Retribution

THIRTY-SEVEN

‘Jesus, this guy’s a fucking killing machine,’ Ken Deane muttered helplessly on the other end of the telephone. ‘Who the hell’s next?’

Harry stared out at a bus full of airport workers going off duty, and wished he had an answer. He was back at El Segundo military base for a flight to Pristina in Kosovo. He knew that the only way to move this business along was to go to the source of the problem: the compound near Mitrovica. Deane had nobody on the ground sufficiently skilled in investigative work, and Harry was the only person he could call on. It meant a long flight with no guaranteed outcome, but they had no choice. Harry wasn’t prepared to sit around waiting for the next grisly development.

‘I’ve got you on a military jet to the Slatina air base complex at Pristina International,’ Deane had explained, after Harry told him what he wanted to do. ‘It should take about ten hours.’

‘Make it two seats,’ said Harry. ‘I’m taking backup.’

‘Ferris?’

‘Yes. Is that a problem?’

‘No. I figured you had him around somewhere. Just keep him out of the limelight.’

After finishing with Bikovsky, he and Rik had been forced to spend the night in a hotel. While waiting for the flight, Harry had called Deane to see if there were any updates. It couldn’t have been much worse: the reports of yet another KFOR-associated murder, this time in England.

With regular flights between Moscow and London Heathrow, Kassim had probably walked on to a plane after his attempt on Koslov and straight off the other end, with no reason for anyone in UK immigration to detain him. The following evening a security alert at a small helicopter base in Gloucestershire had revealed a dead RAF corporal, Malcolm Oakes, also with the UN sign carved into his chest.

‘Oakes was due for a tour of the Falklands,’ said Deane. ‘He’d just finished a training course in the north of England and was on a temporary posting at the base in Gloucestershire to beef up security while they had people coming back from overseas.’

‘Didn’t he get the warning?’ Harry asked.

‘He did. Your Ministry of Defence sent out a written letter telling him to remain on the base pending developments.’ He sighed. ‘They found the envelope in his pocket. He hadn’t opened it.’

So Oakes had received the same treatment as the others. But with no close witnesses, there was little to go on and nothing significant from anywhere else, either. A woman cleaner at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport had seen a thin-faced man ‘vigorously’ washing his hands and forearms, then being sick in the toilets. It had been odd behaviour but hardly pointed towards a serial killer; go almost anywhere in Moscow and you could see people being ill following a heavy session on bootleg vodka.

The man’s description could have fitted any number of people in transit through the airport, and so far there was no camera footage available to back up the cleaner’s claims. At the helicopter base where Oakes had been murdered, a fellow guard named Killick had seen a figure hurrying from the hangar towards the perimeter fence, but had been too far away to make pursuit possible. He’d taken it to be another opportunist intruder. . until he’d discovered his colleague’s body.

‘You realize there are only four of you left, don’t you?’ Deane asked. ‘Bikovsky, Koslov, Pendry and you.’

There was silence as they contemplated what had happened, and what would happen again if Kassim wasn’t stopped. If the newspapers got a sniff, they would have a field day about the UN’s inability to protect its own against a knife-wielding maniac bent on revenge.

‘Have the Aeroflot passenger lists thrown up anything?’

‘We’re narrowing it down — or at least the FBI is. There are three possibles at the moment, all unaccompanied male passengers who flew from the US to Moscow on Middle East or European passports. They’re running a check of late flights from Moscow to London as we speak. Once they’ve got the right one, they’ll have a name and passport details, and where he got his tickets. I’m willing to bet it’ll be right here in New York.’

‘Nothing on the woman, Demescu?’

‘Not a whisper. She’s either gone to ground in the local community or she’s back in central Europe.’ Deane sighed, his frustration at being so in the dark and helpless clearly showing. ‘I just wish we knew where this Kassim was going to pop up next. It’s like he’s got a fucking crystal ball.’

Harry rang off and looked for Rik, who was chatting to a young woman in a USAF uniform. They had another hour before boarding their flight. He couldn’t help wondering if they were wasting their time going to Kosovo when Kassim might even now be heading back to the States, and any information he picked up in the Balkans could prove futile. On the other hand, if he kept on the move, at least Kassim wouldn’t know where he was, which was good.

He stopped in mid-stride, his brain spinning. Something Deane had said. .

He rang Deane again, who said, ‘What’s up — miss your flight?’

‘You said Oakes was on a temporary posting to the base in Gloucestershire.’

‘That’s right. He’d been there three days.’

‘With Demescu in the wind, how would Kassim have known that?’

The silence on the other end was palpable, then Deane said, ‘I’ll call you back. When’s your flight?’

‘Just under an hour.’

Thirty minutes later, Deane called.

‘Remember Demescu’s supervisor — a techy nerd named Ehrlich?’

‘Yes. A nervous type.’

‘And with good reason. They shared drinkies, he admitted that at the outset. It looks like she’s been playing him. Security checked his workstation and found a memory stick concealed in the handle of his rucksack. It was full of data from the personnel records. Ehrlich’s been carrying information out of the building to Demescu, and from her to Kassim. The last data he downloaded was about Oakes, lifted from British MoD personnel movement records.’

‘So he took over from her.’

‘Yeah. He had a programme running that updated any new information on each of the names. We should have spotted it.’

‘Does Ehrlich know you’re on to him?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Good. Let him run. Demescu must still be out there somewhere. She probably knows who some of Kassim’s other helpers are — like the source of the tickets he’s using.’

‘Hell of a way to operate; they must have known we’d make the connection sooner or later.’

‘Maybe. But it was never meant to be a long-term arrangement. They probably figured on being long gone before then. And Kassim wouldn’t care.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Everything he’s done indicates he’s on a one-way trip. He’s not using multiple documents to travel and he’s taking bigger risks. It’s as if he knows when this is over, he’ll be burned, and the others will fade into the background. Let Ehrlich run but monitor his movements.’

‘You got it. This guy’s gonna be more carefully watched from now on than the Secretary-General himself. What are you going to do?’

‘I’m staying put in LA. Kosovo can wait. You’ll have to pass my apologies to the military. I want to draw Kassim in.’

‘How?’

‘By laying some bait.’

‘What are you suggesting?’

Harry had already had an idea which might draw Kassim out of the woodwork. ‘We can start by updating the UN computer records on Bikovsky. Put him back in his apartment in Venice Beach, say, nursing a broken leg.’

Deane gave a grim laugh. ‘Christ, a British hunting trick from the days of the Raj. Put out a wounded goat and wait for the tiger.’

‘More or less,’ Harry agreed. He didn’t care for Bikovsky, but he drew the line at coldly using the man as such obvious bait. But he could use the address and Kassim’s knowledge of its location at no risk to anyone else. ‘You’ll have to spice it up a bit,’ he added. ‘Make it really worth his while coming.’

‘How do we do that?’

‘Put in something that Ehrlich will be bound to pass on.’

‘Like what?’

‘Let him know I’ll be there as well.’