Petrović knows you ride past his house on your bike.”
“He said that?”
“He saw us together last week. I don’t know that he recognized you from Djoba, but don’t give him a chance to think about you. For now, drive to work. And don’t chase him.”
Anna lowered her head and said, “You don’t have to remind me. That was my last chase.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scold. I’m worried that he could pop you from his front step. You know that better than I do.”
She nodded vigorously. Then she hugged him again, hard.
Joe patted Anna’s back, opened her car door, watched as she buckled in.
She said, “Thank you so much,” with a breaking voice. “I thank you for my son and my husband.”
Joe said, “Be safe,” closed her door, and stood on the sidewalk as she drove away.
He headed back to the FBI building. Once he was inside his office, he locked his door, texted Lindsay: It went well. I’ll tell you all about it tonight.
He booted up his computer and dug back into the files he’d begun collecting on the ethnic cleansing that had devastated Bosnia in the mid-1990s. The images came up on his screen and flooded his mind; stories told by the women separated from their families and brutalized, men detained and forced to sing Serbian songs and to commit sex acts upon one another as they waited to be executed.
There were fresh images now; Anna’s half-told story of her imprisonment in a cell-like room in the rape hotel as the very men who’d killed her husband and child repeatedly assaulted her. One of them had been Petrović himself.
He remembered Anna’s expression as she told him about the horrific assaults, and could almost feel her terror and revulsion, with the threat of imminent death something to wish for.
He got up, walked down the hall to the coffee room. Ten minutes later he was back at his desk, going through his files, looking for something that would reveal more about Slobodan Petrović.
Petrović was mentioned in hundreds of the documents Joe had accumulated. His military career was all there; a soldier moving up steadily through the ranks, peaking with his command of the massacre at Djoba. There were photos of him in uniform inspecting a barn where dozens of people had hanged themselves from the rafters, choosing suicide over the torture and humiliation of death by Petrović’s hands.
Joe stared at those bodies and at the shadows they cast on the floorboards, Petrović’s sadistic smile and his triumphant expression.
There had been witnesses at Petrović’s trial, but while Filip Nikolic and his top commanders had received life sentences, Petrović had been sentenced to only five years, despite the number of witnesses against him and the incontrovertible proof of his unspeakable crimes. Then Petrović had been released.
Joe got up from his desk, crossed his office, and leaned against the window frame as the sun sank below the shabby buildings across the street. His mind was still swimming in the horrors of the war in Bosnia, but it was time to narrow his focus to the commitments he had made. He was one man working from an office in San Francisco. He could probably get Steinmetz to assign another agent or two to this case, but unless or until he had something worth the manpower, he was working alone.
He’d promised Anna he’d try to neutralize Petrović. The other commitment, the official one, was to Steinmetz, either to make a case quickly or to walk away.
As of this moment, Joe didn’t know if he could do either.
But he was determined to do his best.
CHAPTER 43
Joe was at his desk at the San Francisco branch of the FBI, but his thoughts were in Quantico, Virginia.
As clearly as if he were there now, he remembered sitting at a long table in the basement conference room at Quantico. He had been a profiler with the Behavioral Science Unit. With him at that meeting had been a dozen and a half officers from the counterterrorism watch center: FBI, CIA, military.
He hadn’t been thinking about Petrović when he’d been sitting in that subterranean room, watching the video that legal attachés from the American embassy in Sarajevo had sent by pouch—a video of the ICC tribunal handing sentences down to the convicted war criminals that stood before them.
The worst of them was Filip Nikolic, the commander responsible for eight thousand deaths in Srebrenica. More than five hundred witnesses had testified against him. More than ten thousand exhibits had been presented