Avenger

17 The Photo

Since the attempt by the FBI to unmask him six years earlier, Dexter had decided there was no need for face-to-face meetings. Instead, he built up several defensive lines to mask his location and his identity.

One of these was a small, one-bedroom apartment in New York, but not the Bronx where he might be recognised. He rented it furnished, paid by the quarter, regular as clockwork, and always in cash. It attracted no official attention, and neither did he when he was in residence.

He also used mobile phones only of the type using SIM pay-as-you-talk cards. These he bought in bulk out of state, used once or twice, and consigned to the East River. Even the NSA, with the technology to listen to a phone call and trace the exact source, cannot identify the purchaser of these use-and-jettison SIM mobiles nor direct police to the location of the call if the user is on the move, keeps the call short, and gets rid of the technology afterward.

Another ploy is the old-fashioned public phone booth. Numbers called from a booth can, of course, be traced; but there are so many millions of them that unless a specific booth or bank of them is suspected, it is very hard to pick up the conversation, identify the caller as a wanted man, trace the location, and get a police car there in time.

Finally he used the much-maligned U. S. mails, with his letters being sent to a "drop" in the form of an innocent Korean-run fruit and vegetable shop two blocks from his apartment in New York City. This would be no protection if the mail or the shop was targeted and put under surveillance, but there was no reason why it should be.

He contacted the placer of the ad on the cell phone listed. He did so from a single-use mobile phone, and he drove far into the New Jersey countryside to do it.

Stephen Edmond identified himself without demur, and in five sentences described what had happened to his grandson. Avenger thanked him and hung up.

He then logged onto LexisNexis. There was enough to confirm who Stephen Edmond was, and there had been two articles concerning the disappearance years ago of his grandson while a student-aid worker in Bosnia, both from the *Toronto Star*. This caller seemed to be genuine.

Dexter called the Canadian back and dictated terms: considerable operating expenses, a fee on account, and a bonus on delivery of Zilic to U. S. jurisdiction, not payable in the event of failure.

"That's a lot of money for a man I have not met and apparently will not meet. You could take it and vaporise," said the Canadian.

"And you, sir, could go back to the U. S. government, where I presume you have already been."

There was a pause. "All right, where should it be sent?"

Dexter gave him a Caymanian account number and a New York mailing address. "The money order to the first, every line of research material already done to the second," he said, and hung up.

The Caribbean bank would shift the credit through a dozen different accounts within its computer system but would also open a line of credit to a bank in New York. This would be in favour of a Dutch citizen who would identify himself with a perfect Dutch passport.

Three days later, a file arrived in a stout envelope at a Korean fruit shop in Brooklyn. It was collected by the addressee, Mr. Armitage. It contained a photocopy of the entire report from the Tracker, that of 1995 and of that same spring of 2001, including the confession of Milan Rajak. None of the files on Zoran Zilic in the archives of the various United States intelligence agencies had ever been shown to the Canadian, so his knowledge of Zilic was sketchy. Worst of all, there was no picture.

Dexter went back to his media archives. Unlike the publicity-hungry Zeljko "Arkan" Raznatovic, Zilic had an abhorrence of being photographed. He clearly went out of his way to avoid publicity of any kind. In this he resembled some of the Palestinian terrorists like Sabri al-Banna, known as Abu Nidal.

Dexter came up with one major *Newsweek* feature going back to the Bosnian war. It was about all the Serbian so-called warlords, but within it Zilic had only a few passing mentions, probably for lack of material.

There was one photograph of a man at a cocktail party of some sort, clearly cropped and blown up, which made it slightly hazy. The other was of a teenager; it came from the Belgrade police files, and clearly went back to the days of the street gangs of Zemun. Either man could walk straight past him in the street, and he would not recognise the Serbian.

The Englishman, the Tracker, mentioned a private investigation agency in Belgrade. It was now postwar, post-Milosevic. The Yugoslav capital, where Zilic had been born and raised, and from which he had vanished, seemed the place to start. Dexter flew New York to Vienna and on to Belgrade, and checked into the Hyatt. From his tenth-floor window, the battered Balkan city stretched out beneath him. Half a mile away he could see the hotel in whose lobby Raznatovic had been shot to death despite his covey of bodyguards.

A taxi brought him to the agency called Chandler, still run by Dragan Stojic, the Philip Marlowe wannabe. Dexter's cover was a publishing commission from the *New Yorker* asking for a ten-thousand-word biography of Raznatovic. Stojic nodded and grunted.

"Everyone knew him. Married a pop singer, glamorous girl. So what do you want from me?"

"The fact is, I have just about all I need for this piece," said Dexter, whose American passport revealed him as Alfred Barnes. "But there is a sort of afterthought I should give mention to. A one-time contemporary of Arkan in the Belgrade underworld. Name of Zoran Zilic."

Stojic let out a long puff of air.

"Now that was a nasty piece of work," he said. "He never liked being written about, photographed, or even talked about. People who upset him in that area wereÉvisited. There's not much on file about him."

"I accept that. So what is Belgrade 's premier clippings agency for written material?"

"Not a problem, there's really only one. It's called VIP. It's got an office in Vracar, and the editor-in-chief is Slavko Markovic."

Dexter rose.

"That's it?" asked the Balkan Marlowe. "Hardly worth an invoice."

The American took a hundred-dollar bill and laid it on the desk. "All information has a price, Mr. Stojic. Even a name and address."

Another cab took him to the VIP clippings agency. Mr. Markovic was at lunch so Dexter found a cafŽ and toyed with a light lunch and a glass of local red wine until he came back.

Markovic was as pessimistic as the private eye. But he punched up his inhouse database to see what he had.

"One piece," he said, "and it happens to be in English."

It was the *Newsweek* piece from the Bosnian war.

"That's it?" queried Dexter. "This man was powerful, important, prominent. Surely there must be some trace of him?"

"That's the point," said Markovic, "he was all those things. And violent. Under Milosevic there was no argument. He seems to have cleaned out every record of himself before he quit. Police and court records, state TV, media, the lot. Family, school contemporaries, former colleagues, no one wants to talk about him. Warned off. Mr. No-face, that's him."

"Do you recall when the last attempt was made to write anything about him?"

Markovic thought for a while.

"Now you mention t, I heard a rumour that someone tried. But it came to nothing. After Milosevic fell, and with Zilic vanished, someone tried to do a piece. I think it was cancelled."

"Who was it?"

"My talking canary said it was a magazine here in Belgrade called *Ogledalo*. That means '*The Mirror*.'"

*The Mirror* still existed, and its editor was still Vuk Kobac. Even though it was print day, he agreed to give the American a few minutes of his time. He lost his enthusiasm when he heard the enquiry.

"That bloody man," he said. "I wish I had never heard of him."

"What happened?"

"It was a young freelancer. Nice kid. Keen, eager. Wanted a staff job. I hadn't got one vacant, but he pleaded for a chance. So I gave him a commission. Name of Petrovic, Srechko Petrovic. Only twenty-two, poor kid."

"What happened to him?"

"He got run over, that's what happened to him. Parked his car opposite the apartment block where he lived with his mother, went to cross the road. A Mercedes came round the corner and ran him over."

"Very careless. Managed to run him over twice. Then drove off."

"And permanent. Even in exile, he can still order and pay for a 'hit' to be done in Belgrade."

"Any address for the mother?"

"Hold on. We sent a wreath. Must have sent it to the flat."

He found it and bade his visitor good-bye.

"One last question," said Dexter. "When was this?"

"Six months ago. Just after New Year. A word of advice, Mr. Barnes. Stick to writing about Arkan. He's safely dead. Leave Zilic alone. He'll kill you. Must rush, it's print day."

The address said Block 23, Novi Beograd. He recognised Novi Beograd, or New Belgrade, from the city map he had bought in the hotel bookshop. It was the rather bleak district in which the hotel itself stood, on a peninsula flanked by the rivers Sava and Dunav, the Danube itself, which was emphatically not blue. It stood across both rivers from downtown Belgrade.

In the Communist years, the taste had been for huge, high-rise apartment blocks for the workers. They had gone up on vacant lots in Novi Beograd, great poured concrete beehives, each cavity a tiny flat with its door opening to a long, open-sided passage, lashed by the elements.

Some had survived better than others. It depended on the level of prosperity of the inhabitants, and thus the level of maintenance. Block 23 was a roach-infested horror. Mrs. Petrovic lived on the ninth floor, and the elevator was out of order. Dexter could take them at a run, but he wondered how senior citizens coped, the more so as they all seemed to be chain smokers.

There was not much point in going up to see her alone. There was no chance she would speak English, and he did not know Serbo-Croat. It was one of the pretty and bright girls behind the reception desk at the Hyatt who accepted his offer to help him out. She was saving to get married, and two hundred dollars for an hour's extra work at the end of her shift was quite acceptable.

They arrived at seven and just in time. Mrs. Petrovic was an office cleaner and left each evening at eight to work through the night in the offices across the river.

She was one of those who have quite simply been defeated by life, and the lined and exhausted face told its own story. She was probably in her midforties going on seventy, her husband killed in an industrial accident with almost no compensation, her son murdered beneath her own window. As always with the very poor approached by the apparently rich, her first reaction was suspicion.

He had brought a large bunch of flowers. It had been a long, long time since she had had flowers. Anna, the girl from the hotel, arranged them in three displays around the tiny, shabby room.

"I want to write about what happened to Srechko. I know it cannot bring him back, but I can perhaps expose the man who did this to him. Will you help me?"

She shrugged. "I know nothing," she said. "I never asked about his work."

"The night that he diedÉwas he carrying anything with him?"

"I don't know. The body was searched. They took everything."

"They searched the body? Right there on the street?"

"Yes."

"Did he have papers? Did he have notes that he left behind? Here in the flat?"

"Yes, he had bundles of papers. With his typewriter and his pencils. But I never read them."

"Could I see them?"

"They are gone."

"Gone?"

"They took them. Took them all. Even the ribbon from the typewriter."

"The police?"

"No, the men."

"Which men?"

"They came back. Two nights later. They made me sit in the corner there. They searched everywhere. They took everything he had had."

"There is nothing left at all of what he was working on for Mr. Kobac?"

"Only the photo. I had forgotten about that."

"Please tell me about the photo."

It came out in small details, all via Anna, from language to language. Three days before he died, Srechko, the cub reporter, had attended a New Year party, and red wine had been spilled on his denim jacket. His mother had put it in the laundry bag for washing later.

When he was dead there was no point. She, too, forgot about the laundry bag, and the gangsters never thought to ask. When she was making a pile of her dead son's clothes, the winestained denim jacket fell out. She felt the pockets quickly to see if her son had forgotten any money, but felt something semi-stiff. It was a photograph.

"Do you still have it? May I see it?" asked Dexter.

She nodded and crept away like a mouse to a sewing box in the corner. She came back with the photo.

It was of a man, caught unawares, who had seen the photographer at the last minute. He was trying to raise his outspread hand to cover his face, but the shutter had clicked just in time. He was full face, upright, in a shortsleeved shirt and slacks.

The picture was in black and white, not of professional clarity, but with enlargement and enhancement was as good as he was ever likely to get. He recalled the teenage picture and the cocktail party photo he had found in New York and carried in the lining of his attachŽ case. They were all a bit grainy, but it was the same man-Zilic.

"I would like to buy this picture, Mrs. Petrovic," he said. She shrugged and said something in Serbo-Croat.

"She says you may have it. It is of no interest to her. She does not know who he is," said Anna.

"One last question. Just before he died, did Srechko go away for a while?"

"Yes, in December. He was away a week. He would not say where he had been, but he had a sunburn on his nose."

She escorted them to her door and the landing exposed to the winds, which led to the nonfunctioning lift and the stairwell. Anna went first. When she was out of earshot, Dexter turned to the Serbian mother who had also lost her child, and spoke gently in English.

"You can't understand a word I say, lady, but if I ever get this swine into a slammer in the States, it's partly for you. And it's on the house."

Of course she did not understand, but she responded to the smile and said, "Hvala." In a day in Belgrade he had learned that it means "Thank you."

He had instructed the taxi to wait. He dropped Anna, clutching her two hundred dollars, at her home in the suburbs, and on the way back to the centre he studied the picture again.

Zilic was standing on what looked like an open expanse of concrete or tarmac. Behind him were big, low buildings like warehouses. Over one of the buildings a flag floated, extended by the breeze, but part of it was off the picture.

There was something else sticking into vision out of frame, but he could not work it out. He tapped the taxi driver on the shoulder.

"Do you have a magnifying glass?" He did not understand, but elaborate pantomime cleared up the mystery. He nodded. He kept one in the glove compartment for studying his A-Z city road map if need be.

The long, flat object jutting into the picture from the left came clear. It was the wingtip of a plane, but no more than six feet off the ground. So not an airliner, but a smaller craft.

Then he recognised the buildings in the background. Not warehouses, hangars. Not the huge structures required for sheltering airliners, but the sort needed for private planes, executive jets, whose tail fins rarely top more than thirty feet. The man was on a private airfield or the executive section of an airport.

They helped him at the hotel. Yes, there were several cyber-cafŽs in Belgrade, all open late. He dined in the snack bar and took a taxi to the nearest. When he was logged on to his favourite search engine, he asked for all the flags of the world.

The flag fluttering above the hangars in the dead reporter's photo was only in monochrome, but clearly it had three horizontal stripes of which the bottom one was so dark it looked black. If not, then a very dark blue. He opted for black.

As he ran through the world's flags, he noted that a good half of them had some kind of logo, crest, or device superimposed on the stripes. The one he sought had none. That cut the choice down to the other half.

Those who had horizontal stripes and no logo were no more than two dozen, and those with a black or near-black bottom stripe were five.

Gabon, the Netherlands, and Sierra Leone all had three horizontal stripes of which the lowest was deep blue, which could show up black in a monochrome photograph. Only two had a bottom stripe of three that was definitely black: Sudan and one other. But the Sudan had a green diamond up against the flagpole as well as three stripes. The remaining one had a vertical stripe nearest the flagpole. Peering at his photo, Dexter could just make out the fourth stripe, not clear, but it was there.

One vertical red stripe by the flagpole; green, white, and black horizontals running out to the flapping edge. Zilic was standing at an airport somewhere in the United Arab Emirates.

Even in December a pale-skinned Slav could get a badly burned nose in the UAE.

18 The gulf

There are seven emirates in the UAE, but only the three biggest and richest, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Sharjah spring readily to mind. The other four are much smaller and almost anonymous.

They all occupy the peninsula at the southeastern tip of the Saudi landmass, that tongue of desert that separates the Persian Gulf to the north and the Gulf of Oman to the south.

Only one, Al Fujayrah, faces west onto the Gulf of Oman and thence the Arabian Sea; the other six are strung in a line along the northern coast, staring at Iran across the water. Apart from the seven capitals, there is the desert oasis town of Al Am that also has an airport.

While still in Belgrade, Dexter found a portrait photographic studio with the technology to rephotograph the picture of Zoran Zilic, increase its clarity, and then blow it up from playing card to softcover book size.

While the photographer worked on one task, Dexter returned to the cybercafŽ, enquired after the United Arab Emirates, and downloaded everything he could get. The following day he took the JAT regular service via Beirut to Dubai.

The wealthy emirates derive their riches mainly from oil, although they have all tried to broaden the base of their economies to include tourism and duty-free trade. Most of the oil deposits are offshore.

Rigs have to be resupplied constantly, and although the vehicles used for heavy cargoes are seaborne lighters, personal transfers are faster and easier by helicopter.

The oil companies operating the rigs have their own helicopters, but there is still ample room for charter firms, and the Internet revealed three such, right in Dubai. The American Alfred Barnes had become a lawyer when he visited the first. He picked the smallest, on the grounds it was probably the least concerned with formalities and the most interested in wads of dollar bills. He was right on both counts.

The office was a Portakabin out at Port Rashid, and the proprietor and chief pilot turned out to be a former British Army Air Corps flier trying to make a living. They do not come much more informal than that.

"Alfred Barnes, attorney-at-law," said Dexter, extending his hand. "I have a problem, a tight schedule, and a large budget."

The British ex-captain raised a polite eyebrow. Dexter pushed the photo across the cigarette-scorched desk.

"My client is, or rather was, a very wealthy man."

"He lost it?" asked the pilot.

"In a way. He died. My law firm is the chief executor. And this man is the chief beneficiary. Only he doesn't know it, and we cannot find him."

"I'm a charter pilot, not Missing Persons. Anyway, I've never seen him."

"No reason why you should. It's the background to the picture. Look carefully. An airport or airfield, right? The last I heard he was working in civil aviation here in the UAE. If I could identify that airport, I could probably find him. What do you think?"

The charter pilot studied the background.

"Airports here have three sections; military, airlines, and private flyers. That wing belongs to an executive jet. There are scores, maybe hundreds of them, in the Gulf. Most have company livery, and most are owned by wealthy Arabs. What do you want to do?"

What Dexter wanted to buy was the charter captain's access to the flying side to all these airports. It came at a price and took two days. The cover was that he had to pick up a client. After sixty minutes inside the executive jet compound, when the fictional client failed to show up, the captain told the tower he was breaking off the charter and leaving the circuit.

The airports at Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Sharjah were huge, and even the private aviation sector of each was far bigger than the background in the photograph.

The emirates of Ajman and Umm al Qaywayn had no airport at all, being cheek by jowl with Sharjah airport. That left the desert town of Al Am, Al Fujayrah out on the far side of the peninsula facing the Gulf of Oman, and, right up in the north, the least known of them all, Ra's al Khaymah.

They found it on the morning of the second day. The Bell Jetranger swerved in across the desert to land at what the British called Al K, and there were the hangars with the flag fluttering behind them.

Dexter had taken the charter for two full days and brought his suitcase with him. He settled up with a fistful of hundred-dollar bills, stepped down, and watched the Bell lift away. Looking around, he realised he was standing almost where Srechko Petrovic must have been when he snapped the photo that sealed his fate. An official stepped from an administration building and beckoned him to clear the area.

The arrival and departure building for both airline and private jet passengers was neat, clean, and small, with the accent on small. Named after the Emiral family, Al Qassimi International Airport had clearly never disturbed those airlines, whose names are famous worldwide.

On the tarmac in front of the terminal building were Russian-built Antonovs and Tupolevs. There was an old Yakovlev single-prop biplane. One airliner bore the livery and logo of Tajikistan Airlines. Dexter went up one floor to the roof cafŽ and ordered a coffee.

The same floor contained the administration offices, including the supremely optimistic Public Relations Department. The sole inhabitant was a nervous young lady robed from head to toe in a black chador, with only her hands and pale oval face visible. She spoke halting English.

Alfred Barnes had now become a development officer for tourism projects with a major U. S. company and wished to enquire about the facilities Ra's al Khaymah could offer to the executives seeking an exotic conference centre; especially, he needed to know if they could be offered airport facilities for the executive jets in which they would arrive.

The lady was polite but adamant. All enquiries regarding tourism should be addressed to the Department of Tourism in the Commercial Centre, right next to Old Town.

A taxi brought him there. It was a small cube of a building on a development site, about five hundred yards from the Hilton and right on the edge of the brandnew, deepwater harbour. It did not appear to be under siege from those seeking to develop tourism.

Mr. Hussein al Khoury would have regarded himself, if asked, as a good man. That did not make him a contented man. To justify the first, he would have said that he only had one wife but treated her well. He tried to raise his four children as a good father should. He attended mosque every Friday and gave alms to charity according to his ability and according to Scripture.

He should have progressed far in life, *Insh'Allah*. But it seemed Allah did not smile upon him. He remained stuck in the middle ranks of the Tourism Ministry; specifically, he remained stuck in a small brick cube on a development site next to the deep-water harbour, where no one ever called. Then one day the smiling American walked in.

He was delighted. An enquiry at last, and the chance to practice the English over which he had spent so many hundreds of hours. After several minutes of courteous pleasantries-how charming of the American to realise that Arabs do not like to delve straight into business-they agreed that as the air-conditioning had broken down and the outside temperature was nudging 100 degrees, they might use the American's taxi to adjourn to the coffee lounge of the Hilton.

Settled in the pleasant cool of the Hilton bar, Mr. al Khoury was intrigued that the American seemed in no hurry to proceed to his business. Eventually the Arab asked, "Now, how can I help you?"

"You know, my friend," said the American with seriousness, "my whole life's philosophy is that we are put upon this earth by our mighty and merciful Creator to help one another. And I believe that it is I who am here to help you."

Almost absentmindedly the American began to fumble in his jacket pockets for something. Out came his passport, several folded letters of introduction, and a block of one-hundred-dollar bills that took Mr. al Khoury's breath away.

"Let us see if we cannot help each other."

The civil servant stared at the dollars. "If there is anything I can doÉ" he murmured.

"I should be very honest with you, Mr. al Khoury. My real job in life is as a debt collector. Not a very glamorous job, but necessary. When we buy things, we should pay for them. Not so?"

"Assuredly."

"There is a man who flies into your airport now and again in his own executive jet. This man."

Mr. al Khoury stared at the photo for a few seconds, then shook his head. His gaze returned to the block of dollars. Four thousand? Five? To put Faisal through universityÉ "Alas, this man did not pay for his plane. In a sense, therefore, he stole it. He paid the deposit, then flew away and was never seen again. Probably changed the registration number. Now, these are expensive things. Twenty million dollars each. So the true owners would be grateful, in a very practical way, to anyone who could help them find their aircraft."

"But if he is here now, arrest him. Impound the aircraft. We have lawsÉ"

"Alas, he has gone again. But every time he lands here, there is a record. Stored in the files at Al Qassimi Airport. Now, a man of your authority could see those archives."

The civil servant dabbed his lips with a clean handkerchief.

"When was it here, this plane?"

"Last December."

Before leaving Block 23, Dexter had learned from Mrs. Petrovic that her son had been away from December 13th to the 20th. Calculating that Srechko had snapped his photograph, been seen, knew he had been seen, and had left immediately for home, he would have been in Ras al Khaymah about the 18th. How he had known to come here, Dexter had no idea. He must have been a good, or very lucky, reporter. Kobac should have taken him on.

"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.

It may look as if the legal attachŽ is some kind of diplomatic appointment, answering to the Department of State. Not so. The "legat" is the FBI representative inside the U. S. Embassy. Every one of them had received the photo of Zilic from Assistant Director Fleming, with an instruction to display it in hope of a lucky break. It came in the unlikely form of Inspector Bin Zayeed.

Insp. Moussa Bin Zayeed would also, if asked, have replied that he, too, was a good man. He served his emir, Sheikh Maktoum of Dubai, with complete loyalty, took no bribes, honoured his god, and paid his taxes. If he moonlighted by passing useful information to his friend at the American Embassy, this was simple cooperation with his country's ally and not to be confused with anything else.

Thus it was that he found himself, with the outside temperature in July over one hundred degrees, sheltering in the welcome cool of the air-conditioned embassy lobby and waiting for his friend to descend and take him out for lunch. His eyes looked over at the bulletin board.

He rose and strolled over to it. There were the usual notices of coming events, functions, arrivals, departures, and invitations to various club memberships. Among the clutter was a photograph and the printed question: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?

"Well, have you?" asked a cheery voice behind him, and a hand clapped him on the shoulder. It was Bill Brunton, his contact, lunch host, and the legal attachŽ. They exchanged friendly greetings.

"Oh yes," said the Special Branch officer, "two weeks ago."

Brunton's bonhomie dropped away. The fish restaurant out at Jumeirah could wait awhile.

"Let's step right back to my office," he suggested.

"Do you remember where and when?" asked the legat, back in his office.

"Of course. About two weeks ago. I was visiting a relative in Ra's al Khaymah. I was on the Faisal Road; you know it? The seafront road out of town between the Old Town and the Gulf."

Brunton nodded.

"Well, a truck was trying to manoeuvre backward into a narrow work site. I had to stop. To my left was a cafŽ terrace. There were three men at the table. One of them was this one." He gestured to the photograph now face-up on the legat's desk.

'No question about it?"

"None. That was the man."

"He was with two others?"

"Yes."

"You recognised them?"

"One by name. The other only by sight. The one by name was Bout."

Bill Brunton sucked in his breath. Vladimir Bout needed no introducti on to virtually anyone in a Western or East bloc intelligence service. He was widely notorious, a former KGB major who had become one of the world's leading black market arms dealers, a merchant of death of the first rank. That he was not even born a Russian, but a half-Tajik from Dushanbe, attests to his skill in the arts of the underworld. The Russians are nothing if not the most racist people on earth, and back in the old USSR referred to denizens of the non-Russian republics collectively as *chorny*, meaning "blacks"; and it was not a compliment. Only White Russians and Ukrainians could escape the term and rise through the ranks on an equal par with an ethnic Russian. For a halfbreed Tajik to graduate out of Moscow 's prestigious Military Institute of Foreign Languages, a KGB-front training academy, and make it to the rank of major, was unusual.

He was assigned to the Navigation and Air Transport Regiment of the Soviet Air Force, another covert "front" for shipping arms consignments to anti-Western guerrillas and Third World regimes opposed to the West. Here he could use his mastery of Portuguese in the Angolan civil war. He also built up formidable contacts in the air force.

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, chaos reigned for several years and military inventories were simply abandoned as unit commanders sold off their equipment for almost any price they could get. Bout simply bought the sixteen Ilyushin IL-76s of his own unit for a song and went into the air charter and freight business.

By 1992, he was back in his native south; the Afghan civil war had started just across the border from his native Tajikistan, and one of the prime contestants was his fellow Tajik, General Dostum. The only "freight" the barbarous Dostum wanted was arms; Bout provided them.

By 1993, he showed up in Ostend, Belgium, a jumping-off point to move into Africa via the Belgian ex-colony, the permanently war-torn Congo. His source of supply was limitless, the vast weapons pool of the old USSR, still operating on fictional inventories. Among his new clients were the Intera-hamwe, the genocidal butchers of Rwanda and Burundi.

This finally upset even the Belgians, and he was hounded out of Ostend, appearing in 1995 in South Africa to sell to both the UNITA guerrillas in Angola and their enemies in the MPLA government. But with Nelson Mandela occupying the South African presidency, things went bad for him there, too, and he had to leave in a hurry.

In 1998, Bout showed up in the UAE and settled in Sharjah. The British and Americans put his dossier in front of the emir, and three weeks before Bill Brunton sat in his office with Inspector Bin Zayeed, Bout had been kicked out yet again.

But his recourse was simply to move ten miles up the coast and settle in Ajman, taking a suite of rooms in the Chamber of Commerce and Industry Building. With only forty thousand people, Ajman had no oil and little industry and could not be as particular as Sharjah.

For Bill Brunton the sighting was important. He did not know why his superior, Colin Fleming, was interested in the missing Serb, but this report was certainly going to earn him a few brownie points in the Hoover Building.

"And the third man?" he asked. "You say you know him by sight? Any idea where?"

"Of course. Here. He is one of your colleagues."

If Bill Brunton thought his surprises for the day were over, he was wrong. He felt his stomach perform some gentle aerobatics. Carefully, he withdrew a file from the bottom drawer of his desk. It was a compendium of the embassy staff. Insp. Bin Zayeed was unhesitating in pointing to the face of the cultural attachŽ.

"This one," he said. "He was the third man at the table. You know him?" Brunton knew him alright. Even though cultural exchanges were few and far between, the cultural attachŽ was a very busy man. This was because behind the faade of visiting orchestras, he was the station chief for the CIA.

The news from Dubai left Colin Fleming incandescent with rage. It was not that the secret agency out at Langley was conferring with a man like Vladimir Bout. That might be necessary in the course of information gathering. What had angered him was that someone high in the CIA had clearly lied to the secretary of state and to his own superior, the attorney general. A lot of rules had been broken here, and he was pretty sure he knew who had broken them. He called Langley and asked for a meeting as a matter of some urgency.

The two men had met before. They had clashed in front of the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and there was little love lost between them. Occasionally, opposites attract, but not in this case.

Paul Devereaux III was the scion of a long line of those families who come as near to being aristocracy as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has had for a long time. He was born a Boston Brahmin to his boot heels. He was showing his intellectual brilliance way before school age and sailed through Boston College High School, the main feeder unit to one of the foremost Jesuit academies in America. His grades when he came out were summa cum laude.

At Boston College, the tutors had him marked out as a high flyer, destined one day to join the Society of Jesus itself, if not to hold high office somewhere in academia.

He read for a B. A. in Humanities, with strong components being philosophy and theology. He read them all, devoured them; from Ignatius Loyola, of course, to Teilhard de Chardin. He wrangled late into the night with his senior tutor in theology over the concept of the doctrine of the lesser evil and the higher goal: that the end may justify the means and yet not damn the soul, providing the parameters of the impermissible are never breached.

In 1966, he was nineteen. It was the pinnacle of the Cold War when world communism still seemed capable of rolling up the Third World and leaving the West a beleaguered island. That was when Pope Paul VI appealed to the Jesuits and entreated them to spearhead the task of combating atheism.

For Paul Devereaux the two were synonymous: Atheism was not always communism, but communism was atheism. He would serve his country not in the church or in academia but in that other place quietly mentioned to him at the country club by a pipe-smoking man introduced by a colleague of his father.

A week after graduating from Boston College, Paul Devereaux was sworn into the ranks of the Central Intelligence Agency. For him it was the poet's bright, confident morning. The great scandals were yet to come. With his patrician background and contacts, he rose in the hierarchy, blunting the shafts of jealousy with a combination of easy charm and sheer cleverness. He also proved that he had a bucketful of the most prized currency of them all in the Agency in those years: He was loyal. For that a man can be forgiven an awful lot, maybe sometimes a bit too much. He spent time in the three major divisions: Operations (Ops), Intelligence (Analysis), and Counterintelligence (Internal Security). His career hit the buffers with the arrival of John Deutsch as director.

The two men simply did not like each other. It happens. Deutsch, with no background in intelligence gathering, was the latest in a long and, with hindsight, pretty disastrous line of political appointees. He believed Devereaux, with seven fluent languages, was quietly looking down on him; and he could have been right.

Devereaux regarded the new DCI (Director of Central Intelligence) as a politically correct nincompoop appointed by the Arkansan president whom, although a fellow Democrat, he despised, and that was before Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky. It was not a marriage made in heaven, and it almost became a divorce when Devereaux came to the defence of a division chief in South America accused of employing unsavoury contacts.

The entire agency had swallowed Executive Order 12333 with good grace, except for a few dinosaurs who went back to World War II. This was the EO brought in by Pres. Ronald Reagan that forbade any more "terminations."

Devereaux had considerable reservations but was too junior to be sought out for his counsel. It seemed to him that in the thoroughly imperfect world occupied by covert intelligence gathering there would arise occasions where an enemy, in the form of a betrayer, might have to be "terminated" as a preemption. Put another way, one life may have to be terminated to preserve a likely ten.

As to the final judgment in such a case, Devereaux believed that if the director himself was not a man of wholly sufficient moral integrity to be entrusted with such a decision, he should not be director at all.

But under Clinton, in the by-now veteran agent's view, political correctness went quite lunatic with the instruction that disreputable sources were not to be used as informants. He felt it was like being asked to confine one's sources to monks and choirboys.

So when a man in South America was threatened with the wreckage of his career for using ex-terrorists to inform on functioning terrorists, Devereaux wrote a paper so sarcastic that it circulated throughout the grinning staffers of Ops Division like illegal *samizdat* in the old Soviet Union.

Deutsch wanted to require the departure of Devereaux at that point, but his deputy director, George Tenet, advised caution and eventually it was Deutsch who went, to be replaced by Tenet himself.

Something happened in Africa that summer of 1998 that caused the new director to need the mordant but effective intellectual, despite his views on their joint commander in chief. Two U.S. embassies were blown up. It was no secret to the lowliest cleaner that since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the new cold war had been against the steadily growing rise of terrorism, and the "happening" unit within Ops Division was the Counterterrorism Centre.

Paul Devereaux was not working in the CT Centre. Because one of his languages was Arabic, and his career included three stints in Arabic countries, he was Number Two in the Middle East at the time.

The destruction of the embassies brought him out of there and into the leadership of a small task force dedicated to one task and answering only to the director himself. The job in hand was called Project Peregrine, after that falcon who hovers high and silent above his prey until he is certain of a lethal hit and then descends with awesome speed and accuracy.

In the new office Devereaux had no-limits access to any information from any other source that he might want and a small but expert team. For his Number Two he chose Kevin McBride, not an intellectual patch on himself, but experienced, willing, and loyal. It was McBride who took the call and held his hand across the mouthpiece.

"Assistant Director Fleming at the Bureau," he said. "Doesn't sound happy. Shall I leave?"

Devereaux signalled for him to stay.

"ColinÉPaul Devereaux. What can I do for you?"

His brow furrowed as he listened. "Why surely, I think a meeting would be a good idea."

It was a safe house, always convenient for a row. Daily "swept" for bugs every word recorded with the full knowledge of the conference participants, refreshments on immediate call.

Fleming thrust the report from Bill Brunton under Devereaux's nose and let him read it. The Arabist's face remained impassive.

"So?" he queried.

"Please don't tell me the Dubai inspector got it wrong," said Fleming. "Zilic was the biggest arms trafficker in Yugoslavia. He quit, disappeared. Now he is seen conferring with the biggest arms trafficker in the Gulf and Africa. Totally logical."

"I wouldn't dream of trying to fault the logic," said Devereaux.

"And in conference with your man covering the Persian Gulf."

"The Agency's man covering the Gulf," said Devereaux mildly. "Why me?"

"Because you virtually ran the Mid East, although you were supposed to be second string. Because back then all company staff in the Gulf would have reported to you. Because even though you are now in some kind of special project, that situation has not changed. Because I very much doubt that two weeks ago was Zilic's first visit to that neck of the woods. My guess is that you knew exactly where Zilic was when the request came through or at least that he would be in the Gulf and available for a snatch on a certain day. And you said nothing."

"So? Even in our business, suspicions are a long way from proof."

"This is more serious than you seem to think, my friend. By any count, you and your agents are consorting with known criminals and of the filthiest hue. Against the rules, flat against all the rules."

"So. Some foolish rules have been breached. Ours is not a business for the squeamish. Even the Bureau must have a comprehension of the smaller evil to obtain the greater good."

"Don't patronise me," snapped Colin Fleming.

"I'll try not," drawled the Bostonian. "All right, you're upset. What are you going to do about it?"

There was no need to be polite any more. The gloves were off and lying on the floor. "I don't think I can let this ride," said Fleming. "This man Zilic is obscene. You must have read what he did to that boy from Georgetown. But you're consorting. By proxy, but consorting for all that. You know what Zilic can do; what he's already done. All on file and I know you must have read it. There's testimony that as a gangster he hung a nonpaying shopkeeper from his heels six inches above a two-bar electric fire until his brains boiled. He's a raving sadist. What the hell are you using him for?"

"If indeed I am, then it's classified. Even from an assistant director of the Bureau."

"Give the swine up. Tell us where we can find him."

"Even if I knew, which I do not admit, no."

Colin trembled with rage and disgust. "How can you be so bloody complacent?" he shouted. "Back in 1945 the CIC in occupied Germany cut deals with Nazis who were supposed to help in the fight against communism. We should never have done that. We should not have touched those swine with a barge pole. It was wrong then; it's wrong now."

Devereaux sighed. This was becoming tiresome and had long been pointless. "Spare me the history lesson," he said. "I repeat, what are you going to do about it?"

"I'm taking what I know to your director," said Fleming.

Paul Devereaux rose. It was time to go. "Let me tell you something. Last December I'd have been toast. Today, I'm asbestos. Times change."

After a tiresome imbroglio in the vote-counting booths of Florida, the president sworn in in January 2001 was one George W. Bush, whose most enthusiastic cheerleader was none other than CIA director George Tenet.

"This is not the end of it," Fleming called at the departing back. "He'll be found and brought back if I have anything to do with it."

Devereaux thought over the remark in his car on the way back to Langley. He had not survived the snakepit of the company for thirty years without developing formidable antennae. He had just made an enemy, maybe a bad one.

"He'll be found." By whom? How? And what could the Hoover Building moralist have to do with it? He sighed. An extra care in a stressfilled planet. He would have to watch Colin Fleming like a hawkÉat any rate like a peregrine falcon. The joke made him smile, but not for long.

20 The jet

When he saw the house, Cal Dexter had to appreciate the occasional irony of life. Instead of the GI-turned-lawyer getting the fine house in Westchester County, it was the skinny kid from Bedford-Stuyvesant. In thirteen years, Washington Lee had evidently done well.

When he opened the door that Sunday morning in late July, Dexter noted he had had the buck teeth fixed, the beaky nose sculpted back a bit, and his wild Afro was down to a neat trim. This was a thirty-twoyear-old businessman with a wife and two small children, a nice house, and a modest but prosperous computer consultancy.

All that Dexter once had he had lost; all that Washington Lee never hoped for, he had earned. After tracing him, Dexter had called to announce his coming.

"Come on in, Counsellor," said the ex-hacker.

They took soda in canvas chairs on the back lawn. Dexter offered Lee a brochure. Its cover showed a twin-jet executive aeroplane banking over a blue sea.

"That's public domain, of course. I need to find one of that model. A specific example. I need to know who bought it, when, who owns it now, and most of all where that person resides."

"And you think they don't want you to know?"

"If the proprietor is living openly and under his own name, I have it wrong. Bum steer. If I am right, he will be holed up out of sight under a false name, protected by armed guards and layers of computerised identity protection."

"And it's the layers you want pulled away."

"Yep."

"Things have got a lot tougher in thirteen years," said Lee. "Dammit, I'm one of the ones that made them tougher, from the technical standpoint. The legislators have done the same from the legal standpoint. What you are asking for is a breakin. Or three. Totally illegal."

"I know."

Washington Lee looked around him. Two little girls squealed as they splashed in a plastic pool at the far end of the lawn. His wife, Cora, was in the kitchen making lunch.

"Thirteen years ago I was staring at a long stretch in the pen," he said. "I'd have come out and gone back to sitting on tenement steps in the ghetto. Instead I got a break. Four years with a bank, nine years as my own boss inventing the best security systems in the United States, even if I do say so myself. Now it's payback time. You got it, Counsellor. What do you want?"

First they looked at the plane. The name of Hawker went back in British aviation to World War I. It was a Hawker Hurricane that Stephen Edmond had flown in 1940. The last frontline fighter was the ultraversatile Harrier. By the seventies, smaller companies simply could not afford the research and development costs of devising new warplanes in isolation. Only the American giants could do that, and even they amalgamated. Hawker moved increasingly into civil aircraft.

By the nineties, just about all the UK aeroplane companies were under one roof, BAE or British Aerospace. When the board decided to downsize, the Hawker Division was bought by the Raytheon Company of Wichita, Kansas. They kept on a small sales office in London and the servicing facility at Chester.

What Raytheon got for their dollars was the successful and popular HS 125 shortrange twinjet executive runabout; the Hawker 800, and the top-of-the-range, three-thousand-mile Hawker 1000 model.

But Dexter's own research in the public domain showed that the 1000 model had gone out of production in 1996, 50 if Zoran Zilic owned one, it would be second-hand. More, only fifty-two had ever been made, and thirty of them were with an American-based charter fleet.

He was looking for one of the remaining twenty-two that had changed hands in the last two years, three at most. There were a handful of secondhand dealers who moved in the rarefied atmosphere of aeroplanes that expensive, but it was ten-to-one that during the owner changeover it had undergone a full servicing, and that probably meant going back to Raytheon's Hawker Division. Which made it likely they handled the sale.

"Anything else?" asked Lee.

"The registration. P4-ZEM. It's not with one of the main international civil aviation registers. The number refers to the tiny island of Aruba."

"Never heard of it," said Lee.

"Former Dutch Antilles, along with Curacao and Bonaire. They all do secret bank accounts, company registrations, that sort of thing. It's a pain in the ass for international fraud regulations, but it's a cheap income for an otherwise no-resource island. Aruba has a tiny oil refinery. Otherwise, its income is tourism based on some great coral; plus secret bank accounts, gaudy stamps, and dodgy number plates. I would guess my target changed the old registration number to the new one."

"So Raytheon would have no record of P4ZEM?"

"Almost certainly not. That apart, they do not divulge client details. No way."

"We'll see," muttered Washington Lee.

In thirteen years the computer genius had learned a lot, in part because he had invented a lot. Most of America 's real computer geeks are out in Silicon Valley; and for the eggheads of the valley to hold an East Coaster in some awe, he had to be good.

The first thing Lee had told himself a thousand times was: Never get caught again. As he contemplated the first illegal task he had attempted in thirteen years, he determined there was no way anyone was ever going to trace a trail of cyberclues back to a home in Westchester.

"How big is your budget?" he asked.

"Adequate. Why?"

"I want to rent a Winnebago motor home. I need full domestic circuit power, but I need to transmit, close down, and vanish. Two, I need the best personal computer I can get; and when this is over I have to deep-six it into a major river."

"Not a problem. Which way are you going to attack?"

"All points. The tailplane register of the Aruba government. They have to cough up what that Hawker was called when Raytheon last saw it. Second, the Zeta Corporation in the Bermuda company's register. Head office, destination of all communications, money transfers. The lot. Third, those flight plans it filed. They must have come to that emirate, what did you call itÉ?"

"Ra's al Khaymah."

"Right, Ra's al Whatever. They must have reached there from somewhere."

" Cairo. They came in from Cairo."

"So its flight plan is logged in the Cairo Air Traffic Control archives. Computerised. I'll have to visit. The good news is I doubt if they will have too many firewalls to protect them."

"You need to go to Cairo?" asked Dexter.

Washington Lee looked at him as if he were mad. "Go to Cairo? Why would I go to Cairo?"

"You said, 'visit.'

"I mean in cyberspace. I can visit the Cairo database from a picnic site in Vermont. Look, why don't you go home and wait, Counsellor? This is not your world."

Washington Lee rented his motor home and bought his PC, plus the software he needed for what he had in mind. It was all for cash, despite the raised eyebrows, except for the motor home, which needed a driver's licence, but renting a motor home does not necessarily mean a hacker is at work. He also bought a gaspowered generator, to give him standard domestic "juice" whenever he needed to plug in and log on.

The first and easiest was to crack the Aruba tailfin registration bank, which operated out of an office in Miami. Rather than use a weekend, where an unauthorised visit would show up on Monday morning, he broke into the archive on a busy working day when the database was answering many questions and his would get lost in the clutter.

Hawker 1000 P4-ZEM had once been VP-BGG, and that meant it had been registered somewhere in the British registration zone.

He was using a system designed to hide its own identity and location called PGP, standing for "Pretty Good Privacy," which is a system so secure that it is actually illegal. He had set up two lines, public and private. He had to send on the public line because that line can only encrypt; receiving answers would be on his private line, because that one can only decrypt. The advantage from his point of view was that the encryption system, worked out by some patriot who did pure theoretical math as a hobby, was so impenetrable that it would be unlikely anyone could find out who he was or where he was located. If he kept time-on-line short and location mobile, he should get away with it.

His second line of defence was much more basic; he would communicate by Email only through Web cafŽs in the towns he passed through. Cairo Air Traffic Control revealed that Hawker 1000 P4-ZEM, when it passed through with a refuelling stop in the Land of the Pharaohs, came in from the Azores -every time.

The very fact that the line across the world ran from west to east via the midAtlantic Portuguese islands to Cairo thence to Ra's al Khaymah indicated that P4ZEM was starting its journey somewhere in the Caribbean basin or South America. It was not proof, but it made sense. From a rest stop in North Carolina, Washington Lee persuaded the Portuguese/Azores air traffic database to admit that P4ZEM arrived from the west but was based at a private field owned by the Zeta Corporation. That made the line of pursuit via the filed flight plans into an impasse. The British colony of Bermuda also operated a system of banking secrecy and corporate confidentiality for the benefit of clients who were prepared to pay top dollar for top security, and it prided itself on being very top notch indeed.

The database in Hamilton could not eventually resist the Trojan horse decoy system fed into it by Washington Lee and conceded that the Zeta Corporation was indeed registered and incorporated in the islands. But it could only yield three local nominees as directors, all of unimpeachable respectability. There was no mention of any Zoran Zilic, no Serbian-sounding name.

Back in New York, Cal Dexter, armed with the suggestion from Washington Lee that the Hawker was based somewhere around the Caribbean, had contacted a charter pilot he had once defended when a passenger had become violently airsick and tried to sue on the grounds that the pilot should have picked better weather.

"Try the FIRs," said the pilot, "flight information registers. They know who is based in their areas."

The FIR for the southern Caribbean is in Caracas, Venezuela, and they confirmed that Hawker 1000 P4-ZEM was based right there. For a moment Dexter thought he might have been wasting his time on all the other lines of enquiry. It seemed so simple. Ask the local FIR and they tell you.

"Mind you," said his charter pilot friend, "it doesn't have to live there. It's just registered as being there."

"I don't follow."

"Easy," said the pilot. "A yacht can have Wilmington, Delaware, all over its stern because it is registered there. But it can spend its whole life chartering in the Bahamas. The hangar this Hawker lives in could be miles from Caracas."

Washington Lee proposed the last resort and briefed Dexter. Two days of hard driving brought Lee to the city of Wichita, Kansas. He called Dexter when he was ready.

The vice president of sales took the New York call in his office on the fifth floor of the headquarters building.

"I am ringing on behalf of the Zeta Corporation of Bermuda," said the voice. "You recall you sold us a Hawker 1000 tailfin number VP-BGG, you know, the British-owned one, some months back? I'm the new pilot."

"I surely do, sir. And who am I speaking with?"

"Only Mr. Zilic is not happy with the internal cabin configuration and would like it made over. Can you offer that facility?"

"Why certainly. We do cabin interiors right here at the works, MrÉerÉ"

"And it could have the necessary engine overhauls at the same time."

The executive sat bolt upright. He recalled the sale very well. Everything had been serviced to give a clear run of major items for a couple of years. Unless the new owner had been almost constantly airborne, the engines would not be due for overhaul for up to a year.

"May I enquire exactly who I am talking to? I do not think those engines are anywhere near to needing another overhaul," he said.

The voice at the other end lost its self-confidence and began to stutter. "Really? Aw, jeez. Sorry about that. Must have the wrong aeroplane."

The caller hung up. By now the vice president of sales was consumed with suspicion. To his recall he had never mentioned the sale of the registration of the British-sourced Hawker offered for sale by the firm of Avtech of Biggin Hill, Kent. He resolved to ask security to trace that call and try to establish who had made it.

He would be too late, of course, because the SIM-based mobile was heading into the East River. But in the meantime, he recalled the delivery pilot from the Zeta Corporation who had come up to Wichita to fly the Hawker to its new owner.

A very pleasant Yugoslav, a former colonel in that country's air force, with papers in perfect order, including the full FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) records of the U. S. flight school where he had converted to the Hawker. He checked his sales records, Capt. Svetomir Stepanovic, and an email address. He composed a brief E-mail to alert the captain of the Hawker to the weird and troubling phone call and sent it. Across the landscaped grounds that surrounded the headquarters building, parked behind a clump of trees, Washington Lee scanned his electromagnetic emanation monitor, thanked his stars the sale executive was not using the Tempest system to shield his computer from such monitors, and watched the EEM (Electronic Engineers Master) intercept the message. The text was immaterial to him. It was the destination he wanted.

Three days later in New York, the motor home returned to the charter company, hard drive and software somewhere in the Missouri River.

Washington Lee pored over a map and pointed with a pencil-tip. "It's here," he said. " Republic of San Martin. About fifty miles east of San Martin City. And the aeroplane captain is a Yugoslav. I think you have your man, Counsellor. And now, if you'll forgive me, I have a home, a wife, two kids, and a business to attend to. Good luck."

The Avenger got the biggest definition maps he could find and blew them up even larger. Right at the bottom of the lizard-shaped isthmus of land that links North and South America, the broad mass of the South begins with Colombia to the west and Venezuela dead centre.

East of Venezuela lie the four Guianas. First is the former British Guiana, now called just Guyana. Next comes former Dutch Guiana, now Suriname. Farthest east is French Guiana, home of Devil's Island and the story of Papillon, now home to Kourou, the European space-launch complex. Sandwiched between Suriname and the French territory, Dexter found the triangle of jungle that was once Spanish Guiana, named, post-independence, San Martin.

Further research revealed it was regarded as the last of the true banana republics, ruled by a brutal military dictator, ostracised, poor, squalid, and malarial, the sort of place where money could buy a bucket of protection.

A week into August, the Piper Cheyenne II flew along the coast at a sedate 1,250 feet, high enough not to arouse too much suspicion as little more than an executive proceeding from Suriname to French Guiana, but just low enough to allow good photography.

Chartered out of the airport at Georgetown, Guyana, the Piper's twelve-hundred-mile range would take it just over the French border and back home again. The client, whose passport revealed him as U. S. citizen Alfred Barnes, now purported to be a developer of vacation resorts looking for possible locations. The Guyanese pilot privately thought he would pay not to vacation in San Martin, but who was he to turn down a perfectly good charter, paid for in dollars?

As requested, he kept the Piper just offshore, so that his passenger, sitting in the right-hand copilot seat could keep his zoom lens ready for use out of the window if occasion arose.

After Suriname, and its border the Commini River, dropped away, there were no suitable sandy beaches for miles. The coast was a tangle of mangrove, creeping through brown, snakeinfested water from the jungle to the sea. They passed over the capital, San Martin City, asleep in the blazing soggy heat.

The only beach was east of the city, at La Bahia, but that was the reserved resort of the rich and powerful of San Martin, basically the dictator and his friends. At the end of the republic, ten miles short of the banks of the Maroni River and the start of French Guiana, was El Punto. A triangular peninsula, like a shark's tooth jutting from the land into the sea, protected from the landward side by a sierra or cordillera of mountains from coast to coast, bisected by a single track over a single mountain pass. But it was inhabited.

The pilot had never been this far east, so the peninsula was, to him, simply a coastal triangle on his nav-maps. He could see there was a kind of defended estate down there. His passenger began to take photographs. Dexter was using a 35mm Nikon F5 with a motor drive that would give him five frames a second and get through his roll in seven seconds to change film, but he absolutely could not afford to start circling.

He was set for a very fast shutter speed, due to the aircraft vibration, which at any slower than five hundred per second would cause blurring. With 400 ASA film and his aperture set at F8, it was the best he could do.

On the first pass he got the mansion on the tip of the peninsula, with its protective wall and huge gate, plus the fields being tended by estate workers; rows of barns and farm buildings; and the chain-link fencing that separated the fields from the cluster of cuboid white cabanas that seemed to be the workers' village.

Several people looked up, and he saw two in uniform start to run. Then they were over the estate and heading for French territory. On the pass back, he had the pilot fly inland so that from the right-hand seat he could see the estate from the landward angle. He was looking down from the peaks of the sierra at the estate running away to the mansion and the sea, but there was a guard in the mountain pass below the Piper who took its number. He used up his second roll on the private airstrip running along the base of the hills, shooting the residences, workshops, and the main hangar. There was a tractor pulling a twin-engined executive jet into the hanger and out of sight. The tailfin was almost gone. Dexter got one brief look at the fin before it was enveloped in the shadows. The number was P4-ZEM.

21 The jesuit

Paul Devereaux, for all that he was confident the FBI would not be allowed to dismantle his Project Peregrine, was perturbed by the acrimonious meeting with Colin Fleming. He underestimated neither the other man's intelligence, influence, or passion. What worried him was the threat of delay.

After two years at the helm of a project so secret that it was known only to CIA director George Tenet and White House antiterrorist expert Richard Clarke, he was close, enticingly close, to springing the trap he had moved heaven and earth to create.

The target was simply called UBL. This was because the whole intelligence community in Washington spelled the man's first name, Usama, using the letter U rather than the O favoured by the media.

By the summer of 2001, that entire community was obsessed by and convinced of a forthcoming act of war by UBL against the United States. Ninety percent thought the onslaught would come against a major U.S. interest outside America; only 10 percent could envisage a successful attack inside the territorial United States.

The obsession ran through all the agencies, but mostly through the antiterrorist departments of the CIA and the FBI. Here the intention was to discover what UBL had in mind and then prevent it.

Regardless of presidential edict 12333 forbidding "wet jobs," Paul Devereaux was not trying to prevent UBL; he was trying to kill him. Early on in his career, the scholar from Boston College had realised that advancement inside the company would depend on some form of specialisation. In his younger days, in the blaze of Vietnam and the Cold War, most debutantes had chosen the Soviet Division. The enemy was clearly the USSR; the language to be learned was Russian. The corridors became crowded. Devereaux chose the Arab world and the wider study of Islam. He was regarded as crazy.

He turned his formidable intellect to mastering Arabic until he could virtually pass for an Arab, and studied Islam to the level of a Koranic scholar. His vindication came on Christmas Day 1979; the USSR invaded a place called Afghanistan and most of the agents inside CIA headquarters at Langley were reaching for their maps.

Devereaux revealed that apart from Arabic, he spoke reasonable Urdu, the language of Pakistan, and had a knowledge of Pashto, spoken by the tribesmen throughout Pakistan 's Northwest Frontier and into Afghanistan.

His career really took off. He was one of the first to argue that the USSR had bitten off far more than it knew; that Afghan tribes would not concede any foreign occupation; that Soviet atheism offended their fanatical Islam; that with U. S. material help, a fierce mountain-based resistance could be fomented that would eventually bleed white Gen. Boris Gromov's Fortieth Army.

Before it was over, quite a bit had changed. The Mujehadin had indeed sent more than twenty-five thousand Russian recruits back home in caskets; the occupation army, despite the infliction of hideous atrocities on the Afghans, had seen their grip pried loose and their morale gutted.

It was a combination of Afghanistan and the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev that between them put the USSR on the final skid toward dissolution and ended the Cold War. Paul Devereaux had switched from Analysis to Ops, and with Milt Bearden had helped distribute one billion dollars a year of U. S. guerrilla hardware to the "mountain fighters."

While living rough, running, fighting through the Afghan mountains, he had observed the arrival of hundreds of young, idealistic, anti-Soviet volunteers from the Middle East, speaking neither Pashto nor Dan, yet prepared to fight and die far from home if need be.

Devereaux knew what he was doing there; he was fighting a superpower that threatened his own. But what were the young Saudis, Egyptians, and Yemenis doing there? Washington ignored them, and Devereaux's reports.

But they fascinated him. Listening for hours to their conversations in Arabic, pretending he had no more than a dozen words of a language he spoke fluently, the CIA man came to appreciate that they were fighting, not communism, but atheism.

More, they also entertained an equally passionate hatred and contempt for Christianity, the West, and most specifically the United States. Among them was a febrile, temperamental, spoiled, offspring of a hugely rich Saudi family, who distributed millions running training camps in the safety of Pakistan; funding refugee hostels; buying and distributing food, blankets, and medicines to the other Mujehadin. His name was Usama.

He wanted to be taken as a great warrior, like Ahmad Shah Massoud, but in fact he was only in one scrap, in late spring 1987, and that was it. Milt Bearden called him a spoiled brat, but Devereaux watched him carefully. Behind the younger man's endless references to Allah, there was a seething hatred that would one day find a target other than the Russians.

Paul Devereaux returned home to Langley and a cascade of laurels. He had chosen not to marry, preferring scholarship and his job to the distractions of wife and children. His deceased father had left him wealthy; his elegant town house in Old Town Alexandria boasted a much-admired collection of Islamic art and Persian carpets.

He tried to warn against the foolishness of abandoning Afghanistan to its civil war after the defeat of Gromov, but the euphoria as the Berlin Wall came down led to a conviction that with the USSR collapsing into chaos, the Soviet satellites breaking westward for freedom and world communism dead in the water, the last and final threats to the world's only remaining superpower were evaporating as mist before the rising sun.

Devereaux was hardly home and settled in when, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. At Aspen, President Bush and Margaret Thatcher, victors of the Cold War, agreed they could not tolerate such impudence. Within forty-eight hours, the first F15 Eagles were airborne for Thumrait in Oman, and Paul Devereaux was heading for the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The pace was furious and the schedule gruelling, or he might have noticed something. A young Saudi, also back from Afghanistan, claiming to be the leader of a group of guerrilla fighters and an organisation called simply "The Base," offered his services to King Fahd in the defence of Saudi Arabia from the belligerent neighbour to the north.

The Saudi monarch probably also did not notice the military mosquito or his offer; instead, he permitted the arrival in his country of half a million foreign soldiers and airmen from a coalition of fifty nations to roll the Iraqi army out of Kuwait and protect the Saudi oil fields. *Ninety percent of those soldiers and airmen were infidels*, meaning Christians, and their combat boots marched upon the same soil as contained the Holy Places of Mecca and Medina. Almost 400,000 were Americans.

For the zealot, this was an insult to Allah and His prophet Muhammad that simply could not be tolerated. He declared his own private war, first against the ruling house that could do such a thing. More important, the seething rage that Devereaux had noticed in the mountains of the Hindu Kush had finally found its target. UBL declared war on America and began to plan.

If Paul Devereaux had been transferred to Counterterrorism the moment the Gulf War was over and won, the course of history might have been changed. But CT was a too-low priority in 1992; and both the CIA and the FBI entered the worst decade of their twin existences. In the CIA's case, that meant the shattering news that Aldrich Ames had been betraying his country for over eight years. Later it would be learned that the FBI's Robert Hanssen was still doing it. At what ought to have been the hour of victory after four decades of struggle against the USSR, both agencies suffered crises of leadership, morale, and incompetence.

The lingering scandals of Irangate and the illicit aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, caused the new masters a crisis of nerves. Good men left in droves; bureaucrats and bean counters were elevated to chiefs of departments. Men with decades of front-line experience were disregarded.

At eclectic dinner parties, Paul Devereaux smiled politely as congressmen and senators preened themselves to announce that at least the Arab world loved the United States. They meant the ten princes they had just visited. The Jesuit had moved for years like a shadow through the Muslim streets. Inside him a small voice whispered, "No, they hate our guts."

On February 26, 1993, four Arab terrorists drove a rented van into the second level of the basement garage below the World Trade Centre. It contained between twelve and fifteen hundred pounds of a homemade, fertilizerbased explosive called urea nitrate. Fortunately for New York, it is far from the most powerful explosive known.

For all that, it made a big bang. What no one knew for certain, and no more than a dozen even suspected, was that the blast constituted the salvo at Fort Sumter in a new war.

Devereaux was by then the deputy chief for the entire Middle East Division, based at Langley but travelling constantly. It was partly what he saw in his travels and partly what came to him in the torrent of reports from the CIA stations throughout the world of Islam that caused his attention to wander away from the chancelleries and palaces of the Arab world, which were his proper concern, into another direction.

Almost as a sideline, he began to ask for supplementary reports from his stations; not about what the local prime minister was doing, but about the mood in the street, in the souks, in the medinas, in the mosques, and in the teaching schools, the *madrassahs* that churn out the next generation of locally educated Muslim youths. The more he watched and listened, the more the alarm bells rang.

"They hate our guts," his voice told him, "they just need a talented coordinator." Researching on his own time, he picked up the trail once again of the Saudi fanatic UBL. He learned that the man had been expelled from Saudi Arabia for his impertinence in denouncing the monarch for permitting infidels onto the sacred sand.

He learned that UBL was based in the Sudan, another pure Islamist state where fundamentalist fanaticism was in power. Khartoum offered to hand the Saudi zealot over to the United States, but no one was interested. Then he was gone, back to the hills of Afghanistan where the civil war had ended in favour of the most fanatical faction, the ultra-religious Taliban.

Devereaux noted that the Saudi arrived with huge largesse, endowing the Taliban with millions of dollars in personal gifts, and rapidly became a major figure in the land. He arrived with almost fifty personal bodyguards and found several hundred of his foreign (non-Afghan) Mujehadin still in place. Word spread in the bazaars of the Pakistani border towns of Quetta and Peshawar that the returnee had begun two frantic programs: building elaborate cave complexes in a dozen places and constructing training camps. The camps were not for the Afghan military; they were for volunteer terrorists. The word came back to Paul Devereaux. Islamist hatred of his country had found its coordinator.

The misery of the Somali slaughter of the U.S. Army Rangers came and went, caused by rotten intelligence. But there was more. Not only was the opposition of the warlord, Aideed, underestimated, but there were others fighting there; not Somalis but more skilled Saudis. In 1996, a huge bomb destroyed the Al Kobar towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen U.S. servicemen and injuring many others.

Paul Devereaux went to see Dir. George Tenet. "Let me go over to Counterterrorism," he begged.

"CT is full, and it's doing a good job," said the DCI.

"Six dead in Manhattan, nineteen in Dhahran. It's Al Qaeda. It's UBL and his team who are behind it, even if they don't actually plant the bombs."

"We know that, Paul. We're working on it. So is the Bureau. This is not being allowed to lie fallow."

"George, the Bureau knows diddly about Al Qaeda. They don't have the Arabic, they don't know the psychology, they're good on gangsters; but east of Suez might as well be the dark side of the moon. I could bring a new mind to this business."

"Paul, I want you in the Middle East. I need you there more. The king of Jordan is dying. We don't know who his successor will be. His son Abdullah or his brother Hassan? The dictator in Syria is failing; who takes over? Saddam is making life more and more intolerable for the weapons inspectors. What if he throws them out? The whole Israel-Palestine thing is going south in a big way. I need you in the Middle East."

It was in 1998 that secured Devereaux his transfer. On August 7th, two huge bombs were detonated outside two U.S. embassies in Africa; at Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

Two hundred and thirteen people died in Nairobi, with 4,722 injured. Of the dead, 12 were Americans. The explosion in Tanzania was not as bad: 11 were killed, 72 injured. No Americans died, but 2 were crippled. The organising force behind both bombs was quickly identified as the Al Qaeda network. Paul Devereaux handed his Middle East duties over to a rising young Arabist he had taken under his wing, and he moved to Counterterrorism.

He carried the rank of assistant director, but he did not displace the existing incumbent. It was not an elegant arrangement. He hovered on the fringe of Analysis as a kind of consultant but quickly became convinced the rule of only employing sources of upright character as informants was complete madness.

It was the sort of madness that had led to the fiasco of the response to Africa. Cruise missiles destroyed a pharmaceutical factory on the outskirts of Khartoum, capital of Sudan, because it was thought the longdeparted UBL was manufacturing chemical weapons there. It turned out to be a genuine aspirin factory.

Seventy more Tomahawk cruise missiles were poured into Afghanistan to kill UBL. They turned a lot of big rocks into little rocks at several million dollars a pop, but UBL was at the other end of the country. It was out of this failure and the advocacy of Devereaux himself that Peregrine was created.

It was generally agreed around Langley that he must have called in a few markers to get his terms accepted. Project Peregrine was so secret that only Director Tenet knew what Devereaux intended. Outside the building, the Jesuit had to confide in one other, White House antiterrorist chief Richard Clarke, who had started under George Bush Sr., and continued under Clinton.

Clarke was loathed at Langley for his blunt and abrasive criticisms, but Devereaux wanted and needed Clarke for several reasons. The White House man would agree to the sheer ruthlessness of what Devereaux had in mind; he could keep his mouth shut when he wanted; more, he could secure Devereaux the tools he needed when he needed them.

But first, Devereaux was given permission to throw in the trash can all talk of not being allowed to kill the target or use to that end "assets" who might be utterly loathsome, if that is what it took. From that moment Paul Devereaux was performing his own very private high-wire act, and no one was talking safety nets.

He secured his own office and picked his own team. He headhunted the best he could get, and the DCI overruled the howls of protest. Having never been an empire builder, he wanted a small, tight unit, and every one a specialist. He secured a suite of three offices on the sixth floor of the main building, facing over the birch and poplars toward the Potomac, just out of sight, save in winter when the trees were bare.

He needed a good, reliable, righthand man; solid, trustworthy, loyal; one who would do as asked and not second-guess. He chose Kevin McBride. Except that both men were career "lifers" who had joined the company in their mid-twenties and served thirty years, they were as chalk and cheese. The Jesuit was lean and spare, working out daily in his private gym at home; McBride had thickened with the passing years, fond of his six-pack of beer on a weekend, most of the hair gone from the top and crown of his head. His annual "vetting" records showed he had a rock-stable marriage to Molly, two youngsters who had just left home, and a modest house in a residential development out beyond the Beltway. He had no private fortune and lived frugally off his salary.

Much of his career had been in foreign embassies, but never rising to chief of station. He was no threat, but a first-class Number Two. If you wanted something done, it would be done. You could rely on him. There would be no pseudointellectual philosophising. McBride's values were traditional, down-home, American.

On October 12, 2000, twelve months into Project Peregrine, Al Qaeda struck again. This time the perpetrators were two Yemenis, and they committed suicide to achieve their goal. It was the first time the concept of suicide bomber had been evoked against U.S. armed forces since 1983 in Beirut. At the Twin Towers, Mogadishu, Dhahran, Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam, UBL had not demanded the supreme sacrifice. At Aden, he did. He was upping the stakes.

The USS *Cole*, a Burke-class destroyer, was moored in the harbour at the old British coaling station and onetime garrison at the tip of the Saudi peninsula. Yemen was the birthplace of UBL's father. The U. S. presence must have rankled.

Two terrorists in a fast inflatable packed with TNT roared through the flotilla of supply boats, rammed between the hull and the quay, and blew themselves up. Due to the compression between the hull and the concrete, a huge hole was torn. Inside the vessel, seventeen sailors died and thirty-nine were injured.

Devereaux had studied terror, its creation and infliction. He knew that whether imposed by the state or a nongovernmental source, it always divides into five levels.

At the top are the plotters, the planners, the authorizers, the inspirers. Next come the enablers, the facilitators, without whom no plan can work. They are in charge of recruiting, training, funding, supply. Third come the doers, those deprived of normal moral thought, who push the Zyklon B pellets into the gas chambers, plant the bombs, pull the triggers. At slot four are the active collaborators, those who guide the killers, denounce the neighbours, reveal the hiding places, betray the one-time school friends. At the bottom are the broad masses; bovine, stupid, saluting the tyrant, garlanding the murderers.

In the terror against the West in general, and the United States, in particular, Al Qaeda fulfilled the first two functions. Neither UBL nor his ideological Number Two, the Egyptian Ayman Al Zawahiri, not his Ops chief, Mohamed Atef, nor his international emissary, Abu Zubaydah, would ever need to plant a bomb or drive a truck.

The mosque schools, the *madrassahs*, would provide a stream of teenage fanatics, already impregnated with a deep hatred of the whole world that was not fundamentalist, plus a garbled version of a few distorted extracts of the Koran. To them could be added a few more mature converts, tricked into thinking that mass murder guaranteed Koranic paradise.

Al Qaeda would then simply devise, recruit, train, equip, direct, fund, and watch.

On his way back in the limousine from his blazing row with Colin Fleming, Devereaux once again examined the morality of what he was doing. Yes, the disgusting Serb had killed one American. Somewhere out there was a man who had killed fifty, and more to come.

He recalled that Fr. John Heaney had taxed him with a moral problem! "A man is coming at you, with intent to kill you. He has a knife. His total reach is four feet. You have the right of self-defense. You have no shield, but you have a spear. Its reach is nine feet. Do you lunge or wait?"

He would put pupil against pupil, each tasked to argue the opposite viewpoint. Devereaux never hesitated. The greater good against the lesser evil. Had the man with the spear sought the fight? No. Then he was entitled to lunge, not counterstrike; that came after surviving the initial strike. But preemptive strike. In the case of UBL, he had no qualms. To protect his country, Devereaux would kill, no matter how appalling the allies he had to call in aid. Fleming was wrong. He needed Zilic.

For Paul Devereaux there was an abiding enigma about his own country and its place in the world's affections, and he believed he had resolved it. About 1945, when he was born, and for the next decade through the Korean War and the start of the Cold War, the United States was not simply the richest and most militarily powerful country in the world, it was also the most loved, admired, and respected.

After fifty years, the first two qualities remained. The United States was stronger and richer than ever, the only remaining superpower, apparently mistress of all she surveyed.

And through great swathes of the world, black Africa, Islam, left-wing Europe, she was loathed with a passion. What had gone wrong? It was a quandary that defied Capitol Hill and the media.

Devereaux knew his country was far from perfect; it made mistakes, often far too many. But it was in its heart as well meaning as any, and better than most. As a world traveller, he had seen a lot of that "most" at close range. Much of it was deeply ugly.

Most Americans could not comprehend the metamorphosis between 1951 and 2001, so they pretended it had not happened, accepting the Third World 's polite mask for its inner feeling.

Had not Uncle Sam tried to preach democracy against tyranny? Had he not given away at least a trillion dollars in aid? Had he not picked up the hundred-billion-dollar-a-year defence tab for Western Europe for five decades? What justified the hate-you-hate-you demonstrations, the sacked embassies, the burnt flags, the vicious placards?

It was an old British spymaster who explained it to him in a London club in the late sixties as Vietnam became nastier and nastier and the riots erupted.

"My dear boy, if you were weak, you would not be hated. If you were poor, you would not be hated. You are not hated despite the trillion dollars; you are hated *because* of the trillion dollars."

The old bureaucrat gestured toward Grosvenor Square, where leftwing politicians and bearded students were massing to stone the embassy. "The hatred of your country is not because it attacks theirs; it is because it keeps theirs safe. Never seek popularity. You can have supremacy or be loved but never both. What is felt toward you is ten percent genuine disagreement and ninety percent envy. Never forget two things! No man can ever forgive his protector. There is no loathing that any man harbours more intense than that toward his benefactor."

The old spy was long dead, but Devereaux had seen the truth of his cynicism in half a hundred capitals. Like it or not, his country was the most powerful in the world. Once the Romans had that dubious honour. They had responded to the hatred with ruthless force of arms.

A hundred years ago, the British Empire had been the rooster. They had responded to the hatred with languid contempt. Now the Americans had it, and they wracked their consciences to ask where they had gone wrong. The Jesuit scholar and the secret agent had long made up his mind. In defence of his country, he would do what he believed had to be done and one day go to his Maker and ask forgiveness. Until then the America haters could take a long walk off a short jetty.

When he arrived at his office, Kevin McBride was waiting for him and his face was gloomy. "Our friend has been in touch," he said. "In a rage and a panic. He thinks he is being stalked."

Devereaux thought, not of the complainant, but of Fleming at the FBI. "Damn the man," he said. "Damn and blast him to hell. I never thought he'd do it and certainly not this fast."

22 The peninsula

There was a secure computer link between a guarded enclave on the shore of the Republic of San Martin and a machine in McBride's office. Like Washington Lee, it used the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) system of unbreakable cybercodes to keep communications from prying eyes; the difference was that this one had authority.

Devereaux studied the full text of the message from the south. It had clearly been written by the estate's head of security, the South African Van Rensberg. The English was overformal, as of one using their second language.

The meaning was clear enough. It described the Piper Cheyenne of the previous morning; its double pass, heading eastward toward French Guiana and then back again twenty minutes later. It reported the flash of sunlight off a camera lens in the right-hand window and even the registration number when it passed too low over the mountain pass in the escarpment. "Kevin, trace that aircraft. I need to know who owns it, who operates it, who flew it yesterday, and who was the passenger. And hurry."

In his anonymous apartment in Brooklyn, Cal Dexter had developed his seventy-two frames and blown them up to prints as large as he could before losing too much definition. From the same original negatives he had also made slides that he could project onto the wall screen for closer study. From the prints he had created, a single wall map running the length of the living room and from ceiling to floor. He sat for hours studying the wall, checking occasionally on a small detail with the appropriate slide. Each slide gave better and clearer detail, but only the wall gave the entire target. Whoever had been in charge of the project had spent millions and made of that once-empty peninsula a fearsome and ingenious fortress.

Nature had helped. The tongue of land was quite different from the hinterland of steamy jungle that made up much of the small republic. It jutted out from the main shore like a triangular dagger blade, but it was guarded on its landward side by the chain of hills that some primeval force had thrown up millions of years ago. The chain ran from the sea to the sea, and at each end dropped to the blue water in vertical cliffs. No one would ever walk round the ends to stroll from the jungle onto the peninsula.

On the landward side, the hills climbed gently from the littoral plain to about a thousand feet, with slopes covered in dense vegetation. Over the crests, on the seaward side, the slope was a vertiginous escarpment, denuded of any foliage, whether by nature or the hand of man. From the estate, anyone with binoculars looking up at the escarpment would easily see anything trying to descend onto the forbidden side.

There was one single col, or mountain pass, in the chain. A narrow track ran up to it from the hinterland then twisted and turned down the escarpment until it reached the estate below. In the mountain pass was a barrier and guardhouse, which Dexter had seen too late as it flashed below his window.

Dexter began to make a list of the equipment he would need. Getting in would not be a problem. It was getting out, bringing the target with him, and against a goodsized force of armed guards, *that* would be close to impossible.

"It belongs to a oneplane, one-man charter firm based at Georgetown, Guyana," said Kevin McBride that evening. "Lawrence Aero Enterprises, owned and run by George Lawrence, Guyanese citizen. It looks perfectly legitimate, the sort foreigners can charter to fly into the interiorÉor along the coast in this case."

"Is there a number for this Mr. Lawrence?" asked Devereaux.

"Sure. Here."

"Did you try to contact him?"

"No. The line would have to be open. And why would he discuss a client with a complete stranger on the phone? He might just tip the client off."

"You're right. You'll have to go. Use scheduled flights. Have Cassandra get you on the first flight. Trace Mr. Lawrence. Pay him if you have to. Find out who our inquisitive friend with the camera was and why he was there. Do we have a station in Georgetown?"

"No, next door. Caracas."

"Use Caracas for secure communications. I'll clear it with the station chief."

Studying his wallsized photo montage, Cal Dexter's eye moved from the escarpment into the peninsula known simply as El Punto. Running along the base of the escarpment wall was a runway, taking up two-thirds of the fifteen hundred yards available. On the estate side of the runway was a chain-link fence that enclosed the entire airfield, hangar, workshops, fuel store, generator house, and all.

Using a pair of compasses and estimating the hangar length at one hundred feet, Dexter was able to start calculating and marking distances between points. These put the cultivated farmland at around three thousand acres. It was clear that centuries of windborne dust and bird droppings had created a rich soil, for he could see grazing herds and a variety of lush crops. Whoever had created El Punto had gone for complete self-sufficiency behind the ramparts of escarpment and ocean. The irrigation problem was solved by a glittering stream that erupted from the base of the hills and flowed through the estate before tumbling in a cataract into the sea. It could only originate in the high inland plateau and flow through the protective wall in an underground flue. Dexter noted the words: "Swim in?" Later he would cross them out. Without a rehearsal, it would be crazy to attempt a passage through an unknown underground tunnel. He recalled the terror inspired by crawling through the water traps of the tunnels of Cu Chi, and they were only a few yards long. This one could be miles, and he did not even know where it began.

At the base of the runway, beyond the wire, he could see a settlement of perhaps five hundred small white blocks, clearly dwelling units of some kind. There were dirt streets, some larger buildings for mess halls, and a small church. It was a village of sorts; but it was odd that, even with the men away in the fields and barns, there were no women or children on the streets. No gardens, no livestock. More like a penal colony. Perhaps those who served the man he sought had little choice in the matter.

He turned his attention to the main body of the agricultural estate. This contained all the cultivated fields, the flocks, barns, granaries, and a second settlement of low, white buildings. But a uniformed man standing outside indicated these were barracks for the security staff, guards, and overseers. By the look and the number and the size of the quarters, and the likely occupancy rate, he put the guards alone at around one hundred. There were five more substantial villas, with gardens, apparently for the senior officers and flight personnel.

The photographs and the slides were serving their purpose, but he needed two things more. One was a concept of three dimensions; the other was a knowledge of routines and procedures. The first would need a scale model of the whole peninsula; the second would require days of silent observation.

Kevin McBride flew the next morning from Dulles direct to Georgetown, Guyana, landing at 2:00 P.M. Formalities at the airport were simple, and with only a suitcase for a one-night stay, he was soon in a taxi.

Lawrence Aero Enterprises was not hard to find. Its small office was in a back alley off Waterloo Street. The American knocked several times, but there was no reply. The moist heat was beginning to drench his shirt. He peered through the dusty window and rapped again.

"Ain't no one there, man," said a helpful voice behind him. The speaker was old and gnarled; he sat a few doors away in a patch of deep shade and fanned himself with a disc of palm leaves.

"I'm looking for George Lawrence," said the American.

"You Briddish?"

"American."

The old-timer considered this as if the availability of charter pilot Lawrence was entirely down to nationality.

"Friend of yours?"

"No. I was thinking of chartering his plane for a flight, if I can find him."

"Ain't been there since yesterday," said the old man. "Not since they took him away."

"Who took him away, my friend?"

The old man shrugged, as if the abduction of neighbours was usual enough.

"The police?"

"No. Not them. They were white. Came in a rental car."

"TouristsÉclients?" asked McBride.

"Maybe," admitted the sage. Then he had an idea. "You could try the airport. He keeps his plane there."

Fifteen minutes later, a sweatdrenched Kevin McBride was heading back to the airport. At the desk for private aviation he asked for George Lawrence. Instead he met Floyd Evans. Inspector Evans of the Georgetown Police Department.

He was taken back downtown yet again, this time in a patrol car, and was shown into an office where the airconditioning was like a longdelayed cold bath and delicious. Inspector Evans toyed with his passport.

"What exactly are you doing in Guyana, Mr. McBride?" he asked.

"I was hoping to pay a short visit with a view to bringing my wife on vacation later," said the agent.

"In August? The salamanders shelter in August down here. Do you know Mr. Lawrence?"

"Well, no. I have a pal in Washington. He gave me the name. Said I might like to fly into the interior. Said Mr. Lawrence was about the best charter pilot. I just went to his office to see if he was available for charter. That's all. What did I do wrong?"

The inspector closed the passport and handed it back. "You arrived from Washington today. That seems clear enough. Your tickets and entry stamp confirm it. The Meridien Hotel confirms your one-night reservation."

"Look, Inspector, I still don't understand why I was brought here. Do you know where I can find George Lawrence?"

"Oh yes. Yes, he's in the mortuary down at our general hospital. Apparently he was taken from his office yesterday by three men in a rented 4 X 4. They checked it back in last night and flew out. Do these three names mean anything to you, Mr. McBride?" He passed a slip of paper over the desk. McBride glanced at the three names, all of which he knew to be false because he had issued them.

"No, sorry, they mean nothing to me. Why is Mr. Lawrence in the morgue?"

"Because he was found at dawn today by a vegetable seller coming to market, dead in a ditch by the roadside just out of town. You, of course, were still in the air."

"That's awful. I never met him, but I'm sorry."

"Yes, it is. We have lost our charter pilot. Mr. Lawrence lost his life and, as it happens, eight of his fingernails. His office has been gutted, and all records of past clients removed. What do you think his captors wanted of him, Mr. McBride?"

"I have no idea."

"Of course, I forgot. You are just a travelling salesman, are you not? Then I suggest you travel back home to the States, Mr. McBride. You are free to go."

"These people are animals," protested McBride to Devereaux down the secure line from Caracas Station to Langley.

"Come on home, Kevin," said his superior. "I'll ask our friend in the south what, if anything, he discovered."

Paul Devereaux had long cultivated a contact inside the FBI on the grounds that no man in his line of business could ever have too many sources of information and the Bureau was not likely to share with him the very gems that would constitute true brotherly love.

He had asked his "asset" to check in the archive database for files withdrawn by Assistant Director (Investigative Division) Colin Fleming since the request from on high had circulated regarding a murdered boy in Bosnia. Among the withdrawals was one marked simply AVENGER. Kevin McBride, weary and travel stained, arrived home the following morning.

Paul Devereaux was in his office as early as usual and crisply laundered. He handed a file to his subordinate. "That's him," he said, "our interloper. I spoke with our friend in the south. Of course, it was three of his thugs who brutalised the charter pilot. And you were right. They are animals. But right now they are vital animals. Pity, but unavoidable."

He tapped the file. "Code name Avenger. Age around fifty. Height, buildÉit's all in the file. There is a brief description. Now masquerading as U. S. citizen Alfred Barnes. That was the man who chartered the deeply unfortunate Mr. Lawrence to fly him over our friend's hacienda. And there is no Alfred Barnes matching that description on State Department files as a U. S. passport holder. Find him, Kevin, and stop him. In his tracks."

"I hope you don't mean terminate."

"No, that is forbidden. I mean, identify. If he uses one false name, he may have others. Find the one he will try to use to enter San Martin. Then inform the appalling but efficient Colonel Moreno in San Martin. I am sure he can be relied on to do what has to be done."

Kevin McBride retired to his own office to read the file. He already knew the chief of the secret police of the Republic of San Martin. Any opponent of the dictator falling into his hands would die, probably slowly. He read the Avenger file with his habitual great care.

Over two hundred miles away, in New York City, the passport of Alfred Barnes was consigned to the flames. Dexter had not a clue or shred of proof that he had been seen, but as he and charter pilot Lawrence had flown over the mountain pass in the sierra, he had been jolted to see a face staring up at him, close enough to take the Cessna's number. So, just in case, Alfred Barnes ceased to exist.

That done, he began to build his model of the fortress hacienda. Across the city, in downtown Manhattan, Mrs. Nguyen Van Tran was myopically poring over three new passports.

It was August 3, 2001.

23 The voice

If it is not available in New York, it probably doesn't exist. Cal Dexter used a lumber shop to create a trestle table with a top of inch-thick ply that almost filled his living room.

Art shops furnished enough paints to create the sea and the land in ten different hues. Green baize from fabric shops made fields and meadows. Wooden building blocks were used for scores of houses and barns; Model Makers Emporium provided balsa wood, fastdrying glue, and pasteon designs of brickwork, doors, and windows.

The runaway Serb's mansion at the tip of the peninsula was made of LEGO from a children's store, and the rest of the landscape was down to a magical warehouse providing for model railway enthusiasts.

Railway modellers want entire landscapes, with hills and valleys, cuttings and tunnels, farms and grazing animals. Within three days Dexter had fashioned the entire hacienda to scale. All he could not see was what was out of sight to his airborne camera: booby traps, pitfalls, the work force, security locks, gate chains, the full strength of the private army, their equipment, and all interiors.

It was a long list and most of the queries on it could only be solved by days of patient observation. Still, he had decided his way in, his battle plan, and his way out. He went on a buying spree.

Boots, jungle clothing, K-rations, cutters, the world's most powerful binoculars, a new cell phoneÉHe filled a haversack that finally weighed close to eighty pounds. And then there was more; for some he had to go out of state to places in the United States with more lax laws, for others he had to dive into the underworld, and others were quite legal but raised eyebrows. By August 10th, he was ready and so were his first ID papers.

"Spare a moment, Paul?"

Kevin McBride's yeoman face came around the edge of the door and Devereaux beckoned him in. His deputy brought with him a large-scale map of the northern coast of South America, from Venezuela east to French Guiana. He spread it out and tapped the triangle between the Commini and Maroni Rivers, the Republic of San Martin.

"I figure he'll go in by the overland route," said McBride.

"Take the air route. San Martin City has the only airport, and it is small. Served only twice daily and then only by local airlines coming from Cayenne to the east or Paramaribo to the west." His finger stabbed at the capitals of French Guiana and Suriname.

"It's such a god-awful place politically that hardly any businessmen go and no tourists. Our man is white, American, and we have his approximate height and build, both from the file and from what that charter pilot described before he died. Colonel Moreno's goons would have him within minutes of debarkation. More to the point, he'd have to have a valid visa and that means visiting San Martin's only two consulates: Paramaribo and Caracas. I don't think he'll try the airport."

"No dispute. But Moreno should still put it under night and day surveillance. He might try a private plane," said Devereaux.

"I'll brief him on that. Next, the sea. There is just one port; San Martin City again. No tourist craft ever puts in there, just freighters and not many of them. The crews are Indians, Filipinos, or Creoles; he'd stand out like a sore thumb if he tried to come in openly as a crewman or passenger."

"He could come in off the sea in a fast inflatable."

"Possible, but that would have to have been hired or bought in either French Guiana or Suriname. Or he could be dropped offshore from a freighter whose captain he has bribed for the job. He could motor in from twenty miles off the coast, dump the inflatable, puncture it, sink it. Then what?"

"What indeed?" murmured Devereaux.

"I figure he will need equipment, a heavy load of it. Where does he make landfall? There are no beaches along San Martin's coast, except here at La Bahia. But that's full of the villas of the rich with bodyguards, night watchmen, and dogs.

"Apart from that, the coast is tangled mangrove, infested with snakes and crocodiles. How is he to march through all that? If he gets to the main east-west road, what then? I don't think it's on, even for a Green Beret."

"Could he land off the sea right on our friend's peninsula?"

"No, Paul, he couldn't. It's girded on all seaward sides by cliffs and pounding surf. Even if he got up the cliffs with grappling irons, the roaming dogs would hear the noise and have him."

"So he comes in by land. From which end?"

McBride used his forefinger again. "I reckon from the west, from Suriname, on the passenger ferry across the Commini, straight into the San Martin border post, on four wheels, with false papers."

"He'd still need a San Martin visa, Kevin."

"And where better to get it than right there in Suriname, one of the only two consulates they run? I reckon that's the logical place for him to acquire his car and his visa."

"So what's your plan?"

"The Suriname Embassy here in Washington and the consulate in Miami. He'll need a visa to get in there as well. I want to put them both on full alert to go back a week, and from now on pass me details of every single applicant for a tourist visa. Then I check every one with the passport section at State."

"You're putting all your eggs in one basket, Kevin."

"Not really. Colonel Moreno and his Ojos Negros can cover the eastern border, the airport, the docks, and the coast. I'd like to back my hunch our interloper will logically try to get all his kit into San Martin by car out of Suriname. It's far and away the busiest crossing point."

Devereaux smiled at McBride's attempt at Spanish. The San Martin Secret Police were known as "Black Eyes" because they and their wraparound black sunglasses struck terror into the peons of San Martin. He thought of all the U. S. aid heading in that direction. There was no doubt the Suriname Embassy would cooperate to the full.

"OK, I like it. Go for it. But hurry."

McBride was puzzled. "We have a deadline, boss?"

"Tighter than you know, my friend."

The port of Wilmington, Delaware, is one of the largest and busiest on the East Coast of the United States. High at the top of the long Delaware Bay that leads from the river to the Atlantic, it has miles of sheltered water, which, apart from taking the big ocean liners, also plays host to thousands of small coastal freighters.

The Carib Coast Ship and Freight Company was an agency handling cargoes for scores of such smaller ships and the visit of Mr. Ronald Proctor caused no surprise. He was friendly, charming, convincing, and his rented U-Haul pickup was right outside with the crate in the rear.

The freight clerk who handled his enquiry had no reason to doubt his veracity, all the more so when, in response to the query, "Do you have documentation, sir?" he produced precisely that.

His passport was not only in perfect order, it was a diplomatic passport at that. Supporting letters and movement orders from the State Department proved that Ronald Proctor, a professional U. S. diplomat, was being transferred to his country's embassy in Paramaribo, Suriname.

"We have a cost-free allowance, of course, but what with my wife's passion for collecting things on our travels, I fear we're one crate over the limit. I'm sure you know what wives are like? Boy, can they collect stuff."

"Tell me about it," agreed the clerk. Few things bond male strangers like commiserating about their wives. "We have a freighter heading down to Miami, Caracas, and Parbo in two days."

He gave the capital of Suriname its shorter and more common name. The consignment was agreed and paid for. The crate would be seaborne within two days and in a bonded warehouse by Parbo docks by the twentieth. Being diplomatic cargo, it would be customs exempt when Mr. Proctor called to collect it.

The Suriname Embassy in Washington is at 4301 Connecticut Avenue, and it was there that Kevin McBride flashed his identity as a senior officer of the Central Intelligence Agency and sat down with an impressed consular official in charge of the visa section. It was probably not the busiest diplomatic office in Washington, and one man handled all visa applications.

"We believe he deals in drugs and consorts with terrorists," said the CIA man. "So far he remains very shady. His name is not important because he will certainly apply, if at all, under a false identity. But we do believe he may try to slip into Suriname as a way of cutting across to Guyana and thence to rejoin his cronies in Venezuela."

"You have a photo of him?" asked the official.

"Alas, not yet," said McBride. "That is where we hope you might be able to help us if he comes here. We have a description of him."

He slipped a sheet of paper across the desk with a short, two-line description of a man of about fifty; five feet, eight inches; compact; muscular build; blue eyes; sandy hair.

McBride left with photocopies of the nineteen applications for visas to Suriname that had been lodged and granted in the previous week. Within three days all had been checked out as legitimate U. S. citizens whose details and passport photos lodged with the State Department fully matched those presented to the Suriname Consulate.

If the elusive Avenger of the file Devereaux had ordered him to memorise was going to show up, he had not done so yet.

In truth, McBride was in the wrong consulate. Suriname is not large and certainly not rich. It maintains consulates in Washington and Miami, plus Munich (but not in the German capital of Berlin) and two in the former colonial power, the Netherlands. One is in The Hague, but the bigger office is at 11 De Cuserstraat, Amsterdam.

It was in this office that Ms. Amelie Dykstra, a locally recruited Dutch lady paid for by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was being so helpful to the visa applicant before her.

"You are British, Mr. Nash?"

The passport she had in her hand showed that Mr. Henry Nash was indeed British, and his profession was that of businessman.

"What is the purpose of your visit to Suriname?" asked Ms. Dykstra.

"My company develops new tourist outlets, notably resort hotels in coastal situations," said the Englishman. "I am hoping to see if there are any openings in your country, well, Suriname, that is, before moving on to Venezuela."

"You should see the Ministry of Tourism," said the Dutch girl, who had never been to Suriname.

From what Cal Dexter had researched about that malarial coast, such a ministry was likely to be an exercise in optimism over reality.

"Precisely my intention, as soon as I get there, dear lady."

He pleaded a last flight waiting at Schiphol Airport, paid his thirty-five guilders, got his visa, and left. In truth, his plane was not for London but for New York.

McBride headed south again, to Miami and Suriname. A car from San Martin met the CIA officer at Parbo airport and he was driven east to the Commini River crossing point. The Ojos Negros who escorted him simply drove to the head of the queue, commandeered the ferry, and paid no toll to cross to the San Martin side.

During the crossing, McBride stepped out of the car to watch the sluggish brown liquid passing down to the aquamarine sea, but the haze of mosquitoes and the drenching heat drove him back to the interior of the Mercedes and its welcome cool air. The secret policemen sent by Colonel Moreno permitted themselves wintry smiles at such stupidity. But behind the black glasses, their eyes were blank.

It was forty miles over bumpy, potholed, road from the river border to San Martin City. The road ran through jungle on both sides. Somewhere to the left of the road, the jungle would give way to the swamps, the swamps to the mangrove tangle, and eventually to the inaccessible sea. To the right the dense rain forest ran away inland, rising gently, to the confluence of the Commini and the Maroni, and thence into Brazil. *A man*, thought McBride, *could be lost in there within half a mile*. Occasionally he saw a track running off the road and into the bush, no doubt to some small farm or plantation not far from the road. Down the highway they passed a few vehicles, mostly pickups or battered Land Rovers clearly used by better-off farmers and occasionally a cyclist with a basket of produce above the rear wheel, his livelihood on its way to market.

There were a dozen small villages along the journey, and the man from Washington was struck at the different ethnic type of the San Martin peasant from those one republic back. There was a reason. All the other colonial powers, conquering and trying to settle virtually empty landscapes, planted their estates and then looked for a labour force. The local Indios took one peek at what was in store and vaporised into the jungle.

Most of the colonialists imported African slaves from the properties they already owned or traded with along the West African coast. The descendants of these, usually mixing the genes with the Indios and whites, had created the modern populations. But the Spanish Empire was almost totally New World, not African. They did not have an easy source of black slaves, but they did have millions of landless Mexican peons; and the distance from Yucatan to Spanish Guiana was much shorter.

The wayside peasants McBride was seeing through the windows of the Mercedes were walnu-thued from the sun, but they were not black nor Creole. The whole labour force of San Martin was still genetically Hispanic.

When Shakespeare's Caesar expressed the wish to have fat men around him, he presumed they would be jolly and amiable. He was not thinking of Col. Hernan Moreno.

The man who was credited with keeping the gaudy and massively decorated President Munoz in the palace on the hill behind the capital of this last banana republic was fat like a brooding toad, but he was not jolly. The torments practised on those he suspected of sedition, or to be in possession of details of such people, were hinted at only in the lowest whispers and the darkest corners.

There was a place, up-country it was rumoured, for such things, and no one ever came back. Dumping cadavers at sea, like the secret police of Galtieri in Argentina, was not necessary; it was not even required to break a sweat with a shovel and pick. A naked body pegged out in the jungle would attract fire ants, and fire ants can do to soft tissue in a night what normal nature needs months or years to achieve.

He knew the man from Langley was coming and chose to offer him lunch at the yacht club. It was the best restaurant in town, certainly the most exclusive, and it was located at the base of the harbour wall facing out over a glittering blue sea. More to the point, the sea winds at last triumphed over the stench of the back streets.

Unlike his employer, the secret police chief avoided ostentation, uniforms, medals, and glitz; his pinguid frame was encased in a black shirt and black suit. If there had been a hint of nobility in his features, thought the CIA man, he might have resembled Orson Welles toward the end. But the face was more Hermann Goering.

Nevertheless, his grip on the small and impoverished country was absolute, and he listened without interruption. He knew exactly the relationship between the refugee from Yugoslavia who had sought sanctuary in San Martin and now lived in an enviable mansion at the end of a piece of property Moreno himself hoped one day to acquire, as did the president. He knew of the huge wealth of the refugee and the annual fee he paid to President Munoz for sanctuary and protection, even though that protection was really provided by himself.

What he did not know was why a very senior hierarchy in Washington had chosen to bring together the refugee and the tyrant. It mattered not. The Serb had spent over five million dollars building his mansion and another ten on his estate. Despite the inevitable imports to achieve such a feat, half that money had been spent inside San Martin, with tidy percentages going to Colonel Moreno on every contract.

More directly, Moreno took a fee for providing the slave labour force and keeping the numbers topped off with fresh arrests and detainees. So long as no peon ever escaped or came back alive, it was a lucrative and safe arrangement. The CIA man did not need to beg for his cooperation.

"If he sets one foot inside San Martin," he wheezed, "I will have him. You will not see him again, but every piece of information he divulges will be passed on to you. On that you have my word."

On his way back to the river crossing and the waiting plane at Parbo, McBride thought of the mission the unseen bounty hunter had set himself; he thought of the defences, and the price of failure-death at the hands of Colonel Moreno and his Black-Eyed experts in pain. He shuddered, and it was not from the air-conditioning.

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, Calvin Dexter did not need to return to Pennington to collect any messages left on the answering machine attached to his office telephone. He could make the collections from a public phone booth in Brooklyn. He did so on August 15th. The cluster of messages were mainly from voices he knew before the speaker identified himself. Neighbours, legal clients, local businessmen, mainly wishing him a happy fishing vacation and asking when he would be back at his desk.

It was the second to last message that almost caused him to drop the phone, to stare, unseeing, at the traffic rushing past the glass of the booth. When he had replaced the handset, he walked for an hour trying to work out how it had happened, who had leaked his name and business, and, most important of all, whether the anonymous voice was that of a friend or a betrayer.

The voice did not identify the speaker. It was flat, monotone, as if coming through several layers of paper tissue. It said simply: "Avenger, be careful. They know you are coming."

24 The Plan

When Prof. Medvers Watson left the Surinamese consul the official was feeling slightly breathless, so much so, he very nearly excluded the academic from the list of visa applicants he was sending to Kevin McBride at a private address in the city.

"*Callicore maronensis*," beamed the professor when asked for the reason he wished to visit Suriname. The consul looked blank. Seeing his perplexity, Professor Watson delved into his attachŽ case and produced Andrew Neild's masterwork: *The Butterflies of Venezuela*.

"It's been seen, you know. Unbelievable."

He whipped open the reference work at a page of coloured photographs of butterflies that, to the consul, looked pretty similar, barring slight variations of marking to the back wings.

"One of the *Limenitidinae*, you know. Sub-family, of course. Like the *Charaxinae*. Both derived from the *Nymphalidae*."

The bewildered consul found himself being educated in the descending order of family, sub-family, genus, species, and sub-species.

"But what do you want to do about them?" asked the consul. Prof. Medvers Watson closed his almanack with a snap. "Photograph them, my dear sir. Find them and photograph them. Apparently there has been a sighting. Until now the *Agrias narcissus* was about as rare as it gets in the jungles of your hinterlands, but the *Callicore maronensis*? Now that would make history. That is why I must go without delay. The autumn monsoon, you know. Not far off."

The consul stared at the U. S. passport. Stamps for Venezuela were frequent. Others for Brazil, Guyana. He unfolded the letter on the headed paper of the Smithsonian Institution. Professor Watson was warmly endorsed by the head of the Department of Entomology, Division Lepidoptera. He nodded slowly. Science, environment, ecology, these were the things not to be gainsaid or denied in the modern world. He stamped the visa and handed back the passport.

Professor Watson did not ask for the letter, so it stayed on the desk.

"Well, good hunting," the consul said weakly.

Two days later Kevin McBride walked into the office of Paul Devereaux with a broad smile on his face. "I think we have him," he said. He laid down a completed application form of the type issued by the Suriname Consulate and filled out by the applicant for a visa. A passport-sized photo stared up from the page.

Devereaux read through the details. "So?"

McBride laid a letter beside the form. Devereaux read that as well. "And?"

"And he's a phoney. There is no U. S. passport holder in the name of Medvers Watson. State Department is adamant on that. He should have picked a more common name. This one sticks out like a sore thumb. The scholars at the Smithsonian have never heard of him. No one in the butterfly world has ever heard of Medvers Watson."

Devereaux stared at the picture of the man who had tried to ruin his covert operation and thus had become, albeit unwittingly, his enemy. The eyes looked owlish behind the glasses, and the straggly goatee weakened instead of strengthened the face.

"Well done, Kevin. Brilliant strategy. But then, it worked; and of course all that works becomes brilliant. Every detail immediately to Colonel Moreno in San Martin, if you please. He may move quickly."

"And the Suriname government in Parbo."

"No, not them. No need to disturb their slumbers."

"Paul, they could arrest him the moment he flies into Parbo airport. Our embassy boys could confirm the passport is a forgery. The Surinamese can charge him with passport fraud and put him on the next plane back with two of our marines as escort. We arrest him on touchdown, and he's in the slammer, out of harm's way."

"Kevin, listen to me. I know it's rough, and I know the reputation of Moreno. But if our man has a big stack of dollars, he could elude arrest in Suriname. Back here he could bail within a day, then skip."

"But, Paul, Moreno is an animal. You wouldn't send your worst enemy into his gripÉ"

"And you don't know how important the Serb is to all of us. Nor his paranoia. Nor how tight his schedule may be. He has to know the danger to himself is over, totally eliminated, or he will bow out of what I need him for."

"And you still can't tell me?"

"Sorry, Kevin. No, not yet."

His deputy shrugged, unhappy but obedient. "OK, on your conscience, not mine."

And that was the problem, thought Paul Devereaux when he was once again alone in his office staring out at the thick green foliage between him and the Potomac. Could he square his conscience with what he was doing? He had to. The lesser evil, the greater good.

The unknown man with the false passport would not die easily, "upon the midnight with no pain." But he had chosen to swim in hideously dangerous waters, and it had been his decision to do so.

That day, August 18th, America sweltered in the summer heat, and half the country sought relief in the seas, rivers, lakes, and mountains. Down on the north coast of South America there was 100 percent humidity sweeping in from the steaming jungles behind the coast, adding ten more degrees to the hundred caused by the sun.

In Parbo docks, ten miles up the teak-brown Suriname River from the sea, the heat was like a tangible blanket lying over the warehouses and quays. The pye-dogs tried to find the deepest shade to pant away the hours until sundown. Humans sat under slow-moving fans, which merely moved the discomfort around a bit.

The foolish tossed down sugary drinks, sodas and colas, which merely made the thirst and dehydration worse. The experienced stayed with piping hot, sweet tea, which may sound crazy but was discovered by the British empire builders two centuries earlier to be the best rehydrator of them all.

The fifteen-hundred-ton freighter, *Tobago Star*, crept up the river, docked at her assigned pier, and waited for dark. In the cooler dusk, she discharged her cargo, which included a bonded crate in the name of U. S. diplomat Ronald Proctor. This went into a chain-link fenced section of the warehouse to await collection.

Paul Devereaux had spent years studying terrorism in general and the types that emanated from the Arab and Muslim world, not necessarily the same type in particular. He had long come to the conclusion that the conventional whine in the West, that terrorism stemmed from the poverty and destitution of those whom Fanon had called "the wretched of the earth" was convenient and politically correct psychobabble.

From the anarchists of tsarist Russia to the IRA of 1916, from the Irgun and the Stern Gang to the EOKA in Cyprus, from the BaaderMeinhof group in Germany, the CCC in Belgium, the Action Directe in France, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction again in Germany, the Rengo Sekigun in Japan, through to the Shining Path in Peru to the modern IRA in Ulster or the ETA in Spain, terrorism came from the minds of the comfortably raised, welleducated, middle-class theorists with a truly staggering personal vanity and a developed taste for self-indulgence.

In the Devereaux theory, those who could order another to plant a bomb in a food hall and gloat over the resultant images all had one thing in common. They possessed a fearsome capacity for hatred. This was the genetic "given." The hatred came first; the target could come later and usually did.

The motive also came second to the capacity to hate. It might be the Bolshevik Revolution, national liberation, or a thousand variants thereof, from amalgamation to secession; it might be anticapitalist fervour; it might be religious exaltation.

But the hatred came first, then the cause, then the target, then the methods, and finally the self-justification. And Lenin's "useful dupes" always swallowed it.

Devereaux was utterly convinced that the leadership of Al Qaeda ran precisely true to form. Its cofounders were a construction millionaire from Saudi Arabia and a qualified doctor from Cairo. It mattered not whether their hatred of Americans and Jews was secular based or religiously fueled. There was nothing, absolutely nothing that America or Israel could do, short of complete self-annihilation, that would even begin to appease or satisfy them.

None of them, for him, cared a damn for the Palestinians save as vehicles and justifications. They hated his country, not for what it did, but for what it was.

He recalled the old British spy chief in the window table at White's as the left-wing demonstrators went by. Apart from the usual snowy-haired British socialists who could never quite get over the death of Lenin, there were the British boys and girls who would one day get a mortgage and vote Conservative, and there were the torrents of students from the Third World.

"They'll never forgive you, dear boy," the old man had said. "Never expect it, and you'll never be disappointed. Your country is a constant reproach. It is rich to their poor, strong to their weak, vigorous to their idle, enterprising to their reactionaries, ingenious to their bewildered, can-do to their sit-and-wait, thrusting to their timid.

"It only needs one demagogue to arise and shout, 'Everything the Americans have they stole from you,' and they'll believe it. Like Shakespeare's Caliban, their zealots stare in the mirror and roar in rage at what they see. That rage becomes hatred; the hatred needs a target. The working class of the Third World does not hate you; it is the pseudo-intellectuals. If they ever forgive you, they must indict themselves. So far their hatred lacks the weaponry. One day they will acquire that weaponry. Then you will have to fight or die. Not in tens but in tens of thousands."

Thirty years down the line, Devereaux was sure the old Brit had got it right. After Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Yemen, his country was in a new war and did not know it.

The Jesuit had asked for the front line and got it. Now he had to do something with his command. His response was "Project Peregrine." He did not intend to seek to negotiate with UBL, nor even respond after the next strike. He intended to try to destroy his country's enemy before that strike. In Father Heaney's analogy, he intended to use his spear to lunge, before the knife tip came in range. This problem was: where? Not more or less, not "somewhere in Afghanistan," but where to ten yards by ten yards, and when to thirty minutes.

He knew a strike was coming. They all did. Dick Clarke at the White House, Tom Pickard at the Bureau headquarters in the Hoover Building, George Tenet one floor above his head at Langley. All the whispers out on the street said "a big one" was in preparation. It was the where, when, what, how, they did not know, and thanks to the crazy rules forbidding them to ask nasty people, they were not likely to find out. That, plus the refusal to collate what they did have.

Paul Devereaux was so disenchanted with the whole lot of them that he had prepared his Peregrine plan and would tell no one what it was. In his reading of tens of thousands of pages about terror in general and Al Qaeda in particular, one theme had come endlessly through the fog. The Islamist terrorists would not be satisfied with a few dead Americans from Mogadishu to Dar es Salaam. UBL would want hundreds of thousands. The prediction of the long-gone Britisher was coming true.

For those kind of figures, the Al Qaeda leadership would need a technology they did not yet have but endlessly sought to acquire. Devereaux knew that in the cave complexes of Afghanistan, which were not simply holes in rocks but subterranean labyrinths including laboratories, experiments had been started with germs and gases. But they were still miles from the methods of mass dissemination.

For Al Qaeda, as for all the terror groups in the world, there was one prize beyond rubies: fissionable material. Any one of at least a dozen killer groups would give their eye teeth, take crazy risks, to acquire the basic element of a nuclear device.

It would never have to be an ultramodern "clean" warhead; indeed, the more basic, the "dirtier" in radiation terms, the better. Even at the level of their inhouse scientists, the terrorists knew that enough fissionable element, jacketed within enough plastic explosive, would create enough lethal radiation over enough square miles to make a city the size of New York uninhabitable for a generation. And that would be apart from the three million people irradiated into an early cancerous grave.

It had been a decade, and the underground war had been costly and intense. So far the West, assisted by Moscow more recently, had won it and survived. Huge sums had been spent buying up any fragment of uranium 235 or plutonium that came near to private sale. Entire countries, former Soviet republics, had handed over every gram left behind by Moscow, and the local dictators, under the provisions of the Nunn-Lugar Act, had become very wealthy. But there was too much, far too much, quite simply missing.

Just after he founded his own tiny section in Counterterrorism at Langley, Paul Devereaux noticed two things. One was that a hundred pounds of pure, weapons-grade uranium 235 was lodged at the secret Vinca Institute in the heart of Belgrade. As soon as Milosevic fell, the United States began to negotiate its purchase. Just a third of it, thirty-three pounds or fifteen kilogrammes, would be enough for one bomb.

The other thing was that a vicious Serbian gangster and intimate at the court of Milosevic wanted out before the roof fell in. He needed "cover," new papers, protection, and a place to disappear to. Devereaux knew that place could never be the United States. But a banana republicÉDevereaux cut him a deal, and he cut him a price. The price was collaboration.

Before he quit Belgrade, a thumbnail-sized sample of uranium 235 was stolen from the Vinca Institute, and the records were changed to show that a full fifteen kilogrammes were really missing.

Six months earlier, introduced by the arms dealer, Vladimir Bout, the runaway Serb had handed over his sample and documentary proof that he possessed the remaining fifteen kilos.

The sample had gone to Al Qaeda's chemist and physicist, Abu Khabab, another highly educated and fanatical Egyptian. It had necessitated his leaving Afghanistan and quietly travelling to Iraq to secure the equipment he needed to test the sample properly.

In Iraq, another nuclear program was underway. It also sought weaponsgrade uranium 235, but was making it the slow, old-fashioned way, with calutrons like the ones used in 1945 at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The sample caused great excitement.

Just four weeks before the circulation of that damnable report compiled by a Canadian magnate concerning his longdead grandson, word had come through that Al Qaeda would deal. Devereaux had to force himself to stay very calm.

For his killing machine, he had wanted to use an unmanned, high-altitude drone called the Predator, but it had crashed just outside Afghanistan. Its wreckage was now back in the United States, but the hitherto unarmed UAV was being "weaponized" by the fitting of a Hellfire missile so that it could in future, not only see a target from the stratosphere, but blow it to bits as well. But the conversion would take too long. Paul Devereaux revamped his plan, but he had to delay it while different weaponry was put in place. Only when they were ready could the Serb accept the invitation to journey to Peshawar, Pakistan, there to meet with Kawaheri, Atef, Zubaydah, and the physicist Abu Khabab. He would carry with him fifteen kilos of uranium, but not weapons grade. Yellowcake would do, normal reactor fuel, isotope 235, 3 percent, refined, not the needed 88 percent.

At the crucial meeting, Zoran Zilic was going to pay for all the favours he had been accorded. If he did not, he would be destroyed by a single phone call to Pakistan 's lethal and pro-Al Qaeda secret service, the ISI. He would suddenly double the price and threaten to leave if his new price was not met. Devereaux was gambling there was only one man who could make that decision, and he would have to be consulted.

Far away in Afghanistan, UBL would have to take that phone call. High above, rolling in space, a listener satellite linked to the National Security Agency would hear the call and pinpoint its destination to a place ten feet by ten feet.

Would the man at the Afghan end wait around? Could he contain his curiosity to learn whether he had just become the owner of enough uranium to fulfil his most deadly dreams?

Off the Baluchi coast, the nuclear sub USS * Columbia * would open her hatches to emit a single Tomahawk cruise missile. Even as it flew, it would be programmed by the Global Positioning System (GPS) plus Terrain Contour Matching (TERCOM) and Digital Scene Matching Area Correlation (DSMAC).

Three navigational systems would guide it to that hundred-square-foot target and blow the entire area containing the mobile phone to pieces, including the man waiting for his callback from Peshawar. For Devereaux, the problem was time. The moment when Zoran would have to leave for Peshawar, pausing at Ra's al Khaymah to pick up the Russian, was moving ever closer. He could not afford to let Zoran panic and withdraw on the grounds that he was a hunted man and thus their deal was null and void. Avenger had to be stopped and probably destroyed. Lesser evil, greater good.

It was August 20th. A man descended from the Dutch KLM airliner straight in from Curaao to Paramaribo airport. It was not Prof. Medvers Watson, for whom a reception committee waited further down the coast.

It was not even the U. S. diplomat, Ronald Proctor, for whom a crate waited at the docks.

It was the British resort-developer, Henry Nash. With his Amsterdam-delivered visa, he passed effortlessly through Customs and Immigration and took a taxi into town. It would have been tempting to book in at the Torarica, far and away the best hotel in town. But he might have met real Britishers there, so he went to the Krasnopolsky on the Dominiestraat. His room was on the top floor, with a balcony facing east. The sun was behind him when he went out for a look over the city. The extra height gave a hint of breeze to make the dusk bearable. Far to the east, seventy miles away and over the river, the jungles of San Martin were waiting.