It may look as if the legal attachŽ is some kind of diplomatic appointment, answering to the Department of State. Not so. The "legat" is the FBI representative inside the U. S. Embassy. Every one of them had received the photo of Zilic from Assistant Director Fleming, with an instruction to display it in hope of a lucky break. It came in the unlikely form of Inspector Bin Zayeed.
Insp. Moussa Bin Zayeed would also, if asked, have replied that he, too, was a good man. He served his emir, Sheikh Maktoum of Dubai, with complete loyalty, took no bribes, honoured his god, and paid his taxes. If he moonlighted by passing useful information to his friend at the American Embassy, this was simple cooperation with his country's ally and not to be confused with anything else.
Thus it was that he found himself, with the outside temperature in July over one hundred degrees, sheltering in the welcome cool of the air-conditioned embassy lobby and waiting for his friend to descend and take him out for lunch. His eyes looked over at the bulletin board.
He rose and strolled over to it. There were the usual notices of coming events, functions, arrivals, departures, and invitations to various club memberships. Among the clutter was a photograph and the printed question: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?
"Well, have you?" asked a cheery voice behind him, and a hand clapped him on the shoulder. It was Bill Brunton, his contact, lunch host, and the legal attachŽ. They exchanged friendly greetings.
"Oh yes," said the Special Branch officer, "two weeks ago."
Brunton's bonhomie dropped away. The fish restaurant out at Jumeirah could wait awhile.
"Let's step right back to my office," he suggested.
"Do you remember where and when?" asked the legat, back in his office.
"Of course. About two weeks ago. I was visiting a relative in Ra's al Khaymah. I was on the Faisal Road; you know it? The seafront road out of town between the Old Town and the Gulf."
Brunton nodded.
"Well, a truck was trying to manoeuvre backward into a narrow work site. I had to stop. To my left was a cafŽ terrace. There were three men at the table. One of them was this one." He gestured to the photograph now face-up on the legat's desk.
'No question about it?"
"None. That was the man."
"He was with two others?"
"Yes."
"You recognised them?"
"One by name. The other only by sight. The one by name was Bout."
Bill Brunton sucked in his breath. Vladimir Bout needed no introducti on to virtually anyone in a Western or East bloc intelligence service. He was widely notorious, a former KGB major who had become one of the world's leading black market arms dealers, a merchant of death of the first rank. That he was not even born a Russian, but a half-Tajik from Dushanbe, attests to his skill in the arts of the underworld. The Russians are nothing if not the most racist people on earth, and back in the old USSR referred to denizens of the non-Russian republics collectively as *chorny*, meaning "blacks"; and it was not a compliment. Only White Russians and Ukrainians could escape the term and rise through the ranks on an equal par with an ethnic Russian. For a halfbreed Tajik to graduate out of Moscow 's prestigious Military Institute of Foreign Languages, a KGB-front training academy, and make it to the rank of major, was unusual.
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 IL-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 them.
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 Intera-hamwe, the genocidal butchers of Rwanda and 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, Bout 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 had 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 the embassy staff. Insp. Bin Zayeed was unhesitating in pointing to the face of the cultural attachŽ.
"This one," he said. "He was the third man at the table. You know him?" Brunton knew him alright. Even though cultural exchanges were few and far between, the cultural attachŽ was a very busy man. This was because behind the faade 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 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 adviser, 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 B. A. in 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.