Chapter 1: Initial Contact

The snow was falling with hesitant flakes on the dirty grey streets of the Capital city. Only a few days ago, there was a fair blanket of the white stuff on the streets and sidewalks, but that was all melted now and the grime reigned supreme.

Harry Johnson stood inside the glass and metal phone booth across the street from the main railway station. It was an archaic monument to long-gone communication systems. This one had illegal advertisements of female services available with a simple introductory call. That would have been a definite no-no in the glory days of the ultimate Partisan Tito. The faint but unmistakable odor of stale urine rose with stealthy insidiousness from the trash-littered floor.

The slightly older than middle-aged Mr. Johnson was in reality an American, but he carried a Canadian passport and worked for a German import-export company well respected in Belgrade. He carried with him glowing recommendations from high officials in the Ministry of the Interior and from the Ministry of Commerce. Neither of these well-known members of the current government had actually ever met Mr. Johnson but they were informed by trusted advisors that the recommendations were warranted and would never come back to "bite" them.

This was not the first time Harry had been to Belgrade. He was quite familiar with the layout of the city and knew the secret to using the excellent mass transit systems to his advantage. Of course, Harry was not his real name and neither was Johnson, but they seemed innocuous enough to escape the notice of the internal police.

Harry was a familiar face around the American Embassy and he occasionally visited the Marine bar staying quietly in the darkened corners listening to the laughter and the antics of the diplomatic corps. All that anyone knew of Harry was that he was a Canadian from some God-awful place in the frozen North and that he was quick to buy a drink for anyone who ventured to talk to him.

For those of you who are curious as to why the quiet and unassuming Mr. Harry Johnson was shivering in the cold telephone booth, it can only be said that he was simply "following orders."

Harry thought back to a time when he was in almost the exact same location and he was waiting patiently for a defecting Bulgarian Jew to show up for transfer to the newest stage of his extraction into beautiful Italy on the Northern border.

It was not as cold that time and his reason for shivering was an ingrained fear of being caught and not because of the elements. The Bulgarian Jew turned out to be a dud with regard to usable intelligence but he did know a number of possible future sources who were dirty with black market ties.

This time his target was described simply as "The Dancer" and he was to take the target to Zagreb to secure some dependable travel documents. That sort of thing was not available in Belgrade any longer because of the many crack-downs to rid the City of undesirable elements. He did know a Greek who worked over in Novi-Sad but as soon as he headed in that direction, Harry knew his cover would be useless for he had no reason to go in that direction.

He kept up the charade of trying to read a railway schedule and made several bogus calls on the telephone just in case anyone was interested in his actions. Harry's gut told him that not a single soul was interested in him and that he was not on anyone's radar at the moment.

A young girl approached his booth from the direction of the river. He assumed she wanted to make a call but it was not convenient to his appointment and he signaled with his hands that he needed several more minutes for his call.

The girl knocked on the glass door.

He could see she was pretty even without any make-up on her face or lipstick on her mouth. She leaned up close to the door and whispered,

"I'm the dancer!"

Suddenly, Harry was worried. This was not a customary transit job or a drop of no consequence. He tried to judge the odds that this might even be a trap of some elaborate design to retaliate for previous indiscretions. He discounted the Serbs; they were too busy with their own problems. The Russians were concerned more with the anti-missile affair and the Balkans were not even on their chalkboard. For one scary moment, he considered that it might be the Mossad finally connecting the dots on his fiasco in Venice. If it was them, then he was a dead man already and he might as well just go with the flow.

Slowly, Harry opened the door and the slender girl slipped inside to get out of the chilly wind that made the cold even colder.

"I am to tell you I am "The Dancer" and give you this packet from the last stop."

The pretty girl handed Harry a manila envelope with a cloth ribbon tied around it. He held it in his hand like it was a live poisonous snake ready to send him to his maker. The whole thing looked like a scene from some thriller film. An errant thought filtered through his brain that it was a film in which he wanted no part.

He looked inside and saw there were a set of photos and unfinished documents from a previous attempt to move the girl along the route out of the country. He hesitated to ask the outcome of that particular disaster.