Frederick Forsyth - Avenger

"This is one clever man, *mi amigo*. You did not tell me this. Hokay, he fool me once. Not again. Look."

Since the moment Prof. Medvers Watson had burst through the border controls, the Secret Police chief had checked every possible entrant into San Martin.

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

Of the four from Suriname, 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 Suriname 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. Se-or 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 4th, 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 can be found in San Martin. It has not been found, yet it cannot drive off the main highway. So I say to myself, a garage somewhere in the country. 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 Suriname. 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 Munoz, 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 chief of Al Qaeda. Sooner or later someone was either going to have to find the manhunter or tell him.

"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, Se-or," 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, Se-or?"

"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 and find his way back to Suriname. 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.

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 six 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 around 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. Toward the far end, near the sea to catch the cooler breezes, were half a dozen small villas, which he presumed to be the 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 small steel wheels beneath the leading edge indicated it was electrically powered and would open to the command of the appropriate remote control. At half past six, 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 outward 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 there were about twelve hundred of them.

Clearly there were some staff who ran the village and would not go to work in the field. He saw them working in open-fronted, lean-to kitchens, preparing a breakfast of bread and gruel. Long trestle tables and benches formed the dining hall 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 down 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 zigzagged down from the single mountain pass 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.