The Wolf of Sarajevo by Matthew Palmer Page B

“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.
    â€œHe’s having a heart attack,” Echo Three said. There was no hint of panic in his voice. They were all experienced professionals.
    â€œBe careful. Could be a trick,” warned Echo Four.
    Echo Three gave him a dismissive look.
    â€œHim?”
    â€œOkay. No.”
    â€œGet 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.
    â€œThe fuckin’ battery’s dead.”
    â€œDidn’t you check that?” Klingsor demanded.
    â€œNo,” Echo One admitted.
    â€œCan 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.
    â€œWhat the hell?” Klingsor asked.
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œCan you hook the defibrillator up to the car battery?”
    â€œIt’s just a goddamn prop. It’s got no juice.”
    â€œLet’s try CPR.”
    â€œAw, 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
    O fficially, 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 theLong-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