The Wolf of Sarajevo (29 page)

Five miles down the road, they came to a small village with a gas station that served double duty as a convenience store. Sarah pulled up to the door.

“Wait for me here,” Eric said.

There was no one minding the store. It had the unmistakable air of a business that compensated for a lack of customers with a dearth of effort. Bags of assorted snacks were lined up on a shelf by the register. A thick layer of dust had settled over the display. No one had disturbed the potato chips and peanuts in quite some time. An idea sprang almost fully formed into Eric's head, and he acted on it impulsively without taking the time to think through the risks. It took almost no time and required little more than a furtive glance over his shoulder to see if anyone was watching.

When he was done, he rang the bell on the counter, summoning a teenage attendant with stringy blond hair and bad acne from some back room.

“Just some cashews, please,” Eric said, dropping the dusty bag next to the register. “And would it be possible to use your phone?” Eric asked.

“Sure. No problem.” The boy pointed to a cheap Chinese handset at the far end of the counter.

Eric picked it up. There was no dial tone. He tapped the plastic switchhook repeatedly but with no result, nothing but dead air.

“It's not working,” he said, trying to keep the edge of desperation out of his voice.

The boy shrugged. “Sorry.”

Eric dropped two marks on the counter.

Back in the car, he told Sarah what had happened. “Both cell phones and landlines. Coincidence?” he asked.

“No way.”

“Could Mali or Kaspar or whatever you want to call him do this?”

“Absolutely.”

“Drive faster.”

She did. There were other cars on the road, but Sarah blew by them as though they were standing still, taking chances on a few blind curves that had Eric reconsidering his committed atheism. They made it to the outskirts of Sarajevo in a little more than two hours, but there the traffic came to a complete stop. To avoid rear-ending a van, Sarah had to slam the brakes on the Golf so hard that she left skid marks. Eric could smell the burned rubber.

“What's going on?” Sarah asked.

“Police checkpoint.”

The road was a tangled mess, cars and trucks had tried to drive around the line of vehicles in all directions. The gridlocked vehicles were going nowhere.

“Wait here,” Eric said. “I want to see if I can get one of the cops to call in on his radio.”

Eric picked his way through the traffic jam as quickly as he could. At the front of the line, the police had set up a roadblock and they were letting one car through at a time, opening both the trunk and the hood, and using mirrors and flashlights to explore the undercarriage. For good measure, a bomb-sniffing dog circled the vehicle, wagging its tail to signal its approval.

No one was in a rush. Even past the checkpoint, cars were lined up, not moving. The police must have closed off so many blocks downtown that traffic had ground to a halt across the city.

The checkpoint was manned by the Federation's Ministry of
the Interior. Like almost every other institution in the country, the police were split in two. The Federation had one structure and the RS had its own police force, with its own command and its own political overlords. There was little communication and almost no cooperation between the parallel police forces.

Eric picked out the one cop who did not seem to be doing anything. He was almost certainly the one in charge.

“Officer,” he said urgently, “I have an emergency.”

“Everyone here has a fucking emergency,” the cop answered. He was middle-aged and thick around the middle, and wore a dark-blue uniform and an NYPD-style peaked cap. His features were all oversize. His ears and nose seemed too large for his head. There was an automatic pistol holstered to his belt and, most important for Eric, a radio.

“My name is Petrosian. I'm an American diplomat and I have reason to believe that EU High Representative Annika Sondergaard is the target of an assassination attempt. I need to get in touch with your headquarters.”

To Eric's surprise, the cop laughed. It was not the reaction he had anticipated.

“Sure. Go ahead and file a report. So far we've had sixteen bomb threats, two of them nuclear; four reports of a sniper; three calls from people with information about plans to crash the High Representative's motorcade with a garbage truck or a cement mixer; and one call from a man who insisted he was Gavrilo Princip reborn and Sondergaard was his Franz Ferdinand. Which one are you?”

“There is a shooter,” Eric insisted, but even to himself he sounded slightly deranged, just one in a series of fanciful reports. “I work
with High Representative Annika Sondergaard and her life is in danger. I want you to use the radio to put me in touch with your headquarters.”

The policeman looked at him dismissively.

“We're already doing everything we can to ensure security.” He gestured at the long line of cars backed up for hundreds of meters. “Now please get back in your vehicle.”

Eric fumbled in his pocket for his wallet and pulled out his diplomatic ID card.

“I'm an American official and I am asking for your assistance.”

“You can submit the request in writing to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I'm sure they'll be interested in helping you.”

Eric looked at his watch. Sondergaard would be meeting the delegations arriving at the Aleksandar Hotel in less than thirty minutes. He had no time to argue with a beat cop at a checkpoint.

From up here in the hills, Eric could almost see the hotel. He thought about running but doubted that he could make it in the time available. The Aleksandar fronted the old Sniper Alley. It was just a few blocks from the intersection where Eric's ghost made his home. His eyes tracked Sniper Alley back up to the hills on the far north of the city. A building halfway up the slope caught his attention. It was unfinished, but it had an almost perfect line of sight to the Aleksandar. It would be an ideal location for a sniper nest except that it would be a very long shot. A mile, maybe more. The shooter would have to be very, very good. Dragan had assured him that Lukić was the best. And Eric had seen his handiwork up close. He had no doubt that the veteran was capable of making the shot.

“Officer, I need you to do something for me. I need you to get a
message through your channels to Dragan Klicković at the Aleksandar Hotel and tell him to meet me at that building over there right now. Do you see which one I mean?”

Almost involuntarily, the Bosnian cop looked where Eric was pointing.

“Yes.”

“Will you make that call?”

“You have to understand. We're all overloaded. There's only so much we can do.”

“I just need you to make this call. Can you do that?”

The cop sighed as though he were being asked to carry the weight of the world. “I'll do what I can.”

It was the best Eric was going to get. He turned and ran back to Sarah.

SARAJEVO

NOVEMBER 14

3:26 P.M.

S
arah pushed the Golf through the backstreets as if she were on the final lap at Le Mans, downshifting into the turns and accelerating hard into the short stretches of straightaway. Her eyes were fixed on the road and her movements were sharp and economical. But she somehow managed to keep up an almost nonstop stream of chatter.

“You understand that we have almost no evidence to back up this theory you've constructed. Golden girls. Middle-aged snipers. Penitent priests. It has a lot of moving parts, none of them solid.”

“I know,” Eric said, hanging on to the grab handle tightly to keep himself from being bounced around the inside of the car. “But the pieces fit together in a way that makes sense. You feel it too.”

“How do you know?”

“You wouldn't be driving like this if you didn't.”

“You may have a point. But you haven't seen my commute to Langley.”

“If I'm wrong, we've lost nothing. But if I'm right, we could lose everything. We have to assume this is real.”

The side of the Golf scraped a lamppost with an ear-splitting screech as Sarah cut a turn a little too sharp. She did not even bother to slow down.

“Sorry about the paint job.”

“It's okay. I never liked this color. Keep driving.”

—

Like Bosnia itself,
the building in which Eric suspected the sniper was hiding was an ambitious project that was only half finished. The contractors had completed the ten-story shell of reinforced concrete and red brick before running out of money. It was a common problem in the region. Capital was always in desperately short supply. Construction projects, even big ones, often went forward right on the bleeding edge of solvency. Undaunted by failure, bankrupt builders would often scrape together just enough money to try again on a different project with a new set of investors, abandoning their earlier effort to the weeds and rats.

Half-built apartment blocks were common on the city's fringe, leering down from the hillside like desiccated skulls. What differentiated this zombie building from all the others in Sarajevo was that this one had a perfect line of sight down Sniper Alley to the Aleksandar Hotel.

Sarah stopped the car a block from the building.

“If the shooter is really in there, we don't want him to see us
coming,” she explained to Eric. “Plus, he could have a spotter or a lookout of some kind.”

“Okay. I'll follow your lead. I've never done anything like this before.”

“Baby, no one has done anything like this.”

Sarah reached into her purse and pulled out a small pistol.

“You get the girl gun,” she said. “It's only a .22, so aim for the head. If the shooter is wearing body armor, those dainty little bullets will bounce off him like he was the Incredible Hulk.”

“What about you?”

“I have a SIG Sauer under my jacket. I'll be fine.”

“I'm still hoping that Dragan shows up with the cavalry.”

“Don't count on it. We're on our own.”

They worked their way to the back of the building, trying to stay out of the sight lines of a shooter or spotter in one of the apartments facing the city. The street was lined with modest older two-story homes. There were a few people on the street, most of them modest and older as well. The pavement ended abruptly, and the last fifty meters to the abandoned apartment building were across a litter-strewn field of weeds that glittered with broken glass. A few large chunks of rusted twisted metal stood in the field like a modernist sculpture.

Weeds were growing up the side of the building, the wind-blown seeds having taken root in the mortar between the bricks. A few weeds big enough to be classified as saplings poked out of some of the windows on the higher floors.

Eric looked at his watch.

“The delegates will start arriving in ten minutes. We've got to hurry.”

Sarah nodded in agreement but gestured helplessly at the apartment block in front of them.

“This is a big fucking building. I'm not even sure where to start.”

“Right there,” Eric said, pointing to a Mitsubishi 4×4 parked near the back door to the building. There was only one reason for a jeep to be parked there. It was a getaway car.

They moved quickly to the door. Eric grabbed Sarah's arm before she could step across the threshold. He pointed at the floor, which was covered in a layer of concrete dust a quarter of an inch thick. A set of boot prints was easily visible in the dust. The sharp patterns seemed to indicate that the prints were fresh.

“That's the trail,” Eric said. “We have eight minutes.”

—

The prints led upstairs.
There were multiple sets of tracks, but they all had the same tread pattern, seeming to indicate that a single person had made several trips.

Eric and Sarah took the stairs two at a time. Sarah had drawn her SIG Sauer and carried it in a two-hand grip at shoulder height pointed at the ceiling. The .22 in Eric's hand felt too light to be a real weapon. It seemed more like a toy. Eric had no illusions about his abilities. He had fired pistols at paper targets in a State Department counterterrorism training program, but that was about it. The man they were pursuing was a battle-hardened veteran with a serious rifle. Eric carried the small pistol away from his body and pointed toward the floor, trying to shake the feeling that this was all some kind of game, like an elaborate form of laser tag.

By the time they reached the third story, Eric's breathing was ragged and uneven. It was not from exertion, but from fear.

“Be careful,” Sarah whispered in Eric's ear. “There could be traps or alarms of some sort on the stairwell. Look where you step.”

“Will do,” Eric croaked. It was the shortest reply he could think of. He could barely speak. His throat was tight. His mouth was as dry as sandpaper and tasted of bile.

Just ahead of him, Sarah climbed the stairs with the grace and surety of a big cat stalking prey. Whatever she was feeling, her surface mask was all calm confidence. Eric envied her.

Windows were cut into the walls of the stairwell at each landing, letting in enough light to navigate. They had also let in the rain, which had mixed with the concrete dust to create a viscous sludge that clung to their shoes. As they moved higher, the Aleksandar Hotel came into view rising with each successive level like the moon. They were getting close.

The boot prints led them to the eighth floor. The interior corridor had no windows, but light leaked through from the empty door frames to the apartments on both sides. Still, the corridor was dim and musty. The tracks diverged. The bulk of the prints, however, pointed to one apartment in the middle of the corridor, right next to the gaping hole where the elevators were eventually supposed to go. Sarah nudged Eric and gestured with her head toward the door frame. Eric strained to listen for any noise coming from inside. There was nothing.

Whatever gods had conspired to put a diplomat armed with a toy pistol in this position must be having a good laugh about now,
Eric thought.
Maybe this would all turn out to be about nothing, just a squatter or a drug den.
But while Eric's doubts about himself were eating away at his confidence, he had no doubts about the danger Annika was in. He would rather Dragan were here instead of him, or
one of Sarah's snake-eating colleagues from the CIA's Special Operations Group. But it was just he and Sarah. There was no one else.

They lined up on opposite sides of the door. Sarah held up three fingers and counted them off.

Three . . . two . . . one . . .

They stepped through the door, guns leveled, scanning for signs of the shooter. The apartment was bigger than Eric had expected. They were standing in a center hall or sitting room of some kind with doors on all three of the interior walls leading to other rooms. The boot prints were not much help. There were tracks just about everywhere. Eric saw sawdust mixed in with the reddish gray dirt on the floor and he could smell freshly cut wood.

Sarah gestured toward what Eric supposed was to have been the living room, with big picture windows looking out on the city. Eric shook his head. The snipers in the war, the professionals, at least, if not the weekend Chetniks who looked at long-distance murder in the same way they might have looked at a hunting trip with the boys, had preferred interior rooms for their nests. The sawdust, he suspected, was from the construction of a shooting platform. It was just like old times.

Darko would be in one of the interior rooms. But which one? He glanced quickly at his watch. Three minutes until three o'clock. Maybe the delegates would be late. They usually were. But he did not want to bet Annika's life on it.

The room to the left looked brighter than the one on the right. Maybe that room had a door toward the outside wall of the apartment. There were several small metallic objects on the floor of that room. They looked like shell casings. Eric touched Sarah's arm and pointed to them. She nodded.

Without the frame, the doorway was wide enough for them to walk through together. On Sarah's signal, they stepped into the room, guns leveled. Eric's foot caught the edge of the door frame and he stumbled, his finger slipping off the trigger of the small pistol. There was a platform along the back wall that smelled of green wood. A sniper's nest.

It was empty. The room was empty.

There was a hole in the wall across from the shooting platform. Someone had smashed through the bricks with a sledgehammer. Each brick was about the size of a cinder block, but they were hollow and the composition was more like ceramic tile than stone. Through the hole in the wall, Eric could see one of the apartment's gaping picture windows, and through the window, he could see the Aleksandar Hotel a mile away.

The shooting platform was here. So where the hell was Lukić?

The delegates should be arriving right about now. The sniper should have been here waiting for the shot.

Eric stepped closer to the platform. There was a thin blanket laid over the wood as a cushion. An iPad was lying flat on the blanket. The screen was dark. He touched the home button and a picture appeared on the screen upside down relative to Eric. It took a moment to process what he was seeing. It was a split-screen image of the front and back entrances to the apartment building. The sniper had seen them coming on closed-circuit TV.

“Where is he?” Sarah hissed.

From somewhere in the apartment, Eric heard the distinctive metallic click of a rifle bolt being pulled back.

Eric understood what had happened. The shell casings on the floor were bait. They were trapped.

“Where the fuck is he?” Sarah said again, more urgently this time.

Sarah was pressed up against the wall to the entryway. One of the large bricks no more than a foot from her head exploded like a bomb, sending shards of sharp ceramic shooting across the room. A piece of brick grazed Eric's forehead, opening up a long cut. Blood started to run down the side of his face.

From the other side of the wall, the rifle bolt clicked shut.

Another brick exploded, this one to Sarah's left. Eric ducked as pieces of brick shot past his head.

He looked around the room for cover of some kind. There was nothing. But his eyes lit on the hole in the wall that Lukić had made for his shot. It was just barely big enough.

Without thinking about what he was about to do, Eric ran toward the wall and leaped headfirst through the hole. He gripped the pistol tightly. If he lost it, he would have nothing.

Eric tried to roll, but his landing was more of a sprawl that knocked the wind from him. His chest tight, he scrambled to his feet and shot wildly through the door into the front hall. Sarah, he could hear, was firing through the holes that Lukić had made shooting at them through the wall.

Eric stepped through the doorway into the front room, blinded by a deep anger that had hovered over his whole life. He fired his pistol at the sniper, but he was also shooting at Pol Pot and Brother Number Two of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić, and Mehmed Talaat Pasha and the Ottoman elite who ordered two million Armenians to their death. He was shooting at the agents of genocide, the nameless soldiers and thugs who killed under orders from a corrupt and twisted
leadership. He kept firing his pistol until the trigger clicked on an empty chamber.

The shooter was gone. He was hiding somewhere back in the dark rooms of the unfinished apartment. Eric had no way of knowing how far back the warren of rooms might run and had no desire to chase the armed sniper back into the dark. He felt drained, as though he had just run for miles in thin Alpine air.

Sarah appeared at his side.

“We should go after him,” she said.

Eric shook his head and pointed wordlessly toward the front door. Sarah understood.

They stood on either side of the door in the hallway outside of the apartment pressed up hard against the wall. Better to make Lukić come to them, Eric reasoned.

They did not have long to wait.

The rifle barrel emerged slowly from the apartment, weighed down by the bipod at the end of the muzzle. It was a heavy weapon, not well suited to this kind of close-quarters fighting. Eric grabbed the barrel and pulled forward and down, hoping to get Lukić off balance and give Sarah a clean shot. But the old soldier was quicker than Eric had anticipated. Instead of following the weapon, he leaped at Eric, grabbing his jacket collar and his wrist, and taking him to the ground.

Eric fell backward and they rolled on the ground struggling for leverage. The heavy rifle was in between them, and Eric's right hand got wrapped up in the harness webbing. He lashed out ineffectually with his left hand. Lukić's elbow caught Eric on the jaw, and there was a sharp pain as a tooth cracked. Eric grabbed the rifle with his free hand and used it as a lever to roll Lukić hard to his right.