Retribution

FORTY-FOUR

In the UN headquarters in New York, Ken Deane rubbed his eyes and stared down at the busy streets below. On his desk lay a scattering of information. It was both good and bad.

The good was a collection of stills from an ATM machine not far from the scene of the Carvalho killing. They were grainy, with some interference from dust particles on the lens cover of the camera, but good enough to show a white male, thin-faced, possibly of Latino or Mediterranean stock. He was using Carvalho’s cash card.

The man hadn’t been too concerned with hiding his features, intent on using the keypad and taking the money. Deane had compared it with the photo of the man named Kassim sent over by Koslov, but he couldn’t see much of a resemblance. The Chechnya photo was of a kid in his teens, skinny as a stick and looking scared. The still showed an older man, taller, harder and with not a trace of fear about him.

Alongside this were the not-so-good and the plain bad. The first was a rash of printouts from various international intelligence organizations warning of chatter claiming to be from a group promising ‘a strike’ against the UN. The exact nature of the group wasn’t clear, but it seemed to consist of a loose conglomeration of extremist names sworn to overthrow western influence and domination in Afghanistan and the wider region by striking at what they called the ‘soft underbelly’ of US aggression — the United Nations. Intelligence and security analysts from the US, France and the UK, aware of the rumours surrounding the Mitrovica compound, had added notes about the dominant group behind the chatter. Most were pointing the finger at Hezb-e-Islami as the most likely instigators, having the money, contacts and network capable of mounting such an exercise. The fact that it was a strike not planned to take place in Afghanistan, said the analysts, was a clever distraction: any blow was worthwhile if successful, and the effects would ripple out across the region.

Top of the pile was the bad news; a report from Archie Lubeszki, Deane’s field security officer in Pristina. It confirmed that the rumours about a young girl murdered in 1999 were gathering pace, and with enough detail to make them worrying. She was found, it was being claimed, lying in long grass immediately adjacent to a UN container compound near Mitrovica. She had gone missing one night, according to her young brother, while looking for food inside the compound. He had been found wandering, traumatized and sick, along a nearby mountain track the following day. Some hours later, a local woman helping with the search had stumbled across the girl’s body right outside the perimeter fence. According to locals, a doctor from Medecins Sans Frontieres had made an examination, and claimed she had been raped then suffocated, her breathing cut off by the pressure of a thumb or forefinger pinching her windpipe.

She was just fourteen.

The news had been slow in emerging at the time due to a spate of ethnic killings, and the absence of any clear infrastructure to investigate the reports. Nobody had been able to trace the doctor who had made the initial examination, and Medecins Sans Frontieres had no records of a medic operating in that immediate area, although they couldn’t discount the possibility.

The story had gradually faded and died, due possibly to the lack of anyone able to keep it alive. Rape, in any case, for them was the final insult in a land which had seen too many horrors inflicted in the name of religious cleansing. Why defile her further by broadcasting to the world the details of her ignominious end?

Eventually, however, on the heels of UN Special Envoy Anton Kleeman’s announcement that the man responsible would be punished, the story had finally been teased out by the relentless probing of reporters desperate for some kind of truth. What they had not included, however, was a verbal addendum by Lubeszki over a scrambled telephone line ten minutes ago.

‘I’ve talked to a woman who knew the girl,’ Lubeszki had said, during a follow-up phone call. He sounded tired and angry, the distortion on the line unable to conceal the emotion he was feeling. ‘When they found her, she’d been gagged to stop her crying out.’

‘Gagged how?’

‘The woman who found her says she’d had some cloth jammed into her mouth. Part of a UN beret.’

‘Give me strength.’ Deane felt a wave of despair. So it was true — they had something.

‘The killer must have tried to remove it,’ Lubeszki continued, ‘but the girl’s teeth had clamped around it and it tore off in her mouth. From the position of the body, it looks like she was dumped over from the inside.’

‘He threw her over?’ It was just as Harry Tate had suggested. He kicked a drawer shut in frustration. The last thing the UN needed was confirmation of this kind of news. Overstretched already, the agency was struggling to retain credibility in its day-to-day operations. It didn’t need the world to know that one of its number, chosen to give help to the needy, had sunk to the lowest of atrocities.

He thought about the discovery of a fragment of a beret at the scene of the killing in Venice Beach. It tied in with what Lubeszki was saying. But was it the same fragment? If so, who had it belonged to?

‘Do they still have the cloth?’ He almost didn’t want to ask the question.

‘No. It disappeared. When the translator pressed the woman, the shutters came down.’

‘Why didn’t the locals complain to the authorities when they found the girl?’

‘Maybe they did. It’s not easy getting anything out of these people. The translator asked about the brother of the dead girl, but he disappeared shortly afterwards. He was most likely taken by the Serbs.’

‘I hear you. Christ, what a mess.’ He sighed. ‘Are you ready for Kleeman’s visit?’

Lubeszki gave a disgruntled snort. ‘About the same as if my mother-in-law was coming to stay. Hasn’t someone told him this might not be a good idea right now?’

Deane didn’t want to get into that. Lubeszki was right, though; Special Envoy or not, Kleeman was poking his toe into a tender spot by returning to Kosovo. What they didn’t need was another high-profile desk-jockey turning up on a white charger promising the world just so he could score some media points — especially if it became known that he had been in the compound the night of the murder.

After telling Lubeszki he’d be in touch again, he called Bob Dosario of the FBI.

The special agent confirmed that the fragment of cloth found at the crime scene was on its way to be analysed at the LAPD forensics laboratory. ‘What are you looking for, exactly?’

‘Blood,’ said Deane. ‘Blood and saliva. .’