooden cabinet on the other side of the room. He was at the lock with his knife a second later, using the screwdriver as a lever and ignoring the damage to the woodwork. The phase of concealment was past.
As soon as he was in he began to work methodically through the documents inside. Three shelves, piles of papers and books, and he guessed at what they were – messages recently received, records of messages sent and received, and so forth – and started on a pile of small ledgers.
It would not be quick, and Knox knew what that meant. Something inside him kicked; a lurch of disappointment.
He straightened, and continued through the books. He must either have sent the message or be out of the room; either way meant the faint possibility of success. To be caught searching was failure.
As he finished skimming each of the ledgers, he threw it aside. Faster. There were two or three lists of what looked like frequencies, but the destinations were in code, and a part of Knox had to respect the mania for security. Faster. Another ledger thrown aside, bouncing off a desk and flapping to the floor. Then another, a cursory rummage through the piles of papers. There is still a faint chance of success in this. Papers flying over his shoulder and fluttering down. Inside five minutes the cupboard was all but empty, and Knox was slipping out of the wireless room and across the corridor.
Krug arrived at the International Cultural Exchange at half past nine, as usual. The routine was set, and congenial to him: a cup of coffee; the international newspapers; the post. His secretary brought in each, silently and at the expected time.
And then his secretary confirmed his appointments for the day. The anthropologist Belcredi was due at ten o’clock. Count Hildebrandt would be present today, and at Herr Krug’s disposal. Herr Krug would visit the Austrian minister in Sarajevo at four o’clock in the afternoon.
Krug felt well. A pleasant day – not too hot. The city en fête, though he would be avoiding the noise and the ceremonial. A scheme in hand to entrap another of the Comptroller-General’s agents – and this one, it seemed, more knowledgeable than most. His world was functioning as it should. He sipped contentedly at the coffee. Sweet, but not too sweet.
The world of Hans Martić was not functioning as it should. He considered himself lucky in his work as wireless operator in the International Cultural Exchange. The pay was good, the conditions were not onerous; he was lucky to have a job, let alone one that used his skill. Sometimes he wondered whether the messages that he passed to the clerks for decyphering contained only diplomatic secrets – might there not be something criminal in all the subterfuge? – but he’d seen enough officials and uniforms around the place to be clear that he was on the right side.
He liked to arrive between nine and nine thirty in the morning. To be ahead of the day, as he put it. Have the equipment warmed up, his lists ready, for the start of business. Ready for the chief’s command, or the message coming in. But today the city was chaos, because of the parade, and he was at least fifteen minutes late.
He knew in a fraction of a second that it was all wrong. The door to the wireless room – his wireless room – was only half open when he saw the first of the papers lying on one of the tables, and that was surely not how he’d left it. As the door opened farther there were more papers – papers everywhere, and the ledgers too! – thrown around the room. He was gaping, sick, wondering how it was his fault, wondering whom to tell, and the door wasn’t even fully open when something shoved him in the back and he was stumbling forwards and the door closed and when he turned there was a pistol pointing at his head.
‘Deutsch?’
Hans continued to gape.
‘Sprechen Sie Deutsch?’
Hans nodded.
Knox nodded back at the man. ‘All right then.’ German it would have to be. ‘First, the rules. If you speak, if you resist, I will kill you. Please believe me.’ He pushed the pistol against the man’s forehead, hard, and the man froze, eyes crossing up at the barrel. ‘You do believe me, don’t you?’ A desperate nod, the barrel scratching against the forehead.
‘Good.’ Knox took his handkerchief. ‘Open.’ And stuffed it into the man’s mouth. ‘Get the list of frequencies for your regular contacts.’ Hesitation, and Knox clutched the man by the back of the head and started to push the pistol against his eye. The man staggered away and flapped at the ledgers on the floor until he found the right one. ‘Now sit.’ The man sat. Knox took the curtain cord that he’d borrowed from the filing room, and tied the man to his chair.
He pulled the handkerchief from the mouth. ‘Decypher the list. You will realize that if I can get in here, I can also tell if you are trying any tricks.’ The man nodded. It was the best Knox could do. Simply asking for the German Embassy frequency would be an invitation to deception; if the man didn’t know what he wanted, under pressure he wouldn’t be able to produce credible bogus answers for all the frequencies. The man started to recite the destinations: offices in Vienna, in Berlin, individual offices in other cities.
The German Embassy in London was ‘Sergius’, near the bottom of the list – a recent addition. Knox made the man repeat the list; again, the best he could do to check he wasn’t being tricked.
He stuffed the handkerchief back into the man’s mouth. He reset the frequency to that for his listeners in London, Venice and the Adriatic, and transmitted details of the frequency used for the Germany Embassy in London. Then he turned the dial to that frequency. ‘Now, send the following message, in clear. You’re doing the transmitting because you’re faster and they’ll know your fist. But believe me that I know enough Morse to know if you’re playing games.’ He pushed the barrel into the man’s ear. ‘You do believe me, don’t you?’ Nod. ‘Right then. First his designation, and yours, as usual. Go!’ The man’s hand trembled over the transmitter key. ‘Relax, my friend, and you might live.’ The hand flexed, settled on the key, and started to tap out the letters.
When the summons came, Thomson was quickly into the old man’s office in Whitehall. If he was surprised to see a woman in there, he didn’t show it. Handsome-looking female; seemed a bit anxious.
The old man fluttered a message slip at him. ‘“Marsden apparently expected.”’
‘Ah…’ Grim smile from Thomson. ‘The gentleman in the Ports and Consulates Office has been indiscreet.’
‘I used the name of Marsden in no other message, to no other office.’
‘“Apparently” expected. The arrangement was that your man would say “certainly” if he could.’
‘That is true.’
‘This is certain enough for you?’
‘This is certain enough for me.’
Knox dictated the second message slowly, a word at a time, wanting to check his own memory of it, wanting no mistakes, wanting the operator to feel that every letter was being monitored. There were substantial pauses.
It was finished within a minute. When the words stopped coming, the man slumped back in his chair. And took a long breath.
‘I think you misplaced your coat,’ said a voice from behind him.
Knox couldn’t restrain the startle. Another long breath. Very slowly, he raised the pistol over his head, then out to the side.
‘That’s good.’ Speaking English; accented. ‘Lay it on the floor beside you, stand, then kick it back towards me.’ Knox did so. ‘Now you may turn.’
He turned. Dark hair, handsome; pistol in one hand, rock-steady, and Knox’s coat in the other.
Vienna; the tram; Ballentyne’s body. ‘Hildebrandt, I believe.’
The eyes widened. ‘You have the advantage.’ He didn’t act disadvantaged.
‘I saw you in Vienna. Ransacking the body of a friend of mine.’
Again the interest, then a rueful smile. ‘Poor Ballentyne. We never did have the conversation I had promised him.’ The smile widened; inspiration. ‘Now I can have it with you instead.’
Valentine Knox wasn’t familiar with fear, but he wasn’t a fool and he wasn’t without imagination. He looked at Hildebrandt, and knew him for a killing gentleman.
‘The unlocked door was our alert. We’re rather strict about security here. Then, the coat didn’t seem right.’ He threw it at Knox’s feet. ‘I have kept the tools; I don’t think you need further encouragement to foolishness.’
‘They weren’t mine anyway.’
‘Mm. Would you kindly release my wireless operator?’
Knox did so. ‘No hard feelings?’ he said, as the man stood and slipped away as fast as he could, the chair scraping on the floor.
‘Get Kopp!’ Hildebrandt snapped in German. ‘Tell no one what has happened. Then come back here and resume your routine.’ The man nodded, and hurried out. ‘You have unsettled him,’ he went on to Knox. ‘And he was quite a good operator.’ He looked around the room. ‘You have been busy, I think. Did you find what you were looking for?’
Knox smiled.
‘And your message?’
‘My mother. Likes to know where I am.’
A polite chuckle from Hildebrandt. ‘You’ve no idea how much that British coolness amuses me.’ He leaned forwards. ‘It will not endure, my friend. Not in our cellar here. Down there… it will be very hot indeed.’
MOST URGENT. SERIOUS… AGENTS… NEPTUNE CONSOLIDATE… ALTEMARK MINOS HARM… ALL MUST REPORT TO EMBASSY.
[SS X/72/165 (TRANSLATION)]
Krug had been looking forward to his meeting with Belcredi. He had his own ideas on the inclinations of the peoples of the Balkans and the Near East, and wanted to test the anthropologist a little. And Belcredi’s patrons in Germany – particularly the woman – were influential indeed and would bear cultivating.
Belcredi was rather late, and when he was shown into Krug’s office the most obvious thing about him was a swelling under his cheek. ‘My dear sir!’ Krug began. ‘That looks…’
His guest, embarrassed, mumbled an explanation about his tooth. Krug had to control a smile. He’d thought Hildebrandt’s description of the man’s haplessness rather overdone, but he did seem rather a fragile element. Which might be useful… Hardly the man to shape a masterstroke in the Near East. Krug offered him a chair, commanded coffee, and began to muse on how he might supplant him and improve his own position among Belcredi’s patrons.
They had only started on the pleasantries when the telephone rang. Polite irritation on Krug’s face, but he answered quickly, and his guest saw the face change immediately. Surprise, and this time the emotion was genuine. A few half-words, and then Krug snapped an order, and replaced the earpiece.
He contrived a smile, but couldn’t disguise his haste. ‘You must excuse me, my dear fellow. A rather urgent matter – in my wireless office. Would you mind returning to the waiting room for a few minutes?’
His guest looked a little irritated, but did as asked. It was more than a few minutes before he was back in Krug’s office, but Krug had recovered his poise. ‘Again, my apologies. A small—’
Krug hesitated.
‘It seems you have controlled the situation, anyway.’
Krug smiled. ‘Indeed. I’ll tell you, my friend. Since you have been so involved in our activities against the British – on top of your own, more civilized work. The British, as you know, sent agents against me in Vienna. Or rather, they thought they did. Instead, they fell into my trap, and you played your part in our success. They seem to have become desperate, and they sent another man – here.’ Krug stirred his coffee. ‘I had warning of it, of course, thanks to my network in London. Quite an impressive fellow, apparently. He was earlier than expected, but we have him anyway. I have now taken steps to rectify the little damage that he managed to do.’ He took a sip, and found that it was cold. ‘Hildebrandt has him in the cellar now, and will encourage him to tell us all that he knows.’ There was something like real discomfort on Krug’s face, and then he suppressed it. ‘Then he will die.’
‘I would like to see this man.’
‘Really?’
A shrug. ‘I have met at least one British agent. Perhaps I know him. Before he…’ An uncomfortable smile. ‘It is amusing to see a proud man who learns his mistake.’
Krug smiled. ‘You’re right. Let’s have him up. Hildebrandt likes it in the cellar, and such places, but then his suits are so much cheaper than mine.’ He rang for his secretary, and gave the instruction.
A few minutes later, there was a knock at the door, and Krug called the invitation. He saw Belcredi stand and edge away from the door as it opened. The first man in was Major Valentine Knox, hands tied behind his back and face cut and bruising; the second, pushing him and holding a pistol casually at his side, was Hildebrandt.
Both of them saw Krug first, and then saw his guest. When they saw his guest, both of them gaped stupid.
There was no regular postal service to the island of the Counts di Lascara in the middle of the Adriatic. But at two or three ports, a boat going in the right direction might be persuaded to make a delivery there.
On the 28th of June a steamer anchored off the island; just long enough for a man to row ashore, and pass a package to a boy who’d come to see what was going on, and row back again.
Isabella di Lascara found the package on the doorstep when she returned from riding. It spent another half an hour on a table, while she washed. Deliveries were rare, but there was little in the world to interest her.
Inside the package, when she finally opened it, she found a pair of man’s slippers, which she did not recognize as being in the Albanian style, and a pipe.
‘Ballentyne!’ For once, Count Paul Hildebrandt’s control had gone.
And from Knox: ‘Good Lord…’
Hildebrandt’s surprise was long enough for Ballentyne to have the pistol out of his pocket and up level. ‘Drop it!’
Anger had replaced surprise in Hildebrandt’s eyes, but too late. He put the pistol on the floor. Ballentyne pulled a wad of cloth from inside his cheek. ‘Untie him.’ It took a few moments for Knox’s hands to come free, and they did so in obvious pain. ‘Over there.’ Ballentyne gestured Hildebrandt away from the door, until both he and Krug were covered by the pistol.
Knox flexed his hands, rubbed the wrists. Then he stepped forwards and punched Hildebrandt in the face. The German staggered back against the wall, and came away with the clattering of a picture and a bleeding nose.
Ballentyne said, ‘Feel better?’
‘Much.’
‘You—’ – Krug was clutching for reality – ‘You are Ballentyne?’ And a glance of vicious accusation at Hildebrandt.
The voice was quiet, flat. ‘I don’t seem to have any identity any more’– the memory of sending the package to Isabella; a final bid to belong – ‘except that I was faster than your friend Mr Belcredi. He got hit by the tram, not I. In the few seconds before the people from the tram made their way back, I got his jacket off and laid mine over him.’
Hildebrandt: ‘And the reports that were sent in the last weeks?’
‘A bit overstated. I’ve been trying out some ideas of my own among the Muslims of south-eastern Europe. You’ll get no tickle from them for a while. I knew this place had some kind of significance for Belcredi; I knew if I didn’t follow the trail to the end, I’d never be able to rest easy. I’ve spent the last few weeks brushing up my German and trying to get to y—’
‘Halt!’ A shout from the door, and Ballentyne started to turn and then saw Knox’s urgent eyes and reaching hand and managed to stop himself. The man in the doorway had a pistol of his own, and it was pointing at Ballentyne’s chest.
Ballentyne laid his pistol on the floor and stood, empty. The man in the doorway shifted round until he could watch both the Englishmen.
A great breath, and the life came back into Krug’s face, and the control. The scale of the chaos had only fuelled his appetite to dominate it. ‘So we are back where we started,’ he said. ‘With a bonus.’ He glanced at Ballentyne, and then to Knox. ‘You: what is your real name?’
‘I am Major Valentine Knox; British Army.’
‘Sent here by the Comptroller-General for Scrutiny and Survey, yes?’ Krug’s triumph.
Knox said nothing.
Krug breathed it in. ‘Major, I must commend you on your daring, your… élan. It is only when we look for a word for an empty quality, that we learn what the French have given Europe, no? Your… resilience. And yet I must inform you that it has been futile.’ He pointed. ‘I knew of your advent. I knew of your mission. I wanted you here. You were here a day earlier than we were warned of, which was why you managed to get in here, but that did not matter.’
He smiled. ‘You have about you the air of the martyr. You think you have done your duty, and may die proud.’ He shook his head. ‘You have done… nothing. My operator has told me what you sent – that desperate, nonsensical message. What did you think? That you would so confuse the German Embassy, the German network, that they would all be persuaded to reveal themselves? What were those meaningless words, anyway? “Neptune” and “Minos” and so on?’
Knox looked at him for a moment, then shrugged.
Hildebrandt said quietly, ‘They are words in German Military Intelligence code.’
‘But do they mean anything? In this context, in this order?’
‘No.’
Krug shook his head again, pitying. ‘In the end, rather a feeble stratagem. You hoped to provoke an excitement in the network, no? To make the agents reveal themselves somehow? It has had the opposite effect to what you intended. We immediately warned the German Embassy about the violation of our codes here – your pillaging of our documents – and the compromise of security. Even if you knew something of the German code, you have lost it because already that code is being changed as a result of your adventure here. The German network in Britain is even farther from you than when you started. It is out of your reach.’
Knox’s face, as watched by Ballentyne: stone, refusing defeat. Then from somewhere deep a flame, burning in his eyes and then warming his whole face. The shoulders pulled up even straighter.
The door pushed open wider, and the cleaning woman stepped into the office.
The five men saw her as a woman, as a servant; they saw the headscarf, the swirl of skirts, the loose smock and the chemise beneath. And because they saw all these things and nothing more, and because it was the day of madness, they took an extra second to see that when she pulled her hand from the folds of her clothes it held a pistol.
Even the guard, the one man with a weapon ready, could not truly see what was happening. The woman had time to glance at each of the faces in turn. The pistol swung with her eyes, and then pistol and eyes hardened at Hildebrandt, and by the time the guard had his own weapon up she had pulled the trigger.
It clicked. It did not fire.
The pistol in the guard’s hand, a 1912 Model Steyr, was less fallible than its nineteenth-century forebear. It cracked once, and the woman was flung to the ground.
Again, the five men stood looking at her, and not seeing.
‘Who – who is she?’ Krug, trying to deal with this final insult to the order of his office.
Ballentyne crouched over her, laid his palm on her forehead, and when he looked up again Knox saw that his eyes were moist. ‘Her name is Besa,’ he said. He looked at Hildebrandt. ‘When you came for me in the village, it was her brother that you murdered.’
‘She came all this way – for that?’
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Ballentyne said. ‘That someone should still care about a single life.’ He looked down at the woman again, at her beautiful face, now pale. Her eyes flickered, winced. She clutched at her stomach, clutched for his hand.
He let her hold it as she weakened, let her pull it against her body. Felt the last warmth of her stomach; felt the butt of the second pistol, tucked into her waistband under the loose shirt.
Her eyes came open again, wild and urgent and lovely. Ballentyne smiled at her, and murmured a word in a language that only they could understand, then stood and the pistol came up with him. Yet again, the guard was caught; he found himself staring into the void of the ancient muzzle while his own weapon was down. Beyond the muzzle, the features of the Englishman were a blur.
Ballentyne swung round to face Hildebrandt, and shot him between the eyes.
A moment of shock, as they all realized that this time the pistol had fired, realized that Hildebrandt was now lying broken and still on the floor. And then the guard’s pistol came up and Knox flung himself forwards and there was a shot and a roar of pain, and Knox had the man by the throat and was driving him to the floor and punching him in the face, punching him and punching him until he was still.
When he came up, one side of his face was a scorched mess, the eye closed. ‘It’s a simple rule,’ he hissed. ‘You fire at the one with the weapon.’
Ballentyne closed the door and locked it, and bent over the woman again. Her breathing was shallower, fading. He glanced up. ‘You above all should understand the idea of duty.’ He looked down at Besa again. Her eyes crept open. He smiled sadly; nodded; said a word.
A smile flickered on her lips; he bent further, and kissed her forehead, and waited until the last breath had escaped.
He covered her face with the headscarf, and stood.
‘Send them away!’ Knox said, hard. ‘It is under control. Do it!’
Krug was lost in the mayhem.
‘Do it!’
Krug called something. A question from the other side of the door, and this time he snapped back angrily, and there was silence.
Knox said, ‘How on earth did she get here?’
Ballentyne shook his head. ‘I don’t… The Albanians in Belgrade? Perhaps the first time I was there, they sent word. I was there again recently. Thanks to them, she will have followed me to Sarajevo last week. Earlier, perhaps.’
‘And then got in this morning?’
‘She wasn’t interested in me. All along she hoped that I would lead her to Hildebrandt. Some time in the last few days, she found him; got work here, or replaced the usual woman. Somehow, today something changed; she was able to do what she hadn’t been able to do before: get into this part of the building.’ Knox frowned. ‘Today, she came to the end of her journey.’
Knox turned to the man behind the desk. ‘And you,’ he said, ‘must be Mr Krug.’
Krug nodded.
‘The Comptroller-General for Scrutiny and Survey sends his regards. “A greeting from Springfontein”, he called it.’ Krug’s face was bleak.
He sat, heavily, gathered himself. ‘This little bit of chaos does not alter the failure of his operation.’
‘Bit of bad news for you there, old chap. I only properly understood it when you described your reaction to my activities this morning. British Intelligence has always suspected who the link-man is for the German network in Britain. But there’s been no way of identifying the members of the network. Arresting the link-man would only break the chain. Everything I did this morning – throwing the papers around, sending that nonsense message, with a few words of German codes that we’ve picked up in recent months – all built the idea that your security was compromised. It prompted the German Embassy, and through them the link-man to the network, to do what seemed like rigorous procedure but was actually exactly what we wanted.’
Krug was white.
‘How will the new code be sent to the network? Some innocent-looking commercial pamphlet? It doesn’t matter; what matters is that when the link-man goes to the post office, he will be jumped on by a lot of policemen, and on the envelopes in his hand – all in one go – will be the set of names and addresses that we couldn’t have dreamed of getting had it not been for you. Special Branch’ll roll up the whole network whenever they choose.’ Grim smile. ‘Your German partners aren’t going to be impressed.’
Krug was staring into the ruins of his Europe. He looked up, searching for defiance. ‘You could kill me, but you would not get out of the building alive.’
‘You could call for help, but you would die.’
‘You suggest that we stay here for ever, Major?’
‘Stalemate.’
The telephone rang.
It continued to ring. Knox said, ‘You’d better answer that. No tricks, no alarms.’
Krug picked up the apparatus, and listened. He said almost nothing, but as he listened his eyes were quickly wide and he was gazing at the two Englishmen.
Eventually he put down the telephone again. It took him a moment to gather the words.
He looked at Knox. ‘You came over the border with a Serbian, yes? Was his name Rade Malobabić?’
‘I didn’t get the surname.’
‘He is the head of Serbia’s network of spies in Bosnia–Hercegovina – a notorious man.’ Knox was indifferent. ‘The strictest watch was being kept for him at the border, but somehow… Did he say why he was entering Bosnia?’
‘He said he was delivering a message.’
Krug nodded, bleak. ‘It was a message of command: to his agents gathered here in Sarajevo. Just a few minutes ago they assassinated the heir to the Austrian throne.’ Faced with the chaos, he seemed very small. He saw farther than Knox and Ballentyne, still poised over him; but even their faces showed glimpses of what must follow. ‘The crisis that no one of the European powers could create has been created by a handful of peasants. They have brought the world to the precipice.’