"And you don't know how important the Serb is to all of us. Nor his paranoia. Nor how tight his schedule may be. He has to know the danger to himself is over, totally eliminated, or he will bow out of what I need him for."
"And you still can't tell me?"
"Sorry, Kevin. No, not yet."
His deputy shrugged, unhappy but obedient. "OK, on your conscience, not mine."
And that was the problem, thought Paul Devereaux when he was once again alone in his office staring out at the thick green foliage between him and the Potomac. Could he square his conscience with what he was doing? He had to. The lesser evil, the greater good.
The unknown man with the false passport would not die easily, "upon the midnight with no pain." But he had chosen to swim in hideously dangerous waters, and it had been his decision to do so.
That day, August 18th, America sweltered in the summer heat, and half the country sought relief in the seas, rivers, lakes, and mountains. Down on the north coast of South America there was 100 percent humidity sweeping in from the steaming jungles behind the coast, adding ten more degrees to the hundred caused by the sun.
In Parbo docks, ten miles up the teak-brown Suriname River from the sea, the heat was like a tangible blanket lying over the warehouses and quays. The pye-dogs tried to find the deepest shade to pant away the hours until sundown. Humans sat under slow-moving fans, which merely moved the discomfort around a bit.
The foolish tossed down sugary drinks, sodas and colas, which merely made the thirst and dehydration worse. The experienced stayed with piping hot, sweet tea, which may sound crazy but was discovered by the British empire builders two centuries earlier to be the best rehydrator of them all.
The fifteen-hundred-ton freighter, *Tobago Star*, crept up the river, docked at her assigned pier, and waited for dark. In the cooler dusk, she discharged her cargo, which included a bonded crate in the name of U. S. diplomat Ronald Proctor. This went into a chain-link fenced section of the warehouse to await collection.
Paul Devereaux had spent years studying terrorism in general and the types that emanated from the Arab and Muslim world, not necessarily the same type in particular. He had long come to the conclusion that the conventional whine in the West, that terrorism stemmed from the poverty and destitution of those whom Fanon had called "the wretched of the earth" was convenient and politically correct psychobabble.
From the anarchists of tsarist Russia to the IRA of 1916, from the Irgun and the Stern Gang to the EOKA in Cyprus, from the BaaderMeinhof group in Germany, the CCC in Belgium, the Action Directe in France, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction again in Germany, the Rengo Sekigun in Japan, through to the Shining Path in Peru to the modern IRA in Ulster or the ETA in Spain, terrorism came from the minds of the comfortably raised, welleducated, middle-class theorists with a truly staggering personal vanity and a developed taste for self-indulgence.
In the Devereaux theory, those who could order another to plant a bomb in a food hall and gloat over the resultant images all had one thing in common. They possessed a fearsome capacity for hatred. This was the genetic "given." The hatred came first; the target could come later and usually did.
The motive also came second to the capacity to hate. It might be the Bolshevik Revolution, national liberation, or a thousand variants thereof, from amalgamation to secession; it might be anticapitalist fervour; it might be religious exaltation.
But the hatred came first, then the cause, then the target, then the methods, and finally the self-justification. And Lenin's "useful dupes" always swallowed it.
Devereaux was utterly convinced that the leadership of Al Qaeda ran precisely true to form. Its cofounders were a construction millionaire from Saudi Arabia and a qualified doctor from Cairo. It mattered not whether their hatred of Americans and Jews was secular based or religiously fueled. There was nothing, absolutely nothing that America or Israel could do, short of complete self-annihilation, that would even begin to appease or satisfy them.
None of them, for him, cared a damn for the Palestinians save as vehicles and justifications. They hated his country, not for what it did, but for what it was.
He recalled the old British spy chief in the window table at White's as the left-wing demonstrators went by. Apart from the usual snowy-haired British socialists who could never quite get over the death of Lenin, there were the British boys and girls who would one day get a mortgage and vote Conservative, and there were the torrents of students from the Third World.
"They'll never forgive you, dear boy," the old man had said. "Never expect it, and you'll never be disappointed. Your country is a constant reproach. It is rich to their poor, strong to their weak, vigorous to their idle, enterprising to their reactionaries, ingenious to their bewildered, can-do to their sit-and-wait, thrusting to their timid.
"It only needs one demagogue to arise and shout, 'Everything the Americans have they stole from you,' and they'll believe it. Like Shakespeare's Caliban, their zealots stare in the mirror and roar in rage at what they see. That rage becomes hatred; the hatred needs a target. The working class of the Third World does not hate you; it is the pseudo-intellectuals. If they ever forgive you, they must indict themselves. So far their hatred lacks the weaponry. One day they will acquire that weaponry. Then you will have to fight or die. Not in tens but in tens of thousands."
Thirty years down the line, Devereaux was sure the old Brit had got it right. After Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Yemen, his country was in a new war and did not know it.
The Jesuit had asked for the front line and got it. Now he had to do something with his command. His response was "Project Peregrine." He did not intend to seek to negotiate with UBL, nor even respond after the next strike. He intended to try to destroy his country's enemy before that strike. In Father Heaney's analogy, he intended to use his spear to lunge, before the knife tip came in range. This problem was: where? Not more or less, not "somewhere in Afghanistan," but where to ten yards by ten yards, and when to thirty minutes.
He knew a strike was coming. They all did. Dick Clarke at the White House, Tom Pickard at the Bureau headquarters in the Hoover Building, George Tenet one floor above his head at Langley. All the whispers out on the street said "a big one" was in preparation. It was the where, when, what, how, they did not know, and thanks to the crazy rules forbidding them to ask nasty people, they were not likely to find out. That, plus the refusal to collate what they did have.
Paul Devereaux was so disenchanted with the whole lot of them that he had prepared his Peregrine plan and would tell no one what it was. In his reading of tens of thousands of pages about terror in general and Al Qaeda in particular, one theme had come endlessly through the fog. The Islamist terrorists would not be satisfied with a few dead Americans from Mogadishu to Dar es Salaam. UBL would want hundreds of thousands. The prediction of the long-gone Britisher was coming true.
For those kind of figures, the Al Qaeda leadership would need a technology they did not yet have but endlessly sought to acquire. Devereaux knew that in the cave complexes of Afghanistan, which were not simply holes in rocks but subterranean labyrinths including laboratories, experiments had been started with germs and gases. But they were still miles from the methods of mass dissemination.
For Al Qaeda, as for all the terror groups in the world, there was one prize beyond rubies: fissionable material. Any one of at least a dozen killer groups would give their eye teeth, take crazy risks, to acquire the basic element of a nuclear device.