by Fritz Galt
The waiter was curt and hovered over them expecting a tip. Mick had seen this before, and the predictable behavior was comforting.
The street was livelier than earlier that evening.
“People spend like there’s no tomorrow,” Bernie said. “With runaway inflation, saving makes little sense.” He gestured at the busy stores. “You have to dispose of all of your income as soon as you’re paid.”
The warm night gave the city a Mediterranean feel. It looked like a scene from La Dolce Vita. But there was work to do and a schedule to keep.
“Ready to take possession of your former house on Banovo Brdo?” Bernie asked.
Mick and Natalie exchanged glances.
Bernie handed them their house keys, a combination of small garage keys, regular bolt-lock keys and long-necked latchkeys. Their shape and weight were all too familiar.
“Thanks,” Mick said. “I’ll stop by the office tomorrow.”
“Get settled in first.” Bernie hailed a cab for them. “Welcome back.”
Natalie stepped into the cab and smiled wanly at their host.
Then they lurched toward home.
A sturdy woman rose from the guard’s desk, stepped out of her grandmotherly shoes, removed her outer uniform and hung it in a broom closet for the night. She slipped her university ID badge off her neck, sighed and dropped it in her purse.
She took one last look at the locked door in front of her. Inside lay Serbia’s sacred Karta. Although the public rarely saw the ancient map, its famous silhouette was printed on T-shirts, waved on the state flag and was otherwise seared into everyone’s consciousness from birth.
It was her map, and she guarded it with her life.
She tested the doorknob. Still firmly locked. Confident that her charge was safe for the night, she turned away and extinguished her desk lamp. A shaft of light from the street shone dimly down the spiral staircase. She shuffled up the steps and left the cold, damp basement behind.
Her shadow converged with her as she emerged at the top step. Drowsy from the evening shift, she concentrated on the front door of the Rector’s Building. But she paused before leaning on the door. She might have felt some movement in the air.
Nobody had entered the building all night. It must have been her imagination. She sighed and stepped outside.
There she turned, inserted a key in the large, oblong keyhole, rattled the door several times to make sure the lock was secure, and left.
A dark figure emerged from the shadows inside the Rector’s Building and stepped into a pool of light cast through the door by the streetlight outside. It was a compact form in tight blue jeans and a ski mask. Then the figure whirled and sped down the spiral staircase.
Moments later, the figure confronted the dim outline of a door. A key jingled and the door creaked open.
A thin carpet rolled from the intruder’s hands through the open doorway and across the concrete floor.
Black sneakers slid over the carpet into the middle of the room and stopped before a glass case. The figure rose to full height and paused. Thick calf muscles trembled to hold the stance before the figure swung a truncheon downward with full force.
Glass shattered with a crash. Splinters showered everywhere, embedding in ancient books that lined the far wall.
Slender gloved fingers reached into the case and withdrew a three-foot-square animal skin map in a wooden frame. It was the Karta.
The figure bent low and whipped the carpet aside. Glass shards strewn on the carpet flew across the room. Sneakers slid down a clean floor that the carpet had covered.
The door shut. The key turned.
Ancient map tucked under one arm, the shadow mounted the steps to leave.
Moments later, two exquisite arcs reflected off Dragana Alexandrov’s derriere as she backed out of the Rector’s Building. With one hand, she removed her ski mask and released her hair that bounced against her shoulders. With the other hand, she picked up a gym bag and artist’s portfolio.
Swinging her hips in her jeans, she casually flipped her red scarf over one shoulder and strolled into the bustling downtown.
Suddenly from nowhere, sirens descended on her. She paused in panic, transfixed by the headlights and flashing blue lights of a caravan of police cars.
She looked back. Approaching from the other direction was a pair of green Ladas, small cars with military plates.
They slowed as they approached her. She backed up against the wall. The cars pulled onto the sidewalk in front of her.
A television truck with glaring camera lights raced up behind them.
All the traffic paused, and the converging police caravan suddenly careened across the intersection away from her. The military cars gunned their engines and followed, pursued by the television truck from the official government station.
No sooner did Dragana breathe a sigh of relief, than she realized that they were headed across the Sava River toward New Belgrade. Were they onto Zoran?
Or to the airport. If so, what was happening there?
Chapter 6
Mick donned his work gloves and surveyed his overgrown garden.
The previous evening at the Moskva, Bernie had allowed him to come in late to work. Bernie wanted to give him time to think over an approach to snaring his brother and to let him recover from jetlag before they executed a sanction-busting operation planned for that evening.
In the bosom of the Serbian heartland, he and Natalie had returned to a calmer world, a world lost in the eddies of time. The most noticeable difference after the Bosnian War was that ethnic cleansing had backfired on the Serbs and brought Serbian refugees to their doorstep in droves. In fact, a number of them were watching him with their noses poked through a chain-link fence.
He looked over the leafy, but dry countryside. Scattered settlements of houses, most half-finished, capped the rolling hills. Not much had changed since he left. Despite the sanctions, and much to the consternation of the rest of the world, life went on in Yugoslavia. People still worked, cars still puttered by on the road below his house, building construction was still underway, grandfathers still strolled with young children, and men still flocked to cafés for their Turkish coffee and smokes.
Mick settled in to his gardening. Within half an hour, he had cleared the original vegetable garden, about the size of two gravesites. Perhaps that was what his audience of refugees thought he was digging.
Then he noticed a low-pitched thumping that seemed to vibrate in his bones.
Wind danced up from the dusty soil.
Brilliant sunlight and heat reflected off his house. He wiped a drop of sweat from his chin.
The mechanical throbbing continued to cut through the air. He couldn’t look up. He jabbed his hoe into the earth and started to furrow a new row.
His shirt billowed and his Greek fisherman’s hat nearly blew off his head. There was the smell of exhaust.
A booming thunder broke over the peak of his roof and a shadow covered his work.
A mechanically clattering chopper was hanging from the sky.
He straightened his back, scratched his head and carefully turned. He squinted at the shadow and felt his stomach tighten.
He stood eye to eye with a Yugoslav Air Force helicopter. Inside the glass dome, the gun turret turned his way. Behind the muzzle sat a man with a sandy-colored mustache. It was Alec, the corners of his mouth turned up in a grin.
Oh my God, Mick thought. What had they turned him into?
The gun sights lowered slightly, and the barrel roared in flames. The round of bullets spit into the garden, inches from Mick’s feet.
He backpedaled and, like skipping pebbles, the line of bullets followed him.
He was as exposed as the people ducking behind the chain-link fence.
He vaulted the fence and headed for the nearby forest. The chopper tilted forward and swooped after him. The clacking machine gun continued to shred the foliage around him.
He lunged behind the fir
st tree he came to.
The chopper paused and faced him uncertainly.
A black truck pulled up Mick’s driveway and practically rear-ended his Army surplus Jeep.
With an angry flick of its rudder, the bird spun midair, dipped low and swept toward the valley.
A team of men in black outfits spilled out of the truck brandishing firearms. With practiced precision, they spread out and scrambled up the incline toward the woods.
Mick turned and sprinted as fast as he could. He dodged well-spaced birch trees as he scrambled uphill into Kocutnijac Park. The paths and roads still felt familiar underfoot despite his two-year absence.
More than the fear, it was the humiliation that drove him. He had been hunted down by his very own brother.
Nearby, tennis balls met racquets and a soft clay surface. A sports café loomed ahead.
A large man with dark hair and a drooping mustache sat there reflecting as two squealing girls chased each other around his chair.
Without breaking stride, Mick vaulted over the table. The man jumped to his feet as his beer glass shattered on the flagstone patio.
As much as Mick had once enjoyed the warmth and humor of the Serbs, they had turned against him. And worse, they had turned his brother against him.
Running hard, he smelled blood in his nostrils. Medieval warfare still plagued the Balkan Peninsula. Over the past two years, he had read headlines about trench warfare, the slitting of throats and the frequent use of torture, it had seemed centuries out of step with the rest of Europe. Yet, it seemed normal in these hills and very real as gunmen breathed down his neck.
At a break in the trees, he watched the tiny speck of the helicopter roar over the deep, green valley, skim over terracotta rooftops and return to its military lair.
Men’s voices shouted behind him. A café waiter pointed in his direction.
Mick swished through dewy, knee-deep grass and trampled over litter. He found a path flattened by car tracks.
He heard grunting ahead. Two pairs of men practiced karate kicks in the deep grass. Sun glinted off their nylon sweat suits and well-groomed hair.
The hilltop had been a golf course before the Second World War. In 1946 royalist troops, who had ended up in a civil war with Tito’s Partisans, had made a valiant last stand on that course. On the ninth green, the Partisans captured General Mihailovic, quickly tried him and shot him between the eyes.
Parked half on blacktop and half in weeds, a man stepped out of his white Honda and folded up his suit coat. A woman stepped out the other side into the wet undergrowth and gasped with exasperation.
The park plunged downward into a forested ravine. Trampled paths sliced through the woods with no apparent direction.
Mick zigzagged down a path muddied by horses from the riding school. He sprinted past a white-haired gentleman just zipping up his pants.
Down one forest path, a peasant family slept in a car, Garfield’s four paws suctioned to the rear window.
Ahead, a plastic sheet was stretched over tree bushes. Mick rushed through the Gypsy encampment, a woman letting out a startled cry.
The forest was deep and endless, and eventually all traces of human activity vanished.
He slowed to a walk, his lungs burning.
His plans were shattered.
Five years earlier, he had spent a routine tour in Washington studying Serbo-Croatian before Natalie’s assignment as press attaché and his posting as an undercover CIA case officer. After a couple of years of work and extensive travel throughout the land, their freedom of movement had been severely curtailed by war.
Before Alec’s helicopter and the pursuing gunmen, Mick’s plan had been to recreate the unobtrusive life he had led on the semi-rural outskirts of the city. That idyllic dream was shattered.
Among the birdcalls, he heard someone’s footsteps in synch with his own.
He glanced over his shoulder. A gray suit kept pace just off the meandering trail.
How did Alec know that he was back?
Mick stopped. His brother was clearly in deep with the Yugoslav Government. They must have tipped him off at passport control.
His resumed walking at a faster pace, as did the man behind him.
Mick broke into a trot. The thrashing in the woods increased.
What had he done wrong? He and Natalie had entered the country legally. They had blended in at the Moskva. Mick had seen his wife off to work as on any normal morning. Maybe he no longer knew what normal meant in Belgrade.
He skidded downhill to a second path and leaped over a fallen log. One shoe splashed in a stream. Ahead, he caught sunlight reflecting off a silvery tube. An elbow crooked behind a tree.
Mick bent and accelerated into a dash.
There was no instant crack of a rifle.
He didn’t look back until he was safely behind a wall of trees. Now he could see the tube clearly. It was a telephoto lens, still following him.
Coughing from the wind sprint, he closed his eyes and slowed to a trot. Maybe the military didn’t want him dead. If they wanted him to lose his mind like Alec, they just might succeed.
The trail split and he tramped up a slight slope in the general direction of home.
When he emerged on the fringe of the park, the truck was gone. The men were nowhere in sight.
Perhaps he was already losing his mind.
Danger didn’t normally bring fear, so long as he understood the threat. So often in the past, in Beirut, Lisbon and La Paz, with his wife and Alec he had pursued and achieved his objectives despite hostile conditions. Each time, when he or Alec was revealed, they had all left the country.
But this time he was already revealed. And Alec was directing the Yugoslav security apparatus against him.
With Bernie in the lead, he would quickly make his move and finish the CIA’s last operation. Then he would focus on his personal goal, namely finding Alec and persuading him to leave the country.
Persuading Alec to leave seemed harder now than he had realized. Not only had Alec burnt his bridges with the West, but he wielded some real power in Yugoslavia. Perhaps Alec had finally found a home.
Mick stared at the settlement of modern, eclectic Balkan houses before him. Belgrade was the last place in the still-proud nation to feel the crippling effects of war and international sanctions. A half-decade of greed and bloodlust were finally taking its toll on the capital.
Then he picked up the faint ring of a telephone inside his house.
He walked across his weedy yard, kicked off his muddy boots, lifted his cap and wiped his brow.
“All right. I hear you.”
He flung the kitchen door open and grabbed the phone.
“Yeah?”
“Mick.” It was Ed Carrigan, acting head of the American Embassy in Belgrade.
“You’re just the man I want to talk to,” Mick said, trying to remain calm. “Alec found me. He just buzzed me with a JNA helicopter and tried to riddle me with bullets.”
“Easy now. We need to talk.”
“Talk?” Mick shouted. “I need help.”
“Yes, and we need your help.”
“Call Bernie Fletcher if you need help.”
“That’s the problem,” Ed said. “He was deported last night.”
Mick dropped in to check on Natalie before going on to see Ed Carrigan.
She and the rest of the chancery seemed to be operating as normal. He didn’t want to ruin that. So as normal, he leaned over her desk to give her a kiss.
Her eyes were wide and attentive. “That suit looks snug on you.”
“It’s all muscle.”
She rose to her feet and received the kiss.
He smiled and tried to shrug his shoulders. “Seems like old times.”
Circling her desk, he saw the travel poster for Hvar, an island off the Croatian coast where they had spent a romantic vacation years before.
“Just like old times,” she repeated. “Apart from closing down the embassy an
d laying off over a hundred Yugoslav employees who have risked their lives for America over the years.”
He stopped squarely before her and sat on the edge of her desk. She remained standing and looked him in the eye. He could intimidate most people with his presence and directness, but not her.
His eyes trailed down the length of the blue, tailored suit.
She whispered in his ear, “Why do we only get this close when there’s nothing we can do about it?”
He lifted an eyebrow. It was true. The past few years, they had sat in their family room powerlessly watching people’s lives being destroyed on television. He had tried one excuse after another not to make love, until she finally understood. There always would be an excuse.
He turned away with a grimace.
“So Ed called me in,” he said.
“Maybe because of this.” She tossed the morning’s Politika across her desk. The entire front page was devoted to a single story and one large, disturbing photo.
A prematurely bald man in a trench coat sat in the departure lounge of Belgrade International Airport transfixed by the glare of camera lights. In the background, two Ministry of Internal Affairs officers in green uniforms stood ready to lead him away. The Cyrillic headline read “American Spy Master Revealed.”
“So Bernie’s been PNG’ed,” Mick said. Made persona non grata. Kicked out of the country.
“That’s right. Expelled yesterday evening just after we had dinner with him.” She watched him, her eyes conveying what she couldn’t say aloud. Mick was the last spy in Belgrade.
He frowned and stared at the floorboards that creaked underfoot.
Her shoes stepped into view. She lifted his chin, her eyes full of pain. “What does that mean for us?”
“We’ll be snowed under for a while, I guess.”
He tucked her silky auburn hair behind her elegant ears.
“I’ve got to go.”
He withdrew and headed toward Ed Carrigan, who was waiting for him in the high-security area. She followed him.