Avenger (19 page)

One entered the Lincoln limousine by the kerb and started the engine.

The other scanned the street. Sitting hunched on the kerb, feet in the gutter, the tramp turned and grinned a smile of rotting or missing teeth. Greasy grey locks fell to his shoulders; a fetid raincoat clothed his body.

Slowly he eased his right hand into a brown paper bag clutched to his chest. The gorilla slipped his hand beneath his left armpit and tensed. The hobo slowly pulled his hand from his bag clutching a bottle of cheap rum, took a swig and, with the generosity of the very drunk, held it out to the gorilla.

The man hawked, spat on the pavement, withdrew his own hand empty from beneath his jacket, relaxed and turned away. Apart from the wino, the pavement was empty and safe. He tapped on the black door.

Emilio, who had recruited Dexter's daughter, was the first out, followed by his boss. Dexter waited till the door closed and self-locked before he rose. The hand that came out of the paper bag a second time held a shortened barrel .44 magnum Smith and Wesson.

The gorilla who had spat never knew what hit him. The slug broke into four flying parts; all four penetrated at ten-feet range and performed considerable mischief inside his torso.

Drop-dead handsome Emilio did exactly that, mouth open to scream, when the second discharge took him in the face and neck, one shoulder and one lung simultaneously.

The second gorilla was halfway out of the car when he met his Maker in an unforeseen rendezvous with four spinning, tumbling metal fragments entering the side of his body exposed to the shooter.

Benyamin Madero was back at the black door, screaming for admission, when the fourth and fifth shots were fired. Some bold spirit inside had the door two inches open when a splinter went through his mar celled hair and the door shut in a hurry.

Madero fell, still hammering for admittance, sliding down the high-gloss panel work, leaving long red smears from his soaked guayabera tropical shirt.

The tramp walked over to him, showing no panic or particular hurry, stooped, turned him on his back and looked into his face. He was still alive but fading.

"Amanda Jane, mi hija," said the gunman and used the sixth shot to shred the entrails.

Madero's last ninety seconds of life were no fun at all.

A housewife in an upper window across the street later told the police she saw the tramp jog away round a corner and heard the putt-putt of a scooter engine moving away. That was all.

Before sunrise the trail bike was propped against a wall two boroughs away, unchained, ignition key in place. It would survive no more than an hour before entering the food chain.

The wig, the prosthetic teeth and raincoat were bundled into a trashcan in a public park. The haversack, relieved of its remaining clothes, was folded and tossed into a builder's skip.

At seven an American business executive in loafers, chinos, polo shirt and lightweight sports jacket, clutching a soft Abercrombie and Fitch travel grip, hailed a cab outside the Miramar Hotel and asked for the airport. Three hours later the same American lifted off in Club Class on the regular Continental Airlines flight for Newark, NJ.

And the gun, the Smith and Wesson adapted to fire slugs that split in four lethal fragments for close-quarter work, that was down a storm drain somewhere in the city now dropping beneath the wingtip.

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 arrest able 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'.

In the 1986 Act the States awarded itself the right to ask politely for the murderer of an American to be extradited back to the States. If the answer was "No', or seemingly endless delay amounting to a snub, that was the end of "Mr. Nice Guy'. The USA had entitled itself to send in a covert team of agents, snatch the 'perp' and bring him back for trial.

As FBI terrorist-hunter John O'Neill put it when the act was passed,

"From now on, host country approval has got jack shit to do with it." A joint CIA FBI snatch of an alleged murderer of an American is called a

'rendition'. There have been ten such very covert operations since the

Act was passed under

Ronald Reagan, and it all began because of an Italian cruise liner.

In October 1985 the Achille Lauro, out of Genoa, was cruising along the north coast of Egypt, with further stops on the Israeli coast in prospect, and carrying a mixed cargo of tourists, including some

Americans.

She had been secretly boarded by four Palestinians from the Palestine

Liberation Front, a terrorist group attached to Yasser Arafat's PLO, then in exile in Tunisia.

The terrorists' aim was not to capture the ship but to disembark at

Ashdod, a stopping point in Israel, and take Israeli hostages there.

But on 7 October, between Alexandria and Port Said, they were in one of their cabins, checking their weapons, when a steward walked in, saw the guns and started yelling. The four Palestinians panicked and hijacked the liner.

There followed four days of tense negotiations. In from Tunis flew Abu

Abbas, claiming to be Arafat's negotiator. Tel Aviv would have none of it, pointing out that Abu Abbas was the boss of the PLF, not a benign mediator. Eventually a deal was struck: the terrorists would get passage off the ship and an Egyptian airliner back to Tunis. The

Italian captain confirmed at gunpoint no one had been hurt. He was forced to lie.

Once the ship was free it became clear that on Day Three the

Palestinians had murdered an old American tourist, 79-year-old, wheelchair-bound New Yorker Leon Klinghoffer. They had shot him in the face and thrown him and his chair into the sea.

For Ronald Reagan that was it; all deals were off. But the killers were airborne, on their way home, in an airliner of a sovereign state, friendly to America and in international airspace; that is, untouchable. Or maybe not.

The flat-top USS Saratoga happened to be steaming south down the

Adriatic, carrying F-16 Tomcats. As darkness fell the Egyptian airliner was found off Crete, heading west for Tunis.