Frederick Forsyth - Avenger

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.