The Wolf of Sarajevo

by Matthew Palmer

  “Why have you come to me?”

  “I have killed. I have killed many men.”

  Stefan nodded.

  “I have killed women and children.”

  “The war brought out the worst in all of us,” the priest said reassuringly.

  “No, Father. It brought out my best. I was good at war. I have never been . . . will never be . . . as good at anything ever again.”

  “You are in conflict with yourself,” Stefan said. “It eats at your soul. I understand this. But there is a part of you that rejects that identity. Rejects violence. Turns from death. Desires another way of living. That is why you have come here.”

  “Yes. There is a conflict. My nature is dual. Both angel and man. And the part of me that is still a man has a soul that is in mortal danger.”

  “Then repent and save your soul,” Stefan said urgently.

  Darko’s list of sins was long even by the standards of a region that had seen too much of war.

  Stefan listened with patience and sympathy, and offered his blessing.

  “Go forth and sin no more,” the priest commanded.

  “I cannot promise that, Father.”

  “You must try.”

  “I am not done with killing. There is one more I must do.”

  “It is one thing to kill during war. It is another thing altogether to murder.”

  “Is it, Father? Is it really?”

  “Why do you say you must do this thing?”

  “Because he wants her dead and I have given my word.”

  “Who?”

  “She is gold. A woman of gold.” Darko seemed to be babbling nonsense.

  “My son, I fear you are in the grip of a delusion. I can tend to your soul, but I cannot treat your mind. You have need of a priest, yes. But you also need a physician. Let me help you.”

  Darko only shook his head, and without another word, he turned and walked out of the church.

  Stefan was left alone with his thoughts. He had been in the presence of something powerful, but whether it was evil or simple madness was impossible for him to tell. Was there even a difference? Was insanity simply a form of spiritual turmoil?

  Was Darko merely delusional or would he act out the commands of the demons in his head? There was something about the woman of gold that almost seemed to make sense to Stefan. But he could not quite put the pieces together. It was almost there. Scattered fragments of understanding that he tried unsuccessfully to shape into a complete picture. He pushed it aside. Darko from Vukovar was insane. The war had broken him, and peace—such as it was—had failed to remake him. He was caught in a world of fantasy and make-believe. In this, he was hardly alone. There were too many of the walking dead from all sides in that terrible conflict.

  Darko needed a psychiatrist, hospitalization, drugs, and therapy. That was a problem for the secular authorities. There was little Stefan could do from his isolated mountain chapel. He had already done everything in his power to help the former soldier save his soul. That was the job of a priest.

  Stefan returned the cross and the holy book to their resting place, and closed the door of the church behind him.

  The bees needed tending.

  AGINO SELO

  NEAR BANJA LUKA

  1570

  25

  I want you to cut the boy,” his mother said. “Disfigure him. Nothing too extreme. Maybe one of his ears. A finger. He won’t miss one.”

  His wife, Brana, was mad with worry, Radoslav knew. The fear that the scout would choose their son Uros had grown in her mind until it had become a certainty. This was the dangerous period for Uros. The scout came only once every four or five years. If they could make it through this “collecting,” it was likely that Uros would be too old the next time. Radoslav understood his wife’s fear, he even shared it, but it was his job to be strong.

  “What’s wrong with you, woman? Disfigure my son? Never. He will not be chosen. There are many boys in the village who are the right age. Many are bigger and stronger than Uros.”

  “And if he is chosen? What then?”

  Radoslav drained his cup of rakija and poured himself another from the wooden cask on the table.

  “We have more than one son.”

  “You are not his mother.”

  Radoslav smiled at his wife and reached for her hand. Life in the village could make a man grow hard, but he was not unkind. It hurt him to see his wife suffer, and if the scout chose his boy, he would no doubt weep himself. In private. Radoslav loved the boy too. But he was a man.

  He twisted the end of his mustache, a habit he had when he was thinking about something especially serious.

  “If he is chosen,” he said carefully, “it might not be all bad. He would be educated in the sultan’s court. He would learn to read and fight. He might come back to us one day as a bey, even as a pasha. Sokollu Mehmed Pasha was born a Serb in Sokolovići and now he is master of us all. Is that so bad?”

  “He would be a slave and a Turk,” his wife said. “They would circumcise him and make him Muslim. He would have no reason to love us, you and me, or even remember us. It is most likely that he will die in some foreign battle fighting the sultan’s wars. That is not what I want for my son.”

  Uros was only eight. This was the age the scouts’ preferred for their Janissaries, the privileged class of slaves who guarded the sultan’s person and administered his sprawling empire. Most Janissaries came from the Balkans: Albanians and Serbs, Croats and Bulgarians. Muslims were exempt from the collecting, the devşirme system by which towns and villages were expected to tithe their children to the sultan’s imperial ambitions. Whole towns had been known to convert from Christianity to Islam to avoid the devşirme.

  Radoslav looked around him at what he had built. They had done well for themselves, he and Brana. They had seven healthy children and two more in the church graveyard. Their house was strong, made of wattle and thatch over stone and timber. Their farm was five acres of wheat and a small orchard that produced plums and cherries and succulent apricots in season. He had iron farm tools in the shed, a draft horse, and a cow that gave enough milk to meet their needs.

  The last thing he wanted was trouble. Not with the village headman, not with the bey and, God alone knew, not with the pasha. Some families tried to hide their sons or pretend they had died. But the scouts knew. The Ottomans were nothing if not very careful keepers of records. Land records. Court records. Marriages, births, and deaths. Those who tried to cheat the scouts lost their homes and farms. It was better to take your chances with the numbers. There were many Christian sons, and few were chosen as Janissaries. But you could not expect a woman to understand numbers.

  A bell rang, the church bell. It was time.

  Brana gathered the children. The girls did not need to come, but if little Uros was chosen, it would be their last chance to see him.

  Radoslav pulled his kožuh, a warm sheepskin vest, over his best shirt of embroidered linen. He wrapped a red wool belt around his waist. Red was for Christians. The Muslims wore green. His hat was also made of wool dyed dark red and embroidered in black thread. Finally, he stuck a long knife into his belt. A man never left the house without a weapon.

  It was already November and the cold rain had turned the roads to mud. The sky was an iron gray. His opanci, shoes made from woven leather, kept his feet dry and his wool socks kept them warm. The scout always came in November. Radoslav did not know why. The walk to town took longer than it usually did, as they were weighed down by their heavy hearts. Within the hour, however, all of the families in the village assembled by the church for inspection. The priest was there with his own family, but his two sons were grown, almost old enough to marry and certainly too old to be of interest to the scout.

  The agent of the sultan’s army was the same man who had come for the last two cycles of devşir
me. He had seen enough winters now that his mustache was beginning to gray. The scout’s riding clothes were made of lamb’s wool dyed a deep blue, and his boots were polished leather. It was his horse, however, that made the most powerful impression on the villagers. If Radoslav had sold his home and all his land, and indentured his sons and daughters as servants, he could not have afforded to buy such a magnificent animal. The horse was black and at least sixteen hands high with a broad chest and thick black mane. This was the scout’s personal mount. But it was the other horses that his wife feared, the dull-brown drays yoked to the wagon that would take their son away to far-off Constantinople at the whim of the man before them. The Muslims, Radoslav knew, had another name for the city, but he could not recall it.

  The sons lined up for inspection, all of the village boys between the ages of seven and eleven. Uros was one of the smallest of even the youngest boys, and Radoslav hoped that he would be overlooked because of it. He did not look like a soldier or even, Radoslav had to admit to himself, a farmer. But Uros was clever, and he had not yet learned to hide that, to dull his eyes and make his face a stone. The sultan was after more than big and strong, Radoslav knew. Uros was a curious boy and also a handsome boy. He took after his mother. The scouts were partial to good-looking sons.

  The scout walked up and down the line of young boys, inspecting a few of the bigger ones the way he might look over a horse, checking their muscle tone and even looking at their teeth. One boy was nearly a head taller than the others. He was eleven and strong for his age. The agent took him. Radoslav heard his mother cry out in anguish and her husband hush her.

  The scout stopped again in front of Uros, and Radoslav felt his wife’s grip tighten on his arm.

  “What is your name, boy,” the scout asked.

  “Uros.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Nine,” the boy lied. He was barely eight.

  The scout seemed to recognize the lie. He smiled.

  “Uros, you will come with me.”

  The boy did not cry. He did not run to his mother. He made his father proud.

  The family was allowed to say good-bye. Brana shrieked and wailed and needed to be pulled apart from her son by two of the village women. Radoslav kept this face impassive. He would show nothing to the Turk. No pain. But he held his son tightly one last time and whispered fiercely in his ear.

  “Remember us. I will remember you.”

  Remember.

  KRIVA RIJEKA

  NOVEMBER 13

  26

  As Eric had anticipated, Sarah was enthusiastic about Dragan’s offer to help them get inside Mali’s mountain villa. She had returned to Sarajevo the day after Eric and Annika had toured the Aleksandar Hotel, typically cagey and uninformative about where she had been.

  “Business trip” was the full extent of her explanation. It was a familiar response to a question he had learned to stop asking back when they were an actual couple. He was not quite certain what they were now, but a couple was clearly not the right answer.

  Sarah had listened carefully to the description of the attack at Nikola’s farmhouse retreat and Filipović’s assassination.

  “You did everything right, Eric,” she had assured him. “And props to Amra. She was right. It looks like our little friend Tiny has, in fact, contracted the services of a capable killer.”

  “For Filipović?” Eric had wondered out loud. “Or for someone else?”

  “We’ll see,” Sarah had replied.

  There was not much time to prepare. The window was one night. Both Eric and Sarah understood that they were alone in this decision. The Agency had grown increasingly conservative and risk averse. The release of the damning Senate report on the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” of terror suspects after 9/11 had only accelerated that trend. If the higher-ups in the intelligence bureaucracy knew what Sarah and Eric had in mind, they would have put the brakes on, demanding studies and quantitative analyses of the risk/reward balance that would have consumed weeks, even months, that they did not have.

  The State Department, meanwhile, would not even have had the vocabulary to respond if Eric had told Wylie or anyone else in his reporting chain what they were planning to do. Eric was not entirely sure how he had found himself so far outside the carefully circumscribed lines of his profession. Part of it, he knew, was Sarah. But more than that, it was his sense of outrage. That anger had been building in him for a long time, going back to that one horrifying afternoon in an Orange County garage. This was his way of shouting, No more! No more to the Armenian genocide. No more to the killing fields of Cambodia. No more to Srebrenica. The risk of taking action belonged to him and Sarah and Dragan. The risks of inaction belonged to an entire country.

  For Dragan, there was nothing especially remarkable about the night’s work they had planned. It was almost routine. And he had a typically Serbian comfort level with improvisation.

  Now, as they sat shivering in a Russian jeep with a broken heater high up the side of the valley where Mali had his villa, Eric was having second thoughts. Sarah, as usual, seemed to be able to read his mind.

  “Too late, cowboy. We’re committed.”

  “We should be committed,” Eric replied. “All of us.”

  “It’ll all be fine,” Dragan said reassuringly from the driver’s seat. “We’ll be careful. If it looks bad, we can pull back and try something different.”

  Dragan had driven them up over the mountains that ringed the valley, following an old logging road that ran through the saddle between two of the rugged peaks. The Lada Niva had jounced down the rutted road on its inadequate shocks, but the little Russian jeep was the automobile equivalent of an AK-47, simple and tough. Russian engineers were consistently disinterested in the health and comfort of end users. Heat, for example, was evidently considered an option on the Niva. And the night was cold. The logging road took them to within a kilometer of the villa. Dragan had driven with no lights, using a set of military-grade night-vision goggles to stay on the road.

  They parked in a clearing that offered a direct line of sight on the villa.

  After more than an hour of patient surveillance, they saw what they had been waiting for. A convoy of three cars pulled away from the house and sped down the road toward Štrigova and on to Banja Luka.

  “Get ready,” Dragan said, with an edge of eagerness once the lights of the convoy had disappeared down the valley road. “Remember. There will be only two guards on duty instead of the usual four. One at the front gate. One on the inside.”

  “You’re sure of the numbers, Dragan?” Sarah asked. “There’s a lot riding on that.”

  “I’m quite sure. My source is very good. I could tell what those two boys had for breakfast this morning if that information was material to the mission.”

  Mali had a contract with a company in Banja Luka that provided his security. One of the owners used to work for Dragan, which in Bosnia’s close-knit and incestuous security community was not terribly surprising. Dragan had helped the company get its start, and he cashed in that favor for a temporary administrator’s password that gave him access to just about everything there was to know about security arrangements at the villa.

  “What about dogs?” Sarah asked.

  “Only outside. Not in the house. According to the file, the client is allergic.”

  From under his seat, Dragan pulled out a compact, ugly-looking handgun and offered it to Eric.

  “No, thanks. I’d just end up shooting one of you.”

  “Suit yourself.” The handgun disappeared under Dragan’s coat. Eric was quite confident it was not the only one the former State Security operative was carrying. He did not offer a gun to Sarah. She had brought her own.

  The three of them slipped on the night-vision goggles that Dragan had supplied from his company’s inventory. It was high-end gear, comfortable and easy to
use. They picked their way carefully down the slope toward the back of the villa. Both Sarah and Dragan were carrying black nylon backpacks. They took their time. In the green glow of the night-vision goggles, the shadows were dark and impenetrable. Eric was careful where he put his feet.

  The stone wall that encircled the garden was more than two meters tall, but the top was smooth and free of barbed wire. It would not be too difficult to climb over. Dragan raised his hand, indicating that Eric and Sarah should hold. From his pack, Dragan pulled a small aerosol can and sprayed the area along the top of the wall. In his scope, Eric could see a bright green line running parallel to the wall. A laser beam.

  Dragan reached into the bag a second time and removed a palm-size device that looked something like a camera on a tripod. He set it on top of the wall and tapped a quick sequence of buttons. The device shifted slightly on the tripod along all of its axes before settling into position. A single red light on the face of the device was the only visible indication that it was active. Dragan confirmed with another shot of aerosol that the light was a laser beam directed back down the line toward the receiver. This would fool the alarm into thinking that the laser had not been disturbed.

  “Okay. Up and over,” Dragan whispered. “Stay to the left of our laser.”

  For a large man, Dragan was surprisingly graceful. He vaulted the wall in a single smooth motion and landed soundlessly on the other side. Eric and Sarah were right behind him. Despite the cold, Eric’s palms were sweaty. It may have been macho bullshit, but he did not want the others to see how nervous he was. He dried his palms surreptitiously on the sides of his pants.

  The walled garden was dark and deserted. Dragan led the way, having committed the layout to memory as part of the “research” he had conducted on the ill-secured computers of Mali’s security company. The door to the house looked like wood, but it was painted steel and cold to the touch. The lock was located in the center of the door, a European style that typically meant there was a mechanical system inside the door that would engage locking rods on all four sides.