No Pages Removed
After a source deliberately exposes him to Russian operatives, American intelligence officer Owen Fletcher escapes wounded into Belgrade—and learns that the relocation he promised the man was never approved. With his cover destroyed and his source determined to surrender evidence implicating them both, Owen rejects a chance to leave alone and risks Serbian custody to get them before investigators. Survival costs him his livelihood, friendships, and operational freedom; accountability means accepting an accurate account of his own failures without editing away the blame.
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Owen changed “probable handling damage” to “forklift damage” and checked the photographs once more. At twelve ten AM on October twenty-four, two thousand twenty-four, he sat at the kitchen table in his Dorćol apartment, three flights above the street in Belgrade. A refrigerator motor rattled behind him. The carrier’s driver had damaged the crate before loading, and a small machine shop in Kragujevac should not have to pay for it.
He sent the assessment, then opened the unfinished recommendation for Dragan Jovanović’s relocation.
An American intelligence officer, Owen Fletcher had spent four of his forty-two years answering to Martin Webb. His cargo-loss business employed a local surveyor when work overlapped, paid rent, and settled real disputes. Clients rang him about wet cartons and broken temperature controls. He knew which repair shops would quote honestly and which customers needed an answer before their bank opened.
The work also gave him access to freight businesses moving equipment toward Russian military procurement. Dragan, a compliance manager at one of those businesses, had begun bringing him evidence of the diversions.
Now Dragan wanted to leave Serbia.
Owen deleted “relocation can be secured” and substituted “relocation remains the recommended course.” He read that twice. Neither sentence belonged in a message to Dragan. One exceeded his authority. The other concealed how little authority he had.
Three weeks earlier, in a parked car, he had told Dragan, “Keep cooperating. We can get you out.”
Dragan had asked whether that meant a new life or a temporary hotel room.
“A proper move,” Owen had said.
He had submitted the request afterward.
A knock interrupted him. Owen closed the recommendation and went to the door.
His neighbor stood on the landing with a rubbish bag held away from his trousers. He worked early shifts at a hospital and objected, with considerable consistency, to the grill downstairs receiving supplies after midnight.
“Someone’s wedged the street door again,” the neighbor said in Serbian. “Can you speak to them tomorrow? They listen to you.”
“They listen when I’m buying food.”
“Then buy food.”
Owen smiled and took his own rubbish from beside the kitchen door. “I’ll shut it now.”
“Use the front. The courtyard’s full of crates.”
“Passable?”
“If you turn sideways,” the neighbor said. “They’ve left the grill’s side door open.”
They went down the front staircase together. The neighbor took both bags toward the bins while Owen removed a flattened carton from beneath the entrance door. Downstairs, a cook raised a hand through the grill window. Owen held up the carton, received an apologetic shrug, and went back upstairs.
He wanted to finish the recommendation before sleeping. Dragan had supplied copies from work and retained a paper folder himself. Some pages documented diverted equipment; others exposed fraudulent claims Dragan had signed. Losing his job would be the mildest consequence of discovery. The people benefiting from the diversions could hurt him. Serbian investigators could prosecute him. Owen’s promise had encouraged him to keep returning to that office.
An earlier source had gone to prison after following Owen’s advice. Owen still knew the man’s visiting days, though he had never been permitted to visit.
By half past midnight, he had written a paragraph explaining why Dragan needed protection. He still lacked a sentence explaining what protection had actually been approved.
He worked on the paragraph for another quarter hour, then got up to rinse his cup. His shoes remained on from the trip downstairs, and he was considering another visit to the grill when metal struck the lock.
The first impact split the wood beside the strike plate.
Owen put the cup down.
A second blow drove the door inward against its chain. Through the gap, a man said, “Martin.”
Owen crossed the bedroom instead of returning to the table. His passport lay in a drawer near the entrance, beside his equipment. His telephone was charging beside the computer. Reaching either would take him back toward the entrance.
The chain tore free.
He opened the narrow rear door and stepped onto the shared service landing. Someone entered the kitchen behind him. Owen pulled the rear door shut and took the stairs, keeping his right hand against the rail where the bulb had failed.
Below, a door closed.
He stopped one step short of the courtyard. A man stood near the passage leading through to the grill’s side entrance. The open door behind him showed stacked drinks crates and a strip of kitchen floor.
For an instant neither moved.
Then the man reached inside his coat.
Owen shoved the nearest stack of empty crates toward him and went for the passage. Plastic struck paving. The man caught Owen’s shoulder, lost his grip, and a shot cracked beneath the enclosed stairwell.
Something struck the outside of Owen’s upper left arm. His hand opened uselessly against the wall.
“Fuck.”
He stumbled into the passage with his left sleeve sticking to him. Another shot broke plaster near the doorframe. He drove forward, struck the grill’s side door with his good shoulder, and fell against a sack of onions.
The cook shouted. Owen pushed upright, leaving blood on the tiled wall.
“Front door,” he said in Serbian. “Move.”
A man holding a bread knife stepped out of his way. Owen crossed behind the counter and entered the serving area, where two adult customers had stopped eating. One rose so abruptly that his chair fell.
“Call the police,” the cook told the woman at the till.
Owen pressed his right palm against the wound. Blood slipped between his fingers.
The man from the passage appeared in the kitchen doorway. His right hand stayed low beside his coat. The cook confronted him with a shouted question. The woman at the till already had a telephone against her ear.
The man paused.
Owen used the pause to reach the front door. Through the glass, a second man was coming around the corner from the apartment entrance.
He stepped back inside.
“Taxi,” he told the woman.
“I’m calling the police.”
“Then ask him.” Owen nodded toward the cook. “A dispatched taxi. Please.”
The cook gave the kitchen doorway another angry glance, then took out his own telephone.
Owen stayed beside the counter. Moving his left arm sent a hot pain toward his elbow. He folded it against his ribs and accepted a clean dishcloth from the woman without trying to thank her.
The man at the rear withdrew. The one outside crossed the street and stopped near a parked car. Owen could see him speaking into a telephone.
The customers wanted explanations. The cook wanted everyone away from his kitchen. Owen gave them his cover name and said someone had tried to rob him upstairs.
“Robbers know your name?” the woman asked.
He kept pressure on the cloth.
The taxi arrived just before twelve fifty-five AM. The driver came inside, saw the blood, and refused to take him anywhere except a hospital.
“A clinic in Vračar,” Owen said. “A doctor I know is on duty.”
“You call her.”
Owen gave him the number. He had learned it years ago, after Ivana Ristić had treated a cut on his hand and complained that his business cards contained better emergency information than his head.
The driver called, spoke briefly, and handed over the telephone.
“Martin?” Ivana said. “What happened?”
“Arm wound. Bleeding. I’m awake.”
“Put the driver back on.”
She gave the driver instructions, then he put the telephone away.
At the kerb, Owen could no longer see the man who had crossed the street. That established nothing. The taxi’s company name and number were visible to anyone watching, and the driver had accepted the job through dispatch.
Owen got into the rear seat. He had enough cash in his trouser pocket for the fare. Everything that proved Martin Webb’s life, and almost everything that could help Owen Fletcher leave it, remained upstairs.
Ivana pulled the cloth from his arm shortly after one ten AM. In her Vračar treatment room, Owen sat beneath a bright examination lamp and tried to unbutton his shirt with one hand. Disinfectant stung his nose.
“Leave it,” she said. “I’ll cut the sleeve.”
She was covering the clinic’s overnight service, a shift she had complained about when he had seen her two days earlier. They had known each other long enough for him to recognize the extra care she took when angry.
“Tell me what made this.”
“A bullet.”
“Then say bullet wound.”
She checked the movement and feeling in his hand, felt his pulse at the wrist, and examined the channel along his upper arm. When she pressed near it, his knee knocked the examination couch.
“Fuck. Sorry.”
“Keep still.”
The bullet had torn along the outside of the arm rather than passing through its full thickness. She controlled the bleeding and cleaned the wound. Owen fixed his attention on a screw in the lamp housing.
“You need a hospital assessment,” she said. “I can dress this. I cannot give you every examination you may need here.”
“Can it wait until morning?”
“I can tell you what requires immediate transfer. I cannot promise there is nothing else wrong.”
She asked about his last tetanus vaccination. He answered. She asked who had shot him.
“I don’t know.”
“Will they come here?”
He shifted on the couch. “They may try to find me.”
Ivana set down the instrument in her hand. “I have two other patients in the building and a nurse on duty. You should have told me that on the telephone.”
“I needed the bleeding stopped.”
“You have that. Now I need information.”
He told her about the forced entry, the grill, and the taxi. She listened without interrupting, then resumed dressing the wound.
“The visit stays in your medical record,” she said. “The wound stays in it. The report to the police will be accurate too.”
“I wasn’t asking you to—”
“You were about to.”
He had been.
When she finished, his left arm rested in a sling. His fingers worked, but raising the elbow brought pain sharp enough to stop him. Ivana gave him medication and told him what changes to report. The nurse notified the police of the wound; Owen gave his cover name and a brief account by telephone. Then Ivana allowed him to use the line for his own call.
Owen reached Judith Keene through an emergency contact arrangement he had used twice in four years. He gave his name, location, and a short account. Judith called the clinic back.
“Stay away from the emergency flat,” she said.
“Why?”
“A commercial inquiry came into the business office yesterday afternoon. Someone checking a residential address for Martin Webb. It reached us late.”
“The right address?”
“Yes,” Judith said. “The emergency flat has administrative overlap with that tenancy arrangement. We’re treating it as exposed.”
He held the receiver in his right hand. The cord dragged across his lap.
“Someone used my name at the door.”
“Understood.”
“Do you have anything on Dragan?”
“No confirmed change.”
“I have his window at five fifteen.”
“I’m arranging an individual departure,” Judith said. “There’s a provisional seat at seven ten AM. You would need to make a five thirty transfer for identity documentation and exit formalities.”
“My passport’s in the apartment.”
“That’s part of what the transfer is for. This requires local clearance. It isn’t a guaranteed boarding.”
“And Dragan?”
“The arrangement is for you,” Judith said.
Owen rubbed his thumb along the receiver. “I’ll speak to him first.”
“Then you will have very little time.”
After the call, Ivana put him in the small staff kitchen rather than a treatment room she might need. She permitted another call at five fifteen, provided he kept the line available between conversations.
“Who is making arrangements for you?” she asked.
“People I work with.”
“I know people you work with. They send you photographs of broken machinery.”
“There is other work,” Owen said.
She pulled a chair away from the table so his injured side had room.
“Before morning appointments, you tell me what risk that brings through my door.”
Owen stayed awake. The pain eased enough for him to notice the ache in his neck and the dried blood beneath his fingernails. He attempted to drink coffee, found that it made him nauseous, and pushed it aside.
At five fifteen AM, he called Dragan from the kitchen. This was their established early window, before Dragan normally went to the freight office. Owen had spent the preceding hour choosing how to ask the question.
When Dragan answered, he abandoned the careful wording.
“Who asked you where I lived?”
Dragan stayed silent long enough for Owen to hear movement near the telephone.
“Dragan.”
“I gave them your business name,” Dragan said.
Owen tightened his good hand around the receiver. “Who?”
“The security people connected to the equipment contracts. I gave them Martin Webb. Your company. The dates we met.”
“You gave them my address?”
“They already had it when they spoke to me again. Through the managing agent, they said.”
“Men broke into my apartment,” Owen said. “One of them shot me.”
“Are you in hospital?”
“Answer the question.”
“I have answered it.”
“You exposed me deliberately,” Owen said.
“Yes.”
Owen pressed his heels against the kitchen floor. Until that word, he had retained room for pressure, a mistake, a name mentioned without understanding.
“What did you think they would do?”
“Hold you. Question you. Find out where the copies had gone.”
“You expected them to take me.”
“Yes,” Dragan said.
“Who gave you that assurance?”
“Pavel Orlov. That is the name he uses. He handles security for them.”
Owen had never heard the name. He repeated it once and asked what Dragan knew about him.
“Russian. He had the claims I signed. He knew the losses were false. He said he could keep that inside the companies if I helped recover their material.”
“And you believed him.”
“I believed you first.”
Owen moved his left arm off the edge of the table and paid for it with a hard pull beneath the dressing.
“We were working on relocation.”
“It was rejected on October twenty-first.”
Owen stopped moving.
“Who told you that?”
“Judith Keene.”
“When?”
“October twenty-first,” Dragan said. “Late afternoon. The eligibility telephone contact you arranged in September.”
“She said rejected?”
“She said I did not qualify for the proposed relocation. No funded move. No new identity. I asked about my wife’s separate application and she said there was no application to make.”
Dragan had never brought his wife to a meeting. Owen knew her only through the ordinary things Dragan had said about home. He had promised a proper move without an approved arrangement for either of them.
“I need to verify that,” Owen said.
“Of course you do.”
“Stay available. I’ll call back.”
“Do you still have an exit?” Dragan asked.
“A possibility.”
“For one?”
Owen delayed before answering.
“Call me back,” Dragan said, and ended the call.
Judith answered on the second attempt. Owen kept his voice low; a patient had begun coughing in the corridor.
“Did you tell Dragan on Monday that relocation was rejected?”
“The eligibility decision was communicated through the existing—”
“Did you tell him?”
“Yes,” Judith said.
“You notified him separately and left me telling him it was being worked.”
“I was seeking reconsideration.”
“You concealed a rejection.”
“I postponed briefing you,” Judith said.
“What the fuck did you think he would do with that? Sit at his desk and wait for me to catch up?”
“I told him you would be briefed. I expected to have the reconsideration resolved before the next substantive meeting.”
“You let me continue,” Owen said.
Judith’s voice hardened. “I authorized you to recommend relocation. I did not authorize you to promise it.”
Owen leaned back and shut his eyes. The chair pressed against a damp patch beneath his shirt.
“You should have told me.”
“Yes. I should have.”
He wanted more from the admission. He wanted it to cover the words he had spoken in the car.
Judith continued. “It’s five twenty-eight. The transfer team needs your decision.”
“Dragan gave me up.”
“Then we need you moving.”
“He has the retained material,” Owen said. “He’s still exposed.”
“So are you. Where is he?”
“He hasn’t told me.”
“Take the transfer,” Judith said. “We can continue contact.”
Owen brought the receiver closer. “From outside the country, after leaving him here.”
“There is no joint departure authorization. There never has been.”
In the corridor, Ivana asked someone to lower their voice. Owen heard a trolley wheel catch on a threshold.
“Release the transfer,” he said.
“Be precise. Are you refusing it?”
“Yes.”
“That closes the five thirty arrangement,” Judith said. “I cannot hold the document staff and transport indefinitely.”
“I understand.”
He ended the call before she could ask him to reconsider.
When he reached Dragan again, five thirty had passed. Dragan answered immediately.
“October twenty-second,” he said. “That was when I gave Orlov your name. Yesterday he told me they had found you.”
“You could have warned me.”
“I could.”
“You let me sit there,” Owen said.
“Yes.”
Owen wanted to hurt him with something exact. Instead he asked, “Do they know you kept the folder?”
“They know I retained something. They don’t know where it is.”
“Are you sure?”
“No,” Dragan said. “I am telling you what they said.”
That correction irritated Owen more than it should have. He lowered his voice.
“You understand what happens if they get it. They will still have the false claims. You’ll have nothing.”
“I understand now that keeping copies is not the same thing as being safe.”
“Then let me help you use what’s left.”
“How?” Dragan asked.
“We separate the commercial fraud pages from the procurement material. Get the equipment evidence to people who can act on it. Your exposure can be dealt with through a lawyer.”
“My exposure.”
“The claims you signed,” Owen said.
“Three claims. Eighty-six thousand euros paid. You knew that when you asked me to keep going into the office.”
“Yes.”
“Say it without making it smaller,” Dragan said.
Owen shifted the telephone against his ear. “I knew you had participated in false claims.”
“And the pages showing what you told me?”
“What pages?”
“The notes I made after our meetings,” Dragan said. “Dates. Your words about leaving. You said proper relocation on October third. On October seventeenth you said I should keep doing my normal work while it was arranged.”
“That was my recommendation at the time.”
“You said it was being arranged.”
Owen could remember the car’s interior, Dragan’s hand on the passenger door, the impatience in his own answer. They had spent too long parked.
“I believed it would be approved.”
“But you didn’t have approval.”
“No.”
Dragan moved something beside the telephone. Paper brushed the mouthpiece.
“You separate the fraud,” he said. “Then I am a useful employee who found equipment going somewhere wrong. You separate your promises, and you never recruited a man by telling him something you could not deliver.”
“I’m trying to keep you alive.”
“Then stop asking me to make you look fucking better,” Dragan said.
Owen almost ended the call. His thumb found the cradle switch and rested beside it.
“The fraud material could make protection harder,” he said.
“It makes your explanation harder too.”
“Yes,” Owen said. He disliked how little of an answer the word provided. “It does.”
For several breaths he heard only the connection.
“I’m not giving you the folder,” Dragan said.
“I haven’t asked you to hand it over.”
“You’ve asked to choose which parts leave it.”
Owen put his forehead against his good hand, holding the receiver awkwardly between wrist and ear. He wanted Dragan somewhere he could see him. He wanted a location, an agreed route, a plan whose decisions passed through him.
“Where are you?”
“Somewhere I can stay for now.”
“That isn’t enough.”
“It is what I am giving you,” Dragan said.
Owen straightened. His injured arm had begun to throb again.
“The number I’m calling from is a clinic. You cannot come here.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
Owen gave him the clinic number. “Call me back on this line. We need a way forward.”
Dragan asked how long Owen could remain. Owen said he had to speak with the doctor before her appointments began.
“Six fifty,” Dragan said. “I will call then.”
Afterward, Owen kept the receiver in his hand until the line sounded. He replaced it and went to find Ivana.
She checked the dressing in the kitchen. A small patch of blood had reached the outer layer, but it had stopped spreading. She eased his arm out of the sling and made him rest it on a folded towel.
“Any numbness?”
“No.”
“Dizziness?”
“When I stand too fast,” Owen said.
“Then stand slowly. You have lost blood and you haven’t slept.”
He told her that people might inquire about Martin Webb and that she should give neither assurances nor false answers on his behalf.
“I already decided that,” she said.
“I need until after a call at six fifty.”
“You can have the kitchen until then. After that, we discuss where you go.”
She returned to her patients. Owen borrowed a pencil and a sheet of paper from beside the telephone. He began an account for Judith, using the kitchen table to steady his wrist.
“Source informed independently of adverse decision.”
He crossed out “adverse” and wrote “rejection.” Then he crossed out the whole sentence.
At around six forty AM, the cleaner came in carrying a plastic food tub. She was an adult woman in worn trainers, with a loose strand of hair stuck to her cheek. She set the tub beside the sink and took out a pear.
“Seventy dinars for this,” she said, pressing a brown patch with her thumb. “He put the good side up.”
Owen moved his paper to give her room.
She cut away a soft section, divided the rest, and held out half. “Want it?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Eat it now. By lunch it’ll need a spoon.”
She ate standing up, rubbed a mark from the counter with a cloth, and picked up her tub. Owen accepted the fruit without explaining the sling or the blood on his shirt. She left the kitchen door open behind her.
He ate his half slowly. The pear tasted overripe near the cut.
The call was still due at six fifty. He placed the unfinished account face down and checked that the telephone cord would reach without pulling his left arm off the towel.
Judith’s transfer arrangement had closed. The seven ten flight had not yet departed, but he no longer had a way to reach it under the conditions she had offered. Dragan still held the folder. Owen had no passport, no equipment, and no reliable account of who had entered his apartment beyond what Dragan had told him.
He had enough information to know that his proposed separation of the pages would serve him.
At six fifty AM, the telephone rang.
Owen lifted the handset with his right hand. “Yes.”
“It all goes together,” Dragan said. “The equipment material. The false claims. My notes about what you promised.”
“Where do you want to take it?”
“To Serbian investigators. With a lawyer. Not another private room where someone tells me what can be arranged.”
Owen pressed his feet flat against the floor.
“I gave them your name,” Dragan continued. “I will tell them that too. I’m not asking you to say I didn’t.”
“And you want me there.”
“I want you to answer for yourself. No one speaking for you. No pages taken out before they see them.”
The clinic kitchen door stood open. Beyond it, Owen heard Ivana giving instructions for the morning appointments. His dressed left arm lay on the folded towel.
Dragan said, “Will you attend under your real name and let me give them the complete account?”
Owen held the handset in his right hand and kept the connection open without answering.
“Yes,” Owen said. “I’ll attend as Owen Fletcher. You give your account. I’ll give mine.”
He kept his left arm on the folded towel while Dragan answered.
“And nothing removed.”
“Nothing removed. I won’t agree to something inaccurate about what I did.”
“Neither will I.”
Owen pressed the handset more firmly against his ear. “A lawyer can advise you. We can ask for protection. Cooperation may count in your favour. None of that guarantees immunity, relocation, or a new identity.”
“Is that what Judith told you to say?”
“It’s what I should have said before.”
Dragan let the answer stand without accepting it. Then he said, “The three claims are in the folder. All eighty-six thousand euros. There are originals at the office that you haven’t seen. I’m bringing the rest there.”
“Don’t go back for the job.”
“I’m going to copy the originals. People will be working. I want to take them out in front of people.”
Owen wanted to specify how, which entrance, whose hands would touch the folder. He lifted his arm an inch from the towel and put it down again.
“Tell the lawyer where you’ll be,” he said. “I’ll meet you in compliance at ten thirty AM. Not a parked car. Not somewhere your people have chosen.”
“I heard you.”
Afterward, Owen called Judith. She heard his decision without attempting another argument about the missed transfer.
“You understand that identifying yourself changes what we can manage privately,” she said.
“I understand that it ends Martin Webb.”
“It may do considerably more than that.”
“Find counsel who can approach the authorities here,” Owen said.
“Dragan needs his own advice. Not instructions passed through me.”
Judith asked for the workplace address and the proposed time. Owen gave both. He described the folder without calling it American property.
When Ivana returned, he asked her to sit down.
“I have patients,” she said.
“My name is Owen Fletcher.”
She stayed beside the door.
“Martin Webb is the name I’ve used here. I work for the American government. Intelligence.”
Ivana pulled the kitchen door almost closed, leaving enough space to hear the corridor.
“Does anyone here need to leave the building?”
“I don’t know whether they’ve found it yet.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“The patients should be moved away from the front if anyone starts asking about me,” Owen said.
“I decide where patients go. You tell me what you know.”
He gave her the real name of the man he had recruited, the admission that had exposed him, and the limited facts of the pursuit. She interrupted when he slipped into “commercial-security interest.”
“The men who shot you.”
“One of them. I can’t identify the others.”
“And the name you just gave me?”
“A man Dragan says arranged it,” Owen said. “I haven’t met him.”
She nodded once at the distinction.
“The treatment entry will show the name you supplied and the identity you now claim,” she said. “My nurse won’t alter her account. Neither will I.”
“I’m not asking.”
“You asked me to sit down. Now you’ve told me. I need the kitchen back when we open.”
At seven thirty in the morning, Judith called with counsel on the line. The lawyer spoke measured English and asked Owen to stop whenever he used a name whose identity he could not establish. He had arranged for two officers to receive them at ten fifty that morning. Counsel could use a ground-floor meeting room off the short side street beside Dragan’s building. The officers would attend before the appointment. They had agreed to receive the material and separate accounts concerning the assault, the alleged pressure on Dragan, and Owen’s activities.
“They have not agreed to release either of you afterward,” counsel said. “I represent you. Another lawyer will advise Mister Jovanović separately. You must not treat this as an agreed outcome.”
“Will they meet us inside the freight office?”
“Not on what we have supplied so far. They will receive you at the room I described. If circumstances change, call.”
Judith came back on alone. “The seven ten flight departed.”
Owen had expected it. Hearing the fact still brought a small, unreasonable anger. He had refused the transfer, yet some part of him had retained the seat.
“Understood.”
“Counsel is being paid to represent you, not validate the operation. Listen to him.”
“Will your account include when you told Dragan?” Owen asked.
“Yes.”
“And when you told me.”
“Yes, Owen. Both.”
He replaced the handset and tried to eat bread the nurse had brought. His mouth had dried enough that he needed water for every bite.
At eight ten in the morning, a man in a grey coat came into reception and asked whether Martin Webb was still being treated. Owen heard his cover name through the kitchen door. He stood slowly, bringing the sling under his left elbow.
The man held a business card out to the receptionist. “It concerns the taxi. Our client needs to establish where the passenger went.”
“Which client?” she asked.
“The vehicle operator. There was blood in the car.”
Ivana came out of a treatment room. “You can send a written request to the clinic.”
“I only need confirmation he attended. The driver brought him from Dorćol shortly before one.”
“You have my answer.”
The man put the card on the desk. He left without arguing. Owen stayed back from the doorway until the outer door shut. Through the reception window, he saw the man cross the street and speak through the lowered passenger window of a dark car. Then the man remained beside it, facing the clinic. It established a watcher and an inquiry. Owen had no reliable count of anyone else.
Ivana returned to the kitchen. “Was that one of them?”
“I haven’t seen him before. He knows the taxi’s starting point and time.”
“My receptionist asked the taxi company. Someone at dispatch gave the destination to a man asking about damage to the vehicle. The driver has complained to them.”
Owen drew the chair out with his good hand. “I need to call the lawyer.”
“You need transport. I have cancelled the next two appointments. One patient has already gone to another practice, and I’m moving the other downstairs until her lift arrives.”
“I’ll leave.”
“My nurse is being paid for a shift in which she’s now answering questions about you,” Ivana said. “I’m closing the front consulting room. None of that disappears when you leave.”
He put the chair back without sitting.
“Book a car through reception,” Ivana said. “A normal one. Give the driver the actual destination. You will not use my staff to find a way out of the back.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
She waited.
“I considered it,” he said.
“Then stop.”
Owen called counsel and reported the inquiry and the watcher across the street. Then he asked reception to book the car.
Judith called while reception was booking the vehicle. She had a final individual option, narrower than the first but real enough to require a decision. Emergency travel documentation could be issued at the embassy. Counsel had checked his position with the relevant officials: no departure restriction had yet been imposed. There was an afternoon seat. Owen would have to go to the embassy now, make the necessary disclosures, and accept that a border decision could still stop him.
“This is a lawful departure possibility,” Judith said. “Not an extraction. It doesn’t include Dragan, and it won’t remain available on these terms after you present yourself.”
“Has he been offered anything else?”
“There is no approved relocation for him.”
Owen asked for the appointment instructions and wrote them down. Then he ended the call and rang Dragan.
“Are you telling me not to go to the police?” Dragan asked.
“No.”
“Then why tell me?”
“So you understand I still have a choice,” Owen said.
“I have a choice too. I’m staying here.”
“Your fraud will go with the rest.”
“I know what I signed.”
“They may keep you,” Owen said.
“I know that too.”
Owen rubbed a patch of dried blood from the side of his thumb. “This isn’t a way to make them improve the offer.”
“There is no offer I’m negotiating with you,” Dragan said. “I’m taking the complete folder to Serbian investigators. Come or don’t come.”
Dragan ended the call. Owen stood beside the telephone until the nurse asked whether he had finished with it. He rang Judith back.
“Cancel the embassy appointment,” he said. “I’m attending the reception.”
“I can request another appointment later.”
“Request it when we know what’s authorised.”
Ivana checked his dressing before he left. He needed further assessment at a hospital; she had repeated that to counsel herself. She gave him written treatment information and medication instructions, then helped him ease his arm into the sling.
“May I call you afterward?” he asked.
“For a medical question, use the clinic. For everything else, speak to our lawyer.”
He had known her four years. He tried to find something he could say without asking her to make that answer less final.
“I’m sorry I brought this here.”
“Yes,” she said. “You did.”
The driver carried Owen’s small bag of medication to the car but left him to open the passenger door. Across the road, the man in the grey coat took out his telephone. Owen gave the driver the office address. He made no request for turns or changes of route.
They crossed the Sava by Branko’s Bridge in slow traffic. Sitting upright pulled at the dressing, so Owen braced his right foot and kept his back against the seat. The driver asked whether he wanted the heating lowered. Owen said yes and thanked him.
Beyond the bridge, the roads broadened. Between vehicles he could see long stretches of pavement and the open ground around the blocks. Any car could remain several places behind them without needing to stay close. He stopped trying to classify each one.
The driver left him outside the occupied freight building off Bulevar Mihajla Pupina. Owen paid with most of the cash remaining in his pocket. Inside, the receptionist recognised Martin Webb. She asked whether he had been in an accident.
“Someone hurt my arm.”
“Doctor said you could come to work?”
“She said I needed a hospital.”
“That sounds different,” the receptionist said.
“It is.”
The receptionist called upstairs and found him a chair while he waited. Employees passed with coffee and keys. A courier argued about a parcel left on the wrong floor. Owen kept his injured side away from the flow of people and felt every minute he had been awake.
The lobby faced the boulevard through glass doors. Beyond them lay a covered forecourt, with a recessed strip along the building used for loading. Crossing it toward the right would bring them to the public pavement near the corner. The side street ran beside the building; counsel’s borrowed meeting room lay a short walk down it. From the lobby, the loading recess offered the least exposed route to that corner. It also hid anyone walking there from the side street.
Owen described that to counsel during a call from reception. The lawyer confirmed the officers would be at his doorway before ten fifty.
“Do not bring anyone else with you,” he said.
“I don’t have control of who follows.”
“Then tell us if you can. Do not make arrangements with them on our behalf.”
By ten thirty in the morning, Owen had finished the water the receptionist gave him. Dragan came down the stairs and stopped several feet away. He wore his usual office jacket. A thick folder rested against his right hip.
For the first time since the call at five fifteen, Owen had the man in front of him. He wanted to ask how Dragan had slept. He wanted to hit him. The two impulses annoyed him equally.
“Everything?” Owen asked.
“Upstairs.”
The compliance room stood on the first floor, with glass above the partition facing the corridor. Voices carried from the adjoining desks. Dragan left the door open. He put the folder on the table and pushed it toward Owen.
“You can inspect it. You don’t take any pages out.”
Owen sat. Dragan remained standing.
The first pages established equipment movements Owen already knew about. Others connected those movements to companies whose names he had only heard. Some entries required explanation from people who had signed them. This could support an investigation. It could not supply a complete account by itself.
Then he reached the insurance claims.
“These are the originals?”
“Copies of the signed originals. The company keeps the others.”
“The payments all went through?”
“Eighty-six thousand euros,” Dragan said. “Three claims. That’s what I told you.”
Owen touched the corner of a page without turning it.
“There were real losses on other consignments,” Dragan said. “That doesn’t make these real.”
“I know.”
“You called it exposure this morning. It’s fraud. Don’t give them some fucking phrase that sounds like I missed a box on a form.”
“I won’t,” Owen said.
Dragan sat opposite him. “And those are my notes.”
Owen recognised the dates before he read the words. October third. October seventeenth. A proper move. Keep doing the normal work. On the second page, Dragan had written that Owen told him relocation was being arranged.
“I’d submitted the request,” Owen said.
“Is that a correction to what you said?”
Owen kept his right hand flat beside the folder. “No.”
The corridor voices grew louder, then faded as someone shut an office door.
Dragan said, “I’ll tell them what I gave Orlov. Your business name. The meetings. I expected them to take you and question you.”
“You let them have me.”
“Yes.”
“You can tell that part without saying my promise made you do it,” Owen said.
“I can say both things happened.”
Owen closed the folder. His anger had sharpened rather than diminished with Dragan in reach. Accurate separate accounts would leave room for that anger. He had agreed to attend, not to forgive him.
At ten forty in the morning, the receptionist knocked on the open door. Counsel had called: he was at the side-street premises, and the two officers had arrived.
Owen stood with the folder in his right hand.
Dragan held out his own hand.
“I’ll carry it down,” Owen said. “You’ll need your access card.”
The explanation came promptly and sounded practical. Dragan let his hand fall.
Downstairs, a man in a dark suit stood near reception with a visitor pass clipped to his coat. Another waited outside, beneath the canopy. The receptionist had pushed her chair back from the desk.
“The side loading access is closed,” the suited man said to Dragan. “There’s company property to account for.”
“We’re using the pavement.”
“Then use the main frontage.”
Owen could see a third man at the far end of the recessed strip. Moving quietly along the building would take them between him and the man under the canopy. Dragan leaned close enough to speak without carrying across reception.
“The one outside, by the column. That’s Pavel Orlov.”
Pavel turned toward them. He had no visitor pass. He wore a plain dark overcoat and stood with his hands visible.
Owen could still return upstairs. He could leave the folder and walk out alone. He could not take Dragan and the material through a concealed route that these men already occupied. The main pavement offered visibility, not cover.
“Do you want me to call someone?” the receptionist asked.
“Yes,” Owen said. “The lawyer who just rang. Tell him we’re coming out now and men are obstructing us.”
The suited man moved away from her desk. Owen went through the glass doors before he could return.
Under the forecourt canopy, footsteps sounded hard against the concrete. The public pavement lay a few strides ahead, but the nearest column and the recessed wall concealed the approach from counsel’s doorway.
Pavel addressed Dragan first. “You have been advised about removing commercial material.”
“I’m giving evidence to investigators.”
“That can be arranged with the company represented.”
“It has been arranged,” Dragan said.
Pavel gave Owen his attention. “Mister Webb. You need medical attention. There is no need for you to remain in this dispute.”
Owen kept the folder against his right thigh. “He’s coming with me.”
“You can leave without him. There is a car available if you require it. Go to your embassy.”
“And the folder?” Owen asked.
“Company material stays. So does the employee until this is resolved.”
Dragan made a small sound of disgust. “I don’t work for you.”
“You have obligations which concern us,” Pavel said.
Owen moved toward the outer edge of the forecourt. The man beside the column stepped across his path.
“Public pavement,” Owen said. “Move.”
The man caught his left elbow. Pain drove straight through the dressed wound. Owen’s knee folded, and he struck the column with his right shoulder. The folder slipped; he trapped it against his body.
“Fuck. Get your fucking hand off.”
The man raised the injured arm enough to hold him against the concrete. Heat spread beneath the dressing. Owen’s fingers moved inside the sling, searching for a position that hurt less.
Pavel stayed a pace away. “You are free to go,” he said. “Leave the material.”
Owen could see the pavement beyond the man’s coat. A woman leaving the lobby slowed, then turned back inside. The restraint remained screened from the officers around the corner. He could shout an allegation from here. Pavel could answer it as a property dispute involving a man whose identity was false.
Dragan reached toward the folder. Owen tightened his grip.
“Give it to me,” Dragan said.
For several seconds Owen held it between them. The man on his left eased the pressure a fraction, offering him the same bargain without words. Owen had been trying to get the source and the evidence into his custody since five fifteen. Now custody gave Pavel something to bargain over.
“Take it,” Owen said.
Dragan closed both hands around the folder. Owen released his grip.
“They can keep us both,” he said. “I heard the lawyer.”
“Give your account. Not mine.”
Dragan drew the folder against his chest and stepped toward the pavement.
Owen turned his head past the column. “My name is Owen Fletcher,” he called. “I’m expected with counsel. I need the officers.”
The man holding him pulled him back. Fresh blood reached the edge of Owen’s sleeve. Owen planted his right foot, turned toward the open frontage, and made the man move with him. It hurt enough to blur the pavement. He kept moving.
Counsel was already coming toward the corner with an officer beside him. The second officer remained near the doorway, watching the approach.
“There,” Owen said, louder. “Owen Fletcher.”
Pavel spoke once in Russian. The grip on Owen’s arm opened. Owen stumbled onto the public pavement. Dragan stayed beside him, carrying the folder.
The approaching officer stopped them with an open hand. “Keep your hands visible.”
Owen lifted his right hand. His left hung in the sling, blood darkening the cloth beneath it.
“The man in the overcoat,” he said. “He knows—”
“One at a time,” the officer said. He turned toward the forecourt. “Stand back.”
Pavel came only as far as the outer column. “There is a disagreement over company documents.”
“Then you can give an account separately. Stand back.”
Counsel reached Owen and asked whether he could walk. Owen said yes. He needed to say it twice.
At the meeting-room doorway, Dragan passed the folder directly to the second officer.
“This is the complete set I retained,” he said. “Some of it concerns my own fraud. I want my lawyer present.”
The officer took it and directed him inside. Owen waited on the threshold while counsel spoke to the first officer. Beyond them, Pavel returned beneath the canopy. His men followed him toward the boulevard. No one drew a weapon. No one admitted anything. Owen had lost sight of them by the time the officer asked for his identity document.
“I haven’t got it. It’s in the apartment where I was attacked.”
“Your name?”
“Owen Fletcher. Martin Webb is the name I used here.”
The officer wrote both down. Then he took Owen into a different room from Dragan. Further questions waited until the bleeding had been assessed.
At the hospital, a doctor removed the damaged dressing while an officer remained outside the treatment area. The reopened wound needed cleaning and closure. Owen received local anaesthetic, fluids, and instructions he struggled to retain.
When the doctor asked how the injury had been reopened, Owen said, “Someone held the arm.”
“During a fight?”
“While stopping me leaving.”
The doctor asked him to describe the movement. Owen did, without trying to decide which legal word should contain it.
That first night, he stayed in a hospital room he was not permitted to leave. A guard sat beyond the open door. Counsel had explained the immediate position, but Owen kept returning to the same request.
“I could sleep somewhere else.”
“Not tonight.”
“I’m not going to disappear.”
“That is not a decision you can make for them,” counsel said.
Owen turned toward the wall. He resented the guard, the treatment trolley, the meal he could barely touch. He resented Dragan in another place, with another lawyer, telling a story Owen could not hear. He slept in short periods. Each time someone opened the door, he woke expecting to be asked another question.
By the second evening, after a longer sleep and another consultation, he could follow the questions without asking for them to be repeated. He gave an account of the recruitment and the assault. He described Dragan’s admission as an admission, Pavel’s identity as something Dragan had supplied and confirmed at the office, and the men at the apartment as men he could not yet name. Counsel stopped him when he began speaking about what investigators would establish.
“Tell them what you know.”
Owen started again.
Over the following weeks, questioning alternated with waiting. Restrictions on his movement continued after he left the hospital. He stayed in approved accommodation, attended interviews, returned for treatment, and slept through afternoons he would once have filled with work. An emergency passport did not restore permission to travel.
Martin Webb’s business failed without him. Clients could no longer rely on his assessments. The local surveyor took what work he could, but he could not replace the name clients had contracted with. Owen asked Judith to ensure that legitimate obligations were settled, including the unfinished Kragujevac claim.
“That requires verification,” she said.
“Request it.”
He hated how little the word accomplished. He used it anyway.
Ivana lost more than the morning’s appointments. Staff had to give statements. Her lawyer handled requests for medical information and challenged demands that exceeded them. Patients who heard about police attending the clinic cancelled later bookings. Owen offered to meet the direct costs.
“Through our lawyer,” Ivana told him during the one call she accepted. “My nurse will not take calls from your office. She has given her account.”
“I won’t ask her to change it.”
“I know what you’re saying now.”
He had no answer that would repair that sentence. He asked whether the clinic had reopened its front room.
“Yes. We have work.”
Dragan’s lawyer provided updates only within the boundaries Dragan had authorised. The complete claims material had strengthened the fraud case. A formal investigation was under way; the next step was further examination before the prosecutor with counsel present. No indictment had yet been filed, and the lawyer offered no prediction about a verdict. Dragan remained in Serbia. Measures intended to reduce the risk of unlawful contact did not remove his criminal exposure. Nor did the folder establish every allegation about the equipment trade. Investigators pursued some transactions and found grounds to stop others. Parts of the procurement channel continued beyond the reach of what Dragan could prove.
Once, during a meeting attended by both lawyers, Dragan asked Owen whether he had described the betrayal accurately.
“I said you knowingly exposed me and expected them to detain me.”
“That is accurate.”
“I also said I could have been killed.”
“Yes,” Dragan said.
Owen waited for something more. Dragan asked his lawyer about the next interview.
Judith’s account recorded that she had told Dragan of the rejection on October twenty-first and had withheld that information from Owen. His own account recorded assurances he had given without authorisation. Neither account absorbed the other’s failure. He still wanted hers to explain more of his.
On a later questioning day, counsel brought official follow-up concerning Pavel. The man identified as Orlov had left Serbia using travel arrangements made before the assault. That established a departure, not who had ordered the attack or which service employed every participant. The investigation remained open.
Owen’s eventual permission to depart followed negotiations through counsel and official channels. It did not clear his conduct or end his obligation to respond to further requests. His work would remain restricted pending review.
On the authorised morning, an escort drove him through Novi Beograd toward Surčin. His travel document stayed with the accompanying official until the airport formalities required it. He had imagined leaving Belgrade many times during the preceding weeks. In those versions, he had usually been moving under his own instructions. Now he followed someone else to a desk, waited where he was told, and boarded when permitted.
He left without speaking to Ivana again. Contact with Dragan continued through counsel.
On a separate reporting morning outside Washington, Owen sat in a quiet administrative room at ten in the morning. His left arm still needed support when he worked at a table. Treatment had restored movement, not strength. He had no active sources and no authority to resume the work he had done in Belgrade.
Dragan’s attributed account lay beside his own. Owen had proposed a correction to one sentence. Dragan had said he kept returning to the office after Owen told him that a proper relocation was being arranged. Owen’s proposed replacement said that Dragan continued cooperating while a relocation request was under review.
The reviewer across the table asked whether he disputed Dragan’s recollection of the words. Owen read the sentence again. He remembered the parked car, Dragan waiting with his hand on the door, and his own impatience to finish the conversation.
“No,” he said.
“Do you want to attach a qualification?”
He thought of the name Dragan had given Pavel. Judith’s withheld decision. The arm that still woke him when he turned in bed. All of it belonged in the account. None of it changed that sentence.
“Withdraw the correction,” he said. “Leave his words.”
The reviewer passed him the page. Owen crossed out his proposed replacement and initialled the deletion. Then he moved to the signature line beneath his own account. He steadied the page with two fingers of his recovering left hand and signed Owen Fletcher.