Avenger

by Frederick Forsyth

  The file the computer disgorged was indeed slim. An advert had been entered in the personal small ads of a technical magazine for aeroplane buffs, seemingly the only way the man would communicate. A story had been spun, a rendezvous agreed.

  The bounty hunter had insisted on sitting in deep shadow behind a bright lamp which shone forward away from him. The agent reported he was of medium height, slim build, probably no more than one hundred and sixty pounds. He never saw the face, and within three minutes the man suspected something. He reached out, killed the light, leaving the agent with no nightvision, and when the agent had quit blinking the man was gone.

  All the agent could report was that as the bounty hunter’s hand lay on the table between them, his left sleeve had ridden up to reveal a tattoo on the forearm. It appeared to be a rat grinning over its shoulder while showing the viewer its bottom.

  None of this would have been the slightest interest to Senator Lucas or his friend in Canada. But the least Colin Fleming thought he could do was pass on the code name and the method of contact. It was a one-in-a-hundred chance, but it was all he had.

  Three days later in his office in Ontario, Stephen Edmond opened the letter sent by his friend in Washington. He had already heard the news from the six agencies and had virtually given up hope.

  He read the supplementary letter and frowned. He had been thinking of the mighty United States using its power to require a foreign government to bring forth its murderer, snap handcuffs on his wrists and send him back to the USA.

  It had never occurred to him that he was too late; that Zilic had simply vanished; that all the billion-dollar agencies of Washington simply did not know where he was and therefore could do nothing.

  He thought it over for ten minutes, shrugged and pressed the intercom.

  ‘Jean, I want to put a classified ad in the personal column “wanted” section of an American technical magazine. You’ll have to check it out. I’ve never heard of it. Called Vintage Airplane. Yeah, the text. Make it: “AVENGER. Wanted. Serious offer. No price ceiling. Please call.” Then put my cellphone number and private line. OK, Jean?’

  Twenty-six men in intelligence agencies in and around Washington had seen the request. All had responded that they did not know where Zoran Zilic was.

  One of them had lied.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Photo

  Since the attempt by the FBI to unmask him six years earlier, Dexter had decided there was no need for face-to-face meetings. Instead, he built up several defensive lines to mask his location and his identity.

  One of these was a small one-bedroom apartment in New York, but not the Bronx where he might be recognized. He rented it furnished, paid by the quarter, regular as clockwork, and always in cash. It attracted no official attention and neither did he when he was in residence.

  He also used mobile phones only of the type using pay-as-you-talk SIM cards. These he bought in bulk out of state, used once or twice and consigned to the East River. Even the NSA, with the technology to listen to a phone call and trace the exact source, cannot identify the purchaser of these use-and-jettison SIM mobiles, nor direct police to the location of the call if the user is on the move, keeps the call short and gets rid of the technology afterwards.

  Another ploy is the old-fashioned public phone booth. Numbers called from a booth can, of course, be traced; but there are so many millions of them that unless a specific booth or bank of them is suspected it is very hard to pick up the conversation, identify the caller as a wanted man, trace the location and get a police car there in time.

  Finally he used the much-maligned US mails, with his letters being sent to a ‘drop’ in the form of an innocent Korean-run fruit and vegetable shop two blocks from his apartment in New York. This would be no protection if the mail or the shop was targeted and put under surveillance, but there was no reason why it should be.

  He contacted the placer of the advert on the cellphone listed. He did so from a single-use mobile phone and he motored far into the New Jersey countryside to do it.

  Stephen Edmond identified himself without demur and in five sentences described what had happened to his grandson. Avenger thanked him and hung up.

  There are several giant newspaper-cuttings libraries in the USA and the best-known are those of the New York Times, Washington Post and Lexis Nexis. He used the third, visited its New York database and paid cash.

  There was enough to confirm who Stephen Edmond was, and there had been two articles concerning the disappearance years ago of his grandson while a student aid worker in Bosnia, both from the Toronto Star. This caller seemed to be genuine.

  Dexter called the Canadian back and dictated terms: considerable operating expenses, a fee on account and a bonus on delivery of Zilic to US jurisdiction, not payable in the event of failure.

  ‘That’s a lot of money for a man I have not met and apparently will not meet. You could take it and vaporize,’ said the Canadian.

  ‘And you, sir, could go back to the US government, where I presume you have already been.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘All right, where should it be sent?’

  Dexter gave him a Caymanian account number and a New York mailing address. ‘The money order to the first, every line of research material already done to the second,’ he said, and hung up.

  The Caribbean bank would shift the credit through a dozen different accounts within its computer system but would also open a line of credit to a bank in New York. This would be in favour of a Dutch citizen who would identify himself with a perfect Dutch passport.

  Three days later a file arrived in a stout envelope at a Korean fruit shop in Brooklyn. It was collected by the addressee, Mr Armitage. It contained a photocopy of the entire report from the Tracker, that of 1995 and of that same spring of 2001, including the confession of Milan Rajak. None of the files on Zoran Zilic in the archives of the various US intelligence agencies had ever been shown to the Canadian, so his knowledge of the man was sketchy. Worst of all, there was no picture.

  Dexter went back to the media archives, which today are the primary source of any seeker after recent history. There is hardly an event or person who ever came to any notice at all whom some journalist did not write about, or some photographer did not photograph. But Zoran Zilic nearly made it.

  Unlike the publicity-hungry Zeljko ‘Arkan’ Raznatovic, Zilic had an abhorrence of being photographed. He clearly went out of his way to avoid publicity of any kind. In this he resembled some of the Palestinian terrorists, like Sabri al-Banna, known as Abu Nidal.

  Dexter came up with one major Newsweek feature going back to the Bosnian war; it was about all the Serbian so-called warlords but within it Zilic had only a few passing mentions, probably for lack of material.

  There was one photograph of a man at a cocktail party of some sort, clearly cropped and blown up, which made it slightly hazy. The other was of a teenager; it came from Belgrade police files, and clearly went back to the days of the street gangs of Zemun. Either man could walk straight past him in the street and he would not recognize the Serbian.

  The Englishman, the Tracker, mentioned a private investigation agency in Belgrade. It was now postwar, post-Milosevic. The Yugoslav capital, where Zilic had been born and raised, and from which he had vanished, seemed the place to start. Dexter flew New York to Vienna and on to Belgrade, and checked into the Hyatt. From his tenth-floor window the battered Balkan city stretched out beneath him. Half a mile away he could see the hotel where Raznatovic had been shot to death in the lobby despite his covey of bodyguards.

  A taxi brought him to the agency called Chandler, still run by Dragan Stojic, the Philip Marlowe wannabe. Dexter’s cover was a publishing commission from the New Yorker asking for a 10,000-word biography of Raznatovic. Stojic nodded and grunted.

  ‘Everyone knew him. Married a pop singer, glamorous girl. So what do you want from me?’

  ‘The fact is, I have just
about all I need for this piece,’ said Dexter, whose American passport revealed him as Alfred Barnes. ‘But there is a sort of afterthought I should give mention to. A one-time contemporary of Arkan in the Belgrade underworld. Name of Zoran Zilic.’

  Stojic let out a long puff of air.

  ‘Now that was a nasty piece of work,’ he said. ‘He never liked being written about, photographed or even talked about. People who upset him in that area were . . . visited. There’s not much on file about him.’

  ‘I accept that. So what is Belgrade’s premier cuttings agency for written material?’

  ‘Not a problem, there’s really only one. It’s called VIP, it’s got an office in Vracar and the editor-in-chief is Slavko Markovic.’

  Dexter rose.

  ‘That’s it?’ asked the Balkan Marlowe. ‘Hardly worth an invoice.’

  The American took a hundred-dollar bill and laid it on the desk. ‘All information has a price, Mr Stojic. Even a name and address.’

  Another cab took him to the VIP cuttings agency. Mr Markovic was at lunch so Dexter found a café and toyed with a light lunch and a glass of local red wine until he came back.

  Markovic was as pessimistic as the private eye. But he punched up his in-house database to see what he had.

  ‘One piece,’ he said, ‘and it happens to be in English.’

  It was the Newsweek piece from the Bosnian war.

  ‘That’s it?’ queried Dexter. ‘This man was powerful, important, prominent. Surely there must be some trace of him?’

  ‘That’s the point,’ said Markovic, ‘he was all those things. And violent. Under Milosevic there was no argument. He seems to have cleaned out every record of himself before he quit. Police records, court records, state TV, media, the lot. Family, school contemporaries, former colleagues, no one wants to talk about him. Warned off. Mr No-face, that’s him.’

  ‘Do you recall when the last attempt was made to write anything about him?’

  Markovic thought for a while.

  ‘Now you mention it, I heard a rumour that someone tried. But it came to nothing. After Milosevic fell, and with Zilic vanished, someone tried to do a piece. I think it was cancelled.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘My talking canary said it was a magazine here in Belgrade called Ogledalo. That means “The Mirror”.’

  The Mirror still existed and its editor was still Vuk Kobac. Even though it was print day, he agreed to give the American a few minutes of his time. He lost his enthusiasm when he heard the enquiry.

  ‘That bloody man,’ he said. ‘I wish I had never heard of him.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was a young freelance. Nice kid. Keen, eager. Wanted a staff job. I hadn’t got one vacant. But he pleaded for a chance. So I gave him a commission. Name of Petrovic. Srechko Petrovic. Only twenty-two, poor kid.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He got run over, that’s what happened to him. Parked his car opposite the apartment block where he lived with his mum, went to cross the road. A Mercedes came round the corner and ran him over.’

  ‘Careless driver.’

  ‘Very careless. Managed to run him over twice. Then drove off.’

  ‘Discouraging.’

  ‘And permanent. Even in exile, he can still order and pay for a hit to be done in Belgrade.’

  ‘Any address for his mum?’

  ‘Hold on. We sent a wreath. Must have sent it to the flat.’

  He found it and bade his visitor goodbye.

  ‘One last question,’ said Dexter. ‘When was this?’

  ‘Six months ago. Just after New Year. A word of advice, Mr Barnes. Stick to writing about Arkan. He’s safely dead. Leave Zilic alone. He’ll kill you. Must rush, it’s print day.’

  The address said Blok 23, Novi Beograd. He recognized Novi Beograd, or New Belgrade, from the city map he had bought in the hotel bookshop. It was the rather bleak district in which the hotel itself stood, on a peninsula flanked by the rivers Sava and Dunav, the Danube itself, which was emphatically not blue. It stood across both rivers from central Belgrade.

  In the communist years the taste had been for huge, high-rise apartment blocks for the workers. They had gone up on vacant lots in Novi Beograd, great poured-concrete beehives, each cavity a tiny flat with its door opening to a long open-sided passage, lashed by the elements.

  Some had survived better than others. It depended on the level of prosperity of the inhabitants and thus the level of maintenance. Block 23 was a roach-infested horror. Mrs Petrovic lived on the ninth floor and the elevator was out of order. Dexter could take them at a run but he wondered how senior citizens would cope, the more so as they all seemed to be chain-smokers.

  There was not much point in going up to see her alone. There was no chance she would speak English and he had no Serbo-Croat. It was one of the pretty and bright girls behind the reception desk at the Hyatt who accepted his offer to help him out. She was saving to get married and two hundred dollars for an hour’s extra work at the end of her shift was quite acceptable.

  They arrived at seven and just in time. Mrs Petrovic was an office cleaner and left each evening at eight to work through the night in the offices across the river.

  She was one of those who have quite simply been defeated by life and the lined and exhausted face told its own story. She was probably mid-forties going on seventy, her husband killed in an industrial accident with almost no compensation, her son murdered beneath her own window. As always with the very poor approached by the apparently rich, her first reaction was suspicion.

  He had brought a large bunch of flowers. It had been a long, long time since she had had flowers. Anna, the girl from the hotel, arranged them in three displays around the tiny, shabby room.

  ‘I want to write about what happened to Srechko. I know it cannot bring him back, but I can perhaps expose the man who did this to him. Will you help me?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘I know nothing,’ she said. ‘I never asked about his work.’

  ‘The night that he died . . . was he carrying anything with him?’

  ‘I don’t know. The body was searched. They took everything.’

  ‘They searched the body? Right there on the street?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he have papers? Did he have notes that he left behind? Here in the flat?’

  ‘Yes, he had bundles of papers. With his typewriter and his pencils. But I never read them.’

  ‘Could I see them?’

  ‘They are gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘They took them. Took them all. Even the ribbon from the typewriter.’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘No, the men.’

  ‘Which men?’

  ‘They came back. Two nights later. They made me sit in the corner, there. They searched everywhere. They took everything he had had.’

  ‘There is nothing left at all of what he was working on for Mr Kobac?’

  ‘Only the photo. I had forgotten about the photo.’

  ‘Please tell me about the photo.’

  It came out in small details, all via Anna, from language to language. Three days before he died, Srechko the cub reporter had attended a New Year party and red wine had been spilled on his denim jacket. His mother had put it in the laundry bag for washing later.

  When he was dead there was no point. She too forgot about the laundry bag and the gangsters never thought to ask. When she was making a pile of her dead son’s clothes the wine-stained denim jacket fell out. She felt the pockets quickly to see if her son had forgotten any money, but felt something semi-stiff. It was a photograph.

  ‘Do you still have it? May I see it?’ asked Dexter.

  She nodded and crept away like a mouse to a sewing box in the corner. She came back with the photo.

  It was of a man, caught unawares, who had seen the photographer at the last minute. He was trying to raise his outspread hand to cover his face, but t
he shutter had clicked just in time. He was full-face, upright, in a short-sleeved shirt and slacks.

  The picture was in black and white, not of professional clarity, but with enlargement and enhancement was as good as he was ever likely to get. He recalled the teenage picture and the cocktail party photo he had found in New York and carried in the lining of his attaché case. They were all a bit grainy, but it was the same man. It was Zilic.

  ‘I would like to buy this picture Mrs Petrovic,’ he said. She shrugged and said something in Serbo-Croat.

  ‘She says you may have it. It is of no interest to her. She does not know who he is,’ said Anna.

  ‘One last question. Just before he died, did Srechko go away for a while?’

  ‘Yes, in December. He was away a week. He would not say where he had been, but he had a sunburn on his nose.’

  She escorted them to her door and the landing exposed to the winds, which led to the nonfunctioning lift and the stairwell. Anna went first. When she was out of earshot Dexter turned to the Serbian mother who had also lost her child, and spoke gently in English.

  ‘You can’t understand a word I say, lady, but if I ever get this swine into a slammer in the States, it’s partly for you. And it’s on the house.’

  Of course, she did not understand but she responded to the smile and said ‘Hvala’. In a day in Belgrade he had learned that it means ‘thank you’.

  He had instructed the taxi to wait. He dropped Anna, clutching her two hundred dollars, at her home in the suburbs and on the way back to the centre studied the picture again.

  Zilic was standing on what looked like an open expanse of concrete or tarmac. Behind him were big low buildings like warehouses. Over one of the buildings a flag floated, extended by the breeze, but part of it was off the picture.

  There was something else sticking into vision out of frame, but he could not work it out. He tapped the taxi driver on the shoulder.

  ‘Do you have a magnifying glass?’ He did not understand, but elaborate pantomime cleared up the mystery. He nodded. He kept one in the glove compartment for studying his A–Z city road map if need be.