The Wolf of Sarajevo (16 page)

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

OCTOBER 31

V
W had always been good at puzzles. Her favorites were acrostics, which required stringing together disparate data points to find the hidden pattern. It was not all that different from analytical work. She did the acrostics in pen—pencils were for intellectual cowards looking to hedge their bets—and filled in the boxes with handwriting that was so neat it looked almost machined. There were few things that got under her skin like failing to finish a puzzle did. It was almost a moral shortcoming. And it had been quite a number of years since VW had left a blank space in one of her acrostics.

Now, whether she meant to or not, VW had started a new puzzle. Parsifal. And she would be damned if she left it unfinished. Her search had so far turned up nothing useful. There was nothing in the files about Parsifal. The database was empty. The few inquiries
she had dared to make had been met with blank looks. But VW had an idea. Money was every operation's Achilles' heel. The black budget was really more a dark gray. Every purchase still needed to be expensed against an authorized fund site and accounted for to the budget analysts. The beans they were counting may have been dyed black, but they were still beans.

In the old days, dissecting Parsifal would have required digging through box after box of paper records in the Agency's subbasement storage rooms. Now VW could do nearly everything without having to stand up from her desk. Or at least David Rennsler could. VW was a manager, after all.

“You wanted to see me?” Rennsler asked diffidently from right outside the door. It was typical of David that he would not come into her office without an engraved invitation.

“Yes, David. Come in, please. Sit down.”

Rennsler complied reluctantly. He was a huge bear of a man with a beard that would not have been out of place on a Canadian lumberjack. He topped the scales somewhere north of three hundred pounds, and the stains on his suit testified to dining habits constructed around vending machines and the office microwave. His social skills were underdeveloped, even on the sliding scale used for grading econ analysts.

Rennsler had been sentenced to the Island largely because nobody wanted to work with him. He smelled like he had not showered in days, often because he had not. He talked to himself as he wrote or read, not muttered asides but a genuine monologue conducted at normal conversation levels. His cubicle smelled vaguely of cheese, maybe because Rennsler wore sandals with black socks rather than
shoes. He was almost certainly somewhere on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum.

But he was also a genius. And there was little enough of that to go around. VW was willing to tolerate and accommodate his eccentricities, including his almost pathological shyness. Before wearing out his welcome and being sentenced to the Island, Rennsler had been Counterterrorism's top analyst on the financing of global extremist groups. He could track a dime as it traveled from the pocket of a believer in a village near Jeddah to the tribal belt in Northwest Pakistan to a Swiss bank.

“David, I need your help.”

Rennsler nodded. He spoke to himself freely and easily, but he had a marked tendency to clam up around others, especially women.

“There's a program with a director-level code called Parsifal. I'd like to know more about it. I'd like to know everything about it. Can you help me?”

Rennsler gulped for air, and he reminded VW of a fish flapping helplessly on the floor of a boat.

“With the money?” he asked finally. His voice was surprisingly thin and reedy for such a large man.

“Yes. If we know where the money's been going that should give us a pretty good idea of what the program managers have been up to.”

Rennsler shifted his considerable bulk in the seat.

“Do you have the financial identifiers?”

“I do.”

“Then it shouldn't be hard.”

It wasn't.

The next morning when VW arrived at work, Rennsler was there, wearing the same tired suit he had been wearing the day before. A pile of empty wrappers from a variety of Hostess products offered evidence of an all-night effort.

“Looks like a late night,” VW said.

“I had nowhere else I needed to be.”

“Let's talk in my office.”

VW had an oversize desk. But even so, Rennsler's printouts covered it several layers deep. VW scanned the data quickly. Parsifal was laid out before her like the patient in the “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—etherized upon a table. Every expenditure was exposed and frozen in place. It was always good to have hard copies. For someone who knew what he was doing, digital fingerprints were too easy to alter or erase.

Assembling the data was only the beginning, however. Now came the struggle to understand it. The puzzle.

“Let's start at the beginning,” VW suggested.

Rennsler nodded vigorously.

“How far back does the spending trail run?”

Rennsler pointed to a column of numbers and letters on a legal-size printout on the far left side of the desk.

“This is the first recorded instance of expenditures linked to Parisfal,” he said. “A little more than two years ago.”

“July 17,” VW said, looking at the entry Rennsler had indicated.

“Yes.”

The rest of the entry was gibberish to VW. The spreadsheets for the black budget were written in a shorthand code that would have taken VW hours to interpret even with access to the master key. Rennsler could read them with the same ease with which a regular
person could read a newspaper. He knew all the fiscal codes without having to look them up. It was a little bit like one those Asperger's kids who could reel off train schedules in Scotland or the names of thousands of Japanese anime characters. It was esoteric knowledge, but at least in this one case it was also invaluable. It would have been almost impossible for VW to sort through the mountain of data without Rennsler's help.

“What can you tell me about it?” she asked.

“It's a travel voucher. Three people to London and Athens. Those numbers”—Rennsler stabbed the printout with a thick stubby finger to indicate which column he meant—“are linked to Parsifal's fiscal data. It's an open-ended account. There's no spending limit.”

VW raised an eyebrow at that. Even on the black budget, open-ended accounts were about as common as unicorns.

“Can you tell who the travelers are?”

“Not from this. The identifiers here are linked to names in a different database that requires special-access permissions. Trying to get into that would trigger all sorts of alarms. And, in any event, the names are more likely to be cover identities than actual given names.”

“Why is it that the only secrets we seem really good at keeping are the ones we keep from ourselves?”

Rennsler blinked rapidly, clearly confused. His thinking was rapid, razor sharp, and almost entirely literal.

“Sorry, David. Don't worry about it. What else can you tell me from the data?”

“Most of the early expenses are for travel, but there's an uptick at about the three-month mark in cash payments that could be going to sources. Some of the payments seem pretty big, tens of thousands of dollars big, which is unusual.”

“I'll say.” The CIA could waste millions of dollars in operation excesses, but it was notoriously stingy with payouts to human sources who took the biggest risks on the Agency's behalf.

“The bulk of the early money seems to have been expensed in Bosnia and Serbia,” Rennsler continued. “The costs are uneven. They spike and then go flat for long periods.”

“Can you graph the expenses so that they're visual? Give me a sense of where and when the spikes are?”

“No problem.”

Two hours later, VW had a new chart laid across her desk that looked something like an EKG from a patient suffering severe cardiac distress. VW did not need Rennsler's help to translate the data in this form. It was pretty clear and—for VW—it raised at least as many questions as it answered.

“Thank you, David,” she said. “Let me sit here with this for a while. I'll call you if I need help.”

Rennsler shuffled out of the room, his Birkenstocks flopping softly on the carpet.

VW looked at the chart on the top of the pile. It was a simple graph with time on the X axis and money on the Y axis. There was the initial spike Rennsler had identified. Whatever Parsifal was, it had involved substantial up-front costs. There was another significant spike about eight months ago and a third that started only about four weeks earlier and seemed to be ongoing.

VW decided to take as her working hypothesis that Parsifal was connected to the Balkans, probably Bosnia. The link to UAV time out of the eastern Slavonia airfield was the original tie to Parsifal, and until something in the data set contradicted that theory, she would work under that assumption.

Through that lens, the spikes in Parsifal spending seemed to track pretty closely to the key developments in RS politics. First, the sudden and dramatic rise to power of Zoran Dimitrović and then his retrograde slide into the swamp of ethnic nationalism and the return of the paramilitaries. The timing seemed too close to be coincidental.

The third spike was something of an anomaly. A second chart, this one set up as a bar graph, broke the spending down by geography as well as time. Parsifal expenses for the first two spikes were heavily weighted toward the Balkans, but the lion's share of expenses making up the third spike seemed to have been spent on an unrelated operation in Geneva.

VW called Rennsler back to her office.

“David, can you break this down for me? What's this bump in Geneva spending? Doesn't seem like the right environment for UAV operations.”

Rennsler looked over the columns of numbers and letters, running a finger over them as though he were reading braille.

“These are payments to contractors,” he answered, after a few minutes deciphering the information. “Sizeable payments.”

“Can you tell which ones?”

“Yes. This group here.” He pointed to a line of accounting code in the middle of a dense block of text that was meaningless to VW. “This is keyed to one of the specialty firms. True North.”

“True North? I thought they were frozen out of Agency contracts after that problem in Afghanistan.”

“Officially. But when I was still in Counterterrorism, the word was that True North had a certain skill set that the agency needed and didn't want to give up.”

“Which is?”

“Renditions.”

“So who were they going after in Geneva? George Clooney?”

Rennsler shrugged. “That's not the kind of thing you'll find in the fiscal data.”

He took another look at the numbers, humming softly to himself as though to block out distractions.

“The really odd thing about this is that most of the expenses aren't tied to the original fiscal codes. They're linked to subordinate codes. It makes it hard to get a clear picture of the totality of the operation. You wouldn't stumble across this by accident. You'd have to know to go looking for it.”

“Who does that sort of thing?”

“In my experience, narco-traffickers and terrorists.”

“David, honey. Those two groups represent the sum total of your experience.”

Rennsler blushed and looked at his feet.

“So, what does this tell us?” VW asked, trying to get Rennsler back on task.

“They're hiding something.”

“Who?”

“Whoever is behind Parsifal.”

“Is there any other way to look at the data?”

Rennsler shook his head vigorously in the way a terrier might do to snap the neck of a rat. “No.”

“Okay. What about this last entry? What's the very latest that we have?”

Rennsler scanned it quickly.

“It's drawing from Parsifal's open-ended fund site for operations in the Balkans.”

“What kind of operations?”

“UAV flights.”

“And those are the most recent Parsifal expenditures?”

“Yes.”

“When were the UAVs flying?”

Rennsler stabbed at one of the columns with his index finger. These numbers even VW could understand.

“Yesterday,” she said.

Rennsler nodded.

—

VW sat at her desk
sipping a cup of room-temperature coffee. Rennsler was back in his cubicle scouring the various databases for anything else he could find on Parsifal.

There was something about Parsifal that bothered VW. It stank of excess and overreach and the kind of scandal that could damage the work of the Agency for decades. She did not have the evidence to support this view yet, just a feeling. And if she was going to be brutally honest with herself, at least some of that might be attributable to her desire for revenge against the Balkan team. Even if her motivation was not entirely pure, Parsifal—she was increasingly convinced—was a cancer. She would be damned if she was going to just let it lie.

She sighed.

She knew what she had to do.

It took no more than a couple of minutes to find the telephone
number she needed. VW took one final swallow of the bitter dregs of her coffee and dialed the eleven-digit number on the secure Sectéra vIPer phone on her desk. The number she dialed was an internal Agency extension, but the phone on the other end was located in eastern Slavonia.

It rang twice before someone picked up.

“Hello.” Somehow these two short syllables managed to convey both boredom and impatience.

“I'd like to speak to the duty officer, please.”

“That's me.”

It was almost ten p.m. in Croatia. It would make sense that the duty officer would be the only one available to answer the phone.

“Excellent. I'm calling from the payroll office in Front Royal. There's a problem on this end that I'm hoping you can help straighten out so that we can pay you and the other members of your team.”