The Embassy of Surinam 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 Surinam 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 about fifty, five feet eight inches, compact, muscular build, blue eyes, sandy hair.
McBride left with photocopies of the nineteen applications for visas to Surinam that had been lodged and granted in the previous week. Within three days all had been checked out as legitimate US citizens whose details and passport photos lodged with the State Department fully matched those presented to the Surinam Consulate.
If the elusive Avenger of the file Devereaux had ordered him to memorize was going to show up, he had not done so yet.
In truth, McBride was in the wrong consulate. Surinam 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 Miss Amelie Dykstra, a locally recruited Dutch lady paid for by the Dutch Foreign Ministry, 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 Surinam?’ 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, Surinam, that is, before moving on to Venezuela.’
‘You should see the Ministry of Tourism,’ said the Dutch woman, who had never been to Surinam. 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 Surinam. A car from San Martin met him 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 the eyes were blank.
It was forty miles over bumpy, pot-holed, ex-colonial 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 rainforest 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 pickup trucks 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 vaporized 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 Guyana was much shorter.
The wayside peasants McBride was seeing through the windows of the Mercedes were walnut-hued from the sun; but they were not black, nor yet Creole. They were Hispanic. The whole labour force of San Martin was still genetically Hispanic. The few black slaves who had escaped the Dutch had gone into the jungle to become the Bushneger, who were very hard to find, and deadly when they were.
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 Colonel Hernan Moreno.
The man who was credited with keeping the gaudy and massively decorated President Muñoz 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.
There was a place, up country it was rumoured, for such things, and no one ever came back. Dumping cadavers at sea like the secret police of Galtieri in Argentina was not necessary; it was not even required to break sweat with shovel and pick. A naked body pegged out in the jungle would attract fire ants, and fire ants can do to soft tissue in a night what normal nature needs months or years to achieve.
He knew the man from Langley was coming and chose to offer him lunch at the Yacht Club. It was the best restaurant in town, certainly the mos