The Deceiver

“I don’t understand what is wrong,” said Rowse. “My visa was issued yesterday by your People’s Bureau in Valletta. Surely it is in order?”

The officer simply made a gesture with one languid hand to suggest that Rowse should be quiet. He was. A fly buzzed. Five minutes elapsed.

From behind him, Rowse heard the door open. The young officer glanced up, shot to his feet, and saluted. Then without a word, he left the room.

“So, Mr. Rowse, here you are at last.”

The voice was deep and modulated, the English of a kind that can only be learned in one of Britain’s better public schools. Rowse turned. He allowed no trace of recognition to cross his face, but he had studied pictures of this man for hours in McCready’s briefing sessions.

“He’s slick and highly educated—by us,” McCready had said. “He’s also utterly ruthless and quite deadly. Be careful of Hakim al-Mansour.”

The Libyan head of external intelligence was more youthful than his pictures had suggested, barely older than Rowse himself. Thirty-three, the dossier had said.

In 1969, Hakim al-Mansour had been a fifteen-year-old schoolboy attending Harrow public school outside London, the son and heir of an extremely wealthy courtier and close confidant of Libyan King Idris.

It was in that year that a group of radical young officers headed by an unknown colonel of Bedouin origin called Qaddafi had carried out a coup d’état while the King was abroad, and had toppled him. They immediately announced the formation of the People’s Jamahariyah, the socialist re­public. The King and his court took refuge with their consid­erable wealth in Geneva and appealed to the West for help in their own restoration. None came.

Unknown to his father, the young Hakim was entranced by the turn of events in his own country. He had already repudi­ated his father and all his politics, for only a year earlier his young imagination had been fired by the riots and near-revolution of the radical students and workers in Paris. It is not unknown for the impassioned young to turn to radical politics, and the Harrow schoolboy had converted in body and soul. Rashly, he bombarded the Libyan Embassy in London with requests to be allowed to leave Harrow and return to his homeland to join the socialist revolution.

His letters were noted and rejected. But one diplomat, a supporter of the old regime, tipped off al-Mansour Senior in Geneva. There was a blazing row between father and son. The boy refused to recant. At seventeen, his funds cut off, Hakim al-Mansour left Harrow prematurely. For a year he moved around Europe, trying to persuade Tripoli of his loyalty and always rejected. In 1972 he pretended to reform his views, made peace with his father, and joined the court-in-exile in Geneva.

While he was there, he learned details of a plot by a number of former British Special Forces officers, funded by King Idris’s financial chancellor, to create a countercoup against Qaddafi. They intended to mount a commando raid against the Libyan coastline in a ship called the Leonardo da Vinci, out of Genoa. The aim was to break open Tripoli’s main jail, the so-called Tripoli Hilton, and release all the desert clan chiefs who supported King Idris and detested Muammar Qaddafi. They would then scatter, raise the tribes, and topple the usurper. Hakim al-Mansour immediately revealed the entire plan to the Libyan Embassy in Paris.

In fact, the plan had already been “blown away” by the CIA, who later regretted it, and it was dismantled by the Italian security forces at America’s request. But al-Mansour’s gesture earned him a long interview at the Paris embassy.

He had already memorized most of Qaddafi’s rambling speeches and zany ideas, and his enthusiasm impressed the interviewing officer enough to earn the young firebrand a journey home. Two years after he was seconded to the Intel­ligence Corps, the Mukhabarat.

Qaddafi himself met and took to the younger man, promot­ing him beyond his years. Between 1974 and 1984, al-Mansour carried out a series of “wet affairs” for Qaddafi abroad, passing effortlessly through Britain, America, and France, where his fluency and urbanity were much appreciated, and through the terrorist nests of the Middle East, where he could become totally Arab. He carried out three personal assassi­nations of Qaddafi’s political opponents abroad, and he liaised extensively with the PLO, becoming a close friend and ad­mirer of the Black September planner and mastermind Abu Hassan Salameh, whom he much resembled.

Only a head cold had prevented him from joining Salameh for his dawn game of squash that day in 1979, when the Israeli Mossad finally closed on the man who had planned the butch­ery of their athletes at the Munich Olympics and blown him to bits. Tel Aviv’s kidon team never knew how close they had come to taking two similar birds with one bomb.

In 1984, Qaddafi had promoted him to direct all foreign terror operations. Two years later, Qaddafi was reduced to a nervous wreck by American bombs and rockets. He wanted revenge, and it was al-Mansour’s job to deliver it—quickly. The British angle was not a problem—the men of the IRA, whom al-Mansour privately regarded as animals, would leave a trail of blood and death across Britain if they were given the wherewithal. The problem was finding a group that would do the same thing inside America. And here was this young Britisher, who might or might not be a renegade. ...

“My visa, I repeat, is in perfect order,” Rowse said indig­nantly. “So may I ask what is going on?”

“Certainly, Mr. Rowse. The answer is simple. You are being denied entry into Libya.”

Al-Mansour strolled across the room to stare out of the windows at the airline-maintenance hangars beyond.

“But why?” asked Rowse. “My visa was issued in Valletta yesterday. It is in order. All I want to do is try to research some passages for my next novel.”

“Please, Mr. Rowse, spare me the bewildered innocence. You are a former soldier of the British Special Forces, appar­ently turned novelist. Now you turn up here saying you want to describe our country in your next book. Frankly, I doubt that your description of my country would be particularly flattering, and the Libyan people, alas, do not share your British taste for self-mockery. No, Mr. Rowse, you cannot stay. Come, I will escort you back to the plane to Malta.”

He called an order in Arabic, and the door opened. The two soldiers entered. One took Rowse’s grip. Al-Mansour picked up the passport from the table. The other soldier stood aside to let the two civilians pass.

Al-Mansour led Rowse down a different passage and out into the sunlight. The Libyan airliner stood ready for takeoff.

“My suitcase,” said Rowse.

“Already back onboard, Mr. Rowse.”

“May I know who I have been speaking to?” asked Rowse.

“Not for the moment, my dear fellow. Just call me ... Mr. Aziz. Now, where will you go from here for your research?”

“I don’t know,” said Rowse. “I seem to have reached the end of the line.”

“Then take a break,” said al-Mansour. “Have a brief holiday. Why not fly on to Cyprus? A lovely island. Person­ally, I always favor the cool air of the Troodos Mountains at this time of year. Just outside Pedhoulas in the Marathassa Valley is a charming old hostelry called the Apollonia. I recommend it. Such interesting people tend to stay there. Safe journey, Mr. Rowse.”

* * *

It was a lucky coincidence that one of the SAS sergeants spotted Rowse coming through the Valletta airport. They had not expected him back so soon. Both men were sharing a room at the airport hotel, spelling each other in the Arrivals hall on a four-hours-on, four-hours-off basis. The duty man was reading a sports magazine when he spotted Rowse emerg­ing from customs, his suitcase in one hand and his grip in the other. Without raising his head, he let Rowse pass and watched him approach the desk beneath the logo for Cyprus Airways. Then he used a wall phone to rouse his colleague in the hotel. The colleague raised McCready in central Valletta.

“Damn,” swore McCready. “What the hell’s he doing back so fast?”

“Dunno, boss,” said the sergeant, “but according to Danny, he’s inquiring at the Cyprus Airways desk.”

McCready thought furiously. He had hoped Rowse would stay in Tripoli for several days and that his cover story of seeking sophisticated weaponry for a bunch of fictional Amer­ican terrorists would eventually lead to his arrest and interro­gation by al-Mansour himself. Now it looked as if he had been thrown out. But why Cyprus? Had Rowse gone out of control?

McCready needed to get to him and find out what had happened in Tripoli. But Rowse was not checking into a hotel, where he could be covertly approached for a situation report. He was moving on. Perhaps he thought he was now under surveillance by the bad guys.

“Bill,” he said down the line, “tell Danny to stay with him. When the coast is clear, get to the Cyprus Airways desk and try to find where they went. Then book us two on the same flight, and two more on the next flight, in case I can’t get there on time. I’ll be out there as soon as I can.”

The traffic in downtown Valletta is fierce at sundown, and by the time McCready reached the airport, the evening flight for Nicosia had gone—with Rowse and Danny onboard. The next flight was not till the following day.

McCready checked into the airport hotel. At midnight, a call came in from Danny.

“Hallo, Uncle. I’m at the Nicosia airport hotel. Auntie’s gone to bed.”

“She must be tired,” said McCready. “Is it a nice hotel?”

“Yes, it’s lovely. We’ve got a super room. Six ten.”

“I’m so glad. I’ll probably stay there myself when I arrive. How’s the holiday so far?”

“Great. Auntie’s rented a car for tomorrow. I think we’re going up into the mountains.”

“That’ll be lovely,” McCready said jovially to his “nephew” across the eastern Mediterranean. “Why don’t you reserve that room for me? I’ll join you and Auntie as soon as I can. Good night, dear boy.”

He put the phone down. “Bugger’s going up into the mountains tomorrow,” he said gloomily. “What the hell did he learn in that stopover in Tripoli?”

“We’ll know tomorrow, boss,” said Bill. “Danny’ll leave a message in the usual place.”

Never seeing the point of wasting good sleeping time, Bill rolled over, and in thirty seconds he was fast asleep. In his profession, one never knew when one would sleep next.

McCready’s plane from Valletta touched down at the airport of the Cypriot capital just after eleven, having lost an hour because of the change of time zone. He was well separated from Bill, although they emerged from the same plane and took the same courtesy shuttle to the airport hotel. McCready settled into the lobby bar while Bill went up to room 610.

There was a maid cleaning it. Bill nodded and smiled, explained he had forgotten his razor, and went into the bathroom. Danny had left his situation report taped to the underside of the lavatory cistern lid. He emerged from the bathroom, nodded again to the maid, held up the razor he had produced from his pocket, was rewarded with an answering smile, and went back downstairs.

They made the exchange in the men’s toilet off the lobby. McCready retired to a cubicle and read the sitrep.

It was just as well that Rowse had not tried to make contact. According to Danny, shortly after Rowse had appeared from the customs hall at Valletta, his tail had followed, a sallow young man in a fawn suit. The Libyan agent had shadowed Rowse until the Cyprus Airways plane took off for Nicosia, but he had not joined the flight. Another tail, presumably called up from the Libyan People’s Bureau in Nicosia, had been waiting at the Nicosia airport and had shadowed Rowse to the hotel, where he had spent the night in the lobby. Rowse might have spotted either man, but he had given no sign. Danny had spotted both and stayed well back.

Rowse had asked the reception desk to order him a hired car for seven the following morning. Much later, Danny had done the same. Rowse had also asked for a map of the island and had consulted the reception manager on the best route to the Troodos Mountains.

In the last passage of the sitrep, Danny had said he would leave the hotel at five, park at a place where he could see the only route out of the car park, and wait for Rowse to emerge. He could not know whether the resident Libyan would follow Rowse all the way into the mountains or just see him off. He, Danny, would stay as close as he could and would call the hotel lobby when he had run Rowse to earth and could find a public phone. He would ask for Mr. Meldrum.

McCready returned to the lobby and made a brief call from one of the public phones to the British Embassy. Minutes later, he was speaking to the SIS Head of Station, an impor­tant post, bearing in mind Britain’s bases on Cyprus and its proximity to Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and the Palestinian strongholds across the sea. McCready knew his colleague from their days in London, and he soon got what he wanted— an unmarked car with a driver who spoke fluent Greek. It would arrive within the hour.

The call for Mr. Meldrum came at ten past two. McCready took the phone from the hand of the reception manager. Once again it was the uncle-and-nephew routine.

“Hallo, dear boy. How are you? How nice to hear from you.”

“Hallo, Uncle. Auntie and I have stopped for lunch at a lovely hotel high in the mountains outside the village of Pedhoulas. It’s called the Apollonia. I think she may stay here, it’s so lovely. The car gave a bit of problem at the end, so I’ve brought it to a garage in Pedhoulas run by a Mr. Demetriou.”

“Never mind. How are the olives?”

“There are no olives up here, Uncle. Just apple and cherry orchards. Olives only grow down in the plain.”

McCready put the phone down and headed for the men’s room. Bill followed him. They waited till the only other occupant had left, checked the cubicles, and talked.

“Is Danny all right, boss?”

“Sure. He tailed Rowse to a hotel high in the Troodos Mountains. Seems Rowse has checked in. Danny’s in the village at a garage called Demetriou’s. He’ll wait for us there. The Libyan tail, the olive-skinned one, remained down here, apparently satisfied that Rowse would go where he was sup­posed to go.

“The car will be here shortly. I want you to take your grip and leave. Wait for us half a mile down the road.”

Thirty minutes later, Mr. Meldrum’s car indeed appeared—a Ford Orion with several dents, the only true sign of an “unmarked” car in Cyprus. The driver was an alert young staffer from the Nicosia Station. His name was Bertie Marks, and he spoke fluent Greek. They picked up Bill from under the shade of a tree by the wayside and headed for the mountains to the southwest. It was a long drive. It was dusk before they entered the picturesque village of Pedhoulas, heart of the Troodos Mountains cherry industry.

Danny was waiting for them in a café opposite the garage. Poor Mr. Demetriou had still not mended the rented car—Danny had ensured when he sabotaged it that it would take at least half the day to fix.

He pointed out the Hotel Apollonia, and he and Bill sur­veyed the surrounding countryside in the darkening light with professional eyes. They fixed on the mountain slope across the valley from the hotel’s splendid dining terrace, hefted their grips, and disappeared silently into the cherry orchards. One of them carried the hand-held communicator that Marks had brought from Nicosia. The other communicator stayed with McCready. The two SIS men found a smaller and less pretentious taverna in the village and checked in.

Rowse had arrived during the lunch hour, after a pleasant and leisurely drive from the airport hotel. He assumed he was being tailed by his SAS minders—and he certainly hoped he was.

The previous evening at Malta, he had deliberately dawdled through the passport and customs formalities. All the other passengers but one had cleared the formalities before him. Only the sallow young man from the Libyan Mukhabarat had hung back. That was when he knew “Mr. Aziz”—Hakim al-Mansour—had given him a tail. He did not look around for the SAS sergeants in the Malta concourse, hoping they would not try to approach him.

The Tripoli tail had not joined the flight to Nicosia, so he assumed another would be waiting for him there. And he was. Rowse had behaved perfectly naturally and had slept well. He had seen the Libyan leave him on the road out of the Nicosia airport complex, and he hoped there was an SAS man some­where behind him. He took his time, but he never looked around or tried to make contact. There might be another Libyan posted in the hills.

There was a room available at the Apollonia, so he took it. Perhaps al-Mansour had arranged for it to be available—perhaps not. It was a pleasant room with stunning views over the valley to a hillside covered with cherry trees, which were now just beyond their bloom.

He lunched lightly but well off a local lamb casserole, washed down by a light Omhodos red wine, followed by fresh fruit. The hotel was an old taverna, well refurbished and modernized with added features such as a dining terrace built on piles out over the valley; the tables were set well apart under striped awnings. Whoever else was staying there, few had turned up for lunch. There was an elderly man with jet-black hair at a corner table on his own, who addressed the waiter in mumbled English, and several couples who were clearly Cypriots and might have simply come for lunch. When he entered the terrace, a very pretty younger woman had been leaving. Rowse had turned to look at her; she was quite a head-turner, and with her mane of corn-gold hair, she was almost certainly not Cypriot. All three admiring waiters had bowed her out of the restaurant before one of them showed him to his table.

After lunch he went to his room and took a nap. If al-Mansour’s laborious hint meant that he was now “in play,” there was nothing further he could do but watch and wait. He had done what he had been advised to do. The next move, if any, was in the Libyan’s court. He only hoped, if the going got rough, that he still had some backup out there somewhere.

The backup was indeed in place, by the time Rowse awoke from his nap. The two sergeants had found a small stone hut among the cherry trees on the mountainside opposite the hotel terrace. They had carefully removed one of the stones of the wall facing across the valley, which gave them a nice aperture from which to observe the hotel at a range of seven hundred yards. Their high-powered field glasses brought the dining terrace to a range that appeared to be twenty feet.

Dusk was deepening when they called up McCready and gave him directions to approach their hideout from the other side of the mountain. Bertie Marks drove according to the instructions, out of Pedhoulas and down two tracks, until they saw Danny standing in their way.

Abandoning the car, McCready followed Danny around the curve of the mountain. They disappeared into the cherry orchard and made the hut without being perceived from across the valley. There, Bill handed McCready his image-intensifying night glasses.

On the dining terrace the lights were coming on, a ring of colored bulbs strung around the perimeter of the dining area, with candles in sconces on each table.

“We’ll need Cypriot peasant clothes tomorrow, boss,” murmured Danny. “Can’t move around this hillside dressed as we are for long.”

McCready made a mental note to have Marks go to a village some miles away in the morning and buy the sort of canvas smocks and trousers they had seen farm workers by the wayside wearing. With luck, the hut would remain undis­turbed; in May it was too late for the spraying of the blossom and too early for the harvest. The hut was clearly abandoned, its roof half-collapsed. Dust was everywhere; a few broken-hafted hoes and mattocks stood against one wall. For the SAS sergeants, who had lain for weeks among soaking scrapes on the hillsides of Ulster, it was like a four-star hotel.

“Hallo,” muttered Bill, who had taken back the night glasses. “Tasty.” He passed the glasses to McCready.

A young woman had entered the terrace from the recesses of the hotel. A beaming waiter was showing her to a table. She wore a simple but elegant white dress over a golden suntan. Blonde hair hung about her shoulders. She sat down and apparently ordered a drink.

“Keep your minds on your work,” grumbled McCready. “Where’s Rowse?”

The sergeants grinned. “Oh yeah, him. One line of windows above the terrace. Third window to the right.”

McCready swiveled his glasses. None of the windows had their curtains drawn. Several had lights on. McCready saw a figure, naked but for a towel around his waist, emerge from the shower room and cross the floor of the bedroom. It was Rowse. So far, so good.

But none of the bad guys had shown up. Two other guests took their places on the terrace: a plump Levantine business­man with flashing rings on both hands, and an elderly man who sat alone at one corner of the terrace and studied the menu. He sighed. His life had involved a hell of a lot of waiting, and he still hated it. He handed back the glasses and checked his watch. Seven-fifteen. He would give it two hours before he took Marks back to the village for supper. The sergeants would keep the vigil through the night. It was what they were best at—apart from violent physical action.

Rowse dressed and checked his watch: seven-twenty. He locked his room and went down to the terrace for a drink before dinner. Beyond the terrace the sun had dropped below the mountains, bathing the far side of the valley in thick gloom while the silhouette of the hills was brilliantly back-lit. On the western coast, Paphos would still be enjoying a warm late-spring evening with another hour of sunshine to go.

There were three people on the dining terrace: a fat man of Mediterranean look, an old fellow with unlikely black hair, and the woman. She had her back to him, staring at the view across the valley. A waiter approached. Rowse nodded to the table next to the woman’s, up against the terrace balustrade. The waiter grinned and hastened to show him to it. Rowse ordered ouzo and a carafe of local spring water.

As he took his seat, she glanced sideways. He nodded and murmured, “Evening.” She nodded back and continued to gaze at the view of the darkening valley. His ouzo arrived. He too looked at the valley.

After a while he said, “May I propose a toast?”

She was startled. “A toast?”

He gestured with his glass to the shadow-shrouded sentinels of the mountains all around them and the wash of blazing orange sunset behind them.

“To tranquility. And spectacular beauty.”

She gave a half-smile. “To tranquility,” she said, and drank a sip of her dry white wine. The waiter brought two menus. At separate tables they studied their cards. She ordered mountain trout.

“I can’t better that. The same for me, please,” Rowse told the waiter, who left.

“Are you dining alone?” asked Rowse quietly.

“Yes, I am,” she said carefully.

“So am I,” he said. “And it worries me, for I’m a God­-fearing man.”

She frowned in puzzlement. “What’s God got to do with it?”

He realized her accent was not British. There was a husky twang; American? He gestured beyond the terrace. “The view, the peace, the hills, the dying sun, the evening. He created all of this, but surely not for dining alone.”

She laughed, a flash of clear white teeth in a sun-golden face. Try to make them laugh, his dad had told him. They like to be made to laugh.

“May I join you? Just for dinner?”

“Why not? Just for dinner.”

He took his glass and crossed to sit opposite her. “Tom Rowse,” he said.

“Monica Browne,” she replied.

They talked, the usual small talk. He explained that he was the writer of a moderately successful novel and had been doing some research in the area for his next book, which would involve Levantine and Middle East politics. He had decided to end his tour of the eastern Mediterranean with a brief break at this hotel, recommended by a friend for its good food and restfulness.

“And you?” he asked.

“Nothing so exciting. I breed horses. I’ve been in the area buying three thoroughbred stallions. It takes time for the shipment papers to come through. So”—she shrugged— “time to kill. I thought it would be nicer here than stewing on the dock side.”

“Stallions? In Cyprus?” he asked.

“No, Syria. The yearling sales at Hama. Pure Arabs, the finest. Did you know that every race horse in Britain is ultimately descended from three Arabian horses?”

“Just three? No, I didn’t.”

She was enthused by her horses. He learned that she was married to the much older Major Eric Browne and that to­gether they owned and ran a breeding stud at Ashford. Origi­nally she was from Kentucky, which was where she had gained her knowledge of bloodstock and horse-racing. He knew Ashford vaguely—it was a small town in Kent, on the road from London to Dover.

The trout arrived, deliciously grilled over a charcoal bra­zier. It was served with a local dry white wine from up the Marathassa Valley.

Inside the hotel, beyond the patio doors open to the terrace, a group of three men had moved into the bar.

“How long will you have to wait?” asked Rowse. “For the stallions?”

“Any day now, I hope. I worry about them. Maybe I should have stayed with them in Syria. They’re terribly mettlesome. Get nervous in transit. But my shipping agent here is very good. He’ll call me when they arrive, and I’ll ship them out personally.”

The men in the bar finished their whiskey and were shown out onto the terrace to a table. Rowse caught a hint of their accents. He raised a steady hand to his mouth with a forkful of trout.

“Ask yer man to bring another round of the same,” said one of the men.

Across the valley, Danny said quietly, “Boss.”

McCready jackknifed to his feet and came to the small aperture in the stone wall. Danny handed him the glasses and stood back. McCready adjusted focus and let out a long sigh.

“Bingo,” he said. He handed the glasses back. “Keep it up. I’m going back with Marks to watch the front of the hotel. Bill, come with me.”

By then, it was so dark on the mountainside that they could walk around to where the car was still waiting without fear of being seen from across the valley.

On the terrace, Rowse kept his attention fixed entirely on Monica Browne. One glance had told him all he needed to know. Two of the Irishmen he had never seen before. The third—clearly leader of the group—was Kevin Mahoney.

Rowse and Monica Browne declined desserts and took coffee. Small sticky sweetmeats came with it. Monica shook her head.

“No good for the figure—no good at all,” she said.

“And yours should in no way be harmed, for it is quite stunning,” said Rowse. She laughed away the compliment, but not with displeasure. She leaned forward. By the candle­light Rowse caught a brief but dizzying glance of the channel between her full breasts.

“Do you know those men?” she asked earnestly.

“No, never seen ’em before,” said Rowse.

“One of them seems to be staring at you a lot.”

Rowse did not want to turn and look at them, but after that remark it would have been suspicious not to. The dark hand­some features of Kevin Mahoney were fixed on him. As he turned, Mahoney did not bother to glance away. Their eyes met. Rowse knew the glance: puzzlement. Unease. As of someone who thinks he has seen a person somewhere before but cannot place him.

Rowse turned back. “Nope. Total strangers.”

“Then they are very rude strangers.”

“Can you recognize their accent?” asked Rowse.

“Irish,” she said. “Northern Irish.”

“Where did you learn to detect Irish accents?” he asked.

“Horse racing, of course. The sport is full of them. And now, it’s been lovely, Tom, but if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to turn in.”

She rose. Rowse followed, his fleeting suspicion allayed.

“I agree,” he said. “It was a wonderful dinner. I hope we can eat together again.”

He looked for a hint that she might want him to accompany her, but there was none. She was in her early thirties, her own woman, and not stupid. If she wanted that, she would indicate it in some small way. If not, it would be foolish to spoil things. She gave him a radiant smile and swept off the terrace. Rowse took another coffee and turned away from the Irish trio to look out across the dark mountains. Soon he heard them retire back to the bar and their whiskey.

“I told you it was a charming place,” said a deep, cultured voice behind him.

Hakim al-Mansour, as beautifully tailored as ever, slipped into the vacant chair and gestured for coffee.

Across the valley, Danny laid down his glasses and muttered urgently into his communicator. In the Ford Orion, parked up the road from the Apollonia’s main entrance, McCready lis­tened. He had not seen the Libyan enter the hotel, but he might have been there for hours.

“Keep me posted,” he told Danny.

“You did indeed, Mr. Aziz,” said Rowse calmly. “And it is. But if you wanted to talk to me, why did you expel me from Libya?”

“Oh, please—not expel,” drawled al-Mansour. “Just de­cline to admit. And well, the reason was that I wished to talk to you in complete privacy. Even in my homeland there are formalities, records to be kept, the curiosity of superiors to satisfy. Here—nothing but peace and quiet.”

“And the facility,” thought Rowse, “to carry out a quiet liquidation and leave the Cypriot authorities with a British body to explain.”

“So,” he said aloud, “I must thank you for your courtesy in agreeing to help me with my research.”

Hakim al-Mansour laughed softly. “I think the time for that particular foolishness is over, Mr. Rowse. You see, before certain—animals—put him out of his misery, your late friend Herr Kleist was quite communicative.”

Rowse spun around on him, bitterly angry. “The papers said he was killed by the drug people, in revenge for what he did to them.”

“Alas, no. The people who did to him what was done do indeed deal in drugs. But their principal enthusiasm is for planting bombs in public places, principally in Britain.”

“But why? Why should those bloody Paddies have been interested in Ulrich?”

“They weren’t, my dear Rowse. They were interested in finding out what you were really up to in Hamburg, and they thought your friend might know. Or suspect. And he did. He seemed to believe your tarradiddle about “fictional” American terrorists masked a quite different purpose. That infor­mation, coupled with further messages received from Vienna, brought me to the view that you might be an interesting man to talk to. I hope you are, Mr. Rowse; for your sake, I sincerely hope you are. And the time has come to talk. But not here.”

Two men had appeared behind Rowse. They were big and olive-skinned.

“I think we should go for a little ride,” said al-Mansour.

“Is this the sort of ride from which one returns?” asked Rowse.

Hakim al-Mansour rose. “That depends very much on whether you are able to answer a few simple questions to my satisfaction,” he said.

McCready was waiting for the car when it emerged from the portico of the Apollonia onto the road, having been tipped off by Danny across the valley. He saw the Libyans’ car—with Rowse in the back seat between the two heavies—turn away from the hotel.

“Do we follow, boss?” asked Bill from the rear seat of the Orion.

“No,” said McCready. To try and follow without lights would have been suicide on those hairpin curves. To put on headlights would give the game away. Al-Mansour had chosen his terrain well. “If he comes back, he’ll tell us what went on. If not ... well, at least he’s in play at last. The bait is being examined. We’ll know by morning whether it has been taken or rejected. By the way, Bill, can you enter that hotel un­seen?”

Bill looked as if he had been grievously insulted.

“Slip that under Rowse’s door,” said McCready, and he passed the sergeant a tourist brochure.

The drive took an hour. Rowse forced himself not to look around. But twice, after the Libyan driver had negotiated hairpin bends, Rowse could look back the way they had come. There was no moving wash of another car’s headlights behind them. Twice the driver pulled to the side of the road, doused his lights, and waited for five minutes. No one came past them. Just before midnight, they arrived at a substantial villa and drove through wrought-iron gates. Rowse was decanted and pushed through the door, which was opened by another heavyweight Libyan. With al-Mansour himself, that made five. Too heavy odds.

And there was another man waiting for them in the large drawing room into which he was pushed, a heavy-set, jowly, big-bellied man in his late forties with a brutal, coarsened face and big red hands. He was clearly not a Libyan. In fact, Rowse easily recognized him though he gave no sign. The face had been in McCready’s rogue’s gallery, shown to him as a face he might one day see if he agreed to plunge into the world of terrorism and the Middle East.

Frank Terpil was a CIA renegade, fired by the Agency in 1971. Soon after, he had gravitated to his true and very lucrative vocation in life—supplying torture equipment, ter­rorist tricks, and expertise to Uganda’s Idi Amin. Before the Ugandan monster was toppled and his hideous State Research Bureau broken up, he had introduced the American to Muammar Qaddafi. Since then Terpil, sometimes in association with another renegade, Edwin Wilson, had specialized in providing a vast range of terrorist equipment and technology to the most extreme groups around the Middle East, always remaining the servitor of the Libyan dictator.

Even by then, Terpil had been well out of the Western intelligence community for fifteen years, but he was still regarded in Libya as the “American” expert. It suited him well to hide the fact that by the late 1980s, he was completely out of touch.

Rowse was told to take a chair in the middle of the room. The furniture was almost entirely shrouded in dust sheets. Clearly, the villa was a holiday home for a wealthy family who had shut it up for the winter. The Libyans had simply taken it over for the night, which was why Rowse had not been blindfolded.

Al-Mansour removed a dust sheet and fastidiously seated himself in a brocade high-back chair. A single bulb hung over Rowse. Terpil took a nod from al-Mansour and lumbered over.

“Okay, boy, let’s talk. You’ve been going around Europe looking for arms. Very special weapons. What the hell are you really up to?”

“Researching a new novel. I’ve tried to explain that a dozen times. It’s a novel. That’s my job, that’s what I do. I write thriller novels. About soldiers, spies, terrorists—fictional ter­rorists.”

Terpil hit him once on the side of the face—not hard, but enough to indicate there was more where that came from and plenty of it.

“Cut the shit,” he said without animosity. “I’m going to get the truth anyway, one way or the other. Might as well keep it painless—all the same to me. Who are you really working for?”

Rowse let the story come out slowly, as he had been briefed, sometimes recalling things exactly, sometimes having to search his memory.

“Which magazine?”

“Soldier of Fortune.”

“Which edition?”

“April ... May, last year. No, May, not April.”

“What did the ad say?”

“ ‘Weapons expert needed, European area, for interesting assignment’ ... something like that. A box number.”

“Bullshit. I take that magazine every month. There was no such ad.”

“There was. You can check.”

“Oh, we will,” murmured al-Mansour from the corner of the room. He was making notes with a slim gold pen on a Gucci pad.

Rowse knew Terpil was bluffing. There had been such an ad in the columns of Soldier of Fortune. McCready had found it, and a few calls to his friends in the CIA and the FBI had ensured—or so Rowse fervently hoped—that the placer of the ad would not be available to deny he had ever received a reply from Mr. Thomas Rowse of England.

“So you wrote back.”

“Yep. Plain paper. Accommodation address. Giving my background, areas of expertise. Instructions for a reply, if any.”

“Which were?”

“Small ad in the London Daily Telegraph.” He recited the wording. He had memorized it.

“The ad appeared? They made contact?”

“Yep.”

“What date?”

Rowse gave it. Previous October. McCready had found that ad as well. It had been chosen at random, a perfectly genuine small advertisement from an innocent British citizen, but with wording that would suit. The Telegraph staff had agreed to alter the records to show it had been placed by someone in America and paid for in cash.

The interrogation went on. The phone call he had taken from America after placing a further ad in The New York Times. (That too had been found after hours of searching—a real ad listing a British phone number. Rowse’s own unlisted number had been changed to tally with it.)

“Why the roundabout way of getting in touch?”

“I figured I needed discretion in case the placer of the original ad was crazy. Also that my secretiveness might impress whoever it was.”

“And did it?”

“Apparently. The speaker said he liked it. Set up a meet.”

When? Last November. Where? The Georges Cinq in Paris. What was he like?

“Youngish, well dressed, well spoken. Not registered at the hotel. I checked. Called himself Galvin Pollard. Certainly phony. A yuppie type.”

“A what?”

“Young, upwardly mobile professional,” drawled al-Mansour. “You’re out of touch.”

Terpil went red. Of course. He had seen the term but forgotten it.

What did he say? He said he represented a group of ultra-radical people, Rowse replied, who were sick and tired of the Reagan Administration, of its hostility to the Soviet and Third Worlds, and particularly of the use of American planes and taxpayer money to bomb women and children in Tripoli the previous April.

“And he produced a list of what he wanted?”

“Yes.”

“This list?”

Rowse glanced at it. It was a copy of the list he had shown Kariagin in Vienna. The Russian must have a superb memory.

“Yes.”

“Claymore mines, for God’s sake. Semtex-H. Booby-trapped briefcases. This is high-tech stuff. What the hell did they want all that for?”

“He said his people wanted to strike a blow. A real blow. He mentioned the White House, and the Senate. He seemed particularly keen on the Senate.”

He allowed the money side of it to be dragged out of him. The account at the Kreditanstalt in Aachen with half a million dollars in it. (Thanks to McCready, there really was such an account, backdated to the appropriate period. And bank secrecy is not really all that good. The Libyans could confirm it if they wanted to.)

“So what did you get involved for?”

“There was a twenty percent commission. A hundred thou­sand dollars.”

“Peanuts.”

“Not to me.”

“You write thriller novels, remember.”

“Which don’t sell all that well. Despite the publisher’s blurb. I wanted to make a few bob.”

“Bob?”

“Shillings,” murmured al-Mansour. “British equivalent for “greenbacks” or “dough.”

At four in the morning, Terpil and al-Mansour went into a huddle. They talked quietly in an adjacent room.

“Could there really be a radical group in the States pre­pared to carry out a major outrage at the White House and the Senate?” asked al-Mansour.

“Sure,” said the burly American who hated his homeland. “In a country that size, you get all kinds of weirdos. Jesus, one Claymore mine in a briefcase on the lawn of the White House. Can you imagine it?”

Al-Mansour could. The Claymore is one of the most devas­tating antipersonnel weapons ever invented. Shaped like a disk, it leaps into the air when detonated, then sends thou­sands of ball-bearings outward from the perimeter of the disk at waist-height. A moving sheet of these missiles will slice through hundreds of human beings. Loosed in an average railway concourse, a Claymore will leave few of the thousands of commuters in the area alive. For this reason, the sale of the Claymore is fiercely vetted by America. But there are always replicas. ...

At half-past four, the two men returned to the sitting room. Although Rowse did not know it, the gods were smiling on him that night. Al-Mansour needed to bring something to his Leader without further delay to satisfy the insistent pressure for revenge against America; Terpil needed to prove to his hosts that he was still the man they needed to advise them about America and the West. Finally, both men believed Rowse for the reason that most men believe: because they wanted to.

“You may go, Mr. Rowse,” said al-Mansour mildly. “We will check, of course, and I will be in touch. Stay at the Apollonia until I or someone sent by me gets in touch.”

The two heavies who had brought him drove him back and dropped him at the hotel doorway before driving off. When he entered his room, he switched on the light, for the dawn was not yet bright enough to fill his west-facing room. Across the valley, Bill, who was on the shift, activated his communi­cator and awoke McCready in his hotel room in Pedhoulas.

Rowse stooped to pick something from the carpet inside his room. It was a brochure inviting visitors to visit the historic Kykko Monastery and admire the Golden Icon of the Virgin. A single script in pencil beside the paragraph said “Ten A.M.”

Rowse set his alarm for three hours’ sleep. “Screw Mc­Cready,” he said as he drifted off.

Chapter 4

Kykko, the largest monastery in Cyprus, was founded in the twelfth century by the Byzantine emperors. They chose their spot well, bearing in mind that the lives of monks are sup­posed to be spent in isolation, meditation, and solitude.

The vast edifice stands high on a peak west of the Marathassa Valley in a situation so remote that only two roads lead to it, one from each side. Finally, below the monastery, the two roads blend into one, and a single lane leads upward to the monastery gate.

Like the emperors of Byzantium, McCready, too, chose his spot well. Danny had stayed behind in the stone hut across the valley from the hotel, watching the curtained windows of the room where Rowse slept, while Bill, on a motorcycle acquired for him locally by the Greek-speaking Marks, had ridden ahead to Kykko. At dawn, the SAS sergeant was well hidden in the pines above the single track to the monastery.

He saw McCready himself arrive, driven by Marks, and he watched to see who else came. Had any of the Irish trio appeared, or the Libyan car (they had noted its number), McCready would have been alerted by three warning blips on the communicator and would have vaporized. But only the usual stream of tourists—most of them Greek and Cypriot—trundled up the track on that May morning.

During the night the head of station in Nicosia had sent one of his young staffers up to Pedhoulas with several messages from London and a third communicator. Each sergeant now had one, aside from McCready.

At half-past eight Danny reported that Rowse had appeared on the terrace and taken a light breakfast of rolls and coffee. There was no sign of Mahoney and his two friends, or Rowse’s girl from the evening before, or any of the other guests at the hotel.

“He’s looking tired,” said Danny.

“No one said this would be a holiday for any of us,” snapped McCready from his seat in the courtyard of the monastery twenty miles away.

At twenty-past nine Rowse left. Danny reported it. Rowse drove out of Pedhoulas, past the great painted church of the Archangel Michael that dominated the mountain village, and turned northwest on the road to Kykko. Danny continued his watch on the hotel. At half-past nine the maid entered Rowse’s room and drew the curtains back. That made life easier for Danny. Other curtains were withdrawn on the facade of the hotel facing the valley. Despite the rising sun in his eyes, the sergeant was rewarded by the sight of Monica Browne doing ten minutes of deep-breathing exercises quite naked in front of her window.

“Beats South Armagh,” murmured the appreciative vet­eran.

At ten to ten, Bill reported that Rowse had come into sight, climbing the steep and winding track to Kykko. McCready rose and went inside, wondering at the labor that had brought these massive stones so high into the mountain peaks, and at the skill of the masters who had painted the frescoes in the gold leaf, scarlet, and blue that decorated the incense-sweet interior.

Rowse found McCready in front of the famous Golden Icon of the Virgin. Outside, Bill insured that Rowse had not grown a tail, and he gave McCready two double-blips on the com­municator in the senior agent’s breast pocket.

“It seems you’re clean,” murmured McCready as Rowse appeared beside him. There was no strangeness in talking in a low voice; all around them, the other tourists conversed in whispers, too, as if afraid to disturb the calm of the shrine.

“So shall we start at the beginning?” said McCready. “I remember seeing you off at the Valletta airport on your very brief visit to Tripoli. Since then, if you please, every detail.” Rowse started at the beginning.

“Ah, so you met the notorious Hakim al-Mansour,” said McCready after a few minutes. “I hardly dared hope he’d turn up at the airport himself. Kariagin’s message from Vi­enna must have tickled his fancy. Go on.”

Part of Rowse’s narrative McCready could confirm from his own and the sergeants’ observations—the sallow-faced young agent who had followed Rowse back to Valletta and seen him on the Cyprus flight, the second agent at Nicosia who had tailed him until he left for the mountains.

“Did you see my two sergeants? Your two former col­leagues?”

“No, never. I remain to be convinced they’re even there,” said Rowse. Together they stared up at the Madonna who, with calm and pitying eyes, stared back down at them.

“Oh, they’re here, all right,” said McCready. “One’s out­side at the moment, just to see that neither you nor I was followed. Actually, they’re taking quite a lot of pleasure in your adventures. When this is all over, you can have a drink together. Not yet. So ... after you arrived at the hotel?”

Rowse skipped through to the moment he first saw Mahoney and his two cronies.

“Wait a minute, the girl. Who is she?”

“Just a vacation pickup. An American race-horse breeder waiting for the arrival of three Arab stallions she bought last week at the Hama yearling sales in Syria. Monica Browne. With an “e.” No problem, just a dining companion.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Sam. Quite sure. Just a civilian. And a very pretty one, as it happens.”

“So we noticed,” muttered McCready. “Go on.”

Rowse narrated the arrival of Mahoney and the suspicious glances his companion had intercepted across the terrace.

“You think he recognized you? From that filling station forecourt?”

“He couldn’t have done,” said Rowse. “I had a wool cap down to my eyes and stubble all over my face, and I was half-hidden by the petrol pumps. No, he’d stare like that at any Englishman as soon as he heard the accent. You know how much he hates us all.”

“Maybe. Go on.”

It was the sudden appearance of Hakim al-Mansour and the nightlong interrogation by Frank Terpil that really interested McCready. He made Rowse stop a dozen times to clarify tiny points. The Deceiver was carrying a hard-cover book on Cypriot Byzantine churches and monasteries. As Rowse talked, he made copious notes in the book, writing over the Greek text. No mark appeared from the point of his pencil—that would only come later when the chemicals were applied. To any bystander, he was just a tourist making notes on what he saw around him.

“So far, so good,” mused McCready. “Their arms ship­ment operation seems to be on hold, ready for some “go” order. Mahoney and al-Mansour turning up at the same hotel in Cyprus is too much to mean anything else. What we have to know is when, where, and how. Land, sea, or air? From where and to where? And the carrier—truck, air freight or cargo ship?”

“You’re still sure they’ll go ahead? Not call the whole thing off?”

“I’m sure.”

There was no need to tell Rowse why he was sure. Rowse had no need to know. But there had been another message from the Libyan doctor who attended Muammar Qaddafi. It would be a multipackage shipment, when it came. Some of the weapons would be for the Basque separatists, the ETA. More would be for the French ultra-Left group, the Action Directe. Another consignment for the small but lethal Belgian terrorists, the CCC. A large present for the German Red Army Faction—at least half, no doubt, to be used on bars frequented by U.S. servicemen. More than half the shipment was for the IRA.

It was reported that one of the IRA’s tasks would be the assassination of the American ambassador to London. Mc­Cready suspected that the IRA, mindful of its fund-raising operations in America, would farm that job out—probably to the Germans of the Faction, successors to the Baader-Meinhof gang, who were diminished in numbers but still deadly and prepared to take contract work in exchange for arms.

“Did they ask where you would want the shipment for the American terror group, if they agree to sell?” McCready asked Rowse.

“Yes.”

“And you told them?”

“Anywhere in Western Europe.”

“Plans for getting it to the States?”

“Told them what you said. I’d remove the consignment, which is quite small in bulk, from wherever they delivered it to a rented garage known only to me. I’d return with a camper van or mobile home, with hidden compartments behind the walls. Drive the van north through Denmark, on the ferry to Sweden, up to Norway and take it on one of the many freighters crossing to Canada. Just another tourist on a wild­life-watching vacation.”

“They like that?”

“Terpil did. Said it was neat and clean. Al-Mansour ob­jected that it would mean crossing several national frontiers. I pointed out that in the holiday season, camper vans pour across Europe, and that at each stage I would say I was picking up my wife and kids at the next capital’s airport after they flew in. He nodded several times.”

“All right. We’ve made our pitch. Now we have to wait and see if you’ve convinced them. Or if their greed for revenge against the White House will outweigh natural caution. It has been known.”

“What happens next?” asked Rowse.

“You go back to the hotel. If they swallow the American scheme and include your package in the shipment, al-Mansour will contact you, either personally or by courier. Follow his instructions to the letter. I’ll only close in on you for a situation report when the coast is clear.”

“And if they don’t swallow it?”

“Then they’ll try to silence you. Probably ask Mahoney and his boys to do the job as a sign of good faith. That’ll give you your chance at Mahoney. And the sergeants will be close by. They’ll move in to pull you out alive.”

“The hell they will,” thought Rowse. That would blow away London’s awareness of the plot. The Irish would scatter, and the whole shipment would reach them by another route at another time and place. If al-Mansour came for him directly or indirectly, he would be on his own.

“Do you want a warning bleeper?” asked McCready. “Something to bring us running?”

“No,” said Rowse shortly. There was no point in having one. No one would come.

“Then go back to the hotel and wait,” said McCready. “And try not to tire yourself to exhaustion with the pretty Mrs. Browne. With an ‘e.’ You might need your strength later.”

McCready then drifted away into the throng. He too knew he could not intervene if the Libyans or the Irish came for Rowse. What he had decided to do, in case the Libyan fox had not believed Rowse, was to bring in a far larger team of watchers and to keep an eye on Mahoney. When he moved, the Irish arms consignment would be moving. Now that he had found Mahoney, the IRA man was the better bet as a trace to the shipment.

Rowse completed his tour of the monastery and emerged into the brilliant sunshine to find his car. Bill, from his cover under the pines up on the hill below the tomb of the late President Makarios, watched him go and alerted Danny that their man was on his way back. Ten minutes later, McCready left, driven by Marks. On the way down the hill they gave a lift to a Cypriot peasant standing by the roadside and thus brought Bill back to Pedhoulas.

Fifteen minutes into the forty-minute drive, McCready’s communicator crackled into life. It was Danny.

“Mahoney and his men have just entered our man’s room. They’re ransacking it. Giving it a right going over. Shall I get out on the road and warn him?”

“No,” said McCready. “Stay put and keep in touch.”

“If I speed up, we might be able to overtake him,” sug­gested Marks.

McCready glanced at his watch. An empty gesture. He was not even calculating the miles and the speed to Pedhoulas.

“Too late,” he said. “We’d never catch him.”

“Poor old Tom,” said Bill from the back.

Unusually with subordinates, Sam McCready lost his tem­per. “If we fail, if that load of shit gets through, poor old shoppers at Harrods, poor old tourists in Hyde Park, poor old women and children all over our bloody country,” he snapped.

There was silence all the way to Pedhoulas.

Rowse’s key was still hanging on its hook in the reception lobby. He took it himself—there was no one behind the desk—and walked upstairs. The lock to his room was unda­maged; Mahoney had used the key and replaced it in the lobby. But the door was unlocked. Rowse thought the maid might still be bed-making, so he walked right in.

As he entered, a powerful shove from the man behind the door sent him staggering forward. The door slammed shut, access to it barred by the stocky one. Danny’s long-range photographs had been sent down to Nicosia with the courier before dawn, faxed to London, and identified. The stocky one was Tim O’Herlihy, a killer from the Derry Brigade; the beefy ginger-haired one by the fireplace Eamonn Kane, an enforcer from West Belfast. Mahoney sat in the room’s only armchair, his back to the window, whose curtains had been drawn to filter the brilliant daylight.

Without a word Kane grabbed the staggering Englishman, spun him around, and flattened him against the wall. Skilled hands ran quickly over Rowse’s short-sleeved shirt and down each leg of his trousers. If he had been carrying McCready’s offered bleeper, it would have been discovered and ended the game there and then.

The room was a mess, every drawer opened and emptied, the contents of the wardrobe scattered all over. Rowse’s only consolation was that he carried nothing that an author on a research trip would not have had—notebooks, story outline, tourist maps, brochures, portable typewriter, clothes, and washkit. His passport was in his back trouser pocket. Kane fished it out and tossed it to Mahoney. Mahoney flicked through it, but it told him nothing he did not already know.

“So, Sass-man, now perhaps you’ll tell me just what the fuck you’re doing here.”

There was the usual charming smile on his face, but it did not reach the eyes.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” said Rowse indignantly.

Kane swung a fist that caught Rowse in the solar plexus. He could have avoided it, but O’Herlihy was behind him and Kane was to one side. The odds were loaded, even without Mahoney. These men were not Sunday-school teachers. Rowse grunted and doubled, leaning against the wall and breathing heavily.

“Don’t you now? Don’t you now?” said Mahoney without rising. “Well, normally I have other ways than words of explaining myself, but for you, Sass-man, I’ll make an excep­tion. A friend of mine in Hamburg identified you there a couple of weeks back. Tom Rowse, former captain in the Special Air Service Regiment, well-known fan club of the Irish people, asking some very funny questions. Two tours in the Emerald Isle behind him, and now he turns up in the middle of Cyprus just when my friends and I are trying to have a nice quiet holiday. So once again, what are you doing here?”

“Look,” said Rowse. “Okay, I was in the regiment. But I quit. Couldn’t take any more of it. Denounced them all, the bastards, three years ago. I’m out, well out. The British Establishment wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire. Now I write novels for a living. Thriller novels. That’s it.”

Mahoney nodded to O’Herlihy. The punch from behind caught him in the kidneys. He cried out and dropped to his knees. Despite the odds, he could have fought back and finished at least one of them, maybe two, before going down himself for the last time. But he took the pain and slumped to his knees.

Despite Mahoney’s arrogance, Rowse suspected the terror­ist chief was puzzled. He must have noticed Rowse and Hakim al-Mansour in conversation on the terrace last night, before driving off. Rowse had returned from that all-night session, and Mahoney was on the point of receiving a very big favor from al-Mansour. No, the IRA man had not turned lethal—yet. He was just having fun.

“You’re lying to me, Sass-man, and I don’t like it. I’ve heard this just-doing-my-research story before. You see, we Irish are a very literary people. And some of the questions you have been asking are not literary at all. So what are you doing here?”

“Thrillers,” wheezed Rowse. “Thrillers nowadays have to be accurate. Can’t get away with vague generalizations. Look at le Carré, Clancy—you think they don’t research every last detail? It’s the only way nowadays.”

“Is it now? And a certain gentleman from across the water that you were talking with last night—he one of your co-writers?”

“That’s between us. You’d better ask him.”

“Oh, I did, Sass-man. This morning, by phone. And he asked me to keep an eye on you. If it were left to me, I’d have the lads drop you off a very tall mountain. But my friend asked me to keep an eye on you. Which I will do, day and night, until you leave. But that was all he asked me. So just between us, here’s a little something for the old times.”

Kane and O’Herlihy waded in. Mahoney watched. When Rowse’s legs gave way, he went down to the floor, doubling up, protecting the lower stomach and genitals. He was too low for a good punch, so they used the feet. He rolled his head away to avoid brain damage, feeling the toecaps thud into his back, shoulders, chest, and ribs, choking on the wave of pain until the merciful blackness came after a kick on the back of the head.

He came to in the manner of people who have been in a road accident: first gingerly aware that he was not dead, and then conscious of the pain. Beneath his shirt and trousers, his body was one large ache.

He was lying on his face, and for a while he studied the pattern of the carpet. Then he rolled over: a mistake. He ran a hand to his face. There was one lump on the cheek below the left eye; otherwise it was more or less the same face he had been shaving for years. He tried to sit up and winced. An arm went behind his shoulders and eased him into a sitting position.

“What the hell happened here?” she asked.

Monica Browne was on her knees beside him, one arm around his shoulders. The cool fingers of her right hand touched the lump below his left eye.

“I was passing, saw the door ajar. ...”

Quite a coincidence, he thought, then dismissed the idea.

“I must have fainted and thumped myself as I went down,” he said.

“Was that before or after you wrecked the room?”

He glanced around. He had forgotten about the tumbled drawers and the scattered clothes.

She unbuttoned his shirt front. “Jesus, that was some fall,” was all she said. Then she helped him up and led him to the bed. He sat on it. She pushed him backward, lifted his legs, and rolled him onto the mattress.

“Don’t go away,” she said unnecessarily. “I have some liniment in my room.”

She was back in minutes, closing the door behind her and giving the key a swift turn. She unbuttoned his Sea Island cotton shirt and slipped it from his shoulders, tut-tutting at the sight of the four bruises, now turning a fetching blue, that adorned his torso and ribs.

He felt helpless, but she seemed to know what she was doing. A small bottle was uncorked, and gentle fingers rubbed liniment into the bruised areas. It stung. He said, “Ow.”

“It’ll do you good, take the swelling down, help the discol­oration. Roll over.”

She eased more liniment into the bruises on his shoulders and back.

“How come you carry liniment around?” he mumbled. “Do all your dining partners end up like this?”

“It’s for horses,” she said.

“Thanks a lot.”

“Stop fussing—it has the same effect on stupid men. Roll back.”

He did so.

She stood over him, her golden hair falling about her shoulders. “They hit you in the legs as well?”

“All over.”

She unbuttoned the waistband of his trousers, unzipped them, and eased them down and off without a fuss. It was no strange task for a young wife with a husband who drank too much. Apart from one lump on the right shin, there were another half-dozen bluish areas on the thighs. She massaged the liniment into them. After the sting, the sensation was of pure pleasure. The odor reminded him of the days when he played Rugby at school. She paused and set the bottle down.

“Is that a bruise?” she asked.

He glanced down toward his jockey shorts. No, it was not a bruise.

“Thank God,” she murmured. She turned away and reached for the zipper at the back of her cream shantung dress. The filtered light from the curtains gave the room a low, cool glow.

“Where did you learn about bruises?” he asked.

After the beating and the massage, he was feeling drowsy. His head was drowsy, anyway.

“Back in Kentucky, my kid brother was an amateur jockey,” she said. “I patched him up a few times.”

Her cream dress slid to the floor in a pool. She wore tiny Janet Reger panties. No bra strap crossed her back. Despite the fullness of her breasts, she needed none. She turned around. Rowse swallowed.

“But this,” she said, “I did not learn from any brother.”

He thought fleetingly about Nikki back in Gloucestershire. He had not done this before, not since marrying Nikki. But, he reasoned, a warrior occasionally needs solace, and if it is offered, he would be less than human to refuse.

He reached up for her as she straddled him, but she took his wrists and pressed them back on the pillow.

“Lie still,” she whispered. “You’re far too ill to partici­pate.”

But for the next hour or so she seemed quite content to be proved wrong.

Just before four she rose and crossed the room to open the curtains. The sun had passed its azimuth and was moving toward the mountains.

Across the valley Danny the sergeant adjusted his focus and said, “Cor, you dirty bastard, Tom.”

The affair lasted for three days. The horses did not arrive from Syria, nor any message for Rowse from Hakim al-Mansour. She checked with her agent on the coast regularly, but always the answer was “Tomorrow.” So they walked through the mountains, took picnics high above the cherry orchards where the conifers grow, and made love among the pine needles.

They breakfasted and dined on the terrace, while Danny and Bill watched in silence from across the valley and Mahoney and his colleagues glowered from the bar.

McCready and Marks stayed at their pension in Pedhoulas village while McCready organized more men from Nicosia Station and a few from Malta. As long as Hakim al-Mansour made no contact with Rowse to indicate that their prepared story had, or had not, been accepted, the key was the Irish­man Mahoney and his two colleagues. They were running the IRA enterprise; so long as they stayed, the operation would not move into the shipment phase.

The two SAS sergeants were to give backup to Rowse; the rest would keep the IRA men under surveillance at all times.

On the second day after Rowse and Monica first made love, McCready’s team was in place, scattered through the hills covering every road in and out of the area from observation posts in the hills.

The telephone line to the hotel had been intercepted and tapped. The monitoring listeners were ensconced in another nearby hotel. Few of the newcomers could speak Greek, but fortunately tourists were common enough for another dozen not to arouse suspicions.

Mahoney and his men never left the hotel. They, too, were waiting for something: a visit, or a phone call, or a hand-delivered message.

On the third day Rowse was up as usual just after dawn broke. Monica slept on, and it was Rowse who took the tray of morning coffee from the waiter at the door. When he lifted the coffee pot to pour his first cup, he saw a folded wafer of paper beneath it. He put the wafer between the cup and the saucer, poured the coffee, and walked with it into the bath­room.

The message said simply, “Club Rosalina, Paphos, 11 P.M. Aziz.”

That posed a problem, Rowse mused as he flushed the fragments of the message down the toilet. Easing Monica out of the picture for the few hours it would take to get to Paphos and back in the middle of the night would not be easy.

The problem was solved at midday, when fate intervened in the form of Monica’s shipping agent, who called to say that the three stallions would be arriving from Latakia in the port of Limassol that evening, and could she please be present to see them signed for and settled in their stables outside the port?

She left at four o’clock, and Rowse made life easier for his backup team by walking up to Pedhoulas village and ringing the manager of the Apollonia to say that he had to go to Paphos that evening for dinner and what, please, was the best route? The message was picked up by the listeners and passed to McCready.

The Rosalina Club turned out to be a casino in the heart of the Old Town. Rowse entered it just before eleven and soon saw the slim, elegant figure of Hakim al-Mansour seated at one of the roulette tables. There was a chair vacant next to him. Rowse slid into it.

“Good evening, Mr. Aziz. What a pleasant surprise.”

Al-Mansour inclined his head gravely. “Faites vos jeux,” called the croupier.

The Libyan placed several high-denomination chips on a combination of the higher numbers. The wheel spun, and the dancing white ball elected to fall into the slot number four. The Libyan showed no annoyance as his chips were swept away. That single throw would have kept a Libyan farmer and his family for a month.

“Nice of you to come,” said al-Mansour as gravely. “I have news for you. Good news, you will be pleased to hear. It is always so agreeable to impart good news.”

Rowse felt relieved. That morning, the fact that the Libyan had sent the message to him instead of an order to Mahoney to lose the Englishman forever among the mountains had been hopeful. Now, it looked even better.

Rowse watched as the Libyan lost another pile of chips. He was inured to the temptation of gambling, regarding the rou­lette wheel as the most stupid and boring artifact ever in­vented. But the Arabs compare only with the Chinese as gamblers, and even the cool al-Mansour was entranced by the spinning wheel.

“I am happy to tell you,” said al-Mansour as he placed more chips, “that our glorious Leader has acceded to your request. The equipment you seek will be provided—in full. There. What is your reaction?”

“I’m delighted,” said Rowse. “I’m sure my principals will put it to ... good use.”

“We must all fervently hope so. That is, as you British soldiers say, the object of the exercise.”

“How would you like payment?” asked Rowse.

The Libyan waved a deprecatory hand. “Accept it as a gift from the People’s Jamahariya, Mr. Rowse.”

“I am very grateful. I am sure my principals will be, too.”

“I doubt it, for you would be a fool ever to tell them. And you are not a fool. A mercenary, perhaps, but not a fool. So as you will now be making a commission of not one hundred thousand dollars but half a million, perhaps you will split that with me? Shall we say, fifty-fifty?”

“For the fighting funds, of course.”

“Of course.”

Retirement fund, more like, Rowse thought, then said aloud, “Mr. Aziz, sir, you have a deal. When I can pry the money out of the clients, half will come to you.”

“I do hope so,” murmured al-Mansour. This time he won, and a pile of chips was pushed toward him. Despite his urbanity, he was delighted. “My arm is very long.”

“Trust me,” said Rowse.

“Now that, my dear chap, would be insulting ... in our world.”

“I need to know about shipment. Where to collect, when.”

“And so you shall. Soon. You asked for a port in Europe. I think that can be arranged. Return to the Apollonia, and I will be in touch very soon.”

He rose and handed Rowse his remaining pile of chips. “Do not leave the casino for another fifteen minutes,” he said. “Here—enjoy yourself.”

Rowse waited for fifteen minutes, then cashed in the chips. He preferred to buy Nikki something nice.

He left the casino and strolled toward his car. Because of the narrow streets of the Old Town, parking was at a premium even late at night. His car was two streets away. He never saw Danny or Bill, who were in doorways up and down the road.

As he approached his car, an old man in blue denim and a forage cap was brushing the garbage from the gutters with a yard-broom.

“Kali spera,” croaked the old road-sweeper.

“Kali spera,” replied Rowse. He paused. The old man was one of those, finally beaten by life, who do the menial jobs all over the world. He remembered the wad of money from al-Mansour’s winnings, pulled out a large-denomination note, and tucked it into the old man’s top pocket.

“My dear Tom,” said the road-sweeper, “I always knew you had a good heart.”

“What the hell are you doing here, McCready?”

“Just keep jiggling with your car keys and tell me what happened,” said McCready as he pushed his broom.

Rowse told him.

“Good,” said McCready. “It looks like a ship. That prob­ably means they’re tacking your small cargo onto the much larger one for the IRA. We must hope so. If yours is simply sent as a one-shot by a different route in a different container, we’re back to where we started. Left with Mahoney. But as your load is only a van-full, they may pack them all together. Any idea which port?”

“No, just Europe.”

“Go back to the hotel, and do what the man says,” ordered McCready.

Rowse drove off. Danny, on a motorcycle, went after him to ensure that Rowse had no follower other than himself. Ten minutes later, Marks arrived with the car and Bill to pick up McCready.

On the drive back, McCready sat in the rear and thought. The ship, if ship it was, would not be Libyan registered. That would be too obvious. Probably a chartered freighter, with a no-questions-asked captain and crew. There were scores of such to be found all over the eastern Mediterranean, and Cyprus was a favored country of registry.

If it was chartered locally, it would have to go to a Libyan port to take on the arms, probably to be buried beneath a perfectly normal cargo like crated olives or dates. The IRA team would probably go with it. When they left the hotel, it was vital that they be followed to the loading dock so the name of the ship could be noted for later interception.

Once noted, the plan was for the vessel to be tracked by a submarine at periscope depth. The submarine was on standby under the waters off Malta. A Royal Air Force Nimrod from the British air base at Akrotiri on Cyprus would guide the sub toward the steaming freighter, then make itself scarce. The sub would do the rest until Royal Navy surface vessels could make the intercept in the English Channel.

McCready needed the ship’s name, or at least the port of destination. With the name of the port, he could have his friends at Lloyds Shipping Intelligence find out what vessels had reserved berthings in that port and for which days. That would narrow the choice down. It could be he no longer needed Mahoney, if only the Libyans would tell Rowse.

The message to Rowse came twenty-four hours later by telephone. It was not al-Mansour’s voice but another. Later, McCready’s engineers traced it to the Libyan People’s Bureau in Nicosia.

“Go home, Mr. Rowse. You will be contacted there shortly. Your olives will arrive by ship at a European port. You will be contacted personally with arrival and collection details.”

McCready studied the intercept in his hotel room. Did al-Mansour suspect something? Had he seen through Rowse but decided on a double-bluff? If he suspected Rowse’s real employers, he would know that Mahoney and his group were also under surveillance. So was he ordering Rowse to England in order to take the watchers off Mahoney? Possibly.

In case it was not only possible but true, McCready decided to play both ends. He would leave with Rowse for London, but the watchers would stay with Mahoney.

Rowse decided to tell Monica the next morning. He had got back to the hotel from Paphos before her. She arrived from Limassol at three A.M., flushed and excited. Her stallions were in beautiful condition, now stabled outside Limassol, she told him as she undressed. She only needed the transit formalities to be completed to bring them to England.

Rowse awoke early, but she was ahead of him. He glanced at the empty space in the bed, then went down the corridor to check her room. They gave him a message at the reception desk, a brief note in one of the hotel’s envelopes.

Dear Tom,

It was beautiful but it’s over. I’m gone, back to my husband and my life and my horses. Think kindly of me, as I will of you.

Monica.

He sighed. Twice he had briefly thought she might be something other than she seemed. Reading her note, he realized he had been right at the beginning—she was just a civilian. He also had his life—with his country home and his writing career and his Nikki. Suddenly he wanted to see Nikki very badly.

As he drove back to the Nicosia Airport, Rowse guessed his two sergeants were somewhere behind him. They were. But McCready was not. Using the Head of Station in Nicosia, he had found a Royal Air Force communications flight heading for Lyneham, Wiltshire, that would get in ahead of the sched­uled British Airways flight. McCready was already on it.

Just before midday, Rowse glanced out of the porthole of the plane and saw the green mass of the Troodos Mountains slipping away beneath the wing. He thought of Monica, and Mahoney still propping up the bar, and al-Mansour, and he was glad to be going home. For one thing, the green fields of Gloucestershire were a good deal safer than the caldron of the Levant.

Chapter 5

Rowse’s flight touched down just after lunch, with the time gained from flying west from Cyprus. McCready had preceded him by an hour, though Rowse did not know it. As he emerged from the airplane cabin into the jetway connecting to the terminal, a trim young woman in a British Airways uniform was holding up a sign saying, MR. ROWSE.

He identified himself.

“Ah, there’s a message for you at the Airport Information desk, just outside the customs hall,” she said.

He thanked her, puzzled, and walked on toward passport control. He had not told Nikki he was coming, wishing to surprise her. When he got to the information desk, the mes­sage said, “Scott’s. Eight P.M. Lobsters on me!”

He cursed. That meant he would not get home to Glouces­tershire and Nikki until morning.

His car was in the long-term car park—no doubt, if he had not returned, the ever-efficient Firm would have had it re­moved and returned to his widow. He took the courtesy shuttle, retrieved his car, and checked into one of the airport hotels. It gave him time for a bath, a shave, sleep, and to change into a suit. Since he intended to drink a lot of fine wine if the Firm was paying, he decided to take a taxi to and from the West End of London.

First he rang Nikki. She was ecstatic, her voice shrill with a mixture of relief and delight. “Are you all right, darling?”

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“And is it over?”

“Yes, the research is finished, all bar a couple of extra details that I can sort out here in England. How have you been?”

“Oh, great. Everything’s great. Guess what happened?”

“Surprise me.”

“Two days after you left, a man came. Said he was furnish­ing a large company flat in London, looking for carpets and rugs. He bought the lot, all our stock. Paid cash. Sixteen thousand pounds. Darling, we’re flush!”

Rowse held the receiver and stared at the Degas print on the wall.

“This buyer, where was he from?”

“Mr. Da Costa? Portugal. Why?”

“Dark-haired, olive-skinned?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

Arab, Rowse thought. Libyan. That meant that while Nikki was out in the barn where they kept the stock of carpets and rugs that they sold as a sideline, someone had been in the house and probably bugged the phone. Al-Mansour certainly liked to cover all the angles. Had he made a single ill-judged phone call to Nikki from Vienna or Malta or Cyprus, as he had been tempted to do, he would have blown away himself and the mission.

“Well,” he said cheerfully, “I don’t care where he was from. If he paid cash, he’s wonderful.”

“When are you coming home?” she asked excitedly.

“Tomorrow morning. Be there about nine.”

He presented himself at the superb fish restaurant in Mount Street at ten past eight and was shown to where Sam McCready already sat at a corner table. McCready liked corner tables. That way, each diner could sit with his back to a wall, at right angles to each other. It was easier to converse that way than sitting side by side, yet each was able to see the restaurant. “Never take it in the back,” one of his training officers had told him years ago. The same man was later betrayed by George Blake and “took it” in a KGB interroga­tion cell. McCready had spent much of his life with his back to the wall.

Rowse ordered lobster and asked for it Newberg. McCready had his cold, with mayonnaise. Rowse waited until a glass of Meursault had been poured for each and the sommelier had departed before he mentioned the mysterious buyer of the rugs. McCready chewed on a mouthful of Benbecula lobster, swallowed, and said, “Damn. Did you phone Nikki from Cyprus anytime before I tapped the hotel phone?”

“Not at all,” said Rowse. “My first call was from the Post House Hotel, a few hours ago.”

“Good. Good and bad. Good that there were no inadvertent slipups. Bad that al-Mansour is going to such lengths.”

“He’s going a bloody sight farther than that,” said Rowse. “I can’t be sure, but I think there was a motorcycle, a Honda, both at the long-term car park when I got my car back, and at the Post House. Never saw it from the taxi into London, but the traffic was very thick.”

“Damn and blast!” said McCready with feeling. “I think you’re right. There’s a couple at the end of the bar who keep peering through the gap. And they’re looking at us. Don’t turn around—keep eating.”

“Man and woman, youngish?”

“Yes.”

“Recognize either?”

“I think so. The man, anyway. Turn your head and call the wine waiter. See if you can spot him. Lank hair, downturned moustache.”

Rowse turned to beckon the waiter. The couple were at the end of the bar, separated from the main dining area by a screen.

Rowse had once done intensive antiterrorist training. It had meant scouring hundreds of photographs, not only of the IRA. He turned back to McCready.

“Got him. A German lawyer. Ultraradical. Used to defend the Baader-Meinhof crowd, later became one of them.”

“Of course. Wolfgang Ruetter. And the woman?”

“No. But the Red Army Faction uses a lot of groupies. A new face. More watchers from al-Mansour?”

“Not this time. He’d use his own people, not German radicals. Sorry, Tom, I could kick myself. Since al-Mansour didn’t have a tail on you in Cyprus, and since I was so busy ensuring that you passed all of the Libyan’s tests, I momen­tarily took my eye off that bloody paranoid psycho Mahoney. If those two at the bar are Red Army Faction, they’ll be on an errand from him. I thought there’d be no heat on you once you got back here. I’m afraid I was wrong.”

“So what do we do?” asked Rowse.

“They’ve already seen us together. If that gets out, the operation’s finished, and so are you.”

“Couldn’t you be my agent, my publisher?”

McCready shook his head. “Won’t work,” he said. “If I leave by the back door, it’ll be all they need. If I go by the front like a normal diner, it’s short odds I’ll be photographed. Somewhere in Eastern Europe that photo will be identified. Keep talking naturally, but listen. Here’s what I want you to do.”

During the coffee, Rowse summoned the waiter and asked for directions to the men’s room. It was staffed, as McCready knew it would be. The tip he gave the attendant was more than generous—it was outrageous.

“Just for a phone call? You got it, guv’nor.”

The call to the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police, a personal call to a friend of McCready’s, was placed while McCready was signing the slip for his credit card. The woman had left the restaurant as soon as he called for the bill.

When Rowse and McCready emerged under the illuminated portico, the woman was half-hidden in the alley beside the poultry shop just down the street. Her camera lens picked up McCready’s face, and she ran off two quick shots. There was no flash; the portico lights were enough. McCready caught the movement, but he gave no sign.

The pair walked slowly to McCready’s parked Jaguar. Ruetter emerged from the restaurant and crossed to his motorcy­cle. He took his helmet from the pannier and put it on, visor down. The woman left the alley and straddled the machine behind him.

“They’ve got what they want,” said McCready. “They may peel off anytime. Let’s just hope their curiosity keeps them there for a short while.”

McCready’s car phone trilled. On the other end was his friend in the Special Branch.

McCready filled him in. “Terrorists, probably armed. Battersea Park, near the Pagoda.” He replaced the receiver and glanced in his mirror. “Two hundred yards—still with us.”

Apart from the tension, it was an uneventful drive to the sprawl of Battersea Park, which was normally closed and locked at sundown. As they approached the Pagoda, Mc­Cready glanced up and down the road. Nothing. Not surpris­ing—the park had been reopened by Rowse’s telephone call.

“Diplomatic protection drill—remember it?”

“Yep,” said Rowse, and reached for the handbrake.

“Go.”

Rowse yanked hard on the brake as McCready pulled the Jaguar into a savage turn. The rear end of the car slid around, tires screaming in protest. In two seconds, the sedan turned around and was heading the other way. McCready drove straight at the oncoming single headlight of the motorcycle. Two unmarked parked cars nearby put on their headlights, and their engines came to life.

Ruetter swerved to avoid the Jaguar and succeeded. The powerful Honda veered off the road, over the curb, and onto the parkland. It almost missed the bench, but not quite. Rowse, in the passenger seat, caught a glimpse of the motor­cycle somersaulting over, its passengers spilling onto the grass. The other cars drew up and decanted three men.

Ruetter was winded but unharmed. He sat up and reached under his jacket.

“Armed police. Freeze,” said a voice beside him. Ruetter turned and looked into the barrel of a service-issue Webley .38. The face above it was smiling. Ruetter had seen the film Dirty Harry and decided not to make anyone’s day. He withdrew his hand. The Special Branch sergeant stood back, the Webley pointed double-handed at the German’s forehead. A colleague removed the Walther P38 Parabellum from inside the motorcycle jacket.

The woman was unconscious. A large man in a light gray coat walked from one of the cars toward McCready. Com­mander Benson, Special Branch.

“What have you got, Sam?” he asked.

“Red Army Faction. Armed, dangerous.”

“The woman is not armed,” said Ruetter clearly, in En­glish. “This is an outrage.”

The Special Branch Commander took a small handgun from his pocket, walked over to the woman, pressed the automatic into her right hand, then dropped it in a plastic bag.

“She is now,” he said mildly.

“I protest!” said Ruetter. “This is in flagrant breach of our civil rights.”

“How true,” said the Commander sadly. “What do you want, Sam?”

“They have my picture, they know my name. And they saw me with him.” He jerked his head at Rowse. “If that gets out, there’ll be an awful lot of grief on the streets of London. I need them held incommunicado. No trace, no appearances. They must be badly hurt after that crash—a secure hospital, perhaps?”

“Isolation ward, I shouldn’t wonder. What with the poor darlings being in a coma and no papers on them, it’ll take me weeks even to identify them.”

“My name is Wolfgang Ruetter,” said the German. “I am a lawyer from Frankfurt and I demand to see my ambassa­dor.”

“Funny how deaf you can get in middle age,” complained the Commander. “Into the car with them, lads. As soon as I can identify them, of course, I’ll bring them to court. But it could take a long time. Keep in touch, Sam.”

In Britain, as a rule, even when an armed and identified member of a terrorist group is arrested, he or she cannot be held without a court appearance for longer than seven days, under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. But all rules occasion­ally have their exceptions, even in a democracy.

The two unmarked police cars drove away. McCready and Rowse climbed into the Jaguar. They had to get out of the park so it could be locked up again.

“When this is over,” asked Rowse, “will they come for me or Nikki?”

“They’ve never done that yet,” said McCready. “Hakim al-Mansour is a pro. Like me, he accepts that in our game, you win some and you lose some. He’ll shrug and get on with his next operation. Mahoney is trickier, I know, but for twenty years the IRA has targeted only their own informers and holders of high office. I’m convinced he’ll go back to Ireland to make his peace with the IRA Army Council. They, at least, will warn him off personal vengeance missions. So hang on in there for just a few more days. It’ll be okay after that.”

Rowse drove back to Gloucestershire the following morning to take up the reins of his life again and await the promised contact from Hakim al-Mansour. As he saw it, when he received the information concerning the docking of the arms ship, he would pass the tip to McCready. The SIS would trace the ship backward from that, identify it in the Mediterranean, and pick it up in the Eastern Atlantic or in the English Channel, with Mahoney and his team on board. It was as simple as that.

The contact came seven days later. A black Porsche crept into the courtyard of Rowse’s home, and a young man climbed out. He looked around at the green grass and beds of flowers in the late May sunshine. He was dark-haired and saturnine, and he came from a drier, harsher land.

“Tom,” called Nikki. “Someone to see you.”

Rowse came around from the rear garden. He let no trace of expression mask the polite inquiry on his face, but he recognized the man: It was the tail who had followed him from Tripoli to Valletta, then seen him off on the flight to Cyprus two weeks earlier.

“Yes?” he said.

“Mr. Rowse?”

“Yes.”

“I have a message from Mr. Aziz.” His English was reason­able but careful, too careful to be fluent. He recited his message as he had learned it.

“Your cargo will arrive at Bremerhaven. Three crates, all marked as office machinery. Your normal signature will se­cure release. Bay Zero Nine, Warehouse Neuberg. Rossmannstrasse. You must remove them within twenty-four hours of their arrival date, otherwise they will disappear. Is that clear?”

Rowse repeated the exact address, fixing it in his mind. The young man climbed back into his car.

“One thing. When? Which day?”

“Ah, yes. The twenty-fourth. They arrive at noon of the twenty-fourth.”

He drove away, leaving Rowse with his mouth open. Min­utes later he was racing to the village to use the public phone, having ensured he was still clean of a tail. His own phone was still tapped, the experts had confirmed, and it would have to stay that way for a while longer.

“What the hell can they mean, the twenty-fourth?” raged McCready for the tenth time. “That’s in three days! Three bloody days!”

“Mahoney’s still in place?” asked Rowse. He had just driven up to London at McCready’s insistence, and they were meeting at one of the Firm’s safe houses, an apartment in Chelsea. It was still not safe to bring Rowse to Century House—officially, he was persona non grata there.

“Yes, still propping up the bar at the Apollonia, still sur­rounded by his team, still waiting for a word from al-Mansour, still surrounded by my watchers.”

McCready had already worked out that there were only two choices. Either the Libyans were lying about the twenty-fourth—another test for Rowse, to see if the police would raid the Neuberg warehouse. In which case al-Mansour would have time to divert his ship somewhere else. Or else he, McCready, had been duped—Mahoney and his team were decoys and probably did not know it themselves.

Of one thing he was certain: No ship could get from Cyprus to Bremerhaven via Tripoli or Sirte in three days. While Rowse was motoring to London, McCready had consulted his friend at Dibben Place, Colchester, home of Lloyds Shipping Intelligence. The man was adamant. First, it would take one day to sail from, say, Paphos to Tripoli or Sirte. Allow another day for loading, more likely a night. Two days to Gibraltar, and four or five more to northern Germany. Seven days minimum, more likely eight.

So either it was a test for Rowse, or the arms ship was already at sea. According to the man from Lloyds, to dock at Bremerhaven on the twenty-fourth, it would now be some­where west of Lisbon, heading north to clear Finisterre.

Checks were being made by Lloyds as to the names of ships expected in Bremerhaven on the twenty-fourth with a Mediterranean port of departure. The phone rang. It was the Lloyds expert on a patch-through to the Chelsea safe house.

“There aren’t any,” he said. “Nothing from the Mediter­ranean is expected on the twenty-fourth. You must have been misinformed.”

With a vengeance, thought McCready. In Hakim al-Mansour, he had come up against a master of the game.

He turned to Rowse.

“Apart from Mahoney and his crew, was there anyone in that hotel who even smelted of IRA?”

Rowse shook his head.

“I’m afraid it’s back to the photograph albums,” said McCready. “Go through them over and over again. If there’s any face—anything at all—that you spotted in your time in Tripoli, Malta, or Cyprus, let me know. I’ll leave you with them. I have some errands to run.”

McCready did not even consult Century House about asking for American help. Time was too short to go through chan­nels. He went to see the CIA Station Head in Grosvenor Square, Bill Carver.

“Well, Sam, I don’t know. Diverting a satellite isn’t that easy. Can’t you use a Nimrod?”

Royal Air Force Nimrods can take high-definition pictures of ships at sea, but they tend to fly so low that they are seen themselves. Without added altitude, they have to make many passes to cover a large area of ocean.

McCready considered long and hard. If he knew the con­signment had gotten through and was firmly in the hands of the IRA, he would have wasted no time alerting the CIA to the threat to their ambassador in London, as reported by the Libyan doctor in Qaddafi’s tent.

But for weeks his concern had been just to stop the arms shipment from getting through to the final destination. Now, needing CIA help, he produced his bombshell—he told Carver of the threat.

Carver came out of his chair as if jet-propelled. “Jesus H. Christ, Sam!” he exploded. Both men knew that apart from the catastrophe of a U.S. ambassador being slaughtered on British soil, Charles and Carol Price had proved the most popular American emissaries in decades. Mrs. Thatcher would not easily forgive an organization that allowed anything to happen to Charlie Price.

“You’ll get your fucking satellite,” said Carver. “But next time you damned well better tell me earlier than this.”

It was almost midnight before Rowse went wearily back to Album One, the old days. He was sitting with a photo expert brought over from Century House. A projector and screen had been installed so that photographs could be thrown onto the screen and alterations made to the faces.

Just before one o’clock, Rowse paused.

“This one,” he said. “Can you put it on the screen?”

The face filled almost one wall.

“Don’t be daft,” said McCready. “He’s been out of it for years. A has-been, over the hill.”

The face stared back, tired eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, iron-gray hair over the creased brow.

“Lose the glasses,” Rowse said to the photo expert. “Give him brown contact lenses.”

The technician made adjustments. The glasses vanished, and the eyes went from blue to brown.

“How old is this photo?”

“About ten years,” said the technician.

“Age him ten years. Thin the hair, more lines, dewlaps under the chin.”

The technician did as he was told. The man looked about seventy now.

“Turn the hair jet black. Hair dye.”

The thin gray hair turned deep black. Rowse whistled.

“Sitting alone in the corner of the terrace,” he said, “at the Apollonia. Talking to no one, keeping himself to himself.”

“Stephen Johnson was Chief of Staff of the IRA—the old IRA—twenty years ago,” said McCready. “Quit the whole organization ten years ago, after a blazing row with the new generation over policy. He’s now sixty-five. Sells agricultural machinery in County Clare, for heaven’s sake.”

Rowse grinned. “Used to be an ace, had a row, quit in disgust, known to be out in the cold, untouchable by those inside the Establishment—remind you of anyone you know?”

“Sometimes, young Master Rowse, you can even be half­way smart,” admitted McCready.

He called up a friend in the Irish police, the Garda Siochana. Officially, contacts between the Irish Garda and their British counterparts in the fight against terrorism are sup­posed to be formal but at arm’s length. In fact, between professionals, those contacts are often warmer and closer than some of the more hardline politicians would wish.

This time it was a man in the Irish Special Branch, awak­ened at his home in Ranelagh, who came up trumps around the breakfast hour.

“He’s on holiday,” said McCready. “According to the local Garda, he’s taken up golf and departs occasionally for a golfing holiday, usually in Spain.”

“Southern Spain?”

“Possibly. Why?”

“Remember the Gibraltar affair?”

They both remembered it all too well. Three IRA killers, planning to plant a huge bomb in Gibraltar, had been “taken out” by an SAS team—prematurely but permanently. The terrorists had arrived on the Rock as tourists from the Costa del Sol and the Spanish police and counterintelligence force had been extremely helpful.

“There was always rumored to be a fourth in the party, one who stayed in Spain,” recalled Rowse. “And the Marbella area is stiff with golf courses.”

“The bugger,” breathed McCready. “The old bugger. He’s gone active again.”

In the middle of the morning, McCready took a call from Bill Carver, and they went over to the American Embassy. Carver received them in the main hall, signed them in, and took them to his office in the basement, where he too had a room all set up for viewing photographs.

The satellite had done its job well, rolling gently high in space over the eastern Atlantic, pointing its Long Tom cam­eras downward to cover a strip of water from the Portuguese, Spanish, and French coasts to more than one hundred miles out into the ocean in a single pass.

Acting on a suggestion from his Lloyds contact, McCready had asked for a study of a rectangle of water from Lisbon north to the Bay of Biscay. The continuous welter of photo­graphs that had poured back to the receiving station of the National Reconnaissance Office outside Washington had been broken down into individual snaps of every ship afloat in that rectangle.

“The bird photographed everything bigger than a floating Coke can,” remarked Carver proudly. “You want to start?”

There were more than a hundred and twenty ships in that rectangle of water. Nearly half were fishing vessels. McCready discounted them, though he might wish to return to them later. Bremerhaven had a port for fishing vessels, too, but they would be of German registry, and a stranger showing up to unload not fish but general cargo would look odd. He concentrated on the freighters and a few large and luxurious private yachts, also ignoring the four passenger liners. His reduced list numbered fifty-three.

One by one, he asked that the small slivers of metal on the great expanse of water be blown up until each filled the screen. Detail by detail, the men in the room examined them. Some were heading the wrong way. Those heading north for the English Channel numbered thirty-one.

At half-past two, McCready called a halt.

“That man,” he said to Bill Carver’s technician, “the one standing on the wing of the bridge. Can you come in closer?”

“You got it,” said the American.

The freighter had been photographed off Finisterre just before sundown on the previous day. A crewman was busying himself with a routine task on the foredeck, while another man stood on the wing of the bridge looking at him. As McCready and Rowse watched, the ship grew bigger and bigger on the screen, and still the definition held. The fore-peak and stern of the vessel disappeared offscreen and the figure of the man standing alone grew larger.

“How high is that bird?” asked Rowse.

“Hundred and ten miles,” said the technician.

“Boy, that’s some technology,” said Rowse.

“Pick up a license plate, clearly readable,” said the Amer­ican proudly.

There were more than twenty frames of that particular freighter. When the man on the bridge-wing filled most of the wall, Rowse asked for all of them to be screened with the same magnification. As the images flashed, the man seemed to move, like one of those stick figures in a Victorian biograph.

The figure turned from looking at the seaman and stared out to sea. Then he removed his peaked cap to run a hand through his thin hair. Perhaps a seabird called above him. Whatever, he raised his face.

“Freeze,” called Rowse. “Closer.”

The technician magnified the face until finally it began to blur.

“Bingo,” McCready whispered over Rowse’s shoulder. “That’s him. Johnson.”

The tired old eyes beneath the thin jet-black hair stared out at them from the screen. The old man from the corner of the Apollonia dining terrace. The has-been.

“The name of the ship,” said McCready. “We need the name of the ship.”

It was on her bow, and the satellite, as she dropped over the horizon to the north, had still been filming. A single, low-angle shot caught the words beside the anchor: Regina IV. McCready reached for the phone and called his man at Lloyds Shipping Intelligence.

“Can’t be,” said the man when he called back thirty minutes later. “Regina IV is over ten thousand tons, and she’s off the coast of Venezuela. You must have got it wrong.”

“No mistake,” said McCready. “She’s about two thousand tons, and she’s steaming north, by now off Bordeaux.”

“Hang about,” said the cheerful voice from Colchester. “Is she up to something naughty?”

“Almost certainly,” said McCready.

“I’ll call you back,” said the Lloyds man. He did, almost an hour later. McCready had spent most of that time on the telephone to some people based at Poole, in Dorset.

“Regina,” said the man from Lloyds, “is a very common name. Like Stella Marts. That’s why they have letters or Roman numerals after the name. To distinguish one from another. It happens there’s a Regina VI registered at Limassol, now believed to be berthed at Paphos. About two thou­sand tons. German skipper, Greek Cypriot crew. New own­ers—a shell company registered in Luxembourg.”

“The Libyan government,” thought McCready. It would be a simple ruse. Leave the Mediterranean as the Regina VI; out in the Atlantic, paint out the single numeral after the V and paint another in before it. Skilled hands could alter the ship’s papers to match. The agents would book the thoroughly reputable Regina IV into Bremerhaven with a cargo of office machinery and general cargo from Canada, and who would know that the real Regina IV was off Venezuela?

At dawn of the third day, Captain Holst stared out of the forward windows of his bridge at the slowly lightening sea. There was no mistaking the flare that had burst into the sky straight ahead of him, hung for a moment, then fluttered back to the water. Maroon. A distress flare. Peering through the half-light, he could make out something else a mile or two ahead of him: the yellow fluttering of a flame. He ordered his engine room to make half-speed, lifted a handset, and called one of his passengers in his bunk below. The man joined him less than a minute later.

Captain Holst pointed silently through the windshield. On the calm water ahead of them, a forty-foot motor fishing vessel rolled drunkenly. She had clearly suffered an explosion in her engine area; a black smudge of smoke drifted up from below her deck, mingling with a flicker of orange flame. Her topsides were scorched and blackened.

“Where are we?” asked Stephen Johnson.

“In the North Sea, between Yorkshire and the Dutch coast,” said Holst.

Johnson took the Captain’s binoculars and focused on the small fishing boat ahead. Fair Maid, Whitby, could be made out on her bow.

“We have to stop and give them help,” Holst said in English. “It is the law of the sea.”

He did not know what his own vessel was carrying, and he did not want to know. His employers had given him their orders and an extremely extravagant bonus. His crew had also been taken care of financially. The crated olives from Cyprus had come onboard at Paphos and were totally legiti­mate. During the two-day stopover in Sirte, on the coast of Libya, part of the cargo had been removed and then returned. It looked the same. He knew there must be illicit cargo in there somewhere, but he could not spot it and did not want to try.

The proof that his cargo was extremely dangerous lay in the six passengers—two were from Cyprus, and four more were from Sirte. And the changing of the numerals as soon as he had passed the Pillars of Hercules. In twelve hours, he expected to be rid of them all. He would sail back through the North Sea, convert again to the Regina VI at sea, and return calmly to his home port of Limassol, a much richer man.

Then he would retire. The years of running strange cargoes of men and crates into West Africa, the bizarre orders now coming to him from his new Luxembourg-based owners—all would be a thing of the past. He would retire at fifty with his savings enough for him and his Greek wife, Maria, to open their little restaurant in the Greek islands and live out their days in peace.

Johnson looked dubious. “We can’t stop,” he said.

“We have to.”

The light was getting better. They saw a figure, scorched and blackened, emerge from the wheelhouse of the fishing vessel, stagger to the forward deck, make a pain-wracked attempt to wave, then fall forward onto his face.

Another IRA officer came up behind Holst. He felt the muzzle of a gun in his ribs.

“Sail on by,” said a flat voice.

Holst did not ignore the gun, but he looked at Johnson. “If we do, and they are rescued by another ship, as they will be sooner or later, they will report us. We will be stopped and asked why we did that.”

Johnson nodded.

“Then ram them,” said the one with the gun. “We don’t stop.”

“We can give first aid and call up the Dutch coast guard,” said Holst. “No one comes aboard. When the Dutch cutter appears, we continue. They will wave their thanks and think no more of it. It will cost us thirty minutes.”

Johnson was persuaded. He nodded. “Put up your gun,” he said.

Holst moved his speed control to “full astern,” and the Regina slowed rapidly. Giving an order in Greek to his helms­man, he left the bridge and went down to the waist before moving up to the foredeck. He looked down at the approach­ing fishing vessel, then waved a hand to the helmsman. The engines went to “midships,” and the momentum of the Regina carried her slowly up to the stricken fisherman.

“Ahoy, Fair Maid!” called Holst, peering down as the fishing boat came under the bow. They saw the fallen man on the foredeck try to stir, then faint again. The Fair Maid bobbed along the side of the larger Regina until she came to the Regina’s waist, where the deck rail was lower. Holst walked down his ship and shouted an order in Greek for one of his crew to throw a line aboard the Fair Maid.

There was no need. As the fisherman slid past the waist of the Regina, the man on the foredeck came to, jumped up with remarkable agility for one so badly burned, seized a grappling hook beside him, and hurled it over the rail of the Regina, securing it fast to a cleat on the Fair Maid’s bow. A second man ran out of the fishing boat’s cabin and did the same at the stern. The Fair Maid stopped drifting.

Four more men ran from the cabin, vaulted to the roof, and jumped straight over the rail of the Regina. It happened so fast and with such coordination that Captain Holst had only time to shout, “Was zum Teufel ist denn das?”

The men were all dressed alike: black one-piece overalls, cleated rubber boots, and black woolen caps. Their faces were blackened, too, but not by soot. A very hard hand took Captain Holst in the solar plexus, and he went down on his knees. He would later say that he had never seen the men of the SBS, the Special Boat Squadron, the seaborne equivalent of the Special Air Service, in action before, and he never wished to again.

By now, there were four Cypriot crewmen on the main deck. One of the men in black shouted a single order to them, in Greek, and they obeyed. They went flat onto the deck, face down, and stayed there. Not so the four IRA members, who came pouring out of the side door of the superstructure. They all had handguns.

Two had the sense to see quickly that a handgun is a poor bargain when faced with a Heckler and Koch MP5 subma­chine carbine. They threw their hands up and tossed their pistols to the deck. Two tried to use their guns. One was lucky: He took the brief burst in the legs and survived to spend his life in a wheelchair. The fourth was not so lucky and collected four bullets in the chest.

There were now six black-clad men swarming over the deck area of the Regina. The third to come aboard had been Tom Rowse. He ran for the companionway that led upward to the bridge. As he reached the wing, Stephen Johnson emerged from the interior. Seeing Rowse, he threw his hands in the air.

“Don’t shoot, Sass-man. It’s over!” he shouted.

Rowse stood aside and jerked the barrel of his machine pistol toward the staircase.

“Down,” he said.

The old IRA man began to descend to the main deck. There was a movement behind Rowse, someone in the door of the wheelhouse. He sensed the movement, half turned, and caught the crash of the handgun. The bullet plucked at the shoulder of his cloth overall. There was no time to pause or shout. He fired as they had taught him, the quick double-burst, then another, loosing two pairs of nine-millimeter slugs in less than half a second.

He had an image of the figure in the doorway that had taken four bullets in the chest, being thrown back into the doorjamb, cannoning forward again—the wild swing of the corn-blond hair. Then she had been on the steel deck, quite dead, a thin trickle of blood seeping from the mouth he had kissed.

“Well, well,” said a voice at his elbow. “Monica Browne. With an ‘e.’ ”

Rowse turned. “You bastard,” he said slowly. “You knew, didn’t you?”

“Not knew. Suspected,” McCready said gently. In civilian clothes, he had come at a more sedate pace out of the fishing vessel when the shooting was over.

“We had to check her out, you see, Tom, after she made contact with you. She is—was—indeed Monica Browne, but Dublin-born and bred. Her first marriage, at twenty, took her to Kentucky for eight years. After the divorce, she married Major Eric Browne, much older but rich. Through his alco­holic haze, he no doubt had not a whit of suspicion of his young wife’s fanatical devotion to the IRA. And yes, she did run a stud farm, but not at Ashford, Kent, England. It was at Ashford, County Wicklow, Ireland.”

The team spent two hours tidying up. Captain Holst proved keen to cooperate. He admitted there had been an open-sea transfer of crates, to a fishing boat off Finisterre. He gave the name, and McCready passed it to London for the Spanish authorities. With speed, they would intercept the arms for the ETA while still on board the trawler—a way for the SIS to say thank you for the Spanish help over the Gibraltar affair.

Captain Holst also agreed that he had been just within British territorial waters when the boarding took place. After that, it would be a matter for the lawyers, so long as Britain had jurisdiction. McCready did not want the IRA men re­moved to Belgium and promptly liberated, like Father Ryan.

The two bodies were brought to the main deck and laid side by side, covered in sheets from the cabins below. With the aid of the Greek-Cypriot crewmen, the covers were taken from the holds, and the cargo searched. The commandos of the SBS team did that. After two hours, the lieutenant who commanded them reported to McCready.

“Nothing, sir.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“A lot of olives, sir.”

“Nothing but olives?”

“Some crates marked office machinery.”

“Containing?”

“Office machinery, sir. And the three stallions. They’re pretty upset, sir.”

“Bugger the horses—so am I,” said McCready grimly. “Show me.”

He and Rowse followed the officer below. The lieutenant gave them a tour of the ship’s four holds. In one, copying machines and typewriters from Japan were visible through the sides of their smashed crates. In the second and third holds, tins of Cypriot olives spilled from broken boxes. No crate or carton had been left untouched. The fourth hold contained three substantial horse boxes. In each of them a stallion whinnied and shied in fear.

There was a feeling in McCready’s stomach, that awful feeling that comes with knowing you have been duped, have taken the wrong course of action, and that there will be the devil to pay. If all he could come up with was a cargo of olives and typewriters, London would nail his hide to a barn door.

A young SBS man was standing with the horses in their hold. He seemed to know about animals; he was talking to them quietly, calming them down.

“Sir?” he asked.

“Yes?”

“Why are they being shipped?”

“Oh. They’re Arabs. Thoroughbreds, destined for a stud farm,” said Rowse.

“No, they’re not,” said the young commando. “They’re riding-school hacks. Stallions, but hacks.”

Between the inner and outer walls of the specially con­structed transport boxes, there was a good foot of space. With crowbars they hacked at the planks of the first loose box. As the shattered timber fell away, the search was over. The watching men saw piled blocks of Semtex-H, serried ranks of RPG-7 rocket launchers, and rows of shoulder-borne surface-to-air missiles. The other horse boxes yielded heavy machine guns, ammunition, grenades, mines, and mortars.

“I think,” said McCready, “we can call in the Navy now.”

They left the hold and went back to the warm morning sunshine of the main deck. The Navy would take over the Regina and bring her to Harwich. There she would be for­mally seized and her crew and passengers arrested.

The Fair Maid had been pumped out to repair her wallowing list. The special-effects smoke grenades that had given her the appearance of being on fire had long been thrown into the sea.

For the IRA man with the shattered knee, the bleeding had been stopped by a rough but skillful tourniquet applied by the commandos. He now sat ashen-faced with his back against a bulkhead and waited for the naval surgeon-commander, who would come with the frigate, now only half a mile off the beam. The other two had been handcuffed to a stanchion farther down the deck, and McCready had the key to the cuffs.

Captain Holst and his crew had descended without demur into one of the holds—not the one containing the weaponry—and sat among the olives until the Navy men could drop them a ladder.

Stephen Johnson had been locked in his cabin belowdecks.

When they were ready, the five SBS men vaulted onto the cabin roof of the Fair Maid, then disappeared below. Her engine started. Two of the commandos reappeared and cast her loose. The lieutenant waved a last farewell to McCready, still on the Regina, and the fishing boat chugged away. These were the secret warriors; they had done their job, and there was no need for them to wait around.

Tom Rowse sat down, shoulders hunched, on the coaming of one of the holds, next to the supine body of Monica Browne. On the other side of the Regina’s deck, the frigate eased alongside, threw graplines, and sent the first of the boarding party across. They conferred with McCready.

A puff of wind blew a corner of the sheet away from the face beneath it. Rowse stared down at the beautiful face, so calm in death. The breeze blew a frond of corn-blond hair across the forehead. He reached down to push it back. Some­one sat down beside him, and an arm came round his shoul­ders.

“It’s over, Tom. You weren’t to know. You weren’t to blame. She knew what she was doing.”

“If I’d known she was here, I wouldn’t have killed her,” said Rowse, dully.

“Then she’d have killed you. She was that kind of person.”

Two seamen unlocked the IRA men and led them toward the frigate. Two orderlies under the supervision of a surgeon lifted the wounded one onto a stretcher and carried him away.

“What happens now?” asked Rowse.

McCready stared at the sea and the sky and sighed. “Now, Tom, the lawyers take over. The lawyers always take over, reducing all of life and death, passion, greed, courage, lust, and glory to the desiccated vernacular of their trade.”

“And you?”

“Oh, I will go back to Century House and start again. And go back each night to my small flat and listen to my music and eat my baked beans. And you will go back to Nikki, my friend, and hold her very tight, and write your books and forget all this. Hamburg, Vienna, Malta, Tripoli, Cyprus—forget it. It’s all over.”

Stephen Johnson was led past. He paused to look down at the two Englishmen. His accent was as thick as the heather of the west coast.

“Our day will come,” he said. It was the slogan of the Provisional IRA.

McCready looked up and shook his head. “No, Mr. John­son, your day has long gone.”

Two orderlies loaded the body of the dead IRA man onto a stretcher and removed it.

“Why did she do it, Sam? Why the hell did she do it?” asked Rowse.

McCready leaned forward and drew the sheet back over the face of Monica Browne. The orderlies returned to take her away.

“Because she believed, Tom. In the wrong thing, of course. But she believed.”

He rose, pulling Rowse up with him.

“Come on, lad, we’re going home. Let it be, Tom. Let it be. She’s gone the way she wanted, by her own wish. Now she’s just another casualty of war. Like you, Tom. Like all of us.”

Interlude

Thursday, when the hearing began for its fourth day, was the day that Timothy Edwards had determined would be its last. Before Denis Gaunt could begin, Edwards decided to preempt him.

Edwards had become aware that his two colleagues behind the table, the Controllers for Domestic Operations and West­ern Hemisphere, had indicated a softening of their attitudes and were prepared to make an exception in the case of Sam McCready and retain him by some ruse or other. After the close of the Wednesday hearing, his two colleagues had taken Edwards to a quiet corner of the Century House bar and made their feelings more than plain, proposing that somehow the old Deceiver be retained within the Service.

That was emphatically not in Edwards’s scenario. Unlike the others, he knew that the decision to make a class action out of the case for the early retirement of the Deceiver stemmed from the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office, a man who one day would sit in conclave with four others and decide the identity of the next Chief of the SIS. It would be foolish to antagonize such a man.

“Denis, we have all listened with the greatest interest to your recall of Sam’s many services, and we are all mightily impressed. The fact is, however, that we now have to face the challenge of the nineties, a period when certain—how shall I put it?—active measures, riding roughshod over agreed pro­cedures, will have no place. Must I remind you of the brou­haha occasioned by Sam’s chosen course of action in the Caribbean last winter?”

“Not in the slightest, Timothy,” said Gaunt. “I had in mind to recall the episode myself, as my last instance of Sam’s continuing value to the Service.”

“Then please do so,” invited Edwards, relieved that this was the last plea he would have to listen to before proceeding to his unavoidable judgment. Besides, he reasoned, this epi­sode would surely sway his two colleagues to the view that McCready’s actions had been more those of a cowboy than of a local representative of her Gracious Majesty. It was all very well for the juniors to give Sam a round of applause when he walked into the Hole in the Wall bar on his return, just before the New Year, but it was he, Edwards, who had had to interrupt his festivities to smooth the ruffled feathers of Scot­land Yard, the Home Office, and the outraged Foreign Office, an interlude he still recalled with intense exasperation.

Denis Gaunt reluctantly crossed the room to the desk of the Records clerk and took the proffered folder. Despite what he had said, the Caribbean affair was the one he would most have liked to avoid. Deep though his admiration for his desk chief ran, he knew that Sam had really taken the bit between his teeth on that one.

He recalled only too well the memoranda that had rained on Century House early in the New Year, and the lengthy one-on-one meeting with the Chief to which McCready had been summoned in mid-January.

The new Chief had taken over the Service only a fortnight earlier, and his New Year present had been to have details of Sam’s Caribbean exploits land on his desk. Fortunately, Sir Mark and the Deceiver went back a long way, and after the official fireworks the Chief had, apparently, produced a six-pack of McCready’s favorite ale for a New Year toast and a promise—no more rule-bending.

Six months later, for reasons McCready could only guess at, the Chief had been much less accessible to him.

Gaunt assumed, wrongly, that Sir Mark had bided his time and waited until the summer to ease McCready out. He had no idea from how high a level the order had really come.

McCready knew. He did not need to be told, had no requirement of proof. But he knew the Chief. Like a good commanding officer, Sir Mark would tell you to your face if you were out of line, chew you off if he felt you deserved it, even fire you if things were that bad. But he would do it personally. Otherwise, he would fight like a tiger for his own people against the outsiders. So this business had come from higher up, and the Chief himself had been overruled.

As Denis Gaunt returned to his own side of the room with the file, Timothy Edwards caught McCready’s eye and smiled.

You really are a bloody menace, Sam, he thought. Bril­liantly talented, but you just don’t fit anymore. Such a pity, really. If only you’d smarten yourself up and abide by the rules, there could be a place for you. But not now. Not now that you have really upset people like Robert Inglis. It will be a different world in the nineties—my world, a world for people like me. In three years, maybe four, I shall have the Chief’s desk, and there will be no place for people like you anyway. Might as well go now, Sam, old boy. We’ll have a whole new officer group by then—bright young staffers who do what they’re told, abide by the rules, and do not upset people.

Sam McCready smiled back.

You really are a prize asshole, Timothy, he thought. You really think the gathering of intelligence is about committee meetings and computer print-outs and kissing Langley’s butt. All right, it’s good, the American signals-intelligence, and their electronic intelligence. The best in the world—they have the technology with their satellites and listening devices. But it can be fooled, Timothy, old boy.

There’s a thing called maskirovka, which you have hardly heard of. It’s Russian, Timothy, and it means the art of building phony airfields, hangars, bridges—entire tank divi­sions—out of tinplate and plywood, and it can fool the Amer­ican Big Birds. So sometimes you simply have to go in on the ground, put an agent deep inside the citadel, recruit a malcon­tent, employ a defector-in-place. Timothy, you’d never have made a field man, with all your club ties and your aristocratic wife. The KGB would have had your balls for cocktail olives in two weeks flat.

Gaunt was beginning his last defense, trying to justify what had happened in the Caribbean, trying not to lose the sympa­thy of the two Controllers who last night had appeared willing to change their minds and recommend a reprieve. McCready stared out of the window.

Things were changing, all right, but not the way Timothy Edwards thought. The world, in the aftermath of the Cold War, was going quietly crazy—the noise would come later.

In Russia, the bumper harvest was still ungathered for lack of equipment, and by the autumn it would be rotting in the sidings for lack of rolling stock. Famine would come in December, maybe January, driving Gorbachev back into the arms of the KGB and the High Command, and they would exact their price for his heresy of this summer of 1990. The year 1991 would be no fun at all.

The Middle East was a powder keg, and the best-informed agency in the region, the Israeli Mossad, was being treated like a pariah by Washington, and Timothy Edwards was taking his cue from there. McCready sighed. The hell with them all. Perhaps a fishing boat in Devon was the answer after all.

“It all really began,” said Gaunt, opening the file in front of him, “in early December, on a small island in the northern Caribbean.”

McCready was jerked back to the realities of Century House. Ah yes, the Caribbean, he thought—the bloody Car­ibbean.

A Little Bit Of Sunshine

Chapter 1

The Gulf Lady came home across a bright and glittering sea an hour before the sun went down. Julio Gomez sat forward, his ample rear end supported by the cabin roof, his moccasined feet upon the foredeck. He drew contentedly on one of his Puerto Rican cheroots, whose foul odors were blown away across the uncomplaining Caribbean waters.

He was, in that moment, a truly happy man. Ten miles behind him lay the underwater drop-off, where the Great Bahama Bank falls into the Santaren Channel; where the kingfish run with the wahoo, and the tuna hunt the bonito, who in turn hunt the ballyhoo and all on occasions are pursued by the sailfish and the big martin.

In the scarred old box astern of the open fishing deck lay two fine dorado, one for him and one for the skipper, who now held the tiller and steered his game fisherman home to Port Plaisance.

Not that two fish had been his entire day’s take; there had been a fine sailfish that had been tagged and returned to the ocean; a mess of smaller bonito that had been used for baitfish; a yellowfin tuna that he had estimated at seventy pounds before it dived so hard and so deep he had had to cut line or see his reel stripped before his eyes; and two big amberjack that he had fought for thirty minutes each. He had returned the big fish to the sea, taking only the dorado because they are among the finest eating fish in the tropics.

Julio Gomez did not like to kill. What brought him on his annual pilgrimage to these waters was the thrill of the hissing reel and the running line, the tension of the bowed rod, and the sheer excitement of the contest between air-breathing man and monstrously strong fighting fish. It had been a wonderful day.

Far away to his left, way out beyond the Dry Tortugas, invisible well below the western horizon, the big red ball of the sun was dropping to meet the sea, giving up its skin-flaying heat, conceding finally to the cool of the evening breeze and the oncoming night.

Three miles ahead of the Gulf Lady, the island straddled the water. They would berth in twenty minutes. Gomez flicked the stub of his cheroot to a sputtering grave in the water and rubbed his forearms. Despite his naturally saturnine complexion and olive skin, he would need to apply a good layer of after-sun cream when he got back to his boarding house. Jimmy Dobbs on the tiller had no such problem: He was an islander born and bred, and he owned his boat and chartered it for the visiting tourists who wanted to fish. On his deep ebony skin, the sun had no effect.

Julio Gomez swung his feet off the foredeck and dropped from the cabin roof into the stern.

“I’ll take over, Jimmy. Give you a chance to swab down.”

Jimmy Dobbs gave his ear-to-ear grin, handed over the tiller, took bucket and broom, and began to swab the fish scales and fragments of gut out through the scuppers. Half a dozen terns appeared from nowhere and took the floating scraps from the wake. Nothing goes to waste in the ocean— nothing organic, that is.

There were, of course, more modern charter fishing boats plying the Caribbean—boats with engine-linked power hoses for cleaning down, with cocktail bars, with television and even video shows; with banks of electronic technology for finding fish, and enough navigational aids to go around the world. Gulf Lady had none of these things. She was an old and chipped clinker-built timber vessel powered by a smoky Perkins diesel, but she had seen more white water than the smart boys from the Florida Keys could shake a radar scanner at. She had a small forward cabin, a tangle of rods and lines, redolent of fish and oil, and an open afterdeck with ten rod-holders and a single fighting chair homemade in oak, cushions extra.

Jimmy Dobbs had no silicon chips to find the fish for him; he found them himself, the way his father had taught him, with eyes for the slightest hint of change in the water color, the ripple on the surface that should not be there, the diving of a frigate bird far, far away; he had the gut instinct to know where they were running this week and what they were feeding on. But find them he did, every day. That was why Julio Gomez came every vacation to fish with him.

The sheer lack of sophistication of the islands pleased Julio, the lack of technology of the Gulf Lady. He spent much of his professional life handling America’s modern technology, tap­ping queries into a computer, steering a car through the tangled traffic of central Miami. For his vacation, he wanted the sea, the sun, and the wind—those and the fish, for Julio Gomez only had two passions in life, his job, and his fishing. He had had five days of the latter, and just two more to go, Friday and Saturday. On Sunday he would have to fly home to Florida and on Monday morning report for work with Eddie. He sighed at the prospect.

Jimmy Dobbs was also a happy man. He had had a good day with his client and friend, he had a few dollars in his pocket to buy a dress for his old lady and a fine fish to make supper for them both and their brood of kids. What more, he reasoned, had life to offer?

They berthed just after five at the rickety old wooden fishing quay that ought to have fallen down years ago but never had. The previous Governor had said he would ask London for a grant to build a new one, but then he had been replaced by the present man, and Sir Marston Moberley had no interest in fishing. Nor in the islanders, if the bar talk in Shantytown was to be believed—and it always was.

There was the usual scuttling of children to see what the catch had been and to help carry the fish ashore, and the usual banter in the lilting, singsong accents of the islanders as the Gulf Lady was made fast for the night.

“You free tomorrow, Jimmy?” asked Gomez.

“Sure am. You wanna go again?”

“That’s what I’m here for. See you at eight.”

Julio Gomez paid a small boy a dollar to carry his fish for him, and together the pair walked off the dock and into the dusky streets of Port Plaisance. They had not far to go, for no distance was far in Port Plaisance. It was not a large town—more a village really.

It was the sort of town found in most of the smaller Caribbean islands, a jumble of mainly wooden houses painted in bright colors with shingle roofs and lanes of crushed shells between them. Along the seashore, around the small harbor bounded by a curving mole of coral blocks against which the weekly trading steamer berthed, stood the more resplendent structures—the custom house, the court house, and the war memorial. All were built of blocks of coral, cut and mortared long ago.

Farther into the town were the town hall, the small Anglican church, the police station, and the principal hotel, the Quarter Deck. Apart from these and an unsightly corrugated-iron warehouse at one end of the port, the buildings were mainly of wood. Along the shore, just out of town, stood the Gover­nor’s residence, Government House, all white and walled in white, with two old Napoleonic cannon by the front gate and the flagpole in the middle of the carefully cultured green-grass lawn. During the day the British Union Jack fluttered from the mast, and even as Julio Gomez made his way through the small town to the boarding house where he lodged, the flag was being ceremoniously hauled down by a police constable in the presence of the Governor’s adjutant.

Gomez could have stayed at the Quarter Deck, but he preferred the homey atmosphere of Mrs. Macdonald’s board­ing house. She was a widow, with a cap of snow-white frizzy hair, as amply proportioned as he was himself, and she made a conch chowder that was to die for.

He turned into the street where she lived, ignoring the garish election posters clipped to most of the walls and fences, and saw that in the dusk she was sweeping down the front steps of her neat, detached residence—a ritual she carried out several times a day. She greeted him and his fish with her usual beaming smile.

“Why, Mistah Gomez, that is one very fine fish.”

“For our supper, Mrs. Macdonald, and enough, I think, for all of us.”

Gomez paid off the boy, who scampered away with his new­found wealth, and went up to his room. Mrs. Macdonald retired to her kitchen to prepare the dorado for the grill. Gomez washed, shaved, and changed into cream slacks and a bright short-sleeved beach shirt. He decided he could use a very large, very cold beer and walked back through the town to the bar of the Quarter Deck.

It was only seven o’clock, but night had come and the town was quite dark, save where it was lit by the glimmer from the windows. Emerging from the back streets, Gomez entered Parliament Square with its neat, enclosed patch of palm trees at the center and three of its sides garnished respectively by the Anglican church, the police station, and the Quarter Deck Hotel.

He passed the police station, where electric lights, powered by the municipal generator that hummed away down on the docks, still burned. From this small, coral-block building Chief Inspector Brian Jones and an impeccably turned-out force of two sergeants and eight constables represented law and order in the community with the lowest crime rate in the Western Hemisphere. Coming from Miami, Gomez could not but wonder at a society that seemed to have no drugs, no gangs, no muggings, no prostitution, no rapes, one bank (no robberies therefrom), and only half a dozen reportable thefts a year. He sighed, passed in front of the darkened church, and entered the portico of the Quarter Deck.

The bar lay to the left. He took a corner stool at the far end and ordered his large, cold beer. It would be an hour before his fish was ready—time for a second beer to keep company with the first. The bar was already half full, for it was the town’s favorite watering hole with tourists and expatriates. Sam, the cheerful white-jacketed barman, administered his nightly array of rum punches, beers, juices, Cokes, daiquiris, and soda-mixers to help down the fiery shots of Mount Gay rum.

At five to eight, Julio Gomez reached into his pocket for a handful of dollars with which to settle his bill. When he looked up, he stopped, fixed rigid, and stared at the man who had entered the bar and was ordering a drink at the far end. After two seconds, he eased back on his stool so that the bulk of the drinker sitting next to him blocked him from view. He could hardly believe his eyes, but he knew he was not wrong. You do not spend four days and four nights of your life sitting across a table from a man, staring into his eyes, and seeing hatred and contempt corning back at you—and later forget that face, even eight years on. You do not spend four days and nights trying to get a single word out of a man and get absolutely nothing, not even a name, so that you have to give him a nickname just to have something to put on the file—and later forget that face.

Gomez gestured to Sam to refill his glass, paid for all three beers, and retired to a corner seat in the shadows. If the man was here, he was here for a reason. If he had checked into a hotel, he would have a name. Gomez wanted that name. He sat in the corner, waited, and watched. At nine the man, who had drunk alone, always Mount Gay rums, rose and left. Emerging from his corner, Gomez went after him.

In Parliament Square, the man climbed into an open Japa­nese-made jeep, started the ignition, and drove away. Gomez looked desperately around. He had no transportation of his own. Parked near the hotel entrance was a small motor scooter, its key still in the ignition. Wobbling precariously, Gomez set off after the jeep.

The jeep left the town and drove steadily out along the coast road—the only road—which went right round the entire island. Properties situated in the hilly interior were all reached by individual service roads, dusty tracks, that ran down to the one coastal highway. The jeep passed the island’s other residential community, the native village known as Shantytown, then went on past the grass strip airport.

It kept going until it reached the other side of the island. Here the road flanked the expanse of Teach Bay—named after Edward Teach, Blackboard the Pirate, who had once an­chored and victualed here. The jeep pulled off the coast road and up a short track to a pair of wrought-iron gates that protected a large walled estate. If the driver had seen the single wobbling headlamp that had been behind him all the way from the Quarter Deck Hotel, he gave no sign of it. But seen it he surely had.

At the gates a man stepped out of the shadows to open them for the jeep driver, but the driver slowed and stopped. He reached above his head to the rollbar and detached a powerful hand-held spotlamp. As Gomez rode past the en­trance to the track, the beam of the spotlamp swept over him, came back, and held him in its glare until he passed out of sight down the road.

Gomez returned the scooter to its place outside the hotel thirty minutes later and walked home. He was deep in thought and deeply worried. He had seen whom he had seen, and he knew he had not been wrong. He now also knew where the man was living. But he himself had been seen. He could only pray that after eight years, in the darkness of a Caribbean night, sputtering past for a few seconds on a motor scooter, he had not been recognized.

Mrs. Macdonald was perturbed at his failure to arrive for supper until almost two hours late, and said so. She served the dorado anyway and watched her guest eat it with no pleasure. He was lost in thought and only made one remark.

“Nonsense, man,” she chided. “We don’t even have them things in these islands.”

Julio Gomez spent the night lying awake and considering his choices. How long the man would remain in the islands, he did not know. But his presence here was something the British ought to hear about, he thought, especially his actual location. Surely that was significant. He could go to the Governor, but what could that official do? The man probably had no cause to be arrested. He was not on U.S. territory now. Nor did Gomez believe that Chief Inspector Jones, with his toy town force, would have any more weight than the Governor. This would need an order from London, following an extradition request from Uncle Sam personally. He could telephone in the morning—then he discarded that thought. The island’s communication, for public use, was an old-style open phone line running to Nassau, the Bahamas, and thence to Miami. He had no choice; he would have to return to Florida in the morning.

That same evening, a Delta Airlines flight from Washington touched down at Miami Airport. Among its passengers was a tired British civil servant whose passport said he was Mr. Frank Dillon. He had other papers—which he had no need to show on arrival from an internal American flight—that speci­fied he was on the staff of the British Foreign Office and asked all whom it might concern to foe as helpful to him as possible.

Neither his passport, which he had no need to show, nor his papers revealed that his real name was Sam McCready. This was known only to the group of senior staff members of the CIA at Langley, Virginia, in whose company he had spent an intensive week attending a seminar on the role of the intelligence community of the Free World in the forthcoming decade of the nineties. It had meant listening to a raft of professors and other assorted academics, none of whom favored using one simple word where ten complicated ones would do.

McCready hailed a cab outside the airport terminal and asked to be taken to the Sonesta Beach Hotel on Key Biscayne. Here he checked in and treated himself to a lobster supper before retiring for a deep and untroubled sleep. He faced, or so he thought, the prospect of seven days of toasting himself by the pool, working his way through several light-hearted spy novels, and occasionally raising his gaze from a chilled daiquiri to watch a Florida girl sway by. Century House was a long way away, and the business of Disinforma­tion, Deception, and Psychological Operations could remain in the capable hands of his newly appointed deputy, Denis Gaunt. It was time, he thought as he fell asleep, for the Deceiver to get a suntan.

On Friday morning, Julio Gomez checked out of Mrs. Macdonald’s boarding house without asking for a rebate for his unused two days and with profuse apologies. He hefted his suitcase and walked to Parliament Square, where he took one of the town’s two taxis and asked to be driven to the airstrip.

His ticket was for the Sunday-morning scheduled flight by BWIA to Nassau, with a connection to Miami. Although it was actually a shorter distance direct to Miami, there were no scheduled nights on the direct run, only via Nassau. There was no travel agent in town—bookings were always made right at the airstrip—so he could only hope that there was a Friday-morning BWIA flight. He did not notice that he was being watched as he took the taxi out of the square.

At the airstrip he was disappointed. The airport building, a single long shed containing a customs area and little else, was not closed, but it was almost deserted. A single passport officer sat in the morning sun reading a week-old Miami Herald that someone, probably Gomez himself, had left be­hind.

“Not today, man,” he replied cheerfully. “Never on a Friday.”

Gomez surveyed the grass field. Outside the single metal hangar stood a Piper Navajo Chief. A man in ducks and shirt was checking it over.

Gomez moved across. “You flying today?” he asked.

“Yep,” said the pilot, a fellow American.

“Available for charter?”

“No way,” said the pilot. “This is a private plane. Belongs to my employer.”

“Where you heading? Nassau?” asked Gomez.

“Nope. Key West.”

Gomez’s heart rose. From Key West, he could take one of the frequent scheduled flights up to Miami.

“Any chance I can have a talk with your employer?”

“Mr. Klinger. He’ll be here in about an hour.”

“I’ll wait,” said Gomez.

He found a shady spot near the hangar wall and settled down. Someone in the bushes withdrew, took a motorcycle from the undergrowth, and motored away down the coast road.

Sir Marston Moberley checked his watch, rose from his breakfast table in the walled garden behind Government House, and sauntered toward the steps that led up to his verandah and his office. That tiresome delegation was due anytime.

Britain retains very few of her former colonies in the Caribbean. The colonial days are long gone. No longer called colonies—an unacceptable word—they are today classed as Dependent Territories. One is Montserrat. Another is the Cayman Islands, known for its numerous and very discreet offshore banking activities. In a referendum, the people of the three Cayman Islands, when offered independence by Lon­don, voted overwhelmingly to stay British. Since then they have prospered like the green bay tree, in contrast to some of their neighbors.

Another obscure group is the British Virgin Islands, now a haven for yachtsmen and anglers. Yet another is the small island of Anguilla, whose inhabitants conducted the only known revolution in colonial history in order to stay British rather than be forcibly amalgamated with two neighboring islands, of whose prime minister they had the most lively and well-founded suspicions.

Even more obscure are the Turks and Caicos, where life proceeds on its somnolent way beneath the palm trees and the Union Jack, untroubled by drug peddlers, coups d’état, and election thuggery. In all cases, London rules with a fairly light hand, its principal role in the case of the last three territories being to pick up the annual budget deficit. In exchange, the local populations appear content to have the Union Jack run up and down the flagpole twice a day and the insignia of Queen Elizabeth on their currency notes and policemen’s helmets.

In the winter of 1989, the last group was the Barclays, a collection of eight small islands situated at the western edge of the Great Bahama Bank, west of the Bahamas’ Andros Island, northeast of Cuba, and due south of the Florida Keys.

Why the Barclays were not amalgamated into the Bahamas when that archipelago secured its independence, few can recall. A wag in the Foreign Office suggested later they might simply have been overlooked, and he could have been right. The tiny group had no more than twenty thousand inhabitants, and only two of the eight islands were inhabited at all. The chief island and home of the Government rejoiced in the name of Sunshine, and the fishing was superb.

They were not rich islands. Industry was nil, and income not much more. Most of that came from the wages of the young people who left to become waiters, chambermaids, and bellhops in the smart hotels elsewhere and who became favorites with visiting European and American tourists for their sunny good nature and beaming smiles.

Other income came from a smattering of tourism, the occasional game fisherman who would make the pilgrimage via Nassau, aircraft-landing rights, the sale of their very obscure stamps, and the sale of lobster and conch to passing yachtsmen. This modest income permitted the importation by weekly steamer of some basic commodities not available from the sea.

The generous ocean provided most of the food, along with fruit from the forests and gardens tended along the slopes of Sunshine’s two hills, Spyglass and Sawbones.

Then in early 1989, someone in the Foreign Office decided that the Barclays were ripe for independence. The first “po­sition paper” became a “submission” and went on to become policy. The British Cabinet that year was wrestling with a huge trade deficit, slumping popularity polls, and restiveness over a divided mood on European policy. The bagatelle of an obscure island group in the Caribbean going independent passed without debate.

The then Governor objected, however, and was duly re­called and replaced by Sir Marston Moberley. A tall, vain man who prided himself on his resemblance to the late actor George Sanders, he had been sent to Sunshine with a single brief, carefully spelled out to him by an Assistant Principal Secretary in the Caribbean Department. The Barclays were to accept their independence. Candidates for Prime Minister would be invited, and a general election day was set. After the democratic election of the Barclays’ first Prime Minister, a decent interval (say, three months) would be agreed to by him and his Cabinet, after which full independence would be granted—nay, insisted upon.

Sir Marston was to ensure that the program went through and another burden removed from Britain’s exchequer. He and Lady Moberley had arrived on Sunshine in late July. Sir Marston had set about his duties with a will.

Two potential candidates had soon presented themselves for the office of Prime-Minister-to-be. Mr. Marcus Johnson, a wealthy local businessman and philanthropist, had returned to the islands of his birth after making a fortune in Central America. He now resided on a fine estate the other side of Sawbones Hill and had formed the Barclays Prosperity Alli­ance, pledged to develop the islands and bring wealth to the people. The more rough-hewn but populist Mr. Horatio Liv­ingstone, who lived down in Shantytown, of which he owned a substantial part, had formed the Barclays Independence Front. The elections were but three weeks away, scheduled for January 5. Sir Marston was pleased to see that vigorous electioneering campaigns were under way, with both candi­dates earnestly canvassing the islanders for support with speeches, pamphlets, and posters on every wall and tree.

There was but one fly in Sir Marston’s ointment: the CCC, or Committee for Concerned Citizens, which was opposed to independence. It was led by that tiresome man Reverend Walter Drake, the local Baptist minister. Sir Marston had agreed to receive a delegation from the CCC at nine that morning.

There were eight of them. The Anglican vicar—a pale, washed-out, and ineffectual Englishman—he knew he could deal with. Six were local worthies—the doctor, two shopkee­pers, a farmer, a bar owner, and a boarding-house keeper called Mr. Macdonald. They were all elderly and of rudimen­tary education. They could not match Sir Marston for fluency in English or persuasiveness in argument. For each one of them, he could find a dozen who were in favor of indepen­dence.

Marcus Johnson, the “prosperity” candidate, was sup­ported by the airport manager, the owners of dockside prop­erty (Johnson had promised to build a thriving international marina in its place), and most of the business community, who would become richer with development. Livingstone was securing backing from the proletariat, the have-nots, to whom he had promised a miraculous rise in living standards based on the nationalization of property and assets.

The problem was the CCC delegation leader, Reverend Drake, a big black bull of a man in a black suit who now wiped perspiration from his face. He was a compulsive preacher, lucid and loud, who had secured an education on the American mainland. He wore the small sign of a fish in his lapel, a born-again Christian. Sir Marston wondered idly from what previous state he had been born again, but it never occurred to him to ask. Reverend Drake thumped a pile of paper on the Governor’s desk.

Sir Marston had ensured there were not enough seats for all, so they had to stand. He stood himself—it would make the meeting shorter. He glanced at the pile of paper.

“That, Governor,” boomed Reverend Drake, “is a petition. Yes, sir, a petition. Signed by more than one thousand of our citizens. We want this petition conveyed to London and put before Mrs. Thatcher herself. Or even the Queen. We believe these ladies will listen to us, even if you will not.”

Sir Marston sighed. It was all going to be—he searched for his favorite adjective—more tiresome than he had expected.

“I see,” he said. “And what does your petition require?”

“We want a referendum, just like the British people had over the Common Market. We demand a referendum. We do not want to be forced into independence. We want to go on as we are, as we have always been. We do not want to be ruled by Mr. Johnson or Mr. Livingstone. We appeal to London.”

Down at the airstrip, a taxi arrived, and Mr. Barney Klinger stepped out. He was a short, rotund man who lived in a substantial Spanish-style property in Coral Gables, next to Miami. The chorus girl who accompanied him was neither short nor rotund; she was stunning, and young enough to be his daughter. Mr. Klinger kept a cottage on the slopes of Spyglass Hill, which he used occasionally for discreet vaca­tions away from Mrs. Klinger.

He intended to fly to Key West, put his girlfriend on a scheduled flight to Miami, then proceed home in his own plane, clearly alone, a tired businessman returning from a commercial visit to discuss a boring old contract. Mrs. Klin­ger would meet him at Miami Airport and note that he was alone. One could not be too careful. Mrs. Klinger knew some very fine lawyers.

Julio Gomez heaved himself to his feet and approached.

“Mr. Klinger, sir?”

Klinger’s heart jumped. A private detective? “Who wants to know?”

“Look, I have a problem, sir. I was vacationing down here, and I just got a call from my wife. Our kid’s had an accident back home. I have to get back, I really do. There are no flights today. None. Not even for charter. I was wondering, could you give me a lift to Key West? I’d be forever in your debt.”

Klinger hesitated. The man could still be a private eye hired by Mrs. Klinger. He handed his grip to a baggage porter, who began to load it and the rest of his valises into the hold of the Navajo.

“Well,” said Klinger, “I don’t know.”

There were six people grouped around: the passport officer, the baggage porter, Gomez, Klinger, his girlfriend, and an­other man who was helping with the luggage. The porter assumed this man was from the Klinger party, and the Klinger party assumed he belonged to the airstrip. The pilot was out of earshot inside his cabin, and the taxi driver was relieving himself in the vegetation twenty yards away.

“Gee, honey, that’s dreadful. We’ve got to help him,” said the chorus girl.

“Okay,” said Klinger. “So long as we take off on time.”

The passport officer quickly stamped the three passports, the baggage locker was closed, the three passengers boarded, the pilot revved up both engines, and three minutes later the Navajo lifted off Sunshine with a filed flight plan for Key West, seventy minutes’ cruising time away.

“My dear friends, and I do hope I may call you friends,” said Sir Marston Moberley. “Please try to understand the position of Her Majesty’s government. At this juncture a referendum would be quite inappropriate. It would be administratively complex to an impossible degree.”

He had not become a senior diplomat with a series of Commonwealth postings behind him without learning to pa­tronize.

“Please explain,” rumbled Reverend Drake, “why a refer­endum is more complex than a general election. We want the right to decide whether to have an election at all.”

The explanation was simple enough, but it was not to be mentioned here. The British government would have to pay for a referendum; but in the election, the candidates were paying for their own campaigns though exactly how, Sir Marston had not inquired. He changed the subject.

“Tell me, if you feel this way, why not stand for the post of Prime Minister yourself? According to your view, you would have to win.”

Seven of the delegation looked baffled. But the Reverend Drake stabbed a sausagelike finger in his direction. “You know why, Governor. These candidates are using printing presses, public address systems, even campaign managers brought in from outside. And they’re offering a lot of cash around among the people.”

“I have no evidence of that—none at all,” interrupted the Governor, now a shade of pink.

“Because you won’t go outside and see what’s going on!” roared the Baptist minister. “But we know. It happens on every streetcorner. And intimidation of those who oppose them.”

“When I receive a report from Chief Inspector Jones to that effect, I will take action,” snapped Sir Marston.

“Surely we need not quarrel,” pleaded the Anglican vicar. “The point is, will you send our petition to London, Sir Marston?”

“Certainly I will,” said the Governor. “It is the least I can do for you. But it is also, I fear, the only thing I can do. My hands, alas, are tied. And now, if you will excuse me.”

They trooped out, having done what they came for. As they left the building, the doctor, who happened to be the uncle of the police chief, asked, “Do you think he really will?”

“Oh, certainly,” said the vicar. “He has said he will.”

“Yes, by surface mail,” growled the Reverend Drake. “It should arrive in London around mid-January. We have to get rid of that Governor and get ourselves a new one.”

“No chance, I’m afraid,” said the vicar. “Sir Marston will not resign.”

In its continuing war against the narcotics invasion of its own southern coast, the American government has resorted to using some expensive and ingenious surveillance techniques. Among these is a series of covert balloons, tethered in out-of-the-way places, owned, bought, or leased by Washington.

Suspended in the gondolas beneath these balloons are an array of extra-high-technology radar scanners and radio mon­itors. They cover the entire Caribbean basin, from Yucatan in the west to Anegada in the east, from Florida in the north to the Venezuelan coast. Every airplane, however big or small, that takes off within this bowl is spotted at once. Its course, height, and speed are monitored and reported back. Every yacht, cruiser, freighter, or liner that leaves port is picked up and tailed by unseen eyes and ears high in the sky and far away. The technology in these gondolas is mainly made by Westinghouse.

When it lifted from Sunshine Island, the Piper Navajo Chief was picked up by Westinghouse 404. It was routinely tracked across the ocean toward Key West on its course of 310 degrees, which, with the wind drift from the south, would have brought it right over Key West’s approach beacon. Fifty miles short of Key West, it disintegrated in midair and disap­peared from the screens. A U.S. Coast Guard vessel was sent to the spot, but it found no wreckage.

On Monday, Julio Gomez, a detective on the force of the Metro-Dade Police Department, did not show up for work. His partner, Detective Eddie Favaro, was extremely annoyed. They were due in court together that morning, and now Favaro had to go alone. The judge was scathing, and it was Favaro who had to bear her sarcasm. In the late morning he got back to the MDPD headquarters building at 1320 North­west Fourteenth Street (the force was then on the threshold of moving to its new complex in the Doral District) and checked with his superior officer, Lieutenant Broderick.

“What’s with Julio?” asked Favaro. “He never showed up at court.”

“You’re asking me? He’s your partner,” replied Broderick.

“He didn’t check in?”

“Not to me,” said Broderick. “Can’t you get by without him?”

“No way. We’re handling two cases, and neither defendant speaks anything but Spanish.”

Mirroring its own local population, the Metro-Dade Police Department, which covers most of what people know as Greater Miami, employs a wide racial mix. Half the popula­tion of Metro-Dade is of Hispanic origin, some with a very halting command of English. Julio Gomez had been of Puerto Rican parentage and raised in New York, where he had joined the police. A decade ago, he had re-migrated south to join Metro-Dade. Here nobody referred to him as a “spick.” In this area, that was not wise. His fluent Spanish was invalua­ble.

His partner of nine years, Eddie Favaro, was an Italian-American, his grandparents having emigrated from Catania as young newly weds seeking a better life. Lieutenant Clay Broderick was black. Now he shrugged. He was overworked and understaffed, with a backlog of cases he could have done without.

“Find him,” he said. “You know the rules.”

Favaro did indeed. In Metro-Bade, if you are three days late back from a vacation without adequate good reason and without checking in, you are deemed to have dismissed your­self.

Favaro checked his partner’s apartment, but there was no sign that anyone had returned from vacation. He knew where Gomez had gone—he always went to Sunshine—so he checked the passenger lists on the previous evening’s flights from Nassau. The airline computer revealed the flight reser­vation and prepaid ticket, but it also showed the ticket had not been taken up. Favaro went back to Broderick.

“He could have had an accident,” he urged. “Game fishing can be dangerous.”

“There are phones,” said Broderick. “He has our num­ber.”

“He could be in a coma. Maybe in a hospital. Maybe he asked someone else to phone in, and they didn’t bother. They’re pretty laid back in those islands. We could at least check it out.”

Broderick sighed. Missing detectives he could also do with­out.

“Okay,” he said. “Get me the number of the police depart­ment for this island—what do you call it? Sunshine? Jeez, what a name. Get me the local police chief, and I’ll make the call.”

Favaro had it for him in half an hour. It was so obscure, it was not even listed in International Directory Inquiries. He got it from the British Consulate, who rang Government House on Sunshine, and they passed it on. It took another thirty minutes for Lieutenant Broderick to get his connection.

He was lucky—he found Chief Inspector Jones in his office. It was midday.

“Chief Inspector Jones, this is Lieutenant of Detectives Clay Broderick, speaking from Miami. Hallo? Can you hear me? ... Look, as a colleague, I wonder if you could do me a favor. One of my men was on vacation on Sunshine, and he hasn’t showed up here. We hope there hasn’t been an acci­dent. ... Yes, an American. Name, Julio Gomez. No, I don’t know where he was staying. He was down there for the game fishing.”

Chief Inspector Jones took this call seriously. His was a tiny force, and Metro-Dade’s was enormous. But he would show the Americans that Chief Inspector Jones was not half-asleep. He decided to handle the case himself and summoned a constable and a Land-Rover.

Quite rightly, he started with the Quarter Deck Hotel, but there he drew a blank. He went on to the fishing quay and found Jimmy Dobbs working on his boat, having no charter that day. Dobbs related that Gomez had not shown up for their Friday charter, which was odd, and that he had been staying with Mrs. Macdonald.

The landlady reported that Julio Gomez had left in a hurry on Friday morning for the airport. Jones went there and spoke to the airport manager. He summoned the passport officer, who confirmed that Mr. Gomez had taken a lift with Mr. Klinger to Key West on Friday morning. He gave Inspector Jones the aircraft registration. Jones telephoned Broderick back at four P.M.

Lieutenant Broderick took time out to phone the Key West police, who checked with their own airport. The lieutenant summoned Eddie Favaro just after six. His face was grave.

“Eddie, I’m sorry. Julio made a sudden decision to come home Friday morning. There was no scheduled flight back, so he hitched a lift on a private plane for Key West. It never made it. The plane went down from fifteen thousand feet into the sea, fifty miles short of Key West. The Coast Guard says there were no survivors.”

Favaro sat down. He shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”

“I hardly can myself. Look, I’m terribly sorry, Eddie. I know you were close.”

“Nine years,” whispered Favaro. “Nine years he watched my back. What happens now?”

“The machine takes over,” said Broderick. “I’ll tell the Director myself. You know the procedure. If we can’t have a funeral service, we’ll have a memorial. Full departmental honors. I promise.”

* * *

The suspicions came later that night and the next morning.

On Sunday, a charter skipper named Joe Fanelli had taken two small English boys fishing out of Bud ‘n’ Mary’s Marina on Islamorada, a resort in the Florida Keys well north of Key West. Six miles out beyond Alligator Reef, heading for the Hump and trolling as they went, one of the boys took a big bite on his line. Between them the brothers, Stuart and Shane, hauled in what they hoped was a big kingfish or wahoo or tuna. When the catch came up in the wake, Joe Fanelli leaned down and hauled it aboard. It turned out to be the remnants of a life-jacket, still bearing the stenciled number of the airplane to which it had once belonged, and some scorch marks.

The local police sent it up to Miami, where the forensic laboratory established that it had come from Barney Klinger’s Navajo Chief, and that the scorch marks bore traces not of gasoline but of plastic explosive. It became a Homicide inves­tigation.

The first thing Homicide did was check on the business affairs of Mr. Klinger. What they discovered caused them to think the case was a dead end. They had, after all, no mandate on the British territory of Sunshine, and little confidence that the local force would get to the bottom of what had to be a professional hit.

On Tuesday morning Sam McCready eased himself onto his poolside lounger at the Sonesta Beach Hotel on Key Biscayne, settled his second after-breakfast coffee on the table by his side, and opened the Miami Herald.

Without any particular interest, he scanned the paper for international news—there was precious little—and settled for local affairs. The second lead concerned fresh revelations in the disappearance of a light airplane over the sea southeast of Key West the previous Friday morning.

The news sleuths of the Herald had discovered not only that the plane might well have been destroyed by a bomb inside it, but that Mr. Barney Klinger was known as the uncrowned king of the illicit trade, theft, and laundering of spare aviation parts in South Florida.

After narcotics, this abstruse area of illegal behavior is probably the most lucrative. Florida bristles with airplanes—airliners, cargo freighters, and private aircraft. It also contains some of the world’s major legitimate companies in the provi­sion of constantly needed new or reconditioned spare parts. AVIOL and the Instrument Locator Service supply replace­ment parts on a worldwide scale.

The illegitimate industry, on the other hand, specializes either in commissioning the theft of such parts for no-ques­tions-asked sales to other (usually Third World) operators, or in the even more dangerous purveying of parts whose opera­tional life is almost expended, selling them as reconditioned parts with most of their operational life still left. For the latter scam, the paperwork is forged. Since some of these parts sell for a quarter of a million dollars each, the profits for a ruthless operator can be huge.

Speculation was running high that someone had wanted to remove Mr. Klinger from the scene.

“In the midst of life,” murmured McCready, and turned to the weather forecast. It was sunny.

Lieutenant Broderick summoned Eddie Favaro on that same Tuesday morning. He was even more grave than he had been the day before.

“Eddie, before we proceed with the memorial service with full honors for Julio, we have to consider a troubling new factor. What the hell was Julio doing sharing a plane with a sleazeball like Klinger?”

“He was trying to get back home,” said Favaro.

“Was he? What was he doing down there?”

“Fishing.”

“Was he? How come he was sharing the same week on Sunshine with Klinger? Did they have business to discuss?”

“Clay, listen to me. No way—no way in this world—was Julio Gomez corrupt. I won’t believe it. He was trying to get home. He saw a plane, he asked for a ride, is all.”

“I hope you’re right,” Broderick said soberly. “Why was he trying to get home two days ahead of schedule?

“That’s what puzzles me,” admitted Favaro. “He loved his fishing, looked forward to it all year. He would never have cut short two days of fishing without a reason. I want to go over there and find out why.”

“You have three reasons for not going,” said the lieutenant. “This department is overworked, you are needed here, and any bomb—if bomb there was—was certainly aimed at Klinger. The girl and Julio were accidents. Sorry, Internal Affairs will have to check out Julio’s financial situation. It can’t be avoided. If he never met Klinger before Friday, it was just a tragic accident.”

“I’ve got some leave time due me,” said Favaro. “I want it, Clay. I want it now.”

“Yes, you’ve got some leave time. And I can’t deny it to you. But you go there and you’re on your own, Eddie. That’s British territory—we have no authority there. And I want your gun.”

Favaro handed over his police automatic, left, and headed for the bank. At three that afternoon, he landed on Sunshine’s airstrip, paid off his chartered four-seater, and watched it leave for Miami. Then he hitched a lift with one of the airstrip staff into Port Plaisance. Not knowing where else to go, he checked into the Quarter Deck.

Sir Marston Moberley sat in a comfortable chair in his walled garden and sipped a whiskey and soda. It was his favorite ritual of the day. The garden behind Government House was not large, but it was very private. A well-tended lawn covered most of the space, and bougainvillaea and jacaranda fes­tooned the walls with their brilliant colors. The walls, which surrounded the garden on three sides—the fourth side was the house itself—were eight feet high and topped with shards of glass. In one wall was an old steel door, seven feet tall, but it was long out of use. Beyond it was a small lane that led into the heart of Port Plaisance. The steel door had been sealed years before, and on its outer side two semicircular steel hasps were secured by a padlock the size of a small dinner plate. All were long fused by rust.

Sir Marston enjoyed the cool of the evening. His adjutant was somewhere inside his own quarters at the other end of the house; his wife was out on an errand visiting the local hospital; Jefferson, his chef/steward/butler, would be prepar­ing dinner in the kitchen. Sir Marston sipped his whiskey with appreciation, then almost choked when his ears were assailed by the scream of rending steel. He turned. He had time to say, “I say, what on earth—Now look here—”

The roar of the first bullet shocked and stunned him. The slug went through a fold of loose fabric in the sleeve of his cotton shirt. It hammered into the coral-block wall of the house behind him and fell back onto the path, misshapen and twisted. The second hit him full in the heart.

Chapter 2

Despite the twin booms of the handgun from the garden, there was no immediate reaction from inside the house. Only two people were there at that hour.

Jefferson was belowstairs preparing a fruit punch for the evening meal—Lady Moberley was a teetotaler. He would say later that when the blender was switched on the noise filled the kitchen, and it must have been on when the shooting took place.

The Governor’s adjutant was Lieutenant Jeremy Haverstock, a downy-cheeked young subaltern seconded from the Queen’s Dragoon Guards. He was in his room at the far end of Government House with the window closed and the air conditioning at full blast. He was also, so he would say, playing his radio and listening to music from Radio Nassau. He, too, heard nothing.

By the time Jefferson came out into the garden to consult Sir Marston over some point concerning the preparation of the lamb cutlets, the assassin had clearly withdrawn through the steel gate and had gone. Jefferson arrived at the top of the steps leading down to the garden and saw his employer lying flat on his back, arms wide, as the second shot had thrown him, a dark blotch still spreading across the front of his dark-blue-cotton shirt.

At first, Jefferson thought his master had fainted, and he ran down to help him up. When he saw the hole in the chest more clearly, he stood back, disbelieving for a moment, then ran panic-stricken to fetch Lieutenant Haverstock. The young army officer arrived seconds later, still in his boxer shorts.

Haverstock did not panic. He examined the body without touching it, established that Sir Marston was extremely dead, and sat down in the ex-Governor’s chair to ponder what to do.

A previous commanding officer had written of Lieutenant Haverstock, “Wonderful breeding, not terribly bright,” as if he were a Cavalry horse rather than a Cavalry officer. But in the Cavalry they tend to have their priorities about right: A good horse is irreplaceable, while a subaltern is not.

Haverstock sat in the chair a few feet from the body and thought the matter through, while a wide-eyed Jefferson watched from the top of the stairs that led to the verandah. The subaltern decided that (a) he had a dead Governor on his hands, (b) someone had shot him and escaped, and (c) he should inform a higher authority. The problem was, the Gov­ernor was the highest authority, or had been. At this point, Lady Moberley came home.

Jefferson heard the crunch of the wheels of the official Jaguar limousine on the gravel of the front drive and rushed out through the hallway to intercept her. His breaking of the news was lucid, if not very tactful. He confronted her in the hall and said, “Oh, Lady, de Governor been shot. He dead.”

Lady Moberley hurried to the verandah to look down and was met by Haverstock coming up the steps. He assisted her to her bedroom and comforted her as she lay down. She seemed more bewildered than grief-stricken, as if worried lest the Foreign Office might now play merry hell with her hus­band’s career.

Having got her settled, Lieutenant Haverstock dispatched Jefferson to summon the island’s only doctor—who also hap­pened to be the island’s only coroner—and Chief Inspector Jones, who was the doctor/coroner’s nephew. The lieutenant instructed the distraught butler to explain nothing to them, simply to ask each man to come urgently to Government House.

It was a fruitless request. Poor Jefferson told Inspector Jones the news in the hearing of three wide-eyed constables, and Dr. Caractacus Jones in front of his housekeeper. Like wildfire the news spread, even as the uncle and his nephew hurried to Government House.

While Jefferson was away, Lieutenant Haverstock pon­dered how to tell London. The residence had not been equipped with modern or secure communication systems. It had never been thought necessary to do so. Apart from the open phone line, the Governor’s messages had always gone to London via the much more substantial British High Com­mission in Nassau, the Bahamas. For this, an elderly C2 system was used. It sat on a side table in the Governor’s private office.

To look at, it was an ordinary Telex machine of the type known to, and dreaded by, foreign correspondents the world over. Connection was made to Nassau by tapping in the usual code and securing an acknowledgment from the other end. The Telex could then be switched to encrypted mode through a second box that sat beside the Telex machine. Any message sent would then appear “in clear” on the paper in front of the sender and would be automatically decoded at the Nassau end. In between the two points, it would be in code.

The trouble was, to operate the encoder, one had to insert corrugated disks according to the day of the month. These disks were kept in the Governor’s safe, which was locked. The dead man’s private secretary, Myrtle, had the combina­tion of the safe, but she was away visiting her parents on Tortola in the Virgin Islands. During her absences, the Gov­ernor was wont to send his own messages. He too knew the safe’s combination; Haverstock did not.

Eventually, Haverstock simply rang the High Commission in Nassau via the telephone exchange and told them verbally. After twenty minutes, an incandescent First Secretary called him back for confirmation, listened to his explanation, and told him crisply to seal Government House and hold the fort until backup could arrive from Nassau or London. The First Secretary then radioed a top-secret and coded message to the Foreign Office in London. It was already six P.M. and dark in the Caribbean. It was eleven P.M. in London, and the message went to the night duty officer. He called a senior official of the Caribbean desk at his home in Chobham, and the wheels began to roll.

On Sunshine, the news went through Port Plaisance within two hours, and on his regular evening call a radio ham told a fellow enthusiast in Chevy Chase, near Washington. The American ham, being a public-spirited fellow, called the As­sociated Press, which was dubious but finally emitted a dis­patch that began, “The Governor of the British Caribbean Dependency known as the Barclay Islands may have been shot dead by an unknown assassin this evening, according to unconfirmed reports from the tiny group of islands.”

The dispatch, written by a night duty subeditor who had consulted a large map with an even larger magnifying glass, went on to explain where and what the islands were.

In London, where by now it was the small hours of the morning, Reuters took the story off its rival’s tape and tried to get confirmation from the Foreign Office. Just before dawn, the Foreign Office admitted it had received a report to that effect and that the appropriate steps were being taken.

The appropriate steps had involved the waking of a consid­erable number of people scattered in their various homes in and around London. Satellites operated by America’s Na­tional Reconnaissance Office noted heavy radio traffic be­tween London and its High Commission in Nassau, and the obedient machines reported down to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade. They told the CIA, which already knew because they read the Associated Press. About a billion dollars worth of technology worked it out three hours after a radio ham with a homemade set in a shack on the side of Spyglass Hill had told a pal in Chevy Chase.

In London, the Foreign Office alerted the Home Office, and they in turn raised Sir Peter Imbert, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, asking for a senior detective to be sent out immediately. The Commissioner woke Simon Crawshaw of the Specialist Operations Division, who got on to the Commander controlling his Serious Crimes Branch.

Commander Braithwaite rang through to the twenty-four-hour Reserve Office and asked, “Who’s in the frame?”

The Reserve Office duty sergeant consulted his roster in New Scotland Yard. The RO at the Yard is a small office whose duty is to maintain a list of senior detectives available at short notice in the event of an urgent request to assist a police authority outside the metropolitan area. The detective at the top of the list has to be available to move at one hour’s notice. The man next in line must move at six hours’ notice, and the third one on twenty-four-hour notice.

“Detective Chief Superintendent Craddock, sir,” said the duty sergeant. Then his eye caught a note pinned to the side of the roster. “No, sir, sorry. He has to be at the Old Bailey to give evidence at eleven this morning.”

“Who’s next?” growled the Commander from his home at West Drayton, out near Heathrow Airport.

“Mr. Hannah, sir.”

“And who’s his Detective Inspector?”

“Wetherall, sir.”

“Ask Mr. Hannah to call me at home. Now,” said the Commander.

Thus it was that just after four A.M., on a bitter, black December morning, the phone rang on a bedside table in Croydon and woke Detective Chief Superintendent Desmond Hannah. He listened to the instruction from the Reserve Office, and then, as bidden, he called a number in West Drayton.

“Bill? Des Hannah. What’s up?”

He listened for five minutes, then asked, “Bill, where the hell is Sunshine?”

Back on the island, Dr. Caractacus Jones had examined the body and pronounced it very dead. Darkness had descended over the garden, and he worked by flashlight. Not that there was much he could do. He was a general practitioner, not a forensic pathologist. He looked after the islanders’ general health as best he could, and he had a small surgery for the treatment of cuts and bruises. He had delivered more babies than he could recall, and he had removed ten times that number of fish hooks. As a doctor, he could issue a death certificate, and as a coroner, issue a burial certificate. But he had never cut up a dead Governor, and he did not intend to start now.

Serious injuries and maladies needing complex operations were always flown to Nassau, where they had a fine modern hospital with all the facilities for operations and post-mor­tems. He did not even have a mortuary.

As Dr. Jones finished his examination, Lieutenant Haverstock returned from the private office.

“Our people in Nassau say that a senior officer will be sent from Scotland Yard,” he announced. “Till then, we must keep everything just as it was.”

Chief Inspector Jones had posted a constable on the front door to keep away the sightseers, whose faces had already begun to appear at the front gate. He had prowled the garden and discovered the steel door through which the assassin had apparently entered and left. It had been pulled closed by the departing killer, which was why Haverstock had not noticed it. Inspector Jones at once posted a second constable outside the door and ordered him to keep everyone away from it. It might contain fingerprints that the man from Scotland Yard would need.

Outside in the darkness the constable sat down, leaned his back against the wall, and promptly fell asleep.

Inside the garden, Inspector Jones pronounced, “Every­thing must be left untouched until morning. The body must not be moved.”

“Don’t be a damned fool, boy,” said his uncle, Dr. Jones. “It will go rotten. It is already.”

He was right. In the heat of the Caribbean, bodies are normally interred within twenty-four hours. The alternative is unspeakable. A crowd of flies was already buzzing over the dead Governor’s chest and eyes. The three men considered their problem, as Jefferson tended to Lady Moberley.

“It will have to be the ice house,” said Dr. Jones at length. “There’s nowhere else.”

They had to agree he was right. The ice house, powered by the municipal generator, was down on the dock. Haverstock took the dead man’s shoulders, and Chief Inspector Jones took his feet. With some difficulty they maneuvered the still-limp body up the stairs, across the sitting room, past the office, and out into the hall. Lady Moberley put her head around the corner of her bedroom door, glanced over the banisters as her late husband went across the hall, uttered a series of “oh-oh-oh-ohs,” and retired again.

They realized in the hall that they could not carry Sir Marston all the way to the docks. The trunk of the Jaguar was considered for a moment, but it was rejected as being too small and not very seemly.

A police Land-Rover turned out to be the answer. Space was made in the back, and the former Governor was eased inside. Even with his shoulders against the rear of the front seats, his legs hung over the tailgate. Dr. Jones pushed them inside and closed the rear door. Sir Marston slumped, head forward, like someone returning from a very long and very liquid party.

With Inspector Jones at the wheel and Lieutenant Haverstock beside him, the Land-Rover drove down to the docks, followed by most of the population of Port Plaisance. There Sir Marston was laid out with greater ceremony in the ice house, where the temperature was well below zero.

Her Majesty’s late Governor of the Barclay Islands spent his first night in the afterworld sandwiched between a large martin and a very fine blackfin tuna. In the morning the expression on all three faces was much the same.

Dawn, of course, came five hours earlier in London than in Sunshine. At seven o’clock, when the first fingers of the new day were touching the roofs of Westminster Abbey, Detective Chief Superintendent Hannah was closeted with Commander Braithwaite in the latter’s office in New Scotland Yard.

“You take off just before twelve on the scheduled BA flight from Heathrow for Nassau,” said the Commander. “Tickets in first class are being arranged. The flight was full—it has meant easing another couple off the plane.”

“And the team?” asked Hannah. “Will they be in club or economy?”

“Ah, the team, yes. Fact is, Des, they’re being provided in Nassau. The Foreign Office is arranging it.”

Desmond Hannah smelled a large rat. He was fifty-one, an old-fashioned thief-taker who had worked his way rung by rung up the ladder from bobby on the beat—testing door locks on the streets of London, helping old ladies cross the road, and directing tourists—to the rank of Chief Superintendent. He had one year to go before retirement from the Force and was probably destined like so many of his kind to accept a less stressful job as a senior security officer for a major corporation.

He knew he would never make Commander rank, not now, and four years earlier he had been seconded to the Murder Squad of the Serious Crimes Branch of the Specialist Opera­tions Division, a slot known as the elephants’ graveyard. You went in a hefty bull, and you came out a pile of bones.

But he liked things to be done right. On any assignment, even an overseas one, a Murder Squad detective could expect a backup team of at least four: a scene-of-crime officer, or SOCO, at least a sergeant; a lab liaison sergeant; a photogra­pher; and a fingerprint man. The forensic aspect could be crucial, and usually was.

“I want them from here, Bill.”

“Can’t be done, Des. I’m afraid the Foreign Office is calling the shots on this one. They’re paying for it all, according to the Home Office. And it seems they’re penny-pinching. The High Commission in Nassau has arranged for the Bahamian Police to provide the forensic backup. I’m sure they’re very good.”

“Post-mortem? They doing that, too?”

“No,” said Commander Braithwaite reassuringly, “we’re sending Ian West out to Nassau for that. The body’s still on the island. As soon as you’ve had a look, get it shipped back to Nassau in a stiff-bag. Ian will be following you twenty-four hours later. By the time he gets to Nassau, you should have got the body to Nassau in time for him to go to work.”

Hannah grunted. He was slightly mollified. At least in Dr. Ian West, he would have one of the best forensic pathologists in the world.

“Why can’t Ian come to this Sunshine place and do the PM there?” he asked.

“They don’t have a mortuary on Sunshine,” the Com­mander explained patiently.

“So where’s the body?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hell, it’ll be half decomposed by the time I get there,” said Hannah. He could not have known that at that hour Sir Marston was not half decomposed. He was rock solid. Dr. West could not have gotten a chisel into him.

“I want ballistics done here,” he said. “If I get the bullet or bullets back, I want Alan to have them. The bullets could tie up the whole thing.”

“All right,” conceded the Commander. “Tell the High Commission people we need them back here in the diplomatic bag. Now, why don’t you get a decent breakfast? The car will be here for you at nine. Your Detective Inspector will have the murder bag. He’ll meet you at the car.

“What about the press?” asked Hannah as he left.

“Full cry, I’m afraid. It’s not in the papers yet. The news only broke in the small hours. But all the wire services have run it. God knows where they got it so fast. There may be a few reptiles at the airport trying to get on the same flight.”

Just before nine, Desmond Hannah appeared with his suit­case in the inner courtyard, where a Rover was waiting for him, a uniformed sergeant at the wheel. He looked around for Harry Wetherall, the Detective Inspector with whom he had worked for three years. He was nowhere to be seen. A pink-faced young man of about thirty came hurrying up. He carried a murder bag, a small suitcase that contained a variety of swabs, cloths, capsules, vials, plastic bags, scrapers, bottles, tweezers, and probes—the basic tools of the trade for discov­ering, removing, and retaining clues.

“Mr. Hannah?” said the young man.

“Who are you?”

“DI Parker, sir.”

“Where’s Wetherall?”

“He’s ill, I’m afraid. Asian flu or something. The Reserve Office asked me to step in. Always keep my passport in my drawer just in case. It’s awfully good to be working with you.”

Blast Wetherall! thought Hannah. Damn his eyes!

They rode out to Heathrow largely in silence. At least, Hannah was silent. Parker (“It’s Peter, really”) expatiated on his knowledge of the Caribbean. He had been there twice, with Club Med.

“Have you ever been to the Caribbean, sir?” he asked.

“No,” said Hannah, and lapsed back into silence.

At Heathrow, he and Parker were expected. Passport ex­amination was a formality. The murder bag did not pass through the X-ray scanners, where it would have caused much interest. Instead, an official led the pair around the formalities and straight to the first class lounge.

The press was indeed in evidence, though Hannah did not see them until he was aboard the aircraft. Two organizations with money to spend had persuaded booked passengers to vacate their seats and take a later flight. Others were trying to get on the two Miami flights of the morning, while their head offices arranged charter planes from Miami into Sunshine. Camera teams from BBC TV, Independent TV News, and British Satellite Broadcasting were heading for the Barclays, spearheaded by their reporters. Reporter-photographer teams from five major newspapers were also in the melee.

In the lounge, Hannah was approached by a panting young sprog who introduced himself as being from the Foreign Office. He had a large file.

“We’ve put together some background briefing for you,” he said, handing over the file. “Geography, economy, popu­lation of the Barclays, that sort of thing. And, of course, a background on the present political situation.”

Hannah’s heart sank. A nice domestic murder would prob­ably have cleared itself up in a few days. But if this was political ... They were called for their flight.

After takeoff the irrepressible Parker took champagne from the stewardess and answered questions about himself with great pleasure. He was twenty-nine—young for a DI—and was married to a real estate agent called Elaine. They lived in the new and fashionable Dockland area, quite close to Canary Wharf. His own passion was a Morgan 4+4 sports car, but Elaine drove a Ford Escort GTI.