by David Stone
The screen flickered, and Galan’s desktop came up, the screen saver a photo of Jerusalem taken under a full moon, the hills bathed in a silvery light.
Brancati sat down at the chair, touched the keys, and pulled up a list of documents. All of the document titles were in Italian and, according to Brancati, a duplication of the same working files Galan had carried on his office computer.
A quick look at the contents of the drive showed nothing else. Galan’s relationship with computers did not extend to the Internet and, from the look of his file history, barely reached beyond e-mail and Word documents. There were no hidden files, no family photos, and, aside from the initial password, no serious attempt had been made to encrypt anything.
“We will go through them,” said Brancati, “but I have already looked at his worksheet at the Arsenale and these are identical. As you can see, Galan did not keep very much on computers. He was an old-fashioned man and did not trust them. Most of his ongoing cases he kept in his head. I do not see very much here. And it is unlikely that if he had anything he wanted you to see that he’d put it on a computer that could be hacked into so easily. But there is this one file—”
He tapped the screen, indicating a title in a strange script.
Brancati looked over his shoulder at Dalton and Veronika. “It looks like Yiddish. Can either of you read it?”
They both shook their heads, so Brancati hit OPEN.
The file contained only one thing, a photo of what looked like some sort of abstract artwork.
“Perfetto,” said Brancati with a note of frustration. “Che cosa è questo? What is this? Galan is buying paintings?”
Veronika, her curiosity overcoming the coldness she was feeling toward Dalton, leaned in, touched the Yiddish letters.
“You could cut and paste these into a translation program. If you want to, I can do it for you.”
Brancati, thinking it over, stood up and offered her the chair. Veronika sat down, hit a few keys, got a translation program up, cut and pasted the characters into it, asking with a nice sense of tact, thought Dalton, for a reply in Italian.
The program ticked over for a moment, and then she got:
Which, in spite of the violent confrontation they had just been through and its disturbing aftermath, made them all smile.
“Well, it must have meant something,” said Brancati. “Issadore did not play games with his computer. This is there for a reason. We should have a copy.”
Veronika asked Brancati if he had a flash drive.
“This is Venice,” he said, puzzled. “We don’t drive in Venice. For myself, I have a launch?”
“I think she means one of these,” said Dalton, picking up a storage stick and inserting it into the computer’s USB drive.
Veronika gave him a tentative smile, some of her former warmth returning.
“If you like, Micah,” she said in a friendlier tone, “I’ll see if I can copy all of his most recent e-mails. If there are any drafts, I’ll copy them too.”
“Yes,” said Dalton, smiling back. “If you would, great.”
Brancati seemed a little uneasy about letting a woman he knew nothing about have that kind of access to Galan’s computer, but she went to work with such obvious speed and skill that he accepted it after a sidelong look at Dalton.
The two men stepped back, giving Veronika some room to work, and turned to consider the room.
“You’re right,” said Dalton. “Galan wouldn’t have left anything important in the computer or anywhere else obvious. But he wanted me to come here. To his flat. So there must be something here. Something he wanted me to see.”
“I agree,” said Brancati, tugging out a cigar and firing it up. “But it will take us days to go through this place.”
“Days I don’t have,” said Dalton, beginning to pace slowly around the main room, trying to put himself inside Galan’s mind. Brancati walked over to the row of pictures and picked up Cora’s portrait, turning it over to see if something was taped to the back. There was nothing. He checked the others as well but without much conviction.
“It must be on his computer,” he said, frustrated and suddenly very tired. “There’s no other logical place. Galan was a very precise man. Not a fanciful man. He usually meant exactly what he said.”
Dalton stopped pacing, looked across at Brancati.
“And what exactly did he say?”
Brancati considered it.
“If you mean, what message did he leave, in his own flesh, it was two marks. The figure 8 and the letter B.”
“Yes,” said Dalton. “Exactly.”
He walked over to the front door, pulled it open, and tapped on the silver plaque screwed into it.
“Eight B. Does Galan have a toolbox?”
That brought a wry smile from Brancati, his lined face creasing up, his eyes bright.
“You have never seen Galan trying to fix anything,” he said, walking over to the plaque and studying the screws that held it in place. He pulled a small cigar-cutting tool out of his shirt pocket, used the edge of it to pry the plaque off the door.
The plaque popped away, leaving a rectangle of unpainted pine underneath it. Taped in the middle of the rectangle was a tiny microchip. Brancati pulled it carefully away from the wood, peeled the tape off it, and held it up in the light.
“Bravo, Micah,” he said with a wry smile. “Well done.”
THERE were three items on the microchip, which was neither encrypted nor password-protected. Two were Word files, and the third was a JPEG. Veronika opened the first Word file, titled simply DALTON ONE. It appeared to be a copy of a news report.
BELGRADE (Reuters)—Four former paramilitaries were sentenced on Thursday by Serbia’s war crimes court to prison terms ranging from 15 to 20 years for the killings of 14 Kosovo Albanians in 1999, a spokeswoman said. They were found guilty of participating in the murder of Kosovo Albanian women, men and children in Podujevo, northern Kosovo, on March 28, 1999, court spokeswoman Ivana Ramic said. The youngest victim was a 21-month-old infant, and five children were wounded.
“Zeljko Djukic, Dragan Medic, and Dragan Borojevic were sentenced to 20 years in prison while Midrag Solaja was sentenced to 15 years in prison when the court determined he was under 18 when he committed the crime,” Ramic said.
The men belonged to the notorious Skorpions paramilitary group. Some of its members have been convicted of killing Bosnian Muslim captives during the 1992-95 Bosnia war, and one was found guilty of killing ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. NATO began an air campaign against Serbian forces on March 24, 1999, to halt the killing of ethnic Albanian civilians in a two-year counterinsurgency war. The campaign ended in June 1999 when Serb forces withdrew from Kosovo.
“Podujevo,” said Veronika with a wary glance at Dalton.
“Yes. And the Skorpions. I remember them.”
“This is the place Micah won’t talk about,” she said with a warning tone. “The man he fought in my apartment, he has my e-mail address and he sent us a picture of this Podujevo.”
Brancati wasn’t following.
“You know about these Skorpions?”
“Yes,” said Dalton. “I’ve gone up against a few.”
“This Podujevo,” said Brancati carefully, since he could see that the situation between Dalton and the Miklas woman was developing some stress fractures, “this village means something personal to you, Micah?”
Dalton sighed, and his light seemed to dim.
“Yes. Veronika got the e-mail from Galan’s server. I think she’s right, that it was sent to her by the man who killed Galan. There was a picture of a burned-out building, rows of charred bodies, and two men in black BDUs with KLA insignias, one holding a fragment of a Paveway missile—an American air-to-ground weapon—and the other one lifting up a sign in Serbian, roughly translated as ‘American murderers did this.’ ”
No one spoke for a while, but the question was circling in the air above them like the Mariner’s albatross.
Dalton stared at the page for a time, his features hardening up. They began to think he wasn’t going to answer, but he did. “Yes. We did that.”
Veronika seemed to diminish, as if something tangible was leaving her body. She did not look at Dalton again for a while, but she listened to what he had to say and never forgot it.
“How?” asked Brancati.
Again, a very long and difficult silence.
Dalton let out a long breath and began in a low, flat tone as if reciting a line of dry statistics.
“Podujevo. It’s in northern Kosovo. NATO was trying to stop the Serbs from massacring Albanian Muslims. I was part of that operation, just not a well-known part. We had Nighthawks overhead. There were a few Predators, but we weren’t assigned one.”
“Who was we ?” asked Veronika in a soft voice.
“We were a Special Forces hunter-killer unit. We were boots on the ground, and we had air cover to take out targets we indicated. We worked all over northern Kosovo during the NATO bombing campaign, trying to protect Bosnian Muslims from the KLA extermination squads. My fire team had been inserted into the Podujevo area during the night, a HALO drop. The idea was to light up, use laser beams, to paint targets for the strike fighters upstairs. We had two F-117 Nighthawks committed to lay down GBUs—sorry—Paveways. They’re a kind of precision laser-guided munition. They home in on a target identified by a laser beam, marking it. That morning, we lost a Nighthawk to a Serb SAM over Belgrade, so we knew we had a limited time frame to make a difference on the ground. We saw a large group of KLA holing up in this building, no markings on it. Turned out it was a mosque. So we set up a strike with the Forward Fire group, painted the building up with our lasers. The Nighthawk laid down some Paveways. We blew it to bits.”
Here Dalton stopped, seeing again in his mind that huge swirling cloud of red-and-green fire, smoke rising up, the shattering roar of the strike. His own unit, five men, their black-painted faces lit up by the fires of the burning building, pulling back into the hills. A two-day hump to their extraction point. And the after action, the Damage Assessment Board verdict that they had just incinerated a mosque crowded with civilians.
Neither Brancati nor Veronika Miklas had anything to say. It was obvious to anyone watching that Dalton was in a very private hell and nothing they could say would relieve him. After a moment he came back to the surface, finished the story.
“Well . . . What we didn’t know at the time was that a hundred and fifty-six men, women, and children had been herded into that mosque two days before and held there while the KLA lured us in. They had a tunnel dug in the basement. They made quite a show of going in and out for days. They knew we had a lot of eyes in the air and that we’d pay a lot of attention to that kind of concentration of troops—”
“But in the days before, you were not on the ground,” said Brancati, “not when they did that. How could you know?”
“We should have checked out that mosque up close before we targeted it and we didn’t. I got aggressive, and all those civilians died . . .”
“La nebbia di guerra, Micah . . .” said Brancati.
“Fog of war? Maybe. In the beginning, it tore me up. I couldn’t cope with it. Got so bad, I had to pop an Ativan whenever I thought of it. So after a while I just . . . stopped thinking about it. I closed it off, sealed it shut, buried it deep. Nobody else wanted to talk about it either, sure as hell not the brass at CENTCOM or the Pentagon. So we didn’t. Not ever.”
“And what is there to say?” asked Brancati, who had his own demons in the cellar. “What is the use of raising the dead?”
“Someone has raised the dead,” said Veronika, but not unkindly. “This Smoke person, do you think he could have been there at Podujevo?”
“Yes. In fact, I’m almost certain he was. But that doesn’t explain how he knew I was there too. It was a black op. We were never officially there.”
“You may have a traitor,” said Brancati. “In your house.”
“Yes.”
“Do you think the man you fought in my apartment was one of these Skorpions?” asked Veronika.
“I think he probably was. We made a real project out of them. Killed and wounded fifty, sixty of them, in hot little engagements all around northern Kosovo.”
“Did you take part in any of the war crimes investigations afterward?” asked Brancati.
“No. Not that any of the brass would have wanted me anywhere around those trials, not after what we did to the people in that mosque. Right after the Kosovo war, I got seconded to the CIA. My operational area shifted to London, and at that time our chief interest was in terror finance. I remember hearing something about a group of Skorpions being tried this year, but I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. I didn’t really like to think about the Kosovo war at all. I did do some work for the Agency in Pristina a while back, trying to deal with ex-KLA involved in the drugs-for-weapons trade.”
“Are these Skorpions still active ?” Veronika asked.
“Yes,” put in Brancati. “Back in the late nineties, there were only a few, five hundred or less. But now—the war in Kosovo never really ended—much of the criminal enterprise in Italy is done by ex-Skorpions, Serbs and Croats working to fund the new KLA so they can take Kosovo back. Galan did a study for me last year. He reached an estimate of over a thousand current members of the Skorpions and related KLA—”
“A thousand?” asked Veronika.
“Galan did a study for you? Does it still exist?”
“Yes. I have a copy on file at the office.”
“Did it include head shots of KLA people?”
“Yes. Hundreds of them. Galan was very thorough. And he had good contacts all over the Balkans.”
“We need to look at those. Can you send us the file? You’ve got my e-mail?”
“I do. I will,” he said, looking at his watch. “It’s almost dawn. We should look at the other material.”
Veronika opened the second file, another Word document, this one titled DALTON TWO:Новини Керчі—KERCH NEWS
ENGLISH VERSION:
KERCH CHARTER CRAFT SEIZED BY RUSSIAN GUNBOAT
Ukrainian officials have filed a formal protest with the Russian government this week after a private tour boat owned by a local Kerch man was boarded and seized in Ukrainian waters by a Russian patrol boat. The boat, called the Blue Nile, was carrying several Ukrainian couples on a sunset-and-dinner cruise around the coast of Kerch when the Russian boat gave chase and intercepted the Blue Nile within sight of Kerch harbor, according to Captain Bogdan Davit, Chief of the Kerch Constabulary. The passengers were forced to off-load into inflatable rafts and left to make their way to shore as the gunboat took the charter craft under tow and left Ukrainian waters.
The Blue Nile is a sixty-foot private craft valued at two million American dollars and was owned and operated as a charter cruise by a Kerch-based businessman named Dobri Levka.
So far the Russian authorities have refused to cooperate with the Ukrainians, saying only that Dobri Levka, a Croatian citizen, was arrested for “violations of Russian sovereignty” and that he is being held at an undisclosed location pending an official hearing.
Tensions between Russia and the Ukraine have increased dramatically since the natural-gas embargo imposed by Russia on the Ukraine a year ago, as well as the decision by the U.S. President to remove missile defense bases from Eastern Europe at the insistence of Putin.
“Dobri Levka,” said Brancati. “I know that name.”
“Yes, you do. Levka was a Croatian freelancer Mandy Pownall and I picked up last year on Santorini. The kid was working for the other side. The Russians had a cell operating out of an office building in Istanbul, their cover was trade and commerce. Levka was supposed to help take Mandy and me out of the picture. We changed his mind.”
The hotel room in Fira, six hundred feet above the Aegean, at night, a storm rattling the w
indows, and Dalton with a pistol up against Levka’s forehead, Levka waiting for the round, Dalton for some reason unwilling to pull the trigger, Levka’s brazen offer: “Instead of kill me, you hire me!”
“Hire you?”
“I got no job here now. You hire me, I work for you. You man who kills much, got that look, no offendings. So maybe you make more bodies later. With handy service of Dobri Levka, you don’t have to bust big fat dead men around place all by self, ruin good suit like you got.”
Dalton had to smile at the memory.
The kid had real sand. Levka was the kind of knocked-around, hardscrabble roustabout you tended to find along the fringes of chronic war zones. Like a true mercenary, Levka was ready to take the round if he had to—the fortunes of war, and no hard feelings—but he had also been nimble and nervy enough to try to talk himself out of that bullet if given half a chance.
“Levka kept his word. He knew the people we were up against. He helped us out in Istanbul. Levka and I took Lujac’s Riva away from the KGB and drove it all the way to Kerch, chasing the Russians. After Kerch, Mandy and I went to Langley to help Cather out of a fix, and Levka got Lujac’s Riva.”
“One more file,” said Veronika. “Called Dalton Three.”
“Open it,” said Dalton.
It turned out to be a scanned-in note, in a rough scrawl, with a short typed message attached.
“Who’s Piotr Kirikoff ?” asked Veronika.
“He was the Russian FSB officer who was running the ring we took apart in Istanbul last winter. We nearly caught him in Kerch. He got out two hours before we got there. He murdered a Navy corpsman and a Latvian woman. We found their bodies in the basement of a clinic in Kerch. They had been beaten to death.”
“So this was Galan’s urgent message to you,” said Brancati. “Why didn’t he come to me first?”
“He said nothing to you?”
Brancati shook his head.
“No. He simply asked for a week’s leave, said he was going to Vienna on some business. He was a private man. I thought he might be meeting someone, a contact. He had a very strict sense of tradecraft, and, as he says, he did not like to talk unless he had something useful to talk about. His methods were his own. He was like an oyster, and I have never attempted to pry him open. And he said nothing about being ‘watched.’ ”
