The Wolf of Sarajevo (27 page)

“Pestilence, war, famine, and death.” Stefan recited it like a liturgy. “Every generation forgets the teachings of their parents.”

“Dimitrović and Marko Barcelona are setting the stage for
another war, hitting the same old nationalist chords to motivate their followers.”

“Things are different now,” the priest insisted. “Most Serbs will not follow the siren song onto the rocks. Not again.”

“No,” Eric agreed. “Most won't. But it doesn't take most; it only takes enough. And Mali and Dimitrović have more than enough. The paramilitaries are back. The Wasps and the Dragons and the Volunteer Guard. It will take only a single spark to light the fire.”

“And we will all burn,” Stefan said.

Sarah reached across the table and laid her hand on the back of the priest's.

“All of us,” she agreed.

There was a faraway look on the priest's face, but Eric could not tell whether he was gazing into the past or the future.

“It doesn't need to be this way,” Eric said softly. “There is another way.”

“Sondergaard?” Stefan asked.

“You've been following this?”

“No. I try to stay away from politics, but it is impossible not to know the basics.”

“This plan has a real chance,” Eric said insistently. “We can undo the mistakes of Dayton, mark a path forward for Bosnia to Europe and the twenty-first century. But we need your help.”

“My help? I am an old man with a small church on a small hill. I am nothing.”

“But you have something important,” Eric said carefully. “You are holding something for Mali, and in return he supports your church and your work. I can understand that. Maybe you don't even know what it is. But you know it's important to him. We believe it
is information. Something about Dimitrović. Something that he is using to control Dimitrović, to push him down the path to war. Father, we need to know where to find it. We need to break the link between Dimitrović and Mali, and give Sondergaard's plan for Bosnia a fair chance to succeed.”

The priest was quiet as he processed what Eric had said. He did not try to deny the threat to what had become a fragile peace, which itself was encouraging. Eric tried to read his face, but it was impassive. Seemingly unconsciously, Stefan picked up a walnut from the table and worked it around in his hand as though it were a prayer bead. There was a tension in the set of his shoulders that gave the impression of an internal struggle. Eric said nothing. He did not want to disturb the priest's thought process, to make him feel as if someone else were making his decisions. He would have to reach the right conclusion on his own.

Sarah seemed to understand this as well. Under the table, she took Eric's hand and squeezed it hard, but she did not speak.

“Let us assume for a moment that what you say is true,” Stefan said, after almost five minutes of silence. “That there was such a package and I knew where to find it. What would you do with this thing if I gave it to you?”

Eric let the air out of his lungs, surprised to find that he'd been holding his breath. The journalist in him understood that Stefan had made up his mind. There was still delicate work to do. Like a fisherman reeling in his catch, Eric could not move too fast or too slow or the line would break. But the hook was set.

“It depends in part on what it is,” Eric answered. “But we would use it to separate Mali from Dimitrović, then work to persuade Dimitrović to support the Sondergaard Plan, or at least not obstruct it.”

“Blackmail, you mean. You would be no better than Mali.”

“No,” Eric hastened to explain, realizing that he had been careless in his response. “If what you have . . . what you might have,” he corrected himself, “is criminal, we would expose it, we would be obligated to. Information about common criminal behavior would be turned over to the state-level prosecutor in Sarajevo. Information about war crimes is the property of the international tribunal in The Hague. We have a treaty obligation to share everything we know about war crimes in the Balkans with the tribunal. It's an obligation we take very seriously.”

“And what about Barcelona?” the priest asked. “What becomes of him?”

“I don't know,” Eric admitted. “It depends, I suppose, on what the information reveals. But I do know this. Mali is bad for Bosnia. He is a cancer, a parasite feeding on the state. He will suck it dry and leave the husk to blow in the wind. He cares nothing for Bosnia. He doesn't care about the RS either, or the Serbian people, or the church. He cares only for himself. You know this is true.”

Stefan shook his head, not in denial but in resignation. “I do,” he said sadly. “God help me, I do.”

“So where do we go from here?” Sarah asked.

Stefan looked at her, studying her face as though the answer might be written there.

“Come with me,” he said.

The priest led them back to the row of apiaries.

“It would be better if you wait here,” Stefan said. “My friends are usually well behaved, but they don't know you.”

The priest did not put on any special gear. He simply walked over to one of the hives and removed the top. Moving slowly and
patiently, he removed two screens from inside the hive and set them on a frame next to the apiary box. A mass of bees crawled aimlessly across the screens. A few took flight and circled around the hive, seemingly disoriented by the sudden transition. One bee lit on Stefan's exposed neck, but if he used his stinger, the priest gave no sign of it.

Stefan reached into the hive with one arm, digging deep for something at the bottom. He pulled out what looked like a small metal box and set it on the grass before replacing the screens and the lid with the same slow, mechanical patience.

Eric felt his pulse quicken. Sarah had taken his hand and was digging her nails into his palm. She was coiled tightly and Eric could sense that it took all of her self-control not to leap forward and snatch the box from the ground.

“Patience,” he whispered to her. “We're almost there.”

Stefan walked over to them, the box and his hand both dripping with raw honey, cloudy and crystalline and spotted with clumps of waxy comb and dead bees.

“This is it,” Stefan said unnecessarily. “My friends have guarded it patiently and without curiosity as to the contents. I have tried to match them, but I suppose we are past that point now. Would you like to see what's inside?”

“Yes,” Sarah said. And the eagerness in her response was an almost physical thing.

TRNOVA, BOSNIA

NOVEMBER 14

12:50 P.M.

I
t was such a small thing. A steel box no more than six inches across, four inches deep, and three inches high. It was well made, with a rubber seal around the lid that looked airtight, and secured with a key lock rather than a combination.

“I don't suppose you have the key?” Eric asked Stefan.

The priest shook his head.

“No. It was not for me to know what was in the box. I was just to keep it safe.”

“And Mali paid you for this?” Sarah said. There was a sharp edge to the question that Eric thought was unnecessarily cruel.

“Yes,” Stefan replied, with no attempt at self-defense. “For the church.”

Sarah studied the lock.

“This isn't a serious thing,” she announced. “It's to deter the merely curious, not the professional.”

From her jacket pocket, Sarah produced a small set of tools on a chain. Within a minute, she had the lock open.

“Took a little longer than I thought,” she said. “I think there's some honey in the mechanism.”

Stefan looked at her curiously.

“What exactly do you do for the embassy, Miss Gold?” the priest asked.

“Economic policy.”

“Of course.” The irony in his reply was as thick as honey.

Sarah raised the lid and removed a foam insert that had been cut to the shape of the box. Using a pocketknife, she peeled off the top of the insert, which looked like it had been secured with some kind of epoxy. Nestled inside was a small videotape, the kind that would fit an old-model handheld camera before everything went to solid state and high-density memory cards.

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.

SREBRENIC
A 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.”