The Wolf of Sarajevo

by Matthew Palmer

  Sarah had it open within forty-five seconds.

  “It was harder to get into your apartment,” she whispered.

  Eric removed his night-vision goggles and hooked them onto his belt. The lights were on in parts of the house, and it was more than bright enough inside to find their way to Mali’s basement study.

  Earlier, Eric had asked Dragan about the guard posted inside the villa.

  “Don’t worry,” Dragan had replied. “I ran a little background investigation of the guard who’ll be on duty. He likes to gamble, and he put a not inconsiderable sum on Partizan to beat Red Star in the derby game. No way he won’t be watching that. We should be okay, at least until halftime.”

  “He’s going to lose his money,” Eric had predicted. “Partizan is just terrible this year.”

  Consistent with Dragan’s expectations, they could hear a television on upstairs broadcasting the unmistakable roar of a match between the two biggest Serbian football clubs. In Serbia, the yearly Partizan–Red Star game was almost a national holiday.

  Mali’s home was extravagantly furnished, with just a hint of the bad taste that spoke of new money. A narrow set of stairs in the back of the house led down to the basement. According to the notes in the files of the security company, Mali’s office was below grade and windowless. It was also secured with a cipher lock and an independent alarm system, the override codes for which were helpfully kept on file by the security contractor for operational reasons. Dragan keyed the six-digit code onto the keypad and was rewarded with the sharp click of the lock disengaging.

  The room was dark, but Sarah found the light switch without much difficulty. When the door closed behind them, Dragan said, “We can speak normally. The room is soundproof.”

  This is something of a double-edged sword, Eric thought. The guard could not hear them, but neither would they be able to hear him if he pulled himself away from the football game to make rounds.

  The room beyond the door was an outer office that, judging by the feminine desiderata on the desk, was used by a receptionist or secretary. Mali’s personal office was in the back. It was spacious and opulent. The floors were hardwood with a few oriental rugs. There was a well-stocked bar along one wall. The opposite wall featured a pair of large paintings that Eric recognized. They were museum pieces. The artist, Nadežda Petrović, was Serbia’s most famous impressionist. Her face was on the two-hundred-dinar note. There were other paintings almost as nice on the wall behind Mali’s desk. The total value of the art in the office was well north of half a million dollars.

  The desk was walnut, with an ornate relief carved on the front. It was a nature scene, birds and flowers and climbing vines. The style was typically Balkan, but Eric had never seen an example of this kind of work so fine and delicate. Wood carving like this was generally done by village artisans. The relief on Mali’s desk was fine art.

  They had divided the responsibilities. Sarah went to work on the computer while Eric went through the contents of the desk drawers. Dragan, meanwhile, searched the room for a safe. The computer was password protected, of course, but Sarah had brought a piece of CIA tech with them that she hoped would get around that.

  There was not much in the desk itself. The middle drawer was full of standard office products, with the exception of a Waterman pen that had a two-carat canary yellow diamond embedded in the cap. Eric did not for a moment suspect that it was a fake. Whatever other problems Mali might have, money was clearly not among them.

  “Look for anything electronic,” Sarah said, as she plugged a small black box into the desktop with a USB connection. “Cameras. Tape recorders. Look out in particular for videotape or anything that can hold electronic records.”

  Eric was again reminded that Sarah was not searching randomly. She might not have known exactly what they were after, but she had a much clearer idea than either Eric or Dragan.

  There was little of interest in the right-hand drawers. On the left side, however, Eric found a plain black ledger book and a manila folder labeled EMERALD WAVE—DARKO LUKIĆ. There was a CIA product inside the folder. Eric scanned it quickly. It seemed to be a bio-cum-psychological study of a Bosnian Serb army sniper, a man of considerable technical skill and equally outsize ethical shortcomings. The black-and-white picture in the upper-right corner showed an unsmiling bearded man in a military uniform with an intense penetrating gaze. This was almost certainly the man who had murdered Luka Filipović.

  “Did you lose something?” Eric asked Sarah, passing her the contents of the folder. He spoke softly so that Dragan could not hear.

  “Goddamn it!”

  “How could Mali get ahold of something like that?”

  “I told you we had a leak.”

  “What’s Emerald Wave?”

  “Psych profiles of likely targets for war crimes prosecution. The idea was to find little fish who might be ready to roll over on bigger fish in exchange for a deal.”

  “This is almost certainly the sniper Amra was talking about and probably the guy who killed Filipović.”

  “Odds are good.”

  “Dragan,” Eric said loud enough to get the former spy’s attention. “Ever hear of a sniper called Darko Lukić from the war?”

  “Lukić?” Dragan considered the question without stopping his fruitless search of the office. “Name is familiar. There was a Lukić who was part of a special unit reporting directly to Ratko Mladić. After the war, he went to work for the Zemun clan in Belgrade, one of the nastier of the mafias. He was the chief suspect in three or four gangland murders. And then nothing. He just disappeared. Maybe into the bottle. He was a very, very good shot. Is he the one who killed our friend Filipović?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then we are both lucky not to be dead.”

  Eric photographed the documents and put the file back in the drawer. The ledger book was equally interesting but considerably more cryptic. It was set up for bookkeeping, and a cursory look indicated that whatever he was tracking with it there was no money coming in. It was a record of expenditures, handwritten in neat block lettering. Most of the outflow was assigned to a category labeled GENEVA, but there was also a regular stream of payments to someone identified only as Father S.

  “What’s in Geneva?” Eric asked. “Maybe a bank?”

  “A lawyer,” Sarah answered. “Mali’s lawyer.”

  “Could he be holding whatever it is we’re looking for?”

  “It’s possible. What about Father S? Who’s he? Or they? Maybe it says fathers.”

  Something stirred in the back of Eric’s brain, a connection struggling to be made. It was like the feeling of having a name at the tip of your tongue. It was almost there, but the harder you tried to lock it in, the more elusive it seemed.

  Eric used a small camera that Dragan had given him to take pictures of the book and the letters. Most of the correspondence was in French, a language Eric did not read. Sarah could look at them later. Her French was good enough that she could have passed as a Parisian.

  “I can’t find any sign of a safe,” Dragan said from across the room with just a hint of frustration. “Nothing in the walls. Nothing on the floor. Maybe he doesn’t have one.”

  “Seems unlikely for a paranoid son of a bitch like Mali,” Sarah suggested. “Keep looking. We have to find his hiding place.” Any possible hint of despondency was buried under a thick layer of indignation that the risks they were running should go unrewarded.

  Eric looked at the open drawers of the desk. Something did not seem quite right, and it took a minute for him to realize what it was.

  “The drawers on the left are shorter than the ones on the right by a good eight inches. Why would that be, unless . . .”

  “There’s a hollow space behind them,” Sarah finished his thought.

  Eric explored the elaborate carving on the back of the desk. He ran hi
s fingers over the wood. One of the heads of a two-headed eagle—the symbol of the Serbian monarchy—seemed loose. He pushed it like a button and the back panel swung out, revealing a safe built into the desk.

  “Can either of you get it open?” Eric asked.

  “Unless there’s something special about this lock, it shouldn’t be hard,” Sarah said confidently.

  From her backpack, Sarah pulled out an odd-looking apparatus that Eric could not identify. A small video screen was connected by several thick cables to what looked like some kind of miniature plunger. Sarah set the head of the plunger over the spin dial. It clapped onto the steel with a force that suggested the rubber shell concealed a powerful magnet. Sarah attached four leads to the safe door in a diamond pattern around the lock. The plunger made an odd clicking noise that sounded almost like dolphins at an aquarium. Sarah looked over her shoulder at Eric and Dragan.

  “Sonic pulses,” she explained. “The vibrations let the computer read the location of the locking pins.”

  A slight whir indicated that underneath the rubber cup something was spinning the safe dial. Sarah watched the video screen and made a series of seemingly small adjustments to the readouts. Some sixty seconds later, she reached for the handle and pulled down. The door popped open without a sound.

  “Easy as pie,” Sarah announced.

  Inside, they found stacks of bills bound with currency straps from several local banks. There were dollars bundled into bricks of ten thousand, euros, Swiss francs, and rubles. Sarah had no interest in the money. Nor in the 9mm pistol and spare magazines on the bottom shelf.

  She scanned quickly through a short stack of papers that looked to Eric like land records.

  “It’s not here,” she said.

  “What is it, Sarah? What are we here to find?” Eric asked.

  “A tape or its electronic equivalent, a disc or even a memory stick. This is just . . . money.”

  “Quiet,” Dragan hissed.

  They froze.

  The keypad on the inside was synched to the cipher lock on the outside. It was beeping. Someone was keying in numbers on the far side of the door. The code.

  “Move,” Dragan said, and there was no mistaking his urgency.

  Eric slammed the safe door closed with a disconcertingly loud crash. Sarah scooped her gear into the backpack she carried and Dragan scanned the room for a place to hide.

  “This way,” he insisted. The burly Serb grabbed Sarah and Eric by their upper arms and half guided, half dragged them behind the bar.

  As they got their heads down, the door opened. Eric could see the guard in the reflection from the bar mirror, which meant, he realized, that the guard would be able to see them as well if he looked in their direction.

  The guard was young and fit-looking, and he walked with the confident swagger of an athlete. He was well over six feet tall and at least two hundred and twenty pounds of muscle. But Eric was more concerned about the pistol strapped to his thigh and the radio hooked onto his belt.

  The guard walked over to Mali’s desk and inspected it as if something did not seem quite right. From under her jacket, Sarah produced a handgun. It was small and looked to be made of more plastic than metal, but it had a large silencer screwed onto the barrel. It did not look like a pistol. It looked like a murder weapon.

  Dragan held up an index finger and shook his head slightly. The meaning was clear: not “no” so much as “not yet.”

  “Evo ga,” Eric heard the guard mutter. Here it is.

  He pulled something from the desk drawer and pointed it at the far wall. The television came on, already tuned to the channel showing the soccer game. If he decided to fix himself a drink, they were all screwed.

  The radio on the guard’s belt squawked.

  “Ivan, are you making your fucking rounds?”

  “Yeah,” the guard replied, pressing the button on the unit without bothering to unhook it from his belt.

  “Well, hurry the fuck up. It’s time to switch. I get the second half.”

  “Cool your fucking jets.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Ivan switched the radio off. He took two steps toward the bar and then stopped. Eric was certain that he had seen them, but instead of drawing his gun, the guard turned to his right and headed for Mali’s private toilet. They did not need to discuss their next move. The instant the guard was out of sight, the three of them were up and moving as quickly and quietly as they could to the door. Eric hoped that Ivan’s mother had taught him to wash his hands. They needed the time.

  Dragan turned the handle slowly and eased the door open without a sound. Eric and Sarah slipped through and the door closed silently behind them. Eric could feel his pulse jackhammering in his ears. His breath was ragged as though he had been running. He was grateful to see that Sarah also looked keyed-up and anxious. Only Dragan seemed unperturbed. It was easy to imagine that this was far from the most stressful situation that his particular line of work had put him in.

  Fifteen minutes later, they were back at the jeep and driving in the dark down the overgrown logging road.

  Sarah examined the device she had hooked up to Mali’s computer to mirror his hard drive.

  “Nothing,” she said in disgust. “I didn’t have enough time to crack the security. All that effort and risk for nothing.”

  “Not nothing,” Eric assured her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Whatever that thing is that Mali has over Dimitrović. The source of his leverage.”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I know where it is.”

  GENEVA

  NOVEMBER 14

  9:30 A.M.

  27

  The moment Klingsor saw the face on the monitor, he knew that everything had gone to hell.

  There was nothing especially imposing about the man standing on the front steps of Gisler’s law office looking directly into the camera with a deceptively pleasant smile. He was of average height and build with a nondescript tan trench coat that looked like it had been bought off the rack at Macy’s or a similar middlebrow department store. His features were smooth and his face unlined by troubles. His short hair was steel gray, most of it hidden under a fedora the color of charcoal that matched his round wire-rimmed spectacles. Fashion points from the Agency’s foundational era.

  His reputation preceded him. He was a decade into the job and had demonstrated a real affinity for its somewhat arcane practices. Everyone in Klingsor’s line of work knew who he was, and no one used his name. The moniker he carried came with the job. It was the same title bestowed on the one man on a football team who no one wanted to talk to. He was the Turk.

  Coach wants to see you. Bring your playbook.

  Those words marked the end of many athletic dreams and careers. The spy world was less forgiving: Coach wants to see you . . . dead.

  The Turk cleaned up the CIA’s internal messes, everything from hopeless drunks to hapless traitors. Deeply flawed individuals with highly classified and potentially valuable knowledge and experience could not simply be cut loose to wander the world at will, nursing grievances and old grudges. The Turk made the arrangements for the separation from the Clandestine Service of its more problematic members. Most could be monitored or otherwise controlled. Maybe they would be asked to surrender their passports or be subject to electronic surveillance for the rest of their lives. A few, the most troublesome, the riskiest, or the least redeemable, were eliminated on a more permanent basis. The pink slip was in the form of a toe tag.

  Klingsor was not certain which category he belonged in. If he was being honest, and Klingsor prided himself on his brutal honesty, the Turk’s unannounced appearance at the front door was not especially surprising. Their part of the operation was not supposed to have dragged on like this. It should have been in and out, over in a few hours at the most. Gisler would ha
ve sung like a tweety bird, and Klingsor and the Echoes would have been on a flight out of Geneva with the package secured the next day. It had not worked out that way, and as hours stretched into days and weeks and the mission had morphed from securing the package to persuading Marko Barcelona that there was nothing wrong with his dead-man’s switch in Geneva, the risk of exposure had grown beyond what Klingsor would have accepted at the outset. He and his team had fallen victim to the mental trap of the boiling frog. Drop a frog in hot water and it will hop out. But put it in a pot of cold water and heat it up slowly and the frog will sit there as it boils to death, ignoring the simple lifesaving option of one good hop to safety. The frog dies before it realizes there is any danger.

  The Turk’s presence in Geneva meant two things. Someone on the other end had screwed up in some way. And Klingsor and his people were royally fucked.

  Echo Three was with Klingsor in Gisler’s office, and he too recognized the Turk.

  “Should we let him in?” Echo Three asked.

  “We don’t really have much of a choice.”

  “No. I suppose we don’t.”

  Echo Three showed him in.

  The Turk removed his hat and coat with a precision of movement that bordered on the fastidious, hanging them both neatly on the rack in Gisler’s office.

  “Please, don’t get up,” the Turk said, though Klingsor had given no sign that he was planning to rise from the chair behind Gisler’s desk.

  “Could you please give us a few minutes alone?” the Turk asked Echo Three.

  Three looked to Klingsor, who nodded his acceptance. Without a word, Three stepped out into the hall, closing the double doors behind him.

  “You’ve done well for yourself, Daniel,” the Turk said, using Klingsor’s actual given name, which was both an egregious violation of OPSEC and a clear threat. All that you are is naked before me, it seemed to say.