Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,77

heard of the Black Panthers?’

There was a long pause.

Down the line, he heard her stop munching on her lunch. In the receiver, there was nothing but a period of silence.

‘Why do you ask?’ she said eventually.

‘Apparently they were a Special Forces Unit during the Kosovo war. Part of the KLA.’

‘I know who they are.’

He paused.

Silence.

‘Can you tell me anything about them?’

Another pause.

‘My family who are still there, they live in a town called Priboj,’ she said. ‘It’s a small place, less than 30,000 people, towards the border with Bosnia. A few years ago, I went to visit my first cousin, Marija. I stayed at her home, with her husband and two small girls. The first night I was there, we all had dinner together, and then she took the girls off for a bath and put them to bed. I headed upstairs too to have a shower and get an early night’s sleep, but from my room I heard Marija telling the two girls a story. I’d never heard it before. It was one of those bedtime stories with a moral that warns children about something. Like the Boy who cried Wolf.’

‘A fable,’ Archer said.

‘Yes, that’s right. Anyway, I heard her talking to them in Serbian. She told them about a family. They used to live down the street, before the two girls were born, and were not nice people. They lied, they cheated, they treated everyone around them badly. They had two boys who would bully all the other children in the playground, punching and kicking them and so forth.’

She paused.

‘Anyway, long story short, there was a school bus in the town that came every morning to pick up the children who lived on the street. And one morning, the driver pulled up outside the house of the two bully boys. But no one came out. The driver shrugged, then drove on and continued on his way. But then the kids didn’t show up the next day. Or the day after. So eventually, the police went round to their house. And they found that the family was gone. Vanished into thin air, the father, the mother, the two boys. But the sheets on their beds were rumpled, blankets half on the floor, chairs knocked over. As if they had been snatched in the night.’

‘OK,’ Archer said, confused, not sure where this was going.

‘Marija told the two girls that something came for the family. She told them that because the family were so cruel a monster came in the middle of the night and took them away, and no one ever saw them again. She said the beast had a name, called the Crno Kuguar. The Black Panther, in English.’

Archer frowned, touching the cut again over his eye.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘After Marija shut the kid’s bedroom door, we went downstairs to get a drink and I told her I’d overheard her story. I didn’t grow up in Serbia so had never heard it before. I asked her if it was a famous old tale or something she made up.’

She paused.

‘Then she told me it was actually true.’

‘What?’

‘Well, not the monsters thing. But I swear to you, as Marija swore to me, that during the war people just went missing from all over the area, in the town and in the surrounding countryside. She assured me that the family she spoke of had existed, and all four of them had vanished. Rumours had spread about who was responsible for these disappearances. She told me it was a KLA Special Forces Unit called the Black Panthers.’

‘They stole people?’

‘That’s what everyone there still thinks, even the adults. No one ever found out what had happened to those who disappeared. But not a single one was ever seen again. Rumour had it the Panthers were arrested and put on trial in Belgrade after the war. And after that happened, no more people went missing.’

‘That’s right. That’s what we were told.’

‘So the story was actually based on reality. It scared kids into behaving because of that. And Marija told me that no one ever knew what had happened to the Black Panthers. Like their victims, they just disappeared too.’

‘Not anymore,’ Archer said.

She paused.

‘Whoa, wait a minute,’ she said. ‘Are you telling me these are the men who attacked your station?’

‘Yes. They’re trying to kill my boss.’

‘Why?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘Jesus Christ, Sam. These men are the stuff of nightmares in Serbia.’

Archer went to reply, but he heard a whistle from behind him. He turned and saw Chalky in