So, he was back to Joe. He didn’t want to think about Joe anymore tonight. Joe had gone off with a pocketful of dough. He had a feeling Joe was like the cowboys he’d known in his youth, the hands that came and went on the ranch. When you paid them on a Saturday, you knew some of them wouldn’t be back—at least, not until they got rid of their pay, which didn’t always take longer than Saturday night in Great Falls. He had a feeling Joe was right now in bed with Helen.
Damn Helen, he thought. Joe without Helen was just about the ideal tool. With Helen … who knew what they’d get up to? To hell with it. If he were home now, he’d pour himself some of that ancient single malt he’d acquired, get out some reports to read or maybe study up on the history of Serbia, and listen to some Bach. He wasn’t at home. He was stuck in a hotel in Detroit, albeit about the best the city could offer, but still sterile and not very accommodating to a man of sophisticated tastes. Still, he had picked up one of those clever little clamshell CD players with some decent earphones. He had been surprised to find Tureck’s splendid version of the Bach partitas in a large music store in the nearby shopping center. There was some commercial Scotch in the minibar. He could tough it out with that. He settled down with Michael Sells’s interesting text on the religious aspect of the Bosnian strife.
The wind must have changed, he thought a half hour later. The airliners were making their approach to Detroit-Wayne just west of the hotel. An old pilot notices these things, almost unconsciously.
Every Bend
“’Round every bend / A crooked man will lie” goes the old blues tune. But Joe Service figured that every straight road has a crook in it, eventually. You didn’t want to get lulled into going too fast when the kink suddenly popped up. And Lieutenant Colonel Tucker’s projected routes were never as straight as they were sketched, Joe knew. But this one was no more than a cursory gesture, a vague line into a far, hazy horizon. There were no markers at all.
Of course, it wouldn’t be the colonel who missed the turn. “Go on over to Butte and find this Franko,” he’d said, more or less.
Find who? Joe said to himself. He was used to clients not knowing where he could find someone—that was his job, after all. Typically, some usually trustworthy fellow had decided to take $X and run—or, more likely, $XXX, XXX. Without guys like that, Joe would be looking for a career change.
But his old clients rarely said, “Find so-and-so.” Well, in the nature of things, they sometimes didn’t know exactly who had taken $X, and they would ask Joe to find out who it was—but there was always a shortlist of suspects. The colonel seemed to know who he wanted found, a missing agent who “maybe” was in Butte. His name was Franko. The Butte location was just a guess—somebody had said the guy was originally from Butte. To be sure, the colonel had checked out this Franko in all the official files. There wasn’t any Franko from Butte.
Joe and Helen were sitting in the colonel’s hotel room, where they had gone to discuss this project. “You must have a file on the guy,” Joe prodded the colonel. “An application for employment, maybe? With family history, educational background, blood type, fingerprints … a picture … a description, shoe size for crying out loud?”
They had a file, the colonel explained, but it wasn’t much use. No one in the DEA, the CIA, or any of the other agencies from which the Lucani drew their members had ever actually met “Franko.” At least, not as far as they knew. So, yes, they had a file, but it was a file derived largely from information provided, at a distance, sight unseen, by the subject of the file: Franko. So, no, they didn’t have a real file.
The problem was that Franko had not been recruited in the usual way. Indeed, he hadn’t been recruited at all. He had contacted them. This wasn’t unusual, Tucker explained. U.S. agencies were often contacted by foreign citizens, volunteering their services. Some of these were more or less clumsy attempts by foreign agencies to infiltrate American agencies or particular spying campaigns. In the old days, of course, these attempts were invariably attributed to the Soviet Union. What was different about this voluntary spy was that he claimed to be an American living abroad, and that he offered invaluable information about narcotics smuggling while insisting that he was not himself engaged in narcotics trafficking in any way. Furthermore, and most important, he had contacted the Lucani.
Joe didn’t understand that. “How could he contact the Lucani?” he asked the colonel. “What are there, billboards in Bosnia—‘The Lucani seek a few good men … Uncle Sam wants you!’ Do you have a number in the phone book?”
The colonel looked patiently suffering and said it wasn’t quite like that. But it was an important question, and the colonel understood it as such. Had Franko contacted them as a group known to him as the Lucani? Or had he simply approached someone who he thought might be an American agent, who just happened to have a somewhat tenuous connection to the Lucani? The link from that agent to the Lucani wasn’t the problem, he felt. But Franko’s motivation and the extent of his knowledge about espionage wasn’t clear, not to them, and they wanted to be clear about it.
They had first heard about Franko from a contract agent named Theo Ostropaki—himself not an American—who had subsequently disappeared and was now presumed dead. He had been last heard from in Mostar, in Herzegovina, more than a year ago. He was supposed to be meeting some people who, like Franko, were involved in the international drug trade. But they had heard nothing since.
Ostropaki had reported his initial contact with Franko to the DEA. He’d suggested that Franko might be a prospect as an agent or at least a source of information. He seemed like a reliable guy, an American from Butte, presently living in Bosnia or in the bordering hill country, at a location that might have been actually in Kosovo—jurisdictions were a little fuzzy up in those hills sometimes. Franko, he said, was intelligent, fairly young, able to move around. His occupation and his reason for being there weren’t clear. Ostropaki was asked to clarify that. Either he didn’t know what the guy was doing up there and didn’t take his explanations seriously, or there was something else, something Ostropaki wasn’t communicating. He hadn’t been able to do much research, for reasons that were later explained, though he was satisfied that Franko was fairly well known in the local area, but … how to put it?
Sometimes a stranger can come into a small, remote, clannish community, with no discernible connection there, no good reason to be there, and be accepted. His reasons, at least his initial reasons, for being there were not germane. The local people liked him and accepted him.
That hadn’t been good enough for the DEA. They’d passed on the offer. Ostropaki had turned to the colonel, who, at the time, was working with the DEA. He’d been impressed with Ostropaki’s intuition regarding Franko, and intrigued.
The colonel had seen a scenario such as Ostropaki had suggested occur in Montana. It wasn’t usual, that was for sure. The world over, villagers are almost painfully aware of strangers, perhaps more so when the stranger doesn’t seem to have any reason to be there. But he remembered a fellow who had come to the High Line when he was a kid, on the ranch.
Everybody talked about this Rick, wondered about him. He’d stayed for a couple of years, perhaps longer. Rick wasn’t a cowboy, he didn’t farm, he wasn’t a construction worker, although he fixed up an old house a mile or two out of Sun River and did a good job, folks said, meaning it was workmanlike and not too fancy, no sun roofs or geodesic-dome additions.
When Ostropaki had shrugged off the DEA’s concerns about Franko’s ostensible purposes, the colonel had immediately been reminded of Rick. He’d been surprised that he’d so completely forgotten this fellow who had occupied his boyish imagination more than a little bit.
Rick was a tall, good-looking man, if not exactly handsome, not movie star handsome. He had gotten the presumably dry well working at the old Ford place, which he’d rented. He kept a good bird dog. Was friendly but not nosy. Had a good pickup, but nothing too new. He hunted a little bit with some of the boys, for up
land birds and deer, and seemed to know what he was doing. Fished a little in the Sun, a fly fisherman. He was good enough at those pursuits to need no guide, no advice, but took it cheerfully.
Some people called him “Perfesser,” because he talked a little formally and seemed to have an education, but that handle didn’t really take. The waitress at the Stockman’s Grill said he could park his boots under her bunk any night, but nobody thought that he did.
Occasionally, a few of Rick’s friends would show up, people from back East. They’d stay a few days and he’d take them hunting or fishing, drive them around; they’d have drinks and a steak in the Stockman’s. They were people who didn’t announce themselves as rich or famous—they seemed like ordinary fellows, possibly farmers or reasonably well paid working folks from back wherever they came from. One was rumored to be a writer, but nobody had ever heard of him or of his putative books. So it was assumed that Rick was of that larger world, somehow, but no one had ever heard him talk about writing or wealth or anything but what folks usually talked about—hunting, fishing, the weather, crops.
The colonel couldn’t remember now if Rick had left before he did, but he thought he had. He’d made no lasting impression on the folks in that part of the country, but he was well regarded. Colonel Tucker wondered if it hadn’t been the same for this Franko—who, incidentally, was also said to be a fisherman.
The colonel wondered now if he hadn’t accepted Theo Ostropaki’s inability to provide any substantial information about Franko because he had known Rick. He pushed the thought aside. After all, the peaceful world of the High Line was not much like a remote Balkan village, but then, it was his impression that the hill people in Kosovo hadn’t yet seen much of the turmoil that later caught them up. Country people, he tended to think, were much the same the world over.
“As far as Theo could find out,” the colonel told Joe and Helen, “Franko was accepted in the community. Just one of those guys, it seems, who gets along and pretty soon people forget that he’s a stranger. He’s a little helpful, but not so as to make people dependent on him, or beholden to him. He doesn’t ask questions … he just gets along.” He paused for a long moment, thinking. “Of course, that could all be bullshit,” he said. “Maybe he was just a hell of a good agent. That’s something I hope you’ll find out, when you catch up to him.”
“Well, what did your guy find out?” Joe asked. He didn’t express any particular concern about this paucity of information, but he wanted to know what there was to know.
According to Ostropaki, the colonel said, Franko had stumbled on the existence of a smuggling operation that was involved in the drug trade. That seemed plausible enough—smuggling was a traditional occupation in those hills, with the borders so close and ill-defined. Franko had become friendly with some of the younger men who were involved. From them, he had heard about Ostropaki, who they suspected was a government agent of some kind, though not for the Serbs. Interpol, maybe. At the time, the colonel informed them, Ostropaki was in fact working for the DEA. That’s how the colonel had gotten on to this—he was the controller on this operation.
Ostropaki had gone to the village, in his role as a contact for suppliers in Belgrade, but the people he was supposed to meet hadn’t shown up. As he was leaving he’d been flagged down on the road back to Montenegro by this fellow, Franko. His car had apparently broken down. He was leaning into the opened hood. When Ostropaki came to look into the engine compartment, Franko confessed that there was nothing wrong with his car. He said he wanted to warn Ostropaki that there were some men a little ways farther on, at a lonely spot, who he suspected were waiting for the agent. He had seen them as he came down and recognized who they were. Maybe it was nothing, he said, maybe they weren’t looking for him, but he thought he should warn him. Ostropaki went home another way.
“Theo was—is, as far as I know—a good agent, a real professional,” the colonel said.
He was standing, looking out the hotel window. The flat landscape of the city sprawled to the south. He said something about visibility having dropped to about six miles. “Haze,” he observed. “Might be some fog come nightfall. I think we could have a drink. It’s that time.”
He poured some good Scotch for them in the glasses provided by the hotel, added ice and water.
“I met Theo a couple of times, in Athens. Smart fellow, looked like he wasn’t all that bright, which is always good. You’d take him for a middle-level manager type, a sales-force supervisor—in fact, that was his cover: he sold construction supplies for a Macedonian firm. I told him we were interested in his Franko, but that the agency couldn’t see his value. But I trusted his judgment and if he thought the fellow was … you know, genuine—and useful—that maybe we could work something out. But for now, it had to be just between the two of us. He should report to me through a separate link. I told him I could supply him with some funds and that if Franko worked out, why then…. I left it at that, and Theo never brought it up again.
“Theo never went back into those hills, after his initial contact with Franko,” the colonel went on, when he was settled again. “He made inquiries, found out who the fellow was who had stopped him and sent him some brochures, or something, I imagine. That would be his style, but he never told me. He heard from the fellow a few weeks later, by phone. Franko had come to Belgrade, where Theo had infiltrated the drug trade. They met in a café. That’s when he learned about Franko’s distaste for the drug trade—said he thought it was bad for the people, the young fellows who were involved. Smuggling the usual goods was one thing—it was a tradition, almost a rite of passage for the young men, one way and another. But when you mixed drugs into that, things changed. Drugs were too volatile; too much money was involved, too much violence, and people inevitably started using what they were hauling over the mountains. And the local smuggler became a link in an international trade—foreigners got seriously interested in your activities. It was no good.
“Specifically, he said he had some information about a transfer of goods. He didn’t want his people, his friends, caught, but maybe if the trade was damaged, maybe the big dealers would quit using this route. That was the premise, anyway. They set up a communication system. The information was accurate. We intercepted the goods, well down the line—in Italy, I believe.
“Over a period of time, thanks to more good intelligence, some of the smugglers were picked up, or otherwise eliminated. Not the mountain boys—the coastal ones, intercepted on the sea.” The colonel glanced away, unwilling to expand on that last piece of information.
“A new plan was worked out, a departure from the original scheme. Franko was supplied with information about the trade; he got personally involved with the smugglers. He advised them, and his advice was good. He became more important to them, eventually becoming the chief contact in the area for the suppliers, a gang out of Belgrade headed up by a Vjelko Zivkovic. It was a nice piece of work. Franko’s information was delivered to Ostropaki, who forwarded it to an answering service in Paris, informing us of shipments of narcotics. The information was always dead accurate. The DEA was able to interdict these shipments, always at some point far from the Balkans.”
The communication technique was familiar to Joe. He used similar systems, actually a chain of such services, each of them another barrier to identifying the person who originated the message. It could be cumbersome at times.
“I thought you guys were into codes and drop boxes, that kind of stuff,” Joe said.
The colonel caught the underlying current of Joe’s remark. “As far as the DEA knew, the information was not ostensibly from Franko,” he said, with no particular emphasis. “The agency had declined him, forgotten about him. He no longer existed. This info was coming from Ostropaki, who had presumably gotten it from nameless Serbian or Kosovar contacts. Theo, naturally, thought I had overcome the agency’s reluctance, but he understood that the provenance of his information was still not to be mentioned to anyone but me.”
/> “Still,” Helen spoke up, “you must have been hot to know who Franko was.”
“Oh, indeed I was! I pressed Ostropaki on every available occasion to find out more about him. The best he ever came up with was a last name, which came to nothing in our research.”
Helen remarked, “I thought Franko was the surname.”
“So did we, and it may turn out that it is. But I suspect that, like the surname Ostropaki came up with, it is also fictitious. Oh yes, we turned those names over every which way, looking for some clue to his real identity. Frank, Frankenheim, Frankenstein, Frankovic, Francis, Franjo—there’s a world of related names to check out in existing files, compare to customs records, border listings of passages, airline reservations, passport applications …”
“What was the other name?” Helen asked.
“Bradovic,” the colonel said. “Or some variation thereof. It was simply a name that Ostropaki had heard attached to his pet agent. Franko himself always went by, simply, Franko.”
“Bradovich,” Helen said, “or Bradovitz, maybe.”
“Fratovic, Pratovic,” the colonel offered, “and Voradovic. We didn’t get anywhere with it.”
“And then Ostropaki went dead on you,” Joe said. “I bet that was a—what would you call it?—a sticky moment when you heard about that.” Joe had a clear notion of that kind of moment: when someone, say a cop or a superior, lays that kind of heavy dope on you. You look at him and wonder how you’re supposed to react. Surprised? Even interested? Puzzled? Thinking to yourself, first, Can it be true? Is this a trap? How much does this guy know?
The colonel knew what Joe meant. “We were spared that, for better or for worse,” he said. “We’d received another of the messages, ostensibly from Ostropaki. We acted on it, with the usual good results. A day or two later we heard that Theo had not been heard from since a time that probably would have precluded him sending the information. Then, I suppose, there was one of those airless moments … waiting for the other shoe to drop. But it didn’t. We just kept getting the good product.”
Badger Games Page 8
