Kara’s Game. Gordon Stevens

grandmother, and stay with her. Except that Travnik was thirty kilometres from Zenica, and Zenica was nearly fifty kilometres from Maglaj and two front lines away – one from the Muslim pocket of Maglaj – Tesanj into the surrounding Serb/Croat-controlled countryside, and the second back into the Muslim-held land to the south. But the front lines at the points where she would have to cross might not be active, might not be carefully guarded, might not be mined. Or they might be.

      Not that it mattered. Not that anything mattered any more.

      She packed the handful of items in a bag, left the house and walked down through the old town and back across the bridge. Either she had been doing things more slowly than she had imagined, or it was getting dark earlier.

      The doctor was in the doorway of the medical centre. Sorry about Jovan and Adin, she said; where was Kara going, she asked. Travnik, Kara told her, I have a grandmother who lives there.

      The town was a ghost, the doctor thought, Kara was a ghost. Already gone, already finished. Not on her way to join her grandmother in Travnik, because Travnik was eighty kilometres away through two sets of front lines. Kara was on her way to join her husband and her son.

      Good luck, she told Kara. God go with you.

      Kara thanked her, left Maglaj, and took the road back towards Tesanj. A quarter way along it, just after the light had faded and the night had closed in, she left the road and began the climb up through the snow and ice to the hill called Bandera and the first of the front lines.

       5

      The unmarked police Audi, two men in the front and one in the rear, was parked where it was always parked at this time of night: near one of the cab ranks on the edge of the Gare du Midi. Sometime tonight they’d score; sometime in the next hours the man in the rear would slip out, arrange to buy some dope – what sort didn’t matter, but headquarters was heavy on crack at the moment – then they’d make the bust.

      On the edge of the Gare du Nord, close to the predominantly immigrant quarter, the pimps and hookers went about their business.

      On the other side of the city, in the haute de la ville, the Upper Town, the industrialists, the bankers, the diplomats and the Eurocrats attended their functions and passed the evening over cocktails and secret deals.

      Brussels.

      Eleven at night.

      Rue Léopold, one of several named after the nineteenth-century Belgian king, appeared empty, and the night above was black. The road and pavements, with their occasional discreet but expensive boutiques, had just been swept, and the windows of the apartment blocks were curtained. In the past minutes snow had fallen – not heavily, but enough for the first white to have settled on the tarmac of the road and the grey of the pavements.

      The lookout was sunk like a shadow in the recess of a doorway fifty metres down the road in the direction from which the car would approach.

      The car turned up the street, its Mercedes engine a low rumble – driver and one other in the front, and a third man in the back. The man in the doorway tensed slightly and swept the street. The Mercedes turned right, into the car park below the apartments, the three men glancing round as they descended the ramp. The sound now was different, almost hollow, and the lighting was subdued. The lift was in the far corner, on the left. The driver swung in a circle so that when he stopped by it the Mercedes was facing out, towards his exit point. The door of the lift opened and the next two men appeared. The front passenger and the man in the rear seat left the car and stepped into the lift.

      ‘Secure,’ the first man whispered in the motorola. The chip of the set had been replaced, the frequency pre-set to one not used in Belgium.

      The second Mercedes slipped out of the night and up the street – same model, same colour, same registration number.

      Everyone played their games, Abu Sharaf had long known. The Israelis, with their snatch teams or platter bombs or rocket launchers opposite flats or suites where they knew their enemies were plotting against them. The British and the French and the Americans. Plus those who were supposed to be on one’s own side. Even the three men he would meet that night, though in the end they would agree. Because unless they had already decided to agree there would have been no meeting.

      He left the car, stepped the two paces to the lift, and was whisked to the third floor.

      The politician and the secret policeman were waiting, relaxed and comfortable in the soft luxury of the suite, both smiling and both smartly dressed Western-style. Only the holy man to come, Sharaf thought, but the holy men had kept the world waiting from the time the first man had thought of the first religion.

      He shook their hands, accepted the sweet thick coffee an aide offered him, and sat down. The suite had been electronically swept for bugs, and when the meeting began the advisers and minders would leave the room.

      ‘He’ll be here soon.’ The secret policeman was in his early fifties, the same age as the politician but some ten years older than Sharaf. His suit was smartly cut, and the fold of the lids gave his eyes a slightly hooded appearance.

      ‘Insh’allah.’ Sharaf sat down. ‘God willing.’

      The door opened and the holy man entered, the man Sharaf knew to be his closest adviser on his right, and his minder on his left. Two of the newcomers – the holy man and his adviser – were dressed traditionally, but the minder was wearing a suit.

      The holy man was the same age as the politician and the secret policeman. He greeted them, nodded to the aide and minder to leave, then took his place in one of the chairs.

      ‘The world is once again at an interesting time and place.’ The holy man sat forward slightly and summed up the starting point of their previous discussions, the others allowing him the chairmanship, perhaps because it was his by right, perhaps because he represented the religious rather than the secular, and without the religious the secular which they represented could not develop, or not so easily.

      Therefore they allowed him the moment: the politician who played the intrigues of the region with the experience of a juggler, the secret policeman who ruled it with a rod of fear, and the man whom the West would describe as the terrorist mastermind, the new Carlos, the new Abu Nidal.

      Of course Sharaf had not always held such importance. Nor was his name generally known to the great public of the East and the West, though he was under no illusions that their intelligence services had him on their computers, and that when the time was right they would try to turn him, or take him out, depending on the secret dealings and hidden agendas of the Middle East. For that reason Sharaf was always careful, even when meeting those he considered his allies. Perhaps especially when meeting those who called themselves his friends.

      ‘The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire … the agreement between Israel and the Palestinians … the Iran-Iraq conflict and the Gulf War.’

      The holy man’s eyes were small and sharp.

      ‘The new situation in South Africa … the talk of peace in Northern Ireland … the decision by certain states to abandon a certain line of struggle.’

      To cease support for what the West called terrorism.

      So the world appeared to be at peace. Yet at the same time the world was closer to war than it had ever been.

      He sat back and indicated with a wave of his right hand that perhaps it was the politician who would best lead the discussion from that point.

      The politician talked for less than thirty seconds then passed the chairmanship to Sharaf. It was the way their meetings always progressed, wreathed in formalities and allusions, just as the smoke from their cigarettes was wreathed above the table.

      ‘The armed struggle has seen a number of developments over the past decades.’ Another couple of minutes and they would know whether they were in agreement,