"Give the swine up. Tell us where we can find him."

"Even if I knew, which I do not admit, no."

Colin trembled with rage and disgust. "How can you be so bloody complacent?" he shouted. "Back in 1945 the CIC in occupied Germany cut deals with Nazis who were supposed to help in the fight against communism. We should never have done that. We should not have touched those swine with a barge pole. It was wrong then; it's wrong now."

Devereaux sighed. This was becoming tiresome and had long been pointless. "Spare me the history lesson," he said. "I repeat, what are you going to do about it?"

"I'm taking what I know to your director," said Fleming.

Paul Devereaux rose. It was time to go. "Let me tell you something. Last December I'd have been toast. Today, I'm asbestos. Times change."

After a tiresome imbroglio in the vote-counting booths of Florida, the president sworn in in January 2001 was one George W. Bush, whose most enthusiastic cheerleader was none other than CIA director George Tenet.

"This is not the end of it," Fleming called at the departing back. "He'll be found and brought back if I have anything to do with it."

Devereaux thought over the remark in his car on the way back to Langley. He had not survived the snakepit of the company for thirty years without developing formidable antennae. He had just made an enemy, maybe a bad one.

"He'll be found." By whom? How? And what could the Hoover Building moralist have to do with it? He sighed. An extra care in a stressfilled planet. He would have to watch Colin Fleming like a hawkÉat any rate like a peregrine falcon. The joke made him smile, but not for long.

20 The jet

When he saw the house, Cal Dexter had to appreciate the occasional irony of life. Instead of the GI-turned-lawyer getting the fine house in Westchester County, it was the skinny kid from Bedford-Stuyvesant. In thirteen years, Washington Lee had evidently done well.

When he opened the door that Sunday morning in late July, Dexter noted he had had the buck teeth fixed, the beaky nose sculpted back a bit, and his wild Afro was down to a neat trim. This was a thirty-twoyear-old businessman with a wife and two small children, a nice house, and a modest but prosperous computer consultancy.

All that Dexter once had he had lost; all that Washington Lee never hoped for, he had earned. After tracing him, Dexter had called to announce his coming.

"Come on in, Counsellor," said the ex-hacker.

They took soda in canvas chairs on the back lawn. Dexter offered Lee a brochure. Its cover showed a twin-jet executive aeroplane banking over a blue sea.

"That's public domain, of course. I need to find one of that model. A specific example. I need to know who bought it, when, who owns it now, and most of all where that person resides."

"And you think they don't want you to know?"

"If the proprietor is living openly and under his own name, I have it wrong. Bum steer. If I am right, he will be holed up out of sight under a false name, protected by armed guards and layers of computerised identity protection."

"And it's the layers you want pulled away."

"Yep."

"Things have got a lot tougher in thirteen years," said Lee. "Dammit, I'm one of the ones that made them tougher, from the technical standpoint. The legislators have done the same from the legal standpoint. What you are asking for is a breakin. Or three. Totally illegal."

"I know."

Washington Lee looked around him. Two little girls squealed as they splashed in a plastic pool at the far end of the lawn. His wife, Cora, was in the kitchen making lunch.

"Thirteen years ago I was staring at a long stretch in the pen," he said. "I'd have come out and gone back to sitting on tenement steps in the ghetto. Instead I got a break. Four years with a bank, nine years as my own boss inventing the best security systems in the United States, even if I do say so myself. Now it's payback time. You got it, Counsellor. What do you want?"

First they looked at the plane. The name of Hawker went back in British aviation to World War I. It was a Hawker Hurricane that Stephen Edmond had flown in 1940. The last frontline fighter was the ultraversatile Harrier. By the seventies, smaller companies simply could not afford the research and development costs of devising new warplanes in isolation. Only the American giants could do that, and even they amalgamated. Hawker moved increasingly into civil aircraft.

By the nineties, just about all the UK aeroplane companies were under one roof, BAE or British Aerospace. When the board decided to downsize, the Hawker Division was bought by the Raytheon Company of Wichita, Kansas. They kept on a small sales office in London and the servicing facility at Chester.

What Raytheon got for their dollars was the successful and popular HS 125 shortrange twinjet executive runabout; the Hawker 800, and the top-of-the-range, three-thousand-mile Hawker 1000 model.

But Dexter's own research in the public domain showed that the 1000 model had gone out of production in 1996, 50 if Zoran Zilic owned one, it would be second-hand. More, only fifty-two had ever been made, and thirty of them were with an American-based charter fleet.

He was looking for one of the remaining twenty-two that had changed hands in the last two years, three at most. There were a handful of secondhand dealers who moved in the rarefied atmosphere of aeroplanes that expensive, but it was ten-to-one that during the owner changeover it had undergone a full servicing, and that probably meant going back to Raytheon's Hawker Division. Which made it likely they handled the sale.

"Anything else?" asked Lee.

"The registration. P4-ZEM. It's not with one of the main international civil aviation registers. The number refers to the tiny island of Aruba."

"Never heard of it," said Lee.

"Former Dutch Antilles, along with Curacao and Bonaire. They all do secret bank accounts, company registrations, that sort of thing. It's a pain in the ass for international fraud regulations, but it's a cheap income for an otherwise no-resource island. Aruba has a tiny oil refinery. Otherwise, its income is tourism based on some great coral; plus secret bank accounts, gaudy stamps, and dodgy number plates. I would guess my target changed the old registration number to the new one."

"So Raytheon would have no record of P4ZEM?"

"Almost certainly not. That apart, they do not divulge client details. No way."

"We'll see," muttered Washington Lee.

In thirteen years the computer genius had learned a lot, in part because he had invented a lot. Most of America 's real computer geeks are out in Silicon Valley; and for the eggheads of the valley to hold an East Coaster in some awe, he had to be good.

The first thing Lee had told himself a thousand times was: Never get caught again. As he contemplated the first illegal task he had attempted in thirteen years, he determined there was no way anyone was ever going to trace a trail of cyberclues back to a home in Westchester.

"How big is your budget?" he asked.

"Adequate. Why?"

"I want to rent a Winnebago motor home. I need full domestic circuit power, but I need to transmit, close down, and vanish. Two, I need the best personal computer I can get; and when this is over I have to deep-six it into a major river."

"Not a problem. Which way are you going to attack?"

"All points. The tailplane register of the Aruba government. They have to cough up what that Hawker was called when Raytheon last saw it. Second, the Zeta Corporation in the Bermuda company's register. Head office, destination of all communications, money transfers. The lot. Third, those flight plans it filed. They must have come to that emirate, what did you call itÉ?"

"Ra's al Khaymah."