Avenger

25 The jungle

It was the American diplomat, Ronald Proctor, who leased the car. It was not even from an established agency but from a private seller advertising in the local paper.

The Cherokee was secondhand but in good repair and with a bit of work and a thorough service, which its U. S. Armytrained new owner intended to give it, it would do what it had to.

The deal he made the vendor was simple and sweet. He would pay ten thousand dollars in cash. He would only need the vehicle for a month, until his own 4X4 came through from the States. If he returned it absolutely intact in thirty days, the vendor would take it back and reimburse five thousand dollars.

The seller was looking at an effortfree five thousand dollars in a month. Given that the man facing him was a charming American diplomat, and the Cherokee might come back in thirty days, it seemed foolish to go through all the trouble of changing the documents. Why alert the tax man? Proctor also rented the lockup garage and storage shed behind the flower and produce market. Finally, he went to the docks and signed for his single crate, which went into the garage to be carefully unpacked and repacked in two canvas knapsacks. Then Ronald Proctor simply ceased to exist.

In Washington, Paul Devereaux was gnawed by anxiety and curiosity as the days dragged by. Where was this man? Had he used his visa and entered Suriname? Was he on his way?

The easy way to indulge the temptation would be to ask the Suriname authorities directly, via the U. S. Embassy on Redmondstraat, but that would trigger Surinamese curiosity. They would want to know why. They would pick him up themselves and start asking questions. The man called Avenger could arrange to be set free and start again. The Serb, already becoming paranoid at the thought of going to Peshawar, could panic and call the deal off. So Devereaux paced and prowled and waited.

Down in Paramaribo the tiny consulate of San Martin had been tipped off by Colonel Moreno that an American pretending to be a collector of butterflies might apply for a visa. It was to be granted immediately, and he was to be informed at once.

But no one called Medvers Watson appeared. The man they sought was sitting at a terrace cafŽ in the middle of Parbo with his last purchases in a sack beside him. It was August 24th.

What he had bought had come from the town's only camping and hunting shop, the Tackle Box on Zwarten Hovenbrug Street. As the London businessman, Henry Nash, he had brought almost nothing that would be useful across the border.

But with the contents of the diplomat's crate and what he had acquired that morning, he could think of nothing he might be missing. So he tilted back his Parbo beer and enjoyed the last he was going to have for some time.

Those who waited were rewarded on the morning of the 25th. The line at the river crossing was, as ever, slow, and the mosquitoes, as ever, dense. Those crossing were almost entirely locals, with pedal bikes, motorcycles, and rusty pickups, all loaded with produce.

There was only one smart car in the line on the Suriname side, a black Cherokee, with a white man at the wheel. He wore a creased seersucker jacket in cream, off-white Panama hat, and heavy-rimmed glasses. Like the others he sat and swatted, then moved a few yards forward as the chain ferry took on a fresh cargo and cranked back across the Commini.

After an hour he was at last on the flat iron deck of the ferry, handbrakes on, able to step down and watch the river. On the San Martin side, he joined the line of six cars awaiting clearance.

The San Martin checkpoint was tighter, and there seemed to be a tension among the dozen guards who milled around. The road was blocked by a stripped pole laid over two recently added oil drums weighted with concrete. In the shed to one side, an immigration officer studied all papers, his head visible through the window. The Surinamese, here to visit relatives or buy produce to sell back in Parbo, must have wondered why, but patience has never been rationed in the Third World nor information a glut. They sat and waited again. It was almost dusk when the Cherokee rolled to the barrier. A soldier flicked his fingers for the needed passport, took it from the American, and handed it through the window.

The offroad driver seemed nervous. He sweated in rivers. He made no eye contact but stared ahead. From time to time he glanced sideways through the booth window. It was during one of these glances that he saw the immigration officer start violently and grab his phone. That was when the traveller with the wispy goatee panicked.

The engine suddenly roared; the clutch was let in. The heavy black 4X4 threw itself forward, knocked a soldier flying with the rearview mirror, tossed the stripped pole in the air, and burst through, swerving crazily around the trucks ahead and charging off into the dusk.

Behind the Cherokee there was chaos. Part of the flying pole had whacked the army officer in the face. The immigration official came out of his booth shouting and waving an American passport in the name of Prof. Medvers Watson.

Two of Colonel Moreno's secret police goons, who had been standing behind the immigration officer in the shed, came running out with handguns drawn. One went back and began to gabble down the phone lines to the capital, forty miles east.

Galvanised by the army officer who was clutching his broken nose, the dozen soldiers piled into the olive-drab truck and set off in pursuit. The secret policemen ran to their own blue Land Rover and did the same. But the Cherokee was around two corners and gone.

In Langley, Kevin McBride saw the flickering bulb flash on the desk phone that linked him to the office of Colonel Moreno in San Martin City. He took the call, listened carefully, noted what was said, asked a few questions, and noted again. Then he went to see Paul Devereaux.

"They've got him," he said.

"In custody?"

"Almost. He tried to come in as I thought, over the river from Suriname. He must have spotted the sudden interest in his passport, or the guards made too much of a fuss. Whatever, he smashed down the barrier and roared off. Colonel Moreno says there is nowhere for him to go. Jungle both sides; patrols on the roads. He says they'll have him by morning."

"Poor man," said Devereaux, "he really should have stayed at home."

Colonel Moreno was overly optimistic. It took two days. In fact, the news was brought by a bush farmer who lived two miles up a track running off the righthand side of the highway into the jungle.

He said he recalled the noise of a heavy engine growling past his homestead the previous evening, and his wife had caught sight of a big and almost new off-road going up the track.

He naturally assumed it must be a government vehicle, since no farmer or trapper would dream of being able to afford such a vehicle. Only when it did not come back by the following night did he trudge down to the main road. There he found a patrol and told them.

The soldiers found the Cherokee. It had made one further mile beyond the farmer's shack when, trying to push onward into the rain forest, it had nosed into a gully and stuck at forty-five degrees. Deep furrows showed where the fleeing driver had tried to force his way out of the gully, but his panic had merely made matters worse. It took a crane truck from the city to get the 4X4 out of the hole, turned around, and heading for the road. Colonel Moreno himself came. He surveyed the churned earth, the shattered saplings and torn vines.

"Trackers," he said. "Get the dogs. The Cherokee and everything in it to my office. Now."

But darkness came down. The trackers were simple folk, not able to face the darkness when the spirits of the forest were abroad. They began next morning at dawn and found the quarry by noon.

One of Moreno 's men was with them and had a cell phone. Moreno took the call in his office. Thirty minutes later, Kevin McBride walked into Devereaux's office.

"They found him. He's dead."

Devereaux glanced at his desk calendar. It revealed the date was August 27th.

"I think you should be there," he said.

McBride groaned.

"It's a hell of a journey, Paul. All over the bloody Caribbean."

"I'll sanction a company plane. You should be there by breakfast tomorrow. It's not just me who has to be satisfied this damn business is over for good. Zilic has to believe it, too. Go down there, Kevin. Convince us both."

The man Langley knew only by his code name of Avenger had spotted the track off the main road when he flew over the region in the Piper. It was one of a dozen that left the highway between the river and the capital forty miles to the east. Each track serviced one or two small plantations or farms, then petered out into nothing.

He had not thought to photograph them at the time, saving all his film for the hacienda at El Punto. But he remembered them. And on the flight back with the doomed charter pilot Lawrence, he had seen them again. The one he chose to use was the third from the river. He had a start of half a mile over his pursuers when he slowed in order not to leave visible skid marks, and then eased the Cherokee up the track. Around a bend, engine off, he heard the pursuers thunder past.

The drive to the farmstead was easy, first-gear, four-wheel work. After the farm, it was all slog. He got the vehicle an extra mile through dense jungle, descended in the darkness, walked ahead, found a gully, and crashed it. He left what he intended the trackers to find and took the rest. It was heavy. The heat, even in the night, was oppressive. The notion that jungles at night are quiet places is a fallacy. They rustle, they croak, they roar, but they do not have spirits.

Using his compass and flashlight, he marched west, then south, for about a mile, slashing with one of his machetes to create a kind of path. After a mile he left the other part of what he intended the pursuers to find and, lightened at last to a small haversack, water bottle, flashlight, and second machete, pressed on toward the river bank.

He reached the Commini at dawn, well upstream of the crossing point and ferry. The inflatable airmattress would not have been his crossing of choice, but it sufficed. Prone on the navyblue canvas, he paddled with both hands, withdrawing them from the water when a deadly cottonmouth, or it might have been a water moccasin, glided past. The beady, lidless eye gazed at him from a few inches away, but the snake pressed on downstream.

An hour's paddling and drifting brought him to the Sunname bank. The trusty airmattress was stabbed into oblivion and abandoned. It was midmorning when the stained, streaked, wet figure, mottled with mosquito bites and hung with leeches, stumbled onto the road back to Parbo. After five miles a friendly market trader allowed him to ride the cargo of watermelons the last fifty miles to the capital.

Even the kind souls at the Krasnopolsky would have raised an eyebrow at their English businessman turning up in such a state, so he changed in the lockup store, used a garage washroom and a gas lighter to burn off the leeches, and returned to his hotel for a lunch of steak and fries, plus several bottles of Parbo. Then he slept.

Thirty thousand feet up, the company Lear jet drifted down the eastern seaboard of the United States with Kevin McBride as its only passenger. "This," he mused, "is the kind of transportation I really could force myself to get used to."

They refuelled at the spook-haven air base of Eglin, northern Florida, and again at Barbados. There was a car waiting at San Martin City airfield to bring the CIA man to Colonel Moreno's secret police headquarters in an oil palm forest on the outskirts of town.

The fat colonel greeted his visitor in his office with a bottle of whiskey.

"I guess a tad early fd'r, me, Colonel," said McBride.

"Nonsense, my friend, never too early for a toast. ComeÉI propose. Death to our enemies."

They drank. McBride, at that hour and in that heat, would have preferred a decent coffee.

"What have you got for me, Colonel?"

"A little exposition. Better I show you."

There was a conference room next to the office, and it had clearly been arranged for the colonel's grisly "exposition." The central long table was covered with a white cloth, which contained one exhibit. Around the walls were four other tables with collections of mixed items. It was one of the smaller tables that Colonel Moreno approached first.

"I told you our friend, Mr. Watson, first panicked, drove down the main road, swerved up a track at the side, and attempted to find escape by driving straight through the jungle? Yes? Impossible. He crashed his off-road into a gully and could not get out. Today it stands in the yard beneath these windows. Here is part of what he abandoned in it."

Table one contained mainly heavy-duty clothing, spare boots, water pannikins, mosquito netting, repellent, and waterpurification tablets. Table two had a tent, pegs, lantern, and a canvas basin on a tripod, along with miscellaneous toiletries.

"Nothing I wouldn't have on any normal camping trip," remarked McBride.

"Quite right, my friend. He obviously thought he would be hiding in the jungle for some time, probably making an ambush for his target on the road out of El Punto. But that target hardly ever leaves by road at all, and when he does it is in an armoured limousine. This assassin was not very good. Still, when he abandoned his gear, he also abandoned this. Too heavy, perhaps."

At table three the colonel whisked a sheet off the contents. It was a Remington 30-06, with a huge Rhino scope sight and a box of shells. Purchasable in American gun stores as a hunting rifle, it would also take a human head away with no problem at all.

"Now," explained the fat man, enjoying his mastery of his list of discoveries, "at this point your man leaves the car and 80 percent of his equipment. He sets off on foot, probably aiming for the river. But he is not a jungle fighter. How do I know? No compass. Within three hundred meters he was lost, heading south into deeper jungle, not west to the river. When we found him, all this was scattered about."

The last table contained a water can (empty), bush hat, machete, flashlight. There were tough-soled combat boots, shreds of camouflage trousers and shirt, bits of a completely inappropriate seersucker jacket, a leather belt with brass buckle and sheath knife still looped onto the belt.

"That was all he was carrying when you found him?"

"That was all he was carrying when he died. In his panic, he left behind what he should have taken-his rifle. He might have defended himself at the end."

"So your men caught up with him and shot him?"

Colonel Moreno threw up both hands, palms forward, in a gesture of surprised innocence.

"Us? Shoot him? Unarmed? Of course not. We wanted him alive. No, no. He was dead by the midnight of the night he fled. Those who do not understand the jungle should not venture into it. Certainly not ill-equipped, at night, seized by panic. That is a deadly combination. Look." With self-adoring theatricality, he whipped the sheet off the centre table. The skeleton had been brought from the jungle in a body bag, feet still in the boots, rags still around the bones. A hospital doctor had been summoned to rearrange the bones in the right order. The dead man, or what was left of him, had been picked clean to the last tiny fragment of skin, flesh, and marrow.

"The key to what happened is here," said Colonel Moreno, tapping with his forefinger. The right femur had been snapped cleanly through the middle.

"From this we can deduce what happened, my friend. He panicked, he ran. By flashlight only, blindly, without a compass. He made it about a mile from the stranded car, then he caught his foot in a root, a hidden tree stump, a tangled vine. Down he went. Snap. One broken leg.

"Now he cannot run, he cannot walk, he cannot even crawl. With no gun he cannot even summon help. He can only shout, but to what end? You know we have jaguars in these jungles?

"Well, we do. Not many, but if one hundred and fifty pounds of fresh meat insists on shouting its head off, chances are a jaguar will find it. That's what happened here. The main limbs were scattered over a small clearing. It's a larder out there. The racoon eats fresh meat. Also the puma and the coati. Up in the tree canopy, the daylight will bring the forest vultures. Ever seen what they can do to a corpse? No? Not pretty, but thorough. At the end of them all, the fire ants.

"Nature's most fantastic cleaners. Fifty yards from the remains, we found the ants' nest. They send out scouts, you know. They cannot see, but their sense of smell is amazing; and, of course, within twenty hours he would have smelt to high heaven. Enough?"

"Enough," said McBride. Early though it might be; he fancied a second whiskey. Back in the colonel's office, the secret policemen laid out some smaller items. One steel watch, engraved MW on the back. A signet ring, no inscription.

"No wallet," said the Colonel. "One of the predators must have snatched it if it was made of leather. But tucked down one of the boots, still intact, we found this."

It was a U. S. passport in the name of Medvers Watson. The profession was given as scientist. The same face McBride had seen before from the visa application form stared at him: eyeglasses, wispy goatee, slightly helpless expression. The CIA man reckoned, quite rightly, that no one would ever see Medvers Watson again.

"May I contact my superior in Washington?"

"Please," said Colonel Moreno, "be my guest. I will leave you your privacy."

McBride took his laptop from his attachŽ case and contacted Paul Devereaux, tapping in a sequence of numbers that would keep the exchange from prying ears. With his cell phone plugged into the laptop, he waited until Devereaux came on line.

He told his superior the gist of what Colonel Moreno reported, and what he had seen. There was silence for a while.

"I want you to come home," said Devereaux.

"Not a problem," said McBride.

" Moreno can keep all the toys, including the rifle, but I want that passport. Oh, and something else."

McBride listened.

"You wantÉwhat?"

"Just do it, Kevin. Godspeed."

McBride told the colonel what he had been ordered to do. The fat secret police chief shrugged. "Such a short visit. You should stay. Lobster for lunch on my boat out at sea? Cold Soaye? No? Oh wellÉthe passport of course. And the restÉ"

He shrugged. "If you wish, take them all."

"I'm told just one will do."

26 The trick

McBride arrived back in Washington on August 29th. That same day, down in Paramaribo, Henry Nash, with his passport issued by Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, to give him his full title, walked into the Consulate of the Republic of San Martin and asked for a visa.

There was no problem. The consul in the one-man office knew there had been a flap several days earlier when a refugee from justice had tried to enter his homeland, but the alarm had been stood down. The man was dead. He issued the entry visa.

That was the trouble with August. You could never get anything done in a hurry, not even in Washington, not even if your name was Paul Devereaux. The excuse was always the same: "I'm sorry, sir, he's on vacation. He'll be back next week." And thus it was as the month of August finally trickled away into September.

It was on the 3rd that Devereaux received the first of the two answers he sought.

"It's probably the best forgery we've ever seen," said the man from the State Department's passport division. "Basically, it was once genuine and was printed by us. But two vital pages were removed by an expert and two fresh pages from another passport inserted. It is the fresh pages that bear the photo and name of Medvers Watson. To our knowledge there is no such person. This passport number has never been issued."

"Could the holder of this passport fly into and out of the States?" asked Paul Devereaux. "Is it that good?"

"Out of, yes," said the expert. "Flying out would mean it would only be checked by airline staff. No computer database involved. Flying inÉthat would be a problem if the INS officer chose to run the number through the database. The computer would reply: No such number."

"Can I have the passport back?"

"Sorry, Mr. Devereaux. We like to try and help you guys, but this masterpiece is going into our Black Museum. We'll have entire classes studying this beauty."

And still there was no reply from the forensic pathology unit at Bethesda, the hospital where Devereaux had a few useful contacts.

It was on the 4th that Henry Nash, at the wheel of a modest little rented compact, with a suitcase of summer clothes and toiletries, British passport in hand, and San Martin visa stamped inside it, rolled onto the ferry at the Commini River border crossing.

His British accent might not have fooled Oxford or Cambridge, but among the Dutchspeaking Surinamese and, he assumed, the Spanishspeaking San Martinos, there would be no problem. There was not.

Avenger watched the brown river flowing beneath his feet one last time and vowed he would be a happy man if he never saw the damned thing again. On the San Martin side, the stripped pole was gone, as were the secret police and soldiers. The border was back to its usual sleepy self. He descended, passed his passport through the side window of the booth, beamed an inane smile, and fanned himself while he waited.

Running in an undershirt in all weathers meant he habitually had a slight tan; two weeks in the tropics had deepened it to a mahogany brown. His fair hair had received the attention of a barber in Paramaribo and was now so dark brown as to be almost black, but that simply matched the description of Mr. Nash of London.

The glance through the trunk of his car and his valise of clothes was perfunctory, his passport went back into the top pocket of his shirt, and he rolled on down the road to the capital.

At the third track on the right, he checked that no one was watching and turned into the jungle again. Halfway to the farmstead he stopped and turned the car around. The giant baobab tree was not hard to locate, and the tough black twine was still deep inside the cut he had sliced in the trunk a week earlier.

As he paid out the twine, the camouflaged Bergen knapsack came down from the branches where it had hung unseen. It contained all he hoped he would need for several days crouched on the crest of the cordillera above the hacienda of the runaway Serb and for his descent into the fortress itself.

The customs officer at the border post had taken no notice of the tenliter plastic can in the trunk. When the Englishman said, "Agua," he merely nodded and closed the lid. With the water added to the Bergen, the load would take even a triathlete to his limit for mountain climbing, but two litres a day would be vital.

He drove quietly through the capital, past the oil-palm forest where Colonel Moreno sat at his desk, and on to the east.

He went into the resort village of La Bahia just after lunch, at the hour of siesta, and no one stirred.

The plates on the car were by now those of a San Martin national. He recalled the adage: Where do you hide a tree? In the forest. Where do you hide a rock? In the quarry. He put the compact in the public car park, hefted the Bergen, and marched eastward out of town. Another backpacker.

Dusk descended. Ahead of him he saw the crest of the cordillera that separated the hacienda from the enveloping jungle. Where the road curved away inland to loop around the hills and go on to the Maroni and the border to French Guiana, he left the road and began to climb. He saw the narrow track snaking down from the mountain pass, and angled away from it toward a peak he had selected from the photographs taken from the plane. When it became simply too black to move, he set down his Bergen, took a supper of high-value hard rations, a cup of the precious water, leaned against the haversack, and slept. In the camping stores of New York he had declined the U. S. Army-derived MREs or Meals Ready to Eat, recalling that in the Gulf War they were so deeply awful that the GIs dubbed them Meals Rejected by Ethiopians. He made up his own con centrates to include beef, raisins, nuts, and dextrose. He would be passing rabbit pellets, but he would keep his strength for when he needed it.

Before dawn he came awake, nibbled again, sipped again, and climbed on. At one point, down the mountain and through a gap in the trees, he saw the roof of the guardhouse in the mountain pass far below.

Before the sun rose, he made the crest. He came out of the forest two hundred yard from whre he wanted, so he crabbed sideways until he found the spot in the photograph.

His eye for terrain had not let him down. There was a slight dip in the line of the crest, screened by the last fuzz of vegetation. With camouflaged shirt and bush hat, daubed face, and olive-coloured binoculars, motionless under the leaves, he would be invisible from the estate below.

When he needed a break, he could slither backward off the crest and stand up again. He made the small camp that would be home for up to four days, smeared his face, and crawled into the hideout. The sun pinked the jungles over French Cayenne, and the first beam slipped across the peninsula below. El Punto lay spread out like the scale model that had once graced the sitting room of his apartment in Brooklyn, a shark tooth jabbing into the glittering sea. From below came a dull clang as someone smashed an iron bar into a hanging length of railway track. It was time for the forced labourers to rise.

It was not until the 4th that the friend Paul Devereaux had contacted in the Department of Pathology at Bethesda called back.

"What on earth are you up to, Paul?"

"Enlighten me. What am I up to?"

"Grave robbing by the look of it."

"Tell me all, Gary. What is it?"

"Well, it's a femur all right. A thighbone, right leg. Clean break at the midsection. No compound fracture, no splinters."

"Sustained in a fall?"

"Not unless the fall involved a sharp edge and a hammer."

"You're fulfilling my worst fear, Gary. Go on."

"Well, the bone is clearly from an anatomical skeleton, purchasable in any medical store, used by students since the Middle Ages. About fifty years old. The bone was broken recently with a sharp blow, probably across a bench. Did I make your day?"

"No, you just ruined it. But I owe you anyway."

As with all his calls, Devereaux had recorded it. When Kevin McBride listened to the playback his jaw dropped.

"Good God."

"For the sake of your immortal soul, I hope he is, Kevin. You goofed. It's phoney. He never died. He choreographed the whole damn episode, duped Moreno and Moreno convinced you. He's alive. Which means he's coming back, or he's back already. Kevin, this is a major emergency. I want the company plane to take off in one hour, and I want you on it.

"I will brief Colonel Moreno myself while you fly. When you get there Moreno will be checking every single possibility that this goddamn Avenger came back or is on his way. Now, go."

On the 5th, Kevin McBride faced Colonel Moreno again. Any veneer of amiability he may have used before was gone. His toadlike face was mottled with anger.

"This is one clever man, *mi amigo*. You did not tell me this. Hokay, he fool me once. Not again. Look."

Since the moment Prof. Medvers Watson had burst through the border controls, the Secret Police chief had checked every possible entrant into San Martin.

Three game fishermen out of St. Laurent on the French side had suffered an engine breakdown at sea and been towed into San Martin Marina. They were in detention and not happy.

Four more non-Hispanics had entered from the Suriname direction. A party of French technicians from the Kourou space launch facility in French Guiana had come over the Maroni River looking for cheap sex and were undergoing an even cheaper stay in jail.

Of the four from Suriname, one was Spanish and two Dutch. All their passports had been confiscated. Colonel Moreno slapped them onto his desk.

"Which one is false?" he asked.

Eight French, two Dutch, one Spanish. One missing.

"Who was the other visitor from the Suriname side?"

"An Englishman. We can't find him."

"Details?"

The colonel studied a sheet with the records from the San Martin Consulate in Parbo and the crossing point on the Commini.

"Nash. Se-or Henry Nash. Passport in order; visa in order. No luggage except a few summer clothes. Small compact car, rented. Unsuitable for jungle work. With this he gets nowhere off the main road or the capital city. Drove in on the 4th, two days ago."

"Hotel?"

"He told our consulate in Parbo he would be staying in the city, the Camino Real Hotel. He had a reservation, faxed from the Krasnopolsky in Parbo. He never checked in."

"Looks suspicious."

"The car is also missing. No foreign car can be found in San Martin. It has not been found, yet it cannot drive off the main highway. So I say to myself, a garage somewhere in the country. The country is being scoured."

McBride looked at the pile of foreign passports.

"Only their own embassies could verify these as forgeries or genuine. And the embassies are in Suriname. It means a visit for one of your men."

Colonel Moreno nodded glumly. He prided himself on absolute control of the small dictatorship. Something had gone wrong.

"Have you Americans told our Serbian guest?"

"No," said McBride. "Have you?"

"Not yet."

Both men had good reasons. For the dictator, President Munoz, his asylum seeker was extremely lucrative. Moreno did not want to be the one who caused him to quit and take his fortune with him.

For McBride, it was a question of orders. He did not know it, but Devereaux feared Zoran Zilic might panic and refuse to fly to Peshawar to meet the chief of Al Qaeda. Sooner or later someone was either going to have to find the manhunter or tell him.

"Please keep me posted, Colonel," he said, as he turned to leave. "I'll stay at the Camino Real. It seems they have a spare room."

"There is one thing that puzzles me, Se-or," said Moreno as McBride reached the door.

He turned. "Yes?"

"This man, Medvers Watson. He tried to enter the country without a visa."

"So?"

"He would have needed a visa to get in. He must have known that. He did not even bother."

"You're right," said McBride. "Odd."

"So I ask myself, as a policeman, why? And you know what I answer, Se-or?"

"Tell me."

"I answer: Because he did not intend to enter legally; because he did not panic at all; because he intended to do exactly what he did-to fake his own death and find his way back to Suriname. Then quietly return."

"Makes sense," admitted McBride.

"Then I say to myself: So he knew we were waiting for him, but how did he know?"

McBride's stomach turned over at the full implication of Moreno 's reasoning.

Meanwhile, invisible in a patch of scrub on the flank of a mountain, the hunter watched, noted, and waited. He waited for the hour that had not yet come.

27 The vigil

Dexter was impressed as he studied the triumph of security and self-sufficiency that a combination of nature, ingenuity, and money had accomplished on the peninsula below the escarpment. Were it not dependent on slave labour, it would have been admirable.

The triangle jutting out to sea was larger than he had imagined in the scale model in his New York apartment.

The base, on which he now looked down from his mountain hideout, was about two miles from side to side. It ran, as his aerial photos had shown, from sea to sea and at each end the mountain range dropped to the water in vertical cliffs.

The sides of the isosceles triangle he estimated at about three miles, giving a total land area of almost six square miles. The area was divided into four parts, each with a different function.

Below him, at the base of the escarpment, was the private airstrip and the workers' village. Three hundred yards out from the cliff a twelve-foot-high chain-link fence topped with razor wire ran across the land from edge to edge. Where it met the sea, he could observe through his binoculars in the growing light, the fence jutted over the cliff and ended in a tangle of rolls of razor wire. No way of slipping around the end of the fence; no way of going over the top.

Two-thirds of the strip created between the escarpment and the wire was dedicated to the airfield. Below him, flanking the runway, was a single large hangar, a marshalling apron, and a range of smaller buildings that had to be workshops and fuel stores. Toward the far end, near the sea to catch the cooler breezes, were half a dozen small villas, which he presumed to be the home of the aircrew and maintenance staff.

The only access and egress to and from the airfield was a single steel gate set in the chain-link fence. There was no guardhouse near the gate, but a pair of visible rods and small steel wheels beneath the leading edge indicated it was electrically powered and would open to the command of the appropriate remote control. At half past six, nothing moved on the airfield.

The other third of the strip was consigned to the village. It was segregated from the airfield by another fence, running from the escarpment outward and also topped with razor wire. The peasants were clearly not allowed on or near the airfield.

The clanging of the iron bar on the railway track stopped after a minute, and the village stumbled into life. Dexter watched the first figures, clad in off-white trousers and shirts, with rope-soled espadrilles on their feet, emerge from the groups of tiny cabanas and head for the communal washhouses. When they were all assembled, the watcher estimated there were about twelve hundred of them.

Clearly there were some staff who ran the village and would not go to work in the field. He saw them working in open-fronted, lean-to kitchens, preparing a breakfast of bread and gruel. Long trestle tables and benches formed the dining hall under palm-thatch shelters, which would protect against occasional rain but more usually against the fierce sun.

At a second beating of the iron rail, the farm workers took bowls and a half loaf and sat down to eat. There were no gardens, no shops, no women, no children, no school. This was not a true village, but a labour camp. The only remaining buildings were what appeared to be a food store, a general clothing and bedding store, and the church with the priest's house attached. It was functional; a place to work, eat, sleep, pray for release, and nothing else.

If the airfield was a rectangle trapped between the escarpment, the wire, and the sea, so was the village. But there was one difference. A pitted and rutted track zigzagged down from the single mountain pass in the whole mountain range, the only access by road to the rest of the republic. It was clearly not suitable for heavy-duty trucks. Dexter wondered how resupply of weighty essentials like gasoline, engine diesel, and aviation fuel would take place. When the visibility lengthened, he found out.

At the extremity of his vision, hidden in the morning mist, was the third portion of the estate, the walled five-acre compound at the end of the foreland. He knew from his aerial pictures it contained the magnificent white mansion in which the former Serbian gangster lived; half a dozen villas in the grounds for guests and senior staff tonsured lawns, flower beds, and shrubbery; and along the inner side f the fourteenfoothigh protecting wall, a series of lean-to cottages and stores for domestic staff: linen, food, and drink.

In his pictures and on his scale model, the huge wall also went from cliff edge to cliff edge, and at this point the land was fifty feet above the sea, which surged and thumped on the rocks below.

A lone but massive double gate penetrated the wall at its centre with a road of pounded rubble leading up to it. There was a guardhouse inside that controlled the gate-opening machinery, and a parapet ran along the inside of the wall to enable armed guards to patrol its entire length. Everything between the chain-link fence below the watcher and the wall over two miles away was the food-producing farm. As the light rose, Dexter could confirm what his photos had told him; the farm produced almost everything the community within the fortress could need. There were grazing herds of beef and lamb. Sheds would certainly contain pigs and poultry. There were fields of arable crops, grains, legumes, tubers; orchards producing ten kinds of fruit; and acre after acre of vegetables either in the open or under long domes of polyethylene. He surmised the farm would produce every conceivable kind of salad and fruit, along with meat, butter, eggs, cheese, oil, bread, and rough red wine. The fields and orchards were studded with barns and granaries, machine stores, and facilities to slaughter the beasts, mill the grain, bake the bread, and press the grapes.

To his right, near the cliff edge but inside the farm, was a series of small barracks for the guard staff, with a dozen better-quality chalets for their officers and two or three company shops.

To his left, also at the cliff edge, also inside the farm, were three large warehouses and a gleaming aluminium fuel storage farm. Right at the very edge of the cliff were two large cranes or derricks. That solved one problem: Heavy cargoes came by sea and were hefted or pumped from the ship below to the storage facilities forty feet above the freighter's deck.

The peons finished their morning meal and again came the harsh clang as the iron bar smashed against the hanging length of rail. This time there were several reactions.

Uniformed guards spilled from their barracks farther up the coast to the right. One put a silent whistle to his lips. Dexter heard nothing, but out of the farmland a dozen loping Dobermans emerged in obedience to the call and entered their fenced compound near the barracks. Clearly they had not eaten for twenty-four hours; they hurled themselves at the plates of raw offal set out and tore the meat to pieces.

That told Dexter what happened each sundown. When every staffer and slave was closed off in their respective compounds, the dogs would be released to hunt and prowl the three thousand acres of farmland. They must have been trained to leave the calves, sheep, and pigs alone, but any wandering burglar would simply not survive. They were far too many for a single man to begin to combat. Entry by night was not feasible.

The watcher had buried himself so deeply in the undergrowth that anyone below, raising his or her eyes to the crest of the range, would see no glint of sun off the lens, nor would he catch a glimpse of the motionless, camouflaged man.

At half past six, when the farming estate was ready to receive them, the iron clang summoned the labourers to work. They trooped toward the high gate that separated the village from the farm.

This gate was a far more complicated affair than the one from the airfield to the estate. It opened inward to the farmland in two halves. Beyond the gate, five tables had been set up and guards sat behind each. Others stood over them. The peons formed into five columns.

On a shouted command, they shuffled forward. Each man at the head of the line stooped at the table to offer a dog tag round his neck to the seated official. The number on the tag was checked and tapped into a database.

The workers must have lined up in the right column, according to their type of number, for after they were nodded through, they reported to a foreman beyond the tables. In groups of about a hundred, they were led away to their tasks, pausing at a number of tool sheds beside the main track to pick up what they needed.

Some were for the fields, some for the orchards, others were destined for animal husbandry, or the grain mill, the slaughterhouse, the vineyard, or the huge kitchen garden. As Dexter watched, the enormous farm came to life. But the security never slackened. When the village was finally empty, the double gate closed, and the men dispersed to their stations. Dexter concentrated on that security and looked for his opening.

It was midmorning that Colonel Moreno heard back from the two emissaries he had sent out with foreign passports in their hands.

In Cayenne, capital of French Guiana to the east, the authorities had wasted no time. They were not pleased that three innocent game fishermen had been detained for the crime of breaking down at sea, nor that five technicians had been picked up and detained without good cause. All eight French passports were pronounced 100 percent genuine and an urgent request was lodged that their owners be released and sent home.

To the west, in Paramaribo, the Dutch Embassy said exactly the same about their two nationals: The passports were genuine, the visas in order, what was the problem?

The Spanish Embassy was closed, but Colonel Moreno had been assured by the man from the CIA that the fugitive was about five feet, eight inches tall, while the Spaniard was over six feet. That just left the missing Mr. Henry Nash of London.

The Secret Police chief ordered his man in Cayenne to come home, and the man in Parbo to hunt through every carrental agency to find out what kind of car the Londoner had rented and its registration number.

By mid-morning the heat on the hills was intense. A few inches from the unmoving watcher's face a lizard with red, erect ruff behind its head, walking on stones that would fry an egg, stared at the stranger, detected no threat, and scuttled on its way. There was activity out by the cliff-top derricks.

Four muscular young men wheeled a thirty-foot aluminium patrol boat to the rear of a Land Rover and hitched up. The Land Rover towed the vessel to a gas pump where it was fueled. It could almost have passed for a leisure craft except for the.30-calibre Browning machine gun mounted in the midsection. When the boat was ready for sea, it was towed beneath one of the derricks. Four webbing bands suspended from a rectangular frame ended in four tough steel cleats. These were fixed into strong points on the boat's hull.

With the crew on board, the patrol boat was lifted off the hard pad, swung out to sea, and lowered to the ocean. Dexter saw it go out of sight. Minutes later he saw it again out at sea. The men on board hauled up and emptied two fish traps and five lobster pots, rebaited them, threw them back, and resumed their patrol.

Dexter had noted that everything in front of him would collapse into ruin without two lifegiving elixirs. One was gasoline that would power the generator plant situated behind the warehouses of the dock. This provided the electricity that would power every device and motor on the whole estate, from the gate to a power drill to a bedside light. The other elixir was water; fresh, clean, clear water in a limitless supply. It came from the mountain stream that he had first seen in the aerial photographs.

That stream was now below him and slightly to his left. It bubbled out of the mountainside, having made its way from somewhere deep in the rain forests of the interior.

It emerged twenty feet above the peninsula, tumbled down several rock falls, and then entered a concrete-sided channel that had clearly been created for it. From that point, man took over from nature.

To reach the farmland it had to flow under the runway below the hunter. Clearly strong, square culverts had been inserted below the runway when it was built. Emerging from below the runway on the other side, the nowmarshaled water flowed under the chain-link fence as well. Dexter had little doubt there was an impenetrable grille there as well. Without a grille anyone could have slipped into the stream within the airfield, gone under the wire, and used the gully and the flowing water to elude the wandering dogs. Whoever designed the defences would not have allowed that.

In the mid-morning two things happened right below his aerie. The Hawker 1000 was towed out of the hangar into the sun. Dexter feared it might be needed to fly the Serb somewhere, but it was only pulled from the hangar to make space. What followed was a small helicopter of the sort traffic police use to monitor flow. It could hover barely inches away from the rock face if required, and he would have to be invisible to avoid being spotted. But it remained below him with its rotors folded while the engine was serviced.

The other thing was that a four-wheeler came from the farm to the electric gate. Using a remote to open the gate, the man on the four-wheeler motored in, waved a cheery greeting to the mechanics on the apron, and went up the runway to where the stream passed under it.

He stopped the quad, took a wicker basket from the back, and looked down at the flowing water. Then he tossed several chicken carcasses into the water. He did this on the upstream side of the runway. Then he crossed the tarmac and looked down into the water again. The carcasses must have been carried by the flow to press up against the grille at the departure side.

Whatever was in that water between the escarpment and the grille, it ate meat. Dexter could only think of one fresh-water denizen of those parts that ate meat, and that was the piranha. If they could eat hens, they could eat swimmers. It mattered not if the water touched the roof longer than he could hold his breath; it was already a three-hundred-yard-long piranha pool.

After the chain-link fence, the stream ran down through the estate, feeding a glittering tracery of irrigation channels. Other taps underground would duct some of the flow to the workers' village, the villas, the barracks, and the master mansion.

The rest, having served all parts of the estate, curved back toward the farm end of the runway, there to tumble over the edge and into the sea.

By early afternoon, the heat lay on the land like a great, heavy, suffocating blanket. Out on the estat the workers had toiled from seven until twelve. They were then allowed to find shade and eat what they had brought in small cotton tote bags. Until four they were allowed to take a siesta before the last three hours' labour, from four to seven.

Dexter lay and panted, envying the salamander basking on a rock a yard away, immune to the heat. It was tempting to throw pints of precious water down his throat to achieve relief, but he knew it must be rationed simply to prevent dehydration, rather than gulped down for pleasure.

At four, the clang of the iron rail told the workers to go back to the fields and barns. Dexter struggled to the edge of his escarpment and watched the tiny figures in rough cotton shirts and pants, nutbrown faces hidden under straw sombreros, take up their hoes and mattocks again to keep the model farm weedfree.

To his left a battered-looking pickup rolled to the space between the derricks and stopped, after reversing its rear toward the sea. A peon in bloodstained overalls hauled a long steel chute from the back, fixed it to the tailgate, and with a pitchfork began to hoist something onto the steel slide. Whatever it was slithered off and fell into the sea. Dexter adjusted his focus. The next forkful gave the game away. It was a black hide with the bullock's head still attached.

Back in New York, examining the photos, he had been struck that even with the cliffs there was nevertheless no attempt to make any access to the beautiful blue sea. No steps down, no diving platform, no moored raft, no beach, no jetty. Seeing the offal go in, he understood why. The water around the whole peninsula would be alive with hammerheads, tigers, and great whites. Anything swimming, other than a fish, would last only a few minutes.

About that time Colonel Moreno took a call on a cell phone from his man across the border in Suriname. The Englishman, Nash, had rented his car from a small private and local company, which is why it had taken so long to trace. But he had it at last. It was a Ford Fiesta. He dictated the number.

The secret policeman issued his order for the morning. Every car park, every garage, every driveway, every track was to be scoured for a Fiesta with this Surinamese registration number. Then he changed his orders. Any Ford with any registration number was to be traced, searching was to start at dawn.

Dusk and dark come in the tropics with bewildering speed. The sun had passed behind Dexter's back an hour earlier, bringing relief at last. He watched the estate workers come home, dragging weary feet. They handed in their tools; they were checked through the double gate one by one, in their five columns, two hundred per column.

They came back to the village to join the two hundred who had not gone to the fields. In the villas and the barracks, the first lights came on. At the far end of the triangle, a white glow revealed where the Serb's mansion was floodlit.

The mechanics on the airfield closed up and took their motorbikes to ride to the villas at the far end of the runway. When all was fenced and locked, the Dobermans were released, the world said farewell to September 6th, and the manhunter prepared to go down the escarpment.

28 The visitor

In a day of peering over the edge of the escarpment, Dexter had realised two things about it that had not showed up on his photographs. One was that it was not steep all the way down. The slope was perfectly climbable until about a hundred feet from the level plain, at which point it dropped sheer. But he had brought more than that length of good climbing rope.

The other was that the nudity of all weeds and shrubs was done through an act of man, not of nature. Someone, preparing the defences, had had teams of men come over the edge of the drop in rope cradles to rip every twig and shrub out of the crevices in the slope, so as to give no leaf cover at all. Where the saplings were slim enough to be entirely ripped out, they had been. But some had had a stem that was simply resistant to the pull of a man on a rope's end. These had been sawn off short, but not short enough. The stumps formed hundreds of hand-and-toe holds for a climber going down or up.

In daylight such a climber would have been instantly visible but not in darkness.

By 10:00 P.M. the moon was up, a sickle moon, just enough to give dim light to the climber, not enough to make him visible against the shale face. Delicacy would be needed not to cause a rockfall. Moving from stump to stump, Dexter began to ease his way down to the airfield below.

When the slope became too steep even for climbing, Dexter used the coiled rope around his shoulders to rappel the rest.

He spent three hours on the airfield. Years earlier another of his "clients" from the Tombs in New York had taught him the gentlemanly art of picking locks, and the set of picks he carried with him had been made by a master. The padlock on the doors of the hangar he left alone. The double doors would have rumbled if they were rolled back. There was a smaller door to one side, with a single Yaletype locking mechanism and it cost him no more than thirty seconds.

It takes a good mechanic to repair a helicopter and an even better one to sabotage it in such a manner that a good mechanic could not find the fault and mend it or even notice the tampering.

The mechanic the Serb employed to look after his helicopter was good, but Dexter was better. Up close he recognised the bird as an EC 120 Eurocopter, the single-engine version of the twin EC 135. It had a big Perspex bubble at the front end with excellent all-around, up-and-down observation for the pilot and the man beside him, plus room for three more behind them.

Dexter concentrated not on the main rotor mechanism but on the smaller tail rotor. If that malfunctioned, the "chopper" would simply not be fit to fly. By the time he had finished, it was certainly going to malfunction and be very hard to repair.

The door of the Hawker 1000 was open, so he had a chance to inspect the interior and ensure that the executive jet had had no serious internal reconfiguration.

When he locked up the main hangar, he broke into the mechanics' store, took what he wanted, but left no trace. Finally, he jogged gently to the far end of the runway, close to the backs of the residential villas, and spent his last hour there. In the morning one of the mechanics would notice with irritation that someone had borrowed his bicycle from where it leaned against the back fence.

When he had done all he came to do, Dexter found his hanging rope and climbed back to the stout stump where it was tied. Beyond that, he climbed, moving from root to root until he was back in his aerie. He was soaked toathe point where he could have wrung the sweat from his clothes. He consoled himself with the thought that body odour was one thing no one was going to notice in that part of the world. To replace the moisture, he allowed himself a full pint of water, checked the level of the remaining liquid, and slept. The tiny alarm in his watch woke him at six in the morning, just before the iron bar began to clang against the hanging rail far below.

At 7:00, Paul Devereaux raised McBride in his room at the Camino Real Hotel.

"Any news?" asked the man from Washington.

"None," said McBride. "It seems pretty sure he came back masquerading as an Englishman, Henry Nash, resort developer. Then he vaporised. His car has been identified as a rented Ford from Suriname. Moreno is starting a countrywide trawl for it about now. Should have news sometime today."

There was a long pause from the Counterterrorist chief, still sitting in a robe in his breakfast room in Alexandria, Virginia, before leaving for Langley.

"Not good enough," said Devereaux. "I'm going to have to alert our friend. It will not be an easy call. I'll wait till 10:00. If there is any news of a capture, or imminent capture before then, call me at once."

"You got it," said McBride.

There was no such news. At 10:00, Devereaux made his call. It took ten minutes for the Serb to be summoned from the swimming pool to the radio shack, a small room in his basement that, despite its traditional name, was no shack and contained some highly modern and eavesdrop-free communications equipment.

At 10:30, Dexter noticed a flurry of activity on the estate below him. Off-roads streamed from the mansion on the foreland, leaving trails of dust behind them. Below him the EC 120 was wheeled out of the hangar and its main rotors spread and locked into flying mode.

"Someone," he mused, "appears to have hit the alarm."

The helicopter crew arrived from their homes at the end of the runway on two motor scooters. Within minutes they were at the controls, and the big rotors began slowly to turn. The engine kicked into life, and the rotor rate rapidly increased to warm-up speed.

The tail rotor, vital to stop the whole machine from spinning around its own main axis, was also whirring around. Then something in its core bearings seemed to snag. There was a grinding of suffering metal, and the spinning hub destroyed itself. A mechanic waved frantically to the two men inside the Perspex bubble and drew his hand across his throat.

The pilot and observer had been told by the instrument panel that they had a major bearing failure in the tail. They closed down. The main rotors ground to a halt, and the crew climbed back out. A group formed around the tail, staring upward at the damaged prop.

Uniformed guards poured into the village of the absent peons and began to search the cabanas, stores, even the church. Others, on four-wheelers, went off across the estate to spread the word to the gang masters to keep an eye open for any signs of an intruder. There were none. Such signs as there had been eight hours earlier had been too well disguised.

Dexter put the uniformed guards at around one hundred. There was a community of about a dozen on the airfield and the twelve hundred workers. Given more security personnel, plus domestic staff out of sight in the grounds of the mansion, and twenty more technicians at the generating station and various repair shops, Dexter now had an idea how many he was up against. And he still had not seen the mansion itself and its no doubt complex defences.

Just before midday, Paul Devereaux called his man in the storm centre.

"Kevin, you have to go over and visit with our friend. I have spoken to him. He is in a high state of temper. I cannot stress enough how vital it is that this wretch plays his part in Project Peregrine. He must not duck out now. One day I'll be able to tell you how vital he is. For the moment, stand by him until the intruder is caught and neutralised. Apparently our friend's helicopter is malfunctioning. Ask the colonel for a Jeep to get you over the sierra. Call me when you get there."

At midday, Dexter watched a small coaster approach the cliffs. Holding stationary in the water just clear of the rocks, the freighter discharged crates from its deck and holds, which the derricks hoisted to the concrete apron, where flat-back pickups awaited them. Clearly they were for those luxuries the hacienda could not produce.

The last item was a thousand-gallon fuel tank, an aluminium canister the size of a fuel tanker. An empty one was lowered to the boat's deck, and it steamed away across the blue ocean.

Just after one o'clock, below him and to his right, an off-road-having been checked through the guardhouse in the defile-grunted and coughed down the track to the village. It was in San Martin police markings, with a passenger beside the driver.

Traversing the village, the blue Land Rover came to the chain-link gates and stopped. The police driver descended to offer his ID to the guards manning it. They made a phone call, presumably to the mansion for clearance.

In the pause, the man in the passenger seat also descended and gazed around with curiosity. He turned to look back at the sierra he had just descended. High above, a pair of binoculars adjusted and settled on his face.

Like the unseen man above him on the crest, Kevin McBride was impressed. He had been with Paul Devereaux on Project Peregrine for two years, from the first contact to recruitment of the Serbian. He had seen the files, knew, he thought, everything there was to know about him, yet they had never met. Devereaux had always reserved that dubious pleasure for himself.

The blue-liveried police off-road drove toward the high defending wall of the foreland compound, which towered over them as they approached the gate. A small door in the gate opened, and a burly man in slacks and a sea island cotton shirt stepped out. The shirt flapped over the waistband, and for a reason. It obscured the Glock 9mm. McBride recognised him from the file: Kulac, the only one the Serb gangster had brought from Belgrade with him, his perpetual bodyguard.

The man approached the passenger door and beckoned. After two years away from home, he still spoke nothing but Serbo-Croat.

"*Muchas gracias. Adios*," said McBride to his police driver. The man nodded, keen to get back to the capital.

Inside the giant timber gates, made of beams the size of rail sleepers and machine operated, was a table. McBride was expertly frisked for concealed weapons, then his suitcase was searched on the table. A whitestarched butler descended from an upper terrace and waited until the precautions were complete.

Kulac grunted that he was satisfied. With the butler in the lead, carrying the suitcase, the three went up the steps. McBride got his first real glimpse of the mansion.

It was three stories tall, set in manicured lawns. Two peons in white tunics could be seen at a distance, intent on their gardening. The house was not unlike some of the more luxurious residences seen along the French, Italian, and Croatian Rivieras, each upper room balconied but steel shuttered against the heat.

The flagged patio on which they stood may have been several feet above the base of the gate they had entered, but it was still below the top of the protective wall. One could see over the wall to the cordillera through which McBride had come, but no sniper in the near ground was going to be able to fire over the wall to hit someone on the terrace.

Set into the patio was a gleaming blue swimming pool, and beside the pool a large table of white Carrara marble on stone supports was set for lunch. Silver and crystal glittered.

To one side, a cluster of easy chairs surrounded a table on which an ice bucket played host to a bottle of Dom Perignon. The butler gestured that McBride should sit. The bodyguard remained upright and alert. From the deep shade of the villa a man emerged in white slacks and cream silk safari shirt.

McBride hardly recognised the man who had once been Zoran Zilic, gang enforcer from Zemun District, Belgrade; mobster of a dozen underworld rackets in Germany and Sweden; killer in the Bosnian war; runner of prostitutes, drugs, and arms out of Belgrade; embezzler of the Yugoslav treasury; and eventually fugitive from justice.

The new face bore little resemblance to the one in the CIA file. That spring the Swiss surgeons had done a good job. The Baltic pallor was replaced by a tropical tan, and only the fine white lines of scars refused to darken. But McBride had once been told that ears, like fingerprints, were totally distinctive to each human being and, short of surgery, never change. Zilic's ears were the same, and his fingerprints, and when they shook hands McBride noticed the hazel, wild animal eyes.

Zilic sat at the marble table and nodded to the only other vacant setting. McBride sat. There was a rapid exchange in Serbo-Croat between Zilic and the bodyguard. The muscular thug ambled away to eat somewhere else. A very young and pretty Martino girl in a blue maid's uniform filled two flutes of champagne. Zilic proposed no toast; he studied the amber liquid, then downed it without pause.

"This man," he said in good if not flawless English, "who is he?"

"We do not exactly know. He is a private contractor. Very secretive. Known only by his own chosen code name."

"And what is that?"

"The Avenger."

The Serb considered the word, then shrugged. Two more girls began to serve the meal. There were quail egg tartlets and asparagus in melted butter.

"All made on the estate?" asked McBride.

Zilic nodded.

"Bread, salads, eggs, milk, olive oil, grapesÉI saw them all as we drove through."

Another nod.

"Why does he come after me?" asked the Serb.

McBride thought. If he gave the real reason, the Serb might decide there was no point in further cooperation with the U. S. or any part of its establishment on the grounds that they would never forgive him anyway. His charge from Devereaux was to keep the loathsome creature inside the Peregrine team.

"We do not know," he said. "He was contracted by somebody else, perhaps an old enemy from Yugoslavia."

Zilic thought it through, then shook his head.

"Why did you leave it so late, Mr. McBride?"

"We knew nothing of this man until you complained of the plane flying over your estate and taking pictures. You took the registration number. Fine. Then you sent men to Guyana to intervene. Mr. Devereaux thought we could find the interloper, identify him, and stop him. He slipped through the net."

The lobsters were cold in mayonnaise, also from local ingredients. To round off there were Muscat grapes and peaches, with strong black coffee.

The butler offered Cohiba Cuban cigars and waited until both were drawing well before leaving. The Serb seemed lost in thought.

The three pretty waitresses were lined up against the wall of the house.

Zilic turned in his chair, pointed at one, and snapped his fingers. The girl went pale but turned and entered the house, presumably to prepare herself for her master's arrival. "I take a siesta at this hour. It is a local custom and quite a good one. Before I leave, let me tell you something. I designed this fortress with Major Van Rensberg, whom you will meet. I regard it as probably the safest place on earth.

"I do not believe your mercenary will even be able to get in here. If he does, he will never leave alive. The security systems here have been tested. This man may have gotten past you; he will not get past my systems and near to me. While I enjoy my rest, Van Rensberg will show you around. Then you can tell Mr. Devereaux his crisis is over. Until later."

He rose and left the table. McBride stayed on. Below the terrace the door in the main gate opened and a man walked up the steps to the flagstones. McBride knew him from the files, but pretended not to.

Adriaan Van Rensberg was another man with a history. During the period when the National Party and its apartheid policies ruled South Africa, he had been an eager recruit to the Bureau of State Security, the dreaded BOSS, and had risen through the ranks due to his dedication to the extreme forms of that body's excesses.

After the arrival of Nelson Mandela, he had joined the extreme-right AWB Party led by Eugene Terre Blanche, and when that collapsed he thought it would be wiser to flee the country. After several years hiring out his services as steward and security expert to a number of European fascist factions, he had caught the eye of Zoran Zilic and landed the plum job of devising, designing, building, and commanding the fortress hacienda of El Punto. Unlike Colonel Moreno, the South African's size was not due to fat but muscled bulk. Only the belly folding over the broad leather belt betrayed a taste for beer and plenty of it.

McBride noted that he had designed himself a uniform for the part, combat boots, jungle camouflage, leopard skin-ringed bush hat, and flattering insignia.

"Mr. McBride? The American gentleman?"

"That's me."

"Major Van Rensberg, head of security. I am instructed to give you a tour of the estate. Shall we say tomorrow morning? Eightthirty?"

In the car park at the resort of La Bahia, one of the policemen found the Ford. The plates were local but forged and made up in a garage elsewhere. The manual in the glove compartment was in Dutch. As in Suriname. Much later someone recalled seeing a backpacker with a large, camouflaged Bergen haversack trekking away from the resort on foot. He was heading east. Colonel Moreno called back his entire police force and the army to their barracks. In the morning, he said, they would climb and sweep the cordillera from the landward side, from the road to the crest.

29 The tour

It was the second sunset and fall of darkness that Dexter had witnessed from his invisible prone position on the peak of the sierra, and it would be his last.

Still motionless, he watched the last lights snuff in the windows of the peninsula below him, then he prepared to move. They rose early down there and slept little. For him as well there would be, again, precious little sleep.

He feasted off the last of his field rations, packing down two days' supply of vitamins and minerals, fibre, and sugar. He was able to finish off the last of his water, giving his body a reservoir for the next twenty-four hours. The big Bergen, the scrim netting, and rain cape could be abandoned. What he needed he had either brought with him or stolen the previous night. They all fit into a smaller backpack. Only the coiled rope across his shoulders would remain bulky and would have to be hidden where it would not be found.

It was past midnight when he made what was left of his encampment as invisible as possible and left it.

Using a branch to brush out the tracks left by his own feet, he worked his way slowly to his right until he was over the laborers' village rather than the airfield. It took him half a mile and cost an hour. But he timed it right. The sickle moon rose. The sweat began to soak his clothes again.

He made his way slowly and carefully down the scarp, from handhold to handhold, stump to stump, root to root, until he needed the rope. This time he had to double it and hang the loop over a smooth root where it would not snag when he pulled from below.

He rappeled the rest of the way, avoiding athletic leaps that might dislodge pebbles, but simply walking backward, pace by pace, until he arrived in the cleft between the cliffs and the rear of the church. He hoped the priest was a good sleeper; he was only a few yards from his house.

He tugged gently on one strand of the double rope. The other slipped over the stump high up the face and at last cascaded down around him. He coiled it around his shoulder and left the shadows of the church.

Latrine facilities were communal and single sex. There were no women in the labour camp. He had watched the men at their ablutions from above. The base of the latrine was a long trench covered by boards to mask the inevitable stench, or at least the worst of it. In the boards were circular holes covered by circular lids. There was no concession to modesty. Taking a deep breath, Dexter lifted one of the lids and dropped his coiled rope into the black interior. With luck, it would simply disappear forever, even if it were searched for, which was extremely unlikely.

The shacks in which the men lived and slept were small squares, little more than a police cell, but each worker had one to himself. They were in rows of fifty, facing another fifty and thus forming a street. Each group of one hundred ran outward from a main highway, and that was the residential section.

The main road led to the square, flanked by the washing units, the kitchens, and the thatch-topped dining hall tables. Avoiding the moonlight of the main square, sticking to the shadows of the buildings, Dexter returned to the church. The lock on the main door detained him for no more than a few minutes.

There was not much to it, as churches go, but for those running the labour camp it was a wise precaution to provide a safety valve in this deeply Catholic country. Dexter wondered idly how the resident priest could square his job with his creed.

He found what he wanted at the far back, behind the altar and to one side, in the vestry. Leaving the main door unlocked, he went back to the rows of huts where the workers snored away their few hours of repose.

From above, he had memorised the location of the cabin he wanted. He had seen the man emerge for his breakfast. Fifth cabin down, lefthand side, third street off the main road after the plaza. There was no lock, just a simple wooden latch. Dexter stepped inside and froze motionless to accustom his eyes to the almost complete darkness after the pale moonlight outside.

The hunched figure on the bunk snored on. Three minutes later, with complete night vision, Dexter could see the low hump under the coarse blanket. He crouched to remove something from his knapsack, then went toward the bed. The sweet odour of chloroform came up to him from the soaked pad in his hand.

The peon grunted once, tried to roll from side to side for a few seconds, then lapsed into deeper sleep. Dexter kept the pad in place to ensure hours of insensibility. When he was ready, he hefted the sleeping man over his shoulder in a fireman's lift and flitted silently back the way he had come to the church.

In the doorway of the coral stone building he stopped again and waited to hear if he had disturbed anyone, but the village slept on. When he found the vestry again, he used stout masking tape to bind the peon's feet and ankles and to cover his mouth, while leaving the nose free to breathe. As he relocked the main door, he glanced with satisfaction at the notice beside it on the blackboard. The notice was a lucky "plus."

Back in the empty shack he risked a penlight to examine the laborer's worldly possessions. They were not many. There was a portrait of the Virgin on one wall and stuck into the frame a faded photo of a smiling young woman. FiancŽe, sister, daughter? Through powerful binoculars the man had looked about Dexter's age, but he might have been younger. Those caught up in Colonel Moreno's penal system and sent to El Punto would age fast. Certainly he was of the same height and build, which was why Dexter had picked him.

No other wall decorations, just pegs on which hung two sets of work clothes, both identical-coarse cotton trousers and a shirt of the same material. On the floor were a pair of rope-soled espadrilles, stained and worn but tough and reliable. Other than that, a sombrero of plaited straw completed the work clothes. There was a canvas bag with a drawstring for carrying lunch to the plantation. Dexter snapped off his flashlight and checked his watch. Five past four.

He stripped down to boxer shorts, selected the items he wanted to take with him, wrapped them in his sweaty T-shirt, and bundled them into the lunch bag. The rest he would have to lose. This surplus was rolled into the knapsack and disposed of during a second visit to the latrines. Then he waited for the clang of the iron bar on the hanging length of railway track. It came as ever at 6:30, still dark but with a hint of pink in the east. The duty guard, standing outside the village just beyond the chain-link double gates of the farmland, was the source. All around Dexter the village began to come to life.

He avoided the run to the latrines and wash troughs and hoped no one would notice. After twenty minutes, peering through a slit in the boards of the door, he saw that his alley was empty again. Chin down, sombrero tilted forward, he scurried to the latrines, one figure in sandals, pants, and shirts among a thousand.

He crouched over an open hole while the others took their breakfast. Only when the third clang summoned the workers to the access gate did he join the line.

The five checkers sat at their tables, examined the dog tags, checked the work manifests, punched the number into the records of those admitted that morning, and to which labour gang he was assigned, and waved the labourer through to join his foreman and be led away to collect tools and start the allocated tasks.

Dexter reached the table attending to his line, offered his dog tag between forefinger and thumb, like the others, leaned forward and coughed. The checker pulled his face away sharply to one side, noted the tag number, and waved him away. The last thing the man wanted was a face full of chilli odour. The new recruit shuffled off to draw his hoe; the assigned task was weeding the avocado groves.

At 7:30, Kevin McBride breakfasted alone on the terrace. The grapefruit, eggs, toast, and plum jam would have done credit to any five-star hotel.

At 8:15, the Serb joined him. "I think it would be wise for you to pack," he said. "When you have seen what Major Van Rensberg will show you, I hope you will agree, that this mercenary has a 1 percent chance of getting here, even less of getting near me, and none of getting out again. There is no point in your staying. You may tell Mr. Devereaux that I will complete my part of our arrangement, as agreed, at the end of the month."

At 8:30, McBride threw his suitcase into the rear of the South African's open Jeep and climbed beside the major.

"So, what do you want to see?" asked the head of security.

"I am told it is virtually impossible for an unwanted visitor to get in here at all. Can you tell me why?"

"Look, Mr. McBride, when I designed all this I created two things: One, it is an almost completely self-sufficient farming paradise. Everything is here. Second, it is a fortress, a sanctuary, a refuge, safe from almost all outside invasion or threat.

"Now, of course, if you are talking about a full military operation, paratroopers, armour, of course it could be invaded. But one mercenary acting alone? Never."

"How about arrival by sea?"

"Let me show you."

Van Rensberg let in the clutch and they set off, leaving a plume of rising dust behind them. The South African pulled over and stopped near a cliff edge.

"You can see from here," he said, as they climbed out. "The whole estate is surrounded by sea, at no point less than twenty feet below the cliff top, in most areas fifty feet. Sea-scanning radar, disguised as TV dishes, warn us of anything approaching by sea."

"Interception?"

"Two fast patrol boats, one at sea at all times. There is a one-mile limit of forbidden water around the whole peninsula. Only the occasional delivery freighter is allowed in."

"Underwater entry? Amphibious special forces?"

Van Rensberg snorted derisively. "A special force of one? Let me show you what would happen."

He took his walkietalkie, called the radio basement, and was patched through to the slaughterhouse. The rendezvous was across the estate, near the derricks. McBride watched a bucket of offal go down the slide and drop into the sea thirty feet below.

For several seconds there was no reaction. Then the first scimitar fin sliced the surface. Within sixty seconds there was a feeding frenzy. Van Rensberg laughed.

"We eat well here. Plenty of steak. My employer does not eat steak, but the guards do. Many of them, like me, are from the old country, and we like our *braai*-or barbecue as you Americans call it."

"So?"

"When a beast is slaughtered, lamb, goat, pig, steer, about once a week, the fresh offal is thrown into the ocean. And the blood. That sea is alive with sharks. Blacktip, whitefin, tiger, giant hammerhead, they're all there. Last month one of my men fell overboard. The boat swerved back to pick him up. They were there in thirty seconds. Too late."

"He didn't come out of the water?"

"Most of him did. But not his legs. He died two days later."

"Burial?"

"Out there."

"So the sharks got him after all."

"No one makes mistakes around here."

"What about crossing the sierra, the way I came in yesterday?"

In answer Van Rensberg handed McBride a pair of field glasses. "Have a look. You cannot climb around the edges of it. It's sheer to the water. Come down the escarpment in daylight, and you'll be seen in seconds."

"But at night?"

"So you reach the bottom. Your man is outside the razor wire, over two miles from the mansion and outside the wall. He is not a peon, not a guard; he is quickly spotted andÉtaken care of."

"What about that stream I saw? Could one come in down the stream?"

"Good thinking, Mr. McBride. Let me show you."

Van Rensberg drove to the airfield, entered with his own remote for the chain-link gate, and motored to where the stream from the hills ran under the runway. They dismounted. There was a long patch of water open to the sky between the runway and the fence. The clear water ran gently over grasses and weeds on the bottom."

"See anything?"

"Nope," said McBride.

"They're in the cool, in the shade, under the runway."

It was clearly the South African's party piece. He kept a small supply of beef jerky in the Jeep. When he tossed a piece in, the water seethed. McBride saw the piranha sweep out of the shadow and the wad of beef was shredded by a myriad of needle-sharp teeth.

"Enough? I'll show you how we husband the water supply here and never lose security. Come."

Back in the farmland, Van Rensberg followed the stream for most of its meandering course through the estate. At a dozen points, spurs had been taken off the main current to irrigate various crops or top up different storage ponds, but they were always blind alleys.

The main stream curved hither and yon but eventually came back to the cliff edge near the runway but beyond the wire. There it increased in speed and rushed over the cliff into the sea.

"Right near the edge I have a plate of spikes buried," said Van Rensberg. "Anyone trying to swim through here will be taken by the current and swept along, out of control, between smooth walls of concrete, toward the sea. Passing over the spikes, the helpless swimmer will enter the sea bleeding badly. Then what? Sharks, of course."

"But at night?"

"Ah, you have not seen the dogs? A pack of twelve. Dobermans and deadly. They are trained not to touch anyone in the uniform of the estate guards and another dozen of the senior personnel no matter how dressed. It is a question of personal odour.

"They are released at sundown. After that every peon and every stranger has to remain outside the wire or survive for a few minutes until the roaming dogs find him. After that there is no chance for him. So this mercenary of yours. What is he going to do?"

"I haven't the faintest idea. If he's got any sense, I guess he's gone by now."

Van Rensberg laughed again.

"Very sensible of him. You know, back in the old country, up in the Caprivi Strip, we had a camp for *mundts* who were causing a lot of trouble in the townships. I was in charge of it. And you know what, Mr. CIA-man? I never lost a single kaffir. Not one. By which I mean, no escapers. Never."

"Impressive, I'm sure."

"And you know what I used? Landmines? No. Searchlights? No. Two concentric rings of chain-link fencing, buried six feet deep, razortopped, and between the rings wild animals. Crocs in the ponds, lions in the grassland. One covered tunnel in and out. I love Mother Nature."

He checked his watch. "Eleven o'clock. I'll drive you up the track to our guardhouse in the gap in the hills. The San Martin police will send a Land Rover to meet you there and take you back to the hotel."

They were driving back across the estate from the coast to the gate giving access to the village and the climbing track when the major's radio crackled. He listened to the message from the duty operator in the cellar beneath the mansion. It pleased him. He switched off and pointed to the crest of the sierra.

"Colonel Moreno's men scoured the jungle this morning from the road to the crest. They've found the American's camp. Abandoned. You could be right. I think he's seen enough and chickened out."

In the distance McBride could see the great double gate and beyond it the white of the buildings of the worker village.

"Tell me about the labourers, Major."

"What about them?"

"How many? How do you get them?"

"About twelve hundred. They are all offenders within San Martin's penal system. Now don't get holier-than-thou, Mr. McBride. You Americans have prison farms. So this is a prison farm. Considering all things, they live pretty well here."

"And if they have served their sentences, when do they go back home?"

"They don't," said Van Rensberg.

*A one-way ticket*, thought the American, *courtesy of Colonel Moreno and Major Van Rensberg. A life sentence. For what offences? Jaywalking? Littering? Moreno would have to keep the numbers upon demand.*

"What about guards and mansion staff?"

"That's different. We are employed. Everyone needed inside the mansion wall lives there. Everybody stays inside when our employer is in residence. Only uniformed guards and a few senior staff like me can pass through the wall. Never a peon. Pool cleaners, gardeners, waiters, maidsall live inside the wall. The peons who work the estate, they live in their township. They are all single men."

"No women, no children?"

"None. They are not here to breed. But there is a church. The priest preaches one text only-absolute obedience." He forbore to mention that for lack of obedience he retained the use of his rhino-hide *sjambok* whip as in the old days.

"Could a stranger come into the estate posing as part of the workforce, Major?"

"No. Every evening the workforce for the next day is selected by the estate manager who goes to the village. Those selected walk to the main gate and report at sunrise, after breakfast. They are checked through one by one. So many desired, so many admitted. Not a single one more."

"How many come through?"

"About a thousand a day. Two hundred with some technical skill for the repair shops, mill, bakery, slaughterhouse, tractor shed; eight hundred for hacking and weeding. About two hundred remain behind each day. The genuinely sick, garbage crews, cooks."

"I think I believe you," said McBride. "This loner doesn't have a chance, does he?"

"Told you so, Mr. CIA-man. He's chickened out."

He had hardly finished when the radio crackled again. His brow furrowed as he listened to the report. "What kind of flap? Well, tell him to calm down. I'll be there in five minutes."

He replaced the set. "Father Vicente, at the church. In some kind of a panic. I'll have to drive by on our way to the mountains. A delay of a few minutes no doubt."

On their left they passed a row of peons, aching backs bent over mattocks and hoes in the raging heat. Some heads lifted briefly to watch the passing vehicle bearing the man who had the power of life and death over them. Gaunt, stubbled faces, coffee-brown eyes under straw brims, but one pair of eyes was blue.

30 The bluff

He was hopping up and down at the top of the church steps by the open door, a short, tubby man with porcine eyes and a none-too-clean white soutane. Father Vicente, pastoral shepherd of the wretched, forced labourers.

Van Rensberg's Spanish was extremely basic and habitually only expressed abrupt commands; that of the priest attempting English was not much better.

"Come queek, Coronel," he said and darted back inside. The two men dismounted, ran up the steps, and followed him.

The soiled cassock swept down the aisle, past the altar, and on to the vestry. It was a tiny room, its main feature a wall cupboard of basic carpentry, assembled and screwed to the wall to contain his vestments. With a theatrical gesture he threw the door open and cried, "Mira."

They looked. The peon was still exactly as Father Vicente had found him. No attempt had been made to release him. His wrists were firmly bound with tape in front of him; his ankles the same; a broad band of tape covered his mouth, from behind which came protesting mumbles. Seeing Van Rensberg, his eyes indicated that he was terrified.

The South African leaned forward and tore away the gag without ceremony. "What the hell is he doing here?"

There was a babble of terrified explanation from the man, and an expressive shrug from the priest.

"He says he not know. He says he go to sleep last night; he wake up in here. He has headache; he remember nothing more."

The man was naked but for a pair of skimpy shorts. There was nothing for the South African to grab but the man's upper arms, so he seized these and brought the peon to his feet.

"Tell him he'd better start remembering!" he shouted at the priest, who translated.

"Major," said McBride quietly, "first things first. What about a name."

Father Vicente caught the sense. "He is called Ramon."

"Ramon what?"

The priest shrugged. He had over a thousand parishioners; was he supposed to remember them all?

"Which cabin does he come from?" asked the American.

There was another rapid exchange of local Spanish. McBride could decipher written Spanish slowly, but the local San Martin patois was nothing like Castilian.

"It is three hundred meters from here," said the priest.

"Shall we go and look?" said McBride. He produced a penknife and cut the tape from Ramon's wrists and ankles. The intimidated worker led the major and the American across the plaza, down the main street, and thence to his alley. He pointed to his door and stood back.

Van Rensberg went in, followed by McBride. There was nothing to find, save one small item which the American discovered under the bed. It was a pad of compressed cotton wool. He sniffed it and handed it to the major, who did the same.

"Chloroform," said McBride. "He was knocked out in his sleep. Probably never felt a thing. Woke up bound hand and foot, locked in a cupboard. He's not lying, just bewildered and terrified."

"So what the hell was that for?"

"Didn't you mention dog tags on each man, checked when they went through the gate to work?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Ramon isn't wearing one. And it's not here on the floor. Somewhere in there I think you have a ringer."

It sank in. Van Rensberg strode back to the Land Rover in the square and unhooked the walkietalkie on the dash. "This is an emergency," he told the radio operator who answered. "Sound the 'escaped prisoner' siren. Seal the gate of the mansion to every one except me. Then use the PA to tell every guard on the estate, on or off duty, to report to me at the main gate."

Seconds later the long, wailing sound of the siren rolled over the peninsula. It was heard in field and barn, shed and orchard, kitchen, garden, and pigsty.

Every one out there raised his head from what he was doing to stare toward the main gate. When their undivided attention had been secured, the voice of the radio operator in the basement beneath the mansion was heard.

"All guards to main gate. Repeat, all guards to main gate. On the double."

There were over sixty on day shift and the rest on layover in their barracks. From the fields, riding four-wheelers from the farthest reaches, jogging on foot from the barracks a quarter mile from the main gate, they converged in response to the emergency.

Van Rensberg took his offroad back through the gate and waited for them, standing on the hood, bullhorn in hand.

"We don't have an escape," he told them when they stood in front of him. "We have the reverse. We have an intruder. Now he's masquerading as a labourer. Same clothes, same sandals, same sombrero. He's even got a stolen dog tag. Day shift: Round up and bring in every single labourer. No exceptions. Off-duty shift: Search every barn, cowshed, stable, workshop. Then seal and mount guard. Use your radios to stay in touch with squad commanders. Junior leaders, stay in touch with me. Now get to it. Anyone in prisoner uniform seen running away, shoot on sight. Now go."

The hundred men began to fan out over the estate. They had the midsection to cover: from the chain-link fence separating the village and airfield from the farmland up to the mansion wall. A big territory; too big even for a hundred men. And it would take hours.

Van Rensberg had forgotten that McBride was leaving. He ignored the American, busy with his own planning. McBride sat and puzzled. There was a notice by the church, right next to the door. It said: OBSEQUIAS POR NUESTRO HERMANO PEDRO HERNANDEZ. ONCE DE LA MANANA.

Even with his laboured Spanish, the CIA man could work out that that meant: "Funeral service for our brother Pedro Hernandez. Eleven in the morning." Did the Avenger not see it? Could he not work out the sense? It would be reasonable that the priest would not normally visit his vestry until Sunday. But today was different. At exactly ten to eleven he would open his vestry cupboard and see the prisoner.

Why not dump him somewhere else? Why not tape him to his own cot where no one would find him till sundown or not even then?

He found the major speaking to the airfield mechanics.

"What's wrong with it? Screw the tail rotor. I need it back up in the air. Well, hurry it up."

He flicked off his machine, listened to McBride, glared and snapped, "Your fellow countryman simply made a mistake, that is all, an expensive mistake. It's going to cost him his life."

An hour passed. Even without field glasses McBride could see the first columns of white cotton-clad workers being forcemarched back to the double gates to their village. Beside the lines of men, the uniformed guards were shouting them on. Midday. The heat was a hammer on the back of the head.

The milling crowd of men in front of the gates grew ever bigger. The chitchat on the radio never stopped, as sector after sector was cleared of workers, buildings searched, declared clear, sealed, and manned from inside.

At 1:30 the number checking began. Van Rensberg insisted on the five checkers resuming their places behind the tables and passing the workers through, one after another, two hundred per column.

The men normally worked in the cool of the dawn or the evening. They were baking alive in the heat. Two or three peons fainted and were helped through by friends. Every tag was checked until its number matched one passed through that same morning. When the last white-bloused figure stumbled toward the village, rest, shade, and water, the senior checker nodded.

"One missing," he called.

Van Rensberg walked to his desk to peer over his shoulder.

"Number five-three-one-oh-eight."

"Name?"

"Ramon Gutierrez."

"Release the dogs."

Van Rensberg strolled across to McBride. "Every single technician must by now be inside, locked in, and guarded. The dogs will never touch my men, you know. They recognise the uniform. That leaves one man out there. A stranger, white cotton pants and floppy shirt, wrong smell. It's like a lunch bell to the Dobermans. Up a tree? In a pond? They'll still find him. Then they will surround him and bay until the handlers come. I give this mercenary half an hour to get up a tree and surrender, or die."

The man he sought was in the middle of the estate, running lightly between rows of maize higher than his own head. He judged the direction of his run by the sun and crests of the sierra.

It had taken two hours of steady jogging earlier in the morning to bring him from his allotted work patch to the base of the mansion's protective wall. Not that the distance was a problem for a man accustomed to half a marathon, but he had to dodge the other work parties and the guards. He was still dodging.

He came to a track across the maize field, dropped to his belly, and peered out. Down the track, two guards on four-wheelers roared away in the direction of the main gate. He waited till they were around a corner, then sprinted across the track and was lost in a peach orchard. His study of the layout of the estate from above had given him a route that would take him from where he had started near the mansion wall to where he wanted to be, without ever crossing a knee-high crop.

The equipment he had brought in that morning, either in his supposed lunch bag or inside the tight briefs he wore beneath the boxer shorts, was almost expended. The tough dive watch was back on his wrist, his belt round his waist, and his knife was up against the small of his back, out of the way but easy to reach. The bandage, sticky plaster, and the rest were in the flat pouch forming part of his belt.

He checked the peaks of the hills again, altered course by a few degrees, and stopped, tilting his head until he heard the gurgle of the flowing water ahead. He came to the stream's edge, backtracked fifteen yards, then stripped, retaining only belt, knife, and briefs.

Across the crops, in the dull, numbing heat, he heard the first hounds baying toward him. What little sea breeze there was would take his odour to the muzzles of the hounds in a few more minutes.

He worked carefully but fast, until he was satisfied, then tiptoed away toward the stream, slipped into the cool water, and began to let the current take him, slanting across the estate toward the airfield and the cliff.

Despite his assertion that the killer dogs would never touch him, Van Rensberg had wound all the windows up as he drove slowly down one of the main avenues from the gate into the heartland.

Behind him came the deputy dog handler at the wheel of a truck with a completely enclosed rear made of steelwire mesh. The senior handler was beside him in the Land Rover, head stuck out on the passenger side. It was he who heard the sudden change in pitch of his hounds' baying, from deepthroated bark to excited yelping.

"They have found something," he shouted.

Van Rensberg grinned. "Where, man, where?"

"Over there."

McBride crouched in the rear, glad of the walls and windows on the Land Rover Defender. He did not like savage dogs, and for him twelve was a dozen too many.

The dogs had found something all right, but their yelping was more from pain than excitement. The South African came upon the entire pack after swerving round the corner of a peach orchard. They were milling around the centre of the track. A bundle of bloody clothes was the object of their attention.

"Get them into the truck," shouted Van Rensberg. The senior handler got down, closed the door, and whistled his pack to order. Without protest, still yelping, they bounded into the rear of the dog truck and were locked in. Only then did Van Rensberg and McBride descend.

"So, this is where they caught him," said Van Rensberg.

The handler, still puzzled by the behaviour of his pack, scooped up the bloodstained cotton blouse and held it to his nose. Then he jerked his face away.

"Bloody man!" he screamed. "Chilli powder, fine-ground green chilli powder. It's stiff with the stuff. No wonder the poor bastards are screaming. That's not excitement; they're in pain."

"When will their muzzles work again?"

"Well, not today, boss, maybe not tomorrow."

They found the cotton pants, also impregnated with chilli powder, and the straw hat, even the canvas espadrilles. But no body, no bones, nothing but the stains on the shirt.

"What did he do here?" Van Rensberg asked the handler.

"He cut himself, that's what the swine did. He cut himself with a knife, then bled over the shirt. He knew that would drive the dogs crazy. Man blood always does when they're on a kill patrol. So they would smell the blood, and inhale the chilli."

Van Rensberg counted up the items of clothing.

"He also stripped down," he said. "We're looking for someone stark naked."

"Maybe not," said McBride.

The South African had outfitted his force along military lines. They all wore the same uniform. Into canvas, midcalf combat boots, they tucked khaki drill trousers. Each had a broad leather belt with a buckle. Above the waist each man had a shirt in the pale African-bush camouflage known as "leopard." Sleeves were cut at the midforearm, then rolled up to the bicep and ironed flat.

One or two inverted chevrons indicated corporal or sergeant, while the four junior officers had cloth "pips" on the epaulettes of their shirts.

What McBride had discovered, snagged on a thorn near the path where evidently a struggle must have taken place, was an epaulette, ripped off a shirt. It had no pips.

"I don't think our man is naked at all," said McBride. "I think he's wearing a camouflage shirt, minus one epaulette, khaki drill pants, and combat boots. Not to mention a bush hat like yours, Major."

Van Rensberg was the colour of raw terra-cotta. But the evidence told its own story. Two scars along the grit showed where a pair of heels had apparently been dragged through the long grass. At the end of the trail was the stream.

"Throw a body in there," muttered the major, "it'll be over the cliff edge by now."

*And we all know how you love your sharks*, thought McBride, but said nothing.

The full enormity of his predicament sank into Van Rensberg's mind. Somewhere, on a sixthousandacre estate, with access to weapons and a four-wheeler, face shaded by a broad-brimmed bush hat, was a professional mercenary contracted, so he presumed, to blow his employer's head off.

He said something in Afrikaans, and it was not nice. Then he got on the radio. "I want twenty extra and fresh guards to the mansion. Other than them, let no one in but me. I want them fully armed, scattered immediately throughout the grounds around the house. And I want it now." They drove back, crosscountry, to the walled mansion on the foreland. It was 3:45.

31 The sting

After the searing heat of the sun on bare skin, the water of the stream was like balm. But it was dangerous water, for its speed was slowly increasing as it rushed between concrete banks to the sea.

At the point where he entered the water, it would still have been possible for Dexter to climb out the other side. But he was too far from the point he needed to be, and he heard the dogs far away. Also, he had seen the tree from his mountaintop and even earlier in the aerial photographs.

His last piece of unused equipment was a small, folding grappling hook and a twenty-foot twine lanyard. As he swept between the banks, along a twisting course, he unfolded the three prongs, locked them rigid and slipped the loop of the lanyard around his right wrist.

He came around a corner in the torrent and saw the tree ahead. It grew on the bank, at the airfield side of the water, and two heavy branches leaned over the stream. As he approached, he reared out of the water, swung his arm, and hurled the grappling hook high above him.

He heard the crash as the metal slammed into the tangle of branches, swept under the tree, felt the pain in his right arm socket as the hooks caught and the rush downriver stopped abruptly.

Hauling himself back on the twine, he crabbed his way to the bank and pulled his torso out. The water pressure eased, confined to his legs. With his free hand digging into the earth and grass, he dragged the rest of his body onto terra firma.

The grappling hook was lost in the branches. He simply reached as high as he could, sliced the lanyard with his knife and let it flutter above the water. He knew he was a hundred yards from the airfield wire that he had cut forty hours earlier. There was nothing for it but to crawl. He put the nearest hounds at still a mile away and across the stream. They would find the bridges but not just yet.

When he was lying in the darkness by the airfield's chain-link fence two nights earlier, he had cut a vertical and horizontal slice, to create two sides of a triangle, but left one thread intact to maintain the tension. The bolt cutters he had pushed under the wire into the long grass, and that was where he found them.

The two cuts had been retied with thin, green plastic-coated gardener's wire. It took not a minute to unlace the cuts; he heard a dull twang as the tension wire was sliced, and he crawled through. Still on his belly, he turned and laced it up again. From only ten yards the cuts became invisible.

On the farmland side, the peons cut hay for forage on spare tracts of grassland, but on each side of the runway it grew a foot long. Dexter found the bicycle and the other things he had stolen, dressed himself so as not to burn in the sun, and lay motionless to wait. A mile away, through the wire, he heard the hounds find the bloodied clothes.

By the time Major Van Rensberg, at the wheel of his Land Rover, reached the mansion gate, the fresh guards he had ordered were already there. A truck was stopped outside and the men jumped down, heavily armed and clutching M-16 assault carbines. The young officer lined them up in columns as the oaken gates swung apart. The column of men jogged through and quickly dispersed across the parkland. Van Rensberg followed, and the gates closed.

The steps McBride had mounted to the pool terrace when he arrived were ahead of them, but the South African pulled to the right, around the terrace to the side. McBride saw doorways at the lower level and the electrically operated gates of three underground garages.

The butler was waiting. He ushered them inside, and they followed him down a passage, past doors leading to the garages, up a flight of stairs, and into the main living area.

The Serb was in the library. Although the late afternoon was balmy, he had chosen discretion over valour. He sat at a conference table with a cup of black coffee and gestured his two guests to sit down. His bodyguard, Kulac, loomed in the background, back against a wall of unread first editions, watchful.

"Report," said Zilic, without ceremony.

Van Rensberg had to make his humiliating confession that someone, acting alone, had slipped into his fortress; gained access to the farmland by posing as a labourer; and escaped death by the dogs by killing a guard, dressing in his uniform, and tossing the body into the fast-flowing stream.

"So where is he now?"

"Between the wall around this park and the chain link protecting the village and airfield, sir."

"And what do you intend to do?"

"Every single man under my command, every man who wears that uniform, will be called up by radio and checked for identity."

"*Quis custodiet ipsos custodes*?' asked McBride. The other two looked at him blankly. "Sorry. Who guards the guardians themselves? In other words, who checks the checkers? How do you know the voice on the radio isn't lying?"

There was silence.

"Right," said Van Rensberg. "They will have to be recalled to the barracks and checked on sight by their squad commanders. May I go to the radio shack and issue the orders?"

Zilic nodded dismissively.

It took an hour. Outside the windows the sun set across the chain of crests. The tropical plunge to darkness began. Van Rensberg came back.

"Every one accounted for at the barracks. All eighty attested to by their junior officers. So he's still out there somewhere."

"Or inside the wall," suggested McBride. "Your fifth squad is the one patrolling this mansion."

Zilic turned to his security chief. "You ordered twenty of them in here without identity checks?" he asked icily.

"Certainly not, sir. They are the elite squad. They are commanded by Janni Duplessis. One strange face and he would have been seen immediately."

"Have him report here," ordered the Serb.

The young South African appeared at the library door several minutes later, snapping smartly to attention.

"Lieutenant Duplessis, in response to my order you chose twenty men, including yourself, and brought them here by truck two hours ago?"

"Yes, sir."

"You know every one of them by sight?"

"Yes, sir."

"Forgive me, but when you jogged through the gate, what was your formation of march?" asked McBride.

"I was at the head. Sergeant Grey behind me. Then the men, three abreast, six per column. Eighteen men."

"Nineteen," said McBride. "You forgot the tail-ender."

In the silence the mantelpiece clock seemed intrusively loud.

"What tail-ender?" whispered Van Rensberg.

"Hey, don't get me wrong, guys. I could have been mistaken. I thought I saw a nineteenth man come around the corner of the truck and jogged through at the rear. Same uniform. I thought nothing of it."

At that moment the clock struck 6:00, and the first bomb went off. They were no bigger than golf balls and completely harmless, more like bird scarers than weapons of war. They had eight-hour-delay timers, and Dexter had hurled all ten of them over the wall around 10:00 A.M. He knew exactly where the thickest shrubbery dotted the parkland around the house from the aerial photographs, and in his teenage years he had been quite a good pitcher. The crackers did, nevertheless, make a sound on detonation remarkably similar to the *whack-whump* of a highpowered rifle shot.

In the library someone shouted, "Cover," and all five men hit the floor.

Kulac rolled, came up, and stood over his master with his gun out. Then the first guard outside, believing he had spotted the gunman, fired back. Two more bomblets detonated, and the exchange of rifle fire intensified. A window shattered. Kulac fired back toward the darkness outside.

The Serb had had enough. He ran at a crouch through the door at the back of the library, along the corridor, and down the steps to the basement. McBride followed suit, with Kulac bringing up the rear, facing backward.

The radio room was off the lower corridor. The duty operator, when his employer burst in, was whitefaced in the neon light, trying to cope with a welter of shouts and yells on the waveband of the guards' breastpocket radios.

"Speaker, identify. Where are you? What is going on?" he shouted.

No one listened as the firefight in the darkness intensified. Zilic reached forward to his console and threw a switch. Silence descended.

"Alert the airfield. All pilots, all ground staff. I want my helicopter, and I want it now."

"It's not serviceable, sir.

"Then the Hawker. I want it airworthy."

"Now, sir?"

"Now. Not tomorrow, not in an hour, now!"

The crackle of fire in the far distance brought the man in the long grass to his knees. It was the deepest dusk before complete darkness, the hour when the eyes play tricks and shadows become threats. He lifted the bicycle to its wheels, put the toolbox in the front basket, pedalled across the runway to the escarpment side, and began to cycle the mile and a half to the hangars at the far end. The mechanic's coveralls with the "Z" logo of the Zeta Corporation on the back were unnoticeable in the dusk, and with a panic about to be launched, no one would remark on them for the next thirty minutes either.

The Serb turned to McBride. "This is where we part company, Mr. McBride. I fear you will have to return to Washington by your own means. The problem here will be sorted, and I shall be getting a new head of security. You can tell Mr. Devereaux I shall not renege on our deal. For the moment I intend to kill the intervening days enjoying the hospitality of friends of mine in the emirates."

The garage was at the end of the basement corridor, and the Mercedes was armoured. Kulac drove, his employer seated in the rear. McBride stood helplessly in the garage as the door rolled up and back. The limousine slid under it, across the gravel, and out of the stillopening gates in the wall. By the time the Mercedes had rolled up to it, the hangar was ablaze with light. The small tractor was hitched to the nosewheel assembly of the Hawker 1000 to tow it out onto the apron.

The last mechanic fastened down the last hatch on the engines, clattered down the gantry, and pulled the structure away from the airframe. In the illuminated cockpit, Captain Stepanovic, with his young French copilot beside him, was checking instruments, gauges, and systems on the strength of the auxiliary power unit.

Zilic and Kulac watched from the shelter of the car. When the Hawker was out on the apron, the door opened, the steps hissed down, and the copilot could be seen in the opening.

Kulac left the car alone, jogged the few yards of concrete, and ran up the steps into the sumptuous cabin. He glanced to his left toward the closed door of the flight deck. Two strides took him to the lavatory at the rear. He flung the door open. Empty. Returning to the top of the steps, he beckoned to his employer. The Serb left the car and ran to the steps. When he was inside, the door closed, locking them in to comfort and safety.

Outside, two men donned earmuffs. Captain Stepanovic started his engines. The two Pratt amp; Whitney 300s began to turn, then whine, then howl.

The second man stood way out front where the pilot could see him, a neon-lit bar in each hand. He guided the Hawker clear of the hangars and out to the edge of the apron.

Captain Stepanovic lined her up, tested the brakes one last time, released them, and powered both throttles.

The Hawker began to roll, faster and faster. To one side, miles away, the floodlights around the mansion flickered out, adding to the chaos. The nose lifted toward the sea and the north. To the left, the escarpment raced by. The twinjet eased off the tarmac, the faint rumbling stopped, the cliffedge villas went under the nose, and she was out over the moonlit sea.

Captain Stepanovic brought up his undercarriage, handed over to the Frenchman, and began to work out the flight plan and track for a first fuel stop in the Azores. He had flown to the UAE several times, but never at thirty minutes' notice. The Hawker tilted to starboard, moving from her northwest takeoff heading toward northeast, and passed through ten thousand feet.

Like most executive jets, the Hawker 1000 had a small but luxurious lavatory, right at the back, occupying the whole hull from side to side. And like some, the rear wall was a movable partition giving access to an even smaller cubbyhole for light luggage. Kulac had checked the lavatory but not the luggage bay.

Five minutes into the flight, the crouching man in the mechanic's coveralls eased the partition aside and stepped into the washroom. He removed the Sig Sauer 9-mm automatic from the toolbox, checked the mechanism yet again, eased off the safety catch, and walked into the main cabin. The two men in the rawhide club chairs facing each other stared at him in silence.

"You'll never dare use it," said the Serb. "It will penetrate the hull and blow us all away."

"The slugs have been doctored," said Dexter evenly. "One-quarter charge. Enough to punch a hole in you, stay inside, and kill you, but never go through the hull. Tell your boy I want his piece out, finger and thumb, on the carpet."

There was a short exchange in Serbo-Croat. His face, dark with rage, the bodyguard eased out his Glock from the left armpit holster and dropped it.

"Kick it toward me," said Dexter. Zilic complied.

"And the ankle gun."

Kulac wore a smaller backup gun taped round his left ankle under the sock. This was also kicked out of range. Avenger produced a pair of handcuffs and tossed them to the carpet.

"Your pal's left ankle. Do it yourself. In vision all the time or you lose a kneecap. And, yes, I am that good."

"A million dollars," said the Serb.

"Get on with it," said the American.

"Cash, any bank you like."

"I'm losing patience."

The handcuff went on.

"Tighter."

Kulac winced as the metal bit.

"Around the seat stanchion. And to the right wrist."

"Ten million. You're a fool to say no."

The answer was a second pair of cuffs É.

"Left wrist, through your friend's chain, then right wrist. Back up. Stay in my vision or you're the one saying adios to the kneecap."

The two men crouched, side by side, on the floor, tethered to each other and the assembly holding the seat to the floor, which Dexter hoped would be stronger even than the giant bodyguard.

Avoiding their grip, he stepped round them and walked to the cabin door. The captain assumed the opening door was his owner coming forward to ask for progress. The barrel of the gun nudged his temple.

"It is Captain Stepanovic, isn't it?" said a voice. Washington Lee, who had intercepted the Email from Wichita, had told him.

"I have nothing against you," said the hijacker. "You and your friend here are simply professionals. So am I. Let's keep it that way. Professionals do not do stupid things if they can be avoided. Agreed?"

The captain nodded. He tried to glance behind him into the cabin.

"Your owner and his bodyguard are disarmed and chained to the fuselage. There will be no help coming. Please do just as I say."

"What do you want?"

"Alter course." Dexter glanced at the electronic flight instrument system just above the throttles. "I suggest Three-One-Five degrees, compass true, should be about right. Skirt the eastern tip of Cuba, as we have no flight plan."

"Final destination?"

" Key West, Florida."

"The United States?"

"Land of my fathers," said the man with the gun.

32 The Rendition

Dexter had memorised the route from San Martin to Key West, but there was no need. The avionics on the Hawker are so clear that even a nonflier can follow the liquid crystal display showing intended course and line of track.

Forty minutes out from the coast he saw the blur of Grenada 's light slip under the starboard wing. Then came the twohour overwater haul to make landfall on the south coast of the Dominican Republic.

After two more, between the coast of Cuba and the Bahamas ' biggest island, Andros, he leaned forward and touched the Frenchman's ear with the tip of the automatic.

"Disconnect the transponder now."

The copilot looked across at the Yugoslav, who shrugged and nodded. The copilot switched it off. With the transponder-designed to pulse out an endlessly repeated identification signal-disconnected, the Hawker was reduced simply to a speck on the radar screen of someone looking very closely indeed. To anyone not looking that closely, it had ceased to exist. But it had also announced it was a suspect intruder.

South of Florida, reaching far out over the sea, is the air defence identification zone, designed to protect the southeastern flank of the United States from the continuous assault of the drug smugglers. Anyone entering ADIZ without a flight plan was playing hide-and-seek with some very sophisticated metal.

"Drop to four hundred feet above the sea," said Dexter. "Dive and dive now. All navigation and cabin lights off."

"That is very low," said the pilot, as the nose dropped through thirty thousand feet. The aircraft went dark.

"Pretend it's the Adriatic. You've done it before."

It was true. As a fighter pilot in the Yugoslav Air Force, Colonel Stepanovic had led dummy attacks against the Croatian coast at well below four hundred feet to slip under the radar. Still, he was right.

The moonlit sea at night is mesmerising. It can lure the low-flying pilot down and down until he flips the surface of the waves, rolls in, and dies. Altimeters under five hundred feet have to be dead accurate and constantly checked. Ninety miles southeast of Islamorada, the Hawker levelled at four hundred feet and raced over the Santaren Channel toward the Florida Keys. Coming in at sea level, those last ninety miles almost fooled the radar.

" Key West Airport, runway Two-Seven," said Dexter. He had studied the layout of his chosen landfall. Key West Airport faces eastwest, with one runway along that axis. All the passenger and ops buildings are at the eastern end. To land heading west would put the entire length of the runway between the Hawker and the vehicles racing toward it. Runway TwoSeven means it pointed to compass heading 270, or due west.

At fifty miles from touchdown, they were spotted. Twenty miles north of Key West is Cudjoe Key, home to a huge balloon tethered to a cable and riding twenty thousand feet in the sky. Where most coastal radars look outward and up, the Cudjoe eye-in-the-sky looks down. Its radars can see any plane trying to slip in under the net.

Even balloons need occasional maintenance, and the one at Cudjoe is brought down at random intervals, which are never announced. It had been down that evening by chance and was heading back up. At ten thousand feet it saw the Hawker coming out of the black sea, transponder off, no flight plan. Within seconds, two F16s on duty alert at Elgin Air Force Base in Pensacola were barreling down the runway, going straight to afterburn once they cleared the deck.

Climbing and breaking the sound barrier, the Fighting Falcons formated and headed south for the last of the Keys. Thirty miles out, Captain Stepanovic was down to two hundred knots and lining up. The lights of Cudjoe and Sugarloaf Keys twinkled to starboard. The fighters' radars picked up the intruder, and the pilots altered course to come in from behind. Against the Hawker's two hundred knots, the Falcons were moving at over a thousand.

As it happened, George Tanner was duty controller at Key West that night and was within minutes of closing the airport down when the alarm was raised. The position of the intruder indicated it was actually trying to land, which was the smart thing to do. Darkened intruders with lights and transponder switched off are given, after fighter interception, one warning to do as they are told and land where they are told. There are no second warnings: The war against the drug smugglers is too serious for games. Still and all, a plane can have an onboard emergency and deserves a chance to land. The light stayed on. Twenty miles out, the crew of the Hawker could see the lights of the runway glowing ahead of them. Above and behind, the F-16s began to drop and brake. For them, two hundred knots was almost landing speed.

Ten miles from touchdown, the Falcons found the darkened Hawker by the red glow from the jet efflux on each side of its tail. First the aircrew in the cabin knew, the deadly fighters were riding on each wingtip.

"Unidentified twin jet, look ahead and land. I say look ahead and land," said a voice in the captain's ear.

The undercarriage came down, with one-third flap. The Hawker adopted its landing posture. Chica Key Naval Air Station swept past to the right. The Hawker's main wheels felt for the touchdown markings, found the concrete, and it was down on U. S. territory.

For the last hour Dexter had had the spare earphones over his head and the mike in front of his mouth. As the wheels hit the tarmac, he keyed the transmit button.

"Unidentified Hawker jet to Key West tower, do you read?"

The voice of George Tanner came clearly into his ears.

"Read you, five."

"Tower, this aeroplane contains a mass murderer and a killer of an American in the Balkans. He is manacled to his seat. Please inform your police chief to exercise close custody and await the federal marshals."

Before waiting for a reply, he disconnected and turned to Captain Stepanovic.

"Go right to the far end, stop there, and I'll leave you," said the hijacker. He rose and pocketed his gun. Behind the Hawker, the Crash/Fire/Rescue trucks left the airport buildings and came after them.

"Door open, please," said Dexter.

He left the flight deck and walked back through the cabin as the lights came on. The two prisoners blinked in the glare.

Through the open door, Dexter could see the trucks racing toward them. Flashing red/blues indicated police cars. The wailing sirens were faint but getting closer.

"Where are we?" shouted Zoran Zilic.

" Key West," said Dexter.

"Why?"

"Remember in a meadow? In Bosnia? Spring of Ninety-five? An American kid pleading for his life? Well, pal, all this"-he waved his hand outside"-is a present from the boy's grandpa."

He walked down the steps and strode to the nose wheel assembly. Two bullets blew out the tires. The boundary fence was twenty yards away. The dark coveralls were soon lost in the blackness as he vaulted the chain link and walked away through the mangrove.

The airport lights behind him dimmed through the trees, but he began to make out the flashes of car and truck headlights on the highway beyond the swamp. He pulled out a cell phone and dialled by the glow of the tiny screen. Far away in Windsor, Ontario, a man answered.

"Mr. Edmond?"

"This is he?"

"The package from Belgrade that you asked for has landed at Key West Airport, Florida."

He said no more and barely heard the yell at the other end before disconnecting. Just to be sure, the cell phone spun away into the brackish swamp water beside the track to be lost forever.

Ten minutes later, a senator in Washington was roused from his dinner, and within an hour two officers from the Federal Air Marshal Bureau in Miami were speeding south.

Before the marshals were through Islamorada, a teamster driving north, just out of Key West, on US1, saw a lone figure by the roadside. Thinking the coveralls meant a stranded trucker, he stopped.

"I'm going up as far as Marathon," he called down. "Any use?"

" Marathon will do just fine," said the man. It was 11:40 P.M…

It took Kevin McBride the whole of the 9th to find his way home. Major Van Rensberg, still trying to find the missing impostor, consoling himself that at least his employer was safe, dispatched the CIA man as far as the capital city. Colonel Moreno fixed him a passage from the airport to Paramaribo. A KLM flight ferried him to Curacao. There was a connector to Miami International and thence the last flight to Washington. He landed very late and very tired. On Monday morning, he was early when he walked into Paul Devereaux's office, but his chief was already there.

He looked ashen. He seemed to have aged. He gestured McBride to a seat and wearily pushed a sheet across the desk.

All good reporters go out of their way to maintain an excellent contact with the police forces of their area. They would be crazy not to. The Key West correspondent of the *Miami Herald* was no exception. The events of Saturday night were leaked to him by friends on the Key West force by Sunday noon, and his report was filed well in time for the Monday edition. It was a synopsis of the story that Devereaux found on his desk that Monday morning-the tale of a Serbian warlord and suspected mass murderer detained in his own jet after an emergency landing at Key West International had made the third lead on the front page.

"Good Lord," whispered McBride as he read. "We thought he had escaped."

"No. It seems he was hijacked," said Devereaux. "You know what this means, Kevin? Project Peregrine is dead. Two years of work down the Potomac. It cannot go forward without him."

Line by line, Devereaux explained the conspiracy he had devised to accomplish the greatest antiterrorist strike of the century.

"When was he due to fly to Karachi and on to the Peshawar meeting?"

"The twentieth. I just needed that extra ten days."

He rose and walked to the window, gazing out at the trees, his back to McBride.

"I have been here since dawn, when a phone call woke me with the news, asking myself: How did he do it, this goddamn Avenger?"

McBride was silent, mute in his sympathy.

"Not a stupid man, Kevin. I will not have it that I was bested by a stupid man. Clever, more than I could have thought. Always just one step ahead of meÉHe must have known he was up against me. Only one man could have told him. And you know who that was, Kevin?"

"No idea, Paul."

"Some sanctimonious bastard in the FBI called Colin Fleming. But even tipped off, how did he beat me? He must have guessed we would engage the cooperation of the Suriname Embassy here. So he invented Prof. Medvers Watson, butterfly hunter extraordinaire. And fictional. And a decoy. I should have spotted it, Kevin. The professor was a phoney, and he was meant to be discovered. Two days ago I got news from our people in Suriname. Know what they told me?"

"No, Paul."

"That the real cover name, the Englishman Henry Nash, got his visa in Amsterdam. We never thought of Amsterdam. Clever, clever bastard. So Medvers Watson went in and died in the jungle. As intended. And it bought the man six days while we proved it was a sting. By then he was inside and watching the estate from the mountaintop. Then you went in."

"But I missed him too, Paul."

"Only because that idiot South African refused to listen to you. Of course the chloroformed peon had to be discovered in the midmorning. Of course the alarm had to be raised. To bring the dogs in. To permit the third sting, the presumption that he had murdered a guard and taken his place."

"But I was at fault as well, Paul. I honestly thought I saw an extra guard trotting into the mansion grounds in the dusk. Apparently there wasn't one. By dawn they were all accounted for."

"By then it was too late. He had hijacked the aircraft."

Devereaux turned from the window and walked over to his deputy. He held out his hand. "Kevin, we all slipped up. He won; I lost. But I appreciate everything you did and tried to do. As for Colin Fleming, the moralising bastard who tipped him off, I'll deal with him in my own time. For the moment, we have to start again. UBL is still out there. Still planning. Still plotting. I want the whole team in here tomorrow at eight. Autopsy and forward planning. Where we go from here."

McBride turned to go.

"You know," said Devereaux, as McBride reached the door, "if there's one thing that thirty years in this agency has taught me, it's this. There are some levels of loyalty that command us beyond even the call of duty."