Avenger

by Frederick Forsyth

  It was a United States 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 beard, 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 attaché case and raised Paul Devereaux, tapping in a sequence of numbers that would keep the exchange from prying ears. With his cellphone plugged into the laptop, he waited until Devereaux came on line.

  He told his superior the gist of what Colonel Moreno had told him, 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 want . . . what?’

  ‘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 Soave? No? Oh well . . . the passport, of course. And the rest . . .’

  He shrugged.

  ‘If you wish. Take them all.’

  ‘I’m told just one will do.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The Trick

  McBride arrived back in Washington on 29 August. that same day, down in Paramaribo, Mr 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 in . . . that 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 Mr Henry Nash, at the wheel of a modest little rented compact, with a handgrip of summer clothes and wash kit, 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 Dutch-speaking Surinamese and, he presumed, the Spanish-speaking 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 striped 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 a singlet in all weathers meant he habitually had a slight tan; two weeks in the tropics had deepened it to 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 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 rucksack 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 little notice of the ten-litre plastic jerrycan 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.

  The manhunter 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 eastwards 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 Guyana, he left the road and began to climb.

  He saw the narrow track snaking down from the col, and angled away from it towards a peak he had selected from the photographs taken from the aeroplane. 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 US-Army derived MREs, 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 concentrates 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 col far below.

  Before the sun rose, he made the crest. He came out of the forest two hundred yards from where 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 leaves, he would be invisible from the estate below.

  When he needed a break, he could slither backwards 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 hide. 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 Forensic 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 thigh bone, right leg. Clean break at the mid-section. 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 blasted Avenger came back or is on his way. Now, go.’

  On the 5th, Kevin McBride faced Colonel Moreno again. Any veneer of amiability Moreno may have used before was gone. His toad-like 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 Professor Medvers Watson had burst through the border controls, the secret police chief had checked every possible entrant into San Martin Republic.

  Three game fishermen out of St Laurent du Maroni 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 Surinam direction. A party of French technicians from the Kourou space-launch facility in French Guyana had come over the River Maroni looking for cheap sex and were undergoing an even cheaper stay in jail.

  Of the four from Surinam, 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 Surinam 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. Señor 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 fourth, 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 cannot be found in San Martin. But it has not been found. Yet it cannot drive off the main highway. So, I say to myself, a garage somewhere in the country. So, a helper; a friend, colleague, employee. 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 Surinam. 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 Muñoz, 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 Al Qaeda chiefs. Sooner or later someone was either going to have to find the manhunter or tell Zilic.

  ‘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, señor,’ 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, señor?’

  ‘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, find his way back to Surinam. 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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  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 three 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 round 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. Towards the far end, near the sea to catch the cooler breezes, were half a dozen small villas which he presumed to be t
he 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 bogey wheels beneath the leading edge, indicated it was electrically powered and would open to the command of the appropriate bleeper. At half past five, 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 outwards 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 about twelve hundred of them.

  Clearly there were some staff who ran the village and would not go to work in the fields. He saw them working in open-fronted lean-to kitchens, preparing a breakfast of bread and gruel. Long trestle tables and benches formed the refectories 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 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 zig-zagged down from the single col 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.