Hendricksen watched Frend leave the lounge, but took his time before following. Thanks to Hendricksen’s efforts, and the expenditure of an eye-watering amount of Louis’s money, all transactions on Frend’s personal and business credit cards were now being monitored. Minutes after Frend’s secretary had booked the return trip to Belgrade for her employer, Hendricksen had obtained seats on the same flights. It might have been better to have reserved a seat in economy, if only to lessen any possibility of Frend becoming familiar with Hendricksen’s face. On the other hand, the investigator wanted to be within earshot if Frend used his cell phone on the plane.

They boarded, and Hendricksen took the aisle seat that had been reserved for him directly behind Frend, who stood aside to allow a young woman to occupy the window seat beside him. Hendricksen saw Frend take in the woman’s figure and wondered if the lawyer might be considering trading in his Bulgarian girlfriend for a newer model. Details about Radka had been included in the dossier on Frend. The possibility of using her to get to her lover had been raised by Louis, only to be dismissed after Hendricksen had succeeded in chasing up a series of payments to one of her bank accounts. They originated from a holding company in Amsterdam, the same company responsible for running two nightclubs in the city operated by associates of the Vuksans. Evidently the brothers were not the trusting kind, not even when it came to their own legal advisor, which explained why they’d survived for so long. Either the Vuksans had deliberately introduced Radka to Frend, or they had recruited her after the relationship began in order to have another set of eyes on the lawyer. Whatever the sequence of events, she was a tripwire: had Louis and Hendricksen tried to exert pressure on Frend through her, the Vuksans would have been alerted immediately.

Frend used his phone only to send texts and emails while boarding continued. It would have been useful to be able to monitor his cell phone and email communications, but that kind of surveillance was beyond the capabilities of the hunters, and when Louis had suggested it to Harris, the spook just laughed. It seemed that Harris’s interest in the Vuksans – and, by extension, that of the American authorities – began and ended with nailing Aleksej Marković and intercepting the delivery of his cargo. Now that Marković and the two Syrian undesirables were dead, Louis and the others could expect little help from that quarter.

Frend stuck to coffee when refreshments were served. Hendricksen did likewise. He spent the duration of the flight refamiliarizing himself with the geography of Belgrade even though he had a driver, Dušan, waiting for him at the airport. Dušan was a former interpreter for the UN, and now ran his own limousine company. He, like Hendricksen, had been at Srebrenica.