Retribution ht-4

by Adrian Magson

  Harry turned to Dosario, and moments later the special agent was through to the agent-in-charge at the Comfort Inn. Bikovsky came on, his speech even more slurred.

  ‘C’mon, Tate,’ he protested. ‘Leave me alone or get me outta here, will you? This place is driving me nuts. They won’t even let me use my phone.’

  ‘You’ll get out when we’re ready,’ Harry told him. ‘What did you do with your UN beret after your tour in Kosovo?’

  ‘What?’ Silence filled the line as Bikovsky tried to work out if it was a trick question. ‘Shit, man. . my beret? What you gonna do — bill me for some cruddy piece of military equipment? Is that what they pay you guys to do? I thought you was chasin’ some freakin’ killer.’

  ‘Answer the question,’ Harry said harshly, ‘or I’ll turn you out on the street and let Marty and his friends know where you are.’

  ‘Hey, man. . c’mon,’ Bikovsky said quickly. ‘Lemme think. . it was a long time ago.’ The line hummed for a moment. ‘Hey — I remember: the beret, yeah. I handed it over, but I never got it back. They gave me a hard time about that. But you tell me who hands in everything? It was a war zone, for Chrissake!’

  ‘What do you mean you handed it over?’

  ‘Like I was told to. When the convoy left, Pendry said to find spare jackets and stuff for the two civilians, ’cos they stood out like tits on a bull. I found two DPM jackets but only one helmet, so I handed over my blue beret. No way was I going to wear that pussy’s colour. I was a Marine.’ He laughed and gave the US Marine battle cry: ‘Hoo-agh!’

  ‘Who did you give it to?’ Harry was holding his breath, although he already knew the answer.

  ‘Who’d ya think?’ Bikovsky’s voice contained outrage. ‘To UN-Special-fuckin’-Rapporteur Kleeman.’

  FORTY-THREE

  Kassim stood in front of the Marriott Hotel on West Century Boulevard and checked the area for signs of police activity. It was nearly nine thirty and the eighteen-floor building was a blaze of lights. So far he had seen nothing to alarm him, save for a couple of hotel security guards checking cars in the main car park.

  In spite of the late hour, the traffic entering and leaving was considerable: cars, shuttle buses and cabs streaming in and out in a constant flow, passengers mixing with aircrew. The sheer bustle of activity made Kassim feel momentarily secure, but he didn’t relax his guard. If there were any police about, they were showing unusual patience; but if they were good, that was what police did the world over.

  He finally stepped through the glass entrance, latching on to a group of European travellers from an airport shuttle. He felt nervous at the sheer size of the place and the surroundings, but he’d been trained for this; all he had to do was look bored — or tired. Either would do. And not catch anyone’s eye. He felt uneasy about approaching the desk to check in. He didn’t want to stay here, so what was the point? Then he spotted an internal phone and veered towards it.

  ‘Concierge.’

  Kassim asked if a package had arrived for him. A knot built in his gut while the man went to check. He came back and confirmed that it had.

  A few minutes later, among another influx of arrivals, he approached the desk and asked for the package in the name of Roberto Lucchini. The concierge, too busy to care, barely looked at him before handing it over. Two minutes later Kassim was out of the hotel and climbing into a cab. He needed to be on the move again.

  ‘Take me to another hotel,’ he told the cabbie. ‘Somewhere smaller.’

  Further along West Century Boulevard, in the Comfort Inn where Bikovsky had been under guard, Harry and Rik were staring at an empty room. After briefing Bob Dosario at FBI headquarters and tossing around ideas, they had gone over the tape again frame by frame. It had been a tiring process, confirming only that Kleeman did not appear to have a UN beret, either on his head or tucked under his epaulette.

  ‘I remember thinking we had to get them some kit,’ Pendry had confirmed on the phone. ‘They were both wearing DPM jackets, but I don’t remember what they had on their heads.’

  ‘Bikovsky could be lying,’ Dosario had suggested reasonably.

  Harry didn’t think so. The Marine’s response had sounded too genuine. ‘He’d be taking a risk. Who would you believe — him or Kleeman?’

  Dosario grinned. ‘Good point. An all-state college sports champ turned international diplomat versus a sleaze with prior for rape who’s now working in porno movies. Mmm. . wonder how a jury would vote on that one?’

  Harry stood up. ‘Only one way to find out. Let’s go see him.’

  They had driven over to the Comfort Inn to talk with Bikovsky, but the ex-Marine was no longer there. An embarrassed officer who had been on guard outside the door was trying to explain how his charge had disappeared while his colleague had taken a comfort break.

  ‘Bikovsky said he needed some ice and to stretch his legs,’ muttered the officer, a fifteen-year veteran. He pointed to a machine down the corridor. ‘I watch him try it, and he calls back that it’s broken. He says he’ll go down to the next floor, and I start to follow. Just as I do, the room phone rings and I go get it, thinking maybe it’s important.’ He pulled a sour face. ‘When I get downstairs, he’s gone. My lieutenant’s gonna have my ass for this.’

  Harry didn’t bother trying to make him feel better; the officer had been unbelievably negligent. They left him to his fate, while his colleagues began organizing a search and Bob Dosario put out a city-wide alert to his FBI agents in the area.

  On the way back to their hotel, Rik checked his email. There was a brief note from Ripper.

  Zip file on way. See cloud. Should I be worried about Homeland Security dogging my ass? Ripper.

  There was a hypertext link to a secure cloud box where the full file could be seen, with no connections back to Ripper or the source material.

  Rik waited until they were back in their hotel before responding. He wanted to see what quality of information Ripper had come up with.

  He opened his laptop and clicked on the link to the secure site. There were several pages collated by Ripper taken from airline databases of passenger manifests, each with a separate link for Rik to follow if he wished. There was also a link to a travel agency in New York. He clicked on it. It belonged to a small company called Life Style Travel in Allen Street on the Lower East Side. Run by a man named Agim Remzi and offering cheap deals to resorts worldwide, it was a bucket shop offering cheap, no-frills airline travel for passengers who didn’t mind going the long way round and maybe finding their own way back.

  ‘Neat way to avoid obvious checkpoints,’ Harry commented, when he saw the website. ‘I wonder how many operators he’s moved around the world?’ He waited for Rik to pull up the pages of airline data that Ripper had uploaded. They ran to several sheets of plain text and figures showing flight numbers, airport acronyms, passenger names, seat numbers and departure and arrival times.

  The name Zef Haxhi had been highlighted on each one, and the pages arranged in line with dates and times, showing Haxhi’s movements beginning with Peshawar and rolling through Paris, Brussels and New York, then to Columbus and on to Moscow and London.

  ‘He gets around, this boy,’ said Rik, clicking on the link to Life Style Travel. ‘Bingo.’

  The details were a summary from Remzi’s PC matching those of the bookings made in the name of Haxhi. The in-bound trip from Peshawar to New York via Paris had been arranged some weeks beforehand, no doubt to prepare the necessary immigration paperwork. But it was clear that Remzi had organized a series of open tickets more recently. Wherever Haxhi had wanted to go, Remzi had smoothed the way like a magic carpet.

  ‘This was no impulse job,’ Harry commented. ‘There’s been too much advance planning.’

  ‘How do we get this to Deane?’ Rik queried. ‘I don’t want to compromise Ripper.’

  ‘You don’t need to. Send Deane the link to Life Style with a copy of one of the flight schedule pages, and he can do his own hacking. He doesn
’t need to know how we got it.’

  Rik did so, and hit the button to send the message on its way. ‘What do we do now?’

  Harry shook his head. ‘Nothing we can do. Bikovsky’s gone, and this is his turf; he could be anywhere by now. Best leave it to the FBI and LAPD to deal with him. We’ve got more important things to do.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Kassim or Haxhi, whatever his name is, won’t be waiting around. He’ll know by now that he’s come out too far and we’ve got a line on him. He’ll give up on Bikovsky and go on to bigger things.’

  ‘But isn’t that breaking with his plan to go after every member of the team?’

  ‘Perhaps. But I think he’s a realist. He knows by now who he isn’t after, so he’s not wasting time or running unnecessary risks by chasing them all down. He left Pendry alive and he didn’t wait to take another shot at Koslov. That must mean something.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Once he’d seen them up close, he knew they weren’t his targets.’

  Rik looked up from the laptop screen. ‘How could he know that?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ Harry had been thinking about what made Pendry and Koslov different from the other men; something that allowed them to live. The most obvious point with Pendry was that he was black. Koslov, on the other hand, was white, like the other men. The only thing that set him apart was his size. Yet the girl’s murder at the compound had supposedly happened in the dead of night, save for security lights. And the murderer would have avoided them. So any sighting would have been vague at best.

  Then he had it. Witness details always differ slightly from one telling to the next — a change of hair colour or body size here, a few inches in height there. Every pair of eyes sees things differently. It made a second-hand description of the killer too vague, too unreliable, especially after all this time.

  But if Kassim could tell the difference between one man and another with any degree of certainty, it could only mean one thing.

  He had been right there at the time.

  FORTY-FOUR

  In the UN headquarters in New York, Ken Deane rubbed his eyes and stared down at the busy streets below. On his desk lay a scattering of information. It was both good and bad.

  The good was a collection of stills from an ATM machine not far from the scene of the Carvalho killing. They were grainy, with some interference from dust particles on the lens cover of the camera, but good enough to show a white male, thin-faced, possibly of Latino or Mediterranean stock. He was using Carvalho’s cash card.

  The man hadn’t been too concerned with hiding his features, intent on using the keypad and taking the money. Deane had compared it with the photo of the man named Kassim sent over by Koslov, but he couldn’t see much of a resemblance. The Chechnya photo was of a kid in his teens, skinny as a stick and looking scared. The still showed an older man, taller, harder and with not a trace of fear about him.

  Alongside this were the not-so-good and the plain bad. The first was a rash of printouts from various international intelligence organizations warning of chatter claiming to be from a group promising ‘a strike’ against the UN. The exact nature of the group wasn’t clear, but it seemed to consist of a loose conglomeration of extremist names sworn to overthrow western influence and domination in Afghanistan and the wider region by striking at what they called the ‘soft underbelly’ of US aggression — the United Nations. Intelligence and security analysts from the US, France and the UK, aware of the rumours surrounding the Mitrovica compound, had added notes about the dominant group behind the chatter. Most were pointing the finger at Hezb-e-Islami as the most likely instigators, having the money, contacts and network capable of mounting such an exercise. The fact that it was a strike not planned to take place in Afghanistan, said the analysts, was a clever distraction: any blow was worthwhile if successful, and the effects would ripple out across the region.

  Top of the pile was the bad news; a report from Archie Lubeszki, Deane’s field security officer in Pristina. It confirmed that the rumours about a young girl murdered in 1999 were gathering pace, and with enough detail to make them worrying. She was found, it was being claimed, lying in long grass immediately adjacent to a UN container compound near Mitrovica. She had gone missing one night, according to her young brother, while looking for food inside the compound. He had been found wandering, traumatized and sick, along a nearby mountain track the following day. Some hours later, a local woman helping with the search had stumbled across the girl’s body right outside the perimeter fence. According to locals, a doctor from Medecins Sans Frontieres had made an examination, and claimed she had been raped then suffocated, her breathing cut off by the pressure of a thumb or forefinger pinching her windpipe.

  She was just fourteen.

  The news had been slow in emerging at the time due to a spate of ethnic killings, and the absence of any clear infrastructure to investigate the reports. Nobody had been able to trace the doctor who had made the initial examination, and Medecins Sans Frontieres had no records of a medic operating in that immediate area, although they couldn’t discount the possibility.

  The story had gradually faded and died, due possibly to the lack of anyone able to keep it alive. Rape, in any case, for them was the final insult in a land which had seen too many horrors inflicted in the name of religious cleansing. Why defile her further by broadcasting to the world the details of her ignominious end?

  Eventually, however, on the heels of UN Special Envoy Anton Kleeman’s announcement that the man responsible would be punished, the story had finally been teased out by the relentless probing of reporters desperate for some kind of truth. What they had not included, however, was a verbal addendum by Lubeszki over a scrambled telephone line ten minutes ago.

  ‘I’ve talked to a woman who knew the girl,’ Lubeszki had said, during a follow-up phone call. He sounded tired and angry, the distortion on the line unable to conceal the emotion he was feeling. ‘When they found her, she’d been gagged to stop her crying out.’

  ‘Gagged how?’

  ‘The woman who found her says she’d had some cloth jammed into her mouth. Part of a UN beret.’

  ‘Give me strength.’ Deane felt a wave of despair. So it was true — they had something.

  ‘The killer must have tried to remove it,’ Lubeszki continued, ‘but the girl’s teeth had clamped around it and it tore off in her mouth. From the position of the body, it looks like she was dumped over from the inside.’

  ‘He threw her over?’ It was just as Harry Tate had suggested. He kicked a drawer shut in frustration. The last thing the UN needed was confirmation of this kind of news. Overstretched already, the agency was struggling to retain credibility in its day-to-day operations. It didn’t need the world to know that one of its number, chosen to give help to the needy, had sunk to the lowest of atrocities.

  He thought about the discovery of a fragment of a beret at the scene of the killing in Venice Beach. It tied in with what Lubeszki was saying. But was it the same fragment? If so, who had it belonged to?

  ‘Do they still have the cloth?’ He almost didn’t want to ask the question.

  ‘No. It disappeared. When the translator pressed the woman, the shutters came down.’

  ‘Why didn’t the locals complain to the authorities when they found the girl?’

  ‘Maybe they did. It’s not easy getting anything out of these people. The translator asked about the brother of the dead girl, but he disappeared shortly afterwards. He was most likely taken by the Serbs.’

  ‘I hear you. Christ, what a mess.’ He sighed. ‘Are you ready for Kleeman’s visit?’

  Lubeszki gave a disgruntled snort. ‘About the same as if my mother-in-law was coming to stay. Hasn’t someone told him this might not be a good idea right now?’

  Deane didn’t want to get into that. Lubeszki was right, though; Special Envoy or not, Kleeman was poking his toe into a tender spot by returning to Kosovo. What they didn’t need was ano
ther high-profile desk-jockey turning up on a white charger promising the world just so he could score some media points — especially if it became known that he had been in the compound the night of the murder.

  After telling Lubeszki he’d be in touch again, he called Bob Dosario of the FBI.

  The special agent confirmed that the fragment of cloth found at the crime scene was on its way to be analysed at the LAPD forensics laboratory. ‘What are you looking for, exactly?’

  ‘Blood,’ said Deane. ‘Blood and saliva. .’

  FORTY-FIVE

  On second shift the following morning, in a ground-floor washroom of Terminal 1 at Los Angeles International Airport, Norm Perrell, the deputy shift superintendent, was cursing roundly and emptying overflowing trash cans. Two members of the cleaning staff had failed to turn up for work and he was having to fill in while a replacement was found. By Christ, he’d have something to say to them if they ever bothered to haul their asses in, the lazy sonzabitches!

  He upended the last can and shook his head at the things people threw out when they visited the washrooms in LA International. A pair of boxers? And what looked like a bedroom slipper? Jesus. . why come to an airport to dump their crap?

  He frowned as the last few items floated down into the reinforced garbage bag. Looked like a passport photo. He bent and retrieved it and saw it was indeed attached to a page from a torn passport. Further down was another page and the pasteboard cover. Hey — what kind of idiot throws away a passport?

  Seconds later Norm was scuttling along the corridor towards the airport security office, his chest buzzing with excitement. He’d found a driver’s licence as well, and knew some of the security guys might be interested in this stuff. Could be from a mugging, of course, but who knew? The owner’s name was weird, though. Haxhi. Zef Haxhi. What kinda name was that? Sounded like a Klingon. Sure as hell wasn’t American, he’d bet his last paycheck on that. .