Page 52 of Tom Clancy Line of Sight
He reached the bookstore in no time, a modern European-style shop featuring children’s books in several languages in the large picture window.
The young woman behind the counter greeted him with a warm smile. Her name tag identified her as Aida Curic as well as the store manager. A thick lick of blond hair peeked out beneath her fashionable pink patterned headscarf. She spoke softly and with an accent somewhat different from what he’d heard before, but she was extraordinarily polite and even interested in meeting him, possibly because no one else was in the store and she was bored.
After handing her his business card, he noticed that her left eye tended toward an outward drift—something that could’ve been caused by an injury. His hopes rose. This might well be the woman he’d been searching for. But he didn’t feel comfortable asking the shy young woman about her lazy eye, and he was glad he hadn’t when she informed him she had moved to Sarajevo from Izmir, Turkey, only in the past year.
She explained to him that there were as many Bosniaks living in Turkey as there were in Bosnia itself, and that Turks and Bosniaks both here and in Turkey thought more highly of one another than they did of Americans. She assured him she did not mean this as an insult.
He assured her he didn’t take it that way and thanked her for her time, trying desperately to hide his disappointment behind his practiced smile.
Time to return to his apartment and regroup.
—
Jack marched back down the street past the corner of the assassination and caught himself almost missing it because he was running through options in his brain about next steps. Discouraged as he was that all eleven Aidas didn’t pan out, he was more determined than ever to see if he could still find her.
But how?
It was six hours earlier in Virginia and way too early to call Gavin, but he had a couple ideas.
As he was crossing the Latin Bridge, it suddenly occurred to him that there was something else about Bookstore Aida that caught his eye. The lick of blond hair strategically located on her forehead wasveryblond. So much so, he wondered if it was natural.
By the time he jogged up the staircase two steps at a time and opened the apartment’s heavy steel door, he’d already composed an e-mail to Gavin in his mind. After hitting the head and washing up, he opened up his laptop and logged on to the apartment Wi-Fi and Google-searched a factoid he seemed to recall about blondes.
He then composed the e-mail, first of all thanking Gavin for the outstanding list of names, which, unfortunately, didn’t pan out, so would he mind putting together another list for him? This time searching for brown-haired women instead.
To drive home the point, he added a link to an article he found and explained to Gavin that a lot of young women who are blond when they’re children find that their hair turns brown or chestnut just before they enter puberty. He signed off with “Let me know your thoughts” and “Thanks again.”
Jack was a huge fan of Gavin’s, even though the tubby ITgenius was kind of a smart-ass. He knew Gavin was covered up to his eyeballs in work, and he knew he was asking him to go the extra mile, but Gavin was his best shot at finding the elusive Aida Curic.
He hit the send button and went to the living room to check out the local TV, always a great window into any culture. He flipped through a dozen channels. They were all American programs, mostly reality shows, with a few familiar cop and medical dramas, all in English but with subtitles. No wonder everybody around here spoke good English. The only reality show he ever watched was on there, too:Forged in Fire, where bladesmiths and farriers competed to forge iconic combat swords from history.
But he hadn’t come to Sarajevo to watch American television. He kept searching until he could find true local programming, and that was a news show. It wasn’t in English and it didn’t have English subtitles, but the shaky, handheld footage of covered bodies on the grass and cops swarming around what looked like the smoldering ruins of a barn told him all he needed to know.
Bad shit happens here, too.
27
Since Gavin probably wouldn’t be responding for a while, Jack decided to venture back out and do some sightseeing, and finally find a place to grab somecevapifor lunch.
Jack decided that the first place he wanted to check out was the assassination museum. He followed his familiar route to the Latin Bridge. From his Google search on the plane to London, he’d learned that Sarajevo was eighty percent Muslim, so he presumed that eight out of ten people he passed were Muslims. There were a half-dozen women in very casual headscarves like the one Bookstore Aida wore, but far more women wore nothing on their heads, and some were dressed scandalously. Same with the men: jeans, soccer shirts, polos. There was nothing to indicate their religious affiliations at all, save for the one old man he saw shuffling along, his hands clasped behind his back, prayer beads rolling absentmindedly through his fingers.
It was always exciting for Jack to find himself in a new country and a new culture. He tried to drink in everything he sawand encountered, down to the smallest detail. He was on vacation, not an op, but he was trained to be observant. Situational awareness was the first and best form of self-defense, and that meant being aware of one’s surroundings and the people in them. As it turned out, that skill set came in really handy on vacations.
And though he couldn’t be sure, the man in the sport coat and Ray-Bans seemed to be tracking him from a discreet distance, and doing so better than most.
Or maybe not. Sometimes his training made him paranoid.
Jack crossed the bridge and the traffic light and entered the modest little museum, paying about six dollars American at the small ticket window inside. He could stand in one place and glance around the room and see just about everything, but since he bought the ticket he decided to take advantage of the exhibits.
The subject matter covered more than just the assassination, depicting life in Sarajevo from 1878 to 1918. It started with a display of immaculate breech-loading rifles with ivory inlay from the nineteenth-century revolt against the Ottoman Turks. He proceeded on to some furniture displays, singing competition medals, famous mustachioed administrators, and other random “slice of life” presentations. What really caught Jack’s eye were the two life-sized mannequins depicting the archduke and his wife in their regalia.
The only other people in the little museum were four teenage kids bowing and curtseying before the royal couple, half clowning around and, in a way, not. One of the girls politely asked Jack if he’d take a photo of them doing that again, so he grabbed her Samsung Galaxy phone and snapped a couple shots as they repeated their genuflections.
On the other side of the creepy mannequins was the glass-box display that he’d come to see. The first thing that grabbed his attention was the picture of the assassin, Gavrilo Princip, the nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb who killed the couple and sparked a holocaust. The guy didn’t look like a fiery revolutionary or a thoughtful ideologue or even very bright. Apparently, he was too short to be accepted into regular military service. There was nothing in his eyes or his stature or his looks that drew your attention. He was just an ordinary kid with a thin mustache and a bad haircut.
But unlike other teenagers his age, he had the blood of millions on his hands, or, at least, the blood of two people he considered oppressors. Maybe Princip read Jefferson just as Ho Chi Minh had—quoting Jefferson in stinging rebuke of his American enemies during the Vietnam War.
The Serbian assassin wanted what every nationalist wanted: freedom and independence for his people from the oppression of foreign powers. No wonder a lot of Serbs still considered him a hero. But to everyone else, he was just another terrorist.
