Ten minutes later a senator in Washington was roused from his dinner and within an hour two marshals from the Federal Marshal Service Bureau in Miami were speeding south.
Before the marshals were through Islamorada, a teamster driving north, just out of Key West, on the US1, saw a lone figure by the roadside. Thinking the coveralls meant a stranded trucker, he stopped.
‘I’m going up as far as Marathon,’ he called down. ‘Any use?’
‘Marathon will do just fine,’ said the man. It was twenty before midnight.
It took Kevin McBride the whole of the 9th to find his way home. Major van Rensberg, still trying to find the missing impostor, consoling himself that at least his employer was safe, despatched the CIA man as far as the capital city. Colonel Moreno fixed him a passage from the airport to Paramaribo. A KLM flight ferried him to Curaçao Island. There was a connector to Miami International and thence a shuttle to Washington. He landed very late and very tired. On the Monday morning he was early when he walked into Paul Devereaux’s office but his chief was already there.
He looked ashen. He seemed to have aged. He gestured McBride to a seat and wearily pushed a sheet across the desk.
All good reporters go out of their way to maintain an excellent contact with the police forces of their area. They would be crazy not to. The Key West correspondent of the Miami Herald was no exception. The events of the Saturday night were leaked to him by friends on the Key West force by Sunday noon and his report filed well in time for the Monday edition. It was a synopsis of the story that Devereaux found on his desk that Monday morning.
The tale of a Serbian warlord and suspected mass murderer detained in his own jet after an emergency landing at Key West International had made the third lead on the front page.
‘Good Lord,’ whispered McBride as he read. ‘We thought he had escaped.’
‘No. It seems he was hijacked,’ said Devereaux. ‘You know what this means, Kevin? No, of course you don’t. My fault. I should have explained to you. Project Peregrine is dead. Two years of work down the Swanee. It cannot go forward without him.’
Line by line, the intellectual explained the conspiracy he had devised to accomplish the greatest anti-terrorist strike of the century.
‘When was he due to fly to Karachi and on to the Peshawar meeting?’
‘The twentieth. I just needed that extra ten days.’
He rose and walked to the window, gazing out at the trees, his back to McBride.
‘I have been here since dawn, when a phone call woke me with the news. Asking myself: how did he do it, this damnable, bloody man Avenger?’
McBride was silent, mute in his sympathy.
‘Not a stupid man, Kevin. I will not have it that I was bested by a stupid man. Clever, more than I could have thought. Always just one step ahead of me . . . He must have known he was up against me. Only one man could have told him. And you know who that was, Kevin?’
‘No idea, Paul.’
‘That sanctimonious bastard in the FBI called Colin Fleming. But even tipped off, how did he beat me? He must have guessed we would engage the cooperation of the Surinam embassy here. So he invented Professor Medvers Watson, butterfly hunter extraordinaire. And fictional. And a decoy. I should have spotted it, Kevin. The professor was a phoney and he was meant to be discovered. Two days ago I got news from our people in Surinam. Know what they told me?’
‘No, Paul.’
‘That the real cover-name, the Englishman Henry Nash, got his visa in Amsterdam. We never thought of Amsterdam. Clever, clever bastard. So Medvers Watson went in and died in the jungle. As intended. And it bought the man six days while we proved it was a sting. By then he was inside and watching the estate from the mountaintop. Then you went in.’
‘But I missed him too, Paul.’
‘Only because that idiot South African refused to listen to you. Of course the chloroformed peon had to be discovered in the mid-morning. Of course the alarm had to be raised. To bring the dogs in. To permit the third sting, the presumption that he had murdered a guard and taken his place.’
‘But I was at fault as well, Paul. I honestly thought I saw an extra guard trotting into the mansion grounds in the dusk. Apparently there wasn’t one. By dawn they were all accounted for.’
‘By then it was too late. He had hijacked the aircraft.’
Devereaux turned from the window and walked over to his deputy. He held out his hand.
‘Kevin, we all slipped up. He won, I lost. But I appreciate everything you did and tried to do. As for Colin Fleming, the moralizing bastard who tipped him off, I’ll deal with him in my own time. For the moment, we have to start again. UBL is still out there. Still planning. Still plotting. I want the whole team in here tomorrow at eight. Coffee and Danish. We’ll catch the CNN news, then go into a major session. Autopsy and forward planning. Where we go from here.’
McBride turned to go.
‘You know,’ said Devereaux as he reached the door, ‘if there’s one thing that thirty years in this agency has taught me, it’s this. There are some levels of loyalty that command us beyond even the call of duty.’
EPILOGUE