Avenger

by Frederick Forsyth

  Of all those in the various agencies who read the circulated report and the joint request from Secretary Powell and Attorney General Ashcroft, he had taken it almost personally that his own department had no current knowledge of Zoran Zilic and could not help.

  In a final bid to do something, he had circulated a full-face picture of the Serbian gangster to the thirty-eight ‘legats’ posted abroad.

  It was a far better picture than had been contained in any Press archive, though not as recent as the one that a charlady in Block 23 had given to the Avenger. The reason for its quality was that it had been taken in Belgrade by a long-lens camera on the orders of the CIA Station Chief five years earlier when the elusive Zilic was a mover and shaker in the court of Milosevic.

  The photographer had caught Zilic emerging from his car, in the act of straightening up, head raised, gaze towards the lens he could not see a quarter of a mile away. Inside the Belgrade embassy the FBI legat had obtained a copy from his CIA colleague, so both agencies possessed the same.

  Broadly speaking, the CIA operates outside the USA and the FBI inside. But for all of that, in the ongoing fight against espionage, terrorism and crime, the Bureau has no choice but to collaborate intensively and extensively with foreign countries, especially allies, and to that end maintains its legal attachés abroad.

  It may look as if the legal attaché is some kind of diplomatic appointment, answering to the Department of State. Not so. The ‘legat’ is the FBI representative inside the US embassy. Every one of them had received the photo of Zilic from Assistant Director Fleming with an instruction to display it in the hopes of a lucky break. It came in the unlikely form of Inspector Bin Zayeed.

  Inspector Moussa bin Zayeed would also, if asked, have replied that he was a good man. He served his emir, Sheikh Maktoum of Dubai, with complete loyalty, took no bribes, honoured his god and paid his taxes. If he moonlighted by passing useful information to his friend at the American embassy, this was simply cooperation with his country’s ally and not to be confused with anything else.

  Thus it was he found himself, with the outside temperature in July over one hundred degrees, sheltering in the welcome cool of the air-conditioned embassy lobby and waiting for his friend to descend and take him out for lunch. His eye strayed to the bulletin board.

  He rose and strolled over to it. There were the usual notices of coming events, functions, arrivals, departures and invitations to various club memberships. Among the clutter was a photograph and the printed question: ‘Have you seen this man?’

  ‘Well, have you?’ asked a cheery voice behind him and a hand clapped him on the shoulder. It was Bill Brunton, his contact, lunch host and the legal attaché. They exchanged friendly greetings.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the Special Branch officer. ‘Two weeks ago.’

  Brunton’s bonhomie dropped away. The fish restaurant out at Jumeirah could wait a while.

  ‘Let’s step right back to my office,’ he suggested.

  ‘Do you remember where and when?’ asked the legat, back in his office.

  ‘Of course. About a fortnight ago. I was visiting a relative in Ras al-Khaimah. I was on the Faisal Road; you know it? The seafront road out of town, between the Old Town and the Gulf.’

  Brunton nodded.

  ‘Well, a lorry was trying to manoeuvre backwards into a narrow worksite. I had to stop. To my left was a café terrace. There were three men at the table. One of them was this one.’ He gestured to the photograph now face-up on the legat’s desk.

  ‘No question about it?’

  ‘None. That was the man.’

  ‘He was with two others?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You recognized them?’

  ‘One by name. The other only by sight. The one by name was Bout.’

  Bill Brunton sucked in his breath. Vladimir Bout needed no introduction to virtually anyone in a Western or Eastern Block intelligence service. He was widely notorious, a former KGB major who had become one of the world’s leading black-market arms dealers, a merchant of death of the first rank.

  That he was not even born a Russian, but a half-Tajik from Dushanbe, attests to his skill in the nether arts. The Russians are nothing if not the most racist people on earth and back in the USSR referred to denizens of the non-Russian Republics collectively as ‘chorny’, meaning ‘blacks’; and it was not meant as a compliment. Only White Russians and Ukrainians could escape the term and rise through the ranks on equal par with an ethnic Russian. For a half-breed Tajik to graduate out of Moscow’s prestigious Military Institute of Foreign Languages, a KGB-front training academy, and make it to the rank of major was unusual.

  He was assigned to the Navigation and Air Transport Regiment of the Soviet Air Force, another covert ‘front’ for shipping arms consignments to anti-Western guerrillas and Third World regimes opposed to the West. Here he could use his mastery of Portuguese in the Angolan civil war. He also built up formidable contacts in the air force.

  When the USSR collapsed in 1991, chaos reigned for several years and military inventories were simply abandoned as unit commanders sold off their equipment for almost any price they could get. Bout simply bought the sixteen Ilyushin 76s of his own unit for a song and went into the air charter and freight business.

  By 1992 he was back in his native south; the Afghan civil war had started, just across the border from his native Tajikistan, and one of the prime contestants was his fellow Tajik, General Dostum. The only ‘freight’ the barbarous Dostum wanted was arms; Bout provided.

  By 1993 he showed up in Ostend, Belgium, a jumping-off point to move into Africa via the Belgian ex-colony, the permanently war-torn Congo. His source of supply was limitless, the vast weapons pool of the old USSR, still operating on fictional inventories. Among his new clients were the Interahamwe, the genocidal butchers of Rwanda/Burundi.

  This finally upset even the Belgians and he was hounded out of Ostend, appearing in 1995 in South Africa to sell to both the UNITA guerrillas in Angola and their enemies in the MPLA government. But with Nelson Mandela occupying the South African presidency, things went bad for him there too and he had to leave in a hurry.

  In 1998 he showed up in the UAE and settled in Sharjah. The British and Americans put his dossier in front of the Emir and three weeks before Bill Brunton sat in his office with Inspector Bin Zayeed, Bout had been kicked out yet again.

  But his recourse was simply to move ten miles up the coast and settle in Ajman, taking a suite of rooms in the Chamber of Commerce and Industry building. With only forty thousand people, Ajman has no oil and little industry and could not be as particular as Sharjah.

  For Bill Brunton the sighting was important. He did not know why his superior, Colin Fleming, was interested in the missing Serb, but this report was certainly going to earn him a few Brownie points in the Hoover Building.

  ‘And the third man?’ he asked. ‘You say you know him by sight? Any idea where?’

  ‘Of course. Here. He is one of your colleagues?’

  If Bill Brunton thought his surprises for the day were over, he was wrong. He felt his stomach perform some gentle aerobatics. Carefully, he withdrew a file from the bottom drawer of his desk. It was a compendium of embassy staff. Inspector Bin Zayeed was unhesitating in pointing to the face of the cultural attaché.

  ‘This one,’ he said. ‘He was the third man at the table. You know him?’

  Brunton knew him all right. Even though cultural exchanges were few and far between, the cultural attaché was a very busy man. This was because behind the façade of visiting orchestras, he was the Station Chief for the CIA.

  The news from Dubai left Colin Fleming incandescent with rage. It was not that the secret agency out at Langley was conferring with a man like Vladimir Bout. That might be necessary in the course of information gathering. What had angered him was that someone high in the CIA had clearly lied to the Secretary of State, Colin Powell himself, and to his own superior, the Attorney General. A lot of rul
es had been broken here, and he was pretty sure he knew who had broken them. He called Langley and asked for a meeting as a matter of some urgency.

  The two men had met before. They had clashed in front of the National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and there was little love lost between them. Occasionally, opposites attract, but not in this case.

  Paul Devereaux III was the scion of a long line of those families who come as near to being aristocracy as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has had for a long time. He was born a Boston Brahmin to his boot heels.

  He was showing his intellectual brilliance way before school age and sailed through Boston College High School, the main feeder unit to one of the foremost Jesuit academies in America. His grades when he came out were summa cum laude.

  At Boston College the tutors had him marked out as a high-flyer, destined one day to join the Society of Jesus itself, if not to hold high office somewhere in academia.

  He read for a BA in Humanities, with strong components being philosophy and theology. He read them all, devoured them; from Ignatius Loyola, of course, to Teilhard de Chardin. He wrangled late into the night with his senior tutor in theology over the concept of the doctrine of the lesser evil and the higher goal; that the end may justify the means and yet not damn the soul, providing the parameters of the impermissible are never breached.

  In 1966 he was nineteen. It was the pinnacle of the Cold War when world communism still seemed capable of rolling up the Third World and leaving the West a beleaguered island. That was when Pope Paul VI appealed to the Jesuits and entreated them to spearhead the task of combating atheism.

  For Paul Devereaux the two were synonymous: atheism was not always communism, but communism was atheism. He would serve his country not in the church or in academia but in that other place quietly mentioned to him at the country club by a pipe-smoking man introduced by a colleague of his father.

  A week after graduating from Boston College Paul Devereaux was sworn into the ranks of the Central Intelligence Agency. For him it was the poet’s bright, confident morning. The great scandals were yet to come.

  With his patrician’s background and contacts he rose in the hierarchy, blunting the shafts of jealousy with a combination of easy charm and sheer cleverness. He also proved that he had a bucketful of the most prized currency of them all in the agency in those years: he was loyal. For that a man can be forgiven an awful lot, maybe sometimes a bit too much.

  He spent time in the three major divisions: Operations (Ops), Intelligence (Analysis) and Counter-Intelligence (Internal Security). His career hit the buffers with the arrival as director of John Deutsch.

  The two men simply did not like each other. It happens. Deutsch, with no background in intelligence gathering, was the latest in a long and, with hindsight, pretty disastrous line of political appointees. He believed Devereaux, with seven fluent languages, was quietly looking down on him, and he could have been right.

  Devereaux regarded the new DCI as a politically correct nincompoop appointed by the Arkansan President whom, although a fellow Democrat, he despised, and that was before Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky.

  This was not a marriage made in heaven and it almost became a divorce when Devereaux came to the defence of a division chief in South America accused of employing unsavoury contacts.

  The entire agency had swallowed Presidential Executive Order 12333 with good grace, except for a few dinosaurs who went back to World War II. This was the EO brought in by President Ronald Reagan that forbade any more ‘terminations’.

  Devereaux had considerable reservations but was too junior to be sought out for his counsel. It seemed to him that in the thoroughly imperfect world occupied by covert intelligence gathering there would arise occasions where an enemy in the form of a betrayer might have to be ‘terminated’ as a pre-emption. Put another way, one life may have to be terminated to preserve a likely ten.

  As to the final judgement in such a case, Devereaux believed that if the director himself was not a man of wholly sufficient moral integrity to be entrusted with such a decision, he should not be director at all.

  But under Clinton, in the by now veteran agent’s view, political correctness went quite lunatic with the instruction that disreputable sources were not to be used as informants. He felt it was like being asked to confine one’s sources to monks and choirboys.

  So when a man in South America was threatened with the wreckage of his career for using ex-terrorists to inform on functioning terrorists, Devereaux wrote a paper so sarcastic that it circulated throughout the grinning staffers of Ops Division like illegal samizdat in the old Soviet Union.

  Deutsch wanted to require the departure of Devereaux at that point but his deputy director, George Tenet, advised caution and eventually it was Deutsch who went, to be replaced by Tenet himself.

  Something happened in Africa that summer of 1998 that caused the new director to need the mordant but effective intellectual, despite his views on their joint commander-in-chief. Two US embassies were blown up.

  It was no secret to the lowliest cleaner that since the end of the Cold War in 1991 the new cold war had been against the steadily growing rise of terrorism, and the ‘happening’ unit within Ops Division was the Counter-Terrorism Center.

  Paul Devereaux was not working in the CT Center. Because one of his languages was Arabic, and his career included three stints in Arabic countries, he was Number Two in Mid-East at the time.

  The destruction of the embassies brought him out of there and into the headship of a small task force dedicated to one task and answering only to the director himself. The job in hand was called Operation Peregrine, after that falcon who hovers high and silent above his prey until he is certain of a lethal hit, and then descends with awesome speed and accuracy.

  In the new office Devereaux had no-limits access to any information from any other source that he might want and a small but expert team. For his Number Two he chose Kevin McBride, not an intellectual patch on himself, but experienced, willing and loyal. It was McBride who took the call and held his hand across the mouthpiece.

  ‘Assistant Director Fleming at the bureau,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t sound happy. Shall I leave?’

  Devereaux signalled for him to stay.

  ‘Colin . . . Paul Devereaux. What can I do for you?’

  His brow furrowed as he listened.

  ‘Why surely, I think a meeting would be a good idea.’

  It was a safe house; always convenient for a row. Daily ‘swept’ for bugging security, every word recorded with the full knowledge of the conference participants, refreshments on immediate call.

  Fleming thrust the report from Bill Brunton under Devereaux’s nose and let him read it. The Arabist’s face remained impassive.

  ‘So?’ he queried.

  ‘Please don’t tell me the Dubai inspector got it wrong,’ said Fleming. ‘Zilic was the biggest arms trafficker in Yugoslavia. He quit, disappeared. Now he is seen conferring with the biggest arms trafficker in the Gulf and Africa. Totally logical.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of trying to fault the logic,’ said Devereaux.

  ‘And in conference with your man covering the Arabian Gulf.’

  ‘The Agency’s man covering the Gulf,’ said Devereaux mildly. ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because you virtually ran Mid-East, although you were supposed to be second string. Because back then all company staff in the Gulf would have reported to you. Because even though you are now in some kind of Special Project, that situation has not changed. Because I very much doubt that two weeks ago was Zilic’s first visit to that neck of the woods. My guess is you knew exactly where Zilic was when the request came through, or at least that he would be in the Gulf and available for a snatch on a certain day. And you said nothing.’

  ‘So? Even in our business, suspicions are a long way from proof.’

  ‘This is more serious than you seem to think, my friend. By any count you and your agents are consorting with known cr
iminals and of the filthiest hue. Against the rules, flat against all the rules.’

  ‘So. Some foolish rules have been breached. Ours is not a business for the squeamish. Even the bureau must have a comprehension of the smaller evil to obtain the greater good.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me,’ snapped Colin Fleming.

  ‘I’ll try not,’ drawled the Bostonian. ‘All right, you’re upset. What are you going to do about it?’

  There was no need to be polite any more. The gloves were off and lying on the floor.

  ‘I don’t think I can let this ride,’ said Fleming. ‘This man Zilic is obscene. You must have read what he did to that boy from Georgetown. But you’re consorting. By proxy, but consorting for all that. You know what Zilic can do, what he’s already done. All on file and I know you must have read it. There’s testimony that as a gangster he hung a non-paying shopkeeper from his heels six inches above a two-bar electric fire until his brains boiled. He’s a raving sadist. What the hell are you using him for?’

  ‘If indeed I am, then it’s classified. Even from an assistant director of the bureau.’

  ‘Give the swine up. Tell us where we can find them.’

  ‘Even if I knew, which I do not admit, no.’

  Colin trembled with rage and disgust.

  ‘How can you be so bloody complacent?’ he shouted. ‘Back in 1945 the CIC in occupied Germany cut deals with Nazis who were supposed to help in the fight against communism. We should never have done that. We should not have touched those swine with a bargepole. It was wrong then, it’s wrong now.’

  Devereaux sighed. This was becoming tiresome and had long been pointless.

  ‘Spare me the history lesson,’ he said. ‘I repeat, what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘I’m taking what I know to your director,’ said Fleming.

  Paul Devereaux rose. It was time to go.

  ‘Let me tell you something. Last December I’d have been toast. Today, I’m asbestos. Times change.’