Джеймс Паттерсон - The 18th Abduction

He booted up his computer and dug back into the files he’d begun collecting on the ethnic cleansing that had devastated Bosnia in the mid-1990s. The images came up on his screen and flooded his mind; stories told by the women separated from their families and brutalized, men detained and forced to sing Serbian songs and to commit sex acts upon one another as they waited to be executed.

There were fresh images now; Anna’s half-told story of her imprisonment in a cell-like room in the rape hotel as the very men who’d killed her husband and child repeatedly assaulted her. One of them had been Petrović himself.

He remembered Anna’s expression as she told him about the horrific assaults, and could almost feel her terror and revulsion, with the threat of imminent death something to wish for.

He got up, walked down the hall to the coffee room. Ten minutes later he was back at his desk, going through his files, looking for something that would reveal more about Slobodan Petrović.

Petrović was mentioned in hundreds of the documents Joe had accumulated. His military career was all there: a soldier moving up steadily through the ranks, peaking with his command of the massacre at Djoba. There were photos of him in uniform inspecting a barn where dozens of people had hanged themselves from the rafters, choosing suicide over the torture and humiliation of death by Petrović’s hands.

Joe stared at those bodies and at the shadows they cast on the floorboards, Petrović’s sadistic smile and his triumphant expression.

There had been witnesses at Petrović’s trial, but while Filip Nikolić and his top commanders had received life sentences, Petrović had been released from his life sentence, despite the numbers of witnesses against him and the incontrovertible proof of his unspeakable crimes. Then Petrović had supposedly drowned.

Joe got up from his desk, crossed his office, and leaned against the window frame as the sun sank below the shabby buildings across the street. His mind was still swimming in the horrors of the war in Bosnia, but it was time to narrow his focus to the commitments he had made. He was one man working from an office in San Francisco. He could probably get Steinmetz to assign another agent or two to this case, but unless or until he had something worth the manpower, he was working alone.

He’d promised Anna he’d try to neutralize Petrović. The other commitment, the official one, was to Steinmetz, either to make a case quickly or to walk away.

As of this moment, Joe didn’t know if he could do either.

But he was determined to do his best.

Chapter 43

Joe was at his desk at the San Francisco branch of the FBI, but his thoughts were in Quantico, Virginia.

As clearly as if he were there now, he remembered sitting at a long table in the basement conference room at Quantico. He had been a profiler with the Behavioral Science Unit. With him at that meeting had been a dozen and a half officers from the counterterrorism watch center: FBI, CIA, military.

He hadn’t been thinking about Petrović when he’d been sitting in that subterranean room, watching the video that legal attachés from the American embassy in Sarajevo had sent by pouch—a video of the ICC tribunal handing sentences down to the convicted war criminals that stood before them.

The worst of them was Filip Nikolić, the commander responsible for eight thousand deaths in Srebrenica. More than five hundred witnesses had testified against him. More than ten thousand exhibits had been presented to the court, and after four years at trial, Nikolić was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Several high-ranking officers of the Serbian Army were also sentenced. The victims’ families had crowded the courthouse and the streets around it to glimpse the monsters who had assassinated a hundred thousand civilians.

One of those grief-stricken wives, a young mother, told a reporter, “They had to be held responsible. But even with the justice done, there is nothing the tribunal could do that would be sufficient punishment for these men.”

Joe was sure that Anna’s feelings were the same.

There had been a more prominent person on trial, and her photos had flashed across the curved face of the old TV on its stand at the head of the table.

Jelena Jovanović looked completely ordinary, a stiffly coiffed white woman of a certain age who would’ve been at home behind a counter in a department store or at a cocktail party in Georgetown. But the seventy-two-year-old woman was the former president of Serbia, known as the Iron Lady. Jovanović had been an unapologetic proponent of ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs, Muslims in particular, calling the eradication of non-Serbian people a “natural phenomenon.”

After governance issues and confrontations with her cronies, Jovanović retired from politics. But she didn’t get far enough to avoid scrutiny by the International Criminal Court.

The year following her retirement, Jovanović learned that there was a sealed indictment against her containing numerous counts of genocide and crimes against humanity. She denied the crimes and voluntarily turned herself in to the ICC to stand trial.

While waiting for trial, Jovanović had an apparent change of her so-called heart. She pleaded guilty on all counts and even recanted her earlier position, stating that the victims of her purge had been innocent.

Back at Quantico, Joe, along with members of the counterterrorism agencies, had watched the announcement of the trial chamber’s decision. He had been stunned to hear the court announce that Jovanović’s confession and admission of guilt would be more meaningful to the survivors of the still war-torn country than a guilty verdict after a many-years-long trial.

Where was the justice in that?

In return for pleading guilty to war crimes, the genocide charges had been dropped. Jovanović had been sentenced to fifteen to twenty-five years for crimes against humanity, but before serving a day, her sentence had been reduced to eleven years, to be served in a Swedish prison that featured all the amenities of a first-class resort.

Later her sentence had been further reduced to five years for time served and good behavior, and at age seventy-nine, after six years of imprisonment, she had been released.

How had this happened?

Had Jovanović gotten her break not just in exchange for her confession but for giving up information on other military officers, in this mother-of-all-grande-dame deals? The unbelievable kicker was that once she was free, Jovanović retracted her confession in full, saying that she had confessed only in order to get a lenient sentence.

No kidding.

After reviewing the disposition of Jovanović, Joe felt more certain that Petrović was free because he, too, had gotten a plea deal.

Petrović had been a colonel. He had taken orders from generals who’d gotten life sentences for genocide and crimes against humanity.

Bigger fish.

If they were obtainable, Joe wanted both the facts on Petrović’s deal and the terms of his release. For God’s sake, how had it come to pass that the Butcher of Djoba had opened a steak house in San Francisco?

Chapter 44

Joe was hungry, but he didn’t want to stop his work to go home and eat.

It was late evening still in DC.

Joe punched numbers for the State Department into his phone, and when his call was answered, he asked to speak with deputy director Brandon Reilly. The call was switched over and Reilly picked up.

After some catching up, Joe said to Reilly, “Do you remember a colonel in the Serbian Army named Slobodan Petrović?”

“That evil scumbag. I remember. He drowned or something, didn’t he?”

“If only.”

Joe sketched it in for Reilly, that Petrović was living in San Francisco, very much alive and well. Once he’d caught Reilly up, Joe made the ask: information on how the bastard had skated on a life sentence for war crimes and crimes against humanity.