The Deceiver

“Convertible, of course,” said Parker.

“Of course,” murmured Hannah. I’ve got a dinky on my hands, he thought. Dual-income-no-kids. A high-flyer.

Parker had gone straight from school to a red-brick univer­sity and gotten a degree, starting with PPE (politics, philoso­phy, and economics) and switching to law. He had joined the Metropolitan Police straight from there, and after the manda­tory cadetship he had worked for a year in the outer suburbs before going on the Bramshill Police College Special Course. From there, he had spent four years in the Commissioner’s Force Planning Unit.

They were over County Cork when Hannah closed the Foreign Office file and asked gently, “And how many murder investigations have you been on?”

“Well, this is my first, actually. That’s why I was so pleased to be available this morning. But in my spare time I study criminology. I think it’s so important to understand the crim­inal mind.”

Desmond Hannah turned his face to the porthole in pure misery. He had a dead Governor, a pending election, a Bahamian forensic team, and a rookie DI who wanted to understand the criminal mind. After lunch, he dozed all the way to Nassau. He even managed to forget about the press. Until Nassau.

The Associated Press news bulletin of the previous evening had been too late to make the British newspapers in London, with their five-hour disadvantage, but it had been just in time to catch the Miami Herald before that paper was put to bed.

At seven in the morning, Sam McCready was sitting on his balcony sipping his first prebreakfast coffee of the day and gazing out over the azure sea when he heard the familiar rustle of the Herald coming under his door.

He padded across the room, took the paper, and returned to the balcony. The AP story was at the bottom of the front page, where a piece about a record-breaking lobster had been scrapped to make way for it. The story was just the AP dispatch, referring to unconfirmed reports. The headline said simply: BRITISH GOVERNOR SLAIN? McCready read it several times.

“How very naughty,” he murmured, and withdrew to the bathroom to get washed, shaved, and dressed. At nine, he dismissed his cab outside the British Consulate in Miami, went in, and made himself known—as Mr. Frank Dillon of the Foreign Office. He had to wait half an hour for the arrival of the Consul, then he got his private meeting. By ten, he had what he had come for, a secure line to the embassy in Washington. He spoke for twenty minutes to the Head of the SIS Station, a colleague he knew well from London days and with whom he had stayed the previous week while attending the CIA seminar.

The Washington-based colleague confirmed the story and added a few more details that had just arrived from London.

“I thought I might pop over,” said McCready.

“Not really our cup of tea, is it?” suggested the Head of Station.

“Probably not, but it might be worth a look. I’ll need to draw some funds, and I’ll need a communicator.”

“I’ll clear it with the Consul. Could you put him on the line?”

An hour later, McCready left the consulate with a wad of dollars, duly signed for, and an attaché case containing a portable telephone and an encrypter with a range that would enable him to make secure calls to the consulate in Miami and have them passed on to Washington.

He returned to the Sonesta Beach, packed, checked out, and called an air taxi company at the airport. They agreed on a two P.M. takeoff for the ninety-minute run to Sunshine.

Eddie Favaro was also up early. He had already decided there was only one place he could start—the game-fishing commu­nity down at the fishing quay. Wherever Julio Gomez had spent his vacation, a large part of it surely had been there.

Having no transport, he walked. It was not far. Almost every wall and tree he passed bore a poster urging the island­ers to vote for one candidate or the other. The faces of both men—one big, round, and jolly, the other smooth, urbane, and paler in tone—beamed from the posters.

Some had been torn down or defaced, whether by children or by adherents to the other candidate, he could not tell. All had been professionally printed. On a warehouse wall near the docks was another message, crudely painted. It said, WE WANT REFERENDUM. As he passed, a black jeep carrying four men raced up.

The jeep screeched to a halt. The four men wore hard expressions, multicolored shirts, and wraparound black glasses that hid their eyes. Four black heads stared at the message, then swiveled toward Favaro as if he were respon­sible for it. Favaro shrugged as if to say, “Nothing to do with me.” The four impassive faces stared at him until he rounded a corner. Then he heard the jeep, revving hard, drive away.

At the fishing quay, groups of men were discussing the same news that had occupied those in the hotel lobby. He interrupted one group to ask who took visitors fishing. One of the men pointed farther down the quay to a man working on a boat.

Favaro crouched on the quay and made his inquiry. He showed the fisherman a picture of Julio Gomez.

The man shook his head. “Sure, he was here last week. But he go out with Jimmy Dobbs. That’s Jimmy’s boat over there, the Gulf Lady.”

There was nobody on the Gulf Lady. He leaned on a mooring post to wait. Like all cops, he knew the meaning of patience. Information gathered in a matter of seconds was for TV thrillers. In real life, you spent most of your time waiting. Jimmy Dobbs showed up at ten.

“Mr. Dobbs?”

“That’s me.”

“Hi—my name’s Eddie. I’m from Florida. This your boat?”

“Sure is. You here for the fishing?”

“That’s my game,” said Favaro. “Friend of mine recom­mended you.”

“That’s nice.”

“Julio Gomez. You remember him?”

The black man’s open, honest face clouded. He reached into the Gulf Lady and took a rod from a holder. He examined the jig lure and the hook for several seconds, then handed the rod to Favaro.

“You like yellowtail snapper? They some good snapper right under the dock. Down at the far end.”

Together they walked to the far end of the jetty, out of earshot of anyone else. Favaro wondered why.

Jimmy Dobbs took the rod back and cast expertly across the water. He reeled in slowly, letting the brightly colored jig wriggle and turn beneath the surface. A small blue runner made a dart for the lure and turned away.

“Julio Gomez dead,” Jimmy Dobbs said gravely.

“I know,” said Favaro. “I’d like to find out why. He fished with you a lot, I think.”

“Every year. He good man, nice guy.”

“He tell you what his job was in Miami?”

“Yep. Once.”

“You ever tell anyone else?”

“Nope. You a friend or a colleague?”

“Both, Jimmy. Tell me, when did you last see Julio?”

“Right here, Thursday evening. We’d been out all day. He booked me for Friday morning. Never showed up.”

“No,” said Favaro. “He was at the airstrip, trying to get a flight to Miami. In a hurry. He picked the wrong plane—blew up over the sea. Why did we have to walk down here to talk?”

Jimmy Dobbs hooked a two-pound horse-eye jack and handed the shivering rod to Favaro. The American reeled in. He was inexpert. The jack took some slack line and jumped the hook.

“They some bad people on these islands,” he said simply.

Favaro realized he could now identify an odor he had smelled in the town: It was fear. He knew about fear. No Miami cop is stranger to that unique aroma. Somehow, fear had now come to paradise.

“When he left you, he was a happy man?”

“Yep. One fine fish he was taking home for supper. He was happy. No problems.”

“Where did he go from here?”

Jimmy Dobbs looked surprised. “To Mrs. Macdonald’s, of course. He always stayed with her.”

Mrs. Macdonald was not at home. She was out shopping. Favaro decided to come back later. First, he would try the airport. He returned to Parliament Square. There were two taxis, but both drivers were at lunch. There was nothing he could do about it; he crossed the square to the Quarter Deck to eat and wait for them to come back. He took a verandah seat from where he could watch for the taxis. All around him was the same excited buzz that had pervaded breakfast—the talk being only of the murder of the Governor the previous evening.

“They sending a senior detective from Scotland Yard,” one of the group near Favaro announced.

Two men entered the bar. They were big, and they said not a word. The conversation died. The two men removed every poster proclaiming the candidacy of Marcus Johnson and put up different ones. The new posters said, VOTE LIVINGSTONE, THE PEOPLE’S CANDIDATE. When they had finished, they left.

The waiter came over and set down grilled fish and a beer.

“Who were they?” asked Favaro.

“Election helpers of Mr. Livingstone,” the waiter said expressionlessly.

“People seem to be frightened of them.”

“No, sah.”

The waiter turned away, eyes blank. Favaro had seen that expression in interrogation rooms at the Metro-Dade head­quarters. Shutters come down behind the eyes. The message is, “There’s no one home.”

The jumbo carrying Superintendent Hannah and DI Parker touched down at Nassau at three P.M., local time. A senior officer of the Bahamian Police boarded first, identified the two men from Scotland Yard, introduced himself, and welcomed them to Nassau. He escorted them out of the cabin before the other passengers, then down to a waiting Land-Rover. The first gust of warm, balmy air swept over Hannah. In his London clothes he felt sticky at once.

The Bahamian officer took their baggage checks and handed them to a constable, who would extract the two valises from the rest of the baggage. Hannah and Parker were driven straight to the VIP lounge. There they met the British Deputy High Commissioner, Mr. Longstreet, and a more junior staffer called Bannister.

“I’ll be coming to Sunshine with you,” said Bannister. “Some problem over there with the communications. It seems they can’t get the Governor’s safe open. I’ll fix a new set, so you can talk to the High Commission here on a direct radio­telephone link. Secure, of course. And of course, we’ll have to get the body back when the coroner releases it.”

He sounded brisk and efficient. Hannah liked that. He met the four men from the forensic team provided by the Baham­ian Police as a courtesy. The conference took an hour.

Hannah looked down from the windows to the airport apron below. Thirty yards away, a chartered ten-seater was waiting to take him and his now-expanded party to Sunshine. Be­tween the building and the airplane, two camera teams had been set up to catch the moment. He sighed.

When the final details had been settled, the group left the VIP lounge and headed downstairs. Microphones were thrust at him, notepads held ready.

“Mr. Hannah, are you confident of an early arrest?” “Will this turn out to be a political murder?” “Is Sir Marston’s death linked to the election campaign?”

He nodded and smiled but said nothing. Flanked by Baham­ian constables, they all emerged from the building into the hot sunshine and headed for the aircraft. The TV cameras re­corded it all. When the official party had boarded, the jour­nalists raced away toward their own chartered planes, which had been obtained by the production of large wads of dollars or prechartered by the London offices. In an untidy gaggle the planes began to taxi for takeoff. It was four twenty-five.

At three-thirty, a small Cessna dropped its wings over Sun­shine and turned for the final run-in to the grass airstrip.

“Pretty wild place!” the American pilot shouted to the man beside him. “Beautiful, but from way back! I mean, they don’t have nothing here!”

“Short on technology,” agreed Sam McCready. He looked through the prespex at the dusty strip coming towards them. To the left of the strip were three buildings: a corrugated-iron hangar, a low shed with a red tin roof (the reception building), and a white cube with the British flag flying above it—the police hut. Outside the reception shed, a figure in a short-sleeved beach shirt was talking to a man in boxer shorts and singlet. A car stood nearby. The palm trees rose on either side of the Cessna, and the small plane thumped onto the grit. The buildings flashed past as the pilot settled his nose-wheel and lifted his flaps. At the far end of the strip, he turned around and began to taxi back.

“Sure, I remember that plane. It was dreadful when I heard later that those poor people were dead.”

Favaro found the baggage porter who had loaded the Navajo Chief the previous Friday morning. His name was Ben, and he always loaded the baggage. It was his job. Like most of the islanders, he was free-and-easy, honest, and prepared to talk.

Favaro produced a photograph. “Did you notice this man?”

“Sure. He was asking the owner of the plane for a lift to Key West.”

“How do you know?”

“Standing right next to me,” said Ben.

“Did he seem worried, anxious, in a hurry?”

“So would you be, man! He done told the owner his wife called him and their kid was sick. The girl, she say that was real bad, they should help him. So the owner said he could ride with them to Key West.”

“Was there anyone else nearby?”

Ben thought for a while. “Only the other man helping load the luggage,” he said. “Employed by the owner, I think.”

“What did he look like, this other loader?”

“Never seen him before,” said Ben. “Black man, not from Sunshine. Bright-colored shirt, dark glasses. Didn’t say noth­ing.”

The Cessna rumbled up to the customs shed. Ben and Favaro shielded their eyes from the flying dust. Favaro saw a rumpled-looking man of medium build get out, take a suitcase and attaché case from the locker, stand back, wave to the pilot, and go into the shed.

Favaro was pensive as he studied the scene. Julio Gomez did not tell lies. But he had no wife and child. He must have been desperate to get on that flight and home to Miami. But why? Knowing his partner, Favaro was convinced that he had been under threat. The bomb was not for Klinger. It was for Gomez.

He thanked Ben and wandered back to the taxi that waited for him. As he climbed in, a British voice at his elbow said, “I know it’s a lot to ask, but could I hitch a ride into town? The cab rank seems to be empty.”

It was the man who had just gotten off the Cessna. “Sure,” said Favaro. “Be my guest.”

“Awfully kind,” said the Englishman as he put his gear in the trunk. On the five-minute ride into town, he introduced himself. “Frank Dillon,” he said.

“Eddie Favaro,” said the American. “You here for the fishing?”

“Alas, no. Not really my scene. Just here on vacation for a bit of piece and quiet.”

“No chance,” said Favaro. “There’s chaos here. There’s a whole crowd of London detectives due in soon, and a whole bunch of journalists. Last night someone shot the Governor in his garden.”

“Good Lord!” said the Englishman. He seemed genuinely shocked.

Favaro dropped him on the steps of the Quarter Deck, dismissed the cab, and walked the few hundred yards through the back streets to Mrs. Macdonald’s boarding house. Across Parliament Square, a big man was addressing a subdued crowd of citizens from the back of a flat truck. It was Mr. Livingstone himself. Favaro caught the booming roar of his oratory.

“And I say, brothers and sisters, you should share in the wealth of these islands! You should share in the fish caught from the sea, you should share the fine houses of the few rich who live up on the hill, you should share the ...”

The crowd did not look very enthusiastic. The truck was flanked by the same two large men who had torn down the Johnson posters in the Quarter Deck Hotel in the lunch hour and put up their own. There were several similar men through­out the crowd seeking to start a cheering response. They cheered alone. Favaro walked on. This time Mrs. Macdonald was in.

Desmond Hannah touched down at twenty to six. It was almost dark. Four other, lighter aircraft had just made it in time and were able to depart back to Nassau before the light faded. Their cargoes were the BBC, ITV, the Sunday Times man sharing with the Sunday Telegraph, and Sabrina Tennant and her team from BSB, the British Satellite Broadcasting company.

Hannah, Parker, Bannister, and the four Bahamian officers were met by Lieutenant Haverstock and Inspector Jones, the former in a cream tropical suit and the latter immaculate in his uniform. On the off-chance of earning some dollars, both of Port Plaisance’s taxis and two small vans had also ap­peared. All were snapped up.

By the time formalities were completed and the cavalcade had descended on the Quarter Deck Hotel, darkness had fallen. Hannah decreed there was no point in beginning inves­tigations by flashlight, but he asked that the guard on Govern­ment House be continued through the night. Inspector Jones, much impressed to be working with a real Detective Chief Superintendent from Scotland Yard, barked out the orders.

Hannah was tired. It might be just after six in the islands, but it was eleven P.M. on his body clock, and he had been up since four A.M. He dined alone with Parker and Lieutenant Haverstock, which enabled him to get a firsthand account of what had actually happened the previous evening. Then he turned in.

The press found the bar with unerring and practiced speed. Rounds were ordered and consumed. The usual jocular banter of the press corps on a foreign assignment grew louder. No one noticed a man in a rumpled tropical suit drinking alone at the end of the bar and listening to their chatter.

“Where did he go after he left here?” Eddie Favaro asked Mrs. Macdonald. He was seated at her kitchen table while the good lady served up some of her conch chowder.

“He went over to the Quarter Deck for a beer,” she said.

“Was he in a cheerful mood?”

Her lilting singsong voice filled the room. “Bless you, Mr. Favaro, he was a happy man. A fine fish for supper, I was preparing him. He said he would be back at eight o’clock. I told him not to be late, or the dorado spoil and go dry. He laughed and said he would be on time.”

“And was he?”

“No, man. He was an hour and more late. The fish done spoil. And him talking nonsense.”

“What did he say? This ... nonsense.”

“He didn’t say much. Seemed worried bad. Then he said he seen a scorpion. Now you finish this soup up. That one bowl of God’s goodness in there.”

Favaro stiffened, his spoon halfway to his lips. “Did he say a scorpion, or the scorpion?”

She frowned at the effort of recollection.

“I thought he said a. But he mighta said the,” she admitted.

Favaro finished his soup, thanked her, and went back to the hotel. The bar was rowdy. He found a place near the far end, away from the press crowd. The end stool was occupied by the Englishman from the airstrip, who raised his glass in salute but said nothing.

“Thank God for that,” thought Favaro. The crumpled limey seemed at least to have the gift of silence.

Eddie Favaro needed to think. He knew how his friend and partner had died, and he thought he knew why. In some mysterious manner, here in these paradise islands, Julio Gomez had seen—or thought he had seen—the coldest killer either of them had ever met.

Chapter 3

Desmond Hannah began work the following morning just after seven, while the cool of dawn still lay on the land. His starting place was Government House.

He had a long interview with the butler, Jefferson, who related to him the Governor’s unswerving habit of retiring to his walled garden about five each afternoon, to take a whiskey and soda before the sun went down. He asked how many people would have known of this ritual. Jefferson frowned in concentration.

“Many people, sir. Lady Moberley, Lieutenant Haverstock, myself, Miss Myrtle the secretary—but she away with her parents on Tortola. Visitors to the house who had seen him there. Many people.”

Jefferson described exactly where he had found the body, but he averred that he had not heard the shot. Later, this use of the word shot would convince Hannah that the butler was telling the truth. But he did not yet know how many shots there had been.

The forensic team from Nassau was working with Parker on the grass, looking for spent cartridges ejected from the killer’s gun. They searched deep, for careless feet might have trodden the small brass case or cases into the earth. The feet of Lieutenant Haverstock, Inspector Jones, and his uncle Dr. Jones had walked all over the grass on the night of the killing, erasing all chances of useful footprints.

Hannah examined the steel gate in the garden wall as the Bahamian fingerprint man dusted the steel for possible prints. There were none. Hannah estimated that if the killer had entered by the gate, as seemed to be the case, and fired immediately, the Governor would have been standing between the gate and the coral wall below the steps that led to his reception area above. If any bullet had passed through him, it should have hit that wall.

Hannah switched the attention of the team crawling about the lawn to the path of crushed conch shells that ran along the base of the wall. Then he went back to the house to talk to Lady Moberley.

The Governor’s widow awaited him in the drawing room where Sir Marston had received the protest delegation from the Committee for Concerned Citizens. She was a thin, pale woman with mousy hair and skin that had been yellowed by years in the tropics.

Jefferson appeared with a chilled lager beer on a tray. Hannah hesitated, then took it. It was, after all, a very hot morning.

Lady Moberley took a grapefruit juice. She looked at the beer with raw hunger. Oh dear, thought Hannah.

There was nothing really that she could contribute. So far as she knew, her husband had no enemies. Political crime was unheard of in the islands. Yes, the election campaigns had caused some small controversy, but all within the ambit of the democratic process. She thought.

She herself had been five miles away at the time of the shooting, visiting a small mission hospital on the slopes of Spyglass Hill. It had been endowed by Mr. Marcus Johnson, a very fine man and a great philanthropist, after his return to his native Barclays six months ago. She had agreed to become patroness of the facility. She had been in the official Jaguar, being driven by the Governor’s chauffeur, Stone.

Hannah thanked her and rose. Parker was outside tapping at the window. Hannah went out to the terrace. Parker was in a state of great excitement.

“You were right, sir! Here it is.”

He held out his right hand. In the palm, badly distorted, was the flattened remnant of what had once been a lead bullet. Hannah stared at him bleakly.

“Thanks for handling it,” he said. “Next time, shall we try tweezers and a plastic bag?”

Parker went pale, then scuttled down to the garden, put the bullet back on the conch-shell gravel, opened his murder bag, and took out a pair of tweezers. Several of the Bahamians grinned.

Parker laboriously lifted the crushed bullet with the tweez­ers and dropped it into a small clear bag.

“Now, wrap the bag in cotton wool and place it inside a glass jar with a screw top,” said Hannah.

Parker did as he was told.

“Thank you. Now put it in the murder bag until we can send it to Ballistics,” said Hannah. He sighed. This was going to be a hard slog. He was beginning to think he would have done better alone.

Dr. Caractacus Jones arrived, as requested. Hannah was glad to be able to talk to a fellow professional. Dr. Jones explained how he had been summoned from his home and surgery just after six the evening before last by Jefferson, who had been sent by Lieutenant Haverstock. Jefferson had told him he should come at once, as the Governor had been shot. The butler had not mentioned that the shooting was fatal, so Dr. Jones had brought his bag and driven over to see what he could do. As it turned out, the answer was, nothing.

Hannah led Dr. Jones into the late Sir Marston’s office and asked him, in his capacity as the island’s coroner, to sign a release for the body to be removed that afternoon to Nassau for a post-mortem.

In British jurisdiction, the court with the highest of all authorities is actually not the House of Lords but a coroner’s court. It takes precedence over every other kind of court. To remove the body from the island of Sunshine to the territory of the Bahamas, a coroner’s order was required. Dr. Jones signed without demur, and then it was legal. Bannister, the junior staffer from the Nassau High Commission who had accompanied them to Barclay’s, typed the release on Government House notepaper. He had just installed the new com­munications system and was prepared to transmit.

Hannah then asked Dr. Jones to show him the body. Down at the dockside, the ice house was opened, and two of Inspec­tor Jones’s police constables slid the cadaver of their former Governor, now like a frozen log, out from between the fish and carried him to the shade of the nearby warehouse, where they laid him on a door supported by two trestles.

For the press—now joined by a team from CNN out of Atlanta who had tailed Hannah all morning—this was wonder­ful stuff. They photographed it all. Even the Governor’s bed companion of the previous thirty-six hours, the marlin, got a spot on CNN’s Headline News.

Hannah ordered the warehouse doors closed to keep them out, and he made as thorough an examination of the rigid body beneath the layer of ice as he could. Dr. Jones stood by his side.

After peering at the frozen hole in the Governor’s chest, Hannah noticed a neat, circular tear in the sleeve of the left arm. Slowly he kneaded the fabric between his finger and thumb until his own hand’s warmth made the material more pliable. The frost melted. There were two such holes in the shirt sleeve, one in and one out. But the skin was not marked. He turned to Parker.

“Two bullets, minimum,” he said quietly. “We are missing a second bullet.”

“Probably still in the body,” said Dr. Jones.

“No doubt,” said Hannah. “But damned if I can see any sign of entry or exit holes. The flesh is too puckered up by the cold. Still, Parker, I want the area behind where the Governor was standing or sitting gone over again. And again. Just in case it’s there.”

He ordered the dead Governor replaced in the ice house. The cameras whirred again. The questions rained in. He nodded and smiled and said, “All in good time, ladies and gentlemen. It’s the early days yet.”

“But we’ve recovered a bullet,” Parker said proudly. The cameras all swiveled toward him.

Hannah began to think the assassin had shot the wrong man. This was turning into a press conference. He did not want one yet. “There’ll be a full statement this evening,” he said. “For the moment, it’s back to work. Thank you.”

He hustled Parker into the police Land-Rover, and they went back to Government House. Hannah asked Bannister to call Nassau over the new system and ask for a plane with stretcher, trolley, body bag, and two attendants by midafternoon. Then he accompanied Dr. Jones to his car. They were alone.

“Tell me, doctor, is there anyone on this island who really knows everything that goes on and everyone who lives here?”

Dr. Caractacus Jones grinned. “There’s me,” he said. “But no, I couldn’t hazard a guess as to’ who did this. Anyway, I only returned from Barbados ten years ago. For the real history of these islands, you should visit Missy Coltrane. She’s like ... the grandmother of the Barclays. If you want someone to guess who done this, she might.”

The doctor drove off in his battered Austin Mayflower. Hannah walked over to the doctor’s nephew, Chief Inspector Jones, who stood beside the Land-Rover still.

“I’d like you to do something, Chief Inspector,” Hannah said politely. “Would you go to the airstrip and check with the passport officer? Has anyone left the island since the killing? Anyone at all? Except the pilots of aircraft who arrived, turned around, and flew away without leaving the airstrip.”

Inspector Jones threw up a salute and left.

The Governor’s Jaguar was in the forecourt, and Oscar Stone, the chauffeur, was polishing it. Parker and the rest of the team were behind the house looking for the missing bullet.

“Oscar?” Hannah asked. “Do you know Missy Coltrane?”

“Oh yes, sah. She fine lady.”

“Do you know where she lives?”

“Yessah. Flamingo House, top of Spyglass Hill.”

Hannah checked his watch. It was half-past eleven, and the heat lay heavy. “Will she be in at this hour?” Oscar looked puzzled. “Of course, sah.”

“Take me to see her, will you?”

The Jaguar wound its way out of town, then began to climb the lower slopes of Spyglass Hill, six miles west of Port Plaisance. It was an old Mark IX model, a classic by now, made the old-fashioned way, redolent of aromatic leather and burnished walnut. Hannah sat back and watched the land­scape drift by.

The lowland scrub gave way to the greener vegetation of the upland slopes, and they passed small plots of maize, mangoes, and papayas. Wooden shacks stood back from the road, fronted by dusty yards where chickens scratched. Small brown children heard the car coming and scampered to the roadside to wave frantically. Hannah waved back.

They passed the neat white children’s hospital that had been endowed by Marcus Johnson. Hannah glanced back and saw Port Plaisance sleeping in the heat. He could make out the red-roofed warehouse on the docks and the ice house next to it where the frozen Governor slept, the gritty sprawl of Parliament Square, the spire of the Anglican church, and the shingles of the Quarter Deck Hotel. Beyond, on the other side of town, shimmering in the haze, was the walled enclosure of Government House. Why on earth, he wondered, would anyone want to shoot the Governor?

They passed a neat bungalow that had once belonged to the late Mr. Barney Klinger, rounded two further curves, and emerged on the top of the hill. There stood a pink villa, Flamingo House.

Hannah pulled the wrought-iron bell chain by the door, and somewhere there was a low tinkle. A teenage girl answered the door, bare black legs emerging from a simple cotton frock.

“I’d like to see Missy Coltrane,” said Hannah.

She nodded and admitted him, showing him into a large and airy sitting room. Open double doors led to a balcony with spectacular views over the island and the glittering blue sea that stretched away to Andros in the Bahamas, far off below the horizon.

The room was cool despite having no air conditioning. Hannah noticed it had no electricity at all. Three burnished brass oil lamps stood on low tables. Cooling breezes wafted from the open balcony doors through to the open windows on the other side. The array of memorabilia indicated it was the home of an elderly person. Hannah sauntered around the room as he waited.

There were pictures on the wall, scores of them, and all of birds of the Caribbean, skillfully painted in delicate watercolors. The only portrait that was not of a bird was of a man in the full white uniform of a British Colonial Governor. He stood staring out at the room, gray-haired and gray-moustached, with a tanned, lined, and kindly face. Two rows of miniature medals covered the left breast of his tunic. Hannah peered to see the small label beneath the oil painting. It said, SIR ROBERT COLTRANE, K.B.E., GOVERNOR OF THE BARCLAY ISLANDS, 1945-1953. He held his white helmet, adorned with white cockerel feathers, in the crook of his right arm; his left hand rested on the pommel of his sword.

Hannah smiled ruefully. “Missy” Coltrane must in fact be Lady Coltrane, the former Governor’s widow. He moved farther round the wall to a display cabinet. Behind the glass, pinned to the hessian board, were the former Governor’s military trophies, collected and displayed by his widow. There was the deep purple ribbon of the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest award for gallantry in the field, and the date of its award, 1917. It was flanked by the Distinguished Service Cross and the Military Cross. Other items the warrior had carried on his campaigns were pinned to the board around the medals.

“He was a very brave man,” said a clear voice behind him.

Hannah spun around, embarrassed.

She had entered silently, the rubber tires of her wheelchair making no sound on the tiles. She was small and frail, with a cap of shining white curls and bright blue eyes.

Behind her stood the manservant who had pushed her in from the garden, a giant of awe-inspiring size. She turned to him.

“Thank you, Firestone. I’ll be all right now.”

He nodded and withdrew. She propelled herself a few feet farther into the room and gestured for Hannah to be seated. She smiled.

“The name? He was a foundling, discovered on a rubbish dump, in a Firestone tire. Now, you must be Detective Chief Superintendent Hannah from Scotland Yard. That’s a very high rank for these poor islands. What can I do for you?”

“I must apologize for calling you Missy Coltrane to your housemaid,” he said. “No one told me you were Lady Col­trane.”

“No more,” she said. “Here I am just Missy. They all call me that. I prefer it that way. Old habits die hard. As you may detect, I was not born British, but in South Carolina.”

“Your late husband”—Hannah nodded toward the por­trait—“was Governor here once.”

“Yes. We met in the war. Robert had been through the First War. He didn’t have to come back for a second dose, but he did. He got wounded again. I was a nurse. We fell in love, married in 1943, and had ten glorious years until he died. There were twenty-five years between our ages, but it didn’t matter a damn. After the war, the British Government made him Governor here. After he died, I stayed on. He was only fifty-six when he died. Delayed war wounds.”

Hannah calculated. Sir Robert would have been born in 1897, got his Victoria Cross at twenty. She would be sixty-eight, too young for a wheelchair. She seemed to read his mind with those bright blue eyes.

“I slipped and fell,” she said. “Ten years ago. Broke my back. But you didn’t come four thousand miles to discuss an old woman in a wheelchair. How can I help you?”

Hannah explained.

“The fact is, I cannot perceive a motive. Whoever shot Sir Marston must have hated him enough to do it. But among these islanders, I cannot perceive a motive. You know these people. Who would want to do it, and why?”

Lady Coltrane wheeled herself to the open window and stared out for a while.

“Mr. Hannah, you are right. I do know these people. I have lived here for forty-five years. I love these islands, and I love their people. I hope I may think that they love me.”

She turned around and gazed at him. “In the world scheme of things, these islands matter for nothing. Yet these people seem to have discovered something that has eluded the world outside. They have found out how to be happy. Just that—not rich, not powerful, but happy.

“Now London wants us to have independence. And two candidates have appeared to compete for the power: Mr. Johnson, who is very wealthy and has given large sums to the islands, for whatever motive; and Mr. Livingstone, a socialist, who wants to nationalize everything and divide it up among the poor. Very noble, of course. Mr. Johnson, with his plans for development and prosperity, and Mr. Livingstone, with his plans for equality—I know them both. Knew them when they were boys. Knew them when they left in their teens to pursue careers elsewhere. And now they are back.”

“You suspect either of them?” asked Hannah.

“Mr. Hannah, it is the men they have brought with them. Look at the men who surround them. These are violent men, Mr. Hannah. The islanders know it. There have been threats, beatings. Perhaps you should look at the entourages of these two men, Mr. Hannah.”

On the drive back down the mountain, Desmond Hannah thought it over. A contract hit? The killing of Sir Marston had all the earmarks of one. After lunch he thought he would have a talk with the two candidates and take a look at their entourages.

As Hannah returned to the sitting room at Government House, a plump Englishman with several chins above his clerical collar jumped up from a chair. Parker was with him.

“Ah, Chief, this is the Reverend Simon Prince, the local Anglican vicar. He has some interesting information for us.”

Hannah wondered where Parker had got the word Chief from. He hated it. Sir would do nicely. Desmond, later—much later. Maybe.

“Any luck with that second bullet?”

“Er, no—not yet.”

“Better get on with it,” said Hannah. Parker disappeared through the French windows. Hannah closed them.

“Well now, Mr. Prince. What would you like to tell me?”

“It’s Quince,” said the vicar. “Quince. This is all very distressing.”

“It is indeed. Especially for the Governor.”

“Oh, ah, yes. I meant really—well ... my coming to you with information about a fellow of the cloth. I don’t know whether I should, but I felt it might be germane.”

“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” suggested Hannah mildly.

The reverend calmed down and sat.

“It all happened last Friday,” he said. He told the story of the delegation from the Committee for Concerned Citizens and their rebuff by the Governor. When he had finished, Hannah frowned.

“What exactly did Reverend Drake say?” he asked.

“He said,” repeated Quince, “ ‘We have to get rid of that Governor and get ourselves a new one.’ ”

Hannah rose. “Thank you very much, Mr. Quince. May I suggest you say no more about this, but leave it with me?”

After the grateful vicar scuttled out, Hannah thought it over. He did not particularly like stool pigeons, but he would now have to check out the fire-breathing Baptist, Walter Drake, as well.

At that point Jefferson appeared with a tray of cold lobster tails in mayonnaise. Hannah sighed. There were some com­pensations to being sent four thousand miles from home. And if the Foreign Office was paying ... He poured himself a glass of chilled Chablis and started.

During Hannah’s lunch, Chief Inspector Jones came back from the airport. “No one has left the island,” he told Hannah, “not in the last forty hours.”

“Not legally, at any rate,” said Hannah. “Now, another chore, Mr. Jones. Do you keep a firearms register?”

“Of course.”

“Fine. Would you check it through for me and visit every­one who has a listed firearm on the islands? We are looking for a large-caliber handgun. Particularly a handgun that can­not be produced, or one that has been recently cleaned and gleams with fresh oil.”

“Fresh oil?”

“After being fired,” said Hannah.

“Ah, yes, of course.”

“One last thing, Chief Inspector. Does Reverend Drake have a registered firearm?”

“No. Of that I am certain.”

When he had gone Hannah asked to see Lieutenant Haverstock. “Do you by any chance own a service revolver or automatic?” he asked.

“Oh, I say, look here. You don’t really think ...” expos­tulated the young subaltern.

“It occurred to me it might have been stolen, or misappro­priated and replaced.”

“Ah, yes. See your point, old boy. Actually, no. No gun. Never brought one to the island. Got a ceremonial sword, though.”

“If Sir Marston had been stabbed, I might think of arresting you,” Hannah said mildly. “Any guns in Government House at all?”

“No, not to my knowledge. Anyway, the killer came from outside, surely? Through the garden wall?”

Hannah had examined the wrenched-off lock on the steel gate in the garden wall at first light. From the angles of the two broken hasps and the torn-apart bar of the great padlock, there was a little question that someone had used a long and very strong crowbar to force the old steel to snap like that. But it also occurred to Hannah that the snapping of the lock might have been a ruse. It could have been done hours or even a couple of days earlier. No one had ever tested the gate; it was deemed to be rusted solid.

The killer could have torn off the lock and left the gate in the closed position in advance, then come through the house to kill the Governor and retreat back into the house afterward. What Hannah needed was that second bullet, hopefully intact, and the gun that had fired it. He looked out at the glittering blue sea. If it was down there, he’d never find it.

He rose, wiped his lips, and went out to find Oscar and the Jaguar. It was time he had a word with Reverend Drake.

Sam McCready also sat at lunch. When he entered the open-sided verandah dining room of the Quarter Deck, every table was full. Out on the square, men in bright beach shirts and wraparound dark glasses were positioning a flatbed truck decorated with bunting and daubed with posters from Marcus Johnson. The great man was due to speak at three.

Sam looked around the terrace and saw a single vacant chair. It was at a table that was occupied by one other luncher.

“We’re a bit crowded today. Mind if I join you?” he asked.

Eddie Favaro waved at the chair. “No problem.”

“You here for the fishing?” asked McCready as he studied the brief menu.

“Yep.”

“Odd,” said McCready after ordering Seviche, a dish of raw fish marinated in fresh lime juice. “If I didn’t know better, I’d have said you were a cop.”

He did not mention the long-shot inquiry he had made the previous evening after studying Favaro at the bar—the call to a friend in the Miami office of the FBI—or the answer he had received that morning.

Favaro put down his beer and stared at him. “Who the hell are you?” he asked. “A British bobby?”

McCready waved his hand deprecatingly. “Oh no, nothing so glamorous. Just a civil servant trying to get a peaceful holiday away from the desk.”

“So what’s this about my being a cop?”

“Instinct. You carry yourself like a cop. Would you mind telling me why you’re really here?”

“Why the hell should I?”

“Because,” McCready suggested mildly, “you arrived just before the Governor was shot. And because of this.”

He handed Favaro a sheet of paper. It was on Foreign Office-headed notepaper. It announced that Mr. Frank Dillon was an official of that office and begged “to whom it may concern” to be as helpful as possible.

Favaro handed it back and thought things over. Lieutenant Broderick had made it plain that he was on his own once he entered British territory.

“Officially, I’m on vacation,” Favaro began. “No, I don’t fish. Unofficially, I’m trying to find out why my partner was killed last week, and by whom.”

“Tell me about it,” suggested McCready. “I might be able to help.”

Favaro told him how Julio Gomez had died. The English­man chewed his raw fish and listened.

“I think he may have seen a man on Sunshine, and been seen himself. A man we used to know in Metro-Dade as Francisco Mendes, alias the Scorpion.”

Eight years earlier, the drug-turf wars had started in South Florida, notably in the Metro-Dade area. Prior to that, the Colombians had shipped cocaine into the area, but the Cuban gangs had distributed it. Then the Colombians had decided they could cut out the Cuban middlemen and sell direct to the users. They began to move in on the Cubans’ territory. The Cubans responded, and the turf wars broke out. The killings had continued ever since.

In the summer of 1984, a motorcyclist in red and white leather, astride a Kawasaki, had drawn up outside a liquor store in the heart of the Dadeland Mall, produced an Uzi submachine carbine from a totebag, and calmly emptied the entire magazine into the busy store. Three people had died, fourteen were injured.

Normally, the killer would have gotten away, but a young motorcycle cop was giving a parking ticket two hundred yards away. When the killer threw down his empty Uzi and sped off, the policeman gave chase, broadcasting the description and direction as he went. Halfway down North Kendall Drive, the man on the Kawasaki slowed, pulled over, drew a nine-millimeter Sig Sauer automatic from his blouse front, took aim, and shot the oncoming policeman in the chest. As the young cop crashed over, the killer rode off at top speed, according to witnesses who gave a good description of the bike and the leather clothing. His helmet hid his face.

Although the Baptist Hospital was only four blocks away and the policeman was rushed into intensive care, he died before morning. He was twenty-three, and he left a widow and baby daughter.

His radio calls had alerted two prowl cars, which were closing on the area. A mile down the road, one of them saw the speeding motorcyclist and forced him into a turn so tight that he fell off. Before he could rise, he was under arrest.

By aspect, the man looked Hispanic. The case was given to Gomez and Favaro. For four days and nights they sat opposite the killer trying to get a single word out of him. He said nothing, absolutely nothing, in either Spanish or English. There were no powder traces on his hands, for he had worn gloves. But the gloves were gone, and despite searching every trash can in the area, the police never discovered them. They reckoned the killer had thrown them into the rear of a passing convertible. Public appeals turned up the Sig Sauer, tossed into a neighboring garden. It was the gun that had killed the policeman, but it bore no fingerprints.

Gomez believed the killer was Colombian—the liquor store had been a Cuban cocaine drop. After four days, he and Favaro nicknamed the suspect the Scorpion.

On the fourth day, a very high-priced lawyer turned up. He produced a Mexican passport in the name of Francisco Mendes. It was new and valid, but it bore no U.S. entry stamps. The lawyer conceded that his client might be an illegal immigrant and asked for bail. The police opposed it.

In front of the judge, a noted liberal, the lawyer protested that the police had only apprehended a man in red and white leather riding a Kawasaki, not the man on the Kawasaki who had killed the policeman and the others.

“That asshole of a judge granted bail,” Favaro said to McCready now. “Half a million dollars. Within twenty-four hours, the Scorpion was gone. The bondsman handed over the half million with a grin. Chickenfeed.”

“And you believe ...?” asked McCready.

“He wasn’t just a mule. He was one of their top triggermen, or they’d never have gone to such trouble and expense to get him out. I think Julio saw him here, even found where he was living maybe. He left his fishing vacation early to try to get back so Uncle Sam would file an appeal for extradition from the British.”

“Which we would have granted,” said McCready. “I think we ought to inform the man from Scotland Yard. After all, the Governor was shot four days later. Even if the two cases turn out not to be linked, there’s enough suspicion to comb the island for him. It’s a small place.”

“And if he’s found? What offense has he committed on British territory?” Favaro asked.

“Well,” said McCready, “for a start you could make a positive identification of him. That could constitute a holding charge. Detective Chief Superintendent Hannah may be from a different force, but no one likes a cop-killer. And if he produces a valid passport, as a Foreign Office official I could denounce it as a forgery. That makes a second holding charge.”

Favaro grinned and held out his hand. “Frank Dillon, I like it. Let’s go see your man from Scotland Yard.”

Hannah stepped out of the Jaguar and walked toward the open doors of the plank-built Baptist chapel. From inside came the sound of song. He stepped through the doors and accustomed his eyes to the lower light inside. Leading the singing was the deep bass voice of Reverend Drake.

Rock of ages, cleft for me ...

There was no musical accompaniment, just plainsong. The Baptist minister had left his pulpit and was striding up and down the aisle, his arms waving like the big black sails of a windmill as he encouraged his flock to give praise.

Let me hide myself in thee.

Let the water and the blood ...

He caught sight of Hannah in the doorway, ceased singing, and waved his arms for quiet. The tremulous voices died away.

“Brothers and sisters!” roared the minister. “We are indeed privileged today. We are joined by Mr. Hannah, the man from Scotland Yard!”

The congregation turned in their pews and stared at the man in the door. Most were elderly men and women, with a scattering of young matrons and a gaggle of small children with huge saucer eyes.

“Join us, brother! Sing with us! Make room for Mr. Han­nah.”

Next to him, a vast matron in a flowered-print frock gave Hannah a wide smile and moved up, offering him her hymn book. Hannah needed it. He had forgotten the words, it had been so long. Together, they finished the rousing anthem. When the service was over, the congregation filed out, each member greeted by the perspiring Drake at the door.

As the last person left, Drake beckoned Hannah to follow him into his vestry, a small room attached to the side of the church.

“I cannot offer you beer, Mr. Hannah. But I’d be happy for you to share in my cold lemonade.”

He took it from a Thermos flask and poured two glasses. It was lime-scented and delicious.

“And what can I do for the man from Scotland Yard?” inquired the pastor.

“Tell me where you were at five P.M. on Tuesday.”

“Holding carol service practice here, in front of fifty good people,” said Reverend Drake. “Why?”

Hannah put to him his remark of the previous Friday morning on the steps of Government House. Drake smiled at Hannah. The detective was not a small man, but the preacher topped him by two inches.

“Ah, you have been talking with Mr. Quince.” He pro­nounced the name as if he had sucked on a raw lime.

“I didn’t say that,” said Hannah.

“You didn’t have to. Yes, I said those words. You think I killed Governor Moberley? No, sir, I am a man of peace. I do not use guns. I do not take life.”

“Then what did you mean, Mr. Drake?”

“I meant that I did not believe the Governor would transmit our petition to London. I meant that we should pool our poor funds and send one person to London to ask for a new Governor, one who would understand us and propose what we ask.”

“Which is?”

“A referendum, Mr. Hannah. Something bad is happening here. Strangers have come among us, ambitious men who want to rule our affairs. We are happy the way we are. Not rich, but content. If we had a referendum, the great majority would vote to stay British. Is that so wrong?”

“Not in my book,” admitted Hannah, “but I don’t make policy.”

“Neither did the Governor. But he would carry a policy out, for his career, even if he knew it was wrong.”

“He had no choice,” said Hannah. “He was carrying out his orders.”

Drake nodded into his lemonade. “That’s what the men who put the nails into Christ said, Mr. Hannah.”

Hannah did not want to be drawn into politics or theology. He had a murder to solve. “You didn’t like Sir Mars ton, did you?”

“No, God forgive me.”

“Any reason, apart from his duties here?”

“He was a hypocrite and a fornicator. But I did not kill him. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, Mr. Hannah. The Lord sees everything. On Tuesday evening the Lord summoned Sir Marston Moberley.”

“The Lord seldom uses a large-caliber handgun,” sug­gested Hannah. For a moment he thought he saw a hint of appreciation in Drake’s glance. “You said ‘fornicator.’ What did that mean?”

Reverend Drake glanced at him sharply. “You don’t know?”

“No.”

“Myrtle, the missing secretary. You have not seen her?”

“No.”

“She is a big girl, robust, lusty.”

“No doubt. She is away with her parents in Tortola,” said Hannah.

“No,” said Drake gently, “she is in Antigua General Hos­pital, terminating a baby.”

Oh dear, thought Hannah. He had only ever heard her referred to by name. He had not seen a picture of her. White parents live on Tortola, too.

“Is she ... how shall I put it ...?”

“Black?” boomed Drake. “Yes, of course she’s black. A big, bouncing black girl. The way Sir Marston liked them.”

And Lady Moberley knew, thought Hannah. Poor washed-out Lady Moberley, driven to drink by all those years in the tropics and by all those native girls. She was resigned, no doubt. Or perhaps she was not. Perhaps she had been driven a bit too far, just this once.

“There is a hint of American in your accent,” said Hannah as he left. “Can you tell me why?”

“There are many Baptist theological schools in America,” replied Reverend Drake. “I studied for the ministry there.”

Hannah drove back to Government House. On the way, he considered a list of possible suspects.

Lieutenant Jeremy Haverstock undoubtedly knew how to use a gun if he could get hold of one, but he had no apparent motive. Unless it was he who was the father of Myrtle’s baby, and the Governor had threatened to break his career.

Lady Moberley, driven too far. She had plenty of motive, but she’d have needed an accomplice to rip off that steel gatelock. Unless it could have been done with a chain behind a Land-Rover.

The Reverend Drake, despite his protestations of being a man of peace. Even men of peace can be driven too far.

He recalled the advice of Lady Coltrane to look at the entourages of the two electoral candidates. Yes, he would do that, have a good look at these election helpers. But what was the motive there? Sir Marston had been playing their game for them, easing the islands into independence, with one of them as the new Prime Minister. Unless one of the groups had thought he was favoring the other.

When he got back to Government House, there was a spate of news waiting for him.

Chief Inspector Jones had checked his firearms register. There were only six workable guns on the island. Three were owned by expatriates—retired gentlemen, two British and one Canadian. They were twelve-bore shotguns, used for clay-pigeon shooting. The fourth was a rifle, owned by the fishing skipper Jimmy Dobbs, for use on sharks if ever a monster attacked his boat. The fifth gun was a presentation pistol, never fired, owned by another expatriate, an American who had settled on Sunshine. The gun was still in its glass-topped case, its seal unbroken. And the sixth gun was Jones’s own, kept under lock and key at the police station.

“Damn,” snorted Hannah. Whatever gun had been used, it was not kept legally.

Detective Parker, for his part, had a report on the garden. It had been searched from end to end and top to bottom. No second bullet. Either it had deflected off a bone in the Gover­nor’s body, come out at a different angle, and sped over the garden wall to be lost forever; or, more likely, it was still in the body.

Bannister had received news from Nassau. A plane would be landing at four, in one hour’s time, to take the body to the Bahamas for post-mortem. Dr. West was due to touch down in a few minutes, and he would be waiting to take his charge to the mortuary at Nassau.

And there were two men waiting to see Hannah in the drawing room.

Hannah gave orders to have a van made ready to bring the body to the airstrip at four. Bannister, who would return to the High Commission there along with the body, left with Inspector Jones to supervise the arrangements. Then Hannah went to meet his new guests.

The man called Frank Dillon introduced himself and ex­plained his chance vacation on the island and his equally chance meeting over lunch with the American. He produced his letter of introduction, and Hannah studied it with little pleasure. Bannister from the official High Commission in Nassau was one thing; a London-based official who happened to be taking an away-from-it-all holiday in the middle of a murder hunt was as likely as a vegetarian tiger. Then he met the American, who admitted that he was another detective.

Hannah’s attitude changed, however, as Dillon narrated Favaro’s story.

“You have a picture of this man Mendes?” he asked finally.

“No, not with me.”

“Could one be obtained from police files in Miami?”

“Yes, sir. I could have it wired to your people in Nassau.”

“You do that,” said Hannah. He glanced at his watch. “I’ll have a search of all passport records made, going back three months. See if there’s a name of Mendes or any other His­panic name entering the island. Now, you must excuse me—I have to see the body onto the plane for Nassau.”

“Are you by any chance thinking of talking to the candi­dates?” asked McCready as they left.

“Yes,” said Hannah, “first thing in the morning. While I’m waiting for the post-mortem report to come through.”

“Would you mind if I came along?” asked McCready. “I promise not to say a thing. But after all, they are both ... political, are they not?”

“All right,” said Hannah reluctantly. He wondered whom this Frank Dillon really worked for.

On the way to the airstrip, Hannah noticed that the first of his posters were being affixed to spaces on walls where room could be found for them between the posters on behalf of the two candidates. There was so much paper being stuck over Port Plaisance, the place was getting plastered in it.

The official posters, prepared by the local printer under the auspices of Inspector Jones and paid for with Government House money, offered a reward of one thousand U.S. dollars to anyone reporting seeing someone in the alley behind the wall of the Government House garden at approximately five P.M. on Tuesday evening.

A thousand American dollars was a stunning sum for the ordinary people of Port Plaisance. It should bring someone out—someone who had seen something, or some person. And in Sunshine everybody knew everybody.

At the airstrip Hannah saw to the loading of the body, accompanied by Bannister and the four men of the Bahamian forensic team. Bannister would see that the entire volume of their scrapings and samples went on the evening flight to London, to be collected at dawn by a squad car from Scotland Yard and taken to the Home Office’s forensic laboratory in Lambeth. He had few hopes it would turn up much; it was the second bullet he wanted, and Dr. West would retrieve that for him when he opened the body in Nassau that night.

Because he was at the airstrip, Hannah missed the Johnson rally in Parliament Square that afternoon. So did the press corps, who having covered the start of the rally, saw the police convoy driving past and followed it out to the airstrip.

McCready did not miss the rally. He was on the verandah of the Quarter Deck Hotel at the time.

A desultory crowd of about two hundred had gathered to hear their philanthropic benefactor address them. McCready noticed half a dozen men in brightly colored beach shirts and dark glasses mingling with the crowd, handing out small pieces of paper and flags on sticks. The flags were in the candidate’s blue and white colors. The pieces of paper were dollar bills.

At precisely ten past three, a white Ford Fairlane—cer­tainly the biggest car on the island—swept into the square and up to the speaking platform. Mr. Marcus Johnson leaped out and ascended the steps. He held up his hands in a boxer’s victory salute. Led by the bright-shirted ones, there was a round of applause. Some flags waved. In minutes, Marcus Johnson was into his speech.

“And I promise you, my friends, and you are all my friends”—the dentifrice smile flashed from the bronze face—“when we are finally free, a wave of prosperity will come to these islands. There will be work—in the hotels, in the new marina, in the bars and cafés, in the new industries for the processing of fish from the sea for sale on the mainland—from all these things, prosperity will flow. And it will flow into your pockets, my friends, not into the hands of men far away in London—”

He was using a bullhorn to reach everyone in the square. The interruption came from a man who did not need a bullhorn. The deep bass came from the other side of the square, but it came over the sound of the politician.

“Johnson!” roared Walter Drake. “We do not want you here! Why don’t you go back where you came from, and take your Yardies with you?”

Suddenly there was silence. The stunned crowd waited for the sky to fall. No one had ever interrupted Marcus Johnson before.

But the sky did not fall. Without a word, Johnson put down his megaphone and jumped into his car. At a word from him, it sped off, pursued by a second car containing his group of helpers.

“Who is that?” McCready asked the waiter on the veran­dah.

“Reverend Drake, sir,” said the waiter. He seemed awe­struck, even rather frightened.

McCready was thoughtful. He had heard a voice used like that somewhere before, and he tried to recall where. Then he placed it; during his National Service thirty years earlier, at Catterick Camp in Yorkshire. On a parade ground. He went to his room and made a secure call to Miami.

Reverend Walter Drake took his beating in silence. There were four of them, and they came for him that night as he left his church and walked home. They used baseball bats and their feet. They hit hard, whipping the wooden staves down onto the man on the ground. When they were finished, they left him. He might have been dead. They would not have minded. But he was not.

Half an hour later, he recovered consciousness and crawled to the nearest house. The frightened family called Dr. Caractacus Jones, who had the preacher brought to his clinic on a handcart, and he spent the rest of the night patching him up.

Desmond Hannah had a call that evening during supper. He had to leave the hotel to go to Government House to take it. It was from Dr. West in Nassau.

“Look, I know they’re supposed to be preserved,” said the forensic pathologist, “but this one’s like a block of wood. Frozen solid.”

“The locals did the best they could,” said Hannah.

“So will I,” said the doctor. “But it’s going to take me twenty-four hours to thaw the bugger out.”

“As fast as you can, please,” said Hannah. “I need that damned bullet.”

Chapter 4

Detective Chief Superintendent Hannah elected to interview Mr. Horatio Livingstone first. He rang him at his house in Shantytown just after sunrise, and the politician came to the phone after several minutes. Yes, he would be delighted to receive the man from Scotland Yard within the hour.

Oscar drove the Jaguar with Detective Parker beside him. Hannah was in the back with Dillon of the Foreign Office. Their route did not pass through the center of Port Plaisance, for Shantytown lay three miles down the coast, on the same side of the capital as Government House.

“Any progress with your inquiries, Mr. Hannah, or is that an unprofessional question?” Dillon asked politely.

Hannah never liked to discuss the state of an inquiry with anyone other than colleagues. Still, this Dillon was apparently from the Foreign Office.

“The Governor was killed by a single shot through the heart from a heavy-caliber handgun,” he said. “There seem to have been two shots fired. One missed and hit the wall behind him. I recovered the slug and sent it to London.”

“Badly distorted?” asked Dillon.

“I’m afraid so. The other bullet seems to be lodged in the body. I’ll know more when I get the results of the post­mortem from Nassau tonight.”

“And the killer?”

“Seems to have entered from the gate in the garden wall, which was torn off its locks. Fired from about a ten-foot range, then withdrew. Apparently.”

“Apparently?”

Hannah explained his idea that the torn-off lock might have been a ruse to distract attention from an assassin coming from the house itself.

Dillon was most admiring. “I’d never have thought of that,” he said.

The car entered Shantytown. As its name implied, it was a village of clustered homes made of wooden planks and galva­nized sheet roofing, with some five thousand inhabitants.

Small shops selling an array of vegetables and T-shirts jostled for space with the houses and the bars. It was clearly Livingstone territory—no posters for Marcus Johnson were to be seen here, but those for Livingstone were everywhere.

In the center of Shantytown, reached by its widest (and only) street, stood a single walled compound. The walls were of coral blocks, and a single gate wide enough for a car admitted entry. Beyond the walls could be seen the roof of the house, the only two-story edifice in Shantytown. Hannah knew of the rumor that Mr. Livingstone owned many of the bars in the village and took tribute from those he did not.

The Jaguar halted at the gate, and Stone sounded the horn. All down the street, Barclayans were standing to stare at the gleaming limousine with the pennant fluttering from the front right wing. The Governor’s car had never been into Shanty­town before.

A small window in the gate opened, an eye surveyed the car, and the gate swung open. The Jaguar rolled forward into a dusty yard and stopped by the verandah to the house. Two men were in the yard, one by the gate and one waiting at the verandah. Both wore identical pale-gray safari suits. A third man in similar dress stood at an upstairs window. As the car halted, he withdrew.

Hannah, Parker, and Dillon were shown into the principal sitting room, cheaply but functionally furnished, and a few seconds later Horatio Livingstone appeared. He was a large fat man, and his jowly face was wreathed in smiles. He exuded bonhomie.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen, what an honor. Please, be seated.”

He gestured for coffee and seated himself in a large chair. His small, button eyes flickered from one to the other of the three white faces before him. Two other men entered the room and seated themselves behind the candidate. Living­stone gestured to them.

“Two of my associates—Mr. Smith and Mr. Brown.”

The two inclined their heads but said nothing.

“Now, Mr. Hannah, what can I do for you?”

“You will know, sir, that I am here to investigate the murder four days ago of Governor Sir Marston Moberley.”

Livingstone’s smile dropped, and he shook his head. “A dreadful thing,” he rumbled. “We were all deeply shocked. A fine, fine man.”

“I’m afraid I have to ask you what you were doing and where you were at five P.M. on Tuesday evening.”

“I was here, Mr. Hannah, here among my friends, who will vouch for me. I was working on a speech to the Smallholders Association for the next day.”

“And your associates, they were here? All here?”

“Every one of them. It was close to sundown. We had all retired for the day. Here, inside the compound.”

“Your associates—are they Barclayans?” asked Dillon.

Hannah shot him a glance of irritation; the man had prom­ised to say nothing.

Livingstone beamed. “Ah, no, I fear not. I and my fellow Barclayans have so little experience of organizing an election campaign, I felt I needed some administrative help.” He gestured and beamed again, a reasonable man among reason­able men. “The preparing of speeches, posters, pamphlets, public meetings. My associates are from the Bahamas. You wish to see their passports? They were all examined when they arrived.”

Hannah waved the necessity away. Behind Mr. Living­stone, Mr. Brown had lit a large cigar.

“Would you have any idea, Mr. Livingstone, who might have killed the Governor?” asked Hannah.

The fat man’s smile dropped again, and he adopted a mien of great seriousness. “Mr. Hannah, the Governor was helping us all on the road to our independence, to our final freedom from the British Empire. According to the policy of London. There was not the slightest motive for me or any of my associates to wish to harm him.”

Behind him, Mr. Brown held his cigar to one side, and with the much-elongated nail of his little finger, he flicked an inch of ash from the tip so that the ash fell to the floor. The burning ember never touched the flesh of his finger.

McCready knew he had seen that gesture somewhere be­fore. “Will you be holding any public meetings today?” he asked quietly.

Livingstone’s small black eyes switched toward him. “Yes, at twelve I am addressing my brothers and sisters of the fishing community on the docks,” he said.

“Yesterday there was a disturbance when Mr. Johnson addressed people in Parliament Square,” said Dillon.

Livingstone showed no pleasure in the ruining of his rival’s meeting. “A single heckler,” he snapped.

“Heckling is also part of the democratic process,” ob­served Dillon.

Livingstone stared at him, expressionless for once. Behind the creased jowls, he was angry. McCready realized he had seen that expression before; on the face of Idi Amin of Uganda, when he had been contradicted.

Hannah glowered at Dillon and rose. “I won’t take up any more of your time, Mr. Livingstone,” he said.

The politician, exuding jollity again, escorted them to the door. Two more gray safari suits saw them off the premises. Different men. That made seven of them, including the one at the upstairs window. All were pure Negroid except Mr. Brown, who was much paler, a quadroon, the only one who dared smoke without asking, the man in charge of the other six.

“I would be grateful,” said Hannah in the car, “if you would leave the questioning to me.”

“Sorry,” said Dillon. “Strange man, didn’t you think? I wonder where he spent the years between leaving here as a teenager and returning six months ago.”

“No idea,” said Hannah. It was only later, in London, when he was thinking things over, that he would wonder at Dillon’s remark about Livingstone leaving Sunshine as a teenager. It was Missy Coltrane who had told him, Desmond Hannah, that. Dillon had not been there.

At half-past nine, they arrived at the gates of Marcus Johnson’s estate on the northern flank of Sawbones Hill.

Johnson’s style was completely different from Living­stone’s. He was clearly a wealthy man. An assistant in psy­chedelic beach shirt and black glasses opened the wrought-iron gates to the drive and let the Jaguar proceed up the raked gravel to the front door. Two gardeners were at work, tending the lawns, flower beds, and earthenware jars of bright gerani­ums.

The house was a spacious, two-story building with a roof of green glazed tiles, every block and stick of it imported. The three Englishmen alighted in front of a pillared Colonial portico and were led inside. They followed their guide, a second brightly shirted “assistant,” across a reception area floored in marble slabs and furnished with European and Spanish-American antiques. Rugs from Bokhara and Kashan splashed the cream marble.

Marcus Johnson received them on a marble verandah scat­tered with white rattan chairs. Below the verandah lay the garden and tonsured lawns running to an eight-foot wall. Beyond the wall lay the coast road, which was one thing Johnson could not buy to give himself direct access to the sea. On the waters of Teach Bay, beyond the wall, was the stone jetty he had built. Next to it bobbed a Riva 40 speed­boat. With long-range tanks, the Riva could reach the Baha­mas at speed.

Where Horatio Livingstone was fat and creased, Marcus Johnson was slim and elegant. He wore an impeccable cream silk suit. The cast of his features indicated he was at least half white, and McCready wondered if he had known his father. Probably not. He had come from poverty in the Barclays as a boy, been brought up by his mother in a shack. His dark brown hair had been artificially straightened, from curly to wavy. Four heavy gold rings adorned his hands, and the teeth in the flashing smile were perfect.

He offered his guests a choice of Dom Perignon or Blue Mountain coffee. They chose coffee and sat down.

Desmond Hannah asked the same questions about the hour of five P.M. the previous Tuesday evening. The reply was the same.

“Addressing an enthusiastic crowd of well over a hundred people outside the Anglican church in Parliament Square, Mr. Hannah. At five o’clock I was just finishing my address. From there I drove straight back here.”

“And your ... entourage?” asked Hannah, borrowing Missy Coltrane’s word to describe the election campaign team in their bright shirts.

“All with me, to a man,” said Johnson. He waved a hand, and one of the bright-shirts topped up the coffee. McCready wondered why he had no local serving staff inside the house, although he would have Barclayan gardeners. Despite the subdued light inside the verandah, the bright-shirts never removed their wraparound dark glasses.

From Hannah’s point of view, the interlude was pleasant but fruitless. He had already been told by Chief Inspector Jones that the prosperity candidate had been on Parliament Square when the shots were fired at Government House. The Inspector himself had been on the steps of his own police station on the square, surveying the scene. He rose to leave.

“Do you have another public address scheduled for to­day?” asked Dillon.

“Yes, indeed. At two, on Parliament Square.”

“You were there yesterday at three. There was a distur­bance, I believe.”

Marcus Johnson was a much smoother operator than Liv­ingstone. No hint of temper. He shrugged.

“The Reverend Drake shouted some rude words. No mat­ter. I had finished my speech. Poor Drake—well intentioned, no doubt, but foolish. He wishes the Barclays to remain in the last century. But progress must come, Mr. Dillon, and with it prosperity. I have the most substantial development plans in mind for our dear Barclays.”

McCready nodded. Tourism, he thought, gambling, indus­try, pollution, a little prostitution—and what else?

“And now, if you will forgive me, I have a speech to prepare.”

They were shown out, and they drove back to Government House.

“Thank you for your hospitality,” said Dillon as he climbed out. “Meeting the candidates was most instructive. I wonder where Johnson made all that money in the years he was away.”

“No idea,” said Hannah. “He’s listed as a businessman. Do you want Oscar to run you back to the Quarter Deck?”

“No, thank you. I’ll stroll.”

In the bar the press corps was working its way through the beer supply. It was eleven o’clock. They were getting bored. Two full days had elapsed since they had been summoned to Heathrow to scramble to the Caribbean and cover a murder inquiry. All the previous day, Thursday, they had filmed what they could and interviewed whom they could. Pickings had been slim: a nice shot of the Governor coming out of the ice house from his bed between the fish; some long shots of Parker on his hands and knees in the Governor’s garden; the dead Governor departing in a bag for Nassau; Parker’s little gem about finding a single bullet. But nothing like a good, hard piece of news.

McCready mingled with them for the first time. No one asked who he was.

“Horatio Livingstone is speaking on the dock at twelve,” he said. “Could be interesting.”

They were suddenly alert. “Why?” asked someone.

McCready shrugged. “There was some savage heckling here on the square yesterday,” he said. “You were at the airstrip.”

They brightened up. A nice little riot would be the thing—failing that, some good heckling. The reporters began to run some imaginary headlines through their minds. “Election Violence Sweeps Sunshine Isle”—a couple of punches would justify that. Or if Livingstone got a hostile reception, “Para­dise Vetoes Socialism.”

The trouble was that so far, the population seemed to have no interest at all in the prospect of freedom from the Empire. Two news teams that had tried to put together a documentary on local reaction to independence had not been able to secure a single interviewee who would talk. People just walked away when the cameras, microphones, and notepads came out. Still, they picked up their gear and sauntered toward the docks.

McCready took time to make a single call to the British Consulate in Miami from the portable phone he kept in the attaché case under his bed. He asked for a seven-seater charter plane to land on Sunshine at four P.M. It was a long shot, but he hoped it would work.

Livingstone’s cavalcade arrived from Shantytown at a quarter to twelve. One aide boomed through a megaphone, “Come and hear Horatio Livingstone, the people’s candidate.” Oth­ers erected two trestles and a stout plank to lift the people’s candidate above the people.

At noon, Horatio Livingstone hoisted his bulk up the steps to the makeshift platform. He spoke into a megaphone on a stem in front of him, held up by one of the safari suits. Four TV cameras had secured elevated positions around the meet­ing, from which they could cover the candidate or, hopefully, the hecklers and the fighting.

The BSB cameraman had borrowed the cabin roof of the Gulf Lady. To back up his TV camera, he had a Nikon camera with a telephoto lens slung across his back. The reporter, Sabrina Tennant, stood beside him.

McCready climbed up to join them. “Hello,” he said.

“Hi,” said Sabrina Tennant. She took no notice of him.

“Tell me,” he asked quietly. “Would you like a story that would blow your colleagues out of the water?”

Now she took notice. The cameraman looked across inquis­itively.

“Can you use that Nikon to get in close, really close, on any face in that crowd?” asked McCready.

“Sure,” said the cameraman. “I can get their tonsils if they open wide.”

“Why not get full-face pictures of all the men in gray safari suits helping the candidate?” suggested McCready. The cam­eraman looked at Sabrina. She nodded. Why not?

The cameraman unhooked his Nikon and began to focus it. “Start with the pale-faced black standing along by the van,” said McCready. “The one they call Mr. Brown.”

“What have you got in mind?” asked Sabrina.

“Step into the cabin, and I’ll tell you.”

She did, and McCready talked for several minutes.

“You’re joking,” she said at length.

“No, I’m not, and I think I can prove it. But not here. The answers lie in Miami.”

He talked to her again for a while. When he had finished, Sabrina Tennant went back to the roof. “Got them?” she asked.

The Londoner nodded. “A dozen close shots of every one, every angle. There are seven of them.”

“Right, now let’s shoot the entire meeting. Get me some footage for background and cutting.”

She knew she already had eight magazines of footage, including shots of both candidates, the capital town, the beaches, the palm trees, and the airstrip—enough, skillfully cut, to make a great fifteen-minute story. What she needed now was a lead angle, and if the crumpled man with the apologetic air was right, she had it.

Her only problem was time. Her main feature spot was on Countdown, the flagship program of the BSB current affairs channel, which went out at noon on Sunday in England. She would need to send her material by satellite from Miami by no later than four P.M. on Saturday, the next day. So she had to be in Miami that night. It was nearly one o’clock now, extremely tight to get back to the hotel and book a Miami-based charter to be in Sunshine before sundown.

“Actually, I’m due to leave myself at four this afternoon,” said McCready. “I’ve ordered my own plane from Miami. Happy to offer you a lift.”

“Who the hell are you?” she asked.

“Just a holidaymaker. But I do know the islands. And their people. Trust me.”

She had no bloody choice, thought Sabrina. If his story was true, this one was too good to miss. She went back to her cameraman to show him what she wanted. The telephoto lens of the camera lazed over the crowd, pausing there, there, and there. Against the van, Mr. Brown saw the lens pointing at him and climbed inside. The camera caught that too.

Inspector Jones reported to Desmond Hannah during the lunch hour. Every visitor to the islands for the past three months had been checked through passport records taken at the airstrip. No one answered either to the name of Francisco Mendes or to the description of a Latin American. Hannah sighed.

If the dead American Gomez had not been mistaken—and he might well have been—the elusive Mendes could have slipped into the Barclays in a dozen ways. The weekly tramp steamer brought occasional passengers from “down island,” and official coverage of the docks was sporadic. Yachts occa­sionally stopped by, mooring in bays and creeks around Sunshine and the other islands, their guests and crews dis­porting themselves in the crystal waters above the coral reefs until they hoisted sail and passed on. Anyone could slip ashore—or leave. Hannah suspected this Mendes, once he had been spotted and knew it, had flown the coop. If he had ever even been there.

Hannah rang Nassau, but Dr. West told him he could not start the autopsy until four that afternoon, when the body of the Governor would have finally returned to normal consis­tency.

“Call me as soon as you have that bullet,” Hannah urged.

At two, an even more disgruntled press corps assembled in Parliament Square. From the point of view of sensations, the morning rally had been a flop. The speech had been the usual nationalize-everything rubbish that the British had discarded a decade earlier. The voters-to-be had been apathetic. As a world story, it was all cutting-room-floor material. If Hannah did not make an arrest soon, they thought, they might as well pack up and go home.

At ten past two, Marcus Johnson arrived in his long white convertible. He wore an ice-blue tropical suit and an open-neck Sea Island shirt as he mounted the back of the flatbed truck that served as his platform. More sophisticated than Livingstone, he had a microphone with two amplifiers strung from nearby palm trees.

As Johnson began speaking, McCready sidled up to Sean Whittaker, the free-lance stringer who covered the whole Caribbean from his Kingston, Jamaica, base for London’s Sunday Express.

“Boring?” murmured McCready.

Whittaker gave him a glance. “Tripe,” he agreed. “I think I’m going home tomorrow.”

Whittaker reported stories and took his own pictures as well. A long-lens Yashica hung around his neck.

“Would you,” asked McCready, “like a story that would blow your rivals out of the water?”

Whittaker turned and cocked an eyebrow. “What do you know that nobody else does?”

“Since the speech is a bore, why not come with me and find out?”

The two men proceeded across the square, into the hotel, and up to McCready’s second-floor room. From the balcony, they could see the whole square below them.

“The minders, the men in multicolored beach shirts and dark glasses,” said McCready. “Can you get full-face close-ups of them from here?”

“Sure,” said Whittaker. “Why?”

“Do it, and I’ll tell you.”

Whittaker shrugged. He was an old hand; he had had tips in his time from the most unlikely sources. Some worked out, some did not. He adjusted his zoom lens and ran off two rolls of color prints and two of black-and-white.

McCready took him down to the bar, stood him a beer, and talked for thirty minutes.

Whittaker whistled. “Is this on the level?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Can you prove it?” Running this sort of story was going to need some hard-sourced quotes, or Robin Esser, the editor in London, would not use it.

“Not here,” said McCready. “The proof lies in Kingston. You could get back tonight, finalize it tomorrow morning, and file by four P.M. Nine o’clock in London—just in time.”

Whittaker shook his head. “Too late. The last Miami-Kingston flight is at seven-thirty. I’d need to be in Miami by six o’clock. Via Nassau, I’d never make it.”

“As a matter of fact, I have my own plane leaving for Miami at four—in seventy minutes’ time. I’d be happy to offer you a lift.”

Whittaker rose to go and pack his suitcase. “Who the hell are you Mr. Dillon?” he asked.

“Oh, just someone who knows these islands, and this part of the world. Almost as well as you.”

“Better,” growled Whittaker, and left.

* * *

At four o’clock, Sabrina Tennant arrived at the airstrip with her cameraman. McCready and Whittaker were already there. The air taxi from Miami drifted down at ten past the hour.

When it was about to take off, McCready explained, “I’m afraid I can’t make it. A last-minute phone call at the hotel. Such a pity, but the air taxi is paid for, and I can’t get a rebate. It’s too late. So please be my guests. Good-bye, and good luck.”

Whittaker and Sabrina Tennant eyed each other suspi­ciously throughout the flight. Neither of them mentioned to the other what they had or where they were going. At Miami the television team headed into town; Whittaker transferred to the last flight to Kingston.

McCready returned to the Quarter Deck, extracted his portable phone, programmed it to a secure mode, and made a series of calls. One was to the British High Commission in Kingston, where he spoke to a colleague who promised to use his contacts to secure the appropriate interviews. Another was to the headquarters of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Ad­ministration, the DEA, in Miami, where he had a contact of long standing since the international drug trade has links with international terrorism. His third call was to the head of the CIA office in Miami. By the time he had finished, he had reason to hope his new-found friends of the press would be accorded every facility.

Just before six, the orange globe of the sun dropped toward the Dry Tortugas in the west, and darkness, as always in the tropics, came with remarkable speed. True dusk lasted only fifteen minutes. At six, Dr. West called from Nassau. Des­mond Hannah took the call in the Governor’s private office, where Bannister had set up the secure link to the High Commission across the water.

“You’ve got the bullet?” Hannah asked eagerly. Without forensic backup, his inquiry was running dry. He had several possible suspects but no eyewitnesses, no clearly guilty party, no confession.

“No bullet,” said the distant voice from Nassau.

“What?”

“It went clean through him,” said the forensic pathologist. He had finished his work at the mortuary half an hour earlier and had gone straight to the High Commission to make the call. “Do you want the medical jargon or the basics?”

“The basics will do,” said Hannah. “What happened?”

“There was a single bullet. It entered between the second and third ribs, left-hand side, traveled through muscle and tissue, perforated the upper left ventricle of the heart, causing immediate death. It exited through the ribs at the back. I’m surprised you didn’t see the exit hole.”

“I didn’t see either bloody hole,” growled Hannah. “The flesh was so frozen, it had closed over both of them.”

“Well,” said Dr. West down the line, “the good news is, it touched no bone on the way through. A fluke, but that’s the way it was. If you can find it, the slug should be intact—no distortion at all.”

“No deflection off bone?”

“None.”

“But that’s impossible,” protested Hannah. “The man had a wall behind him. We’ve searched the wall inch by inch. There’s not a mark on it, except for the clearly visible dent made by the other bullet, the one that went through the sleeve. We’ve searched the gravel path beneath the wall. We’ve taken it up and sifted it. There is one bullet only, the second bullet, badly smashed up by the impact.”

“Well, it came out all right,” said the doctor. “The bullet that killed him, I mean. Someone must have stolen it.”

“Could it have been slowed up to the point that it fell to the lawn between the Governor and the wall?” asked Hannah.

“How far behind the man was the wall situated?”

“No more than fifteen feet,” said Hannah.

“Then, not in my view,” said the pathologist. “I’m not into ballistics, but I believe the gun was a heavy-caliber handgun, fired at a range of more than five feet from the chest. There are no powder burns on the shirt, you see. But it was probably not more than twenty feet. The wound is neat and clean, and the slug would have been traveling fast. It would have been slowed by its passage through the body, but nowhere near enough to drop to the ground within fifteen feet. It must have hit the wall.”

“But it didn’t,” Hannah protested. Unless, of course, someone had stolen it. If so, that someone had to be within the household. “Anything else?”

“Not a lot. The man was facing his assailant when he was shot. He didn’t turn away.”

Either he was a very brave man, thought Hannah, or more likely, he just couldn’t believe his eyes.

“One last thing,” said the doctor. “The bullet was traveling in an upward trajectory. The assassin must have been crouch­ing or kneeling. If the ranges are right, the gun was fired about thirty inches off the ground.”

Damn, thought Hannah. It must have gone clean over the wall. Or possibly it hit the house, but much higher up, near the guttering. In the morning Parker would have to start all over again, with ladders.

Hannah thanked the doctor and put the phone down. The full written report would reach him by the scheduled flight the next day.

Parker had now lost his four-man forensic team from the Bahamian Police, so he had to work alone the next day. Jefferson, the butler, aided by the gardener, held the ladder while the hapless Parker went up the house wall above the garden looking for the imprint of the second bullet. He went as high as the gutters, but he found nothing.

Hannah took his breakfast, served by Jefferson, in the sitting room. Lady Moberley drifted in now and again, ar­ranged the flowers, smiled vaguely, and drifted back out again. She seemed blithely unconcerned whether her late husband’s body, or what was left of it, was brought to Sun­shine for burial or taken back to England. Hannah gained the impression that no one had cared much for Sir Marston Moberley, starting with his wife. Then he realized why she seemed so blithe. The vodka bottle was missing from the silver drinks tray. Lady Moberley was happy for the first time in years.

Desmond Hannah was not. He was puzzled. The more the hunt for the bullet went on in vain, the more it seemed his instinct had been right. It was an inside job, the torn-off lock on the steel gate a ruse. Someone had descended the steps from the sitting room where he now sat and had circled the sitting Governor, who had then seen the gun and risen to his feet. After the shots, the assailant had found one of his bullets in the gravel by the wall and taken it. He had failed to find the other in the dusk and had ran off to hide the gun before any interruption came.

Hannah finished his breakfast, went outside, and glanced at Parker up near the gutter.

“Any luck?” he asked.

“Not a sign,” Parker called down.

Hannah walked back to the wall and stood with his back to the steel gate. The previous evening he had stood on a trestle and stared over the gate at the alley behind it. Between five and six, the alley was constantly busy. People taking a short cut from Port Plaisance to Shantytown used it; smallholders returning from the town to their scattered homes behind the trees used it. Nearly thirty people had passed up and down it within the hour. At no time was the alley completely empty. At one time there had been seven people walking down it, one way or the other. The killer simply could not have come in that way without being spotted. Why should Tuesday evening have been so different from any other? Someone must have seen, something.

Yet no one had come forward in response to the posters. What islander would forgo a thousand American dollars? It was a fortune. So ... the killer had come from inside the house, as he had surmised.

The grilled front door to Government House had been closed that evening at that hour. It was self-locking from the inside. Jefferson would have answered if anyone rang the bell. No one could just walk through the gates, across the gravel forecourt, through the front door, across the hall, through the sitting room, and down the steps to the garden. It was no casual intruder; the front door would have blocked them. The ground-floor windows were grilled, Spanish style. There was no other way in—unless an athlete had vaulted the garden wall and dropped to the grass. ... Possible.

But how to get out again? Through the house? Then there was a very good chance of being seen. Back over the wall? It had been minutely searched for scrape marks, as of someone climbing, and there were glass shards along the top. Out through the steel gate, previously opened? Another good chance of being seen.

No—it looked like an inside job. Oscar, the chauffeur, had vouched for Lady Moberley, who had been away at the children’s hospital. That left harmless, bumbling old Jeffer­son, or young Haverstock of the Queen’s Dragoon Guards.

Was this another white society scandal like the Kenyan affair before the war, or the killing of Sir Harry Oakes? Was it a one-killer affair, or were they all in on it? What was their motive—hate, lust, greed, revenge, political terror, or the threat of a ruined career? And what about the dead Julio Gomez? Had he really seen a South American contract killer on Sunshine? If so, where on earth did Mendes fit in?

Hannah stood with his back to the steel door, walked forward two paces, and dropped to his knees. He was still too high. He went on his stomach and propped his torso on his elbows, his eyes thirty inches above the grass. He stared at the point where Sir Marston would have been standing, having risen from his chair and taken one step forward. Then he was up and running.

“Parker!” he yelled. “Get off that ladder and come down here!”

Parker almost fell off, so loud was the shout. He had never seen the phlegmatic Hannah so disturbed. When he reached the terrace, he scampered down the steps to the garden.

“Stand there,” said Hannah, pointing to a spot on the grass. “How tall are you?”

“Five foot ten, sir.”

“Not tall enough. Go to the library and get me some books. The Governor was six foot two. Jefferson, get me a broom.”

Jefferson shrugged. If the white policeman wanted to sweep the patio, that was his business. He went for a broom.

Hannah made Parker stand on four books on the spot where Sir Marston had stood. Crouching on the grass he aimed the broom handle like a rifle at Parker’s chest. The broom sloped upward at twenty degrees.

“Step to one side.”

Parker did so and fell off his books. Hannah stood up and walked to the steps that ran up the wall to the terrace, rising from left to right. It was still hanging on its wrought-iron bracket, as it had for three days and before that. The wire basket, packed with loam, cascaded brilliant geraniums. So thick were the clusters, one could hardly see the basket from which they came. As the forensic team worked on the wall, they had brushed the streaming flowers out of their faces.

“Bring that basket down,” Hannah said to the gardener. “Parker, bring the murder bag. Jefferson get a bedsheet.”

The gardener moaned as his work was strewn all over the bedsheet. One by one, Hannah extricated the flowers, tapping the loam clear of their roots before placing them on one side. When only the loam was left, he separated it into hand-size clods, using a spatula to break the clods into grains. And there it was.

Not only had the bullet passed through the Governor intact, it had not even touched the wire frame of the basket. It had gone between two strands of wire and stopped dead in the middle of the loam. It was in perfect condition. Hannah used tweezers to drop it into a plastic bag, wrapped the bag, and dropped it into a screw-top jar. He rocked back on his ankles and rose.

“Tonight, lad,” he told Parker, “you are going back to London. With this. Alan Mitchell will work through Sunday for me. I’ve got the bullet. Soon I’ll have the gun. Then I’ll have the killer.”

There was nothing more he could do at Government House. He asked that Oscar be summoned to drive him back to the hotel. As he waited for the chauffeur, he stood at the windows of the sitting room looking out over the garden wall toward Port Plaisance, the nodding palms and the shimmering sea beyond. The island slumbered in the heat of midmorning. Slumbered—or brooded?

This isn’t paradise, he thought. It’s a bloody powder keg.

Chapter 5

In the city of Kingston that morning, Sean Whittaker was having a remarkable reception. He had arrived late and gone straight to his apartment. Just after seven the next morning, the first call had come in. It was an American voice.

“Morning, Mr. Whittaker. Hope I didn’t wake you.”

“No, not at all. Who’s that?”

“My name is Milton. Just Milton. I believe you have some photographs you might care to show me.”

“That would depend on who I am showing them to,” said Whittaker.

There was a low laugh down the line. “Why don’t we meet?”

Milton arranged a rendezvous in a public place, and they met an hour later. The American did not look like the head of the DEA field station in Kingston, as Whittaker had expected. His casual air was more that of a young academic from the university.

“Forgive my saying so,” said Whittaker, “but could you establish any bona fides at all?”

“Let’s use my car,” said Milton.

They drove to the American Embassy. Milton had a headquarters office outside the embassy, but he was persona grata inside it as well. He flashed his identity card to the Marine guard at the desk inside, then led the way to a spare office.

“All right,” said Whittaker, “you’re an American diplo­mat.”

Milton did not correct him. He smiled and asked to see Whittaker’s pictures. He surveyed them all, but one held his attention.

“Well, well,” he said. “So that’s where he is.”

He opened his attaché case and produced a series of files, selecting one. The photograph on the first page of the dossier had been taken a few years earlier, with a long lens, appar­ently through an aperture in a curtain. But the man was the same as the man in the new photograph on his desk.

“Want to know who he is?” he asked Whittaker. It was an unnecessary question. The British reporter compared the two photographs and nodded.

“Okay, let’s start at the beginning,” said Milton, and he read out the contents of the file—not all of them, just enough. Whittaker took notes furiously.

The DEA man was thorough. There were details of a business career, meetings held, bank accounts opened, oper­ations run, aliases used, cargoes delivered, profits laundered. When he had finished, Whittaker sat back.

“Phew,” he said. “Can I source this on you?”

“I wouldn’t specify Mr. Milton,” said the American. “Highly placed sources within the DEA—that would do.”

He escorted Whittaker back to the main entrance. On the steps he suggested, “Why don’t you go down to Kingston police headquarters with the rest of the pictures? You may find you are expected.”

At the police building, the bemused Whittaker was shown up to the office of Commissioner Foster, who sat along in his big air-conditioned room overlooking downtown Kingston. After greeting Whittaker, the Commissioner pressed his inter­com and asked Commander Gray to step in. The head of the Criminal Investigation Division joined them a few minutes later. He brought a sheaf of files.

The two Jamaicans studied Whittaker’s pictures of the eight bodyguards in bright beach shirts. Despite the wraparound dark glasses, Commander Gray did not hesitate. Opening a series of files, he identified the men one after the other. Whittaker noted everything.

“May I cite you two gentlemen as the source?” he asked.

“Certainly,” said the Commissioner. “All have long crimi­nal records. Three are wanted here as of now. You may quote me. We have nothing to hide. This meeting is on the record.”

By midday, Whittaker had his story. He transmitted his pictures and text down the usual London link, took a long phone call from the news editor in London, and was assured of a good spread the following day. His expenses would not be queried—not for this one.

In Miami, Sabrina Tennant had checked into the Sonesta Beach Hotel, as she had been advised the previous evening, and took a call just before eight on Saturday morning. The appointment was set for an office building in central Miami. It was not the headquarters of the CIA in Miami, but it was a safe building.

She was shown to an office and met a man who led her to a TV screening room, where three of her videotapes were screened in front of two other men who sat in half darkness. They declined to introduce themselves and said nothing.

After the screening, she was led back to the first office, served coffee, and left alone for a while. When the first officer rejoined her, he suggested she call him Bill, and he asked her for the still photographs that had been taken at the dockside political rally of the previous day.

On the videos, the cameraman had not concentrated on the bodyguards of Horatio Livingstone, so they appeared only as peripheral figures. But in the stills they were in full-face shot. Bill opened a series of files and showed her other pictures of the same men.

“This one,” he said, “the one by the van. What was he calling himself?”

“Mr. Brown,” she said.

Bill laughed. “Do you know the Spanish word for ‘brown?’ ” he asked.

“No.”

“It’s moreno—in this case, Hernan Moreno.”

“Television is a visual medium,” she said. “Pictures tell a better story than words. Can I have these photos of yours for comparison with my own?”

“I’ll have copies made for you,” said Bill, “and we’ll keep copies of yours.”

Her cameraman had had to remain outside in the taxi. Covertly, he took a few pictures of the office building. It did not matter. He thought he was photographing CIA headquar­ters. He was not.

When they got back to the Sonesta Beach, Sabrina Tennant spread the photos—hers and those unusually provided from secret CIA files—on a large table in the borrowed banquet room, while the cameraman shot moving film of them all. She did a stand-up piece against a backdrop of the banquet room wall and a picture of President Bush, borrowed from the manager. It would suffice to give the impression of an inner CIA sanctum.

Later that morning, the pair found a deserted cove down a lane off U.S. Highway One and she did another piece, this time backed by white sand, waving palms, and a blue sea, a facsimile for a beach on Sunshine.

At midday she set up her satellite link with London and beamed all her material to the BSB in London. She had a long talk with her news editor as the cutting-room staff began to put the feature together. When they had finished it was a fifteen-minute news story that looked as if Sabrina Tennant had gone to the Caribbean with only one idea in mind—the exposé.

The editor rejigged the running order of the Sunday lunch-time edition of Countdown and called her back in Florida.

“It’s a bloody cracker,” he said. “Well done, love.”

McCready had been busy, too. He spent part of the morning on his portable telephone to London and part talking to Washington.

In London he found the Director of the Special Air Service Regiment staying at the Duke of York’s Barracks in King’s Road, Chelsea. The leathery young general listened to McCready’s request.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” he said. “I’ve got two of them lecturing at Fort Bragg at the moment. I’ll have to get clear­ance.”

“No time,” said McCready. “Look are they owed leave?”

“I suppose they are,” said the Director.

“Fine. Then I’m offering them both three days of rest and recreation here in the sun. As my personal guests. What could be fairer than that?”

“Sam,” said the Director, “you are a devious old bugger. I’ll see what I can do. But they’re on leave, Okay? Just sunbathing, nothing else.”

“Perish the thought,” said McCready.

With just seven days to go to Christmas, the citizens of Port Plaisance were preparing for the festive season that Saturday afternoon.

Despite the heat, many shop windows were being decorated with depictions of robins, holly, Yule logs, and polystyrene snow. Very few of the islanders had even seen a robin or a holly bush, let alone snow, but the British Victorian tradition had long suggested that Jesus had been born surrounded by them all, so they duly formed part of the Christmas decora­tions.

Outside the Anglican church, Mr. Quince, aided by a swarm of eager little girls, was decorating a tableau beneath a straw roof. A small plastic doll lay in the manger, and the children were placing figurines of oxen, sheep, donkeys, and shep­herds.

On the outskirts of town, Reverend Drake was conducting choir practice for his carol service. His deep bass voice was not up to scratch. Beneath his black shirt, his torso was swathed in Dr. Jones’s bandages to ease his sprung ribs, and his voice wheezed as if he were out of breath. His parishioners eyed each other meaningfully. Everyone knew what had happened to him on Thursday evening. Nothing remained a secret in Port Plaisance for long.

At three o’clock, a battered van drove into Parliament Square and stopped. From the driver’s seat emerged the enormous figure of Firestone. He went around to the rear, opened the door, and lifted Missy Coltrane out, invalid chair and all. Slowly, he wheeled her down Main Street to do her shopping. There were no press about. Most of them, bored, had gone swimming off Conch Point.

Her progress was slow, being marked by innumerable greetings. She responded to each, hailing shopkeepers and passersby with their names, never forgetting one.

“G’day, Missy Coltrane,” “Good day, Jasper,” “Good day, Simon,” “Good day, Emmanuel”—she asked after wives and children, congratulated a beaming father-to-be on his good fortune, sympathized with a case of a broken arm. She made her usual purchases, and the shopkeepers brought their wares to the door for her to examine.

She paid from a small purse she kept in her lap, while from a larger handbag she dispensed a seemingly inexhaustible supply of small candies to the crowd of children who offered to carry her shopping bags in the hopes of a second ration.

She bought fresh fruit and vegetables; kerosene for her lamps, matches, herbs, spices, meat, and oil. Her progress brought her through the shopping area to the quay, where she greeted the fishermen and bought two snapper and a wriggling lobster that had been preordered by the Quarter Deck Hotel. If Missy Coltrane wanted it, she got it. No argument. The Quarter Deck would get the prawns and the conch.

As she returned to Parliament Square, she met Detective Chief Superintendent Hannah descending from the hotel steps. He was accompanied by Detective Parker and an American called Favaro. They were off to the airstrip to meet the four o’clock plane from Nassau.

She greeted them all, although she had never seen two of them. Then Firestone lifted her up, placed her and her chair beside the groceries in the rear of the van, and drove off.

“Who’s that?” asked Favaro.

“An old lady who lives on a hill,” said Hannah.

“Oh, I’ve heard of her,” said Parker. “She’s supposed to know everything about this place.”

Hannah frowned. Since his investigation had run out of steam, the thought had occurred to him more than once that Missy Coltrane might know more than she had let on about who had fired those shots on Tuesday evening. Still, her suggestion about the entourages of the two candidates had been shrewd. He had seen them both, and his policeman’s instinct had told him he thought very little of them. If only they had a motive.

The short-haul island-hopper from Nassau landed just after four. The pilot had a package from the Metro-Dade Police Department for a Mr. Favaro. The Miami detective identified himself and took the package. Parker, his sample bottle con­taining the vital bullet in his jacket pocket, boarded.

“There’ll be a car for you at Heathrow tomorrow morn­ing,” said Hannah. “Straight to Lambeth. I want that bullet in the hands of Alan Mitchell as fast as possible.”

On the ground, after the plane took off, Favaro showed the photos of Francisco Mendes, alias the Scorpion, to Hannah. The British detective studied them. There were ten in all, showing a lean, saturnine man with slicked-back black hair and a thin, expressionless mouth. The eyes, looking into the camera, were blank.

“Nasty-looking bastard,” agreed Hannah. “Let’s get them up to Chief Inspector Jones.”

The head of the Barclayan Police was in his office on Parliament Square. The sound of carols came from the open doors of the Anglican church, and laughter came from the open bar of the Quarter Deck. The press was back.

Jones shook his head. “No, never seen him, man. Not in these islands.”

“I don’t think Julio would mistake his man,” said Favaro. “We sat opposite him for four days.”

Hannah was inclined to agree. Maybe he had been looking in the wrong place, inside Government House. Perhaps the killing had been a contract job. But why ...?

“Would you circulate these, Mr. Jones? Show them around. He was supposed to have been seen in the bar of the Quarter Deck last Thursday week. Maybe somebody else saw him. The barman, any other customers that night. Anyone who saw where he went when he left, anyone who saw him in any other bar—you know the score.”

Inspector Jones nodded. He knew his patch. He would show the picture around.

At sundown, Hannah checked his watch. Parker would have arrived at Nassau an hour ago. He would be boarding the overnight plane to London about now. Eight hours’ flying, add five hours for time zones, and he would touch down just after seven A.M. London time.

Alan Mitchell, the brilliant civilian scientist who headed the Home Office ballistics lab at Lambeth, had agreed to give up his Sunday to work on the bullet. He would subject it to every known test and phone Hannah by Sunday afternoon with his findings. Then Hannah would know exactly what weapon he was looking for. That would narrow the odds. Someone must have seen the weapon that was used. This was such a small community.

Hannah was interrupted over his supper by a call from Nassau.

“I’m afraid the plane’s an hour delayed on takeoff,” said Parker. “We’re off in ten minutes. Thought you might like to alert London.”

Hannah checked his watch. Half-past seven. He swore, put the phone down, and went back to his grilled grouper. It was cold.

He was taking his nightcap in the bar at ten when the bar phone rang.

“I’m awfully sorry about this,” said Parker.

“Where the hell are you?” roared Hannah.

“In Nassau, Chief. You see, we took off at half-past seven, flew for forty-five minutes over the sea, developed a slight engine fault, and turned back. The engineers are working on it now. Shouldn’t be long.”

“Give me a call just before you take off,” said Hannah. “I’ll tell London of the new arrival time.”

He was awakened at three in the morning.

“The engineers have fixed the fault,” said Parker. “It was a warning light solenoid cut-out on the port outer engine.”

“Parker,” said Hannah slowly and carefully, “I don’t care if it was the Chief Purser pissing in the fuel tank. Is it fixed?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So you’re taking off?”

“Well, not exactly. You see, by the time we make London, the crew will have exceeded their permitted hours without a rest. So they can’t fly.”

“Well, what about the slip crew? The ones who brought that plane in yesterday afternoon, twelve hours ago. They must have rested.”

“Yes, well, they’ve been found, Chief. Only they thought they had a thirty-six-hour stopover. The First Officer went to a friend’s stag night. He can’t fly, either.”

Hannah made a remark about the world’s favorite airline to which the chairman, Lord King, would have taken considera­ble exception, had he heard it.

“So what happens now?” he asked.

“We have to wait until the crew has rested. Then we fly,” said the voice from Nassau.

Hannah rose and went out. There were no taxis, no Oscar. He walked all the way to Government House, raised Jeffer­son, and was let in. In the humid night he was soaked in sweat. He put through a long-distance call to Scotland Yard and got Mitchell’s private number. He called that number to warn the scientists, but the man had left his home for Lambeth five minutes earlier. It was four A.M. in Sunshine, nine A.M. in London. He waited an hour until he could reach Mitchell at the laboratory to tell him Parker would not be there until early evening. Alan Mitchell was not pleased when he heard it. He had to drive all the way back to West Mailing in Kent through a bitter December day.

Parker called again at midday on Sunday. Hannah was killing time in the bar at the Quarter Deck.

“Yes?” he said wearily.

“It’s okay, Chief. The crew is rested. They’re able to fly.”

“Great,” said Hannah. He checked his watch.

Eight hours’ flying, add five for time zones—if Alan Mitch­ell would agree to work through the night, Hannah could have his answer in Sunshine by breakfast hour on Monday.

“So you’re taking off now?” he asked.

“Well, not exactly,” said Parker. “You see, if we did, we’d land after one A.M. at Heathrow. That’s not allowed. Noise abatement, I’m afraid.”

“So what the hell are you going to do?”

“Well, the usual takeoff time is just after six this afternoon here, landing just after seven A.M. at Heathrow. So they’re going to revert to that timing.”

“But that’ll mean two jumbos taking off together,” said Hannah.

“Yes, it does, Chief. But don’t worry. Both will be full, so the airline won’t take a loss.”

“Thank God for that!” snapped Hannah, and put the phone down. Twenty-four hours, he thought, twenty-four bleeding hours. There are three things in this life about which one can do nothing: death, taxes, and airlines.

Then he spotted Dillon walking up the steps to the hotel with two fit-looking young men. Probably his taste, thought Hannah savagely, bloody Foreign Office. He was not in a good mood.

Across the square, a flock of Mr. Quince’s parishioners—the men in neat dark suits, the women brightly caparisoned like birds of brilliant plumage—were streaming out of the church at the end of morning service, prayer books in white-gloved hands, wax fruit bobbing and nodding on straw hats. It was an (almost) normal Sunday morning on Sunshine Is­land.

In the home counties of England, things were not quite so peaceful. At Chequers, the country residence of the Prime Ministers of Great Britain, set amid twelve hundred rolling acres of Buckinghamshire, Mrs. Thatcher had been up early as usual and had plowed through four red dispatch boxes of state papers before joining Denis Thatcher for breakfast be­fore a cheery log fire.

As she finished, there was a tap on the door, and her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, entered. He held the Sunday Express in his hand.

“Something I thought you might like to see, Prime Minis­ter.”

“So who’s having a go at me now?” inquired the PM brightly.

“No,” said the beetle-browed Yorkshireman. “It’s about the Caribbean.”

She read the large centerfold spread, and her brow fur­rowed. The pictures were there: of Marcus Johnson on the hustings in Port Plaisance, and again, a few years earlier, seen through a gap in a pair of curtains. There were photos of his eight bodyguards, all taken around Parliament Square on Friday, and matching pictures taken from Kingston Police files. Lengthy statements from “senior DEA sources in the Caribbean” and from Commissioner Foster of the Kingston Police occupied much of the accompanying text.

“But this is dreadful!” said the Prime Minister. “I must speak to Douglas.”

She went straight to her private office and rang Douglas.

Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Mr. Douglas Hurd, was with his family at his official country residence—another mansion, called Chevening, set in the county of Kent. He had perused the Sunday Times, Observer, and Sunday Telegraph, but he had not yet reached the Sunday Express.

“No, Margaret, I haven’t seen it yet,” he said. “But I have it within arm’s reach.”

“I’ll hold on,” said the PM.

The Foreign Secretary, a former novelist of some note, knew a good newspaper story when he saw one. This one seemed to be extremely well sourced.

“Yes, I agree. It’s disgraceful, if it’s true. ... Yes, yes, Margaret, I’ll get onto it in the morning and have the Carib­bean desk check it out.”

But civil servants are human beings too—a sentiment not often echoed by the general public—and they have wives, children, and homes. With six days to go to Christmas, Parliament was in recess and even the ministries were thinly staffed. Still, there had to be someone on duty the next morning, Monday, and the matter of a new Governor could be addressed then.

Mrs. Thatcher and her family went to Sunday-morning service at Ellesborough and returned just after twelve. At one they sat down for lunch with a few friends. These included Bernard Ingham.

It was her political adviser Charles Powell who caught the BSB program Countdown at twelve o’clock. He liked Count­down. It carried some good foreign news now and again, and as an ex-diplomat that was his specialty. When he saw the program’s headlines and a reference to a later report on a scandal in the Caribbean, he pressed the “record” button on the VCR machine beneath the TV.

At two, Mrs. Thatcher was up again—she never saw much point in spending a long time over food; it wasted part of a busy day—and as she left the dining room a hovering Charles Powell intercepted her. In her study he put the tape into her VCR and ran it. She watched in silence. Then she rang Chevening again.

Mr. Hurd, a devoted family man, had taken his small son and daughter for a brisk walk across the fields. He had just returned, hungry for his roast beef, when Mrs. Thatcher’s second call came through.

“No, I missed that too, Margaret,” he said.

“I have a tape,” said the Prime Minister. “It is quite appalling. I’ll send it straight to you. Please screen it when it arrives and call me back.”

A dispatch rider roared through the gloom of a dismal December afternoon, skirted London via the M25 motorway, and was at Chevening by half-past four.

The Foreign Secretary called Chequers at five-fifteen and was put straight through. “I agree, Margaret, quite appall­ing,” said Douglas Hurd.

“I suggest we need a new Governor out there,” said the PM, “not in the new year, but now. We must show we are active, Douglas. You know who else will have seen these stories?”

The Foreign Secretary was well aware that Her Majesty was with her family at Sandringham but not cut off from world events. She was an avid newspaper reader, and she watched current affairs issues on television.

“I’ll get on to it immediately,” he said.

He did. The Permanent Under-Secretary was jerked out of his armchair in Sussex and began phoning around. At eight that evening the choice had fallen on Sir Crispian Rattray, a retired diplomat and former High Commissioner in Barbados, who was willing to go.

He agreed to report to the Foreign Office in the morning for formal appointment and a thorough briefing. He would fly on the late-morning plane from Heathrow, landing at Nassau on Monday afternoon. He would consult further with the High Commission there, spend the night, and arrive on Sunshine by chartered airplane on Tuesday morning to take the reins in hand.

“It shouldn’t take long, my dear,” he told Lady Rattray as he packed. “Mucks up the pheasant shooting, but there we are. Seems I’ll have to withdraw the candidacy of these two rascals and see the elections through with two new candi­dates. Then they’ll grant independence, I’ll hoist the old flag down, London will send in a High Commissioner, the island­ers will run their own affairs, and I can come home. Month or two, shouldn’t doubt. Pity about the pheasants.”

* * *

At nine o’clock on Sunday morning on Sunshine, McCready found Hannah having breakfast on the terrace at the hotel.

“Would you mind awfully if I used the new phone at Government House to call London?” he asked. “I ought to talk to my people about going back home.”

“Be my guest,” said Hannah. He looked tired and unshaved, as someone who had been up half the night.

At half-past nine, island time, McCready put his call through to Denis Gaunt. What his deputy told him about the Sunday Express and the Countdown program confirmed to McCready that what he had hoped would happen had indeed happened.

Since the small hours of the morning, a variety of news editors in London had been trying to call their correspondents in Port Plaisance with news of what the Sunday Express was carrying in its centerfold page spread and to ask for an urgent follow-up story. After lunch, London time, the calls redou­bled—they had seen the Countdown story as well. None of the calls had come through.

McCready had briefed the switchboard operator at the Quarter Deck that all the gentlemen of the press were ex­tremely tired and were not to be disturbed under any circum­stances. He had himself been elected to take all their calls for them, and he would pass them on. A hundred-dollar bill had sealed the compact. The switchboard operator duly told every London caller that his party was “out” but that the message would reach him immediately. The messages were duly passed to McCready, who duly ignored them. The moment for further press coverage had not yet come.

At eleven A.M. he was at the airport to greet two young SAS sergeants flying in from Miami. They had been lecturing for the benefit of their colleagues in the American Green. Berets at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when alerted to take three days’ furlough and report to their host on the island of Sunshine. They had flown south to Miami and chartered an air taxi to Port Plaisance.

Their baggage was meager, but it included one hold-all containing their toys, wrapped in beach towels. The CIA had been kind enough to ensure that bag cleared customs at Miami, and McCready, waving his Foreign Office letter, claimed diplomatic immunity for it at Port Plaisance.

The Deceiver brought them back to the hotel and installed them in a room next to his own. They stashed their bag of “goodies” under the bed, locked the door, and went for a long swim. McCready had already told them when he would need them—at ten the next morning at Government House.

Having lunched on the terrace, McCready went to see the Reverend Walter Drake. He found the Baptist minister at his small house, resting his still bruised body. He introduced himself and asked how the pastor was feeling.

“Are you with Mr. Hannah?” asked Drake.

“Not exactly with him,” said McCready. “More ... keeping an eye on things while he gets on with his murder investigation. My concern is more the political side of things.”

“You with the Foreign Office?” persisted Drake.

“In a way,” said McCready. “Why do you ask?”

“I do not like your Foreign Office,” said Drake. “You are selling my people down the river.”

“Ah, now that might just be about to change,” said Mc­Cready, and told the preacher what he wished of him.

Reverend Drake shook his head. “I am a man of God,” he said. “You want different people for that sort of thing.”

“Mr. Drake, yesterday I called Washington. Someone there told me that only seven Barclayans had ever served in the United States armed forces. One of them was listed as Drake W.”

“Another man,” growled Reverend Drake.

“This man said,” pursued McCready quietly, “that the Drake W. they had listed had been a sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps. Served two tours in Vietnam. Came back with a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts. I wonder what hap­pened to him?”

The big pastor lumbered to his feet, crossed the room, and stared out at the clapboard houses up and down the street where he lived.

“Another man,” he growled, “another time, another place. I do only God’s work now.”

“Don’t you think what I ask of you might qualify?”

The big man considered, then nodded. “Possibly.”

“I think so, too,” said McCready. “I hope I’ll see you there. I need all the help I can get. Ten o’clock, tomorrow morning, Government House.”

He left and strolled down through the town to the harbor. Jimmy Dobbs was working on the Gulf Lady. McCready spent thirty minutes with him, and they agreed on a charter voyage for the following day.

He was hot and sticky when he arrived at Government House just before five that afternoon. Jefferson served him an iced tea while he waited for Lieutenant Jeremy Haverstock to return. The young officer had been playing tennis with some other expatriates at a villa in the hills.

McCready’s question to him was simple: “Will you be here at ten o’clock tomorrow morning?”

Haverstock thought it over. “Yes, I suppose so,” he said.

“Good,” said McCready. “Do you have your full tropical dress uniform with you?”

“Yes,” said the cavalryman. “Only got to wear it once. A state ball in Nassau six months ago.”

“Excellent,” said McCready. “Ask Jefferson to press it and polish up the leather and brasses.”

A mystified Haverstock escorted him to the front hall. “I suppose you’ve heard the good news?” he asked. “That detective chappie from Scotland Yard. Found the bullet yes­terday in the garden. Absolutely intact. Parker’s on his way to London with it.”

“Good show,” said McCready. “Spiffing news.”

He had dinner with Eddie Favaro at the hotel at eight. Over coffee he asked, “What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Going home,” said Favaro. “I only took a week off. Have to be back on the job Tuesday morning.”

“Ah, yes. What time’s your plane?”

“Booked an air taxi for midday.”

“Couldn’t delay it until four o’clock, could you?”

“I suppose so. Why?”

“Because I could do with your help. Say, Government House, ten o’clock? Thanks, see you then. Don’t be late. Monday is going to be a very busy day.”

McCready rose at six. A pink dawn, herald of another balmy day, was touching the tips of the palm trees out in Parliament Square. It was delightfully cool. He washed and shaved and went out into the square, where the taxi he had ordered awaited him. His first duty was to say good-bye to an old lady.

He spent an hour with her, between seven and eight, took coffee and hot rolls, and made his farewells.

“Now, don’t forget, Lady Coltrane,” he said as he rose to leave.

“Don’t worry, I won’t. And it’s Missy.”

She held out her hand. He stooped to take it.

At half-past eight, he was back in Parliament Square and dropped in on Chief Inspector Jones. He showed the chief of police his Foreign Office letter.

“Please be at Government House at ten o’clock,” he said. “Bring with you your two sergeants, four constables, your personal Land-Rover, and two plain vans. Do you have a service revolver?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Please bring that too.”

At the same moment, it was half-past one in London. But in the Ballistics Department of the Home Office forensic labora­tory in Lambeth, Mr. Alan Mitchell was not thinking of lunch. He was staring into a microscope.

Beneath the lens, held at each end in a gentle clamp, was a bullet. Mitchell stared at the striation marks that ran the length of the lead slug, curving around the metal as they went. They were the marks left by the rifling in the barrel that had fired the bullet. For the fifth time that day, he gently turned the bullet under the lens, picking out the other scratches—the “lands”—that were as individual to a gun barrel as a finger­print to a human hand.

Finally he was satisfied. He whistled in surprise and went for one of his manuals. He had a whole library of them, for Alan Mitchell was widely regarded as the most knowledgeable weapons expert in Europe.

There were still other tests to be carried out. He knew that somewhere four thousand miles across the sea, a detective waited impatiently for his findings, but he would not be hurried. He had to be sure, absolutely sure. Too many cases in court had been lost because experts produced by the defense had flawed the evidence presented by the forensic scientists for the prosecution.

There were tests to be carried out on the minuscule frag­ments of burnt powder that still adhered to the blunt end of the slug. Tests on the manufacture and composition of the lead, which he had already carried out on the twisted bullet he had had for two days, would have to be repeated on the newly arrived one. The spectroscope would plunge its rays deep into the metal itself, betraying the very molecular struc­ture of the lead, identifying its approximate age and some­times even the factory that had produced it. Alan Mitchell took the manual he sought from his shelves, sat down and began to read.

McCready dismissed his taxi at the gate of Government house and rang the bell. Jefferson recognized him and let him in. McCready explained he had to make another phone call on the international line that had been installed by Bannister, and that he had Mr. Hannah’s permission. Jefferson showed him into the private study and left him.

McCready ignored the telephone and addressed himself to the desk. In the early stages of the investigation, Hannah had been through the drawers, using the dead Governor’s keys, and after assuring himself there were no clues to the murder therein, he had relocked them all.

McCready had no keys, but he did not need them. He had picked the locks the previous day and found what he wanted. They were in the bottom left-hand drawer. There were two of them, but he needed only one.

It was an imposing sheet of paper, crisp to the touch and creamy like parchment. In the center at the top, raised and embossed in gold, was the royal coat-of-arms: the lion and the unicorn supporting the shield emblazoned in its four quarters with the heraldic emblems of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.

Beneath, in bold black lettering, were the words:

WE, ELIZABETH THE SECOND, OF THE UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND, AND OF ALL HER TERRITORIES AND DEPENDENCIES BEYOND THE SEAS, BY THE GRACE OF GOD QUEEN, DO HEREBY APPOINT ... (here there was a gap) TO BE OUR ... (another gap) IN THE TERRITORY OF ... (a third gap).

Beneath the text was a facsimile signature that read, “Eliz­abeth R.”

It was a Royal Warrant. En blanc. McCready took a pen from the inkstand of Sir Marston Moberley and filled it in, using his best copperplate script. When he had finished, he blew gently on the ink to dry it and used the gubernatorial seal to stamp it.

Outside in the sitting room his guests were assembling. He looked at the document again and shrugged. He had just appointed himself Governor of the Barclays. For a day.

Chapter 6

There were six of them. Jefferson had served coffee and left. He did not inquire what they were doing there. It was not his business.

The two SAS sergeants, Newson and Sinclair, stood by the wall. They were in cream tracksuits and shod in cleated training shoes. Each had a pouch around the waist, held by a strap, the same as those favored by tourists for storing their cigarettes and sun oil on the beach. These pouches did not contain sun oil.

Lieutenant Haverstock had not changed into his dress uni­form. He sat on one of the brocaded chairs, his long legs elegantly crossed. Reverend Drake was on the settee beside Eddie Favaro. Chief Inspector Jones, in his dark-blue tunic, silver buttons, and insignia, shorts, stockings, and shoes, stood by the door.

McCready took the warrant and offered it to Haverstock. “This arrived from London at dawn,” he said. “Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.”

Haverstock read the warrant.

“Well, that’s all right then,” he said, and passed it on. Inspector Jones read it, stiffened to attention, and said, “Yes, sir.” He passed it to the sergeants. Newson said: “All right by me,” and Sinclair read it and said, “No problem.”

He passed it to Favaro, who read it and muttered, “Jeez,” getting a warning glance from Reverend Drake, who took the document, read it, and growled, “Lord be praised.”

“My first act,” said McCready, “is to empower you all—excepting Chief Inspector Jones, of course—with the author­ity of Special Constables. You are hereby deputized. Sec­ondly, I’d better explain what we are going to do.”

He talked for thirty minutes. No one disagreed. Then he summoned Haverstock, and they left to change. Lady Moberley was still in bed enjoying a liquid breakfast. It made no matter. She and Sir Marston had had separate bedrooms, and the late Governor’s dressing room was unoccupied. Haverstock showed McCready where it was and left. McCready found what he wanted right at the back of the wardrobe; the full dress uniform of a British colonial Governor, albeit two sizes too large.

When he re-entered the sitting room, the rumpled tourist in the creased jacket from the terrace bar of the Quarter Deck Hotel was gone. On his feet the George boots with their boxed spurs gleamed. The tight trousers were white, as was the tunic jacket, which buttoned to the throat. The gold buttons and gilt aiguillettes from the left breast pocket glittered in the sunlight, as did the slanting chain and spike on his Wolsey helmet. The sash around his waist was blue.

Haverstock was also in white, but his flat officer’s cap was in dark blue with a black peak. The double-headed eagle of the Queen’s Dragoon Guards was above the peak. His aiguillettes were also gilded, as were the patches of chain-mail covering each shoulder. A gleaming black leather strap lay slantwise across his chest and back, at the rear supporting a slim ammunition pouch, also in black leather. He wore his two service medals.

“Right, Mr. Jones. Let us go.” said McCready. “We must be about the Queen’s business.”

Chief Inspector Jones swelled. No one had ever asked him to be about the Queen’s business before. When the cavalcade left the front forecourt, it was led by the official Jaguar. Oscar drove, with a policeman beside him. McCready and Haver­stock sat in the back, helmets on. Behind them came the Land-Rover, driven by a second constable with Jones beside him. Favaro and Reverend Drake sat in the back.

Before leaving Government House, Sergeant Sinclair had quietly slipped Favaro a loaded Colt Cobra, which now nes­tled in the American detective’s waistband beneath his loose shirt. The sergeant had also offered one to Reverend Drake, who had shaken his head.

The two vans were driven by the remaining two constables. Newson and Sinclair crouched by their open side doors. The police sergeants were in the last van.

At a sedate pace, the Jaguar rolled into Shantytown. Down the long main street people stopped and stared. The two figures in the back sat up straight and looked ahead.

At the gates to the walled compound of Mr. Horatio Living­stone, McCready ordered the car to stop. He descended. So did Lieutenant Haverstock. A crowd of several hundred Barclayans emerged from the surrounding alleys and watched them, mouths agape. McCready did not ask for admission; he just stood in front of the double gate.

Sergeants Newson and Sinclair jogged up to the wall. Newson cupped his hands, Sinclair put a heel in them, and Newson heaved. The lighter man went over the wall without touching the shards of glass along its top. The gates were unlocked from the inside. Sinclair stood back as McCready entered with Haverstock at his side. The vehicles rolled after them at a walking pace.

Three men in gray safari suits were halfway across the compound, running for the gate, when McCready appeared. They stopped and stared at the two white-uniformed figures walking purposefully toward the front door. Sinclair disap­peared. Newson darted through the open gates and did the same.

McCready walked up the steps of the verandah and into the house. Behind him, Haverstock stood on the verandah and stared at the three gray safari suits. They kept their distance. Favaro and Drake, Jones, the two police sergeants, and three constables left their vehicles and came after them. One con­stable remained with the cars and vans. Haverstock then joined the group inside. There were now ten of them and one outside.

In the big reception room the policemen took positions by the doors and windows. A door opened, and Horatio Living­stone emerged. He surveyed the invasion with ill-concealed rage.

“You can’t come in here! What is the meaning of this?” he shouted.

McCready held out his warrant. “Would you please read this?” he said.

Livingstone read it and tossed it contemptuously to the floor. Jones retrieved it and handed it back to McCready, who restored it to his pocket.

“I would like you to summon all your Bahamian staff here—all seven of them—with their passports, if you please, Mr. Livingstone.”

“By whose authority?” snapped Livingstone.

“I am the supreme authority,” said McCready.

“Imperialist!” shouted Livingstone. “In fifteen days I will be the authority here, and then—”

“If you decline,” said McCready calmly, “I will ask Chief Inspector Jones here to arrest you for attempting to subvert the course of justice. Mr. Jones, are you ready to carry out your duty?”

“Yes, sir.”

Livingstone glowered at them all. He called one of his aides from a side room and gave the order. One by one the men in safari suits appeared. Favaro circulated, collecting their Ba­hamian passports. He handed them to McCready.

McCready went through them one by one, handing each to Haverstock. The lieutenant glanced at them and tut-tutted.

“These passports are all false,” said McCready. “They are good, but they are forgeries.”

“That’s not true!” screamed Livingstone. “They are per­fectly valid!”

He was right. They were not forged. They had been pur­chased with a very substantial bribe.

“No,” said McCready, “these men are not Bahamians. Nor are you a democratic socialist. You are, in fact, a dedi­cated Communist who has worked for years for Fidel Castro, and these men around you are Cuban officers. Mr. Brown over there is, in fact, Captain Hernan Moreno of the Direccion General de Informacion, the Cuban equivalent of the KGB. The others, picked for their pure Negroid appearance and fluent English, are also Cubans from the DGI. I am arresting them all for illegal entry into the Barclays, and you for aiding and abetting.”

It was Moreno who went for his gun first. It was tucked in his waistband at the back, hidden by the safari jacket, as were all the guns. He was very fast, and his hand was behind his back reaching for the Makarov before anyone in the reception area could move.

The Cuban was stopped by a sharp shout from the top of the stairs that led to the upper floors: “Fuera la mano, o seras fiambre.”

Hernan Moreno got the message just in time. His hand stopped moving. He froze. So did the six others, who were in the act of following his example.

Sinclair’s Spanish was fluent and colloquial. Fiambre is a collation of cold meats, and in Spanish slang, a stiff, or corpse.

The two sergeants were at the top of the stairs, side by side, having entered through upper windows. Their touristic pouches were empty, but their hands were not. Each held a small but reliable Heckler and Koch MP5 machine pistol.

“These men,” said McCready mildly, “are not accustomed to missing. Now, please ask your men to put their hands above their heads.”

Livingstone remained silent.

Favaro slipped up behind him, slid his arm around the man’s chest, and eased the barrel of his Colt Cobra into his right nostril. “Three seconds,” he whispered. “Then I have an awful accident.”

“Do it,” rasped Livingstone.

Fourteen hands went upward and stayed there. The three police constables went around collecting the seven handguns.

“Frisk,” said McCready. The police sergeants frisked each Cuban. Two knives in calf-sheaths were discovered.

“Search the house,” said McCready.

The seven Cubans were lined up, facing the sitting-room wall, hands on top of heads. Livingstone sat in his club chair, covered by Favaro. The SAS men stayed on the stairs in case of an attempt at mass breakout. There was none. The five local police officers searched the house.

They discovered a variety of extra weapons, a large sum of American dollars, further sums of Barclayan pounds, and a powerful short-wave radio with encrypter.

“Mr. Livingstone,” said McCready, “I could ask Mr. Jones to charge your associates with a variety of offenses under British law—false passports, illegal entry, carrying of unlicensed guns—it’s a long list. Instead, I am going to expel them all as undesirable aliens. Now—within the hour. You may, if you wish, stay on here alone. You are, after all, a Barclayan by birth. But you would still be open to charges of aiding and abetting, and frankly you might feel safer back where you belong, on Cuba.”

“I’ll second that,” growled Reverend Drake.

Livingstone nodded.

In single file, the Cubans were marched out to the second of the two vans waiting in the courtyard. Only one tried violence. Attempting to run, he was blocked by a local consta­ble and threw the officer to the ground.

Inspector Jones acted with remarkable speed. He produced from his belt the short holly-wood truncheon known to gen­erations of British policeman as “the holly.” There was a loud pok as the timber bounced off the Cuban’s head. The man sank to his knees, feeling quite unwell.

“Don’t do that,” Chief Inspector Jones advised him.

The Cubans and Horatio Livingstone sat on the floor of the van, hands on heads, while Sergeant Newson leaned over from the front seat, covering them with his machine pistol. The cavalcade formed up again and trundled slowly out of Shantytown to the fishing quay in Port Plaisance. McCready kept the pace slow so that hundreds of Barclayans could see what was going on.

At the fishing quay, the Gulf Lady waited, her engine idling. Behind her, she towed a garbage scow newly fitted with two pairs of oars.

“Mr. Dobbs,” said McCready, “please tow these gentle­man as far as the start of Cuban territorial waters, or until a Cuban patrol boat starts to cruise in your direction. Then cast them loose. They can be pulled home by their fellow country­men, or row home with the onshore breeze.”

Jimmy Dobbs looked askance at the Cubans. There were seven of them, plus Livingstone.

“Lieutenant Haverstock here will accompany you,” said McCready. “He will, of course, be armed.”

Sergeant Sinclair gave Haverstock the Colt Cobra that the Reverend Drake had declined to use. Haverstock stepped onto the Gulf Lady and took position sitting on the cabin roof, facing aft.

“Don’t worry, old boy,” he said to Dobbs. “If one of them moves, I’ll just blow his nuts off.”

“Mr. Livingstone,” said McCready, looking down at the eight men in the scow, “one last thing. When you reach Cuba, you may tell Señor Castro that taking over the Barclays through a stooge candidate in the elections, and then perhaps annexing the islands to Cuba, or turning them into an inter­national revolutionary training camp, was a wonderful idea. But you might also tell him that it ain’t going to work. Not now, not ever. He’ll have to salvage his political career some other way. Good-bye, Mr. Livingstone. Don’t come back.”

More than a thousand Barclayans thronged the quay as the Gulf Lady turned away from the jetty and headed for the open sea.

“One more chore, I believe, gentlemen,” said McCready, and strode back down the jetty toward the Jaguar, his gleam­ing white uniform cutting a swath through the crowd of onlookers.

The wrought-iron gates to the estate of Marcus Johnson were locked. Newson and Sinclair stepped out of the side door of their van and went straight over the wall without touching the top. Minutes later, from inside the estate, there came a soft thunk, as of the edge of a hard hand coming into contact with the human frame. The electric motor hummed, and the gates swung open.

Inside, and to the right, was a small hut with a control panel and telephone. Slumped on the floor was a man in bright beach shirt, his dark glasses crushed on the floor beside him. He was thrown into the last van with the two police sergeants. Newson and Sinclair slipped away across the lawns and were lost to view among the bushes.

Marcus Johnson was descending the tiled staircase toward the open-plan reception area when McCready strode in. He was pulling a silk bathrobe around himself.

“May I ask what the hell this means?” he demanded.

“Certainly,” said McCready. “Please read this.”

Johnson handed the warrant back.

“So? I have committed no offense. You break into my house—London will hear of this, Mr. Dillon. You will regret this morning’s work. I have lawyers.”

“Good,” said McCready. “You may well need them. Now, I want to interview your staff, Mr. Johnson—your election assistants, your associates. One has been kind enough to escort us to the door. Please bring him in.”

The two police sergeants picked up the gatekeeper, whom they had been supporting between them, and dropped him on a sofa.

“The other seven, if you please, Mr. Johnson, with their passports.”

Johnson crossed to an onyx telephone and picked it up. The line was dead. He put it down.

“I intend to summon the police,” he said.

“I am the police,” retorted Chief Inspector Jones. “Please do as the Governor asks.”

Johnson thought it over, then called upstairs. A head ap­peared at the upper banister. Johnson gave the order.

Two men in bright shirts emerged from the verandah and stood beside their master. Five more came down from the upper rooms. Several muffled female squeals were heard. There had apparently been a party going on.

Inspector Jones went around collecting their passports. The man on the sofa had his own removed from his back pocket.

McCready examined them all, one by one, shaking his head as he did so.

“They are not forgeries,” Johnson said with quiet assur­ance, “and as you see, all my associates entered Sunshine Island legally. The fact that they are of Jamaican nationality is irrelevant.”

“Not quite,” said McCready, “since all of them failed to declare that they have criminal records, contrary to Section Four, Subsection B-1, of the Immigration Act.”

Johnson looked dumbfounded, as well he might. McCready had just invented the whole thing.

“In fact,” he said evenly, “all these men are members of a criminal conspiracy known as the Yardbirds.”

The Yardbirds had started as street gangs in the slums of Kingston, taking their name from the backyard where they held sway. They began in protection racketeering and earned a reputation for vicious violence. Later, they developed into purveyors of hemp and the cocaine-derivative crack and went international. For short, they are known as Yardies.

One of the Jamaicans was standing near a wall against which a baseball bat was leaning. His hand slowly crept nearer to the bat.

Reverend Drake caught the movement. “Hallelujah, brother,” he said quietly, and hit him. Just once. Very hard. They teach many things in Baptist colleges, but the short-arm jab as a means of converting the ungodly is not one of them. The Jamaican rolled up his eyes and slid to the floor.

The incident acted as a signal. Four of the six remaining Yardies went for their waistbands beneath their beach shirts.

“Freeze! Hold it!”

Newson and Sinclair had waited until the upper floor was vacated, except for the girls, before coming in through the windows. Now they were on the upper landing, machine pistols covering the open area below. Hands froze in mid-movement.

“They daren’t fire,” snarled Johnson. “They’d hit you all.”

Favaro came across the marble floor in a roll and rose behind Marcus Johnson. He slid his left hand under the man’s throat and dug the barrel of the Colt into his kidneys.

“Maybe,” he said, “but you go first.”

“Your hands above your heads, if you please,” said McCready.

Johnson swallowed and nodded. The six Yardies raised their hands. They were ordered to walk to the wall and lean against it, hands high. The two police sergeants relieved them of their guns.

“I suppose,” snapped Johnson, “you will be calling me a Yardbird. I am a citizen of these islands, a respectable busi­nessman.”

“No,” said McCready reasonably, “you’re not. You’re a cocaine dealer. That’s how you made your fortune. Running dope for the Medellin cartel. Since leaving these islands as a poor teenager, you’ve spent most of your time in Colombia, or setting up dummy companies in Europe and North America to launder cocaine money. And now, if you please, I would like to meet your Colombian chief executive, Señor Mendes.”

“Never heard of him. No such man,” said Johnson.

McCready thrust a photograph under his nose.

Johnson’s eyes nickered.

“This Señor Mendes, or whatever he is calling himself now.”

Johnson remained silent. McCready looked up and nodded to Newson and Sinclair. They had already seen the photo­graph. The soldiers disappeared. Minutes later, there were two short, rapid bursts of fire from the upper floor and a series of female screams.

Three Latin-looking women appeared at the top of the stairs and ran down. McCready ordered two of the constables to take them out to the lawn and guard them. Sinclair and Newson appeared, pushing a man in front of them. He was thin and sallow, with straight black hair. The sergeants pushed him down the stairs but stayed at the top.

“I could charge your Jamaicans with a variety of offenses under the law here,” McCready said to Johnson, “but in fact I have reserved nine seats on the afternoon plane to Nassau. I think you will find the Bahamian Police more than happy to escort you all to the Kingston flight. In Kingston you are expected. Search the house.”

The remaining local police did the search. They found two more prostitutes hiding under beds, further weapons, and a large amount of American dollars in an attaché case. In Johnson’s bedroom were a few ounces of white powder.

“Half a million dollars,” hissed Johnson to McCready. “Let me go, and it’s yours.”

McCready handed the attaché case to Reverend Drake. “Distribute it among the island’s charities,” he said. Drake nodded. “Burn the cocaine.”

One of the policemen took the packets and went outside to start a bonfire.

“Let’s go,” said McCready.

At four that afternoon the short-haul carrier from Nassau stood on the grass strip, its propellers whirling. The eight Yardbirds, all cuffed, were escorted aboard by two Bahamian Police sergeants, who had come to collect them. Marcus Johnson, his hands cuffed behind him, stood waiting to board.

“You may, after Kingston has extradited you to Miami, be able to get a message to Señor Ochoa, or Señor Escobar, or whoever it is for whom you work,” said McCready.

“Tell him that the taking-over of the Barclays through a proxy was a brilliant idea. To own the coast guards, customs, and police of the new state, to issue diplomatic passports at will, to have diplomatic luggage sent to the States, to build refineries and store depots here in complete freedom, to set up laundering banks with impunity—all extremely ingenious. And profitable, with the casinos for the high rollers, the bordellos ...

“But if you can get the message through, tell him from me, it ain’t going to work. Not in these islands.”

Five minutes later, the boxlike frame of the short-haul lifted off, tilted its wings, and headed away toward the coast of Andros.

McCready walked over to a six-seat Cessna parked behind the hangar. Sergeants Newson and Sinclair were aboard, in the back row, their bag of “goodies” stashed by their feet, on their way back to Fort Bragg. In front of them sat Francisco Mendes, whose real Colombian name had turned out to be something else. His wrists were tied to the frame of his seat. He leaned out of the open door and spat onto the ground.

“You cannot extradite me,” he said in very good English. “You can arrest me and wait for the Americans to ask for extradition. That is all.”

“And that would take months,” said McCready. “My dear chap, you’re not being arrested, just expelled.” He turned to Eddie Favaro. “I hope you don’t mind giving his fellow a lift to Miami,” he said. “Of course, it could be that as you touch down, you will suddenly recognize him as someone wanted by the Metro-Dade force. After that, it’s up to Uncle Sam.”

They shook hands, and the Cessna ran up the grass strip, turned, paused, and put on full power. Seconds later it was out over the sea, turning northwest toward Florida.

McCready walked slowly back to the Jaguar, where Oscar waited. Time to go back to Government House, change, and hang the white uniform of Governor back in the wardrobe.

When he arrived, Detective Chief Superintendent Hannah was in Sir Marston Moberley’s office taking a call from London. McCready slipped upstairs and came down in his rumpled tropical suit. Hannah was hurrying out of the office, calling for Oscar and the Jaguar.

Alan Mitchell had worked until nine that Monday evening before he put through the call to Sunshine Island, where it was only four in the afternoon. Hannah took the call eagerly. He had spent the whole afternoon in the office waiting for the call.

“It’s remarkable,” said the ballistics expert. “One of the most extraordinary bullets I’ve ever examined. Certainly never seen one like it used in a murder before.”

“What’s odd about it?” asked Hannah.

“Well, the lead, to start with. It’s extremely old. Seventy years, at least. They haven’t made lead of that molecular consistency since the early 1920s. The same applies to the powder. Some tiny traces of it remained on the bullet. It was a chemical type introduced in 1912 and discontinued in the early 1920s.”

“But what about the gun?” insisted Hannah.

“That’s the point,” said the scientist in London. “The gun matches the ammunition used. The bullet has an absolutely unmistakable signature, like a fingerprint. Unique. It has exactly seven grooves, with a right-hand twist, left by the barrel of the revolver. No other handgun ever left those seven right-hand grooves. Remarkable, what?”

“Wonderful,” said Hannah. “Just one gun could have fired that shot? Excellent. Now, Alan, which gun?”

“Why, the Webley 4.55, of course. Nothing like it.”

Hannah was not an expert in handguns. He would not have known, at a glance, a Webley 4.55 from a Colt .44 Magnum. Not to look at, that is.

“Fine, Alan. Now tell me, what is so special about the Webley 4.55?”

“Its age. It’s a bloody antique. It was first issued in 1912, discontinued about 1920. It’s a revolver with an extremely long barrel, quite distinctive. They were never very popular because that extra-long barrel kept getting in the way. Accu­rate though, for the same reason. They were issued as service revolvers to British officers in the trenches in the First World War. Have you ever seen one?”

Hannah thanked him and replaced the receiver.

“Oh yes,” he breathed, “I’ve seen one.”

He was rushing across the hall when he saw that strange man Dillon from the Foreign Office.

“Use the phone if you like. It’s free,” he called, and climbed into the Jaguar.

When he was shown in, Missy Coltrane was in her wheelchair in the sitting room. She greeted him with a welcoming smile.

“Why, Mr. Hannah, how nice to see you again,” she said. “Won’t you sit down and take some tea?”

“Thank you, Lady Coltrane, I think I prefer to stand. I’m afraid I have some questions to ask you. Have you ever seen a handgun known as a Webley 4.55?”

“Why now, I don’t think I have,” she said meekly.

“I take leave to doubt that, ma’am. You have in fact got one. Your late husband’s old service revolver. In that trophy case over there. And I’m afraid I must take possession of it as vital evidence.”

He turned and walked to the glass-fronted trophy case. They were all there—the medals, the insignia, the citations, the cap badges. But they were rearranged. Behind some of them could be dimly discerned some oil smudges on the hessian, where another trophy had once hung.

Hannah turned back. “Where has it gone, Lady Coltrane?” he asked tightly.

“Dear Mr. Hannah, I’m sure I don’t know what you are talking about.”

He hated to lose a case, but he could feel this one slipping slowly away. The gun or a witness—he needed one or the other. Beyond the windows the blue sea was darkling in the fading light. Somewhere out there, deep in its unquestioning embrace, he knew lay a Webley 4.55. Oil smudges do not make a court case.

“It was there, Lady Coltrane. On Thursday, when I came to see you. It was there in the cabinet.”

“Why, Mr. Hannah, you must be mistaken. I have never seen any .. . Wembley.”

“Webley, Lady Coltrane. Wembley is where they play football.” He felt he was losing this match six-nil.

“Mr. Hannah, what exactly is it you suspect of me?” she asked.

“I don’t suspect, ma’am, I know. I know what happened. Proof is another matter. Last Tuesday, at about this hour, Firestone picked you and your chair up with those huge arms of his and placed you in the back of your van, as he did on Saturday for your shopping expedition. I had thought perhaps you never left this house, but with his help, of course, you can.

“He drove you down to the alley behind the Governor’s residence, set you down, and with his own hands tore the lock off the steel gate. I thought it might take a Land-Rover and chain to pull that lock off, but of course he could do it. I should have seen that when I met him. I missed it. Mea culpa.

“He pushed you through the open gate and left you. I believe you had the Webley in your lap. Antique it may have been, but it had been kept oiled over the years, and the ammunition was still inside it. With a short barrel you’d never have hit Sir Moberley, not even firing two-handed. But this Webley had a very long barrel, very accurate.

“And you were not quite new to guns. You met your husband in the war, as you said. He was wounded, and you nursed him. But it was in a maquis hospital in Nazi-occupied France. He was with the British Special Operations Execu­tive, and you, I believe, were with the American equivalent, the Office of Strategic Services.

“The first shot missed and hit the wall. The second did the job and lodged in a flower-basket full of loam. That’s where I found it. London identified it today. It’s quite distinctive. No gun ever fired that bullet but a Webley 4.55, such as you had in that case.”

“Oh dear, poor Mr. Hannah. It’s a wonderful story, but can you prove it?”

“No, Lady Coltrane, I can’t. I needed the gun, or a witness. I’ll bet a dozen people saw you and Firestone in that alley, but none of them will ever testify. Not against Missy Coltrane. Not on Sunshine. But there are two things that puzzle me. Why? Why kill that unlovable Governor? Did you want the police here?”

She smiled and shook her head. “The press, Mr. Hannah. Always snooping about, always asking questions, always in­vestigating backgrounds. Always so suspicious of everyone in politics.”

“Yes, of course. The ferrets of the press.”

“And the other puzzle, Mr. Hannah?”

“Who warned you, Lady Coltrane? On Tuesday evening you put the gun back in the case. It was there on Thursday. Now it is gone. Who warned you?”

“Mr. Hannah, give my love to London when you get back. I haven’t seen it since the Blitz, you know. And now I never shall.”

Desmond Hannah had Oscar drive him back to Parliament Square. He dismissed Oscar by the police station; Oscar would have to polish up the Jaguar in time for the new Governor’s arrival the next day. It was about time Whitehall reacted, he thought. He began to cross the square to the hotel.

“Evening, Mistah Hannah.”

He turned. A complete stranger, smiling and greeting him.

“Er ... good evening.”

Two youths in front of the hotel were dancing in the dust. One had a cassette player around his neck. The tape was playing a calypso number. Hannah did not recognize it. It was “Freedom Come, Freedom Go.” He recognized “Yellow Bird,” however—it was coming from the Quarter Deck bar. He recalled that in five days he had not heard a steel band or a calypso.

The doors of the Anglican church were open; Reverend Quince was giving forth on his small organ. He was playing “Gaudeamus Igitur.”

By the time Hannah strode up the steps of the hotel, he realized there was an air of levity about the streets. It did not match his own mood. He had some serious report-writing to do. After a late-night call to London, he would go home in the morning. There was nothing more he could do. He hated to lose a case, but he knew this one would remain on the file. He could return to Nassau on the plane that brought in the new Governor, and fly on to London.

He crossed the terrace bar toward the staircase. There was that man Dillon again, sitting on a stool nursing a beer. Strange fellow, he thought as he went up the stairs. Always sitting around waiting for something. Never actually seemed to do anything.

* * *

On Tuesday morning, a de Havilland Devon droned in toward Sunshine from Nassau and deposited the new Governor, Sir Crispian Rattray. From the shade of the hangar McCready watched the elderly diplomat, crisp in cream linen with wings of silver hair flying from beneath his white panama hat, descend from the aircraft to meet the welcoming committee.

Lieutenant Haverstock, back from his marine odyssey, introduced him to various notables from the town, including Dr. Caractacus Jones and his nephew, Chief Inspector Jones. Oscar was there with the newly polished Jaguar, and after the introductions the small cavalcade drove off toward Port Plaisance.

Sir Rattray would discover that he had little to do. The two candidates appeared to have withdrawn their candidacies and gone on vacation. He would appeal for other candidates. None would come forward—Reverend Drake would see to that.

With the January elections postponed, the British Parlia­ment would reconvene and, under pressure from the opposi­tion, the government would concede that a referendum in March might well be appropriate. But that was all in the future.

Desmond Hannah boarded the empty Devon for the journey to Nassau. From the top of the steps he had a last look around. That strange fellow Dillon seemed to be sitting with his suitcase and attaché case again, waiting for something. Hannah did not wave. He intended to mention Mr. Dillon when he got back to London.

Ten minutes after the Devon left, McCready’s air taxi from Miami arrived. He had to return his portable telephone to the Miami CIA office and say a few thank-yous to friends in Florida before flying on to London. He would be home in time for Christmas. He would spend it alone in his flat in Kensington. Perhaps he would go down to the Special Forces Club for a drink with some old mates.

The Piper took off, and McCready had a last look at the drowsy town of Port Plaisance, going about its business in the morning sun. He saw Spyglass Hill drift by, and a pink villa on its peak.

The pilot turned once more for his course to Miami. The wing dipped, and McCready looked down at the interior of the island. On a dusty track a small brown child looked up and waved. McCready waved back. With luck, and for the moment, he thought, the boy could grow up without ever having to live under the red flag or to sniff cocaine.

Epilogue

“I am sure we are all deeply grateful,” said Timothy Ed­wards, “to Denis for his excellent presentation. I would suggest that as the hour is late, my colleagues and I mull the matter over between ourselves, to see if there is room for a variation of the Service policy in this matter, and deliver our view in the morning.”

Denis Gaunt had to return his file to the clerk from Records. When he turned around, Sam McCready was gone. He had slipped away almost as Edwards finished speaking. Gaunt traced him ten minutes later to his office.

McCready was still in shirt-sleeves, his creased cotton jacket over a chair, puttering about. Two cardboard wine crates stood on the floor.

“What are you doing?” asked Gaunt.

“Clearing out my bits and bobs.”

There were only two photographs, and he kept them in a drawer, not ostentatiously propped on the desk. One was of May, the other of his son on his graduation day, smiling diffidently in a black academic’s gown. McCready put them into one of the boxes.

“You’re crazy,” said Gaunt. “I think we may have cracked it. Not Edwards, of course, but the two Controllers. I think they may change their minds. We know they both like you, want you to stay.”

McCready took his compact disk player and put it in the other box. Sometimes he liked to play soft classical music when he was deep in thought. There was hardly enough bric-a-brac to fill both the boxes, though. Certainly there were no me-shaking-hands-with-a-celebrity photos on his walls; the few Impressionist prints were service-issue. He straightened up and looked at the two boxes.

“Not a lot, really, for thirty years,” he murmured.

“Sam, for God’s sake, it’s not over yet. They could change their minds.”

McCready turned and gripped Gaunt by his upper arms. “Denis, you’re a great guy. You did a good job in there. You gave it your best shot. And I’m going to ask the Chief to let you take over the desk. But you have to learn on which side of the sky the sun rises. It’s over. Verdict and sentence were handed down weeks ago, in another office, by another man.”

Denis Gaunt sat down miserably in his boss’s chair. “Then what the hell was it all for?”

“The hell it was for was this: Because I care about this fucking Service, and because they’re getting it wrong. Be­cause there’s a bloody dangerous world out there, and it’s not getting less dangerous, but more so. And because dickheads like Edwards are going to be left looking after the security of this old country that I happen to love, and that frightens the shit out of me. I knew I couldn’t change anything in that hearing, but I wanted to make the bastards squirm. Sorry, Denis, I should have told you. Will you have my boxes run over to my flat sometime?”

“You could still take one of the jobs they’ve offered you. Just to spite them,” suggested Gaunt.

“Denis, as the poet said, ‘One wild, sweet hour of glorious life is worth a world without a name.’ For me, sitting down there in the archive library or approving expense accounts would be a world without a name. I’ve had my hour, done my best—it’s over. I’m off. There’s a whole sunny world out there, Denis. I’m going out there, and I’m going to enjoy myself.”

Denis Gaunt looked as if he were attending a funeral. “They’ll see you again around here,” he said.

“No, they won’t.”

“The Chief will give you a farewell party.”

“No party. I can’t stand cheap sparkling wine. Plays merry hell with my gut. So does Edwards being nice to me. Walk me down to the main door?”

Century House is a village, a tiny parish. Down the corridor to the lift, on the ride to the ground floor, across the tiled lobby, colleagues and secretaries called, “Hi, Sam—hallo, Sam.” They did not say, “Bye-bye, Sam,” but it was what they meant. A few of the secretaries paused as if they would like to straighten his tie one last time. He nodded and smiled and walked on.

The main door stood at the end of the tiled hall, beyond it the street. McCready wondered whether he should use his compensation to buy a cottage in the country, grow roses and marrows, attend church on Sunday mornings, become a pillar of the community. But how to fill the days?

He regretted that he had never developed any absorbing hobbies, like his colleagues who bred tropical fish or collected stamps or walked up and down mountains in Wales. And what could he say to the neighbors? “Good morning, my name’s Sam, I’ve retired from the Foreign Office, and no, I can’t tell you a damned thing I did there.” Old soldiers are allowed to write their memoirs and bore tourists in the snug bar. But not those who have spent their lives in the shadowed places. They must remain silent forever.

Mrs. Foy from Travel Documents was crossing the lobby, her high heels clacking on the tiles, a statuesque widow in her late thirties. Quite a number of denizens of Century House had tried their luck with Suzanne Foy, but she was not known as the Fortress for nothing.

Their paths crossed. She stopped and turned. Somehow, McCready’s tie-knot had arrived at the area of the middle of his chest. She reached out, tightened it, and slid it back toward the top shirt button. Gaunt watched. He was too young to remember Jane Russell, so he could not make the obvious comparison.

“Sam, you should have someone take you home for some­thing nourishing,” she said.

Denis Gaunt watched her hips sway across the lobby to the lift doors. He wondered what it would be like to be given something nourishing by Mrs. Foy. Or vice versa.

Sam McCready pushed open the plate-glass door to the street. A wave of hot summer air blew in. He turned, reached into his breast pocket, and brought out an envelope.

“Give it to them, Denis. Tomorrow morning. It’s what they want, after all.”

Denis took it and stared at it.

“You had it all the time,” he said. “You wrote it days ago. You cunning old bastard!”

But he was talking to the closing door.

McCready turned right and ambled toward Westminster Bridge half a mile away, his jacket over his shoulder. He loosened his tie back down to the third shirt button. It was a hot June afternoon, one of those that made up the great heat wave of the summer of 1990. The early commuter traffic poured past him toward the Old Kent Road.

It would be nice out at sea today, he thought, with the Channel bobbing bright and blue under the sun. Perhaps he should take that cottage in Devon, with his own boat in the harbor, after all. He could even invite Mrs. Foy down there. For something nourishing.

Westminster Bridge rose before him. Across it the House of Parliament, whose freedoms and occasional foolishness he had spent thirty years trying to protect, towered against the blue sky. The newly cleaned tower of Big Ben glowed gold in the sunlight beside the sluggish Thames.

Halfway across the bridge, a news vendor stood beside his stand with a pile of copies of the Evening Standard. At his feet stood a placard. It bore the words; BUSH-GORBY—COLD WAR OVER—OFFICIAL. McCready stopped to buy a paper.

“Thank you, guv,” said the news vendor. He gestured toward his placard. “All over, then, eh?”

“Over?” asked McCready.

“Yeah. All them international crises. Thing of the past.”

“What a lovely idea,” agreed McCready, and strolled on.

Four weeks later, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Sam McCready heard the radio bulletin while fishing two miles off the Devon coast. He considered the newsflash, then decided it was time to change his bait.

About the Author

FREDERICK FORSYTH is the author of eight best-selling novels: The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Dogs of War, The Devil’s Alternative, The Fourth Protocol, The Negotiator, The Deceiver, and The Fist of God. He has also written an acclaimed collection of short fiction, No Comebacks. He lives outside London.

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