‘Why certainly we do cabin interiors right here at the works, Mr . . . er . . .’
‘And it could have the necessary engine overhauls at the same time.’
The executive sat up bolt straight. He recalled the sale very well. Everything had been serviced to give a clear run of major items for a couple of years. Unless the new owner had been almost constantly airborne, the engines would not be due for overhaul for up to a year.
‘May I enquire exactly who I am talking to? I do not think those engines are anywhere near to needing another overhaul,’ he said.
The voice at the other end lost its self-confidence and began to stutter.
‘Really? Aw, Jeez. Sorry about that. Must have the wrong airplane.’
The caller hung up. By now the vice-president sales was consumed with suspicion. To his recall he had never mentioned the sale of the registration of the British-sourced Hawker offered by the firm of Avtech of Biggin Hill, Kent. He resolved to ask security to trace that call and try to establish who had made it.
He would be too late, of course, because the SIM-based mobile was heading into the East River. But in the meantime, he recalled the delivery pilot from the Zeta Corporation who had come up to Wichita to fly the Hawker to its new owner.
A very pleasant Yugoslav, a former colonel in that country’s air force, with papers in perfect order including the full FAA records of the US flight school where he had converted to the Hawker. He checked his sales records: Captain Svetomir Stepanovic. And an email address.
He composed a brief email to alert the captain of the Hawker to the weird and troubling phone call and sent it. Across the landscaped grounds that surround the headquarters building, parked behind a clump of trees, Washington Lee scanned his electromagnetic emanation monitor, thanked his stars the sales executive was not using the Tempest system to shield his computer from such monitors, and watched the EEM intercept the message. The text was immaterial to him. It was the destination he wanted.
Two days later in New York, the motorhome returned to the charter company, hard drive and software somewhere in the Missouri River, Washington Lee pored over a map and pointed with a pencil tip.
‘It’s here,’ he said. ‘Republic of San Martin. About fifty miles east of San Martin City. And the airplane captain is a Yugoslav. I think you have your man, counsellor. And now, if you’ll forgive me, I have a home, a wife, two kids and a business to attend to.’
The Avenger got the biggest-definition maps he could find and blew them up even larger. Right at the bottom of the lizard-shaped isthmus of land that links North and South America, the broad mass of the South begins with Columbia to the west and Venezuela dead centre.
East of Venezuela lie the four Guyanas. First is the former British Guyana, now called just Guyana. Next comes former Dutch Guyana, now Surinam. Farthest east is French Guyana, home of Devil’s Island and the story of Papillon, now home to Kourou, the European space-launch complex. Sandwiched between Surinam and the French territory, Dexter found the triangle of jungle that was once Spanish Guyana, named, post-independence, San Martin.
Further research revealed it was regarded as the last of the true banana republics, ruled by a brutal military dictator, ostracized, poor, squalid and malarial. The sort of place where money could buy a bucket of protection.
At the beginning of August the Piper Cheyenne II flew
along the coast at a sedate 1250 feet, high enough not to arouse too much suspicion as little more than an executive proceeding from Surinam to French Guyana, but just low enough to allow good photography.
Chartered out of the airport at Georgetown, Guyana, the Piper’s 1200-mile range would take it just over the French border and back home again. The client, whose passport revealed him as US citizen Alfred Barnes, now purported to be a developer of vacation resorts looking for possible situations. The Guyanese pilot privately thought he would pay not to vacation in San Martin, but who was he to turn down a perfectly good charter, paid for in cash dollars?
As requested, he kept the Piper just offshore so that his passenger, sitting in the right-hand co-pilot seat, could keep his zoom lens ready for use out of the window if occasion arose.
After Surinam and its border, the Commini River, dropped away, there were no suitable sandy beaches for miles. The coast was a tangle of mangrove, creeping through brown, snake-infested water from the jungle to the sea. They passed over the capital, San Martin City, asleep in the blazing soggy heat.
The only beach was east of the city, at La Bahia, but that was the reserved resort of the rich and powerful of San Martin, basically the dictator and his friends. At the end of the republic, ten miles short of the banks of the Maroni River and the start of French Guyana, was El Punto.
A triangular peninsula, like a shark’s tooth, jutting from the land into the sea; protected from the landward side by a sierra or cordillera of mountains from coast-to-coast, bisected by a single track over a single col. But it was inhabited.
The pilot had never been this far east, so the peninsula was, to him, simply a coastal triangle on his nav maps. He could see there was a kind of defended estate down there. His passenger began to take photographs.
Dexter was using a 35mm Nikon F5 with a motordrive that would give him five frames a second and get through his roll in seven seconds, but he absolutely could not afford to start circling in order to change film.
He was set for a very fast shutter speed, due to the aircraft vibration, which at any slower than 500 per second would cause blurring. With 400 ASA film and aperture set at f8, it was the best he could do.
On the first pass he got the mansion on the tip of the peninsula, with its protective wall and huge gate, plus the fields being tended by estate workers, rows of barns and farm buildings, and the chain-link fencing that separated the fields from the cluster of cuboid white cabanas that seemed to be the workers’ village.
Several people looked up, and he saw two in uniform start to run. Then they were over the estate and heading for French territory. On the pass back, he had the pilot fly inland, so that from the right-hand seat he could see the estate from the landward angle. He was looking down from the peaks of the sierra at the estate running away to the mansion and the sea, but there was a guard in the col below the Piper who took its number.
He used up his second roll on the private airstrip running along the base of the hills, shooting the residences, workshops and the main hangar. There was a tractor pulling a twin-engined executive jet into the hangar and out of sight. The tailfin was almost gone. Dexter got one brief look at the fin before it was enveloped in the shadows. The number was P4-ZEM.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Jesuit