"These are posted all over former Yugoslavia. There are almost no photos. Just silhouettes. The descriptions are a joke. Look at this one. It said, 'Bosko Boder. Six feet tall. Known to drive a taxi in Sarajevo. Wore gold."'
"Know him?" asked Remo.
"I could be he. It could be any Serb who drives a taxi and stands so tall."
"I'm not allowed to nail just any Serb. I have to nail the correct Serb."
"What means this 'nail'?" asked a brooding-faced man who looked like the local torturer. He had a scar running across his forehead like an exposed red vein. Remo grabbed the clipping from the lead interrogator's grasp. The third blacked-out face down in the second column mentioned a Serb concentration-camp guard with a jagged scar running from temple to temple.
"Your name wouldn't be Jaromir Jurkovic, would it?" asked Remo.
"I deny being Jurkovic!"
"And what if he is?" pressed the lead interrogator.
"If he is, I get to nail his sorry butt."
"It is illegal to nail Serbs in Sarajevo. Whatever that is." And the man snapped his fingers.
At that, Jagged Scar Jurkovic stepped behind Remo and laid two meaty paws on Remo's shoulders. Remo sensed the nearing pressure waves and allowed this to happen, although his reflexes screamed at his brain to strike back with all the power at his command. Which was considerable.
Instead, Remo reached up and casually slapped the crushing fingers to loose sausages.
Jaromir let out the screech of screeches and turned it into a high howling yowl. Coming out of his seat like casual lightning, Remo turned and quieted the man with an equally casual slap. His jawbone flew off its hinges and tried to jump out of his mouth. The envelope of skin that was his stubble-blue chin kept it from hitting the opposite wall. Finally, it stopped wobbling and just stayed slack. Jaromir's tongue hung out like a panting dog's.
He tried to speak, but without working mandibles, all he could manage was a hollow groan and a slow drool.
"That," said Remo, "is one definition of the verb to nail."
The interrogation room was quiet long enough for the alleged Jaromir Jurkovic to finish his groan. Then tensed hands slapped for side arms. That gave Remo permission to defend himself, and he did.
In place, he spun around. Arms floated high. One foot came up and out. Centrifugal force made the rest automatic.
The stiff fingers of Remo's left hand reamed out a man's eye sockets while the right jabbed another's Adam's apple. The foot, still rising, impacted a groin. The groin became suddenly and forever concave. The owner didn't care. The pain traveled up his spinal column and literally short-circuited his brain.
Remo left four groaning Serbs on the floor in various degrees of distress, thinking that it had been a detour worth taking.
Like most Americans, when the fractious ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia had broken out, he hadn't known for five months who was who. If the Russians had declared war on the Canadians, he would have known whom to root for-after some thought. If Germany had reinvaded France, he would have had a clue. If Korea had bombed Japan, he would have had a rooting interest.
But he didn't know what a Bosnian was. A Croat might as well have sat on a grocery shelf labeled Croats. Remo early on figured out that a Serb was a kind of low-rent Russian. But it was months before the TV news anchors had added the qualifier Muslim to the noun Bosnian and Remo was all set to cheer on the Croats because these days the only Muslims fighting anyone were car-bombing civilians. Until the first pictures of the emaciated Bosnians in Serb concentration camps started coming out, and it began to look as if the Serbs were the real bad guys.
To this day, he had no clue what a Croat was or did or looked like. But he knew that the Serbs were being bastards and Bosnians were being victimized.
He gave up on the United Nations before the UN rolled in. The UN was fine if there was no shooting. But they had simply stood around with their hands in their pockets while helpless families were being massacred in so-called safe haven after safe haven.
That lasted until NATO came in, but NATO wasn't much better. They actually surrendered confiscated weapons so Serbs could start up all over again. And when the call came to arrest war criminals and detain them, they ignored it. War criminals were celebrities in the former Yugoslavia. No one dared touch them because it threatened the fragile peace hammered out in Dayton, Ohio-of all places.
The way Remo saw it, a fragile peace in which war criminals were issued free passes was no peace at all.
Finally, Upstairs saw it this way, too.
"Go to Sarajevo," said the lemony voice of Remo's superior, Dr. Harold W. Smith. "And get General Tanko."
"Done," said Remo, who by trade was an assassin. In this case, he was an unofficial U.S. government sanction.
The idea was to nail the biggest war criminal of them all. Maybe that would scare the others into hiding or surrender.
Remo walked through the terminal at Sarajevo past bullet-pocked windows and other evidence of the long war that had shattered a once semicivilized nation and found his way to the cabstand.
The cabs were green. They looked as if they had been salvaged from a junk heap. Consulting his clipping, Remo went from driver to driver asking, "Are you Bosko?"
The fourth cabbie in line said, "I am Bosko."
"I need a ride to General Tanko's house."
"You have business with Tanko?"
"He said to ask for you," Remo lied.
"Come in. Come in. I will take you to Tanko."
The drive was depressing. Bombed-out buildings. Open sewers. All the amenities of warfare. The international community kept talking about rebuilding, but with all three sides still at one another's throat, no one wanted to pour money into the rat hole its inhabitants had made of Yugoslavia. So the people lived in squalor.
"You bring drugs, eh?" Bosko asked.
"I bring the most potent narcotic of all."
"Heroin, yes?"
"Heroin, no. It's called Death."
"Death. Is designer drug, yes?"
"Is ultimate drug," said Remo. "One hit, and you never want to wake up."
"You tip me with Death, of course."
"You read my mind," said Remo, smiling with thin lips that bordered on cruel.
Remo didn't look strong. He looked wiry. His build was average for a six-footer, but his wrists stood out. They were freakishly thick, as if they belonged to someone else. But there they were, holding his longfingered hands to his wiry forearms. The tendons in them stood out like white cord.
He didn't look old enough to have been a Marine in Vietnam, but he was. He didn't look like a former cop, except maybe around the eyes. Remo was that, too. And he certainly didn't look like the most dangerous killing machine wearing white skin. But he was. Remo was a Master of Sinanju, the first and ultimate martial art. The discipline that gave rise to every Asian fighting skill from kung fu to yubiwaza, Sinanju had been practiced exclusively by the head of a Korean house of assassins that originated in the village of Sinanju high in rocky, forbidding North Korea.
For five millennia, the House of Sinanju had been a Korean power. Now the secrets that transformed an ordinary man into the perfect fighting machine had fallen into non-Korean hands and were dedicated to furthering American aims. And Remo was the disciple who was focusing now on one aim in particular.
The house of General Tanko was in a suburb and very well maintained. No bullet holes. Intact glass. The paint looked fresh. It had once belonged to a Muslim doctor whose blood had seeped into the front door after they stood him before it and shot him to bone splinters. The fresh paint was to mask the blood.
The cab rolled up the graveled path, and at the entrance, the driver turned and smiled with big yellow teeth.
"You tip me with Death?"
Bosko's eyes were on Remo's eyes. They were dark and set deep into his skull. They were the eyes of a death's-head. In his last moment, Bosko thought exactly that.