The Wolf of Sarajevo (24 page)

KRIVA RIJEKA

NOVEMBER 13

A
s Eric had anticipated, Sarah was enthusiastic about Dragan's offer to help them get inside Mali's mountain villa. She had returned to Sarajevo the day after Eric and Annika had toured the Aleksandar Hotel, typically cagey and uninformative about where she had been.

“Business trip” was the full extent of her explanation. It was a familiar response to a question he had learned to stop asking back when they were an actual couple. He was not quite certain what they were now, but a couple was clearly not the right answer.

Sarah had listened carefully to the description of the attack at Nikola's farmhouse retreat and Filipović's assassination.

“You did everything right, Eric,” she had assured him. “And props to Amra. She was right. It looks like our little friend Tiny has, in fact, contracted the services of a capable killer.”

“For Filipović?” Eric had wondered out loud. “Or for someone else?”

“We'll see,” Sarah had replied.

There was not much time to prepare. The window was one night. Both Eric and Sarah understood that they were alone in this decision. The Agency had grown increasingly conservative and risk averse. The release of the damning Senate report on the CIA's “enhanced interrogation” of terror suspects after 9/11 had only accelerated that trend. If the higher-ups in the intelligence bureaucracy knew what Sarah and Eric had in mind, they would have put the brakes on, demanding studies and quantitative analyses of the risk/reward balance that would have consumed weeks, even months, that they did not have.

The State Department, meanwhile, would not even have had the vocabulary to respond if Eric had told Wylie or anyone else in his reporting chain what they were planning to do. Eric was not entirely sure how he had found himself so far outside the carefully circumscribed lines of his profession. Part of it, he knew, was Sarah. But more than that, it was his sense of outrage. That anger had been building in him for a long time, going back to that one horrifying afternoon in an Orange County garage. This was his way of shouting,
No more!
No more to the Armenian genocide. No more to the killing fields of Cambodia. No more to Srebrenica. The risk of taking action belonged to him and Sarah and Dragan. The risks of inaction belonged to an entire country.

For Dragan, there was nothing especially remarkable about the night's work they had planned. It was almost routine. And he had a typically Serbian comfort level with improvisation.

Now, as they sat shivering in a Russian jeep with a broken heater
high up the side of the valley where Mali had his villa, Eric was having second thoughts. Sarah, as usual, seemed to be able to read his mind.

“Too late, cowboy. We're committed.”

“We
should
be committed,” Eric replied. “All of us.”

“It'll all be fine,” Dragan said reassuringly from the driver's seat. “We'll be careful. If it looks bad, we can pull back and try something different.”

Dragan had driven them up over the mountains that ringed the valley, following an old logging road that ran through the saddle between two of the rugged peaks. The Lada Niva had jounced down the rutted road on its inadequate shocks, but the little Russian jeep was the automobile equivalent of an AK-47, simple and tough. Russian engineers were consistently disinterested in the health and comfort of end users. Heat, for example, was evidently considered an option on the Niva. And the night was cold. The logging road took them to within a kilometer of the villa. Dragan had driven with no lights, using a set of military-grade night-vision goggles to stay on the road.

They parked in a clearing that offered a direct line of sight on the villa.

After more than an hour of patient surveillance, they saw what they had been waiting for. A convoy of three cars pulled away from the house and sped down the road toward Å trigova and on to Banja Luka.

“Get ready,” Dragan said, with an edge of eagerness once the lights of the convoy had disappeared down the valley road. “Remember. There will be only two guards on duty instead of the usual four. One at the front gate. One on the inside.”

“You're sure of the numbers, Dragan?” Sarah asked. “There's a lot riding on that.”

“I'm quite sure. My source is very good. I could tell what those two boys had for breakfast this morning if that information was material to the mission.”

Mali had a contract with a company in Banja Luka that provided his security. One of the owners used to work for Dragan, which in Bosnia's close-knit and incestuous security community was not terribly surprising. Dragan had helped the company get its start, and he cashed in that favor for a temporary administrator's password that gave him access to just about everything there was to know about security arrangements at the villa.

“What about dogs?” Sarah asked.

“Only outside. Not in the house. According to the file, the client is allergic.”

From under his seat, Dragan pulled out a compact, ugly-looking handgun and offered it to Eric.

“No, thanks. I'd just end up shooting one of you.”

“Suit yourself.” The handgun disappeared under Dragan's coat. Eric was quite confident it was not the only one the former State Security operative was carrying. He did not offer a gun to Sarah. She had brought her own.

The three of them slipped on the night-vision goggles that Dragan had supplied from his company's inventory. It was high-end gear, comfortable and easy to use. They picked their way carefully down the slope toward the back of the villa. Both Sarah and Dragan were carrying black nylon backpacks. They took their time. In the green glow of the night-vision goggles, the shadows were dark and impenetrable. Eric was careful where he put his feet.

The stone wall that encircled the garden was more than two meters tall, but the top was smooth and free of barbed wire. It would not be too difficult to climb over. Dragan raised his hand, indicating that Eric and Sarah should hold. From his pack, Dragan pulled a small aerosol can and sprayed the area along the top of the wall. In his scope, Eric could see a bright green line running parallel to the wall. A laser beam.

Dragan reached into the bag a second time and removed a palm-size device that looked something like a camera on a tripod. He set it on top of the wall and tapped a quick sequence of buttons. The device shifted slightly on the tripod along all of its axes before settling into position. A single red light on the face of the device was the only visible indication that it was active. Dragan confirmed with another shot of aerosol that the light was a laser beam directed back down the line toward the receiver. This would fool the alarm into thinking that the laser had not been disturbed.

“Okay. Up and over,” Dragan whispered. “Stay to the left of our laser.”

For a large man, Dragan was surprisingly graceful. He vaulted the wall in a single smooth motion and landed soundlessly on the other side. Eric and Sarah were right behind him. Despite the cold, Eric's palms were sweaty. It may have been macho bullshit, but he did not want the others to see how nervous he was. He dried his palms surreptitiously on the sides of his pants.

The walled garden was dark and deserted. Dragan led the way, having committed the layout to memory as part of the “research” he had conducted on the ill-secured computers of Mali's security company. The door to the house looked like wood, but it was painted steel and cold to the touch. The lock was located in the center of the
door, a European style that typically meant there was a mechanical system inside the door that would engage locking rods on all four sides.

Sarah had it open within forty-five seconds.

“It was harder to get into your apartment,” she whispered.

Eric removed his night-vision goggles and hooked them onto his belt. The lights were on in parts of the house, and it was more than bright enough inside to find their way to Mali's basement study.

Earlier, Eric had asked Dragan about the guard posted inside the villa.

“Don't worry,” Dragan had replied. “I ran a little background investigation of the guard who'll be on duty. He likes to gamble, and he put a not inconsiderable sum on Partizan to beat Red Star in the derby game. No way he won't be watching that. We should be okay, at least until halftime.”

“He's going to lose his money,” Eric had predicted. “Partizan is just terrible this year.”

Consistent with Dragan's expectations, they could hear a television on upstairs broadcasting the unmistakable roar of a match between the two biggest Serbian football clubs. In Serbia, the yearly Partizan–Red Star game was almost a national holiday.

Mali's home was extravagantly furnished, with just a hint of the bad taste that spoke of new money. A narrow set of stairs in the back of the house led down to the basement. According to the notes in the files of the security company, Mali's office was below grade and windowless. It was also secured with a cipher lock and an independent alarm system, the override codes for which were helpfully kept on file by the security contractor for operational reasons.
Dragan keyed the six-digit code onto the keypad and was rewarded with the sharp click of the lock disengaging.

The room was dark, but Sarah found the light switch without much difficulty. When the door closed behind them, Dragan said, “We can speak normally. The room is soundproof.”

This is something of a double-edged sword,
Eric thought. The guard could not hear them, but neither would they be able to hear him if he pulled himself away from the football game to make rounds.

The room beyond the door was an outer office that, judging by the feminine desiderata on the desk, was used by a receptionist or secretary. Mali's personal office was in the back. It was spacious and opulent. The floors were hardwood with a few oriental rugs. There was a well-stocked bar along one wall. The opposite wall featured a pair of large paintings that Eric recognized. They were museum pieces. The artist, Nadežda Petrović, was Serbia's most famous impressionist. Her face was on the two-hundred-dinar note. There were other paintings almost as nice on the wall behind Mali's desk. The total value of the art in the office was well north of half a million dollars.

The desk was walnut, with an ornate relief carved on the front. It was a nature scene, birds and flowers and climbing vines. The style was typically Balkan, but Eric had never seen an example of this kind of work so fine and delicate. Wood carving like this was generally done by village artisans. The relief on Mali's desk was fine art.

They had divided the responsibilities. Sarah went to work on the computer while Eric went through the contents of the desk drawers. Dragan, meanwhile, searched the room for a safe. The computer
was password protected, of course, but Sarah had brought a piece of CIA tech with them that she hoped would get around that.

There was not much in the desk itself. The middle drawer was full of standard office products, with the exception of a Waterman pen that had a two-carat canary yellow diamond embedded in the cap. Eric did not for a moment suspect that it was a fake. Whatever other problems Mali might have, money was clearly not among them.

“Look for anything electronic,” Sarah said, as she plugged a small black box into the desktop with a USB connection. “Cameras. Tape recorders. Look out in particular for videotape or anything that can hold electronic records.”

Eric was again reminded that Sarah was not searching randomly. She might not have known exactly what they were after, but she had a much clearer idea than either Eric or Dragan.

There was little of interest in the right-hand drawers. On the left side, however, Eric found a plain black ledger book and a manila folder labeled
EMERALD WAVE—DARKO LUKIĆ
. There was a CIA product inside the folder. Eric scanned it quickly. It seemed to be a bio-cum-psychological study of a Bosnian Serb army sniper, a man of considerable technical skill and equally outsize ethical shortcomings. The black-and-white picture in the upper-right corner showed an unsmiling bearded man in a military uniform with an intense penetrating gaze. This was almost certainly the man who had murdered Luka Filipović.

“Did you lose something?” Eric asked Sarah, passing her the contents of the folder. He spoke softly so that Dragan could not hear.

“Goddamn it!”

“How could Mali get ahold of something like that?”

“I told you we had a leak.”

“What's Emerald Wave?”

“Psych profiles of likely targets for war crimes prosecution. The idea was to find little fish who might be ready to roll over on bigger fish in exchange for a deal.”

“This is almost certainly the sniper Amra was talking about and probably the guy who killed Filipović.”

“Odds are good.”

“Dragan,” Eric said loud enough to get the former spy's attention. “Ever hear of a sniper called Darko Lukić from the war?”

“Lukić?” Dragan considered the question without stopping his fruitless search of the office. “Name is familiar. There was a Lukić who was part of a special unit reporting directly to Ratko Mladić. After the war, he went to work for the Zemun clan in Belgrade, one of the nastier of the mafias. He was the chief suspect in three or four gangland murders. And then nothing. He just disappeared. Maybe into the bottle. He was a very, very good shot. Is he the one who killed our friend Filipović?”

“I think so.”

“Then we are both lucky not to be dead.”

Eric photographed the documents and put the file back in the drawer. The ledger book was equally interesting but considerably more cryptic. It was set up for bookkeeping, and a cursory look indicated that whatever he was tracking with it there was no money coming in. It was a record of expenditures, handwritten in neat block lettering. Most of the outflow was assigned to a category labeled
GENEVA
, but there was also a regular stream of payments to someone identified only as Father S.