The First Casualty (8 page)

20

Aerodrom Zra
č
na luka Zagreb (Zagreb International Airport)

Pleso, Croatia

7:22 a.m. Local Time, the Next Morning

Day 2

Last night's train ride to Paris, a stay in a nameless airport hotel, and the early flight from the madness that was Charles de Gaulle was a blur. During it, though, Jason had finished both the book and material Momma had furnished. If he had entertained any doubts as to the urgency of his mission, he did so no longer.

But, before he could complete the task, there were a number of questions that needed answering, questions that were a stream of consciousness as he walked along one of the dozen new concourses added to what had been a Russian-built terminal, the massive, ugly, if utilitarian, architecture common to most former Soviet states. Communist Gothic, Jason called it. Other Russian influence also lingered: The escalator from the second to bottom floor was out of service.

Setting down his only bag in front of the Air France counter, he waited while the single clerk listened to a stocky, elderly woman. Head covered by a scarf, her tone was angry, a complaint even if Jason couldn't understand the language, though it sounded like Russian. From her gestures, it became clear her luggage had taken an excursion of its own. Despite the clerk's polite replies, frustration was in her tone as she tried to point the angry woman to wherever victims of misdirected baggage went.

Jason checked his watch. He had been standing here nearly five minutes. Not a great deal of time, but more than enough to give a potential attacker an opportunity to set a trap. Not having to wait at baggage carousels was the reason he never checked a bag.

Finally, the old woman either understood that lost luggage was not to be found at the ticket counter, gave up, or decided to vent her anger elsewhere. The clerk, a young woman with blunt-cut dark hair, gave Jason a radiant smile.

“Thank you for your patience,” she said in accented English. “It was the
babuška
's first flight, bags not arrive.” She shrugged. “Or, more likely, her
kutija,
” She made a rectangle with her hands. “What is the English?”

“Box?”

“Yes, box. Many Russians come here because is little cost, particularly the older ones, never travel more than a few kilometers from their village. Now that they are retiring from government . . . how you say?'

“Government work? Government service?”

“Yes. They have retire and now are no government restriction on travel like when Communist rule. They come, but do not own such thing as real suitbox.”

“Suitcase?”

“Yes, suitcase. They never own, put clothes in cardboard box, tie with string. Sometimes not so good, string break. Plane land, baggage hold full of loose clothes.”

“I can see that might be a problem,” Jason said, turning to scan the area for anything out of the ordinary, anything suspicious. “I'm Jason Peters. I think you have a package for me.”

Her face clouded in confusion for an instant, then brightened, “Yes! A man . . . what is the English?”

“Courier?”

She shook her head. “DHL delivery.”

“OK, DHL. There's something here for me?”

She disappeared behind the counter, returning with the bright red-and-yellow package of the delivery company. After he produced his passport for inspection, she handed it across the counter.

“It is heavy!” she observed.

“Books,” Jason explained as he lifted the parcel.

He assumed the “
Dobro jutro!”
she called after him as he headed toward the mens' room was Croatian for something akin to “have a good day.”

Regrettably, he had made other plans.

Inside a stall, he tore open the cardboard. Momma had fulfilled his wish list: Passport bearing an unflattering picture, American Express and Capitol One Visa cards, all bearing the name of one George R. Simmons. A driver's license gave Mr. Simmons's address as P Street in the Georgetown section of Washington, DC. Three wallet-size photos­ of two chubby cheeked children filled out the identity packet. A .40-caliber Glock with two fully loaded clips and belt holster were next. Jason pressed the magazine release, slid it from the butt of the pistol, and noted with approval it was also full. Cocking the pistol, he slipped it into the holster and clipped the holster to his belt at the small of his back before he dropped the extra clips into his pocket. Next, he removed a knife, one he had designed himself. He took it from its scabbard to check the titanium blade. Ten inches in length, it was only half an inch wide with a razor-sharp edge on both sides. Ideal for stabbing or slashing with minimum risk of getting entangled in bone or entrails. He returned it to its scabbard, strapped it onto his right calf, and pulled his trouser leg over it. He turned the open end of the package downward and shook it. An enveloped floated to the stall's floor, the last of the box's contents.

Inside was a single piece of paper on which were Momma's neat block letters:

Herka Kerjck

Budačka ulica 16

Gospić,
Lika

She has been contacted and is expecting you.

He memorized the name and address and consigned the shredded paper to the toilet.

He then went to a booth to exchange his euros for kuna, the local currency. Seven and a half was a slightly better exchange rate than he had expected. Once again, he took careful stock of his surroundings as he pretended to focus on counting the money before exiting the terminal to join a line of people waiting for cabs. What was it about the town that made waiting for a taxi at the airport make a similar wait at, say, La Guardia, seem nonexistent? Nearly twenty minutes later, he was in a cab, riding the ten kilometers into the city. He gave the cabby the rail station as his destination and sat back to enjoy the view.

Zagreb could have been any Eastern European city—Prague, Vienna—with its white stone buildings and red tile roofs. Bright blue trams clattered along tracks in the middle of main streets. Like those other cities, it, too, was in the plain of a river, the Sava. The cab darted from a very modern highway into narrow cobblestone streets. Shops and eating establishments dominated the first floors with living quarters upstairs. Ahead, the twin towers of the fourteenth­-century Cathedral of the Assumption and its colorful mosaic roof, depicting the coats of arms of two of the church's early patrons, dominated­ the skyline.

The curbs of the street were lined with cars, mostly of the claustrophobically small European variety. But the streets were filled with more economic transportation, bicycles and scooters. Jason knew Americans liked to whine about high gas prices, but they paid roughly a third of what their European cousins did.

The cab emerged onto a large, grassy square, Tomislavov Trg, where a statue of Croatia's first king showed his back to a large, Greek revival building with rococo ornamentation below a widow's walk at the top of its peaked roof. The rail station, obviously predating the featureless, massive Communist buildings. Kiosks selling food, cigarettes, magazines, and other items that might be of interest to train passengers ringed the entrance.

Unsure if his driver spoke English since, unlike Western Europe, many cabbies there did not, Jason pointed to an open spot at the curb just vacated by another cab. “There.”

His guess had been correct. The driver said something Jason didn't understand and pointed to the meter mounted on the dash: 16.90. Jason reached over the seat to hand him a twenty. The reaction, a smile like a picket fence missing a few palings, told him he had been overgenerous.

If the outside of the station had been busy, the inside was chaos. Gypsy women, many suckling babies as they sat on the floor, beseeched passersby for money with raucous cries. Men and women in farm clothes clutched tickets as they formed lines for no reason Jason could discern. A group of perhaps a half dozen women in hijabs and head scarves reminded Jason that this part of the Balkans had been part of the Ottoman Empire and that Moslems, though now a small number, were a recognized minority. Part of the reason for the “ethnic cleansing” that had taken place in November 1992 when Bosnia and Croatia had become civil war battlefields. Orthodox Serbs had attacked Roman Catholic Serbs with both attacking the Moslems. Centuries of ethnic suspicion, hatred, and jealousy, suppressed by Communism's iron fist, had boiled over. Had it not been for intervention by the United Nations, with strong U.S. support, the countryside would have been littered with dead men, women, and children. Although subsequent war-crime trials revealed thousands killed, most defenseless citizens, the true number would never be known.

Thankful that the signs above the ticket windows were in Roman as well as Cyrillic letters, Jason edged his way through the mob to stand in line in front of the one reading
Gospi
ć
,
Lika
, his destination.

The train could have been any of the electric variety common in Europe. But there was nothing common about the scheduled arrival time posted in electric lights above the track: four hours plus. Jason rechecked his iPod. Sure enough, the distance was only 185 kilometers.

“But it's two hundred and thirty-two by rail because of the turns going through the mountains,” a feminine voice informed him.

He whirled around to look into a pair of laughing blue eyes in a round face. A knit cap covered the rest of her head, other than a renegade strand of blonde hair that reached the collar of her suede overcoat.

She slipped off a glove and extended the hand. “Natalia Čupić, frequent rail rider.”

Jason returned the iPod to his coat pocket and shook. “And mind reader.”

She tinkled a laugh, showing nothing of the poor dentistry for which Eastern Europe was infamous. “Not really. I couldn't help but notice your iPod. Then, I saw what was on the screen. Did you know you make a grunting sound when you are disappointed? Or is it when you are surprised?”

Jason climbed the three steps up into the railcar, pulling himself up with one hand on one of the vertical chrome rails beside the door installed for just that the purpose. Without them, boarding the train would have been difficult for someone burdened with heavy baggage. He extended a hand to help her manage her one bag. “Do you make a practice of reading other people's screens?”

She swung up into the car, the move of an athlete, holding on to his hand a full second longer than necessary. “Only those of interesting-looking men, and only when I am faced with a long, boring journey. And that is the last bit of information you get until I know your name. I do not have conversations with strange men.”

He was in front of her as they walked past groups of seating, two facing two with a small fixed table between. “Even interesting ones on long boring trips?”

“A girl has to have some sort of rules.”

Jason shoved his bag in the overhead. “Seat twenty-three, that's me.” It took a split second to remember who he was. “George Simmons.”

She tossed her bag next to his and sat. “I'm right across the table, number twenty-five. Now that we are properly introduced, might I ask what an American is doing traveling to such an out-of-the-way place as that to which this train is going?”

Jason was instantly on guard but kept his tone jocular. “The train makes a dozen stops. Just how did you know where I'm going?”

She looked up at one of the several signs depicting a smoking cigarette in a circle with a line drawn through it. “That's new, that
no smoking
sign. Croatia is following the West in getting into the health police business. Bad idea, don't you think?”

Jason sat, his knees nearly touching hers. “I think you ought to answer the question I just asked: If you're not a mind reader, how did you know where I was going?”

She gave that musical laugh again as she swept off her cap, freeing a cascades of golden hair, “I didn't.”

“But you said . . .”

“I said you were going to an out-of-the-way place. Take a look at the train's route. There's not a stop on it that has ten thousand people living there. So, what is an American doing in places like that?”

Jason relaxed. “Visiting relatives, actually. Or, rather searching for them. My mother came from the town of Gospić. As long as I was in the country on business, I thought I'd spend a little time seeing if can find a cousin or two.”

“More like five or six. Families in the mountains are large. There is not much else to do. What sort of business?”

Jason held up a hand, palm out, stop. “Whoa, Natalia! You've just about heard my life story and all I know is your name. For starters, how did you learn such good English?”

The car clanked forward with a jolt and trains on adjacent tracks seemed to slide by with increasing speed.

“I was fortunate to have an excellent teacher in school, an American. My parents paid her for four years of extra tutoring. Satisfied?”

Not entirely.

Natalia was thirty, perhaps thirty-five. Her schoolgirl days would have been, when, in the late '70s, early '80s? Tito, the Communist dictator of Yugoslavia, of which Croatia had been a part, died in 1980, and the Communists remained in power until 1990, when the country fragmented like a hand grenade, creating not only Croatia but Slovenia, Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, and one or two countries that might include Disney World for all Jason could recall. It was doubtful an American, particularly one teaching English, would have been hired in the state-run schools of a Communist country. At least, not the schools open to children of ordinary people. Possible, but not probable.

The train was reaching speed now, accelerating smoothly.

Jason stood. “Don't go away. I'll be right back.”

Heading toward the end of the car where the toilets were located, he turned back to watch her as she looked out of the window. When he was fairly certain she wouldn't turn away, he took his iPhone from his pocket and snapped her picture. He would have preferred a full, rather than partial, face shot, but this was the best he was going to get without alerting her.