The Wolf of Sarajevo (8 page)

In Klingsor's experience, really serious fuckups were rarely the result of a single major mistake. Rather, it was a series of small things that went wrong in just the right way, each one compounding the consequences of the error or oversight that preceded it. In the world of after-action reviews, there was even a word for it. The “snowball.” Klingsor could feel that he and the team were already trapped in a snowball that was rolling downhill and picking up both speed and mass. Force equals mass times acceleration, and they were in for one hell of a hard hit at the bottom of this hill.

“Can you hook the defibrillator up to the car battery?”

“It's just a goddamn prop. It's got no juice.”

“Let's try CPR.”

“Aw, fuck. You might as well sacrifice a chicken.”

Klingsor ignored him, although he knew that Echo Four was almost certainly right. CPR was not a high-percentage strategy. But it was the best of the available options. The only alternative as near as he could see was to sit on his ass and hope that Gisler did not die.

Like everyone else on the team, Klingsor had the right training. He forced air into Gisler's lungs while Echo Three compressed his chest at the prescribed intervals. They kept it up for some time after it was clear that the lawyer was dead.

Ordinarily, his first call would have been to a specialized team that his organization kept on standby to clean up messes like this one. But this op was different. There was no safety net. Klingsor would have to rely on the assets at hand and wing it. He hated winging it.

His first call—his only call, really—would be to Kundry, who was going to be royally pissed.

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

OCTOBER 15

O
fficially, it was the South-Central Europe Long-Range Planning Group. Nobody called it that, at least nobody who worked below the seventh floor at CIA headquarters in Langley. To everyone else, even if only to those who bothered to talk about it at all, it was the Island of Misfit Toys.

On the org chart of the European Directorate, the office floated off to one side, tied into the hierarchy by only a few tenuous dotted lines. On paper, the group was responsible for red-celling U.S. policy in the Western Balkans, trying out various scenarios, and developing the pros and cons of particular responses so that there would always be something on the shelf to respond to just about any conceivable contingency. It looked good on paper. In Washington, a lot of things look good on paper.

But that did not fool Victoria Wagoner. As director of the
Long-Range Planning Group, she was queen of the Island of Misfit Toys. Except that she had her own name for it. Exile. She felt like some obscure European potentate from another century who was too high profile to kill but too awkward to have hanging around the palace. It was easier to stick an extraneous royal in a tower somewhere, with or without an iron mask. Or maybe on some island. Elba would do nicely, thank you.

For Vicky, known universally as VW since starting in the intel business as an analyst on East Germany at the tail end of the Cold War, the Long-Range Planning Group was her own personal Elba. And after almost two years in the group, she still was not certain just what she had done to deserve exile. She had given twenty years of her career to the Western Balkans Division. She had been one of the first to anticipate the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia, and she had had the guts to put her prediction on paper. For a while at least, that had made her something of a minor deity in the narrow professional circles she traveled in.

She knew why Clark had been sent to the Island. He was an asshole with a serious anger-management problem who had picked an unwinnable fight with senior management one too many times. Linda Marigliano had had an affair with her boss that ended badly. She had filed a sexual harassment suit and lost. Her prize had been a transfer. This is where the losers of the European Directorate's turf wars and policy battles washed ashore like so much bureaucratic flotsam. In the private sector, they probably would have been fired, which would have been merciful. It was hard to fire civil servants, even those in sensitive national security positions. That's what the Island was for. Other directorates had their own version. It was as if a gulag archipelago stretched across the organizational
charts and personnel systems of the CIA and almost every other U.S. government agency. There should be some kind of club, VW had long thought, a system of lapel pins and a secret handshake. They could hold meetings with their own peculiar rituals like Freemasons or Boy Scouts. Lord knows they had the time.

Why VW was on the Island was not clear to her. To the best of her knowledge, she had not crossed any of the higher-ups in any significant way. She had not flunked the part of the lifestyle polygraph where they asked about drug use, gambling, or sex with farm animals. She had not published any spectacularly wrong products that had contributed to a decision to invade one or more small countries. Her batting average on predictions was, in fact, well above the median.

For two years, VW and her team had turned out a steady stream of useless reports on a range of hypothetical events, none of which had come to pass. Albania had not fallen under the control of a drug trafficking narco-boss with ties to the FARC in Colombia. Serbia had not gone to war with Kosovo in a quixotic attempt to take physical possession of the Serb-majority municipalities north of the Ibar River.

But now there was Bosnia in danger of melting down into a new round of ethnic violence. The indicators were increasingly stark and worrisome. They should be hitting all kinds of alarm bells. The Bosnian army had effectively split, with most of the guns again going to the Serbs. The paramilitaries were back on the scene, and low-intensity acts of ethnic violence had become commonplace. In a town near the Croatian border, someone had thrown a hand grenade into a Serbian elementary school, killing two children and seriously injuring a teacher. Bosniak nationalists had bulldozed a Croatian
war memorial. One of the few remaining mosques in Republika Srpska, a historically significant Ottoman-era building in Zvornik with a graceful minaret, had been recently firebombed. The Scorpions were claiming responsibility.

The LPG had identified a breakdown in governance in Bosnia as a real risk as far back as five years ago, but not in exactly this way. No one had seen this coming.

VW had devoted her life to the CIA. She had no children and no husband, and had long ago entered the age group where her odds of getting married closely paralleled those of being killed by a terrorist. Hell, since she worked at CIA headquarters, her prospects for winding up on the business end of a terrorist operation may well have been slightly better than those for being on the receiving end of the Question.

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 would 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.