“Aw, dang.” She goes back in her room, pulling Rada inside. Lucija and I step into the elevator, getting ready to face what is certain to be a confrontation.
Drago
We’re halfway drunk when the doorbell rings. I assume more people are showing up to Emilija’s party, even though it’s almost midnight. I’m sitting on the couch in the living room of Emilija’s two-bedroom apartment, right on Flagey Square. She gets up from next to me and opens the door. I take another gulp of beer.
She frowns as she sees it’s Elena and Lucija. Somehow, I doubt that they are here to party. Afrim walks over to turn the music down.
Lucija grumbles from the doorway. “You’re having a party? What’s worth celebrating?”
“The end of exam period. What isn’t to celebrate? Geez, do you ever let your hair down?” Emilija says with a peevish tone.
“No, I don’t,” Lucija replies. “Now, tell everyone who isn’t you or those two on the couch to get their lazy bums out of here.”
Emilija sighs. “Leave it to you to take the fun out of everything.” She calls to the rest of the living room. “The party is over, guys. The Croatians have some emergency diplomatic business that evidently can’t wait until morning.”
I’m pretty sure Emilija is being sardonic but Lucija apparently doesn’t get that. “You’re damn right it can’t wait.” She watches about twenty other people file out of the apartment.
Emilija shuts the front door. “Now, what is so important that you had to show up here in the middle of the night and make me kick everyone out of my house?”
Elena steps forward. “Where is your father?”
I resist the urge to groan.
Emilija looks at the ceiling in annoyance. “So that’s what this is about? Trying to persecute my father again? For crying out loud, you searched his whole company and you didn’t find anything. Can’t you just drop it and admit that you were wrong?”
“No, because we got a promising lead,” Elena insists. “Your father may be the real owner of the Trepča factory, near Mitrovica in Kosovo, maybe through a subsidiary or something. I’m not sure yet, but at least it’s worth checking out.”
Emilija shakes her head. “That’s ridiculous. How could he just hide something like that? Who told you that anyway?”
“Drago knows the source.”
My head snaps over to Elena. I realize that I’m about to get dragged into the middle of this.
“Oh really? Who do I know that would have that kind of information?” I snap at her.
“Remember Ayoub, the kid from the pigeon monument? He turns out to be a wealth of information.”
Emilija steps forward like she’s about to try to punch Elena. I stand up from the couch and walk over. I put a hand on her shoulder, not least because I know that Elena could knock her on her butt if she wanted to. She settles for yelling. “Seriously, a kid told you some gossip and now you’re all ready to reopen the case?”
“Pretty much,” Elena insists.
“He’s come through for us before,” Afrim says from the couch.
I sigh and say something that I know will piss my girlfriend off. But it needs to be said. “Emilija, I know you don’t want to hear this from me, but I do know the kid in question. He probably does know something, exactly because everyone thinks he’s just a kid and he’s not paying attention. What is the harm in checking?”
I brace myself for her to whirl on me. She does.
“That’s it. Elena and her cousin show up here asking ridiculous questions and you take their side? So much for the whole ‘our friendship is over, Elena’ thing.”
“Hey, I am trying to be objective here. Now, tell us where your dad is. If he’s not in Gothenburg, where is he?”
“He’s in Bosnia, checking on some of his operations near Banja Luka. This is all ludicrous. If he went to Kosovo, you’d know. There would be a stamp in his passport. Why can’t you just check when he comes back?”
Lucija arches her eyebrows. “Not necessarily. Did your father get naturalized in Sweden after the two of you fled there?”
Emilija hunches her shoulders. “Yes, both of us did. Why?”
“Because, then he could travel overland through Serbia into Kosovo with his ID card and there wouldn’t be a record of it. He could be doing this all on the sly.” Lucija looks over at Elena. “We need to be on a flight to Kosovo, first thing in the morning.”
Emilija shakes her head like she can’t believe that she is in this situation. “Fine. But if you’re going to insist on trying to prove this harebrained theory of yours, then I’m coming too, to confirm that anything you claim to find is real and you’re not trumping it up for some reason.”
Again, I know how Emilija is going to react to this, but that means I feel like I have to go, too.
“Emilija, if any of this is real—and I’m not saying that it is—then we could run into some pretty nasty characters. If you’re going then I’m going along to make sure both you and Elena stay safe.”
Afrim raises his hand. “If you’re all going then I’m coming, too. I haven’t been back to the homeland in years. Who knows what I might miss out on?”
Emilija sighs sarcastically. “Sure, come right on along. I guess it’s the more the merrier at this point.”
She brushes past me and then walks into her bedroom, slamming the door.
For the first time since I’ve met her, Lucija smiles. “Well, what do you know, it looks like we’ve got ourselves a good old-fashioned hunting party.”
Fifteen:
Trepča
Elena
The Adria Airways CRJ 900—I read it on the safety card thing—touches down at Pristina Airport. We had to transfer in Ljubljana. Our connection was so short that we had to run through the passport control there, when we left the Schengen Area.
It doesn’t take long for the plane to taxi to one of the airport’s four gates. We have to wait for the single bag that Afrim checked, with tools and equipment and stuff we might need. While we wait, Emilija goes over to the Europcar desk. After we get Afrim’s bag, an employee leads us out to a small white hatchback with the word Škoda printed on the emblem above the grille.
Emilija accepts the keys from the employee.
Drago starts to head for the front passenger seat. Emilija snaps at him. “Why don’t you sit in the back, with Elena?”
He hesitates for a second before he says, almost as if he is making a point of being okay with it, “Fine, I think I will.” He heads for the crowded back seat, taking the middle between his brother and me. Lucija takes the other passenger seat. With that, we get going to whatever we’re going to find in Mitrovica.
Drago
We made it into Mitrovica. It’s my first time back in Kosovo since we left in 1999. It brings back a lot of memories. Few of them are good. At least we are headed in the opposite direction from where our parents were killed, where I had to fight in the war—where she died.
Afrim just has to pipe up. “Wow, I never thought I’d see these hills again. We’re back home, isn’t that great?”
“Yeah.” I stare down at where my knees are scrunched together in the crowded back seat, on either side of the drivetrain’s hump.
Elena grabs my chin and makes me look at her. “Hey, I know you’re still mad at me, but are you doing all right?”
No. I’m not. I had to be a teenage soldier here. I have a death threat on my head here.
“I’m fine,” I tell her in a tone that makes it effectively mean ‘piss off.’ I don’t want her to know. She doesn’t live in a world of such things and I don’t want to drag her down into it with me.
We’ve been driving through the center of Mitrovica and reach the bridge that goes over the Ibar River. It is now a UN-policed military checkpoint that divides the Kosovar part from the Serb side of the city to the north, where we are headed.
Elena hunches her shoulders, as we show our passports. “Geez, sorry I asked.”
Emilija drives to No
rth Mitrovica’s northeastern outskirts, toward a really high orange and white smokestack. We come around a bend over a hill. This immense factory comes into view. Emilija turns onto a road that goes along the top of an embankment. To the left of the car, down the slope, there is a bunch of rusting buildings. Emilija parks. We get out of the car and start walking toward them. Lucija and Elena have disappointed looks. Aside from the decay, which you could say is the norm around here, nothing is out of the ordinary. Definitely not the smoking gun they were expecting to find.
Emilija snaps at them, as if she’s scoring a victory. “See, there’s nothing here, just a bunch of old abandoned buildings.”
Lucija shakes her head. “I’m not going to accept that until I inspect every centimeter of the property.”
Emilija groans. “If you must.”
We go inside. Lucija takes out a flashlight and starts scanning the room with the beam. Apparently, it was mostly used to house ore storage vats.
“Anything?” Elena asks eventually.
“No, nothing,” Lucija says. “Let’s try the next room.”
We go through another space that has a long conveyor belt for ore. It looks like it hasn’t worked in a decade, or more. Lucija looks it over. We go into a third room.
It contains equipment that I think was used for smelting lead when this factory was still in use. Lucija’s flashlight falls on a mark on the floor, where the old, dusty concrete is darker. Cleaner, like it only recently got exposed.
Lucija holds the flashlight on it. “Something is off. Somebody removed the main blast furnace, not that long ago.”
Emilija hunches her shoulders. “So what? Isn’t seventy percent of this town supposed to be unemployed? Maybe somebody stole it.”
Lucija shakes her head. “No. There are plenty of easier and more valuable things to steal than a furnace that’s as tall as a house. You would need a big rig to move it anyway. Somebody did this on purpose, and it would have had to be above board, approved by whoever owns this place. I think we should head up to another part of the mining complex, near the village of Stari Grad. If someone was doing something untoward, they’d want to do it in the middle of nowhere, rather than right on the outskirts of a UN-patrolled town.”
“Makes sense to me,” Elena says.
Emilija rolls her eyes. “If you think it’s necessary.”
“I do.” Elena glowers at her.
Emilija toys with her hair, absentminded. “Fine.”
It is getting dark as we walk back to the car and get back on the road. Lucija gives Emilija directions from her phone’s GPS. After about another fifteen minutes we go past a village and a sign over the gap between two run-down-looking reception buildings. Smoke comes out of one of the stacks of the buildings behind them. Looking forward into the rear-view mirror, I see that Emilija glances sideways at it and raises an eyebrow.
“Drive past,” Lucija orders.
Emilija does and parks the car to the side of the crumbling asphalt. She starts trying to explain why the facility would be active. “So what? The owner of the mine and the factory just started up this campus of it again and they needed a smelter, so they moved another one they had.”
Lucija shakes her head. “No. This factory should have been closed since 2000, when the US Army stormed it. I checked the land registry before I came here this morning. It’s hard to tell who actually does own this part of the mine. Something fishy is going on here.”
I see in the rear-view mirror that Emilija is rolling her eyes again. “If you say so, Nancy Drew. Why can’t we just walk up and ask what they’re doing?”
I shake my head. She apparently is not getting why we can’t do that, as much as I don’t get her reference to someone called Nancy. “Sorry, Emilija, but if they are up to something illegal, then they’ll just cover everything up the moment they know we’re here. I speak from experience.”
Emilija turns around in her seat and glowers at me.
Afrim hunches his shoulders. “It’s true.”
Elena leans forward. “Look, guys, I may still be learning about EU diplomacy and all that, but sneaking around and fighting is more my department. It’s already dusk. I say we wait until dark and then sneak in to take a look around.”
“Deal,” says Lucija.
Afrim and I nod. He gets out of the car, opens the trunk and takes out the bag with the tools that he thought to bring with us. We wait until it’s dark. Emilija hesitates before she gets out from behind the steering wheel. Before she can step into the snow on the other side of the road, I walk over and put a hand on her shoulder. “Maybe you should stay here and watch the car while we go.”
She hesitates. Then she whispers in my ear, “No. Now that I’ve seen that working factory, I have to know for sure.”
I realize that she’s much less confident about her father than she is letting on.
“I’ll tell you everything, I promise. What we’re walking into might not be pretty. Elena knows how to defend herself in a fight, you don’t.”
She shudders out a sigh and leans against the car’s door. The four of us make our way through the dormant branches and the snow to the edge of the fence that surrounds this part of the Trepča mining and smelting complex. Afrim takes a pair of wire cutters from his bag and starts to snip through the chain links. Elena unsheathes her bichaq dagger that was also in the checked bag and helps, sawing. There is what looks like an abandoned warehouse off to the side of the building that has a high industrial chimney rising from the center, belching some smoke, but not a lot. The factory must not be running at full capacity. Definitely not enough to make millions of euros. I arch an eyebrow. If Stanić is somehow behind this, the money must be coming from somewhere else.
We sneak through the fence. No one is around. We crouch over to the nearest building, the warehouse. I wonder if Elena realizes that this was almost too easy, but I don’t have time to ask her before she opens the rear door. I hear her gasp. “Um, guys? This warehouse isn’t as abandoned as it looks from the outside.”
I peek past the door and gasp just like she did. Inside are piles of weapons: automatic assault rifles that look like some knockoff of AK-47s.
As if on cue, the main doors at the far end of the warehouse open. There is a run-down car sitting in front of it. Two men lift out the bottom of the car’s back seat. They partly fill the cavity underneath with just a few of the many guns in the warehouse. They put the seat bottom back. It reminds me of exactly how Afrim and I were smuggled out of Kosovo by al-Qadir’s men, more than a decade and a half ago.
I hear a voice that after a moment of sheer disbelief I recognize, speaking from beyond the wall of the warehouse. I feel a wave of disappointment and shame—the first for Emilija and the second for how I treated Elena. She was right all along.
“Is this your first time making a weapons run?” booms Ranko Stanić’s deep baritone.
One of the men loading the car nods.
“Well, don’t worry. Just make sure that you cross the borders at one of the checkpoints where we have connections with the local constabulary, after you pick up your assigned migrants. You should get through with no problems. Remember to deposit my cut in the mine’s account when you get back.”
My scowl deepens as Ranko Stanić himself walks into my field of vision beyond the warehouse’s doors like he owns the place; he probably does. The man who I always thought was a hero for trying to bring peace and reconciliation to the Balkans really was behind something nefarious this entire time.
Then another man steps up beside him. A man I haven’t seen in a decade and a half. A man I hate with no reservation. Abd al-Qadir, the man who forced me to be a child soldier, to commit war crimes. I feel my heart sink at the knowledge that—not only is Stanić guilty—he and al-Qadir are working together.
Elena
I duck down the second I see Stanić walk into the center of the concrete apron beyond the warehouse’s main loading door. There is this Middle Eastern-looking guy stand
ing next to him, probably one of his servants or something.
He motions for the smugglers to go. They jump in their car and speed off. Stanić turns in the direction of where I’m hiding in the warehouse. He greets me like I’m a houseguest. Like he knows I’m there crouching behind the pile of weapons, even though there is no way he can see me. “Well, Maršal Marković, fancy finding you here. You and your friends certainly did show up right on time.”
We stand, coming into his vision. “You mean I was expected? You used Ayoub as a plant?”
The Middle Eastern man speaks in French.
“Exactly. They are never too young to start fighting for Allah, especially if they misbehave. Anyway, after you overheard Ranko talking on the telephone, I knew you still suspected our plan, our ties with UKIP, even after your so-called investigation. I decided to use him to lure you here and have you and your friends disappear in a place that no one else would think to look. That I finally have an excuse to eliminate Ekrim Avdi’s adopted infidel children is merely an added benefit.”
Both Drago and Afrim stare at this guy like their blood is about to boil. I realize that I’ve seen him before, when Afrim and I were hanging from a crane in a different warehouse in Brussels, just from another angle.
Afrim whispers to me and confirms it. “It’s him. Al-Qadir. The guy who made Drago fight in the Kosovo war.”
I nod, turn back to him and yell as my mind starts to ferret out what the two of them are plotting. “You’re using the wave of migration from Kosovo as an excuse to smuggle weapons into the EU, aren’t you?”
Stanić actually laughs, like he’s in one of the parlors back in his mansion, listening to an interesting anecdote. “Using the migrant wave? Elena, I created it with a bit of fake information, well placed on the internet, in order to disguise what we are really smuggling: arms that I manufacture here for the IS terror cells throughout Europe and for their army in Syria and Iraq. I am also funding Mr. al-Qadir and his men on behalf of the UK Independence Party, and certain factions of the Tory party, by using the money I get from smuggling the migrants. When you came to Brussels on a ridiculous mission to try to bring the rest of the Balkans into the EU, I knew I had the perfect chance to take you down, too.” He chuckles. “The worst part of it was knowing my daughter was hanging around with a couple of Albanian šiptar lowlifes.” He chortles. “No matter, that is about to be over now, too.”
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