Page 73 of Tom Clancy Line of Sight

“What am I looking at?”

Aida pointed at the plaque on the wall listing the names of twenty-six people. “All killed by a Serbian artillery shell. Look.” Aida pointed at their feet. The pavement was marred by holes, almost like a flower. A large one in the center and smaller, irregular ones radiating forward from it. All of the holes were filled with a faded red resin.

“That’s called a Sarajevo Rose. It marks the spot where the shell exploded, killing people. There are dozens of them all over the city as a kind of memorial.”

Jack felt bad. He’d stepped on at least two of these since he’d been here, including this one, not even really noticing. But he saw that the Sarajevans walked over it without noticing, either.

“A shell from the siege?”

“Yes, when the city was cut off for over fourteen hundred days, the longest siege in modern European history. We were starving, thirsty, suffering. And then there were the snipers, and of course, the shelling.”

Jack imagined living in a modern American city surrounded and shelled for years. These people must have been overwhelmed with feelings of anger and helplessness.

“The war is why there’s no hope?”

“The Serbs did more than just kill and wound our bodies.”

“There must be a lot of resentment toward the Europeans as well for letting it go on for so long.”

“Yes. We are quite cynical these days about Europe. A bitter past, an uncertain future.”

“Those memories of the war are still with you, aren’t they?”

Aida nodded. “Yes, of course, though I was quite young.” She darkened with a bad memory.

Jack waited for her to share more, but she didn’t.

“We are all epicureans now, here in Bosnia,” she suddenly said with a smile, willing away the darkness. “As you can see by the people passing by, we’re all smoking and drinking and eating way too much because today we live and tomorrow we may die in another mortar attack.”

“The war ended twenty-three years ago,” Jack said. “Haven’t most people been able to move beyond it?”

“The fighting stopped, yes. But not the war. Not its root causes. Nothing has healed the lingering mistrust and animosity. It’s hard to find peace when there is no justice for the nearly forty thousand dead Bosniaks.”

“What do you mean, ‘no justice’?”

“Of course, I wouldn’t expect you to know our history. But it boils down to this: Almost nobody was prosecuted for war crimes against us, and nobody at NATO or the UN was held accountable for letting the genocidal war go on for years. And when we were finally winning the war against our enemies? Despite the NATO arms embargo against us? Then NATO threatened to bomb us, so a ‘peace’ was forced down our throats to protect our enemies.”

“I can understand why Bosniaks are still angry and still dealing with it.”

Jack wanted to add,But you can’t undo the past.

Aida searched Jack’s eyes. “Perhaps you do understand. But you should also know that some of us still have hope, at least a little.” She smiled. “And where there is hope, there is nothing that cannot be accomplished.”

She checked her watch, then flashed him another smile. “Let me show you why.”

MOSCOW

The middle-aged GRU intelligence analyst stared out of the open third-story window of his modest apartment toward Dubki Park, smoking oily Iranian tobacco, grateful the tram wasn’t rattling down the middle of the street this cool evening or, worse, bothersome children weren’t playing outside.

He was waiting for confirmation that an electronic Bitcoin deposit had been made in his account. The Iron Syndicate’s digital “wanted poster” on the Dark Web site he frequented had offered an extremely generous reward for any information that could be provided. Bitcoin was the Dark Web’s preferredcurrency, because of its anonymity, but the analyst insisted on it because he put no faith in the fiat currencies of the world’s central banks.

He was surprised when his reward was doubled after he provided both the man’s stolen image and its geographic metadata to the Iron Syndicate account.

That told him the wanted man was, indeed, wanted badly, and the syndicate was known to pay both well and on time. Still, both his job and his life were hanging in the balance if his treason were to be discovered by his superiors at GRU headquarters. On the other hand, his gambling debts and a drug-addicted girlfriend were significant drains on his meager government salary.

To his great delight, the analyst had been the duty officer when the identification request from Sarajevo came in, and he was the one who personally confirmed the identity of Jack Ryan, Jr., with a seventy-eight percent positivity score.

If Ryan was wanted by both the Iron Syndicate and the GRU, he was fucked either way. Might as well make a few Bitcoin off the man’s corpse while he could, he reasoned, inhaling the last deep draw of bitter smoke from the nub.