by Gordon Kent
“Yes. You know I do.”
She bent her head as she talked and picked, as if doing so was important, at a small patch of crusty skin on her leg. “On the sixth of April three years ago, the airplane with the two presidents in it crashed coming into Kigali. Everybody says now it was shot down.” She sighed. She sounded hopeless. “I was there.”
He knew a lot about that event, certainly knew exactly what she was talking about and its importance to the weeks of genocide that had followed. He knew, or at least had had reliable information, that two missiles had been used to shoot the plane down, and he had a less reliable report that the shooters had been white. Still, he didn’t get it. “Where were you?” he said. He thought she meant at the crash.
“I saw the missiles fired,” she said.
“Jesus.”
“There were four Europeans. The missiles were in ski bags; I recognized them from Davos. Two of them fired the missiles, one gave the orders; the other one had a radio. My brother had set it up.”
The half-brother was Harry’s nightmare, one of the leaders of the Interahamwe.
“Maybe he hadn’t set it up; he acted as if he had. I think that at least he provided his personal guards for protection. They were there, twenty or so of them, around the missiles with their guns.”
“What the hell were you doing there?”
“I was just there. I just went along. They had come in the night before, the Europeans—”
“How?”
“Air. A big airplane, somebody said it had flown in from Angola. Probably running guns to UNITA.”
“Do you remember anything else about the plane?”
“Four engines. Fans, you know—what do you say?”
“Propellers? Propellers? Okay, okay.” Some old plane, then—turboprop?
“I don’t care about that. Let me get through it my way! They came in and we met them at the airport. Out at the end, not by the terminal—they got off way out on the runway and then the plane taxied back. We had two cars. The head European got in with us. Then we went home; we had a kind of party, some people of my brother’s, then dinner.”
And next day she went along, meaning—“You went to bed with him?”
She blew out smoke, nodded. “That was before you, Harry, I didn’t care so much. I wanted him to like me. Next day, I just got in the car when everybody else did and we went out to this place in the bush. I didn’t get it until a small plane went over, landing, and I knew we were on the flight path. Everybody knew the presidents’ plane was due in. I saw the ski bags, I knew what they were going to do.” She let out her breath in a great gust. She looked down at herself. “I took pictures.”
“How?”
“This guy, the European, had a camera. He wanted me to take photos! I just took out my own camera and took some, too. I had this hot-pink point-and-shoot. I thought, If they stop me, okay. Nobody cared.”
“Your brother?”
“Oh—” She hugged herself. “He’s always bad-tempered; he was no worse. Anyway, he was being a big man for the Europeans. So, anyway—” Her mouth was trembling. “They shot the missiles and the plane crashed. Like that.”
Like that. And then the killings started. A hundred thousand in three weeks. The plane crash had been like a match thrown into a puddle of gasoline.
“Where are the pictures?”
“Safe. At home.”
“How good are they?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t dare have them processed. Somebody could have seen them, or the shop could have been burned or bombed. Anything. Those were crazy days.”
“It may be no good because it’s been so long. The heat.”
“I know.”
“Still, I should—”
“I’ll get it to you, Harry. Now that you know everything, of course, the photos are for you. Just don’t let it come back on me!” Her hands were shaking and one knee was bobbing up and down like a shuttle, from tension. “He’d kill me.”
“No, no.” She was safe, he was sure of that; he would put the film and the Agent Report in the diplomatic pouch and it would go straight to the Agency, highest classification. It would be a bombshell, though. He went through it with her again, the case officer now. He asked more questions, drew out things she thought she had forgotten. They had called the top guy Z—just Z. Z had had a horrible nose—grotesque. The whites had worn Belgian uniforms, but they weren’t Belgian, she said.
“Can you be sure?”
“They didn’t speak French. The top man spoke French, but with an accent; I couldn’t place it. Among themselves, they spoke something else.”
“Some Belgians speak Flemish.”
“I don’t know about that. All the Belgians here speak French.”
“Maybe American?”
“No.”
“German?”
She hesitated. “Maybe. Possible.”
The third time through, she remembered that she had glimpsed one of the pilots through the big aircraft’s windscreen. He was white. She remembered details of the Europeans’ weapons and equipment. The missiles sounded from her description like Stingers. Put together this and that and he agreed with her that they didn’t sound like either Belgians or French. Mercenaries, maybe, with a mixture of NATO and some other gear. There were a lot of Russians around, other Eastern European military left over from the Cold War.
He let her run down. There was no love-making; she was profoundly shaken, almost in shock. He helped her to lie down and rubbed her neck and her back, and he gave her a pill, and after half an hour she slept. O’Neill lay in the dark room, smelling the rank, unfamiliar cigarette smoke, wondering how he was going to get her out of it. Get them both out of it. It would be easy for him; he’d resign. He skipped the hard part, getting her out of Zaire. He tried to concentrate on the good part: They’d marry, and he’d take her home and he’d get a law degree or go to med school or study business or some goddam thing. That would be easy.
He’d started out in the Navy. Once, he’d told Alan Craik that he was going to be CNO: he’d spend a tour each in Air OPS, ELINT, HUMINT, and SIGLINT, and then he’d cut a swathe in the military intel establishment. He’d been wrong. He was burned out already. All he wanted was home and her.
He’d thought he was hot stuff and his plan was a good one, do everything and be CNO, why not? But even then, secretly, semi-consciously, he had seen that Craik got something out of it that he didn’t. Some lift, some rush. He hadn’t realized that the rush was essential.
Craik was his best friend, whatever that meant. Kids have best friends; adults don’t, really. But he and Craik were close, despite O’Neill’s being envious of Craik’s dedication and his—what? His luck? And—admit it—of Craik’s reputation and his awards. Craik made things happen, got medals pinned on his chest. O’Neill had wanted some of that, too, some of the glory stuff. That’s why he’d resigned from the Navy and signed on with the Agency. Now he realized that Craik had a need for risk—that was his “luck,” that hunger for risk—that he lacked. Craik had flown, even though he had been a squadron IO; O’Neill, also a squadron IO, had never gone up. Craik, in his view now, had some error in his core program that made him foolish about danger. The truth was that they should switch roles: O’Neill could still be a good IO, Craik a good spook.
Now none of that mattered. What mattered lay beside him, terrified. He’d get her home. Somehow. For once, he didn’t care what his parents would say. Love had done that for him, too. He saw now that the first time, he had married a woman his mother had picked out, and it hadn’t worked. His wife had thought she was slumming because her husband was a military officer. She had been a sour-minded snob. Incapable of being happy. What a curse. The marriage hadn’t lasted two years.
So he would send the Agent Report and the film, undeveloped, in the diplomatic bag. Then he would get her out and give her a new identity and send her somewhere, and then he would join her and they would go home.
But he would have
to persuade her, first, to give up the idea that she could stop the killing.
Sarajevo.
The two men walking in the Bascasija looked somewhat like the others who had survived the war years, but a veteran could probably have seen that they were not local. Here, deep in the oldest part of Sarajevo, they were not quite out of place, but not quite of it, either. For one thing, they smiled.
Dukas had a local sort of face—his ancestors, after all, were from not far away, and he shared some of the locals’ genes. He wore a traveler’s nylon raincoat, the kind that folds into its own pocket, which was not in itself wrong, but it looked both too new and too touristic to have belonged to somebody who had survived the siege of Sarajevo and now wanted the latest, the coolest. He looked, in fact, like a blue-collar worker on holiday. The trouble was, he was sure he fit right in.
With him was a slightly shorter man whose face and body seemed to be all angles, made to cut the wind like a sailing ship. He, too, wore nylon—a short jacket in blue and copper—and any Parisian would have looked at him and thought, Flic. And they would have been right: he was a French cop.
“I like this,” the French cop said. He meant the part of the city where they were walking. “When I was here in eighty-four, I came down here all the time. It has character.” He smiled. “In Paris, we would say it is an Islamic slum.”
“What were you doing here in eighty-four?” Dukas said. His voice was hoarse from a cold. His nose was stuffy, his nostrils red.
“The Olympics.”
“The Olympics! You were in the Olympics?” Dukas looked aside at the smaller man. His name was Jean-Luc Pigoreau; he was a senior lieutenant in the Sûreté. Dukas did a quick calculation—a dozen years ago, could this small tough guy have been an Olympian?
“A skater, Michael.” Pigoreau’s English was almost unaccented, very American, only the “R” sounds betraying his roots. “Not a dancer like the pédés in the fancy shirts. A speed skater. Eight hundred meters.”
“Wow.” Dukas didn’t know what to say. He had never met an Olympian before. “Did you, um, win?”
Pigoreau laughed. He laughed the way people laugh in movies when they’re showing wild abandon, head back, mouth wide open, big smile. “I was very, very good—but not good enough. You know how it is, to be very good, but not good enough?”
Dukas’s view of himself was that he was probably not very, very good at most things, and certainly not good enough to win the gold at anything. Still, with a guy who had actually made it to the Olympics, you were talking about a different way of not being good enough. Dukas tried to say something consoling and sounded perfectly stupid. He laughed at himself when Pigoreau gave him a funny look, then started coughing. Pigoreau stood with him while he gulped cough medicine from a bottle. “That sounded pretty stupid,” Dukas said. “I meant, I’m sorry you didn’t get the gold.”
“I have nothing to be sorry for,” Pigoreau said. He was very serious. This was something he had thought all the way through, perhaps many times. “I was just so good—so—” and he indicated a height with a hand—“and I lost, so—” and the hand went up a little—“and now I know exactly how good I was.” He dropped his hand and shoved it into his jacket pocket. “Most men, they do not dare find that out. To know exactly how good you are.” He turned a little and stared across the little plaza-like widening of the streets, what the locals called a mejdan, and looked off toward the mountains to the north, visible only as a dark mass between the red-tiled roofs, with the narrow spire of a mosque splitting it like a tear in paper. “It was all very beautiful in eighty-four, Michael. And exciting. This city was so alive, so—clean! They were all very proud of Novi Grad, Novi Sarajevo, all that new stuff that is so full of holes out there now, all those walls without glass. But I liked it down here. This is old Sarajevo. This is Turk, you know? This—” He turned around, gesturing with a hand. “This was the market. Big! Blocks and blocks. Now—” He shrugged and hunched down in his jacket.
“I gotta meet somebody,” Dukas said.
“I know. Just another street or two here. I think I remember.” Pigoreau grinned. He was trying to find a memory. “You know, you visit a place for one week, you come back twelve years later, you forget.”
“Not to mention some sonofabitch blowing the shit out of it with artillery.”
Dukas had been in Sarajevo a month, and he had seen most of the damage. The Holiday Inn. The UNIS Towers. The old National Library, a gutted shell. More discouraging, as he stayed longer, was the damage to the modest buildings where people’s lives had been destroyed, the only evidence an exposed interior wall with the faded outline where a picture had hung, or a second-story bathroom, still intact but with no outer wall, the bathtub an astonishing pink. He had seen empty shells of apartment houses where curtains still blew in glassless windows, cellars that stank of wet plaster and rats, a sodden dining table lying on its top, its carved legs in the air like a dead horse.
“Well,” Pigoreau muttered. He had a habit of making little ttt-tt-tt noises with his tongue and the roof of his mouth. Tt-tt-tt, he said to himself. “It was along here.” He was looking for a restaurant he remembered from 1984. Tt-tt. “I am getting old, I think.”
Dukas and Pigoreau were finding that they liked each other. They were both cautious men, but they were spending a lot of time together, not all of it demanded by the job. On paper, Pigoreau was commander of what was called—on paper—the Counter-Intelligence Unit; in fact, he was already becoming Dukas’s second-in-command. Wary of intimacy, experienced in cynicism, the two men had circled each other and come closer and liked what they saw.
“Ah!” Pigoreau cried. He grabbed Dukas’s sleeve and pulled him to the right, down toward the river. “Just along here—” And he pulled Dukas around a corner and drew up across the street from a bombed-out ruin. “And there it is. Well.” Shrugging himself into his jacket. “It was stupid of me to think things would not change, eh?” His restaurant was a hole between damaged buildings.
“You can’t go home again,” Dukas said.
“I was young there, Michael. Now I will tell you something foolish. I had a meal there before I won my first race in eighty-four. So I came back, for the good luck. Then I lost.” He laughed, the way a man laughs at himself so somebody else will not think him self-pitying. “Maybe I thought I would see myself in there, still eating a meal and praying to win. Eh?” He ran into the street, dodging a run-down Fiat, and looked into the ruin. Dukas crossed more cautiously; Sarajevo drivers, he had concluded, were not to be trusted. He, too, looked into the ruin—bricks, weeds, one wall with some white tiles halfway up that may have indicated where the kitchen had been. “I want you to be careful,” Pigoreau said. “You have a gun?” Clearly, he wasn’t talking about the ruin.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Tt-tt. They’re on to who we are now. They won’t like it when we actually go after somebody. You’re in charge; they could have targeted you already.”
“Nah.”
“Don’t sit outside. You see anybody on a Vespa, get off the street. Anybody parks a car and walks away, run.” Pigoreau had headed an anti-terrorist squad in Lille. He knew a lot about assassination.
“I’m just going to meet a woman,” Dukas said. He blew his nose and groaned.
“You are going to meet a Serb woman. I could still call in a couple of minders.”
Dukas grinned despite himself. He loved “minders.” The first time he had heard Pigoreau use the word, he had thought he was kidding. “Nah,” he said. He looked at his watch. “I gotta go. Sorry about your restaurant.”
Pigoreau shrugged. “I am a big boy, Michael.” Tt-tt.
Dukas nodded. “So am I.” Dukas slapped the French cop on the upper arm and walked away. When he reached the corner, Pigoreau called after him, “You should be in bed!” and Dukas growled, “I don’t know anybody to go to bed with,” and walked on. He went down toward the river and waited with half a dozen people for the tram to Novi. The other
s stood a little away from him, not because they knew he was a cop but because they sensed he was different. When the tram came, they moved toward the back and Dukas sat alone, facing into the car. It swayed along its tracks. He nursed the cold and thought about these people. They were tough but tormented, often clinically depressed. They had been under siege, a literal artillery bombardment that had gone on sporadically for years. One stretch of the city was called Sniper’s Alley because men had hidden in the ruined apartment blocks there and randomly shot down civilians. Perhaps people they had once known, perhaps even people they were related to. Now the siege was over and the city had segregated itself into zones more rigid and more hate-filled than the old Muslim-Christian or Turk-Austro-Serb. Now it was a city of forty percent unemployment, its economy down by eighty percent from prewar levels, a city of splendid destruction. A few years before, it had been one of the most beautiful small cities in Europe, a sparkling, modern bracelet around an ancient core. Now—
He got down in the shadow of a bombed-out modern tower in Marijin Dvor and stopped next to a still-operating bakery to study a map. The woman—he knew it was a woman; she had said so in the note—had drawn a crude map on a piece of ruled paper from which a child’s drawing had been erased. Paper was in short supply.
Figuring his direction, he crossed the tram tracks and headed toward the river and the distant mountains. The apartments here had been fairly modest, like something from the sixties in the States. A lot of aluminum sheet and glass, the glass now gone, the aluminum twisted. People were living in some of them, God knew how, he thought.
Her map was all right. He found the church she had drawn by the oddly truncated steeple; he went to the left of it as she had indicated, then down a flight of steps and into a small park with a cinder running track around a half-sized soccer field. Some children were kicking a ball. The air felt warmer here, more like summer, and he unbuttoned the raincoat, then peeled it off and threw it on his right shoulder. She was sitting where she had written she would be, all the way across the soccer field. When he came toward her, she stood, as if to welcome him, and he saw she was beautiful.
