When he needed a break, he could slither backward off the crest and stand up again. He made the small camp that would be home for up to four days, smeared his face, and crawled into the hideout. The sun pinked the jungles over French Cayenne, and the first beam slipped across the peninsula below. El Punto lay spread out like the scale model that had once graced the sitting room of his apartment in Brooklyn, a shark tooth jabbing into the glittering sea. From below came a dull clang as someone smashed an iron bar into a hanging length of railway track. It was time for the forced labourers to rise.

It was not until the 4th that the friend Paul Devereaux had contacted in the Department of Pathology at Bethesda called back.

"What on earth are you up to, Paul?"

"Enlighten me. What am I up to?"

"Grave robbing by the look of it."

"Tell me all, Gary. What is it?"

"Well, it's a femur all right. A thighbone, right leg. Clean break at the midsection. No compound fracture, no splinters."

"Sustained in a fall?"

"Not unless the fall involved a sharp edge and a hammer."

"You're fulfilling my worst fear, Gary. Go on."

"Well, the bone is clearly from an anatomical skeleton, purchasable in any medical store, used by students since the Middle Ages. About fifty years old. The bone was broken recently with a sharp blow, probably across a bench. Did I make your day?"

"No, you just ruined it. But I owe you anyway."

As with all his calls, Devereaux had recorded it. When Kevin McBride listened to the playback his jaw dropped.

"Good God."

"For the sake of your immortal soul, I hope he is, Kevin. You goofed. It's phoney. He never died. He choreographed the whole damn episode, duped Moreno and Moreno convinced you. He's alive. Which means he's coming back, or he's back already. Kevin, this is a major emergency. I want the company plane to take off in one hour, and I want you on it.

"I will brief Colonel Moreno myself while you fly. When you get there Moreno will be checking every single possibility that this goddamn Avenger came back or is on his way. Now, go."

On the 5th, Kevin McBride faced Colonel Moreno again. Any veneer of amiability he may have used before was gone. His toadlike face was mottled with anger.

"This is one clever man, *mi amigo*. You did not tell me this. Hokay, he fool me once. Not again. Look."

Since the moment Prof. Medvers Watson had burst through the border controls, the Secret Police chief had checked every possible entrant into San Martin.

Three game fishermen out of St. Laurent on the French side had suffered an engine breakdown at sea and been towed into San Martin Marina. They were in detention and not happy.

Four more non-Hispanics had entered from the Suriname direction. A party of French technicians from the Kourou space launch facility in French Guiana had come over the Maroni River looking for cheap sex and were undergoing an even cheaper stay in jail.

Of the four from Suriname, one was Spanish and two Dutch. All their passports had been confiscated. Colonel Moreno slapped them onto his desk.

"Which one is false?" he asked.

Eight French, two Dutch, one Spanish. One missing.

"Who was the other visitor from the Suriname side?"

"An Englishman. We can't find him."

"Details?"

The colonel studied a sheet with the records from the San Martin Consulate in Parbo and the crossing point on the Commini.

"Nash. Se-or Henry Nash. Passport in order; visa in order. No luggage except a few summer clothes. Small compact car, rented. Unsuitable for jungle work. With this he gets nowhere off the main road or the capital city. Drove in on the 4th, two days ago."

"Hotel?"

"He told our consulate in Parbo he would be staying in the city, the Camino Real Hotel. He had a reservation, faxed from the Krasnopolsky in Parbo. He never checked in."

"Looks suspicious."

"The car is also missing. No foreign car can be found in San Martin. It has not been found, yet it cannot drive off the main highway. So I say to myself, a garage somewhere in the country. The country is being scoured."

McBride looked at the pile of foreign passports.

"Only their own embassies could verify these as forgeries or genuine. And the embassies are in Suriname. It means a visit for one of your men."

Colonel Moreno nodded glumly. He prided himself on absolute control of the small dictatorship. Something had gone wrong.

"Have you Americans told our Serbian guest?"

"No," said McBride. "Have you?"

"Not yet."

Both men had good reasons. For the dictator, President Munoz, his asylum seeker was extremely lucrative. Moreno did not want to be the one who caused him to quit and take his fortune with him.

For McBride, it was a question of orders. He did not know it, but Devereaux feared Zoran Zilic might panic and refuse to fly to Peshawar to meet the chief of Al Qaeda. Sooner or later someone was either going to have to find the manhunter or tell him.

"Please keep me posted, Colonel," he said, as he turned to leave. "I'll stay at the Camino Real. It seems they have a spare room."

"There is one thing that puzzles me, Se-or," said Moreno as McBride reached the door.

He turned. "Yes?"

"This man, Medvers Watson. He tried to enter the country without a visa."

"So?"

"He would have needed a visa to get in. He must have known that. He did not even bother."

"You're right," said McBride. "Odd."

"So I ask myself, as a policeman, why? And you know what I answer, Se-or?"

"Tell me."

"I answer: Because he did not intend to enter legally; because he did not panic at all; because he intended to do exactly what he did-to fake his own death and find his way back to Suriname. Then quietly return."

"Makes sense," admitted McBride.

"Then I say to myself: So he knew we were waiting for him, but how did he know?"

McBride's stomach turned over at the full implication of Moreno 's reasoning.

Meanwhile, invisible in a patch of scrub on the flank of a mountain, the hunter watched, noted, and waited. He waited for the hour that had not yet come.

27 The vigil

Dexter was impressed as he studied the triumph of security and self-sufficiency that a combination of nature, ingenuity, and money had accomplished on the peninsula below the escarpment. Were it not dependent on slave labour, it would have been admirable.

The triangle jutting out to sea was larger than he had imagined in the scale model in his New York apartment.

The base, on which he now looked down from his mountain hideout, was about two miles from side to side. It ran, as his aerial photos had shown, from sea to sea and at each end the mountain range dropped to the water in vertical cliffs.

The sides of the isosceles triangle he estimated at about three miles, giving a total land area of almost six square miles. The area was divided into four parts, each with a different function.

Below him, at the base of the escarpment, was the private airstrip and the workers' village. Three hundred yards out from the cliff a twelve-foot-high chain-link fence topped with razor wire ran across the land from edge to edge. Where it met the sea, he could observe through his binoculars in the growing light, the fence jutted over the cliff and ended in a tangle of rolls of razor wire. No way of slipping around the end of the fence; no way of going over the top.

Two-thirds of the strip created between the escarpment and the wire was dedicated to the airfield. Below him, flanking the runway, was a single large hangar, a marshalling apron, and a range of smaller buildings that had to be workshops and fuel stores. Toward the far end, near the sea to catch the cooler breezes, were half a dozen small villas, which he presumed to be the home of the aircrew and maintenance staff.