“Who wishes to know?”
“A voice from the past. My name is Paul Devereaux. I think you will remember it.”
There was a l
ong pause, as by one who has just been hit in the solar plexus.
“Are you there, Mr. Dexter?”
“Yes. I’m here. And I well recall the name. How did you get this number?”
“Not important. Discreet information used to be my stock-in-trade, as you will also recall.”
The man in New Jersey recalled extremely well. Ten years earlier he had been the most successful bounty hunter the U.S. ever produced. Unwittingly, he had crossed the Boston Brahmin working out of CIA HQ in Langley, Virginia, and Devereaux had tried to have him killed.
The two men were as unalike as chalk and cheese. Cal Dexter, the wiry, sandy-haired, friendly, smiling, small-town attorney of Pennington, had been born in 1950 in a roach-infested Newark slum. His father had been a construction worker fully employed through World War II and Korea creating new factories, dockyards and government offices along the Jersey Shore.
But with the ending of the Korean War, work had dried up. Cal was five when his mother walked out of the loveless union and left the boy to be raised by his father. The latter was a hard man, quick with his fists, the only law on many blue-collar jobs. But he was not a bad man and tried to live by the straight and narrow, and to raise his toddler son to love Old Glory, the Constitution and Joe DiMaggio.
Within two years, Dexter Senior had acquired a trailer home so that he could move where the work was available. And that was how the boy was raised, moving from construction site to site, attending whichever school would take him, and then moving on. It was the age of Elvis Presley, Del Shannon, Roy Orbison and the Beatles, over from a country Cal had never heard of. It was also the age of Kennedy, the Cold War and Vietnam.
His formal education was fractured to the point of near nonexistence, but he became wise in other ways: streetwise, fight-wise. Like his departed mother, he did not grow tall, topping out at five feet eight inches. Nor was he heavy and muscular like his father, but his lean frame packed fearsome stamina and his fists a killer punch.
By seventeen, it looked as if his life would follow that of his father, shoveling dirt or driving a dump truck on building sites. Unless . . . In January 1968 he turned eighteen, and the Vietcong launched the Têt Offensive. He was watching TV in a bar in Camden. There was a documentary telling him about recruitment. It mentioned that if you shaped up, the Army would give you an education. The next day, he walked into the U.S. Army office in Camden and signed on.
The master sergeant was bored. He spent his life listening to youths doing everything in their power to get out of going to Vietnam.
“I want to volunteer,” said the youth in front of him.
The master sergeant drew a form toward him, keeping eye contact like a ferret that does not want the rabbit to get away. Trying to be kindly, he suggested the boy sign for three years, as opposed to two.
“Good chance of better postings,” he said. “Better career choices. With three years you could even avoid going to Vietnam.”
“But I want to go to Vietnam,” said the kid in the soiled denims.
He got his wish. After boot camp, and with his noted skill driving earthmoving equipment, he was sent to the Engineer Battalion of the Big Red One, the First Infantry Division, based right up in the Iron Triangle. That was where he volunteered to become a Tunnel Rat and enter the fearsome network of scary, black and often lethal tunnels dug by the Vietcong under Cu? Chi.
In two tours of nearly suicidal missions in those hellholes, he came back to the States with a hatful of medals, and Uncle Sam kept his promise. He was able to study at college. He chose law, and got his degree at Fordham, in New York.
He had neither the backing, the polish nor the money for the big Wall Street firms. He joined the Legal Aid Society, speaking up for those destined to occupy the very lowest reaches of the legal system. So many of his clients were Hispanic that he learned fluent and rapid Spanish. He also married and had a daughter, on whom he doted.
He might have spent all his working life among the unrepresented destitute, but when he was just over forty, his teenage daughter was abducted, forced into prostitution and sadistically murdered by her gangster pimp. He had to identify her battered body on a marble slab at Virginia Beach. The experience brought back the Tunnel Rat, the one-on-one man killer.
Using his old skills, he tracked down the two pimps behind his daughter’s death and gunned them down, with their bodyguards, on a pavement in Panama City. When he returned to New York, his wife had taken her own life.
Cal Dexter abandoned the courts and appeared to retire to become a civil attorney in the small New Jersey town of Pennington. In fact, he took up his third career. He became a bounty hunter, but, unlike the great majority of his trade, he operated almost exclusively abroad. He specialized in tracking down, snatching and bringing back for due process in the USA those who had committed evil crimes and thought they had got away with it by seeking sanctuary in a non-extradition country. He advertised extremely discreetly under the pseudonym “Avenger.”
In 2001, he had been commissioned by a Canadian billionaire to find the sadistic Serbian mercenary who had murdered the old man’s aid-worker grandson somewhere in Bosnia. What Dexter did not know was that a certain Paul Devereaux was using the killer Zoran Zilic, now a freelance arms trader, as bait to lure Osama bin Laden to a rendezvous where a cruise missile could wipe him out.
But Dexter got there first. He found Zilic holed up in a filthy South American dictatorship, slipped in and hijacked the killer at gunpoint, flying him back to Key West, Florida, in his own jet. Devereaux, who had tried to have the interfering bounty hunter eliminated, found his two years of planning in ruins. It soon became irrelevant; a few days later, 9/11 would ensure that Bin Laden was not going to attend any unsafe meetings outside his caves.
Dexter vanished back into the persona of the harmless little lawyer from Pennington. Devereaux later retired. Then he had the time, and he used it to trace the bounty hunter called simply the Avenger.
Now they were both retired: the ex-Tunnel Rat who came up from the ranks and the dandified aristo from Boston. Dexter looked down at the handset and spoke.
“What do you want, Mr. Devereaux?”
“I have been summoned out of retirement, Mr. Dexter. By the commander in chief himself. There is a task he wishes performed. It affects our country quite grievously. He has asked me to accomplish it. I will need a first deputy, an executive officer. I would be most grateful if you would consider taking the post.”