Avenger (24 page)

He was assigned to the Navigation and Air Transport Regiment of the

Soviet Air Force, another covert 'front' for shipping arms consignments to anti-Western guerrillas and Third World regimes opposed to the West.

Here he could use his mastery of Portuguese in the Angolan civil war.

He also built up formidable contacts in the air force.

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

By 1992 he was back in his native south; the Afghan civil war had started, just across the border from his native Tajikistan, and one of the prime contestants was his fellow

Tajik, General Dostum. The only 'freight' the barbarous Dostum wanted was arms; Bout provided.

By 1993 he showed up in Ostend, Belgium, a jumping-off point to move into Africa via the Belgian ex-colony, the permanently war-torn Congo.

His source of supply was limitless, the vast weapons pool of the old

USSR, still operating on fictional inventories. Among his new clients were the Interahamwe, the genocidal butchers of Rwanda/ Burundi

This finally upset even the Belgians and he was hounded out of Ostend, appearing in 1995 in South Africa to sell to both the UNITA guerrillas in Angola and their enemies in the MPLA government. But with Nelson

Mandela occupying the South African presidency, things went bad for him there too and he had to leave in a hurry.

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

But his recourse was simply to move ten miles up the coast and settle in Ajman, taking a suite of rooms in the Chamber of Commerce and

Industry building. With only forty thousand people, Ajman has no oil and little industry and could not be as particular as Sharjah.

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

Hoover Building.

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

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

If Bill Brunton thought his surprises for the day were over, he was wrong. He felt his stomach perform some gentle aerobatics. Carefully, he withdrew a file from the bottom drawer of his desk. It was a compendium of embassy staff. Inspector Bin

Zayeed was unhesitating in pointing to the face of the cultural attache.

"This one," he said. "He was the third man at the table. You know him?"

Brunton knew him all right. Even though cultural exchanges were few and far between, the cultural attache was a very busy man. This was because behind the facade of visiting orchestras, he was the Station

Chief for the CIA.

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

The two men had met before. They had clashed in front of the National

Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and there was little love lost between them. Occasionally, opposites attract, but not in this case.

Paul Devereaux III was the scion of a long line of those families who come as near to being aristocracy as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has had for a long time. He was born a Boston Brahmin to his boot heels.

He was showing his intellectual brilliance way before school age and sailed through Boston College High School, the main feeder unit to one of the foremost Jesuit academies in America. His grades when he came out were summa cum laude.

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

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

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

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

A week after graduating from Boston College Paul Devereaux was sworn into the ranks of the Central Intelligence Agency. For him it was the poet's bright, confident morning. The great scandals were yet to come.

With his patrician's background and contacts he rose in the hierarchy, blunting the shafts of jealousy with a combination of easy charm and sheer cleverness. He also proved that he had a bucketful of the most prized currency of then1 all in the agency in those years: he was loyal. For that a man can be forgiven an awful lot, maybe sometimes a bit too much.

He spent time in the three major divisions: Operations (Ops),

Intelligence (Analysis) and Counter-intelligence (Internal Security).

His career hit the buffers with the arrival as director of John

Deutsch.

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

Devereaux regarded the new DCI as a politically correct nincompoop appointed by the Arkansan President whom, although a fellow Democrat, he despised, and that was before Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky.

This was not a marriage made in heaven and it almost became a divorce when Devereaux came to the defence of a division chief in South America accused of employing unsavoury contacts.

The entire agency had swallowed Presidential Executive Order 12333 with good grace, except for a few dinosaurs who went back to World War II.

This was the EO brought in by President Ronald Reagan that forbade any more 'terminations'.

Devereaux had considerable reservations but was too junior to be sought out for his counsel. It seemed to him that in the thoroughly imperfect world occupied by covert intelligence gathering there would arise occasions where an enemy in the form of a betrayer might have to be

'terminated' as a preemption. Put another way, one life may have to be terminated to preserve a likely ten.

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

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

So when a man in South America was threatened with the wreckage of his career for using ex-terrorists to inform on functioning terrorists,

Devereaux wrote a paper so sarcastic that it circulated throughout the grinning staffers of Ops Division like illegal samizdat in the old

Soviet Union.

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

Something happened in Africa that summer of 1998 that caused the new director to need the mordant but effective intellectual, despite his views on their joint commander-in-chief. Two US embassies were blown up.

It was no secret to the lowliest cleaner that since the end of the Cold

War in 1991 the new cold war had been against the steadily growing rise of terrorism, and the 'happening' unit within Ops Division was the

Counter-Terrorism Center.

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

The destruction of the embassies brought him out of there and into the headship of a small task force dedicated to one task and answering only to the director himself. The job in hand was called Operation

Peregrine, after that falcon who hovers high and silent above his prey until he is certain of a lethal hit, and then descends with awesome speed and accuracy.

In the new office Devereaux had no-limits access to any information from any other source that he might want and a small but expert team.

For his Number Two he chose Kevin McBride, not an intellectual patch on himself, but experienced, willing and loyal. It was McBride who took the call and held his hand across the mouthpiece.

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

Devereaux signalled for him to stay.

"Colin .. . Paul Devereaux. What can I do for you?"

His brow furrowed as he listened.

"Why surely, I think a meeting would be a good idea."

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

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

"So?" he queried.

"Please don't tell me the Dubai inspector got it wrong," said Fleming.

"Zilic was the biggest arms trafficker in Yugoslavia. He quit, disappeared. Now he is seen conferring with the biggest arms trafficker in the Gulf and Africa. Totally logical."

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

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

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

"Because you virtually ran Mid-East, although you were supposed to be second string. Because back then all company staff in the Gulf would have reported to you. Because even though you are now in some kind of

Special Project, that situation has not changed. Because I very much doubt that two weeks ago was Zilic's first visit to that neck of the woods. My guess is you knew exactly where Zilic was when the request came through, or at least that he would be in the Gulf and available for a snatch on a certain day. And you said nothing."

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

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

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

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

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

There was no need to be polite any more. The gloves were off and lying on the floor.

"I don't think I can let this ride," said Fleming. "This man Zilic is obscene. You must have read what he did to that boy from Georgetown.

But you're consorting. By proxy, but consorting for all that. You know what Zilic can do, what he's already done. All on file and I know you must have read it. There's testimony that as a gangster he hung a non-paying shopkeeper from his heels six inches above a two-bar electric fire until his brains boiled. He's a raving sadist. What the hell are you using him for?"

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

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

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

Colin trembled with rage and disgust.

"How can you be so bloody complacent?" he shouted. "Back in 1945 the