None of this would have been the slightest interest to Senator Lucas or his friend in Canada. But the least Colin Fleming thought he could do was pass on the code name and the method of contact. It was a one-in-a-hundred chance, but it was all he had.
Three days later in his office in Ontario, Stephen Edmond opened the letter sent by his friend in Washington. He had already heard the news from the six agencies and had virtually given up hope.
He read the supplementary letter and frowned. He had been thinking of the mighty United States using its power to require a foreign government to bring forth its murderer, snap handcuffs on his wrists and send him back to the USA.
It had never occurred to him that he was too late; that Zilic had simply vanished; that all the billion-dollar agencies of Washington simply did not know where he was and therefore could do nothing.
He thought it over for ten minutes, shrugged and pressed the intercom.
‘Jean, I want to put a classified ad in the personal column “wanted” section of an American technical magazine. You’ll have to check it out. I’ve never heard of it. Called Vintage Airplane. Yeah, the text. Make it: “AVENGER. Wanted. Serious offer. No price ceiling. Please call.” Then put my cellphone number and private line. OK, Jean?’
Twenty-six men in intelligence agencies in and around Washington had seen the request. All had responded that they did not know where Zoran Zilic was.
One of them had lied.
PART TWO
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Photo
Since the attempt by the FBI to unmask him six years earlier, Dexter had decided there was no need for face-to-face meetings. Instead, he built up several defensive lines to mask his location and his identity.
One of these was a small one-bedroom apartment in New York, but not the Bronx where he might be recognized. He rented it furnished, paid by the quarter, regular as clockwork, and always in cash. It attracted no official attention and neither did he when he was in residence.
He also used mobile phones only of the type using pay-as-you-talk SIM cards. These he bought in bulk out of state, used once or twice and consigned to the East River. Even the NSA, with the technology to listen to a phone call and trace the exact source, cannot identify the purchaser of these use-and-jettison SIM mobiles, nor direct police to the location of the call if the user is on the move, keeps the call short and gets rid of the technology afterwards.
Another ploy is the old-fashioned public phone booth. Numbers called from a booth can, of course, be traced; but there are so many millions of them that unless a specific booth or bank of them is suspected it is very hard to pick up the conversation, identify the caller as a wanted man, trace the location and get a police car there in time.
Finally he used the much-maligned US mails, with his letters being sent to a ‘drop’ in the form of an innocent Korean-run fruit and vegetable shop two blocks from his apartment in New York. This would be no protection if the mail or the shop was targeted and put under surveillance, but there was no reason why it should be.
He contacted the placer of the advert on the cellphone listed. He did so from a single-use mobile phone and he motored far into the New Jersey countryside to do it.
Stephen Edmond identified himself without demur and in five sentences described what had happened to his grandson. Avenger thanked him and hung up.
There are several giant newspaper-cuttings libraries in the USA and the best-known are those of the New York Times, Washington Post and Lexis Nexis. He used the third, visited its New York database and paid cash.
There was enough to confirm who Stephen Edmond was, and there had been two articles concerning the disappearance years ago of his grandson while a student aid worker in Bosnia, both from the Toronto Star. This caller seemed to be genuine.
Dexter called the Canadian back and dictated terms: considerable operating expenses, a fee on account and a bonus on delivery of Zilic to US jurisdiction, not payable in the event of failure.
‘That’s a lot of money for a man I have not met and apparently will not meet. You could take it and vaporize,’ said the Canadian.
‘And you, sir, could go back to the US government, where I presume you have already been.’
There was a pause.
‘All right, where should it be sent?’
Dexter gave him a Caymanian account number and a New York mailing address. ‘The money order to the first, every line of research material already done to the second,’ he said, and hung up.
The Caribbean bank would shift the credit through a dozen different accounts within its computer system but would also open a line of credit to a bank in New York. This would be in favour of a Dutch citizen who would identify himself with a perfect Dutch passport.
Three days later a file arrived in a stout envelope at a Korean fruit shop in Brooklyn. It was collected by the addressee, Mr Armitage. It contained a photocopy of the entire report from the Tracker, that of 1995 and of that same spring of 2001, including the confession of Milan Rajak. None of the files on Zoran Zilic in the archives of the various US intelligence agencies had ever been shown to the Canadian, so his knowledge of the man was sketchy. Worst of all, there was no picture.
Dexter went back to the media archives, which today are the primary source of any seeker after recent history. There is hardly an event or person who ever came to any notice at all whom some journalist did not write about, or some photographer did not photograph. But Zoran Zilic nearly made it.
Unlike the publicity-hungry Zeljko ‘Arkan’ Raznatovic, Zilic had an abhorrence of being photographed. He clearly went out of his way to avoid publicity of any kind. In this he resembled some of the Palestinian terrorists, like Sabri al-Banna, known as Abu Nidal.