' I'm not criticizing you,' Joey said.
' If he were not armed, if thai were proved, if he gave clear signs that he wished to surrender, then I would reconsider.' The foreman shrugged.
'Should he run, what would be his chance of setting off a mine?' Joey asked.
' It would be in God's hands.'
'He's not broken, not yet,' Joey said. 'He will be.'
They walked away, taking with them their shears, their probes, the metal detector, the roll of yellow tape and their dog. The sun was rising and bathed the valley's fields. They trudged off alongside the tree-line, and Frank was close to the foreman. Joey thought it was how he wanted it to be. He smiled at the four men who were withj him but none caught his gaze.
He sat down The dog, Nasir, came to him. It lay against his leg and his raised knee threw some shade for it. The Sreb Four made a little huddle and sat apart from him. In front of him, caught in the sun's strength, Mister stood and Joey did not see a muscle of his body moving. He would weaken, Joey knew it. Exhaustion, hunger, thirst and the creeping fear of the mines around him would sap Mister. And then Mister would run… He cupped his hands.
'Men were here, Mister, who had the skill to reach you and bring you out, but I told them you were armed and had killed, and who you are. They've decided you're not worth the risk. All that's left to you, Mister, is to run and to hope.'
Midday…
… Judge Delic, having recessed his court till the late afternoon, wheeled Jasmina from the Mercedes to the doorway of a boutique on Ferhadija, tilted the chair over the street step and pushed her inside. They were no longer window-shoppers. She knew the trouser-suit she wanted, black, professional and styled from Milan.
The car was left on the kerb, a no-parking zone, but a black Mercedes would not be interfered with by the police. And up on the hill, over the river, workmen scrambled over and through their home.
… the firemen took the strain on their rope, relied on the grappling hook to hold, and pulled the body on to the steep stone-clad bank of the Miljacka. The water dripped from it as it was beached. Around the ice-white throat of the body was a gold chain. A fireman fingered it and read the inscription on the bar: 'To dearest Enver, with love, Serif'. He wiped his hands on his overalls, and activated his radio.
… Ismet Mujic sat in his apartment, the curtains drawn, the gloom on his face, his world collapsed, and waited for the telephone to ring. And as he waited, he cursed the day that a man from Green Lanes in London had telephoned to urge him to receive strangers anxious to put to him a business proposition.
… Nikki Gornikov slept off his overnight travel in his own Budapest bed, and Marco Tardi dozed in the Rome transit lounge before the Palermo feeder flight was called, and Fuat Selcuk snored in the first-class cabin of the Austrian Airlines flight to Damascus.
Going their different ways, returning to their base camps, they had each pledged that they would – singly or collectively – never deal again with Albert William Packer. He was dead meat, might as well have hung from a butcher's hook.
… Monika Holberg, her desk and computer screen in the Unis building abandoned, walked into the Holiday Inn's atrium, crossed to the reception desk and saw her letter in the pigeon – hole beside the key.
She asked for it to be returned to her. She tore it into small pieces and gave the scraps back to the clerk to be dropped in the rubbish bin behind the desk. As she pushed open the hotel's doors she felt a sense of disaster falling on her. It was the same sense she had known when coming back to her home at Njusford, on the island of Flakstodoya, to be told that her brother had hanged himself in the cattle byre.
… the men and the woman of Sierra Quebec Golf stood around Gough's computer screen on the central desk and stared in tongue-tied astonishment at the image presented to them.
… a detective chief inspector reached for his telephone to make a routine call, and found that his line was dead. He looked up and saw that the immediate open-plan area where he worked on the upper floor of the National Crime Squad's Pimlico offices was deserted. In the moment that the first bead of sweat broke on his neck, he heard the door behind him snap open and there were hands on his shoulder and his collar, and he was lifted from his chair.
… checking his watch to be certain that his call was in tandem with events two floors below, the commander from the National Crime Squad rang the private secretary to the minister. ' I think we are now in a position to share. The rotten apple is out of the bucket.' Then he spoke to the car pool and told his driver at what time they would leave for the Custom House.
… Clarrie Hinds told her daughter to get home and stop moaning, and young Sol closed down the screen on the last computer disk and marvelled at his luck in being chosen, and the Mixer waited for a call to alert him to the return flight so that he could send an Eel to meet it, and around the capital city men who dealt in business and pushed business grumbled at the inconvenience caused by Mister's absence.
… the sun blazed down on the Bunica valley.
It burned his face and his hands. It seared into his eyes as it reflected back from the grass carpet.
Mister knew that he had to stay standing. If he slipped down onto the flattened ground under his shoes, then he would never rise again, would never run. The sweat ran in his hair, over his forehead, into his eyes and made them smart. With the sweat in his eyes, the trees at the riverbanks danced and misted. If he turned, he would see Cann, and the shouts would cut deeper. He tried to keep his gaze ahead of him, on the dark pools of the river and the silver spates separating them. If he looked down, he would see the pit he had excavated, and the mine. Each time the voice taunted him, coldly teasing, tormenting and torturing, the fear was stronger. Mister did not know if he could destroy the fear. Behind him was the fox.
There was no meat left on the Eagle's ankle and shin; its teeth were scraping bare bone. He started to count, but he knew that when he reached ten he would change the target to a hundred, and then to a thousand. He could not kick his feet in front of him and start to run.
The high sun beat on him, and the sweat streamed down him, and the strength dribbled from him.
'It is a duel.'
They had met at the ford. The water over the stones was too high, too fast-flowing for an old man to cross.
'That is stupid talk,' Husein Bekir called back.
'You say it is stupid because you have not read books. Is that because, like an old fool, you cannot read books?'
' I can read.'
Dragan Kovac grimaced smugly. 'Then, perhaps, like an old fool, you have forgotten what you have read, or forgotten what your teacher told you at school. It is in history listen, old fool – there are stories in history about duels. Champions fought in single combat, man against man, to the death or until one submits.'
' It's idiot talk.'
'You never listen I have talked to the foreman of the de-miners. They speak with me because I am a man of experience ami importance. Do they talk to you? It is what lie tells me, the foreman. It is like the time of Ban kulin, or when the Great Khan came from the east, or the time of King Stephen Tvrtko, or when Mehmet arrived from the south and the tyranny of the Muslims began. Disputes were settled in single combat, to the death or to surrender.'
Husein spat onto the ground.
Dragan persisted, 'That is why the foreman has come back here to clear your fields – not that you, an old fool, will ever work them.'
'This spring I will plant my new apple orchard, fifty trees, and I will be here to harvest the first crop… Do you mean it, this shit about single combat?'