The UN-sanctioned International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia investigated and tried individuals for war crimes committed during the complicated and tragic fighting among the Serbs, Bosnians, Croatians and Albanian ethnic groups in the 1990s. The ICCt was the International Criminal Court, established in 2002 to try war criminals for crimes in any area of the world. Both were located in The Hague in Holland, and had been created because nations tended to quickly forget about the atrocities committed within their borders and were reluctant to find and try those who’d committed them.

“How did you end up working for them? It seems a curious leap from your country’s army to an international tribunal.”

“I was planning to retire anyway. I’d been in the service for more than two decades.”

“But still. Please.”

Middleton decided that cooperation was the only way that would let him leave anytime soon. With the time difference he still had a chance to get into D.C. in time for a late supper at the Ritz Carlton with his daughter and son-in-law.

He explained to the inspector briefly that he had been a military intelligence officer with the 7,000 U.S. troops sent to Kosovo in the summer of 1999 as part of the peacekeeping force when the country was engaged in the last of the Yugoslavian wars. Middleton was based at Camp Broadsteel in the southeast of the country, the sector America oversaw. The largely rural area, dominated by Mount Duke which rose like Fuji over the rugged hills, was an ethnically Albanian area, as was most of Kosovo, and had been the site of many incursions by Serbs—both from other parts of Kosovo and from Milosevic’s Serbia, which Kosovo had been part of. The fighting was largely over—the tens of thousands of ironically dubbed “humanitarian” bombing strikes had had their desired effect—but the peacekeepers on the ground were still on high alert to stop clashes between the infamous Serb guerillas and the equally ruthless Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army forces.

Padlo took this information in, nodding as he lit another cigarette.

“Not long after I was deployed there, the base commander got a call from a general in the British sector, near Pristina, the capital. He’d found something interesting and had been calling all the international peacekeepers to see if anyone had a background in art collecting.”

“And why was that?” Padlo stared at the Sobieski hidden below eye-level.

The smell was not as terrible as Middleton had expected, but the office was filling with smoke. His eyes stung. “Let me give you some background. It goes back to World War Two.”

“Please, tell me.”

“Well, many Albanians from Kosovo fought with an SS unit—the Twenty-First Waffen Mountain Division. Their main goal was eliminating partisan guerillas, but it also gave them the chance to ethnically cleanse the Serbs, who had been their enemies for years.”