‘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, señor,’ 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, señor?’
‘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, find his way back to Surinam. 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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
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 three 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 round 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. Towards the far end, near the sea to catch the cooler breezes, were half a dozen small villas which he presumed to be t
he home of the aircrew and maintenance staff.
The only access and egress to and from the airfield was a single steel gate set in the chain-link fence. There was no guardhouse near the gate, but a pair of visible rods, and bogey wheels beneath the leading edge, indicated it was electrically powered and would open to the command of the appropriate bleeper. At half past five, nothing moved on the airfield.
The other third of the strip was consigned to the village. It was segregated from the airfield by another fence, running from the escarpment outwards and also topped with razor wire. The peasants were clearly not allowed on or near the airfield.
The clanging of the iron bar on the railway track stopped after a minute and the village stumbled into life. Dexter watched the first figures, clad in off-white trousers and shirts, with rope-soled espadrilles on their feet, emerge from the groups of tiny cabanas and head for the communal washhouses. When they were all assembled, the watcher estimated about twelve hundred of them.
Clearly there were some staff who ran the village and would not go to work in the fields. He saw them working in open-fronted lean-to kitchens, preparing a breakfast of bread and gruel. Long trestle tables and benches formed the refectories under palm-thatch shelters, which would protect against occasional rain but more usually against the fierce sun.
At a second beating of the iron rail, the farm workers took bowls and a half-loaf and sat to eat. There were no gardens, no shops, no women, no children, no school. This was not a true village but a labour camp. The only remaining buildings were what appeared to be a food store, a general clothing and bedding store and the church with the priest’s house attached. It was functional; a place to work, eat, sleep, pray for release and nothing else.
If the airfield was a rectangle trapped between the escarpment, the wire and the sea, so was the village. But there was one difference. A pitted and rutted track zig-zagged down from the single col in the whole mountain range, the only access by road to the rest of the republic. It was clearly not suitable for heavy-duty trucks; Dexter wondered how resupply of weighty essentials like gasoline, engine diesel and aviation fuel would take place. When the visibility lengthened he found out.
At the extremity of his vision hidden in the morning mist was the third portion of the estate, the walled five-acre compound at the end of the foreland. He knew from his aerial pictures it contained the magnificent white mansion in which the former Serbian gangster lived; half a dozen villas in the grounds for guests and senior staff; tonsured lawns, flower beds and shrubbery; and along the inner side of the fourteen-foot-high protecting wall, a series of lean-to cottages and stores for domestic staff, linen, food and drink.