"There are many executive jets that come here," said Mr. al Khoury.

"All I need are the registration numbers, and the types, of every privately or corporately owned executive jet, specifically owned by Europeans, hopefully this one, parked here between the 15th and 19th of December. Now I would think, in those four daysÉwhat?ÉTen?"

He prayed the Arab would not ask how he did not know the make of the jet if he represented the vendors. He began to peel off one-hundred-dollar bills.

"As a token of my good faith, and my complete trust in you, my friend. And the other four thousand later."

The Arab still looked dubious, torn between desire for such a magnificent sum and fearful of discovery and dismissal. The American pressed his case.

"If you were doing anything to harm your country, I would not dream of asking. But this man is a thief. Taking away from him what he has stolen can surely only be a good thing. Does not the Koran praise justice against the wrongdoer?"

Mr. al Khoury's hand covered the thousand dollars.

"I'll check in here now," said Dexter. "Just ask for Mr. Barnes when you are ready."

The call came two days later. Mr. al Khoury was taking his new role as secret agent rather seriously. He phoned from a booth from a public place.

"It is your friend," said a breathless voice in the midmorning.

"Hello, my friend, do you wish to see me?" asked Dexter.

"Yes. I have the package."

"Here or at the office?"

"Neither. Too public. The Al Hamra Fort. Lunch."

His dialogue could not have been more suspicious had anyone been eavesdropping, but Dexter doubted the Ra's al Khaymah Secret Service were on the case.

He checked out and ordered a taxi. The Al Hamra Fort Hotel was out of town, ten miles down the coast but in the right direction, heading back toward Dubai, a luxurious conversion from an old turreted Arab fortress into a five-star beachside resort.

He was there at midday, much too early for a Gulf lunch, but found a low-slung club chair in the vaulted lobby, ordered a beer, and watched the entrance arch. Mr. al Khoury appeared, hot and dripping even from the onehundredyard walk from his car in the parking lot, just after 1:00 P.M. Of the five restaurants, they selected the Lebanese with its cold buffet.

"Any problems?" asked Dexter, as they took their plates and moved down the groaning trestle tables.

"No," said the civil servant. "I explained my department was contacting all known visitors to send them a brochure explaining the new and extra leisure facilities now available in Ra's al Khaymah."

"That is brilliant," Dexter said, beaming. "No one thought it odd?"

"On the contrary, the officials in Air Traffic took out all the flight plans for December and insisted on giving me the whole month."

"You mentioned the importance of the European owners?"

"Yes, but there are only about four or five who are not well-known oil companies. Let us sit."

They took a corner table and ordered two beers. Like many modern Arabs, Mr. al Khoury had no problem with alcoholic drinks.

He clearly enjoyed his Lebanese food. He had piled his plate with mezzah, hummus, moutabel, lightly grilled halloumi cheese, sambousek, kibbeh, and stuffed vine leaves. He handed over a sheaf of paper and began to eat.

Dexter ran through the listings of filed flight plans for December, along with the time of landing and duration of stay before departure, until he came to December 15th. With a red felt-tip pen he bracketed those appearing then and covering the period to December 19th. There were nine.

Two Grumman 3s and a 4 belonged to internationally known U.S. oil companies. A French Dassault Mystere and a Falcon were down to Elf Aquitaine. That left four.

A smaller Lear jet was known to belong to a Saudi prince, and a larger Cessna Citation to a multimillionaire businessman from Bahrain. The last two were an Israelibuilt Westwind that arrived from Bombay and a Hawker 1000 that came in from Cairo and departed back there. Someone had noted something in Arab script beside the Westwind.

"What does that mean?" asked Dexter.

"Ah, yes, that one is regular. It is owned by an Indian film producer. From Bombay. He stages through on his way to London or Cannes or Berlin. All the film festivals. In the tower, they know him by sight."

"You have the picture?"

Al Khoury handed back the borrowed photograph.

"That one, they think he comes from the Hawker."

The Hawker 1000 had a registration number listed as P4-ZEM and was down as owned by the Zeta Corporation of Bermuda.

Dexter thanked his informant and paid over the promised balance of four thousand dollars. It was a lot for a sheaf of paper, but Dexter thought it might be the lead he needed.

On his drive back to Dubai airport, he mused on something he had once been told. That when a man changes his entire identity, he cannot always resist the temptation to keep back one tiny detail for old time's sake.

ZEM just happened to be the first three letters of Zemun, the district in Belgrade where Zoran Zilic was born and raised. And ÔZetaÕ just happened to be Greek for the letter ÔZÕ.

But Zilic would have hidden himself and his covering corporations, not to mention his plane, if indeed the Hawker was his, behind layers of protection. The records would be out there somewhere, but they would be stored in databases of the type not available to the innocent seeker of knowledge.

Dexter could manage a computer as well as the next man, but there was no way he could hack into a protected database. But he remembered someone who could.

19 The confrontation

When it came to matters of right and wrong, of sin and righteousness, FBI assistant director Colin Fleming was a fundamentalist. The concept of "No Surrender" was in his bones and his genes, brought across the Atlantic a hundred years ago from the cobbled streets of Portadown. Two hundred years before that, his ancestors had brought their Presbyterian code across to Ulster from the western coast of Scotland.

When it came to evil, to tolerate was to accommodate, to accommodate was to appease, and to appease was to concede defeat. That he could never do.

When Fleming read the synthesis of the Tracker's report and the Serbian confession, and when he reached the details of the death of Ricky Colenso, he determined that the man responsible should, if at all possible, face due process in a court of law in the greatest country in the world, his own.

____________________= Of all those in the various agencies who read the circulated report and the joint request from Secretary Powell and Attorney General Ashcroft, he had taken it almost personally that his own department had no current knowledge of Zoran Zilic and could not help.

In a final bid to do something, he had circulated a full-face picture of the Serbian gangster to the thirty-eight "legats" posted abroad.

It was a far b etter picture than had been contained in any press archive, though not as recent as the one that a charlady in Block 23 had given to the Tracker. The reason for its quality was that it had been taken in Belgrade by a long-lens camera on the orders of the CIA station chief five years earlier, when the elusive Zilic was a mover and shaker in the court of Milosevic.

The photographer had caught Zilic emerging from his car; in the act of straightening up, head raised, gaze toward the lens he could not see a quarter of a mile away. Inside the Belgrade Embassy, the FBI legat had obtained a copy from his CIA colleague, so both agencies possessed the same photo.

Broadly speaking, the CIA operates outside the United States and the FBI inside. But for all of that, in the ongoing fight against espionage, terrorism, and crime, the Bureau has no choice but to collaborate intensively and extensively with foreign countries, especially allies, and to that end maintains its legal attaches abroad.