“Mr. Struna, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Only one bag?”
“I travel light.”
“Good. I’m the same way. My car’s close.” Struna and Jack headed for the sliding glass doors and the temporary parking, which was just a few feet from the drop-off, another advantage to the sleepy little airport. There wasn’t enough rain to bother with an umbrella. A security camera was perched on the lamppost just above Struna’s SUV, a blue BMW X3.
Jack loaded his carry-on and laptop into the back of the BMW, then climbed into the plush black leather passenger seat as Struna pressed the starter button. By the time they pulled onto the southbound two-lane E61, the sky had darkened considerably and the windshield wipers were slapping away a heavy rain. The light traffic sped along nicely, mostly German and Italian nameplates on the cars, with a few Škodas making up the rest.
“Sorry about the weather. We’re due for rain the whole week. I was hoping to get you up into the mountains while you were here.”
“I’ve got plenty to do anyway. At least I won’t be tempted to leave the office.”
“It still might clear up. Around here we say, ‘If you don’t like the weather right now, just wait ten minutes.’”
“If you don’t mind my saying, your English is perfect.” Jack couldn’t detect any Slovenian accent—not that he knew what that would sound like anyway.
“Thanks. It’s my first language. I was born in Newport Beach.”
“What’s a beach bum from California doing in the Balkans?”
“My parents immigrated to the States just after Tito died in 1980. They opened a pizza joint and a bar and did pretty well. You know, the American Dream and all of that.”
“That’s great.”
“My sister and I both graduated from San Diego State. She went into nursing, and I studied computer science.”
“Which explains your company.” Struna’s firm was pioneering some of the best medical robotics technologies in the industry. “What brought you here?”
“California is a great place to live, but it’s a hard place to raise a family. Too crowded, too expensive, too many taxes. My wife and I have two small kids, and I’d come back here for vacations for years, so I knew the place well. Maybe it was my parents’ nostalgia or something else, but I really wanted to make a go of it, so here we are.”
“So far, so good?”
“As I hope you’ll see from our financials.”
“I’ve already seen the preliminaries. You’re tearing the joint up. Based on those, I don’t foresee any problem with you getting registered on the NASDAQ next year.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“Well, that’s what I’m here to find out, one way or the other.”
Jack glanced out the rain-streaked passenger window. He saw low tree-covered mountains and green fields, dotted with the occasional farmhouse.
“Slovenia is a beautiful country.”
“This? This is nothing. Wait until you see the Julian Alps and the Soča River. It will take your breath away.”
Struna eased into the passing lane to get around a big Mercedes eighteen-wheeler. “And by the way, thanks for not calling it ‘Slovakia’ like a lot of Americans do. That’s another country altogether.”
“Not every American is geographically illiterate. But it’s not like I know a whole lot about your country.”
“I take it you’ve never been here before?”
“No, but the pictures I found on the Web were incredible.”
“We used to be Europe’s best-kept secret. I’m afraid our tourism office is doing too good of a job these days.”
“Lots of tourists?”
“The euro goes a long way here, if you have a lot of euros.”
“You joined the EU in 2004. How’s that worked out?”
Struna smiled cautiously, uncertain if he should be completely honest with the American analyst.
“For me, and people like me, it’s great. We have complete access to markets from here to the Atlantic.”
“But if you have access to them, they have access to you, right?”
Struna nodded. “And therein lies the problem. Big European companies, especially the Germans, have moved in, and the euro is strong relative to our economy. Some of us are doing pretty well, but others are falling behind. It’s hard to become middle class in a globalist environment unless you’re very entrepreneurial.”
“Same in the States,” Jack said. Too many American companies were chasing cheap labor overseas and importing cheap goods. High-wage blue-collar jobs had been lost in the process, and too many blue-collar folks never made the transition to high-tech, high-wage jobs.
“Overall, it’s been a net benefit. But at a cost. Foreign companies coming in, young Slovenes emigrating out to find better work. As a European, it’s a good thing. But as a Slovenian, well, I sometimes wonder.”
“Can’t you be both Slovenian and European?”
“In theory, yes. But the reality is that European money and culture are overpowering. Small states like ours will have a hard time maintaining their national identities, which I suppose was the reason the EU was created in the first place.”
“Hence Brexit.”
“Exactly. Don’t get me wrong. I still think we gain more than we lose, but the EU must adapt or it might not survive in its current form. The idea of ‘Europe’ is just that—an idea, beautiful and vague. But identity is deeply personal, specific, and concrete.”
The rain lightened up. The automatic windshield wipers slowed.
“Do I sound like some crazy nationalist to you?”
“You sound like a man who loves his country, or, at least, his new country.”
“I have dual citizenship, actually, and I still do love America and all that it did for me. But I have several hundred years of family history rooted in these mountains and valleys. That’s hard to let go of. A man’s identity is his destiny, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, for sure.” Jack scratched his chin. He wondered what that meant for his own country, when the definition of being an American was changing so rapidly.
“What do people think about Tito these days?”
“My grandparents—really, anybody who remembers the Tito days—wish they lived in the old Yugoslavia again.”
“Communism is that strong here?”
Struna laughed. “Well, not communism like Stalin and those crazies. It was more like a really progressive social democracy. We could own land, vacation overseas, and had other freedoms that the Soviets didn’t enjoy.”
“But it was still a dictatorship.”
“Sure, but a benign one. What my grandparents say is that everybody had a job, everybody got a long vacation, everybody had a relatively good life without having to work eighty hours a week. Nobody was too rich—well, except for Tito and the elites, of course—but nobody was starving. I’m not saying they’re right, but it is a nearly universal longing among the older generation.”
“A lot of American millennials think socialism is a good idea, too, mostly because they don’t really know what it is. They just know it’s really hard to make it in the current system, and they’re looking for alternatives.”
“You know Yugoslavia’s history?”
“Only the rough outline. It was a communist state under Tito, and then he died in, what, 1980? Then the wars started in 1991 and didn’t end until 2001.”
“Very good. Yugoslavia was a federation of six republics and two autonomous regions, including Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. We declared independence on June 25, 1991, along with Croatia. The Yugoslav Army, which was really the army of Serbia, controlled by Milošević, attacked us, and we defeated them in ten days and earned our freedom. The Croatians had it worse, but in the end they won their independence, too. It was
the Bosnians that suffered the most.”
“I read over a hundred and forty thousand Yugoslavians died in the wars.”
“Yes, but not here, thank God. Almost no Serbs lived here, so Milošević couldn’t claim to be protecting anybody from our ‘aggression’ like he did in Bosnia.”
“Why were the Yugoslavian wars so vicious? I read stories of lifelong neighbors killing neighbors, friends killing friends.”
“It’s strange, isn’t it? The only good explanation I’ve ever heard was that for many years, everybody was a Yugoslavian and there was peace. But once people started saying, ‘I’m a Serb,’ or ‘I’m a Muslim,’ all of a sudden people started seeing their neighbors as ‘others,’ and all of their problems were because of ‘them.’ Democracy and identity politics don’t work so well together.”
“Is it really that simple?”
“Probably not. What’s really crazy is that most families were mixed. I have a Bosniak friend—a Bosnian Muslim—whose grandfather was a Catholic Croat and his grandmother was an Orthodox Serb. Nobody cared about all of that until Milošević and the Serbs started causing trouble.”
“So everything was caused by the Serbians?”
Struna shook his head. “Maybe they were the cause of the most recent troubles, but believe me, there are five hundred years of grievances in this part of the world. Nobody is innocent.
“The amazing thing is, someone did a genetic study a few years ago. Apparently, Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks are genetically closer to each other than any other groups in the region. We’re just one big, happy Slavic family that keeps murdering each other. And that’s just recent history. I won’t bore you with the sixteenth-century Islamic Ottoman invasion.”
“So today there is the Catholic country of Croatia, but many Croats still live in Bosnia. And there is the Orthodox country of Serbia, but many Serbs live in Bosnia, too. Is that about right?”
“Exactly, and the Muslims are the majority in Bosnia. Nice people, great food. You should visit Sarajevo sometime.”
“I plan to, actually, when I’m done here.”
“Business or pleasure?”
“Pleasure, sort of.”
“Good. You’ll love it. It’s a beautiful country and the people are kind. More Americans should visit there, but a lot of them think the war is still going on even though it ended twenty-three years ago.”
Struna hit his turn signal and eased into the right lane. “Your hotel is at the next exit.”
“If you don’t mind, let’s go straight to the office. There’s a lot to do and not enough time to do it.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to rest up first?”
“My grandmother used to say, ‘There’s no rest for the wicked, and the righteous don’t need any,’ and I learned a long time ago to never argue with her.”
“She sounds Slovenian.”
“German-Irish, but close.”
Struna killed his blinker just as the sky opened up again. This time it poured.
Jack sighed. It was going to be a long, wet week stuck in an office.
TRIESTE, ITALY
Elena Iliescu loved her work, and she was good at it. She took particular joy in her profession, devoting laser focus and creative energy to each endeavor. Phone calls and other distractions simply had no place. But there was one ringtone the busty, girl-next-door blonde always answered.
Always.
She stabbed out her cigarette on the wall of rough-hewn stone, nude beneath her badly stained coveralls.
“Yes?”
“I need you.” A man’s voice. The Czech.
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
She swore in her mind. Romanian, her native tongue. “I’m not finished here. I was told what I was doing here was a priority.”
“This assignment is Code Red.”
Elena’s heart sank. She swallowed her fear.
“How long do I have?”
“Ten days, maximum. Preferably sooner.”
“That isn’t enough time for me to scout and plan the op.”
“It has to be. Details to follow.”
“At least tell me where I’m going.”
“Ljubljana.”
Not her favorite city. Quaint but boring. At least it was a short drive. A little over an hour by car without traffic. She checked her watch. It was just after midnight.
“I’ll leave first thing in the morning. Photo and genetic sample, as usual?”
“No. You need to bring me his head, his face fully intact. That’s straight from the top.”
What the hell?
“Elena, you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes.”
“Ten days.”
“I’ll call you when I check in to my hotel in Ljubljana.”
The Czech rang off.
Elena swore again, but this time audibly. She pocketed the phone and marched back into the other room in the dank cellar, lit by a dim bulb hanging from a frayed cord.
The naked man duct-taped to the chair was semiconscious and still whimpering beneath the gag. He shuddered when she entered, sensing her presence rather than seeing her through his blackened eyes, swollen and bloodshot. Brand-new jumper cables snaked from a car battery on the floor to the foot of his chair. Her plan was to attach the sharp teeth of the copper battery clamps to his ruined genitals, and then the fun could really begin.
Too bad.
Elena swept past a table, on top of which was a neatly ordered collection of specialized knives, forged in fire by her own hand. She snatched up the smallest one, her sharpest by far.
“It’s your lucky day, Sanchez.”
She drew a thin line across his throat. His neck opened up, spitting blood. He bled out quickly in a spasm of terror and pain, dead before she hit the stairs a few minutes later.
Lucky, indeed.
The ancient farmhouse flamed like a druid’s torch in the cool night air, fueled by its three-hundred-year-old timbers. Elena caught a last, smiling glimpse of the towering fire in her rearview mirror as she made a turn.
Time for a hot shower and a stiff drink back at her hotel. She wasn’t tired; in fact, every nerve in her body was on fire. Her work had a rhythm, and it had been interrupted. It had been an unsatisfying kill. That left an itch inside her that still hadn’t been scratched. She needed to clear her head.
She checked the speed dial on her phone for the name of a man she knew in Trieste, a hard and angular Florentine. A few hours in the embrace of the violent, insatiable signore would be the best thing she could hope for before starting her next assignment.
11
NEAR ČITLUK, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
The night air cooled a little, but not too much, and the breeze off the mountain carried the sharp, sweet tang of the whispering pines. It was fall but not yet cool, the summer warmth lingering like a lonely cousin in the small, rocky valley. The inky black sky shimmered with stars bright in their courses.
It was the first September the four teenagers hadn’t been in school, and none of them were going to college this year. The boys—fraternal twins—were heading for Split to work in an uncle’s restaurant on the Adriatic coast in two days. Like other ethnic Croats in Bosnia, all four of them had relatives in the country of Croatia to the west, where there was more work to be had, though mostly for the tourist industry. It was long, grueling labor, but better than no work at all, and the new American tourists tipped like drunken sailors, unlike the Germans.
The girls were planning on leaving, too, as soon as they could find something, somewhere—anywhere. They had their feelers out, but nearly half of all Bosnians were unemployed, and good, steady work with a decent paycheck was scarce, especially in the countryside. The taller girl was good with numbers but shy, and the fine-boned brunette spoke passable French. They we
re heading to Sarajevo at the end of the week to start their search.
But all of that was for later. The four of them had spent the last two days hiking in the hills and swimming in the Lukoć River, roasting river trout on open fires and drinking sweet summer wine, cheaper and better than weed, which was harder to come by, too expensive, and still illegal in Bosnia.
Tonight was their last night together and they turned in early to their respective tents, summer lovers soon separated, probably forever. They each finally fell asleep, spent and sated, the smell of salty sweat and campfire smoke in their nightclothes. Their deep, rhythmic breathing wasn’t disturbed by the crunch of pine needles beneath eight pairs of heavy boots, and the tall girl woke only when she heard the muffled scream of her friend in the dark, followed by the zip of a blade shearing through her tent wall.
* * *
—
The camouflaged men hid their faces behind balaclavas. One of them, the unit commander, stood back in the shadows, his milky left eye glistening in the moonlight, watching the other men bind and gag the four teenagers. They tied the boys to the trees and forced them to watch the gang rape of the two girls, then forced the girls to watch them beat the boys with batons until their bones cracked, before raping them with the same heavy instruments.
The four broken bodies were tossed facedown onto the pine needles, whimpering and faint. Two men stepped forward, put heavy knees in the center of the boys’ backs, pulled their heads up by the hair, and slit their throats.
The last thing the brunette remembered before she passed out was a rasping whisper in her ear.
“Croatia for Croats, Bosnia for Serbs.”
* * *
—
On a bridge six kilometers north of the campsite, the man with the milky eye was dressed in civilian clothes again, as was his driver, their camouflage gear carefully packed and hidden in the back of the unmarked panel van beneath a stack of boxes.
His burner phone signal had just one bar, but that was enough to call the local police. He reported that he had heard screams in the woods west of Čitluk, and hung up before he could answer any further questions, then pulled the battery and pocketed it before tossing the remainder of the burner phone into the river below. He signaled the driver to head for home, careful to keep within the speed limit.