Avenger

For the last hour Dexter had had the spare earphones over his head and the mike in front of his mouth. As the wheels hit the tarmac, he keyed the transmit button.

"Unidentified Hawker jet to Key West tower, do you read?"

The voice of George Ta

"Read you, five."

"Tower, this aeroplane contains a mass murderer and a killer of an American in the Balkans. He is manacled to his seat. Please inform your police chief to exercise close custody and await the federal marshals."

Before waiting for a reply, he disco

"Go right to the far end, stop there, and I'll leave you," said the hijacker. He rose and pocketed his gun. Behind the Hawker, the Crash/Fire/Rescue trucks left the airport buildings and came after them.

"Door open, please," said Dexter.

He left the flight deck and walked back through the cabin as the lights came on. The two prisoners blinked in the glare.

Through the open door, Dexter could see the trucks racing toward them. Flashing red/blues indicated police cars. The wailing sirens were faint but getting closer.

"Where are we?" shouted Zoran Zilic.

" Key West," said Dexter.

"Why?"

"Remember in a meadow? In Bosnia? Spring of Ninety-five? An American kid pleading for his life? Well, pal, all this"-he waved his hand outside"-is a present from the boy's grandpa."

He walked down the steps and strode to the nose wheel assembly. Two bullets blew out the tires. The boundary fence was twenty yards away. The dark coveralls were soon lost in the blackness as he vaulted the chain link and walked away through the mangrove.

The airport lights behind him dimmed through the trees, but he began to make out the flashes of car and truck headlights on the highway beyond the swamp. He pulled out a cell phone and dialled by the glow of the tiny screen. Far away in Windsor, Ontario, a man answered.

"Mr. Edmond?"

"This is he?"

"The package from Belgrade that you asked for has landed at Key West Airport, Florida."

He said no more and barely heard the yell at the other end before disco

Ten minutes later, a senator in Washington was roused from his di

Before the marshals were through Islamorada, a teamster driving north, just out of Key West, on 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 11:40 P.M…

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, dispatched 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 Curacao. There was a co

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 Saturday night were leaked to him by friends on the Key West force by Sunday noon, and his report was 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? Project Peregrine is dead. Two years of work down the Potomac. It ca

Line by line, Devereaux explained the conspiracy he had devised to accomplish the greatest antiterrorist 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 goddamn 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 meÉHe 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."

"Some 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 Suriname Embassy here. So he invented Prof. 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 Suriname. 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 midmorning. 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 moralising 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 pla

McBride turned to go.

"You know," said Devereaux, as McBride 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."