Badger Games (11 page)

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.”

“How long did you wait before you sent someone to find him?” Joe asked.

The colonel shrugged. “Where would we send an agent? And to whom?”

“Um,” Joe said, and held up a finger. “If I followed you, Ostropaki was not in the Lucani?”

“He was a prospect, but,” the colonel said with a shrug, “I don't think any of us really seriously considered bringing him in. He wasn't … not to put too fine a point on it, one of us. I mean a federal agent. We all of us are in this for essentially the same reason, and somehow that didn't include Theo. But I interviewed him in Athens, later on, when things got going so well, to get an idea of his attitude. I liked what I heard and saw—he seemed to share our feelings about the failings of the system—but there wasn't any compelling reason, really, to open up to him, to expose ourselves. You see? And then he was gone.”

He sat back and gestured with his hand, opening it with a little wave, as if releasing a bird.

Helen did not see. “You mean, because he wasn't an American? But it was okay to use him … sort of like … ?” She gestured at Joe and, by implication, herself.

The colonel thought for a long moment, then said, “We don't know if authority—the agencies we work for—is aware of us. I expect that someone may be curious why certain things happen that seem to have no firm explanation—disappearance of various figures, of goods. We try to provide adequate, plausible scenarios, usually premised on the notion that it's internal, that crooks are ripping off each other, hijacking, protecting their respective turf. That's about as far as we can go. An action has to be explained, you see, and it seems there is always some rival organization at hand who can be blamed. But at some point, someday, someone is bound to notice that quite a few events are not substantiated by interrogation of those who were thought to have been responsible. As far as I know it hasn't happened yet, but we may not be aware of official suspicions if they exist.

“So far,” he hastened to assure the two, “we haven't detected even a rumor of the existence of the Lucani. Which is at least one reason why we've been successful, thus far,” he murmured.

After a moment, he observed further, in a donnish manner: “The history of the Balkans is rife with secret organizations, of course—the Black Hand, the Brotherhood, and so on. They were generally associated with secret movements of national liberation, revolutionary groups. But it's something that people are familiar with in that part of the world. In a way,” he mused, “it may have unconsciously inspired our own group. Unconsciously, let me emphasize. We have no political ambitions.” He dismissed any such vagrant thoughts that may have been conjured in the heads of Joe and Helen with a wave of his hand. He seemed a little surprised at the thought, himself.

“But the point here,” he said, “is that security is Principle One in this kind of activity. Theo Ostropaki was an agent involved in dangerous business. We did not endanger him further, as far as we
can tell. Indeed, by keeping him on the outside, as it were, we protected him from …
contamination.
”

“Sounds like he got contaminated,” Helen said.

“Well, we don't know that, do we?” the colonel said. “That's a corner where Franko could cast some light. If you find him. But—point two—your situation is not analagous to Theo's. I, we, initiated a relationship with you, Joe. We saw that your services would be helpful to us and we could be helpful to you. Ms. Sedlacek, your involvement is a consequence of your relationship with Mr. Service.”

He gazed at her pleasantly enough, but Helen felt that the colonel had barely stopped himself from saying something that might have been less amiable.

“Wait a minute,” Joe said. “Back up here. First you said that Franko may have known about the Lucani. Then you said that Ostropaki didn't even know about it. So what's the prob? Franko is just a nameless source, now missing.”

“Yes, it's confusing and mysterious,” the colonel conceded, “but it's not really a contradiction. It's possible, from some intimations Ostropaki had made when I interviewed him, that he'd had some notion of the existence of a group like the Lucani. But I concluded that he knew nothing and I didn't enlighten him. Still … you see, this is where it gets sticky … there was always the possibility that Franko was actually a probe from another agency, one that had heard rumors of the Lucani, and his approach to Ostropaki was part of an internal investigation. Wheels within wheels. I essentially gave up on that notion, especially when Franko began to provide such good information.”

“And it's just on the basis of Ostropaki,” Joe said, “that you want us to go to Butte?”

“Well, you know, there have been some refugees who have shown up in Butte,” the colonel said. “And I know that you two
have some connections there, some reason to be there. I thought it serendipitous, and it might be convenient …” He let the idea drift in the air. “There is no very pressing urgency about it, you know. Take your time. At present, things have turned somewhat more positive, politically, in Serbia. As far as we can tell, the NATO war disrupted the drug traffic, as did the revolution that brought down Milosevic.”

“What is this guy supposed to look like,” Joe asked, “according to Ostropaki?”

“Theo said Franko was about thirty-one or -two, but he could be much older, maybe as much as forty. He's about one point seven five meters, weighs about seventy-five kilos or so … say, five-eight or -nine, about one sixty-five pounds. Dark hair, worn medium length, the usual mustache but no beard, no glasses. Dark complexion, brown eyes. Looked like a Kosovar, you might say. Dressed neatly, in the style of those hills. Good sturdy shoes, slacks, a sweater, an old tweed wool jacket. No hat. I mention all this not because he'd still be wearing those clothes, but because it gave him a local look, though you wouldn't mistake him for a farmer. Theo said he looked like he could be a schoolteacher, maybe, and talked like it. Spoke Serb and the local Albanian dialect well, if not quite like a native, but also English like an American.”

Joe Service sighed, but said nothing.

The colonel said, “Thin-lipped, lean face, no prominent cheekbones, dark eyebrows but not particularly heavy, ears small and close to the head, which is round, not elongated, hair close but not dense or wavy or crimped, prominent brow and large, smooth forehead but no widow's peak. Walks like a city dweller, confident stride, knows where his feet are landing, but doesn't choose to stride rapidly. That sort of thing?” He raised an eyebrow at Joe.

“Not very helpful,” Joe said, “and I try not to get too firm an image. By now, he could be limping, or had an ear shot off. Probably
no mustache, but maybe a full beard. Who knows? It sounds like, if he's alive—in Butte—that he was blown but managed to escape.”