Avenger (30 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You are British, Mr. Nash?"

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

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

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

"You should see the Ministry of Tourism," said the Dutch woman, who had never been to Surinam. From what Cal Dexter had researched about that malarial coast, such a ministry was likely to be an exercise in optimism over reality.

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

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

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

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

It was forty miles over bumpy, pot-holed, ex-colonial road from the river border to San Martin City. The road ran through jungle on both sides. Somewhere to the left of the road the jungle would give way to the swamps, the swamps to the mangrove tangle and eventually to the inaccessible sea. To the right the dense rain forest ran away inland, rising gently, to the confluence of the Commini and the Maroni, and thence into Brazil.

A man, thought McBride, could be lost in there within half a mile. Occasionally he saw a track running off the road and into the bush, no doubt to some small farm or plantation not far from the road.

Down the highway they passed a few vehicles, mostly pickup trucks or battered Land Rovers clearly used by better-off farmers, and occasionally a cyclist with a basket of produce above the rear wheel, his livelihood on its way to market.

There were a dozen small villages along the journey and the man from Washington was struck at the different ethnic type of the San Martin peasant from those one republic back. There was a reason.

All the other colonial powers, conquering and trying to settle virtually empty landscapes, planted their estates and then looked for a labour force. The local Indios took one peek at what was in store and vaporized into the jungle.

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

The wayside peasants McBride was seeing through the windows of the Mercedes were walnut-hued from the sun; but they were not black, nor yet Creole. They were Hispanic. The whole labour force of San Martin was still genetically Hispanic. The few black slaves who had escaped the Dutch had gone into the jungle to become the Bushneger, who were very hard to find, and deadly when they were.

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

The man who was credited with keeping the gaudy and massively decorated President Murioz in the palace on the hill behind the capital of this last banana republic was fat like a brooding toad, but he was not jolly.

The torments practised on those he suspected of sedition, or to be in possession of details of such people, were hinted at only in the lowest whispers and the darkest corners.

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

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

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

Nevertheless, his grip on the small and impoverished country was absolute and he listened without interruption. He knew exactly the relationship between the refugee from Yugoslavia who had sought sanctuary in San Martin, and now lived in an enviable mansion at the end of a piece of property Moreno himself hoped one day to acquire, and the president.

He knew of the huge wealth of the refugee and the annual fee he paid to President Munoz for sanctuary and protection, even though that protection was really provided by himself.

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

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

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

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

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, Calvin Dexter did not need to return to Pennington to collect any messages left on the answering machine attached to his office telephone. He could make the collections from a public phone booth in Brooklyn. He did so on 15 August.

The cluster of messages was mainly from voices he knew before the speaker identified himself. Neighbours, law clients, local businessmen; mainly wishing him a happy fishing vacation and asking when he would be back at his desk.

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

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

Chapter TWENTY-FOUR

The Plan

WHEN PROFESSOR MEDVERS WATSON LEFT, THE SURINAMESE CONSUL was feeling slightly breathless; so much so, the official very nearly excluded the academic from the list of visa applicants he was sending to Kevin McBride at a private address in the city.

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

"It's been seen, you know. The type "V". Unbelievable."

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

"One of the Limenitidinae, you know. Subfamily, of course. Like the Charaxinae. Both derived from the Nymphalidae, as you probably know."

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

"But what do you want to do about them?" asked the consul. Professor Medvers Watson closed his almanac with a snap.

"Photograph them, my dear sir. Find them and photograph them. Apparently there has been a sighting. Until now the Agrias narcissus was about as rare as it gets in the jungles of your hinterlands, but the Callicore maronensis? Now that would make history. That is why I must go without delay. The autumn monsoon, you know. Not far off."

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

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

"Well, good hunting," he said weakly.

Two days later Kevin McBride walked into the office of Paul Devereaux with a broad smile on his face.

"I think we have him," he said. He laid down a completed application form of the type issued by the Surinamese Consulate and filled out by the applicant for a visa. A passport-sized photo stared up from the page.

Devereaux read through the details.

"So?"

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

"And?"

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

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

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

"And the Surinam government in Parbo."

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

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

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

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