LITMIR.BIZ

       Prologue

       The Kosovo-Albania Border, 1997

      The late afternoon rain sent the Albanian soldiers into the cover of the trees. Dukas thought the move was probably for the best. What he had seen of the Albanians scared him, and he was glad when they walked off up the road to the stand of oak trees, shouting at each other and carrying their rifles across their necks like ox yokes.

      The rain beat on the windshield of Dukas’s borrowed Land Rover and the wipers droned back and forth, harmonizing with the heater and the raindrops on the roof, washing away some of the mud accumulated in a nine-hour drive across “the former Yugoslavia.” There was mud from Bosnia and mud from Croatia and a little mud from Kosovo, all washing off into the ruined tarmac of a road in Albania.

      “Have a little faith, okay,” muttered the Mossad guy in the back seat. Actually, there were two Mossad guys in the back seat, but one of them was so obviously a bureaucratic functionary that Dukas ignored him. Dukas tried to adjust his body language so that he was not telegraphing his views on the afternoon quite so blatantly. He looked back.

      “When do you want to call this off?” he asked.

      “Give the man another hour.”

      His name was Shlomo, he had said. Dukas thought the name was funny, but the man himself was serious. Now, he moved his hand slightly to indicate that, no, he didn’t expect their quarry to appear either, and that, yes, they were going to wait an hour because he, Shlomo, was under the scrutiny of someone who had sent a bureaucrat to watch him.

      Dukas liked Shlomo. And he didn’t mind helping the Israelis, as long as his own investigations into Bosnian Muslim war crimes benefited from helping them. He pulled a headset up over his ears and keyed his radio.

      “Roger, Squid, I copy you,” the voice on the other end said. The Canadians he had picked up as an ops team thought it was hilarious that Dukas was attached to the US Navy, and they called him Squid at every opportunity.

      “Give it another six zero minutes.”

      “Roger, copy.” The Canadians were in cover along the Albanian side of the border. Dukas had looked for them a few times and failed, but they answered radio calls and they had stayed in their positions all day; now they would all be drenched in addition to tired. By contrast, the Albanians had a roaring fire going in the tree line; at dusk, both the smoke and the fire must have shown for miles. But Dukas would not have been allowed here without the “support” of the Albanians.

      A column of headlights showed across the ridge to the south in Kosovo. Dukas and Shlomo had their binoculars up in an instant and then back in their laps. They both sighed on much the same note.

      “He’ll come in this lot,” the bureaucrat said.

      Dukas shook his head. Shlomo said, “No, David. It’s just local militia crossing the border to buy weapons.”

      “Why can’t he be in among them? He could be with them.” The Mossad bureaucrat, who had introduced himself as David, sounded as if he believed that he could make his assertions true by repeating them. He had the makings of a politician, Dukas thought.

      “He doesn’t have that kind of contact.”

      “You don’t know that.” David sounded petulant.

      Dukas listened to them and wondered what made their target, a Lebanese, so important that David would get his penny loafers

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