by Mike Maden
They woke up famished and attacked an amazing breakfast buffet of local meats, cheeses, specialty dishes, and just about anything sweet Jack could think of, along with strong black coffee and orange juice. Aida devoured two helpings of ratatouille, not Jack’s idea of a breakfast dish. She listed the sites they could see as they left Mostar, including the sixteenth-century dervish tekija, a monastery built into the side of a cliff, and the Catholic pilgrimage city of Medjugorje, where the appearance of the Virgin Mary to six Herzegovinian children in 1981 was commemorated.
She then began describing the windy Vjetrenica cave, one of the largest in Europe . . .
But Jack hardly heard a word. He just fell deeper into her stunning blue eyes. He grabbed her by the hand, tossed the desk clerk an extra twenty-euro note for a late checkout, and took her back to their room.
* * *
—
They arrived in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in the early afternoon. Situated on the coast of the dazzling blue Adriatic, the gleaming white medieval city glowed beneath the sun. It reminded Jack of Minas Tirith from the Lord of the Rings movies. The only problem was that Gandalf—Gerry—had already sent him two anxious texts: Where the hell are you?
“Problem?” Aida asked.
“Just my boss. Wants me to cut my vacation short.”
“You Americans work too hard.”
Jack texted back. I’m in Dubrovnik. Perfect weather. Four more days, guaranteed.
Gerry wrote back. The girl?
Yup
Would I like her?
Yup
Your dad?
Yup
Your mother?
Yup X 2
Since nothing confirmed on our end regarding your situation and against my better judgment I’ll give you four more days. But that’s it. Check in daily and stay alert. Understood?
Understood
“All good?” Aida smiled hopefully.
“All good.” Except for the fact there might be a secret international criminal syndicate trying to murder him. But he dismissed it. If there was a real problem, Gerry would have told him.
The tourist traffic was bumper-to-bumper across the 1,700-foot Franjo Tuđman Bridge, an ultramodern steel-cabled structure featuring a giant A-shaped pylon, a real contrast to the fitted, ancient stones of the Old Town.
They finally made their way to Lapad, one of the newer suburbs of the city, where Aida said she owned an apartment.
She pulled up to a small warehouse, its steel door shut. She called a number on her phone and a moment later the steel door was rolled open by a Croatian man in grease-stained gray coveralls. His eyes narrowed at the sight of Jack, but he didn’t say a word as Aida pulled in and the garage door closed behind them.
“This will just take a minute,” Aida said as she got out.
“No problem.”
Jack watched Aida and the Croatian wander over to a pallet stacked with cardboard boxes stamped in Croatian he couldn’t read but with medical symbols he recognized, including the Staff of Asclepius. Aida had told him the reason she needed to come to Dubrovnik was to pick up some medical supplies. He assumed it would be at a pharmacy or a hospital, not an unmarked warehouse in a semi-suburban neighborhood.
He watched Aida chatting it up with the expressionless Croatian, and what little he could hear of it was in a language he didn’t speak. The man kept his heavy hands shoved into the pockets of his coveralls, his eyes shifting back and forth between Aida and Jack.
Aida turned around once or twice, offering Jack a wide smile while she kept speaking, and Jack returned it, but he got the sense the conversation was a little more heated than Aida was letting on.
Finally, the Croatian nodded. Aida pulled out cash from her pocket and counted off a number of bills that Jack couldn’t make out. Apparently, it was enough. The stone-faced Croatian finally smiled and took the cash.
Aida came back over to the van and stuck her head in the window. “Ready to go?”
“Everything okay?”
“Sure. We’ll just leave the van here. Parking on the street is no good at my place. It’s not far.”
“Works for me.”
They pulled their two wheeled bags out of the back of the van as the Croatian rolled up the steel door again, shutting it behind them as they started up the steep concrete hill toward her apartment.
“So those were the medical supplies you came for?”
“Yes.”
“There was a problem, though.”
“Not a problem, a misunderstanding. All good now.”
The diesel engine of a giant silver Mercedes tour bus roared in their ears as it passed by. Several white-haired tourists stared blankly at them out of their smoke-tinted windows.
The hill got steeper as they walked. It reminded Jack of a summer he had spent in San Francisco. The air here on the coast was cooler and there was a slight breeze. They passed several staircases climbing up to homes and apartments built on the hills ascending from the street. Jack was glad he wasn’t on crutches or in a wheelchair living in this city.
“So, I’m curious. Why drive all the way to pick up the meds? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to order them by mail? Fly them in?”
“Sadly, it’s cheaper to do it this way. The clinic can’t afford the—how do you Americans say it? The ‘five-finger discount’?”
“You’re worried about stuff getting stolen?”
“Sometimes high-value cargo gets ‘inspected’ by customs agents, and things disappear. And then there is the red tape, which magically disappears once a handful of cash appears. Or sometimes things get impounded and the shipment is never seen again.”
“So, basically, you’re smuggling.”
“Well, yes. I suppose you could call it that.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
Aida tilted her head. “Yes, of course. But it was illegal to smuggle black slaves on the Underground Railroad, too, wasn’t it? Why should I let corrupt and greedy politicians rob poor refugees of the medicines they need?”
“I expect that kind of thing in the Third World, not Europe.”
Aida stopped in her tracks, fighting a smile. “Oh, Jack. Are you really so naive? Do you think such things don’t happen all over Europe? And in your country as well?”
“What do you mean?”
“How do you suppose so many billions of dollars’ worth of drugs and smuggled people and guns and everything else illegal gets into your country every year? Do you think it could be done without bribing judges and mayors? Do you think there are no American border guards and customs officers on the payrolls of the Mexican Mafia?”
Jack should have known better. His grandfather was a Baltimore police detective, and Jack had heard stories over the years of all manner of big-city corruption and crime. He just thought—or, rather, hoped—those days were long past in his country.
They trudged along like Sherpas for another hundred yards and Aida stopped again. “We’re here.”
Jack glanced up the staircase. He’d skied on Colorado mountain slopes that weren’t as steep.
Aida laughed, collapsing her telescoping bag handle. “If it’s too much for you, I’ll carry your bag.”
Jack collapsed his handle, too, and snatched up her bag. “I’ve got the bags. Start climbing, Sir Edmund.”
Seventy-seven steps later, they made a sharp left turn onto a landing, and then another right, and up yet another twenty-seven steps through a vine-covered archway gate. Aida pulled out a set of keys and opened the door on her front porch.
The apartment was small but clean, decorated with local art pieces, and full of comfortable and stylish furniture. Best of all, from her front porch was a view of the Adriatic Sea. A cruise ship was passing by, trailing a small wake, heading south for the Old Town.
“Can I get you something to drink b
efore we leave? Water? Beer?”
“‘Leave’?”
Jack was surprisingly exhausted from the arduous climb. Nearly two weeks without a serious workout and overindulging in rich food and carb-loaded beer hadn’t exactly enhanced his physical conditioning.
“We’re going to tour the Old Town. It’s beautiful this time of day, and then I know a great place for dinner.”
49
Jack and Aida took a Dubrovnik city bus to the Pile Gate in the Old Town and crossed over the moat beneath the iron bars of the portcullis, just like in an old Hollywood movie. They climbed up the stone stairs beyond the gate and paid for their tickets for the wall walk, and they strolled the perimeter of the ancient port citadel.
The wide, towering walls provided picture-perfect glimpses of the glassy Adriatic Sea, the sturdy St. Lawrence fortress just beyond the western wall, and the city’s old battlements, Croatian flags snapping in the breeze. Tour boats, yachts, and cruise liners were at their slips or heading out, as rental kayaks bobbed up and down near the walls.
Directly below, Jack saw the smooth, tightly fitted stones of the city streets crowded with international tourists, Renaissance-era churches, and innumerable shops. He could definitely feel the Venetian influence on the architecture.
Aida explained that the Serbs bombarded the city at the beginning of the war, and pointed out the original faded red roof tiles and then the newer, brighter ones that had been replaced after the shelling finally stopped.
“How long was the siege here?”
“It lasted from October 1991 until May 1992.”
“Eight months? The casualties must have been terrible.”
“Less than a hundred civilian deaths and less than two hundred military killed.” She added dismissively, “That was their war.”
They descended the wall into the city and she dragged him through the crowds to a few of her favorite shops, but she could tell Jack was less than interested.
“Something wrong, Jack?”
“I noticed a lot of Game of Thrones merchandise in the windows.”
“They shoot some of the series in Dubrovnik. You can even take Game of Thrones–themed tours if you want.”
“Don’t get me wrong. The city is beautiful, but some of it feels like a Renaissance version of a shopping mall.”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right. But shopping is what tourists do, isn’t it? And Dubrovnik is all about tourists.”
“I guess I’m just not a big shopper.”
“Hungry?”
“Starving. Where’s that restaurant you were talking about?”
Aida smiled.
They raced back to her place and messed up her bedsheets with rigor before she ordered up a hand-tossed pizza from a local restaurant while Jack opened a bottle of fine Croatian red wine.
This was definitely Jack’s favorite restaurant in Dubrovnik, but he wouldn’t be posting about it on TripAdvisor.
* * *
—
While Jack and Aida feasted on their delivered pizza and red wine, the grease-stained Croatian bolted shut the last case of handguns in the secret compartment wedged into the undercarriage of the Happy Times! tour van. He then wiped on a couple handfuls of manufactured road grime to camouflage the compartment just in case an honest cop decided to put a mirror to the undercarriage at the border crossing. He slid out from underneath and dusted himself off, satisfied that the medicines were as well hidden as the guns. The van was ready to go now.
Time to find something to eat.
SARAJEVO, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
Cenk Yılmaz, an ethnic Turk, was happy.
The room he supervised was working exactly as he had designed it, humming with the murmur of excited young voices sharing ideas and the rapid clicking of computer keyboards.
As a former Facebook employee with contacts still working in Menlo Park, Yılmaz possessed an intimate working knowledge of the complex algorithms that drove social media trends across all the major platforms. He’d personally trained each of the fifteen men and three women working this evening, pushing out the next social media campaign he’d designed.
By his calculation, within hours, four hundred thousand Bosniaks would be raging at their computers and smartphones over the Muslim wedding massacre.
The talent in the room was divided into two distinct parts: the humans and the bots.
Over the past two years, Yılmaz had used his human engineers to create dozens of fake but prominent social media accounts of “ordinary” Croats, Serbs, and Muslims, primarily on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and popular Bosnian blogging sites. Several of the fake accounts had garnered tens of thousands of devoted followers across the country and throughout the region in both the Serbo-Croatian and English languages. No matter how hard the coding wizards in Silicon Valley tried, nobody had yet come up with software that could simulate the authentic engagement of actual human minds. These human-orchestrated accounts were the platforms where Yılmaz’s important messages were first deployed. Any message put on them would instantly touch thousands.
But in order to get those messages to go viral and reach hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of people with sudden impact, his other, nonhuman team jumped into action.
Yılmaz understood better than most the Achilles heel of all social media platforms: They were their own worst enemy. Social media platforms were designed for the sole purpose of drawing as many eyeballs as possible to their sites in order to sell ads to advertisers.
Social media platform algorithms were always on the lookout for hot new trending topics and looking to point their consumers to those same hot trends, and in turn make those pages even hotter. The more popular the trend, the more eyeballs on the page and the more advertising money the platform could make.
The challenge for any blogger or poster was to find a way to get their blog or post trending. Technicians like Yılmaz knew the answer: Fake it.
Yılmaz’s cadre of talented software programmers designed and deployed social media bots. These bots—automated software programs—amplified each human post, “Like,” and tweet with thousands of new software-generated Likes, posts, and tweets, along with retweets and reposts, making it appear as if an avalanche of interest and engagement was coalescing around the original human content.
Suddenly, “hot” trends manufactured by Yılmaz and his team became hotter and hotter as more and more people became aware of them, fueled by the social media platforms’ own search algorithms. This created an exponential increase in social media attention for any news item Yılmaz was directed to exploit. He further capitalized on the situation by deploying commercially available analytical tools such as BuzzSumo and DataMinr, which identified and even contributed to emerging social media trends.
Using the carefully edited photos and videos he’d received from the Višegrad wedding massacre, Yılmaz deployed both his humans and his bots to begin a campaign to manufacture Muslim outrage, first in Bosnia, and then, he hoped, throughout the Muslim communities of Europe and, eventually, the world. The first Facebook post that started gaining viral traction ended with the hashtag #remembersrebrenica.
His main concern was that companies like Facebook had recently begun to take extra precautions against the governments and criminal organizations corrupting and hijacking their algorithms. But Silicon Valley paid scant attention to Bosnia and didn’t deploy enough software-generated assets in Serbo-Croatian for shadow banning or any other defensive measures to be of any concern.
If Yılmaz was wrong he’d know soon enough, but he hoped his phone call to his employer would be a pleasant one. Judging by the gruesome massacre images now being pushed out onto the Internet, Yılmaz understood the brutal consequences of failure for him and his team.
Red Wing was not a forgiving person.
50
NEAR BLAGAJ, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
The one place Jack wished he had seen on the way out to Dubrovnik was the dervish tekija overlooking the Bruna River. So, on their return leg, they left Dubrovnik in time to arrive at about noon to tour the sixteenth-century cliffside monastery, and then to sample the special trout at the nearby riverside restaurant. That left them enough time to get back to Sarajevo before dark if they kept moving.
A kilometer south of Blagaj, Aida and Jack spotted a Bosnian policeman standing in the road behind his unmarked car with a sign that read GRANIČNA INSPECKCIJA and waving a red flashlight baton, indicating where they should exit the road.
“My Bosnian isn’t so good, but that looks like a customs inspection.”
“Not a problem,” Aida said. “Open the glove box, please.”
Jack opened it and saw a folded stack of Bosnian marks in a money clip. He handed it to her as she slowed to a stop. She peeled off a large bill as she rolled down her window and spoke to him in their native tongue. But neither the sweet talk nor the cash had the desired effect, and the sour-faced policeman simply shook his head and pointed the baton in the direction of the exit.
Aida gave up, muttering under her breath, and headed down the dirt incline.
“So maybe it is a problem,” Jack said. For a brief moment, he wondered if this might have been the Iron Syndicate hit Gerry had warned him about.
She shook her head. “More money, that’s all. They’re all greedy bastards.”
She seemed confident enough, so Jack relaxed. The van kicked up dust as it rapidly descended toward the river, far below the highway above and out of sight of any passing traffic.
Jack turned around and saw the unmarked police vehicle following them down the same dirt path in their cloud of dust.
Not a good sign.
Two masked policemen in tactical gear stood down by the river where the dirt road ended. The tall one had a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun on a sling. The shorter carried only a pistol on his hip. He pointed to a spot just in front of him, indicating where Aida should park the van.