‘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 charlady 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 legat 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 attachés abroad.
It may look as if the legal attaché is some kind of diplomatic appointment, answering to the Department of State. Not so. The ‘legat’ is 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 attaché. 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 legat, 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 seafront road out of town, between the Old Town and the Gulf.’
Brunton nodded.
‘Well, a lorry was trying to manoeuvre backwards into a narrow worksite. I had to stop. To my left was a café terrace. There were three men at the table. One of them was this one.’ He gestured to the photograph now face-up on the legat’s desk.