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He has walked through the valley of death and man's depravity. Now war photographer Mitch Coltrane is trying to escape his memories. As he loses himself in a world of art and obsession in L.A., a haunting photograph of a woman pulls him into the mystery of a beautiful starlet during Hollywood's golden age. But past and present are about to collide. A living woman, eerily like the woman in his photograph, comes into his life. So does a killer -- straight from the hell that Coltrane survived. Deception, double identities, and murderous revenge will shatter his new life, and force Coltrane to perform the ultimate act of courage -- not with a camera, but with a gun...

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Double Image

Warner Books

Chapter One

The pit smelled of loam, mold, and urine. It was three feet wide, sevenfeet long, and three feet deep, the size of a shallow grave. Coltranehad been lying in it for thirty-six hours, a rubberized sheet under him,an earth-colored nylon sheet suspended over him, anchored by deadbranches and further camouflaged by fallen pine needles. Two hundredyards below the wooded slope on which he was concealed, vehicles werearriving. Six big open-backed trucks jounced along a narrow road into aclearing in the deserted valley. With an echoing rumble, a bulldozer anda backhoe struggled to keep up. A few flakes of snow drifted to thefrost-hardened ground as the convoy stopped next to a rectangular area,roughly fifty by a hundred feet, where the ground had been disturbed.

Having waited so long, Coltrane frowned toward the increasingly darkclouds drifting into the valley and prayed that the weather wouldn'tturn against him. He raised one of the four cameras arranged before him,focused its zoom lens, and started taking photographs. Men in tatteredwinter clothes, clutching automatic rifles, jumped from the trucks andscanned the slopes around them. Despite the care with which Coltrane hadhidden himself, he tensed when they concentrated in his direction.Afraid he'd been spotted, he ducked his head and pressed himself harderagainst the floor of the pit. When the men changed their attention toanother area of the valley, Coltrane let out his breath, taking morepictures. A bandy-legged, heavy-chested, beefy-faced man with dense darkhair and a thick mustache waved directions to the bulldozer and thebackhoe.

Got you, you bastard. Coltrane pressed the shutter button, unable to getover his good fortune. Back in Tuzla, his contact on the UN inspectionteam had spread out a map and indicated a dozen areas that they intendedto investigate. Of course, they wouldn't get around to those areas untilthey finished with the dozen areas they were alreadyinvestigating. The schedule depended on the weather, which was due toworsen now that November was almost half over. By the time theinvestigators reached all the suspected areas, the men they wanted toprosecute would have eliminated the evidence against them.

Coltrane had chosen the most isolated spot, his compass and terrain mappreventing him from getting lost as he made his way, burdened by twoknapsacks, across streams and ridges toward this slope. Concealed amongbushes, waiting two hours, he had studied the rugged landscape for anysign that he had been noticed. Only after dark had he constructed hisprimitive shelter and crawled into it, exhausted, craving sleep butknowing that food had to come first, the cheese sandwiches and drysausage he had brought along. But even before eating, there was onething he knew he absolutely had to do: check his cameras.

Throughout the next day and night, Coltrane had remained in his coldhiding place, permitting himself movement only when he ate more sausage,drank from a straw inserted in his canteen, or turned onto his side,urinating into a plastic bottle. All the while, he had second-guessedhimself, telling himself that he was wasting his time, that he hadchosen the wrong location, or that nothing was going to happen inany location and he might as well hike out of here. The dingy barwhere his fellow photojournalists hung out in Tuzla was beginning toseem more and more appealing. But he hated to surrender to impatience.Giving up wasn't in his nature. And now he was overjoyed that he hadn't.Not only was he getting prime photos of what the UN inspection team hadsuspected was happening at various sites but he was also documenting theparticipation of the man they most wanted to nail.

Dragan Ilkovic. A perfect name for a monster.

The son of a bitch leaned his rifle against the front of a truck andbraced his hands on his powerful-looking hips, watching withsatisfaction as the bulldozer went to work, plowing earth. The backhoemoved into position behind it. Heart pounding against the rubber sheet,Coltrane kept rapidly taking pictures, glad that he had brought fourcameras, each with a different lens and film speed, some withblack-and-white film, some with color, so that he wouldn't have to wastetime changing film.

Below him, a man with a rifle shouted, pointing fiercely at what thebulldozer had exposed. The beefy-faced man hurried over, yellingcommands at the backhoe's driver. For a frustrating moment, thecommotion hid what agitated them, but the group quickly parted, some ofthem rushing to help unload a large piece of equipment from a truck, andColtrane reacted with horror, the small image in his viewfinderintensified by the magnification of his zoom lens.

He was staring at corpses, a soul-searing countless jumble of them. Thebodies had been thrown into the mass grave with such careless haste, sotangled among one another, that it was impossible to know which legbelonged to which torso, which arm to which shoulder to which neck towhich skull. The confusion became more manifest as the weight of thebulldozer crushed spines and rib cages. Clothes had disintegrated, fleshhad rotted, creating a common putrescent black mush from which graybones protruded and lipless mouths gaped in silent, eternal anguish.

During the war, this region in eastern Bosnia was supposed to have beena UN-controlled safe haven for Muslims. From hundreds of miles around,as many as fifteen thousand Muslims had hurried here, seekingprotection. The target had been too tempting for the Serbs, whosurrounded the area and bombarded it, forcing the UN troops tosurrender. Surprisingly, the Serbs had let the Muslim children go. Butthey raped the women — to breed the Muslims out of existence by forcingMuslim women to bear Serbian children. And as for the men. . . Coltrane's mouth filled with bile as he worked thecameras, taking more and more photographs of what remained after theSerbs had loaded the Muslim men into trucks and driven them to isolatedvalleys like this one, where they dug pits with bulldozers and backhoes,lined the Muslim men up on the edge of the pits, and shot them.

Some of the pits, like the one Coltrane photographed, held as many asfour hundred corpses, he had been told. It took a lot of hate anddetermination to get the job done, but the Serbs had been up to thechallenge. When they had finally shot the last Muslim in the back of thehead, they had used the bulldozers to spread earth over the bodies, andthat was that — problem solved, everything neat and tidy. Except, whenthe war ended and Bosnia had been carved into Serb, Croat, and Muslimregions, the UN had started talking about outrages against humanity. Awar-crimes tribunal was convened in the Netherlands, and suddenly a lotof Serb commanders, like Dragan Ilkovic down there, had become wantedmen. They had to be tidier.

The roar of a large machine attracted Coltrane's notice toward thecumbersome piece of equipment that the men had unloaded from one of thetrucks. It had a huge funnel on one side and a spout on the other. Itresembled the device that city cleanup crews used to pulverize fallentree limbs. In this case, the machine was a rock pulverizer thatDragan Ilkovic had brought from one of the many nearby mines. Thebackhoe was dropping bones into the funnel. The spout on the other sidewas spewing horrifying pebbles into the back of a truck. The pebbleswould be eliminated in a shaft in one of the mines, Coltrane's informanthad suspected. The trouble was, no one could prove that this sanitizingwas actually taking...