10

Cafell took one look at his partner and wondered what had happened. Marker had not only made breakfast – fruit juice, pancakes, waffles and coffee – but had also shaved for the first time in four days. Since his last meeting with the Arcilla woman, in fact. He even had a smile on his face.

‘What are you looking so cheerful about?’ Cafell asked, picking up a glass of orange juice.

‘Do you remember that moment on the SC1 course when they remind you that it’s an officer’s duty to have brilliant inspirations?’

‘No. You just made it up.’

Marker grinned at him.

Cafell sighed and reached for the maple syrup. ‘You’ve had one, I take it.’

‘Let me ask you a question. Why would someone paint a large number three on something they only have one of?’

Cafell thought about it, his fork poised above the pancake. ‘Good question,’ he said. His eyes widened momentarily. ‘Are you suggesting they have three of them?’

Marker smiled. ‘No. You’re looking at it the wrong way round.’

Cafell inserted a wodge of pancake between his lips and chewed. ‘I don’t. . .’ he began to say, then his eyes widened again.

‘Yeah,’ Marker said. ‘They have two of them, and they both have the same number. The whole point of the number is to make anyone watching believe that they’re seeing the same submarine. As long as no one sees both submarines at once . . .’

‘It’s a great idea, but what proof do you have?’

‘Absolutely none. But it fits, doesn’t it. Who would know? There’s only the Russian who brought them out here, and he got conveniently blown away . . .’

‘And maybe that’s what Nick Russell saw, that evening in the marina. Maybe someone overheard him talking about it in the bar. Or maybe someone saw him under the boat – that must be where they keep the second one.’

‘Maybe. You remember Thunderball?’

‘I saw the film.’

‘Well, in the book – it must be in the film – the big villain’s boat has an underwater hatch. Bond nearly got eaten by a barracuda checking it out.’

‘Sounds familiar. But our chum Fidel would need a hell of a big hatch to take that sub of his. And if he has one then what could Russell have seen?’

‘Good point. I hope you’re right, because according to the master plan we need access to both subs.’

‘Ah,’ Cafell said, ‘the master plan. Are you going to fill me in on the details by any chance?’

Marker looked at his watch. ‘In a bit.’ The boss should be coming through in a few minutes. I called him last night with a couple of requests.’

‘I see,’ Cafell said, following Marker out on to the terrace and watching as he prepared the PRC 319 for reception. ‘Did anything else happen while I was asleep?’

‘One of those supermodels came round to see you – I didn’t get her name. I told her you couldn’t be disturbed.’

Cafell laughed.

Letters started marching across the liquid crystal display.

Marker acknowledged and waited for the Poole operator to send Colhoun’s reply.

‘Two, repeat two, submarines,’ it began, ‘missing Murmansk naval research. Fifty per cent reliable technical estimates suggest range 200 miles, subsurface max speed twenty knots. Items requested arrive Miami 18.15 hours. Contact airport FBI office Jim Brandon. Do you require reinforcements?’

Marker gave Cafell a questioning look.

‘Not yet,’ the younger man decided.

‘Agreed,’ Marker said, and sent the appropriate reply.

‘So you were right,’ Cafell said, as he watched him pack up the set.

‘You doubted me?’

‘The thought did cross my mind that you’d got everything confused with some film you’d seen.’

‘Perish the thought.’

‘So how about telling me the master plan? I already know what my role will be – I’ll be doing the thinking, right?’

‘Something like that. I . . .’

‘Incidentally,’ Cafell went on, ‘I find those estimates hard to believe, particularly the speed. Our little beauty can hardly manage half that.’

‘Maybe that’s why Arcilla went to such trouble to get hold of them.’

‘Yeah. And there’s not much call for speed in treasure hunting . . .’ He stopped suddenly, having just remembered something. ‘What items have you requested?’ he asked Marker.

‘A second one of these,’ he said, tapping the radio. ‘And a tracking system . . .’

‘More James Bond.’

Marker smiled. ‘Come and take a look at the map,’ he said.

Cafell followed him down the jetty and on to the Slipstream Queen.

‘The way I work it out,’ Marker said, opening up the map, ‘the helicopter leaves Provo at around six-thirty in the evening – at least it has on its last two trips – picks up whatever it picks up en route and delivers it to the Tiburón Blanco sometime around eleven. The Muertos Cays are about seventy miles from here and another thirty or so from the mainland coast. At twenty knots the sub would have no trouble reaching either long before dawn.’ He looked up at Cafell. ‘So the radio’s for us, because today you’re taking the one we have to Frankie. The bugs are for Fidel’s two submarines. The idea being that when Frankie sends word that the helicopter has left Provo we take the Queen out ten miles or so and wait for a little dot to appear on our screen. And then we follow it to wherever it’s going.’

Cafell grinned at him. ‘Now that’s what I call a master plan.’

It was a hundred and ten miles to Miami, and Marker drove as fast as the traffic allowed, anxious that Cafell should not miss the only plane of the day to Providenciales.

The fifty-mile section between Marathon and Key Largo, which they had only previously traversed by night, was as attractive as the Keys’ reputation claimed. Both ocean and bay were studded with pleasure boats, the motels seemed to strike the right balance between seedy nostalgia and soulless modernity, and the bright colours of the foliage blazed in the sunshine. Marker found himself thinking he would like to come back for a real holiday.

Two-thirds of the way down Key Largo the highway took an abrupt turn to the left and headed out along a causeway towards the mainland. As the ocean receded from sight the scenery grew less interesting, with only scrub and telephone poles breaking the flat horizon.

‘OK,’ Cafell said. ‘Some questions. Do you know what the range of the tracking system is?’

‘I’m not sure. I seem to remember that it’s around thirty miles, but that may be optimistic.’

Cafell drew a rough circle on the map which was balanced on his knees. ‘Even if you’re right, and assuming the sub will head for the US mainland rather than the Bahamas, we’ll have to narrow the angle a lot more than you suggested if we want to be certain of picking up the signal.’

‘OK,’ Marker said equably.

‘Which leads to another question. How are we planning to follow these guys, in the Queen or the Vickers?’

‘I think we have to play that by ear. If those estimates on the Soviet sub are even half right the Vickers is too slow to keep us in contact for more than an hour or so. And in any case, it only has a range of about seventy miles. We don’t want to strand ourselves somewhere with no way of getting back to the boat.’

‘Maybe one of us should stay in the boat. One man can handle those subs at a pinch.’

‘At a pinch, maybe. I’d rather we were both in the same boat – literally – when we get to wherever it is we’re going. It’ll give us more flexibility.’

‘You mean you want to jump out and have fun while I keep the motor running for you.’

Marker smiled.

‘What about our gracious hosts?’ Cafell asked. ‘Do we tell them anything? They’re likely to be pissed off if we don’t.’

‘Only if they find out. And anyway, as of this moment we still don’t know that the trail will end on US soil.’

‘Right,’ Cafell agreed, as Marker sped past a camper in a no-passing section, ‘and in the meantime at least you’re giving their car a thorough test drive.’

They reached the airport with fifteen minutes to spare, and Cafell went straight through the international departures gate, carrying only the PRC 319 in a plastic bag. Marker checked the time of his partner’s return from Provo and visited the British Airways desk for an update on the flight from London. It had taken off on time from Heathrow.

He went back out to the car and sat behind the wheel, wondering how best to spend the next six and a half hours. He would rather have done Cafell’s job, but after the staged confrontation at the Ocean View hotel it didn’t seem sensible for him to have any more contact with Worrell Franklin than was necessary.

‘So go and see Miami,’ he murmured to himself. At least he wasn’t in a hire car, so the chances of being taken for a tourist and shot had to be better than fifty-fifty.

He followed the signs for Downtown out of the airport and found himself driving down an eight-lane freeway towards the usual clump of high-rise towers. Marker had been to America twice before – for a whole summer as a sixteen-year-old, when his parents were touring with a Shakespearian company, and for a couple of weeks in California with Penny about halfway through their eight-year marriage. There was a lot he had liked, and a lot that he hadn’t. Sharing a concrete ribbon with a bunch of people who talked into their car phones as they swapped lanes at high speed came into the latter category. So did the idea of naming the damn thing the Dolphin Expressway. No dolphin of Marker’s acquaintance would have been seen dead on it.

The clump of towers was appreciably nearer when an exit sign for Little Havana caught his attention. That was where Arcilla hung out when he was in Miami, which seemed to be most of the time. Marker took the ramp and dipped into his memory for the address which had been mentioned in the American briefing report. Calle Ocho, he remembered. Eighth Street. There hadn’t been a number.

The street wasn’t hard to find. He drove slowly down it, staring out at the thronging pavements and impressive buildings. Little Havana was an apt enough name – it certainly bore no resemblance to any part of America that Marker had seen before. Several of the buildings clearly dated from the art deco era, but over this Anglo-Saxon skeleton the Cuban exile community had draped their own flesh and blood. The faces were all black or Hispanic, the atmosphere an aggressive blend of Mediterranean and Caribbean. The signs all seemed to be in Spanish. In fact the only English word Marker could see was ‘burger’.

A car pulling out into the traffic directly in front of him opened up a parking bay. He pulled over, inserted a couple of quarters in the meter, and walked on in the same direction until he found a coffee bar with tables by the window. He bought a cup of coffee just to get a seat, and found it was the most delicious he had ever tasted. He ordered another, this time with a roast beef sandwich, and sat there watching the Cuban-American world go by.

He was looking at the woman for a couple of seconds before he realized it was her. She had come out of a building on the other side of the street, and had stood outside the glass doors while the man with her finished saying something to someone inside.

She was wearing a short, primrose-coloured dress, a wide-brimmed hat of the same shade, and brown thong sandals. Marker felt an involuntary spasm in his groin as he looked at her.

He concentrated on the man. The photo they had seen at Poole hadn’t really done Arcilla justice. Though the face looked much the same he looked taller than Marker had imagined. And there was an air of confidence about the man which no photograph could reproduce. The clothes were both well chosen and beautifully cut. Crockett and Tubbs would have been proud to wear them.

From Castro’s version of borstal to this must have been a hell of a long journey, Marker thought. He remembered a history teacher at school arguing that most of humanity’s woes could be traced to the widening gap between a caveman’s emotions and modern man’s ability to transform his environment. Mankind was still swinging a blunt club, only nowadays it was big enough to pulverize an entire rainforest.

And maybe the same principle held true for Arcilla and his sister. Between their Cuban origins and the world they now moved in there was no natural meeting ground. Something somewhere had been bound to get warped.

They were walking away. Marker slid off his stool and left the cafe intent on pursuit, but before he had gone ten yards the couple disappeared through the door of a restaurant on the other side of the street. For a moment he felt disappointed, but as he thought about it the full stupidity of trying to follow them became apparent. If she had recognized him there would have been no way he could have explained his presence in Little Havana. At best their whole cover would have been blown; at worst he would have been bundled into a convenient alleyway, killed, and thrown in a skip.

In fact, coming to the area had been a mistake in itself. He was letting his cock do the thinking, rather than his brain. Feeling more than a little disappointed with himself, Marker walked quickly back to his car and took the first road heading east.

He spent the rest of his allotted hours behaving like a conventional tourist, taking a leisurely stroll through the art deco splendours of Miami Beach before taking a siesta on the beach itself. The evening rush hour was worse than he had expected, and the British Airways flight had already arrived when he finally reached the airport. Cafell was waiting for him in the agreed bar, and reported no problems in delivering the radio to Franklin. The ex-SAS man, according to Cafell, had ‘looked like Fergie with a new toe to suck’. And he would be watching for helicopter departures from Arcilla’s villa each evening until further notice.

The next job was to find the FBI office, which proved surprisingly simple. Agent Brandon, an enormous man dressed in white from head to foot, was expecting them, the bulky package prominent on his desk. Though obviously irritated by the fact that no one had considered it necessary to burden him with knowledge of what it contained, he signed the package over to them with no more than the usual surliness which Marker had come to expect from American law enforcers.

They carried it down to the subterranean parking lot and inspected the contents. The PRC 319 looked identical to the one Cafell had just delivered, the tracking system much as Marker remembered it from the technical aids workshop he had attended a couple of years before. He was relieved to see that Poole had included instructions for its use.

They drove south once more, this time with Cafell at the wheel. ‘Are we going out in the Queen tonight?’ he asked, as they crossed the bridge on to Key Largo.

‘I’d say no,’ Marker said. ‘The first helicopter flight we know about was on a Thursday, and so was the second. It might just be coincidence . . . but if we assume the next one will be this coming Thursday, then tomorrow night seems a better bet for what we have to do. I’d like to be out all day, and give them the chance to get used to us being around. Sneaking up on them in the dark is more likely to make them wonder what the fuck we’re doing.’

‘I sometimes wonder that myself,’ Cafell murmured.

It was just after two in the morning, and the compound on Tortuga seemed fast asleep. Russell was squatting underneath the trees outside his bungalow window, letting his eyes get accustomed to the dark. He could make out the silhouette of a guard standing in the ramshackle tower beside the gates, and there might well be sentries patrolling the outside of the perimeter wall, but within the compound no one seemed to be stirring.

He put his fingers into the dirt and scraped them across his face for camouflage, wishing he had remembered to do this properly before he came out. Well, there was no time now. He started making his way towards the building which housed Joutard’s office, not using the path but setting a course which maximized the time spent in the darker shadows cast by the scattered palms.

Outside the barracks which housed the male orphans several were curled up on mattresses. They looked younger in sleep, Russell thought, and told himself to stop being sentimental.

The HQ building was almost directly in front of him now, the bare light-bulb glowing above the doors. Another light was glowing in the outer office where the night guard was stationed. The man was not in sight, but he was probably sitting at his desk, either dozing or reading one of the soft-porn cartoon books which were so popular among his colleagues.

Russell continued on his way, using the barracks on his left to shield him from the guard tower as he circled around to the back of the office. From that position he advanced along its side to the right-front corner and squatted on his haunches in the shadows to wait.

The previous night it had been exactly two-thirty when the guard emerged with the cup of coffee for the man in the watch-tower, but tonight that time went by without his emerging from the office. It was almost three, and Russell was beginning to fear that he had already missed his chance, when the screen door opened and the man emerged, steaming cup in his hand.

Russell watched him cross the parking space and disappear round the corner of the first barracks, waited a long two minutes, and then walked briskly towards the office doors, hoping that the guard’s attention was now on his approaching refreshments. He passed inside and stopped, listening for any ominous sounds, either from elsewhere in the building or up on the distant tower.

There were none. He walked behind the desk and started memorizing the map that he had remembered was there from his only previous visit. If that night had been anything to go by he had another two minutes before the guard returned.

Almost thirty seconds were taken up in searching for the compound’s location. A combination of logic, luck and the titbits of information which he had garnered from clinic patients finally enabled him to pinpoint it, and he spent the next minute studying the lie of the land between the compound and the island’s southern coast. There seemed to be no roads, only paths connecting villages, and none of these crossed the range of hills, some nine hundred feet high, which ran east to west along the narrow island. He would have only five miles or so to travel, but they wouldn’t be easy.

His time was up. He turned towards the door, just in time to catch sight of the guard coming back round the corner of the barracks.

He sank to his haunches, cursing under his breath, and then scuttled across the floor towards the passage which led down past Joutard’s office. None of the doors were open.

He took a deep breath and opened one, stepped inside, and closed it behind him as quietly as he could. As his eyes adjusted he could see the thin light from the window shining on an iron bedstead and bare mattress. Otherwise the room was empty.

Russell blessed his luck and walked across to the open window. After unclasping the shutters he put a leg across the frame and levered himself out and down, landing in the dirt with what seemed like a deafening thud. He crouched there for a few minutes, decided it was safe to assume that no one had heard him, and made his way carefully back to his bungalow. There he spent the next ten minutes trying to recreate the details of the map he had examined.

It was amazing how much had stuck. SBS training, he told himself, remembering the agony of the film observation test almost fifteen years before. Once he had everything down on paper Russell went back to bed, and fell asleep counting oil drums as they were loaded on to the back of a lorry.

After rising early the following morning, Marker and Cafell were soon on their way. Franklin had made contact shortly after eight the previous evening with the news that the occupants of the Arcilla villa had apparently retired for the night, and that there had been no helicopter departure. If there was one during the coming evening then the SBS men would have to fix the tracking devices before the helicopter’s arrival at the treasure boat, and then scurry back to the Keys for their own submarine. Leaving the area in the middle of the night would undoubtedly look suspicious, but a lot less so than towing the Vickers along behind them in full view of the Tiburón Blanco.

With any luck, Marker thought as he changed into his wetsuit, the opposition would stick to their Thursday pattern, and they would get another day’s grace.

Once they were well beyond the reefs, and before they reached the shipping lane which ran down the centre of the Straits, Cafell cut the engines of the Slipstream Queen and let the boat drift. Marker went over the side and Cafell carefully lowered the electric torpedo down to him. Marker practised with the machine for the next fifteen minutes, taking it down around four fathoms and testing its manoeuvrability. He had used them often enough in the past, but not for several years, and in that time a number of modifications had been made.

Nothing basic had been changed though, and the practice session over, they resumed course for the Muertos Cays. This time they had decided on putting at least two miles between the Slipstream Queen and the Tiburón Blanco, reckoning that what they lost in observational clarity would be more than made up for by the enemy’s assumption of their innocence. As luck would have it there were two other leisure fishing boats anchored within a mile and a half of the Arcilla boat, allowing them to set up shop slightly closer than they had expected.

The day proved long and hot. Once again they fished with an enthusiasm that was more apparent than real, and took occasional turns at the telescope. As far as they could tell the men on the Tiburón Blanco were following the same routine as before. The only obvious difference was that the man with the binoculars had more boats to keep a check on, and he seemed to be finding the larger of the two other craft by far the most interesting. Marker realized why when one of the two nymphets on board sat herself up, and began replastering her bare breasts with sunblock.

Both the other boats took off in a northerly direction during the hour before sundown, leaving the Slipstream Queen and the Tiburón Blanco with nothing else to look at but the sea, the sky and each other. The navigation lights grew brighter as darkness fell, and then fainter again as the crescent moon rose in the south-eastern sky, flooding the water with yellow light and turning the distant ship back into a discernible silhouette.

Marker and Cafell ate a light supper, played a few hands of German whist on the galley table, and listened to a tape of early U2 songs which they had found in the Key Vaca house. They didn’t drink any alcohol.

At eight o’clock Marker was ready on the roof for Franklin’s incoming message, his body between the small radio and any watcher with a nightscope on the enemy’s boat. To his relief the words ‘not tonight, Josephine’ skipped across the display.

Cafell was already asleep when Marker went back inside – he had always possessed the ability to turn himself off whenever it was convenient. A forte of the truly innocent, the older man thought. Either that or the truly obtuse.

He kept watch until twelve-thirty, then woke the other man so that he could have four hours’ sleep himself. At four-thirty he was dreaming his way through playing Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire on Brighton Pier when Cafell brought him back to life.

The two men got into their diving suits in the dark, then checked the fastening on each other’s breathing apparatus before crawling on their hands and knees out on to the deck. It didn’t seem very likely that Arcilla’s men would be keeping an all-night watch on the Slipstream Queen but Marker wasn’t taking any chances. With the bulk of the cabin cruiser shielding them from the enemy the two men fixed goggles and put on their flippers. Cafell slipped over the side and Marker carefully lowered the electric torpedo into the water before joining him. The ocean seemed warmer than it had during the day.

Marker flipped the ignition switch on the electric torpedo, and the motor started up with a satisfyingly low purr. The two men took hold of the grab rail and Marker opened the throttle. They took themselves down about twenty feet and started in the direction of the Tiburón Blanco, Cafell doing the steering with the help of the luminous compass strapped to his wrist.

For the moment it was hardly necessary: the sinking moon shone above and behind them like an interrogator’s lamp, flooding the water all around them with its ghostly yellow light. On the grey ocean floor plants waved at them eerily as in a nightmare.

But in ten minutes the moon would set, and they would have their window of darkness before the dawn.

Cafell looked as composed as ever, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Marker, on the other hand, could feel anxieties queuing up in his mind. First and foremost was the fear that the Tiburón Blanco would prove to have some kind of underwater hatch, and that they would be denied access to the second submarine. Second was the fear that there would be no second submarine, and that the whole business was an expensive waste of time. After all, there might be two subs missing, but they had no proof Arcilla had bought both of them. He might have just needed one for a bona fide treasure hunt; the other one could be anywhere.

But no, Marker told himself. Even if the treasure hunt was kosher it could still serve as a cover. A better cover, in fact.

Cafell tapped him on the hand holding the grab rail, and gestured off to the right where a large fish was watching them. The two similar dorsal fins gave it away as a sand tiger shark, one of the least aggressive members of the shark family. As if it suddenly realized as much, the fish turned lazily away and swam slowly out of their sight.

No other possible threats presented themselves during the remainder of the outward journey. The sea gradually darkened, but the compass was only needed for a few minutes before the navigation lights on the Tiburón Blanco were glimmering through the water and providing them with a new beacon. Using all his long experience of underwater operations to judge the distances, Cafell guided the electric torpedo in a long three-quarter circle to bring it around on the far side of their target. He then held the machine in five fathoms of water while Marker swam to the surface with the small hand periscope which had been devised at Poole for such situations.

Some hundred yards to the west Arcilla’s boat sat on the near-motionless sea. Save for its navigation lights, the boat was still in darkness. There was no sentry visible on this, the starboard side, but Marker kept an eye glued to the periscope for several more minutes, searching for any tell-tale movement in the shadows. There was none.

He swam back down to where Cafell was treading water, and gave him the good news by means of the prearranged signal. A thumbs down would have meant the younger man returning straight to the Slipstream Queen, while Marker went in alone, and then swam the two miles back to their boat. The thumbs up meant they could both get closer without an appreciable risk of being observed.

Cafell put the electric torpedo back into gear and they headed towards the target, gaining depth as they did so. The navigation lights on the Tiburón Blanco dimmed and swung upwards until they seemed almost overhead, and at that moment the dark shape of the boat’s keel loomed into sight slightly ahead and far above them. A thinner shape hung alongside it – the submarine that was stabled on the surface. If another one was attached to the keel they could not see it from where they were.

Cafell manoeuvred the torpedo until he was directly underneath the boat, which would then assist in diffusing their oxygen bubbles.

Marker gave him a grin through the mask, waved a farewell, and swam slowly upwards.

It was there, as his instinct had told him it had to be. The submarine was held between two fin-like shields and attached to the keel by a customized system of clamps. There was an underwater hatch, but it was only big enough for divers. Even so, it clearly enabled them to exit the boat above and enter the submarine without any need for movement on the surface. An umbilical air-line was hooked up between the two craft, recycling the air while the sub was attached to the mother craft.

Marker swam from one end of the sub to the other, conscious that every moment increased the danger of discovery, but keen to find as inconspicuous a location as possible for the tracking bug. He settled on a niche inside the propeller casing, removed the two magnetic devices from his belt pocket and dropped one of them into place. Then he swam carefully around to where the other sub was gently tapping against the boat’s port side, and fixed the other bug in the identical spot.

Swimming back down he found Cafell without difficulty, and gave him an even wider grin. They headed east once more before turning back in a long arc around the anchored Tiburón Blanco.

An hour later they were eating breakfast on the Slipstream Queen, watching the sun climb into the sky. By seven o’clock they had upped anchor and sailed off in a northerly direction, with Cafell at the wheel and Marker watching the signal from the tracking devices slowly fade as they slipped across the tiny screen.

They reached the villa on Key Vaca soon after eleven, reported the latest developments to Poole, and took to their beds for the rest of the daylight hours. Cafell was up around seven, and spent the best part of an hour checking and double-checking that anything and everything they might conceivably need was already on board the cabin cruiser. The only obvious omission, he thought, remembering what he had read in the guide book, was the set of beads they would need if they decided to buy the Everglades from the Seminoles.

Marker meanwhile had woken from a broken sleep, and lay on his bed feeling angry with himself. He knew the whole business with Tamara Arcilla was over – it even felt over – but it had been like an emotional tidal wave, and it seemed to have swept away almost everything in its path. Including his past with Penny.

He clenched his fist, unclenched it, and walked angrily into the adjoining bathroom. Standing under a cold shower took the edge off his rage, or at least gave it a new focus.

‘Time to take control,’ he murmured to himself. So far at least, Marker was pretty sure that the emotional turmoil he seemed unable to shake off during his unemployed hours was not affecting his active performance. But sooner or later, unless he found some way to snap out of it, it would. Already he was conscious of the occasional questioning look from Cafell.

He found his partner putting the microwave through its paces. They ate, copiously but less healthily than they would have wished, and then sat watching two dreadful TV sitcoms while they waited for Franklin’s transmission. It came at eight, right on time. ‘Chopper depart 18.35 hours, heading south.’

The two men looked at each other, eyes shining in the darkness.

‘Bingo,’ Cafell said.

On this Thursday evening the atmosphere in the Tortuga operating room seemed considerably more sober – and not merely in the alcoholic sense – than it had the week before. The loss of the girl the previous week had apparently disturbed Calderón, at least enough for him to tear a strip off Bodin. Or that was what Russell guessed: he couldn’t think of any other reason why Bodin’s breath should be so sweet or his temper so foul.

The four surgeons worked in virtual silence, each removing a pink kidney from the unconscious youth in their care. Bodin was the last to fill a plastic box, and Emelisse was almost finished sewing her patient back together before he reached the point of closure. She delegated the rest of the work to her nurse and bent over to examine Bodin’s patient, provoking a vitriolic outburst in French. She ignored it, and came across to look at Russell’s. ‘Good,’ she said, and went back to her own.

Russell finished closing his patient, stretched, and palmed the needle he had been using. In the washroom she waited for him, as if having a post-operative drink together was now part of the routine. He told her he was tired and felt like an early night.

‘OK,’ she said, in a tone which suggested it made no difference to her one way or the other.

He watched her go, feeling sorry that these days he felt awkward in her company.

Back at the bungalow he poured himself a modest shot of whisky, sat down at the table and removed one of the batteries from Dr Barlow’s cassette recorder. Then he took the length of insulated wire he had acquired by shortening a light flex and coiled it carefully around the needle. This done, he held the two bare ends of the wire to the battery terminals for five minutes.

The bedsheet supplied him with a piece of thread, and he created a small loop in one end for the magnetized needle. Then he took the improvised compass out to the bungalow’s veranda and put it to the test. At this latitude Polaris was too close to the horizon, and hidden by the intervening buildings and foliage, but Russell hadn’t forgotten his celestial navigation. From the position of Cassiopeia and the other constellations which circled the North Star he was able to infer its position. The needle knew too.

‘I thought you were going to bed,’ she said, making him start.

‘Changed my mind,’ he said, more gruffly than he intended.

‘I felt like some company,’ she said simply.

He smiled. ‘Come in,’ he said, opening the door for her. ‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked, putting the compass down on the table beside the battery.

‘Sure,’ she said, examining the needle and thread. ‘You’re going, aren’t you?’

He put a glass of whisky in her hand. ‘Yes. I was going to tell you,’ he added, ‘and ask if you wanted to come.’

She shook her head. ‘Thank you, no,’ she said.

There was something in the way she said it which made him feel defensive. ‘You don’t have to pay such a price to help people,’ he said.

She turned her lovely eyes on him. ‘I don’t know about other places,’ she said, ‘only here.’

He sighed and sat down. ‘I don’t know what’s right,’ he replied. ‘Only . . . I don’t know.’

She smiled. ‘There’s no right or wrong in this place. Except for what you feel here.’ She tapped her breast above her heart.

‘My heart tells me this is wrong.’

‘Then follow it,’ she said, almost coldly.

‘I intend to.’

She put the glass down. ‘When are you going?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know yet. In a few days.’

She nodded. ‘I shall miss you,’ she said, the words sounding strangely out of sympathy with the coldness in her voice.

He didn’t know what to say.

‘Don’t try the ocean,’ she said from the doorway. ‘The mainland is your best chance.’

And then she drained her glass and was gone.