Avenger

by Frederick Forsyth

  What he meant was that in December 2000 the President had been Bill Clinton.

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

  And the brass-noses around George Dubya were not going to see Project Peregrine fail because someone just trashed the Clintonian rulebook. They were doing the same themselves anyway.

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

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

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

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Jet

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

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

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

  ‘Come on in, counsellor,’ said the ex-hacker.

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

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

  ‘And you think they don’t want you to know?’

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

  ‘And it’s the layers you want pulled away.’

  ‘Yep.’

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

  ‘I know.’

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

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

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

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

  What Raytheon got for their dollars was the successful and popular HS 125 short-range twinjet executive runabout, the Hawker 800 and the top-of-the-range 3000-mile Hawker 1000 model.

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

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

  ‘Anything else?’ asked Lee.

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

  ‘Never heard of it,’ said Lee.

  ‘Former Dutch Antilles, along with Curaçao and Bonaire. They stayed Dutch. Aruba broke away in 1986. Went solo. They all do secret bank accounts, company registrations, that sort of thing. It’s a pain in the ass for international fraud regulations, but it’s a cheap income for an otherwise no-resource island. Aruba has a tiny oil refinery. Otherwise its income is tourism based on some great coral; plus secret bank accounts, gaudy stamps and dodgy number plates. I would guess my target changed the old registration number to the new one.’

  ‘So Raytheon would have no record of P4-ZEM?’

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

  ‘We’ll see,’ muttered Washington Lee.

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

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

  ‘How big is your budget?’ he asked.

  ‘Adequate. Why?’

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

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

  ‘All points. The tailfin register of the Aruba government. They have to cough up what that Hawker was called when Raytheon last saw it. Second, the Zeta Corporation in the Bermuda Companies’ Register. Head office, destination of all communications, money transfers. The lot. Thirdly, those flight plans it filed. It must have come to that Emirate, what did you call it . . . ?’

  ‘Ras al-Khaimah.’

  ‘Right, Ras al Whatever. It must have reached there from somewhere.’

  ‘Cairo. It came in from Cairo.’

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

  ‘You need to go to Cairo?’ asked Dexter.

  Washington Lee looked at him as if he were mad.

  ‘Go to Cairo? Why would I go to Cairo?’

  ‘You said “visit”.’

  ‘I mean in cyberspace. I can visit the Cairo database from a picnic site in Vermont. Look, why don’t you go home and wait, counsellor? This is not your world.’
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br />   Washington Lee rented his motorhome and bought his PC, plus the software he needed for what he had in mind. It was all with cash, despite the raised eyebrows, except the motorhome which needed a driver’s licence, but renting a motorhome does not necessarily mean a hacker is at work. He also bought a power generator, petrol-driven, to give him standard domestic ‘juice’ whenever he needed to plug in and log on.

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

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

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

  His second line of defence was much more basic: he would communicate by email only through web cafés in the towns he passed through.

  Cairo Air Traffic Control revealed that Hawker 1000 P4-ZEM, when it passed through with a refuelling stop in the land of the Pharaohs, came in from the Azores; every time.

  The very fact that the line across the world ran from west to east via the mid-Atlantic Portuguese islands to Cairo thence to Ras al-Khaimah indicated P4-ZEM was starting its journey somewhere in the Caribbean basin or South America. It was not proof, but it made sense.

  From a lay-by in North Carolina Washington Lee persuaded the Portuguese/Azores air traffic database to admit that P4-ZEM arrived from the west but was based at a private field owned by the Zeta Corporation. That made the line of pursuit via the filed flight plans into an impasse.

  The island of Bermuda also operates a system of banking secrecy and corporate confidentiality for the benefit of clients who are prepared to pay top dollar for top security, and it prides itself on being very blue-chip indeed.

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

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

  ‘Try the FIRs,’ said the pilot. ‘Flight Information Registers. They know who is based in their areas.’

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

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

  ‘I don’t follow.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Why certainly we do cabin interiors right here at the works, Mr . . . er . . .’

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

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

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

  The voice at the other end lost its self-confidence and began to stutter.

  ‘Really? Aw, Jeez. Sorry about that. Must have the wrong airplane.’

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

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

  A very pleasant Yugoslav, a former colonel in that country’s air force, with papers in perfect order including the full FAA records of the US flight school where he had converted to the Hawker. He checked his sales records: Captain Svetomir Stepanovic. And an email address.

  He composed a brief email to alert the captain of the Hawker to the weird and troubling phone call and sent it. Across the landscaped grounds that surround the headquarters building, parked behind a clump of trees, Washington Lee scanned his electromagnetic emanation monitor, thanked his stars the sales executive was not using the Tempest system to shield his computer from such monitors, and watched the EEM intercept the message. The text was immaterial to him. It was the destination he wanted.

  Two days later in New York, the motorhome returned to the charter company, hard drive and software somewhere in the Missouri River, Washington Lee pored over a map and pointed with a pencil tip.

  ‘It’s here,’ he said. ‘Republic of San Martin. About fifty miles east of San Martin City. And the airplane captain is a Yugoslav. I think you have your man, counsellor. And now, if you’ll forgive me, I have a home, a wife, two kids and a business to attend to.’

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

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

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

  At the beginning of August the Piper Cheyenne II flew
along the coast at a sedate 1250 feet, high enough not to arouse too much suspicion as little more than an executive proceeding from Surinam to French Guyana, but just low enough to allow good photography.

  Chartered out of the airport at Georgetown, Guyana, the Piper’s 1200-mile range would take it just over the French border and back home again. The client, whose passport revealed him as US citizen Alfred Barnes, now purported to be a developer of vacation resorts looking for possible situations. The Guyanese pilot privately thought he would pay not to vacation in San Martin, but who was he to turn down a perfectly good charter, paid for in cash dollars?

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

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

  The only beach was east of the city, at La Bahia, but that was the reserved resort of the rich and powerful of San Martin, basically the dictator and his friends. At the end of the republic, ten miles short of the banks of the Maroni River and the start of French Guyana, was El Punto.

  A triangular peninsula, like a shark’s tooth, jutting from the land into the sea; protected from the landward side by a sierra or cordillera of mountains from coast-to-coast, bisected by a single track over a single col. But it was inhabited.

  The pilot had never been this far east, so the peninsula was, to him, simply a coastal triangle on his nav maps. He could see there was a kind of defended estate down there. His passenger began to take photographs.

  Dexter was using a 35mm Nikon F5 with a motordrive that would give him five frames a second and get through his roll in seven seconds, but he absolutely could not afford to start circling in order to change film.

  He was set for a very fast shutter speed, due to the aircraft vibration, which at any slower than 500 per second would cause blurring. With 400 ASA film and aperture set at f8, it was the best he could do.