there was the sound of heavy blows. Dillon hesitated but the sergeant showed no emotion, simply put a hand between the Irishman’s shoulder-blades and pushed him towards a flight of stone steps and urged him up. There was an oaken door at the top banded with iron. Zekan opened it and pushed him through.
The room inside was oak-beamed with granite walls, tapestries hanging here and there. A log fire burned in an open hearth and two of the Dobermanns sprawled in front of it. Branko sat behind a large desk reading a file and drinking from a crystal glass, a bottle in an ice-bucket beside him. He glanced up and smiled, then took the bottle from the ice-bucket and filled another glass.
‘Krug champagne, Mr Dillon, your preferred choice, I understand.’
‘Is there anything you don’t know about me?’ Dillon asked.
‘Not much.’ Branko lifted the file then dropped it on the desk. ‘The Intelligence organizations of most countries have the useful habit of frequently cooperating with each other even when their countries don’t. Do sit down and have a drink. You’ll feel better.’
Dillon took the chair opposite and accepted the glass that Zekan handed him. He emptied it in one go and Branko smiled, took a cigarette from a packet of Rothmans and tossed it across.
‘Help yourself.’ He reached out and refilled Dillon’s glass. ‘I much prefer the non-vintage, don’t you?’
‘It’s the grape mix,’ Dillon said and lit the cigarette.
‘Sorry about that little touch of violence back there,’ Branko told him. ‘Just a show for my boys. After all you did cost us that Mig and it takes two years to train the pilots. I should know, I’m one myself.’
‘Really?’ Dillon said.
‘Yes, Cranwell, courtesy of your British Royal Air Force.’
‘Not mine,’ Dillon told him.
‘But you were born in Ulster, I understand. Belfast, is that not so and Belfast, as I understand it, is part of Great Britain and not the Republic of Ireland.’
‘A debatable point,’ Dillon said. ‘Let’s say I’m Irish and leave it at that.’ He swallowed some more champagne. ‘Who dropped me in it? Wegner or Schmidt?’ He frowned. ‘No, of course not. Just a couple of do-gooders. Tomic. It would be Tomic, am I right?’
‘A good Serb.’ Branko poured a little more champagne. ‘How on earth did you get into this, a man like you?’
‘You mean you don’t know?’
‘I’ll be honest, Mr Dillon. I knew you were coming, but no more than that.’
‘I was in Vienna for a few days to sample a little opera. I’m partial to Mozart. Bumped into a man I’d had dealings with over the years in the bar during the first interval. Told me he’d been approached by this organization who needed a little help, but were short on money.’
‘Ah, I see now.’ Branko nodded. ‘A good deed in a naughty world as Shakespeare put it? All those poor little children crying out for help? The cruel Serbs.’
‘God help me, Major, but you have a way with the words.’
‘A sea-change for a man like you I would have thought.’ Branko opened the file. ‘Sean Dillon, born Belfast, went to live in London when you were a boy, father a widower. A student of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at eighteen, even acted with the National Theatre. Your father returned to Belfast in 1971 and was killed by British paratroopers.’
‘You are well informed.’
‘You joined the Provisional IRA, trained in Libya courtesy of Colonel Gadaffi and never looked back.’ Branko turned a page. ‘You finally broke with the IRA. Some disagreement as to strategy.’
‘Bunch of old women.’ Dillon reached across and helped himself to more Krug.
‘Beirut, the PLO, even the KGB. You really do believe in spreading your services around.’ Branko laughed suddenly in a kind of amazement. ‘The underwater attack on those two Palestinian gunboats in Beirut in 1990. You were responsible for that? But that was for the Israelis.’
‘I charge very reasonable rates,’ Dillon said.
‘Fluent German, Spanish and French, oh, and Irish.’
‘We mustn’t forget that.’
‘Reasonable Arabic, Italian and Russian.’ Branko closed the file. ‘Is it true you were responsible for the mortar attack on No. 10 Downing Street during the Gulf War when the British Prime Minister, John Major, was meeting with the War Cabinet?’
‘Now do I look as if I’d do a thing like that?’
Branko leaned back and looked at him seriously. ‘How do you see yourself, my friend, gun for hire like one of those old Westerns, riding into town to clean things up single-handed?’
‘To be honest, Major, I never think about it.’
‘And yet you took on a job like this present affair for a bunch of well-meaning amateurs and for no pay?’
‘We all make mistakes.’
‘You certainly did, my friend. Those boxes on the plane. Morphine ampoules on top, Stinger missiles underneath.’
‘Jesus.’ Dillon laughed helplessly. ‘Now who would have thought it.’
‘They say you have a genius for acting, that you can change yourself totally, become another person with a look, a gesture.’
‘No, I think that was Laurence Olivier.’ Dillon smiled.
‘And in twenty years, you’ve never seen the inside of a cell.’
‘True.’
‘Not any longer, my friend.’ Branko opened a drawer, took out a two hundred pack of Rothmans cigarettes and tossed them across. ‘You’re going to need those.’ He glanced at Zekan and said in Serbo-Croat, ‘Take him to his cell.’
Dillon felt the sergeant’s hand on his shoulder pulling him up and propelling him to the door. As Zekan opened it Branko said, ‘One more thing, Mr Dillon. The firing squad operates most mornings here. Try not to let it put you off.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Dillon said. ‘Ethnic cleansing, isn’t that what you call it?’
‘The reason is much simpler than that. We just get short of space. Sleep well.’
They went up a flight of stone steps, Zekan pushing Dillon ahead of him. He pulled him to a halt outside an oak door on the passageway at the top, took out a key and unlocked it. He inclined his head and stood to one side and Dillon entered. The room was quite large. There was an army cot in one corner, a tablet chair, books on a shelf and, incredibly, an old toilet in a cubicle in one corner. Dillon went to the window and peered through bars to the courtyard eighty feet below and the pine forest in the near distance.
He turned. ‘This must be one of your better rooms. What’s the catch?’ Then realized he was wasting his time for the
