He went out onto the balcony for the cool air.
He had been in the room for forty minutes after the shower, in dark khakis and a clean gray T-shirt, with his hair toweled and his hands at the small operational tasks of the end of a travel day — the get-home bag opened on the foot of the bed, the topo and the compass moved to the small entry table for the morning, the field watch wound and set to local time, the boot-knife checked and re-sheathed and laid next to the topo.
The room was clean. The bedspread was a heavy patterned wool the Belgrade hospitality group had selected to honor the building’s sixty-year history of being a hunting lodge, the pattern a small repeating weave of pine boughs and stags.
The room smelled faintly of the pine cleaner the housekeeping staff had used at four in the afternoon when they had turned the room down. The sconce in the bathroom hummed at the low frequency Eastern European wiring hummed at.
The suite’s air was good enough for the night but slightly close, and the balcony door was the kind of heavy double-glazed continental door that opened with a small brass handle and a quarter-turn. He turned the handle. He opened the door.
The mountain came in.
He stepped out onto the balcony.
The lodge was an L-shape, built into the lip of the Tara Canyon at thirteen hundred meters of elevation, with the long arm of the L running along the canyon rim and the short arm running back into the pine. His suite was at the corner end of the long arm.
The balcony was small — six feet deep, ten feet wide, slate flooring, an iron railing at the canyon edge, a small wrought-iron table and two chairs against the inside wall — and it overlooked the country to the south, with the canyon falling away in front of him at the kind of angle that made the railing the only thing between him and a thousand-foot drop to the river.
The air at thirteen hundred meters in late spring at ten in the evening was the kind of air that landed on the skin as a piece of weather. Twelve degrees Celsius. The smell of the pine on the slope below him. The very faint mineral edge of the karst country. The river at the bottom of the canyon, low and persistent, which he had heard from inside the room and had stepped out, in part, to hear directly.
He set his hands on the iron railing. The railing was cold against his palms.
He stood for a count of ten with the canyon below him and the small mountain dark stretching south to the Albanian border somewhere past the pine.
Then he heard her voice.