‘And?’
‘And he’s a phoney. There is no US passport-holder in the name of Medvers Watson. State Department is adamant on that. He should have picked a more common name. This one sticks out like a sore thumb. The scholars at the Smithsonian have never heard of him. No one in the butterfly world has ever heard of Medvers Watson.’
Devereaux stared at the picture of the man who had tried to ruin his covert operation and thus had become, albeit unwittingly, his enemy. The eyes looked owlish behind the glasses, and the straggly goatee beard off the point of the chin weakened instead of strengthened the face.
‘Well done, Kevin. Brilliant strategy. But then, it worked; and of course all that works becomes brilliant. Every detail immediately to Colonel Moreno in San Martin if you please. He may move quickly.’
‘And the Surinam government in Parbo.’
‘No, not them. No need to disturb their slumbers.’
‘Paul, they could arrest him the moment he flies into Parbo airport. Our embassy boys could confirm the passport is a forgery. The Surinamese charge him with passport fraud and put him on the next plane back. Two of our marines as escort. We arrest him on touchdown and he’s in the slammer, out of harm’s way.’
‘Kevin, listen to me. I know it’s rough and I know the reputation of Moreno. But if our man has a big stack of dollars he could elude arrest in Surinam. Back here he could get bail within a day, then skip.’
‘But, Paul, Moreno is an animal. You wouldn’t send your worst enemy into his grip . . .’
‘And you don’t know how important the Serb is to all of us. Nor his paranoia. Nor how tight his schedule may be. He has to know the danger to himself is over, totally eliminated, or he will butt out of what I need him for.’
‘And you still can’t tell me?’
‘Sorry, Kevin. No, not yet.’
His deputy shrugged, unhappy but obedient.
‘OK, on your conscience, not mine.’
And that was the problem, thought Paul Devereaux when he was once again alone in his office, staring out at the thick green foliage between him and the Potomac. Could he square his conscience with what he was doing? He had to. The lesser evil, the greater good.
The unknown man with the false passport would not die easily, upon the midnight with no pain. But he had chosen to swim in hideously dangerous waters, and it had been his decision to do so.
That day, 18 August, America sweltered in the summer heat, and half the country sought relief in the seas, rivers, lakes and mountains. Down on the north coast of South America, 100 per cent humidity, sweeping in from the steaming jungles behind the coast, added ten more degrees to the hundred caused by the sun.
In Parbo docks, ten miles up the teak-brown Surinam River from the sea, the heat was like a tangible blanket, lying over the warehouses and quays. The pye-dogs tried to find the deepest shade to pant away the hours until sundown. Humans sat under slow-moving fans which merely moved the discomfort around a bit.
The foolish tossed down sugary drinks, sodas and colas, which merely made the thirst and dehydration worse. The experienced stayed with piping hot, sweet tea, which may sound crazy but was discovered by the British empire-builders two centuries earlier to be the best rehydrator of them all.
The fifteen-hundred-ton freighter, Tobago Star, crept up the river, docked at her assigned pier and waited for dark. In the cooler dusk she discharged her cargo, which included a bonded crate in the name of US diplomat Ronald Proctor. This went into a chain-link-fenced section of the warehouse to await collection.
Paul Devereaux had spent years studying terrorism in general, and the types that emanated from the Arab and Muslim world, not necessarily the same type, in particular.
He had long come to the conclusion that the conventional whine in the West, that terrorism stemmed from the poverty and destitution of those whom Fanon had called ‘the wretched of the earth’, was convenient and politically correct psychobabble.
From the Anarchists of Tsarist Russia to the IRA of 1916, from the Irgun and the Stern Gang to EOKA in Cyprus, from the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany, CCC in Belgium, Action Directe in France, Red Brigades in Italy, Red Army Faction in Germany again, the Renko Sekkigun in Japan, through to the Shining Path in Peru, to the modern IRA in Ulster or the ETA in Spain, terrorism came from the minds of comfortably raised, well-educated, middle-class theorists with a truly staggering personal vanity and a developed taste for self-i
ndulgence.
Having studied them all, Devereaux was finally convinced the same applied to all their leaders, the self-arrogated champions of the working classes. The same applied in the Middle East as in Western Europe, South America or Far East Asia. Imad Mugniyah, George Habash, Abu Awas, Abu Nidal and all the other Abus had never missed a meal in their lives. Most had college degrees.
In the Devereaux theory those who could order another to plant a bomb in a food hall and gloat over the resultant images all had one thing in common. They possessed a fearsome capacity for hatred. This was the genetic ‘given’. The hatred came first; the target could come later and usually did.
The motive also came second to the capacity to hate. It might be Bolshevik revolution, national liberation or a thousand variants thereof, from amalgamation to secession; it might be anti-capitalist fervour; it might be religious exaltation.
But the hatred came first, then the cause, then the target, then the methods and finally the self-justification. And Lenin’s ‘useful dupes’ always swallowed it.
Devereaux was utterly convinced that the leadership of Al Qaeda ran precisely true to form. Its co-founders were a construction millionaire from Saudi Arabia and a qualified doctor from Cairo. It mattered not whether their hatred of Americans and Jews was secular-based or religiously fuelled. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that America or Israel could do, short of complete self-annihilation, that would even begin to appease or satisfy them.
None of them, for him, cared a damn for the Palestinians save as vehicles and justifications. They hated his country not for what it did but for what it was.