Andrew Gross - Reckless

“Yes.” Naomi nodded.

Their drinks came and she passed over a new series of photos. What Hauck was looking at was completely stomach turning. A long maze of dead bodies strewn together in a deep ravine. Dozens. More than dozens. There was also a photocopied report from the UN War Crimes Commission.

“Franko Kostavic was being held by the new Serbian government in connection with his role in events that took place on the night of August fourth, in the village of Donje Velke in Kosovo. Sixty-seven townspeople, mostly women and children, were massacred in a Serbian raid.”

Hauck felt the moisture dry up in his mouth. He fixed on the grisly photos. Bullet-riddled bodies in nightclothes and traditional native garb, lying in a seemingly endless line at the bottom of a gorge. Old men and women. Kids. Painful as it was, it was hard to remove his eyes from them. It was one of the saddest things he had ever seen.

“Donje Velke is in the Drenica valley,” Naomi explained, “a region that was home to much of the Kosovan resistance. On August fourth, Serbian forces came in after midnight. The Scorpion Brigade was an unmonitored military arm. Its commanders were said to take their orders directly from Milosevic himself. It was filled with violent thugs and common criminals and led by zealots who committed the most brutal acts in the name of ethnic cleansing. From what I’ve learned, the village, mostly ethnic Albanians, was rousted up in the night from sleep. The men who came in went door to door. Some were in uniforms, others wore civilian clothes. They concentrated on women and children. Some were raped and then lined up against the walls of their own homes and shot in the head, right where they stood. The rest were marched up the trail to the gorge and flung in. Machine-gunned. The troops forced the remaining townspeople to fill the ravine with dirt. Lye was spread over it. Because the village was isolated, for years it was just a rumor that anything like that even took place. As you know, there were many such atrocities. The townspeople claimed they always feared the men would come back. After the war, NATO got involved, the UN War Crimes Commission. Witnesses finally spoke up.”

Hauck raised his eyes from the terrible photos. His blood was boiling. “Thibault?”

Naomi nodded. “Never proven, of course. He was never brought to trial. It was his unit, the sixth regiment, that was proven to have been involved. According to the UN affidavits, he had boasted about leading the raid, along with several others. Some of the witnesses talked about a man who led the raid who matches up. He was being held in connection with it. In the aftermath of the war, with emotions still mixed on both sides and graft running high, he escaped from the local prison in Split where he was being held. That was 1999.” Naomi collected the photos. “Not a big fish,” she said with a shrug, “one of hundreds. According to the Council on War Crimes at the Hague, he was never seen since.”

“Until he was seen here, in the United States,” Hauck said, “under someone else’s name.”

“I checked with Interpol.” Naomi nodded. “Dieter Thibault was a Dutch national who was born in Rotterdam in 1964. He went to the University of Rotterdam and emigrated to Belgium, where he worked as an account manager for the NazionsBank in Anderlecht, outside of Brussels. In 2000, he disappeared while on a business trip to France and was never found.”

Hauck recalled the file he had given to Naomi and the information he had gotten from Snell.

“Yet not long after, not that anyone would have checked, there was a Dieter Thibault employed by the RezionsBank in Brussels. Then at the KronenBank in Lichtenstein, where he was a senior investment manager…”

Hauck leafed through the file. A hard lump the size of a rock stuck in his throat. Thibault was scum. He had likely overseen the killing of dozens of innocent victims. There was no telling how the real Dieter Thibault had disappeared. Hauck looked up and met Naomi’s level eyes. In them, he saw the same glint he knew was in his eyes. This had far eclipsed two dead traders. Far eclipsed April.

This was a guy they had to bring down.

Their food arrived, but neither of them felt particularly hungry.

“He told Merrill he had been in the Kosovo War,” Hauck said. “He claimed he was Belgian and Dutch. We thought to look only among the NATO forces.”

Naomi nodded. “And he’s been hiding under the radar ever since. Ten years. Right in plain sight. Building a new life. Not so prominent a case that anyone was really looking for him. Christ, he was right there in the European gossip columns, clubbing around with cousins of Princess Beatrix of Belgium. But Donje Velke was just one of many such incidents in that war. He was never even a priority on the UN’s list. Bigger fish to fry. It would have gone on indefinitely if-”

“If Merrill Simons hadn’t come to us to look into him,” Hauck said, finishing her thought.

Naomi nodded with a smile. “Or until some midlevel magistrate in the Hague who happened to have a fetish for the party-hopping friends of the Belgian royals finally made it to the bottom of his open files. And even then, he barely looks the same and operates under a new ID.”

A surge of anger started to burn in Hauck’s chest. Merrill Simons’s instincts had been right from the start. Dani was never who he claimed, not the freewheeling financier, not the attentive boyfriend. But how for a second could even she have suspected this? A wave of sadness for her came over him.

“So now you have a reason to pick him up,” Hauck said. He dropped the UN report back in front of her. “I assume there’s a valid Interpol warrant outstanding against him?”

“There is,” Naomi said. She leaned forward and looked him firmly in the eye. “But I think you can understand how the people I work for aren’t altogether keen on cleaning up the files for some bureaucratic war-crimes commission in the Hague with all that’s going on. What’s pressing today”-she tapped her nail against Dani’s photo-“is to find out what Thibault’s role was in the deaths of Marc Glassman and James Donovan and, even more important, where that might lead. Later, we can always hand him off to the UN to answer for what he’s done.”

“So then pick him up.” Hauck shrugged. “You have sufficient cause. There’s nothing stopping you now.”

“Yes, there is.” Naomi looked at him directly. “Just one thing…”

Suddenly Hauck started to wonder why they were even meeting. Why she was sharing all this with him.

“Thibault’s missing.”

“Missing!”

Naomi nodded. “He’s gone underground. We were keeping tabs on him-loosely, until we could fill in the details. He went into work in his office two days ago. According to the agents tracking him, they haven’t seen him since.”

“Someone doesn’t just completely disappear!”

“That’s exactly what he did. He never came back out. According to his secretary, he told her he had a sudden trip that had come up and he’d be back in a few days. So far, he hasn’t called in. We executed a warrant and impounded his computer. We found a wall safe in his office, cleaned out. We think he may have kept alternate passports in there.”

“He knew you were onto him,” Hauck said, putting it all together. “He fled.”

“The agents who were watching him claim there’s no way they could have been made. If he fled, it wasn’t under his own name. I don’t know if he got tipped off, but there’s no record of Thibault leaving the country. There is, however”-Naomi reached inside her case and pushed across a series of new black and white photos-“this.”

The photos showed a bearded man in a black leather jacket with a baseball cap drawn over his eyes passing through an airport security station. “It’s at Newark international. Last Tuesday night. The same day he went missing. It could be him. We’ve interviewed various gate agents and they seem to recall someone similar boarding an Air France flight for Paris.”