‘Sorry, Mr Devereaux. We like to try and help you guys, but this masterpiece is going into our Black Museum. We’ll have entire classes studying this beauty.’
And still there was no reply from the Forensic Pathology unit at Bethesda, the hospital where Devereaux had a few useful contacts.
It was on the 4th that Mr Henry Nash, at the wheel of a modest little rented compact, with a handgrip of summer clothes and wash kit, British passport in hand and San Martin visa stamped inside it, rolled onto the ferry at the Commini River border crossing.
His British accent might not have fooled Oxford or Cambridge, but among the Dutch-speaking Surinamese and, he presumed, the Spanish-speaking San Martinos, there would be no problem. There was not.
Avenger watched the brown river flowing beneath his feet one last time and vowed he would be a happy man if he never saw the damned thing again.
On the San Martin side, the striped pole was gone, as were the secret police and soldiers. The border was back to its usual sleepy self. He descended, passed his passport through the side window of the booth, beamed an inane smile and fanned himself while he waited.
Running in a singlet in all weathers meant he habitually had a slight tan; two weeks in the tropics had deepened it to mahogany brown. His fair hair had received the attention of a barber in Paramaribo and was now so dark brown as to be almost black, but that simply matched the description of Mr Nash of London.
The glance through the trunk of his car and his valise of clothes was perfunctory, his passport went back into the top pocket of his shirt, and he rolled on down the road to the capital.
At the third track on the right, he checked no one was watching, and turned into the jungle again. Halfway to the farmstead he stopped and turned the car around. The giant baobab tree was not hard to locate and the tough black twine was still deep inside the cut he had sliced in the trunk a week earlier.
As he paid out the twine, the camouflaged Bergen rucksack came down from the branches where it had hung unseen. It contained all he hoped he would need for several days crouched on the crest of the cordillera above the hacienda of the runaway Serb, and for his descent into the fortress itself.
The customs officer at the border post had taken little notice of the ten-litre plastic jerrycan in the trunk. When the Englishman said ‘Agua’, he merely nodded and closed the lid. With the water added to the Bergen, the load would take even a triathlete to his limit for mountain climbing, but two litres a day would be vital.
The manhunter drove quietly through the capital, past the oil-palm forest where Colonel Moreno sat at his desk, and on to the east. He went into the resort village of La Bahia just after lunch, at the hour of siesta, and no one stirred.
The plates on the car were by now those of a San Martin national. He recalled the adage: where do you hide a tree? In the forest. Where do you hide a rock? In the quarry. He put the compact in the public car park, hefted the Bergen and marched eastwards out of town. Another backpacker.
Dusk descended. Ahead of him he saw the crest of the cordillera that separated the hacienda from the enveloping jungle. Where the road curved away inland, to loop around the hills and go on to the Maroni and the border to French Guyana, he left the road and began to climb.
He saw the narrow track snaking down from the col, and angled away from it towards a peak he had selected from the photographs taken from the aeroplane. When it became simply too black to move, he set down his Bergen, took a supper of high-value hard rations, a cup of the precious water, leaned against the haversack and slept.
In the camping stores of New York he had declined the US-Army derived MREs, Meals Ready to Eat, recalling that in the Gulf War they were so deeply awful that the GIs dubbed them Meals Rejected by Ethiopians. He made up his own concentrates to include beef, raisins, nuts and dextrose. He would be passing rabbit pellets, but he would keep his strength for when he needed it.
Before dawn he came awake, nibbled again, sipped again and climbed on. At one point, down the mountain and through a gap in the trees, he saw the roof of the guardhouse in the col far below.
Before the sun rose, he made the crest. He came out of the forest two hundred yards from where he wanted, so he crabbed sideways until he found the spot in the photograph.
His eye for terrain had not let him down. There was a slight dip in the line of the crest, screened by the last fuzz of vegetation. With camouflaged shirt and bush hat, daubed face and olive-coloured binoculars, motionless under leaves, he would be invisible from the estate below.
When he needed a break, he could slither backwards off the crest and
stand up again. He made the small camp that would be home for up to four days, smeared his face and crawled into the hide. The sun pinked the jungles over French Cayenne, and the first beam slipped across the peninsula below. El Punto lay spread out like the scale model that had once graced the sitting room of his apartment in Brooklyn, a shark tooth jabbing into the glittering sea. From below came a dull clang as someone smashed an iron bar into a hanging length of railway track. It was time for the forced labourers to rise.
It was not until the 4th that the friend Paul Devereaux had contacted in the Department of Forensic Pathology at Bethesda called back.
‘What on earth are you up to, Paul?’
‘Enlighten me. What am I up to?’
‘Grave-robbing by the look of it.’
‘Tell me all, Gary. What is it?’
‘Well, it’s a femur, all right. A thigh bone, right leg. Clean break at the mid-section. No compound fracture, no splinters.’
‘Sustained in a fall?’
‘Not unless the fall involved a sharp edge and a hammer.’
‘You’re fulfilling my worst fear, Gary. Go on.’