Avenger (23 page)

"I should be very honest with you, Mr. al Khoury. My real job in life is debt collector. Not a very glamorous job, but necessary. When we buy things, we should pay for them. Not so?"

"Assuredly."

"There is a man who flies into your airport now and again. In his own executive jet. This man."

Mr. al Khoury stared at the photo for a few seconds, then shook his head. His gaze returned to the block of dollars. Four thousand? Five?

To put Faisal through university .. .

"Alas, this man did not pay for his aeroplane. In a sense, therefore, he stole it. He paid the deposit, then flew away and was never seen again. Probably changed the registration number. Now, these are expensive things. Twenty million dollars each. So, the true owners would be grateful, in a very practical way, to anyone who could help them to find their aircraft."

"But if he is here now, arrest him. Impound the aircraft. We have laws .. ."

"Alas, he has gone again. But every time he lands here, there is a record. Stored in the files at Ras al-Khaimah airport. Now, a man of your authority could require to see those archives."

The civil servant dabbed his lips with a clean handkerchief.

"When was it here, this aeroplane?"

"Last December."

Before leaving Block 23 Dexter had learned from Mrs. Petrovic that her son had been away from 13 to 20 December. Calculating that Srechko had snatched his photograph, been seen, knew he had been seen, and had left immediately for home, he would have been in Ras al-Khaimah about the

18th. How he had known to come here, Dexter had no idea. He must have been a good, or very lucky, reporter. Kobac should have taken him on.

"There are many executive jets who come here," said Mr. al Khoury.

"All I need are the registration numbers and the types of every privately or corporately owned executive jet, specifically owned by

Europeans, hopefully this one, parked here between 15 and 19 December last. Now, I would think, in those four days .. . what? .. . Ten?"

He prayed the Arab would not ask how he did not know the make of the jet if he represented the vendors. He began to peel off hundred-dollar bills.

"As a token of my good faith. And my complete trust in you, my friend.

And the other four thousand later."

The Arab still looked dubious, torn between desire for such a magnificent sum and fear of discovery and dismissal. The American pressed his case.

"If you were doing anything to harm your country, I would not dream of asking. But this man is a thief. Taking away from him what he has stolen can surely be only a good thing. Does not the Book praise justice against the wrongdoer?"

Mr. al Khoury's hand covered the thousand dollars.

"I'll check in here, now," said Dexter. "Just ask for Mr. Barnes when you are ready."

The call came two days later. Mr. al Khoury was taking his new role as secret agent rather seriously. He phoned from a booth in a public place.

"It is your friend," said a breathless voice in the mid-morning.

"Hallo, my friend, do you wish to see me?" asked Dexter.

"Yes. I have the package."

"Here or at the office?"

"Neither. Too public. The Al Hamra Fort. Lunch."

His dialogue could not have been more suspicious, had anyone been eavesdropping, but Dexter doubted the Ras al-Khaimah secret service were on the case.

He checked out and ordered a taxi. The Al Hamra Fort Hotel was out of town, ten miles down the coast but in the right direction, heading back towards Dubai, a luxurious conversion from an old turreted Arab fortress into a five-star beach side resort.

He was there at midday, much too early for a Gulf lunch, but found a low-slung club chair in the vaulted lobby, ordered a beer and watched the entrance arch. Mr. al Khoury appeared, hot and dripping even from the hundred-yard walk from his car in the parking lot, just after 1 p.m. Of the five restaurants they selected the Lebanese with it's cold buffet.

"Any problems?" asked Dexter as they took their plates and moved down the groaning trestle tables.

"No," said the civil servant. "I explained my department was contacting all known visitors to send them a brochure describing the new and extra leisure facilities now available in Ras al-Khaimah."

"That is brilliant," beamed Dexter. "No one thought it odd?"

"On the contrary, the officials in Air Traffic got out all the flight plans for December and insisted on giving me the whole month."

"You mentioned the importance of the European owners?"

"Yes, but there are only about four or five who are not well-known oil companies. Let us sit."

They took a corner table and ordered up two beers. Like many modern

Arabs Mr. al Khoury had no problem with alcoholic drinks.

He clearly enjoyed his Lebanese food. He had piled his plate with mezzah, houmous, moutabel, lightly grilled halloumi cheese, samhousek, kibbeh and stuffed vine leaves. He handed over a sheaf of paper and began to eat.

Dexter ran through the listings of filed flight plans for December, along with time of landing and duration of stay before departure, until he came to 15 December. With a red felt-tip pen he bracketed those appearing then and covering the period to 19 December. There were nine.

Two Grumman Threes and a Four belonged to internationally known US oil companies. A French Dassault Mystere and a Falcon were down to

Elf-Aquitaine. That left four.

A smaller Lear jet was known to belong to a Saudi prince and a larger

Cessna Citation to a multi-millionaire businessman from Bahrain. The last two were an Israeli-built Westwind that arrived from Bombay and a

Hawker 1000 that came in from Cairo and departed back there. Someone had noted something in Arab script beside the Westwind.

"What does that mean?" asked Dexter.

"Ah, yes, that one is regular. It is owned by an Indian film producer.

From Bombay. He stages through on his way to London or Cannes, or

Berlin. All the film festivals. In the tower, they know him by sight."

"You have the picture?"

Al Khoury handed back the borrowed photograph.

"That one, they think he comes from the Hawker."

The Hawker 1000 had a registration number listed as P4-ZEM and was down as owned by the Zeta Corporation of Bermuda.

Dexter thanked his informant and paid over the promised balance of four thousand dollars. It was a lot for a sheaf of paper but Dexter thought it might be the lead he needed.

On his drive back to Dubai airport he mused on something he had once been told. That when a man changes his entire identity, he cannot always resist the temptation to keep back one tiny detail for old time's sake.

ZEM just happened to be the first three letters of Zemun, the district in Belgrade where Zoran Zilic was born and raised. And Zeta just happened to be the Greek and Spanish for the letter Z. But Zilic would have hidden himself and his covering corporations, not to mention his aeroplane if indeed the Hawker was his, behind layers of protection.

The records would be out there somewhere, but they would be stored in databases of the type not available to the innocent seeker of knowledge.

Dexter could manage a computer as well as the next man, but there was no way he could hack into a protected database. But he remembered someone who could.

Chapter NINETEEN

The Confrontation

WHEN IT CAME TO MATTERS OF RIGHT AND WRONG, OF SIN AND righteousness, FBI Assistant Director Colin Fleming would brook no compromise. The concept of "No Surrender' was in his bones and his genes, brought across the Atlantic a hundred years ago from the cobbled streets of Portadown. Two hundred years before that his ancestors had brought their Presbyterian code across to Ulster from the western coast of Scotland.

When it came to evil, to tolerate was to accommodate, to accommodate was to appease, and to appease was to concede defeat. That he could never do.

When he read the synthesis of the Tracker's report and the Serbian confession, and when he reached the details of the death of Ricky

Colenso, he determined that the man responsible should, if at all possible, face due process in a court of law in the greatest country in the world, his own.

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 char lady 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 leg at 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 attaches abroad.

It may look as if the legal attache is some kind of diplomatic appointment, answering to the Department of State. Not so. The legatis 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 attache. 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 leg at 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 se afront road out of town, between the Old Town and the Gulf."

Brunton nodded.

"Well, a lorry was trying to manoeuvre backwards into a narrow work site I had to stop. To my left was a cafe terrace. There were three men at the table. One of them was this one." He gestured to the photograph now face-up on the leg at 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.