The First Casualty (10 page)

23

Croatia

“You will let
me
get off? Peters, you will be dead before then. You Westerners have no heart for what must be done, like killing a woman.”

He didn't want to admit it to himself, certainly not to Natalia, but, yeah, he really did have qualms about killing a woman.

The thought vanished as she flicked her weapon at him, ripping the arm of his jacket with a tearing sound.

Fuck chivalry.

What she did next was as unorthodox as it was unexpected. With a move like a striking snake, she bent low, swiping his left calf with steel.

Jason's reaction was to try to reposition the tip of his knife for a stab into her exposed back. But she was too quick.

Either too fast or his reservations were clouding his mind.

It took maybe a full second before the sensation arrived, a searing hot pain that brought tears to his eyes, tears she saw.

“Tell you what,” she said with a smile, “put down your weapon and I'll let you live. No hard feelings.”

The thin carpet of the platform was getting slick with Jason's blood. He was careful where he placed his feet and how he shifted his weight. A slip, certainly a fall, would be fatal.

He feigned a jab from the right, his plan to slash from the left instead, a maneuver requiring a minimum of movement. Even so, the poor footing caused him to slip, the aggressive sortie of a boxer rather than the graceful lunge of a fencer. He twisted frantically to avoid Natalia's blade and his feet went out from under him, sending him crashing into the exit to outside hard enough to knock the breath out of him.

Worse, the killing knife clattered against the far door as it slipped from his hand.

He must have hit the button that slid the door open, leaving him on his back gasping for air, his head hanging outside the train with half a mile drop below.

Recognizing an easy kill, Natalia dropped to her knees, leaning over him. Her blade was raised for the coup de grâce. The knife was just before beginning its deadly down stroke when there was a woman's scream.

Without completely taking his eyes from his opponent, Jason saw a woman's horrified face through the glass of the following car. Natalia hesitated a fraction of a second.

Not much time, but all Jason had. Grabbing the vertical rails beside the open door, the very ones he had used to pull himself aboard, he brought his knees nearly to his chin at the instant Natalia put her weight down behind the killing stroke. For an instant, her body was balanced on Jason's knees, an instant in which her face was frozen in the horror of realization.

Like a circus acrobat, Jason flipped his knees over his head, a backward somersault, flinging Natalia through the open door and into space.

Jason saw, or thought he saw, a figure, stiff with arms outstretched like a paper doll cut from black paper, that got smaller and smaller until it disappeared against the landscape half a mile down.

As he scrambled to his feet, the woman who had been looking through the glass had both hands over her mouth as though to staunch the low moaning sound she made as her eyes went from the open door to Jason's bloody leg to the killing knife on the blood-soaked carpet. If ever Jason had seen sheer terror in someone's eyes, he was looking at it now.

“These domestic quarrels can be a bitch,” he said before realizing how slim was the chance this woman understood a word of English.

No time to comfort strangers. The conductor was still around somewhere. He picked up his knife. Hugging the wall, Jason cautiously peered around the door and into the car in which he and Natalia had been sitting only minutes before.

Empty.

The burning agony of his leg was difficult to ignore, but the threat of the conductor made it imperative to do so. Jason did take the time to roll up his pant leg and note he had sustained a wound to the flesh only. Though deep, he could only hope there had been no, or minimal, damage to the muscle. Either way, he was already becoming light-headed from the loss of blood.

He used seat backs to help him walk to the quartet of seats where he and Natalia had sat. He picked up her purse, took out the wallet, and stuffed it in his jacket pocket. Doubtful a professional would be carrying anything of use, but he would look when he had time anyway.

Every second or two, he glanced up, making sure the complicit conductor didn't surprise him. Eyes flicking toward the forward car. He used the knife to sever the shoulder strap of the Hermès purse.

Next, he used the knife's razor edge to cut her jacket into strips. He could not help but note the four-pocket model had the distinctive interlocking Cs of Chanel on each pocket. Natalia and her fanatical Islamists might preach hatred for the West, but they had little reluctance to avail themselves of its luxuries.

He used the purse strap to bind the soft suede of the strips to the bleeding wound in his calf—possibly the world's most expensive bandage. But it should prevent him from bleeding to death before he could get the cut stitched shut.

Returning the knife to its sheath, he drew the Glock. The police were going to get involved now for certain; Jason just had to make sure the conductor was accounted for and depart the train before the local heat arrived.

24

Federal Bureau of Investigation

Re: Nikola Tesla

File No. 2121-70

TOP SECRET

February 3, 1943

To: William Donovan, Director, Office of Strategic­ Services

From: J. Edgar Hoover

Bill:

The Bureau has completed its search of the effects of the above-styled, including a War Powers Act secret order to drill and inspect his bank box. We searched the two rooms he occupied­ at the Hotel New Yorker within hours of his death. We have found no evidence of contact of any sort with an Axis power. Of course, it is unlikely the subject would have left evidence of treason lying around.

We did find the names in his address book of members of both the Swiss and Swedish Embassies here in Washington. Unfortunately, neither man is still here, both being sent to other postings in late 1942. Both embassies disclaim any knowledge or record any contact between their staff and the subject, and both are equally disinclined to allow the Bureau to pursue the matter. I don't think either of us expected a lot of help from pantywaist neutrals anyway.

The only thing of possible interest we turned up was a Railway Express Agency receipt for what appears to be a large package shipped from New York to the Savannah, Georgia, offices of Norddeutscher Lloyd. See below as to why the subject went to the trouble to send something to the shipping company in Georgia when the company had offices here in New York until the United States became involved in the war when, as an enemy alien corporation, it ceased operation on U.S. soil in early 1942.

We interviewed Kolman Cazo, one of the subject's assistants, who is presently in infantry training at Fort Ord, California. Although his memory is not as clear as we might wish, he said the subject frequently sent packages­ to relatives in Croatia. Subject believed the U.S. government had been intercepting and reading his mail and spying on him ever since the military declined to purchase subject's so-called “Death Ray.” He went to great lengths to avoid observation. Cazo remembered subject originally demanded he (Cazo) carry a large package by train to Savannah but relented and allowed it to go by R.E.A. He has no idea what might have been in the package but he was quite sure its final destination was Croatia, not Germany. Subject told him it was canned goods and clothing for his family there.

I regret not to have more specific information, but I believe we have no evidence that the subject gave aid or comfort of any sort to the enemy, nor do we have reason to believe he shared any information of military value.

Don't hesitate to call if I or the Bureau can be of further assistance. Give my warmest regards to Ruth.

J. Edgar

25

Hotel Ante

Jasikovacka 9

Gospi
ć
, Lika, Croatia

Three Hours Later

Jason stiffly eased himself into one of the contemporary chairs that was every bit as uncomfortable as it looked. He propped his throbbing leg up on the chair's mate. The room was furnished in what some might call “Danish Modern.” Others might call it IKEA. In any event, the room, one of only twenty-six, was clean and inexpensive, if totally bland. And cold. A cursory inspection had revealed no individual thermostat. Whoever controlled the central heat either planned on saving money on creature comforts or enjoyed arctic temperatures. Jason had never stayed in a hotel where he could see his own breath before. He should have guessed heat was not a significant amenity of the hotel when he had presented his George Simmons passport to a desk clerk in a fur-lined parka.

Jason turned to look out of the room's window, where swirling snowflakes were comets in the light from the hotel's windows. Cold or not, he should consider himself lucky. He had disembarked from the train at the next stop, one of those for which there seemed no reason other than a man and woman, cardboard suitcases or boxes in hands, waiting to board. The conductor had been conspicuous in his absence. Jason surmised Natalia had bribed the regular conductor to render whatever assistance she might need and he'd taken the money and then kept out of sight. Had he earned whatever he had been paid, it would be Jason, not Natalia, at the bottom of that ravine.

It was hard to find good help.

Jason guessed he must have made quite an appearance as he painfully climbed down from the railcar with his trouser leg slashed and bloody. His jacket covered the blood his shirt had absorbed from the drenched carpet. He did draw the attention of a walrus-mustached old man wearing some sort of military colored jacket in a very dated Zastava 750 automobile, a product of the same company who had unsuccessfully inflicted the Yugo on the United States a couple of decades ago.

Mustache watched with open curiosity as Jason limped across the single track, looking both ways for possible transportation. He had exited the train prematurely to avoid the police likely to be swarming all over it once the near hysterical woman who had witnessed Natalia's last moments could summon them. Now he needed medical help, but as far as he could see, he was in open country.

Clutching his suitcase, he limped toward the only vehicle in sight, the Zastava. The driver rolled down the window.

“Speak English?” Jason asked.

The answer was definitely not. Not a good sign.

Jason pointed to his bloody pants leg, making a sewing motion.

Mustache replied by rubbing a thumb against the fingers of one hand, the universal sign money was required.

Jason dug into a pocket and held out a handful of kuna.

Mustache considered the money, took it, counted it out, and returned some bills to Jason.

He motioned for Jason to go around and get in the passenger door. Grateful, Jason climbed in, the squeeze making him mindful the car had been designed under license from Fiat, a version of its diminutive 500.

Mustache's lack of English skills did nothing to discourage conversation, or at least, his side of one. He chatted away, the inflection of his voice indicating questions Jason could neither understand nor answer. He could only hope the man understood he needed to see a physician.

Five minutes later, the little car rounded a curve in the mountainous combination of asphalt and potholes. Half a dozen houses, each a single story with red-tile roofs, bracketed the road. By now, flakes of snow were drifting down from higher elevations. Beyond the village, if it was large enough to deserve the description, a valley was filled with fog like a lake of mist. Jason would not have been surprised to see the clouds sweep aside like a stage curtain to reveal Count Dracula's castle adorning one of the far peaks.

The car came to a stop in front of one of the houses. There was nothing to distinguish it from its neighbors other than the small red cross beside the door. Getting out of the tiny car, Jason almost fell. His head was spinning at a dizzying rate, and his legs felt like spaghetti. Mustache caught him, swinging an arm over his shoulder, and somehow managed to wrestle him inside. Bandage or not, Jason had lost more blood than he had thought.

The clinic was tidy, clean, and empty. Helping Jason onto the room's examination table, Mustache pressed a buzzer. Less than a minute later, a middle-aged woman strode into the room, steel gray hair in a no-nonsense­ bun and still struggling into a long white lab coat. Jason guessed that, like many European doctors, she had set up practice in her home.

Mustache and the doctor exchanged words, possible greetings, and a question or two. He sat in the room's only chair and lit a cigarette. Jason was so accustomed to the American Health Gestapo, he was surprised when there was no rebuke forthcoming from the doctor. Coat finally straight, she turned her attention to Jason. She produced a pair of surgical scissors and snipped away the bloody pant leg. Jason was thankful the killing knife was strapped to the other leg, sparing him questions best left unasked.

After applying a stinging antiseptic to the wound, she regarded him with a suspicion that needed no translation. “How?”

Stalling for an answer might result in a call to the police. Jason blurted out the first thing he could think of. “Slipped on the train, cut myself on the edge of the door.”

He was not certain she understood, but it was clear she was skeptical at the least. Wordlessly, she finished sterilizing the cut and turned to a metal cabinet. She held up a needle and sutures.

“No anesthetic,” she announced as she began to thread the needle.

She made no effort to explain whether she simply had none or chose not to use it. He decided not to ask for a bullet to bite.

Jason had endured worse. As an adviser to the mujahideen in Afghanistan, he had had a Russian bullet dug out of his back by a bayonet under flickering candlelight. A covert operation in Sub-Saharan Africa had ended with a two-day donkey ride with a broken leg using a rifle stock as a splint. The recollections did little to dim his present discomfort. Besides, the only mercy shown by pain was that it fades from memory almost as soon as it ends. We remember precisely the smell of a rose, the flavor of a favorite wine on the back of the tongue, but not the degree of agony. We recall there was pain but, once ceased, our brains have no measure of it.

Jason clinched his teeth. His eyes searched the room until they focused on a case clock in a far corner. The grain of the wood in which it was encased was without knots, indicating it had been taken from the heart of the tree. What tree? Jason concentrated on the swirls of the grain and the depth of color. Oak? No, more like walnut. He imagined the feel, the cool smoothness of the wood as it had been sanded, smelled the sawdust that had swirled around the skilled craftsman who had made that case.

Slowly, grudgingly, the pain of each stitch diminished ever so slightly with each new observation. During Jason's special Delta Force training, a psychiatrist or psychologist, some brand of head shrinker, had lectured on the subject of meditation as a tool for pain control. At the time, Jason had accepted the message as so much psychobabble. Subsequently, he found there was some truth to what he had been told. Meditation was not an opiate to pain, more like aspirin. But better than no relief at all.

There had been some respite from the pain certainly, for Jason was surprised when he noticed the doctor was no longer stitching but almost finished bandaging.

She motioned, and he gingerly climbed down from the table. He tested his left leg by putting weight on it. It hurt, but that was hardly news. He could flex the calf, though, an indication the muscle had not been severed.

The physician handed him a bottle of pills with one hand, a syringe in the other. “Pills three times a day,” she ordered, holding up three fingers as though she doubted he was bright enough to understand and motioning for his arm.

He guessed the injection was a tetanus shot, the pills an antibiotic. Whatever, it had to be more beneficial than the one he had averted at Heathrow.

She put the empty syringe into a tin tray. “Two hundred.”

This time, she was holding up two fingers with one hand, pointing to his hip pocket with the other. Jason counted out 200 kuna, marveling that medical services anywhere could be priced at the equivalent of, what, ten bucks?

Mustache stubbed out a third cigarette into a small ceramic bowl and offered his shoulder.

Jason took it and started out.

“Sir?” The doctor asked in clear English. “Next time you fall on train, try not to land on only door that has a knife edge.”

She was chuckling to herself as he and Mustache left.

After a meal in the hotel's starkly modern restaurant—
odojak
, pork roasted over an open fire, washed down with
stoino vino
, table wine recommended by the chef himself—Jason felt pleasantly drowsy. His leg throbbed with a pain that was easily bearable. The doctor had given him no pain pills, nor would he have taken any. The slothfulness induced by painkillers was something he didn't want. If he needed to wake suddenly, act quickly, or make a decision in an instant, drugs were not for him.

He shoved one of the chairs under the doorknob of his room, stripped, and lingered under the shower for the four or five minutes it took for the hot water to run out. He was drying himself when there was a knock at his door. Wrapping the towel around his waist, he slipped the Glock from its holster lying on the dresser and went to the door.

“Yeah?”

“Mr. Simmons?”

English was not the speaker's first language.

“What is it?”

“A Mr. Džaja wants to know if you will need him tomorrow.”

Jason knew no one named Džaja. Could be the police? Or whoever sent Natalia. Had they had identified him from the train and tracked him to this hotel? That would have required neither Sherlock Holmes nor bloodhounds. There were few hotels in the area.

“Just a minute,” he called.

Crossing the room, he looked at the window. The old-fashioned kind that still opened, probably because air-conditioning in summer was used as sparingly as heat in winter. Jason had requested and gotten a room on the second, top, floor. Ground-floor rooms made for poor security. It was only twenty feet or less down to the snow-soaked lawn below, a relatively safe drop Jason could reduce considerably by hanging from the sill before letting go.

He opened the window.

“I'm coming!” he called in response to another knock as he slipped into a pair of jeans and his feet into shoes.

He was contemplating departing the room without further conversation when it occurred to him: “Need him tomorrow”?

Going back to the door, he asked. “Who is Džaja?”

“The man driving you here,” the desk clerk's voice answered.

A quick glance confirmed what Jason already knew: There was no phone in the room. His driver could not simply have the clerk call up.

Jason chuckled, both at his own overreaction and the relief there was no danger. But paranoia trumped foolish risks. “Tell him I'll see him right after breakfast.”

As footsteps receded, Jason risked cracking the door. Even from the back, he recognized the fur parka of the desk clerk and that old army jacket Mustache wore. He shut the door quietly, locked it, and shoved the chair back under the knob. Only then did he realize how much colder the room had become.

Small wonder. The window was still open, snow blowing in onto the threadbare carpet. Jason was glad he wasn't going to be going out.

For the first time in many years, Jason had difficulty in falling asleep, a problem he attributed to the throbbing pain in his leg, not allowing himself to consider the possibility the cause might lay elsewhere. The fact he had been forced to kill someone had never kept him awake before. But then, none of his victims had been a woman, albeit a deadly one.

When sleep finally came, it was thin and troubled. More than once, Jason awoke after his dreams replayed that figure falling, falling . . .