Adrian Magson - Retribution

‘The killer took them.’

‘Must have. They’re trawling through the nearest ATMs that have cameras. If the killer used the card, he’d have done so pretty soon after leaving the body.’

Harry took a cab back to the hotel and booked his room for a further night, then went in search of Rik and got him to check his email. He was impatient to be on his way to LA, and the enforced delay was frustrating. But there was nothing he could do about it. If he left the area before being given clearance by Deane, he might be picked up unceremoniously by military police and shipped straight to Fort Benning and a military lock-up. And the colonel from the training area, accompanied by his junior shadow, wouldn’t be far away.

Deane had sent him the link to the blog and some photographs. Rik clicked on the link, opening a vividly colourful site with anti-American and anti-UN propaganda. The sidebars were cluttered with more links to extremist sites and a rolling live feed to Twitter comments demanding an end to the UN and justice for ‘Victims of the Satanist United Nations Organization’. Some of the names included ‘Islam’ or ‘Jihad’; many of them Harry had never come across before. There were, however, several familiar groups, including Hezb-e-Islami (HIG) and Army of Islam. The first was a fundamentalist Afghan organization set up over thirty years ago, with a strong political arm and a bloody history of attacks against Coalition forces. The second was a Palestinian group with a list of ‘spectaculars’ to its name and links to al-Qaeda.

The commentary accompanying the photographs was surprisingly brief.

This place marks where a child of God met her end. Inside this compound near Mitrovica, Kosovo, an innocent, loved by God, treasured by family, a child who never hurt anyone, was defiled and murdered by a member of the military United Nations invaders. Her name lives for evermore in the heart, and will soon echo around the world! Allah be praised!

The first photo showed a concrete base surrounded by a wire mesh fence topped by razor wire, overlooked by security lights on gantries. Inside the fence were several shipping containers and trucks, and further over, a huddle of temporary buildings. Harry couldn’t tell if it was the depot at Mitrovica, but instinct told him that it had to be. There had been too much planning involved in this to allow it to fall apart because of a set of bogus photographs.

This place of so-called sanctuary offered only death and defilement, within sight of her home!

The next showed a section of mesh, held by concrete posts and topped with rolls of razor wire. The ground on the outside was covered in long grass and weeds, running away into a stretch of trees in the background. Beyond that, a cluster of old buildings hugged a distant slope, surrounded by a spiky growth of pine trees. It looked bleak and cold, a place lacking in any vestige of comfort or warmth.

Harry wondered which house the girl had come from. It should surely be easy enough to find out. How many young girls could have been living in the area at the time, unless she had been a transient?

God take her soul and protect her, and give strength to he who avenges this atrocity! For surely there will be a spectacular which will mark this crime and burn the name of the hated UN forever!

The fourth was a close-up shot of the grass immediately outside the fence. Someone had planted a short stake in the ground. Tied to it was a small bunch of flowers.

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.