eager eyes and I could see the resemblance. Even through the burns that had scarred the entire left side of Galloway’s body, there was no mistaking the similarity between the two.
“I’m not exactly prepared,” I said, breaking the tension.
“It’s okay. I suppose it’s best we start at the beginning.”
“The embassy fire…”
He shook his head and grinned mischievously. “No. That’s the end…more or less. The beginning was Bosnia.”
I settled in for what I knew had to be a story unlike any I could have anticipated.
“The U.S. didn’t want to get involved in the civil war, but that didn’t mean troops weren’t sent over there. There were thousands of troops deployed who were stationed in a safe zone, ready to intervene if need be. And there were some of us there on intelligence gathering missions. What you need to understand is that things were so fucked up over there. The carnage was unlike anything anyone should ever have to see and it gets to you. Our unit’s sole purpose was to try to get intel on Serbian and Croatian movements, plans, et cetera, and that meant turning someone on the inside. We went through thousands of dossiers, looking for someone who would have some motive to help us. We stumbled on a man name Viktor Popovic. Granted, there was nothing too suspicious about him on paper, but when I looked at family history, something struck me as odd.”
“What was that?” I asked, intrigued.
“He was only twenty-three at the time of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s declaration of independence. At which time, he also filed for and was granted a very quick divorce. Upon further inspection, I realized his father was very influential in the Bosnian Serbs. It all could have turned out to be nothing, but something didn’t sit right with me about this. I looked into his former wife and learned she was Muslim. It made me very suspicious. Maybe this guy’s father forced him to divorce her. Maybe he had privileged information regarding the forthcoming ethnic cleansing of the Muslims and wanted to save his son from that. So we took our chances and made our approach to learn more.”
“And what did you learn?” I asked, taking a sip of water.
“That my instincts were right. It took some time to get this guy to open up and talk about everything, but he eventually admitted he tried to fight his father on the matter, but his father promised him his wife would not meet any harm if he agreed to divorce her. So he did. Of course, this wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I was hoping to use his ex-wife as leverage to get him to be my man on the inside. So I did what I could to look into his ex-wife’s whereabouts. We found that she was being held at a sort of concentration camp just over the border from the safe zone. At first, Viktor didn’t want to believe us. He insisted he had been secretly seeing her up until about a month prior when his father put her on a flight to Greece, but I had planted that seed of doubt. Days later, he came to me, furious. He had confronted his father and found out that his wife, Irena, had been taken to a camp. He agreed to help us with any information we wanted, as long as we agreed to bring Irena to safety.”
He shook his head and took a deep breath, briefly looking away as he composed himself. When he looked back up, his eyes were worn, the weariness etched on his face. “I’m not proud of it, but I agreed, although I had no intention of following through. An operation like that could take months to plan and, by that time, I hoped to be long gone with enough information that could help our country should we have to become involved in the conflict.”
“But that didn’t happen, did it?” Mackenzie asked, grabbing her father’s hand, comforting him.
“No, it didn’t. The more I learned about what was going on over there, the harder following my directive to not get involved became. When I learned exactly what was happening in those camps, I knew I couldn’t sit by and do nothing. Based solely on my promise that I would deliver his wife to safety, Viktor had put his own life at risk to help me and my country. And I knew I had to make it right.
“When I approached my team with my plan, I gave