When she finally opened her eyes he was there.
She turned her face and smiled foggily at him. “It would be you, wouldn’t it, Ty…”
“I told you, didn’t I, I wasn’t just passing through.”
“No, maybe you’re not.” Her pupils shined with a sparkle of green back in them. Then she looked away. “I’m a terrible mother, Ty. Marc wants more. I just-”
“No.” He moved closer. “You’re not a terrible mother. Any more than I was a terrible dad. I called him. I found his number on your cell. He’s on his way back.”
She shut her eyes, tears making their way down her cheeks, shaking her head. “I’m so ashamed…”
“No, no, don’t…,” Hauck said. He winked. “You remember what they say about crazy…”
She nodded with her hands over her face. A tear fell onto the sheet. “I know.” She looked at him. “I wish…” He knew what she wanted to say. What maybe they both were thinking. I wish it were you. Why couldn’t it be you? And in a way maybe he was feeling it too. Things just hadn’t worked that way.
She smiled, sniffing back her tears. “What did you say? When you called him…Who you were.”
“I just said I was a friend.”
She smiled, looking back up, monitors beeping her vitals, IV pumping life back into her blood. She seemed to draw some comfort from the word. “You are, Ty.” She nodded. “You are.”
They spoke once or twice after she was released and on her way to getting better.
Then they didn’t see each other again for four years.
See, you were wrong. Hauck smiled, staring out at the sound. You were always wrong. I wasn’t just passing through.
He took hold of his cell and scrolled to the familiar number he was searching for. He pushed Send and waited for the call to connect.
Annie answered on the third ring. “Hey.”
“Hey yourself,” he said. “Busy?”
“Swamped. Manuel’s out sick. I’m holding my end down and doubling on desserts too. Can’t really talk now. Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” He stood up, leaned against the railing. The plane he had been following had disappeared. “I just wanted to let you know,” he said, “something’s come up. I’m going to be away for a while.”
PART III
CHAPTER FIFTY
The international airport at Belgrade in Serbia looked like any other modern European terminal-sweeping curves of glass and digital flight boards. Hauck barely dozed on the flight over, his anticipation running wild.
He had told the people at Talon that he needed a couple of days off, and that ran into Memorial Day weekend. So he kept what he was doing to himself. All he told Annie was that he wouldn’t be around for a few days. And she only asked back, a little helplessly, What are you getting involved in, Ty?
Thibault had fled through Paris. Hauck felt pretty certain that if Thibault needed to disappear, if he needed to blend into a backdrop where the outside world would never find him, he knew where he would be.
Richard Snell had traced wire transfers every month from Thibault’s RBS account in the UK to a local branch of AstraBanca in a town called Novi Pazar in southern Serbia. The recipient’s name was Maria Radisovic. That had to be Thibault’s family back home, Hauck figured, a sister or his mother. It seemed right that no one would judge him where he had grown up in Serbia for what he had done in the war. He would have family to protect him. He could blend back into his roots.
On the flight over, Naomi mapped out how tricky and sensitive this all was. He couldn’t help but notice how cute she looked out of work clothes, in slim-fitting jeans, a white T-shirt, and a loose lavender sweater. She explained that even if they were able to locate Thibault, the last people the government wanted to get involved were the Serbian police or their security arm, the BIA. First, there was no acting extradition treaty between the two countries. There was some Serbian basketball player who had assaulted a fellow student while in college in the U.S. The legal battle to get him back to stand trial had gone on for years. And if it got wrapped up in the fight to bring back someone who had been part of atrocities in the Kosovo War, the story would be in headlines all over the world. The Serbian government would never back down. The press there would go crazy if they let a suspected war criminal be ushered back to the U.S. for a lesser crime. Naomi’s team would lose whatever leverage they had against him.
The plan, as she mapped it out, was first to simply see if they could locate him. The next step would be determined then. They might try to bargain with him. Use the threat of turning him over to the Serbian government to be prosecuted for war crimes as leverage.
Then there was always the next option, which Naomi didn’t seem inclined to talk about. This was a U.S. government action. The stakes were high. This was looked at as a Homeland Security issue. Thibault was a vital person of interest. There were professionals who could be brought in-to interrogate him or to whisk him surreptitiously out of the country.
But the first step was to see if he was even there.
Upon landing, they passed through immigration on a diplomatic visa. They registered their firearms. Hauck was surprised and impressed that Naomi even carried one. They got their bags and rented a midsize Ford diesel. They got directions to the central highway south, the E75; plugged their hotel, the Vrbak in Novi Pazar, into the GPS; and drove past the industrial areas that ringed the city, into the flat Balkan countryside, which became picturesque green hills and small, rustic villages for the three-hour drive.
Hauck took the wheel, excitement fending off the jet lag. He prayed his instincts were right and that he hadn’t dragged both of them on a senseless wild-goose chase. But Naomi (and her superiors) agreed it was worth the bet. They got to know each other a little along the way. “Hauck” and “Agent Blum” turned into “Ty” and “Naomi.” She told him how she had first gotten involved in working for the Treasury. How she had started out studying music at Princeton.
“Music theory,” she said, noticing his surprise, but brushed past it so as not to bore him. “Sort of academic stuff.”
She told him how her brother had enlisted out of college after 9/11 and then had the training accident that had cost him his legs. She told him how she felt compelled to follow in his steps. How she had ended up in the investigative corps, worked the Nisoor Square and Tabitha shooting incidents, which ended up as army whitewashes. Fighting off sleep, she shared the story of how one of the convoys she had been riding in had been ambushed, a small child by the side of the road struck by shrapnel from the IED. How with small-arms fire raging all around, she had crawled over and had to bag the kid with a makeshift ventilator while the medics attended to their own. She told him how fire was whizzing back and forth pretty heavily, how she didn’t know if she was going to be hit. “I just blew and blew into the kid’s chest, everything going on around me, until reinforcements finally came, and then I stopped, sitting there on the dusty road, his blood all over me. I realized he had died.
“His name was Ahmed. He had this Michael Jackson T-shirt on.” Naomi shrugged. “I’m not sure why I’m telling you this.”
“You did what you could,” Hauck replied, watching her gaze drift out the window. “What you did was brave. You can’t ask for more.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I’m not into any more whitewashes, Ty; you understand that. You can always do more.” Then, switching subjects, she said, “What do you think, we have maybe another two hours?”
Sixty kilometers south, they crossed back west, onto more local roads, cutting through steeper, mountainous valleys and through centuries-old hillside towns. The roofs were always red and clung to the slopes, the churches old and stone with Serbian Orthodox markings, and old men in caps towed goats or cattle out of the way of young people scooting by on mopeds. The local signs were generally in Serbian, but Hauck always recognized a “taverna” by its signs for Jemel beer, Pepsi, and Jugopetrol.