Gun Metal Heart (17 page)

He waited thirty minutes to make sure she was alone, then sauntered her way. He sat quickly at her table, tried to engage her in English small talk; it was clear she didn't understand the lingo. But she blushed and brushed stray hair away from her eyes and smiled at him. Brook thought:
And the crowd goes wild …

He laughed about their language imbroglio. He bought her a prosecco, and one for himself to be suave. Then two more. He flashed paper bills to pay for their dinner, and they laughed and struggled with the language. She had a map, and they sat shoulder to shoulder and studied it.

Bubbly wine is good for date-rape drugs. The pill dissolves unseen.

She was a bit unsteady on her strappy sandals as they walked the curved shore of Como. He would point to objects and say their names, and she would repeat it. She would point to objects and say them in her language, whatever the fuck that was. And he mimicked her monkey sounds.

He showed her his houseboat. She seemed in awe of it. He took her hand and guided her onboard. Her legs wobbled a little, but then again, so did his.
Too many hours on land today
, Brook thought. He glanced around, and nobody looked their way. He noticed a blurring at the edge of his vision and wondered what was wrong.

*   *   *

Brook dreamed. The foreign chick using his kitchenette to make baked beans or coffee. The foreign chick doing tai chi in her underwear. The foreign chick poring over maps.

*   *   *

Daria sat on the side of the hide-a-bed onboard the houseboat, bored out of her mind. She'd read every book Brook Slate owned—both of them—and even scoured his porn magazines for reading material. He had satellite TV, thank God, and she watched Al Jazeera English and Sky News and the BBC.

On the fourth day she watched him come out of his Rohypnol stupor. It had been an interesting experiment, to see how much of the drug would keep a grown man unconscious without killing him. His eyes opened, pupils red. Daria said, “Can you hear me? Brook?”

“Wuzzzz … hppnnnnnn…?”

“What's happening? Ah, very well. First rule of being a predator is: always be able to identify the other predators.”

She shimmied on a pair of jeans that were just a tad short for her long legs. She shouldered her way into his Kid Rock T-shirt, pulling it over her torso. “I couldn't very well believe my luck. First, you were comically stupid. Then you turned out to be approximately my size. But a gender-neutral first name? Well, there you go.”

“Cannnnn … moooove…”

“Either that will wear off or you'll suffer some sort of toxic side effect. I've really no idea. And it would be interesting to stay about and see, but I must scoot.”

She slipped on a Hawaiian shirt Brook had picked up a couple of years ago. It was a favorite. She did her hair in a tight French braid, then moved to a mirror over his sink and tried on his straw porkpie hat. Brook tried to react—the hat had always been good luck in poker. He couldn't just lay there and let her take it.

She slid on some sunglasses, then picked up Brook's driver's license, studied it, studied herself in the mirror, turned a quarter this way and a quarter that.

She unfolded a paper clip and took a minute to scratch through the laminate of his driver's license, obscuring the M after
Gender.

“Should do,” she proclaimed. She threw Brook's wallet in a little black leather backpack with a fleur-de-lis stamp on it.

She knelt on the bed and bent low and kissed his sweaty forehead. “I'd have let you go. But I found the photo albums of your other
dates
. Souvenirs? That won't do. D'you understand me, Brook?”

He tried to swallow and nodded. His lips were cracked. His joints ached.

“The people who raised me wanted to ingrain a certain way of calculating into our brains. Aptitude tests, I suppose you'd call them. For instance, locking us in a sealed room with the ingredients for plastic explosives, a single match, and limited air supply.”

His eyes pinballed wildly in his skull.

Daria shrugged. “Homeschooling.”

She stood. “I'm about to scuttle your boat. It will sink. How long will that take? I don't know. Now: You're drugged. You likely will recover enough to get off the boat. How long will that take? I don't know. But my guess is: You're motivated to find out.”

She checked her reflection in the mirror, and then walked to the door.

“Biiiiitch…”

Daria belted a musical laugh, her eyes scrunching tight. “Oh, I also have friends in the American FBI. I'm taking your souvenirs and mailing them from here. If you do get off the boat, then it's time for your next class in calculating. Bye. Thanks for dinner and the prosecco.”

*   *   *

On the way to the bus depot, Daria found a post box and dropped off the photo albums of horrible assaults, addressed to Ray Calabrese, her former handler at the FBI.

Daria checked her reflection in a shop window. She disliked the hipster vibe, but it would suffice for the time. She had worked with facial recognition software before. She had no illusions that the Brook Slate ID would hold up once she got closer to the cities and the mass of CC cameras. But it was a start.

 

Twenty

John and Diego ate in the town of Split, a centuries-old trading village with Greek and Roman ancestry. They wound through the labyrinthine souk, through tall and tight oatmeal-colored walls, until they found a decent restaurant. John had been looking for an Internet connection. In just a few years, the term
Wi-Fi
had become ultrainternational.

He used an alias to check in with a contact at the International Red Cross, who would get word to Adair Simon-Cavanaugh that he was wheels-down in the Balkans and doing all right.

He sent a message to his contact at the IRC:
ULTRA-LIGHT MAVS. GET INTERNS ON THIS: WHO MANUFACTURES BATTERIES? WHO MANUFACTURES CAMERA LENSES?

The questions had been bothering him all through the freezing flight across the Atlantic. Daria had described quick, tiny micro air vehicles chasing her and firing at her. And John had kicked himself that it had taken so long to ask the essential questions: Who was manufacturing and/or buying the batteries for such vehicles? Or the light but effective lenses for their cameras?

Find out who made the drones, and you just might figure out who was flying the drones.

From Split, John took the wheel, and they headed inland and up—steeply up—into Bosnia-Herzegovina.

A bored border guard took the two passports Diego handed him. Diego doffed his hat to expose his face. The guard glanced at them both, then pocketed the twice-folded euros, handed the passports back, and wished them
dobre deyn
.

John shoved the recalcitrant gearshift. “It means ‘good day.'”

Diego slicked back his long hair with his hand and returned the cowboy hat. Diego said, “You speak Bosnian?”

“I learn five phrases, every country I get sent to: Hello and good-bye. Please and thank you. And, Where's the toilet.”

A few kilometers in, Diego nodded. “Those're good.”

The road to Mostar turned north and entered craggy stone canyons. In places rock strata rose crookedly, as if the gods had lifted one end of a geologic couch to vacuum underneath it. Ancient train tracks paralleled the road and dove into rounded, stone-framed tunnels. John could imagine the Orient Express, or its southernmost sibling, making the journey in the 1920s.

They passed through ramshackle lumber and mining towns that had started in hard times and fallen from there. Diego noted, on some of the winding and more luxuriously forested stretches, signs on trees with the skull and cross bones.

“Minefields,” he said.

Every town they drove through had a minaret. “This is a Muslim country,” John said.

“How'd that work out for them in the war?”

John grunted. Diego knew more than he let on.

*   *   *

They left the craggy, fractured Neretva Valley and entered the town of Mostar. John parked.

“You think Daria's here?”

“No.” John climbed out, and after a moment, Diego did, too. “A woman who knows the ins and outs of politics in the region. She'll have information I don't.”

Diego looked around the 1930s façade, at the graffiti and the clusters of bored teenagers. “So?”

“So information is power.” John started walking, and Diego moved up beside him.

Diego said, “Only power's power, man.”

The Turkish side of the Neretva River was one of the best marketplaces John had visited. Old men sipped sweet coffee from small bronze decanters on hammered-bronze saucers. Merchants sold metal-works and scarves, plus the ubiquitous paraphernalia of football clubs. John saw half a dozen very skinny, very black cats. He paused and knelt and scritched a couple behind their ears. Diego stood with his thumbs in his belt, his boots scuffed and dusty and low at the heel. John got the impression he saw everything and reacted to nothing.

Halfway to the ancient Stari Most, or Old Bridge, Diego nudged John and jutted his chin to the left. For a brief second the man's deep brown eyes were exposed to sunlight.

John followed his gaze. It was an abandoned building. Two large, vaguely round holes appeared in the wall, about twenty feet up.

Diego muttered, “Mortar fire.”

“Yeah, and…” John pointed to a wall that looked like a giant Braille text. “Machine guns.”

“The war?”

“It must've been bad here. My friend will know more.”

They walked to the Stari Most, the bridge arched like a camel's back. Diego was not large and not angry looking. But city dwellers gave him a wide slip anyway. He just had that … John stumbled around for a description. Gravity well? Yes. As if bullets fired at him would enter his orbit instead of hitting him.

They crossed the bridge. All Turkish influence ended abruptly. Crossing the bridge wasn't easy: the builders had added one- to two-inch-high crossbars to the path. They made walking a chore. They found a flat flagstone at the end of the bridge that read R
EMEMBER 1993.

The civil war.

John said, “Before we get there: she's kind of abrupt. And caustic. And just plain rude. Her name's Sylvia Rush. During the war, mid-nineties, she'd been part of the State Department's shuttle-diplomacy mission with Richard Holbrooke. Before that, she was a professor. She taught at the Kennedy School when I was there. After that and law school, I was an analyst for the CIA. Sylvia Rush was my go-to guy on the former Yugoslavia.”

On the western side of the bridge, the remnants of the Neretva Canyon reasserted themselves. The place was vertical; it was the only way John could describe it. They came to an office and noticed a hotel ten feet below them, with a bridge ten feet below that, with a restaurant ten feet below that, with a cluster of shops ten feet above them.

Below it all was a trickle of a tributary of the mountain region. That trickle had needed a million years to dig such a ferocious trench. And the city had formed around it, hugging it, teetering precariously over it.

They came to a stout building and a dark wooden door with a placard in Bosnian and Arabic and English. It read:
BOSNIAN-AMERICAN FELLOWSHIP FOUNDATION.

Diego snorted.

A young woman worked at the counter. John asked her if he could speak to Sylvia Rush.

Moments later an inner door opened and a human pixie emerged. She wasn't quite five feet tall and had a wild moss of kinky salt-and-pepper hair and crystal blue eyes. She looked tanned and taut, and John knew she was in her sixties. She wore jeans and soft suede booties and a frayed sweater, with half glasses hanging from a beaded lanyard.

She said, “Holy moly. John Broom.”

She cackled and threw a hug around his shoulders. John had to bend over to receive it.

“Christ almighty. What a surprise! You should've said you were coming!”

John said, “We're flying under the radar. Sylvia Rush, you remember Professor Diego?”

Diego turned flat, chocolate eyes on John but didn't react.

The petite woman studied the Indio in the cowboy hat and boots. “Professor?”

John said, “He works in pain studies.”

“Neurology?”

“Hoodlum.”

Sylvia squinted up at John.

“What's going on?”

“Something big and bad is happening. Diego and I are trying to figure out what. I thought I'd start with you.”

Sylvia Rush contemplated that. “You two eaten?”

“Not for a while.”

“Come on. Nobody stays hungry in Mostar.”

*   *   *

The restaurant had outdoor seating on gold-colored flagstones and under a flat stone awning. A plate of cheeses, olives, and quarter-sized, very red salami arrived, along with fresh bread and frosty pints of Bosnian beer. Sylvia Rush sat on one side, the men on the other.

Sylvia perched her half glasses on the end of her nose and peered over them. “Give me the Yugoslavia 101, John. It'll help calibrate where I need to start.”

John picked out a green olive. “The intersection of empires,” he said. “The Romans, the Ottomans, the Hapsburg Empire, the Eastern Orthodox. The first shot of World War I, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. The Nazis and the Soviets. General Tito tamped down all that hostility for four decades. But he died, and the old divisions came right back alive. The Serbs versus the Croats versus the Muslims. The civil war took up most of the 1990s, until the United States and NATO and the U.N. stepped in, leading to the Dayton Peace Accord.”

Sylvia sipped her beer. “Very good.” She turned to Diego. “During the civil war, the Serbs kept Sarajevo under siege for a thousand four hundred days. No fresh water, precious little food. Snipers picked off shoppers and children in playgrounds. In places like Srebercia, there was ethnic cleansing, with mass graves. Men, women, and children. Brutal.”