‘That would be great.’ Harris shrugged.
‘Yes. We should celebrate such good news. Yoinakuwa!’ Victor called out.
A moment later the Indian stepped into the doorway.
‘Some wine,’ Victor said, his gaze resting on Harris who was slow to catch on. ‘Visitor’s treat.’
‘Oh. Right,’ Harris said, digging into his pocket to produce some notes. ‘Dollars okay?’
‘Of course,’ Victor said. ‘Where is the Yankee dollar not welcome?’
Harris held out several dollar bills, unsure how much to offer. Yoinakuwa took them all and walked away, closing the door behind him and muffling the drumlike noise of the rain hitting the awning.
Harris and Jacobs exchanged glances. The younger man looked vindicated.
‘Did you change your name or is that our mistake?’ Harris asked Victor.
‘I was born Francois . . . Francois Laporte. When I found myself embroiled in the local politics here I decided it was . . . well, politically uncomfortable. “Francois” sounded too much like Franco . . . as in Francisco Franco, the fascist general - Spanish Civil War.’
‘Yes, I understand.’
‘We were in the middle of a revolution and I thought Victor was more victorious-sounding.’
‘A scientist turned revolutionary. That’s quite a switch.’
‘Is it? Surely scientists are revolutionaries by nature. An FBI agent turned revolutionary, now that would be fantastic. If that’s why you’re here by the way, you’re too late to join up. The revolution’s over.’
Harris smiled politely.
‘So. If you have come all this way just to tell me that Steel is dead then I’m flattered,’ said Victor.
Harris took a moment to collect his thoughts. ‘What can you tell me about Steel?’ he asked. ‘How did you know him?’
Victor shrugged. ‘Steel worked for the CIA. Did he not?’
‘I’ll be honest. I don’t know who he worked for. I’ve come here to ask you some questions, that’s all. It’s just a small part of a larger investigation.’
Victor shrugged. ‘That much was obvious, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Steel came here to help the rebellion because at the time it suited American foreign policy in the region. He was a clandestine operator. He had no papers of authority. But he had money, weapons - he could provide lots of both. He supported us, or at least gave us the impression that the United States supported us. And why should they not have? We were democratic liberals prepared to risk our lives to kick out a bunch of fascist pigs. It was a classic enough story. The Neravista government was nothing more than a corrupt, despotic dictatorship of the worst kind. They were a darkness, a blight on the land, and Neravista himself was an evil man with the blood of children on his hands.’
Harris wanted to avoid any political stuff and paused to let the moment pass. ‘How often did you see Steel?’
‘He came now and then. He would appear out of the blue, without warning.’
‘Over how long?’
‘A year, maybe. You see, we believed he was our friend. Maybe he was for a time. I’m sure he began by following orders. It seemed as though the Americans supported us in the beginning. Why would they have merely pretended to? But Steel changed his mind at some point, or his bosses did. Or we were sidelined by something that became more valuable to them. I don’t know. I was not privy to that information.’
Harris took a notepad from a pocket and opened it. He jotted down a comment before underlining his next question. ‘Did you know an Englishman named John Stratton?’
Victor stared at the fire, smiling thinly. ‘Stratton. Yes. I knew him.’
‘Do you know who he worked for?’
‘He worked for Steel, at least in the beginning. He seemed to be his own boss. You didn’t ask people like him where he came from or who he worked for . . . It was obvious what he was.’
‘What was that?’
‘What else could he have been? He was a mercenary. ’
Harris nodded as he made a note. ‘Steel left behind a letter to be opened in the event of his death. It included a list of names, people who should be suspected of his murder if he died in suspicious circumstances.’
Victor chuckled as he took a long draw on his cheroot.
‘Why do you find that amusing?’
‘I’ll bet you don’t have the list with you.’
‘No.’
‘That’s because you could not have fitted it into your pack. There were many people who wanted to kill Steel. I knew a few thousand myself.’
‘I suppose Steel meant those who would have had the skill to find him as well as kill him. After all, considering the line of work he was in . . . Stratton was on that list.’
Victor shrugged as if he had no idea why.
‘In an excerpt from Steel’s report on the rebellion he wrote that Stratton had betrayed him.’
Victor shook his head, as though he was denying a statement he’d heard often before. ‘What do you know of the rebellion?’ he asked.
‘Not a lot. There was a popular rising against Neravista’s dictatorship. It lasted several years and the government succeeded in putting it down.’
‘So many suffered for so long. So many died and you describe it all in a couple of short sentences.’
‘I didn’t mean to make light of the conflict. There’s hardly a country in this part of the world that hasn’t gone through a painful change of government costing many lives in the last forty years.’
‘I suppose it was a small rebellion compared with most. This is a small country. Around here it’s still called Sebastian’s Rebellion. It was the rebellion of many but it bears the name of one man. And rightly so . . . You heard of him?’
‘I understood that he was one of the rebel leaders.’
‘There were several leaders, true, but Sebastian was the main one. He was the most intelligent, the most powerful, the most determined to finish what he essentially began . . . I was his second in command, you know . . . his last one . . . Through the course of the campaign some of us lost our way. Doubt set in. Ideologies altered. Then came confusion, lies, corruption. By the end just about everyone had betrayed someone in some way. Not Sebastian, of course. He never wavered from his course, to the very end. Stratton’s only betrayal was of himself. He betrayed his own code of survival. We all lost in the end.’
A flash illuminated the room through the window and a second later an enormous crack of thunder sounded as if it had detonated just outside the door. Water began to drip through the reed roof onto the floor. ‘What was Stratton’s part in the rebellion?’ Harris asked.
‘He got caught up in things he never expected to . . . He was not an ordinary man. He did not try to lead but men wanted to follow him anyway. He did not try to impress others but others wanted to be like him.’
‘My report describes him as a trained killer. Is that how you yourself would describe him?’
‘Would you describe a gentle breeze as a killer? But a tornado is also just a wind . . . Stratton was like a welcome breeze most of the time. But he could also become a tornado.’
‘How did he come into it?’
Victor grinned. ‘In a spectacular fashion,’ he said, taking a final drag from his cheroot before tossing it into the fire. ‘He arrived the same way he left . . . Like an eagle . . .’
A Hercules transport aircraft thundered low over the jungle, gracefully following the contours of the rolling peaks and troughs of the forest canopy as dawn broke over the distant horizon. The plane’s sand-coloured fuselage, free of any identifying markings, was not as old as the paint job made it look. The propellers purred robustly as it banked easily onto a new heading and levelled off towards the rising sun.
As the tailgate motors whined the two large doors separated, the upper one folding into the fuselage, the bottom one lowering to form a level platform.
