Avenger by Frederick Forsyth Page A

not."
    The Englishman produced a wad of US dollars, all hundred bills, and counted them onto the bar.
    "I am old-fashioned," he said. "I believe people should help each other. It makes life easier, more pleasant. Will you help me, Dusko?"
    The barman was staring at the thousand dollars a few inches from his fingertips. He could not take his eyes off them. He dropped his voice to a whisper.
    "What you want? What do you do here? You not reporter."
    "Well, I am in a way. I ask questions. But I am a rich asker of questions. Do you want to be rich like me, Dusko?"
    "What you want?" repeated the barman. He flicked a glance towards the other drinkers, who were staring at the pair of them.
    "You've seen a hundred-dollar bill before. Last May. The fifteenth, wasn't it? A young soldier tried to settle the bar bill with it. Started one hell of a row. My friend Lasse was here. He told me. Explain to me exactly what happened and why."
    "Not here. Not now," hissed the frightened Serb. One of the men from the tables was up and walking towards the bar. A wiping cloth flicked expertly down over the money. "Bar close at ten. You come back."
    At half past ten, with the bar closed and locked, the two men sat in a booth in half-darkness and talked.
    "They were not the Yugoslav Army, not soldiers," said the barman. "Paramilitary people. Bad people. They stay three days. Best rooms, best food, much drink. They leave but not pay."
    "One of them tried to pay you."
    "True. Only one. He was good kid. Different from others. I don't know what he was doing with them. He had education. The rest were gangsters. Gutter people."
    "You didn't object to them not paying for three days' stay?"
    "Object? Object? What I say? These animals have guns. They kill, even fellow Serbs. They all killers."
    "So when the nice kid tried to pay you, who was the one who slapped him around?"
    He could feel the Serb tense rigid in the gloom.
    "No idea. He was boss man, group leader. But no name. They just call him Chief."
    "All these para militaries have names, Dusko. Arkan and his Tigers. Frankie's Boys. They like to be famous. They boast of their names."
    "Not this one. I swear."
    The Tracker knew it was a lie. Whoever he was, the freelance killer inspired a sweat-clammy measure of fear among his fellow Serbs.
    "But the nice kid ... he had a name?"
    "I never heard it."
    "We are talking about a lot of money here, Dusko. You never see him again, you never see me again, you have enough to start up in Sarajevo after the war. The kid's name."
    "He paid the day he left. Like he was ashamed of the people he was with. He came back and paid by cheque."
    "It bounced? Came back? You have it?"
    "No, it was honoured. Yugoslav dinars. From Belgrade. Settlement in full."
    "So, no cheque?"
    "It will be in the Belgrade bank. Somewhere, but probably destroyed by now. But I wrote down his ID card number, in case it bounced."
    "Where? Where did you write it?"
    "On the back of an order pad. In ballpoint."
    The Tracker traced it. The pad, for taking long and complicated drinks orders that could not be memorized, only had two sheets left. Another day and it would have been thrown away. In ballpoint on the cardboard back was a seven-figure number and two capital letters. Eight weeks old, still legible.
    The Tracker donated a thousand of Mr. Edmond's dollars and left. The shortest way out of there was north into Croatia and a plane from Zagreb airport.
    The old seven-province federal republic of Yugoslavia had been disintegrating in blood, chaos and cruelty for five years. In the north, Slovenia was the first to go, luckily without bloodshed. In the south, Macedonia had escaped into separate independence. But at the centre, the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic was trying to use every brutality in the book to cling on to Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Montenegro and his own native Serbia. He had lost Croatia but his appetite for power and war remained undiminished.
    The Belgrade into which the Tracker