A battle between good and evil has been joined here. Contrary to what the world's human, political, and military "Great Powerless Powers" have to say, what is at present happening in Bosnia has nothing to do with nationality or with religion, languages, or heritage. Here the gates of Hell have opened, and out of the darkness have emerged monsters – worse than monsters – capable of raping six-year-old girls, of burning people alive, of destroying age-old monuments.

But by destroying the mosques of Ferhadija and Arnaudija, they have not only destroyed a cultural heritage of Islam: they have annihilated the soul of sacred places.

Those who are capable of such deeds are not welcome here. You may remember a time half a century ago when others like them arrived at midnight to round up and take away millions of people who never returned. Those who remained consoled themselves with the thought that it could not happen to them, since they weren't Jews. The next night they came again, looking for Communists, and on the third night those who remained had nothing left to console themselves with, because now it was their turn.

Here in Sarajevo, we have been deceived once again. Promises of planes, food, and aid have been broken. Having lied to us, the criminals have continued to destroy Zepa, Sarajevo, Mostar, Jablanica, and Goradze. As well as monuments, they have destroyed history, hope, and goodness. It is their aim to destroy everything, down to the last Bosnian. They will go on destroying until all that remains is evil, hatred, nationalism, and fascism.

May God forgive them. We here, unimportant and naïve as we may be, will try to preserve in our souls at least a trace of the sense of justice that we once had. We Sarajevans have been able to conquer hate. We pride ourselves on being different in that respect.

Zlatko Dizdarević

Savajevo – A War Journal

Now

Nearly four in the morning, and the city streets were still populated with cars, with pedestrians. Thinner now that at mid-day, but far from empty. Even on a holiday weekend, the late-nighters had not given up and the early risers were headed to work.

The lights never went out in New York, and the city was never entirely asleep. But it was quiet enough, there by the shore, for Control's purposes.

He walked towards the woman on the bench with his heart racing. From the back, he could see how her hair peeked from beneath her baseball cap. It didn't come quite to her collar. He mourned, for one moment, that smooth, shiny hair that he had tangled his fingers in so many times, that he had buried his face in and gathered her scent. She had been a blond, a brunette, occasionally a red-head. But always the silken length, the warmth and the weight of it.

Gone.

He walked around the bench in a wide circle. He did not want to startle her, though he was certain she'd heard his approach. When he stood in front of her, she kept her head down, her eyes hidden beneath the brim of the cap.

He said, quietly, "I hear you got your hair cut."

"I had lice."

"Charming." He sat next to her on the bench, with a body width between them. At her feet was a circle of dandelion parts, the heads all torn from the stems. "How are you, my love?" he asked.

She was silent for a long time. Then she raised one hand and took the baseball hat off.

Her hair was shockingly short and horribly symbolic.

She would not look at him. Control studied her profile. She was completely still, her expression blank. McCall was right; she had gone phantom. Her body was in New York; her soul was still in the Balkans. And it was broken.

"I can get you out tonight," he said.

Again there was silence. She stared very intently towards the Statue of Liberty, glowing across the placid water. "You know the frog in the boiling water?"

Control nodded. Urban myth, probably: If you put a frog in a pot of water and heated it one degree every hour, the frog could not detect the temperature change and would stay there until the boiling water killed him. "Are you cooked?" he asked.

"If you take the frog out before she's quite dead," Lily answered, "and throw her in a nice cool pond – give her her freedom – the shock will kill her anyhow."

"Ahh." He didn't know if that was technically true, but the allegory made sense. His heart sank. "You want to stay in."

"Yes. No." Her hands stayed in her lap, but her fingers twisted. "I can't go back to the field. I can't, and I don't want to. But I can't leave, either. I can't wake up tomorrow completely free of all of it." She glanced at him, then looked away again. "I'm not making any sense."

"You're saying you need to rest on the desk for a while before you go hopping off into the pond," Control interpreted. "That's easy enough to understand."

"Not for long," Lily promised. "Just … long enough for my skin to cool."

Control nodded. "That can be arranged."

There was a long silence. Lily said, "I love you."

Control wanted to reach for her, to gather her in his arms. He didn't. They were in the open, exposed, and anyone who followed him could easily still be watching. But caution was not what restrained him. He knew where Lily was, in her mind. His touch would not comfort her. It would only make her feel more distant, more alien. Her body was here, her mind still in the war zone. She was struggling. And his touch would only serve to make her more aware of how far away and lost she was.

"Tell me how to help you," he said.

Lily sighed, very softly. "Everyone offers to help. And nothing helps. I can't … I can't … " Tears cracked in her voice. "Just watching, that helps. Watching people be normal. Watching them fight over cabs and primp in front of windows and … that helps. And walking helps. Moving. Not being shot at."

Control stood up. "Come on."

Lily looked at him, and for the first time there was life in her eyes. "Where?"

"Anywhere. No where. Just walk."

"But …" She looked around anxiously. "If someone sees us …"

"They'll think I'm a hard-hearted bastard who wants my debriefing now and won't even let you get any sleep. Come on."

She rose slowly. They walked together along the shore, side by side but not touching, not talking. Not yet. Only walking, only together into the sunrise.

Now

From a half-concealed parking space three hundred yards away, James Simms squinted, puzzled.

He had not meant to follow Control from the airstrip. He wasn't a complete idiot, and he had a pretty good sense of self-preservation. But the spymaster had driven the same direction Simms went to get home. Completely innocent, that he was behind his boss.

Control was much too easy to follow.

Ten minutes into the drive, Simms had made the conscious choice to tail him. He'd dropped back in traffic, missed a light on purpose. The spymaster hadn't noticed. It was all much too easy.

Either Control had known he was there and didn't care, or he was entirely distracted.

Simms knew Control had had a personal hand in the release of the gruesome photos of the gravesite in Srebrenica. But that card had been played now; it shouldn't be worrying him. Or was there something else to come? Where the hell was he going at this hour of the morning?

It entered Simms' memory that Lily Romanov had flown home with Nancy Campbell's body. He'd found it curious, at first. Most of the agents from Bosnia were pulling back to Germany or Hungary. Why was she coming all the way home? But knowing that she had brought back Anne Keller – Anne Keller Kostmayer, and wasn't that a pretty bit of timing? – and most likely the film that was now all over the news, her trip home made sense.

If Control really was having a relationship with the courier, and he was going to meet her now, wouldn't he be a lot more careful about being tailed?

But there they were, Simms thought, sitting on a bench looking at the water. And his interpretation was falling apart.

If your lover has just come back from a war zone, and if she's been witness to the horrors that he'd seen on the television screen, wouldn't you embrace her? You wouldn't, Simms mused, sit on a park bench two feet away from her.

He watched as the courier took off her hat. Even at a distance, he could see how short her hair was. Military regulation short – for a man. What the hell was that all about? Maybe it wasn't her at all. He could only see the back of her head and her shoulders. He was only assuming it was Romanov.

They spoke for a moment or two. He could see their heads moving as they talked. But not their hands. It was a quiet conversation. Control stood up. His contact stood up also and looked around. It was Romanov, after all.

The two began to walk along the river bank, away from him on the pathway. There was still a foot of space between them.

Simms scratched his head. He'd been back and forth since the Fall of the Wall party about his boss and his lead courier. He'd never been able to prove that they were lovers. He'd never been able to disprove it, either. Every time the evidence began to weigh on one side or the other, something else happened to even the scales. After this long, Simms thought, if you can't prove it, you're probably wrong.

If they were lovers, in this situation, they'd be in each other's arms.

If they weren't lovers – what the hell were they?

There was clearly a relationship between them. There had been too many meetings like this, covert, away from the office. But if the relationship was not romantic in nature, what exactly was it?

A sick chill crept up Simms' spine. If she wasn't Control's lover, perhaps she was his mole.

She was only a courier.

But she was smart, observant, and she was everywhere. And how many times had he wondered why she was still only a courier? How many missions and operations had she run for Simms, and then reported under the table to Control? The Old Man knew everything; of course he had a network of spies throughout the Company.

How in the hell had Simms missed it?

But he knew how. It was a classic misdirection. He'd been so busy looking for the sexual angle that he'd missed all the other implications. If Romanov had been a man, he'd have seen her true intent much earlier. But because she was a beautiful woman, he'd assumed that Control's interested was physical.

It had been an idiotic mistake.

The only comfort Simms had was that he had not done anything behind Control's back that was counter to his interests. He had kept his boss informed of his activities, their intent if not the details. He had not been working with those in the Company who were plotting Control's downfall, most notably Jason Masur. Aside from some minor technical issues, Simms was largely blameless. Whatever Control had heard about him was not actionable.

Which was more than he could say for at least three of his colleagues.

Simms took a deep breath. With the Balkan conflict fully enflamed, Control had needed all his people at hand, regardless of their questionable loyalty. If a peace accord was reached, the spymaster might be free to turn his attention to housekeeping matters. It had happened before.

Simms considered himself reasonably safe. Probably. But some of the others …

None of the others were out here watching Control in the middle of the night.

Chilled, Simms rolled up his window, locked his doors, and went home.

It wasn't until he was safe behind his own door that it occurred to Simms that Control might have been so easy to follow on purpose.

Now

Mickey Kostmayer lay on his belly in the brush, panting silently. He could hear his heart pounding, feel the blood rushing to his head, his limbs. He was getting too damn old to run up mountains, he thought. He looked at his watch, listening intently as the seconds ticked by.

Twenty-eight seconds behind him, he heard the first boots on the ground.

Kostmayer grinned. Almost half a minute faster than men half his age? Maybe he wasn't that old after all.

His pursuers slowed, confused. They listened for his movement. He hadn't cared how much noise he'd made running up the mountain; he'd been easy to track. But now he was still, and they didn't know how to find him. Their pursuit became slower, less organized. Though it would be a while before they admitted it, they'd lost him.

Mickey's breathing and heart rate were already nearly back to normal. He relaxed onto the leaves. Being still was hard for new agents to learn, but it was critical. You couldn't run forever, but you could lay still all day long if you worked at it.

Part of the militia chasing him had moved way off to his right. They were splitting up, spreading out. He could move now and pick them off, a few at a time. But there were nearly fifty of them. He wouldn't get them all. So though it was tempting, he lay still.

Be still, and live.

Flies buzzed in the brush a few yards to his right.

Very deliberately, he touched his thumb to the gold ring on his left hand. You promised her you'd live, he reminded himself. He meant to keep that promise.

He refused to speculate about where Lily Romanov had gotten wedding bands.

To the north, he could hear the whine of jet engines, the thump of shells falling. Explosions muffled into thunder by distance and the mountains.

Anne would be back in New York by now. A few more hours, maybe, and her pictures of the mass grave would be all over the papers, all over the news. Maybe they were already out. Maybe this stupid, bloody war had finally started to unravel.

Maybe. Wars could be damned persistent things. Like wildfires, easy to start and hard to stop. And when you'd hosed one down, stomped it out and buried it in sand, you'd turn around and find another already blazing at your back, sometimes from the same sparks.

But this war, this one would be ending. He hoped.

He was sick to death of climbing this damn mountain. Sick of snow and cold, sick of trees and brush and climbing. Sick of rivers clogged with corpses. Sick of stupidity and prejudice and selfishness. Sick of the complete lack of common sense that seemed to grip this whole damn country. But mostly, sick of this mountain.

Something nice and flat, warm and dry next time, he thought. Maybe a nice desert war.

The militia continued to move away. They were following the trail, the game trail, the refugee trail. He'd left it three minutes ago. They weren't going to find him.

The flies continued to buzz industriously. A soft breeze brought a whiff of decomposition.

Mickey raised his head, hoping it wasn't another body. Something gold and white and black was hidden in the brush. Something dead. He looked around, then pushed up to his elbow. Not a human, certainly. It was too small, too hairy. Some kind of animal. From the gentleness of the smell, it had been dead quite a while.

He couldn't hear his pursuers any more. Silently, he rose to his feet and stepped towards the carcass.

The skull had a bullet hole through the center of it. Gold fur with brown spots, downy white underneath, blackened flesh and whitened bones, were all that remained of the Balkan lynx.

In my dreams, I walk among the ruins

Of the old part of town

Looking for a bit of stale bread.

My mother and I inhale the fumes of gunpowder.

I imagine it to be the smell of pies, cakes, and kebab.

A shot rings out from a nearby hill. We hurry.

Though it's only nine o'clock, we might be hurrying

Towards a grenade marked "ours".

An explosion rings out in the street of dignity.

Many people are wounded –

Sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers

I reach out to touch a trembling, injured hand.

I touch death itself.

Terrified, I realize this is not a dream.

It is just another day in Sarajevo.

Edina, 12, from Sarajevo

I Dream of Peace – Images of war by children of former Yugoslavia

The End

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