The Wolf of Sarajevo (17 page)

Now, VW knew, she had his complete attention. The contractor force performed a wide range of functions on behalf of the Agency, but their motives were almost entirely mercenary. These were not patriots. They were—quite literally in some cases—hired guns.

“What's the holdup?”

“Well, a number of overtime charges have been submitted that the auditors want to deny. There's no justification for the claims, and they need more detail before they'd be willing to sign off on them.”

“What a goddamn waste of time.” VW could hear the edge of irritation in his voice.

“I agree with you . . . did you tell me your name?”

“Allen.”

“I agree with you, Allen, and I'm certain we can clear this up
quickly. I just need something to take back to the accountants. There's a significant overtime charge for UAV operations over the last forty-eight hours. If you can give me more detail, I may be able to shoehorn all of the outstanding overtime under the single claim.”

“What do you need?”

“Justification. Was the flying time over Bosnia?”

“Allen” in eastern Slavonia hesitated. He was not supposed to discuss the details of operations with people outside his immediate chain of command, but the call was coming in on a CIA vIPer phone and VW knew that he would want to put any administrative hassles behind him as quickly as possible.

“Yes,” he finally admitted.

The ice had been broken. They were talking about the operation. Now, as Churchill had put it, they were simply dickering about the price.

“Is there a flight plan?”

“Nothing written down.”

“What kind of flights are we talking about? The overtime codes are different. Was it surveillance? Signals gathering?”

“Surveillance.”

“Routine patrol or a specific target? It'll be harder to justify overtime for routine operations.”

“It was a specific target. We had orders.”

“What was the target? I need to input something into the field on the new system. Without it, I can't get the approvals I need to process the paperwork.”

“A house,” the man said, after another moment's consideration.

Interesting.

“Do you know whose?”

“No.”

“Well, do you at least have grid coordinates?'

“Of course.”

“That should be all I need.”

Allen gave her the coordinates.

VW assured him that she would do everything she could to expedite the outstanding overtime claims.

“You boys are at the pointy end of the spear,” she assured him. “It's my job to make sure we keep you oiled and sharp.”

“Thanks,” Allen had said appreciatively.

Asshole,
VW thought, after she hung up the phone. Allen was cutting corners on OPSEC to make sure he got paid. And although he had done it at VW's urging, it was still infuriating. She abhorred unprofessional behavior in all its forms, even when she was the direct beneficiary.

“So what have you been looking at, Parsifal?” she asked out loud.

There was a paper map of Bosnia in the filing cabinet with air force grid markings. The coordinates Allen had so helpfully provided had the UAV loitering over a valley called Kriva Rijeka. The Crooked River.

There was only one way to find out what was there.

VW picked up the vIPer phone again and dialed another number, this one from memory.

“Bob, it's Victoria.”

“How's tricks?”

“Still living the dream. Listen. I need UAV time in Bosnia. But not out of eastern Slavonia. I want a Global Hawk out of Ramstein.”

“And I want to sleep with Scarlett Johansson. My chances are actually somewhat better than yours.”

“Bob, get me my Global Hawk or I'll be forced to remember that time you took your girlfriend on a joyride to West Virginia on a CIA helicopter. I don't think the inspectors would take kindly to that.”

“You really want to play that card, VW?”

“Not unless I have to.”

“Well, I hope it's for something pretty fucking important.”

“Me too.”

Bob Landis sighed. “Give me two or three days.”

TRNOVA, BOSNIA

OCTOBER 31

T
he bees were living up to their reputation. The pear trees were heavy with the last fruit of the season, and standing on the edge of the small orchard, Father Stefan could hear the low hum of the honeybees from the monastery's apiaries as they gathered the pollen from the purple flowers of the aster that grew in the shadows of the trees.

Stefan loved the bees. They had something of an understanding. He did not take more of their honey than he needed, and they did not sting him more than they had to.
People could do worse than to model themselves after honeybees,
Stefan thought. Hard workers. Productive. Ready to sacrifice themselves for the good of the hive. Gentle unless provoked.

Wasps were something else altogether. Nasty. Aggressive. They would sting for pleasure, and they offered nothing of value. It was
no coincidence that they had lent their name to one of the more vicious of the paramilitaries. Father Stefan was a man of peace. At least now he was.

It had been a good year for honey,
Stefan thought. The spring had been wet and cool, and the summer warm and dry. God was good.

There were almost a hundred glass jars of sweet-clover honey in the cellar, some with a generous piece of the waxy comb that the village children chewed like gum. There were also five big oak casks holding the pear brandy that the novices had distilled under Stefan's direction. The brandy would need at least a year to mellow, but there were four barrels from last year's harvest that were ready to be bottled and fifty glass bottles with beeswax seals from the year before that. The cellars also held wheels of monastery cheese and boxes of onions, carrots, and potatoes from the garden that would keep through the winter months. The monastery was not rich, but it had been self-sufficient even when the godless communists had been in power.

Now the monastery was more than self-sufficient. It was well-off. All thanks to the patronage of the mysterious newcomer to Bosnia, Marko Barcelona. Mali gave generously to the church, and all he had asked in return was the smallest of personal favors. Stefan tried not to think about it too much. If he did, it raised questions that he could not answer and did not want to answer.

He knew, of course, why Mali had come to him. Reputation followed a man for years, long after he had stopped doing what he had done to earn it. He had been a young man back then, or at least younger. His beard was already salted with gray when Yugoslavia had splintered into its warring parts. But he had been full of fire and passion. Attributes he had always associated with youth.

It was impossible to separate ethnicity and religion in the Balkans. The Croats were Catholic. The Serbs were Orthodox. The Muslims were what they were. The new politically correct term “Bosniak” was the misnomer meant to lay claim to all of Bosnia by one of its constituent peoples. But even so, Bosniak meant Muslim. A Catholic Bosniak was like dry water. The church had inevitably and to its detriment been sucked into the politics of Yugoslavia's disintegration. Stefan had been swept along with all the rest on the tide of religious and nationalist fervor that had blanketed the entire region. It was a kind of insanity, less temporary than latent. That was the past. You could not escape its shadow, but you could, Stefan believed, light a candle against the darkness.

He picked a yellow-green pear off a branch and took a bite. The flesh was firm, and the fruit was sweet and juicy. It was truly God's bounty.

He walked back toward the small chapel he tended. It was still early, and the field was wet with dew. It was time to treat his boots with beeswax again. The fall rains were cold, and his feet would freeze if he allowed the water to soak through the leather.

The chapel was small, not more than a single room, but it was elegant, with an octagonal design in the classic Byzantine style and frescoes of the saints and martyrs of Christendom that dated to the fourteenth century. The door to the chapel was at least two hundred years old, dark oak bound with iron and worn smooth by the elements. Nominally, the chapel was a part of the Monastery of St. Archangel Gabriel complex that had more than a hundred novitiates and a vast acreage, mostly forest and mountain slopes too steep to cultivate. In practice, this small chapel was Father Stefan's private world. He lived an ascetic life of prayer and labor
appropriate to a hieromonk, a monk who had taken priestly vows. In another age, he might have been a hermit.

Inside the chapel, it was five degrees cooler and there was a damp that he had begun to feel in his joints. He was, Stefan thought with a sense of resignation to the inevitable, growing old. He would be seventy in the spring. God willing.

On the wall to the right of the door was a fresco of Saint Nikola holding in one hand a model of the chapel. He had no eyes. The villagers believed that eating even a small piece of the plaster from the eyes of a saint in a fresco could cure cataracts. It was superstition. Sympathetic magic. The disfigurement of Saint Nikola, a masterpiece of Byzantine art, depressed him. But eyeless saints were more the rule than the exception in the churches and monasteries out here in the wilds of the Bosnian mountains. He hoped someday to repair the once-elegant frescoes. The money from Mali would make that possible.

It was time for the morning liturgy. As on most mornings, there were no parishioners in this small mountain chapel. But Stefan put on the vestments and read the liturgy out loud in a clear voice as an act of devotion to God. Much of the service was conducted with his back to the door, facing the altar with its seventeenth-century icon of the Madonna and child. He was somewhat surprised when he turned at the end of the service to find someone standing at the back of the chapel, waiting patiently.

It was a woman. She was elderly, although village life in the mountains had a way of aging people prematurely. It was possible that she was as much as a decade younger than Stefan. She was wearing a head scarf, the kind that covered the chest as well. Observant Orthodox women covered their heads in the church, but this
was an Islamic-style
hijab
. A Muslim woman then.
What was she doing here?
he wondered.

“Good morning,” he said, after removing his vestments and hanging them back up on the altar. “It is always nice to have visitors for the service even if they are not of my flock.”

The woman looked nervous, and she backed away as Stefan approached her until she was pressed up against the wall.

Reputation.

Stefan stopped. If he moved too quickly or stepped too close, he thought the woman might bolt for the door.

“You have nothing to fear here. You are in a house of God.”

The woman smiled tentatively. The few teeth she had left were yellow-brown.

“Thank you, Father. I have not been here since I was a girl and Andreas looked after the church.”

Father Andreas was a Greek priest the communists had just barely tolerated. He had been a senior figure at the monastery when Stefan had first arrived some forty years ago.

“It is good to meet a friend of Father Andreas's,” the priest offered. “I was just about to make myself a cup of coffee. Would you care to join me?”

“With pleasure.”

Stefan slept in a small room with its own entrance at the back of the church that had once been used for storage. There was also a kitchen with a wood-fired stove. Stefan packed it with dry kindling and lit it with a match. The stove heated up quickly and he set a
džezva
of water to boil for coffee.

The village woman waited outside, sitting on a bench at a wooden
table at the base of an apple tree that was too old to produce fruit but that could still make shade. When the coffee was ready, Stefan carried a tray out to the table loaded with two demitasses of coffee, a bottle of pear brandy, cheese, bread, a shallow bowl of honey, and a dish of dried apricots. Hospitality was an ironclad rule that bound both Orthodox Christianity and Islam.

“My name, by the way, is Stefan,” he said, pouring his guest a shot of brandy to go with the coffee.

“I know,” the woman answered. “I came here to see you. My name is Orahovac. I am Ibrahim's widow.”

Stefan remembered Ibrahim Orahovac as a friendly and mostly capable mechanic who helped keep the monastery's two small trucks in a semblance of working order, patching the old bald tires until they were more epoxy than rubber. He had died suddenly some four years ago, heart failure or a stroke. Stefan could not remember which. Ibrahim had two children, both girls. A terrible tragedy in a Muslim family.

Ibrahim had been drafted into the Bosnian army during the war, and he had fought at Žepa and Goražde, where he had been badly wounded by shrapnel. He had walked with a limp.

“I remember your husband,” Stefan said. “He was a good man.”

“Yes,” his widow agreed. “He was a good provider.”

“It must have been hard for you and the children after his loss.”

The widow Orahovac nodded, and Stefan could see just how hard it had been from the lines etched into her face by hard work, deprivation, and fear.

“How can I help you, Mrs. Orahovac?” She was not his parishioner. She was not even a Christian. But she was clearly a soul in
need, and Stefan would do what he could to help her. That was the proper role for a priest, not mucking around in ethnic politics like so many of his younger colleagues—or his younger self.

“Ibrahim always said that you were a good man, an honest man, that he trusted you to do what was right. That you didn't deserve your . . .”

“Reputation.”

She nodded but said nothing in response, stopping suddenly as though at a loss for what came next. Stefan just sipped his coffee and let Ibrahim's widow organize her thoughts.

“I have tried to keep the farm and work it with the girls. But it has been hard. There are not enough men since the war. Too many dead. Others who have left for Germany or even America. One girl, my oldest, found a match and moved to Sarajevo. Her sister is still with me. We keep chickens and sell the eggs in town. We grow vegetables, and we have two cows that give good milk. We have enough to eat. But when the tractor broke, I had no money to fix it. So I borrowed three hundred euros from Zarko Golubović. But I wasn't able to pay him back, and now Golubović is going to take our house and our land. My older daughter lives in a small apartment in the city, and her husband is unemployed. They can't take us in. And we have nowhere else to go.”

The widow Orahovac began to cry, and Stefan handed her one the cloth napkins from the tray so that she could dry her eyes.

“Golubović is a religious man,” the widow continued. “His office has a big picture of one of your saints, and he wears a big gold cross around his neck. Would you speak to him, please? Ask him to take pity on an old woman. If you ask, I am certain he would give us more time to find the money.”

Stefan was much less confident. He knew Golubović, a greedy, grasping man who would charge his mother a usurious rate of interest if he had reason to believe she was good for it or if he could get one of his siblings to cosign the note. Golubović's superficial religiosity was more a matter of fashion than faith. He would no sooner sacrifice a fat profit for Stefan and the church than he would donate to the Bosnian chapter of the Red Crescent Society.

“I would be happy to speak to Golubović, but I am afraid that it would do little good.”

The widow Orahovac nodded her understanding, her eyes bright with the tears she could barely hold back. Coming to see him, Stefan knew, was grasping at straws. She must have exhausted every possible alternative before deciding on this minipilgrimage to his little mountain chapel.

Stefan was moved to pity.

The meek may inherit the earth, but not until they had paid decades of rent to the strong. It was an affront, and Stefan knew that he could not simply slough it off and tell Ibrahim's widow that there was nothing he could do to help her. He could help her. Thanks to Mali.

“Golubović will not listen to the church,” Stefan said gently, and he reached across the table to cover one of her calloused, sunbaked hands with his. “But there is a way I can help you.”

“Yes, Father?” she said, trying and failing to keep a note of hope out of her voice.

“Wait here a moment, Mrs. Orahovac.”

Stefan got up from the table and walked around the chapel to the front door. Inside, at the altar, behind the icon of the Virgin Mary and her miraculous child, there was a loose stone. Stefan carefully
lifted it out and reached into the hollow. His fingers closed around a metal box. He pulled it out and opened the lid. There was more than two thousand euros piled neatly inside the box, all in crisp new bills and all from Mali in payment for that smallest of favors Stefan did for the head of the White Hand.

Stefan removed five hundred euros and slipped the bills into an envelope. Then he replaced the box, the stone, and icon.

When he gave the envelope to Mrs. Orahovac, she again broke into tears.

“I cannot pay you back,” she said.

“You don't have to. Go with God.”

“God bless you,” the elderly Muslim woman replied, and her invocation was wide enough to transcend the barriers between their faiths.

When she was gone, Stefan sat at the table under the apple tree eating a breakfast of bread and honey and sipping at his coffee. He was not a political man. Not anymore. He was not, however, entirely ignorant of his benefactor. The White Hand was quite possibly the driving force behind the resurgent paramilitaries and the growing threat of a new Bosnian war. He had not known this when he had first agreed to be the keeper of Mali's secrets as well as the monastery's bees, but it had become clear to him over time.

The money Mali gave him could be used for good. It could do the Lord's work, and it could provide comfort to those in need, people like the widow Orahovac. Surely, noble purpose could cleanse the money even if it had been stained with blood. Couldn't it?