"OK, I like it. Go for it. But hurry."
McBride was puzzled. "We have a deadline, boss?"
"Tighter than you know, my friend."
The port of Wilmington, Delaware, is one of the largest and busiest on the East Coast of the United States. High at the top of the long Delaware Bay that leads from the river to the Atlantic, it has miles of sheltered water, which, apart from taking the big ocean liners, also plays host to thousands of small coastal freighters.
The Carib Coast Ship and Freight Company was an agency handling cargoes for scores of such smaller ships and the visit of Mr. Ronald Proctor caused no surprise. He was friendly, charming, convincing, and his rented U-Haul pickup was right outside with the crate in the rear.
The freight clerk who handled his enquiry had no reason to doubt his veracity, all the more so when, in response to the query, "Do you have documentation, sir?" he produced precisely that.
His passport was not only in perfect order, it was a diplomatic passport at that. Supporting letters and movement orders from the State Department proved that Ronald Proctor, a professional U. S. diplomat, was being transferred to his country's embassy in Paramaribo, Suriname.
"We have a cost-free allowance, of course, but what with my wife's passion for collecting things on our travels, I fear we're one crate over the limit. I'm sure you know what wives are like? Boy, can they collect stuff."
"Tell me about it," agreed the clerk. Few things bond male strangers like commiserating about their wives. "We have a freighter heading down to Miami, Caracas, and Parbo in two days."
He gave the capital of Suriname its shorter and more common name. The consignment was agreed and paid for. The crate would be seaborne within two days and in a bonded warehouse by Parbo docks by the twentieth. Being diplomatic cargo, it would be customs exempt when Mr. Proctor called to collect it.
The Suriname Embassy in Washington is at 4301 Connecticut Avenue, and it was there that Kevin McBride flashed his identity as a senior officer of the Central Intelligence Agency and sat down with an impressed consular official in charge of the visa section. It was probably not the busiest diplomatic office in Washington, and one man handled all visa applications.
"We believe he deals in drugs and consorts with terrorists," said the CIA man. "So far he remains very shady. His name is not important because he will certainly apply, if at all, under a false identity. But we do believe he may try to slip into Suriname as a way of cutting across to Guyana and thence to rejoin his cronies in Venezuela."
"You have a photo of him?" asked the official.
"Alas, not yet," said McBride. "That is where we hope you might be able to help us if he comes here. We have a description of him."
He slipped a sheet of paper across the desk with a short, two-line description of a man of about fifty; five feet, eight inches; compact; muscular build; blue eyes; sandy hair.
McBride left with photocopies of the nineteen applications for visas to Suriname that had been lodged and granted in the previous week. Within three days all had been checked out as legitimate U. S. citizens whose details and passport photos lodged with the State Department fully matched those presented to the Suriname Consulate.
If the elusive Avenger of the file Devereaux had ordered him to memorise was going to show up, he had not done so yet.
In truth, McBride was in the wrong consulate. Suriname is not large and certainly not rich. It maintains consulates in Washington and Miami, plus Munich (but not in the German capital of Berlin) and two in the former colonial power, the Netherlands. One is in The Hague, but the bigger office is at 11 De Cuserstraat, Amsterdam.
It was in this office that Ms. Amelie Dykstra, a locally recruited Dutch lady paid for by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was being so helpful to the visa applicant before her.
"You are British, Mr. Nash?"
The passport she had in her hand showed that Mr. Henry Nash was indeed British, and his profession was that of businessman.
"What is the purpose of your visit to Suriname?" asked Ms. Dykstra.
"My company develops new tourist outlets, notably resort hotels in coastal situations," said the Englishman. "I am hoping to see if there are any openings in your country, well, Suriname, that is, before moving on to Venezuela."
"You should see the Ministry of Tourism," said the Dutch girl, who had never been to Suriname.
From what Cal Dexter had researched about that malarial coast, such a ministry was likely to be an exercise in optimism over reality.
"Precisely my intention, as soon as I get there, dear lady."
He pleaded a last flight waiting at Schiphol Airport, paid his thirty-five guilders, got his visa, and left. In truth, his plane was not for London but for New York.
McBride headed south again, to Miami and Suriname. A car from San Martin met the CIA officer at Parbo airport and he was driven east to the Commini River crossing point. The Ojos Negros who escorted him simply drove to the head of the queue, commandeered the ferry, and paid no toll to cross to the San Martin side.
During the crossing, McBride stepped out of the car to watch the sluggish brown liquid passing down to the aquamarine sea, but the haze of mosquitoes and the drenching heat drove him back to the interior of the Mercedes and its welcome cool air. The secret policemen sent by Colonel Moreno permitted themselves wintry smiles at such stupidity. But behind the black glasses, their eyes were blank.
It was forty miles over bumpy, potholed, road from the river border to San Martin City. The road ran through jungle on both sides. Somewhere to the left of the road, the jungle would give way to the swamps, the swamps to the mangrove tangle, and eventually to the inaccessible sea. To the right the dense rain forest ran away inland, rising gently, to the confluence of the Commini and the Maroni, and thence into Brazil. *A man*, thought McBride, *could be lost in there within half a mile*. Occasionally he saw a track running off the road and into the bush, no doubt to some small farm or plantation not far from the road. Down the highway they passed a few vehicles, mostly pickups or battered Land Rovers clearly used by better-off farmers and occasionally a cyclist with a basket of produce above the rear wheel, his livelihood on its way to market.
There were a dozen small villages along the journey, and the man from Washington was struck at the different ethnic type of the San Martin peasant from those one republic back. There was a reason. All the other colonial powers, conquering and trying to settle virtually empty landscapes, planted their estates and then looked for a labour force. The local Indios took one peek at what was in store and vaporised into the jungle.
Most of the colonialists imported African slaves from the properties they already owned or traded with along the West African coast. The descendants of these, usually mixing the genes with the Indios and whites, had created the modern populations. But the Spanish Empire was almost totally New World, not African. They did not have an easy source of black slaves, but they did have millions of landless Mexican peons; and the distance from Yucatan to Spanish Guiana was much shorter.
The wayside peasants McBride was seeing through the windows of the Mercedes were walnu-thued from the sun, but they were not black nor Creole. The whole labour force of San Martin was still genetically Hispanic.
When Shakespeare's Caesar expressed the wish to have fat men around him, he presumed they would be jolly and amiable. He was not thinking of Col. Hernan Moreno.
The man who was credited with keeping the gaudy and massively decorated President Munoz in the palace on the hill behind the capital of this last banana republic was fat like a brooding toad, but he was not jolly. The torments practised on those he suspected of sedition, or to be in possession of details of such people, were hinted at only in the lowest whispers and the darkest corners.