It was a U. S. passport in the name of Medvers Watson. The profession was given as scientist. The same face McBride had seen before from the visa application form stared at him: eyeglasses, wispy goatee, slightly helpless expression. The CIA man reckoned, quite rightly, that no one would ever see Medvers Watson again.

"May I contact my superior in Washington?"

"Please," said Colonel Moreno, "be my guest. I will leave you your privacy."

McBride took his laptop from his attachŽ case and contacted Paul Devereaux, tapping in a sequence of numbers that would keep the exchange from prying ears. With his cell phone plugged into the laptop, he waited until Devereaux came on line.

He told his superior the gist of what Colonel Moreno reported, and what he had seen. There was silence for a while.

"I want you to come home," said Devereaux.

"Not a problem," said McBride.

" Moreno can keep all the toys, including the rifle, but I want that passport. Oh, and something else."

McBride listened.

"You wantÉwhat?"

"Just do it, Kevin. Godspeed."

McBride told the colonel what he had been ordered to do. The fat secret police chief shrugged. "Such a short visit. You should stay. Lobster for lunch on my boat out at sea? Cold Soaye? No? Oh wellÉthe passport of course. And the restÉ"

He shrugged. "If you wish, take them all."

"I'm told just one will do."

26 The trick

McBride arrived back in Washington on August 29th. That same day, down in Paramaribo, Henry Nash, with his passport issued by Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, to give him his full title, walked into the Consulate of the Republic of San Martin and asked for a visa.

There was no problem. The consul in the one-man office knew there had been a flap several days earlier when a refugee from justice had tried to enter his homeland, but the alarm had been stood down. The man was dead. He issued the entry visa.

That was the trouble with August. You could never get anything done in a hurry, not even in Washington, not even if your name was Paul Devereaux. The excuse was always the same: "I'm sorry, sir, he's on vacation. He'll be back next week." And thus it was as the month of August finally trickled away into September.

It was on the 3rd that Devereaux received the first of the two answers he sought.

"It's probably the best forgery we've ever seen," said the man from the State Department's passport division. "Basically, it was once genuine and was printed by us. But two vital pages were removed by an expert and two fresh pages from another passport inserted. It is the fresh pages that bear the photo and name of Medvers Watson. To our knowledge there is no such person. This passport number has never been issued."

"Could the holder of this passport fly into and out of the States?" asked Paul Devereaux. "Is it that good?"

"Out of, yes," said the expert. "Flying out would mean it would only be checked by airline staff. No computer database involved. Flying inÉthat would be a problem if the INS officer chose to run the number through the database. The computer would reply: No such number."

"Can I have the passport back?"

"Sorry, Mr. Devereaux. We like to try and help you guys, but this masterpiece is going into our Black Museum. We'll have entire classes studying this beauty."

And still there was no reply from the forensic pathology unit at Bethesda, the hospital where Devereaux had a few useful contacts.

It was on the 4th that Henry Nash, at the wheel of a modest little rented compact, with a suitcase of summer clothes and toiletries, British passport in hand, and San Martin visa stamped inside it, rolled onto the ferry at the Commini River border crossing.

His British accent might not have fooled Oxford or Cambridge, but among the Dutchspeaking Surinamese and, he assumed, the Spanishspeaking San Martinos, there would be no problem. There was not.

Avenger watched the brown river flowing beneath his feet one last time and vowed he would be a happy man if he never saw the damned thing again. On the San Martin side, the stripped pole was gone, as were the secret police and soldiers. The border was back to its usual sleepy self. He descended, passed his passport through the side window of the booth, beamed an inane smile, and fanned himself while he waited.

Running in an undershirt in all weathers meant he habitually had a slight tan; two weeks in the tropics had deepened it to a mahogany brown. His fair hair had received the attention of a barber in Paramaribo and was now so dark brown as to be almost black, but that simply matched the description of Mr. Nash of London.

The glance through the trunk of his car and his valise of clothes was perfunctory, his passport went back into the top pocket of his shirt, and he rolled on down the road to the capital.

At the third track on the right, he checked that no one was watching and turned into the jungle again. Halfway to the farmstead he stopped and turned the car around. The giant baobab tree was not hard to locate, and the tough black twine was still deep inside the cut he had sliced in the trunk a week earlier.

As he paid out the twine, the camouflaged Bergen knapsack came down from the branches where it had hung unseen. It contained all he hoped he would need for several days crouched on the crest of the cordillera above the hacienda of the runaway Serb and for his descent into the fortress itself.

The customs officer at the border post had taken no notice of the tenliter plastic can in the trunk. When the Englishman said, "Agua," he merely nodded and closed the lid. With the water added to the Bergen, the load would take even a triathlete to his limit for mountain climbing, but two litres a day would be vital.

He drove quietly through the capital, past the oil-palm forest where Colonel Moreno sat at his desk, and on to the east.

He went into the resort village of La Bahia just after lunch, at the hour of siesta, and no one stirred.

The plates on the car were by now those of a San Martin national. He recalled the adage: Where do you hide a tree? In the forest. Where do you hide a rock? In the quarry. He put the compact in the public car park, hefted the Bergen, and marched eastward out of town. Another backpacker.

Dusk descended. Ahead of him he saw the crest of the cordillera that separated the hacienda from the enveloping jungle. Where the road curved away inland to loop around the hills and go on to the Maroni and the border to French Guiana, he left the road and began to climb. He saw the narrow track snaking down from the mountain pass, and angled away from it toward a peak he had selected from the photographs taken from the plane. When it became simply too black to move, he set down his Bergen, took a supper of high-value hard rations, a cup of the precious water, leaned against the haversack, and slept. In the camping stores of New York he had declined the U. S. Army-derived MREs or Meals Ready to Eat, recalling that in the Gulf War they were so deeply awful that the GIs dubbed them Meals Rejected by Ethiopians. He made up his own con centrates to include beef, raisins, nuts, and dextrose. He would be passing rabbit pellets, but he would keep his strength for when he needed it.

Before dawn he came awake, nibbled again, sipped again, and climbed on. At one point, down the mountain and through a gap in the trees, he saw the roof of the guardhouse in the mountain pass far below.

Before the sun rose, he made the crest. He came out of the forest two hundred yard from whre he wanted, so he crabbed sideways until he found the spot in the photograph.

His eye for terrain had not let him down. There was a slight dip in the line of the crest, screened by the last fuzz of vegetation. With camouflaged shirt and bush hat, daubed face, and olive-coloured binoculars, motionless under the leaves, he would be invisible from the estate below.