The Wolf of Sarajevo (20 page)

Someone walked out into the garden. He was wearing a hat.

“Can you get in closer?”

“With the camera? Sure.”

The operator zoomed in on the man in the hat. His face was not visible.

“Can you try a different angle?”

“Not enough fuel for maneuvers, sorry. We are bingo plus one minute.”

VW studied the image.

“That's a baseball cap,” she said, thinking out loud.
What kind of mafia boss wears a baseball cap? Look up, you bastard. Let me see your face.

“Bingo,” the operator said, reaching for the joystick.

VW grabbed his wrist.

“Wait,” she said, before adding as an afterthought, “Please. We may not get another chance like this.”

The pilot looked at Landis, who nodded.

“Ninety seconds, VW. If he doesn't look at the birdie in ninety seconds, we're flying home.”

“Keep the camera pointed at his head,” VW instructed the pilot.

She stared at the screen intently, as though she could will the image to do what she wanted. With thirty seconds left on the clock, the man VW believed to be Marko “Mali” Barcelona doffed his hat and turned his face to the sun. VW had as clear a view as she could have asked for.

It took almost ten seconds for VW to process what she was seeing.

“It can't be,” she said.

“What?” Landis asked.

“Mali,” she said.

“Yes?”

“I know him.”

SARAJEVO

NOVEMBER 8

I
have someone who wants to meet with you.” Nikola sounded eager, even anxious, but the cell reception was spotty, and it was difficult for Eric to judge the subtleties.

“Do I want to meet him?”

“You do.”

“Who is it?”

“A colleague of mine . . . but no names over the phone.”

“What's it about?”

“Our mutual Spanish friend.”

“Then I am interested. When and where?”

“Tonight. Do you remember that place where you and I had too much to drink that one time?”

“Oh, god. My head still hurts.”

“Do you think you can find the place?”

“I'll just follow the trail of empty tequila bottles.”

“See you tonight.”

—

Eric was now
as close as you could come in the Foreign Service to being a free agent. Ambassador Wylie had essentially cut him loose to support the High Rep's peace process and Sondergaard only needed Eric's help episodically. He had found himself devoting an increasingly significant share of his time to the Mali-Dimitrović connection. And to Sarah.

For the first time in his diplomatic career he did not have to account for his whereabouts. There was no requirement to get approval for a midnight meeting with an unknown Bosnian Serb politician at an isolated farmhouse ten miles from the nearest cell reception. He had not told either the ambassador or the embassy's regional security officer where he was going and why. There was too great a risk that one of them might say no and reimpose the kind of restrictions on travel and contacts that could make a political officer's job almost impossible to do well.

Sarah was off again. Eric did not know where. He had made the decision to meet with Nikola's nameless contact on his own.

When Eric pulled his Golf up in front of the ramshackle wooden structure, he had a moment of doubt as to the wisdom of that choice. He was miles from the nearest paved road and considerably farther from the nearest town. Even with a sky full of stars, the night up here in the foothills of the Dinaric Alps was dark. There was a chill in the air, and Eric pulled the zipper of his North Face jacket closed against the cold. He turned his face up toward the night sky. The Milky Way was easily visible against the black
of a moonless night. With Eric's every breath, a cloud of vapor blurred the stars for just a brief moment.

The farmhouse belonged to Nikola's cousin, who lived in Vienna and rarely visited. Nikola looked after the place and used it as he pleased. The farm had gone fallow years ago and the livestock had been sold off or slaughtered, but the plum and cherry trees still produced fruit and the house itself was in good shape. Last spring, Nikola and Eric had spent an epic boys' weekend up here with a couple of friends that had involved fishing, grilling, and more drinking than he cared to remember.

Reluctantly, Eric turned his attention away from the grandeur of the Milky Way to the job at hand, a midnight meeting with someone he did not know to discuss the activities of a ruthless gangster. Eric had friends back in California who were convinced that all diplomats did was go to cocktail parties in top hats and tails. If only they could see him now.

He pulled a small flashlight out of his pocket. The narrow beam of the LED light revealed three other vehicles parked in front of the farmhouse. The canary yellow Yugo was Nikola's and the wonder of it was that this twelve-year-old car—more rust than metal at this point in its life cycle—had made it up the twisty mountain road. The Yugo was the most basic car imaginable with the absolute minimum number of moving parts. In a day when cars seemed built around their onboard computers, the Yugo did not have so much as a radio. Next to the Yugo was a black Mitsubishi 4×4 with oversize tires and a whip antenna. This was almost certainly Dragan's vehicle. The security services in the former Yugosphere were partial to black SUVs and had never felt any compunction about being conspicuous.

The last car was a Mercedes, silver and expensive-looking. This one must belong to the guest of honor.

Nikola answered the door wearing a black sweater and jeans. He hugged Eric and kissed him on both cheeks with Balkan exuberance.

“Glad you found the place.”

“Me too. Get lost out here and they'll never find your body.”

Inside, the farmhouse was warm and inviting. The main room was spacious with both a living area organized around a pair of overstuffed couches and a dining area with a farm table the size of a barn door. A wagon-wheel chandelier hung from the ceiling.

A fire was burning in the stone fireplace, casting an orange glow through the room. Two men sat near the fire holding cognac glasses. One, as Eric had suspected, was the ex-spy Dragan. His bullet-shaped bald head gleamed in the firelight. The second man was someone Eric knew by sight but had never met. His presence immediately elevated the significance of the meeting several notches.

He was middle-aged with a gray beard and a substantial paunch straining against an olive green army-surplus sweater. The cigarillo in his left hand was clutched so tightly that it looked like a sixth finger.

“Eric, this is Luka Filipović.”

“I know.”

Filipović's handshake was firm, but his palm was damp and his eyes darted about the room as though he were expecting something terrible to happen at any moment. Filipović was one of Dimitrović's senior lieutenants in the National Party. They had been together a long time, many said all the way back to their wartime service. Given the increasingly paranoid and conspiratorial nature of RS
politics there were many people in Banja Luka with good reason to be nervous. But Filipović did not belong on that list.

The four men sat by the fire. Nikola produced another snifter of cognac for Eric.

“Nikola told me that you wanted to meet, that you had something to tell me about Marko Barcelona.”

Filipović nodded and took a pull from his cigarillo. The cloud of blue smoke hovered over the table, a physical reminder that all negotiations in the Balkans were shrouded in a fog of secrecy and ambiguity. “I did and I do,” Filipović said.

“Are you here representing Dimitrović? I know the two of you are close.”

“We
were
close,” Filipović corrected Eric. “I have come to the view that my old friend now represents an unacceptable danger to my country, my family, and . . . I suppose . . . myself.”

Eric raised an eyebrow at this but said nothing.

“When Zoran and I were younger, we fought together. It's an experience that bonds men closer than brothers. And that's what I thought we were. When he went into politics, I followed him. Not just because I believed in what he believed, but because he was my brother. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“And when Zoran changed, when he embraced a different future for Bosnia, for Srpska, for all of us, a future of tolerance and peace, I followed him. And then, that Spanish gangster, or whatever he is, appeared in Banja Luka. A man from nowhere. A man with no past. Zoran chose to follow this man back down the road of violence, back down the road to war. That I could not do. I could not take my family back to this hell.”

“What can you tell me about Mali?” Eric asked. “What is his relationship with Dimitrović? What does he want?”

There was a pause in the conversation. Filipović sipped his cognac and puffed on his little cigar, but to Eric it looked like studied nonchalance, like an anxious man trying to pretend a cool equanimity he did not feel. “Now, that's the bush in which the rabbit lies,” Filipović finally replied. It was a Serbian idiom, something akin to the Shakespearian “Now there's the rub.” Eric recognized the opening salvo of a negotiation when he heard one.

“How can I help you?”

Filipović reached into his pocket and pulled out a photograph. He set it on the table in front of Eric. It was a family portrait, Filipović, his wife, and their two sons. His wife was short and round and far from beautiful, but Eric could tell from the way Filipović's arm was draped over her shoulder, holding her close against him, that he loved her. The boys, sadly, took after their mother. They were young, neither looked to have hit puberty yet, but they were pudgy, dull-eyed, and even in the snapshot they seemed sullen. Family was family.

“This is Mileva and my two boys. I want to get them out of Banja Luka.”

“To Sarajevo?”

“Chicago.”

“You want to emigrate to the United States?”

“In a manner of speaking. I want to be relocated to the Chicago area, my family and I, with new identities and enough in the way of financial resources to start over.”

“Why Chicago?”

“It's a good city for Serbs. Dimitrović and Mali are too well connected in Europe. No matter where we are, they would find us. None of the Europeans do witness protection in the way you Americans do. That's one of the reasons they haven't broken the back of organized crime like your FBI has. I will help you get Mali and Dimitrović, but I need protection and immunity in return.”

Eric did not have the authority to offer any of what Filipović was asking for, but he wanted to explore what Dimitrović's erstwhile ally had to offer and whether he was really ready to switch teams or whether this was an elaborate con of some sort.

“Tell me something that will get me interested,” Eric said.

“Mali meets with Zoran at least once a week, often more, always alone. After each meeting, there is something. Sometimes it is something small, make a list of journalists sympathetic to Dimitrović's enemies and bug their phones and offices. Sometimes it is something big like reviving the paramilitaries. That didn't just happen on its own. We did it.”

“Is Dimitrović using Mali or is it the other way around?”

“Mali's in charge. He's in control of Dimitrović.”

“What does he have on Dimitrović? What's the leverage?”

Filipović ignored the question.

“Mali and Zoran have been working on something important, something big and ambitious. I don't know what it is, but they've called all of the power brokers in the RS to a meeting in Banja Luka five days from now. Whatever comes out of that is going to be dark and ugly. I think this meeting will be the key to everything they are planning.”

“Have you been invited?”

“Yes. But I am hopeful that I can send my regrets from Lake Forest.” Filipović had evidently been reading up on Chicago's high-end suburbs.

“If you had visibility into what they were planning, it would make you more valuable, more useful to my government. It would be easier to argue for witness protection if you were bringing something like that to the table.”

“It would also be extremely dangerous. I have spoken up too many times. I have a feeling that Zoran is starting to doubt my loyalty. Mali, I am certain, has been trying to turn him against me.”

“I understand that, Mr. Filipović. But there is no reward without risk.”

Eric was getting pretty far outside his lane. This was not diplomatic deal making. This was much closer to a case officer running an asset or, reaching back to his own experiences, a journalist working a source. If Filipović was sincere about coming over to the Americans, then he was right about the dangers. But the information he might be able to bring with him could be invaluable. It could potentially stop a war.

Filipović hesitated.

“I do this thing for you and you get my family out of Bosnia?”

There was no way for Eric to duck the moral culpability in his response. Did it matter that his motives were pure? That he and Sarah were trying to avert a genocide that they felt was coming but that their government refused to see? Did it matter if Filipović was sacrificed in the process? His own past was hardly free of blood and terror. Did it matter?

“I can't make any promises,” Eric said, both because it was true and because a part of him wanted selfishly to lessen the burden of
responsibility. “But it would make a stronger case if you had something to trade.”

“I do have something to trade,” Filipović replied, holding his cognac up to the firelight and staring at it intently as a Gypsy fortune-teller might gaze into her crystal ball.

“I have the keys to the kingdom,” he continued, having evidently found the answer he was looking for in the depths of the cognac.

“Tell me. And I'll see what I can do.”

“That thing you asked about, the leverage Mali has over Dimitrović. The thing he uses to control him.”

“Yes.”

“I know what it is.”

He raised the snifter to his lips, but before he could drink, the glass disintegrated in his hand and Filipović's head exploded in a red mist that was flecked with gray and white from brain and bone.

Milliseconds later, Eric heard the windowpane shatter and the crack of a hypersonic bullet. It all happened in reverse, an illusion generated by the chasm that separated the speeds of light and sound.

Every man in the farmhouse had been under fire before and none of them hesitated. Eric and Nikola dove to the floor and sought cover behind the heavy furniture. Dragan pulled a pistol from a concealed holster and calmly shot the fuse box over the front door. The lights in the house flared briefly then went dark. The fire still cast an orange glow, but the shadows were deep and long. It would confuse the aim of whoever was shooting at them. Nikola, Eric saw, had grabbed the poker from the fireplace.

Eric crawled toward the door on his elbows and knees. Hurling himself to the floor, he had landed in a pool of Filipović's blood and his shirtsleeve was wet and sticky. The coppery smell of blood filled
his nostrils. Every sense was heightened and the rush of adrenaline seemed to slow time. It took forever to make it to the door.

He pulled himself up to stand next to Dragan, just to the left of the door frame. Nikola was on the right side of the door with the wrought-iron fireplace poker in one hand. Eric wanted a weapon of some sort as well. There would be knives in the kitchen, but there were too many windows, and they did not know how many men they were facing.