The Marchand Woman

Chapter 13

Crobey drove, as always, with one eye on the mirror. She was accustomed by now to his sudden turnings and doublings back. All the same when they reached the highway she was exasperated enough to say in a caustic voice, “I trust you’re sure you’ve lost them.”

“Right.”

She cast an eye at him. “You mean you were being followed?”

“Right.”

And she believed him. Crobey had the peripheral vision of a professional basketball player.

She said, “Why are you angry with me this time?”

“Forget it.”

It didn’t take her long to work it out. Insects smashed into the windshield and the Bronco jounced her gently. Crobey’s profile was pale in the dashboard’s reflected illumination. She said, “If you didn’t have me along you’d have let them catch you, wouldn’t you?”

“It might have been useful to ask them a few questions.”

“Suppose they’d asked first?”

Crobey only crooked his lip corner in a tidy smile. Feeling rebuffed she said, “Tell me something: Is there anything you do badly?”

“Yes. Lose.”

“Your conceit is absurd.”

“I told you before: We’d get along faster if you’d go home.”

She began to retort, then curbed her tongue. It was occurring to her he might be right. He tolerated her because he was a mercenary and she was his employer; he resented her because she was a woman and an amateur.

She wondered why he put up with her at all.

She said, “Who were they?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“But they might be some of Rodriguez’s people?”

“Might.”

She didn’t comprehend his equanimity; she said bluntly, “You want me to leave, then.”

He made no answer. They were approaching the turnoff. Crobey punched the button, extinguishing the lights, and used the hand brake to slow the truck so that the brake lights wouldn’t flash. They rolled slowly off the main road into that total darkness that had frightened her so much the first time. The truck eased to a halt; she heard the ratchet of the emergency brake. Crobey hooked his elbow over the back of the seat and twisted to watch the road behind. He didn’t take the revolver from under his jacket but she knew it was there; she’d seen him put it there before they left the house.

He had a stalking predator’s steady inexcitability. It wasn’t tranquillity; it was the cool command of an otherwise tumultuous temper. His cool passivity came across as menace.

That morning he’d instructed her in the manufacture of a Molotov Cocktail. “You mix soil and gravel, and a little bit of soap powder to make it grunge together. Fill the bottle about one third with this gunk. It weights the bottom and gives you throwing ballast — and the gravel makes good shrapnel. Now we fill the rest up with petrol — gasoline from the pump, the octane doesn’t matter. Right to the top. Tear off this much rag, see — wad it up with this little bit of clotheslines for a fuse. Stuff it in the mouth like this to soak up gasoline from inside and make sure the clothesline pokes out an inch or two. When you light this thing get rid of it fast — throw it hard and drop on your face. Drop behind something that’ll shield you from the blast and the heat, if you’ve got a choice. In Hungary they took out Soviet tanks with these things.”

“Why the hell are you showing me these horrible things?”

“Because the kind of people we’re dealing with, ducks, you may find yourself getting chased into the woods by people with guns and machetes and maybe all you’ve got is your little car and your handbag. You’ve got gasoline in the car — suck it out through a hose you strip off the engine, if you have to — and I never met a woman who didn’t carry half a dozen little bottles in her handbag.”

She’d stared with revulsion at the fused bottle of gasoline. Crobey had said, “When the crossbow was introduced in the twelfth century the Pope called it an inhuman engine of destruction and banned its use.”

“If I were still a college sophomore I might find that world-weary cynicism of, yours dramatically mysterious. Right now I’m not too thrilled by it.”

“Cynicism,” he’d replied, “is idealism corrupted by experience, like Machiavelli said. Remember one thing: You haven’t been there. I have. Listen to old Harry once in a while.”

Now, watching him peer back into the darkness with his chin on his forearm, she remembered the quiet tolerant tone he’d used.

He faced front and let the brake out and put the vehicle forward at a crawl, hunching over the wheel to peer through the night. Carole couldn’t see a thing. Branches slapped the truck, coming out of nowhere; the suspension bucked and pitched as roots and rocks went under the wheels. But Crobey seemed to know where he was going. Finally he switched on the headlights. When she looked behind she saw nothing in the red taillights’ glow except forest — the road was out of sight back there.

After a while they reached the yard of Santana’s farm and Crobey parked the truck behind the house; they went inside and Santana, dressed as if he planned to go somewhere — a shabby seersucker jacket, a white shirt frayed at the collar — stood up in deference to Carole’s presence. He had an open can of beer in his fist: He looked, she thought, rather like a can of beer himself — stubby, squat, cylindrical.

Santana’s face was animated. He began to speak in something approximating English but neither of them understood it and Santana lapsed into Spanish. Crobey snapped a few monosyllabic questions at him, got answers and translated for her:

“He thinks he’s got a line on Rodriguez’s family.”

“Where?”

“Here. Rio Piedras.”

Santana spoke again, with gestures, and Crobey said, “All right, but keep your head down. Don’t show yourself.”

An adventurously brash grin and Santana was gone, the screen door slapping shut behind him.

“Where’s he going?”

“To stake out the house.”

“He knows the house?”

“Sure. Probably the one where Rodriguez spent the night when Glenn’s cop spotted him.”

“Then why send Santana? Let’s question them ourselves.” She was already turning toward the door.

“Calm down, ducks. We’d get nowhere.”

“What?”

“Elementary security — if you’ve gone to ground you don’t tell civilians where you are. Not even your own wife. We could torture the children and force the wife to talk but she wouldn’t be able to tell us what she doesn’t know, would she? All we’d do is expose ourselves.” Crobey tossed his jacket onto the couch. “If Rodriguez turns up Santana will spot him. I kind of doubt he’ll turn up. He knows people are looking for him.”

She was shocked. “Don’t you even want to know—”

“Know what? What his wife and kiddies look like? I don’t care all that much, ducks. Go on — go to bed. You’ve got to learn how to wait things out.”

She lowered herself into one of Santana’s ruined chairs. “How did he find them?”

“Mostly on the telephone. He hunted down some of the old-timers from the days we all worked training fields in Alabama. You know how it goes. You dig up one veteran and he gives you the number of two others. It’s like a chain letter. The first nineteen don’t know a thing but number twenty happened to bump into Rodriguez’s wife in a supermarket or whatever. It’s harder to disappear than most people think it is. Especially if you’ve got reasons to stay around an island where people know you. If Rodriguez had really wanted to evaporate he’d have had to move to Africa or the Philippines. But he didn’t because he’s a soldier, of sorts, and this is where his army is.”

“And Santana was able to make this contact while all Glenn Anders’ minions couldn’t?”

“In the first place I kind of get the feeling Glenn’s minions have dried up on him. I don’t think he’s got police co-operation any longer. If he did he wouldn’t be so eager to have our help. And in the second place Glenn didn’t know all those people the way Santana did. Santana was one of them. He knew who to ask.”

She was still tracking Anders. “Why wouldn’t he have police co-operation?”

“My guess is they’ve told him to soft-pedal the investigation.”

She tipped her head back onto the top of the chair and closed her eyes. She’d been running on her nerve ends too long; exhaustion was overtaking her.

Crobey said, “Maybe tomorrow we’ll show ourselves again and let them follow us around a while. Maybe we can pull them in and ask them questions.”

She opened her eyes. He stood in the middle of the room looking down at her, lamplight reflecting frostily off the surface of his eyes. She said, “We? Us?”

“You wanted to be dealt in, didn’t you?”

It made her sit up. “You’ve changed your tune.”

“Have I?” He turned away. “Go on to bed, ducks.”

He stood with his back to her; his spine seemed rigid — defensive; but against what?

Too tired to resist his suggestion, she went into her cell — she thought of it as a cell: the cot, plaster flaking off the wall. There was no shade at the window; she took one or two things out of her case and then switched off the light before undressing. A narrow rind of moon had come out, throwing a bit of light through the glass, and for a while she stood taut in tawny underwear looking up toward the mountain peak. It was quite clearly silhouetted against the stars.

The floor creaked; she turned; and knuckles rapped her door.

“Yes?”

She watched the knob turn. She could have spoken; she didn’t. A bit of faint illumination bounced around corners from the kitchen and outlined Crobey when the door came open. He didn’t advance, he only stood there.

“I sort of was wondering what you’d look like without your clothes.” His voice had gone raspy.

Almost with relief she stirred, with a slow, carnal smile. “Ah Crobey,” she murmured, “you’ve got twenty-four hours to get out of my bedroom.”

He flipped the door shut with his heel. His hands lifted to her shoulders and dropped upon them. He stood at arm’s length. His hands seemed weightless. “You’re vibrating.”

“I’m terrified.”

“Tell me to leave. I’ll go.”

With hesitant fascination she reached up, palms against his grizzled cheeks. Crobey had a face like a leather coat, she thought; the kind that looked better the more battered it got. He turned his lips into her palm, kissing her hand; everything seemed to move at sixty-four-frame slow motion. She felt the pound of a pulse in her throat and an odd vertigo — her head thrown back to look into his eyes, she felt as if he were bearing down on her like an avalanche. She cried out; but what emerged from her lips was only breath. Then he tugged her forward.

His face loomed an inch from her own. His eyes had gone wide and the preposterous idea struck her that he was as intimidated as she was — that the monumental self-confidence was all facade.

Astonishingly tender, he bore her down.

Sex, to Carole, was always followed by feelings of starvation. She came back from the kitchen with a plate of cheese and half-crumbled crackers. Crobey was crowded far over on the edge of the narrow cot, hands under the back of his head, long hard body full-length. She almost tripped over the heaped tangle of his clothes where he’d left them on the floor. Even in the faint light she could see how his eyes explored her body when she sat down on the cot and set the plate beside her and began to nibble.

Crobey hiked up on one elbow and helped himself to a snack. Holding the cracker in his hand, regarding it, he mused. “For what you’re about to receive may you be truly thankful, Harry.”

“Do you have any children?”

“Probably not.”

He’d have been a good father, she thought; he had the strength to be gentle.

Robert...

Robert, she thought, looking at Crobey’s naked form, would have liked Crobey. Robert had no snobbery.

She had no fear of Crobey now.

She said, “That was terrific, you know.”

“It’s an old trick I learned in the South Seas,” he told her gravely. “What the Trobriand Islanders call the missionary position.”

“You’re demented.”

Crobey laughed casually. “Maybe I am. Hell, I don’t know what I am any longer.”

“What’s the matter, Harry?”

“I don’t know. Postcoital depression.”

“Tell me.” She’d buried her face in the hollow of his throat; her voice came up muffled.

He said, “Will you promise not to laugh if I tell you something?”

“No, but I’ll promise to try not to laugh.”

“Supercilious bitch.”

“Ill-mannered lout.”

He said, “Would you find it possible to believe a slob like me could ever long for the sanctuary of a home?”

“Why not? Everybody needs a hand to hold onto. Even me.”

“Right. Somebody to be around to pick up the soap when I drop it in the shower.” He stirred, hooking a leg over her; his fingertips trailed up her spine. “I’m a mean tough two-headed son of a bitch, ducks. My job is terror. I did it, you know, for a while, believing in it. Then it was just a job. You fly them in, you fly them out. They put bombs in the plane and point you at a target and you go. You can destroy them so easily. The day comes when for the first time in your life you realize you can’t just keep killing them. You can’t ever kill them all. I’m too old for this foolishness and too far gone to repent. Going downhill and maybe getting scared — I never was any good at coping with failure. I’m trying to learn to accept my changing limitations, I expect, but it’s hardly a propitious moment for — this, you and me, us. Shit, why should I tell you all this?”

“Maybe it’s time you told someone.”

“Thing is, I’d tucked myself into a hole in the ground over there in Nassau to try and sort myself out — I was ready to chuck it in, find myself another line of work. Then you hit me with recollections of your brother Warren, who was a guy I liked and maybe owed. I didn’t think much of this job, you know. I thought you were around the bend. But you were right up there on your supercilious high horse and I never sat at a table over drinks with a woman like you before. I got it into my head to take care of two things. I was going to take you down off the high horse and I was going to get you into bed to prove you weren’t any different from any other woman.”

“You succeeded.”

“Wrong, ducks. Nobody’s ever going to knock you down and as for the other thing, you’re not the same as any other woman.”

“Why not?”

“Because no other woman ever got to me the way you do.”

“Go to sleep now, Harry.”

“Right.” And, amazingly, he did.

She drifted in a soft haze of contentment, not trying to think. Her awareness was limited to the physical present: the weight of his hard body against her, the sound and warm flutter of his breathing, the rise and fall of his ribcage under her outflung arm, the abrasive stubble on his cheek.

After a time she heard him whimper softly in his sleep.

She woke up feeling an absolute wreck; she opened her eyes slowly and Crobey took on a sort of surrealistic substance limned in red — the back of his head: Somehow he’d contrived to roll over without knocking them both off the cot.

She got up gingerly, ran her tongue over her front teeth and stumbled outside carrying rudiments of clothing. By the time she mastered the use of the eccentric outdoor shower she was in a state of shimmering rage.

Crobey laughed at her.

“Shut up,” she told him.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh. I see. You grind your teeth every morning at eight, that’s all.”

“One of the basic freedoms is the right to be irritable before breakfast, all right?”

“Come on,” he said, “come over here.”

“Can’t you see I need to be left alone right now?”

“Be reasonable.”

“No.” In high dudgeon she left the room, hauling the doorknob after her, and winced when the door slammed.

In the kitchen she got out her compact and looked critically into its mirror. Then Crobey appeared, naked, a bath towel in his fist. She backed up against the sink to let him pass. Crobey made as if to walk by, then turned and pinioned her.

He was grinning: His face came down on hers but she kept her lips stiff and still under his.

Crobey lifted his face away. “Come on back to the bedroom.”

“Man does not live by bed alone.”

He backed away, defeated. “A record-breaking fit of pique.”

“Beat it. I feel my temper going.”

“I can see that. You’re more than just a bit glacial today, considering. Wasn’t it Catherine the Great who commanded the farm serfs into her bed at night and ordered them back to the fields next morning?”

“Harry, please, for Heaven’s sake!”

He went.

By the time he returned — hair all wet down, towel strapped around his middle — she had fried four eggs and poured coffee. They sat facing each other across the Salvation Army table and she pushed the eggs around on her plate with a fork until Crobey said, “Stop looking like an injured cocker spaniel.”

“Shut up. Will you please just shut up?”

“What the hell do you think I am, ducks? An extra on your movie set?”

“You’re leading the witness,” she warned.

“Come on. Spit it out.”

She almost upset the coffee when she reached for it. Vexed, she lifted it with great care and drank from it and set it down, absurdly proud of the fact that she hadn’t spilled a drop.

Finally she said, “You just don’t give a shit, do you.”

“About what?”

“Last night. Me. Anything.”

“Come again?”

“‘The world is my whorehouse,’” she said bitterly. “Well you proved what you wanted to prove. You could get me into bed just like any other woman.” She mocked him: “Ah, ducks, take it easy, what the fuck, a little roll in the hay never hurt anybody.”

Crobey put his fork down and laid both palms on the table. “Now listen to me: Don’t confuse someone who doesn’t parade his feelings with someone who doesn’t have any feelings. You think it was a game? A one-nighter?”

Subdued, she said, “I wouldn’t care, if only—”

“If only what?”

She began to cry then — surreptitiously at first, hoping he wouldn’t notice, but it turned into great gasping heaves and she didn’t know how but he somehow got her up and guided her into the front room and sat her down on the couch and folded her against him so that she cried it out with her face buried against his hirsute chest, baptizing him with her tears, clinging to him, clutching him in an insane desperation because sometime during the night she had awakened and realized with a sudden explosion of terror that she would not be able to bear it if he left her.

She had never felt this with anyone. Never known such an agony, never known what a tender sad thing love could be. She’d got up this morning hating him for making her long for him, for destroying all her carefully constructed defenses with his muscular embrace or his harsh laugh, for subverting her prejudices by making her love him in spite of — because of? — his ridiculous masculinity, his reckless gaiety and resolute foolishness, his violently assertive intensity. It was melodramatic, absurd — she truly was obsessed by him: In the night she’d thought of all the years she hadn’t known him; and she’d been jealous of all the women he’d ever known; and she’d kept thinking that at best he’d make the kind of bully husband who never touched the dishes.

He kept patting her shoulder and there-thereing her. It was imbecilic. She pulled herself away, snuffled, dragged a sleeve across her eyes. “Don’t just let me sit here with egg on my face.”

She peered at him, trying to clear her eyes. “God damn you, it’s not that I don’t want to live without you — it’s that I can’t. And I don’t know what the hell to do about that.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it, ducks.” He took both her hands. “You’ve eaten your way right through me like termites.”

“What a suave line you have there.”

He wrapped himself around her, more like a wrestler than a lover but his rough kiss dissolved her, made her feel as if her colors were running and blending into his own.

They were tangled together on the couch. Past Harry’s shoulder she saw Santana in the doorway, not smiling.

“God invented the fist so that we could knock before entering.” She began to sit up.

Santana’s expression never changed. He had a rolled newspaper in his hand. She watched him approach: He unfolded the paper and held it out for them to see. It was in Spanish but she recognized the photograph — Rosalia Rojas very young, her hair straight down over her shoulders and her smile bright and expectant: yearbook photograph.

Harry swung his legs around and got his feet on the floor. She saw his jaw creep forward to lie in a hard straight line. He looked from the newspaper up into Santana’s face. “¿Donde está?”

“¿Pues — a la policia?”

She said, “Goddamn it. What is it?”

“Sorry, ducks. Seems the game’s been called on account of death.”

“Rosalia?”

Harry, naked, left the towel when he strode across the room. “Get yourself ready to travel.” He disappeared.

“Oh, the poor thing. She was so—” She followed him as far as the door. “Why her?”

He was climbing into underwear. “Gunning for both of them, I guess. The paper makes it out to be a mugging.”

“Isn’t there a chance—”

“No.”

She pressed her cheeks with her palms as if to reassure herself of her own reality. I must look a fright: She ought to do something about her hair. But she didn’t move from the doorway. “You want to put me on a plane.”

“Ducks, I want you to stay alive.”

She said, “She was such a breezy kid.”

“She was all right,” Harry acknowledged.

“Maybe now at least they’ll reopen it in Washington.”

“I doubt it. They’ll just pull the covers up over their heads. They’ve got an out, haven’t they — nobody can prove it wasn’t an ordinary robbery attack.” He buttoned up his short-sleeve khaki shirt and left the tails out over his Levi’s. Then he sat down to lace up his roughout-buck boots.

“What are you going to do?”

“Find out how Glenn wants to play it. Give him a hand if I can.” He looked up. “This gives him a stake in it, doesn’t it?”

“What about you?”

“Ducks, you’re my stake in it.”

“I don’t want you killed, Harry.”

“People have been trying to kill me for twenty-five years. Don’t worry about me.”

She went back across the front room for her boots. Santana stood in the kitchen doorway — neither drinking nor smoking nor eating nor reading; simply waiting.

She tried to comb her hair. Turmoil enveloped her — she had always tried to exercise control over the events of her life and because she was able and intelligent she usually succeeded but now they were racing by too quickly and she felt adrift.

Harry was with Santana talking Spanish when she emerged. Santana came away, heading back past her to her room. She said, “Don’t bother, I didn’t pack it.”

Santana hesitated and Harry scowled. She said, “Down in the Amazon basin the jaguars hunt in male-female pairs. When two of them pounce on a big tapir that outweighs both of them put together, the battle can be kind of fierce. We were down there on location once and I saw it happen. It can look right dicey, as you’d say. But the outcome’s always the same.”

“That’s kind of fanciful.”

She said, “Please don’t sell me short.”

Santana looked on with stiff disapproval.

Harry said, “Okay, ducks. We’d better pick you out a gun.”

Chapter 14

Cielo walked fretfully to the edge of the cliff and peered down into the thin mist. Kruger was down there striding back and forth like a colonial officer, whipping a stick against his britches; Cielo measured the distance again with his eye and turned back toward the mountain.

Vargas’s eyebrows lifted — he was awaiting Cielo’s signal. Uneasy, Cielo shook his head and went back to the trees, crossing the flat rock where the helicopter had set down last night, passing two field guns and the crated mortars. The field pieces were small ones, three-inchers.

He had another close look at the oak to which the block-and-tackle was cabled. It was the biggest tree in the vicinity and looked as substantial and monolithic as a granite mountain and Kruger, the engineer among them, had passed on its suitability as an anchor for the cable but Cielo was troubled by doubts because water was easy in the rain forest and the rock subsurface was close beneath the soil — even the biggest trees had no need to drill roots very far down; it made for a shallow purchase.

Kruger had dismissed it. The oak, he’d pointed out, was old enough to have survived a hundred hurricanes. It would support the weight of a Sherman tank, let alone a small mountain howitzer or a crate of rockets.

Vargas came across to the oak. “Before long the sun will burn this off. We need to be under cover by then.”

“All right.” He still felt nagged by reluctance but he forced himself away from it. “Let’s get started then.”

He went to the rim and watched the cable pull taut over the guy pully. The crate — twelve hundred pounds — began to skid and tilt; then it was lifted off the ground and swung far out. Vargas and two of the men prodded it with poles to slow its pendulum swing. After a time it settled down, twisting a bit in the air, hanging clear out over the face of the cliff.

Down below Kruger was watching with his neck craned back, his face pale in the mist. He began to make beckoning gestures with both hands and Cielo relayed these signals to Julio who shifted the gears and began to pay out cable from the donkey engine’s winch drum. The heavy crate began to descend, well out away from the face of the cliff, and Cielo sat back on his haunches and relaxed; it was working splendidly.

The donkey engine banged away methodically and down at the mouth of the cave Kruger had stepped to one side and was reaching up to guide the crate to its seat on the flatbed cart that waited to receive it. Four men clustered around the swaying load while it dropped slowly amid them. There was a second donkey engine in the cave, only seven horsepower but enough to winch the dolly into the cave.

For the next hour Cielo squatted on the rim relaying hand signals from Kruger at the base of the cliff to Julio at the hoist engine. It gave him a kind of peace to perform this near-mindless repetitive job. There were two small howitzers, four mortar crates (one containing mortars and three containing ammunition), two crated rocket-launchers and four crates of rockets. The rocket-launchers doubled up on one load; at seven minutes per load Kruger had calculated it would take an hour and a quarter to finish the job but it was running a little slower than that and Cielo realized the mist probably would clear before they had everything put away. But that did not particularly exercise him.

In any event near the end of the first hour the clouds came scudding over the peaks and by half past eight it had begun to drizzle, a very fine spray that pricked his face and made him smile.

The donkey engine ran out of gas. There was always something you’d neglected. They had to pause while Cielo tossed the end of the rope down to Kruger and a man went off to the camp to bring back a five-gallon jerrycan from the Jeep. Julio came over to the rim and gave him a hand hauling it up; it was heavy and the work made him sweat. Julio said, “Almost done now — just the two guns left. Then I can get back to my book. I’ve only got a couple of chapters left — I want to find out how it comes out.”

“I can tell you how it comes out. The computers take over the universe.”

“Very funny.” Julio stumped away lugging the gasoline. He was in a good mood; the helicopter had brought him half a dozen science fictions.

Vargas and his crew hooked up the first field gun and Kruger down below waited with his arms folded on his chest, head tipped back, blinking when raindrops struck his face; brooding. To Kruger everything had come out of kilter with time. The tragedy of Kruger’s existence was that he hadn’t been born early enough to be a storm trooper.

The engine coughed and started up again. Cielo looked back toward the cliff and thought of checking up on the oak tree again but he was feeling a bit lazy and his earlier unease had been settled by a gentle calm. He wagged a finger at Vargas and then at Julio; the field gun dragged along the ground a bit and then swung aloft and swayed out over the drop.

Down below him Kruger’s men stood out well away from the cliff. Kruger walked across the hardpan and dragged the dolly aside; they wouldn’t need it this time, the gun had its own wheels. Coming back onto the drop zone Kniger looked up and watched the gun descend; he began to wave the others forward and they moved in like scavengers toward a carcass. Old men now, all of them — old for this at least; they were over forty, some of them fifty or as near to it as made no difference; Vargas was what, now — fifty-six? For men like these this kind of life was nothing more than simulation.

They’d been nurtured on patriotism and old Draga’s monstrous calumnies. Time had betrayed them. When Draga was gone Cielo would have to face up to the dismal grief of disbanding them. Some of them would take it with relief, he knew — Vargas for instance. Others would lose their moorings and be swept away by the guilt of their failure: He could picture one or two of them on skid row and he didn’t know how he could prevent that. Julio had his own plans, Cielo thought — but they involved business, not insurrection. As for Kruger, that one wouldn’t suffer; he’d find another war and go off to shoot Communists somewhere.

For himself there was simply the money Draga would leave him. There was something curious in that — not long ago he’d had ten million dollars in his hands but he’d turned it over to the old man. When Julio had questioned that he’d explained that they couldn’t double-cross the old man and survive it; the old man had tentacles everywhere and how could you spend money without his getting wind of it? But that was only a half truth. In a way he loved the old man. After the old man died it wouldn’t matter if Cielo turned traitor to his cause but while Draga lived Cielo would humor him because these dreams were all the old man had left.

A boat. That was his own dream. Not a Greek yacht; just a boat — fifty feet, maybe sixty, an old one would do if it didn’t have dry rot. Something with plenty of canvas and a little diesel auxiliary. A boat and a warm-water landing where he could moor it; a house by the landing where he could moor Soledad and the children and bask away his days in a soft warm nesty feeling of family and love. All he really wanted was the old man’s half million dollars to see him through. Ah, he thought, I’m one hell of a revolutionary.

Musing, he watched Kruger’s men drag the field gun out of sight into the cave. The cable came back up and Vargas hooked it to the last gun.

The drizzle tapered off. Steam in the air now; he could hardly see the oak back there and beneath him Kruger’s face was leached of color by the gray mist. There was always rain in El Yunque but it seemed to have been heavier than usual this year — every day a half dozen squalls, some of them drenching. It was a wonder the whole mountain didn’t wash away. Everywhere you saw trees with their root systems exposed to the air where floods had carried the earth away.

He didn’t like it up here. Cabin fever was another danger; he couldn’t keep the men here forever. The schedule of rotations permitted each man a two-day furlough in the fleshpots; the men were away two at a time on overlapping days; their discipline was strong and he knew none of them would get drunk enough to let anything slip. Nevertheless they were beginning to think of themselves as prisoners. A few had their own resources: Julio would last as long as the supply of science fiction held out and Vargas had the methodical patience of a saint and Kruger, the good soldier, obeyed orders to the end but the others were restless and soon a listless apathy would infect them; they would begin to quarrel among themselves and things would begin to disintegrate. And there was Emil, if he ever returned from the city. But he saw no solution to it unless the old man died soon.

The idea had occurred to him that if push came to shove he might mount an attempt to invade Cuba, then abort it for some reason. That would push things back toward Square One for a while. It would take time to reorganize and re-equip. The thought remained in his mind as a workable contingency but he preferred to avoid it; anything like that might cause injuries and jeopardy. What was the sense in exposing the men to pointless risks? Besides, an aborted attack would disappoint the old man acutely.

Something snapped — very loud. The earth seemed to quake under him. He was watching Kruger, waiting for signals, but the noisy tremor spun him around and he was in time to see Vargas diving toward a man nearby, tackling the man, driving him down and back from the cliff — and then it registered on Cielo’s consciousness that the derrick was coming apart.

He saw in an instant what was happening: The one thing they hadn’t been able to test — the rim of the cliff itself was buckling. A fissure must have opened; rot in the rock. The telegraph pole that had been pinned into the ledge by cables and rock drills was letting go and in that split instant of time he saw the great logs scatter like toothpicks,

He whipped around to scream a warning at Kruger but Kruger had seen it, too, and was scrambling to get out from under the plummeting field gun. For a moment Cielo thought there was time, believed Kruger would make it; the angle of perspective gave him false hope. Kruger launched himself like an Olympic swimmer — a flat dive to get away from the impact area — but his soles skidded on the wet and he bellyflopped and the gun came down on him — bounced horribly and tipped over, its cable whipping like a snake, lashing its heavy loop back toward the cliff where it knocked a man — Ramirez — clear off his feet; Cielo wasn’t certain but he had the terrible feeling the cable had struck Ramirez right in the face. The man pirouetted back out of sight.

Stunned by shock and the suddenness of it Cielo climbed to his feet on rubber knees and looked left: Vargas was standing up, the man he’d rescued dusting himself off, someone else lying askew with the butt end of a telegraph pole across his chest. The donkey engine died with a sputter and Julio stared at Cielo in horror. Vargas on his big legs stumbled from side to side like a man concussed; but Cielo believed he’d not been hurt.

Juices pumped through him but he forced himself to behave with leaderly calm. He went jogging across to the man pinned under the pole. It was Ordovara and he was quite dead, his rib cage crushed; Cielo turned away, then turned back and laid a finger along Ordovara’s throat to feel for a pulse. There was none. A stink of excrement hung in the air.

He went to the lip and looked down. Two men were manhandling the capsized field gun away from Kruger who lay on his belly with both legs splayed out at weird angles. Even from up here Cielo could hear Kruger’s moans. Well, at least he was still alive but it looked as if both legs had been crushed.

He felt weight behind him. When he turned Vargas was there. Cielo pointed toward the body of Ordovara. “Get that thing off him and bring him down to the camp. Tell the others to clear up — get the equipment out of sight. Put Julio in charge. I’m going down.”

He strode along the rim, not hurrying, heading for the trail they’d cut down the side slope. It would take him fifteen minutes to cover the circuitous course but it was the only way down, short of rappelling down the cliff on a rope.

The fault, he thought, was no one’s but his own; he could lay the blame at no one else’s door. And how do I expiate this sin?

Ramirez was dead, half his face taken off by the whipping cable. The two dead men were not a major problem — only a major grief. It was Kruger who commanded his attention.

It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared it might be — the undercarriage of the field gun had landed square across the back of Kruger’s thighs but it was a pneumatic tire and that had absorbed a bit of the impact; the bones of both Kruger’s legs were broken but the flesh hadn’t been badly severed. Nevertheless he was already swelling up and it was obvious a good many blood vessels had been crushed. With immediate sophisticated medical attention it might be possible to save his legs. Up here there wasn’t much they could do but splint the fractures.

He took Julio aside. “You’d better break radio silence. Call in the helicopter. We’ll have to carry him up there.”

“You want to risk everyone for Kruger?”

“Do you think I should let him lose his legs, Julio?”

“He’s lost them anyway.”

“Now you’re a surgeon, are you?”

“Rodrigo — listen, think what will happen if we break security. The old man, what’ll he think? What’ll he do?”

“I don’t care right now. We owe Kruger a chance to keep his legs. Call Zapatino.”

“What if I can’t raise him?”

“You’ll raise somebody.”

Emil met Cielo at the door. The big youth’s eyes were filled with scorn. He conducted Cielo through the house to the tiled deck where his grandfather sat in a cane chair with a newspaper across his lap. Through an open door Cielo glimpsed the cathode screen of a stock market quotations machine. The old man sat with his chin on his chest and appeared to be dozing but then the newspaper rattled in his hands and he tossed it to the table beside him and lifted his eyes. He did not look well, Cielo thought. It was something other than old age or irritation; a malaise. For some time the old man seemed to have been shrinking into gauntness — Cielo wondered if he had cancer.

The old man said, “How is Kruger?”

“The chances are pretty good, they said.”

Emil said, “It shouldn’t have happened.”

“I know that.” He didn’t want to give Emil a chance to exploit it; he said, “It was my fault.”

“Zapatino tells me it was an accident,” the old man said.

“Accidents don’t just happen. Someone’s careless — then there’s an accident. We should have made surer of the rock before we bolted the derrick to it.”

Emil said, “It’s easy to say that now,” and the old man, misunderstanding him, nodded his head. Then Emil said, “It’s magnanimous of him to take responsibility for it, isn’t it. Now that it doesn’t cost him anything.”

The old man ignored him. “Kruger’s the engineer. It was his fault, then, not yours. Must you burden yourself with feelings of guilt for every mishap that takes place around you?”

“I’m in command. The responsibility’s mine. If it weren’t for me Ramirez and Ordovara would be alive.”

“If it weren’t for me they’d be alive, too,” the old man pointed out, “and if it weren’t for you they might all have died long ago in a Havana dungeon, yourself included. You mustn’t put on sackcloth and ashes for the rest of your life on their account, hijo.”

“One day I’ll get over it,” Cielo said philosophically.

Emil pressed his opening: “Papa, he broke security. We can’t dismiss that so easily.”

“I believe we’ve covered the breach as well as could be done,” the old man said. “We’ve made Kruger out to be a tourist who was changing a tire when the jack slipped in the mud and the car fell on him. It explains the imprint of the tire tread on his legs. It’s not as if he had a bullet in him — there’ll be no official inquiry. Cielo did the right thing. We’re not savages — we don’t leave men to die just because they’ve been injured.”

“All the same. They could have brought Kruger down in the Jeep. They didn’t have to violate radio silence.”

Cielo watched him loom and wondered if the youth would have the audacity to challenge him for the leadership of the group. Not yet, he thought. He’s not ready just yet. He’s preparing the ground now, that’s all.

“Breaking radio security,” Emil said, “that’s a serious mistake.”

“I had to make the decision on the spot,” Cielo replied. “I don’t regret it.”

“Then you’re a fool!”

Cielo laughed at him. It was the only way to deal with him.

The old man said, “Emil has a point, you know.”

“Not realistically. Nobody has direction finders zeroed in on us. Nobody even knows we’re here. The odds were favorable and my concern was Kruger. I stand by the decision.”

“You’re wrong,” the old man said, “at least in part. They know we’re here.”

Cielo looked from face to face. They were both watching him. “I wasn’t told that, was I?”

“I’m telling you now,” the old man said.

Emil said, “It changes things. They’re getting close — we can’t afford sloppy leadership any longer. We can’t afford to allow accidents to happen — we can’t allow security to be broken again.”

The old man lifted a palm toward his grandson. “The most important thing is that Cielo didn’t panic. It must have been a dreadful few moments. Cielo kept his head. That’s why he’s in command.”

It was a vote of confidence but Cielo thought gloomily, I wish you trusted me less.

The old man said, “They’ve traced the kidnaping of Ambassador Gordon to Puerto Rico.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. I’m not blaming you. You have a distressing tendency to shoulder the responsibility for everything — I’m not putting any fault on you. The fact remains, they’ve traced you — at least they know you’re on the island and perhaps they know who you are. I believe you know two of the men involved in the investigation — Glenn Anders and Harrison Crobey. I remember the names from years ago when you trained in Alabama. Your reports mentioned Crobey several times.”

Cielo stood at the parapet. A white sloop gamboled offshore. The sun gave it the look of a hovering butterfly. Crobey, he thought. He’d always been a little afraid of Crobey, but he liked him.

“I’ve heard of Anders but I never met him.”

“He was Crobey’s liaison with Langley.”

“Yes, I suppose he was.”

“There was a young woman with Anders. Presumably a member of his staff.” The old man squirmed a bit in the cane chair and spent a moment clicking his teeth and it occurred to Cielo the old man was having trouble for some reason — searching for the right words. “There was a certain — breakdown in communications here in my headquarters. When we learned of these people’s activities we attempted to shadow them and take certain steps to throw them off the scent and discourage them. You know how these things are. Orders pass down a chain. A few links in the chain turn out to be imperfect conductors of the current — information is garbled and there’s an excess of zeal or a misunderstanding of instructions.”

Emil’s face was getting red; he was turning his back and his shoulders lifted defiantly.

The old man continued: “The young woman with Anders was killed. Not by my order, but it’s happened. Like you with your accidents, I must take responsibility for mine. The killing of this unfortunate woman may stir up the hornets in the nest. I’ve no doubt the search will be intensified. Of course the girl may have been simply Anders’ lover but I doubt it, and it makes no difference anyway. What has happened is tantamount to what happens when a police officer is killed. The department tends to drop everything else in the rush to apprehend the cop-killer. We can expect a good deal of pressure. For that reason I propose that you discontinue further shipments and arms purchases for the time being.”

Relief flooded him; he tried not to let it show.

The old man said, “We must pull in our horns and wait it out. Cover our tracks completely.”

“This killing — was it Luz?”

“No. You don’t trust Luz, do you?”

“No, I never have.”

“You needn’t be concerned about him. Luz obeys my orders without question and without deviation. He will continue to do so even if the orders come from beyond the grave. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.” The meaning was clear and it proved once again the old man’s shrewdness. After the old man died Luz would deliver the safe-deposit key to Cielo and Julio. The half million dollars: the house, the landing, the fifty-foot boat. That was the leash to which Cielo was tethered. That and his loyalty to this absurd old man.

Then he understood something else. The anguish with which the old man had skirted the issue of the CIA woman’s death, and the way Emil had flushed and averted his face — it could only mean the woman had been killed by young Emil, or by others at Emil’s command.

Cielo said, “It means postponing the attack on Havana then.”

“It can’t be helped. We must go to ground. Keep all your men in the camp, don’t let anyone out on furlough. Keep your radio receiver switched on at all times and have a man monitor it twenty-four hours a day. If we learn of any danger approaching you we’ll give you warning by radio, but you’re to use it only for receiving and you’ll make no transmissions. Questions?”

“Harry Crobey — is he in charge of the investigation?”

“We don’t know. My sources in the government are not master spies, you know. I acquire dribbles of information here and there. I know that Anders is a sort of troubleshooter for a department of the CIA headed by a gentleman named O’Hillary who seems to have all the earmarks of a clever and ambitious civil servant. Up to now the handling of the investigation of the Mexican kidnaping has been guided more by political considerations than by legalistic ones, but the murder of this girl may change that. We don’t know yet. I don’t have a private pipeline into the White House or the CIA’s top echelons. I have only friends, here and there, with their ears to the ground. Of course I have friends on the police here in San Juan. They know about Anders well enough. They haven’t been able to tell me very much about Crobey, however. He’s here and he met with Anders — just before the girl died — but the nature of his official function is obscure. We’re not even certain who he’s working for. He told a police detective he’d come to Puerto Rico to scout film locations for a Hollywood director. That’s patently ridiculous, of course, but it shows how little we’ve learned. There’s a woman with Crobey, too — either an associate or a courtesan.”

“What’s her name?”

“Marchant, I think. Or Marchand. Something like that.”

“Carole Marchand? She’s the mother of the boy Emil killed.”

“Then perhaps that’s who she is.” The old man didn’t seem interested. “I keep my lines open to the police, of course, and any information they have tends to filter back to me. But if Crobey is free-lancing we’ll have no way to anticipate his movements.”

Cielo said, “Crobey’s like a mamba. I know him — he’s dangerous.”

“We’ll see that he doesn’t find you. Your job now is to go to ground and keep the others in the burrow with you. Don’t communicate with Soledad.”

“I know that well enough,” he said irritably.

“I’m sorry. Love of a woman often makes a man foolish. I’m fortunate to be so old. Pretty girls no longer turn my head.”

That wasn’t true at all; the old man was only having his little joke as a way of easing the admonishment. There were always delectable girls around the old man. Cielo didn’t like to think how they probably must service him.

“I wonder how they traced us here,” Cielo said.

“I’ve no idea. But Puerto Rico’s a big country. Let’s just make sure they don’t trace us any farther than they already have.”

“Will you have Anders and Crobey killed, then?”

“I haven’t decided yet. The decision will depend on how close to us they come.”

Emil, throughout this, had wandered about the deck with his hands in his pockets. Cielo said, “What about Emil? Do I take him with me?”

“No. Emil will remain here and go about his business as if nothing were amiss. His absence from this house might create suspicion.”

Cielo was relieved not to be harassed by Emil’s presence; things in the camp would be tense enough without him.

Emil said, “While you’re waiting up there you might draw up the plans for the coup in detail. I’ll have a look at them afterwards. This investigation will die away like they always do. When it does we’ll make our final decisions. There’s not going to be any more foot-dragging.”

The old man smiled. “To the young everything must happen quickly.”

It was more than that, Cielo thought. Emil wanted to get the job done while the old man was still alive because only in that way could Emil be sure of securing the power he wanted for himself. The old man would see to it that Emil was looked after: Perhaps Emil even had designs on Castro’s position. Without the old man there wouldn’t be a prayer of that happening — Emil had no constituency. So he had to move fast.

All I have to do, Cielo thought, is delay things until the old man dies.

After that it would be possible to deal with Emil, because he could be isolated.

Emil watched him angrily: For an instant Cielo was afraid the youth had read his mind. Emil was clever in his brutal way.

The old man reached for the newspaper beside him. “Luz will drive you back. I know you’d prefer another chauffeur but Luz is the one I trust to make sure you’re not followed.”

On his way out of the house Cielo felt a measure of dulled contentment. The predicament now was in the old man’s lap. The old man would die soon and everything would dwindle away — all Cielo had to do was go to ground and stay there.

Chapter 15

The message at the hotel desk advised Glenn Anders to call a phone number between four and six. He took it to be the number of a public telephone. He made the call from a booth in the lobby of the Sheraton; Harry Crobey answered on the fourth ring.

“We heard about Rosalia.” It was, in its tone, sufficient expression of shared sorrow. Crobey’s voice went on: “We should meet.”

“I agree. Where and when?”

Crobey gave him instructions and Anders broke the connection. He made another call immediately, to the Department of Agriculture office where they’d given him a desk. The GS-8 on the front desk, a pale man whose name he kept having trouble remembering, exchanged identifying greetings with him and said, “We’re all awful sorry about that young lady, Mr. Anders.”

“Did Langley call back after I left?”

“No sir.”

“No messages of any kind from O’Hillary?”

“There’s a Telex, sir. Plain English. It’s only a confirmation.”

“Read it to me anyway.”

“Yes sir. Message reads, ‘Prior instructions remain in effect until further notice. No change in orders.’ That’s it, sir — just the signature.”

“All right. Thanks.”

He went outside with his hand on the flat automatic pistol in his pocket. There were taxis at the curb; he boarded the first one and rode it to the north gate of the university and paid it off there and walked through the campus, stopping twice to check behind him. Students milled about the lawns and a couple was necking under a palm tree; a fat youth sat on the grass reading a comic book. Anders drifted aimlessly among the buildings, going in and out, upstairs and down, from one building to another, staying within crowds when he could; he kept an eye on his watch and at exactly half past five he emerged from the south gate of the campus and walked a block to Calle de Diego where a taxi was just pulling up: Anders stepped in and the car pulled away and Crobey, on the other side of the seat, twisted around to look back through the window.

“Nobody came with me,” Anders said

“All right.”

Crobey dismissed the taxi and they walked together through a dusty passage, bordered with scrubby bougainvillea and oleander; Crobey led him erratically through the turnings and kept looking back. No one was following them; Anders was beginning to be annoyed by the excessiveness of the precautions when Crobey led him out onto a paved street where a Ford Bronco waited at the curb with Carole Marchand behind the wheel. Anders tipped the passenger seat forward and climbed into the back; Crobey got in and Anders said, “Good evening.”

“My condolences,” she said, “and I mean that.”

“Were you two followed last night?”

“Yes,” Crobey said. “We shook them.”

His hands wrenched at each other; he turned his stare out the window because he didn’t want to cry again, not in front of them. “You know she was a little wacky, all right, she was far too young for the likes of me, none of it made any sense anyway — just a kid from the office they assigned to run errands for me. She was Cuban herself, you know. For a while I even suspected she might be a plant. Then after a while I didn’t give a damn.”

“Now you know she wasn’t a plant,” Carole Marchand said mildly.

No, he thought, actually he didn’t know that at all. Maybe Rosalia had been the target after all — how could he be sure they weren’t afraid she’d expose them? Maybe they’d known she was falling in love with Anders. Maybe they’d killed her to keep her silent.

What he said was, “They’re going to pay for it. I don’t much care why they did it.”

Then he thought, Pull yourself together, you’ve got to be cold now. He needed dispassion. He said, “This bastard Cielo — presumably Rodriguez — bought some fairly heavy weapons from a dealer in Mayaguez. Mainly mortars and a couple of small artillery pieces. They were delivered to a farm. That’s all the dealer knew about it — he took the money and delivered the merchandise. I ran a check on the serial numbers of the banknotes. They match the numbers on some of the ransom bills — if we need more confirmation of that kind. I had a look at the farm where he delivered the guns. Nothing there now, they’ve cleared out. Most likely they used it just once and they’ll never use it again.”

“Do you mind coming to the point?”

Anders said, “I reported to O’Hillary. A few hours later he got back to me. This is off the record now. Officially we’re still engaged in the hunt for these terrorists. But unofficially my orders, as of noon today, are to lose the file down behind the file cabinet somewhere. You see the connection?”

“Right,” Crobey said. “The arms buy makes our boy respectable.”

“Spell it out for me,” Carole Marchand commanded.

“They’re picking up heavy ordnance,” Anders said. “This buy will be one of dozens, I imagine. They’ll spread the purchases around to avoid drawing too much attention. It begins to look like a major paramilitary operation. You can buy a lot of weapons for ten million dollars. O’Hillary’s analysts likely have it sized up that Rodriguez shows every sign of intending to mount a well-equipped mobile striking force for an attack on Castro’s headquarters.”

“With a handful of men?”

“We don’t know for sure how many men there are, do we. Anyhow look what the Israelis accomplished at Entebbe with a handful of troops. It’s not numbers that count in a palace coup — it’s tactics and planning. They could wipe out the Cuban leadership if they handle it with enough sophistication.”

She said, “That’s a farfetched extrapolation from a few flimsy clues, isn’t it?”

“The agency works that kind of scenario all the time.”

“In other words O’Hillary thinks Rodriguez may have a chance of overthrowing Castro so he’s ordering you to keep hands off?”

“It’s one possibility.”

“It’s what I thought all along,” she said, “more or less.”

“There’s another possibility,” Anders said. He felt so weary he could hardly get the words out. “Your idea that there had to be someone here in San Juan with enough political clout to sic the local police on Harry — somebody with that much clout might also have enough influence in Washington to put pressure on the agency to soft-pedal the investigation.”

She said, “And the murder of Rosalia — one of your own agents — doesn’t even put a dent in those policies. You folks sure are expendable.”

Anders managed a lopsided hint of a smile; and Crobey said, “Are you filing for a divorce from O’Hillary?”

“Not yet. Officially I’m still under orders to locate the terrorists. Locate ’em but keep hands off. Those are the orders I’m obliged to obey, aren’t they? After we locate them — we’ll see.”

Crobey said to Carole Marchand, “The first rule is cover your ass. Glenn doesn’t think of himself as a bureaucrat but it rubs off on everybody.”

“As opposed to Harry here, who’s of pure and noble character,” Anders said without heat. “You’re both missing the point. If I can show legitimate orders then I can maintain my freedom of action. There’s no point going out of my way to shut off communications. I may as well keep making use of the apparatus as long as it’s available to me. And to hell with O’Hillary’s private instructions.”

“Watch closely, ducks, and you’ll notice that amazingly enough, at no time do his hands leave his arms.”

“As of now,” Anders went on, feeling the anger rise within him, “I’m in this right up to my hairline. No more reservations. I want to nail these bastards and to hell with Fidel Castro. Put a gun in my hand and Rodriguez in the sights — that should settle the question quick enough.”

Something made a sudden noise — a slam of sound: The truck jiggled and Anders went into his pocket for his gun, whipping his eyes around — it was two kids: Their baseball had bounced off the truck fender.

“Jesus.”

Crobey climbed out and the kids scuttled back. Crobey went along the curb and picked up the baseball. He talked in Spanish to the kids and tossed the baseball to one of them; the kids swallowed and nodded their heads and put their backs to him and ran like hell. Crobey got back into the truck. He glanced at Anders. “Shooting them wouldn’t have done a whole lot for your image, Glenn.”

Anders was rattled; it was clear to all of them; excuses or apologies wouldn’t change it. He didn’t really care. His future had been shot down last night with a bullet on the steps of El Convento. That had been his second chance; now he’d missed it. It was time to quit: Take early retirement and put O’Hillary out of his life and mark time in an Arizona suburb ranchette writing letters to the editor and taking up hobbies.

There was only one possible escape from that: The sense of justification he might derive from destroying the destroyers who’d taken Rosalia from him.

Crobey said mildly, “That house in the next block with the pink Pinto in the carport — that’s Rodriguez’s house.”

“What?”

“He hasn’t been back since that night he ditched your plainclothes cop,” Crobey said. “Will you relax a little?” He tipped his head toward the house he’d indicated. “The wife’s name is Soledad. They’ve got three girls, various ages, the oldest about fourteen I think. Or maybe twelve — kids grow up faster these days, don’t they. The family name on the mailbox is Mendez. Ernesto Mendez, that’s the name he goes by when he’s not being Cielo and/or Rodrigo Rodriguez.”

A battered camper-bodied pickup truck came crunching down the street, turned in at a driveway and let off a woman with her hair in yellow plastic curlers who began to unload brown grocery bags from the seat. Crobey’s voice went on, droning in his ear with that faint Liverpudlian overlay: “The neighbors believe him to be an adjuster for a casualty insurance company, which is a fair dodge because it explains his absences — he’s away investigating claims. He belongs to a local National Guard regiment, the kind where they train every Thursday night and one weekend a month. A couple of old pals of mine have been asking questions around. They’ve come up with some interesting bits and pieces. This National Guard outfit has a little rat-pack of noncommissioned officers all of whom seem to have served with Mendez-Rodriguez at some unspecified time in the past, for which I tend to read Bay of Pigs. It turns out, on inquiry, that every last one of the members of this little rat-pack happens to be away on important business at the moment — extended business trips.”

“You’ve been busy. What else have you found?”

“We’re still about thirty bricks short of a full load but we’re getting there,” Crobey told him. “These two buddies who’ve been working for us on Carole’s payroll have talked to several of the National Guardsmen in that outfit. Not rat-pack types but other chaps in the same unit. It seems the first lieutenant in command of that particular platoon is one Emil Draga, age twenty-four, graduate of the University of Florida at Coral Gables.”

“The name sounds familiar.”

“The family name ought to. Try this on — Jorge Vandemeer Draga-Ruiz.”

“Ah. The boy’s father?”

“Grandfather. The old boy’s pushing ninety.”

Anders looked at Carole Marchand. She hadn’t spoken for a long time. Between the bucket seats her hand lay across Crobey’s; Anders marked that and drew its meaning. He said to her, “That could be the source of the police clout you were looking for.”

“I know.”

Carole Marchand said, “What if we asked him a few hard questions at the end of a gun?”

Anders smiled a little at her naïveté. “I’m sure that man’s guarded by a security system as heavy as a medieval baron’s moat. You’d never get within half a mile of him.”

“We could get him to come to us,” Crobey said.

“How?”

“Leave that aside a minute. The question is, if we get the old goat under a gun, do you go along with it or do you blow the whistle on us? He’s a powerful old bastard. He’s probably got four senators and a dozen congressmen in his pocket.”

“And that’s supposed to scare me off?”

“It’s the kind of thing that’ll cost you your job and your pension.”

“I doubt that. These old Cuban families aren’t that influential anymore. They’ve turned into White Russian emigrés — nobody pays that much attention to them.”

“Draga’s just a little bit different from most of them,” Crobey said. “To the tune of maybe three hundred million dollars.”

Anders kept glancing fitfully up the street toward the Mendez-Rodriguez house, reassuring himself that no one was going in or out. He said, “I’d be happier if we had better evidence the old man’s involved. Suppose we get him under a gun, as you say — suppose he turns out to be the wrong man? Suppose he doesn’t know anything about this business? We’ll have made ourselves an enemy strong enough to blast us out of Puerto Rico permanently. Then what happens to the hunt for Rodriguez?”

Carole Marchand said, “Harry and I are willing to take the chance. We believe Jorge Draga has got to be the power behind Rodriguez.”

“A minute ago you were accusing the CIA of jumping to conclusions on the basis of flimsy fragments.”

“All right, the shoe’s changed feet — we bought your reasoning. Why shouldn’t you buy ours?”

Anders picked at a ragged fingernail. Carole Marchand said, “You can get out of the car right now if you like. We’ll do this by ourselves if we have to. But we’re a little short of manpower and we could use your help. I thought, in view of what happened to Rosalia, you might be inclined to throw in with us...”

The last of the day’s sunlight was creeping up toward the low roofs across the street. The two young baseball players had disappeared — gone inside for dinner, probably.

Crobey said, “The two blokes I’ve been using here are Cubans. They owe me favors and I’ve been collecting. But they hate Castro. I don’t think we ought to depend on them to help us do anything except collect information. I’m sure they won’t go up against Rodriguez in a firefight — there’s a limit to their obligations to me. They wouldn’t have strung along this far except that Carole’s paying them good money. What I’m doing is giving you the full picture. Odds against. There’s only the three of us, unless you can recruit people from the agency.”

“Not much chance of that. I couldn’t do it without O’Hillary getting wind of it.”

Carole Marchand said, “Then it’s just three of us. If you’re in.”

“And just two of you if I’m not. What happens then? How can you fight him by yourselves?”

Her reply was a defiant stare.

“I think you’re nuts.” He looked at Crobey. “She’s nuts. I never thought you were. What’s in this for you? I hope it’s enough to pay your funeral expenses.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve arranged to sell my body to science.”

“Come on, Harry. If I buy in, how do I know you won’t disappear when we need you?”

“I trust him,” Carole Marchand said.

“Sure — but you’re infatuated with him.”

It only made her smile, a reckless bawdy sort of grin. She was, he thought, a remarkably likable woman. Clearly she had captivated Crobey; and he found that to be an amazing thing.

Anders sighed out a long exasperated breath. His chin dropped toward his chest and he contemplated the veins in the backs of his hands. He made a few faces and glimpsed the tail ends of various rationalizations and in the end he said, “All right. How do we get our hands on Draga?”

Chapter 16

She felt cramped in the truck seat — too many hours of sitting. The night was muggy and the shirt was pasted to her; she felt unclean. She said, “What if someone has to pee?”

“You go in the bushes, ducks.”

The armory was a low pink stucco shoebox. A high chainlink fence enclosed a paved yard on which squatted two dark green tanks, their cleated treads glistening under the lights, and several trucks and Jeeps. Beyond the armory the road rolled away through open fields.

Anders, in the back seat, yawned audibly. It was the only sound any of them made until Carole shifted in her seat to ease her rump. They had run out of conversation more than an hour ago.

Harry seemed imperturbable but she’d detected signs of unease in Glenn Anders. The death of the girl had unraveled his nerves.

Along both shoulders of the dusty road cars were parked — she’d counted forty-odd. Crobey had told her to ignore the rest, they were only interested in one of them. Nobody intended to start a fight with the entire platoon.

She felt conflicting pulls toward Anders. There was an urge to comfort him; but something else held her back — a lingering distrust. He was one of them, the apparatchiks. She dealt with his kind all the time: the people who ran the studios. A movie executive was a sorry creature whose guiding principle was fear: “Let’s take another meeting. We want to keep our options open.” Things were stalled forever by their dithering. And in the end the decision usually was negative; very few heads of production had ever been fired for turning down a project. It was always safer to say no. Soon Anders might begin to remember he was an organization man. He had never altogether forgotten it: I’d be happier if we had better evidence...

Harry’s hand dropped casually upon her shoulder and she tipped her cheek against his knuckles, wondering what would become of them.

There was a plan of sorts — she wasn’t sure she had faith in it. The first step was to isolate the old tycoon and force information out of him. That was dicey, as Harry put it. But if they could pry the location of Rodriguez’s hiding place out of the old man then they would keep the old man on ice while they made their way to what Harry with a straight face had designated as the Bad Guy’s Hideout.

The weapon of Harry’s choice was gas and they’d spent nearly twenty-four hours and the major part of Carole’s cash to obtain cartons of Mace canisters, tear-gas grenades and the military handcuffs that now crowded the rear compartment of the Bronco beside Anders’ seat. Ballistic arms were there as well — the light automatic guns Harry had been disassembling in Santana’s house — but if they had to resort to those they would fail. The guns were only for defense: to cover a running retreat.

She stirred, lifted Harry’s hand off her shoulder and tried to read the luminous dial of his diver’s watch. “How much longer, for God’s sake?”

“Settle down. This is mañana country. A couple hours of lectures and then the boys probably shoot a few racks of pool — most of them haven’t got all that much to go home to.”

It was frightfully hot, a night for long cool drinks; she squirmed in her sweat and poked her head half out the open window in the search for air. Below the truck a crowd of red ants were dragging a huge dung beetle stubbornly across the earth. She had done her hair up with a few pins in an attempt to leave her neck bare and cool but it hadn’t helped. She desperately wanted a shower.

Harry had withdrawn his hand and she sat far over on her side of the seat, not so much watching the armory as thinking about Harry. It was always her tendency to expose the ludicrous side of things: Can you honestly picture yourself facing this man across the breakfast table every day for the rest of your life? If what she felt toward him was infatuation, what would happen when it wore out? God knew she was not at ease in Harry’s world. She could not bear the thought of losing him — but what was the alternative? Think about the derivation of that word “wedlock.”

Then she thought, I am putting the cart ahead of an unborn horse. But she had no pride left. She would demand that he marry her. Or at least live with her. It came to the same thing; in her tradition — inescapable — marriage was not an experiment but a contract. And now she felt like a Victorian belle — setting her cap for him.

And then what?

Abruptly she turned to face his profile. “Harry?”

“What, ducks?”

“You could be a stunt director.”

“A what?”

“In the movies. Stunts. Airplanes, special effects. You know.”

“I did that a couple of times. In Yugoslavia a few years ago. A guy I knew was making war pictures.”

“Didn’t you like it?”

“The truth. I love it. But I felt like a damn silly ass, play-acting at war.”

“You were young then.”

From the back seat Anders said with a nervous laugh, “Harry’ll never be old.”

But Harry kept his eyes on Carole, grave and gentle — she felt an outpouring of love: She touched his cheek fondly. She was thinking that in nature, no matter what the species, only one male in a hundred was any good. I’m not about to let him go. And to hell with the impossibility of it.

Harry said, “If that’s a job offer I think I’ll take it. This was going to be my last caper anyhow, wasn’t it?”

She breathed, “Oh, Harry!” — like an ingenue; and threw herself into his arms.

“Heads up,” Glenn Anders said, very mild. “Here they come.”

Entangled with Harry she twisted her head to bring the armory into her field of vision. Men emerged in clusters, all of them in fatigues. A good deal of talk; some calling back and forth, good nights and hasta luegos. She straightened in the seat in abrupt alarm. “How do we know which one he is?”

“He’ll be wearing a silver bar,” Harry said. “Scrunch down a little.”

She slid down in the seat until she could barely see over the rim of the windowsill. Anders hissed, “I don’t see him!”

“Give him time.”

The soldiers were separating, going to their cars. Right in front of the Bronco the battered ruin of a pickup truck started up, flicked on its headlights and gnashed away down the two-lane. By ones and twos the Guardsmen climbed into vehicles and the parking shoulders gradually emptied, streams of red tail-lights retreating in both directions. No one paid any attention to the Bronco. After five minutes nothing was left on the road shoulder except a glossy Trans Am with discreet racing stripes, parked directly opposite the entrance to the armory.

Anders said, “I guess he didn’t come to the meeting then.” Was it relief in his voice?

“Wait it out,” Harry said.

“That’s the only car left. It must belong to the night guard.”

“No. Leave a car alone on this road overnight and you’d come out in the morning and find you didn’t have any tires or battery. The night guard’s car must be parked inside the compound.”

“That’s a point.”

The scheme had been to follow the car and, given the opportunity, run it off the road and trap the driver. Apparently that no longer was going to be necessary — if in fact the Trans Am didn’t belong to a watchman.

The armory door opened. Harry tensed beside her and she heard a quiet click behind her — Anders getting out a pair of handcuffs.

For a moment the man stood silhouetted in the open doorway — she had an impression of size: big shoulders, a squarish head, legs too short for the powerful torso. Then the door closed and the man came down the steps under the exterior light; she saw then that he was quite young. The lights glinted off the insignia on the collar of his fatigues.

“My God in Heaven,” Glenn Anders whispered. “Him!”

“What?”

“That’s the guy. That’s the guy who killed her.”

Harry paused with his hand on the door handle. “Nothing stupid now, Glenn.”

“What? Come on — let’s go, what’s holding you up?”

“We don’t want him dead,” Harry said in a firm but quiet way.

The big youth was crossing the street toward the Trans Am, tossing a casual glance at the Bronco. He took car keys out of his pocket and stooped to find the lock in the door.

Harry was out of the Bronco by then; Anders clambered over the tilted driver’s seat and squeezed out after him, hurrying. Carole felt everything tighten — muscles, gut, throat. She saw the big young man recognize the gun in Harry’s fist and straighten up beside the car, going bolt still, his face rising into the light — fear, but defiant stoic acceptance with it.

Anders was moving in fast from one side and Harry spoke quickly, harshly: “Glenn.” Anders slowed down and looked back briefly — a head-shaking frown like a puzzled baffled bull.

“Easy.”

The big youth’s eyes flicked back and forth from one to the other. He looked once toward the armory and she thought he might yell but Harry spoke again, his words too soft to reach her ears this time, and the youth slowly deflated. Anders was right beside him then and she found she was holding her breath expecting a shot from Anders’ pistol but he only showed the handcuffs to the young man and the youth slowly turned around and crossed his wrists behind his back, staring into the muzzle of Harry’s revolver.

Anders fitted the handcuffs onto him and propelled the prisoner into the back seat of the Trans Am and then Harry crowded Anders aside and climbed in alongside the prisoner. Anders spoke — some sort of objection — and Harry must have answered him from within the car, for Anders threw his head back and she saw his chest rise and fall with a full slow breath. Then Anders looked back at her, at the Bronco, and made a vague signal with his hand: He managed to convey both instructions and bitterness with that gesture; then he got into the driver’s seat of the Trans Am and pulled the door shut. The exhaust puffed smoke and the lights came on.

Trembling, Carole turned the key. The Trans Am rolled away and she put the Bronco in gear and followed it.

She still didn’t know the way; she had to follow closely through the forest. Ahead of her the Trans Am, low-slung and sporty, bottomed several times in the ruts — she heard the clanking. The Bronco pitched her around on its hard springs but she had no trouble handling it and her only moments of fear came when, for brief intervals, she lost sight of the car’s red lights in the deep woods ahead. Each time, however, Anders waited for her. Then finally they were running down the bumpy track into Santana’s yard.

By the time she’d parked Harry and Anders had the prisoner out of the car. She saw that Harry had tied a black cloth blindfold over his eyes. The big youth stumbled as they guided him across the weedy ground and hustled him inside. She followed them in through the back door and the kitchen.

In the front room Santana switched off the television and looked at them all with a commendable lack of visible surprise. Santana must have been out in the fields; he smelled of it. He stood picking sunburnt skin shreds from his nose.

Harry said, “You probably won’t want to know about this.” And Santana with a shrug and a nod picked up his can of beer and left the house.

Anders went around turning off all the lights except one in the kitchen, which threw enough light into the front room to see by. When Anders came back into the front room he was trembling visibly, anger coursing through him and flooding his face with color.

The prisoner, head high, hands shackled, waited with tight-mouthed endurance. The black velvet over his eyes gave him a slightly comical look — like a blindfold trick-shooting act in a county-fair carnival.

Harry said, “In here,” and turned the prisoner toward the door of the cell Carole had been using as a bedroom.

She waited at the door while Anders went in past her; she stood in the doorway to watch, too ambivalent about this to enter the room. Harry looked up at her — he had sat the prisoner down on the cot and was locking another pair of handcuffs, fastening the youth’s ankle to the crossleg of the cot. It wouldn’t prevent him from hobbling around but it would be an unpleasant anchor to drag — no chance he’d get far with that hanging from his foot.

Harry took a wallet out of the pocket of the young lieutenant’s fatigues. He looked through it and held it up so Anders could see it. Anders’ face never changed; it was as if he feared any shift in expression might break the tenuous skein of his spurious dispassion.

The young man was making surreptitious attempts to explore his boundaries: a tug and shift of the shackled ankle, sly shiftings of hip and elbow. He said, “Do you people know who I am?”

“Emil Draga.” Harry tossed the wallet into the young man’s face. It was a gentle toss but Emil Draga, blindfolded, jerked away from it violently, almost upsetting the cot.

“How much ransom do you plan to get for me?” It was mostly a snarl.

Harry got to his feet. Anders watched him: “You going to make the phone call?”

“Maybe we won’t need to.”

“Now there’s a thought.” Anders thrust his automatic pistol toward Emil Draga. “Maybe you’re right.”

“Why don’t you stop waving that thing at him? He can’t see it and you’re not going to use it until we’ve found out what we want to know.”

Anders didn’t lower the pistol. “Ask him fast, then.”

Carole said, “You’d better take it away from him,” to Harry, and afterward she was surprised because she had no doubt he could.

Anders looked at her — a wry sour face — and then at Harry, who only stood there monolithically; Anders put the pistol in his pocket with a rueful show of reluctance. “Ask him now,” he said again, and stalked out of the room.

Under the black blindfold Emil Draga had a waxen and slightly concave face — ugly but shrewd and arrogant, a rich youth who must have learned early that everything had a price and could be purchased — probably the only sexual love he’d ever had was the kind you bought.

“I suppose you people know what the penalty for kidnaping is.”

Carole said, “Maybe you should have thought of that before you kidnaped—”

“Let us handle this part, ducks.”

“All right.” She propped her shoulder against the wall, folded her arms and smiled at Harry to show her trust. “I’d just as soon be watching this part from an airplane anyway.”

Emil Draga blurted, “Who the fuck are you people?”

Carole only watched Harry; and Harry shook his head, mute. The whole scheme was Harry’s: We’ll keep him blindfolded throughout. For one thing we don’t want to put Santana in jeopardy, do we. For another thing if the kid knows anything we’ll want to get it out of him. Deprive a man of one of his senses and he’ll begin to go up the walls pretty fast. The blindfold stays on.

The plan had been to telephone the old millionaire and force him to come out of his lair. But that was before Anders had identified Emil Draga as one of Rosalia’s killers. If he was that deeply involved then he probably knew everything and that suggested there might be no need to drag the old millionaire into this.

Abruptly Harry said, “Draga!”

The youth almost leaped off the cot. He tried to control his trembling.

Harry let the silence run on. Anders came back into the room and stood just inside the door with his hands in his pockets and his face closed up tight. He’d gone outside to collect himself; but he’d been unable to stay away. His eyes ran around, alighting fitfully on Harry, on herself, on the blindfolded prisoner.

“What do you want from me?”

When Emil Draga got no answer to that he began to shout. Tendons corded his neck and he screamed obscenities until Harry stepped forward calmly and slapped him hard across the ear.

Emil Draga fell across the cot, struggled back to a sitting position and snapped his mouth shut, breathing hard and fast through his nose. He was, she saw, a youth who probably had the battlefield sort of courage — he could run screaming right into the guns — but he’d never had to learn endurance. And there was the torture of anticipation...

She turned away, not wanting to watch this, but Harry said, “You’d better stay,” and she understood: This was on her account and he meant her to accept the responsibility.

Anders said in a chilly voice, “I guess it’s time we had a word with this citizen.” With a deliberation that shocked her Anders stepped forward, leaned down and slammed the barrel of his pistol against Emil Draga’s shin.

The youth screamed.

Anders stepped back, pocketing the gun. Harry gave him an unpleasant look but didn’t speak.

Anders lifted shaking fingers and ran them through his hair.

Emil Draga began to flay about him wildly with his free leg. He flung his torso off the cot and crashed painfully onto the floor and scrabbled about like a half-crushed beetle until Harry’s toe slammed him in the ribs and Harry bellowed something at him and the youth curled up fetally, cringing, trying to hide his head between his knees, the cot overturned across his legs.

Harry let him whimper for a while and then got down and unlocked the ankle cuff from the cot. He set the cot back in place and beckoned to Anders. Between them they lifted Emil Draga to his feet.

Harry motioned with his head toward the door and they manhandled Emil Draga outside, the loose handcuff clattering behind his right foot.

Feeling nauseous, Carole followed them across the front room into the kitchen, where Anders held Emil Draga upright while Harry plugged the stopper into the sink and began to pump water into it.

Immediately she understood, without having to be told, what they had in mind; she turned her face away and stared at the gray television screen.

Somehow she comprehended without the need of explanation that it was in their minds to break him first — then ask questions. Unprepared, he would have no opportunity to rehearse lies.

They were torturing Emil Draga by depriving him of basic sensory information. Harry was right, it was astonishingly effective: It was working on her — and she wasn’t even blindfolded.

Harry’s mouth was screwed up in an expression of sour distaste. Two things amazed her: that he was capable of this, and that having learned the capacity he nonetheless took no pleasure from it. It was something essential she’d learned about him: Harry was hard but there wasn’t a shred of sadism in him.

But Glenn Anders... Anders looked on with his lips peeled back from his teeth, a burning intensity in his eyes: She’d never seen the hunger for revenge written so clearly on a human face. The eager glow sickened her. A week ago did I look like that?

Harry abandoned the pump handle. A final gush flowed into the sink — it was about two thirds filled.

Emil Draga said in a dull voice from which all feelings had been sucked, “Please — what do you want?”

Anders snapped, “Before long you’re going to be getting your emissions from dreaming that this is over. Well it’s never going to be over, I promise you — it’s never going to finish. You’re in Hell, Lieutenant.”

“Why... why?”

But Anders only grinned unseen.

Harry made a harsh gesture: Calm down, get a grip on yourself.

Harry took Emil Draga from behind by both shoulders and pushed him gently forward until he stood facing the sink with his belly two feet from its rim. He moved to one side to position himself; Anders stepped in behind Emil Draga and hooked both hands strongly in Draga’s web belt. Draga stiffened, utterly rigid.

“Spread your feet out,” Harry said mildly.

When Draga didn’t move Anders kicked his Achilles’ tendon, not hard but it was enough to provoke reluctant co-operation: Draga slid his foot out to one side, then the other foot until he stood splayed, hands flicking open and shut in the manacles, head whipping back and forth and breath sawing through him. Then Harry’s fist slammed into his gut.

It doubled him over. A gasp, a little cry — not so much pain as dread — the breath punched out of him and his head poised over the sink and that was when Harry shoved him down into the sink face-first.

Draga struggled every way he could but there was no chance — he was pinioned by four strong arms and had no way to get purchase. Carole gripped the doorjamb with both hands and pushed her face into it and clenched her eyes shut, hearing Anders’ tremulous voice: “Amazing how a man can drown in just a few inches of water, ain’t it.”

In the end she was unable not to look. The silent struggle had abated; Draga’s body was lurching with the heaves of choked nausea and he’d slumped so that the only thing holding him up was Anders’ powerful two-handed grip on his web belt.

Harry lifted him by the epaulets, pulling his face out of the water. Draga blurted water from his mouth and nose. A choking cough; wheezing to suck air back into him — eyes popping, mouth working, panic.

The sounds he made were so agonized that she had to leave. She stumbled into the front room, fell across the couch and covered her ears with both hands.

But the not knowing got to her and she turned her face to listen.

Draga was coughing now — a painful wheeze, a sucking gasp.

Then Harry: even-voiced, firm, giving away nothing. “I’ll ask a question once. You’ve got one second to answer and then you go back in the water and you stay there twice as long next time. Are you listening? Where’s Cielo?”

A mutter, then a cough; then, “El Yunque.”

Anders was pacing back and forth, shoulders jerking with each turn. Harry sat at the table leaning over the topographical map. Sitting on the couch with her elbows on her knees she held the glass of rum in both hands and sucked at it. The door to the bedroom cell stood open and she could see one of Emil Draga’s feet at the end of the cot: They’d manacled him there, flat on his belly with his hands cuffed together under the cot. The chloral hydrate capsule would keep him unconscious for at least a few hours.

Anders said irritably, “It’s no good using a helicopter. They’d spot it.”

“And nothing with wheels. It’s got to be on foot,” Harry said.

Carole shuddered. She spilled a few drops of rum and wiped ineffectually at her shirt.

Harry picked up on it. “Sorry ducks but you’re in that part of the world now.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“Sure. I know you will.” Harry watched her a moment longer and went back to his map and put his finger on it again. “The farm’s here. The track goes back into the hills from there. There’ll be false trails and it’ll take us a while but we’ll have to get all the way back in there and scout them out. We can’t decide how to handle them before we know the position and the defenses. He said there are fourteen men — but suppose they’ve recruited more?” Harry glanced toward Emil Draga’s door. “Someone’s got to keep him on ice. That’ll be you, ducks. Take out whatever guards they’ve got on the place, seal up their exit route and Glenn and I will go in on foot while you sit on our friend there.”

She said, “You’ve been looking for an excuse to leave me behind, haven’t you?”

“Use your head, ducks. You’re hardly a veteran guerrilla. And we’ve got to keep little Emil and those guards locked up and fed until this is done.”

“I don’t see why we have to wait hand and foot on them,” Anders said. “Remember what they did to Rosalia.”

“When we get the job done,” Harry said, “you can take your choice of turning Emil Draga over to Castro along with the rest of the bunch or delivering him to the police and testifying against him for the murder. If you don’t mind going up against the Draga interests in court. That’ll be up to you — but you try putting this lady’s neck on the block and I’ll find things to do to you.”

Anders put his head down. “I’m sorry. Wasn’t thinking.”

“You’re doing a lot of that right now, Glenn. Not thinking.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll cool down.” Anders trudged into the kitchen; she heard him filling a glass from a bottle. Harry began to roll up the map.

She sat behind the wheel of the Bronco with the revolver in her lap and tried to ignore the sensation that Emil Draga, handcuffed to a chain in the back seat, was burning holes in her back with his eyes.

Farmland rolled away in all directions and the mountains lifted soft and green under the bellies of the clouds. Harry and Anders had been gone a long time. She kept looking at her watch. Get hold of yourself.

She twisted the rear-view mirror to get a better view of Emil Draga. Blindfolded still, he sat groggily with his head slack against the window, mouth open. The drug was half worn off and in another thirty minutes he’d be alert.

She was going to have to get used to being his jailer. She tried to steel herself.

On the horizon a smoke-chuffing tractor moved very slowly, pulling some sort of harvesting machine. She could see the driver’s tiny silhouette and wondered if he would become curious about the vehicle parked by the fence. He was a good quarter-mile away and she hoped his curiosity wouldn’t be sufficient to goad him into crossing the distance.

After a time the tractor went out of sight. A few fine drops of rain touched the windshield. She thought about switching on the radio for company but decided against it; it might awaken Draga. She didn’t want to have to converse with him.

She covered her eyes with tinted glasses and tipped her head over against the frame of the door. The few droplets were all; a false alarm — the cloud moved on, the windshield dried. Ten minutes more and the sun poked through.

She heard him stirring behind her and looked up in quick alarm but he was only shifting position. His head lolled to the left and he uttered a somnolent murmur, something in Spanish and too slurred for her to guess at it.

Tensions and anxieties had drained her of the will to think. She tried to see ahead but preoccupation with the present kept crowding everything else aside. A kind of hyperacuity had infected her, sensitizing her to every signal: the flight of a bird from a tree, the shuddering tempo of Draga’s breathing, the smells of farming, the very motionlessness of the truck seat.

A figure approached on foot — Harry, there was no mistaking his limp even at a distance. He emerged from the trees and waved her forward and she started it up and drove bumping across the field, Draga awakening and grumbling in the back seat with petulant loquaciousness. He was still talking in Spanish when she stopped the truck and Harry opened her door.

“Everything’s fine. There was one man — he decided not to fight the drop. Glenn’s got him undercover.”

“Get in, then.”

“No hurry.” He offered his hand and helped her down. Looking in at Draga he said, “He’ll keep,” and walked her away — a copse of trees, a hummock of grass in the shade. It was hot but she was getting used to the sticky closeness of the climate.

She understood right away that he wanted to be alone with her here because they’d have no chance once they joined Anders. She turned toward him. Her hands touched his shirt, shyly, and slid up to the back of his neck.

There was no heat in it; it was only a touching of lips, very light, but she needed his touch, needed to draw strength from him. They sat down on the earth with their backs against the same tree and leaned against each other, shoulder to shoulder. Harry crooked his good leg and looked at the bottom of his shoe. “These are the times that try men’s bootsoles.” There was muck smeared on it.

She took off her sunglasses and swung them back and forth by one earpiece. “What’s the program?”

“We’ll backpack a few gas grenades. If it looks promising we’ll try to knock them out. Otherwise we’ll pull back to the farm and think about raising reinforcements.”

“From whom?”

“I can maybe call in a few friends and acquaintances from various ports. It’d cost you some money.”

“Wouldn’t it be safer to do that first?”

“Ducks, we don’t know how long Rodriguez is going to sit up there on the mountain. He could bug out any time.”

“Don’t be too heroic, Harry. I can only take nobility in small doses. You were the one who used to keep insisting the wages didn’t include walking into the jaws of death.”

“There won’t be any trouble.”

“You’re lying and I love you for it but I don’t believe it.”

“Then I’ll lay it out for you. There’s a good chance they’ve got some central gathering place up there. A tent, a cave, a hut, whatever. There’ll be one or two men on guard and we’ll have to take them out. Then we find the camp and we wait for all of them to congregate. If it’s an enclosed space we’re all right. We hit ’em with tear-gas grenades and exploding canisters of chemical Mace. In less than ten seconds that stuff disables a man completely. It takes him quite a while to function again and by that time we’ll have handcuffs on them. It’ll work if they eat together or have a pep-talk meeting or sleep in the same hut or otherwise have some reason to reassemble inside. It’ll work if we can take out the guards without alerting the camp, and it’ll work if Draga’s told us the truth and there’s only a dozen or fourteen men up there.”

“Have you counted the ifs in that?”

“If it doesn’t work out that way we’ll pull back.”

“Promise me.”

“I’m not a fool, ducks. Sure.”

“How far is it? To the camp.”

“Not too far as the buzzard flies but we may waste a while chasing false leads. I’ve tracked VC through country thicker than this — if they’re up there I’ll find them but I don’t want you to come apart at the seams if I’m not back right away. Give it a couple of days before you start to panic. On the morning of the third day you’re on your own. How do you feel about this?”

“Scared.”

Harry nodded. “That’s the right answer.”

“Maybe it’s like what Mark Twain said about Wagner: It isn’t as bad as it sounds.”

“You just need to worry about two things, ducks. Keep an eye on the mountain because if anyone besides Glenn and me comes down that hill it means you’re in trouble. Get in the Bronco and run for it — forget everything, just run. Head for the federal building in San Juan and don’t stop till you get there.”

The unspoken addendum was that if the terrorists came down the mountain it would mean Harry and Anders were dead because that was the only way Rodriguez was going to get through them.

He said, “And the other thing’s your charges there. You’ve got two prisoners to look after and they’ll try every trick they can think of to get loose, especially when they realize they’re being held by a woman alone. Keep them ankle-shackled to water pipes in separate rooms. Spoon-feed them but never undo the handcuffs behind their backs. You listening to me? Keep the revolver cQcked and if you’re even a little bit uncertain of their intentions start shooting. You’ve got five loads and you may as well burn them all up because one of them’s bound to knock the man down if you keep plugging in his direction. Are you going to get gun-shy and not pull the trigger?”

“No.”

“Remember this: If you get humane and one of them gets away, all three of us are dead. There’s not a chance in a thousand that Rodriguez hasn’t got a radio receiver up there on the mountain. If Emil Draga or the watchman gets away from you they’ll head for the nearest phone and we’ll be finished.”

“I understand.”

In a different voice he said, “Do you regret it, ducks?”

“Doing this? No, I don’t think so. I regret that it has to be done.”

“You’re not wrought up anymore. Not the way Glenn is.”

“I haven’t forgotten my son if that’s what you mean.”

He said bluntly, “Your son’s dead whether or not we go through with this.”

“But Rodriguez is free. Until we do it.”

“Which is it then — revenge or justice?”

She shook her head. “God knows. It’s not an obsession — but it’s a compulsion. Does that make any sense?”

“Bet your bottom,” he agreed.

“Harry, tell me something.”

“All right.”

“After this — after it’s done — are we going to be able to make it together?”

“Why, ducks,” he said, “do you know, I expect we will.”

Harry swung the Bronco into the caved-in barn and they got Emil Draga out and took him across to the house and at the door Harry could not resist his moment of wistful comedy: He took a step backward and bowed over his extended leg with a minuet flourish. Then he kicked Emil Draga in the rump and sent him inside asprawl.

Anders, holding the door open, made a face. Glancing at him as she came past into the house, Carole suppressed a shiver. Anders’ eyes had gone peculiar and she was disturbed by it: She said, “Harry, you’d better show me around,” using it as an excuse to get him away from Anders.

Harry took her through the house. It was ramshackle — a bigger and more substantial place than Santana’s but it had the same smell, the same taste. In the kitchen — she was relieved to see running water — she said under her breath, “Glenn’s got a wire down in him, Harry. Don’t trust him.”

“I’m keeping an eye on him. But I want him with me, not with you.”

She clutched him then, squeezed until her arms gave out. “Promise me you’ll come back.”

“I promise, ducks.”