The Wolf of Sarajevo (28 page)

“We have a treaty-level obligation to turn anything like this, all of the evidence, over to the tribunal for prosecution.”

“Oh, grow up, Eric. That's the past. There's nothing you can do for the dead. Our concern was for the living and the future. If that's not a higher calling, then I don't know what is.”

Eric shook his head. Sarah did not see it. The past and future were the same here. Stefan was right. The Serbs needed to come to terms with the past, to go back before they could go forward.

“So what did you do with the tape?”

“We made contact with Dimitrović. Made it clear to him that he belonged to us now and that he would do what we told him to,
starting with enthusiastic support for revising the Dayton agreement and building a new unitary Bosnian state.”

“Was this after his election?”

Sarah's look was bemused and maddeningly confident.

“You still don't understand. Dimitrović was on his way up, but he hadn't made it all the way and there was no particular reason to believe that he would, at least not on his own.”

Eric was stunned.

“So you got him elected president of the RS? Knowing what he was, what he had done.”

“Well, we did our bit. Money. Information. Access. Positive press coverage. More money. These are the things on which political success is built. We didn't steal the election, if that's what you mean. It's been a while since we did that sort of thing. But we sure did make it easier for him. And when he won, we owned him. And we used him. And we were winning, Eric. We were so close.”

There was more to the story, Eric understood.

“How did you lose control of the tape? Weren't there copies?”

“Not as many as you might think. We had to keep the operational circle on this thing small. Very small.”

“Why? You guys don't do anything small.”

“The operation wasn't entirely . . .” Sarah struggled visibly for the right word. “Official.”

“Are you shitting me? You were running the president of the RS as an asset off-the-books without authorization?”

Sarah raised her chin in a gesture of defiance.

“Yes. We did that. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. If we went through channels, this thing would have gotten caught up in the same kind of legalisms that you were talking about. We'd never
have gotten approval for what we wanted to do. What we had to do.”

“Maybe there's a reason for that.”

“Maybe. But the only one I can think of is the knee-jerk cowardice of bureaucracies, even . . . hell, maybe especially . . . intelligence bureaucracies. The whole torture-report fiasco has my headquarters afraid of its own shadow.”

“All right. So you had your tight little team. And then somehow you lost control. What happened?” Eric could already imagine what the answer was to this question. There was no honor among thieves.

“One of our number, a talented but relatively junior analyst, saw an opportunity for self-advancement. He stole every copy of the tape and wiped the system down so cleanly that we couldn't recover so much as a byte.”

“And he sold it to the Russians? Is that where Mali comes into the picture? Is he working for Moscow and the FSB?”

“No, Eric. You still don't see. The analyst who stole the tape was named Michael Kaspar. Yugoslav background. His father was Slovene. His mother was mixed Serbian and Croatian. He knows this place well and speaks the language like a native. He kept the tape for himself.”

Sarah paused and looked Eric straight in the eyes before continuing.

“Marko Barcelona is Michael Kaspar. He is one of our own.”

TRNOVA, BOSNIA

NOVEMBER 14

1:25 P.M.

E
ric was numb. He was beyond feeling. The video and Sarah's revelations seemed to have overloaded both his intellectual and his emotional circuits. His thinking felt slow and clumsy, and he was moderately disoriented, something akin to the feeling of having had too much to drink.

He bit the inside of his cheek hard, hoping that simple physical pain could help him cut through the fog that clouded his brain.
What should he do with the new knowledge he had acquired? And what should he do with the videotape in his pocket? How much could he trust Sarah?

This last question was the most difficult, the most layered, and the most painful. He loved Sarah fiercely and selflessly, but not to the point of delusion. She was unworthy of trust. It was hard to frame this thought. Unpleasant. But it was necessary for Eric to
remind himself of this fundamental truth. Maybe she loved him back in some way, whatever minimal way she was capable of after allowing years of deceit to settle over the truth like a thick blanket of snow. Two decades in the world of espionage had done that to her, as it ultimately did to nearly every case officer working in the hall of mirrors.

Sarah would sacrifice him in a heartbeat in pursuit of her goals and call it duty. She would shed a tear for him, but it would be more to valorize her own heroism than to mourn Eric's loss.

They sat under Stefan's scarlet maple tree in a fragile silence, an uneasy truce. Sarah watched the priest work on his beehives. Eric studied her face. She was beautiful. But lots of women were beautiful. Sarah was more than that. She was powerful. She had a strength of will that would have driven Nietzsche to his knees in awe. It made her compelling, as addictive as the most powerful narcotic . . . and as dangerous.

Stefan finished up whatever he had been doing with his hives and rejoined Eric and Sarah at the table.

“May I sit?” he asked.

Sarah simply nodded as though she did not trust herself to speak.

“I have been thinking over what was on that tape and what it means,” the priest said.

“You are not alone in that, Father,” Eric replied.

“There is something else,” Stefan said. “Something you should know. I am not certain if this thing is true, and it was entrusted to me under the seal of confession. If it is true, however, I cannot believe that God would will it to be kept secret. Although we who speak in his name would do well to preserve a little humility in our claims to understand what is in his heart. He is a mystery.”

“Tell me, Stefan.” Eric was still distracted and he was only half listening to the priest. He was finding Stefan's stereotypically Balkan thought process with its elaborate and elliptical digressions somewhat irritating.

“A man came to see me a week ago, a former soldier haunted by demons as too many former soldiers are. This man, Darko was the name he gave me, told me that he was a sniper in the war. He said that Marko Barcelona had ordered him to kill someone. A woman.”

The priest looked at Sarah, his expression grave. “A woman of gold.”

Sarah Gold smiled at that, a smile as enigmatic as any that the Mona Lisa had ever managed. “How flattering. A girl always likes to be the center of attention.”

“So you think this could be the real thing?” Stefan asked. “I should caution you that this Darko seemed very disturbed. I was not at all convinced that his grip on what you and I would understand as reality was terribly firm.”

An unsettling image of Luka Filipović's head exploding in a red-gray mist leaped unbidden to the forefront of Eric's consciousness. That incident was both more and less than real. It was surreal in a way that André Breton, Miró, or Dalí would have understood. Eric knew from the Emerald Wave file they had found in Mali's desk both that the priest was right and the threat was real.

“There's good reason to believe his story,” Eric said. “I think the man who came to see you is named Darko Lukić. He was a sharpshooter in the Bosnian Serb army, one of the killers from Sniper Alley. And he may be crazy, but he's also very good at what he does.”

“And I can think of reasons why Mali might want me dead,” Sarah added.

If Stefan thought it odd that a Balkan mobster would want to put a hit on a woman who had introduced herself as an economic officer at the U.S. embassy, he gave no sign of it.

“Dead, yes,” Eric agreed. “But there's something about this that doesn't feel right. Why a sniper? There are plenty of street toughs who would be happy to kill on Mali's say-so at close range. A sniper is an awkward weapon. The target needs to be in a known place at more or less a known time. Kennedy's motorcade in Dallas, for example, or Zoran Đinđić meeting the Swedish foreign minister at the government office in Belgrade. Even Luka Filipović at Nikola's farmhouse. Your movements are not exactly predictable, Sarah. Sending a sniper after you would seem an odd choice. Bizarre even. Outside of war, the kind of killing a sniper does is more a political statement. It's public and visceral. There are easier ways to get rid of an enemy.”

“Maybe it was more important to Mali to avoid his assassin getting captured.”

“Wouldn't that be even easier with a disposable piece who doesn't even know who hired him? That's been the MO for mafia hits in the Balkans for the better part of twenty years.”

“What did Darko say to you exactly?” Sarah asked Stefan.

“He said he had one last job to do, to kill a woman of gold.”

“Zlatna zena?”
Eric asked, switching to Serbian.

“No. That's golden woman. He said
‘zena od zlata.'
Literally, woman of gold.”

Something urgent clawed at the back of Eric's brain, an insight that vanished into the shadows of his thoughts when he tried to seize it. He would need to coax it into the light. Let it show itself.

“
Zlatna zena
can mean a woman with a kind heart,” Sarah
suggested. “If that's what he meant, he certainly wasn't talking about me.”

“But
zena od zlata
is different. It's a physical thing, like a statue of a woman cast from gold,” the priest replied.

“Oh, god,” Eric said.

The priest's description of the difference between the two phrases was the clue he had needed. The insight that had been hiding at the dim edge of Eric's awareness stepped boldly into the light. He did not like the look of it. But it could not be easily denied. It felt true.

“We've been looking at this the wrong way. The three of us are verbal creatures. We engage with the world through language. That's why we're focused on the coincidence of Sarah's name. But Lukić is a sniper. His thinking would be more visual. Woman of gold is what he would see through the scope when he takes the shot.”

“An actual woman of gold?” Sarah asked, confused.

Eric had a mental flash of long hair as pure as spun eighteen-carat gold dyed red with blood.

“No. A platinum blonde. Lukić's target is Annika Sondergaard. I'm sure of it.”

“That would bring a pretty quick end to the peace conference,” Sarah agreed. “But it's a huge risk on Mali's part.”

“Not if what he wants is a war.”

Sarah nodded, signaling agreement as much as understanding.

“I can see that, yes.”

“There's more,” Eric said.

“Do I want to know?”

“To be effective, Lukić would need to know where Annika is going to be, a fixed time and place. There are not many of those opportunities. But one is the ceremonial opening of the peace
conference at the Aleksandar Hotel in”—he looked at his watch—“a little more than two and a half hours.”

—

Lukić shifted
his position on the shooting platform slowly and patiently, as though he were moving only one muscle at a time. It was a routine he had worked out over the years. It was important to stay loose as well as focused, to find a comfortable and relaxed position that would keep his hands steady and sure. Even a small muscle cramp could throw off his aim or break his concentration. At this distance, any error would be compounded. If the shot was off by even a fraction of a degree, the bullet would miss the target by several feet. It was delicate work. Much of it was a science. Physics and chemistry. But the last little bit—the part that separated competence from brilliance—that was art.

He settled into his new position, releasing the tension that had been building in his left shoulder. His concentration never wavered. The reticle in the Zeiss optical sight remained locked in on the kill zone. The target would present herself soon enough and he would be ready.

She was beautiful, with alabaster skin and hair the color of pure gold. Lukić considered this simultaneously regrettable and exciting. He tried not to think about what he would do to her, not because he was ashamed but because it raised his pulse and made it harder to steady the rifle. The bond he would forge with the woman of gold, what they would do together, was more intimate than sex. It was forever. It was death.

His breathing quickened slightly, and he felt a rush of blood to his groin that was not unpleasant but it was distracting. He pushed
thoughts of Annika Sondergaard out of his head and concentrated on the technical aspects of what would be a difficult shot.

He had built the shooting platform himself; it rose two meters off the floor in an internal room of the eighth floor of an unfinished building. The walls were raw concrete and brick, and the windows were open to the elements with no glass between Lukić and his target one thousand nine hundred and sixty-six meters away.

With a sledgehammer, he had knocked a hole in the wall approximately a meter and a half off the floor. Lying on the platform, he could sight through the hold and then through the window to the kill zone in front of the Aleksandar Hotel. There would be no muzzle flash, no noise, and no protruding rifle barrel to betray his position. He would be a silent killer, unseen and untraceable. One moment, Sondergaard would be standing there in her golden glory, and in the next, she would be his forever.

He looked away from the scope to rest his eyes, using the opportunity to check the weather on the PDA, which was receiving information from the sensors he had placed on the roof. Temperature and humidity were within the expected parameters. Wind speed was manageable. The flags of Bosnia and the EU flying in front of the hotel would be even more useful to him in gauging the speed and direction of the wind downrange. The conditions were perfect, just like those in the valley where he had practiced the shot.

Lukić pressed his eye back against the scope and did his best to ignore the ghosts. This angle, looking down into the heart of the city, was all too familiar. He had spent hundreds of hours tracking his prey on the streets of Sarajevo from sniper nests just like this. He remembered with absolute fidelity every shot he ever took. And the phantasms of victims—young and old, male and female, military
and civilian—floated across both his memory and his field of vision like clouds drifting in a clear blue sky. At first, Lukić had been afraid that the ghosts were conspiring against him to ruin his shot. Hide his target. But they were too insubstantial for that. If he concentrated, he could see past them, burn holes through their torsos with an act of will as though he were Superman shooting laser beams from his eyes.

Maybe he was Superman, or a reasonable facsimile.

A small voice in his head whispered to him that he had lost his mind, that the ghosts he saw through the rifle sights were more delusion than illusion. Lukić knew that this was true and he did not care. What mattered was the shot. All that mattered was the shot.

Even from this distance, he could take her in the head. The blood would coat her chest and run like sweat in rivulets down her back.

A middle-aged woman in a black cloth coat ragged at the hem rose up from the ground in front of the Aleksandar Hotel. She stared at him, unconstrained by distance or the brick walls of the building. The sniper could see through her to the brass doors of the hotel behind her. She was a shadow.
You are dead, bitch. I killed you twenty years ago. You cannot stop me.

His finger tightened involuntarily on the trigger, and he was a hair's breadth from sending a copper-jacketed .30 slug through a ghost into the front door of the Aleksandar. He forced his trigger finger to relax. This would ruin everything. He could no more kill this specter than he could slay his own memories. This Muslim woman in her patched coat was a part of him.

Soon, the woman of gold would be a part of him too. He would need to be patient, but not for too much longer.

—

After no more
than thirty seconds of macho bullshit, Eric gave Sarah the keys. Twenty minutes later, he was questioning the wisdom of that decision as Sarah manhandled the Golf around a series of twisting turns on the narrow mountain road at speeds well beyond what either the car or the road were designed to handle. The State Department taught its officers defensive driving before sending them to dangerous assignments overseas. The CIA evidently trained its personnel in offensive driving as well.

“Any luck getting a signal?” Sarah asked.

Eric checked his BlackBerry, which was still reading
NO SERVICE
. They should have been within range of a cell tower by this point.

“Still nothing, but I'm not sure if the problem is with the phone or the cell system.”

“Let me check my phone,” Sarah said, taking one hand off the wheel. The speedometer read eighty-five miles an hour.

“I'll get it.”

Eric fished Sarah's phone out of her jacket pocket.

“Nothing.”

“Something's not right.”

“Let's see if we can find a place with a landline.”

Eric wanted to call ahead to warn Annika. He wanted to get through to the police, the embassy, Annika herself, Dragan, anyone who might be in a position to disrupt the assassination attempt on the EU High Representative that Eric feared was already under way. Annika had a chance to save Bosnia. Her death might destroy it.