It might not have been allowed in the Tunnels of Cu Chi, but twenty years later it worked like a dream on the streets of Panama.
Dexter knew there was something wrong when he entered his latchkey in his own door in the Bronx. It opened to reveal the face of his mother-in-law, Mrs Marozzi, her cheeks streaked with tears.
Along with the grief, it was the guilt. Angela Dexter had approved of Emilio as a suitor for her daughter; she had agreed to the ‘vacation’ by the sea that the young Panamanian had proposed. When her husband said he had to leave for a week to take care of unfinished business, she presumed he meant some legal work.
He should have stayed. He should have told her. He should have understood what was in her mind. Leaving her parents’ house where she had lodged since her daughter’s funeral, Angela Dexter had returned to the apartment with an over-supply of barbiturates and ended her own life.
The ex-hardhat, soldier, student, lawyer and father went into a deep depression. Finally he came to two conclusions. The first was that he had no further life in the office of the Public Defender, scurrying from court to remand centre and back again. He handed in his papers, sold the apartment, bid a tearful farewell to the Marozzi family who had been good to him, and went back to New Jersey.
He found the small town of Pennington, content in its leafy landscape, but with no local lawyer. He bought a small one-man office and hung up his shingle. He bought a frame house on Chesapeake Drive and a pickup truck in lieu of the city sedan. He began to train in the brutal discipline of the triathlon to take away the pain.
His second decision was that Madero had died too easily. His just deserts should have been to stand in a US court and hear a judge sentence him to life without parole; to wake up each day and never see the sky; to know that he would pay until the end of his days for what he had done to a screaming girl.
Calvin Dexter knew that the US Army and two tours in the stinking hell under the jungle floor of Cu Chi had given him dangerous talents. Silence, patience, near-invisibility, the skill of a hunter, the relentlessness of a born tracker.
He heard via the media of a man who had lost his child to a murderer who had vanished abroad. He made covert contact, obtained the details, went out beyond the borders of his native land and brought the killer back. Then he vanished, becoming the genial and harmless lawyer of Pennington, NJ.
Three times in seven years he hung the ‘Closed for Vacation’ notice on his Pennington office and went out into the world to find a killer and claw him back into the range of ‘due process’. Three times he alerted the Federal Marshals Service and slipped back into obscurity.
But each time it landed on his mat he checked the small ads column of Vintage Airplane, the only way the tiny few who knew of his existence could make contact.
He did it again that sunny morning of 13 May 2001. The advert read: ‘AVENGER. Wanted. Serious offer. No price ceiling. Please call.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The File
Senator Peter Lucas was an old hand on Capitol Hill. He knew that if he were going to secure any official action as a result of the file on Ricky Colenso and the confession of Milan Rajak, he would have to take it high: right to the top.
Operating with section or department heads would not work. The entire mindset of civil servants at that level was to pass the buck to another department. It was always someone else’s job. Only a flat instruction from the top floor would achieve a result.
As a Republican senator and friend over many years of George Bush Senior, Peter Lucas could get to the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and the new Attorney General, John Ashcroft. That would cover State and Justice, the two departments likely to be able to do anything.
Even then, it was not that simple. Cabinet secretaries did not want to be brought problems and questions; they preferred problems and solutions.
Extradition was not his speciality. He needed to find out what the USA could do and ought to do in such a situation. That needed research, and he had a team of young graduates for precisely that purpose. He set them to work. His best ferret, a bright girl from Wisconsin, came back a week later.
‘This animal, Zilic, is arrestable and transferable to the USA under the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984,’ she said.
The passage she had discovered came from the Congressional Hearing on Intelligence and Security of 1997. Specifically the speaker had been Robert M. Bryant, Assistant Director of the FBI, addressing the House Committee on Crime.
‘I’ve highlighted the relevant passages, senator,’ she said. He thanked her and looked at the text she laid before him.
‘The FBI’s extraterritorial responsibilities date back to the mid-1980s when Congress first passed laws authorizing the FBI to exercise federal jurisdiction overseas when a US national is murdered,’ Mr Bryant had said four years earlier.
Behind the bland language was a staggering Act that the rest of the world had largely ignored, and most US citizens as well. Prior to the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, the global presumption was that if a murder was committed, whether in France or in Mongolia, only the French or Mongolian governments had jurisdiction to pursue, arrest and try the killer. That applied whether the victim was French, Mongolian or visiting American.
The USA had simply arrogated to itself the right to decide that if you kill an American citizen anywhere in the world, you might as well have killed him on Broadway. Meaning US jurisdiction covers the whole planet. No international conference conceded this; the USA simply said so. Then Mr Bryant went further.
‘ . . . and the Omnibus Diplomatic Security and Anti-terrorism Act of 1986 established a new extraterritorial statute pertaining to terrorist acts conducted abroad against US citizens.’
‘Not a problem,’ thought the senator. ‘Zilic was not a Yugoslav Army serviceman, nor a policeman. He was freelance and the title of terrorist will stick. He is extraditable to the US under both statutes.’
He read on, ‘Upon the approval of the host country, the FBI has the legal authority to deploy FBI personnel to conduct extraterritorial investigations in the host country where the criminal act was committed, enabling the United States to prosecute terrorists for crimes committed abroad against US citizens.’
The Senator’s brow furrowed. This did not make sense. It was incomplete. The key phrase was ‘Upon the approval of the host country’. But cooperation between police forces was nothing new. Of course the FBI could accept an invitation from a foreign police force to fly over and help them out. It had been going on for years. And why were two separate Acts needed, in 1984 and 1986?
The answer, which he did not have, was that the second Act went miles further than the first, and the phrase, ‘Upon the approval of the host country’, was just Mr Bryant being comforting to the committee. What he was hinting at but not daring to say (he was speaking during the Clinton era) was the word ‘rendition’.