‘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
The Loyalty
Kevin McBride walked down the hall and turned into the executive washroom. He felt drained; days of travelling, worrying, not sleeping, had left him exhausted.
He stared at his tired face in the mirror above the hand basins and wondered at Devereaux’s last Delphic remark. Would Project Peregrine have worked? Would the Saudi master-terrorist have fallen for it? Would his acolytes have showed up in Peshawar in ten days? Would they have made the vital phone call for the listening NSA to intercept?
Too late now. Zilic would never travel again, save to a US courtroom and thence to a maximum security jail. What was done was done.
He dunked his face a dozen times and stared at the man in the mirror. Fifty-six, going on fifty-seven. A thirty-year man, due to take his pension at the end of December.
In the spring, he and Molly would do what he had long promised. Their son and daughter were through college and making their own careers. He wanted his daughter and her husband to make him a grandchild whom he could spoil rotten. While waiting, they would buy the big motorhome he had promised Molly and go see the Rockies. He knew he had a rendezvous with some serious cut-throat trout up in Montana.
A much younger agent, a newly joined GS12, came out of a cubicle and began to wash his hands two basins down. One of the team. They nodded and smiled. McBride took paper towels and dabbed his face dry.
‘Kevin,’ said the youngster.
‘Yep.’
‘Mind if I ask you a question?’
‘Ask away.’
‘It’s kind of personal.’
‘Then maybe I won’t answer it.’
‘The tattoo on your left arm. The grinning rat with his pants down. What does it mean?’
McBride was still looking in the mirror, but he seemed to see two young GIs, rat-assed on beer and wine, laughing in the warm Saigon night, and a white petromax lamp hissing, and a Chinese tattooist at work. Two young Americans who would part company, but be bound by a bond that nothing could ever break. And he saw a slim file a few weeks earlier, which mentioned a tattoo of a grinning rat on the left forearm. And he heard the order to find the man, and have him killed.
He slipped his bracelet watch back on his wrist and flipped his sleeve back down. He checked the day-date window. Tenth September, 2001.
‘It’s quite a story, son,’ said the Badger, ‘and it all happened long ago and far away.’
THE END
Footnote
Chapter Sixteen: The File
*Abu Abbas was captured by US Special Forces in the desert west of Baghdad, Iraq, in April 2003 while this book was at the printers.
Frederick Forsyth, Avenger
(Series: # )
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