Avenger

by Frederick Forsyth

  The old man had already made up his mind.

  ‘I may have to move heaven,’ he rumbled, ‘and I may have to move hell. And if I must, I will.’

  He let her go, nodded to the professor and strode away to his limousine. As the driver eased up the slope to the R Street gateway, he took his phone from the console and dialled a number. Somewhere on Capitol Hill a secretary answered.

  ‘Put me through to Senator Peter Lucas,’ he said.

  The face of the senior senator for New Hampshire lit up when he got the message. Friendships born in the heat of war may last an hour or a lifetime. With Stephen Edmond and Peter Lucas, it had been fifty-six years since they sat on an English lawn on a spring morning and wept for the young men of both their countries who would never come home. But the friendship had endured, as of brothers.

  Each knew that, if asked, he would go to the wire for his friend. The Canadian was about to ask.

  One of the aspects of the genius of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was that although a convinced Democrat he was quite prepared to use talent wherever he found it. It was just after Pearl Harbor that he summoned a conservative Republican who happened to be at a football game and asked him to form the Office of Strategic Services.

  The man he summoned was General William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the son of Irish immigrants, who had commanded the Fighting 69th Regiment on the Western Front in World War I. After that, as a trained lawyer, he had become Deputy Attorney General under Herbert Hoover, then spent years as a Wall Street legal eagle. It was not his law skills that Roosevelt wanted; it was his sheer combativeness, the quality he needed to create the USA’s first foreign intelligence and Special Forces unit.

  Without much hesitation the old warrior gathered around himself a corps of brilliant and well-connected young men as his gofers. They included Arthur Schlesinger, David Bruce and Henry Hyde, who would all go on to high office.

  At that time Peter Lucas, raised to wealth and privilege between Manhattan and Long Island, was a sophomore at Princeton, and he decided on the day of Pearl Harbor that he too wanted to go to war. His father forbade any such thing.

  In February 1942, the young man disobeyed his father and dropped out of college, all taste for study gone. He raced around trying to find something he really wanted to do; toyed with the idea of fighter pilot, took private flying lessons until he learned that he was constantly airsick.

  In June 1942 the OSS was established. Peter Lucas offered himself at once and was accepted. He saw himself with blackened face, dropping by night far behind German lines. He attended a lot of cocktail parties instead. General Donovan wanted a first-class aide-de-camp, efficient and polished.

  He saw at short range the preparations for the landings in Sicily and Salerno in which OSS agents were wholly involved, and begged for action. Be patient, he was told. It was like taking a boy to a sweetshop but leaving him inside a glass box. He could see but he could not touch.

  Finally, he went to the general with a flat ultimatum. ‘Either I fight under you, or I quit and join the Airborne.’

  No one gave ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan ultimatums but he stared at the young man and maybe saw something of himself a quarter of a century earlier. ‘Do both,’ he said, ‘in reverse order.’

  With Donovan’s backing all doors opened. Peter Lucas shrugged off the hated civilian suit and went to Fort Benning to become a ‘ninety-day wonder’, a fast track commission to emerge as a Second Lieutenant in the Airborne.

  He missed the D-Day Normandy landings, being still in parachute school. When he graduated, he returned to General Donovan. ‘You promised,’ he said.

  Peter Lucas got his black-faced parachute drop, one cold autumn night, into the mountains behind the German lines in northern Italy. There he came across the Italian partisans who were dedicated communists, and the British Special Forces who seemed too laid-back to be dedicated to anything.

  Within a couple of weeks he learned the ‘laid-back’ bit was an act. The Jedburgh group he had joined contained some of the war’s most skilled and contented killers.

  He survived the bitter winter of 1944 in the mountains, and almost made it to the end of the war intact. It was March 1945 when he and five others ran into a stay-behind squad of no-surrender SS men they did not know were still in the region. There was a firefight and he took two slugs from a Schmeisser sub-machine gun in the left arm and shoulder.

  They were miles from anywhere, out of morphine, and it took a week of marching in agony to find a British forward unit. There was a patch-up operation on the spot, a morphine-dazed flight in a Liberator and a much better reconstruction in a London hospital.

  When he was fit enough to leave, he was sent to a convalescent home on the coast of Sussex. He shared a room with a Canadian fighter pilot nursing two broken legs. They played chess to while away the days.

  Returning home, the world was his oyster. He joined his father’s firm on Wall Street, took it over eventually, became a giant in the financial community and ran for public office when he was sixty. In April 2001, he was in his fourth and last term as a Republican senator for New Hampshire and he had just seen a Republican president elected.

  When he heard who was on the line, he told his secretary to hold all calls and his voice filled the moving limousine ten miles away.

  ‘Steve. Good to hear you again. Where are you?’

  ‘Right here in Washington. Peter, I need to see you. It’s serious.’

  Catching his mood, the senator dropped the bonhomie. ‘Sure, pal. Wanna tell me?’

  ‘Over lunch. Can you make it?’

  ‘I’ll clear the diary. The Hay Adams. Ask for my usual corner table. It’s quiet. One o’clock.’

  They met when the senator strode into the lobby. The Canadian was waiting there.

  ‘You sounded serious, Steve. You have a problem?’

  ‘I just came from an interment up in Georgetown. I just buried my only grandson.’

  The senator stared and his face creased with shared pain. ‘Jesus, old friend, I am so sorry. I can’t even imagine it. Illness? Accident?’

  ‘Let’s talk at the table. There’s something I need you to read.’

  When they were seated the Canadian answered his friend’s question. ‘He was murdered. In cold blood. No, not here, and not now. Six years ago. In Bosnia.’

  He explained briefly about the boy’s age, his desire back in 1995 to help alleviate the pain of the Bosnians, his odyssey through the capitals to the town of Travnik, his agreement to try to help his interpreter trace his family homestead. Then he passed over the Rajak confession.

  Dry martinis came. The senator ordered smoked salmon platter, brown bread, chilled Meursault. Edmond nodded, meaning: the same.

  Senator Lucas was accustomed to reading fast, but halfway through the report he gave a low whistle and slowed down.

  While the senator toyed with the salmon and read the last pages, Steve Edmond glanced around. His friend had chosen well: a personal table just beyond the grand piano, secluded in a corner by a window through which part of the White House was visible. The Lafayette at the Hay Adams was unique, more like a house set at the heart of an eighteenth-century country estate than a restaurant in the middle of a bustling capital city.

  Senator Lucas raised his head.

  ‘I don’t know what to say, Steve. This is perhaps the most awful document I have ever read. What do you want me to do?’

  A waiter removed the plates and brought small black coffees and for each man a glass bowl of old Armagnac. They were silent while the young man was at the table.

  Steve Edmond looked down at their four hands on the white cloth. Old men’s hands, cord-veined, sausage-fingered, liver-spotted. Hands that had thrown a Hurricane fighter straight down into a formation of Dornier bombers; hands that had emptied an M-1 carbine into a trattoria full of SS-men outside Bolzano; hands that had fought fights, caressed women, held first-borns, signed cheques, created fortunes, altered politics, changed the wor
ld. Once.

  Peter Lucas caught his friend’s glance and understood his mood. ‘Yes, we are old now. But not dead yet. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Maybe we could do one last good thing. My grandson was an American citizen. The USA has the right to require this monster’s extradition from wherever he is. Back here. To stand trial for Murder One. That means the Justice Department. And State. Acting together on any government that harbours this swine. Will you take it to them?’

  ‘My friend, if this government of Washington cannot give you justice, then no one can.’

  He raised his glass.

  ‘One last good thing.’

  But he was wrong.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Father

  It was only a family spat and it should have ended with a kiss-and-make-up. But it took place between a passionate Italian-blooded daughter and a doggedly tenacious father.

  By the summer of 1991 Amanda Jane Dexter was sixteen and knockout attractive. The Naples-descended Marozzi genes had given her a figure to cause a bishop to kick a hole in a stained-glass window. The blond Anglo-Saxon lineage of Dexter endowed her with a face like the young Bardot. The local boys were over her like a rash and her father had to accept that. But he did not like Emilio.

  He had nothing against Hispanics, but there was something sly and shallow about Emilio, even predatory and cruel behind matinée-idol looks. But Amanda Jane fell for him like a ton of bricks.

  It came to a head during the long summer vacation. Emilio proposed he take her away for a holiday by the sea. He spun a good tale. There would be other young people, adults to supervise, beach sports, fresh air and the bracing tang of the Atlantic. But when Cal Dexter tried to eye-contact the young man, Emilio avoided his gaze. His gut instinct told him there was something wrong. He said, ‘No.’

  A week later she ran away. There was a note to say they should not worry, everything would be fine, but she was a grown woman now and refused to be treated like a child. She never came back.

  School holidays ended. She still did not appear. Too late, her mother, who had approved her request, listened to her husband. They had no address for the beach party, no knowledge of Emilio’s background, parentage, or real home address. The Bronx address he had used turned out to be a lodging house. His car had Virginia number plates but a check with Richmond told Dexter it had been sold for cash in July. Even the surname, Gonzalez, was as common as Smith.

  Through his contacts Cal Dexter consulted with a senior sergeant in the Missing Persons Bureau of the NYPD. The officer was sympathetic but resigned.

  ‘Sixteen is like grown-up nowadays, counsellor; they sleep together, vacation together, set up home together . . .’

  The Department could only send out an all-points if there was evidence of threat, duress, forcible removal from the parental home, drug abuse, whatever.

  Dexter had to concede there had been a single phone message. It had come at a time Amanda Jane would know her father would be at work and her mother out. The message was on the machine tape.

  She was fine she said, very happy and they should not worry. She was living her own life and enjoying it. She would be in touch when she was good and ready.

  Cal Dexter traced the call. It came from a mobile phone, the sort that operates off a purchased SIM card and cannot be traced to the owner. He played the tape to the sergeant and the man shrugged. Like all Missing Person Bureaux in every force across the States he had a case overload. This was not an emergency.

  Christmas came, but it was bleak. The first in the Dexter household in sixteen years without their baby.

  It was a morning jogger who found the body. His name was Hugh Lamport, he ran a small IT consultancy company, he was an honest citizen trying to keep in shape. For him that meant a three-mile run every morning between six thirty and as near to seven o’clock as he could make it, and that even included cold bleak mornings like 18 February 1992.

  He was running along the grass verge of Indian River Road, Virginia Beach, which was where he lived. The grass was easier on the ankles than tarmac or concrete. But when he came to a bridge over a narrow culvert, he had a choice. Cross via the concrete bridge or jump the culvert. He jumped.

  He noticed something pass under him in the jump, something pale in the pre-dawn gloom. After landing, he turned and peered back into the ditch. She lay in the strange disjointed pose of death, half in and half out the water.

  Mr Lamport glanced frantically round and saw four hundred yards away through some trees a dim light; another early riser brewing the morning cup. No longer jogging but sprinting, he arrived at the door and hammered hard. The coffee brewer peered through the window, listened to the shouted explanation, and let him in.

  The 911 call was taken by the night-duty dispatcher in the basement switchboard at Virginia Beach’s police HQ on Princess Anne Road. She asked as a matter of urgency for the nearest patrol car and the response came from the First Precinct’s sole cruiser, which was a mile from the culvert. It made that mile in a minute, to find a man in jogging kit and another in a dressing gown marking the spot.

  It took the two patrol officers no more than two minutes to call in for homicide detectives and a full forensic team. The householder fetched coffee, which was gratefully received, and all four waited.

  That whole sector of eastern Virginia is occupied by six cities with contiguous boundaries, a conurbation that extends for miles on both banks of the James River and Hampton Roads. It is a landscape studded with navy and air bases, for here the Roads run out into Chesapeake Bay and thence the Atlantic.

  Of the six cities, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Hampton with Newport News, Suffolk, Chesapeake and Virginia Beach, the biggest by far is Virginia Beach. It covers 310 square miles and contains 430,000 citizens out of a total of 1.5 million.

  Of its four precincts, Second, Third and Fourth cover the built-up areas, while First Precinct is large and mainly rural. Its 195 square miles run right down to the North Carolina border and are bisected by Indian River Road.

  Forensics and Homicide arrived at the culvert around the same time, thirty minutes later. The Medical Examiner was five minutes after that. Dawn came, or what passed for dawn, and a drizzle set in.

  Mr Lamport was driven home to shower off and make a full statement. The coffee brewer made a statement, which is to say he could only aver he had heard and seen nothing during the night.

  The ME established quickly that life was extinct, that the victim was a young Caucasian female, that death had almost certainly occurred somewhere else and the body had been dumped, presumably from a car. He ordered the attendant ambulance to take the cadaver to the state morgue in Norfolk, a facility that serves all six cities.

  The local homicide detectives took time out to muse that if the perpetrators, who seemed to have a moral code on the level of a snake’s navel and an IQ to match, had driven three miles further on, they would have entered the swamp country at the head of Back Bay. Here, a weighted body could disappear for ever and none the wiser. But they had seemingly run out of patience and dumped their grisly cargo where it would be quickly found and start a manhunt.

  At Norfolk, two things happened with respect to the corpse: an autopsy to establish cause, time and, if possible, location of death, and an attempt to secure identification.

  The body itself yielded nothing to the second search: some skimpy but no longer provocative underwear, a badly torn and slinky dress. No medallions, bracelets, tattoos or purse.

  Before the forensic pathologist began his task, the face, which bore lesions and contusions compatible with a savage beating, was restored as best possible with sutures and make-up, and photographed. The photo would be passed around the vice squads of all six cities, for the body’s dress code seemed to indicate a possibility that she had been involved with what is hopefully called ‘night life’.

  The other two details the ID hunters needed and got were fingerprints and blood group. Then the pathologist started. It was th
e fingerprints they pinned their hopes on.

  The six cities came up with a zero on the prints. Details went to the state capital at Richmond where prints covering the whole of Virginia were stored. Days went by. The answer came back. Sorry. The next step up is the FBI covering the entire USA. It uses IAFIS – the International Automated Fingerprints ID System.

  The pathologist’s report made even hardened homicide detectives queasy. The girl appeared not much more than eighteen, if that. She had once been pretty, but someone, plus her lifestyle, had put an end to that.

  Vaginal and anal dilation was so exaggerated that she had clearly been penetrated, and repeatedly, by instruments far larger than a normal male organ. The terminal beating had not been the only one; there had been others before. And heroin abuse, probably dating back no more than six months.

  To both homicide and vice detectives in Norfolk the report said ‘prostitution’. It was no news to any of them that recruitment into vice was often accomplished by narcotic dependency, the pimp being the only source of the drug.

  Any girl trying to escape the clutches of such a gang would certainly be punished; such ‘lesson learning’ could involve forced participation in exhibitions featuring brutal perversions and bestiality. There were creatures prepared to pay for this, and thus creatures prepared to supply it.

  The post-autopsy body went into the cold room while the search for identity continued. She was still Jane Doe. Then a vice detective in Portsmouth thought he might recognize the circulated photograph, despite the damage and discoloration. He thought she might have been a hooker going under the name of Lorraine.

  Enquiries revealed that ‘Lorraine’ had not been seen for several weeks. Prior to that she had worked for a notoriously vicious Hispanic gang who recruited by using good-looking gang members to pick up girls in the cities to the north and entice them south with promises of marriage, a lovely vacation, whatever it took.