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