“What do you mean, you don’t have it?” she asked incredulously. “It was in your jacket pocket.”
With her left hand, Sarah patted his chest and sides, feeling for the telltale boxy shape of the videocassette. She found nothing.
“Where is it? Where did you put it?”
“Someplace safe.”
“Why?”
“I thought you might try to steal it. It never occurred to me that you might be willing to kill me to get it. I’m still not entirely persuaded.”
“No? Care to place a little wager on it?”
“Not really, no.”
Sarah stood up slowly, tossing her hair to the side of her face with a quick shake of her head. It was a thing she did that Eric had always liked. Sarah knew it and she used it. When Eric looked at her hands, the knife was gone, back in its hidden sheath. Where the knife had been, Sarah was holding her SIG Sauer. It was sleight of hand worthy of a stage magician.
“Let me reason with you, lover,” she said, as Eric stumbled clumsily to his feet. His body felt stiff and sore from the fight with the sniper, and his muscles were tense and soaked with adrenaline. He felt he might vomit.
“Reason was never really your strongest suit,” Eric said. He leaned on a concrete pillar for support.
“I have the facts on my side,” Sarah replied. She was pointing the gun at his feet rather than at his chest, but it was menacing enough. The steel beneath the velvet glove. “We want the same thing, Eric. To stop a war. No more killing. No more genocide. We can do that, but I need that tape.”
“No, you don’t, Sarah. With this tape as evidence the tribunal will take all of ten minutes to issue an indictment against Dimitrović. With Dimitrović gone, Mali—Kaspar—is nothing. He loses all of his influence. That opens the political space for people like Nikola and the peace movement in the RS. The Serbs are as sick and tired of the killing as anyone. The public wants peace. They want a deal. Annika can deliver that. Putting Dimitrović in prison will guarantee it.”
“Guarantee? Really, Eric? What kind of assurances can you offer? How the fuck do you know what’s going to happen with the Sondergaard Plan? Maybe it’ll all work out and we’ll all join hands and sing ‘Kumbaya’ around the campfire. Or maybe it’ll fall apart like every other Bosnian peace plan and they’ll all go back to killing each other, only this time our leverage over the sides won’t amount to diddly-squat because you’ll have wasted it putting one guy in a cushy Dutch prison with cable TV and turndown service.
“We saw what we can do with that tape. With it, we can control Dimitrović and make him dance to our tune. Then we can force the sides to a permanent peace whether they want it or not. I have real empirical evidence to back up my position. Hard facts. You have hopes and a saccharine-sweet belief in human perfectability. People aren’t like that, Eric. People are rat bastards who will rob you blind if you give them a six-inch opening. It’s in our nature.”
“You’re wrong, Sarah. About me. About Annika. About Bosnia. You don’t know this place like I do. You don’t know these people.”
“These people have been fertilizing their fields with the blood of their neighbors for a thousand years. You can’t believe that they’ve put that behind them. You can’t trust them to know what’s in their own best interest. We saw that in the nineties in spades.”
Sarah’s eyes were tough and flinty. Eric could hear the passion and intensity in her voice. She believed what she was saying, believed absolutely.
“I don’t give a shit who did what to who in the last century or six centuries before that, and neither do the vast majority of people on any side. They just want it all to be over.”
“But you do care about who killed who two decades ago, don’t you?”
Eric could see the blow coming as though in slow motion, but there was nothing he could do to protect himself from it. There was no defense against the truth.
“Is this all about you, Eric?” Sarah continued. “You get on your high horse and spout righteous nonsense, but this is really about Meho. Your guilt and your need for absolution. It’s selfish and narcissistic. Is it so important to you to punish your friend’s killer that you’d risk the lives of thousands of others? Tens of thousands? How many is too many? How many does it take to tip the scales?”
Eric was at a loss. He did not know the answer. Sarah had put her finger right on a question that had been scratching on the edge of his conscious thinking. Sarah was both well trained and intuitive. She sensed his confusion, and as was standard practice in her profession when finding a soft spot, she drilled down until she hit bone.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” she said almost triumphantly. “This is all about you. You feel bad and you think exposing Dimitrović as Captain Zero will make it all square. That it will fix whatever’s wrong with you. And maybe it’s about your mother as well. The Khmer Rouge killed her as surely as if they had put a gun to her head. You couldn’t get Brother Number One, but maybe Captain Zero will make up for that in some way. Why not? Ones and Zeros. But life isn’t binary, Eric. It’s all gray. And what’s at stake right now in this country is a damn sight bigger than you and your burden of guilt.”
“What about justice?” Eric asked, and he could hear the weakness in his response, feel himself losing the argument.
“What about it? Does it bring the dead back to life? Does it make the trauma of rape fade into the background for the thousands of victims? Justice is an abstraction. But what is going to happen here if you don’t give me that tape is going to be very, very real. The past is a foreign country. The past is history. What matters is the future.”
“Without the past, there is no future.” It sounded lame even as he said it. Trite. Empty.
“Where’s the tape, Eric?”
“You don’t need it. This can work. What Annika and I are doing. With Dimitrović gone, it can work.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I believe it.”
“I can’t afford to believe.”
“I can’t afford not to.”
“I don’t give a shit.”
“So what happens now?”
Sarah shot him.
It was intensely painful, and the pain as much as the force of the bullet knocked him hard to the concrete floor. But he knew that Sarah had taken careful aim. She had hit him in the upper leg, missing the bone. The bullet had carved a deep gash in his thigh. Blood was running freely from the wound and pooling on the floor, but there was none of the arterial gushing that would have indicated a serious injury. Eric had no doubt that Sarah could inflict that kind of wound if she chose to. This was a warning.
He struggled to a sitting position, back pressed against the pillar and his hand pressed against the wound in his thigh.
“Was that really necessary?”
“You tell me.”
“Goddamn it, Sarah, you shot me.”
“Yes. And I’ll shoot you again if you don’t give me the tape. The next one’s going to hurt.”
“So that’s how it is with you now? Torture’s okay as long as the ends justify the means. Did you guys learn nothing from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib?”
The flow of blood from his leg was already beginning to slacken. It hurt like hell, but it did not seem dangerous. He stretched the leg slightly to see if he might stand on it. A white-hot sheet of pain made him think better of it.
Sarah saw what he was doing.
“You’ll live, Eric. But I’m not screwing around here. The next round takes a knee. That one’s forever. I’m sorry about this. I really am. But there’s too much at stake.”
“I can’t believe you would really do that.”
“Try harder.”
Sarah swung the SIG Sauer to point at his right kneecap.
“Please, Eric,” she said, and there was a note of desperation in her voice. “I do
n’t want to do this. Don’t make me do this. Don’t make me be the monster.”
“Then don’t be one.”
“Give me the goddamn tape.”
“No.”
His obstinacy was surprising even to himself. But he believed every word of what he had said to Sarah even if he had not persuaded her. Maybe she was right about his guilt over Meho driving him. Maybe it was because of the ghosts that had haunted him from the day he had found his mother’s body in the garage. But there was more to it than that. Without justice, without an honest accounting of the past, whatever future was built in Bosnia would be unstable. Brittle. The peace plan that Annika and he had been fighting for could work. But only if the foundation was strong. Sarah’s way was an illusion. A shortcut. There were no shortcuts.
“I’m sorry, Eric,” she said. “Sorry about what I’ve done and sorry about what comes next.”
He felt it before he heard it. Vibrations in the concrete that became footsteps. Someone was coming up the stairs.
Sarah sensed it as well. She turned toward the stairwell as two black-clad policemen rushed toward them through the gloom. These were not traffic cops. Their uniforms marked them as Special Police, expensively trained by the United States as part of the Global War on Terror. They wore body armor and tactical helmets, and carried evil-looking machine pistols.
Eric realized that Dragan must have gotten his message and that he had sent in the heavies. The job of the Special Police was not to make arrests.
“Sarah, don’t!” Eric shouted, as she raised her weapon unthinkingly, reflexively.
The U.S.-trained antiterror police did not hesitate. They had rehearsed this scenario or one like it a thousand times. This was combat and Sarah was a target.
“Ne pucaj!” Eric called out helplessly, as he rose to his feet ignoring the pain in his thigh. Don’t shoot!
But they shot, first and expertly.
Eric saw three holes appear in Sarah’s back where the bullets from their machine pistols had passed straight through her torso.
The SIG clattered to the floor and Sarah spun to face Eric before collapsing into his arms. Eric went to his knees, cradling her head to keep it from hitting the floor.
Dragan appeared at the top of the landing, puffing and red with the exertion of the climb. He was no longer a young man. It took the former spy no more than a few seconds to process the scene.
“Kreteni!” he bellowed at the two men who had shot Sarah. Idiots!
Eric held Sarah to his chest as if they were lovers again. He could feel the sticky warmth of her blood soaking his jacket and shirt.
Her eyes were vacant and lifeless.
Just like he felt.
TRNOVA, BOSNIA
NOVEMBER 16
34
The bees were settled in for the winter. Soon Stefan and the monks down the hill would be doing the same. Winter in the mountains could be long and hard. The monks had laid in their store of provisions to see them through to spring. Cheese and smoked meat. Preserved fruit and jars of honey. There were potatoes and parsnips in the root cellar and oak barrels full of brine and cabbage heads that were slowly pickling. They would bake fresh bread in the monastery’s wood-fired ovens and wash it all down with the occasional glass of brandy.
The monastery had survived more than five hundred winters, and there was no reason to believe that it would not last for five hundred more.
Stefan had just finished installing the entrance cleats that would keep field mice from seeking shelter in the hives from the winter cold. He had also sealed the hives to guard against condensation. Bees were like people. They could survive the cold, but cold and wet would lead to hypothermia and that could kill the colony.
With that done, the bees would need little enough from him until spring. Winter was hard, but it was also a peaceful season. There was less labor and more time for quiet reflection. Even after twenty years, Stefan still had a great deal to reflect on. He remembered reading somewhere that the Chinese had a curse: May you live in interesting times. His time had certainly been interesting, and he understood full well what the anonymous sage from the Far East had meant. Interesting times required a man to choose. Stefan had chosen poorly. He would spend the rest of his life atoning for the choices he had made as a younger man when the times in Bosnia had been at their most interesting.
He had also made a mistake in agreeing to be the keeper of Mali’s secrets. He knew that now. After he had watched the tape of the Srebrenica murders, that conclusion was unavoidable. But it had been a deal with the devil from the very beginning and he should have seen it. He should have been stronger. No matter the good he had been able to do with Mali’s money, nothing pure could grow from an evil seed.
Stefan was glad that he had given the tape to the Americans. They were an odd people, Americans. They were like the Romans, vital and energetic, but limited in ways that they did not seem to understand. Their penchant for messianic thinking, for believing it their responsibility to remake the world in their own image, was especially hard to understand. You would think the Americans would learn from experience, but they seemed to repeat the same mistakes from Vietnam to Yugoslavia to Iraq to Afghanistan. The Americans were like some medieval physician prescribing a cure that was too often worse than the disease.
Still, he had liked the two who had come to see him. They seemed different. Less arrogant. Less entitled than the politicians and “peacemakers” he remembered from the 1990s.
They had taken the time to learn the language and the culture of the society they were working in, and they did not pretend to have all the answers. There had been something between those two, a spark of attraction and conflict that was unmistakable. They made an interesting pair, the man with dark skin and the woman of gold. He hoped she lived. Stefan did not listen to the news anymore, but if Darko from Vukovar had succeeded in murdering either the EU High Representative or an American embassy official, it was likely that he would have heard about it in some fashion.
Stefan stood by the chapel looking out across the valley. The sky was iron gray and it looked like it would rain soon. It would be a cold rain, the harbinger of winter.
A black jeep, one of the big ones, crested the rise and bounced down the uneven road to the monastery trailing a brown cloud of dust. Stefan knew that it was not a local vehicle. Farmers and villagers did not drive cars like that. Neither did monks or pilgrims. The big black jeeps were for politicians and businessmen and gangsters. It could sometimes be hard to tell them apart. Those groups mixed easily, often within the same person.
The jeep parked by the monastery and two men in dark suits got out. Even from his distant vantage on the hill, Stefan could see that they were large men. Tall and broad. Muscle rather than brains.
The men stopped one of the young monks and spoke to him. The monk pointed up the hill at Stefan’s chapel. At Stefan.
The two men climbed the hill through the tall grass. For such big men, their steps were oddly light and mincing as they dodged piles of sheep shit.
Stefan waited for them patiently, for the unavoidable, the inevitable.
When they reached the top, the men walked straight toward him. Their shirts and ties matched their shoes. All black. All they needed were hoods and a scythe to complete the look. For these men, the priest knew, were death itself.
“Father Stefan?” the larger of the two large men asked. His hair was cut military short and he wore dark sunglasses on an overcast day. His partner had longer hair pulled back in a ponytail and a three-day growth of beard.
“Yes,” Stefan said. “That is my name and title.”
“Mali sent us,” the man with the ponytail said, as though that were at all necessary. Who else would have sent men like these?
Stefan nodded his acknowledgment of their bona fides.
“You have something of his that you are keeping for him.�
� This was the larger man again. They seemed to take turns like two priests sharing a benediction.
“Marko Barcelona gave me something to look after,” Stefan answered.
Ponytail’s eyes narrowed some as he considered the carefully worded response. Muscle, but not stupid, the priest realized.
“Mali would like it back. He sent us to fetch it,” Ponytail said.
“How interesting. You’re too late, I’m afraid. The other two already came for it.”
The look of alarm on their faces was understandable, and Stefan felt himself moved to sympathy. Mali was not the kind to limit the responsibility for failure. The consequences for which could be severe.
“What do you mean, priest?” It was Crew Cut’s turn. “There is no one else. We are the ones Mali sent.”
“The others came here two days ago. A man and a woman. They knew what I was holding for Mali and they asked for it. I gave it to them.”
“How did you know that they worked for Mali?”
“Same way I know that you do. Who else would know about our arrangement? I certainly didn’t tell anyone.”
Stefan was careful in his responses. He did not want to meet his maker with a lie on his lips. There had been enough lies. But the truth was a malleable thing, not fixed and firm. If anyone knew this, it was priests.
Ponytail unbuttoned his suit jacket and reached inside with his right hand.
“If we can’t bring Mali the package, we will have to bring him your head. Tell us everything you know about the people who came here and told you they were with Mali, and it will be quick. Otherwise this could take some time.”
“You wouldn’t kill a priest, surely. It’s a grave sin.”
“No, Father. I am a godly man. But Suleiman here is from Sandžak and he’s a follower of Muhammad. I don’t think your death will disturb his sleep.”
“No,” Stefan agreed. “I don’t suppose it will matter much to anyone. Just to my bees.”
KRIVA RIJEKA
NOVEMBER 18
The Wolf of Sarajevo Page 30