He drove east across the top of the city then south down to the woman’s apartment building near the railway tracks. Unit 801. He parked on the street and looked at his watch. It was going on four o’clock. He got out of the car and went into the building. He pressed the buzzer for her unit and waited. He pressed it again, holding it this time for fifteen seconds.
“Yes?” came a woman’s voice. “Who is it?”
“Kadro,” he said. “From home.”
A pause. A long pause. As though she were thinking. This is what he thought as he stood there. It would be naïve to assume every facet and angle of the operation would roll out exactly as planned. People changed their minds. Soldiers talked with bravado and offered up promises of infinite courage while drinking on the eve of battle. When the bullets and the mortars started to fly, it was another story. He knew about people and their limits. This is why one had to be adaptable, ready to transform within the moment. He waited, looking at some flyers scattered on the floor of the vestibule. Full-colour pictures of pizzas and buckets of chicken. Delivery to your door so you didn’t have to get off your ass and walk down to the pizzeria. The pizzas looked good and hot. His stomach growled. Then the door buzzed. He opened it and stepped inside.
They had assembled in that kitchen those years ago, around that long wood table. Back home. Would she ever see home again? It seemed like a lifetime already lived in this new country. At first the plan was easy to follow, the directives and the drills running your body as though you were on automatic pilot. The paperwork was handled through The Colonel’s unseen contacts, and she’d entered the country with a suitcase and a number to call. The one-eyed man she met through the immigration support centre, everything made to seem natural and quite by circumstance. The man got her the job as a seamstress in the little factory in the fashion district. She kept her head down and made dresses, or parts of them, and the women around her were all immigrants from some other place: Cambodia, Vietnam, and yes, Bosnians too, working for this Serb manager (though she had lied about her background and her hometown to get the job). She worked and she watched and she made notes. She saved some money and moved to that small apartment away from the guns and the gangs of Jane and Finch. She took the night course in English. Her only social time away from work, out of the apartment.
The teacher. This was her mistake. The Canadian with the sad eyes. The good heart, the small smile. She never should have gone for coffee when he asked. And then asked again. But it felt good to talk to someone—even if she felt her English made her sound like a grade school student. This was her mistake. She had lost so much, it seemed like a small gift she could allow herself, a simple coffee with a good soul. First you lose your village, then you lose your family, and finally you lose yourself. You die or choose to be born again. There had been something in the eyes of the sad Canadian, this teacher who made bad jokes about words they looked up in the dictionary—something there, yes, within the sadness a tiny spark of life. A flash of hope. And this was her mistake…
Donia Kruzik opened the door of her apartment. She stood there for a long moment. Kad stared at her, blinking. She opened the door all the way, and he stepped inside. An awkward moment as they stood there, each deciding on the proper greeting. Finally he moved to embrace her, but she shrank, and stepped back.
“Friend,” he said, “it has been a long journey. From there to here.”
He spoke in his native tongue, and it brought her back to who they were, where they had come from. She went to the tiny kitchen and put the kettle on to boil.
“I will make tea,” she said. “Are you hungry?”
He stood there. Watching her. He knew, and she knew that he knew. She took two cups down from the cupboard and got a box of Red Rose from the shelf. Something had changed. However small.
“I met the man. I have the tools,” he said.
He watched her. Then he moved to the kitchen and put a hand on her shoulder from behind. She froze. His hand was strong, and he held her there, rooted.
“Are you ready?” he said.
“Ready?”
“To do what we have sworn to do,” he said. “Have you forgotten already, sister? Has your time in this country erased the past? Have you lost your appetite to avenge our people? Please tell me this is not so.”
She bowed her head and nodded. “I am ready,” she said. “It’s a surprise, that’s all. You plan for the day for so many months and years, and then it is finally here. I apologize for not welcoming you. It was wrong of me. Please, come and sit.”
He moved his hand from her shoulder to his side but sensed the change in the weather, within the hesitation. This was the inherent risk for those sent to conduct surveillance prior to operations—a settling in, an assimilation of sorts. He would kill her if it came to that. If she was unwilling to follow through. It was her choice. That was his directive. All of them shared the same directive. The only way this would work is if every link in the chain remained connected, solid—and every link in turn knew it was expendable in the name of the cause. Hesitation or gross misconduct was to be dealt with in the most extreme manner. There was no half measure. They had signed their oath in the blood of their forsaken kin. Those who had fallen in the fields, in the rows. He had not come this far to turn away. Their trust was sacred.
She put a cup of tea in front of him, and he sat at the two-seat kitchen table. She sat with her cup and blew across the steaming water. Their eyes met and held for a long moment. They saw each other as they had been, younger and wounded, not as they had become. Changed.
“Can you share your work with me?” he said.
She went to the bedroom and returned with a single file folder. It was letter-sized, blue, and bore no writing or identifying features. She placed it on the table in front of him. He opened and began to read. The first page contained the photos of the two targets, their names typed beneath:
BOJAN KORDIC
GORAN MITOVIC
Then followed several pages of tiny notations—dates and times and tracked movements of the targets. Their home address, their work address, phone numbers, the names of their spouses and children and the schools they attended, their lives reduced to a series of comings and goings. She had done good work. The information was concise, invaluable in ensuring the two main criteria were met: that these were in fact the bona fide targets; and that it would be possible within the scheduling and routine of their lives to make contact and retreat with limited collateral damage or liability to the cause.
“Well done,” he said, and set folder aside.
“I have worked hard,” she said, “getting to know the people at work. The woman who works outside the manager’s office, this Bojan Kordic. His executive assistant. She keeps his schedule. We share a cigarette outside during break.”
“There will be time to talk of our plans,” he said. “It has been what, three years?”
“Almost,” she said.
“You look good. Healthy. This country agrees with you,” he said.
She caught his eyes, and he held her there, and she knew what he was looking for. Some sign that she had forsaken their plans. The first thing The Colonel had instructed in bringing them together for this: the greatest threat is not death, for we all died a long time ago. No, the greatest threat is that those of you who are sent abroad will succumb to the liberties and luxuries of your new country. Shopping malls and fast food drive-through restaurants, and women and men who lay down with anyone at all after a single dance in a night club. There will be those of you who forget in time why you are there in the first