Frederick Forsyth: Avenger

Before the marshals were through Islamorada, a teamster driving north, just out of Key West, on US1, saw a lone figure by the roadside. Thinking the coveralls meant a stranded trucker, he stopped.

"I'm going up as far as Marathon," he called down. "Any use?"

" Marathon will do just fine," said the man. It was 11:40 P.M…

It took Kevin McBride the whole of the 9th to find his way home. Major Van Rensberg, still trying to find the missing impostor, consoling himself that at least his employer was safe, dispatched the CIA man as far as the capital city. Colonel Moreno fixed him a passage from the airport to Paramaribo. A KLM flight ferried him to Curacao. There was a connector to Miami International and thence the last flight to Washington. He landed very late and very tired. On Monday morning, he was early when he walked into Paul Devereaux's office, but his chief was already there.

He looked ashen. He seemed to have aged. He gestured McBride to a seat and wearily pushed a sheet across the desk.

All good reporters go out of their way to maintain an excellent contact with the police forces of their area. They would be crazy not to. The Key West correspondent of the *Miami Herald* was no exception. The events of Saturday night were leaked to him by friends on the Key West force by Sunday noon, and his report was filed well in time for the Monday edition. It was a synopsis of the story that Devereaux found on his desk that Monday morning-the tale of a Serbian warlord and suspected mass murderer detained in his own jet after an emergency landing at Key West International had made the third lead on the front page.

"Good Lord," whispered McBride as he read. "We thought he had escaped."

"No. It seems he was hijacked," said Devereaux. "You know what this means, Kevin? Project Peregrine is dead. Two years of work down the Potomac. It cannot go forward without him."

Line by line, Devereaux explained the conspiracy he had devised to accomplish the greatest antiterrorist strike of the century.

"When was he due to fly to Karachi and on to the Peshawar meeting?"

"The twentieth. I just needed that extra ten days."

He rose and walked to the window, gazing out at the trees, his back to McBride.

"I have been here since dawn, when a phone call woke me with the news, asking myself: How did he do it, this goddamn Avenger?"

McBride was silent, mute in his sympathy.

"Not a stupid man, Kevin. I will not have it that I was bested by a stupid man. Clever, more than I could have thought. Always just one step ahead of meÉHe must have known he was up against me. Only one man could have told him. And you know who that was, Kevin?"

"No idea, Paul."

"Some sanctimonious bastard in the FBI called Colin Fleming. But even tipped off, how did he beat me? He must have guessed we would engage the cooperation of the Suriname Embassy here. So he invented Prof. Medvers Watson, butterfly hunter extraordinaire. And fictional. And a decoy. I should have spotted it, Kevin. The professor was a phoney, and he was meant to be discovered. Two days ago I got news from our people in Suriname. Know what they told me?"

"No, Paul."

"That the real cover name, the Englishman Henry Nash, got his visa in Amsterdam. We never thought of Amsterdam. Clever, clever bastard. So Medvers Watson went in and died in the jungle. As intended. And it bought the man six days while we proved it was a sting. By then he was inside and watching the estate from the mountaintop. Then you went in."

"But I missed him too, Paul."

"Only because that idiot South African refused to listen to you. Of course the chloroformed peon had to be discovered in the midmorning. Of course the alarm had to be raised. To bring the dogs in. To permit the third sting, the presumption that he had murdered a guard and taken his place."

"But I was at fault as well, Paul. I honestly thought I saw an extra guard trotting into the mansion grounds in the dusk. Apparently there wasn't one. By dawn they were all accounted for."

"By then it was too late. He had hijacked the aircraft."

Devereaux turned from the window and walked over to his deputy. He held out his hand. "Kevin, we all slipped up. He won; I lost. But I appreciate everything you did and tried to do. As for Colin Fleming, the moralising bastard who tipped him off, I'll deal with him in my own time. For the moment, we have to start again. UBL is still out there. Still planning. Still plotting. I want the whole team in here tomorrow at eight. Autopsy and forward planning. Where we go from here."

McBride turned to go.

"You know," said Devereaux, as McBride reached the door, "if there's one thing that thirty years in this agency has taught me, it's this. There are some levels of loyalty that command us beyond even the call of duty."

Kevin McBride walked down the hall and turned into the executive washroom. He felt drained. Days of travelling, worrying, not sleeping, had left him exhausted.

He stared at his tired face in the mirror above the hand basins and wondered at Devereaux's last Delphic remark. Would Project Peregrine have worked? Would the Saudi master terrorist have fallen for it? Would his acolytes have showed up in Peshawar in ten days? Would they have made the vital phone call for the listening NSA to intercept?

Too late now. Zilic would never travel again, save to a U. S. courtroom and thence to a maximum security jail. What was done was done.

He dunked his face a dozen times and stared at the man in the mirror. Fifty-six, going on fifty-seven. A thirty-year man, due to take his pension at the end of December.

In the spring, he and Molly would do what he had long promised. Their son and daughter were through college and making their own careers. He wanted his daughter and her husband to make him a grandchild whom he could spoil rotten.

While waiting, they would buy the big motor home he had promised Molly and go see the Rockies. He knew he had a rendezvous with some serious cutthroat trout up in Montana.

A much younger agent, a newly joined GS 12, came out of a cubicle and began to wash his hands two basins down. One of the team. They nodded and smiled. McBride took paper towels and dabbed his face dry.

"Kevin," said the youngster.

"Yep."

"Mind if I ask you a question?"

"Ask away."

"It's kind of personal."

"Then maybe I won't answer it."

"The tattoo on your left arm. The grinning rat with his pants down. What does it mean?"

McBride was still looking in the mirror, but he seemed to see two young GIs, rat-assed on beer and wine, laughing in the warm Saigon night, and a white Petromax lamp hissing, and a Chinese tattooist at work. Two young Americans who would part company but be bound by a bond that nothing could ever break. And he saw a slim file a few weeks earlier, which mentioned a tattoo of a grinning rat on the left forearm. And he heard the order to find the man and have him killed.

He slipped his watch back on his wrist and flipped his sleeve back down. He checked the day-date window. September 10, 2001.

"It's quite a story, son," said the Badger, "and it all happened long ago and far away."