Evensong

Also on October 9, late at night, Kiril Horvath turned his flatbed Land Rover onto the road that led out of Opatija, past the Villa Angiolina and up into the foothills of the Mount Ucka national park. Horvath was an illegal hunter; he hunted brown bears. They weren’t as big as grizzlies, but they were still very big: the biggest wild predators in the Croatian highlands, or anywhere in Europe. Conservation measures had rescued them from near-extinction, but they were still very rare.

Horvath hunted not with bullets but with tranquiliser darts, fired by special low-recoil, low-impact guns with night sights and laser target designation. He’d always hated the idea of killing wild animals for sport; he hunted brown bears to capture them and sell them. He sold only to zoos and wildlife parks, or sometimes to conservation foundations who were prepared to bend the rules, and he made a reasonable (but still strictly illegal) profit. He could have made a lot more if he sold them to circuses for entertainment or to Asian dealers who milked their glands for medicines and aphrodisiacs, but he had no time for either; he thought they were scarcely better than those who killed for sport.

He liked brown bears, and he knew a lot about them: where to find them at night, especially at this time of the year when they were getting sluggish and fat in the leadup to hibernation. He only targeted males, preferably younger males because the fully-grown ones would be impossible to manhandle onto his vehicle’s flatbed, even with lifting gear. He wouldn’t take females in case they had dependent cubs.

He was average build and thirtyish, with a reticent but not unfriendly manner. He was a farmer, and like most farmers in Croatia he hadn’t been doing well for some time. Farming was like no other business. Each year you had to invest everything—all your capital, everything you had—in the next year. He had a young family, and the strain was beginning to tell on him. His bear-catching hadn’t made him a fortune, but it provided enough to top up his farm income.

What he did was illegal, but other people supplemented their earnings in more unpleasant ways. He worked on his farm during the week but every Saturday he used his old Land Rover to go up into the Mount Ucka hills, past the villa where he’d heard some strange things had happened, and higher up into the mountains. It had been a regular, and moderately successful, routine: every Saturday from September through to mid-November. He’d been doing it for the last two years. This late on a Saturday night there was no traffic. Those who weren’t at home were in town, not up here in the forested hills.

But tonight was different. Nobody had followed him out of Opatija on this road, but now something was behind him, closing rapidly: a big lumbering black truck, unlit and unmarked. It couldn’t be the police, they’d have lit up the night and had sirens blaring, and they didn’t travel in vehicles like that. It must have been parked off road and pulled out to follow him as he drove past, which at first seemed frightening, though on reflection he had little to feel frightened about. They could be drug dealers or gangsters, but he had no involvements with either and wasn’t so rich that anyone would try robbery. Not a gambling creditor or a jealous husband, either; his life wasn’t that interesting.

By now it had caught him up and was tailgating him.

He shrugged. He’d been an army driver during his military service—quite a good one—and his Land Rover, though aging, was in good condition and was more agile than any truck. And he didn’t like being tailgated. He was approaching a series of uphill bends he knew well, where he’d be able to out-accelerate and outcorner the truck. He dropped a gear and floored the accelerator, and left it wallowing far behind and downhill.

Except that he didn’t. It was still there.

It negotiated the uphill bends expertly, even more expertly than he’d done, and kept coming. They came to a straighter, more level stretch of road and it still kept coming. Who’s driving that? And what do they want with me? Nothing, apparently, because to his amazement the truck moved out to overtake, cut in front of him like a sports car, and ran him neatly off the road. Then it hurtled past, still unlit, and away up into the hills.

He should have been angry but instead he was puzzled. This wasn’t a road-rage incident, it was too precise for that. The truck had done just enough to force him off the road without making him crash or overturn. As it sped past, he saw it had no license plates. The cab was too dark and too high to see who was driving, but whoever it was, was very good.