‘No question about it?’
‘None. That was the man.’
‘He was with two others?’
‘Yes.’
‘You recognized them?’
‘One by name. The other only by sight. The one by name was Bout.’
Bill Brunton sucked in his breath. Vladimir Bout needed no introduction to virtually anyone in a Western or Eastern Block intelligence service. He was widely notorious, a former KGB major who had become one of the world’s leading black-market arms dealers, a merchant of death of the first rank.
That he was not even born a Russian, but a half-Tajik from Dushanbe, attests to his skill in the nether arts. The Russians are nothing if not the most racist people on earth and back in the USSR referred to denizens of the non-Russian Republics collectively as ‘chorny’, meaning ‘blacks’; and it was not meant as a compliment. Only White Russians and Ukrainians could escape the term and rise through the ranks on equal par with an ethnic Russian. For a half-breed Tajik to graduate out of Moscow’s prestigious Military Institute of Foreign Languages, a KGB-front training academy, and make it to the rank of major was unusual.
He was assigned to the Navigation and Air Transport Regiment of the Soviet Air Force, another covert ‘front’ for shipping arms consignments to anti-Western guerrillas and Third World regimes opposed to the West. Here he could use his mastery of Portuguese in the Angolan civil war. He also built up formidable contacts in the air force.
When the USSR collapsed in 1991, chaos reigned for several years and military inventories were simply abandoned as unit commanders sold off their equipment for almost any price they could get. Bout simply bought the sixteen Ilyushin 76s of his own unit for a song and went into the air charter and freight business.
By 1992 he was back in his native south; the Afghan civil war had started, just across the border from his native Tajikistan, and one of the prime contestants was his fellow Tajik, General Dostum. The only ‘freight’ the barbarous Dostum wanted was arms; Bout provided.
By 1993 he showed up in Ostend, Belgium, a jumping-off point to move into Africa via the Belgian ex-colony, the permanently war-torn Congo. His source of supply was limitless, the vast weapons pool of the old USSR, still operating on fictional inventories. Among his new clients were the Interahamwe, the genocidal butchers of Rwanda/Burundi.
This finally upset even the Belgians and he was hounded out of Ostend, appearing in 1995 in South Africa to sell to both the UNITA guerrillas in Angola and their enemies in the MPLA government. But with Nelson Mandela occupying the South African presidency, things went bad for him there too and he had to leave in a hurry.
In 1998 he showed up in the UAE and settled in Sharjah. The British and Americans put his dossier in front of the Emir and three weeks before Bill Brunton sat in his office with Inspector Bin Zayeed, Bout had been kicked out yet again.
But his recourse was simply to move ten miles up the coast and settle in Ajman, taking a suite of rooms in the Chamber of Commerce and Industry building. With only forty thousand people, Ajman has no oil and little industry and could not be as particular as Sharjah.
For Bill Brunton the sighting was important. He did not know why his superior, Colin Fleming, was interested in the missing Serb, but this report was certainly going to earn him a few Brownie points in the Hoover Building.
‘And the third man?’ he asked. ‘You say you know him by sight? Any idea where?’
‘Of course. Here. He is one of your colleagues?’
If Bill Brunton thought his surprises for the day were over, he was wrong. He felt his stomach perform some gentle aerobatics. Carefully, he withdrew a file from the bottom drawer of his desk. It was a compendium of embassy staff. Inspector Bin Zayeed was unhesitating in pointing to the face of the cultural attaché.
‘This one,’ he said. ‘He was the third man at the table. You know him?’
Brunton knew him all right. Even though cultural exchanges were few and far between, the cultural attaché was a very busy man. This was because behind the façade of visiting orchestras, he was the Station Chief for the CIA.
The news from Dubai left Colin Fleming incandescent with rage. It was not that the secret agency out at Langley was conferring with a man like Vladimir Bout. That might be necessary in the course of information gathering. What had angered him was that someone high in the CIA had clearly lied to the Secretary of State, Colin Powell himself, and to his own superior, the Attorney General. A lot of rul
es had been broken here, and he was pretty sure he knew who had broken them. He called Langley and asked for a meeting as a matter of some urgency.
The two men had met before. They had clashed in front of the National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and there was little love lost between them. Occasionally, opposites attract, but not in this case.
Paul Devereaux III was the scion of a long line of those families who come as near to being aristocracy as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has had for a long time. He was born a Boston Brahmin to his boot heels.
He was showing his intellectual brilliance way before school age and sailed through Boston College High School, the main feeder unit to one of the foremost Jesuit academies in America. His grades when he came out were summa cum laude.
At Boston College the tutors had him marked out as a high-flyer, destined one day to join the Society of Jesus itself, if not to hold high office somewhere in academia.
He read for a BA in Humanities, with strong components being philosophy and theology. He read them all, devoured them; from Ignatius Loyola, of course, to Teilhard de Chardin. He wrangled late into the night with his senior tutor in theology over the concept of the doctrine of the lesser evil and the higher goal; that the end may justify the means and yet not damn the soul, providing the parameters of the impermissible are never breached.
In 1966 he was nineteen. It was the pinnacle of the Cold War when world communism still seemed capable of rolling up the Third World and leaving the West a beleaguered island. That was when Pope Paul VI appealed to the Jesuits and entreated them to spearhead the task of combating atheism.
For Paul Devereaux the two were synonymous: atheism was not always communism, but communism was atheism. He would serve his country not in the church or in academia but in that other place quietly mentioned to him at the country club by a pipe-smoking man introduced by a colleague of his father.