“May I sit?” he asked.
Sarah simply nodded as though she did not trust herself to speak.
“I have been thinking over what was on that tape and what it means,” the priest said.
“You are not alone in that, Father,” Eric replied.
“There is something else,” Stefan said. “Something you should know. I am not certain if this thing is true, and it was entrusted to me under the seal of confession. If it is true, however, I cannot believe that God would will it to be kept secret. Although we who speak in his name would do well to preserve a little humility in our claims to understand what is in his heart. He is a mystery.”
“Tell me, Stefan.” Eric was still distracted and he was only half listening to the priest. He was finding Stefan’s stereotypically Balkan thought process with its elaborate and elliptical digressions somewhat irritating.
“A man came to see me a week ago, a former soldier haunted by demons as too many former soldiers are. This man, Darko was the name he gave me, told me that he was a sniper in the war. He said that Marko Barcelona had ordered him to kill someone. A woman.”
The priest looked at Sarah, his expression grave. “A woman of gold.”
Sarah Gold smiled at that, a smile as enigmatic as any that the Mona Lisa had ever managed. “How flattering. A girl always likes to be the center of attention.”
“So you think this could be the real thing?” Stefan asked. “I should caution you that this Darko seemed very disturbed. I was not at all convinced that his grip on what you and I would understand as reality was terribly firm.”
An unsettling image of Luka Filipović’s head exploding in a red-gray mist leaped unbidden to the forefront of Eric’s consciousness. That incident was both more and less than real. It was surreal in a way that André Breton, Miró, or Dalí would have understood. Eric knew from the Emerald Wave file they had found in Mali’s desk both that the priest was right and the threat was real.
“There’s good reason to believe his story,” Eric said. “I think the man who came to see you is named Darko Lukić. He was a sharpshooter in the Bosnian Serb army, one of the killers from Sniper Alley. And he may be crazy, but he’s also very good at what he does.”
“And I can think of reasons why Mali might want me dead,” Sarah added.
If Stefan thought it odd that a Balkan mobster would want to put a hit on a woman who had introduced herself as an economic officer at the U.S. embassy, he gave no sign of it.
“Dead, yes,” Eric agreed. “But there’s something about this that doesn’t feel right. Why a sniper? There are plenty of street toughs who would be happy to kill on Mali’s say-so at close range. A sniper is an awkward weapon. The target needs to be in a known place at more or less a known time. Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas, for example, or Zoran Đinđić meeting the Swedish foreign minister at the government office in Belgrade. Even Luka Filipović at Nikola’s farmhouse. Your movements are not exactly predictable, Sarah. Sending a sniper after you would seem an odd choice. Bizarre even. Outside of war, the kind of killing a sniper does is more a political statement. It’s public and visceral. There are easier ways to get rid of an enemy.”
“Maybe it was more important to Mali to avoid his assassin getting captured.”
“Wouldn’t that be even easier with a disposable piece who doesn’t even know who hired him? That’s been the MO for mafia hits in the Balkans for the better part of twenty years.”
“What did Darko say to you exactly?” Sarah asked Stefan.
“He said he had one last job to do, to kill a woman of gold.”
“Zlatna zena?” Eric asked, switching to Serbian.
“No. That’s golden woman. He said ‘zena od zlata.’ Literally, woman of gold.”
Something urgent clawed at the back of Eric’s brain, an insight that vanished into the shadows of his thoughts when he tried to seize it. He would need to coax it into the light. Let it show itself.
“Zlatna zena can mean a woman with a kind heart,” Sarah suggested. “If that’s what he meant, he certainly wasn’t talking about me.”
“But zena od zlata is different. It’s a physical thing, like a statue of a woman cast from gold,” the priest replied.
“Oh, god,” Eric said.
The priest’s description of the difference between the two phrases was the clue he had needed. The insight that had been hiding at the dim edge of Eric’s awareness stepped boldly into the light. He did not like the look of it. But it could not be easily denied. It felt true.
“We’ve been looking at this the wrong way. The three of us are verbal creatures. We engage with the world through language. That’s why we’re focused on the coincidence of Sarah’s name. But Lukić is a sniper. His thinking would be more visual. Woman of gold is what he would see through the scope when he takes the shot.”
“An actual woman of gold?” Sarah asked, confused.
Eric had a mental flash of long hair as pure as spun eighteen-carat gold dyed red with blood.
“No. A platinum blonde. Lukić’s target is Annika Sondergaard. I’m sure of it.”
“That would bring a pretty quick end to the peace conference,” Sarah agreed. “But it’s a huge risk on Mali’s part.”
“Not if what he wants is a war.”
Sarah nodded, signaling agreement as much as understanding.
“I can see that, yes.”
“There’s more,” Eric said.
“Do I want to know?”
“To be effective, Lukić would need to know where Annika is going to be, a fixed time and place. There are not many of those opportunities. But one is the ceremonial opening of the peace conference at the Aleksandar Hotel in”—he looked at his watch—“a little more than two and a half hours.”
—
Lukić shifted his position on the shooting platform slowly and patiently, as though he were moving only one muscle at a time. It was a routine he had worked out over the years. It was important to stay loose as well as focused, to find a comfortable and relaxed position that would keep his hands steady and sure. Even a small muscle cramp could throw off his aim or break his concentration. At this distance, any error would be compounded. If the shot was off by even a fraction of a degree, the bullet would miss the target by several feet. It was delicate work. Much of it was a science. Physics and chemistry. But the last little bit—the part that separated competence from brilliance—that was art.
He settled into his new position, releasing the tension that had been building in his left shoulder. His concentration never wavered. The reticle in the Zeiss optical sight remained locked in on the kill zone. The target would present herself soon enough and he would be ready.
She was beautiful, with alabaster skin and hair the color of pure gold. Lukić considered this simultaneously regrettable and exciting. He tried not to think about what he would do to her, not because he was ashamed but because it raised his pulse and made it harder to steady the rifle. The bond he would forge with the woman of gold, what they would do together, was more intimate than sex. It was forever. It was death.
His breathing quickened slightly, and he felt a rush of blood to his groin that was not unpleasant but it was distracting. He pushed thoughts of Annika Sondergaard out of his head and concentrated on the technical aspects of what would be a difficult shot.
He had built the shooting platform himself; it rose two meters off the floor in an internal room of the eighth floor of an unfinished building. The walls were raw concrete and brick, and the windows were open to the elements with no glass between Lukić and his target one thousand nine hundred and sixty-six meters away.
With a sledgehammer, he had knocked a hole in the wall approximately a meter and a half off the floor. Lying on the platform, he could sight through the hold and then through the window to the kill zone in front of the Aleksandar Hotel. There would be no
muzzle flash, no noise, and no protruding rifle barrel to betray his position. He would be a silent killer, unseen and untraceable. One moment, Sondergaard would be standing there in her golden glory, and in the next, she would be his forever.
He looked away from the scope to rest his eyes, using the opportunity to check the weather on the PDA, which was receiving information from the sensors he had placed on the roof. Temperature and humidity were within the expected parameters. Wind speed was manageable. The flags of Bosnia and the EU flying in front of the hotel would be even more useful to him in gauging the speed and direction of the wind downrange. The conditions were perfect, just like those in the valley where he had practiced the shot.
Lukić pressed his eye back against the scope and did his best to ignore the ghosts. This angle, looking down into the heart of the city, was all too familiar. He had spent hundreds of hours tracking his prey on the streets of Sarajevo from sniper nests just like this. He remembered with absolute fidelity every shot he ever took. And the phantasms of victims—young and old, male and female, military and civilian—floated across both his memory and his field of vision like clouds drifting in a clear blue sky. At first, Lukić had been afraid that the ghosts were conspiring against him to ruin his shot. Hide his target. But they were too insubstantial for that. If he concentrated, he could see past them, burn holes through their torsos with an act of will as though he were Superman shooting laser beams from his eyes.
Maybe he was Superman, or a reasonable facsimile.
A small voice in his head whispered to him that he had lost his mind, that the ghosts he saw through the rifle sights were more delusion than illusion. Lukić knew that this was true and he did not care. What mattered was the shot. All that mattered was the shot.
Even from this distance, he could take her in the head. The blood would coat her chest and run like sweat in rivulets down her back.
A middle-aged woman in a black cloth coat ragged at the hem rose up from the ground in front of the Aleksandar Hotel. She stared at him, unconstrained by distance or the brick walls of the building. The sniper could see through her to the brass doors of the hotel behind her. She was a shadow. You are dead, bitch. I killed you twenty years ago. You cannot stop me.
His finger tightened involuntarily on the trigger, and he was a hair’s breadth from sending a copper-jacketed .30 slug through a ghost into the front door of the Aleksandar. He forced his trigger finger to relax. This would ruin everything. He could no more kill this specter than he could slay his own memories. This Muslim woman in her patched coat was a part of him.
Soon, the woman of gold would be a part of him too. He would need to be patient, but not for too much longer.
—
After no more than thirty seconds of macho bullshit, Eric gave Sarah the keys. Twenty minutes later, he was questioning the wisdom of that decision as Sarah manhandled the Golf around a series of twisting turns on the narrow mountain road at speeds well beyond what either the car or the road were designed to handle. The State Department taught its officers defensive driving before sending them to dangerous assignments overseas. The CIA evidently trained its personnel in offensive driving as well.
“Any luck getting a signal?” Sarah asked.
Eric checked his BlackBerry, which was still reading NO SERVICE. They should have been within range of a cell tower by this point.
“Still nothing, but I’m not sure if the problem is with the phone or the cell system.”
“Let me check my phone,” Sarah said, taking one hand off the wheel. The speedometer read eighty-five miles an hour.
“I’ll get it.”
Eric fished Sarah’s phone out of her jacket pocket.
“Nothing.”
“Something’s not right.”
“Let’s see if we can find a place with a landline.”
Eric wanted to call ahead to warn Annika. He wanted to get through to the police, the embassy, Annika herself, Dragan, anyone who might be in a position to disrupt the assassination attempt on the EU High Representative that Eric feared was already under way. Annika had a chance to save Bosnia. Her death might destroy it.
Five miles down the road, they came to a small village with a gas station that served double duty as a convenience store. Sarah pulled up to the door.
“Wait for me here,” Eric said.
There was no one minding the store. It had the unmistakable air of a business that compensated for a lack of customers with a dearth of effort. Bags of assorted snacks were lined up on a shelf by the register. A thick layer of dust had settled over the display. No one had disturbed the potato chips and peanuts in quite some time. An idea sprang almost fully formed into Eric’s head, and he acted on it impulsively without taking the time to think through the risks. It took almost no time and required little more than a furtive glance over his shoulder to see if anyone was watching.
When he was done, he rang the bell on the counter, summoning a teenage attendant with stringy blond hair and bad acne from some back room.
“Just some cashews, please,” Eric said, dropping the dusty bag next to the register. “And would it be possible to use your phone?” Eric asked.
“Sure. No problem.” The boy pointed to a cheap Chinese handset at the far end of the counter.
Eric picked it up. There was no dial tone. He tapped the plastic switchhook repeatedly but with no result, nothing but dead air.
“It’s not working,” he said, trying to keep the edge of desperation out of his voice.
The boy shrugged. “Sorry.”
Eric dropped two marks on the counter.
Back in the car, he told Sarah what had happened. “Both cell phones and landlines. Coincidence?” he asked.
“No way.”
“Could Mali or Kaspar or whatever you want to call him do this?”
“Absolutely.”
“Drive faster.”
She did. There were other cars on the road, but Sarah blew by them as though they were standing still, taking chances on a few blind curves that had Eric reconsidering his committed atheism. They made it to the outskirts of Sarajevo in a little more than two hours, but there the traffic came to a complete stop. To avoid rear-ending a van, Sarah had to slam the brakes on the Golf so hard that she left skid marks. Eric could smell the burned rubber.
“What’s going on?” Sarah asked.
“Police checkpoint.”
The road was a tangled mess, cars and trucks had tried to drive around the line of vehicles in all directions. The gridlocked vehicles were going nowhere.
“Wait here,” Eric said. “I want to see if I can get one of the cops to call in on his radio.”
Eric picked his way through the traffic jam as quickly as he could. At the front of the line, the police had set up a roadblock and they were letting one car through at a time, opening both the trunk and the hood, and using mirrors and flashlights to explore the undercarriage. For good measure, a bomb-sniffing dog circled the vehicle, wagging its tail to signal its approval.
No one was in a rush. Even past the checkpoint, cars were lined up, not moving. The police must have closed off so many blocks downtown that traffic had ground to a halt across the city.
The checkpoint was manned by the Federation’s Ministry of the Interior. Like almost every other institution in the country, the police were split in two. The Federation had one structure and the RS had its own police force, with its own command and its own political overlords. There was little communication and almost no cooperation between the parallel police forces.
Eric picked out the one cop who did not seem to be doing anything. He was almost certainly the one in charge.
“Officer,” he said urgently, “I have an emergency.”
“Everyone here has a fucking emergency,” the cop answered. He was middle-aged and thick around the middle, and wore a dark-blue uniform and
an NYPD-style peaked cap. His features were all oversize. His ears and nose seemed too large for his head. There was an automatic pistol holstered to his belt and, most important for Eric, a radio.
“My name is Petrosian. I’m an American diplomat and I have reason to believe that EU High Representative Annika Sondergaard is the target of an assassination attempt. I need to get in touch with your headquarters.”
To Eric’s surprise, the cop laughed. It was not the reaction he had anticipated.
“Sure. Go ahead and file a report. So far we’ve had sixteen bomb threats, two of them nuclear; four reports of a sniper; three calls from people with information about plans to crash the High Representative’s motorcade with a garbage truck or a cement mixer; and one call from a man who insisted he was Gavrilo Princip reborn and Sondergaard was his Franz Ferdinand. Which one are you?”
“There is a shooter,” Eric insisted, but even to himself he sounded slightly deranged, just one in a series of fanciful reports. “I work with High Representative Annika Sondergaard and her life is in danger. I want you to use the radio to put me in touch with your headquarters.”
The policeman looked at him dismissively.
“We’re already doing everything we can to ensure security.” He gestured at the long line of cars backed up for hundreds of meters. “Now please get back in your vehicle.”
Eric fumbled in his pocket for his wallet and pulled out his diplomatic ID card.
“I’m an American official and I am asking for your assistance.”
“You can submit the request in writing to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I’m sure they’ll be interested in helping you.”
Eric looked at his watch. Sondergaard would be meeting the delegations arriving at the Aleksandar Hotel in less than thirty minutes. He had no time to argue with a beat cop at a checkpoint.
From up here in the hills, Eric could almost see the hotel. He thought about running but doubted that he could make it in the time available. The Aleksandar fronted the old Sniper Alley. It was just a few blocks from the intersection where Eric’s ghost made his home. His eyes tracked Sniper Alley back up to the hills on the far north of the city. A building halfway up the slope caught his attention. It was unfinished, but it had an almost perfect line of sight to the Aleksandar. It would be an ideal location for a sniper nest except that it would be a very long shot. A mile, maybe more. The shooter would have to be very, very good. Dragan had assured him that Lukić was the best. And Eric had seen his handiwork up close. He had no doubt that the veteran was capable of making the shot.
The Wolf of Sarajevo Page 28
