The Old Bridge

by Andrew Turpin

  Johnson rolled his eyes. That would be yet another three-and-a-half-hour journey. “He’s confident it’s the same guy?”

  “Oh, yes, he’s confident. Hasanović is apparently one of the very few ex-government officials who’s not on a pension ten times what it should be. Bernard says most of them set their own pension payments and they’re all loaded now. But this guy, apparently, is trustworthy.”

  Johnson snorted. He had realized long ago, during his stint working in the region in 1999, that certain people had actually been sorry to see the civil war end. While a hundred thousand people died during the fighting, including those killed in high-profile massacres at places such as Srebrenica, others had somehow managed to walk away from the carnage having siphoned off small fortunes.

  Some estimates by international observers had put the total amount missing from public funds during and after the war as high as a billion US dollars. Significant amounts of international aid money had also vanished.

  “He’s one of the few honest ones, then,” Johnson said.

  Jayne nodded. “I think you’re right.”

  Johnson leaned back in his seat. At least there were still a few slender leads to go on. In that moment, Johnson realized that amid the chaos of the previous couple of days, he hadn’t updated Vic on developments regarding the documents found at the minefield and in the bank safe-deposit box.

  He stared out the window. A CIA operative and Pentagon military adviser involved in enabling arms imports into Bosnia from Iran and arranging mujahideen training camps in the country.

  On many levels, the revelations did not surprise Johnson. But who the hell were those people?

  Then he stood up. “I just need to go and make a phone call to the US. I’ll be right back.”

  Johnson left Jayne and Natasha on the balcony and went to his bedroom.

  First, he needed to inform Aisha that Franjo was definitely alive. He tapped out a message on his phone summarizing the situation, although omitting details of their recent encounter, and asked Aisha to let him know if anything else came to mind that might help him, as he still had no idea where Franjo was based, what he was doing, or what alias he might be living under.

  Then he dialed Vic’s cell phone number. It was answered immediately.

  “Vic, it’s Joe.”

  “Doc—where are you?”

  “In Dubrovnik. Listen, I’ve got some good and bad news. The good is we found those documents.” He gave Vic a summary of their adventures in the minefield and, after extracting a promise to keep it quiet, described the demise of Edwards. However, Vic had already heard whispers on the Langley rumor mill about the Zagreb chief of station’s death.

  “You can’t worry about that,” Vic said. “He shouldn’t have been there. You’ve done a very good job with the dossier. I’m pleased. But you said there was bad news as well?”

  Johnson paused. “Yes, I’m afraid so. We’ve lost the documents again.”

  “What?”

  Feeling somewhat embarrassed, Johnson told Vic of his incarceration at gunpoint, and the debt he now owed Jayne.

  “We’ve got copies of the papers, but I know you’ll need the originals. We’re working on getting them back. There were actually a few bombshells among those papers,” Johnson said. “Listen to this: a senior CIA operative and a Pentagon military adviser in Sarajevo were involved in fixing arms import deals to Bosnia from Iran in ’93. Can we find out who they were and who was stationed there?”

  “Interesting. Yeah, I’ll get onto that,” Vic said. “From memory I don’t think we had a station chief in Sarajevo at that time—it was too dangerous—only one in Zagreb. So it must have been someone operating informally, I’d guess.”

  Vic hesitated. “By the way, given Watto’s interest in the documents you had, I’ve arranged for his phones to be tapped. Had to get one of my NSA technical guys to do it on the sly. There’s no way I’d have got official clearance for it, not for Watto.”

  “Smart move. I hope it doesn’t backfire,” Johnson said.

  “Yes. But also just to warn you, Watto’s working on plans to nail you.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I gather he’s already decided you’re responsible for Edwards’s demise. He was Watto’s blue-eyed boy. He’s apparently livid.”

  Sunday, July 22, 2012

  Langley

  “So you’re telling me that not only have I lost my top guy in Croatia but Johnson got hold of the documents as well?” Watson asked, his voice rising.

  Despite the rather crackly encrypted phone line, he heard Boris take a deep breath, then mutter something that sounded vaguely insulting.

  “What? What did you say?” Watson asked.

  “SILVER, I’m in a roadside café halfway between Dubrovnik and Split. So I can’t talk, there are people about. But the bottom line is, you sent one of your guys after my documents when I warned you not to, and he’s paid the penalty. I’m sorry, but that’s your responsibility and his. It has nothing to do with me.”

  Watson seethed silently.

  “Also,” Boris said, “although Johnson had the documents briefly, we’ve got them back again now. You kept telling me Johnson’s an incompetent, but frankly, he and that woman helping him are not proving easy to handle.”

  Watson felt a heaviness in the bottom of his stomach. He was still trying to piece together the story coming from Croatia, but it seemed as though he had seriously screwed up for the first time in many years of running off-the-books operations such as this one. After receiving a phone call from someone in the Zagreb station to tell him about Edwards, he had swiftly called Boris to get his version of events. But he certainly hadn’t expected to hear that Johnson had got to the document cache first.

  Now he was fire-fighting on two fronts: first to make sure his boss, the deputy director of the National Clandestine Service, didn’t suspect that Edwards was involved in any unauthorized off-the-books activity when he died; and second, to stop Johnson or Boris from doing any damage with the documents.

  “So how long did Johnson have the documents for?” Watson asked. “I presume long enough to read them, so what will he know?”

  “The really vital ones were in the safe-deposit box. He had them for hardly any time. We caught him as soon as he came out of the bank, trapped him, and tied him up at SUNMAN’s house here. They were in a bag with the others from the minefield. I grabbed his Beretta too,” Boris said.

  “So you caught him. He’s still in SUNMAN’s house then, I assume. When will you dispose of him and have you got the woman as well?” Watson said.

  There was silence for a few seconds.

  “No, he’s not in SUNMAN’s house,” Boris said. “Not anymore. Someone teargassed me and SUNMAN, then blew in the door and rescued Johnson. He had some woman with him, who we were also holding. My gut feeling is it was the other woman working with him who must have teargassed us and got them both out.”

  Watson tried to process what he was hearing. This was the problem with dealing with amateurs. It was like trying to herd cats. He mentally counted to ten.

  “Dammit, man. So he’s escaped. What happens now if he’s read those documents? What does he know? Do the documents identify anyone—me or anyone else?” Watson asked.

  “Unlikely. They’re vague.”

  Watson’s breathing became heavier. “Is there any way Johnson could work it out?”

  “Only if he gets to Hasanović, which he’ll struggle to do. At least I think—”

  “Don’t think,” Watson said. “Make sure. You’ll have to get to Hasanović before Johnson does. He’s now obviously a risk, so get rid of him and Johnson. I would suggest you or Marco hire someone else to do the Hasanović job. Don’t take the risk of doing it yourself. That would be foolish at this point. Get someone good, though.”

  “You don’t need to spell it out. Marco knows people.”

  “Well, we can’t have any information that points to me made public. Got it?” Watson sa
id. “This is the most almighty screwup.”

  “Understood.”

  “And do the documents name, or say anything about, a former Pentagon military adviser who was in Bosnia?” Watson asked.

  “The papers do mention someone from the Pentagon, yes, but they don’t name the person. Who is that, anyway?” Boris asked.

  Watson tapped his fingers on the side of his chair. “Never mind. If the documents don’t mention his name, you don’t need to know.”

  Thank God I’ve kept all these people’s identities hidden from each other, Watson thought to himself.

  “I need to get going now,” Watson said. “I’ve got a plane to catch.”

  “Where to?”

  “Where do you think? I’ve lost my top man in Croatia and there’s an arms lift about to happen out of Sinj, which he was supposed to oversee. So I’m flying to Split to sort it out.”

  Boris paused. “Okay. But calm down. Threats aren’t going to help. Just remember I’ve got a system in place if you do anything that harms me. Details about you will go to a number of key people in the States. Okay?”

  “So you’ve said before.” Watson wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “I’m not threatening anything. I just want to get this fixed.”

  Watson hung up. He realized his hand was shaking a little.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Sunday, July 22, 2012

  Manhattan

  Aisha knew the instant she saw the picture of his naked eye. She felt a little light-headed and groped for a chair. It was a slightly grainy photocopy, but there was absolutely no mistake.

  It was him all right. The man whom, until Joe Johnson’s recent arrival on the scene, she had assumed had been dead since 1993.

  Aisha had arrived early at the CBA television studios for her Sunday news shift. She’d had time to pick up her internal mail and actually read through it, for once.

  One of the items was a memo in an envelope from the station director in advance of the forthcoming interview with Patrick Spencer at the studios.

  The interview was with Wolff Live, a British show she’d never seen. Attached was a color picture of the interviewer, a Boris Wolff, together with a short biography, a list of other people he had interviewed, and a couple of photocopied profile interviews with British media and broadcasting trade magazines.

  Aisha first flicked through the biography, then glanced quickly at the two magazine articles about Wolff. The second of the articles had a large main photograph of him in action, interviewing the German chancellor Angela Merkel. But it was the second photograph on the following page that made her snap to attention. It was a close-up picture showing Wolff being prepared by a makeup artist prior to one of his shows.

  He was glancing sideways at the camera, and at that angle, she could see it—the defect in his right eye, the one that all those years ago she had found so endearing. It was a black line running from the bottom of his pupil across his iris, making it look almost like a keyhole. A long time ago, Aisha had loved the absolute uniqueness of it. Now she stared at it and she knew.

  This wasn’t Boris Wolff. It was Franjo Vuković.

  She studied the photos again.

  If it hadn’t been for the eye, she definitely wouldn’t have recognized him. His thick beard had gone, he had lost most of his hair, and rather than the flowing dark locks that he had been so proud of twenty years earlier, what little was left was tightly cropped to his scalp. His face was significantly fatter, with two fleshy jowls under his chin, and his nose was a little crooked in a way it hadn’t been before, as if it had been broken at some point.

  Whereas in his youth he had been thin and tall, now he was far more heavily built and quite imposing.

  But in the other photos the eye defect wasn’t visible. How did he hide it? She found the answer in the article, three paragraphs from the end. “On camera, Wolff normally wears a colored contact lens in his right eye to hide a defect of the iris . . .”

  Aisha set the papers down on her desk.

  Of course. What did Vuković translate as in English? Son of the wolf . . . the wolf’s son.

  So Johnson was correct. Franjo was alive.

  Aisha picked up the picture again and stared at it. So, he had interviewed various political leaders, a rock star—even the England cricket captain.

  But how the hell had he managed to do it? From an upstart trainee broadcast journalist in Split to, seemingly, a top political interviewer in London? She had no answer.

  His English back then had been little more than decent school standard. Presumably now he spoke like a native Brit. And he must have completely re-engineered his entire identity to do it.

  But one thing she did know. The same anger she had tried to push to the back of her mind for the previous nineteen years now surged back up inside her, as it had done every time she thought about him.

  The bitterness continued to eat at her, no matter how much she prayed to Allah for it to go away, and now the thoughts and memories tumbled around her mind yet again. Aisha closed her eyes.

  On the eastern side of the bridge, she waits, her blue dress flapping in the wind. Her father and sister are out of sight, still on the way back from the front line. It’s taking forever. Another tank shell screams in and crashes into the center of the bridge; dust and black smoke rise up, masonry falls into the river, people scream.

  Then, at last, through the gloom, they appear on the other side: her father, her sister, and two others. They’re carrying a stretcher to the arch, an injured, bandaged man on it. She’s relieved at seeing them alive. “Hurry, hurry, quick, come over, before the next shell,” someone yells. Nearby, another man is speaking fast into a walkie-talkie.

  But before they can move, a shell detonates right next to them. She screams and screams and runs over the bridge, up the slope and down the other side, through the scaffolding and the broken stones and the rubber tires and the tarpaulins and old blankets and piles of debris.

  People shout “Stop! Stop! Stop!” But she keeps going until she sees what was her family but is no more. Her father lies bloody and motionless, his legs mashed and ragged, his face destroyed; her sister’s body is torn and red and limp. She wails and lies with her head on her father’s chest, feeling his last warmth, clutching her sister, telling her she loves her. And she feels shredded and empty and alone and frightened and angry.

  Aisha opened her eyes. She could not forget, and no matter how hard she tried, she could not forgive, either. She swore and threw the briefing pack into her bag.

  She felt very unsure about what to do next. She sat at her desk and tried to think. Should she give Joe Johnson a call and tell him? But that was no guarantee of justice. What proof did he have? Indeed, what physical proof did she have, other than what she had seen and knew for certain? No, she needed a concrete guarantee. Maybe there was a different way.

  She left her desk and headed into Studio One, just down the corridor from Studio Three, where she was scheduled to work that day on the main news program. Her colleague Olly was there, fiddling with the scenery hoist panel.

  “Olly, have you read the memo about the Spencer interview? You working on that one?”

  He frowned at her. “You all right? You’re not looking great.”

  “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, yeah, I’m working on Spencer. I thought I’d take a chance to see the big man close up. Speaker of the House today, who knows, he could be president in four years time. You doing it?”

  “I’m not listed to do it, no,” Aisha said. “But now I’m thinking that maybe you’re right, it could be interesting. Which studio is it slated for?”

  “Studio One, of course, here. If you want to do it, go and speak to Steve now. He’s sorting out the roster. I think he still needs one or two people.”

  Aisha nodded. Studio One was the largest of the three CBA studios, with an extensive array of lighting equipment, all on motorized
hoists suspended from the overhead grid, the crisscross of metal walkways high above the studio floor.

  Her specialist role was to program and operate the lighting desk that controlled all of the fixtures and other special effects in the studio.

  Aisha worked closely with Tim, who, as lighting director, was in charge of the look of the show.

  Studio One had seating for an audience of up to four hundred people. It was rarely fully utilized, but Aisha knew all the seats would be occupied for the Spencer interview.

  Aisha strolled over to Steve Abrahams, who had wandered in to see what was going on.

  “Steve, just a quick question. You still need a couple people for the Spencer interview with that British team that’s coming over?”

  “Yeah, certainly do. Had one or two dropouts, including Will, the other board op. You up for it?”

  “Sure, put me down.”

  “Great, you’re down. Thanks, Aisha. There’ll be a few meetings coming up with the studio director and with Tim. We need to get this one absolutely right, make a good impression, and show the Brits what we can do, right?”

  Aisha nodded, her face serious. “Creativity’s my bag. I’ll have a think about it.”

  She walked away. Then she sat in one of the audience seats and stared up at the lighting rig, almost in a trancelike state.

  Several minutes later, Aisha took out her cell phone and texted Ana, telling her simply that she now knew Franjo was alive, but giving few other details. Ana had been following up with her ever since Joe Johnson’s visit and Aisha felt compelled to tell her.

  Then she began to tap out another message, this time to her friend Adela.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Sunday, July 22, 2012

  Split

  Johnson took a mental snapshot of Haris Hasanović’s home as he and Jayne Robinson walked through the gate and up the path toward the front door. Hasanović might have been one of the most honest members of Izetbegović’s inner circle of government, but he had still clearly done pretty well.