The Wolf of Sarajevo by Matthew Palmer

available?”
    â€œYou could put in a request to transfer an airframe from Ukraine or Syria ops on a temporary basis,” Landis suggested.
    â€œAnd the odds of success on that?”
    â€œStatistically indistinguishable from zero,” he admitted.
    The Balkans had once been the highest-priority issue on the international agenda, but those days were long gone. Moving assets from a hot place like Ukraine was simply not a realistic option. VW would have a better chance of building her own UAV in the garage of her Alexandria town house and flying it over the Atlantic like Charles Lindbergh with a remote control.
    â€œWhat’s going on?”
    â€œDamned if I know.”
    â€œGood-bye, Bob.”
    She hung up.
    VW sat at her desk stirring the cold coffee without drinking it. She needed to think.
    Something was going on in her region. Something that she was being kept out of. It was infuriating, an insult on top of an insult, salt rubbed into the wound of her exile. But there was something else as well, a spark of intellectual curiosity. It was a puzzle. VW liked puzzles and she was very, very good at them.
    There was, she realized, a back door. There was always a back door. In this case, it was the contractors. One of the ironclad laws of government was that contractors would demand their time and a half for every minute of mandatory overtime. The CIA’s UAV fleet was operated exclusively by a corps of contractors. Eventually, permanent staffing patterns in the intelligence community wouldcatch up to twenty-first-century reality . . . but likely not until the twenty-second century. It was the nature of government.
    Among the more ignominious duties that she had been assigned that were consistent with the terms of her exile to the Island was being the backup comptroller for budget and finance in the Office of Russian and European Analysis. In truth, the demands on her time were not especially onerous. She was merely the backup, after all. But it did mean that she had administrative access to the time-and-attendance software from her desktop. She fished a pocket of Nescafé from her desk drawer and mixed it with water that was almost but not quite hot enough from the machine in the break room. With a sigh, she sat down at the computer to review the overtime charges for the last three months.
    It took longer than she had bargained for, but once VW got her teeth into a challenge, she rarely let go, and by nine p.m. that evening, she had found what she was looking for. Contractors from BlueSky Solutions, a Beltway bandit with ties to General Atomics—the company behind both the Predator and Reaper UAVs—were consistently billing overtime to a program identified only by an eleven-digit number. This was the director-level code that Landis had referred to. This worked well enough for the time-and-attendance software, but VW knew that the T&A figures would need to be reconciled with the accounting program that managed the massive flow of money in and out of the subregional budget for operations. The budget software would not accept the code; it would require the program name to be input into the correct field.
    VW toggled over to the accounting program and searched the database for the entries that corresponded to the suspicious time-and-attendance overtime charges. It was not hard to find. All of theovertime for BlueSky Solutions had been charged to a single program. Parsifal. VW had been working on Balkan issues for most of her career, and she had never seen this program name in any of the operational files.
    â€œWhat the fuck is Parsifal?” she asked out loud to an empty office.

SARAJEVO
    OCTOBER 16
7
    I have a lead.” Sarah’s eagerness was visible in the athletic hunch of her shoulders and the bright gleam in her eyes. Her body seemed almost to quiver, like a hunting dog that had spotted a bird in the brush and was holding point.
    â€œWhat sort of lead?” Eric shook his