31 DECEMBER 2005
ANNA ROSEN crunched through the gears of the Land Rover Defender. It seemed she would never get the hang of driving this monster. It thundered through narrow passes, its startling, unmuffled roar echoing from the limestone walls. Genjac had offered to send his daughter as her driver, but Anna told him she had already put Ena in danger and she refused to make it worse. She had huddled in private conversation with him before she left, sipping his strong, sweet Turkish coffee.
‘It is done,’ said Genjac. ‘The preparations have been made. You are sure you want to do this?’
‘What would you be prepared to do for Ena?’ she asked him quietly.
‘Everything.’
‘That’s how it is.’
‘God be with you, sister.’
‘Thank you, brother, I might need her.’
Genjac laughed and slapped the armoured door. ‘Go, go.’
•
Jasna Perak had acted quickly after Anna’s panicked late-night call. She told Anna to book the first available flight to Zagreb and promised to dispatch a team to Motovun early the following morning to find Ante Lovren.
It was soon discovered that the priest was missing, having failed to appear for the midday Christmas mass. On that day, the churchwarden and several parishioners had gone to his house, but found it locked up. They went around the back and broke in, worried that he might have been taken ill, but they found no sign of him inside. They told the investigators from Zagreb that they were mystified.
An old woman remembered him going off with two strangers after the morning mass. She described a pretty young woman and a middle-aged man with thick glasses. Several others remembered the same strangers had been sitting at the back of the church that morning.
Jasna’s team went back to the priest’s house and found traces of blood in the kitchen, two different types. Two days later a truffle dog had gone crazy, refusing to leave a patch of newly turned soil in the forest. The bodies of two men were found buried there. Both had been killed with single shots to the head. The corpse of Ante Lovren was identified by his housekeeper; that of Pierre Villiers by the passport in his pocket. A decision was taken in Zagreb to suppress the news.
When Jasna told her that Pierre’s body had been found, Anna had gone back to her hotel room, locked the door and howled so loudly and for so long that the people in the next room started banging on the wall. Anna wanted to embrace the old Jewish traditions: to tear her clothes; fall to the floor; to lock herself away from the world; and to do nothing but grieve for him. But she didn’t have time for that. The mortal danger to her daughter forced her to put Pierre’s death to one side and just keep going.
She felt the adrenaline released into her body by primordial emotions. For the first time in her life she understood the impulse to violence, which had, for so long, consumed Marin Katich. She found herself in the bitter hours of that sleepless night calling on whatever spirits might intervene to alter her nature. She spoke aloud the remembered lines of Lady Macbeth, like an incantation: ‘Unsex me here … Fill me from the crown to the toe topfull … Of direst cruelty.’
•
Now she was on the road she had once before driven with Pierre. It took her in between two mountains, then back through the town of Medjugorje, on whose rocky paths millions of pilgrims had made the hard climb up to Apparition Hill, where the ever-virgin stood waiting for them to kneel before her. She remembered Pierre’s gentle, mocking humour as he had described how pilgrims had blinded themselves by staring into the sun, looking for a vision and losing their own. The thought of him, alive and vital and funny, threatened again to undo her resolve.
It had been high summer back then, when she and Pierre had last broached these mountains in his dusty old Golf. Now it was winter and a layer of snow had crept down from the white peaks. When she reached the valley floor, the snow was patchier and strands of mist rose from the rocky karst and swirled about the dark-purple skeletons of bare trees and over rows of dormant grapevines. Ahead of her, the white ball of the sun shone through the clouds like a weak torchlight. It was setting over the saw-toothed mountain ranges and, as the distant peaks darkened into shadow, the closer layers of mountains were blue, then grey, then white.
Anna saw a bank of drifting fog on the road ahead. She slowed as she hit it, flicked on her headlights and was immediately overwhelmed with the sense that she had entered a netherworld.
•
From time to time, Anna glanced at the black shoulder bag, her only luggage, sitting benignly on the passenger seat. It was not the bagful of cash so typical of the kidnap stories she’d heard about all her life. Rebic had no need for cash. His ransom demands were more complex and she had done her best to fulfil them. The bag contained all the evidence she had gathered against him. Rebic had told her exactly what he wanted and she had told him it would take some days to comply with his demands.
After a period of negotiation, he gave Anna until New Year’s Eve and ordered her to come alone to Ljubuski on that day. He warned her that if there were any signs of police activity around her arrival he would have absolutely no hesitation in killing Rachel.
It was dusk when she reached the outskirts of Ljubuski and the orange-tiled roofs she remembered from that long-ago summer were white with snow. The roads had been ploughed and dirty snow was heaped on either side of the streets. Anna followed the directions she’d been given, driving past the shopping mall and left onto the R424, on past the furniture store and the Restoran Avantgarde, then second right and first left to Hotel Trebizat, where she was told a room had been booked for her.
The hotel was a faux modernist monstrosity, comprising two cement boxes: a smaller white one superimposed onto a large pink one. Anna parked in front of the entrance, grabbed her shoulder bag and went in to the reception desk. She read nothing telling in the face of the young woman who checked her in and handed her a key.
Once inside her room, she threw back the curtains and found that it overlooked the car park. The last of the sunlight stained the low clouds red and purple. Beyond the car park, a row of leafless trees was silhouetted against the sky; the fine lacework of their branches reminded her of fish bones. Beneath one of those trees she saw the brake lights of a solitary car. It was a smart black German sedan and she made out the figures of two men in the front seat. She had known they would be watching her, but it was still unnerving to see it.
She found a refrigerator stacked with miniature bottles of spirits. She cracked open the metal lid of a brandy bottle and took a long swig as a settler. On a tray above the fridge was a bottle of local red, two glasses and an old-style T-shaped corkscrew. She stared at the corkscrew for a moment and then slipped it into her coat pocket. As an afterthought, she put into the same pocket three miniature bottles of liquor, remembering as she did so the clinking pockets of Tom Moriarty.
She took off her coat, hung it carefully on a chair, closed the curtains, checked her phone and found no new messages. She lay on the royal-blue bedspread and stared at the ceiling. Soon her eyes were full of tears. She blinked them away and rehearsed the lines she had been working on for days.
After two hours, the room phone rang and she picked it up. ‘Hello?’
‘Go down to your car,’ a man’s voice ordered, then the line disconnected. She put her coat back on, picked up her bag and went out into the cold night. The German car she had seen earlier was parked alongside the Land Rover. As she approached, a big man got out of the car and waited. He had the mournful face of a practised killer, with a long scar that ran from below his right eye to the corner of his mouth.
‘Get in,’ he said. ‘You will drive. Follow the car. Don’t do anything stupid.’
‘I just want to see my daughter,’ Anna replied.
She started the roaring engine and Scarface looked momentarily startled. He rolled his eyes when she crunched through the gears to keep up with the German sedan.
They drove slowly through the centre of town, and she was surprised to see the bright lights of a winter market and hundreds of people thronging the streets. On both sides were glowing coal braziers; there were food tents with smoking BBQs and spitted meat, and crowded bars with gas heaters. In some of the tents, she glimpsed musicians and dancers, and a giant sign stretched high across the street from side to side: NOVA GODINA NOVA HRVATSK. She knew enough Croatian to translate it as New Year New Croatia, which sounded bizarrely like a political slogan.
Anna turned to Scarface. ‘What is this?’ she asked.
‘The boss makes big New Year party for Ljubuski,’ he said. ‘People very happy tonight. Much drinking, food, dancing and later fireworks from old Ljubuski fortress on mountain.’
‘Bread and circuses,’ she said.
‘No,’ he replied emphatically. ‘No circus.’
Anna followed the black sedan out of town and found they were driving alongside a fast-flowing river, foaming white over rocks. A chilling wind—she remembered that Pierre had told her this region was famous for what they called ‘the breath of Bora’—had cleared the skies so that the countryside was visible in the moonlight. Up ahead, she saw some artificial light. Soon they came to a large floodlit stone structure spanning a narrow part of the river. It was an ancient stone mill with water rushing through three high archways at its base. Then they passed over a stone bridge and into a vast flat expanse of dormant vines—a large, well laid-out vineyard, framed by stands of old forest.
They came eventually to a set of electric gates, which Scarface opened by remote-control, and they entered a long drive lined with old chestnut trees. At the end of the drive Anna saw a walled compound and the upper floors of a French-style chateau. They reached the wall and a second set of electric gates, set in a high stone archway, swung open to reveal the chateau’s courtyard. She drove in and the Land Rover’s rumbling engine echoed off the walls in the enclosed space.
A number of guards with sub-machine guns slung on their chests stood waiting. She turned the engine off, left the keys in the ignition and climbed from the vehicle, pulling on her coat. As she looked around, she saw security cameras on the wall above the gates. She retrieved her shoulder bag from the back seat.
One of the guards produced a hand-held metal detector. As he passed it over her body, Anna was forced to produce her mobile phone and a metal pen, which Scarface took from her. When the wand beeped at her coat pocket, she gave an embarrassed smile and produced the three miniature bottles of spirits with the offending metal caps. The men laughed and made some sneering comments, she imagined, about the skinny Australian booze hound who’d had to get herself tanked-up to see the boss. Anna shrugged an apology and handed over the clinking bottles. The search was over and she made to move away from the car. But Scarface stopped her.
‘Leave your coat,’ he said, pointing back at the Land Rover. She was forced to shrug out of its warmth and regretfully threw it back onto the front seat.
Scarface took her roughly by the arm and led her through a pair of tall, carved doors into a wide entranceway with black-and-white chequered tiles. She was taken into a large, expensively furnished living room with high ornate ceilings and a fireplace big enough to walk into were it not blazing with huge logs. An old map above the fireplace, perhaps made in the eighteenth century, showed the layout of the house, the vineyards and the surrounding countryside. When she looked closer, she saw that the map was a counterfeit antique—a fake, no doubt masquerading as evidence of ancestral Rebic family holdings.
‘Anna!’ She turned to the familiar, oddly accented voice. ‘Finally, you’ve come. I would say welcome, but …’
‘Where’s my daughter,’ she said, trying to rein in the edge of hysteria she felt at seeing, in the flesh, this creature responsible for so much misery. She saw that Rebic had turned himself out like an imagined version of an English squire: brown brogues, a handmade tweed suit, a blue-striped Bond Street shirt, a Patek Philippe worn loose on his wrist like a fashionable gold bracelet.
‘In due course,’ he said, and the gibbous eyes narrowed. I set the agenda here, was the message. Scarface shifted his weight from foot to foot, as if awaiting the inevitable order to do violence.
‘I want to see my daughter,’ said Anna. ‘I won’t say a word to you until I know she is okay.’
‘Very well,’ said Rebic. ‘I will take you to see her. Then there will be no more games.’
Scarface took her arm again, wilfully brutish now, hauling her almost off her feet. She was dragged down a corridor and into a doorway leading downstairs to a basement. To one side she saw the entrance to a wine cellar, on the other was a door to a locked room that must once have been servants’ quarters. Rebic unlocked the door and let her in. There was Rachel, and Anna’s legs buckled.
Her daughter was lying, frighteningly still, on a single bed, half-covered by a white sheet. Anna rushed in and shook her gently, but Rachel wouldn’t wake. Anna looked around, her vision blurred by the rush of tears that came no matter how much she steeled herself. Beside the bed was a silver dish in which lay a syringe. She turned back to Rebic.
‘You’ve drugged her,’ she said.
‘Naturally,’ he said. ‘Did you expect she’d be playing tennis and riding horses?’
‘What is it?’
‘Heroin, of course,’ he said mildly. ‘Very pure. I have to be careful with it. She’ll come out of this as healthy as she ever was. Although she may have an expensive new habit.’
Anna checked Rachel’s pulse. It was slow but steady.
‘Wouldn’t you rather just dream and dream through something like this?’ said Rebic. ‘I would say I have been quite humane.’
‘You murdered my friend Pierre,’ said Anna, choking back her revulsion. She stared at Rebic and thought of the photo of him holding up a man’s head. ‘Pierre was a gentle soul. He was Anna’s godfather, my oldest friend, and he was just one in a long list of your victims … And you call yourself “humane”?’
‘He was in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ said Rebic coldly. ‘But that is enough of this nonsense. Kiss your daughter goodnight. We are running out of time.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I have a speech to make at midnight,’ he said. ‘Come.’
Scarface tore her away from Rachel and dragged her back up the stairs to the living room, where he thrust her into a tall wing-backed chair. Rebic sat opposite her, pop-eyed and expectant.
‘First,’ he said. ‘The location where they are hiding Ramic.’
Scarface handed Anna her shoulder bag and she began rummaging through it.
‘Don’t fuck with me, Anna,’ said Rebic. ‘People are waiting.’ She produced a sheet of paper with a map and directions.
‘This was hard for me to get hold of,’ she said. ‘When I went to see him, I was blindfolded.’
‘Amazing what a mother’s love can accomplish,’ said Rebic staring hard at her. ‘This better be true. Both Rachel’s life and yours depend on it.’
‘I know that,’ said Anna. ‘You needn’t remind me. I am giving up a good man to be killed to save my daughter.’
‘Oh,’ said Rebic, standing to pluck the note from her fingers. ‘He is not a good man. I think you are a poor judge of good men, Anna.’
Rebic walked across the room, carefully reading the note. Then he called to Scarface who brought him a satellite phone. Rebic pressed some buttons and was soon speaking rapidly into the receiver. Anna understood little of his monologue, but she was aware of him repeating directions from the note. Eventually, he disconnected and handed the phone back to Scarface. He looked at the gold watch.
‘Now we will see,’ he said. ‘My team has been waiting in Mostar. They are about an hour away from the location. When they call back, you will know if you live or die. How interesting for your future to be so simply defined. And the future of Marin Katich—of his line, I mean. It could all come to an end before midnight. What drama!’
Anna found she could not remain silent. ‘Is it a form of sickness,’ she asked, ‘that you take pleasure in threatening the lives of others, and in murder?’
‘It’s no pleasure for me,’ he said. ‘I just do what is necessary. The war taught me that, and it taught me how fleeting life is. How it turns on the merest chance. But you have more for me, no?’
Anna pulled the Rebic file from her bag and handed it to him, watching as he flicked through it.
‘Ah!’ he cried, holding up the photo of himself with the disembodied head of the Orthodox priest. ‘The mythical photograph—so it does exist! I must say I doubted it.’
‘You don’t seem bothered,’ said Anna.
‘Oh,’ said Rebic. ‘That was a fun day. I must have been overenthusiastic, shall we say. I don’t remember posing for a photo.’
‘It would make an interesting TV ad if you really do run for president,’ she said, and Rebic laughed.
‘Why?’ he cried. ‘It’s such an obvious fake. Leftist propaganda, don’t you see? A blatant imitation of an old Ustasha photo from 1943, and we know those images were all faked in Tito’s propaganda labs. But here’s the funny thing, Anna—if my opponents did ever dare to put this outrageous forgery out there, it would probably win me many more votes than it loses.’
‘This is the world you’re pleased to inhabit?’
‘This is the world I’m pleased to create, Anna. Do you really not see that the time is right for men like me?’
‘The world will always reject men like you,’ she said. ‘Like a bad virus.’
‘Oh, yes. So speaks the great idealist,’ said Rebic. ‘Just like your precious hero, Marin Katich. Well, I should say that his father certainly was a hero. He kept the brotherhood of the Ustasha alive after the Bleiburg massacre; after the assassination of Poglavnik, he kept the light burning in exile. That is a hero. But his pathetic son? No! It’s funny to me that you think this man is pure as fresh-fallen snow? I know him better than you. He’s as much of a killer as anyone.
‘I will tell you a story. You know, don’t you, that his blood is not pure? He is half Muslim from his whore of a mother, Samira. Such a man could never have been trusted with the future of our people! There came a day, during the shelling of Mostar, when his mother was killed by a Serbian shell. What does he do? I admire him for it, actually. He leads an assault one night on the Serb artillery positions in the hills above Mostar. Crazy-brave action, even I admit it.
‘His men reach the artillery position in the middle of the night. The Serbs, they are mostly drunk. Many of them are young conscripts. These were Serbian and Montenegrin kids, what do they know? They are snoring, drunk in their tents. Katich and his men begin killing them all. Those who are not dead in the first assault are rounded up. These are unarmed prisoners now by the Geneva laws, yes? And among them are these boys, not men at all. He takes his pistol and goes along the line executing them one after the other—just like he killed my poor brother-in-law.
‘Now, I tell you the truth, Anna—I cheered when I heard this story. It became part of the legend of Cvrčak. But the murder of prisoners? This is a war crime, yes? In The Hague? Yes, it is. And he would be tried and convicted for it. Lucky for him I already silenced the witnesses. This is a real irony, no?’
Anna said nothing. It was too much for her to fully comprehend, and she knew this man was a liar by nature. And yet … There was something about the story that rang true to her. Look here, he seemed to be saying, I admit I’m a monster, but one thing I recognise is the true nature of men like me.
At 11.30 pm, Rebic took a call on his satellite phone.
‘They are in place,’ he told Anna.
•
Six men, with the alien profiles created by night-vision equipment, rose from their concealed positions and moved towards the walled Ottoman house. One remained in the vehicle with the satellite phone—an expert driver, ready to extract them once the job was done. The men moved through the darkness that was artificially bright for them. They moved expertly, silently, weapons at their shoulders.
They reached the gate and attached a small explosive to it, then crouched to one side as it detonated. They rushed in, the interior courtyard visible in their goggles, looking for stairs and doorways.
At that moment, bright spotlights came on from above them on each side of the courtyard. The men were suddenly blinded by the flaring in their own night vision. Then came the murderous rattle of automatic weapons from above. They were caught in crossfire from all directions—the perfect killing trap, fish in a barrel.
At the same moment their driver looked up, startled by the extent of the gunfire. A sniper’s bullet pierced his window and entered his brain above his nose.
Every man in Rebic’s assault team was dead in less than a minute.
•
Rebic waited five minutes before he started to worry. He called the satellite phone again and again. Then he looked up at Anna.
‘You treacherous whore!’ he shouted. ‘What have you done?’
Anna had no time to respond. At that moment, the assault began on Rebic’s compound. Black-clad soldiers, who had come across the back wall, were already in his house. Short bursts of gunfire marked their confrontations with each of Rebic’s men. Then the front gate blew open and Anna saw through the front windows that more men were rushing in. Scarface cried out, his massive handgun pointed straight at her.
Anna was cringing away from Scarface when the back of his head exploded in a red spray. She saw Jasna Perak, in black from head to toe, standing in the braced position as a wisp of smoke curled from the barrel of her gun. Then Rebic was shooting at the black shadow and Jasna ducked back through the door.
Anna ran for the corridor, trying to get to Rachel in the basement, but Rebic was on her before she reached the door. His arm was around her neck, his gun to her head. He dragged her fast through the door, shot one of the black-clad soldiers and threatened another that he would kill Anna if he interfered with their escape. A fierce gun battle was going on in the courtyard as the remnant group of Rebic’s men fought from behind cover.
In the confusion, Rebic managed to drag Anna to the Land Rover. He threw her into the passenger seat, fired up the engine and spun the big vehicle around to face the gateway. Two soldiers stood in front of the vehicle, their weapons trained on the windscreen. As Rebic powered towards them, they aimed bursts of fire at him. The bulletproof window shattered at multiple points, but it remained intact as he accelerated towards the men.
Anna tried to jump from the moving vehicle, but Rebic held her back with one arm, steering through the gate with the other and accelerating down the tree-lined entranceway, reaching high speed as rounds continued to ping off the armour plating.
‘Where are you going?’ cried Anna. ‘There’s no way out of this.’
‘Shut your mouth, whore!’ Rebic screamed as she looked into the barrel of the gun pointed at her head. ‘I should blow your brains out now!’
Anna stayed silent as they tore down the road next to the river, past the floodlit mill. She felt her coat at her feet and slowly reached down for it. Pushing her hand into the pocket, she found the T-shaped corkscrew and drew it out slowly, gripping the wooden handle in her fist.
She thought Rebic must be headed back to the town, but he took a sharp left into a forested road and they began climbing swiftly and dangerously up a steep switchback road, ascending the mountain, which towered over the north end of the town. She knew where they were going.
The ruins of old Ljubuski, the ancient Croat fortress, were above the town at that point. As they pushed on fast, up and up, she wondered if Rebic had tipped over into madness; if he intended to make some kind of last stand in the ruined stronghold of his warrior ancestors. They climbed higher and there was mist on the road, but Rebic ignored it and the breakneck journey became even more perilous.
Finally, they rose above the mist and Anna saw the broken-backed ruins were lit up, jagged as a set of uneven teeth in a skull. The stone walls of the fortress seemed to grow organically from the limestone mountain. Parts of it were better preserved and, under the low spotlights, the high, crenulated battlements seemed to her eerily like a film set. Other parts of the wall had fallen as if in a slow-motion process of tumbling down the sheer cliff face.
Rebic stamped on the brakes and they skidded across a section of icy snow, thumping into a low wall. He leapt from the Land Rover and dragged Anna out of the passenger door, hauling her into a snowy stone courtyard, where the foundations of the crumbling fortress were laid out like a floorplan.
She heard a krump, a sickening noise that reminded her of a mortar firing. Then came a secondary explosion and the sky above them lit up like a thousand white stars. Then another high explosion and another, and colour blossomed in the sky, each bloom of light growing from the core of the explosion and expanding out like burning, circular rainbows. The midnight fireworks, paid for by Rebic, now stopped his progress.
Explosion after explosion first blinded them then rained down burning embers. Lit by these flashes of colour—in reds and blues, in greens and oranges, and in silver light—Rebic’s gaunt face and his ghastly protruding eyes seemed inhuman. Anna saw, in each flash-frame of his face, the panic of a trapped predator.
But still he dragged her up and up, until finally she saw his purpose. In the widest of the stone courtyards, high within the ruins, sat a small helicopter with drooping blades. She understood now that he had intended to descend into the town square of Ljubuski at the conclusion of the fireworks in his flying machine, like a God, and address the crowd he had fed and entertained. She imagined that he might have even timed this night, crowned by the triumphant murders of those who could give evidence against him, as the moment to announce his intention to run for president.
She had seen film crews in the night market and guessed now that the whole event was propaganda. She had no doubt at all that she and Rachel would have been his final victims that night. How could he have let them live with what they knew?
All these thoughts raced through her mind as he pulled her towards the machine. Another succession of explosions above them, bright starbursts, signalled the final flurry of light and noise. When they reached the machine, Anna cried out, ‘No!’
Rebic turned on her, his face full of rage. She took the one chance he had offered and plunged the corkscrew into his bulging left eye. Rebic screamed and let her go. She scrambled away from him and, slipping on the icy snow, found cover behind a stone wall. Rebic fired at her wildly, screaming all the while in agony.
Then the fireworks ended and all was black and quiet. Drifting smoke and the stench of gunpowder filled the air. Anna’s eyes were burning. She heard the whirring sound of a helicopter building up enough revolutions for flight and saw the lights of its instruments.
Then Jasna appeared out of the acrid smoke like an apparition. Anna saw her black form fleetingly—seen and then lost, then seen again—and raced after her. The chopper was above her, its spotlight raking the ground. Rebic was holding the controls with one hand, hovering precariously as he fired at the two of them through the open doorway, before commencing to rise high and fast.
Jasna propped herself against the outer walls of the fort, using the battlements to steady her weapon. She fired at the ascending machine in short bursts, and Anna saw a line of bullet holes punching into the fuselage until they hit the fuel tank and the machine exploded.
Anna’s last sight of Rebic was as a blackened silhouette in the flames. Then the machine plummeted, tumbling down the cliff face, rolling and burning and disintegrating.