The Wolf of Sarajevo

by Matthew Palmer

  Sarah picked it up and examined it the way a jeweler might inspect an especially precious stone. There was a gleam in her eye that Eric interpreted as triumph.

  “What is it?” Stefan asked.

  “The Holy Grail,” Sarah replied with deadly seriousness.

  “Let’s see what’s on the tape,” Eric said.

  “That won’t be so easy,” the priest observed. “That tape will require a special player or the original camera. I don’t have either of those.”

  “No,” Eric agreed, before turning to look at Sarah. “But you do, Sarah, don’t you?”

  The expression on Sarah’s face hardened, and for a moment, she looked ready to launch into a vigorous denial. Eric looked her hard in the eyes and shook his head slightly. Don’t even think about it.

  “It’s in the car,” she said.

  Eric could feel the anger building in him. He had tried to deny the truth, but there was no escaping it. Sarah had been drip-feeding him the bare minimum of information to keep him engaged. She had used him in the same way she had used the set of lock picks in her pocket, as a tool to open doors that would otherwise have been closed. She had manipulated his emotions and his ambitions with ruthless efficiency.

  In truth, he could not really blame her for that. That’s what they taught you to do in the CIA. He should have expected nothing different from Sarah, no matter the past they had once shared.

  Eric motioned for the tape and Sarah handed it over to him, doing her best to look hurt at this show of distrust.

  “Afraid I’ll make a run for the Mexican border?” she asked.

  “The thought had occurred to me.”

  “You understand so little, Eric.”

  “I know.”

  —

  Ten minutes later, Sarah set a black Kevlar computer bag on the table. She removed a laptop then a video camera. Clunky and oversize. A relic of twentieth-century technology. A time when it looked like the Japanese would rule the world.

  “JVC,” Eric said. “Where did you even find that?”

  “On eBay.”

  Sarah hooked up the camera to the computer and popped the tape into place. She fiddled with the connections until the computer screen was displaying the picture from the camera.

  Sarah put a finger on the play button.

  “Do you really want to do this?” she asked, with a note of what Eric took to be compassion, either genuine or feigned with remarkable skill. It was possible that Sarah could no longer tell the difference.

  “Yes.”

  She looked over at Stefan and then back at Eric.

  “Let him stay,” Eric said. “He earned it.”

  Sarah shrugged.

  She pressed play.

  —

  The picture was dark and grainy. The resolution was poor, and the cameraman had had trouble keeping the image focused and stable.

  It was a large room of some kind. There looked to be hundreds of people inside packed close together, some standing, most sitting on the floor with their heads bowed as though in prayer. Some of those standing were armed with rifles.

  The camera panned across the room, settling for a moment on a sign painted on the wall. Eric recognized the logo and there was a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  SREBRENICA TRACTOR COLLECTIVE.

  Srebrenica.

  It haunted him still. There was no escape from it.

  Eric found himself unconsciously craning his neck as if that would somehow give him a better view of the men he now recognized for what they were. Prisoners. Men and boys condemned to die not for what they had done, but for who they were.

  Eric was looking for one familiar face. For his friend. For Meho.

  Sarah hit the pause bottom and turned to face him.

  “Eric . . .”

  Wordlessly, he reached across her and pushed play.

  There was no narrative. It was a seemingly unconnected series of images and vignettes. This was raw footage. The cameraman could be heard laughing and joking with his unseen friends about what they were doing.

  “Look at these sheep,” one disembodied voice said.

  “Sheep? I only see pigs.”

  The doors at the far end opened with a clang of metal, and a tall man, his face hidden under a green balaclava, strode onto the factory floor like a conquering caesar. The cameraman zoomed in for a close-up. Eric could see the lizard patch on the shoulder of his uniform. The Green Dragons. Eric did not need the unit insignia to identify the man. This was Captain Zero, the last indicted war criminal from the Balkan conflicts still at large. But Zero was known only by his nom de guerre, and the tribunal’s prosecutors had long ago given up hope of bringing the infamous paramilitary leader to justice.

  The cameraman settled on Zero’s face. The eyes behind the mask were like black pits. There was something familiar about them, something that danced on the edge of Eric’s recognition. Where had he seen those eyes before?

  Captain Zero marched confidently to the middle of the large room. And Eric got his first glimpse of Meho, sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor not ten feet from the leader of the Green Dragons. Meho’s head was bent to his chest, his shoulders slumped.

  Eric’s throat tightened. He reached for the screen as though he thought he could touch his friend, comfort him in his time of need. But Meho was long dead.

  Sitting next to his friend was a man that Eric recognized as a younger version of the caretaker at the Srebrenica genocide memorial who had given him the message from Meho that it was not his fault. Eric had rejected that offer of forgiveness until just now. He had had no one to blame but himself. Eric was alone with his “if onlys.” Now his rage and anguish had a target. The man in the green mask. Captain Zero. This was the monster who had killed his friend.

  On screen, Meho raised his head and seemed to lock eyes with Captain Zero. The paramilitary had turned to face him, and his back was now toward the camera. With one hand, he grabbed the balaclava and pulled it off over his head. The picture quality was not good enough to read Meho’s expression, but Eric had no doubt that his friend would have understood the meaning of this gesture. Death to all.

  The paramilitaries kicked the prisoners to their feet and drove them outside with the liberal use of their rifle butts. The cameraman followed. The next scenes were a disjointed blur of groups of men walking through the dark. They knew as surely as Eric did with the benefit of hindsight what was going to happen. But there was nothing that they could do.

  The prisoners were forced to kneel facing a ditch. The paramilitaries went down the line shooting men and boys in the back of the head.

  The concentration camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Jasenovac. Tuol Sleng prison in Cambodia. The Nyarubuye Catholic church in Rwanda’s Kibungo Province. The killing fields of Srebrenica. It all came down to the same thing.

  Genocide.

  Captain Zero himself was executing prisoners with an enormous pistol, killing each man with a single shot to the head then moving on to the next victim. The gunshots were loud barks, sharp and final. Zero’s face was obscured by shadows and impossible to make out.

  Meho was on his knees. Waiting for Captain Zero. Waiting for death.

  Eric could only watch in horror as the paramilitary leader approached Meho, knowing that the murder of his friend and colleague was simultaneously seconds away and twenty years in the past.

  Zero’s advance was inexorable and pitiless. As he stepped behind Meho, the Green Dragon was caught in the headlights of one of the earthmoving machines that could be heard growling in the background. For a moment, his face was clearly visible. Eric hit the pause button and used the computer to zoom in on Captain Zero. At high magnification, the image was blurry, but the face was unmistakable.

  He was a bit heavier now and a bit fleshier around the jowls. There was gray
in his hair now. It had been twenty years, after all.

  But the eyes were the same.

  The blood drained from Eric’s face and he felt light-headed.

  It made so much sense. And the implications were so terrible.

  He had seen those eyes before.

  Captain Zero was Zoran Dimitrović.

  —

  Father Stefan looked to be as devastated as Eric by what he had seen. His complexion was ashen, his expression somber. He brushed something from his cheek that might have been dirt but might also have been a tear.

  “I’m sorry,” the priest said in Serbian to no one in particular. “I did not know.”

  “There was no way you could, Father,” Eric said gently.

  “Those were ideas that I once supported, giving them life and flesh,” Stefan said. “I might as well have executed those men myself.”

  “Then it’s a good thing you’re in the redemption business.” Eric paused. “You did the right thing, giving this to us.”

  “Others need to see this,” Stefan said. “Everyone needs to see this. If only they knew. The Serbs need to go backward before they can go forward.”

  Eric understood. Too many on the Serbian side of the complex Balkan equation denied the reality of Srebrenica. The numbers were exaggerated, many claimed. It was hundreds, not thousands, as though that somehow justified industrial murder. Others acknowledged the crime, but insisted it was balanced by equivalent attacks against their own ethnic kin. Serbian civilians had been the target of ethnically motivated violence, even—in the case of the once-thriving Serbian community in Croatia—ethnic cleansing. But there was nothing like Srebrenica. Nothing that could balance the scales. Nothing but justice.

  For the Serbian public, rejection of the crime of Srebrenica had left them bewildered by the way they had been cast as the primary architects of Yugoslavia’s bloody breakup and the West’s rush to side with the Kosovo Albanians when the fighting flared in what had been Serbia’s southernmost province and was now Europe’s newest country. Western resolve to prevent a repeat of the horrors of Bosnia had motivated NATO to attack Serbia even at the cost of siding with the thuggish Kosovo Liberation Army, a group that straddled the line between paramilitary force and organized-crime network.

  “The world will know,” Eric said. “This cannot be denied. The tribunal will be able to use this tape to put Dimitrović in prison for the rest of his life. The world will see this. I’ll make sure of it.”

  Eric took the camera and hit the eject button. He removed the tape and stuck it in the inside pocket of his jacket. It was a kind of promise. Sarah looked sharply at Eric but made no effort to stop him.

  “This is a dangerous thing you are carrying,” the priest said.

  “Yes,” Eric replied. “But for whom?”

  “For everyone.”

  Eric looked over at Sarah, who was now avoiding his gaze. They had a great deal to discuss.

  “Stefan, could you give us a few minutes, please?”

  “Of course. There is more work to be done on the hives.”

  Stefan returned to his bees.

  They sat in silence for several minutes. Eric tried to order his thoughts.

  “So, do you want to explain this to me?” he asked finally. “It seems pretty clear that you knew what was on that tape. No. Not just knew. You had seen it before, hadn’t you?”

  “Yes, I had.”

  “You had this. The CIA had this.”

  “Yes. One of the Green Dragons made the tape on that awful night and he kept it. God knows what he was thinking. It’s like leaving a live bomb ticking in your living room. But when Dimitrović started his rise to prominence, the man recognized that he had something valuable to the right buyer. He reached out to us through a middleman with a proposal.”

  “What sort of proposal?”

  “Resettlement to the United States for himself and his family, a new identify, and a small suitcase of cash in exchange for the keys to Zoran Dimitrović’s soul. It seemed like a fair price.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “You have to understand, Eric. I wasn’t kidding when I told Stefan that this was the Holy Grail. Bosnia was falling apart. Our analysts were predicting another major war within the next eighteen months. Tens of thousands of dead. Hundreds of thousands of refugees. With this tape, we could do something. We could change the trajectory of the entire country.”

  “We have a treaty-level obligation to turn anything like this, all of the evidence, over to the tribunal for prosecution.”

  “Oh, grow up, Eric. That’s the past. There’s nothing you can do for the dead. Our concern was for the living and the future. If that’s not a higher calling, then I don’t know what is.”

  Eric shook his head. Sarah did not see it. The past and future were the same here. Stefan was right. The Serbs needed to come to terms with the past, to go back before they could go forward.

  “So what did you do with the tape?”

  “We made contact with Dimitrović. Made it clear to him that he belonged to us now and that he would do what we told him to, starting with enthusiastic support for revising the Dayton agreement and building a new unitary Bosnian state.”

  “Was this after his election?”

  Sarah’s look was bemused and maddeningly confident.

  “You still don’t understand. Dimitrović was on his way up, but he hadn’t made it all the way and there was no particular reason to believe that he would, at least not on his own.”

  Eric was stunned.

  “So you got him elected president of the RS? Knowing what he was, what he had done.”

  “Well, we did our bit. Money. Information. Access. Positive press coverage. More money. These are the things on which political success is built. We didn’t steal the election, if that’s what you mean. It’s been a while since we did that sort of thing. But we sure did make it easier for him. And when he won, we owned him. And we used him. And we were winning, Eric. We were so close.”

  There was more to the story, Eric understood.

  “How did you lose control of the tape? Weren’t there copies?”

  “Not as many as you might think. We had to keep the operational circle on this thing small. Very small.”

  “Why? You guys don’t do anything small.”

  “The operation wasn’t entirely . . .” Sarah struggled visibly for the right word. “Official.”

  “Are you shitting me? You were running the president of the RS as an asset off-the-books without authorization?”

  Sarah raised her chin in a gesture of defiance.

  “Yes. We did that. I’d do it again in a heartbeat. If we went through channels, this thing would have gotten caught up in the same kind of legalisms that you were talking about. We’d never have gotten approval for what we wanted to do. What we had to do.”

  “Maybe there’s a reason for that.”

  “Maybe. But the only one I can think of is the knee-jerk cowardice of bureaucracies, even . . . hell, maybe especially . . . intelligence bureaucracies. The whole torture-report fiasco has my headquarters afraid of its own shadow.”

  “All right. So you had your tight little team. And then somehow you lost control. What happened?” Eric could already imagine what the answer was to this question. There was no honor among thieves.

  “One of our number, a talented but relatively junior analyst, saw an opportunity for self-advancement. He stole every copy of the tape and wiped the system down so cleanly that we couldn’t recover so much as a byte.”

  “And he sold it to the Russians? Is that where Mali comes into the picture? Is he working for Moscow and the FSB?”

  “No, Eric. You still don’t see. The analyst who stole the tape was named Michael Kaspar. Yugoslav background. His father was Slovene. His mother was mixed Serbian and Croatian. He knows th
is place well and speaks the language like a native. He kept the tape for himself.”

  Sarah paused and looked Eric straight in the eyes before continuing.

  “Marko Barcelona is Michael Kaspar. He is one of our own.”

  TRNOVA, BOSNIA

  NOVEMBER 14

  1:25 P.M.

  31

  Eric was numb. He was beyond feeling. The video and Sarah’s revelations seemed to have overloaded both his intellectual and his emotional circuits. His thinking felt slow and clumsy, and he was moderately disoriented, something akin to the feeling of having had too much to drink.

  He bit the inside of his cheek hard, hoping that simple physical pain could help him cut through the fog that clouded his brain. What should he do with the new knowledge he had acquired? And what should he do with the videotape in his pocket? How much could he trust Sarah?

  This last question was the most difficult, the most layered, and the most painful. He loved Sarah fiercely and selflessly, but not to the point of delusion. She was unworthy of trust. It was hard to frame this thought. Unpleasant. But it was necessary for Eric to remind himself of this fundamental truth. Maybe she loved him back in some way, whatever minimal way she was capable of after allowing years of deceit to settle over the truth like a thick blanket of snow. Two decades in the world of espionage had done that to her, as it ultimately did to nearly every case officer working in the hall of mirrors.

  Sarah would sacrifice him in a heartbeat in pursuit of her goals and call it duty. She would shed a tear for him, but it would be more to valorize her own heroism than to mourn Eric’s loss.

  They sat under Stefan’s scarlet maple tree in a fragile silence, an uneasy truce. Sarah watched the priest work on his beehives. Eric studied her face. She was beautiful. But lots of women were beautiful. Sarah was more than that. She was powerful. She had a strength of will that would have driven Nietzsche to his knees in awe. It made her compelling, as addictive as the most powerful narcotic . . . and as dangerous.

  Stefan finished up whatever he had been doing with his hives and rejoined Eric and Sarah at the table.