The Wolf of Sarajevo

by Matthew Palmer

  For her part, Sarah told him that after Bosnia she had moved over to the Middle East department with postings in Jordan and Israel as well as Egypt and Iraq. About two years ago, she had moved back to Washington to take charge of the Balkan Action Team at Langley. She did not mention anything about a husband or kids. She would have, wouldn’t she? Eric asked himself. If she had them. But maybe she suspected that he still had feelings for her and wanted to use them to manipulate him. It was the kind of thing the CIA taught the new recruits at their famous Farm in Virginia. It was not really fair to think that way, however. Sarah would tell him soon enough why she had sought him out after so many years.

  Sarah was easy to talk to. She had always been easy to talk to. Talking had never been their problem. Srebrenica had been their problem, or at least Eric’s inability to shake off the moral outrage and the depression that followed. Eight thousand murder victims, and all Eric could do was think about his own pain, his own loss. It was, he now understood, the narcissism of youth.

  They passed a building on which an anonymous graffiti artist with more passion than imagination had spray-painted SMRT SRBIMA in angry red block letters. Death to Serbs.

  Sarah stopped to look at it and shook her head.

  “Just like old times.”

  “Yeah. Things are getting tense. You can see this kind of stuff all over town.”

  Two women walked by them in the opposite direction dressed in loose dark-colored tunics with their heads covered in the hijab. Observant Muslims.

  “That’s new,” Sarah commented. “I remember there were more miniskirts and high heels than hijabs back in the day.”

  “Yes,” Eric agreed. “Bosnia is changing. It’s more conservative and the communities are still drifting farther away from one another. It’s a matter of identity. Being Bosnian doesn’t mean as much as being Bosniak for most people, and that means Islam is fundamental to your sense of self. So you get more Bosniaks fasting during Ramadan or adopting traditional dress codes. The Serbs, for their part, have embraced their Saints’ Day celebrations and mark the new year on January 13. The Croats are actually going to mass on Sunday and taking communion. The major ethnic groups are all circling the wagons.”

  “Who are they afraid of?”

  “Each other.”

  “What a mess.”

  “You said it. Bosnia is deeply unloved. Everyone sees something in it that they hate. The Serbs reject the state—Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their country is Republika Srpska. The Bosniaks hate Dayton and the two-entity structure that split this country in half and makes it essentially ungovernable. And the Croats hate the Federation that makes them a minority in their own patch of Bosnia. They want a third entity that the other two groups will never agree to.”

  “Is there a way out?”

  “There’s Sondergaard.”

  Sarah scoffed. “Another do-gooding Nordic? Hasn’t Bosnia seen enough of them?”

  “No. This one seems different to me.”

  “How so?”

  “She’s tough. She’s not going to shy away from the hardball politics of this place.”

  “Tough enough?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “And you’re working for her now from what I understand.”

  “Word gets around.”

  “That’s what words do.”

  The look she gave him was ambiguous, hard for Eric to interpret. But whatever she was hinting at, it seemed important.

  Eric stopped abruptly, catching Sarah by surprise.

  “Is this it?” she asked.

  “It is.” The building in front of them had wooden walls covered in green paint that was sun faded and peeling. He pointed to a hand-lettered sign over the door that advertised Kod Jasne.

  “Everything looks so different,” Sarah commented.

  “The city has changed a lot since the old days. It’s changed in the three years I’ve been here. Even old buildings like this one are surrounded by so much new construction that it can be hard to get your bearings.”

  “I’ll say. I hardly recognize the place.”

  She pointed to something on the ground.

  “But I recognize that,” she said. “Are there many of them left?”

  It was a Sarajevo rose. City residents had poured red enamel into the scars left in the sidewalks and streets by shells or mortar rounds that had taken at least one life. The pattern was distinctive and unforgettable, and the roses were a symbol of both Bosnian defiance and crippling sorrow.

  “Fewer and fewer all the time. When they dig up the streets or sidewalks for various construction projects, they don’t bother to replace the roses. There are only a handful left.”

  “I remember that one,” Sarah said.

  Eric nodded.

  “Me too.”

  It had been a rainy day in April when a mortar round had landed right on that spot, sending a shell fragment into the brain of a young woman who had been waiting in line for a table at the restaurant. Eric and Sarah had been inside, and were among the first to go to her assistance. There had been nothing they could do, however, except hold her hand as the life drained from her body. They had stopped going to Kod Jasne for a while after that. Ghosts.

  Jasna was still there, and she greeted Eric and Sarah like they were old friends.

  “So good to see the two of you together again,” she said, as she led them to the table in the back corner that had once been “theirs.”

  Jasna’s decorating style sprawled right on the border of kitsch, occasionally veering over the line as it did with the collection of porcelain cats scattered throughout the room. The chairs were low, more like stools, and the tables were made of large copper trays balanced on wooden stands. The floors were covered with several layers of Turkish kilim. The kitchen was open and connected directly to the dining room. This was now fashionable in trendy restaurants in the West, but Kod Jasne had always been like that. It had once been Jasna’s house.

  There were no menus. Jasna fed her guests whatever she had made that day. Today it was ćevapčići, sausage-shaped kebabs that were one of the reliable staples in the Balkans. Jasna made hers from a mix of beef and lamb. They arrived hot off the grill with a round flatbread called somun and a mix of sides and salads, all chosen by Jasna. Nothing goes better with ćevapčići than beer, and the local stuff, Sarajevsko Pivo, was pretty good. Eric and Sarah each had a pint.

  Balkan food was not sophisticated. It was largely based on village cooking traditions. There was not a lot of variety to it, but the ingredients were all fresh and locally sourced, and the recipes had stood the test of centuries. Sarah slathered a piece of bread with kajmak, a spread made from sheep’s milk that was halfway between butter and cheese, and a roasted-pepper-and-eggplant dip called ajvar.

  “God, I missed this stuff,” she said. “You can’t get this kind of thing anywhere else in the world.”

  Dessert was baklava made with walnuts rather than pistachios and drenched with honey. Demitasses of bitter Turkish coffee kept the sweetness of the baklava from being cloying. In Bosnian culture, coffee meant that it was time to move from social talk to business. Washington culture was not really all that different in that respect.

  “Tell me, Sarah,” Eric said, as he sipped his coffee. “What are you doing in Sarajevo? And what does it have to do with me?”

  “My team is worried about Bosnia.”

  “We all are.”

  “Our predictive models all point toward some sort of conflict—maybe even a renewal of open war—in the next six to twelve months.”

  “How much did you pay for that model? ’Cause I think I could have got you the same prediction for a hell of a lot less.”

  Sarah smiled. She had many different smiles. And Eric thought of the last time he had seen that particular one, a little off center, producing just one dimple on her ri
ght cheek. The last time he had kissed her.

  “You’re in the wrong line of work,” she said. “You should have gone into consulting.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Anyway. Our analysts have been watching things deteriorate over the last eight months or so. The critical variable seems to be the rise of Marko Barcelona and the White Hand. Dimitrović’s government and the paramilitaries in the RS are operating more or less under his direction, even if that’s not anything you or I might recognize as control.”

  Eric nodded. He knew all this.

  “At first, we’d been operating under the assumption that Mali was an extension of Dimitrović, that Dimitrović himself created the White Hand for his own purposes. The Hand was a tool for undermining the Bosnian state and giving himself an alibi for breaking his commitments.”

  “But lately you’ve started to think that maybe the reverse is true,” Eric suggested. “That Mali is controlling Dimitrović. That maybe Dimitrović built the White Hand but lost control of his creation. A kind of Dr. Frankensteinović.”

  Sarah’s smile was different this time. The soft one that meant she was impressed.

  “That’s about it,” she said. “It would explain Dimitrović’s one-eighty on changing the Bosnian constitution and trying to make this place into a viable unified country. Mali has a different agenda.”

  “What is it?”

  “Himself.”

  They finished the coffees. Jasna brought them each a small glass of brandy, her family’s personal home brew, she whispered conspiratorially, so the other diners would not overhear. For old times’ sake, she explained. Jasna’s rakija was made from quince and smoother than the typical plum-based moonshine.

  “So what does Mali have on Dimitrović?” Eric asked.

  “We’re not sure yet,” she admitted. “Something big. Something important. We had one source in Dimitrović’s camp who reported that there was a disc or a tape. Dimitrović was evidently bitching about it one night and our source was there. But he didn’t know what was on it.”

  “Can you use him to try to get more on this? Something more specific.”

  “We can’t ask him anything anymore.”

  “Sleeping with the fishes?”

  “The worms.”

  “That works too. So where do I fit into this?”

  “I want you to help me find out what Marko Barcelona has over Zoran Dimitrović. What’s his leverage and how can we counter it.”

  “I’m just a regular diplomat, Sarah. This is really more your organization’s sort of thing, isn’t it? Don’t you have some Jason Bourne type you can wheel out for something like this? Someone with substantially more muscle mass.” Eric was fortunate to get his height from his father’s side and stood a hair under six feet tall. But his build was from his mother, lanky and whip thin. He was in good shape and strong, but although he was a regular at the embassy gym and ran every weekend with Sarajevo’s Hash House Harriers, Eric was never going to be anything but skinny. The rectangular hipster glasses he wore did nothing to make him look tougher.

  “I’m not looking for someone with massive biceps,” Sarah replied. “I need someone with a bulging Rolodex. No one in the U.S. government has anything like your range of contacts in Republika Srpska. You know everyone who matters in Banja Luka and Zvornik and all of the one-cow towns in between. I need your help. Bosnia needs your help.”

  “Okay. I understand that. But why the cloak-and-dagger? Why not do this through channels? Set up a task force. Have me seconded to it. Why are we having this conversation at Jasna’s rather than the ambassador’s office?”

  “Eric, you’ve grown cynical over the years.”

  “Just a little more cautious maybe.”

  “Don’t get me wrong. A little cynicism is a good thing. It’ll help keep you sane . . . and alive. But only in small doses. Too much can be poisonous.”

  “Like love or oxygen?”

  “God, you are a child of the eighties. That’s very sweet.”

  “And you are a clever girl.”

  “Ain’t I though.”

  “But back to my question.”

  Sarah’s smile vanished like a mirage. She bit her lower lip and looked quickly around the restaurant, looking for anyone who seemed out of place. The gesture seemed somehow mannered, a moment staged for Eric’s benefit rather than a piece of genuine tradecraft.

  “We have a leak,” she confided. “Someone on the inside. Maybe CIA. But maybe State or one of the other agencies. There’s not enough data to be sure. We don’t know if it’s someone working directly for Dimitrović or if Belgrade or Moscow is passing him stuff, but we have to believe that anything we do through channels will get to Banja Luka. That’s what we think happened to our source in Dimitrović’s office. We only get one shot at this, so we need to be extremely careful. We’re doing this with a small team.”

  “How do you know the mole’s not part of that team?”

  “We can’t know. But we’re playing the odds. The smaller the number of people who know what we’re doing, the less the chance of exposure.”

  “Do you have authority for this?” Eric asked.

  “It falls under our group’s standing authorities. We’ve got a letter from the Langley lawyers that says so.”

  “Can I bring Wylie in on this? Let him know what I’m doing.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t trust him to keep his mouth shut. He’s a braggart and a drunk and kind of a gasbag.”

  “You’ve got his number,” Eric agreed, with a rueful shake of his head.

  “Wylie’s already cut you loose,” Sarah added. “You work for Sondergaard now. You don’t need to account for your time to him. Or to Sondergaard. Not really. She’ll be in and out of Bosnia. You’ll still be available to her when she needs you. But you’ll also be available to me. I need you, Eric.”

  Sarah leaned toward him, and over the powerful smells of grilled meat and mint and cardamom, Eric picked up a hint of her perfume. L’Eau d’Issey. The same one she had used when they were together. Was she still wearing the same perfume or did she put it on just for him, hoping that he would remember? Of all the senses, scent offered the most direct connection to memory.

  Eric sighed. He could rationalize his choice in professional terms any way he chose. On the surface, it was about the future of Bosnia. But if he was going to be honest with himself, this was as much about the past as it was about the future. Sarah and Srebrenica and a garage in suburban Orange County. Ghosts.

  “What do you need me to do?”

  “Take me to Banja Luka. Help me meet some people who might be in a position to know what’s going on and what Mali is using to control Dimitrović if—in fact—that’s what’s happening.”

  “And then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s always more.”

  She smiled that “I’m impressed” smile again.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Maybe so,” she agreed. “We’ll see. But we have to hurry. There’s no time to waste.”

  “Because of Sondergaard’s conference?”

  “No. Because whatever it is that Mali has . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “We’re not the only ones looking for it.”

  GENEVA

  OCTOBER 13

  5

  As a matter of principle, he hated code names. Too much artifice; not enough value. He used them, of course. It was an integral part of his chosen profession. It was tradecraft. But he did it reluctantly. For this op, he had been saddled with an especially clunky sounding code name—Klingsor. It sounded like something best treated with a shot of penicillin. Fuck it. If he was going to be Klingsor, then he would be fucking Klingsor.

&nb
sp; Klingsor and his team had their mark. They were targeting a Geneva-based lawyer named Emile Gisler. Kundry—Klingsor tried to use the code names for the op even in his private thoughts to minimize the risk of a slip over the radio or the phone—had told him that their mark almost certainly had the package. Kundry wanted it something fierce. It was Klingsor’s job to get it.

  Klingsor and Kundry had worked together before. Kundry was a solid professional, one of the best he knew. But there was something about this current op that did not feel quite right. It seemed ad hoc, made up on the fly, and cobbled together from bits and pieces of capabilities. But Klingsor the Sorcerer had performed miracles for Kundry on more than one occasion. Odds were he could do it again.

  Geneva was a god-awful place to do this kind of thing. The Swiss liked things neat and tidy. The national sport of Switzerland was ratting out your neighbors to the police, and static surveillance quickly drew a host of disapproving glances followed by a visit from a friendly member of the Kantonspolizei acting on an anonymous inquiry from a “concerned citizen.” It was better to keep moving even if the logistics were a little more convoluted as a consequence.

  “Klingsor,” said a voice in his ear. The receiver was no bigger than a hearing aid and connected via Bluetooth rather than the Secret Service–style spiral cord that practically screamed “I’m a spy.” “This is Echo Three. I have eyes on target, southbound on rue des Rois. Gray suit. Red tie. Black briefcase in his right hand.”

  Echo Three could just as easily have been describing himself. Geneva was a city of bankers and bureaucrats, and they dressed the part, anonymous men who could have stepped right off the canvas of a Magritte painting if bowler hats ever came back into fashion.

  “This is Echo Four. I have acquired the target.”

  “Echo Three. Dropping contact.”

  Klingsor did not want to do it this way. Too many things could go wrong with a snatch and grab, and the consequences of a fuckup could be quite severe. But Gisler’s office had been a dry hole. Klingsor’s team had tossed the place pretty thoroughly. It had taken no more than ten minutes to crack the safe. There had not been anything inside. Just gold, gaudy jewelry, cash, and a thick stack of bearer bonds. Nothing really valuable. No information. The package was no doubt secured in one of the several hundred safe-deposit boxes that Gisler maintained for a client list that included drug dealers, Central Asian autocrats, the more respectable sort of terrorist—think Red Brigade rather than al-Qaeda—and “controversial businessmen” from east of the Urals. Gisler was not too picky as long as the check could be expected to clear. Kundry had ordered the snatch and grab, which is why Klingsor found himself sitting in the passenger seat of a panel van cruising through the streets of Europe’s most antiseptic city.