Avenger (20 page)

Out of the gloom four Tomcats suddenly flanked the airliner. The terrified Egyptian skipper asked for an emergency landing at Athens.

Permission denied. The Tomcats signalled he should accompany them or face the consequences. The same EC2 Hawkeye, also off the Saratoga, that had found the Egyptian plane passed the messages between the fighters and the airliner.

The diversion ended when the airliner, with the killers and Abu Abbas, their leader, on board, landed under escort at the US base at

Sigonella, Sicily. Then it became complicated.

Sigonella was a shared base: US navy and Italian air force. Technically it is Italian sovereign territory; the USA only pays rent. The government in Rome, in a pretty high state of excitement, claimed the right to try the terrorists. The Achille Lauro was theirs, the air base theirs.

It took a personal call from President Reagan to the US Special Forces detachment at Sigonella to order them to back off and let the Italians have the Palestinians.

In due course, back in Genoa, home city of the liner, the small fry were sentenced. But their leader, Abu Abbas, flew out free as air on

12 October and is still at liberty." The Italian Defence Minister resigned in disgust. The Premier at the time was Bettino Craxi. He later died in exile, also in Tunis, wanted for massive embezzlement while in office.

Reagan's response to this perfidy was the Omnibus Act, nicknamed the

"Never Again' Act. It was not finally the bright kid from Wisconsin but the veteran FBI terrorist hunter Oliver "Buck' Revell, in retirement, who took a good dinner off the old senator and told him about 'renditions'.

Even then it was not thought that for Zilic a 'rendition' would ever be needed. Post-Milosevic, Yugoslavia was keen to return to the community of civilized nations. She needed large loans from the International

Monetary Fund and elsewhere to

"Abu Abbas was captured by US Special Forces in the desert west of

Baghdad, Iraq, in April 2003 while this book was at the printers. rebuild her infrastructure after seventy-eight days of NATO bombing.

Her new President Kostunica would surely regard it as a bagatelle to have Zilic arrested and extradited to the USA?

That certainly was the request Senator Lucas intended to proffer to

Colin Powell and John Ashcroft. If worst came to worst, he would ask for a covert rendition to be authorized.

He had his writer-team prepare from the full 1995 report of the Tracker a one-page synopsis to explain everything from Ricky Colenso's departure to Bosnia to try to help pitiful refugees to his presence in a lonely valley on 15 May 1995.

What happened in the valley that morning, as described by Milan Rajak, was compressed into two pages, the most distressing passages heavily highlighted. Fronted by a personal letter from himself, the file was edged and bound for easy reading.

That was something else Capitol Hill had taught him. The higher the office, the shorter the brief should be. In late April he got his face-to-face with both Cabinet secretaries.

Each listened with grave visage, pledged to read the brief and pass it to the appropriate department within their departments. And they did.

The USA has thirteen major intelligence (information) gathering agencies. Between them they probably garner ninety per cent of all the intelligence, licit and illicit, gathered on the entire planet in any twenty-four-hour period.

The sheer volume makes absorption, analysis, filtration, collation, storage and retrieval a problem of industrial proportions. Another problem is that they will not talk to each other.

American intelligence chiefs have been heard to mutter in a late-night bar that they would give their pensions for something like the British

Joint Intelligence Committee.

The JIC meets weekly in London under the chairmanship of a veteran and trusted mandarin to bring together the smaller country's four agencies: the Secret Intelligence Service (foreign); the Security Service (home); the Government Communications

HQ (SIGINT, the listeners); and Scotland Yard's Special Branch.

Sharing intel and progress can prevent duplication and waste, but its main aim is to see if fragments of information learned in different places by different people could form the jigsaw puzzle that makes up the picture everyone is looking for.

Senator Lucas's report went to six of the agencies and each obediently scoured their archives to see what, if anything, they had learned and filed about a Yugoslav gangster called Zoran Zilic.

Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, known as aTF., had nothing. He had never operated in the USA and aTF. rarely if ever goes abroad.

The other five were Defence Agency (DIA), who will have an interest in any arms dealer; National Security Agency (NSA), the biggest of them all, working out of their "Black Chamber' in Annapolis Junction,

Maryland, listening to trillions of words a day, spoken, emailed or faxed, with technology almost beyond science fiction; Drug Enforcement

Agency (DEA), who will have an interest in anyone who has ever trafficked narcotics anywhere in the world; the FBI (of course), and the CIA. Both the latter spearhead the permanent search for knowledge about terrorists, killers, warlords, hostile regimes, whatever.

It took a week or more and April slipped into May. But because the order came right from the top, the searches were thorough.

The people at Defence, Drugs and Annapolis Junction all came up with fat files. In various capacities they had known about Zoran Zilic for years. Most of their entries concerned his activities since he became a major player on the Belgrade scene: as enforcer to Milosevic, racketeer in drugs and arms, profiteer and general low-life.

That he had murdered an American boy during the Bosnian war they had not known, and they took it seriously. They would have helped if they could. But their files all had one thing in common: they ran out sixteen months before the senator's enquiry.

He had vanished, vaporized, disappeared. Sorry.

At the CIA building, enveloped in summer foliage just off the Beltway, the Director passed the query to the Deputy Director Operations. He consulted downwards to five sub-divisions: Balkans, Terrorism, Special

Ops and Arms dealings were four. He even asked, more as a formality than anything else, the small and obsessively secret office formed less than a year earlier after the massacre of the seventeen sailors on the

USS Cole in Aden harbour, known as Peregrine.

But the answer was the same. Sure we have files, but nothing after sixteen months ago. We agree with all our colleagues. He is no longer in Yugoslavia, but where he is, we do not know. He has not come to our attention for two years, so there has been no reason to expend time and treasure.

The other major hope would have been the FBI. Surely, somewhere in the huge Hoover Building at Pennsylvania and 9th, there would be a recent file describing exactly where this cold-blooded killer could now be found, detained and brought to justice?

Director Robert Mueller, recently appointed successor to Louis Freeh, passed the file and request downwards with his "Action Without Delay' tag, and it found the desk of Assistant Director Colin Fleming.

Fleming was a lifelong bureau man who could never remember the time, even as a boy, when he did not want to be a G-Man. He came from

Scottish Presbyterian stock and his faith was as unflinching as his concept of law, order and justice.

On the work of the bureau he was a fundamentalist. Compromise, accommodation, concession in the matter of crime these were mere excuses for appeasement. This he despised. What he may have lacked in subtlety he made up in tenacity and dedication.

He came from the granite hills of New Hampshire where the boast is that the rocks and the men vie for toughness. He was a staunch Republican and Peter Lucas was his senator. Indeed, he had campaigned locally for

Lucas and had made his acquaintance.

After reading the skimpy report, he rang the senator's office to ask if he might read the full report by the Tracker and the complete confession of Milan Rajak. A copy was messengered over to him that same afternoon.

He read the files with growing anger. He too had a son to be proud of, a navy flier, and the thought of what had happened to Ricky Colenso filled him with a righteous wrath. The Bureau had got to be the instrument of bringing Zilic to justice either via an extradition or a rendition. As the man heading the desk covering all terrorism from overseas sources, he would personally authorize the rendition team to go and get the killer.

But the Bureau could not. Because the Bureau was in the same position as the rest. Even though his gangsterdom, drugs and arms dealing had brought him to the attention of the Bureau as a man to watch, Zilic had never been caught in an act of anti-American terrorism or support thereof; so when he had vanished, he had vanished and the Bureau had not pursued. Its file ran out sixteen months before.

It was with the deepest personal regret that Fleming had to join the others in the intelligence community in admitting they did not know where Zoran Zilic was.

Without a location, there could be no application to a foreign government for extradition. Even if Zilic were now sheltering in a

'failed' state where the writ of normal governmental authority did not run, a snatch operation could only be mounted if the Bureau knew where he was. In his personal letter to the senator, Assistant Director

Fleming apologized that it did not.

Fleming's tenacity came with the Highland genes. Two days later he sought out and lunched with Fraser Gibbs. The FBI has two retired senior officers of almost iconic status, who can pack the student lecture halls at the Bureau's Quantico training facility when they go.

One is the towering ex-foot baller former Marine pilot Buck Revell; the other is Fraser Gibbs, who spent his early career penetrating organized crime as an undercover agent, about as dangerous work as you can get, and the second half crushing the Cosa Nostra down the eastern seaboard.

When restored to Washington after a bullet in the leg left him with a limp, he was given the desk covering freelances, mercenaries, guns for hire. He considered Fleming's query with a furrowed brow.

"I did hear something once," he conceded. "A manhunter. Sort of bounty hunter. Had a code name."

"A killer himself? You know government rules absolutely forbid that sort of thing."

"No, that's the point," said the old veteran. "The rumour was, he doesn't kill. Kidnaps, snatches, brings them back. Now, what the hell was his name?"

"It could be important," said Fleming.

"He was terribly secretive. My predecessor tried to identify him. Sent in an undercover man as a pretend client. But he smelt a trick somehow, made an excuse, left the meeting and disappeared."

"Why didn't he just fess up and come clean?" asked Fleming. "If he wasn't in the killing business .. ."

"I guess he figured that as he operated abroad, and as the Bureau doesn't like freelances operating on its own turf, we'd have sought top-level instruction and been ordered to close him down. And he'd probably have been right. So he stayed in the shadows and I never hunted him down."

"The agent would have filed a report."

"Oh, yes. Procedure. Probably under the man's code name.

Never got any other name. Ah, that's it. Avenger. Punch in

"Avenger". See what comes up."

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 night-vision, 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.