“Treason?” Evan eased back a step and slid the gun into his waistband. “How do you get to treason? The powers that be wanted a hawkish foreign minister dispatched—”
“The foreign minister you assassinated was publicly hawkish, yes. Beating the drums about nukes. Lots of carefully cultivated sound bites to the media. That’s how he rose to power. But in private? He was willing to accede to our demands.”
“He was under U.S. influence?”
“Yes. And he also happened to be very close to Milošević. In fact, he was plotting his execution. With our help, no less.”
“But the president decided to change course?”
“No. The undersecretary of defense did.”
Evan’s skin tightened against the cool of the room. “You’re telling me that as undersecretary of defense, Jonathan Bennett ordered a political assassination in violation of the wishes and policy directives of the sitting U.S. president?”
“I am telling you precisely that.”
“And no one found out?”
The Mystery Man’s hand pulsed around a wandlike control, releasing another hit of morphine. He sighed, relief mixed with pleasure. “That’s the point of black programs,” he said. “No one can see them.”
Evan pictured the minister’s wife in her billowing aubergine dress, her mouth stretched wide, a scream of primal grief. He forced down a swallow. “Bennett would take that risk just to line the pockets of his defense-contractor cronies so they’d … what? Put him in the Oval Office one day? How much financial gain can be had from the murder of one foreign minister?”
The Mystery Man’s cracked lips stretched in a smile. “All the gain in the world,” he said. “Thanks to you, Slobodan Milošević was not killed. We lost our opportunity — and our window. Weeks after you dispatched the foreign minister, Milošević expanded his title from president of Serbia to president of Yugoslavia. And we know where that led. You see, Bennett and his backers didn’t want an ally in the foreign minister. They required an enemy in Milošević.”
“Why?”
“Had the Butcher of Belgrade been killed in 1997, that would have precluded the need for the bombings in Serbia a year and a half later.”
“They can’t have known that,” Evan said. “No one could have predicted that.”
“Not that specifically. But if you were a warmonger with chips to bet in 1997? You would’ve put every last one on a madman despot in the Balkans.” A smile moved the cracked lips. “Do you recall that bombing campaign?”
Evan wiped his mouth. “NATO ran thousands of air strikes. Almost every single town was targeted. Combat aircraft fired four hundred twenty thousand missiles and dropped almost forty thousand cluster bombs. They used graphite bombs to take down the power system.”
He paused to regain his composure. When it came to ordnance and war campaigns, Jack had drilled into him an aptitude for specifics. His head swam with them now: 25,000 housing units damaged or destroyed, 500 kilometers of roads, 600 kilometers of railways, 14 airports, 19 hospitals, 20 health centers, 44 bridges, 87 schools.
He found his voice again. “More than four thousand dead, thirteen thousand injured, half of them civilians, children. A billion dollars of damage to the infrastructure.”
“Ah,” the Mystery Man said. “But it made much more than that.”
Evan’s face slackened with disgust.
“Not just the bombs and the planes, the armored vehicles and the artillery,” the Mystery Man continued. “But you have to understand, you can’t buy a testing ground like that. Our defense firms finally got to flex their muscles, haul all that gear out of R&D and see what it could do. Ordnance and explosives testing in a real theater at zero cost. And that was just the start. You remember what was politically noteworthy about the bombing campaign, don’t you?”
The answer spun just out of reach, like a flicked coin. And then it settled, and Evan saw the face of it. “It was the first time NATO ever used military force without the approval of the UN Security Council.”
“Correct. Which allowed the Pentagon, on the heels of that attack, to seize a thousand acres of land in Kosovo. They built a colossal U.S. military base there, one of the biggest in the world.”
“Camp Bondsteel.”
“We’re talking seven thousand troops, fifty-two helipads, twenty-some Black Hawks, a few dozen tanks. The contracts that were awarded then?” The Mystery Man gave a weak whistle. “More commas than a Russian novel. And the thing is? We don’t even need it. We never did. It’s not an air base. It’s not connected to the sea. It doesn’t hold a strategic position. Truth is, we should’ve mothballed it years ago. And yet we’ve been paying to supply it for nearly two decades.”
The recycled air with its whiff of rubbing alcohol and iodine was making Evan feel sick.
“So let’s return to your question,” the Mystery Man said. “How much financial gain can be had from the murder of one foreign minister?” He tried to lift his head again, but it just rustled dryly against the pillowcase. “A kingdom’s worth.”
Evan took an unsteady step back and sat on the sill of the box window.
The Mystery Man read his face. “You were a nineteen-year-old kid.”
“I pulled the trigger.”
The relentless hiss of the oxygen kept on, a backdrop for Evan’s mounting dismay. A single bullet had opened the floodgates. A war crime. Treason. A nation destroyed, four thousand dead, and a new chapter in American imperialism. The weight of it threatened to crush him.
Remorse spread through him, heated and seething. He tried to get his arms around it, wrestle it down, reshape it into something sharp and unforgiving, something he could weaponize.
The Mystery Man adjusted the tube beneath his nose. “You ensured that this was all pinned on an anonymous Chechen shooter. If you were to say now that you were behind the scope, it would point to America. And if it points to us, it’ll point to Bennett. Now you understand why he has to have you killed.” He shook his head, the tufts of hair sparse and thin. “The wolves are massing at the White House gates. You can bet he hears them howling every night when he goes to sleep.” He closed his eyes, the lids translucent and veined. “I hear them myself sometimes.”
Evan stood again. The light from the window streamed over his shoulders, his shadow falling across the Mystery Man. Evan waited for him to open his eyes again.
Then he asked, “Why are you still alive? Why did Bennett let you live?”
“Is that what you call this? Living?” The Mystery Man grinned flatly. “Because clearly I don’t represent a threat. At least for many more days. Plus, I had an insurance policy.”
He lifted a hand and pointed past the desk, a shawl of loose skin draped around the bone of his forearm. “Left file cabinet. Bottom drawer.”
Evan circled the desk, crouched, and slid the drawer open. It held a number of hanging files. He thumbed through them. Redacted operation reports, redacted intelligence briefings, redacted after-action reviews.
Evan looked from the blacked-out papers across the room to the Mystery Man. “These are useless.”
The answer came as a wheeze. “Behind the drawer.”
Evan pulled the drawer out all the way and then wiggled it free of its tracks. Lying flat on the floor, he peered into the empty slot.
A hatch had been cut into the metal rear of the cabinet.
Aligned with a jagged mouth of drywall.
Inside the wall rested a single manila file.
Mashing his cheek to the cabinet, Evan strained to reach it. With his fingertips he managed to slide it out.