35
It had all fallen apart so quickly. Mali still could not understand where he had gone wrong. The first sign had been Gisler’s unexplained disappearance. Then, Lukić’s failure to kill that Danish bitch, Sondergaard. And finally Stefan’s betrayal. Sarah had beaten him. And Sarah was dead. Even in death, she was screwing up his plans. Goddamn her.
She had demeaned him and disrespected him so many times back at Langley that he had lost count. When Michael Kaspar had skipped town and become Marko “Mali” Barcelona, he had more than evened the score, ruining her clever little Parsifal ploy. Sarah had struck back, however, and now it was Mali who was undone. His paid informants had told him that the tribunal had physical evidence that it was going to use to bring genocide charges against Dimitrović. They had the tape. Sarah must have given it to her puppy from the State Department before she was shot, reportedly by a Bosnian SWAT team in a case of mistaken identity. Served the frigid bitch right.
Once the tribunal went public with the tape and the indictment, it would all be over. Mali would lose his hold on Dimitrović and then on power. Then his enemies would step out of the shadows, and he had no illusions about their number. They were numerous and influential, and they would sing glad songs as they drank a victory toast from his skull.
It was time to run.
—
No one would ever call the CIA nimble.
The bureaucracy could be dense and impenetrable. Getting the Agency to change direction was like turning an ocean liner. It took time and space.
Once VW had jumped through the initial hoops, however, this action had been surprisingly easy to arrange. She had filled out more forms the last time she had needed to change the toner cartridge in her printer.
It shouldn’t be this easy. It shouldn’t be so simple to kill a man.
What VW had found most shocking was that there was an existing protocol to manage this kind of situation. It happened often enough that it had its own rules and procedures. The first and most important rule was never to write anything down. No memos. No e-mails. Nothing discoverable by a congressional committee. No phone calls. No texts. Nothing that could be tapped by a foreign intelligence service. This was all managed in face-to-face discussions in secure rooms.
The protocol was called Red Elegy. But those read into the program had a different name with the same initials. Rogue Elephant. A bull that had broken faith with the herd. It was a problem that had only one solution.
“Okay, Victoria. This is your show. Are you ready?”
It took VW a moment to realize the man was talking to her. Not many people called her Victoria. And she was not at all certain that she wanted to think of this as her show.
“I’m ready, Walther.”
Walther Menendez was a genuine big shot. He was the deputy director for operations, and he was here as the personal representative of the CIA director herself. It was Menendez’s job to make sure that no one at the White House or the Office of the Director of National Intelligence ever learned about it. The Agency cleaned up its own messes. And it was Menendez who ultimately had to give the thumbs-up or thumbs-down on a Rogue Elephant operation.
After hearing what VW had to say and seeing the pictures for himself, it had not taken him more than five minutes to give the green light.
“Let’s get started.”
Menendez was a veteran of the Clandestine Service, but he was more like a smooth political operator than the used-car salesmen and knuckle draggers VW had come to expect as the norm on the operations side of the house. His blue suit had creases so sharp, it looked like origami. His red tie stood out in bold relief against a striped shirt with French cuffs. His thinning hair was slicked back and gelled tightly against his scalp like a monk’s cap.
They were in the drone-operations room in the subbasement where VW and Landis had flown the Wyvern on its initial reconnaissance of Kaspar’s mountain sanctuary. But now the room had been cleared of all but a handful of people. Those present carried secrets inside their heads that could start half a dozen wars, unsettle the global economy, and bring down governments, including, no doubt, their own. It was better not to think in those terms, or the secrets would begin to feel like a crushing weight.
“Bob, can you put it on screen, please?”
The giant LED screen that dominated the room flickered briefly and displayed a sweeping view of a rugged mountain valley. Technical data was overlaid in yellow in the upper-right corner.
“Tell me what I’m looking at, Victoria,” Menendez said. He knew perfectly well what this was. VW understood that he was trying to keep her cool and focused. His faux ignorance ensured that there was nothing condescending in the gesture. VW was confident that Menendez had been a hell of a case officer in his day.
“This is the Kriva Rijeka Valley. It’s where Kaspar built his little retreat, running his empire out of splendid isolation. He must have known that Sarah Gold and the Parsifal team would come after him. This was his solution. I think he wanted to be like Peachey Carnehan in that Kipling novella, The Man Who Would Be King.”
“Interesting,” Menendez said. “You remember what happened to Carnehan in that story after he set himself up as a god-king? The thing that brought him down?”
“Yes,” VW replied. “His subjects saw his partner bleed. They realized that they weren’t gods.”
“Indeed. Can you see the villa from here?”
“Almost. Bob, how far out are we?”
“Twenty seconds.”
The young pilot at the controls used a joystick and track pad to input commands, and the picture of the valley swung sharply to the left as the Wyvern-B adjusted course.
The Wyvern-B was top of the line, larger and heavier than the Wyvern-A that VW and Landis had used on their last visit to the valley. It had a greater range, better optics, and certain additional capabilities.
The high-resolution camera and the enormous curved LED screen in the drone-operations suite resulted in an image that was so real, VW felt her stomach jump as the Wyvern banked. This was a far cry from the grainy black-and-white feed from the early days of drone warfare. It was closer to a Disneyland ride than a video game.
The villa came into view and the Basilisk’s Eye camera system zoomed in for a close-up. The optical quality was so good that the quick change in perspective on the giant screen made VW feel as though she were falling. She had always hated roller coasters.
“What’s the tactical situation?” Menendez asked.
“We had a pair of Wyvern-Bs passing the baton all night, keeping watch over the villa. Kaspar arrived home last night at eleven twenty from Banja Luka with two men we believe are security. One guard is posted outside. The other is somewhere in the house. It’s now oh six thirty in Bosnia. Kaspar is most likely in the master bedroom. We have acquired the floor plans for the building through an asset on the ground. We know which room is Kaspar’s from the plans. There’s a chance he’s in his study. It won’t matter either way. According to the plans, the study is hardened, but only against something on the order of a car bomb. Not this.”
“Okay. Let’s do this thing. VW, we’re here because of you. You give the orders.”
VW swallowed hard. She understood the nature of their business, the hard choices they had to make. But she had always found a way to duck direct responsibility for this kind of thing up until now. It wasn’t that Kaspar did not deserve this. He did. But that didn’t make what she had to do any easier.
“Get me a lock,” VW said, and she was pleased with herself that there was no wavering in her voice.
A red targeting reticle appeared on the screen and lined up with one of the windows, fixing into place even as the UAV continued to turn in lazy circles high up and out of sight over the villa.
“Lock established,” the UAV pilot said. “Clean and clear.”
“Open the doors.”
> “Doors are open.”
VW paused for an extra beat. This next step could not be undone. There was really no choice.
“Fire.”
—
There was no sense thinking of himself as Mali anymore, he decided. Marko Barcelona was dead. Michael Kaspar was dead as well. He had been dead for more than a year. If he was being honest with himself, Kaspar had been dead for decades. He may never have truly been alive, at least not the way Mali had been alive. Energized. Powerful.
He would not give that up without a fight. But not this fight. This fight was lost. There would be battles to come. He would rebuild his kingdom. Eastern Ukraine was wide-open territory now. It would be perfect for a man of his talents. He would ally himself with the rebels in Donetsk or Mariupol and carve out a little kingdom for himself equidistant from Moscow and Kiev, East and West.
The seams and fissures of the international system presented opportunities that only men like him could capitalize on. Men who had what was necessary to take advantage of open space.
He spun the dial on the safe in his office. The sound it made as the door opened was like the popping of a champagne cork. From inside, he retrieved two thick stacks of hundred-dollar bills and five-hundred-euro notes. The eurocrats in Brussels had decided to print the large-denomination bill precisely to appeal to those who operated in a cash economy on the margins of the law: drug dealers and smugglers and tax cheats. It was their way of challenging the supremacy of the dollar as the currency of choice for international crime and in this, at least, they had been remarkably successful.
The stack of passports was shorter but no less valuable. There were a number of nationalities to choose from. He settled on Malta. It was in the EU, which would make travel easier, but the justice system was weak and corrupt, and the Maltese were infamous for selling citizenship at reasonable prices. It was a country that no one had strong feelings about, or feelings of any sort, for that matter. As identity documents went, a Maltese passport was as close as one could get to a blank piece of paper. It would do nicely.
The picture in the passport was his. The name he had given himself was Sergei Tarullo.
Sergei, for it was not too early to start thinking of himself by his new name, returned to his room to pack his bag. He opened the shutters of the big picture window to give himself a view of the mountains. He loved the Dinaric Alps. They were in his blood. He would miss them, but Sergei was confident that he would grow to love the flat plains of eastern Ukraine in time.
The sky was a blue the color of a California swimming pool. It was clear and open and full of promise.
What the fuck is that?
The black dot grew bigger. It seemed to be coming toward him, growing rapidly, moving at speed.
Michael Kaspar understood what it was. The false identities were stripped away, and for the last few seconds of his life, he stood at the window stripped bare to his core self. He did not especially like that man, and it galled him to have to die in his company.
Shit happens.
The Hellfire was moving at almost a thousand miles an hour when it shattered the glass on the bedroom window. The missile slammed into Kaspar like a giant bullet, liquefying everything above his waistline through sheer kinetic energy. His body was not solid enough to trigger the warhead, but within a millisecond, the missile impacted the back wall of the bedroom, and the fireball and overpressure vaporized what was left of the would-be king.
—
The Basilisk’s Eye captured the destruction of the villa in glorious Technicolor. VW was not quite certain what to feel. She had just killed a man, a man she had neither liked nor respected, but a man nonetheless. Someone she had known. They had attended the same office parties and sat in on the same endless staff meetings. Now he was dead at her hand. She had likely killed one or two others as well. Kaspar’s bodyguards. Men she did not know who had just been doing their jobs. Those deaths would be harder to live with, she knew. Kaspar, at least, had made a choice.
Sarah Gold had made her choices as well. It was at last clear to VW why she had been exiled to the Island of Misfit Toys, an exile that would end in two days with her appointment as director of the Balkan Action Team. Sarah had arranged to have VW wander in the bureaucratic wilderness to keep her away from Parsifal. She knew that VW would not have agreed with the logic behind it. It was truly amazing the evil that people could do when they think they are doing good.
VW had seen the tape. It was extraordinary documentary evidence of the single worst crime on the European continent since Auschwitz. Officially, the CIA was pleased that the tribunal was in a position to issue an indictment against Zoran Dimitrović, aka Captain Zero. Privately, there was some unhappiness that a striped-pants-wearing State Department cookie pusher had gotten the better of a decorated CIA case officer, even one who had wandered pretty far off the reservation.
VW had seen the reporting. Petrosian had evidently suspected that Sarah would try to take it from him, so he had hidden the tape behind a pile of potato-chip bags in a gas station in the middle of nowhere. It was a pretty ballsy move on his part, she had to admit. But then he had sent the tape on to the tribunal without any decision on the part of the government that this was what the United States would do with the evidence.
Petrosian had no more right to give that tape to the prosecutors than Sarah had to use it in her private little game of blackmail. Both were arrogant and undisciplined.
The system existed for a reason, VW believed. It was not perfect, but it at least reflected a comprehensive debate that was supposed to take into account the full range of U.S. interests. No one person, not even the president, could make those kinds of decisions alone. The issues were too complex.
No one person was above the system. Trying to do the right thing was no excuse for circumventing the checks and balances of government. Both Eric and Sarah had been convinced of the fundamental righteousness of their cause.
Who was Sarah to decide what was right?
Who was Eric?
Who was anyone?
POTOČARI
DECEMBER 22
EPILOGUE
The first snowfall of winter had blanketed the memorial, softening the sharp lines of the steles. Against the stark white snow, the marble grave markers were a dull gray. The bare trees encircling the memorial hung heavy with snow that seemed to absorb and muffle all sound. The memorial was eerily quiet. It was as if the whole world had stopped. A moment of silence in respect for the dead. It was cold enough that their breath condensed into ephemeral clouds that lasted no longer than a heartbeat. They were the only visitors. Even the caretaker had seemingly chosen to stay in bed on such a cold morning. But he was an old man, and Eric did not hold that choice against him.
He bowed his head and blinked back frozen tears. Meho would not have approved of any maudlin display of sentiment. He would have skewered it mercilessly. Meho would have preferred a joke and a laugh. Had he been there, he would have been more than happy to supply the humor. At the very least, he would have wanted those coming together in his memory to take not just comfort but pleasure from the company of friends.
And Eric was flanked by friends. Amra was on his left and Annika was standing by his right side. They helped to steady him—literally as well as emotionally. The leg that had taken the bullet was still weak. It was growing stronger through intense and painful physical therapy sessions, but it would be some time before it was really healed. And it might never be as strong as it had been.
“Maybe it’s an illusion,” Eric said. “Maybe Sarah had it right after all. But coming here makes me feel as though I did the right thing giving the tape to the tribunal. Meho was a part of that decision, I have to be honest. But it’s bigger than that. The thousands murdered here deserve justice.”
“You did the right thing, Eric,” Annika said, putting a hand on his upper arm. “Left to its own devices,
your government probably would have handed the tape over to the tribunal . . . eventually. But it could have taken weeks, even months, before the Washington machinery reached that conclusion. By forcing their hand, you helped secure the early indictment against Dimitrović that got him out of Banja Luka into a cozy holding cell in The Hague. With your friend Nikola running the show in the RS, at least temporarily, the New Compact for Bosnia has a fighting chance.”
“You mean the Sondergaard Plan?”
“I’m Danish, Eric. Modesty prevents me from calling it that.”
Things can change quickly in politics. The peace plan that had once been a long shot was now established policy, and as was so often the case, it seemed inevitable in hindsight. Eric and Annika both knew that it had been anything but. The peace conference itself had gone well, but overcoming Dimitrović’s opposition in Banja Luka had always been the most uncertain part of the process. With Mali’s death and Dimitrović’s arrest, the RS political establishment had been turned upside down. Dimitrović’s party had fragmented into a dozen squabbling factions. Snap elections had produced a stunning victory for Nikola and the Social Democrats, who were aggressively pursuing a new pro-reconciliation agenda. The checkpoints at the border of the RS had come down and the paramilitaries had slunk back into their holes. The leaders of the three major ethnic groups were building real Bosnian institutions and the economy was at long last starting to grow. The voices of the majority in all three communities, hungry for peace and opportunity and disinterested in the old fights, were being heard. There was still a great deal of work to do, but it was a start.
“It may have been the right decision,” Eric said, “but Washington doesn’t like to get sandbagged that way. It will probably cost me my job. Wylie has been blasting me at every opportunity. Do you know anyone who’s hiring?”
“Funny you should ask. I had a nice chat with Hank the other day.” Hank was Henry Pembroke, secretary of state of the United States of America. Waspy. Patrician. Aloof. Independently wealthy. His great-great-grandfather had been secretary of state to President James Buchanan. It was hard for Eric to think of him as Hank.
The Wolf of Sarajevo Page 31
