She was twenty-five years old. Along with Serbian, she spoke English, Italian, and German. She traveled a lot but he could find nothing about her employment. He realized that this was her personal phone and she must have used another one for work. Her friends were not just Serbian but from across Europe and the US.
He hesitated before entering WhatsApp but eventually got up enough courage. He knew that this would reveal much about her intimate life. He was torn between his vision of her purity and his barely controllable desire to soak in the imagined reality of her sexual being.
Just as he decided to finally click on the app, an alert flashed on his screen. The remote phone had been attached to another device. Miloš rushed to his laptop and flipped it open before feverishly typing in various commands. Within a minute, he had access to her desktop. Using the RAT, he activated her camera.
Her bedroom was predictably elegant. Minimalist but not austere. Above a luxurious but tasteful sofa, there was a poster of a giant cat smirking and holding a gun. Below this, a small table upon which sat a large metal statuette — a man in a great coat smoking a cigar. Miloš zoomed in. Underneath the bust on a little plinth was the inscription: Comrade Tito. To the left was what looked like a walk-in closet and to the right side of the computer, Miloš assumed there was a door leading out of the room. Against the wall, a large double bed.
Katarina started playing something on her iTunes. Miloš had never heard the song although he identified it as German. So he looked on her computer — Udo Lindenberg, “Unterm Säufermond.” She was lying on her sofa, and as the melancholic sounds floated over her, he focused on those green eyes and realized that she had begun to cry.
He was frozen with a sympathy that he couldn’t articulate. Least of all to her. As the song came to an end, she left the room, returning with a large glass of red wine. Miloš longed to be there to offer her comfort. But, real as this was, it was mediated by virtual deception.
At this point, Katarina started to remove her top. This was too much for Miloš to process and he slammed his computer shut.
Try as he might, Miloš could not keep away from her computer. Each time he watched her undress, he would wait a little longer before slamming down the top of his computer, overcome with guilt and anger at himself. At the same time, he felt betrayed because her WhatsApp messages indicated that she was having an affair. Her lover had yet to pay a visit to her apartment, but Miloš suspected it was only a matter of time.
Xenonauts 2 still provided a healthy distraction. The latest version was proving to be a magnificent challenge. He would play with intense concentration for two hours and then he would return to Katarina. By now, he knew every contour of what he considered her celestial body. Deep inside, his conscience was telling him that what he was doing was infernally immoral. Unfortunately, burning desire could outmaneuver his conscience. When at work, he distracted himself by thinking of ways in which he might approach her, how he might declare his resolute, adamantine, and eternal love. Should he casually bump into her as she was leaving her apartment? But what would he say? Hey, miss, you remember me? I fixed your iPhone. Fancy a drink? Preposterous.
Perhaps he could research fine red wines and present a rare bottle to her as a gift. There was something about this idea that appealed to him. He could get the necessary cash from his father.
But he couldn’t quite complete the plan in his head. How would he actually fashion a situation whereby giving her the bottle of wine would not appear, well, weird? Would he suggest that they drink it together? Or simply walk away with a euphoric smile on his face? These were details he had yet to finalize. But he felt that he had at least a seed of an idea.
Newly inspired, Miloš flipped open the lid of his computer. It was six thirty p.m., around the time that Katarina usually arrived home. He was in luck. The RAT told him her computer was already on. He switched on the camera. Early on, he had programmed the little green light at the top of her Mac only to turn on if she used it. So, as he was watching her, she would be ignorant of his presence.
As soon as the familiar room came up on his screen, he noted that something was odd. Something was distorting the image of the room which was by now seared into the screen of his mind. Then he spotted it. There were two glasses by the now familiar bottle of French wine. Not one.
Miloš’s insides began to churn. He’d known that this moment would come at some point. He’d known he would have to watch his beloved Katarina have sex with somebody else. In his mind, he didn’t reproach her for it. How could she carry any blame? She was unaware of the depth, the sincerity, not to mention the existence of his passion for her. He believed that once their friendship and companionship were established, then the cursory carnal pleasures that her other male friends delivered would disappear into the woods.
Suddenly, Katarina returned, switching off the main bedroom light as she entered before flicking another switch. Her bedside lamp threw but a modest dull circle of light across the left side of her bed. The lamp was beyond Miloš’s field of vision and so it was only the dark shapes of Katarina and her friend that he observed in a state of controlled frenzy as they impatiently removed each other’s clothes. Miloš was close to tears as he watched her being defiled and dishonored. But he could no longer restrain himself and less than a minute into the event, his reluctant excitement was seeping stickily into the keyboard.
He felt transformed into a bottom feeder in an ocean of shame. He had never felt so miserable. He was desperate to slam shut his laptop in order to end the tortured on-screen show and its associated sighs and grunts. But he knew well that this would soak his motherboard with the viscous liquid and render it unusable. All the data of his Xenonauts conquests lay there. So he did the only thing he could: he started to cry before finding some tissues with which he could clean up the mess and turn the machine off.
Over the next few days, Miloš refused to even open his computer. Not only did he stop spying on Katarina, he actually stopped playing Xenonauts. At work, he retreated into his own thoughts. Bane and Jovana tiptoed around him — aware that something was very wrong, but apprehensive about doing anything that might trigger what they suspected was an emotional volcano.
Five days later, Miloš could no longer resist the lure of Xenonauts and so he lifted the lid on his laptop. He stared at the keyboard, the focus of his recent embarrassment. He thought he detected a couple of small stains which he carefully removed with a dab of water on a tissue. Before long, he was back — this time in a new environment that the aliens were seeking to establish as their base in the Middle East.
It was soon after he had stumbled across an oasis south of Mosul that the alert sounded. It was six thirty-five p.m. Katarina had returned home. He froze the Iraqi action and flipped over to her webcam, his heart pounding. Deploying those hawk eyes which had been the downfall of so many aliens, he clocked the two glasses next to the wine.
Jealousy, anger, prurience, desire, tristesse, curiosity. Which impulse would take over? As they vied for his attention, something most unexpected occurred, recalibrating all his emotions into a wave of astonishment. A dinner plate came flying through the door and sailed right across the bedroom before exiting into the bathroom, followed by a loud crash which was efficiently picked up by the microphone on Katarina’s Mac.
Worse followed. Much worse. Miloš heard Katarina scream as she fell back into the room before the man with a swift, expert sleight of hand immobilized her. It reminded him of the Vulcan nerve grip that Mr. Spock was able to deploy so fatally in his close-combat encounters aboard the USS Enterprise. The man squatted over her with his back to Miloš. Having kicked her to ensure she remained on the floor, the man turned to grab Comrade Tito before raising the statuette above his head in preparation to strike.