Retribution ht-4

by Adrian Magson

  ‘Have they named the victim?’

  ‘Not yet. As it goes there’s very little fact at all, just a brief description with some anti-UN comment. They say more will be revealed shortly. It’s like they’re taunting us. Most of the press have been sceptical so far, thank God, but this stuff is enough to give a louder voice to those who don’t like the UN.’

  ‘Any way of tracking down the origin of the site?’

  ‘Not much. Our guys say it probably passed through several servers before hitting the blog site, and the blogger will certainly have moved on by now. Give it a day or so and it’ll come back up from somewhere else. That’s not all, though.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He talks about a “spectacular” being planned.’

  It was typical extremist talk, signalling something big in the wind. It could be hot air, to stir up unrest, but Harry didn’t think so. This whole thing felt as if it was gathering momentum. It wouldn’t take much now for the sparks to be fanned into a roaring inferno.

  ‘Is there a date on the photos?’

  ‘No. But they look recent. Someone’s been doing his homework.’

  Harry was surprised. Somehow he’d expected the depot and everything in it to have disappeared, along with the changing political landscape in Kosovo. He had only a vague memory of the compound itself, having seen it mostly in the dark and under floodlights.

  ‘Can you email me the photos and send me the link to the blog site?’

  ‘Sure. If I send the link, you’ll get the photos anyway.’

  ‘Belt and braces; send both in case the site gets taken down.’

  ‘Good point. Anything else?’

  ‘Get your man in Kosovo to take similar shots of the same locations.’

  ‘How will that help?’

  ‘It might tell us if they’re genuine. If your man’s shots look different, it’s because the ones you just received are a put-up job.’

  ‘And if they match?’

  ‘Then somebody went there to take them. That makes it more real.’

  There was a pause. ‘No. I think someone’s playing us.’

  ‘If you believe that, you’re dreaming.’ He sensed Deane was still reluctant to believe what was happening. ‘This is real — they’ve gone to too much trouble for a scam or a smear campaign against the UN. With this much organization, someone somewhere has got something that’s going to sink you.’

  ‘Christ, you’re bad news, you know that?’ Deane sounded depressed. ‘What’s your email address?’

  Harry gave him the email he shared with Rik. He wasn’t sure how much help the photos would be, but they might refresh his mind about the place where this had all begun.

  Deane made a note then said, ‘They’re on the way. Check back with me when you’ve had a chance to study them. I need some input, Harry.’

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Jesus, anything: ideas, thoughts, guesses — anything you’ve got. This thing’s driving me nuts. There’s too much that they know and we don’t.’

  ‘Such as who “they” are.’

  Deane sighed. ‘Tell me about it. Take your pick. We’ve got plenty of anti-UN groups around the world.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that. There’s got to be a connection with Kosovo.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘They’ve got a story, a location and a list of UN names, none of it random. Anyone wanting to hurt the UN could have taken any one of several complaints over the years, most of them well documented. But this is too specific to one place and one event.’

  ‘What about the girl’s name? Wouldn’t they have jumped at making that public by now? It would add credibility to their claims.’

  ‘Maybe it points too directly at the killer or the people behind him. They could be saving that for later once they’ve got the attention of the press.’

  ‘And here was I thinking it was a single nut job.’

  ‘Get used to it,’ Harry said. ‘This was never a lone operator. He got the names of personnel from protected UN archives going back a dozen years, with updates on their current locations. So far he’s managed to track down and take out three of them in different countries. He’s mobile and resourceful enough to adapt to situations as they arise. But he couldn’t do it alone. He’s got a network, starting with Demescu and whoever used her.’

  ‘Well, maybe it’s not all bad news,’ Deane said finally, sounding a little happier. ‘We might yet have a face. The crime scene officers at the place Carvalho was killed found his wallet. No driver’s licence, no cash and no credit card. What are the odds?’

  ‘The killer took them.’

  ‘Must have. They’re trawling through the nearest ATMs that have cameras. If the killer used the card, he’d have done so pretty soon after leaving the body.’

  Harry took a cab back to the hotel and booked his room for a further night, then went in search of Rik and got him to check his email. He was impatient to be on his way to LA, and the enforced delay was frustrating. But there was nothing he could do about it. If he left the area before being given clearance by Deane, he might be picked up unceremoniously by military police and shipped straight to Fort Benning and a military lock-up. And the colonel from the training area, accompanied by his junior shadow, wouldn’t be far away.

  Deane had sent him the link to the blog and some photographs. Rik clicked on the link, opening a vividly colourful site with anti-American and anti-UN propaganda. The sidebars were cluttered with more links to extremist sites and a rolling live feed to Twitter comments demanding an end to the UN and justice for ‘Victims of the Satanist United Nations Organization’. Some of the names included ‘Islam’ or ‘Jihad’; many of them Harry had never come across before. There were, however, several familiar groups, including Hezb-e-Islami (HIG) and Army of Islam. The first was a fundamentalist Afghan organization set up over thirty years ago, with a strong political arm and a bloody history of attacks against Coalition forces. The second was a Palestinian group with a list of ‘spectaculars’ to its name and links to al-Qaeda.

  The commentary accompanying the photographs was surprisingly brief.

  This place marks where a child of God met her end. Inside this compound near Mitrovica, Kosovo, an innocent, loved by God, treasured by family, a child who never hurt anyone, was defiled and murdered by a member of the military United Nations invaders. Her name lives for evermore in the heart, and will soon echo around the world! Allah be praised!

  The first photo showed a concrete base surrounded by a wire mesh fence topped by razor wire, overlooked by security lights on gantries. Inside the fence were several shipping containers and trucks, and further over, a huddle of temporary buildings. Harry couldn’t tell if it was the depot at Mitrovica, but instinct told him that it had to be. There had been too much planning involved in this to allow it to fall apart because of a set of bogus photographs.

  This place of so-called sanctuary offered only death and defilement, within sight of her home!

  The next showed a section of mesh, held by concrete posts and topped with rolls of razor wire. The ground on the outside was covered in long grass and weeds, running away into a stretch of trees in the background. Beyond that, a cluster of old buildings hugged a distant slope, surrounded by a spiky growth of pine trees. It looked bleak and cold, a place lacking in any vestige of comfort or warmth.

  Harry wondered which house the girl had come from. It should surely be easy enough to find out. How many young girls could have been living in the area at the time, unless she had been a transient?

  God take her soul and protect her, and give strength to he who avenges this atrocity! For surely there will be a spectacular which will mark this crime and burn the name of the hated UN forever!

  The fourth was a close-up shot of the grass immediately outside the fence. Someone had planted a short stake in the ground. Tied to it was a small bunch of flowers.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Harry waited while
Rik trawled the related links and pages for clues. It was slow going, and Rik complained about the speed of the connections. But he found nothing to indicate the origins of the photographs or the text. Contributions to the site were openly welcomed, and the site’s owners, if found, would probably claim that they accepted bloggers’ submissions without question, taking advantage of the freedom of the internet, and that this particular submission broke no rules about incitement to violence.

  He also drew a blank with the site’s location, tracking it through several servers until the trail ran out at a site in Indonesia.

  ‘I could spend a week on this,’ he said eventually. ‘Whoever runs this has covered his tracks too well.’

  Harry was tempted to ask him to get the community of hackers and cyber-geeks to help. But they skated close enough to the wind already, without risking being linked to terrorist or extremist sites.

  In the end he called Deane.

  ‘The photos certainly look real enough,’ he told him. ‘But only an eyes-on comparison will tell.’

  ‘I’ve asked Archie Lubeszki to take some shots and compare them to those on the site. Beyond that, I’m not sure what else we can do.’

  ‘Get him to check the houses in the area,’ Harry suggested. ‘See if anyone still there from that time remembers stories of girls going missing.’

  ‘We did that already, but came up blank.’

  ‘Include any who were reported missing due to ethnic cleansing. Concentrate on young girls.’

  ‘OK. I’ll get him to try again. It’s tough, though, like opening old wounds. The press have been in there, too, stirring up the dust.’

  ‘Well, somebody must know something,’ Harry countered. ‘Memories go back a long way in that region.’

  ‘Leave it with me.’

  ‘Something else,’ Harry continued, remembering the photos. ‘Get him to check the wire, will you? See if there’s any way of getting out of the compound near the point where the girl’s body was dumped.’

  ‘Like a back gate?’

  ‘Anything. If it really happened, whoever did this had to get the body outside the wire. He wouldn’t have been able to risk carrying her out because of the guard patrol.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘If she didn’t go round, she went over the top.’

  There was a shocked silence as Deane digested the words. ‘He threw her over? Christ. Would that have been possible?’

  ‘If he was desperate enough.’ And strong enough, he decided.

  After the call, Harry prowled the room while Rik continued scouring the net for any mention of Mitrovica, missing girls or references to UN atrocities. But there were too many links, most eventually proving unhelpful and time-consuming. In a region where so much death and violence, so many unexplained disappearances had happened over the years, including whole communities in some cases, it would have taken a vast team of researchers several days to follow up and eliminate each one.

  ‘It’s too fragmented,’ was Rik’s conclusion. He sat back and stared at the screen in frustration. ‘If the name hasn’t surfaced by now, it probably won’t unless the people behind it let it out. That’s if they’ve got one.’

  ‘They’ve got one,’ said Harry with certainty. The closer he got to this, the less he felt it was an elaborate bluff. ‘What puzzles me is why now?’

  Rik looked at him. ‘You think they’ve been sitting on it?’

  ‘Maybe. Or someone knew but didn’t talk about it.’

  ‘How do you keep that sort of thing quiet?’

  Harry picked up his key and jacket. He needed a change of scenery. The room was beginning to close in around him. ‘Unless the person who knew couldn’t talk.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted, and shrugged on his jacket. ‘But I will, given time.’ He picked up Rik’s jacket and threw it across to him.

  ‘What’s this for?’ Rik looked puzzled.

  Harry had been thinking that Rik needed reacquainting with some live firing. They hadn’t been to a gun range recently, and he was worried that Rik had been too quick to wave his gun at the men who’d approached him outside the bar in Phenix. Rik’s memories of being shot would be vivid, still, and Harry didn’t want him to rely too much on showing a gun to get out of trouble.

  ‘We’re going to get some gun practice.’

  He led the way out to the car and drove to an indoor range recommended by Pendry. He could have asked to use the facilities at Fort Benning, but that would have brought Rik under the suspicious eye of the military. And he still wasn’t ready to broadcast their connection to anyone he wasn’t absolutely sure of.

  The range was an anonymous, low building at the back of an industrial estate, with nothing to show what function it performed. The foyer was utilitarian in appearance, save for a wallboard behind the counter holding an impressive collection of guns. The man behind the counter had the lean, fit look of a former soldier. After checking their passports and getting them to sign waivers, he called a colleague, who checked in the Rugers and led them through a rear door to the range, where giant fans clearing the air did not entirely reduce the familiar smell of gunpowder.

  At Hartsfield-Jackson airport, Atlanta, Kassim waited patiently while his passport was examined by a female officer. Her plump fingers were cluttered with rings and her fingernails each a different, vivid colour, a stark contrast to her shiny black skin and hair. She looked at him twice while turning the pages, and was fingering the paper of the passport and flexing the covers, looking for signs of tampering. He decided that her carefully contrived outward appearance did not reflect the person within. He kept his face blank; being over-friendly would probably irritate her just as would showing impatience at what was an unavoidable procedure.

  She turned away and used a keyboard below the level of the counter, her nails clack-clacking like distant machine-gun fire. Behind the booth an armed security guard watched her working, then glanced at Kassim.

  He felt his heart rate increasing and forced himself to breathe easily. He had to remain calm. He was still using the Haxhi documents, but beginning to feel exposed. How long could he continue to rely on them? But to risk using another set of ID presented the same danger: that someone somewhere had made a simple mistake and he would end up being called aside by a vigilant security officer. If that happened, he might never see the light of day again.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Haxhi. Have a good trip.’ She pronounced it like ‘taxi’ with the ‘h’ in the middle and slapped the passport down on the counter, her attention switching to the next in line.

  Kassim walked away, feeling the eyes of the security guard on his back. He didn’t look back, concentrating instead on not giving way to a powerful feeling of nausea washing over him. He looked for a sign to the rest rooms. He had a long trip ahead of him, and if he was going to be ill, better to get it over and done here rather than on the plane to Moscow.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The sun was setting low over Venice Beach, Los Angeles, as Harry walked down a paved footpath between two sets of condominiums, leaving behind the busier area of Speedway and the shops and restaurants along Ocean Front Walk. The atmosphere was heavy and still, in spite of the proximity of the ocean, but there were crowds out enjoying the evening air and the sights.

  After finally being given permission to leave Columbus yesterday evening, he’d told Rik to meet him in LA, and to make sure he hadn’t picked up a tail on the way. There were further delays in the military flight from the airport, with a diversion to collect some senior staff officers, a reminder to Harry that he was being accorded the use of one of the biggest air taxi companies in the world.

  After landing at El Segundo air force base, he’d been ferried to a hotel near LA’s International Airport. The Rugers he’d checked in at Columbus security had been handed back without comment, and he’d locked them in the room safe. On the way to the hotel, he called Deane to use his influence and get the neare
st LAPD precinct house to send an officer to run an eye over Bikovsky’s address. The officer’s report came straight back; there was no sign of the man and none of his neighbours had been able to venture any comments about his whereabouts.

  A meandering cycle path was busy with roller bladers, boarders and cyclists, a moving tide of cut-off jeans, halter tops and open shirts, testimony to the attitude that if you were going to be fit, why not look good, too? A juggler strolled in their midst, keeping five balls in the air and talking on a mobile phone. He looked bored. Harry passed a bronze statue of a cowboy, frozen on a plinth until a girl came too close, then he came to life. The girl shrieked and the cowboy froze again, waiting for the next mark.

  A young woman carrying a large tabby cat swept smoothly past, her long, blonde hair flowing like a Norse goddess, her sun-bronzed body encased in a minute, sequin-studded bikini. She gave Harry a brief smile and was gone, drawing little more than a passing glance from any of the men nearby.

  Harry soon understood why. Another Baywatch lookalike cruised by, followed by others, either singly or in small groups. Men too were in the parade, using rollerblades to carry them along at near Olympic speeds, muscular, bronzed bodies swaying elegantly around pedestrians and other bladers. Most seemed intent on their progress, eyes concealed behind sunglasses and ears plugged with stereo earphones.

  In lightweight slacks and a cotton shirt, Harry felt distinctly overdressed.

  He came to the area known as Muscle Beach, where men with huge chests and hands dusted with chalk powder were pumping iron, like a scene from a prison movie. Seeing them reminded Harry of his comment to Deane: what if the girl’s body had been tossed over the wire at the compound? It would have taken explosive power to do it, not sculptured muscle. Worryingly, of the men in the CP team, more than one would have had the means.