The Wolf of Sarajevo (2 page)

NOVEMBER 14

3:28 P.M.

T
here was not enough time. Thirty-two minutes. At four o'clock or near enough as to make no difference, he would kill her. There would be no peace. The country would slide inexorably and tragically into war, and Eric would lose another friend who deserved to live. Bosnia's fate and the life of a friend were balanced on a knife-edge with no room for error.

“Drive faster.”

The car careened around a tight corner in the warren of narrow streets on Sarajevo's outskirts. The back bumper scraped loudly against the side of a van parked halfway up on the sidewalk. Up ahead, Eric could see the building where he believed the shooter was hiding. But that's all he had. A belief. A theory. One grounded in experience both long and recent, but a supposition nonetheless.
What if he was wrong? What if the shooter was somewhere else? What
if his skills had eroded to the point where he chose to do his serious killing with a car bomb rather than a scoped rifle?
If Eric was wrong, he would miss this one window.

The room for self-doubt was almost infinite. But Eric could not afford to doubt. It would make him weak. Indecisive. It would kill his friend. He would not allow that, Eric swore. He would not let them kill her.

But it was so late.

There was so little time.

And the costs of failure would be unacceptably high.

He must not fail. He would not fail.

Not again.

Never again.

SARAJEVO

OCTOBER 5

T
he ghost was right where he had left him. Same place as always. The corner of Ulica Zmaja od Bosne and a nameless side street, standing there stiff and startled as the blood ran down his chest, belly, and legs to pool on the cement sidewalk. It was the ghost of the first man Eric Petrosian had watched die. It could just as easily have been him. There was no particular reason that the anonymous sniper had picked the man six feet to his left rather than Eric. It was happenstance. Karma. Luck.

Inasmuch as Eric could remember, there had been nothing especially different about the man who would become a ghost. He had been about Eric's age, about his height and build, dressed in jeans and a dark winter coat. But he was dead and Eric was not, and that was ultimately the difference that mattered.

In a way, of course, the man had been fortunate. He had simply died. The paramilitaries who specialized in this kind of long-distance murder typically tried to wound their targets first so that they could kill the rescuers before finishing off their initial victim. All wars were cruel. This one had been vicious.

The ghost faded as he always did, and the pool of blood sank into the cracked pavement like a cooling rain into parched earth. They were only memories, a distant echo of the siege that held the city close in its iron grip for almost four years.

Every time he passed this spot, Eric saw the ghost, if only fleetingly. In this, he was hardly alone. Nearly every Sarajevan was haunted by ghosts. At least those old enough to remember. The end of the siege was some twenty years in the past. The city had never really moved on, however. The Bosnian War was very much a piece of unfinished business.

It was a beautiful crisp day. Early October was the time of year when Sarajevo was at its best. In six weeks or so, the streets would be awash in runoff from seemingly unending rains, and a few weeks after that the city would be shrouded in clouds of smog from the soft brown coal that the poorer residents still burned for heat. Today, however, the sky was a perfect cerulean blue bowl balanced upside down on the ring of dark mountains that girded the Bosnian capital. It would have been easy to pretend, if Eric allowed himself the luxury of self-delusion, that all was well. But somewhere up in that clear blue sky, the invisible specter of war hovered over a city that had known far too much of it.

Eric glanced at his watch. He was running late.
Better pick up the pace,
he thought. The ambassador was not famous for his patience. If he had had more time, Eric would have chosen a circuitous route
for the short walk from the embassy to the ambassador's residence, one that bypassed his ghost. But he was in a hurry.

The ambassador's residence was something of an oddity. It was aggressively modern in a society that valued the traditional, antiseptic in a city that never quite felt clean. The guard at the gate recognized Eric and waved him through without asking to look at his badge.

“
Dobar dan,
Rasim,” Eric said by way of greeting.

“
Dobro došli, gospodine,
Eric.”
Welcome.

Ambassador Prescott Wylie was sitting on the veranda at the back of the house nursing a glass of tomato juice that Eric knew was a mere stalk of celery away from being classified as a Bloody Mary. It was ten o'clock in the morning. Wylie liked to think of himself as a modern Churchill, but he had really been successful only in his emulation of the British Bulldog's prodigious drinking habits.

The American ambassador to Bosnia was physically imposing, and he had gotten far using his bulk to intimidate colleagues as well as foreigners. He had played linebacker at Dartmouth, and even after three decades of diplomatic dinners, he was still more big than fat. Eric was not impressed by either Wylie's bulk or his brain. The ambassador's father had been both a Dartmouth alum and an American diplomat of some renown. Eric suspected that it was his legacy status, rather than any actual talent, that accounted for Wylie's career success.

The ambassador was not alone. The Nordic blonde sitting across from him with a relatively restrained double espresso in front of her was familiar to Eric from the papers and by reputation. Annika Sondergaard was a Danish politician, a former foreign minister and current High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and
Security Policy. The Union in this case was the European Union, the block of twenty-eight mostly wealthy states that Bosnia theoretically aspired to join. Hers was a highfalutin title if ever there was one, and Sondergaard had staked much of her political credibility on an all-out effort to keep Bosnia from sliding back into chaos.

The U.S.-backed Dayton peace agreement had ended the fighting in Bosnia in 1995 but left behind a divided system of government that had proved to be entirely unworkable. Bosnia was composed of two “entities,” the borders of which roughly tracked the front lines from twenty years ago. On the map, the Serb-controlled Republika Srpska with its capital in Banja Luka seemed to squeeze the Muslim-Croat Federation from the north and east like a vise. Sarajevo's central government was weak and fractious. Real power was held at the entity level. The negotiators at Dayton had understood full well the inherent fragility of the system they devised, but it was the best they could do at the time. The priority had been to stop the fighting. A viable unitary state, it was assumed, would emerge over time. But it hadn't worked out that way.

The new High Rep had her own ideas about what the country should look like, and she had outlined the principles in her New Compact for Bosnia, a proposal that was already being referred to in European capitals as the Sondergaard Plan. Eric did not doubt her sincerity, but Sondergaard was one in a long line of senior public officials whose ambitions of Balkan peacemaking were animated in no small part by dreams of a Nobel Peace Prize. Most quickly found their plans undone by the intransigence of a three-sided conflict that had been given twenty years to set.

The High Rep looked older in person than she did in the papers.
Worn down by the weight of office perhaps,
Eric thought. Or maybe
she just photographed especially well. Still, she was a striking woman with an angular face and sharp cheekbones that gave her something of an air of haughty indifference. Even sitting down, she looked tall. There was a reason the local press had dubbed her the Valkyrie, and the political cartoonists invariably drew her with a horned helmet and metal breastplate.

“You're late,” the ambassador observed with a hint of irritation.

And you, sir, are drunk.

“My apologies, Ambassador. I couldn't get the deputy speaker of parliament off the phone.”

“He does go on,” the ambassador acknowledged, seemingly mollified now that he had established his dominant position in front of the attractive woman. “I don't think you've had the chance to meet High Representative Sondergaard.”

“Not yet, no. Pleasure to meet you, ma'am.”

The High Representative looked him up and down as though he were a blind date. It was not an unpleasant sensation.

“Good to meet you, Eric,” she said, once she had finished her brief assessment. “The people in the EU mission here tell me that you're the man to know in this town.”

Eric shrugged.

“They exaggerate.”

Eric sat at the table, and the waiter brought him his usual, a cup of strong and bitter Turkish coffee poured straight out of a slender copper
džezva
. The finely ground Turkish-style coffee that served as the region's universal lubricant was one of the legacies of five hundred years under Ottoman rule and—as far as Eric was concerned—perhaps the single greatest gift that any culture had ever given another.

“Hvala,”
he whispered sotto voce to the server by way of thanks.

“Petrosian. That's Armenian, isn't it?” the High Representative asked.

“On my father's side,” Eric replied, knowing full well why she had asked. With his brown skin and vaguely almond-shaped eyes, he did not look especially Armenian. It would be kinder, he decided, to assuage her curiosity without making her ask a question she might fear was intrusive. “My mother was Cambodian.”

“Was?”

“Yes, she passed away when I was young.”

“I'm sorry.”

Eric nodded in acknowledgment of her sympathy but said nothing. He did not like to speak about his mother. When his father had smuggled her out of Pol Pot's Cambodia, she had left a part of herself behind. A part of her that died along with nearly every member of her extended family. Eric had been the one to find her body, a ten-year-old boy confused and uncertain as to why his mother would be sitting in the car in the garage with the engine running. To this day, exhaust fumes had a kind of Proustian power to send him back in time to that awful moment.

“You were here before,” Sondergaard said to him in a manner that was almost, but not quite, a question. “During the war, I mean.”

“I was.”

“As a diplomat?”

“A journalist. Stringing for the wire services. Reuters and UPI mostly.”

“What convinced you to cross over?”

“I thought I could do more good in this job. Make more of a difference.”

“And have you?”

“Jury's still out.”

“Cambodia, Armenia, Bosnia. They all have something in common, don't they?”

“Yes, they do.”

Prescott Wylie looked confused. Eric turned to him.

“Genocide.”

Annika Sondergaard, he decided, would have made one hell of a psychiatrist.

“So tell me what I need to know about the guest of honor.”

Sondergaard was clearly talking to Eric, but the ambassador jumped in to answer the question.

“Bakir Hasović is one of the linchpins on the Federation side,” he said. “If your plan is going to get traction, you are going to need to make sure that he's supportive. His position is deputy prime minister in the Federation government, but that undersells his importance. As the head of the Bosniak Unity Party, he's the key to the coalition. If the BUP pulls out, the government falls. That lets Hasović punch well above his weight.”

So far, all pretty much in line with the briefing that Eric had given the ambassador earlier that morning to prep him for this meeting. Diplomacy was an odd business that operated according to its own arcane rules. It could, in particular, be rigidly hierarchical and rank conscious. As a consequence, it was often the case that the person speaking in a meeting knew much less than the younger, more junior people taking notes or sitting along the back wall. It was just the way things worked. Eric's job was to advise the ambassador in private and defer to him in front of others. He had never been especially good at the second part, to Wylie's occasional irritation.

Prescott Wylie was competent enough in his own way, but he was a newcomer to the Balkans who had spent most of his career well to the west of where the Iron Curtain had once been drawn across the continent. Most of his previous assignments would have fit neatly into the group of countries that Washington wags referred to derisively as the Chocolate Makers. Wylie did not speak the local language, and he had not had enough time to develop any kind of real feel for the culture. Living inside his bubble of drivers and bodyguards, armored cars, and translators, it was unlikely that he ever would. This was a manageable shortcoming as long as he was willing to listen. In their nine months together, however, it had become clear to Eric that Prescott Wylie was quite taken with the sound of his own voice.

“So what approach would you recommend I take with Hasović to get him to see things my way?” Sondergaard asked the ambassador. “Our way,” she corrected herself.

“I'd suggest playing to his sense of patriotism. Go with the big picture: bringing Bosnia into the twenty-first century and the European family of nations.”

It was a stock answer that could have applied to just about any conversation with just about anyone on just about anything. It was also, Eric knew, absolutely wrong. This was not at all what he and Wylie had discussed earlier that morning. Hasović was a crook. You didn't appeal to a crook's conscience; you appealed to his wallet. Wylie would never forgive Eric, however, for challenging him in front of Sondergaard. He held his tongue. The ambassador was just getting warmed up.

“Hasović is a Bosnian nationalist,” Wylie continued. “He needs to understand your plan as the last best chance to keep the country
together. He has no love for the Serbs, but I am convinced that he loves his country and ultimately shares our vision of a unitary Bosnia with room enough for all.”

Eric almost choked on his coffee. The only thing Hasović loved was money.

“That's very interesting,” Sondergaard said, even as her tone made clear that it was not.

The ambassador's butler appeared in the doorway. He was a Bosnian Croat of indeterminate sexuality who affected the manners of an Edwardian-era majordomo that he seemed to have acquired by watching pirated DVDs of
Downton Abbey
.

“Deputy Prime Minister Hasović is here, Mr. Ambassador,” he announced in his passable English, with an accent that somehow merged Slavic with faux British.

“Show him in.”

They all rose in greeting as Hasović was ushered into the room. He was short and dark and built like a wrestler. His black hair was styled in an early-Elvis pompadour held in place by so much mousse that it looked almost shellacked. He wore a dark suit with a white shirt and no tie. The top two buttons of the shirt were undone, doubtless to offer his interlocutors a better look at the thick gold chain around his neck that was the Bosnian gangster world's equivalent of a Zegna tie.

Hasović's hands were big and beefy, and his grip was just a little too strong, an effort to dominate rather than a greeting.

“Please.” The ambassador gestured to the table once the initial round of introductions were done. “High Representative Sondergaard doesn't have much time, I'm afraid, so we need to get right to business. But first, coffee? Something stronger?”