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desnuda, alongside numerous darker, more explicit scenes.
    The chief paced back and forth behind a huge Alexander Roux desk, patinated by age and lavishly ornamented in ormolu. It was grand and completely over the top. Set high upon the wall behind the desk, glowering down upon the three obedient servants, was an enormous portrait of the chief as he once was, wearing the uniform of a brigadier general of the Army of Republika Srpska, more widely known as the Bosnian Serb Army. The portrait was an indulgence in the extreme. Commissioned by its subject, it was designed to awe and spoke volumes of the chief's conceit and sense of personal historical significance. The painting depicted the man in his mid-forties, powerfully built, square-jawed with prominent cheekbones, a long slender nose and cold eyes looking into the future with absolutely no humanity to be read in them. Thick graying hair showed around the temples beneath a cap that sat like a crown upon his large head. Golden badges and buttons and the vibrant colors of a general's embellishments and medal ribbons had all been presented against the olive drab dress uniform for prime intimidatory effect. This was a man of power, a decorated man of uncompromising motivation. A man apart from other men. One to be feared.
    Now, a decade and a half later, pacing beneath his portrait, General Dragoslav Obrenovic was an affectation of his former self. The cruel realities of decline and excess had begun to take their toll. The square jaw was now a jowl disguised by a dense steel-wool beard that jutted from his face like the prow of a Viking longship. The nose was fleshy and red and the hair, white and long, was gathered in a band behind his neck. Of course, the uniform was gone. No more gold braid or ribbon bars to draw attention away from the heavy weight at the waist, although he did have his clothes tailored to hide it as much as possible. But despite all the changes that so encumbered the man's journey into his later years, the cold, lifeless eyes remained. They were blocks of glacial ice, buried deep within the dark fissures of his face. They had seen too much to be even remotely altered or softened by age. The eyes told the story of the man's terrifying reputation. It was not one built on folklore: he'd earned it. And he was as brutal today as he had been twenty years ago. If that was possible.
    Dragoslav Obrenovic, or Drago as he was more commonly known, was a cold-blooded butcher; a murderer of such magnitude that the common laws of man could barely accommodate his depravity. In 1994, Radovan Karadzic personally promoted Drago to the rank of brigadier general. Fiercely loyal and answerable only to Karadzic, his s e fa and mentor, Drago immediately assumed command of the largest body of ground troops committed to perpetrating the Siege of Sarajevo, a responsibility he retained until the very end of the Bosnian War. He willingly took responsibility for the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, a geno cide on a scale not seen since the Second World War; more than 8000 Bosniak men and boys were mercilessly exterminated and over 30 000 Bosniak women, children, elderly and infirm forcibly deported.
    With the arrest of Karadzic in 2008, Mladic and Hadzic in 2011 and their subsequent detention by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Drago then assumed absolute control of the forces remaining loyal to the old Serbian leadership. Now Drago was chief of the darkest arm of the Serbian mafia known only as Zmajevi, the Dragons; a name adopted in deference to the paramilitary force who, under Drago's personal direction, carried out some of the most heinous crimes of the war. As their commanding general, Drago was held in such high regard by the Zmajevi that he accepted the rare honor they bestowed upon him: to be tattooed with their unit crest, a blood-red dragon, on his left breast - above the heart. Now worn by all members of Drago's immediate circle,