by Evans, Jon
“What…that…what are you doing?”
“Oh.” She shook her head. “Just, I don’t know, checking up. No progress, not really. They caught some minnow guy who shelled Dubrovnik and they unsealed a bunch more warrants and indictments, that’s all.”
“You were checking up on Zoltan?”
She looked up at me, confused. “On who?”
“Zoltan,” I said. “That’s Zoltan.” I pointed at his picture. “The guy I told you about, who was with Sinisa. You met him, remember? For like ten seconds. Him and his wife Zorana. What are you looking at? What is this site?”
I peered at the picture, which was captioned ‘Zoltan Knezevic, born 26.07.69 Vojvodina, warrant date 13.08.03, no known alias.’ The photo was black and white, taken from his left side. It was a few years old but there was no doubt it was him.
“The guy who was with Sinisa,” Talena repeated slowly. She stared up at me as if I had spoken in some foreign language that she barely knew, and she had to slowly mentally translate. “You knew him. He was with Sinisa. This man right here,” she pointed at the screen, “you’re saying he was with Sinisa.”
“Yeah. What is this? How did you get this picture?”
“Oh my God.” She stared up at me with her mouth half-open.
“What…” I looked at the page address, which started with ‘www.un.org/icty/’. “The UN? What does Zoltan have to do with the UN?”
She just looked at me.
A cloud of horrible comprehension began to congeal inside my skull.
“Warrant date? What the fuck is ICTY?” I demanded.
Her voice was very quiet, almost a whisper. “The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia,” she said. “The war crimes tribunal. This is their list of wanted war criminals they’ve issued arrest warrants for. They just, he just, he’s on the list. He’s a war criminal. Three times over. I was just reading about him. He was at Omarska and at Keraterm and, Jesus, Paul, he was at Srebrenica, he helped organize Srebrenica.”
“The doctor,” I said, pointing at another face, a row below. I felt cold and dizzy, like all the blood was draining from my body. “That’s the doctor. That’s the one who helped Saskia on the plane when she had that ear problem.”
“Veselin Mrksic,” Talena said. “Oh my fucking god. He was on the plane too? He helped Saskia?” She shook her head disbelievingly.
“What did he do? Why is he there?”
“He was at Vukovar Hospital. He was a doctor there, but he helped. There was a massacre. He murdered his own patients. Dozens of them. After that he was Mladic’s personal doctor. Ratko Mladic. The Serb general. King of the monsters.”
I scanned the rest of the pictures. “Oh shit. I think those two too. I think they came to Belize with us too.”
We stared at each other.
“War criminals,” she said. “You’re saying your friend Sinisa flew a planeload of war criminals over the Atlantic with you. Not just, I mean, criminals, that’s such a, that’s not the right word, I don’t think there is a right word, not for what they did. Evil. That’s the only word. These people on this page, they were the worst of the worst, they could have given lessons to the Nazis. Jesus, Paul, do you have any idea what these people did? Do you have any fucking idea?”
“I guess. I’ve read some books about it.”
“You guess. No you don’t. You don’t. Neither do I. You had to be there to have any idea. You know what Zoltan is wanted for? I was just fucking reading about him. For pushing a prisoner’s face against a red-hot stove until half his face was burnt off, then doing the other half. For smashing a prisoner in the face with a big chain until he didn’t have any teeth left and every bone in his face, every single bone, was broken and one eye was burst. For wrapping wire around a prisoner’s testicles, then tying the other end of the wire to his motorcycle and driving off. He had an office. It sounds like a sick joke, but he had an office. Omarska was an old mining complex and there were offices in the administrative building. Every day he would torture men in his office, then at night he’d take women into this office, high-school girls a lot of the time, with the men’s blood and shit and bones and brains all over the place, and he and his friends would make her clean it up, sometimes they made her eat it, and then they would bend her over the desk and gang-rape her and stick things in her until at least once a girl died of blood loss because she was hemorrhaging from everywhere. There’s more. There’s a lot more. That’s just his greatest hits, just Omarska. That doesn’t count Keraterm. That doesn’t count Srebrenica. Jesus, Paul, Srebrenica, seven thousand people slaughtered, fucking genocide, Zoltan was there, he helped organize it.”
“He’s here.”
“He what?”
“I told you. I think I told you. Last month, when I met up with Arwin, he said Zoltan and Zorana came with him to San Francisco.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. I remember. You told me.”
We stared at each other.
I sat down, hard. The enormity of it all was beginning to hit.
Zoltan and the zombies were war criminals. Not smugglers, not drug dealers. They made murderers and arms dealers and child pornographers look like Mother Teresa. The things they had done were called crimes against humanity, and with reason. The other passengers on the Gulfstream that had carried Saskia and me to safety were two dozen of the worst people in the world. No hyperbole, no exaggeration, cold hard fact, up there in the pantheon of modern evil with the architects of the Rwandan genocide, the brutal SLORC generals who ran Myanmar, or the late unlamented Uday Hussein, to name a few. And Sinisa, ponytailed self-proclaimed-idealist Sinisa, had smuggled them out of the Balkans, away from the scene of their crimes, into the relative safety of Belize. Some of them had since come to America. Maybe all of them.
And I had helped them.
He had known. Sinisa must have known. He had known all along who they were. He had told me he was helping the poor and downtrodden, setting the world to rights, and I had taken his blood money and shrouded his operation in a cloak of absolute secrecy. It was like I had helped Goebbels and Eichmann escape Nazi Germany.
They would be almost impossible to catch now. In part because of me.
“What are we going to do?” Talena asked. “What in God’s name are we going to do?”
* * *
What we were going to do was, we were going to call the FBI.
It was a pretty stark choice. Stay quiet or go to the cops. There were a lot of reasons to stay quiet. Saskia, for one. Arwin, probably, I didn’t think he knew who the zombies were, I thought he was relatively innocent. In this newly paranoid America they could both easily get sucked in and chewed up by the vortex of an official FBI investigation. For all I knew they might wind up in Guantanamo Bay. Hell, I might wind up in Guantanamo Bay, it was farfetched but it didn’t seem impossible. I had been complicit in what Sinisa had done, ignorant or not I was probably culpable of something, aiding or abetting or who knows what. God knew it felt like I had committed a terrible crime. I had provided tangible assistance to some of the most horrific torturers and mass murderers in recent planetary history.
We never really seriously considered keeping our mouths shut. We wouldn’t have been able to live with ourselves. Talena had been slightly obsessed with the hunt for Bosnia’s war criminals ever since she first escaped to America. I felt crippling guilt about what I had done, but at least I had the excuse of honest ignorance. Now that I knew the truth, doing nothing would be far worse than what I had already done. Saskia or no, Arwin or no, even me or no, silence was not an option.
“It’s here somewhere,” I said absent-mindedly, digging through my NATO ammunition box, a gift from Hallam that contained all of my potentially-important-but-rarely-needed documents. “What happened to the one she gave you?”
“I lost it. Didn’t she send you email? Can’t you get her name from that?”
“That’s right. She did. I don’t – oh, here it is.” I dug a business card from the box. The
FBI logo was embossed on the upper left-handed corner. “Turner,” I read. “Of course. I can’t believe I forgot. Must be getting old or something. Special Agent Anita Turner. Pass me my phone.”
It was almost 9 PM but I dialled the number anyway on the off chance she was still in the office. The receiving telephone rang once.
“Special Agent Turner,” she answered briskly.
“Ms. Turner. Oh. Uh. Hi.” I had expected voice mail. “Uh, yeah, um, good to talk to you again. My name is Balthazar Wood. I don’t know if you remember me, but, um, we met a few years ago, about, uh…” I didn’t know how to describe it. I didn’t really want to talk about our previous encounter.
“I remember you well, Mr. Wood.”
“Oh. Good. I hope. Anyway, something’s happened, um, not at all related to what was going on back then, something else entirely, and the FBI needs to know about it. You really do. So, it’s complicated, I’d like to meet you if that’s possible, tomorrow if that’s possible, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
“Is that so.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Ma’am was not part of my usual conversational repertoire but it seemed appropriate. Agent Turner, if I recalled correctly, was very proper and 1950s.
“What I remember most about you, Mr. Wood, is that less than a week after our last conversation, the subject of that conversation was found in Morocco, dead.”
There wasn’t anything I wanted to say to that.
“What is the subject you want to discuss?” she asked.
“War criminals,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“War criminals. Bosnian war criminals. They’ve been smuggled into America.”
“Mr. Wood, this sounds a lot like a crank call.”
“I know. That’s why I’m calling you. Because you know from our last conversation that I’m a serious person. You can probably also guess that I wouldn’t be calling you at all if I didn’t think it was absolutely necessary.”
After a pause she said, “True. My office, oh-eight-hundred Friday.”
“What?”
“Oh-eight-hundred,” she said impatiently. “Be in my office at that time the day after tomorrow.”
“Right.” I had forgotten that she talked in military time. “I’ll be there.”
She hung up without another word. I supposed it was efficiency rather than rudeness.
I looked over to Talena. “I hope this is the right thing to do.”
“Me too. Me too. We better practice your lies before you go.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“She’s going to know you’re lying. She’s really fucking smart. I remember that.”
“I know. I hope she’s smart enough to see I’m not lying about the important parts.”
Talena nodded.
“It all makes sense now,” I said. “Fucking war criminals. Fuck. That was so stupid. I should have known. I knew something was wrong with them, the zombies, but I didn’t know what. It was all so weird, I figured I was just being paranoid.”
“Stop it. There will be no blaming yourself, understand?”
“Easy for you to say,” I muttered.
“Shut up. I don’t want to hear it. You were not stupid. You were in a desperate situation in an alien country and there is no way you could have known. You were lucky the warrants weren’t unsealed while you were there or they would have killed both of you. Now what about the Russian guy? Arwin?”
“I don’t know.” I considered. “I don’t think he knew the whole story. He knew we were going to Belize, but he didn’t know much about the zombies. He acted more like he thought they were total losers, not scary war criminals. I hope he didn’t know. I like Arwin. You know, him I can get in touch with, he gave me his email – holy shit.”
“What?”
“His back door. Arwin put a back door into the system. I scrambled it but it’s still there.”
Talena regarded me warily.
“Basically,” I said, “if Arwin and I got together, we could break into Mycroft. That web site I built for them. Arwin put a back door in. All the messages there are supposed to be secret but if Arwin and I got together we could read them.”
“Good. That’s good. You should tell the FBI that.”
“Yeah. But. If I tell the FBI about Arwin they’ll probably lock him up. He was already deported, at least once, and now they’ll probably figure he’s some kind of dangerous hacker on top of that.”
“Can’t make an omelette.”
“Yeah, but…probably the one guy who doesn’t deserve to get screwed over is Arwin.”
“Life is harsh,” Talena said curtly.
“OK, point taken, getting Sinisa and Zoltan and the rest is more important. But still. We don’t actually need Arwin, we just need…basically we just need him to give us a password. If I can get him to give me that then we won’t have to sic the FBI on him.”
“So now you’re going to lie about both Saskia and Arwin? And you’re still going to pretend that what you’re lying about isn’t important? Arwin’s password thing is probably the most important thing you can tell them. And he’s the one who told you that Zoltan and Zorana were here in the USA. All the important stuff is all about him.”
“I think I owe him one chance,” I said. She was right, but I didn’t want to turn around and rat on Arwin without at least giving him a chance. “Tell you what. I’ll send him an email and tell him I have to talk to him tomorrow. Then I’ll give him one chance to give me the password. If he does then I won’t have to tell the FBI about him.”
“You’re going to threaten him,” Talena said skeptically.
“What, now you think I’m going too hard on him?”
“You’re not thinking this through, Paul.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean if you go to Arwin and threaten him and tell him you’re about to go to the FBI, he just might turn around, call your friend Zoltan –”
“Please stop referring to him as my friend.”
“Okay. Sorry. But he just might call Zoltan and tell him he better make sure we never make it to Agent Turner’s office. You understand? This isn’t a game. Please wake the fuck up. Just because we’re back in America doesn’t mean we’re safe. If they find out that we know, we’ll be in very deep, very serious shit. Even after we tell the FBI, we’ll be witnesses. You know what happens to witnesses a lot of the time? Their corpses wind up face-down in large bodies of water. Not the final resting place I had in mind, you know, I was kind of planning on a big funeral when I’m eighty, lots of sobbing grandchildren and a nice mausoleum and all the bells and whistles. So wake up and stop worrying about your Russian friend and start worrying about us. We could be in danger here. Seriously. A lot of it. You understand?”
I looked at her. After a moment I nodded. “Yeah,” I said quietly. “Yeah. I understand.”
* * *
The FBI’s San Francisco headquarters is on the thirteenth floor of 450 Golden Gate Avenue, the Philip Burton Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse, a 22-story sheer-walled monstrosity near City Hall that looks a bit like a gigantic radiator grille. The Stars & Stripes waved over a few small trees struggling to emerge from tiny portholes in the concrete plaza that led up to the entrance. The general architectural intent seemed to be Abandon All Hope And Be Intimidated And Dehumanized, Ye Who Enter Here. I felt a bit like a Catholic schoolboy about to go to his first confession, afraid that he would be damned to hell forever.
Agent Turner hadn’t changed a bit. Middle-aged, dressed in a conservative dark business suit, a face wrinkled like her skull had shrunk beneath it, sharp eyes that studied rather than observed everything they encountered. Her desk was frighteningly clean, decorated only by the picture of a pretty blonde girl maybe eighteen years old holding a swimming trophy. Her daughter, I supposed. Maybe her niece. It was hard to imagine Agent Turner with a family or any kind of human existence at all outside the FBI.
She shook our hands from behind her
desk and had us sit down.
“Begin recording,” Agent Turner said, presumably to some voice-activated digital recorder lurking in her desk. “August fifteenth, two thousand and three, oh eight oh four Pacific Time. Special Agent Anita Turner.” She looked at us. “Please introduce yourselves with your names, ages, addresses and occupations.”
I swallowed and said, “Balthazar Wood, twenty-nine, 1256 Rhode Island Street, San Francisco, software consultant, self-employed.”
After a moment Talena said, “Talena Radovich, twenty-eight, 880 Kansas Street, San Francisco, Web editor, Lonely Planet Publications.”
Which was already something of a lie. Talena paid the rent on 880 Kansas, but it was occupied by Saskia, Talena lived with me in our new place on Rhode Island. If she had given my address it might have looked suspicious that she was the tenant of record at Kansas Street. On the other hand now that they had both addresses maybe they would come to 880 Kansas looking for Talena and find Saskia there. What a tangled web we weave.
“Subjects have alleged that they have personal knowledge of Balkan war criminals at large in America,” Agent Turner said. She turned to me. “Please tell me everything in your own words, from the start. Then I’ll ask whatever questions I need answered.”
“All right,” I said. “Well. I guess it all started with the little boy…”
I talked long enough that my voice grew hoarse. Mostly I told the truth. Omitting any mention whatsoever of Saskia was surprisingly easy. I simply claimed that after I took the little boy to the warehouse, Sinisa had asked to meet me, and when we met he offered me a job, and I needed the money so I took it. The lie depicted me as pretty damn mercenary, but as long as I shielded Saskia I didn’t mind being misunderstood.
I told Agent Turner all about meeting Arwin in San Francisco, and him telling me that Zoltan and Zorana had arrived in the country, and, although I felt terrible about it, I told her about Arwin’s back door. As I spoke I was convinced that I was initiating a massive FBI investigation, the full brunt of which was about to fall on Arwin’s rodentlike shoulders, and I felt horribly guilty about ratting out a friend.