The Wolf of Sarajevo

by Matthew Palmer

  VW was a little overweight—okay, maybe a little bit more than a little—and a little bit frumpy in how she dressed. Her colleagues had never cared. All that mattered in the Directorate of Intelligence was the quality of your mind—and VW had analytic acumen in spades.

  She deserved better from the Agency. At the very least, she deserved an explanation for her ostracism. It would never, she knew, be forthcoming. The system did not work like that.

  She had tried to make the best of it.

  When Dimitrović had come to power and announced his support for a new post-Dayton Bosnia, everyone had been hopeful that Europe’s most dysfunctional state had at long last turned the corner. The mainstream analysts fell back on the standard clichés in lauding Dimitrović’s conversion on the road to Damascus or his “Nixon-to-China” moment for Bosnia. From the very beginning, however, VW had had her doubts. Dimitrović was a classic alpha wolf, lean and crafty and hungry. His turn to the West struck her as manufactured. At best, it was tactical; at worst, it was deceptive. Under her direction, the Island of Misfit Toys had put forward a number of analytic red-cell reports that challenged Dimitrović’s bona fides as a reformer. As she knew they would, the reports had sunk into the bureaucratic swamp without a sound or trace.

  But after six months of the new leader’s extraordinary and unprecedented progress in building a unified state, even VW had started to come around.

  Dimitrović’s fall from grace, his regression to chauvinistic nationalism, had been as sudden as his earlier embrace of “brotherhood and unity” with the Federation’s Bosniaks and Croats. It had caught everyone by surprise. It was exactly the kind of thing that the Long-Range Planning Group was supposed to forecast. And they had missed it.

  At least they were still working the problem, VW consoled herself. It seemed like the mainstream analytic office covering the Western Balkans had simply stopped trying. They produced almost nothing in the way of serious analysis. They seemed to be working hard, or at least late, but there was no product to show for it.

  VW stirred the cold dregs of coffee in a mug embossed with the CIA’s eagle and shield. Maybe she should take a walk down to the cafeteria for a fresh cup. It might help clear her head. But there was a significant risk at this time of day of running into a friend, a colleague, or an acquaintance from her earlier life, back when she had been somebody. She could not stand the expressions of sympathy for her state of exile. They were too close to pity. She would rather drink her coffee cold and bitter.

  On the desk next to the coffee was a file with an orange Top Secret cover sheet. Inside was a report that her political-military unit had been working on. There were some indications in the intelligence that an old military airfield near Bijeljina was being used to fly in guns and ammunition from Russia. Putin, she knew, looked at the RS as a wedge that he could drive between the Balkans and the West, as well as a way to validate his ethnic landgrab in Ukraine and punish the Europeans and the Americans for their sanctions policy. It was even possible that the mysterious Marko Barcelona was secretly working for the Kremlin. That was a theory worth exploring as a red-cell exercise. The report on her desk contained some interesting speculation, but it was short on hard evidence. It would be nice to have some surveillance imagery and maybe signals intelligence from the airfield.

  VW picked up the phone on her desk and dialed from memory.

  “Hello.”

  No one at the CIA ever answered the phone with a given name, or even the name of the office. Either you knew who you were calling or you did not. And if you did not, then fuck off.

  “Bob, it’s Vicky.”

  “VW. Hey. How’s life on the Island?”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to say that out loud.”

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry. Didn’t mean to be rude.”

  Bob Landis was an engineer, a nuts-and-bolts techie who had long ago crossed the Rubicon into management but had never quite lost the social ineptitude characteristic of his profession.

  “What can I do for you?” Landis asked.

  “I need a favor.”

  “What is it?” Landis’s tone shifted from conciliatory to cautious.

  “I need a couple of hours of drone time in Bosnia.”

  “They aren’t drones, VW, they’re . . .”

  “Unmanned aerial vehicles. I know. My turn to apologize. I certainly don’t want to hurt their feelings. But I do need some UAV time and I’m hoping you can help me out.”

  “Who do you want to kill?”

  It was a joke. Sort of.

  As a consequence of what had once been known in government circles as the Global War on Terror—often abbreviated with the ugly uneuphonious acronym GWOT and later gifted with the much more frightening moniker the Long War—the CIA had acquired a large and sophisticated air force all its own. The Agency operated a fleet of Reapers and Predators and other more exotic UAVs that it used for collecting information and, more recently, for something referred to euphemistically as kinetic operations. Assassination.

  Landis had once built drones. He had been a part of the team that had the idea to mount a Hellfire missile on a Predator. And he had watched by live satellite feed as his creation was used in battle for the first time, killing a group of innocent scrap-metal collectors in Afghanistan because one of them was tall and in some way resembled Osama bin Laden. Since then, this kind of operation had become routine, standardized with kill lists and checklists and “safeguards” intended more to ward off any potential congressional investigation than to ensure that collateral damage was kept to a minimum.

  Much of the work was done by contractors. The CIA did not actually like getting its hands dirty. Landis’s job was to manage the schedule for the drones.

  “You know who I want to kill, Bob. Whoever the son of a bitch is who sent me here. But I’ll do that job myself. For now, I need something a little more prosaic. Just some overflights, imagery, and SIGINT on an airfield near Bijeljina that we think the Russians may be using.”

  “Sorry, VW. I got nothing for you.”

  “Waddaya mean? If I need to wait a few days, that’s okay. This is potentially significant, but it’s not hair-on-fire urgent.”

  “No, I mean I don’t have anything for anyone at any time. All of the UAV time has been earmarked for another program indefinitely. The relevant satellite time too. It’s out of my hands.”

  “What program?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “It’s a director-level code. I don’t know the name of the actual program. And I sure as hell don’t know what it does.”

  VW knew better than to ask him for the code. There was no way he was going to give that out.

  “Where are the assets?”

  “You mean physically?”

  Landis had stopped thinking of the UAVs as actual aircraft operating in the real world. To him, they were just hours of flying time and maintenance schedules on a spread sheet.

  “Yes. Physically.”

  “Same place.”

  VW knew where that was, a clandestine airfield in eastern Slavonia that the CIA rented from the Croatian government at an exorbitant cost.

  “So whatever it is they’re doing is still in the Balkans?”

  “Probably. But it’s not the kind of question I ask.”

  “So what can I do to get what I need? Are there any other assets available?”

  “You could put in a request to transfer an airframe from Ukraine or Syria ops on a temporary basis,” Landis suggested.

  “And the odds of success on that?”

  “Statistically indistinguishable from zero,” he admitted.

  The Balkans had once been the highest-priority issue on the international agenda, but those days were long gone. Moving assets from a hot place like Ukraine was simply not a realistic option. VW w
ould have a better chance of building her own UAV in the garage of her Alexandria town house and flying it over the Atlantic like Charles Lindbergh with a remote control.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “Good-bye, Bob.”

  She hung up.

  VW sat at her desk stirring the cold coffee without drinking it. She needed to think.

  Something was going on in her region. Something that she was being kept out of. It was infuriating, an insult on top of an insult, salt rubbed into the wound of her exile. But there was something else as well, a spark of intellectual curiosity. It was a puzzle. VW liked puzzles and she was very, very good at them.

  There was, she realized, a back door. There was always a back door. In this case, it was the contractors. One of the ironclad laws of government was that contractors would demand their time and a half for every minute of mandatory overtime. The CIA’s UAV fleet was operated exclusively by a corps of contractors. Eventually, permanent staffing patterns in the intelligence community would catch up to twenty-first-century reality . . . but likely not until the twenty-second century. It was the nature of government.

  Among the more ignominious duties that she had been assigned that were consistent with the terms of her exile to the Island was being the backup comptroller for budget and finance in the Office of Russian and European Analysis. In truth, the demands on her time were not especially onerous. She was merely the backup, after all. But it did mean that she had administrative access to the time-and-attendance software from her desktop. She fished a pocket of Nescafé from her desk drawer and mixed it with water that was almost but not quite hot enough from the machine in the break room. With a sigh, she sat down at the computer to review the overtime charges for the last three months.

  It took longer than she had bargained for, but once VW got her teeth into a challenge, she rarely let go, and by nine p.m. that evening, she had found what she was looking for. Contractors from BlueSky Solutions, a Beltway bandit with ties to General Atomics—the company behind both the Predator and Reaper UAVs—were consistently billing overtime to a program identified only by an eleven-digit number. This was the director-level code that Landis had referred to. This worked well enough for the time-and-attendance software, but VW knew that the T&A figures would need to be reconciled with the accounting program that managed the massive flow of money in and out of the subregional budget for operations. The budget software would not accept the code; it would require the program name to be input into the correct field.

  VW toggled over to the accounting program and searched the database for the entries that corresponded to the suspicious time-and-attendance overtime charges. It was not hard to find. All of the overtime for BlueSky Solutions had been charged to a single program. Parsifal. VW had been working on Balkan issues for most of her career, and she had never seen this program name in any of the operational files.

  “What the fuck is Parsifal?” she asked out loud to an empty office.

  SARAJEVO

  OCTOBER 16

  7

  I have a lead.” Sarah’s eagerness was visible in the athletic hunch of her shoulders and the bright gleam in her eyes. Her body seemed almost to quiver, like a hunting dog that had spotted a bird in the brush and was holding point.

  “What sort of lead?” Eric shook his head and laughed. “Even asking that question makes me feel like a character from Law & Order.”

  “Not here.”

  They were standing in the embassy’s expansive atrium, a corner of which had been given over to a coffee bar. Eric had just gotten his usual morning fix, a double espresso straight up, when Sarah had arrived looking like she had already had several shots.

  It had been four days since Eric had agreed to help her. Since then, Sarah had passed through the embassy on several occasions, but she never stayed for long. Eric expected that she was there just to use the commo facilities and read the traffic.

  “My office?” he suggested.

  “Not there either.”

  “My office isn’t secure enough?”

  It looked to Eric as though there was something Sarah wanted to say in response but that she had changed her mind.

  “Maybe I just feel like some fresh air,” she said instead. “It’s a beautiful day out. Let’s go for a ride.”

  “I have a meeting at two.”

  “Cancel it.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’ll tell you in the car.”

  Sarah was like that. She had always been like that: secretive and demanding, maddening and passionate, selfish and generous. Eric had loved her for her dualities even as they had made him crazy. Part of him wanted to refuse on principle, but he knew that he could not.

  Twenty minutes later, they were in Sarah’s car, a rented Peugeot 308, headed north on the major road leading to the RS.

  It was unseasonably warm, with clear blue skies and just enough of a breeze to keep the diesel fumes from settling over the city like a shroud.

  “Okay, what’s the big lead?” Eric asked. “Was it Colonel Mustard in the billiard room with the candlestick? I never trust a guy with a mustache big enough to do double duty as a comb-over.”

  “Nothing so dramatic, I’m afraid. But I’ve been working my old network in Srpska along with some of our more recent acquisitions. It can be a slow process. A mentor of mine once told me that operational intel work is like being a spider on a web trying to read the vibrations of the various threads. If you can feel them, the vibrations will tell you that you’ve got prey trapped, how big it is, and where it is on the web. But you have to keep a light touch. If you grab the threads too hard, you can’t read the vibrations.

  “In any event, one of my old assets got word to me that he had something on Mali that he was willing to share. There’ll be a price, of course. This guy was pretty mercenary back in the day. But he worked cheap, and I think I can cover his fee out of what I can dig out of the station’s couch cushions.”

  “So where are we going?”

  “Zvornik.”

  Zvornik was a depressed postindustrial town on the banks of the Drina River. Although right across the river from its sister city in Serbia, Mali Zvornik, or “little Zvornik,” Zvornik had been 60 percent Bosniak before the war. The paramilitaries had zeroed in on Zvornik early in the conflict. Arkan’s Tigers and the Scorpions had been the most aggressive, running concentration camps, blowing up mosques, and stealing everything that was not nailed down. Decades after the fighting, Zvornik was still a hotbed of ethnic nationalism.

  “Do you have security of some kind for this little exercise?”

  “Well, I’m traveling with a big strong man,” Sarah said flirtatiously.

  “Where is he? In the trunk? Maybe you should let him out. Give him some air.”

  “You’re still funny, Eric. I always liked that about you.”

  Eric was somewhat chagrined at the way Sarah’s simple compliment delivered a strong shot of dopamine to the pleasure center of his brain. It was clear to him that his feelings for her had not entirely faded. No good can come of this, he warned himself.

  “Who’s the contact?”

  “His name is Viktor Jovanovski.”

  “Macedonian?” Eric asked. In the former Yugosphere, the “ski” ending to a family name was usually either Macedonian or Bulgarian.

  “On his father’s side. His mother was a Bosnian Serb and Viktor grew up in Zvornik. Dad was a small-time criminal, but his son made the big leagues, or at least triple-A ball. He was with the Scorpions during the war and made a small fortune smuggling cigarettes and gasoline. As a sideline, he also worked for me. Agency reporting indicates that he’s still a serious player in the black economy and that gives him a reason not to be happy about Marko Barcelona.”

  “New guy muscling in on his territory?”

 
“Pretty much. These are apex predators. Their position depends as much on reputation as on capability. A mob boss like Viktor can’t be seen as being scared of a guy like Mali. Otherwise the pack will tear him to pieces.”

  “It almost sounds like you feel bad for the guy.”

  “I don’t have an ounce of sympathy to spare for Viktor. But I need to understand him if I plan to use him.”

  “And what does he want from you? He made contact, no? And nothing’s for nothing in this part of the world.”

  “He’s probably hoping that I can get a Reaper to drop a Hellfire on Mali’s house.”

  “Is he right?”

  Sarah laughed.

  “Not my department.”

  “What makes you think you can trust this guy?”

  “Self-interest rightly understood.”

  “Okay, but I’m skeptical that your old friend Viktor has read much Tocqueville.”

  “He may not recognize the line, but he’ll understand the concept. Believe me, if there’s anything Viktor knows, it’s what’s best for himself.”

  It was not a long distance to Zvornik as the crow flew. But they were not crows. Although the road was in decent shape on the relative scale used in judging Bosnia’s roads, it was circuitous, winding up and around the steep peaks of the Majevica mountain range. Spindly trees somehow clung to life on the nearly sheer black-rock cliff faces on either side of the narrow road. This was wild Bosnia, the old Balkans of bears and wolves and mountain clans that had refused to bend the knee to the Ottoman invaders. The high mountain passes had been tamed by brute-force Yugoslav engineering but never entirely subdued. Sarah drove the mountain road expertly, just on the edge of control, downshifting into the turns and steering the agile Peugeot around the occasional rockfall.

  Five kilometers before the border with Republika Srpska, Sarah pulled off the road, and Eric changed out the Peugeot’s Bosnian license plates for a set of Serbian plates from the trunk that began with the two-letter code used for cars registered in Mali Zvornik. The guards at the makeshift border crossing wore Scorpion patches on their uniforms. Zvornik was their home turf. Two bored-looking paramilitaries waved them through the checkpoint with only a quick glance at their license plates. It was not their job to harass the locals.