Retribution

TWENTY-SEVEN

Harry waited while Rik trawled the related links and pages for clues. It was slow going, and Rik complained about the speed of the connections. But he found nothing to indicate the origins of the photographs or the text. Contributions to the site were openly welcomed, and the site’s owners, if found, would probably claim that they accepted bloggers’ submissions without question, taking advantage of the freedom of the internet, and that this particular submission broke no rules about incitement to violence.

He also drew a blank with the site’s location, tracking it through several servers until the trail ran out at a site in Indonesia.

‘I could spend a week on this,’ he said eventually. ‘Whoever runs this has covered his tracks too well.’

Harry was tempted to ask him to get the community of hackers and cyber-geeks to help. But they skated close enough to the wind already, without risking being linked to terrorist or extremist sites.

In the end he called Deane.

‘The photos certainly look real enough,’ he told him. ‘But only an eyes-on comparison will tell.’

‘I’ve asked Archie Lubeszki to take some shots and compare them to those on the site. Beyond that, I’m not sure what else we can do.’

‘Get him to check the houses in the area,’ Harry suggested. ‘See if anyone still there from that time remembers stories of girls going missing.’

‘We did that already, but came up blank.’

‘Include any who were reported missing due to ethnic cleansing. Concentrate on young girls.’

‘OK. I’ll get him to try again. It’s tough, though, like opening old wounds. The press have been in there, too, stirring up the dust.’

‘Well, somebody must know something,’ Harry countered. ‘Memories go back a long way in that region.’

‘Leave it with me.’

‘Something else,’ Harry continued, remembering the photos. ‘Get him to check the wire, will you? See if there’s any way of getting out of the compound near the point where the girl’s body was dumped.’

‘Like a back gate?’

‘Anything. If it really happened, whoever did this had to get the body outside the wire. He wouldn’t have been able to risk carrying her out because of the guard patrol.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘If she didn’t go round, she went over the top.’

There was a shocked silence as Deane digested the words. ‘He threw her over? Christ. Would that have been possible?’

‘If he was desperate enough.’ And strong enough, he decided.

After the call, Harry prowled the room while Rik continued scouring the net for any mention of Mitrovica, missing girls or references to UN atrocities. But there were too many links, most eventually proving unhelpful and time-consuming. In a region where so much death and violence, so many unexplained disappearances had happened over the years, including whole communities in some cases, it would have taken a vast team of researchers several days to follow up and eliminate each one.

‘It’s too fragmented,’ was Rik’s conclusion. He sat back and stared at the screen in frustration. ‘If the name hasn’t surfaced by now, it probably won’t unless the people behind it let it out. That’s if they’ve got one.’

‘They’ve got one,’ said Harry with certainty. The closer he got to this, the less he felt it was an elaborate bluff. ‘What puzzles me is why now?’

Rik looked at him. ‘You think they’ve been sitting on it?’

‘Maybe. Or someone knew but didn’t talk about it.’

‘How do you keep that sort of thing quiet?’

Harry picked up his key and jacket. He needed a change of scenery. The room was beginning to close in around him. ‘Unless the person who knew couldn’t talk.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted, and shrugged on his jacket. ‘But I will, given time.’ He picked up Rik’s jacket and threw it across to him.

‘What’s this for?’ Rik looked puzzled.

Harry had been thinking that Rik needed reacquainting with some live firing. They hadn’t been to a gun range recently, and he was worried that Rik had been too quick to wave his gun at the men who’d approached him outside the bar in Phenix. Rik’s memories of being shot would be vivid, still, and Harry didn’t want him to rely too much on showing a gun to get out of trouble.

‘We’re going to get some gun practice.’

He led the way out to the car and drove to an indoor range recommended by Pendry. He could have asked to use the facilities at Fort Benning, but that would have brought Rik under the suspicious eye of the military. And he still wasn’t ready to broadcast their connection to anyone he wasn’t absolutely sure of.

The range was an anonymous, low building at the back of an industrial estate, with nothing to show what function it performed. The foyer was utilitarian in appearance, save for a wallboard behind the counter holding an impressive collection of guns. The man behind the counter had the lean, fit look of a former soldier. After checking their passports and getting them to sign waivers, he called a colleague, who checked in the Rugers and led them through a rear door to the range, where giant fans clearing the air did not entirely reduce the familiar smell of gunpowder.

At Hartsfield-Jackson airport, Atlanta, Kassim waited patiently while his passport was examined by a female officer. Her plump fingers were cluttered with rings and her fingernails each a different, vivid colour, a stark contrast to her shiny black skin and hair. She looked at him twice while turning the pages, and was fingering the paper of the passport and flexing the covers, looking for signs of tampering. He decided that her carefully contrived outward appearance did not reflect the person within. He kept his face blank; being over-friendly would probably irritate her just as would showing impatience at what was an unavoidable procedure.

She turned away and used a keyboard below the level of the counter, her nails clack-clacking like distant machine-gun fire. Behind the booth an armed security guard watched her working, then glanced at Kassim.

He felt his heart rate increasing and forced himself to breathe easily. He had to remain calm. He was still using the Haxhi documents, but beginning to feel exposed. How long could he continue to rely on them? But to risk using another set of ID presented the same danger: that someone somewhere had made a simple mistake and he would end up being called aside by a vigilant security officer. If that happened, he might never see the light of day again.

‘Thank you, Mr Haxhi. Have a good trip.’ She pronounced it like ‘taxi’ with the ‘h’ in the middle and slapped the passport down on the counter, her attention switching to the next in line.

Kassim walked away, feeling the eyes of the security guard on his back. He didn’t look back, concentrating instead on not giving way to a powerful feeling of nausea washing over him. He looked for a sign to the rest rooms. He had a long trip ahead of him, and if he was going to be ill, better to get it over and done here rather than on the plane to Moscow.