by Mike Maden
“You’re Aida Curić?”
“Obviously. Is there something you need?”
Jack ignored the Hulk behind her, his nostrils flaring. Jack had the feeling that if he waved his handkerchief the guy would start pawing the ground and charge him.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Ms. Curić. I tried calling earlier, but nobody picked up. My name is Jack Ryan, and I think I’m looking for you.”
She frowned with confusion at the strangely worded statement. “Sorry?”
“I’m looking for a young woman about your age who was injured years ago in the war. Her name was Aida Curić and—”
“My birth name is Lulić.” She nodded to one side, indicating the goon behind her. She raised her left hand and flashed a diamond wedding band. “My husband’s name is Curić. So is mine now.”
“Well, then you can’t be the Aida Curić I’m looking for. Sorry to have bothered you.”
“Anything else?” she asked.
“My check, please.”
Jack drained his beer waiting for the check, leaving cash and an enormous tip for the trouble he’d caused and his slight embarrassment. He now realized this little adventure was fraught with a few more challenges than he’d anticipated.
At least the beer and the Bosnian Pot were good.
NEAR BIOKOVO, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
The small, idyllic farm was surrounded on three sides by gently sloping, forested hills and bounded by a burbling creek that ran all year except for the winters, when it froze. The traditional whitewashed one-story house appeared gray in the quarter moon, and the red roof tiles grayer still. The sturdy barn stood nearby, topped with cedar shingles slathered in moss. Part of the meadow was surrounded by a stack rail fence to accommodate three milk cows, and another part was a neatly groomed truck garden behind the house, plowed by a swaybacked horse now bedded down in the barn with the cows for the night.
The squad of black-uniformed men approached from out of the tree line, with red-checkered Croat militia CRUSADER KNIGHTS unit patches sewn on the sleeves. They carried suppressed AK-74UB long guns with night-vision optics, far more firepower than what they needed for this operation. But it wasn’t the elderly Serb farmers inside the house they were worried about.
Tarik Brkić was kitted out like the others but didn’t wear a balaclava. No need. He remained in the tree line one hundred meters back, and, thanks to his blinded white eye, used a Gen 3 night-vision monocular to supervise the operation.
He watched as flash-bangs flared and popped inside the farmhouse, and a moment later came the dull flash and muffled chatter of suppressed small-arms firing. The only scream that arose was snuffed out in another short burst.
Four of his men dragged the bodies onto the lawn and splayed them out in a row, a slaughtered choir robed in blood.
“Don’t forget the note,” Brkić whispered in his comms, staring through his monocular.
The ghosted green hand of his number two reached into a coat pocket and held the envelope high. The envelope and the letter inside both bore the dreaded crossed swords and red-checkered shield of the infamous Crusader Knights militia.
“Got it,” he replied in Brkić’s earpiece as he pinned the note to the old man’s bullet-ridden nightshirt.
Brkić also heard three dull pops in his ear. Three more of his men in the barn had just dispatched the animals in short order.
But the crack of a branch behind him caught the big Chechen by surprise.
He whipped around, scanning the trees with his one good eye.
Three meters away, pale moonlight illumined a barefoot Serbian boy in nightclothes, staring at him, his wide eyes fixated on the Chechen’s rifle.
The boy was about the same age and height as his own seventh son. He even looked like him.
The boy’s eyes locked with his. Brkić recognized the horrified shudder. His milk-white eye did that to children, even the ones who knew him.
Brkić smiled, gesturing the boy forward with a gloved hand.
“Everything is going to be okay.”
The boy stood frozen in place, trembling. His terrified face grew brighter in the rising yellow light of a roaring fire far behind Brkić’s shoulder.
But it was the scream of the burning horse that made the boy suddenly gasp.
The flickering catchlight of the fire danced in the boy’s dark eyes in the clear German optics of the Chechen’s rifle. A muffled pop and the spray of black blood behind the child’s head ended his terror. His body crumbled to the ground like a puppet when its strings are cut, crunching in the pine needles where it fell, as the first of his men thundered up behind him.
“Who was that?” one of them asked.
“Time to go,” was all Brkić said.
Ten minutes later they were in their vehicles and far away, long before the fire would even be noticed or reported.
Red Wing had called for sharper measures, Brkić thought, as they sped along the two-lane road. Tonight they had delivered, with evidence left behind to spread the tale of Croatian crimes, written in blood and lead.
And the corpse of a nameless boy.
Brkić prayed his parents would find him before the rats did.
Inshallah.
26
SARAJEVO, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
After his embarrassing first attempt at finding his mother’s Aida Curić, Jack decided to try working the phones harder and avoiding personal contact. He came to realize that if a Bosnian appeared out of nowhere and walked into his office at Hendley Associates and asked if he was Jack Ryan, he’d be suspicious as hell.
Before he went to bed, he dove into his first three calls. They were nearly as awkward as the encounter earlier in the evening had been, but he played the bumbling American role pretty well, apologizing after every question and acknowledging that what he was doing was strange. All three calls were strikeouts, but he was encouraged. He showered and hit the sack early, determined to make a day of it tomorrow.
* * *
—
After a cup of steaming-hot Jocko White Tea, he made his first two phone calls for the day. They went faster and felt less awkward than the previous ones, and also resulted in two more names getting crossed off the list.
Six down, five to go.
He popped on the news and caught the local weather. Cool this morning, but it was going to be another warm and perfect day. No point in staying cooped up in the apartment. He decided he could make his calls from a breakfast joint just as well.
He’d noticed the day before that he was the only guy on the street wearing shorts. He wondered if that was a cultural thing or even a taboo. But then again, it was brisk this morning, so pants made sense and it made him look just a little more professional.
He found a TripAdvisor review for a place on the edge of the Old Town and dropped in. The small restaurant was crowded with people grabbing coffee and pastries to go. Jack spotted a seat by the window and beelined for it.
He took the advice of one of the TripAdvisor commenters and ordered a Bosnian coffee and a crunchy chocolate-hazelnut pastry called a pita. The doughnut-shaped pastry was phyllo dough, and the dense, gooey filling tasted like Nutella.
Full of fat, sugar, and countless carbs, the flaky pastry might have been the best damn thing he’d ever eaten.
Knowing he’d have to run at least an extra ten miles next week to burn off the additional calories, he passed on getting a second pita and instead ordered another cup of dark, rich Bosnian coffee, smoother and less harsh than a full espresso, and sweetened with two small sugar cubes, Bosnian style.
Fortified with sugar and caffeine and happy to people-watch through the big picture window, Jack began his next round of calls.
The next Aida, number seven, was a harried bank clerk who assured him in no uncertain terms he had the wrong person, and number eight�
��s mother informed him her daughter had immigrated to Australia two weeks ago. But he sounded like a nice man, she said, and she had a lovely daughter named Amina, who worked as a bookkeeper, and perhaps he would like to meet her?
Number nine was unemployed and living at home with her parents, and, unfortunately, she wasn’t the one he was looking for, either, she said in the form of an apology.
The tenth call was not only nice but sympathetic and, even though she wasn’t the woman he was looking for, offered her services to help him in his search. Jack thanked her but politely declined.
One Aida left.
Despite his failure so far, he was encouraged. Nearly everyone he spoke with this morning was not only nice but even understanding. He picked up the phone and dialed the number, but it went straight to voice mail in Bosanski. He hated leaving voice mails in his own language, let alone with such a strange request, so he hung up. He double-checked the address of her employment and discovered she worked in a bookstore just a few blocks away.
Jack paid his bill and tip with cash and headed out the door. Within twenty feet, he was out of the pedestrian part of the Old Town and walking down one of the main thoroughfares bisecting the capital city, Maršala Tita—Marshal Tito Street. Bustling with traffic and pedestrians, it felt like a downtown street of any large American city, except for the minarets in the distance and the noticeable lack of skyscrapers.
He reached the bookstore in no time, a modern European-style shop featuring children’s books in several languages in the large picture window.
The young woman behind the counter greeted him with a warm smile. Her name tag identified her as Aida Curić as well as the store manager. A thick lick of blond hair peeked out beneath her fashionable pink patterned headscarf. She spoke softly and with an accent somewhat different from what he’d heard before, but she was extraordinarily polite and even interested in meeting him, possibly because no one else was in the store and she was bored.
After handing her his business card, he noticed that her left eye tended toward an outward drift—something that could’ve been caused by an injury. His hopes rose. This might well be the woman he’d been searching for. But he didn’t feel comfortable asking the shy young woman about her lazy eye, and he was glad he hadn’t when she informed him she had moved to Sarajevo from Izmir, Turkey, only in the past year.
She explained to him that there were as many Bosniaks living in Turkey as there were in Bosnia itself, and that Turks and Bosniaks both here and in Turkey thought more highly of one another than they did of Americans. She assured him she did not mean this as an insult.
He assured her he didn’t take it that way and thanked her for her time, trying desperately to hide his disappointment behind his practiced smile.
Time to return to his apartment and regroup.
* * *
—
Jack marched back down the street past the corner of the assassination and caught himself almost missing it because he was running through options in his brain about next steps. Discouraged as he was that all eleven Aidas didn’t pan out, he was more determined than ever to see if he could still find her.
But how?
It was six hours earlier in Virginia and way too early to call Gavin, but he had a couple ideas.
As he was crossing the Latin Bridge, it suddenly occurred to him that there was something else about Bookstore Aida that caught his eye. The lick of blond hair strategically located on her forehead was very blond. So much so, he wondered if it was natural.
By the time he jogged up the staircase two steps at a time and opened the apartment’s heavy steel door, he’d already composed an e-mail to Gavin in his mind. After hitting the head and washing up, he opened up his laptop and logged on to the apartment Wi-Fi and Google-searched a factoid he seemed to recall about blondes.
He then composed the e-mail, first of all thanking Gavin for the outstanding list of names, which, unfortunately, didn’t pan out, so would he mind putting together another list for him? This time searching for brown-haired women instead.
To drive home the point, he added a link to an article he found and explained to Gavin that a lot of young women who are blond when they’re children find that their hair turns brown or chestnut just before they enter puberty. He signed off with “Let me know your thoughts” and “Thanks again.”
Jack was a huge fan of Gavin’s, even though the tubby IT genius was kind of a smart-ass. He knew Gavin was covered up to his eyeballs in work, and he knew he was asking him to go the extra mile, but Gavin was his best shot at finding the elusive Aida Curić.
He hit the send button and went to the living room to check out the local TV, always a great window into any culture. He flipped through a dozen channels. They were all American programs, mostly reality shows, with a few familiar cop and medical dramas, all in English but with subtitles. No wonder everybody around here spoke good English. The only reality show he ever watched was on there, too: Forged in Fire, where bladesmiths and farriers competed to forge iconic combat swords from history.
But he hadn’t come to Sarajevo to watch American television. He kept searching until he could find true local programming, and that was a news show. It wasn’t in English and it didn’t have English subtitles, but the shaky, handheld footage of covered bodies on the grass and cops swarming around what looked like the smoldering ruins of a barn told him all he needed to know.
Bad shit happens here, too.
27
Since Gavin probably wouldn’t be responding for a while, Jack decided to venture back out and do some sightseeing, and finally find a place to grab some ćevapi for lunch.
Jack decided that the first place he wanted to check out was the assassination museum. He followed his familiar route to the Latin Bridge. From his Google search on the plane to London, he’d learned that Sarajevo was eighty percent Muslim, so he presumed that eight out of ten people he passed were Muslims. There were a half-dozen women in very casual headscarves like the one Bookstore Aida wore, but far more women wore nothing on their heads, and some were dressed scandalously. Same with the men: jeans, soccer shirts, polos. There was nothing to indicate their religious affiliations at all, save for the one old man he saw shuffling along, his hands clasped behind his back, prayer beads rolling absentmindedly through his fingers.
It was always exciting for Jack to find himself in a new country and a new culture. He tried to drink in everything he saw and encountered, down to the smallest detail. He was on vacation, not an op, but he was trained to be observant. Situational awareness was the first and best form of self-defense, and that meant being aware of one’s surroundings and the people in them. As it turned out, that skill set came in really handy on vacations.
And though he couldn’t be sure, the man in the sport coat and Ray-Bans seemed to be tracking him from a discreet distance, and doing so better than most.
Or maybe not. Sometimes his training made him paranoid.
Jack crossed the bridge and the traffic light and entered the modest little museum, paying about six dollars American at the small ticket window inside. He could stand in one place and glance around the room and see just about everything, but since he bought the ticket he decided to take advantage of the exhibits.
The subject matter covered more than just the assassination, depicting life in Sarajevo from 1878 to 1918. It started with a display of immaculate breech-loading rifles with ivory inlay from the nineteenth-century revolt against the Ottoman Turks. He proceeded on to some furniture displays, singing competition medals, famous mustachioed administrators, and other random “slice of life” presentations. What really caught Jack’s eye were the two life-sized mannequins depicting the archduke and his wife in their regalia.
The only other people in the little museum were four teenage kids bowing and curtseying before the royal couple, half clowning around and, in a way, not. One of the girls politely
asked Jack if he’d take a photo of them doing that again, so he grabbed her Samsung Galaxy phone and snapped a couple shots as they repeated their genuflections.
On the other side of the creepy mannequins was the glass-box display that he’d come to see. The first thing that grabbed his attention was the picture of the assassin, Gavrilo Princip, the nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb who killed the couple and sparked a holocaust. The guy didn’t look like a fiery revolutionary or a thoughtful ideologue or even very bright. Apparently, he was too short to be accepted into regular military service. There was nothing in his eyes or his stature or his looks that drew your attention. He was just an ordinary kid with a thin mustache and a bad haircut.
But unlike other teenagers his age, he had the blood of millions on his hands, or, at least, the blood of two people he considered oppressors. Maybe Princip read Jefferson just as Ho Chi Minh had—quoting Jefferson in stinging rebuke of his American enemies during the Vietnam War.
The Serbian assassin wanted what every nationalist wanted: freedom and independence for his people from the oppression of foreign powers. No wonder a lot of Serbs still considered him a hero. But to everyone else, he was just another terrorist.
The other thing that really grabbed Jack’s attention was the pistol on display, with the claim that it was the weapon Princip had used to carry out the murders. What struck Jack was how completely unremarkable it was, almost primitive, even for those days. Jack knew enough about the actual event, with its multiple failures and incredible coincidences, to believe that God or history or some other force had decided that Ferdinand was supposed to die that day, no matter what.
Jack’s moment of philosophical musing was interrupted by the phone vibrating in his pocket. It was Gavin. Having seen enough, he stepped outside into the warm sunlight.
“Hey, Gavin, kinda early for you, isn’t it?”
