Testimony

by Scott Turow

  “Merde,” said Goos.

  With the bad news delivered, the captain spoke again.

  “Vee have been able to monitor communications. Zey are vatching you. Very helpful.”

  “For us or you?” Goos asked. No smile. He was prickly.

  The general, however, grinned politely.

  “Both actually. As we expected, the people we have overheard are not surprised that you now have protection, which they regard as an unfortunate consequence of their overrreaction on Tuesday. But they remain nervous that sooner or later you will correctly guess their true motivations. We take it from the chatter that they successfully encouraged the gentleman you had gone to Vo Selo to visit to leave the area.”

  “So we understand,” I said.

  “They hope you will be departing once you learn he is gone.”

  “Wish is my command,” said Goos.

  The general again smiled at Goos’s venting.

  “Here are our thoughts,” she said. “We would like to use the situation they created on Tuesday night to ensnare them. Given what followed your last visit to Vo Selo and your witness’s response to you, it would be understandable—especially to those who know little about your Court—if you returned to Vo Selo, accompanied, say, by a full squad in combat gear as a way to express your repugnance at this fellow’s intimidation.”

  “And why won’t Kajevic bash off as soon as they see NATO troops?” Goos asked.

  General Moen nodded. “We have access to Bosnian Army uniforms. I would describe the arrangement as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. At any rate, these ‘Bosnian’ troops will be there to help you enter the premises and to ensure that your reluctant witness does not use the same measures as last time.”

  “But he’s gone,” I said.

  “Exactly,” said the general. “You will find the house empty. Just as you are about to leave, however, one of you will suffer a serious injury.”

  “What kind of injury?” asked Goos.

  “Feigned of course. Although we must make it convincing. However, because of this mishap, you and your military escort will rush to the nearest hospital—in Madovic.”

  I got it, naturally.

  “This injury in Vo Selo,” continued the general, “will take place just as the three monks have departed from the hospital, around 13:30. Traveling at top speed, you should be in Madovic in roughly ten minutes. The monks’ procession back to the monastery usually takes half an hour, although it would be better to apprehend them in the first fifteen minutes, when they are farther away and less likely to receive any efforts at aid from the mountaintop. Four ‘tourists’ will cut them off from the rear. If all goes well, the subject can be extracted in a matter of seconds.

  “He will be taken back to The Hague, but I assume you would rather travel independently, which you can do on your own or with an escort, as you prefer.”

  Goos’s face was still.

  “Why can’t one of the soldiers be the injured party?”

  The intelligence officer answered. “He vould go to military hospital.”

  Goos still had a snarling look. “They’ll know, you realize. Kajevic’s people? They’ll know it wasn’t a coincidence we were there when he was bailed up.”

  “If you like,” said General Moen, “you can proceed to the hospital for medical treatment. We’ll have someone in place. Or we can have a medic on the scene bandage you up as a smoke screen.”

  Goos was shaking his head, and I interrupted.

  “General,” I said, “we need to talk about this. I’m sure you understand. And even if we choose to go along, we probably need to inform our superiors.”

  “Please let me know. I’m sure we can help with that.”

  “And when would this take place?” I asked.

  She stopped to consider how to deliver the next piece.

  “Given the realities, the sooner the better. We are preparing for an operation tomorrow.”

  Again, no one spoke for some seconds.

  “You must understand,” she said, “how reluctant we are to ask the assistance of civilians in a matter of this nature, especially given your recent experiences. Unfortunately, you are essential.”

  Goos left the room without a word. Andersen and a soldier named Greer were at the front doors of the hotel to escort us to the car.

  “Look, Goos,” I said quietly, when we were in the backseat again, “I’m going to be asking myself only one thing: Do they really need us?”

  He replied in a low growl, “You don’t have to talk me into this, mate.”

  “I wasn’t going to try.” I bowed my head toward the two soldiers in the front seat, but Goos was unconcerned about speaking in front of them. “I just want to think it through.”

  “They already have,” Goos answered. “It’s as she said: They don’t want to be using civilians for a military operation any more than we care to be used. But they need numbers to do this quickly and to keep anyone from getting killed.”

  He was surprising me, as usual.

  “I still need to think,” I answered.

  “That you should, buddy,” he said. “Because there’s a lot that can come a gutser.”

  After another minute without words, Goos said, “You can skip this one, Boom. They only need one of us and I signed up for this sort of thing a long time ago.”

  To be precise, neither of us had really signed up. But he meant that when he took his oath in law enforcement he knew he was accepting a measure of physical risk. For lawyers, that was not in the job description. Early in my career as an Assistant US Attorney, I had, for kicks, gone along with the DEA to watch when they arrested Gaucho Hinjosa, a local drug kingpin. My boss, Stan Sennett, reamed me out afterward. ‘You want a badge and a gun, then go apply to be a policeman. Would you let an agent give a closing argument? We each have our jobs and an obligation not to get in each other’s way.’

  Perhaps if Goos were better off physically, I might have been willing to send him on his own. But he didn’t seem to be in condition to be falling down in a heap to play a part, or to do whatever else might be required to pass himself off as seriously injured.

  I said again that I needed time to think.

  “And no matter what,” Goos said, “I wouldn’t be telling the home office. You know what they say: Better to ask forgiveness than permission. If you need cover, then send Badu an e-mail saying you have an urgent matter.”

  I laughed out loud. Badu was infamous for never answering his e-mails. He generally responded only to Akemi.

  Back at the Blue Lamp, I went immediately to my room and sat alone on the bed to commune with myself, but I soon realized that my decision had been made in January. Both of my sons were well on their way now. I had no life partner to worry about. Far more important, as I had discerned with a Zastava resting on my temple atop that water tank, I had come to The Hague out of a family obligation to subdue the toxic predators who became a cancer on civilization. I was scared utterly shitless. But my life would not mean what I wanted it to if I didn’t help bring justice to the millions in several nations murdered, tortured, raped, starved, and savagely misled by Laza Kajevic.

  24.

  Now in Person—June 10

  I woke on Wednesday after sleeping better than I had anticipated. My feeling-state was a bit like the first morning of trial, when I employed a meditative effort to freeze away my exploding anxieties over all the things I couldn’t control. As I dressed, the momentousness of what was at hand seemed to enhance my vision, as if I was seeing a more sharp-edged version of myself when I looked in the mirror. If you were very lucky, you experienced times like this, when what you did mattered to thousands more people than just you, and which, for that reason, you’d remember right to the end.

  Goos had gotten himself buttoned together. He sported his usual subtle smile when I greeted him at the breakfast table. We ate quickly and for lack of anything else talked about the news that Obama was going to send five hundred Special Forces troops back to I
raq to fight ISIS.

  At 10:00, Andersen and a new MP drove us to Barupra. The empty basketball court outside the former base was a staging area for a training session intended to be largely fictitious, in clear sight of the road and whatever surveillance vehicles the Arkans would send by. Fourteen soldiers, all members of the NATO Response Force, a special ops unit, had been outfitted in the camo combat fatigues of the Armed Forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Seven were German, seven were Danish, twelve men and two women.

  The commander was a German colonel, Lothar Ruehl. He was thickset and positive, with a ginger bottle-brush mustache, and greeted us with a quiet word of appreciation passed on from General Moen. The shoulder of his make-believe uniform bore a tan patch with a single star and a line, the insignia of a second lieutenant.

  Goos and I, both dressed in jeans and running shoes, were outfitted with ballistic helmets and full body armor, which included a groin panel, half sleeves, and a collar. It was heavy but the Velcro strapping allowed more mobility than I expected.

  With Ruehl in charge, we acted out the fake operation. I pretended to knock on Ferko’s door, while the squad fanned out to surround the perimeter and then batter its way in. As anticipated, the two local cops guarding the gravesite today wandered up to see what we were doing, but maintained a polite distance. For their sake, a sergeant—who was actually a Danish first lieutenant—went through the charade of shouting out Colonel Ruehl’s orders in Bosnian.

  After that, we broke for lunch. The NATO field ration pack was French and, astonishingly, included a tin of chicken pâté and a small wheel of Brie, but I was in no state to eat. Ruehl sat with Goos and me and quietly explained the real plan, which, naturally, we couldn’t practice around prying eyes. The colonel repeated the details several times, until we understood the deviations from the maneuvers we’d acted out.

  At noon precisely, we started for Vo Selo. The military vehicles were all NATO issue, which apparently was not unusual in BiH. The convoy included a boxy blue armored Mercedes SUV, in which Goos and I rode behind Colonel Ruehl; a canopied 4x4 personnel truck; and an armored personnel carrier, which Goos proudly told me was a Belgian design called a BDX. It looked a little like a miniaturized tank, with four tires, camouflage paint on the plating, and a gun turret.

  The hope, as General Moen suggested, was that Kajevic’s thugs would take the size of this force as a measure of how thoroughly they’d scared the crap out of Goos and me last Tuesday night, which they’d probably view with mean-spirited glee. With any luck, they’d still be laughing when we ended up in the middle of Madovic.

  Goos and I rode with our helmets in our laps, largely unspeaking due to the loud radio traffic as Colonel Ruehl exchanged encrypted communications with the troops here and the undercover elements who had spent the night in Madovic. The driver, who spoke Serbo-Croatian, also frequently issued phony orders in perfect Bosnian over the Army’s normal channel.

  During one of the few quiet moments, I turned to Goos.

  “Okay?”

  He nodded solidly. “First-class operation,” he said.

  “I’m wearing adult undergarments,” I told him. “Just in case.”

  He smiled a little less than I’d hoped.

  After the fifty-minute ride, we rolled through Vo Selo, where many of the Roma emerged from their tiny sad homes to watch. Up the hill, Ferko’s little castle gave all signs of being abandoned. The place was utterly still. The laundry was no longer flapping on the lines on the balconies, and the shutters on the windows, as well as the front gate, were wide open. The dogs’ blood remained in brown-black circles on the gravel of the courtyard.

  Nonetheless, we went through the whole act. The Danish lieutenant handed an electric megaphone to Goos, who asked Ferko in Serbo-Croatian to come out. After a minute without response, it was my turn to yell. I had memorized two words in Romany, Gavva na, which I had been told meant ‘Don’t hide,’ and I screamed them repeatedly while Goos stalked around, calling out more or less what he had last week when Ferko was actually here.

  With our signal, the troop truck steamed between the gates and, without stopping, drove right through Ferko’s double front doors, which popped off like a Lego toy. From behind, the soldiers in the 4x4 immediately deployed.

  While Goos and I flattened ourselves against the stucco walls by the front doors, four soldiers in full combat array, including helmets and the same body armor we wore, ran to cover the rear. Four more fanned out behind us with their weapons pointed, while another foursome ran through the house, shouting in Bosnian as they cleared each room.

  After about ten minutes, Colonel Ruehl, at the SUV, circled his hand, which was the sign that the monks had just appeared at the door of the hospital in Madovic, prepared to depart.

  Now came my close-up. Behind the house, the Response Force members had covertly planted something like a cherry bomb, meant to sound like a blowout on the armored vehicle. At that bang, one of the soldiers protecting the courtyard was going to pretend to panic and fire his assault rifle toward the front door. One round would supposedly ricochet and strike me in the lower forearm. The uncomfortable part was that combat troops didn’t use blanks. Colonel Ruehl assured me that the shooter was a first-class marksman, but there was still going to be live fire within a yard of me, and in the moment, as three bullets suddenly chewed into the stucco, pulverizing it into a fine white dust, I didn’t need any acting lessons to scream as loud as I could and spin to the ground.

  The lieutenant rushed to me and emptied a vial of blood from inside his sleeve all over my hand, which he then wrapped in his bandanna. The troops on the perimeter ran to the rear and pretended to discover that the explosion was a blowout, not armaments, with the mounting of a spare undertaken with the speedy precision of a pit crew. The soldier who’d supposedly shot me dashed up to the lieutenant and me, pleading for understanding. Playing the sergeant, the lieutenant screamed out orders, still in Bosnian, while Ruehl and Goos and my accidental assailant all grabbed me by the elbows and dragged me to the SUV.

  The convoy was in motion immediately, but we were underway only a minute or two when a police car came tearing up. The cop clearly had been watching from someplace below us. The Bosnian-speaking sergeant leaned out his window to explain I had been shot accidentally and had suffered an arterial bleed and would be dead shortly unless they got me to a surgeon. Lying across the backseat of the SUV, with my back against the rear passenger’s-side door and my hand in the air, I did my part by moaning and crying out, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

  I don’t know what the cop’s orders were—he probably was unwitting and simply reporting to a superior officer—but he bought what he was told completely. He sprinted back to his vehicle and set off his Mars lights and the hee-haw siren to lead us at maximum speed as we tore through Vo Selo and reached the mountain road. The 4x4 was next, with us in the SUV right behind it. The armored vehicle, trailing because of the tire change, arrived at the rear of the speeding convoy. It was impressively nimble and stayed on our tail, even though we were going over 100 kilometers per hour on the straightaways.

  In the SUV, Goos and I said very little. The radio screamed at intervals with at least six different voices. Two or three soldiers somewhere were continuing the Bosnian narration of events, but Ruehl now and then switched to a NATO frequency for brief traffic in English. I took it that Kajevic, code-named Vulture, and his bodyguards were so far unsuspecting and still walking in slow procession from the hospital toward the monastery.

  We were no more than a minute outside of Madovic when an emergency call barked from the radio.

  “Up high, they see us coming and don’t like it,” Ruehl explained. NATO was all over the radio traffic from the monastery. Whoever watched out for Kajevic had ordered the local police to do what they could to detain us.

  As we spun through the last turn on the hillside, we could see that the cop who’d been leading us had suddenly pulled over with his beacons still spinning. He was out of his
car, one hand in a white glove raised to bring us to a halt. With the radio mike to his mouth, Ruehl ordered the convoy to proceed at top speed. The troop truck bore down on the cop and he sprang out of the way at the last second, literally diving off the road, while the vehicle hit his hat, which had gone flying. As we tore by, I could see the officer lying in a bush about six feet below the roadside, with a hand over his head to shelter him from the dust and flying gravel.

  We were coming straight downhill and must have reached the turn to Madovic at about 60 miles per hour, skidding around it. One of the strengths of the plan to seize Kajevic on the way back to the monastery was, as General Moen explained, that Vulture could not get any visual directions from the top of the mountain. The infrared surveillance of the bodyguards, which had detected the AKs under the rassas, had shown no radios. But that missed the obvious.

  As we flew into Madovic, just above the main square, the three monks were in sight. They had come to a halt a hundred yards in front of us on the narrow road that crossed through the town. One of the three had his cell phone to his ear. Looking back, I saw a black sedan throwing a fog of dust as it raced down from the monastery, while police sirens were suddenly echoing from at least two directions.

  Halfway to the monks, our SUV stopped. The 4x4 braked another twenty yards ahead, while the armored vehicle surged to the front, bearing down on Kajevic. Goos and I were supposed to take shelter on the floor, but instead we knelt in the foot wells, our eyes just high enough to see through the windows on Goos’s side. The SUV was parked laterally to block the road, and Ruehl and the driver jumped out to take up spots behind the vehicle, the young driver leveling his assault rifle across the hood. Crouched beside him, Ruehl raised the electric megaphone. In front of us the troops flowed out of the rear of the 4x4 in precision, each one rolling as he or she landed and quickly assuming a combat position on their bellies with their rifle sights trained on Kajevic and his bodyguards, only a few yards away. The four supposed tourists, with their hidden pistols now drawn, had crept near the monks to close off the rear.