From the bodega, I tried several calls, connecting with no one. For Nara, it was too late; she’d already silenced her phone. Goos seemed to be out of range in Kosovo. And after getting Roger’s voice mail, I texted him all the contact info I had for Emira Jahanbani. In a few months, Rog and I would have dinner and a lot of wine in Kindle County or DC and decide yet again that we’d been friends for too long to turn away from each other now. Finally, I left a message on Merriwell’s personal cell, where an out-of-office recording said he’d return tomorrow.
The one person I did reach was Teresa Held, one of my former litigation partners here, whom I met at my hotel for a drink. Teresa had been recently nominated for the federal bench in Brooklyn. She wanted my advice and help about making it through the Senate Judiciary Committee. The bipartisan fan club Roger thought I enjoyed on the Hill had its sole shadow of reality in Judiciary. My home state’s senior senator, who’d made me US Attorney, was now the committee’s ranking member, and I also had a friend on the other side of the aisle, my freshman dorm counselor, an R who was the junior senator from Kentucky. Todd remained a wonderfully decent guy, even though my jaw sometimes fell open listening to what he said on TV. I promised to call both senators for Teresa.
Then I went upstairs to order room service and deal with my e-mail. I found a very sweet note Nara had sent before going to sleep, and a couple of messages Goos had forwarded while he was in Kosovo or on his way. Before looking at them, I sent him an e-mail offering a brief précis of my confrontation with Esma. “She claims ardently that Ferko duped her, too. God only knows why but I tend to believe her. She seemed sincerely surprised about his wife and his house and the grave. That said, I wouldn’t wager even a keim that there’s not a lot more to the story than she acknowledged.”
The e-mails Goos had forwarded proved to be from NFI. The first was a report analyzing the explosive residues on the stones Professor Tchitchikov had first collected at the Cave five weeks ago. Given Goos’s physical condition, it had taken him a while, once we returned after Kajevic’s capture, to deliver the samples to the lab. The Dutch scientists then found it necessary to confer with the FBI. The report they’d finally prepared included a lot of terminology that was beyond me—‘fragment range and dispersal,’ ‘shock wave reflection’—but the conclusion was intelligible: The black stuff was characteristic of a small explosive device, such as a hand grenade, utilized by the United States military. Interestingly, NFI reached this determination based not on the chemical composition of the explosive material, but rather of the metal from the hand grenade wall that was melted into the residue.
Given the NATO aerial surveillance photos, the result was unsurprising, although I still had no idea why US troops wanted to bury five thousand weapons in the Cave. I was mulling that over, when my phone buzzed. It was Merriwell, calling from the limo on his way back home from Dulles.
We talked for a second about baseball. I had paid exorbitantly for seven field box seats for Sunday’s Trappers game, to which I would take two sons, one fiancée, one girlfriend, and, as an appreciation of their generosity, Ellen and Howard.
“So you’re in the US then?” Merry asked.
“I am. And I was hoping to make a stop in DC to get some more of your time.”
“Official business?”
“Not really. Related perhaps, but definitely personal.”
“Sounds intriguing.”
“I’ll explain when I see you.”
He weighed that for a second, but said he would have time tomorrow afternoon.
Once I hung up, I booked a seat on the noon Acela and returned to the second e-mail Goos had forwarded, which attached NFI’s findings from several of the cell phones that had been recovered from the Cave. The lab had identified four of the cells’ owners, although the names meant nothing to me. One of the phones was equipped with a camera. That was still an innovation in 2004, and given the dismal living standard in Barupra, the device might have been acquired by means other than purchase. But whoever was using it had taken pictures of everything—kids, dogs, clouds, cars, and many of the neighbors. The photos were often touching, showing people, even in the midst of agonizing poverty, enjoying what they could.
The most interesting pictures for our purposes had been snapped on the night of April 27, 2004. There were probably a dozen of them. They’d clearly been taken on the sneak, and many were unfocused and often quite dark, but they were still revealing. The first showed a line of Chetniks entering Barupra, weapons in hand. Next were a couple of stills of what I assumed was the Chetnik commander, standing with a flashlight shining on him and with the electric megaphone raised to his mouth. The most dramatic photograph in the bunch was of the same officer, a moment later. The megaphone still hung from his neck but he’d dropped to one knee, his assault rifle raised and flame, like a lizard tongue, jumping from the barrel. Following in the sequence was a photo of the soldiers tearing the old plasterboard sheeting off one of the dwellings, and then several images of the residents marching off toward the trucks at gunpoint, their arms crowded with things precious to them, while young children carried dolls or, even more pathetically, walked with their hands in the air. The last shot was fairly blurry, and it required a minute to make out the forms: the bodies of Boldo and his son. The boy had fallen faceup on his father’s chest, as they lay together on the ground brown with blood.
I had visualized and revisualized what had happened in Barupra so often, based on Ferko’s account, that I was instantly comparing what was here to what I’d imagined. Having dismissed Ferko as largely a con, I was startled that so much of what had been captured in these images bore out his testimony. Yet I also felt exhausted by the constant chase for the truth with Ferko and cautioned myself against trying to reach conclusions. Some of the hardest words for an investigator, especially after lots of work, are ‘We’ll never know.’
Once I set that aside, I found myself nagged at by something else, a sense I might have known the commander. His form—his posture and narrow physique—in the three photos in which he appeared seemed familiar. I couldn’t place him, although I had a visceral memory that he was someone I liked. My best guess was that he was one of the soldiers I’d met under General Moen’s command.
Merriwell was CEO of Distance Communications, a job he’d held quite successfully since leaving the service in scandal. The corporate campus was in northern Virginia, not far from the Pentagon, on a piece of land with hills and big deciduous trees, surrounded by a fence of steel spears at least fifteen feet high. At the guardhouse, I gave my name and waited for the back-and-forth until I was admitted.