The Old Bridge – sample chapters - Andrew Turpin Thriller Author

Prologue

Tuesday, November 9, 1993

Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Adrian Turner pressed the red record button on his camera and ducked down behind a pile of rubble. Seconds later, another shell whined overhead and crashed into the parapet right in the center of the ancient stone bridge. It exploded with a deafening bang.

A large cloud of gray smoke and dust rose against the azure sky. A clatter of automatic gunfire sounded in the background.

Turner stood and assessed the situation. “You’ve got about ninety seconds before the next one,” he muttered to his partner, the British TV news reporter Martin Baron, who crouched next to him.

Baron’s face was as ashen as the layer of dust that now covered his hair and the shoulders of his blue flak jacket. He scrambled to his feet and walked a few yards to stand in front of the camera, which sat on a tripod among piles of smashed old stone, brick, and wood. It was all that remained of an old cottage on the riverbank.

“Behind me you can see the wreckage of one of the most famous stone bridges in the world, the Stari Most, or ‘Old Bridge,’ in Mostar,” he said into the lens. “It was built in 1566 on the orders of the Ottoman Empire’s greatest ruler, Suleiman the Magnificent. But today, this once beautiful old bridge is coming under heavy fire. A tank situated on Stotina Hill, further down the Neretva River and manned by gunners from the mainly Catholic Croatian army, the HVO, has been attacking all morning in an attempt to destroy it. The Croats want to smother morale among the 25,000 remaining Bosnian Muslims who live just across the other side of the river in eastern Mostar.”

As he spoke, Baron half turned and indicated with his hand toward the crumbling structure, which was covered with a makeshift tangle of scaffolding, corrugated iron sheets, planks, and old rubber car tires in a vain attempt to protect it from the shelling.

To his left and his right, all the buildings along the riverbank, which together had formed the medieval heart of one of Eastern Europe’s most beautiful old cities, lay in ruins.

“The Bosnian Muslims rely on this bridge for access to drinking water here on the western side of the river and also use it to get supplies to the front line in this increasingly bloody civil war. They have to run across the bridge to try and avoid the Croatian snipers who are up in the hills surrounding this city,” Baron continued.

Next to the wreckage of an archway that led onto the bridge stood four people: an older man, a woman in her late teens, and two men in their twenties, holding a stretcher on which a wounded man lay, a bloodstained bandage wrapped around his head.

Baron glanced over his shoulder and pointed at them. “You can see just over there four people who are waiting to try and carry a wounded man back from the front line across the bridge to the only hospital functioning on the eastern side. So far, this bridge has remained just about usable, but if this shelling continues for much longer, it may not be.”

Baron was interrupted by the telltale whine of another incoming shell. Turner and Baron simultaneously threw themselves facedown to the floor, their fingers in their ears, eyes shut.

This time, the shell exploded much nearer, right next to the former archway, causing the ground beneath the two newsmen to shake as pieces of stone and other debris landed on them.

When the noise died down a little, Turner lifted his head. His camera was still intact on the tripod. But beyond it, next to the ruined arch, he saw that the four people carrying the stretcher, and the man on it, were no more. Only a mess of blood, body parts, and the misshapen stretcher remained.

To Turner’s left, another man yelled loudly into a walkie-talkie. On the far side of the bridge he could see a woman in a bright blue dress screaming nonstop. Other people were wailing.

Turner glanced at his camera. They’d caught everything.

“We got it all on film. Do another minute, can you?” Turner asked Baron.

Baron stared at him, then brushed pieces of stone and dust from his hair. “You’re mad. Five people have just died. We should get out of here now.”

But he got to his feet, picked up his handheld microphone, and staggered around in front of the camera one more time. He coughed and then began to speak.

“We’ve just seen firsthand the devastating effect of this war on all who live here. An injured man on a stretcher and four others who were trying to save his life have just been blown apart by a tank shell. That one landed unexpectedly near to us. The others have been hitting the center of the bridge. Yet another senseless loss of life in a senseless war. As the tank seems to have suddenly begun to target the area here on the western side of the bridge, rather than the center, we’re going to move to a safer location.”

Turner stepped over and turned off his camera, then picked up the tripod. He and Baron strode to a new position about a hundred yards from the bridge, where Turner set up his equipment again. He focused on the smoking bridge structure, zoomed in a little, and then pressed the record button.

As he did so, the woman who had been screaming on the other side of the bridge suddenly sprinted across it, her blue dress blowing in the wind, hair trailing in her wake, ignoring the shouts of those behind her who yelled at her to stop.

She knelt in the dust and the blood next to the mangled bodies of the stretcher bearers. There she prostrated herself beside the torso of the older man, placing her head on his red-stained chest. Then she did likewise with the woman lying next to him.

Baron watched her for a moment, then shook his head, stood in front of the camera, and resumed his report.

“It is clear there’s now a concerted effort by the Croatians to destroy this old bridge,” he said. “It was once described in the 1930s by British author Rebecca West as one of the most beautiful bridges in the world. She wrote about its architecture, the slender arch that stretched between its two round towers, about how its parapet was bent in a shallow angle in the center. Well, all of that might soon become no more than a memory for those who still live here, some of them clinging to life, many others dying by the day, in a city that is slowly being destroyed. This is Martin Baron reporting from Mostar.”

As he stopped speaking, there was another whine behind him, and an incoming shell smashed into the center of the bridge, exploded loudly, and sent another cloud of debris up into the blue sky.

Several large chunks of masonry fell off the bridge and down into the river eighty feet below. Then a few more dropped.

Suddenly, as if in slow motion, and with an almighty crash, the entire thirty-yard-long bridge collapsed into the river.

Hundreds of tons of carefully handcrafted medieval stonework plunged, causing an immense geyser of displaced water to shoot skyward, reaching almost up to the point where the bridge had been until a few moments earlier.

Turner stepped over to his camera and peered through the viewfinder to check what he was recording. He’d gotten it all.

In the center of the frame the Croatian army soldiers, still firing their weapons, came into view as they drew near to the bodies of the five people who had died a few minutes before.

The woman kneeling next to the bodies now had her head in the gutter, her hands on the torso of the older man, and she wept uncontrollably.

Turner ended the recording. “We’d better get this film off to London, quick as we can,” he said to Baron.

“Yes, we should.”

Away to his right, Turner saw a small group of Croatian army soldiers dancing and triumphantly firing their automatic rifles into the air.

Chapter 1

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Dubrovnik, Croatia

Joe Johnson emerged from the hotel’s windowless conference room and blinked in the sun that reflected off the Adriatic Sea, just a short distance away.

One of his fellow conference attendees, a tall blond German academic who was an authority on the Holocaust, had already changed into her bikini and was laying a towel on a sun lounger next to the pool.

Johnson gazed for a few seconds at the woman’s Amazonian figure through the floor-to-ceiling plate glass that separated the bar from the pool. Then he walked to the bar and threw his speaker’s notes and slide deck printout onto the shiny black granite surface. “Thank God that’s over,” he muttered to himself.

“Death in Yugoslavia” ran the title in large letters on the front of his pack of PowerPoint slides. The subheading beneath it read, “1991–1995: Atrocities of War That Shocked the World.” Then came a further heading, which referenced the heart of his speech: “An international approach to tracing war criminals.”

Johnson’s presentation to the 330 delegates at the Balkans War Crimes Conference had gone as planned. The deck of about fifty slides was graphic, including a few photographs of emaciated Muslim and Croatian prisoners in Serbian-run concentration camps at Omarska and Keraterm, but it made all the points he wanted to get across to his audience.

The conference venue was one of Dubrovnik’s largest hotels, the Valamar Lacroma, on the Lapad peninsula, ten minutes’ drive from the historic Old Town. It made for an idyllic setting.

Johnson had just reached into his jacket pocket and taken out his sunglasses when someone nudged his elbow. “Relieved that’s over, Joe? Can I get you a beer?”

Johnson turned to see Professor Philip De Vere, a stooping Oxford historian whom he vaguely knew and who had also delivered a paper to the conference.

“Thanks, I need one,” Johnson said.

And he did. The nervous buildup to a conference speech was always the same: a restless night, the 2 a.m. whiskey, then the black coffee that overstimulated his nervous system. Then, when it was over, the wave of relief was often accompanied by a craving for alcohol.

De Vere ordered two local Ožujsko beers before turning back to Johnson. “An interesting talk you gave there,” De Vere said. “But you were rather generous toward Bill Clinton and his policies on Bosnia in the early ’90s. I suppose you are American, after all.” He chuckled.

Johnson put on his sunglasses and placed his documents into his leather briefcase. “I think Clinton got most things right. Dayton was a good agreement, despite Clinton only doing it because he wanted it finished before the ’96 election. Can’t stand the guy personally, but someone needed to stand up for the Bosnian Muslims, and he did it.”

“Depends whether you take a long-term view or not, and how closely you look at how he went about it,” De Vere said. He paused and peered sideways at Johnson. “Do you do a lot of research work? You’re not a full-time academic, are you?”

Johnson eyed him. Always the snob. He explained that he worked as a visiting lecturer at American University in Washington, DC, within its College of Law, speaking periodically if its War Crimes Research Office required he do so. Otherwise, he ran his own business doing private investigations but was increasingly trying to focus on jobs with a war crimes element. That was his passion.

“Interesting work,” De Vere replied with a smirk.

Johnson had had enough of being talked down to. He picked up his beer and said, “You’re going to have to excuse me, I need a smoke.” He walked out the door of the interior bar to the far side of the patio, where a path wound its way past a couple of palm trees.

He continued for a few yards along the path, out of sight of De Vere, then pulled a pack of Marlboros and a lighter out of his pocket. He ripped off the cellophane wrapper and lit one.

Staring out to sea, where the dark azure of the Adriatic met the paler sky as the sun began its descent behind the Elaphiti Islands beyond, Johnson found it hard to imagine this as the backdrop to a raging battle that had erupted only two decades earlier. Croatian forces had somehow defended Dubrovnik, whose Old Town was a UNESCO World Heritage Site, against an ultimately fruitless bombardment of shells, mortars, antitank missiles, and bombs from the Yugoslav People’s Army, the JNA, as well as the Yugoslav air force.

He had developed a strong interest in the region during the course of two separate stints in 1999 in the Croatian capital, Zagreb, and in the Bosnia and Herzegovina capital, Sarajevo, when he had gathered evidence on war criminals hiding in the US. That was during his time at the Office of Special Investigations, based in Washington, DC. A prolific linguist, he had picked up a decent knowledge of Serbo-Croat there, to add to his Russian, German, Spanish, and Pashto.

Johnson finished his cigarette, drained his beer, and set off back to the outdoor bar, where a busy crowd of conference attendees now gathered. There were a couple hundred there now, he calculated, and the number grew as those who had gone back to their hotel rooms to change into more comfortable clothing returned to the bar.

Johnson couldn’t be bothered to change, although he felt too warm in his crumpled dark blue linen jacket and chinos. He removed the jacket and threw it over one shoulder. Sweat stains were starting to spread from his armpits across his pale blue cotton shirt. It was still at least eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit, he guessed.

A waiter offered him a glass of prosecco, which he accepted, and he joined the edge of a group, including De Vere, that was debating the value of pursuing war criminals in their eighties and nineties who were no longer a danger to those around them.

Johnson listened for a moment, then shook his head and snorted to himself.

What kind of justice would it be to let them off just because they were old?

He turned away from the group, then jumped slightly upon finding himself face-to-face with a thin, dark-haired man.

“Mr. Johnson?” the man asked in heavily accented English.

“Yes, hello.” Johnson felt slightly nonplussed at the stranger’s silent approach and proximity.

“Have you got a minute to speak to me?”

Johnson ran the back of his hand across his chin. “Sure.”

“I was listening to your talk today, which was interesting—especially the part about how you go about tracking down war criminals who just disappeared without a trace. I live in Bosnia, in Mostar, and I think the authorities should have made more of an effort to make sure they covered all the allegations.”

Johnson squinted a little as he weighed the man’s point. “I thought they did a good job here, personally.”

“You think so?”

“Yes, in my view,” Johnson said. He folded his arms. “Well, the international tribunal’s nearly finished processing the 161 people they indicted. And I think the local court in Bosnia’s been effective since it took over war crimes prosecutions after 2005.”

The man shifted from one foot to the other. “Yes, that’s what you said in your talk. But the truth is, there were people who did things that never came to the authorities’ notice, crimes that they didn’t pursue, so they were never indicted in the first place.”

Johnson glanced to his right. A couple of people from De Vere’s group were staring at them, as were those from another small group from Sarajevo University, whom he’d briefly spoken to earlier. He turned back to the man.

“What are you trying to say? And sorry, who are you?”

“I’m Petar Simic.” He held out his hand and Johnson shook it. “This is your expertise, isn’t it? Hunting war criminals. I had a quick check, so I’ve seen your record. Nazis, right?” he said. “There are things I’d like to discuss that you might be interested in, as an investigator. I’m sure you’re busy here right now, but maybe we could meet somewhere else at another time?”

Johnson paused and sighed inwardly. It was typical of the kind of approach he had often received over the years at the OSI, the US government’s Nazi-hunting organization, before he had become self-employed.

The man was obviously going to tip him off about someone who’d supposedly done something evil and gotten away with it. Virtually always, such leads came to nothing.

“When and where were you thinking of?” Johnson asked.

“Tomorrow morning, down in the Stari Grad, the Old Town.” He smiled. “You should see the Old Town if you haven’t done so already. It’s a beautiful historic place.”

Johnson thought about it. He had been planning to visit the Old Town the next day anyway, given that he had nothing scheduled. And it might be interesting to chat with a local rather than the usual cluster of international academics.

“Right, we can have a quick chat for half an hour,” Johnson said. “Say ten o’clock? Where do you want to meet?”

“Café right on the harbor, near the boats—Poklisar is its name. Good coffee, okay? Tomorrow at ten, then?”

Johnson took a step back. “Okay. I hope you’re not wasting my time.” He gave the man a questioning look.

Petar shook his head. “No, I won’t be wasting it. But you might need plenty of it.” Then he turned and walked away.

***

An hour and a half after Petar had left, Johnson drained his fourth Ožujsko of the evening and reached into his jacket pocket for his cigarettes.

He lit one, leaned on the bar, and took a deep drag just as the sun finally disappeared over the horizon.

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world . . .”

Johnson jumped upon hearing the low-pitched, gravelly voice, but he knew immediately whom he’d find standing there when he turned around. It was a voice he had known well for more than two-and-a-half decades, ever since his days with the CIA in the sweat and dust of Pakistan and Afghanistan in the late 1980s.

He pivoted to face a familiar tall, bespectacled figure.

“Vic! What the hell are you doing here?”

“Business, I’m afraid, Doc. Sorry, I would have called first, but I knew you were here, so I opted for surprise. I got sent here at short notice—only flew in from DC this morning.”

One of Johnson’s oldest friends from his CIA days, Vic Walter had long ago nicknamed Johnson as “Doc” because of his Ph.D. in history from Freie Universität Berlin.

“You knew I’d be here?” Johnson said. “Of course, you would. How stupid of me. So, what’s going on? Would you like a beer?”

Vic nodded, and Johnson signaled to the barman for two more beers.

Vic scratched his graying temple. “I was given a job a couple of days ago and thought of you straightaway. So I called your home, and your sister said you’d gone to Dubrovnik for a conference. Bit of a coincidence, as that was where I was heading. Is Amy watching your kids?”

“Yes, Amy always steps in for me if I’m away on business. But now I’m intrigued,” Johnson said. “You thought of me? Why? And what are you doing here, anyway?”

The barman put two bottles on the bar in front of Johnson.

“Well, I thought of you because I need someone to subcontract out to.” Vic grinned. “It’s actually an old Yugoslav issue, a Balkan job. That’s why I’m here. I might need your help with something a little delicate. And I needed to be in Dubrovnik for a meeting at the port. The counterparty refused to fly to DC, so I had no choice but to travel. But it worked out in the end, with you being here anyway.”

“So, what’s the story?” Johnson asked.

Vic perched his angular frame on one of the black-leather-covered barstools and sipped his beer. “Well, I’ve been asked, on the quiet, to do what you might call a tidying up job. And I thought it was a job that’s right up your street.”

“I’m sorry?”

Vic grinned. “Okay, you remember who was in the hot seat at the White House during the Bosnian civil war twenty years ago?”

Johnson didn’t need reminding. “Hillary’s dear husband, Bill.”

“Correct, it was Clinton. And you might also remember that Bill had a tough time because his policies toward Bosnia went against the grain. They were different than those of other Western European leaders.”

Again, Johnson knew about that—he’d just talked about it earlier with De Vere. Clinton had taken some flak because he supported the Muslims during that war, whereas the French, British, and Germans were all far more cautious.

“The story is,” Vic said, “that there was a sheaf of documents relating to Bill’s policies toward Bosnia that the Bosnian government in Sarajevo had. Bill’s people requested the documents be destroyed. This was when the Bosnian president was Alija Izetbegović.”

“Okay,” Johnson said, wondering where this was going.

Vic sipped his beer. “Izetbegović’s office had promised to destroy the documents,” he said, “but later admitted they’d gone missing and the foreign ministry couldn’t find them. Or so the office said. And they hadn’t been seen since, so people forgot about them.” He leaned forward. “But I was called up a couple of weeks ago and asked if I could try and track them down.”

Johnson lit another cigarette. “So why were you asked to track them down? And who’s doing the asking and how high up?”

Vic averted his gaze from Johnson and looked out over the Adriatic. Then he said, “I’m not sure why. And the request came indirectly, so I’m not sure of who made it, either.”

Johnson avoided the temptation to roll his eyes. It was typical CIA doublespeak.

“Okay,” Vic said, “the truth is, the request came out of the director’s office. I can tell you that much—on the quiet.”

All right, so it was critical, Johnson thought.

“Right, so spit it out. What do you want?”

Vic leaned back. “Well, I’ve had clearance to use someone who’s not CIA, at least not currently, who’s independent but trustworthy, who can try and find these docs. It would be harder for us internally to cover it for a whole load of reasons that I won’t bore you with.”

He gave Johnson a look, head lowered, from beneath his eyebrows. “You know what I mean?”

Johnson snorted. He knew exactly what Vic meant. There was no point in even replying. The bottom line was, as often was the case in the Agency, they needed someone who was deniable.

Vic read his expression and shrugged. “I could employ you as an anonymous contractor. It won’t be an easy job—a needle in a haystack. But we’ve got to give it a go so we can at least say we gave it our best shot.”

He raised his eyebrows. “What d’you think?”

Johnson shook his head. He did need to find another major job or project to work on, although he wasn’t going to admit that to Vic. Time was moving on, and he definitely didn’t want to go back to hometown searches for lost people. He wanted it to be something really worthwhile.

However, working with the Agency again?

“Nothing personal, because you’re an old buddy and I know I owe you a favor,” Johnson said, “but I’m not keen on anything CIA-related. I mean, the organization’s screwed me, fired me, and even last year, when I was trying to track down that old Nazi, that asshole Watson did his best to block me. How he stays in his job at his age is a mystery. Is he still focused on Syria?”

He was referring to Robert Watson, who had been Johnson’s boss in the CIA as chief of station in Islamabad in the late 1980s.

“Yeah, Syria’s his baby right now,” Vic said. “He should concentrate on the big picture in his job, but he can’t resist getting into the detail of operations. He’s effectively been heading up Syria since he switched from Special Activities, running the Pakistan drone strikes.”

Vic walked to the other end of the bar and picked up a small tub of complimentary olives, then returned and put them next to his beer. “You’re right,” he said. “I think they’ll need to retire him soon. He’s sixty-five now. But you don’t need to worry. He’s not involved in this particular project.”

Johnson gave a wry smile and sipped his beer. Vic was working hard on him this time.

“The other thing is,” Johnson said. “I can’t stand the Clintons. I don’t like this sort of dynastic thing going on where you’ve got father and son Bush or husband and wife Clinton trying to follow each other into the White House. It’s not healthy.”

He paused, then said, “Sorry, buddy, but you’re going to have to find someone else to do the dirty work on this job.”

“I’d make it worth your while,” Vic said. “There’s plenty of budget, and if you’re here now anyway for this war crimes conference, it seems like a perfect opportunity. A few days extra in the sun. Kill two birds and all that.”

Johnson ran a hand through the graying semicircle of short-cropped hair that bordered his extensive bald patch. “The answer’s no. I’ve got a few possible work options at the moment. I just need to check them all out properly. I’m going to grab a few days here, then on to Istanbul on Monday morning for a meeting, then home Monday night. If the Clintons need someone to drag them out of the shit, I’m not the man.”

Johnson took a deep drag on his cigarette and exhaled smoothly. “Also, we’re meant to be having a long family weekend break in Castine, north of Portland, at the end of next week. I promised the kids. Amy and her husband are coming along as well. They would all kill me if I don’t make it. We haven’t had a break for ages.”

“Mmm, a tricky one,” Vic said. He drained his beer bottle.

There seemed no obvious reason why Vic couldn’t have the job done internally. It seemed fairly routine. Unless there was something Vic wasn’t telling him, which was quite likely and would be rather typical.

“You know, this is the second time I’ve been propositioned tonight, so to speak,” Johnson said.

“Oh, yeah, who was the first?” asked Vic.

“Strange guy, a local, wants to meet me down at the Old Town tomorrow morning. Got something he wants to discuss, wouldn’t say what, but he’d done his homework. He knew I was a war crimes investigator and ex-Nazi hunter. It’ll probably be the usual bullshit, though.”

Vic raised his eyebrows. “Good luck with that then, Doc. I’m going to have to get moving. I need to make sure I get the late flight back to DC tonight, otherwise I’ll be in trouble.”

He paused. “If you change your mind about these documents, let me know.”

Johnson shook his head. “No thanks, not this time, buddy. Appreciate the thought, but it’s not for me.”

Chapter 2

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Dubrovnik

“I never intended to tell anybody about this, not initially, but times change, thoughts change,” Petar Simic said.

Just as he had promised, Petar had arrived at Poklisarat ten o’clock. The colorful café was right on the harbor and built next to the imposing stone wall that encircled the Old Town. It was busy at this time in the morning, full of tourists who were either waiting for boats to the various islands surrounding Dubrovnik or stopping off for refreshments after returning.

“Actually, I’m not comfortable sitting here talking,” Petar said. “There are too many people, and you never know who’s around. Instead of ordering coffee now, why don’t we walk around the city walls for a while, then we can chat as we go? You can do your tourist bit at the same time, then.”

Johnson, who had been looking forward to a jolt of caffeine, sighed and nodded reluctantly. He put on his sunglasses and stood.

Petar got up and apologized to the hovering waiter, then led the way through an archway. He turned right and took Johnson up a steep stone staircase that led to the pathway around the top of the walls, a formidable barrier to potential invaders that dated back to the fourteenth century. At the top he handed over some money to a man in a kiosk and took two tickets.

“I’ll pay—consider it me doing my bit for American-Bosnian relations,” Petar said.

Johnson nodded and followed him onto the walls. Standing sixty feet above the narrow paved streets, Johnson looked down at the Old Town spread out below them. With its red tile roofs, stone bell towers, and tiny cramped houses, it truly looked like a medieval city dragged into the modern age.

To their left was the harbor, with its ferryboats and milling crowds of camera-wielding tourists. Ahead of them, beyond the city, was the Adriatic. A white haze rose from the horizon and blurred the lines between sea and sky. Johnson turned around. Behind them was a steep hill; a cable car slowly rose to the top.

Already the heat was stifling, and it was only just after ten o’clock.

Johnson took his phone out, quickly turned on his voice recorder, and put his phone back into his pocket. Recording conversations was an old habit.

“Okay, then, tell me what’s on your mind,” Johnson said. He thought Petar was probably in his mid-forties, with his dark hair that was going a little gray. Not much younger than Johnson himself.

“First, you need to think back to 1992,” Petar said. “I’m a Bosnian-Croat. I grew up in eastern Mostar, which is about 150 kilometers north from here, over the border,” Petar said. “My brother, Filip, me, and a couple of other guys I knew, Franjo Vuković and Marco Lukić, were in the HVO, the Croatian Defence Council, the army. Initially we fought with the Muslims, the Bosniaks, in the Bosnia and Herzegovina army to get rid of the Serbs. But then it all went wrong, and we started fighting each other instead toward the end of ’92.”

Petar took a long drink from a bottle of water he was carrying and explained that things had really started to go downhill with the start of a miniwar within a war, with fighting between the Catholic Croats and the Bosnian Muslims—the Bosniaks.

“It was vicious,” he said, “with Mostar right in the thick of it.”

Johnson listened intently. “So what went on between the two sides then? I did some work in Bosnia and in Croatia in 1999, so I’ve heard a few stories, that it wasn’t just straightforward fighting. But tell me in your own words.”

Petar gave a sardonic laugh. “Not straightforward. That’s one way of putting it. It was bad on both sides. Any prisoners were treated like pigs. Many died or they were tortured. Franjo, Marco, and Filip were in a unit that spent some of the time looking after Muslims locked up in a concentration camp at the Heliodrom, just south of Mostar.”

“Don’t misunderstand me,” Petar said. “All the soldiers on both sides were doing this kind of stuff. I did things I wasn’t proud of. But the Heliodrom—that was something else.”

He explained how at the Heliodrom, which consisted of a three-story prison building and a sports hall, Muslims had been continually beaten up, given little food and water, and were frequently tortured. Many were eventually killed.

“Here, read this,” Petar said. He reached into his back pocket and took out a folded sheet of paper and handed it to Johnson.

It was a printout from an amended indictment issued in 2008 against various HVO officers at a war crimes trial conducted at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Johnson flicked through the six pages Petar had given him, many of them annotated with scribbles, underlines, circles, and other marks in red pen.

He stopped when he saw one particular reference. “Approximately 1,800 Bosnian Muslim civilians were detained by the Herceg-Bosna/HVO forces at the Heliodrom,” it read.

And then, a little further down, came the damning detail. “The use of Bosnian Muslim detainees held at the Heliodrom in forced labor or as human shields resulted in at least fifty-six Muslim detainees being killed and at least 178 being wounded.”

Another paragraph, heavily underlined, read, “Many Bosnian Muslims held by the HVO were forced to engage in physical labor, such as building military fortifications, digging trenches, carrying ammunition, and retrieving bodies, often in combat and dangerous conditions, which resulted in many Bosnian Muslim detainees being killed or severely wounded.”

The indictment described how Muslims were forced to dress like HVO soldiers, ordered to carry wooden rifles, and made to walk toward Bosnian army positions in order to draw fire and enable the HVO to identify enemy gun positions.

Johnson shook his head as he read a paragraph that described conditions at the Heliodrom. “Conditions were inhumane, with severe overcrowding, inadequate medical and sanitary facilities, insufficient food and water, inadequate ventilation, and in the summer, suffocating heat. Detainees often slept on concrete floors with no bedding or blankets. On some occasions, HVO guards withheld all food and water from the detainees in retaliation for HVO military setbacks.”

It said that HVO soldiers often beat detainees until they were unconscious, causing severe injuries, fired bullets at them indiscriminately, set attack dogs on them, and subjected them to sexual assaults.

The indictment referred to numerous acts of torture, inhumane treatment, and killing of Muslims between April 1993 and March 1994.

“Is there more of this?” Johnson said as he handed the sheets back to Petar.

“Yes. That’s just a few extracts. The indictment’s eighty pages long. And of course, that’s just the crimes and offenses they could identify, which were a tiny fraction of the whole,” he said.

Johnson knew very well that there had been many serious war crimes committed during the civil war on all sides, but the ones listed here were extreme.

Petar put the sheaf back into his pocket. “Franjo, Marco, and Filip were responsible for quite a lot of those deaths, no doubt about it,” he said. “But it was only Filip who they caught and tried at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague and then sent to prison. The other two, Franjo and Marco, got away with it, as did very many others.”

“They must have murdered dozens,” Petar continued. “When I first knew Franjo and Marco, they were quite happy to live alongside Muslims. Franjo was even married to one. But they changed massively—really seemed to hate them in the end.”

Johnson stopped walking. The two of them were now on a high section of wall overlooking Lokrum Island, a mile or two out to sea, with the harbor to their left. He leaned back against a stone parapet and folded his arms.

On a clear day, according to Johnson’s guidebook, it was possible to see Italy across the Adriatic from Dubrovnik, but there was far too much haze for that today.

Johnson scratched the small nick at the top of his right ear. “So do you know what happened to these guys, Franjo and Marco? Where they are now?”

“Franjo vanished not too long after that—gone,” Petar flicked his wrist away from him to emphasize the point. “He was a bit of an enigma. Some said he was killed when his truck ran over a land mine. Other people said he vanished somewhere and got a new identity. But nobody seems to know the truth.”

Franjo and Filip had both trained as journalists together, Petar explained. That was how they knew each other. After studying at university in Zagreb, they had trained together for a while as copy editors and producers at Radio Televizija Zagreb, the Croatian state-owned broadcaster, working across both radio and television stations.

But then the war had started, and both men had joined the armed forces, as everyone did.

“Franjo could well be dead for all I know,” Petar said. “But Marco’s still definitely around—nasty guy, made loads of money, I’m not sure how. There were whispers about illegal arms sales or something but obviously no proof. It was Marco who ratted on my brother to the authorities, the investigators. That’s why Filip ended up in jail while Marco and Franjo went free. The authorities never believed Filip when he said that the man who turned him in was part of it, too. And Marco paid off the ones that looked into it. But I know it can be proven.”

Petar stopped talking as a group of tourists went slowly past with a guide. They all took photographs from both sides of the wall, looking down into the Old Town on one side and out over the Adriatic on the other.

“So, this guy Franjo has disappeared,” Johnson said. “Has anybody checked out his files, I mean his VOB military records?”

Johnson knew from his previous work in Croatia in 1999 that if Franjo had been in the HVO, then he would have a vojno-evidencioni obrazac, a master military service record, which would be held by the local office of the Ministry of Defence where he lived. It would include details of his conscripted military service, postings, the units he had served in, and other information, and would have been maintained, even during the chaos of war. It crossed Johnson’s mind that there might be references in there to where he was now, as the VOB was an important record for state pension purposes.

But even as he spoke, Johnson suspected what the answer would be. The VOB files were not easily accessible without a good reason.

“No,” Petar said, as if reading Johnson’s mind. “You’d need someone on the inside to get them for you.”

Johnson nodded. There would be ways around that if necessary, especially in countries like Bosnia and Croatia, where the wheels of bureaucracy could be oiled by dripping bank notes into the machinery.

The last time, he had done exactly that and had found ferrets to dig out what he needed: two good intelligence service sources he had carefully cultivated. One had been in Croatia, at the Security and Intelligence Service of the Ministry of Defence, and the other in Bosnia, at the civilian intelligence service, the Agency for Investigation and Documentation. Both men were still in their jobs, although the names of their agencies had changed. Maybe he could call on them for help again.

“But why have you taken so long to do anything about this?” Johnson asked. “Haven’t you talked to anyone before?”

Petar shifted from one foot to the other. “I was never going to tell anyone,” he said, “partly because I didn’t want people targeting me or my brother when he finally comes out of jail. These are dangerous people. You start talking, and before you know it . . . ” He shrugged. “But I’ve changed my mind over the years. It’s been eating away at me, seeing my brother holed up in prison while these other guys go free. I approached a senior policeman I know, privately, but he said that without proof, it would be difficult to pin anything on Marco. Likewise with Franjo, although he had disappeared anyway.”

“Okay,” Johnson said. “Do you have any old photographs of Franjo? At least that would help for ID purposes.”

Petar shook his head. “No, nothing. But there is one thing that makes his disappearance even more peculiar. Franjo was, to my mind, quite easily identifiable, not because of his looks generally but because of his eye. He had a slightly odd iris. You know the circular pupil in the middle of a normal eye is black, then there’s a colored surrounding bit, the iris? Well, Franjo’s right eye had a very narrow black line that ran from the pupil down across the iris. It made his eye almost look like a keyhole.”

Johnson nodded. “A coloboma, you mean?” He knew exactly what Petar meant because an old school friend had something similar. It was a very distinctive identifying feature, but when he was older, his friend used to wear a colored contact lens to cover it up.

“Exactly,” Petar said. “A coloboma. That’s what it’s called. He also used to have a thick beard. He was a skinny guy but strong. Well muscled.”

The more Petar talked, the more Johnson felt intrigued. But he was now also starting to fade a little. After the alcohol he’d drunk the previous night and waking up early, plus the absence of caffeine, his mind was now slightly fuzzy.

“Shall we go for that coffee now and continue talking at the café?” Johnson asked.

“Yes, I’ve said most of the sensitive information now. Let’s go.” Petar smiled for the first time that morning, his forehead less furrowed. He retraced their steps around the wall and down the steep stone staircase to ground level, then back to the café.

They sat down at a white wooden outdoor table beneath a canvas awning. Petar signaled to a waiter and ordered two cappuccinos.

Johnson watched him carefully. If all that Petar had said was true, then it sounded potentially interesting, but he would definitely need to have the story verified before he could start to think about pursuing it further.

Then Petar’s phone beeped loudly. He took it out of his pocket and read a message, completely focused on what was on the screen. He put the phone down on the table in front of him. His shoulders hunched, and he unconsciously stroked his chin, staring straight past Johnson, deep in thought.

“Everything all right?” Johnson asked.

Petar jumped a little. “Yes, yes. Just thinking.”

As the waiter arrived with their coffees, Johnson took the opportunity to take out his own phone to make sure the recorder was working properly and to check his emails. There was a note from his fourteen-year-old son, Peter, asking if he was enjoying the sunshine and saying it was raining hard in Portland; he said he was looking forward to the family getaway in Castine.

Johnson smiled and tapped out a short reply.

Petar seemed to partly recover his poise, then excused himself to go to the bathroom. Johnson watched as he walked into the café, then cut left between the tables and disappeared through an open doorway at the back.

Johnson took another sip from his coffee, then put it down. Just then, a high-pitched shriek came from inside the café. Johnson saw a woman in a red dress emerge from the bathrooms. Clearly agitated, she yelled something in Croatian that Johnson didn’t understand, and a white-shirted waiter ran across to her. They both disappeared back through the door.

Something was wrong. He slowly stood, a shard of anxiety digging into his stomach, then walked into the café and made his way to the door leading to the bathrooms, just as the woman in red came running out past him, babbling something unintelligible.

Johnson found himself in a long, dark corridor. At the far end, right outside the entrance to the men’s bathroom, the waiter was crouched over someone lying on the white stone floor.

The person on the floor was Petar.

Johnson felt the skin on the back of his neck prickle involuntarily. “What the hell . . . ” he said out loud, before remembering to switch to Croatian. “What’s happened?”

The waiter turned his head sharply and stood. He waved his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “He is shot in the head,” the waiter said.

Johnson bent down. Petar was facedown, his legs splayed and right arm trapped under his body. There was a dark red pool of blood spreading across the floor. Now he could see where a bullet had entered the back of his head.

“Go and call an ambulance, quickly,” Johnson ordered. He said the words almost instinctively, but he knew it was pointless.

“The lady is calling,” the waiter said.

“No, she was panicking. You do it—now, quickly,” Johnson said firmly, again in Croatian.

The waiter nodded and ran back toward the exit.

Johnson took a deep breath, then slowly turned over Petar’s body. There, to the right of his forehead, below the hairline, was a ragged exit wound, where the blood was coming from. Johnson gagged a little and swallowed hard to quell it.

Then he noticed there was a phone in Petar’s right hand, under his body. Johnson picked it up and stood. He knew immediately what he was going to do. He gently put Petar’s body back as it had been, then slipped into the bathroom, where he removed the battery and the SIM card from the phone and pocketed everything. Opening the door a fraction, he made sure no one was in the hallway and then exited the bathroom. Then he walked back along the corridor and out into the main café area.

He looked left. The waiter whom he had told to phone for an ambulance was standing, a receiver clamped to his right ear, speaking quickly and gesticulating, facing away from Johnson.

The woman in red was standing near the waiter, now wailing loudly, waving her arms and telling other customers at a nearby table what had happened. A couple of them jumped to their feet. Some of the people queuing on the quayside for the ferries, attracted by the woman’s shrieks, were drifting over.

It was obvious to Johnson how the scene was going to play out. Within minutes the café would be swarming with police and ambulance crews. Yet nothing could be done to help Petar.

Johnson walked toward the waiter. As much as he disliked the idea of getting involved with the authorities, he knew he was going to have to give a statement of some kind.

But he just might omit a few details.

Chapter 3

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Dubrovnik

An hour later, Johnson left the café. He had been questioned by two police officers and had told them that he’d met Petar for the first time at a conference the previous day. He said they had decided to meet for coffee that morning to discuss history and work and had taken a short walk around the walls before heading for the café.

He omitted details about pocketing Petar’s phone and that they had discussed searching for war criminals. That would have opened a can of worms. The last thing Johnson wanted was for police to start inadvertently alerting the men Petar had mentioned, Marco Lukić and Franjo Vuković, assuming they were still alive.

So, after his statement and ensuring that several patrons in the café had verified that he hadn’t left his table while Petar was in the bathroom, he was allowed to leave. The police took his contact information in case they had more questions.

Once Johnson had escaped the confines of Dubrovnik Old Town and its claustrophobic maze of narrow streets, he looked around for somewhere private where he could check Petar’s phone.

He saw a tourist office and walked inside, then made his way to a bathroom in the corner. There he locked himself in a stall, took out the phone, replaced the battery but not the SIM card, and scrolled up the list of text messages on the device, all of which were in Croatian.

Johnson knew enough of the language to get a good sense of most of the messages. After checking the translations of a couple of words on his smartphone, he quickly pieced together the contents of the final message listed.

I’ve been watching you with the American. You’re making a mistake. He’s not what he seems. Be careful.

Johnson frowned. The number from which the message had been sent was visible, but there was no name attached to it. It worried Johnson that the person who had sent it had apparently been watching him and Petar—and therefore, logically, he had to assume it was probably the same person who had shot Petar.

But why is he warning Petar about me?

Johnson had taken no countersurveillance measures as there had seemed to be no need. But now he quickly cycled through his memory of the moments before Petar’s death. There had been so many people in the café, and Johnson had been taking in many of the faces and their clothing as he waited for Petar to return from the bathroom. It was an old CIA street habit that had stuck with him.

Who had come from the bathrooms? There was the woman in the red dress, the waiter, two middle-aged women and then—there had been a man. Johnson concentrated. The man had been wearing sunglasses and a navy baseball cap over his dark hair.

After the murder, he had seen all the people again, apart from the man in the baseball cap, who must have left. He had to be the most likely suspect.

Johnson glanced down at the phone in his hand. It was an old, basic Nokia model, not a smartphone, so there were no emails on the device. Johnson put the phone back in his pocket, then went outside again. This time, he carefully checked around him for any sign of the man who he now believed had shot Petar. There was nobody in view.

The departures board at the bus stop at Pile, outside the main gate to Dubrovnik’s walled Old Town, showed that the next number six bus to the Babin Kuk peninsula, where his hotel was located, was due in two minutes.

An ambulance screamed past, its blue and red lights flashing, siren blaring, heading in the direction of the Old Town harbor.

Johnson leaned against the bus stop post and turned his attention back to Petar’s previous text messages.

There were a few suggestive messages from a woman called Olga, clearly not Petar’s wife, who signed off with “xxxx Olga” on all her messages. There were a whole series of exchanges with some friends that appeared to be about a soccer team, Hajduk Split, and a few to and from another number. These last messages said something about it being his mother’s birthday, had she still been alive, and about trying to arrange a visit. The sender was presumably Petar’s father.

Then, going back six weeks, there was another threatening message from the same number as that morning’s missive, saying that the sender had heard that Petar had talked to someone about “our wartime activities” and that he should keep his mouth shut—otherwise there would be “serious consequences.”

That was it—no signs of other contact from the same number. No incoming or outgoing calls listed on the calls register.

Johnson removed the phone battery again. He didn’t want it to be traced while it was in his possession.

A number six drew into the bus stop. He joined the short queue, paid the driver, and made his way to the back of the bus. The air conditioning was a welcome relief from the rising heat outside.

He tried to think through the best course of action. He was away from the scene of the killing, not being followed, and was on the way back to his hotel. But now what?

Was this thing worth his attention? Petar had said there was no proof, and the detail was vague. The issue lay in evaluating the importance of what Petar had said and the significance of what might be, in reality, just a few straightforward wartime killings.

But someone clearly thought it was important—the person pulling the trigger on Petar at the café.

Johnson also had to bear in mind the other work options he had. The discussions he had lined up in Istanbul, relating to arms deals for Syrian rebels, seemed quite promising.

Johnson knew that the prosecuting authorities, originally the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, and then, since 2005, the local courts in Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, and other countries of the former Yugoslavia, had taken their responsibility to prosecute war crimes very seriously. So if he could come up with evidence, the prosecutors would use it. But the question was, should he simply tip off local police and let them handle it.

Johnson was due to head to Istanbul on Monday. Perhaps he could look into it until then and make a decision based on what he could find out.

Clearly, his best bet now would be to get in touch with Petar’s brother, Filip. But he was in jail, Petar had said, without indicating which jail or when he might be released.

Then there was the father, for whom there was a phone number stored but no address. That might be a good starting point, but Johnson doubted whether a cold call to an old man who might not speak very good English would work well. Johnson could try speaking Croatian, but it wouldn’t be an easy conversation, especially if the man had been informed about his son’s death, which Johnson estimated would happen quite quickly.

Johnson felt somewhat at a dead end.

Then he thought of Jayne Robinson. Jayne was a long-standing friend, and for a brief period in the late 1980s, when they were both stationed in Pakistan—she for the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and he for the CIA—they had been more than just friends.

Jayne had also helped Johnson with his most recent job, at the end of the previous year, tracking down a Nazi war criminal, and she was priceless as a partner on that type of investigation.

He knew, too, that Jayne had also done a four-year posting in the Balkans in the early 2000s, where she helped collect information to prosecute war criminals across the former Yugoslavia and fed back intelligence on political and economic issues to London.

That had come to an end when her cover, along with that of several of her colleagues, had been blown by a leak to local media in 2004.

But she might be able to put some context around everything Petar had said and help him out. Given her longer experience in the region, she would probably have a better idea than him about how to navigate her way through the labyrinth of government bodies and sources of information in these parts. It was certainly worth a try.

Johnson got off the bus when it stopped outside the Valamar Lacroma hotel. Instead of going to his room, he turned left down a road, past two other large tourist hotels, the Neptun and Royal Palm, and onto a pathway running along the rocky coastline. After a few hundred yards he came to the Cave Bar. Tucked underneath the cliff, the bar was built into a cave that extended deep into the cliff face and had an outdoor seating area right next to the water.

He sat down well away from the few other customers and ordered a beer, still feeling spooked by the shooting.

Johnson waited until the beer arrived, then checked carefully around him for possible eavesdroppers, pulled out his phone, and placed an encrypted call to Jayne, as was his habit with her.

She answered almost immediately. “Joe! Hello, good to hear from you. Where are you? What are you up to?”

Johnson pictured Jayne, her shortish dark hair and slim figure. She sounded excited to hear from him.

“I’m in Dubrovnik—work, not holiday,” Johnson said. “I flew over earlier in the week to speak at a war crimes conference.”

“Sounds good. Beautiful spot there. I miss it sometimes. How’s it going?”

“It was going all right—but I’ve just come from drinking coffee with a guy who was shot dead outside the men’s room of the café we were at, in the Old Town.”

There was a pause as Jayne digested what he had said.

“What was that all about, then?” It was a typically low-key response from her.

Johnson explained the background to the morning’s events and the information Petar had given him; he also told her about the visit from Vic and what he had asked him to find.

“So,” Jayne said, “you’ve had Vic asking you to go look for some lost Bosnian government documents, which obviously must be highly critical if the Americans need them after twenty years. And then this guy Petar comes and tells you about a couple of war criminals who have evaded prosecution for two decades. Then he’s shot dead, after receiving warning messages. Sounds like something of an odd coincidence to me.”

“Yes, that just about sums it up,” Johnson said.

“It might be worth investigating, then,” Jayne said. “You could take the money from your friend Vic, do that job, and then, while he’s paying your expenses, have a look at this other situation at the same time.”

“Maybe, but it’s difficult to know the significance of Petar’s story,” Johnson said. “Yes, he was murdered, but whether it’s worth chasing from a war crimes perspective—and whether there’s any evidence that could be used in a court to prosecute them—that’s the hard question. Maybe I should just leave his murder to local police and drop the rest of it. What do you think?”

“If evidence does emerge of something that war crimes investigators weren’t aware of before, then yes, it’s worth pursuing. I know the Bosnian prosecutors are still pressing new charges all the time, having people extradited from various countries, including the US,” Jayne said. “Another problem is, if you just hand it to local police, you can’t be certain how seriously they’ll pursue it or how capable they are. The bottom line is, how strongly do you feel about it?”

“I don’t know, honestly,” Johnson said. “But I was thinking of going to Split over the next two days to visit anyway, while I’m in Croatia, so I thought I could try and track down Petar’s father, if I have time. I don’t want to put you through a lot of trouble, but I was wondering if your technical guys at GCHQ might be able to track down the address registered against the father’s cell phone number? Otherwise I can get Vic to try the NSA.”

The Government Communications Headquarters was the British signals intelligence agency, responsible for a huge range of activities, including monitoring internet, telephone and email traffic for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and other government functions, as required. Johnson knew that, as a member of the SIS, Jayne would have any number of contacts within the agency whom she could call on for a favor.

“I’ll have a go,” Jayne said. “Email me the details and I’ll see what I can do. My friend Alice at GCHQ should be able to help.”

Johnson also asked her to request from GCHQ a trace on the cell phone number from which the warning text message to Petar had been received.

She agreed, then paused. “You seem keen on this, Joe.”

“No, really, I haven’t decided that yet,” Johnson said. “I’ve got other jobs I’m looking at. And anyway, I need to get home. I’m meant to be flying to Istanbul on Monday morning for a meeting, then home Monday night from there. What about you, what are you up to?”

Jayne paused. “Actually, I’m leaving Six. I’ve had enough. I’ve done twenty-six years. They’re just taking costs out all the time, flogging us senseless, and with these London Olympics kicking off at the end of this month and all the security stuff flying around, it’s just gone nuts. I’ve paid off the mortgage on my little apartment, so I handed my notice in some time back. You might remember I was getting close to quitting last year?”

Johnson remembered very well. But now he was surprised that she had actually taken such a bold step—and that he was learning of it only now. He thought they were closer than that.

It must be nice, in some ways, to be single, child-free, and footloose like Jayne, he thought. “So what are you planning to do when you leave?”

“I was thinking maybe something like you do,” Jayne said. “Some private investigation work for corporates, governments, or intelligence agencies, maybe looking for wanted people who have removed themselves from the radar. There’s plenty of work like that once you start looking around internationally. Actually . . . how about if I come and give you a hand now? It’s a vipers’ nest down there, Joe. You might need a little assistance and some extra local experience. And I’ll get to explore the job that way, figure out if I like the reality as much as the idea.”

Johnson laughed. “Really? You would? If I were going to do this job, then absolutely, but I don’t think I will end up on it.” But something in the back of his mind made him ask, “When could you do that, anyway?”

“Next week. Tuesday probably. I finish here on Monday afternoon.”

For a second Johnson really considered it, but then reality hit him. “The kids would kill me, I’m afraid. We’re meant to be going on a short break in northern Maine for a few days next weekend with my sister and her husband. I can’t possibly miss that. So I’ll be heading home Monday as planned.”

“Okay, but if anything comes up, you know where to find me.”

***