Gun Metal Heart (29 page)

“You treat the symptom.”

Antic held John's hand in both of his, the way men of a certain generation do. Maybe it was camaraderie, and maybe it was support for an old man too vain to use a walker.

“John … it is John, yes? Not Jonathan?”

“John.”

“John. My new friend. You say the White Scorpions have stolen weaponry? The White Scorpions, or criminals such as they, made hay with stolen weaponry during the civil war. During the Tito years. During World War II. During World War I. That is a very old song in the Balkans. You say the attack on the hotel in Florence was terrible, and now you are running about, searching the skies, fearful of seeing the words
Made in the USA
. John, the Americans have played that game—apologizing for old threats, reacting to current threats, oblivious to future ones—for generations! This is nothing new. Your friend is captured, and you want to ride to the rescue: the American cavalry!”

He wheezed a laugh, eyes disappearing into leathery folds of his skin. John started to react, and Antic squeezed his hand. “I don't poke jest, John. I admire this. But it is as I say: you react to symptoms only. Not to diseases. You believe America played a hand in the current calm because of the Dayton Peace Plan, but Dayton did not stop the hatred anymore than the iron fist of General Tito did. John, you are in the old Yugoslavia. You are in the Balkans. You and I? We are in the crosshairs of history.”

John begrudgingly understood the truth of the professor's words. “I know this, sir. I do. I'm not generally naïve. I'm only naïve by Balkan standards.”

The old man laughed, filmy eyes twinkling, and for a second John saw the vigor of the man's youth.

“Come in with me. Hear what our Serbian hosts are suggesting. Then think about the future, John. Think about—”

“Excuse me?” A woman slipped in next to John. He glanced in her direction, back to Antic, then did a double take. Crisis it might be, but a knockout's a knockout.

She was ice blond with eyes like quicksilver. She wore a gorgeous suit, a bit risqué for an embassy gathering, maybe, but stunning.

“Professor Antic? I am such a fan.” She spoke English with a cultured German accent but switched quickly to a Balkan dialect John couldn't understand. She spoke of something that sounded like political victories. The old man preened a bit. The aides instantly warmed to her but continued to shoot daggers at John.

The tall blonde gripped Antic's papyrus hand in both of hers, spoke a few more sentences, then turned to John. “Forgive the interruption, please.” The German accent turned back on. “Professor? An honor.”

She turned to walk toward the entrance to the ambassador's residence. John watched her walk away. Who wouldn't?

Antic chuckled and patted his arm. “To be young again…”

John snapped back to reality. “Sir, I honestly think—”

“Mr. Broom.” He spoke firmly but not unkindly. “I need to be in that room tonight. I need to hear what our host country is proposing. I'm sorry. I understand your warning, but I can't let it sway me. However, if you'd care to join me…?”

John started to laugh. He had just told this crazy old coot that it wasn't safe in the U.S. ambassador's residence. Now he …

But John checked himself. Who was he fooling? He'd spent the last of his cash on a suit. Of course he was going into the residence.

When have I ever let being an idiot get in my way?

Besides: his number one job now was to find Daria Gibron. And if not in the eye of a shit storm, where else?

*   *   *

Ahead of them, a U.S. Marine captain let a cable film crew through, checking their heavy metal boxes carefully.

Next in line—and looking none too patient at the delay—was a Mr. Riordan. The Marine captain was a battle-hardened veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. He looked at the taut man with the steely eyes and brush-cut hair and thought,
If this guy's a civilian, I'm a Quaker.

“Go right in, sir.”

The military officer nodded curtly and barged through the metal detector, which was inlaid subtly into the doorframe.

The next group on the list was a handsome, somewhat regal woman in her forties with three blond, teenage girls who were clearly her daughters. Her ID read Adrijana Petrovic. She had ID cards ready for her daughters, too. The Marine waved them in.

As he did, his ear jack chirped. A Marine at the camera monitor station said, “Captain? Guy on the sidewalk, on your ten, black suit and brown hair.”

The captain scanned the growing crowd outside the ambassador's residence. He saw the person in question, a man standing with a small, white-haired, elderly gentleman. “I see him.”

The captain's ear jack crackled a bit. “That's the guy showed up earlier. His CIA creds were a bust, sir. Orders are to let him through, then detain him in the basement for questioning.”

The captain nodded. “Okay. Swenson, Gerardo: haul ass. Bring your sidearms.”

*   *   *

The crowd for the ambassador's residence soiree appeared to be in the scores
, John thought. Possibly a hundred or more. He hoped like hell he was wrong about the threat assessment.

The throng logjammed at the tall double doors and on the three stairs leading up to them. John noted the uniformed Marine at the door. The man wasn't armed, which was no surprise. Marines assigned to American embassies rarely carry handguns.

The partygoers clustered outside the door. The Marine captain was not happy about that. He was aware that two of his guys had pulled up behind him, ready for action.

People were pushing a bit now, anxious to get inside.
And not for the canapés
, John thought. People understood that the most dangerous place at any given embassy is outside, nearest the traffic.

John was two steps from the front door when a woman to his left stumbled as if pushed. She fell forward, toppling a young couple, who in turn toppled another man.

Diego grabbed John's arm and yanked him back from the door, and from the stumbling partygoers.

“Viking. Your fake ID got tagged. They made you. Go.”

John looked past the quiet man and realized that two of the three Marines in the entryway were armed. They began wading out of the building, into the stumbling scrum of well-dressed people. Heading right for John.

Smiling, Diego turned to the Marine captain on duty at the door and punched him in the nose.

 

Thirty-Seven

John was pushed free of the scrum and saw the Marine captain at the residence door fall straight back. Diego followed him in, wailing on the man. John stumbled down the half-circle stairs and was jostled by partygoers.

He reoriented himself in time to see one of the Marines pistol-whip Diego, just before the double doors slammed shut.

John further extracted himself from the throng and kept the people between himself and the Marine pillbox on the embassy grounds. He stumbled out onto a side street and kept moving, until he couldn't see the residence or the embassy, or their ubiquitous surveillance cameras.

As near as he could tell, Zoran Antic and the Bosnia-Herzegovina delegates got inside the residence before Diego's well-timed dustup.

Leaving John free to …

… what?

*   *   *

Teodore held open the door to the Escalade. “The ambassador's residence, Minister?”

Dragan Petrovic climbed up into the seat. He probably smelled of scotch but didn't care. His eyes were shadowed, a little too much white showing around the irises.

“No. Parliament.”

Teodore paused for only a split second, then closed the door. He drove quickly to the stately Parliament building, with its fluttering flag and soldiers on roving duty.

Petrovic entered through the front door and stepped straight through the metal detector—no queue at this hour. He worked enough nights that the soldiers on duty recognized him. One of the soldiers jokingly asked about his ever-present attaché case, but Petrovic stumbled past him without a word.

One of the guards lifted a fist near his lips, thumb out, and tipped—the international sign for “drunk.” The men stifled laughter.

Petrovic rode up to his floor, and used his swipe card to open both the anteroom and the door to his office.

His
office. The office of the Serbian foreign minister. An office that had become tragically vacant after …

Petrovic went to his side table and splashed scotch whiskey into a tumbler. Some missed the glass, hitting his hand. Liquor seeped under his gold Philippe Patek. He gulped the straight drink. It stung, going down. He poured more.

He walked, stiff-legged, to the arched window overlooking Avenue Kralja Milana. By his own order, the bombed-out Chinese embassy remained brightly lit with harsh, ground-floor floods. The setting sun made the formerly flavorless and colorless office building appear a vivid oyster pink. The gaping, jagged, round holes from the American missiles looked like three zombie eyes, their insides hollow and black as hell.

Dragan Petrovic gulped his whiskey. More liquor seeped coldly under his Swiss watch. He set down his drink, unclasped the watch, and spinning around, hurled it at the foreign minister's desk.

He missed. The heavy gold watch hit a portrait of the late minister, his widow, and their children. The glass shattered. The tumbling frame took out two more family photos.

He glowered at the destruction, breathing shallow, almost hyperventilating. He turned back and stared at the cadaver of the Chinese embassy.

For a second he thought one of the missile holes on the fourth floor winked at him.

The Americans. First, interfering in a civil war that was none of their business. Raining death down on Petrovic's troops surrounding the Muslim enclaves of Srebrenica and Gorazde. Then on the soldiers bravely holding out around Sarajevo. Then interfering with the border dispute with Kosovo. The damn Americans breaching protocol in 1999 by dropping missiles on Belgrade! On this oldest and most historic of cities! Bombing the embassy of a valued ally not three hundred meters from Parliament!

The Americans had laughed at Serbia.

Dragan Petrovic had arranged for a fitting end to that laughter, tonight. A strike on an American asset, using illegal American weapons, that could never be linked back to Serbia. A blow that would smack down the grinning cowboys of Washington while simultaneously sending a strategic loss to the Croats and the Muslim Bosnians.

It was a grand master's play, a coup de grace.

And Adrijana had waltzed blithely into the midst of it. Adrijana and their beloved Sofija, Ana, and Ljubica.

He pulled the disposable mobile phone out of his pocket and stared at the inert, meaningless block of plastic. He could use it. It would be easy. Only one phone number had ever been accessed from this phone.
Major Arcana.
That unsettling blond witch with the inhuman eyes.

Press Redial and Adrijana and the girls survive. Nothing could be easier. In his years as a soldier, Dragan Petrovic had never been asked to make a simpler life-or-death decision than that.

Redial. Call it off.

Petrovic held his phone in one hand, thumb hovering over the lit rectangle marked Redial.

He drained his drink.

Sandpoint, Idaho

It was just past noon as the unmarked Longbow Apache looped in low over Lake Pend Oreille and touched down flawlessly at the Sandpoint airfield. Stripped of its gun and rocket arms, the Boeing helicopter looked more mantislike than usual. It settled quickly and smoothly next to a Lexus SUV.

Colonel Olivia Crace stood at attention beside the Lexus. Three military men stepped out of the Longbow and duck-marched beneath the propellers. All three wore black trousers and button-down shirts under gray Windbreakers with shiny black shoes.

Crace opened the front and rear passenger-side doors. Two of the men rode in back and one in front. The one in front, a redhead with hazel eyes, was armed. He wasn't from the Joint Chiefs. He was part of the crew of killers General Cathcart had at his disposal.

Crace circled the Lexus and climbed behind the wheel.

She did not speak until spoken to. One man said, “Status?” He was the highest-ranking man in the car. He was also the highest-ranking officer Crace had ever addressed.

“The weapons platform is solid, sir.”

They motored through the sparse noon traffic toward the American Citadel off-site research facility.

“And these idiots here?”

“Dangerous, sir. Huge risks.” She slowed and hit her turn indicator.

The men from the Pentagon exchanged looks. The man in front spoke for the first time. “Is it worth it? For us to even be here?”

Crace turned into the parking lot. She hesitated longer than protocol allowed.

The third man said, “Colonel?”

“Huge risk, sir. Huge reward.”

“How huge?”

Crace unbuckled her seat belt. “Sir, American Citadel can't be trusted. Doing business with them is doing business with the Devil. This wouldn't be the kind of deal that ends in scandal. It's the kind of deal that ends with life sentences in Leavenworth, best-case scenario. Worst-case? War crime trials in The Hague.”

Before she could reach for her door handle, the highest-ranking man said, “Then why are we even here, Colonel?”

“The finest drone tech on earth. Period.”

 

Thirty-Eight

Daria had a long and productive talk with the silent Serb soldier, Lazarevic.

He sat on the floor of the warehouse. She threw him a greasy shop towel to bandage his badly bleeding wrist but wouldn't let him touch the squibs and the round, medical plasters she'd adhered to the crotch of his trousers. The big man's eyes flickered in a three-part pattern: from the explosives over his dick, to the remote in Daria's hand, to the pool of blood coagulating in an almost perfect circle around Kostic's head, shoulders, and torso. Daria's lightning-fast blow had severed Kostic's windpipe and his carotid, and it had been a race to see if he'd suffocate or bleed out first.