He recalled that Fr. John Heaney had taxed him with a moral problem! "A man is coming at you, with intent to kill you. He has a knife. His total reach is four feet. You have the right of self-defense. You have no shield, but you have a spear. Its reach is nine feet. Do you lunge or wait?"

He would put pupil against pupil, each tasked to argue the opposite viewpoint. Devereaux never hesitated. The greater good against the lesser evil. Had the man with the spear sought the fight? No. Then he was entitled to lunge, not counterstrike; that came after surviving the initial strike. But preemptive strike. In the case of UBL, he had no qualms. To protect his country, Devereaux would kill, no matter how appalling the allies he had to call in aid. Fleming was wrong. He needed Zilic.

For Paul Devereaux there was an abiding enigma about his own country and its place in the world's affections, and he believed he had resolved it. About 1945, when he was born, and for the next decade through the Korean War and the start of the Cold War, the United States was not simply the richest and most militarily powerful country in the world, it was also the most loved, admired, and respected.

After fifty years, the first two qualities remained. The United States was stronger and richer than ever, the only remaining superpower, apparently mistress of all she surveyed.

And through great swathes of the world, black Africa, Islam, left-wing Europe, she was loathed with a passion. What had gone wrong? It was a quandary that defied Capitol Hill and the media.

Devereaux knew his country was far from perfect; it made mistakes, often far too many. But it was in its heart as well meaning as any, and better than most. As a world traveller, he had seen a lot of that "most" at close range. Much of it was deeply ugly.

Most Americans could not comprehend the metamorphosis between 1951 and 2001, so they pretended it had not happened, accepting the Third World 's polite mask for its inner feeling.

Had not Uncle Sam tried to preach democracy against tyranny? Had he not given away at least a trillion dollars in aid? Had he not picked up the hundred-billion-dollar-a-year defence tab for Western Europe for five decades? What justified the hate-you-hate-you demonstrations, the sacked embassies, the burnt flags, the vicious placards?

It was an old British spymaster who explained it to him in a London club in the late sixties as Vietnam became nastier and nastier and the riots erupted.

"My dear boy, if you were weak, you would not be hated. If you were poor, you would not be hated. You are not hated despite the trillion dollars; you are hated *because* of the trillion dollars."

The old bureaucrat gestured toward Grosvenor Square, where leftwing politicians and bearded students were massing to stone the embassy. "The hatred of your country is not because it attacks theirs; it is because it keeps theirs safe. Never seek popularity. You can have supremacy or be loved but never both. What is felt toward you is ten percent genuine disagreement and ninety percent envy. Never forget two things! No man can ever forgive his protector. There is no loathing that any man harbours more intense than that toward his benefactor."

The old spy was long dead, but Devereaux had seen the truth of his cynicism in half a hundred capitals. Like it or not, his country was the most powerful in the world. Once the Romans had that dubious honour. They had responded to the hatred with ruthless force of arms.

A hundred years ago, the British Empire had been the rooster. They had responded to the hatred with languid contempt. Now the Americans had it, and they wracked their consciences to ask where they had gone wrong. The Jesuit scholar and the secret agent had long made up his mind. In defence of his country, he would do what he believed had to be done and one day go to his Maker and ask forgiveness. Until then the America haters could take a long walk off a short jetty.

When he arrived at his office, Kevin McBride was waiting for him and his face was gloomy. "Our friend has been in touch," he said. "In a rage and a panic. He thinks he is being stalked."

Devereaux thought, not of the complainant, but of Fleming at the FBI. "Damn the man," he said. "Damn and blast him to hell. I never thought he'd do it and certainly not this fast."

22 The peninsula

There was a secure computer link between a guarded enclave on the shore of the Republic of San Martin and a machine in McBride's office. Like Washington Lee, it used the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) system of unbreakable cybercodes to keep communications from prying eyes; the difference was that this one had authority.

Devereaux studied the full text of the message from the south. It had clearly been written by the estate's head of security, the South African Van Rensberg. The English was overformal, as of one using their second language.

The meaning was clear enough. It described the Piper Cheyenne of the previous morning; its double pass, heading eastward toward French Guiana and then back again twenty minutes later. It reported the flash of sunlight off a camera lens in the right-hand window and even the registration number when it passed too low over the mountain pass in the escarpment. "Kevin, trace that aircraft. I need to know who owns it, who operates it, who flew it yesterday, and who was the passenger. And hurry."

In his anonymous apartment in Brooklyn, Cal Dexter had developed his seventy-two frames and blown them up to prints as large as he could before losing too much definition. From the same original negatives he had also made slides that he could project onto the wall screen for closer study. From the prints he had created, a single wall map running the length of the living room and from ceiling to floor. He sat for hours studying the wall, checking occasionally on a small detail with the appropriate slide. Each slide gave better and clearer detail, but only the wall gave the entire target. Whoever had been in charge of the project had spent millions and made of that once-empty peninsula a fearsome and ingenious fortress.

Nature had helped. The tongue of land was quite different from the hinterland of steamy jungle that made up much of the small republic. It jutted out from the main shore like a triangular dagger blade, but it was guarded on its landward side by the chain of hills that some primeval force had thrown up millions of years ago. The chain ran from the sea to the sea, and at each end dropped to the blue water in vertical cliffs. No one would ever walk round the ends to stroll from the jungle onto the peninsula.

On the landward side, the hills climbed gently from the littoral plain to about a thousand feet, with slopes covered in dense vegetation. Over the crests, on the seaward side, the slope was a vertiginous escarpment, denuded of any foliage, whether by nature or the hand of man. From the estate, anyone with binoculars looking up at the escarpment would easily see anything trying to descend onto the forbidden side.

There was one single col, or mountain pass, in the chain. A narrow track ran up to it from the hinterland then twisted and turned down the escarpment until it reached the estate below. In the mountain pass was a barrier and guardhouse, which Dexter had seen too late as it flashed below his window.

Dexter began to make a list of the equipment he would need. Getting in would not be a problem. It was getting out, bringing the target with him, and against a goodsized force of armed guards, *that* would be close to impossible.

"It belongs to a oneplane, one-man charter firm based at Georgetown, Guyana," said Kevin McBride that evening. "Lawrence Aero Enterprises, owned and run by George Lawrence, Guyanese citizen. It looks perfectly legitimate, the sort foreigners can charter to fly into the interiorÉor along the coast in this case."