The Wolf of Sarajevo (9 page)

Among the more ignominious duties that she had been assigned that were consistent with the terms of her exile to the Island was being the backup comptroller for budget and finance in the Office of Russian and European Analysis. In truth, the demands on her time were not especially onerous. She was merely the backup, after all. But it did mean that she had administrative access to the time-and-attendance software from her desktop. She fished a pocket of Nescafé from her desk drawer and mixed it with water that was almost but not quite hot enough from the machine in the break room. With a sigh, she sat down at the computer to review the overtime charges for the last three months.

It took longer than she had bargained for, but once VW got her teeth into a challenge, she rarely let go, and by nine p.m. that evening, she had found what she was looking for. Contractors from BlueSky Solutions, a Beltway bandit with ties to General Atomics—the company behind both the Predator and Reaper UAVs—were consistently billing overtime to a program identified only by an eleven-digit number. This was the director-level code that Landis had referred to. This worked well enough for the time-and-attendance software, but VW knew that the T&A figures would need to be reconciled with the accounting program that managed the massive flow of money in and out of the subregional budget for operations. The budget software would not accept the code; it would require the program name to be input into the correct field.

VW toggled over to the accounting program and searched the database for the entries that corresponded to the suspicious time-and-attendance overtime charges. It was not hard to find. All of the
overtime for BlueSky Solutions had been charged to a single program. Parsifal. VW had been working on Balkan issues for most of her career, and she had never seen this program name in any of the operational files.

“What the fuck is Parsifal?” she asked out loud to an empty office.

SARAJEVO

OCTOBER 16

I
have a lead.” Sarah's eagerness was visible in the athletic hunch of her shoulders and the bright gleam in her eyes. Her body seemed almost to quiver, like a hunting dog that had spotted a bird in the brush and was holding point.

“What sort of lead?” Eric shook his head and laughed. “Even asking that question makes me feel like a character from
Law & Order
.”

“Not here.”

They were standing in the embassy's expansive atrium, a corner of which had been given over to a coffee bar. Eric had just gotten his usual morning fix, a double espresso straight up, when Sarah had arrived looking like she had already had several shots.

It had been four days since Eric had agreed to help her. Since
then, Sarah had passed through the embassy on several occasions, but she never stayed for long. Eric expected that she was there just to use the commo facilities and read the traffic.

“My office?” he suggested.

“Not there either.”

“My office isn't secure enough?”

It looked to Eric as though there was something Sarah wanted to say in response but that she had changed her mind.

“Maybe I just feel like some fresh air,” she said instead. “It's a beautiful day out. Let's go for a ride.”

“I have a meeting at two.”

“Cancel it.”

“Where are we going?”

“I'll tell you in the car.”

Sarah was like that. She had always been like that: secretive and demanding, maddening and passionate, selfish and generous. Eric had loved her for her dualities even as they had made him crazy. Part of him wanted to refuse on principle, but he knew that he could not.

Twenty minutes later, they were in Sarah's car, a rented Peugeot 308, headed north on the major road leading to the RS.

It was unseasonably warm, with clear blue skies and just enough of a breeze to keep the diesel fumes from settling over the city like a shroud.

“Okay, what's the big lead?” Eric asked. “Was it Colonel Mustard in the billiard room with the candlestick? I never trust a guy with a mustache big enough to do double duty as a comb-over.”

“Nothing so dramatic, I'm afraid. But I've been working my old
network in Srpska along with some of our more recent acquisitions. It can be a slow process. A mentor of mine once told me that operational intel work is like being a spider on a web trying to read the vibrations of the various threads. If you can feel them, the vibrations will tell you that you've got prey trapped, how big it is, and where it is on the web. But you have to keep a light touch. If you grab the threads too hard, you can't read the vibrations.

“In any event, one of my old assets got word to me that he had something on Mali that he was willing to share. There'll be a price, of course. This guy was pretty mercenary back in the day. But he worked cheap, and I think I can cover his fee out of what I can dig out of the station's couch cushions.”

“So where are we going?”

“Zvornik.”

Zvornik was a depressed postindustrial town on the banks of the Drina River. Although right across the river from its sister city in Serbia, Mali Zvornik, or “little Zvornik,” Zvornik had been 60 percent Bosniak before the war. The paramilitaries had zeroed in on Zvornik early in the conflict. Arkan's Tigers and the Scorpions had been the most aggressive, running concentration camps, blowing up mosques, and stealing everything that was not nailed down. Decades after the fighting, Zvornik was still a hotbed of ethnic nationalism.

“Do you have security of some kind for this little exercise?”

“Well, I'm traveling with a big strong man,” Sarah said flirtatiously.

“Where is he? In the trunk? Maybe you should let him out. Give him some air.”

“You're still funny, Eric. I always liked that about you.”

Eric was somewhat chagrined at the way Sarah's simple
compliment delivered a strong shot of dopamine to the pleasure center of his brain. It was clear to him that his feelings for her had not entirely faded.
No good can come of this,
he warned himself.

“Who's the contact?”

“His name is Viktor Jovanovski.”

“Macedonian?” Eric asked. In the former Yugosphere, the “ski” ending to a family name was usually either Macedonian or Bulgarian.

“On his father's side. His mother was a Bosnian Serb and Viktor grew up in Zvornik. Dad was a small-time criminal, but his son made the big leagues, or at least triple-A ball. He was with the Scorpions during the war and made a small fortune smuggling cigarettes and gasoline. As a sideline, he also worked for me. Agency reporting indicates that he's still a serious player in the black economy and that gives him a reason not to be happy about Marko Barcelona.”

“New guy muscling in on his territory?”

“Pretty much. These are apex predators. Their position depends as much on reputation as on capability. A mob boss like Viktor can't be seen as being scared of a guy like Mali. Otherwise the pack will tear him to pieces.”

“It almost sounds like you feel bad for the guy.”

“I don't have an ounce of sympathy to spare for Viktor. But I need to understand him if I plan to use him.”

“And what does he want from you? He made contact, no? And nothing's for nothing in this part of the world.”

“He's probably hoping that I can get a Reaper to drop a Hellfire on Mali's house.”

“Is he right?”

Sarah laughed.

“Not my department.”

“What makes you think you can trust this guy?”

“Self-interest rightly understood.”

“Okay, but I'm skeptical that your old friend Viktor has read much Tocqueville.”

“He may not recognize the line, but he'll understand the concept. Believe me, if there's anything Viktor knows, it's what's best for himself.”

It was not a long distance to Zvornik as the crow flew. But they were not crows. Although the road was in decent shape on the relative scale used in judging Bosnia's roads, it was circuitous, winding up and around the steep peaks of the Majevica mountain range. Spindly trees somehow clung to life on the nearly sheer black-rock cliff faces on either side of the narrow road. This was wild Bosnia, the old Balkans of bears and wolves and mountain clans that had refused to bend the knee to the Ottoman invaders. The high mountain passes had been tamed by brute-force Yugoslav engineering but never entirely subdued. Sarah drove the mountain road expertly, just on the edge of control, downshifting into the turns and steering the agile Peugeot around the occasional rockfall.

Five kilometers before the border with Republika Srpska, Sarah pulled off the road, and Eric changed out the Peugeot's Bosnian license plates for a set of Serbian plates from the trunk that began with the two-letter code used for cars registered in Mali Zvornik. The guards at the makeshift border crossing wore Scorpion patches on their uniforms. Zvornik was their home turf. Two bored-looking paramilitaries waved them through the checkpoint with only a quick glance at their license plates. It was not their job to harass the locals.

Twenty minutes from the checkpoint, the road split. Sarah slowed to make the turn to Zvornik.

“Stop here,” Eric said impulsively.

They were in a small village called Konjevići. There was no road sign, no store, no obvious reason to stop at this particular crossroads.

“Turn right,” Eric said.

“Zvornik's to the left.”

“I know. I want to make a stop first.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been back there since?”

“No.”

“Are you ready?”

“I don't know.”

“Okay. Let's go.”

The secondary road was rutted and washed out in places. The Peugeot was built for the autobahns and smooth tarmacs of Western Europe, and nearly bottomed out crossing a couple of deep gullies. Thirty minutes of hard driving brought them to a small black-and-white sign with an arrow that pointed to the left.
SREBRENICA-POTOČARI
GENOCIDE MEMORIAL
.

Sarah stopped and looked at Eric questioningly.

He nodded.

“Turn here.”

The parking lot was empty. Srebrenica was a Serbian town now, and with the uptick in tensions between the Federation and the RS, the flow of tourists and visitors from Sarajevo had slowed to a trickle. The memorial itself was striking. Rows of small, Egyptian-style obelisks that looked like miniature Washington Monuments
covered acres of ground. Each one a grave. To one side was a graceful arc of gray granite, a memorial wall with names and birth years. The victims of Srebrenica. There were more than eight thousand names on the wall. It was stark and powerful.

Eric and Sarah stood at the edge of the cemetery. The sheer number of graves was daunting, a mute testament to man's capacity for evil.

“Can I help you?”

Eric almost jumped out of his skin. The voice was right behind him, and he had been so lost in thought that he had not heard anyone approach.

Turning, he saw a wizened old man bent over almost double and using an old shovel as a cane.
There are few things,
Eric thought,
more macabre and redolent of mortality than a shovel in a graveyard.

“Are you looking for someone in particular?” the man asked. He spoke in Serbo-Croatian with a Bosniak accent.

“Yes,” Eric answered. “I'm looking for a friend.”

“What's his name?”

“Meho Alimerović.”

The old man arched one of his eyebrows, and he stiffened as though trying to stand straight.

“Alimerović, you say.” He stared intently at Eric through eyes that had grown milky and dim with age.

“Yes, Meho Alimerović. He would have been twenty-five years old.”

“Follow me.”

“You know where he's buried?”

“I know where all of them are. It's really not that difficult. They don't move around all that much.”

The old man was surprisingly sure-footed. The blade of the shovel crunched into the gravel path with each step. The steles, Eric noted, were engraved with a name and two dates. The first dates spanned decades, but on every grave the second date was the same: July 1995.

“Your friend is one of the lucky ones,” the attendant said. His accent was so rural that it was a little hard for Eric to follow.

“Lucky?”

“He's all here. Some of the other graves have only bits and pieces. When the Serbs saw they were starting to lose the war, they dug up the graves and scattered the bodies. They used heavy machinery and they weren't especially careful. Most of those buried here would never have been identified without DNA testing.”

The man stopped in front of one of the thousands of identical steles.

“Here's the one you're looking for, Eric,” he said.

Eric's attention snapped from the stele to the graveyard attendant.

“You know who I am?”

“I've been waiting for you.”

“For how long?”

“Twenty years.”

“You were here that night, weren't you? You were here with Meho.”

“I was. Along with thousands of others.”

“And you survived.”

“A few of us did. Those too old to be any kind of threat. And I was a considerably younger man back then. I suppose they didn't want to go to the trouble of burying us all.”

“And he told you about me?”

“Yes.”

“That he was here because of me.”

“No. Quite the opposite, in fact. He asked me to give you a message. He told me to tell you that it was not your fault. In truth, it was a strange message. I asked him if you would understand it, and he assured me you would.”

Eric did and he felt a hot flush of shame at the memory. From beyond death and across twenty years, Meho reached out to him to offer succor. But Eric could not accept. It was his fault. It was his responsibility, his pride and vanity and ambition. The graveyard swam in his vision behind a wall of tears that he fought back, knowing even as he did so that this was just another act of pointless pride.

“How did you know it was me?” Eric asked.

“Who else could it be? Meho hasn't gotten many visitors. Two women, his sister and his mother. That's all. No friends before you. Where are his friends?”

“Dead.”

“All of them.”

“All that mattered.”

“I'm sorry,” the old man said. “There were so many. So very many.”

“Too many,” Eric agreed.

“I looked for you after the war. In Sarajevo. But I couldn't find you. All I knew was Eric the American.”

“I was gone by then,” Eric said. “I left not long after . . . this.”

The caretaker nodded his understanding.

“I'll leave you to grieve in private. May the blessings of Allah be upon you. Thank you for coming here, even after all these years.”

He walked away slowly, leaving Eric and Sarah alone at the grave.

Eric bowed his head. He wished that he believed in God. It would have been easier if he did. He laid his palm on the top of the stele. The marble was cold to the touch.

Forgive me.

“There's nothing to forgive.”

Had he said that out loud?

Eric looked over at Sarah.

“I know what you're thinking,” she explained. “We went over this a thousand times before . . . we stopped seeing each other. I know why you wanted to come here. It's not your fault. It's Captain Zero and the Green Dragons and the Yellow fucking Wasps. It's not your fault. It's not Meho's fault. It's not my fault or the fault of the poor DUTCHBAT veteran who wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat because he was here and he was armed and maybe he could have done something even though his orders were to stand by and watch. It's not your fault. Meho himself just told you that.”