Read Evil Deeds (Bob Danforth 1) Online
Authors: Joseph Badal
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers, #Spy Stories & Tales of Intrigue, #Espionage
Liz lay next to Bob, one of her legs across his. She lightly rubbed his chest. “You made me feel wonderful,” she said.
“Uh huh.”
“There’s a snake in the bed; it’s about to bite you.”
“Umm,” Bob said.
Liz poked him. “You’re not even listening to me. What’s going on?”
“I’m sorry.” He turned toward her, stroked her thigh. “You know, the Agency ought to hire you as an interrogator.”
“Dammit, Bob. What’s wrong?”
Bob sighed. “I’m worried about the situation in Kosovo.”
“What do you have to do with that mess?”
“You know I can’t say.”
“What can you say?”
“That it’s a mess.”
“You’re just full of useful information,” Liz said, slipping out of bed.
Bob looked around Jack Cole’s spacious office while he waited for the CIA’s Special Operations Chief – and his long-time friend – to finish the phone call that had interrupted their conversation. He looked at the walls and thought about what could have been hanging there: the Silver Star Jack had earned in Vietnam, the Bronze Star with “V” device, the two Purple Hearts, the citations he’d won in his twenty-some years with the CIA. But there was only one “ego” item in sight: The photo of Jack’s sailboat.
Bob noticed there were more lines in Jack’s face and that his once sandy-blond hair had turned almost completely gray. Jack looked older than his fifty-two years. But the blue eyes were still alert, intelligent.
Jack replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle. “Bob, I don’t have to tell you how important this is,” he said. “You’re the only man in the Agency with the knowledge and experience to pull this off. You speak Serbo-Croatian, you’ve got years of fieldwork, you recruited our agents in Yugoslavia. Besides, as my Covert Operations Chief, you have to do what I tell you to do.”
Bob didn’t reply. Jack was just stating facts.
“The wild card over there is the Serb President,” Jack said. “His only concern is his own political survival. We’re convinced he won’t agree to any settlement involving Kosovo becoming an independent province. All our intelligence reports tell us the man is unstable, a megalomaniac with an insatiable appetite for power. If he isn’t controlled, sooner rather than later, this thing in the Balkans could become a regional disaster.”
“So you want to take out the Serb leader?” Bob asked.
“I wish it were that simple,” Jack said. “Killing the leader of a foreign country is not an option anymore. Not since Congress, in its infinite wisdom, decided to handcuff the Agency.”
“I can’t believe any President would sign that legislation.”
Jack nodded. “We’ve got to find a way to limit the Serbs’ capacity to wage war, and maybe get the Serb President indicted for war crimes at the same time.”
“Tall order,” Bob said.
“I want you and your team to come up with a plan I can sell to the Director. I suggest you find a way to dilute the support the Serbs have in the international community. If we make it embarrassing enough for the Serbs’ allies to associate with the Serb President and his henchmen, maybe we can politically and economically isolate the Serbs. Without the Russians, for example, the Serbs’ supply lines will dry up.”
“How much time do I have?”
“Three weeks at best. We’ve got to knock the Serb leadership down a peg. Maybe that will keep the President from having to commit American ground troops to a potentially very bloody war.”
Bob reviewed agency files on the Serb President for hours, met with intelligence, diplomatic, and military experts on the Balkans, and even contemplated how – despite U.S. laws against it – an assassin might get close to the Serbian leader. He‘d come to a dead-end. The Serb leader never stayed in one spot for very long. Never slept in the same building two nights in a row. According to a CIA informant within the Yugoslav People’s Army, no one outside his inner circle knew the Serb President’s plans more than four hours in advance. He never appeared in public without an impenetrable ring of bodyguards.
Bob had called his three top aides to a strategy session. They tossed ideas around, and then discarded them all. Bob checked his watch. They’d been at it for ten straight hours. While his people continued rehashing possible plans, Bob looked around the room and considered their skills.
Forty-five-year-old Frank Reynolds, a bookish, twenty-two-year employee of the CIA, with an IQ in the stratosphere, had spent most of his career with the Agency analyzing message traffic and news reports coming out of the Balkans, Turkey, and Greece. He’d studied Serbo-Croatian at the Defense Language Institute, West Coast, in Monterey, California, and received his doctorate in Balkan Studies at Georgetown. He knew more about the Serb leadership now ruling Yugoslavia than anyone in the free world. Frank’s salt and pepper hair, as usual, looked as though it had never known a comb. The man was impatiently drumming the table with his fingers.
Thirty pounds overweight, Tanya Serkovic wore frumpy, grandmotherly dresses. She had thick, shoulder-length black hair, violet-colored eyes, and exotic Slavic features, with a trace of Oriental blood showing in the shape of her eyes. A Bosnian who was a former analyst with the Yugoslavian Intelligence Service, an expert in Eastern European Languages, and also fluent in Greek and Italian, she’d witnessed the genocide perpetrated by the Serbs against her people. She’d fought with the Bosnian resistance, and fled to the United States when Serb hit squads were sent to assassinate her.
Raymond Gallegos had the dark good-looks of a Latin moviestar and the intelligence of a brain surgeon. A highly decorated Army veteran, who got his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in geography after two tours in Vietnam, he’d spent years with the National Security Agency as a cartography consultant. He knew every foot of the Balkans the way most people knew their own homes or neighborhoods.
They all looked exhausted. “Okay, people,” Bob said. “We’ve had a long day. Let’s all go home and sleep on it.”
They all groaned, as though disappointed about having to call it quits.
“I’ll see you at 7 a.m.,” Bob said. “We need to come up with something really soon.”
Liz looked out the living room window and saw Bob’s car pull into the driveway. She glanced at the grandfather clock in a corner of the room. Already half past ten. She went to the front door and watched through a glass panel while Bob slowly climbed out of his car and walked toward the house. He looks like a zombie, she thought. An old zombie. She opened the door and met him. She took his briefcase and topcoat, placing them on a chair in the entry. The dark circles under his eyes and the sallow cast to his skin were hard to miss. How can he continue working at this pace? she wondered. This was the third night in a row he’d come home after ten.
“How were your classes today?” he asked.
She smiled. She knew what an effort it must be for him to even ask, considering how tired he looked. “Actually, not bad,” she said. “Thank God for graduate courses. My days of teaching Economics to freshmen are long over.”
He appeared to try to laugh, but the sound he made came out more like a grunt.
“I’ve got a plate in the microwave. Why don’t you go upstairs and change while I heat it up?”
Bob planted a kiss on Liz’s cheek, trudged up the stairs, and plodded into the master bedroom. He turned on the television to catch the news. While he undressed, he listened to reports that yet another mass grave had been found in Kosovo. This one, just south of the Serbian border, held three hundred Kosovar Albanian bodies – men, women, and children – all executed with bullets to the back of the skull.
Bob felt a churning in his guts. I can’t take three weeks to come up with a plan, he thought. The Serb hierarchy has got to be stopped
yesterday
.
The ringing of the telephone interrupted his thoughts. He jerked the receiver from its cradle. Who the hell’s calling at this hour? “Hello!”
“Dad, it’s Mike.”
“Hey, Mike. How ya doin?”
“Great! How are things there?”
“Everything’s fine. Sure you’re okay? You usually don’t call so late.”
“No, no, I’m fine. Thought I’d better tell you before you heard it on the news. Part of the 82nd Airborne’s been put on alert. My unit included. There’s a good chance we’ll be sent to the Balkans to join the part of the unit that’s already there.”
“When?” Bob asked.
“Probably within two to three weeks.”
Bob slumped down on the bed, feeling what little energy he had left drain out of him. “Appreciate you letting me know, Mike,” Bob said, keeping his true emotions from his voice. “Can we get together before you ship out?”
“Sure, Dad. Count on it. I’ll arrange a couple days up there. But, listen, I’ve got to go now. Got a lot of work to do.”
“Okay, Mike. We love you.”
Michael didn’t answer right away. There was a several-second pause before he finally said, “Give Mom a hug for me.” Then he hung up.
“Will do, son!” Bob said to the dead phone line. He felt a tightening in his throat. He knew he’d surprised his son when he’d told him, “We love you.” He balled his fists and told himself he was a shit and a coward. Why hadn’t he said, I love you, instead of We love you. Bob stood up and continued undressing. There were a lot of things he wished he’d done over the last two decades. Not saying I love you was just one of many fuckups when it came to his relationship with his son. How many soccer games and wrestling matches had he said he was going to attend and didn’t? How many birthdays had he missed? He’d put his work first and his family second. He’d been more attentive to Liz and Michael for a couple years after Michael had been kidnapped and found in Bulgaria. But then he reverted back to his old habits..
“Dammit!” he said aloud. Mike and his unit were going to be shipped out to the Balkans. This business with the Serb leader had just become personal.
Bob rubbed his eyes. The glare from the overhead fluorescent lights in the Langley conference room were starting to get to him. “All right, where are we going wrong? We haven’t come up with a thing.”
Tanya Serkovic tapped her fingernails on the tabletop and swiveled back and forth in her chair. She gazed around the room at each of the others. “I think we’re approaching the problem from the wrong angle,” she said. “We’re wasting our time talking about assassination squads. Besides, the Serb leader is impossible to isolate.”
“Nothing’s impossible,” Frank Reynolds interjected. “But it sure as hell would be illegal.”
“Yeah, right, Frank,” Tanya shot back. “As I was saying, we need to change our approach.”
“Well, we could catch him with an intern,” Raymond Gallegos offered. “On second thought, forget it! Clinton’s already done that, and it didn’t hurt him a bit.”
Groans and half-hearted laughs.
“Let’s get serious, guys,” Bob said. He got up from his chair and walked over to the blackboard. “Tanya’s right. Let’s look at the problem from a different angle. If we can figure out a way to destabilize the Serb regime . . ..” He let the thought hang while he returned to his chair.
Deep in the bowels of the Central Intelligence Agency complex at Langley, Virginia, Photographic Intelligence Analyst Rosalie Stein inspected the contents of a file. News articles, agent-in-place photographs and reports, and satellite photographs were scattered on the table in front of her. She’d worked through the articles and reports first, but had come up with nothing new. The satellite photographs – hundreds of them – hadn’t been touched. Like leaving dessert until last. She knew analyzing them would be tedious, but it was the part of her job she loved the most.
The National Reconnaissance Office had satellites passing over Serbia sixty times each twenty-four-hour period. Most of the pictures transmitted by the “eyes in the sky” were of scenery, rooftops, and traffic. The definition of the photographs was amazing. Anything that emitted a heat signature – living things, vehicle engines, and smokestacks – could be spotted in the dark by infrared (“IR”) satellites. During daylight hours, the synthetic aperture radar (“SAR”) satellites sent back shots that were so clear individuals could be identified.
Rosalie had to analyze each photo slowly and carefully. She never knew what she might find. After eleven hours, the images were starting to blur. She swept her dark red hair away from her face, while she leaned over and stared at the pictures, searching for something – a clue, an anomaly. Some of the photos revealed Serb military units in the field. But most, as usual, were of open space, or of one Serb town or another. Lots of scenic views. About to call it a day, she glanced again at one last picture, and suddenly shoved all the others aside. She reached for her magnifying lens.
The tension in the room was becoming thicker than the oppressive Washington humidity. Tanya and Frank had, off and on, been at each other’s throats over the past two hours. Raymond sat slouched in his chair, his face in his hands. Bob glanced at his watch. “It’s eight-fifteen. Let’s wind this–.” The telephone interrupted him.
Raymond answered it. “Who . . . Stein, you said?” He listened for several seconds, then covered the mouthpiece and looked across at Bob. “It’s someone from Photographic Analysis. She claims she’s got something to show us.”
“Tell her to come right up,” Bob said. “What do we have to lose?”
“Got lost!” Rosalie apologized when she rushed, blushing and breathing heavily, into the room fifteen minutes later. “Rosalie Stein, Photographic Analysis,” she announced. “I’m new.”
“Wonderful!” Frank murmured. “Tell me something I don’t already know.”
Rosalie’s face reddened even more. She looked around the room, then focused on Bob at the head of the table. She walked to him and put six pictures on the table in front of him. “I looked at a bunch of photos today. Nothing stood out. Then, a little while ago, I noticed something in one photograph. I went back through the pile and discovered I’d missed the same thing in some of the others.
“Twelve of the satellite shots picked up one of the Serbs’ top generals on several different days over a fifteen-month period. In three of these shots, the general is standing next to a woman. She’s not his wife of record.”
“Who’s the general?” Tanya asked.
“Karadjic, Antonin Karadjic,” Rosalie answered.
“Great! Karadjic!” Frank exclaimed. “The psycho has a girlfriend!” He shoved his chair away from the table and stood up.
“The guy’s way up there,” Frank continued. “He carries out the government’s toughest assignments. He and the Serb President go way back. They were schoolmates and came up through the Yugoslav Communist Party system together. He’s been involved in every major Serb battle since the breakup of Yugoslavia. Nearly every time there’s been a massacre – of Croats, Bosnians, Slovenes, Gypsies, or Kosovar Albanians – Karadjic’s troops are likely to have been involved. The guy’s a master tactician, but he’s a maniac. He enjoys the killing. The Serb leadership can’t do without him.”
Frank’s words seemed to energize the others in the room. They all appeared suddenly alert, sitting up straighter, studying the photographs with renewed enthusiasm.
Frank returned to his seat at the table and pulled one of the pictures to him. He studied it for several moments. “Holy shit!” he suddenly exclaimed. “Why didn’t we think of that?”
“Think of what?” Raymond asked.
“Karadjic could be the Serb leadership’s Achilles’ heel. If we’re talking destabilization, Karadjic could be a terrible embarrassment to their regime.”
“Good point,” Raymond said. “But what’s with these photographs?” Raymond switched his gaze toward Rosalie. The others in the room followed his example.
Rosalie’s face reddened again. “Well, uh . . . I think the woman’s a Gypsy.”
Bob sat up straighter in his chair. Ever since Michael’s kidnapping back in 1971, just the word “Gypsy” gave him a chill. “What about Gypsies?”
“So what if she’s a Gypsy?” Frank said caustically. “We’ve got–.” A sharp glare from Bob shut Frank up.
“She wears traditional, colorful Gypsy clothing. Her head’s always covered with a bright shawl.” Rosalie paused. She had their undivided attention. “Each time she shows up in a photo, a major Serb offensive occurs no more than one week later. I checked the dates of her visits against dates of Serb offensives.”
“Are you saying before Karadjic goes to war, he has sex with this Gypsy?” Raymond interjected.
Rosalie shrugged.
Tanya said, “From what I know about the Serbs’ feelings about Gypsies, I doubt Karadjic would have a Gypsy mistress. But maybe it’s not about sex. She could be a . . . fortune-teller.”
“Jee-z-z!” Bob blurted out. Heads snapped around. The members of Bob’s team shot incredulous looks at one another. “Thank you, Ms. Stein,” Bob said. “We’ll look into this. Tanya, why don’t you escort Ms. Stein back to her office. I wouldn’t want someone as important as she is to get lost again.” Bob smiled at Rosalie to make sure she knew he was teasing her. “And while you’re there, Tanya, go over all her photos. Maybe you two will come up with something else.”
As Tanya and Rosalie left, Bob turned to Frank. “Call the Serb desk. Get a message to Bessie, our agent in the Balkans. I want to know if she knows anything about Karadjic meeting with a Gypsy woman. If so, what’s their relationship? Who is she?”