Badger Games (10 page)

He contrasted Joe with Pollak, the man who had not returned from the DiEbola mission. Tucker had a feeling that whatever had happened up there, it hadn't been Joe who had precipitated the mischance, such as it was. Pollak, now, he was one of those hard-nosed types, a guy who saw himself as the leader in any situation, the guy who would make the tough decisions. Unfortunately, he didn't always have good judgment, and he was likely to have made decisions that were not his to make. Joe was a guy, the colonel felt, who could react coolly to unforeseen developements. Joe's first priority would be to survive, but he'd also do everything possible to save the mission—and, of course, the mission had been accomplished. You wanted to be close to that guy, in any kind of scrap.

The colonel had been nervous about Pollak before this. He had considered him dangerous. If Pollak ever lost faith in the Lucani's mission, he'd be the one to blow the whistle on all of them, and there would be no warning. He was competent, but he might
not be a good comrade if the basic premise was seriously challenged. Until this episode, from which he hadn't returned, Pollak had never given the colonel reason to object. When the operation was proposed and planned, Tucker had agreed with Pollak's volunteering to go, mainly because he had figured that whatever problems there might be with Pollak, Joe's presence would probably override those problems. In other words, without actually saying as much to anyone, including himself, he'd seen Joe as the de facto leader of the operation.

He'd made a mistake, though. He realized it now. Before they'd left, he'd said to Pollak, “If anything goes wrong, make sure it's you who comes back.” What he'd meant by that, he thought, was simply that Joe was the expendable one, the guy who would have to take the fall for a failed mission, the cutout, the insulation. That was Joe's role from the beginning, wasn't it? But, he considered, Pollak might have taken that another way. Maybe that was what was eating Joe. Maybe he thought that Tucker had meant for him to be neutralized, that it was an integral part of the plan, rather than a prudent option.

Tucker sighed. The simple fact was, something had gone wrong and it wasn't Pollak who had come back. Maybe it wasn't a disaster, but now he would have to do the cleanup, disinfect the situation. Was Joe a mistake? He hoped not.

In the meantime, he had other concerns. One of them was Franko. Another disappearance. Unlike Pollak, Franko's disappearance was eminently explicable. The intelligence community had pretty much accepted the notion that Franko had been caught up in a Serbian militia operation and been killed. There were a lot of people missing over there. The problem was if Franko hadn't been captured or killed. Where was he? What was he doing?

Lieutenant Colonel Vern Tucker was a man of action, of course. He had already put some actions in train to find out the
whereabouts of Franko Bradovic, his man in Kosovo. The trouble was, nothing had come of it. The actions had turned up nothing. The only fallback was some suspect information about Butte.

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.

“'
R
ound 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 upland 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.