The Wolf of Sarajevo (21 page)

“Who do you think it is?” Eric asked Dragan.

“Dimitrović's men. Mali's maybe. It looks like Filipović waited a little too long to jump.”

“Do you have another gun?”

“Are you going to shoot me with it?”

“Not on purpose.”

Dragan reached down and pulled a squat pistol out of an ankle holster. He handed it to Eric. For such a small weapon, it was surprisingly heavy. It was a revolver rather than an automatic, so Eric would not have to fumble with a safety. Just squeeze the trigger.

“If you're not close enough to smell his breath, don't fire,” Dragan said, as though reading Eric's thoughts. “You won't hit anything with that. At least not anything you want to.”

A ghost of a shadow passed in front of the window shattered by the assassin's bullet, a darker black against the black of the cold night. A soft shuffling sound came from the other side of the door, and there was a low whispered exchange. Eric could not make out the words, but the note of urgency was clear enough.

Eric held up the pistol and gestured toward the door. Dragan shook his head. The front door was made of thick oak planks. It was almost certainly strong enough to stop a pistol bullet.

Instead of a knob, the door had a European-style handle. Eric watched as it moved slowly to point at the floor. Someone was opening the door from the outside.

Nikola raised the poker straight up with two hands as if it were a samurai sword. Dragan and Eric readied their pistols.

Two muffled gunshots from the outside were followed by two more and the sound of bodies hitting the ground.

“Boss, are you alive?” The question was matter-of-fact rather than concerned.

“I'm still here,” Dragan said. “So's our principal. Don't worry. The check will clear.”

The door opened.

Two men came in with the black leather dusters and shaved heads that Dragan's associates seemed to favor. They were both so large that Eric thought it must have taken the skin from an entire cow to make each of their jackets. The pistols in their hands were sized to match. They were easily three times as large as the snub-nosed popgun that Eric was holding.

“Who was it?” Dragan asked.

“Paramilitaries,” one of the men answered. “Amateurs.” It was clear that there was no harsher epithet in his vocabulary.

“That sniper was no amateur,” Nikola said angrily.

“No,” the other man conceded. He looked over at Filipović's body. There was a hole the size of a quarter in the center of his forehead. The back of the politician's head was a sodden mass of blood and tissue where the bullet had made an explosive exit from his skull. “That was a quality shot.”

“Is he still out there?” Eric asked. He worked hard to keep his voice calm and neutral.

“Novak sent the dogs after him. I doubt they'll get him, but they should flush him out of his nest. These sniper guys are trained to shoot and move. I don't think he'll be hanging around.”

Dragan stepped outside.

“Get me a light,” he commanded.

One of the men produced a flashlight, and Dragan ran the beam quickly over the two dead men lying on the ground by the door. Eric could see that each had been shot twice in the head. The patches on their shoulders were cartoon wasps dive-bombing a city with their stingers extended.

“It's a shame that Filipović wasn't able to tell us what he knows,” Nikola said resignedly.

“Maybe not everything,” Dragan said, “but he told us one thing that's pretty fucking important.”

“What's that?” Eric asked.

“There's going to be a meeting of all the big shots in Banja Luka in five days, including Mali.”

“So?”

“So he won't be home. We know where he lives, and I'm pretty confident that I can get us inside his house.”

ROSULJE, REPUBLIKA SRPSKA

NOVEMBER 10

D
arko Lukić was disturbed. It was not the killing that bothered him. He had done a great deal of killing. But he had only taken a handful of shots since the end of the war, and each one stirred up old memories that had settled into the recesses of his brain like silt at the bottom of a pond. It took little more than a single footstep to turn the water cloudy and muddy, to make it hard to see or think clearly.

For Lukić, the past and the present had blurred. They were comingled in such a way as to be indistinguishable. This had been true for a long time. Like many of his fellow veterans, Lukić had taken to drinking. Alcohol could not help him separate the past and the present, but it did make the distinction seem less important.
Rakija
had dulled the edge of the pain and confusion. Killing, however, cut through the fog of memory like a searchlight.

Drinking also made his hands shake, so Lukić had not touched a drop since his meeting with Mali. He had had a few bad nights—very bad nights—but it had been worth it. The tremors in his hands were gone. Now he could shoot.

Lukić had enjoyed killing the fat man Mali had wanted dead. He understood, of course, that it was part of some political game. It was a game in which he was completely disinterested. The technical challenge of the shot was more engaging, but there was another level of meaning. Deeper. Primal. It was killing itself. He felt it coursing in his veins the way other men felt their devotion to God or love for their children. For Lukić, killing from a distance was an act of worship.

The shot on the target at the farmhouse had been a thing of beauty. It was like meeting up with an old friend after many years and finding that nothing had changed between you, or like sex with a long-ago lover that was as sweet in the flesh as it was in memory. There were only a handful of men who could have made that shot. At night. At almost fifteen hundred meters. Through the distortion of the glass and the flickering shadows of firelight. Dead center. It was so beautiful that it had almost reduced Lukić to tears.

Only one flaw had discomfited him, something so strange that it was hard to credit. He would have blamed drink had he not been stone-cold sober to keep the shakes out of his hand. It was a phantasm. Something that made him doubt his own grasp on reality. The past had him by the throat.

He would need to be in absolute control of both himself and his environment to succeed in his assignment. Filipović was not the primary target. He was no more than an appetizer. Lukić knew that
the next shot would require different tools and an even more obsessive attention to detail.

For the shot at the farmhouse, he had used a Belgian-made bolt-action .300 Winchester Magnum. The shot on the woman would be harder. He had planned and rehearsed the shot mentally. The geometry was familiar. He had made shots down that same line many times. But the city had sprawled since the war. The empty buildings he had used as a nest had either been torn down or were no longer vacant. After considerable hard work, he had found a place that would serve his purpose, which was not only to kill but also to escape.

The real challenge was the distance. It would be a long shot, almost two kilometers. One thousand nine hundred and sixty-six meters to be exact. It would take the bullet 3.6 seconds to reach the target. In flight, the bullet would arc to a height of 17.25 meters relating to the sighting plane. Then it would begin to drop as gravity did its work, inexorable but entirely predictable. Lukić knew the drop charts by heart. The unknowns included wind speed, air temperature, visibility, even humidity. This was where shooting became less of a science and more of an art.

Even for an artist, however, inspiration needed to be bolstered by practice and preparation. Lukić had identified an isolated valley in Bosnia's wild Romanija region that allowed him to duplicate the distance and angle of the shot.

It was a cold day, but he had long ago learned to ignore mere physical discomfort. Heat. Cold. Hunger. Pain. These were all states of mind. They could be blocked out, controlled by conscious acts of will.

He removed some items from his rucksack. A Swiss range-finding binocular, a PDA encased in rubber armor, and a handheld weather meter. Back in the war, the snipers had not had access to such high-end equipment, but for a shot like this, where he would only get one pull of the trigger, they were a necessity. He checked the range to the target and, dismissing the creaking pain in his knees, moved the wooden pallet he had hauled up the mountain to the right spot.

He was getting old. War was a young man's game, but what Mali needed from him was not war. It was murder.

He did not bother with concealment. He would be shooting from inside a building, and his camouflage would be to blend in with the people of the city rather than the forest floor.

He turned on the PDA, which looked like a bulky cell phone, and connected it to the binocular with a cable. The weather meter automatically fed data to the little computer. He scrolled down the PDA's screen, making sure all the fields were correct. It took every variable into consideration: the bullet's weight, how fast it would exit the barrel, aerodynamics, and a dozen other parameters.

His ammunition came from a special department located within Zastava Arms, as did his rifle. The cartridges were as long as his hand and heavy. The bullets, which had been individually turned on specialized lathes, terminated in needle-sharp points.

He assembled the rifle, which weighed as much as a small child and came in two pieces. After joining the barrel to the receiver and lowering the legs on the bipod, he laid down on the pallet.

Lukić looked through the binocular and ranged the target. A red LED indicated a distance of 1,966 meters. Perfect. The PDA used this range and information from the weather meter to produce
a firing solution. He dialed the figure into the scope, correcting for elevation. He knew that the computer's estimate was just that—an estimate—one that he would fine-tune as he shot.

He considered the wind. The meter only told him the speed it was blowing and in what direction from his spot on the hillside. That tidbit of data was better than nothing, but not by much.

He switched to the rifle scope and studied the air between him and the target. To most people, wind is invisible. To Lukić, it was alive and dynamic, and it would speak to you if you knew how to listen. He divided the distance to the target in five-hundred-meter increments and changed the focus on his scope to look at each slice of air in turn. He looked at how the grass swayed in the field before him and how the leaves on the trees shook. An observer coming on the scene might have thought Lukić had fallen asleep behind the large rifle. Eventually, he lifted his head from the scope, working the stiffness from his neck. But he knew. The wind had yielded its secrets. It was his feel for the wind that separated Lukić from all but a select few snipers.

He chambered a round, sliding the bolt forward and down. There was no time to waste. The wind told him what he needed, but at some point it would change. It always did.

Lukić looked through the scope at the target downrange, a simple metal rectangle the size of a human torso that he had painted white.

He saw the plate floating in space, hanging by chains in a metal frame. In his mind's eye, the background was not the valley floor but a Sarajevo streetscape. It was Sniper Alley circa 1993 with dark-clad Turks scurrying for safety like cockroaches across a kitchen floor. The view through his scope reached not only across the
distance that separated Lukić from the target but also across the years that separated him from the man he had been. It was either the power of a god or the delusion of a madman. Maybe there was no difference between the two.

This was what had happened to him at the farmhouse. He pulled back from the scope and shook his head to clear the image. His breathing was ragged, and despite the cold, he could feel himself sweating. His heart raced. It would be hard to shoot with his pulse pounding behind his eyeballs and in his fingers.

Lukić closed his eyes and slowed his breathing. He pictured the blood flowing through his veins and arteries. He willed his heart to slow. Like an obedient dog, it obeyed its master's voice.

His heart was tractable, but his brain had a mind of its own. Lukić knew that the war would be with him forever. It had marked him deeply, marked him on his soul.

He could fight the visions, he decided, or embrace them. How many men could maintain this visceral connection to their youth, reach out and caress it from a kilometer or more away? In that moment, Lukić chose power over clarity. He would not deny these visions. He would not resist them. They were a part of him. He had been touched by the divine.

Lukić settled his finger on the trigger, and as he emptied the air from his lungs, he shot.

Despite the power of the round, the rifle barely moved. Lukić didn't blink. He kept his eyes on the target and saw his bullet's impact, which made the plate dance. His wind call was perfect. But the round hit low. He shot again, and then once more. All three rounds were within a hand's breadth of one another.

He adjusted the data in the PDA to give him the correct hold. Now he was ready.

Lying prone on the wooden pallet on the cold ground, Lukić sent more rounds downrange. Each bullet struck the plate in the center in a tight group no more than twenty centimeters in diameter. Each shot was a foreshadowing.

He was the god of death.

And he never missed.

SARAJEVO

NOVEMBER 8

W
e have a problem.”

Eric knew there was no need to beat around the bush with Annika. She was tough and practical. If there was a problem, she wanted to know about it. She did not need it sugarcoated, and Eric had yet to see the High Rep lose her cool.

“Tell me,” she said, gesturing to Eric to sit. They were in Annika's office. Eric still had his office in the U.S. embassy, but Annika had also made room for him at the EU mission, and he had found himself spending more and more of his time working out of the converted town house that the EU used as its Sarajevo headquarters. Even when the High Rep was back in Brussels, Eric was in no hurry to move back to his old office with its multiple layers of security and bureaucracy. The EU mission was more human in scale than the U.S. embassy, which bore more than a passing
resemblance to a high-security federal prison. Avoiding the embassy also kept him away from Ambassador Wylie, who had grown sour as he watched the Sondergaard Plan for Bosnia gather momentum, leaving him stranded on the sidelines with no role and no visibility. He seemed to hold Eric personally responsible for this.

Eric sat in one of the minimalist chairs across from Annika. The whole office was decorated in a vaguely Scandinavian style with blond wood furniture that looked like it had been ordered from the IKEA catalogue. It was all uncomfortable. The High Rep liked it that way. The Nordics, Eric suspected, viewed physical comfort as a sign of moral weakness.

“I got a call about half an hour ago from a contact in the HDF.” This was the Serbo-Croatian acronym for the Croatian Democratic Front, the center-right party that dominated Bosnian Croat politics. “Ante Strelić has called a press conference for tomorrow morning, and my guy tells me that he is going to withdraw his support for your plan and pull out of the talks. I didn't want to come to you with only a single source, so I asked around. It looks like an accurate report.”

“If we lose the HDF, we lose the Federation,” Annika observed. “The Bosniak Unity Party won't move without cover from their Croat partners.”

“That's right,” Eric agreed. “The HDF is just the first domino. We'd lose all the center-right parties in the Federation. The left is too small to carry the load. The whole thing would fall apart.”

Annika leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. Eric could see lines at the corners of her eyes that had not been there when they had met six weeks ago. There were a few streaks of gray in her white-blond hair. Maybe the gray had been there before, but if so,
he had not noticed it. Annika was tired. She was carrying enormous responsibilities, and it was slowly wearing her down. They were in this together. If they failed, they would both have ownership of the consequences. But Eric's failure would be private and personal. Annika's would be spectacularly public.

She would be linked forever to the war they were persuaded would follow the collapse of the talks. The first Balkan war of the twenty-first century would be associated with her in the way that Chamberlain and Munich still resonated seventy years after the British prime minister's disastrously supine performance in his negotiations with Hitler. It would be the end of her political career and the beginning of a long period of soul-searching and repentance. But Eric knew enough about her to recognize that her personal circumstances were not the source of her anxiety. It was the consequences their failure would have on the lives of millions. The loss of yet another generation of Balkan youth to the insatiable maw of war.

“Why?” she asked, after allowing herself the luxury of two minutes of silent contemplation. “What does Strelić want? Why the change of heart?”

“According to my contacts, it's not about your plan or the conference at all. Strelić's number two, a guy named Arsić, is making a play for the top job. Arsić is the one who's made an issue of Strelić's support for the peace conference. I don't think he gives a damn about it, but he's targeted the party's nationalist base and Strelić is feeling the heat. If he backs off from his support for reconciliation with Srpska, Strelić has a fighting chance to get a grip on his leadership position in the party. If he holds firm, he's likely to lose control of the HDF to Arsić.”

“Who would withdraw the party's support for the peace conference within hours of taking the reins.”

“That's a good bet.”

Annika stood up and began to pace back and forth behind the desk. It was a habit she had that Eric had observed before. It seemed to help her think.

“What if Arsić was out of the picture altogether?” she asked.

“What do you have in mind?” Eric flashed back to Filipović's head exploding into a mass of red-gray goo. But he did not believe for a moment that this was what Annika meant by “out of the picture.”

“What if Arsić was gone? Just out of the equation. Could we keep Strelić onside?”

“I think so, yes. His calculus would certainly change, and it's the challenge from Arsić that is pushing him to abandon the peace process.”

“Can you get me another twenty-four hours? Get Strelić to postpone his press conference by a day?”

“Maybe. But no promises. There are a few guys firmly in Strelić's camp in the HDF who owe me a favor or two. I can try to cash those in for a delay, but it depends on the dynamics inside the party. If they've decided that Arsić is the future, they may already be looking to switch sides. And if Strelić feels the walls closing in, he won't listen to anyone who's telling him to do anything other than defend his position.”

“See if you can get me the time I need.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

Annika's eye's narrowed and her expression was steely.

“I'm going to play politics.”

“I'll do my best,” Eric promised.

“And one more thing,” Annika said, as though she had not already asked for the moon. “Ask Strelić to come in and meet with me tomorrow morning.”

“Now I'm not just cashing in markers, I'm writing IOUs.”

“That's alright,” Annika said with a mischievous smile. “You're good for it.”

—

Ante Strelić
was a former semipro basketball player in Croatia's development league. Eric had to crane his neck at an awkward angle as they shook hands. Strelić still carried himself like an elite athlete, angular and confident. His suit was Italian, charcoal gray with dark-blue pinstripes. His haircut was expensive. Strelić was not your average Bosnian politician. He had a future, and he would be the first to tell you that. His personal political fortune, Eric knew, would be the single most important factor in his decision making on the Sondergaard Plan. If his personal interests led him to choose war over peace, so be it.

In that way, at least, Strelić was all too typical of your average Bosnian politician even if his sartorial splendor was not.

Eric led the HDF leader up the stairs to Annika's second-floor office. The High Rep was easily Strelić's match in the wardrobe department. Black suit with a white open-necked shirt. Blond hair pulled back in a tight bun. Single strand of pearls. She looked ten years younger than she had just the day before.

They perched more than sat on the High Rep's vaguely uncomfortable Scandinavian furniture.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” Annika said, once coffee had been served.

“It's my pleasure,” Strelić replied. His English was smooth and cultured, the accent colored by the decade he had spent living in Germany. “Your people were both persuasive and . . . insistent.”

“It's all in the service of peace,” Annika offered.

“Of course,” Strelić said carefully. “Madam High Representative, I am happy to meet with you and I agreed to postpone my press conference at your request, but I am afraid that this conversation is unlikely to produce the results you desire. The HDF is forced to withdraw support for your plan. It's not personal. I have enormous regard for your diligent efforts in pursuit of an agreement. The time is just not right.”

“Is it the HDF pulling out of the peace conference,” Annika asked, “or Ante Strelić?”

“Is there a difference?”

“That's a little Louis XIV, don't you think?”

“I am the party.”

“But only so long as you can hold on to the top job.”

“That's the nature of our profession, alas. All political careers end in failure.”

“And you're concerned that Mr. Arsić will use your support for the peace conference to move your career forward to that unfortunate end before its time.”

Eric admired the way Annika controlled the conversation. She was firm but not overbearing. The High Rep was a hell of a politician.

“I'm not concerned,” Strelić said. “I'm certain. If I don't pull my
party out of your conference, I'm going to lose it. And Arsić will be even more difficult for you to deal with than I am. He represents the hard-liners in our party, the unreconstructed nationalists. If you are thinking that you can back them in this fight against me and make Arsić an ally, you're sadly mistaken.”

“I think no such thing,” Annika assured him. “We have no illusions about Mr. Arsić, his supporters, or his views.”

“So why have you asked to see me?”

“I just thought that you might like to know that three hours ago Mr. Arsić accepted a position as a senior advisor for the European Commission's Western Balkans Neighborhood Program. He starts immediately.”

Strelić looked stunned.

He was no more surprised than Eric. The High Rep had made these arrangements through her own channels.

“Why would he do this?” Strelić asked.

“The position pays rather well, about fourteen thousand euros a month,” Annika said with a tone that implied the answer was blindingly obvious. “The job also comes with a nice apartment in Brussels and a generous expense account.”

“And that was enough?”

“So it would seem.”

“You know what they say about gift horses,” Eric added.

“I suppose that I do.” Strelić still seemed confused by the sudden change in his political fortunes.

“This would seem to solve your little problem within the party,” Annika suggested.

“So it would seem,” Strelić said in conscious imitation of the High Rep's own blithe reassurances.

“What can we expect about the HDF's position with respect to the peace conference?”

Strelić did not hesitate.

“Madam High Representative, I can assure you that our press conference tomorrow will focus on the importance of all of Bosnia's political leaders putting aside their personal differences and embracing your plan as the surest path to peace and prosperity.”

“I'm so pleased to hear that,” Annika said with a slight smile. “And I am certain you will be quite convincing. I look forward to our continued partnership.”

“Partnership. Yes. I would imagine, Madam, that it is considerably more profitable to be your partner than your enemy.”

“I should hope so.”

After Strelić had left, Eric and Annika poured another round of coffees and shared a moment of quiet satisfaction.

“That was a pretty impressive performance, Annika.”

“Thank you. You're the regional expert, but I'm the politician. Politics is the same all over the world. It's all about who gets what.”

“Too many of them seem to want it all.”

Annika laughed lightly. “We politicians can be limited in our outlook, I agree.”

“There was more to the Arsić deal than just the job offer, wasn't there?” Eric suggested.

“Well, there was also the matter of his trading company.”

Arsić ran a successful business exporting fruits and vegetables from Bosnia to supermarket chains in Western Europe.

“A stick to go along with his carrots perhaps.”

“Very good. I may have suggested to Mr. Arsić that if he did not take the position the EU's health inspectors were going to find his
company in breach of so many phytosanitary regulations that not a single cucumber would make it onto the supermarket shelves of Western Europe.”

“Were you ready to follow through on that? Bankrupt him if he wouldn't play along?”

“Yes. I was.”

“That's what we Americans call hardball,” Eric said.

“Do you think it was unethical, what I did?”

It was a serious question and Eric gave it serious consideration.

“Maybe,” he offered, after a minute or two of thought. “But in the service of a good cause. I think that gives you some rope.”

“Thank you, Eric. I don't love playing those kinds of games even when they're necessary.”

“It's a tough town. You do what you have to.”

Annika nodded in agreement.

—

A few hours later,
Eric and Annika took the short drive to the Aleksandar Hotel. In a few short days, the Aleksandar would host the conference at which the fate of the Sondergaard Plan would be decided. Annika wanted the logistics to be smooth and predictable even as the politics promised to be anything but.

The Aleksandar was a venerable establishment and the beneficiary of a major facelift that had rejuvenated the façade and brought the once-tired interior into the twenty-first century. It was one of the best on Sarajevo's hotel scene and an obvious choice for the conference. They toured the rooms that were being readied for the delegates from the three major ethnic communities, the entities of the Federation, and the two big neighbors—Serbia and Croatia—
as well as the scores of European and American officials who were descending on the conference like locusts in the hopes of claiming a slice of the credit and a share of the glory that would come with success. These same self-promoters—so instrumental to the outcome, they would say back home—would slink out the back door into the night in the event of failure. It was always like that.