“Meaning?”
“Are we together? What are we, actually?” Eric and Sarah had not slept together again since that one night. And the signals Eric had been getting from his former lover had been mixed and ambiguous.
“What do you want?” Case officers, like psychiatrists, were fond of answering a question with a question.
“I want you to come home with me and make love like a pair of wild weasels.”
Sarah laughed, and there was a tightness in Eric’s throat as that sound pulled him back twenty years into the past.
Sarah leaned forward and kissed him softly on the cheek. It was tender, loving even, but not sexual.
“Not now. There’s too much to do. Let’s get through this thing, and we can talk about it. Right now I can’t afford the distraction.”
Eric reached for her, and she let him embrace her—briefly. God, this woman had a grip on his psyche that was deeply troubling.
“Come on,” she said, stepping back to put some distance between them. “I’ve got some calls to make. Walk a girl home?”
Eric offered his arm and Sarah took it. They walked into the heart of old Sarajevo, down the cobblestone streets through neighborhoods redolent of a thousand years of history. But they did not talk about the past. Eric could only hope they had a future.
SARAJEVO
JUNE 28, 1914
18
Who would have thought that it would be that hard to kill one man? Even a royal. Gavrilo Princip tried to push aside the feelings of failure and disappointment. There was still a chance, he hoped, that he could make everything right.
God was with them. Their cause was just. The South Slavs, the Yugoslavs, were a people denied their right to self-determination by their Austrian overlords. Only Serbia was truly free. The Slavs of Bosnia were little more than serfs, and the arrogant Austrians missed no opportunity to drive that point home. Today was one of these opportunities. Archduke Franz Ferdinand had come to Sarajevo in his gaudy military regalia on this of all days. Vidovdan. St. Vitus’s Day. The anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo—a noble defeat that had marked the beginning for Serbia of five hundred years of Ottoman rule.
The Slavs were a proud people, and they chafed under the yoke of foreign control. It had taken five centuries for the Serbs to rid themselves of the Ottomans. Princip was determined that the period of Austrian domination would not be nearly so long.
Belgrade had already taken the first steps. The tired Obrenović dynasty had been overthrown, with the weak King Alexander I and his wife, Queen Draga, shot, stabbed, and defenestrated. Peter I of the house of Karađorđević was king now, and Serbia had won glorious victories in the wars against first the Turks and then the Bulgarians. Serbia now controlled both Macedonia and its historic heartland, Kosovo.
Princip was not yet satisfied and he was far from alone in this. He was a member of a revolutionary movement, Young Bosnia. They were students, most of them Serbs but also Muslims and Croats, and they were committed to direct action against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Tyrannicide.
There had been seven of them spaced along the route that the archduke’s motorcade would follow, all of them armed and all carrying cyanide pills to ensure that they could not betray their comrades under the pressure of torture. But somehow they had failed. The Bosnian Muslim, Mehmedbašić, had waited in front of a bank with a bomb that he did not throw. Vaso Čubrilović, a fellow Serb, had stood nearby with a pistol and a second bomb, but he too had lost his nerve and failed to act.
Nedeljko Čabrinović at least had tried. Standing on the opposite side of the street farther down the route near the Miljacka River, Čabrinović had thrown his bomb at the archduke’s open-top double phaeton. The bomb had bounced off the folded roof of the vehicle and exploded under another car in the motorcade. A dozen or more people had been injured, none of them people of consequence.
Čabrinović bravely swallowed his cyanide capsule and threw himself into the Miljacka River to drown. But the pill had only made him sick and the river was only a few centimeters deep in the middle of a dry, hot summer. Čabrinović had been dragged from the nearly dry river and beaten by the crowd. They came close to finishing the job that the poison and the Miljacka had begun. Close, but not quite. Čabrinović was somewhere in police custody.
Princip and the other would-be assassins had watched helplessly as the archduke’s motorcade had sped past them on their way to the town hall, now moving too fast for either bullet or bomb.
But Princip had not lost faith. There was still a chance. Now he waited for the archduke to make his return. The next stop on the itinerary was supposed to be the National Museum, but Princip suspected that Franz Ferdinand would want to visit those who had been injured in the bombing once they’d been taken to the hospital. The archduke was a royal, but he was also a politician. If he did visit the hospital, the motorcade would have to pass this spot. Princip stood in front of a small grocery near the Latin Bridge and waited.
His faith was rewarded. The motorcade was moving at speed, but the lead car made what must have been a wrong turn. Princip heard a voice he recognized as belonging to Oskar Potiorek, the governor of Bosnia, call out to the driver to back up and follow Appel Quay to the hospital. The five-car motorcade stopped almost directly in front of where Princip was standing. The young revolutionary felt a hot flush of fear, joy, and anticipation as he stepped forward, drawing the Belgian Fabrique Nationale semiautomatic pistol from his pocket.
The distance was no more than a meter and a half. He could not miss. The archduke was sitting in the backseat of the phaeton in full military peacock finery, his ridiculous handlebar mustache waxed and sharp.
Princip’s first bullet hit the archduke in the throat, and a spray of blood covered the white dress of the duchess who was sitting so prettily next to him. The blood may have distracted Princip because his second bullet struck the duchess in the abdomen. He had meant to shoot Governor Potiorek sitting in the front seat.
I am sorry about that, Princip thought. It was bad luck to shoot a woman, even if she was married to an Austrian royal. He turned the pistol toward the governor, but before he could squeeze the trigger, a burly Sarajevo policeman tackled him and pinned him to the cobblestone street.
“You murdering son of a bitch,” the policeman said in his ear, as he twisted Princip’s arm hard behind his back and forced the pistol from his fingers. “You’ll hang for this.” His breath smelled of onions, and drops of spittle hit the back of Princip’s neck.
Murder. Princip was satisfied. The archduke’s wound, he was confident, was mortal. He could hear the death rattle.
He had succeeded. He had struck a blow for freedom.
All would be right in the end.
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
NOVEMBER 7
19
Something was rotten in the Western Balkans Division. VW could feel it. And she was determined to do more than pace the battlements of the Island of Misfit Toys and suffer the slings and arrows, assuming that they were still outrageous fortune’s weapons of choice.
Rennsler was still combing through the financial trail that Parsifal had left behind. He would do a more than thorough job. In parallel, VW was wading through the intel, looking for patterns, for a thread that would help guide her through the labyrinth of data.
The reporting from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the attachés in Sarajevo, Belgrade, and Zagreb was dull, technical, and unilluminating. This was pretty much par for the course with DIA. It seemed to VW that most of the defense attachés’ reporting from the field consisted of articles from military magazines translated into English with a comment paragraph tacked onto the end that was something along the lines of “I totally agree.” That was enough to justify slapping a Secret label on the product and—VW suspected—counting it against some kind of informal quota that would be used to assess the attaché’s suitability for promotion and a cushy assignm
ent in Rome.
The State Department reporting was more useful. The political counselor in Sarajevo, Eric Petrosian—VW had looked him up—had interesting contacts, and his cables were both well written and relevant. His reporting was crisp and readable, and offered a sharp contrast to DIA’s cables, which were as dense and dry as a Christmas fruitcake and just about as appetizing. VW was impressed by the political reporting from Sarajevo, and she was not easily impressed. Petrosian, she remembered reading somewhere, had been working closely with High Rep Sondergaard in laying the groundwork for the upcoming peace conference.
In his reporting, Petrosian acknowledged that the obstacles to success were significant, but he nonetheless argued that there was a real and growing chance for an agreement and that the U.S. government should do everything it could to back the Sondergaard Plan. The alternative, he suggested, was another Balkan war that would likely leave Bosnia fractured beyond repair. That VW shared this view may have contributed to her respect for the quality of his work.
State Department cables were an interesting mix of intelligence collection, analysis, and policy advocacy. There was no other government agency that produced anything like it. The CIA, for one, was enjoined by its charter from advocating particular policy choices. The National Clandestine Service did collection and the Directorate of Intelligence did analysis. They were not policy makers. But there were ways that the intel community had to influence policy, and spooks were not always shy about using them. If the president was considering three options and the CIA told him that options one and three were likely to trigger nuclear war or a global financial meltdown, the Agency did not really need to specify its preference for option two. It was implied.
It was the analysis carried out by the CIA’s Balkan Action Team, however, that was the most interesting, at least for VW’s purposes. The BAT was an unusual mix of operations officers from the Clandestine Service and DI analysts that was meant to ensure that the collection and analysis were synched up especially closely, but the opposite seemed to be true. The raw human intelligence, or HUMINT, was consistent with what VW was seeing in other reporting channels, but the finished intelligence that went to senior decision makers in the policy process was little short of an apologia for the Dimitrović regime in Banja Luka. Reading the finished intel, you would believe that Dimitrović’s sharp turn to the right was a temporary aberration and that the risk of renewed conflict in Bosnia was low. VW did not believe either of these was true. The aberrant period was Dimitrović’s short-lived embrace of Western priorities and a true partnership with Sarajevo. That period she was at a loss to explain. The thug he was now was the real Dimitrović, not the gauzy cotton-candy version that had for a short while embraced the West’s vision and agenda.
VW looked up from her stacks of reports and pressed the tips of her fingers against her temples. She felt a migraine coming on.
“Why Parsifal?” she wondered aloud. Was that code name chosen at random by a computer program? It did not sound like that. It felt deliberate, intentional.
Parsifal’s quest for the Holy Grail had been the subject of both a tedious thirteenth-century poem and an opera by Richard Wagner whose music was not, as one wag had observed, as bad as it sounds.
The phone rang. Deep in the fugue state of puzzle solving, VW nearly jumped out of her skin.
“Hello,” she said into the receiver.
“VW, it’s me. It’s time.”
The voice belonged to Bob Landis.
“Already?”
“Yes.”
“Shit. Give me ten minutes.”
She swallowed two ibuprofen and splashed some water on her face in the ladies’ room. The damn automatic faucets only offered one temperature, lukewarm. VW wanted ice-cold and there was nothing the CIA could or would do to meet that need. Typical.
Her eyes were dry and felt like they had been scrubbed with sandpaper. She took a look at herself in the mirror and immediately wished that she had not. God, she looked like hell. The bags under her eyes were dark enough that they could have been mistaken for bruises, and her skin looked waxy, with the translucent sheen of supermarket apples. She was working too hard, and some part of her understood that she was dancing on the fine line between dedication and obsession. If the UAV did not turn up any kind of solid lead, VW promised herself, she would ratchet back a bit, try to restore some semblance of normalcy to her life.
Bob Landis’s domain was deep in the bowels of the CIA’s old wing, a subterranean vantage point for gimlet eyes on the far side of the world.
The elevator opened up right into the flight-control center. Banks of monitors bathed the room in a dim blue glow as operators controlled UAVs with macho names like Reaper, Global Hawk, or Predator as they tracked the movements of America’s enemies. The flight center felt tacky, cut-rate, and temporary, as though the CIA did not want to overcommit to a tool—drones—and a strategy—targeted killing—it had never quite made peace with.
“’Bout time, VW. You almost missed the show.”
Landis was standing at one of the workstations looking over the shoulder of an impossibly young pilot with a regulation haircut who gripped the joystick casually with three fingers.
“Not a big deal, Bob, the Preds have plenty of loiter time.”
“Yeah? Well, this isn’t a Predator.”
“What the hell is it?”
“A Wyvern.”
“Jesus, that’s a toy. I need loiter time over the target.”
“I’m sorry, VW. This was the best I could do, particularly because you wanted to avoid using the base in eastern Slavonia. There’s a small test base for the Wyverns in Montenegro, and someone there owed me a favor. Now I owe him. The boys bolted an external fuel tank onto the fuselage for this mission. It’ll make it. But we aren’t getting very much time on target. Ten or fifteen minutes tops. Depends on fuel consumption. The extra tank adds weight and screws with the aerodynamics so we’re not really confident in the numbers.”
“Where’s my goddamn Predator, Bob?”
“Predator time out of Ramstein is all blocked off with a director-level code I’ve never seen before.”
“Parsifal.”
“That’s the one. If you can submit your request through that channel, I can blanket that place with twenty-four-hour coverage from every possible angle. But without that, this is what I’ve got. If it makes a difference, this isn’t a regular Wyvern. The test birds have some cutting-edge mods. This makes us square, VW.”
“Understood. Thanks, Bob. I know you did the best you could.”
VW sighed. Parsifal again. It seemed to lurk under almost every rock she turned over.
“Okay. Let’s see what we can see.”
Landis stepped aside to give VW a look at the monitors. The unmistakable rocky landscape of western Bosnia drifted slowly across the screens. The Wyvern’s current coordinates were displayed in the upper-right corner of the center screen.
“How far out are we?” Landis asked the pilot, a word that VW had always found somewhat incongruous when applied to the twenty-something operators who looked and acted more like they were playing Call of Duty in their parents’ basement on a Saturday morning rather than flying multimillion-dollar aircraft on the other side of the world.
“About ten klicks, sir.”
Definitely former military, VW decided, maybe not even former. The lines had gotten blurry since the start of the war on terror.
The Wyvern, a CIA variant of the army’s Shadow drone, needed only three minutes of flight time to cover the distance. The UAV crested a final hill. The onboard cameras captured a valley with steep sides and a river running along the floor. About halfway up the sides of the valley was a house—a villa, really—with extensive interior gardens surrounded by walls. A single-lane road connected the valley with the nearest town, a small village that the tactical overlay on one of the monitors ide
ntified as Štrigova.
Half a dozen vehicles were parked in front of the villa. From this angle, VW could not identify the makes and models, but they were big, almost certainly SUVs.
It was a nice house, an expensive house. Whose was it? VW wondered.
“Won’t they see the drone?” she asked.
“UAV,” the pilot said automatically, just barely beating Landis to the same riposte.
“Of course. Won’t they see it?”
The pilot smiled as he made a series of small adjustments with the joystick and keyboard that set the Wyvern onto a slow, looping course over the villa.
“Not likely,” he said, glancing up briefly from his monitors. “The bird is up higher than it looks. It just looks like we’re flying at fifty feet because of the magnification from the Basilisk’s Eye optical system, which is totally kick-ass. What’s more, the Wyvern has active camouflage. The bottom is an LED screen that projects an image of what’s overhead fed to it by a camera mounted on the top. And it’s whisper quiet, so they shouldn’t hear us coming either.”
“Those are the modifications?”
“Yep. The boys in S&T went all out on this one.”
“What else can it do?”
“We can listen in.”
The young pilot’s fingers danced over the keyboard, and one of the screens switched from a view of the valley floor to something that looked to VW like a hospital monitor displaying a series of sine waves.
“These are the frequencies we can tap into. The one at the top looks like a satellite TV signal, not terribly interesting unless you’re trying to track your target’s taste in situation comedies. The one at the bottom is probably from the home-security system. High-end stuff. The middle one is more interesting. It’s a radio signal. Short range. Like a walkie-talkie. Want to hear what they’re saying?”
“Damn straight I do.”
The pilot again tapped the keys furiously. The voice that came over the speakers was coarse and guttural.
The Wolf of Sarajevo Page 18
