7

This is not going to work, Marker thought to himself. There had to be about twenty available-looking men spread around the Club Med-Turkoise dining room, and probably the same number again in the bar next door. Knowing Tamara Arcilla’s predatory m.o. might give him an edge, but forty to one was still long odds.

He lifted the glass of wine to his lips, took a modest sip, and put it down again. Another couple of drinks and his ability to think straight would follow his inhibitions into limbo-land.

He wondered where the inhibitions came from. Before Penny he had stalked his way through enough parties and pubs in search of women to screw. In Hong Kong he had occasionally gone with a street whore. What was the line from the song? – ‘times I was so lonesome I took some comfort there.’ Lonesome? Horny, more like it. Sex for its own sake was hardly a crime, and he was only sitting at this table because that was the way Tamara Arcilla seemed to like it.

So why was he agonizing about it? Nick Russell’s life might depend on him screwing this woman. Maybe other people’s too. He told himself to stop being so bloody moralistic, and took a larger gulp of the claret, just as the waiter appeared at his shoulder suggesting coffee. He raised his head to say yes just in time to see the woman enter.

He immediately knew it was her, and the signal from Franklin, sitting across the room, merely offered confirmation. At least she didn’t look like Penny, he thought. Almost the opposite in fact. She had those classic Spanish cheek-bones which in some faces seemed unbearably haughty but which in hers were more than offset by the full lips and tumbling hair. The eyes were deep and dark, but Marker was too far away to read any expression they might hold.

She was wearing a simple red cotton dress which made the most of her figure, and walked with an easy grace. Inside his head Marker heard a familiar schoolboy saying, yeah, I’d like to give her one.

He sugared his black coffee and looked at his watch. According to Franklin she never ate more than a starter, before moving through to the bar.

Marker waited patiently, drinking the coffee more from a sense of duty than pleasure. At first he tried not to stare at her, but then realized that it was hardly a suspicious thing to do – most of the men in the restaurant were finding it hard to keep their eyes off her. Occasionally she would look up and catch someone, and a slight smile would crease her lips. It occurred to Marker that with a brother like Fidel Arcilla she would probably have been allowed little control over her own life. Maybe here, in the choosing of sexual partners, she was exercising the only power she had. Like a female Sultan she was visiting her harem to pick out a man for the night.

Suddenly she was getting to her feet and walking out, hips swinging slightly, the dark hair dancing on her bare shoulders.

Marker followed her out of the restaurant, hoping that she followed her usual pattern and went to the ladies, before gracing the bar with her presence.

She did, and Marker quickly took in the situation at the bar. There were only four stools unoccupied, in two pairs of two. Of the four seats adjoining these, one was occupied by a woman, two by middle-aged Americans and one by a handsome young West Indian. Marker took the seat next to him, and hoped she didn’t change her usual habits and take a table.

He ordered a drink and waited, feeling more than a little ridiculous. If she was on a power trip, he told himself, then she would have to choose him. He couldn’t afford to show any interest in her until she had made the decision. He took a diving school leaflet out of his pocket and begun to study it.

The scent of her perfume was the first thing he was aware of. It was a subtle, lovely, expensive smell. He looked up to say hello and found her eyes already on him. Franklin had told them of his feeling that she was lonely at best, seriously disturbed at worst, and maybe, Marker thought, he was seeing something that wasn’t really there, but in that moment her dark eyes seemed to hold a sort of quiet desperation. A stab of pity went through him, just as the smile lit up her face, and drove the bleakness of the eyes away.

‘Hi,’ he said, smiled, and went back to his leaflet.

‘If you’re interested in diving you should try the Laurel Canyon,’ she said.

‘Oh, where’s that?’ he asked.

‘On the West Wall.’

He half turned back to the leaflet, then looked up again. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ he asked, in a tone that was mixed politeness and kindness. His parents would have been proud of him, he thought.

‘Thank you,’ she said, with another smile.

Marker was finding it hard not to stare at her. Her legs were crossed and the red dress had ridden up, exposing beautiful brown thighs. When she leant forward to put an elbow on the bar more square inches of brown breast came into view.

‘Do you live here?’ he asked.

‘Uh-huh. I have a house over on Long Bay. How long are you here for?’

‘Two weeks. We arrived the day before yesterday.’

‘We?’

‘A friend and I. A male friend. We belong to the same diving club in England.’ Which was almost true, Marker thought.

‘I like the English,’ she said. ‘Mostly because they are not American,’ she added, smiling. ‘Tell me what you do when you’re not diving.’

They talked for the next hour, working their way through several drinks in the process. She talked about the islands, and asked Marker about England and himself, but the occasional attempts he made to get her to talk about herself all fell on stony ground. She never refused, just deftly changed the conversation back to safer territory.

After an hour Marker was beginning not to care. He was not drunk, but neither did he feel any intense urge to organize his thoughts. Most of all he wanted sex with her, wanted it more strongly than he could remember wanting sex with anyone for years, Penny included. And he didn’t want to think about why.

It was hard not to, though. He told himself it was a primal urge, and that was all there was to it. It was the same urge which had given him such rock-hard erections looking at Playboy centrefolds when he was fourteen. It had nothing to do with love or affection or home or anything like that. He just wanted to fuck her, and not because of any desire to extract information from her. He just wanted to fuck her.

And it seemed she wanted to fuck him.

‘I’d like a walk on the beach,’ she said abruptly.

‘Great idea,’ he murmured.

There were a few couples on the beach in front of the hotel, but the two of them hadn’t walked more than a hundred yards when the sand stretched away empty into the darkness. She put an arm through his, and he felt a shot of electricity pass through him, then a slowly rising sense of excitement. She leant across to kiss him lightly on the lips, as if she was announcing that he had won that evening’s prize.

They walked on in a silence broken only by their feet in the sand and the distant swish of the waves on the reef. After about half a mile she pulled them to a halt, and turned to face him, her back to the sea. ‘I feel like a swim,’ she said, kicking off her shoes. She slipped her shoulders out of the straps, let the dress fall, and stepped out of it. ‘Unhook me,’ she said, turning her back to him. He did so, and she dropped the brassiere neatly on the dress.

‘Aren’t you coming?’ she asked, pulling down the lacy knickers.

She walked into the sea. Marker watched her for a moment, silhouetted against the sky, and then took off his clothes and followed her in.

She swam well, and they were fifty yards or so out from the shore when he caught her up and roughly pulled her into his arms. The water was only about four feet deep, and they found themselves standing in it. She returned his kiss hungrily, almost too hungrily, and pushed her body hard against his. The stray thought went through his head that if there were perfect relative heights for doing it standing up then his and hers qualified.

‘Not here,’ she said. She sank back into the water and started swimming back towards the shore. He followed, thinking that a few seconds earlier he had been trying to insert himself, without a condom, into a woman who probably slept with two hundred men a year.

She had more sense. ‘If you don’t have one I do,’ she said.

‘I have one,’ he said, reaching into his trouser pockets for the packet he had bought earlier that evening.

‘Give me,’ she said, holding herself against him and kissing him again. ‘And lie down on your back.’

He did as he was told, his mind spinning off into the distance as she sat astride his knees and took the condom out of its packet. Then she leant forward and took his penis briefly in her mouth, as if she was lubricating it for him. Marker felt he would come on the spot, and frantically tried using his mind to bring his body under control.

She was easing the condom over his throbbing cock, and then holding it in one hand as she gently lowered herself on to him.

‘Don’t move,’ he groaned, and he thought he saw the glint of teeth in her shadowed face as she smiled. Her head was surrounded by stars, and she begun to hum with pleasure as they lay there locked in a stillness that seemed to have no end.

It was almost one in the morning when Marker let himself back into their cabin at the Coconut Cove. He found Cafell and Franklin watching Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell trade innuendoes in an old movie.

Cafell reached forward and turned the TV off. Marker sat down on the couch and closed his eyes. Either he was getting paranoid, or the looks on the faces of the welcoming committee had rather too accurately reflected the way he was feeling.

‘Any luck?’ Cafell asked. He could tell Marker was not feeling too good about things, but had no idea what to say to make him feel better.

‘I scored, if that’s what you mean,’ Marker said.

Cafell and Franklin said nothing.

Marker opened his eyes. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘No’s the answer. I didn’t get taken to the house.’

‘Then where . . .’

‘The beach.’

‘It’s kind of a traditional place around here,’ Franklin said. He and Sibou sometimes went to a secluded beach at the western end of the island. And the very first time they had ever made love had been on the one behind the Atlantic Hotel in the Gambia. The memory still made him smile inside with happiness.

‘Did she say anything useful?’ Cafell asked.

‘Nothing. The woman talks about everything but herself.’ Marker got up and went to pour himself a glass of water. ‘I didn’t want to push too hard,’ he added, as much to himself as the others.

‘Sure,’ Cafell agreed. He couldn’t remember seeing Marker like this.

‘Did you arrange another . . . ?’ Franklin began.

‘Date?’ Marker laughed. ‘Yeah, tomorrow night.’ He sat down again. ‘Maybe this time I’ll get invited home.’

‘We can always drop this approach,’ Cafell said.

‘We haven’t got any others,’ Marker said flatly.

‘OK,’ Cafell agreed, ‘but . . .’ He wanted to ask his partner what it had been like, and wondered if his motives amounted to anything more than mere voyeurism. Then again, talking about it might be the best way of ridding Marker of whatever it was that was troubling him . . .

Maybe later, Cafell decided. ‘We got the report on her brother,’ he said.

Marker looked a bit more cheerful. ‘How did it get here?’

‘Would you believe by special plain-clothes courier? A Yank flew over with it from Miami, and pressed it into my grubby hand.’

‘What’s it say?’

Cafell retrieved it from the table. ‘There’s not much more in the way of hard fact than we had already, but some of it’s interesting. He lived in Cuba until he was twenty-one, and he seems to have had problems with the authorities there from about the age of six. Castro’s regime set up political neighbourhood-watch-type things called CDRs – Committees for the Defence of the Revolution? Well, young Arcilla managed one hundred and seventeen black marks on his social-behaviour record before he was fourteen. And of course once he really got into his stride, well, then the real trouble started. Black marketeering, ration swindling, simple theft, and eventually murder. He was sixteen when he knifed a boy who he caught in bed with his sister . . .’

Christ, Marker thought. She would have been twelve.

‘He spent four years in prison in Havana,’ Cafell continued, ‘and then he was one of the thousands of misfits Castro managed to dump on the Americans with the Mariel boat-lift. He got his sister out a year later – no one knows how.’

‘What happened to his parents?’ Franklin asked.

‘No information. I guess they’re either dead or still in Cuba. Anyway, Arcilla signed on with one of the Cuban crime factions in Miami, probably just as extra muscle. But he obviously has brains – he also got involved with the largest and most right-wing of the exile organizations . . .’

‘And they make the Nazis look like Social Democrats,’ Franklin muttered.

‘He seems to have used his criminal life to do favours for his political chums, and in return he got both money and a degree of protection.’ Cafell looked up. ‘Of course it wouldn’t say so here, but he may even have been doing jobs for the CIA, which would give him a pretty long rope.’

‘Any definite drug connections?’ Marker asked.

‘I’m getting to that. In 1983 he bought the house here on Provo, and a year later he was given British citizenship. The Americans don’t know why . . .’

‘Neither did the Foreign Office,’ Marker said. ‘It must have been some local fix. Makes me wonder why we can’t just revoke his citizenship and leave it to the Yanks.’

‘That wouldn’t help us find Nick,’ Franklin said quietly.

‘Right,’ Marker agreed.

‘He was a known associate of the three island politicos who got sent to jail for helping drug smugglers, but not a known business associate. There was no proof against him then, and there never has been. He hasn’t been arrested since his departure from Cuba. He even survived a heavy tax investigation in 1988. He is suspected of involvement in the drug trade, if only as a money launderer, but that’s all it is – suspicion. He’s extremely rich and getting richer all the time, but . . .’

‘If you’re rich you have to work really hard not to get richer,’ Marker said gloomily.

‘It has to be him, doesn’t it,’ Cafell said. It was half statement, half plea for reassurance.

‘Yeah,’ Franklin said quietly.

‘Who else?’ Marker asked. And the only way to reach the man was through his sister, whose perfume was still lingering in his nostrils.

Despite their late night the vestiges of jet lag ensured that neither Marker nor Cafell found it possible to sleep beyond seven. This was particularly bad news for Marker, whose head seemed to be vibrating in an unpleasant manner. ‘You’re not doing any diving today,’ Cafell told him, but he needn’t have bothered: Marker knew from painful experience how dangerous diving with a hangover could be.

So when they took the boat out that morning it was Cafell who ventured down into the magical kingdom of the reef, leaving the senior man to gaze out across the open sea and brood over the happenings of the last twenty-four hours. And the last year.

Before he had met Tamara . . . He smiled to himself. Who was he kidding? He had not met her in any significant sense – they had fucked, that was all.

He started again. Before he had fucked Tamara he had entertained the thought that, however else the experience would affect him, it might at least drive Penny out of his mind. Draw a line under the past, he thought wryly, remembering what Colhoun had said. Well, the boss had been wrong. Somehow the pain of losing his wife seemed even more intense in the cold light of day.

He didn’t know what to do about it, and for someone who had made his living overcoming mental and physical challenges that was a hard thing to admit. He knew that in a way it was just a question of grief – learning to accept the loss from day to day. But when the lost one was dead there was no small voice wondering if she would ever come back to you.

He sighed and tried to turn his mind back to work. If Tamara’s past habits were anything to go by there was a good chance he would be invited back to the villa that evening, and he would have to make the most of the opportunity. If he was unable to discover anything either incriminating or worth following up, then there seemed no point in hanging around on the island.

An involuntary pang of regret accompanied this thought.

‘Fuck,’ he muttered to himself.

Russell lay on his bed, a book face down across his chest, watching a mosquito carefully checking out his screen for a possible entry point. Emelisse had just dropped by with the news he had been dreading for days – in not much more than an hour he would be extracting his first kidney.

He covered his mouth with cupped hands and stared at the ceiling, where faint, flickering shadows from fires outside were dancing. Get a grip, he told himself, and abruptly levered himself into a sitting position on the side of the bed.

A drink was what he wanted. In fact he found it hard to remember wanting one quite so much. He also knew that having one would be the worst thing he could possibly do.

Where had all that training gone, he wondered. The self-discipline, the ability to centre oneself, to feel the stillness spreading out from that centre. In Hong Kong he had studied several of the martial arts, and got more than a little interested in the philosophies which underlay them. In some strange way – which seemed less strange as his knowledge increased – his Marine and SBS training had been the perfect preparation for such studies. After all, lying in an inch of water in a soggy hide above Port Stanley for three days presented a man with a pretty stark choice – he could either go mad or start making use of his inner resources.

Which was exactly what he needed to do now, he decided. But he seemed to have lost the knack, to have allowed his mental muscles to get flabby over the years.

He walked through into the main room. His stomach felt the way it always had as a child sitting in the dentist’s waiting room. Then he had tried to distract himself with thoughts of some future treat.

It had never worked.

The only thing in this place which might stop him thinking was Emelisse Alabri. The evening he had witnessed his first operations – the evening she had come to his bungalow for a drink – had marked a watershed in their relationship, and by extension in Russell’s attitude towards his captivity. She hadn’t suddenly started treating him as a friend, and as often as not her instinctive reaction still seemed suspicious rather than trusting, but since that night he had the feeling she had decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. His offer to help at her clinic had been accepted, and now each morning he assisted her in dressing wounds, taking vital signs and dispensing drugs from the surprisingly well-stocked pharmacy. After the last patient disappeared they would usually drink coffee together and reminisce about their pasts. His, of course, had been offered in a somewhat censored version. She had been surprised, and he thought probably somewhat disappointed, to learn that he had been in the armed forces at all, without him regaling her with tales of life in the SBS.

As for Emelisse, she had brought herself to speak freely about her years in France and America, but her life in Haiti, both as a child and now, was still something she rarely referred to.

Russell was not sure whether he could now consider himself her friend, but she didn’t seem to have any others. There didn’t seem to be a sexual partner either, and occasionally he had found himself thinking about her in that way. The loveliness which had taken his breath away at their first meeting had become something he almost took for granted, except in those rare moments when something caught her by surprise and she let her guard down. Then he wasn’t at all sure how he felt about her. Protective maybe, almost fatherly. And sometimes he had felt the beginnings of a desire which he didn’t think had anything to do with sex, but for which he could imagine no other outlet.

As the days went by he had also learnt more about the camp. The three doctors – four, if he counted himself – were left pretty much to their own devices, subject to their all being available at short notice for collective surgery. Otherwise Bodin kept to his bungalow and bottle, Calderón to his laboratory, and Emelisse to her clinic and the orphans. Joutard’s thugs were always around, but after a while it was possible to think of them as moving parts of the scenery, with about as much brains as the palm trees.

He had not seen Joutard since their one and only meeting, but occasionally he could hear Elvis Presley’s voice coming from the colonel’s living quarters. According to Emelisse, Joutard never allowed anyone else to be played on his ‘boombox’. This, though bizarre, was almost comforting, rather like the situation as a whole. If it hadn’t been for his dread of this particular moment, Russell might have thought he was getting used to his captivity, even accepting it.

Twenty-seven minutes had passed since her visit. He took a deep breath, and left the air-conditioned bungalow for the steamy heat of the Haitian evening. As usual, it was like walking out into an oven.

The drums were silent. Maybe the voodoo gods were having an evening off. The groups of mostly young people sitting outside also seemed subdued, as if they knew something bad was going to happen.

Stop it, Russell told himself. You didn’t put yourself in this position. You can only do your best.

He found the other three doctors in the theatre ante-room. Emelisse and Calderón were scrubbing up, Bodin sitting on a chair with his eyes closed. There was no powerful smell of brandy on his breath this time, but the Frenchman was obviously the worse for something.

As before, the unconscious donors were laid out naked on parallel tables. This time there were four of them. The other three doctors took the same tables as before, leaving Russell the one which had previously been unoccupied. He wondered if he should ask to have his name engraved on it.

There were two males and two females, all of them aged between adolescence and young adulthood. The girl Russell was to operate on appeared to have fully developed breasts and hips, and seemed every bit as physically mature as the nurse who would be assisting him. He looked at her, wondering if life in Joutard’s orphanage was worth the sacrifice of a kidney. But then if the alternative was prostituting herself for pennies on the streets of Port au Prince maybe it was. That shouldn’t be the choice, though.

‘I’ll do the first incision for you,’ Emelisse said, ‘and then you’re on your own. Any questions, ask me.’

Russell watched while she opened the patient and showed him once more how to expose the kidney. Then she was gone. He looked at the nurse, who gave him an encouraging smile that lacked a couple of front teeth.

He started work with the scalpel, and his brain started rerunning its film of the previous week’s operation. Now that the moment was here he felt exactly that sense of inner stillness which he had thought was lost. He remembered the sergeant at Poole telling them: ‘You’ll never lose this fucking training, so get it right.’

It was easier than he had expected. A couple of times Emelisse appeared at his shoulder, looked, and merely nodded. He took five minutes longer than the others, but as he stitched up the original incision he felt a sense of achievement which ranked with any he had ever known.

They met as arranged in the Club Med-Turkoise bar, and spent another two hours drinking and talking about nothing in particular. Marker had been interested in how different she would be now that they had consummated their acquaintance, and was surprised, at least initially, by the answer. She was exactly the same.

After a while he thought he could see why. Each date had to be a seduction; each time they had to start and end in the same place. It was as if she was condemned to life on an ever-repeating emotional loop.

And of course there were only so many times she could repeat it with each man.

Changing the location would help. Soon after ten she leaned over and ran a hand up his thigh. ‘Would you like to see me home?’ she asked.

‘I’d love to,’ he said, and wished that he didn’t mean it quite so much.

She let him drive her dark-green Range Rover, directing him east along the Leeward Highway and then down the long, bumpy and unlit track which ended at the gates to the Arcilla compound. A strong source of light somewhere within was throwing a halo into the sky.

She leant over and sounded the horn as they approached, and they waited. Longer than usual, Marker guessed, as she honked again. Almost immediately the gates swung open for them. Marker noticed the video surveillance cameras and the discreetly positioned electronic sensors.

‘Why all the security?’ he asked casually. ‘Is there a lot of crime on the island?’

He thought he saw a glimmer of a smile before she answered: ‘It’s just to keep my boyfriends in. They never escape until I want them to.’

It occurred to Marker for one ludicrous moment that Nick Russell was chained up in one of the outhouses as a sex slave. The thought was driven from his mind by the sight of the brilliantly lit helipad on the other side of the compound.

‘Do you have a helicopter?’ he asked, sounding impressed.

‘My brother does. Just pull up here,’ she said, indicating the front of the main house. It was an old colonial mansion which had been lovingly restored, with perhaps half a dozen rooms and an all-round veranda on each of its two storeys. Two other, more recent, buildings were connected to the mansion’s rear by glassed-in, covered walkways.

Marker could only think of one reason for such an arrangement in such a climate: it offered safe passage between the buildings at night, when guard dogs were loose in the compound.

As if to confirm these suspicions, Tamara looked at her watch before opening the car door.

On the veranda she turned, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him the way she had the night before on the beach, rubbing her pubis against him. He felt a surge of desire, and buried his lips in her neck, even while a voice inside his head was telling him she had stopped here on the veranda, where they were clearly visible from the other buildings, for a purpose.

It doesn’t matter, he told himself. Whatever games she was playing had nothing to do with him, or the job he was supposed to be doing.

It was hard to draw the distinction, with her hand inside his trouser pocket, stroking him.

‘Let’s go inside,’ she said finally, and led him in by the hand.

The interior of the villa was decorated in a mixture of modern and classic Spanish colonial styles. It was both tasteful and somehow sterile, like a museum without visitors. There were few signs of ongoing life – no magazines or books or dirty cups or toys. The only thing of interest to Marker was the portrait of Fidel Arcilla above the mantelpiece. He looked like a cross between a political visionary and a captain of industry, which was perhaps the effect intended.

‘Who’s that?’ Marker asked.

‘My brother,’ she said shortly.

‘Oh, does he live here?’

‘Only for vacations. He lives in Miami.’

‘What does he do?’

‘He’s a businessman. What do you think of my picture?’ she asked, reaching down behind a sofa and lifting up a similar-sized portrait of herself. The artist had rendered the lovely curves of her body with even more generosity than nature, but her face had been painted as that of an innocent child. Marker remembered Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which a man’s face had retained its innocence through life while his portrait had changed to reflect the ugliness growing in his soul. This seemed like an attempt to do the opposite, to hold on to something in a painting which could not be held on to in life.

The fact that she had pulled it out from behind the sofa suggested that her brother was the one with the fixation. For the second time in their short acquaintance Marker felt moved by a terrible pity.

‘It doesn’t do you justice,’ he told her.

Tamara laughed, put the painting back, and took his hand. ‘Do you need another drink?’ she asked.

‘No . . .’

‘Then let me show you my bedroom,’ she said.

It was as lovely as she was. The furniture comprised a rocking chair, an old Victorian dressing-table and a large bed without head or tailboards. A wooden fan whirred lazily above. Through the open doors which led out to the veranda Marker could see and hear the ocean.

They undressed each other this time, and stood naked in each other’s arms for a long time before taking to the bed. Then, as if to make up for lost time, they made love in what seemed a ferocious haste, coming together in a violent arching of limbs and digging of fingernails. They sat outside on the veranda for a while, and then went back to bed and made love again, this time slowly, lingeringly, savouring each sensation until hunger drove them over the brink once more. For half an hour after that Marker struggled to stay awake, until he was sure she was sleeping soundly. Then he eased himself out of the bed, pulled on his trousers, and started to explore the house.

He quickly realized that his chances of finding anything useful were very slim. For one thing he had no idea what he was looking for; for another he could see no reason why Arcilla should leave anything incriminating in a house he only ever used for vacations. The elaborate security might indicate otherwise, but it could easily reflect nothing more sinister than habit on Arcilla’s part.

And there was always the risk of his getting caught. He had decided against wearing a gun on the grounds that Tamara’s hands would almost certainly have detected it at some point during the evening, and he was far from certain that his unarmed combat skills would suffice to overcome the combination of Arcilla’s thugs, the dogs and the wall. Getting caught might be the quickest way to find out what had happened to Nick Russell, but it didn’t seem the most sensible.

Of course they might believe he really was looking for the toilet. And that pigs could fly.

It took him ten minutes to go through all the rooms in the main villa. There was a safe behind the portrait of Arcilla which might contain something useful, but he could only have opened it with some C4 explosive. There was nothing else in the house that seemed even remotely suspicious. To all intents and purposes the place seemed set up as somewhere for the idle rich to idle in, and nothing else.

He went back upstairs to check that Tamara was still sleeping, and then down to the door which led out to the covered walkway. In the dark he could detect no alarm sensors, either around the doorway or inside the walkway, and there was no way he could turn on a light.

‘Sink or swim,’ he murmured to himself, and started forward. No alarms went off, no men came bursting through doorways waving guns. Marker was almost down at the end when he saw two dogs running towards him across the dark compound. They almost threw themselves at the glass, spattering it with flecks of drool, and then stood staring at him, feet restlessly pawing the ground, teeth bared, eyes full of yellow hatred.

But they didn’t bark. They couldn’t – someone had seen to that. No one would ever hear these dogs coming. They weren’t there to provide warning of intruders, they were there to finish them off.

Marker had never liked dogs much. He took a deep breath, opened the connecting door to the next building, and eased himself through it.

The rooms seemed to house the staff, all of whom seemed to enjoy snoring. One door was open though, revealing an empty bed. Either two of the staff were sleeping together, or one of them was up and about.

Confident that he wouldn’t be tripping any alarms, and not wanting to attract the dogs’ attention again, he took the next passageway at a faster pace, noticing as he did so the light glimmering from one of the windows in the building he was approaching.

Prudence dictated that he check out that room first. He eased his way silently down the passage until he reached the door which was leaking a ribbon of light. Muted Spanish music was audible inside. Putting his eye to the keyhole, Marker could see the back of a seated man, and beyond him a modern radio transmitter. On the edge of his field of vision a silverish glow suggested video screens, presumably those for monitoring the compound. From the man’s posture Marker thought it likely he had allowed himself to doze off, confident that any message from the helicopter would wake him up again.

The SBS man started searching through the other rooms in the building. No one lived here – that was for certain. The floors were mostly bare earth, the walls unpainted plasterboard. Several of the rooms were empty, but the largest contained a neat pile of boxes. Marker investigated the contents, and found tinned food, bottled water and sundry general supplies. On the other side of the same room there was a stack of assorted fuel drums, several of them containing marine oil. Twin doors gave on to the empty helipad.

It was all consistent with a regular airlift to resupply an underwater treasure hunt on the Cay Sal Bank. And there was no sign of drugs or guns or any other contraband which Arcilla might be smuggling into the United States.

Tamara Arcilla had led them nowhere, he thought. In his case, in more ways than one.

The silence was suddenly broken by the distant sound of an incoming voice on the radio. Hoping he might hear something interesting, Marker walked quietly and swiftly back towards the radio room, but the message must have been a short one, and the door swung open when he was only about six feet away from it. He flattened himself against the wall of the passage and prayed the man would walk the other way and not look back.

He did, and disappeared into what Marker remembered was the toilet. The sound of piss hitting water confirmed as much.

Marker backed into one of the empty rooms, waited until the man had resumed his position in the radio room, and then retraced his steps through the walkways and buildings to Tamara Arcilla’s bedroom. She was still asleep.

He climbed back in beside her, feeling a sense of emptiness which seemed as apt as it was irrational. She stirred and turned towards him, her face almost angelic in the soft, grey light.

Marker let exhaustion carry him into sleep, but not for long. He lay there listening to the sound of decelerating rotor blades, and realized that it been the helicopter’s return which had woken him. His watch said half-past three.

When he woke again the sun was already streaming into the room. A hand encircled his neck and gently pulled him into a sleepy embrace.