The Wolf of Sarajevo

by Matthew Palmer

  At least it was dark.

  Gisler was on his way back to his apartment from the bar where he spent most nights drinking. He liked to drink. And eat. Their mark was something of a bon vivant with a penchant for fine dining and the build to prove it. Gisler was as close to perfectly spherical as Klingsor had ever seen a man achieve. Klingsor listened in on the radio as Echoes Two through Four traded coverage of the lawyer back and forth, always keeping him in sight but never giving him a chance to spot the coverage by overstaying their welcome. They were a good team. Klingsor was proud of them. This next part was the tricky bit.

  Klingsor pulled a black balaclava out of his pocket and slipped it on over his head. Echo One did the same.

  The van crept carefully down rue du Diorama, turning left onto rue de la Synagogue just as Gisler reached the intersection. This was a quiet part of Geneva, which even on a good day could not be mistaken for Berlin or Milan. At twenty minutes to midnight, there was no traffic. The one security camera covering that intersection had come down with a nasty virus. It would show a continuous loop of nothing in particular for the next three hours before the virus took its own electronic life.

  Echo One slid the van door open. Echoes Three and Four had come up alongside behind Gisler wearing masks like Klingsor’s, and in one carefully choreographed motion, they muscled the rotund Swiss lawyer into the back of the van before he had time to so much as protest. Had he tried, he would have had a hard time making himself heard with the palm of Echo Four’s hand pressed firmly over his mouth. Echo One closed the door and the driver pulled away from the curb. The whole thing had taken no more than six seconds. It was textbook.

  “What a fat tub of lard,” Echo Three complained. He said it in German. They had agreed as part of OPSEC that all conversation would be in German. It was not Klingsor’s best foreign language, but his Hochdeutsche was more than adequate, and it was the one language other than English that all members of the team had in common.

  The lawyer had recovered from the initial shock. He did not seem especially surprised at what had happened. With the kind of clients Gisler routinely dealt with, Klingsor supposed that kidnapping was no doubt an ever-present risk.

  “Who do you work for?” Gisler demanded, once Echo Four had removed his hand. He tried to stand up, but Echo Four pushed him back onto the floor of the panel van using just enough excess force to make the point.

  “Tell me who you work for,” Gisler insisted again.

  “You don’t want to know,” Klingsor answered. He put as much menace as he could into the phrase. He wanted Gisler afraid. As he spoke, he leaned forward and let his jacket open up far enough that the well-padded lawyer could see the butt of Klingsor’s Glock sticking out of its holster at his waist.

  “Do you want money?” Gisler asked. “I have money. Enough money.” The fear was already starting to eat away at his bluster. That was good.

  Klingsor said nothing and his team was disciplined. They followed his lead. He wanted Gisler to imagine the worst. His thoughts would settle inevitably on his own particular and personal fears. He would do a better job of frightening himself than Klingsor ever could. Quiet was most effective in raising anxiety, and anxiety made men like Gisler talkative.

  It was a twenty-minute drive to the parking garage. The building was only half finished. The company that owned it had recently sold it to another developer with an address on Cyprus that was little more than a post-office box and a tax credit. That company was controlled by Klingsor’s employer. The deal would ultimately fall through. But for now, work on the garage had been suspended while all involved did due diligence. They would have it all to themselves.

  Echo Three unlocked the gate, and the van took a circular ramp down three stories into subterranean Geneva.

  “It’ll be quiet down here,” Klingsor explained to Gisler. “And private. We have some things to discuss.”

  “What do you want from me?” Gisler asked. The lawyer did not try to put on any kind of display of false bravado. His double chin quivered with evident fear. He was sweating heavily, Klingsor noted. His shirt was already soaked through at the collar.

  “Just one simple little thing,” Klingsor said.

  “What is it?”

  “Be patient.”

  The van stopped. Klingsor opened the door and Echo Four hauled the lawyer to his feet by the collar of his bespoke suit jacket. The sound of ripping cloth testified to both Echo Four’s freakish strength and Gisler’s substantial bulk.

  A plain steel door was set in the wall of the garage next to where the van had parked. Klingsor opened it with a key from a chain around his neck and Echoes Three and Four hustled Gisler inside. The room behind the door was little more than a raw concrete cube. In the center of the room was a dentist’s chair. A metal table held a range of tools, some sharp and shiny, others dull and blunt. A car battery sat at the far end of the table with a pair of jumper cables lying next to it.

  It was all for show.

  Klingsor had no intention of torturing Gisler. It was not that his organization was above that sort of thing. But that was not his department. There were specialists for that, and Klingsor respected what they did. They were professionals. Klingsor, however, was an expert on human psychology. The manipulation of fear. He was quite good at it, almost an artist, really. And that is what this was, a kind of performance art. He could leverage the full range of emotions. Greed was a reliable old standby, and lust had its place, particularly with the young and naïve. But fear was his favorite. It made the strong weak and the weak bare their souls. If Klingsor did his job correctly, Gisler would be back at his apartment in a few hours unharmed. At least physically, at least for now. What might happen to him when his client discovered that his lawyer had misplaced the package left in his keeping was not Klingsor’s concern.

  Echo Three stripped Gisler of his jacket and tie, and forced him down into the dentist’s chair. The chair was Klingsor’s idea, a trademark of sorts. For most people, there was an almost Pavlovian response to the chair. The association with pain was strong and deeply rooted. The chair set the right tone.

  I am going to hurt you.

  The skin on the lawyer’s face and neck was pale and clammy. There were dark circles of fear sweat under his armpits. Klingsor bent over him. With the mask on, only his eyes were visible, eyes that Klingsor knew how to use to create the impression of a window to a dark and twisted soul. He liked to believe that wasn’t true. He was a devoted family man, with two daughters he adored and doted on. He was a good churchgoer and generous to his many friends. This was a job. But he was introspective enough to recognize the corrosive effects that this particular art form could have on the psyche. Every man had his limits.

  I’ll take a break after this job, he had promised himself, go someplace warm and lie around for a while, maybe put in for a transfer to a different department, something with less travel. He had tried that once or twice before and had been denied. He was, they had assured him, too valuable in his current position. Well, fuck them.

  Klingsor stared at Gisler from behind his mask, willing his eyes to be as cold as polished stone.

  “You have something I want.”

  “Tell me,” Gisler croaked.

  Water dripping from the ceiling had formed a puddle in the middle of the room. There was a broken pipe somewhere. The effect was suitably dramatic.

  “You are keeping a package for a man. You may not even know what’s in it. But it is very important to me. I want it. Tonight.”

  “I keep almost everything in safe-deposit boxes,” Gisler pleaded. “The banks are closed. They will not open until nine.”

  Good, Klingsor thought. They were already discussing the terms of the handover. This should not be especially difficult.

  “Tell me where.”

  “All over the city. What is it you’re looking for?”

 
“A package left in your care by a man named Marko Barcelona.”

  Gisler looked confused.

  “I don’t have the faintest idea who that is.”

  “Don’t fuck with me,” Klingsor said menacingly. “This is not a game.”

  “No,” Gisler agreed. “I’m telling you the truth. What’s his real name? Maybe I know him by something else.”

  This was a problem. Klingsor did not know. Marko Barcelona was an obvious alias, but nobody seemed to know who he really was. And Klingsor’s organization was usually pretty good at that sort of thing.

  “He’s the head of the White Hand,” Klingsor answered. “A Bosnian criminal organization. Sometimes he goes by Mali. Other than that, he uses no other name that we know of. It’s likely that the package contains a tape or a disc or a memory stick. Maybe it’s just the URL to a site on the dark web where it’s sitting on an anonymous server, but I will have it from you.”

  Klingsor sensed that this was the time to imply a more direct physical threat. Gisler was right on the edge. His complexion was waxen and pale. His shirt now soaked all the way through with sweat. His breathing was heavy and ragged, and he stank of fear.

  On the table was a power drill. Klingsor picked it up and pretended to examine it carefully. It was an older Makita, covered in stains that were supposed to look like dried blood but were really nail polish. The drill bit was long and had a quarter-inch router head at the tip.

  “You don’t need that,” Gisler gasped. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know. Please.”

  The lawyer stiffened and tried to clutch at his chest, coming up short because of the restraints.

  “He’s having a heart attack,” Echo Three said. There was no hint of panic in his voice. They were all experienced professionals.

  “Be careful. Could be a trick,” warned Echo Four.

  Echo Three gave him a dismissive look.

  “Him?”

  “Okay. No.”

  “Get the defibrillator from the van,” Klingsor instructed.

  Echo One retrieved a bright red hard-plastic case from the back of the van. He popped it open and pulled out a pair of paddles. Then put them down.

  “The fuckin’ battery’s dead.”

  “Didn’t you check that?” Klingsor demanded.

  “No,” Echo One admitted.

  “Can we plug it in somewhere?”

  Echo One held up the plug. It had a British-style three-prong connector. It would not fit the European plugs in a Swiss parking garage.

  “What the hell?” Klingsor asked.

  “We got the kit from the London office,” Echo Four said.

  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

  6

  Officially, 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 municipa
lities 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.