“I thought Boldo stole them,” I said.
“That’s why I’m so sure. Because after that, I had three guys patrolling each depot. We just about tucked every vehicle into bed at night. That was even before we realized Kajevic had ended up with the trucks.”
Something in her last remark struck Attila. She angled her round face. In her eyes, I could see a thought taking her somewhere.
“Did you say you made some photos in Madovic?” Attila asked. “Any chance I could see them?”
I reminded Attila that the Bosnian Friendship Club had stolen our cell phones.
“What about the cloud?” Attila asked.
I went upstairs for my tablet. Until this moment, neither Goos nor I had given any thought to using the ‘find my phone’ app. We tried now, but no signal registered, implying either that the phones were off or, more likely, destroyed. But the photos and the short video I’d taken in Madovic had uploaded before then.
Attila looked all of it over for quite a while and replayed the video three times, finally spreading her fingers—and her ragged bitten nails—to enlarge the shot of the three monks approaching. I hadn’t even caught it in real time, but the one in the center had flicked his dark intense eyes toward us minutely, as we watched them from where we sat. He’d actually stared a bit longer than the nearer monk, whom I’d seen glance in our direction later.
“That’s why they were going to take you out,” Attila said.
I was astonished. “I had no idea it was forbidden to take pictures of monks.”
Attila laughed then and faced us looking a lot like a jack-o’-lantern on Halloween night, the same fiendish gap-toothed grin, appearing as if she were lit from within.
“See that one?” She put her finger on the screen, indicating the monk in the middle. “I’m almost positive you guys just found Laza Kajevic.”
VI.
Kajevic
23.
Who’s There?—June 4–9
Goos immediately wanted to inform his former colleagues at the Yugoslav Tribunal that we might have located the most wanted war criminal since Nuremberg, but Attila persuaded us that the better course was to contact NATO headquarters in Sarajevo. They were authorized to arrest Kajevic—in fact, hunting for him was probably their most significant remaining duty in Bosnia—and also had the most secure structure to preserve the secret. Attila, who evinced a junior-high giddiness about nabbing such a big-time bad guy, made the introductory call, followed by several coded communications, mostly by text, between Goos and me and various NATO officers. Goos was in a grim mood, which I attributed to pain. I, by contrast, was simply confused. My ability to adjust to dramatic news seemed to be like a broken transmission in which the gear spun without catching.
In the intervals, the three of us sat in the breakfast room, whispering as we reinterpreted what had gone down the night before last. Some conclusions seemed fairly obvious. Once the parking cop in Madovic had established that the yokelly guys snapping photographs of the monks and the monastery were from the International Criminal Court in The Hague, word had filtered back to Kajevic’s protectors, who sounded the alarm. Their plan probably was to take us out ASAP, before we could report our findings. Following us from Madovic, Kajevic’s cadre almost certainly witnessed our visit to Ferko before they were able to grab us outside Vo Selo. During the hours they were awaiting darkness before throwing us into the salt tank, somebody must have realized that the ICC and the Yugoslav Tribunal, where Kajevic was wanted, were not the same institution. Local inquiries would have validated that Goos and I were present to investigate Barupra, not capture the former president. Coincidentally, my rant that Ferko would never get away with killing us demonstrated to them that we didn’t realize what we’d discovered. At the last minute, some old Arkan commander had rushed to the salt mine to stop Nikolai rather than risk the intense manhunt that would have followed our murders.
Given these insights, though, it seemed likely that the Arkans would want to keep an eye on us, to be certain that we remained unsuspecting about the true reason we’d been kidnapped. Attila called her police friend, who swept by the hotel a few times in her private vehicle and confirmed that there were a couple of guys just sitting around in two different cars, both trained on the hotel. The news was instantly terrifying to me, and Goos didn’t appear any happier, but we agreed with Attila to await NATO’s input before doing anything to show we were aware of being under watch.
In our communications earlier with the NATO fugitive hunters, we’d set a meeting at Attila’s headquarters on the outskirts of Tuzla, where we all would pretend to be attending a business gathering related to our ICC work. We left the Blue Lamp at 6 p.m. Dalija, Attila’s cop pal, called to let us know there was a tail—and a fairly clumsy one, just two vehicles following at a short distance, almost as if they were the laggards in a funeral procession. Dalija said she’d keep everybody in sight, just in case.
Attila’s headquarters occupied an entire single-story building about the size of a small strip mall, decorated with a seemingly studied effort in the nondescript. Her office had indoor-outdoor carpeting, the color of brown dirt, and louvered vertical blinds. On the desk were several photos of the wife Attila had said she met here, a blue-eyed, black-haired beauty. The shots showed the two of them together, posed beside horses and dogs on their farm in northern Kentucky. Attila’s domestic life, which she almost never mentioned, seemed somehow incongruous, but she was pleased by compliments about how gorgeous it all was, house and garden and wife.
“Yeah,” Attila answered, “it’s amazing how fast a poor girl can get used to spending money.”
Not long after dark, the NATO delegation arrived in two pickup trucks bearing the logo of an international construction company. Attila had already made a dozen local calls, designed to put out the word that we were beginning preparations to dig up the Cave. The NATO soldiers were in jeans and windbreakers and hard hats, and all four of them carried clipboards. The commander was a Norwegian general, Ragnhild Moen, accompanied by three senior staffers, a Dutchman, a German, and an American. The general was lean and almost six feet tall, with impossibly long, thin hands. She proved disarmingly personable while remaining quietly authoritative. She had relatives in Minnesota where she had spent a year in high school, and she retained fond memories of Kindle County, which she had visited several times. Her student-exchange group had met the chief federal judge there, Moria Winchell, whom I knew well.
The NATO officers huddled around my tablet and examined the photos several times. No one doubted Attila’s identification, especially not after comparing my photographs to pictures of Kajevic obtained in the last several years. The four spoke English among themselves, so for once I could follow the deliberations.