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 ten
acity 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-footballer, 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 nightvision, 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.