The First Casualty (11 page)

26

Buda
č
ka ulica 16

Gospi
ć
, Lika, Croatia

The Next Morning

Day 3

Džaja shared the front seat with Jason. The hotel's desk clerk, Aleksandar, now off-duty, had eagerly accepted Jason's offer to come along and act as interpreter should one be needed. His enthusiasm at the prospect of extra cash was undiminished by being stuffed into a space that was a backseat in name only. He and Džaja chattered away with only an occasional translation.

The house was on the edge of town, a single-story clapboard a few kilometers past the rail station and the cobblestone square with its circular­ fountain. As the houses became farther apart, the spaces were frequently filled with crude roadside shrines, some still bearing the dried flowers of summer. Beyond the house lay the high, flat, mountain-­rimmed plateau above the Novčića River, land that reminded Jason of the high plains of the United States.

Džaja pointed at the street number and swerved across the road to park the little Zastava in the otherwise barren yard where patches of winter-yellowed grass were islands in the sea of snow. The house's occupant must have seen them coming, for she opened the door just as Jason was getting ready to knock.

At least seventy, the woman's face was road map of furrows. Wisps of gray hair had escaped the bun at the back of her head, and blue veins were the only color in the white hands that held the door. But there was nothing old or decrepit about the sky blue eyes that peered out from the drooping lids that gave the face a sleepy look.

“Herka Kerjck?” Jason asked.

She nodded as her eyes went to the two men behind him.
“Da.”

“I'm George Simmons. Someone told you I was coming I believe.”

She started at him blankly until the hotel clerk translated. She stepped aside, opened the door wider.
“Dobro jutro. Uci.”

The three men entered a room that reminded Jason of his grandmother's house. Knitted doilies occupied every horizontal space above floor level. A sofa and two chairs were covered in a cabbage-rose pattern through which stuffing escaped along seams long parted. The halo of the crucified plaster Christ gleamed from the far wall just above the rabbit ears of a small-screen television. What was really reminiscent for Jason was the sterile cleanliness. Not a mote of dust dared to be seen. The glass of the room's two windows showed recent attention and even the faded patterned rug, though showing threads, was without stain. The room smelled vaguely of lye soap and stale tobacco.

She indicated a chair for Jason and sat opposite on the sofa. She crossed her arms and waited expectantly. Džaja found an ashtray and applied a wooden match to a cigarette before he sat. The thing smelled like silage. Apparently, Croatians did not ask permission before lighting up in someone's home.

Jason spoke to the desk clerk. “Ask her who she told I was coming.”

After a brief exchange, the woman looked at Jason though speaking to Aleksandar.

“No one, she says. No one other than a few neighbors and her daughter who comes to visit every Sunday.”

Hardly a secure network, but that explained Natalia. Well, Momma could hardly have expected an old woman, this old woman, to keep a tight lip without an explanation that would have put Jason in more jeopardy than he already was.

“Is she related to the scientist Nikola Tesla?”

At the mention of the name, the old woman sat up straight, full of pride. She didn't wait for the translation.
“Da!”

She continued.

“He was her father's uncle,” Aleksandar translated.

And so the interrogation went, question, translation, next question. She remembered that, when she was a very little girl, the Nazis came, men dressed in frightening black uniforms with lightning bolts on them and high boots, boots like no local people wore.

“I thought the German army wore a shade of gray,” Aleksandar observed.

“They did,” Jason replied, impatient to get back to the subject at hand. “But SS, Schutzstaffel, uniform is what she described.”

Wait a minute,
Jason thought.
Why would the elite of the German military bother with an out-of-the-way place such as this?

“Ask her if these men in black were really Germans or just local men who had joined.”

She was quite sure they were real Germans. What they wanted, she answered when asked, was the box that had come from America, the box that came a few days before her father returned home from Russia, miraculously excused from further military service on behalf of the Third Reich.

“The box, what happened to it?”

She shrugged as the question was translated.

“She doesn't know.”

Jason was becoming increasingly impatient, both with the cumbersome process of translating back and forth and with what seemed to be a dead end. “Ask her to explain, tell us when she last saw the box.”

The family, it seemed, lived on adjacent farms, of which the present house was one. The SS had arrived within hours of the mysterious box. They had moved the animals out of the barn, taken the box there, and put a guard on duty to make certain only those permitted entered. For the next several days, strange noises had come from the barn, and weird lights at night. There was much speculation among the locals as to what was being done there. One or two of the more superstitious recalled old legends about conjuring up the devil. One night, the Allies dropped a single bomb that destroyed the barn, but oddly did no damage to surrounding structures.

“A bomb?” Jason asked.

She nodded. At least that was the only thing the townsfolk could think of that could have caused the explosion, though no one had heard an aircraft overhead. The device must have fallen through the roof and exploded inside, for the walls were blown out, not in. But this was not an ordinary bomb, those who knew of such things said. The bodies of the dead Germans had shrunk, she understood, although, as a small child, she was not allowed to see such a thing for herself.

Jason glanced out of a window. “I don't see any barn.”

An exchange between the old woman and the translator ensued before the latter said, “It was never rebuilt. As a matter of fact, some of the rubble is still there. Her father said it was a bad place, forbade the children to go near it. They did, of course. The box had been opened, and there was a machine that looked like it had been partially assembled. Or perhaps partially destroyed by the bomb.”

“What kind of a machine?” Jason wanted to know.

The old woman shrugged again as she fished a cigarette from somewhere in the folds of her dress. She accepted a light from one of Džaja's wooden matches. If anything, the tobacco smelled worse than his.

“Other than her sewing machine, she knows little of machinery,” the clerk translated. “Besides the fact this one was about the size of her sewing machine and its table, she remembers little about it.”

Jason did a masterful job of concealing his growing frustration. “I thought she didn't know what happened to the box.”

“She doesn't. She never saw it again after the Germans took it to the barn. She's guessing they threw it away after they took the machine out.”

Was the woman dense or simply being intentionally difficult?

“OK, ask her about the machine. What happened to it?”

The clerk asked.

“The machine stayed where it was. Odd thing, it didn't rust in all those years of sitting in the weeds. Then came the Bosniaks . . .”

“The who?”

“Bosniaks, Moslems.”

The clerk must have seen the puzzled look on Jason's face. “October of 1991, the so-called Gospić Massacre. Serb troops shot at least fifty people in the town, some Moslems. The Moslems took it as a renewal of the conflict between them and Christians, wanted revenge.”

He said something to the old woman and she responded.

“A number of them came here, burned the next house down, the one where her relatives lived.”

She became agitated, moving her hands in a parody of aircraft and making a
whoosh-
ing sound as the translation continued, “But two American jets came over the hills, scattered the Bosniaks.”

“What does that have to do with the machine in the yard?” Jason wanted to know.

“After the Bosniaks left, it was gone. She is sure they took it.”

27

Hotel Ante

Jasikovacka 9

Gospi
ć
, Lika, Croatia

Back at the hotel, Jason had the current desk clerk add up his bill while he went to his room to pack his single bag. Finished, he set the bag on the bed and took out his iPhone, a specially modified device with a few apps not available in the basic phone shop in malls across America.

He texted Momma a brief review of the morning's conversation, hit a button, and sent the entire message as a millisecond burst that, without the appropriate equipment, would register as no more than an electronic mini-surge. Minutes later, he was proffering the red-white-and-blue-on-silver Bank of America Visa card of Mr. George Simmons in payment of a bill that was modest by the standards of the day.

Outside, Džaja and his trusty, if diminutive, Zastava 750 waited to begin the mirror image of the trip Jason had taken yesterday. Unlike the unmanned stop at which Jason had disembarked in haste the day before, Gospić had a rail station. A small one-room building heated by a wood-burning stove, but a station nonetheless. Džaja insisted on carrying the bag inside, where Jason paid him and shook his hand.

“
Do vi
đ
enja
,” the Croatian said as sorrowfully as though losing his best friend.

Perhaps he was. Or close to it. Jason guessed fares were few in this part of the world. He repeated the phrase, assuming it to be appropriate to parting.

In addition to the wood stove, the room featured a pair of back-to-back benches on which an elderly couple sat, surrounded by half a dozen cardboard suitcases. Their clothes, though worn, were clean and pressed. The grime under the man's fingernails and the obvious calluses on his large hands suggested farming as an occupation. Whatever their purpose in traveling, Jason had a hard time seeing them as a potential threat. There was no Natalia-type visible.

The man behind the ticket counter eyed him tentatively when Jason presented the credit card in payment. He held out both hands together like the opening and closing of a book. It took Jason a second to comprehend. The man wanted papers, identification. He seemed satisfied when Jason handed him the Simmons passport.

Required procedure, or had identity theft reached the Balkans?

Jason returned to sit on the bench just as his iPhone vibrated. He took it out of his pocket and read the message, a single line of an address in Paris in the 20th Arrondissement. He knew it well, well enough that he didn't have to memorize it before deleting it.

When he looked up, the elderly couple, unfamiliar with current technology, was staring at him as if he had sprouted horns. Perhaps he had; the woman was definitely making signs to counter the evil eye.

28

141 Boulevard Mortier

Paris, France

Six Hours Later

The train to Zagreb and the three-hour Air France flight into a foggy, rainy Orly merged into one miserable journey. First, Jason had been faced with the choice: abandon his weapons or check them. As much as standing around a baggage carousel flew in the face of his training and experience, being unarmed for whatever period was required to either ship the weapons or replace them was worse. He would be relatively safe in the air, at risk once on the ground. Paris, after all, had around 155,000 Moslems, almost 7½ percent of the city's population.

It would be a good bet some of them wanted Jason dead.

That was the reason he retreated to the nearest men's room after retrieving his bag. In a stall, he strapped the killing knife to his leg and the Glock in its holster at the small of his back.

He took a cab, which was soon cruising Paris's 20th Arrondissement through a section of single houses. The soggy day made the stone walls of Père Lachaise Cemetery weep as though mourning the passing of such diverse talents as Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Pissarro, and the Doors' Jim Morrison. Past the cemetery, they turned left and stopped.

Jason gritted his teeth as he climbed from the cab onto the drizzle-moistened sidewalk. After hours of enforced idleness, the wound in his calf resented the sudden action. He paid the driver with euros he had gotten at the airport's exchange booth, looked both ways, and crossed the street to an unremarkable wall. Behind the bricks adorned with razor wire, Jason could see the top story of the rather ordinary-looking­ two-story, freestanding house that was home to France's Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure
,
the DGSE, France's CIA. Because of its proximity to the Piscine des Tourelles
,
its habitués referred to it as the swimming pool. As he stood before the massive wooden gate, he pulled his jacket collar flat to give a better view to the concealed cameras he knew were transmitting his image to the facial recognition technology.

He couldn't resist. Putting down his bag, he used both hands to pull his jaws back and stick out his tongue as he gave the invisible speakers the raspberry.

The mechanical voice that followed was not amused. It requested he identify himself and state his business here.

“Jason Peters. René de Terre is expecting me.”

The gates swung open. Picking up his bag, Jason followed paving stones glistening with winter moisture oozing from lead skies, as typical of Paris's winters as the chestnut blossoms are of spring. He entered a marble foyer. In the center of the floor was a blue mosaic disk, crisscrossed by white lines with a red hexagon in the center, a symbol as enigmatic as the French words for “In every place where necessity makes law” that surrounded the disk.

Jason had long ago abandoned hope of understanding either women or the French.

The room was bare of furnishings or people. There was no need for a receptionist. No one got this far without identifying both self and purpose.

From an entrance Jason hadn't seen, a dark-skinned, white-haired man in a stylish pinstripe suit appeared. “Jason! Good to see you again, lad!”

Jason submitted to a one-armed embrace and air kissing in the vicinity of each cheek before shaking René's right hand. René had lost his left arm to a FLN bomb as the eight-year Algerian War wound down in the early sixties and the Fourth Republic was collapsing along with the last vestige of French imperialism. With the advent of de Gaulle and the Fifth Republic, France's reforming intelligence agencies recognized the Ouled Aissim tribesman's usefulness. He spoke Arabic, Farsi, and several Berber dialects in addition to impeccable French and Oxford-accented English. Not only had much of North Africa been in turmoil when René had joined the organization, but France had had a long policy of treating its colonials as full citizens of France, thereby causing a migration of poor Moslems whose culture would never be assimilated into that of France no matter how much French liberals had hoped. Instead, the culture and laws of Islam would threaten the nation's very existence as the pall of Islamic extremism spread across Europe in the following half century.

René's talents had been useful in the sixties and were even more so as time passed, so useful that France's mandatory retirement age of sixty-two had been waived, ignored, or simply swept under the rug of bureaucracy.

René shepherded Jason to a section of wall that silently slid open, revealing an elevator. It hummed upward, opening onto an anteroom with a steel door. René leaned toward the door and stood still for a second before it swung open.

He confirmed what Jason had guessed, “Iris recognition. Bloody ingenious!”

After a few steps down a hall lit to operating room standards, they stopped in front of what appeared to be a normal wooden door. Jason knew case-hardened steel was sandwiched between the oak panels. Inside was an office remarkable only for its economy. Two nondescript club chairs faced a desk that had seen long and hard service. On it, sat a computer monitor, a key pad, telephone, a file folder, and a hand-tooled leather desk blotter. A Kerman rug in pale pinks and blues and a well-done reproduction of Renoir's
Luncheon of the Boating Party
in a golden frame softened the austerity of the room. Men in straw hats, women in summer frocks. An unidentified but recognizable bottle of wine dark against a tablecloth.

Jason was examining the painting as René slid behind the desk. “I'm rather fond of that picture. The depiction of frivolity lessens the burden of the more serious matters that pass through this office.”

René always talked like that, a professor standing behind a lectern.

This was no art-store print, but an actual painting. The artist had even mimicked the original by using a palette knife to apply a coat of white over the empty canvass before he had begun, giving a translucence to his subjects. Jason was noting the strokes that arranged color rather than applied it, sculpted rather than brushed.

“As delighted as I am to see you, Jason, I was informed you are here for specific information this organization is willing to share, not to admire my art.”

Reluctantly, Jason turned from the painting and sank into one of the chairs, not conscious he was massaging the throbbing calf. “You have already been briefed on what I'm looking for?”

René opened the file folder and handed over several typed sheets. “Here is the official BEA report. Attached are some pages that are anything but official. I've taken the liberty of having both translated into English.”

“Thanks, but I'll try the original French. Don't want risk the translator missing something.”

“As you wish. Read all you like, but these papers don't leave this room.”

Jason was already absorbing the information before him. He acquiesced with a nod of the head. René began work at the computer.

Twenty minutes later, Jason leaned forward and placed the papers on the desk. “The official report is amazing enough. The unofficial part is right out of some sci-fi story.”

René's bushy eyebrows lifted, small furry animals arching their backs. “Sci-fi?”

“Science fiction. You know, like
Star Wars.
”

“Regrettably, this didn't happen in some galaxy far, far away.”

Jason was rubbing his leg again. “May as well have. Death ray, earthquake machines.”

René was puzzled. “I don't understand.”

Jason zipped open his bag and handed the man a sheaf of papers. “I'll wait while you read this.”

After a few minutes, René looked up. “Are you telling me someone has resurrected this man's inventions, this man . . .”

“Tesla.”

“Tesla. You Yanks think somehow the jihadists have gotten their hands on his inventions?”

Jason told René of his trip to Croatia, finishing with, “Apparently, the man made a deal with the Croatian Fascists to furnish them his machine—or the one he was working on—to get his nephew out of military service. The Germans couldn't perfect it, and the Moslems got hold of whatever remained and have finished what Tesla started.”

René stared into space. “The bunch who participated in the massacre, the Bosniaks, they are Sunni, I believe.”

“So?”

If you read the report I gave you carefully, you'll note whatever impacted that aircraft came at a certain angle.”

Jason stopped rubbing his leg. “I'm not following you.”

René peered over the edge of his desk. “You might want to get that sodding wound looked at.”

Jason averted his eyes downward. A dark stain was spreading across his pants leg. The damn stiches!

René was muttering into the phone. “Help is on the way, old chappie. We have a physician on call, specializes in trauma. Every so often, one of our lads gets banged about, a trauma we had rather not be made public, you understand. He'll fix you right up.”

“Thanks. But while we wait, you were saying something about the aircraft and an angle.”

René stared at him blankly as though trying to remember, blinked, and stood. Turning, he reached up and pulled down a map of the world, a map that, like those used in schools, unrolled like a window shade.

Using a pen, he indicated a point in mid-South Atlantic. “This is the area where Flight 447 went down.” He moved his makeshift pointer to the skull-like bulge of western Africa. “The angle of impact would place the origins of whatever hit the aircraft roughly here, in the nation of Mali.”

“I understand some sort of triangulation was used to pinpoint the source.” Ignoring the pain in his leg, Jason stood and leaned over the desk for a better view. “In the middle of the desert?”

“Our people used a number of methods to locate the source. They all agreed on this location. You'll note there's a city, a town, rather, in the general area. Interestingly enough, we—the Western intelligence communities—have noted a decided uptick in activity there by people we believe to be the Islamic Maghreb.”

Jason inhaled audibly. “The North African arm of Al Qaeda.”

“Not exactly, the Maghreb have allied themselves with Al Qaeda, but they are a separate entity. And they are Sunni just like your Bosniaks and just like Al Qaeda.”

“Same difference.”

“Perhaps. Sat-intel tells us the activity is centered around Timbuktu.”

Jason squinted to make out the print on the map. “Timbuktu?”

“More or less.”

Jason hobbled back to his chair. “If you guys know where the missile or whatever came from, why haven't you sent someone to investigate? After all, it was your plane that went down.”

René let the map roll itself back up before taking a seat. “Same reasons I'm sure you've already heard. Why should we when your chaps are so accommodating?” Elbows on the desk, René made a steeple of his fingers. “Which raises a question of why this matter didn't refer itself to one of your intelligence organizations, CIA, NIA, et cetera.”

Jason leaned back in the chair and tried to stretch his wounded leg out. The pain continued unabated. “Ordinarily, it would. Problem as I understand it, reason my employer was hired, was that the American intelligence folks want plausible deniability if things go in the crapper. It looks very much like this op is going to be wet and take place in a Moslem country. After the United States' engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, after what amounted to an invasion of Pakistan to take out Osama bin Laden . . . Well, the powers that be in Washington don't want to take any action that could be construed as anti-Islamic.”

René was now leaning forward, his arms crossed on the desk top. “And if, as you so picturesquely phrase it, ‘things go in the crapper' . . . ?”

“It's my ass. The bad guys will know Washington's behind it, but they won't be able to prove it.”

“You think you could resist, ah, what is the delightfully euphemistic phrase your CIA uses? . . . ‘Enhanced interrogation,' that's it. You think you could withstand enhanced interrogation?”

Jason's hand grew still on his leg. “I don't think anyone expects me to resist. If I'm taken, no one expects me to be alive.”