Edge

ROŠTILJ

    LOCATED IN A DECLARED
    THERAPEUTIC REGION, AND
    IS RECOMMENDED BY ALL
    FOR CONVALESCENCES AFTER
    SURGERIES, ESPECIALLY
    HELPING FOR ACUTE AND
    CHRONIC DISEASES OF
    RESPIRATION ORGANS, AND
    ANEMIA. FULL BAR .
    He returned to the staging area, behind a decrepit garden shed that smelled of engine oil, petrol and piss, near the driveway to the restaurant. His two “comrades,” as he thought of them, were waiting here.
    James Bond preferred to operate alone but the plan he’d devised required two local agents. They were with the BIA, the Serbian Security Information Agency, as benign a name for a spy outfit as one could imagine. The men, however, were under cover in the uniform of local police from Novi Sad, sporting the golden badge of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
    Faces squat, heads round, perpetually unsmiling, they wore their hair close-cropped beneath navy-blue brimmed caps. Their woolen uniforms were the same shade. One was around forty, the other twenty-five. Despite their cover roles as rural officers, they’d come girded for battle. They carried heavy Beretta pistols and swaths of ammunition. In the backseat of their borrowed police car, a Volkswagen Jetta, there were two green-camouflaged Kalashnikov machine guns, an Uzi and a canvas bag of fragmentation hand grenades—serious ones, Swiss HG 85s.
    Bond turned to the older agent but before he spoke he heard a fierce slapping from behind. His hand moving to his Walther PPS, he whirledround—to see the younger Serb ramming a pack of cigarettes into his palm, a ritual that Bond, a former smoker, had always found absurdly self-conscious and unnecessary.
    What was the man thinking ?
    “Quiet,” he whispered coldly. “And put those away. No smoking.”
    Perplexity sidled into the dark eyes. “My brother, he smokes all time he is out on operations. Looks more normal than not smoking in Serbia.” On the drive here the young man had prattled on and on about his brother, a senior agent with the infamous JSO, technically a unit of the state secret service, though Bond knew it was really a black-ops paramilitary group. The young agent had let slip—probably intentionally, for he had said it with pride—that big brother had fought with Arkan’s Tigers, a ruthless gang that had committed some of the worst atrocities in the fighting in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
    “Maybe on the streets of Belgrade a cigarette won’t be noticed,” Bond muttered, “but this is a tactical operation. Put them away.”
    The agent slowly complied. He seemed about to say something to his partner, then thought better of it, perhaps recalling that Bond had a working knowledge of Serbo-Croatian.
    Bond looked again into the restaurant and saw that the Irishman was laying some dinars on the metal tray—no traceable credit card, of course. The partner was pulling on a jacket.
    “All right. It’s time.” Bond reiterated the plan. In the police car they would follow the Irishman’s Mercedes out of the drive and along the road untilhe was a mile or so from the restaurant. The Serbian agents would then pull the car over, telling him it matched a vehicle used in a drug crime in Novi Sad. The Irishman would be asked politely to get out and would be handcuffed. His mobile phone, wallet and identity papers would be placed on the boot of the Mercedes and he’d be led aside and made to sit facing away from the car.
    Meanwhile Bond would slip out of the backseat, photograph the documents, download what he could from the phone, look through laptops and luggage, then plant tracking devices.
    By then the Irishman would have caught on that this was a shakedown and offered a suitable bribe. He’d be freed to go on his way.
    If the local partner left the restaurant with him, they’d execute essentially the same plan with both men.
    “Now, I’m ninety percent sure he’ll believe you,” Bond said. “But if not, and he engages, remember that under no circumstances is he to be killed. I need him alive. Aim to wound in the arm he favors, near the elbow, not the shoulder.” Despite what one saw in the movies, a shoulder wound was usually as fatal as one to the abdomen or chest.
    The Irishman now stepped outside, feet splayed. He looked around, pausing to study the area. Was anything different? he’d be thinking. New cars had arrived since they’d entered; was there anything significant about them? He apparently decided there was no threat and both men climbed into the