Peacemaker

by Gordon Kent

  LaFond grunted. “I fired one of everything, ma’am. If not in anger, at least in some school or other.” Now, he slitted his eyes at her and said, “What’re you expecting, with all this firepower?”

  “I’m not expecting anything, Gunny. I just don’t want to be surprised. You heard about Fleetex?”

  He gave a thin smile. “Ma’am, I was there—on the flag deck.”

  “It’s not going to happen again.”

  He looked at her with the same hard squint. “Nothing personal, ma’am, but are you the Siciliano who was a chopper pilot that flew some gyrenes into Sudan and out again a couple years back?”

  “That was me.”

  LaFond turned to the three other marines. “She’s the one, guys.” He held out his hand to Rose. “Honored to serve with you, ma’am.”

  The hand was dry, the handshake quick and almost painful.

  “See you at the boat at 0800. Enjoy Naples.” See Naples and die, she thought. She gave them a big, big smile.

  At sea, aboard the Jackson.

  Rafehausen was in his pilot’s seat, going over checklists before a flight. She came in and gave him that big smile and went back to her seat, and he felt the sense of her like something embarrassing, a hot flash, something other people would see and laugh at. He kept himself under tight controls these days, not only with her but with everything. With Screaming Meemie most of all, whom he wanted to punch in the mouth and whom he probably would punch in the mouth when they were back on the beach.

  Maybe everybody on the boat was under tight self-control—too long without a break, too long boring holes in the air, troughs in the water, waiting for something to happen.

  He heard her swear, and then she was on her knees just behind him and to his right, just at the end of the tunnel. He made the mistake of looking back. She was there, head bent, picking up something. Gathering papers. And for an instant, the temptation to reach out and touch her hair was irresistible, and, afterward, he thought his hand had even moved, but he caught himself, feeling dizzy, and he almost said, Christy, I’m in love with you.

  But didn’t. Couldn’t. If he did, the squadron would explode. The ship would sink. The Navy would cease to exist.

  Discipline first, or chaos is come again.

  Belgrade.

  Draganica Obren was sitting in Z’s apartment. She was frightened but didn’t show it. Her nerve was shaken by the interrogation she had gone through, but she had a reserve of strength. She would survive, she knew, if she could get through this.

  Z’s wife sat facing her. She was smiling. She was a little plump, a little aged by having his children, a nice housewife. At first suspicious of Mrs Obren, she was open and friendly now, because Mrs Obren had the power to charm.

  Mrs Obren was selling cosmetics. Or that was what she said when she appeared at the door. She had a free gift, she had said, for every woman who would look at her catalog; the gift was an expensive lipstick and eye shadow she had bought with her own money in a Belgrade store. The woman, this nice woman, this smiling cow, couldn’t resist the gift.

  And now here she was. She needed only to find a way to turn the conversation to the husband. She knew how; she would introduce the subject of the schoolteacher and say that he was a friend in common, what a small world. And the pleasant cow would agree, and they would talk of people they both knew—Do you know So-and-so, she lives in RS, too? Do you know X? Do you know Y? And then she would talk of husbands: My husband does this; my husband says; Does your husband—?

  And then, Where is your husband?

  The cow smiled.

  Mrs Obren sipped her sweet tea and smiled. She had praised the children, the tastefulness of the room, the smell of baking bread. She smiled. Now, she thought. Sweat trickled from her underarms and moistened her brassiere. Now, I will mention the schoolteacher, and she—

  A sound like a rat chewing, a kind of scratch, then a single knock. The wife made an exasperated sound and went to the door like a woman who knew who it was and didn’t want to see him.

  She opened the door.

  It was the schoolteacher. He came in, all the way into the room, and only then did he look at Mrs Obren. They looked at each other, and in an instant she understood: he had been following her ever since she had crossed the border into RS.

  “What is this woman doing here?” he demanded.

  33

  December 5–8

  Next day. The border of Bosnia and Republika Srpska.

  Dukas is waiting for her. He has been waiting for two days, and she is overdue, and in another three hours it will be dark and she won’t come and it will be over.

  He is sitting in a collapsing farmhouse that was hit by an artillery round in the last days of the war. The ground slopes down from the remains of the farmyard to the border, which is only a string of signs here that warn of a minefield that may be real or that may simply have been a cruel invention of the Serbs as they pulled out. One day soon, NATO will get to it and sweep it, but for now it is real and made more so by the bones of a dead horse through whose pelvis the border runs. Dukas has been watching a crushed-stone road and the border posts along it—one down at the bottom of the hill where Bosnia begins, and another a hundred meters along where Republika Srpska starts. This is the American Zone, both sides, and the American forces come and go to patrol both sides—equally, they say—but when they go into RS they go in Bradleys or tanks or armored Humvees.

  If she comes, she will come here. That was the plan, the only plan.

  He waits. Next to him, Pigoreau waits. Pigoreau is there mostly to keep Dukas from doing something stupid when—if—she appears. Pigoreau has convinced him that Zulu or people near Zulu will use this opportunity to kill Dukas. It is a perfect setup, with Mrs Obren the perfect bait.

  “She’s not coming,” Dukas says.

  Pigoreau shrugs. Pigoreau hopes she isn’t coming. To Pigoreau, she is nothing but trouble.

  They wait another twenty minutes. The shadows of the trees up the hill in RS are getting long, painted across the melting snow in dirty lines. A bus appears on the RS side.

  “There’s the bus,” Pigoreau says. “Late, of course.” He lights a new cigarette. They have been seeing the bus go back and forth every day.

  After twenty minutes, the bus gets through the checkpoint and starts down the hill. At the bottom, it stops at the Bosnian checkpoint and the American soldiers get aboard and look around. Dukas studies the bus with binoculars and his heart lurches because he sees her by a window. “There she is,” he says.

  “Shit,” Pigoreau says.

  “She made it. By Christ, she made it!” Dukas grins and starts to get up, saying, “It worked, it’s going to be okay,” but Pigoreau pulls him down and back, away from the window.

  They watch the bus come through the checkpoint and stop again and let three passengers off. One is Mrs Obren. Dukas, watching her in the binoculars, sees that she is smiling. She looks happy. Happy because she thinks she is going to see him? No, that can’t be. Why is she happy?

  A green Yugo has pulled up at the far checkpoint, pulled over by the side of the road. Dukas sees it but does not think about it. Pigoreau, however, is watching it intently in his own binoculars. Below them, one of their men is getting out of his car and is walking toward Mrs Obren. Pigoreau insisted on doing it that way. The man is Belden, a young Brit from Cardiff. He is wearing a raincoat. From here, he looks like Dukas, and that was what Pigoreau intended.

  “It’s the schoolteacher,” Pigoreau says. He is looking at the green Yugo. He sounds grim. He pulls a radio from his belt and flips it on and snarls, “Belden, get out—get out—!”

  Dukas sees Belden hesitate, and then he and Mrs Obren vanish in an explosion of flash and fire, and the concussion wave rolls up the hill, bending the leafless bushes and small trees, and a man who had got off the bus with Mrs Obren flies sideways, blood squirting over the snow; the green Yugo turns back into RS and disappears; and the sound hits the ruined farmhous
e like the thump of a great drum, or a heart breaking.

  Sarajevo.

  After a false spring that had lasted only three days, Sarajevo was cold again and plunged back into winter. A little after five in the afternoon, dark already falling, and Dukas stood by his window, reading the last of a stack of files. When he had started reading, he had gone to the window for light; now, it was darkest there, but he read on, hearing the hiss of the snow against the glass but not noticing it. Pigoreau had brought the files in and left; he had stuck his head in twice, seen Dukas still reading, and left.

  Now, Pigoreau looked in again and Dukas, without looking up, waved him in. Burrowing in his pullover for a cigarette, Pigoreau took one of the two chairs, crossing the room bent over like somebody playing a servant in bad Chekhov.

  “What d’you think of the forensics? Hold up in court?”

  Pigoreau shrugged. “They’re Hungarians. Who knows?”

  “Ask them to do some more stuff on trajectories—the side of the bus, they didn’t do much on that. Ditto the flak jacket; see if we can get it for evidence and keep it, and ask them to get a statement from the soldier, exactly how he was standing, stuff like that. This isn’t for now; it’s for three, five years from now, when we get Zulu. I want to bury him in proof on this one. I know it’s Zulu.”

  “It was the schoolteacher.”

  “What’d IWCT say about him?”

  “No to making him a war criminal. This was terrorism aimed at us, is their position.”

  Dukas folded his hands over his gut and blew out a long sigh, his cheeks puffed like a trumpeter’s. “That’s the way I’d read it, too. How long before we have to turn him over?”

  “Now. Tomorrow at the latest. Federation cops wanted him since yesterday. US military want him. Your FBI ‘demand’ to have exclusive access to him. Everybody wants him. Maybe we should sell him.”

  “Maybe we should kill him, the sonofabitch. Okay, keep him at least until tomorrow, even if you have to move him again. Tell him this: it was real cute to use a detonator with an Islamic manufacture, but it won’t work. It was remote-detonated, Mrs Obren was his agent—we can prove it, tell him that—and it wasn’t suicide. Tell him that’s a nice soap opera, he has a very inventive mind, but we don’t believe he was up there in his car because he was worried about her mental state. He killed her, and this is why we know he killed her: Mrs Obren’s husband was in a prison for the criminally insane until the day before she was killed. Then he was moved, on forged orders, to a doctor’s office in Republika Srpska. She visited him there.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “I know that! Why the hell do you think she was so happy? Then she comes down here and he blows her up, to get one of us. That’s Zulu. I don’t know how he did it, but he did it. The schoolteacher doesn’t kill people on his own hook. Tell him if he cooperates, we’ll turn him over to the US military. If not, it’ll be the Federation cops. Remind him that one Bosnian was killed in the explosion and one lost an arm and an eye. Show him the pictures.”

  “He’s a fanatical pro-Serb. He thinks he’s a hero.”

  “I don’t care if he’s a fucking holy martyr. You let him have any idea of himself he likes. Just find out about Zulu.”

  Pigoreau went out, and Dukas started through the files again. He was still there at one in the morning when Pigoreau threw himself into the other chair. “He’s giving us shit. Nothing, he won’t crack.”

  “Give him to the Federation. Right now. Give him to that Bosnian detective, what’s his name?—Rago—Raguz. The big one with the shaved head. Tell him if he gets the dope on Zulu from the schoolteacher, we’ll drop a Bosnian name from our active war-criminal list.” Dukas looked at Pigoreau, gray-faced in the bad light. “Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m being a bad cop. Well?”

  Pigoreau stood up. “What you do is okay with me, Michael. Just between you and me, I think Raguz himself should be on the war-crimes list.”

  Two days later, Dukas met Raguz in a cops’ café and was told that the schoolteacher said that Zulu himself had set up the murder of Mrs Obren, which had been meant to kill Dukas, by e-mail from Africa. “I believe him,” Raguz said. “He tells me the truth.” Raguz grinned, showing a gold tooth.

  “The FBI want to talk to him. What condition is he in?”

  “For a man who jumped out a third-story window, not bad.” Raguz said it exactly as if he believed it. “Now, you keep your word, Dukas—you take Bosnian name from war-crimes list?”

  “I can’t do anything but take one from my active list. The Hague draws the indictments.”

  Raguz got up. “I send you the name.”

  That day, Pigoreau had the results of a paid French hacker’s probes into Zulu’s web site (information provided, not quite intentionally, by NCIS via Dukas). The hacker had made a hit on another web site belonging to a French corporation called FranTek, and from that on a man named Lascelles. “I want to go overnight to Paris, Michael—I think this is something very big.”

  Dukas stared at him with what seemed like hostility. “Reporting in to the boss?”

  “It isn’t like that, Michael.” Pigoreau waited for some sort of blessing, didn’t get it. “They can help us, Michael.”

  “They haven’t helped us so far. Nobody much has helped us so far, have they? The CIA drops us a crumb and doesn’t send us what they’ve really got; you know they’ve got files, hunches, more photos—! You’d think we were fucking pariahs. Security risks! I’m a security risk to your people because I’m American; you’re a security risk to my people because you’re French. Okay, go to Paris. Tell them what we got. But look—” He seemed embarrassed. “Don’t give them Zulu on a platter, okay? He’s ours.”

  Pigoreau had been there when Mrs Obren was killed. “He’s yours, Michael,” he said.

  Paris.

  Pigoreau rolled quietly off the bed and began to look for clean clothes, still in their old places, although he’d hardly been there for months. He was quiet, but she heard him, and she rolled toward him, her cat’s eyes glittering at him.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  “You are always leaving me. You bastard.” She was slipping into one of her angry moods, of which she had quite a variety. They made her life interesting to her, he thought—to him, too. His groin felt exhausted, hollow; he had had no sleep because of love-making. That made their life interesting, too.

  “You’ve been with women in Bosnia,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  She laughed, a nasty, tough little laugh. “You bastard. If you bring me AIDS, I’ll kill you. I will, Jean-Luc! I’ll wait until you’re asleep and kill you with your own gun.”

  “Jealous wives use knives. Crime passionnel—a pretty woman like you can get off if she uses a knife. A gun—” He stuck out his lips and rocked one hand back and forth.

  “I wouldn’t go to trial; I’d have killed myself. Poison. I rather fancy poison. Something horrible—lye, I think. It burns you up from inside. Pain like the fires of hell.” Her eyes were bright. Sophie was a self-dramatist, not, he sometimes thought, an entirely sane one. Interesting to be married to, nonetheless.

  He bent and kissed her. “Drive me to the Quai d’Orsay.”

  “No.”

  “Do it. For love.”

  “Love, what do you know about love—? You bastard, you’re gone all the time, fucking other women, big Slav peasants with butts like car upholstery! I won’t drive you anywhere.”

  “Sophie—” They kissed. And kissed. Her mouth on his, she opened her eyes and saw his open. “Love me?” she said.

  “Too much. I feel as if somebody’s opened a tap in my feet.”

  She scrambled from the bed. “I know you, you bastard; you’ll be at it tomorrow all over again.” He heard the shower. In three minutes, she was out, dressing in clothes that were strewn around the room. She sniffed several of the things, rejected them, sniffed at something else. Finding a clean blouse, or at least one that passed the olfactory t
est, was the toughest. Pigoreau watched all this with affection. He hadn’t married her for her cleanliness. When he parted from her, they embraced for a long time, and she whispered, “I love you so much, you tough bastard. Come back to me.” Sophie was a statistician; she made better money than he did. The only really bad thing between them had been that he had been a cop in Lille, which she hated; now, with him in Bosnia, she had moved to Paris and was—not happy, because Sophie was probably incapable of happiness—but less unhappy. He squeezed her and got out of the car.

  At the Quai d’Orsay, the bureaucrats made a fuss about his getting in; he was just a cop there, and he had to send in his name and fill out a form and wear a special badge, like a boy who’s done something wrong at school. Still, he finally got up to the special-intel section, where he was led along a corridor and into Belloc’s office. Belloc looked fatter than ever, balder, wearier. He held out a pudgy hand and waved at a green chair.

  “So?”

  Pigoreau told him what had happened with Zulu—the killing of Mrs Obren, the unproven connection between Zulu and the 1994 shootdown in Rwanda, the computer trail.

  “That prick,” Belloc growled. He muttered into a desk phone and rubbed his forehead, offered Pigoreau coffee to fill the time, and, when a thinner, younger man came in, made Pigoreau tell it all over again. Then he introduced the man as Hamy. Just Hamy—no rank, no first name.

  “So,” Belloc said. “What’s it mean?” He looked first at Hamy, then at Pigoreau. Both men looked at Pigoreau.

  Pigoreau shrugged. “It means he was working for Lascelles when he shot down the plane in ninety-four. It means he’s in Africa now, working for Lascelles.” He began to search for a pack of cigarettes. He shot an eyebrow up. “You got anything on that?”