14

The joint operations undertaken by the US Customs Service and the Florida State Police on that summer Friday did not reach the ears or eyes of the press for several days. The hospital staff concerned were bound by confidentiality, the authorities by the hope that bigger fish would still fall into their net, and the donor recipients by sheer ignorance.

But there was no way of keeping the whole business under wraps indefinitely, and soon after four o’clock that afternoon Hector Chavez, the Cuban-American lawyer who had been acting as coordinator between the Health Trust and Arcilla’s organization, received a phone call from a worried hospital executive. That afternoon the executive had arrived back from lunch to find the parking lot full of police cars. He had driven away again, and eventually gone home, only to find that there was a police car sitting outside his house. A phone call to a friend at the hospital had confirmed his fears that it all had something to do with the transplants, but he had been unable to get hold of any more specific information. What, he asked Chavez, should he do?

‘Pray,’ the lawyer told him, and hung up. Chavez then tried to reach his contacts at the other three hospitals in the Trust, but only one proved available, the consultant in St Petersburg, who denied that anything unusual had happened that day.

‘Did you have a delivery today?’ Chavez asked.

‘No, it was . . .’

Chavez hung up on him too, and sat in his Miami office wondering whether he should call Arcilla.

Not yet, he decided. First he needed details. Half an hour and a dozen phone calls later he had set enough investigatory wheels in motion to satisfy a Congressional Committee. Before another hour had passed a picture had begun to emerge, one that was far from comforting. It was possible that the police had been tipped off by someone in the know at the first delivery point, and then followed the delivery boy to the other two hospitals. Possible, but a little too fortuitous, Chavez thought. More likely, and much more seriously, the delivery had been followed all the way from Anhinga Lodge.

He sat at his desk for a few minutes, building up the nerve to tell Arcilla, and finally picked up the phone. At almost the same moment a police detective pushed past his secretary, prised the receiver none too gently from his hand, and started to recite him his rights.

Marker was woken by the hand shaking his shoulder. ‘Ten minutes, boss,’ Finn told him.

‘OK.’

He sighed, shifted his legs off the bunk, and sat on the edge rubbing his eyes and yawning. His watch said it was two-twenty in the morning. Mind and body were telling him that four hours’ sleep in twenty-four hours was not enough.

The eighteen or so hours which had passed since the SBS team’s hurried departure from Anhinga Lodge had been busy. They had conducted five interrogations, taken lessons in handling the Russian submarine and been through several conversations with Poole. They had sailed the Slipstream Queen through the Keys and out across the Straits to its current position some twenty miles south-west of the Muertos Cays. They had rendezvoused with the Argyll, and persuaded her captain to offer their prisoners the hospitality of the frigate’s brig. He in turn had passed on some up-to-the-minute intelligence – American troops would be moving into Haiti within the next few days. Tuesday at dawn was the current best guess.

Which didn’t bode well for Russell, Marker decided. Arcilla’s man in Haiti would presumably be shutting up shop.

In fact the whole business was becoming a race against the clock. For all they knew the Tiburón Blanco had already received word that the operation was unravelling, and headed out into the wide blue yonder. Or was waiting, guns at the ready, for a visit from the SBS.

There was no way of knowing. The US authorities had promised Colhoun they would do their best to keep the lid on for twenty-four hours, but Marker didn’t have the highest opinion of American security. It had also occurred to him, and perhaps the Americans too, that any communication between Arcilla and his captain at this juncture would make it harder for the former to claim ignorance of the Tiburón Blanco’s illicit activities. An American might reckon that was worth a couple of British casualties.

They would soon know. Marker got to his feet and walked forward to the lounge area, where Finn was sitting in his wetsuit, encyclopaedia in hand.

‘Don’t ask,’ Marker told him. ‘I can’t cope with any more interesting facts.’

Finn grinned. ‘Time to go?’ he asked.

The two of them helped each other on with their diving equipment, double-checked that everything was working, and went out on deck, where Cafell and Dubery were manoeuvring the Russian submarine alongside. They were dressed in the original crew’s clothes, which fitted pretty well.

Marker walked forward into the bow and stood there for a few moments staring out into space. The sea stretched away, empty of other shipping, with only a few small and scattered cays to break the flat line of the horizon. The nearly full moon was almost overhead, and the Milky Way seemed to stream from its sides, north-west towards Florida, south-east towards Cuba. On nights like this Marker knew why men created gods.

It was time to go.

The four men synchronized their watches, and Cafell and Dubery clambered down through the hatch and into the submarine. Marker and Finn slung the cling-film-wrapped MP5s across their chests and lowered themselves on to the submarine’s curving back, where they sat splay-legged and facing each other on either side of the protruding hatch, their hands grasping the loop of rope which had been thrown around it.

Inside the sub, Dubery started up the engine. The Russian craft was more uncomfortable than their own, and defiantly devoid of any cosmetic trimmings. But the controls were simple, it was wonderfully responsive, and its capacity for speed was almost unbelievable. Cafell thought he knew a bit about engineering, but he had no idea how the Russians had done it. If the sub survived this particular night the research lads back at Poole would be thinking Christmas was early this year.

Dubery steered them towards the north-east, aiming the submarine towards the easternmost of the three flat humps which made up the Muertos Cays. Assuming that the Tiburón Blanco had not shifted position during the last week, such a course should keep the cay between them and the enemy, blinding the latter’s radar.

Perched on the submarine’s back Marker was remembering the giant worm riders from Dune, one of his favourite books as a teenager. Dubery was keeping the sub to about fifteen knots, but the surface was calm, and they weren’t in any danger of being thrown off. It was exhilarating, like one of those rides at seaside amusement parks. Whatever his childhood might have lacked, Marker thought, it hadn’t been excitement.

The cay grew steadily nearer, the moonlit ocean floor visible beneath them. Dubery brought the submarine to a halt, and the two men on its back slid down into the water. While Finn untied the electric torpedo Marker and Cafell checked their watches again through the window.

They were now only a mile or so away from the Tiburón Blanco. Since their means of locomotion was considerably slower, Marker and Finn left earlier. The former steered them in an easterly direction for a couple of hundred yards, and then left Finn with the electric torpedo while he went up to the surface for a look through the small hand periscope. And there the boat was, exactly where they had left it ten days before.

He went back down, gave Finn a thumbs up, and they resumed their journey. The water was clear, and very shallow until they had left the cay far behind them. There seemed to be few fish, and Marker wondered whether the long presence of the Tiburón Blanco nearby had scared them away. If so, he was not sorry. The last thing they needed now was a run-in with an irritable barracuda.

None appeared, tetchy or otherwise. About fifteen minutes after leaving the sub they found themselves under the thick black square of the floating helipad, and Marker cut the electric torpedo’s motor. After they had tethered the machine to one of the helipad’s anchor lines the two men swam deeper before coming back up directly underneath the hull of the enemy’s boat. Marker checked his watch. They had two minutes to spare before the sub arrived.

They hung there in the water, watching the bubbles bounce off the hull, Marker cursing the fact that he hadn’t thought to wait under the helipad.

The seconds dragged by, but no divers came plunging through the surface. The submarine finally swam into view, and Marker could see the concentration on Dubery’s face as the young Scot guided the craft into position just off the cabin cruiser’s starboard side. He caught a glimpse of a thumbs up from Cafell as the submarine started rising towards the surface.

He and Finn moved to the other side, waited until the sub was no longer visible beyond the keel, and brought their heads up into the night air.

On the boat above them people were talking excitedly in Spanish. Cafell was presumably following the script and pretending to have trouble with the hatch.

Marker used the rungs on the boat’s side to lift himself out of the water, and laboriously removed the cling film from the MP5 with his other hand. Then he advanced another two rungs and hung there while Finn followed the same procedure beneath him.

A tap on his foot told Marker the younger man was ready. He pushed his head up over the side of the boat, saw no one, and climbed over the rail and on to the deck. The voices on the other side of the boat were louder now, and more threatening. There seemed to be no one on the bridge.

Finn joined him, and the two men moved off at a brisk walk in the direction of the stern deck. They were only a few steps away when a cavalcade of noises – the clang of a hatch, the ping of bullet on metal, the reverberation of the shot – erupted from the other side of the boat.

Marker rounded the corner just as the man with the gun turned away from the rail in disgust. His brain registered the gun pointing loosely down, the empty hands of the other two men. ‘Freeze,’ he heard himself say, his finger poised to squeeze the trigger and send all three men backwards over the rail.

The gunman’s hand twitched involuntarily, and then suddenly went limp by his side. The automatic hit the deck with a thud. Finn went forward, picked it up, and tossed it overboard.

Marker was wondering where the other submarine crew was. If they were on board the shot should have brought them out on deck. ‘Look after this lot,’ he told Finn, and made his way back along the deck to the lounge door. He slipped inside and held still for several seconds, listening for any sounds.

Then it suddenly occurred to him – there had been no submarine tethered beneath the boat. He went swiftly through the rest of the cabins, and came up as empty as he had expected. Back on deck he found Cafell and Dubery trussing up the new prisoners while Finn kept them covered. At this rate, Marker thought, they should go into business as bounty-hunters.

‘Take them inside,’ he told Finn, and then waited until they were out of earshot before whispering new instructions to Cafell and Dubery. Both men smiled.

While Cafell disappeared down the deck, Marker and Dubery followed the others inside. ‘Where is the second submarine?’ he asked the man in the captain’s cap.

The man said nothing.

‘Your name is Angel Socarras,’ Marker told him. ‘You work for Fidel Arcilla as a treasure hunter and a smuggler of human spare parts. I will happily feed you to the sharks.’

Socarras shrugged. ‘Do what you wish,’ he said.

Marker looked at him, sighed, and nodded to Dubery and Finn. The latter looked surprised, but joined Dubery in taking hold of one of the captain’s arms. ‘Off the stern,’ Marker added, and the two SBS men bundled the man out into the night. A few seconds later the men in the cabin heard the beginnings of a struggle, as it belatedly dawned on Socarras that Marker wasn’t bluffing. A few more seconds, and there was a loud splash.

‘Where is the other submarine?’ Marker asked the man who had held the gun.

The man’s mouth was gaping open. ‘It is gone to Florida,’ he said quickly.

‘With another shipment?’

‘Yes, they go every night now. Because the Americans invade Haiti,’ he added unnecessarily.

It was even worse than Marker had feared – Arcilla’s man in Haiti was upping production to make the most of the little time he had left. He thought about the cargo that was now heading towards Anhinga Lodge – kidneys probably. They had been taken from someone, but the chances of their finding a new home were distinctly remote. And when the submarine arrived at the lodge the shit would hit the fan . . .

The crew would have to be intercepted. He would have to radio the American authorities.

Every night now, the man had said. ‘The helicopter, what time does it arrive?’ Marker asked.

The man shrugged. ‘Around eleven.’

‘See what you can make of their radio,’ Marker told Cafell. ‘We need to call the Yanks and the Argyll.’

Dubery arrived back in the doorway.

‘How’s the captain?’ Marker asked.

‘Still out old.’

‘What did you throw overboard?’

‘A chest full of fishing tackle.’

The gunman’s mouth was gaping again.

‘The oldest tricks are always the best,’ Marker told him.

The following twenty hours were much like the previous twenty. The four men slept in shifts, and devoted their waking hours to the jobs that needed doing. Dubery and Finn went off in the Russian submarine to collect the Slipstream Queen, which they then used for transferring the new prisoners to the Argyll. The frigate, on station some fifty miles to the east, came to meet them, but the captain failed to show his face.

‘Fucking brass,’ Finn said. ‘They spend weeks sailing their little ships round in circles, and when someone asks them to do something useful they get pissed off.’

‘Maybe he didn’t join the navy to be a prison governor,’ Dubery observed.

Back on the Tiburón Blanco, and now relieved of the need to guard their captives, Marker and Cafell contacted Poole via the satellite radio. According to Colhoun the American authorities had so far been successful in keeping the lid on their end of the operation. And Arcilla, who was being watched from a discreet distance, had displayed no awareness of anything being amiss. As far as the Turks and Caicos were concerned, two men from the Attorney-General’s office were en route from London with all the necessary powers. They would be there that evening.

The sun went down, and Dubery was entrusted with the task of moving the Slipstream Queen a reasonable distance away from the Tiburón Blanco. The hours dragged by. At ten-thirty Cafell switched on the helipad’s perimeter lighting, and the three men sat out on the bow deck, ears cocked for the sound of an approaching helicopter.

At one minute past eleven they heard it, and soon the dark shape was growing in the south-eastern sky. The pilot landed without difficulty on the barely moving helipad, cut the engine, and jumped down from the cockpit, shouting something in Spanish at the waiting SBS men. Marker advanced towards him in the captain’s hat, but the pilot was not so easily fooled. He stared for several seconds, then shouted out a question in Spanish, and finally lunged for the safety of his cockpit. Marker caught him by the legs, pulled him back out again, and showed him his Browning High Power.

‘Shit,’ the man said, but he seemed more surprised than upset.

Behind him Cafell was examining the plastic boxes, and the organs suspended within them. ‘What are we going to do with these?’ he asked.

‘Feed them to the fish,’ Marker said.

There was something in his voice which made Cafell reluctant to argue.

They took the pilot aboard the Tiburón Blanco, and sat him down in the saloon cabin. He was not much older than twenty-five, good-looking, and with at least an air of intelligence. And he was certainly pleased with himself – even in these circumstances he had a hard job to keep from smiling.

‘Right,’ Marker said. ‘You understand English?’

‘Of course,’ the man replied indignantly.

‘Good. Your name?’

‘Felix Córdoba.’

‘OK, Felix. You have two choices. Cooperate with us for twenty-four hours and we’ll let you go. Refuse to cooperate, and we’ll hand you over to the authorities on Provo, and make damn sure you serve at least ten years in prison. So choose now.’

The man looked at Marker, disbelief on his face. ‘Ten years? And you will really let me go?’

‘Yes,’ Marker said. ‘If you help us.’

There was another long pause.

‘Felix . . .’

‘OK, OK, I cooperate. What do I lose?’

‘Not a lot.’

Felix laughed, as if the misfortune belonged to someone else. ‘So what you want to know?’

‘First off, where do you fly from here?’

‘Back to Provo.’

‘OK, then that’s where we’re going.’

‘First we must refuel.’

Marker turned to Cafell. ‘Tell Colhoun what’s happening, and ask him to contact the people Whitehall has sent out to Provo. We need to make sure the people at Arcilla’s villa are in custody before we get back.’

‘OK, boss.’

‘Let’s fill up the chopper,’ Marker told Finn and Felix.

The helicopter came to rest on the tarmac at Provo’s tiny airport soon after four in the morning. To Marker’s relief the men from London were not there to meet them. Jet lag had presumably taken its toll, and the hapless Sergeant Oswald had been obliged to form the entire welcoming committee.

There were rooms waiting for the SBS quartet at the Club Med-Turkoise, he said. Marker told him they needed the use of a room here in the airport building for the interrogation of their captive.

Oswald found them one in the west wing, which was not used during the tourist low season. A windowless storeroom next door could be used as a detention room for their captive. Marker thanked the sergeant and gently shut the door on him.

Felix asked if he could have a few hours’ sleep.

‘Not yet,’ Marker told him. ‘Questions first, and then you can have some sleep.’

‘OK,’ Felix agreed good-naturedly.

‘Where do you make the pick-up?’

The pilot looked surprised that they didn’t know. ‘Tortuga,’ he said.

‘Where on Tortuga?’ Cafell asked, pushing a map in front of him.

‘Here,’ Felix said, pointing with his finger.

‘And what is it?’ Marker asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Is it a house like the one here on Provo?’

‘No, no. It is a camp, a soldiers’ camp, but with many civilians. It is Colonel Joutard’s camp.’

‘How many soldiers?’ Marker asked.

‘Hard to say. Ten, fifteen, maybe twenty even. They are not army, you understand. More like Ton-Ton. Private soldiers.’

‘Armed thugs,’ Cafell suggested.

‘Sí.’

Marker stretched his back in the chair. ‘OK, Felix, now we want to know every single thing you can remember about this place – where everything is, where the soldiers are and the civilians are, where this Joutard will be.’ Marker grinned at him. ‘And the better your memory, the more future you’ll probably have, because this evening you’ll be taking us in there, and your chances of getting out again are probably going to depend on how well we do once we’re on the ground.’

Felix murmured something unhappy in Spanish, but he didn’t bother to argue, and for the best part of an hour he answered the questions Marker and Cafell put to him. He knew there were doctors in the camp, but he had not seen them himself, and couldn’t confirm that one of them was English. He hadn’t been around the camp either, but he had seen it from the air, albeit always in darkness, each time he made a pick-up. And as Marker jogged the pilot’s memory with questions, Cafell’s diagram of the camp acquired more and more useful detail.

Eventually the well of information ran dry.

‘Round up some cushions for our friend here,’ Marker told Dubery. ‘And you and Finn should get some sleep as well.’

Once the pilot had been locked in the storeroom, Finn said he had a question.

Marker gave him an enquiring look.

‘Are we going to get away with this? I mean, isn’t HMG going to jump on us from a great height when they find out we’ve been invading a foreign country?’

‘We’re going in after one of our own,’ Cafell retorted. ‘The CO will back us up. He . . .’

‘He will,’ Marker agreed, ‘but it’s still a good question.’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘And I guess the only answer is – what choice do we have? The good news is that if we fuck up then we probably won’t be around to care, and if we don’t the most we can expect is a rap on the wrist.’ He looked at Finn. ‘But if you feel you don’t want . . .’

‘Fuck, no,’ Finn said, looking offended. ‘I’m coming. I just like knowing exactly where, if you see what I mean.’

‘Up shit creek,’ Cafell told him cheerily.

‘But with a paddle,’ Marker said. He got to his feet. ‘Thing that worries me is someone trying to stop us. Like these guys from the Attorney-General’s office or wherever it is they really come from. So before they come looking for our guide I think I’ll go looking for them. Take them our video, tell them about the prisoners on the Argyll. That should keep them happy for a couple of hours.’

‘You can tell them to go collect the Americans’ boat,’ Cafell suggested.

Marker grinned. ‘You know, I’d completely forgotten about that.’

‘I expect the Argyll wants her submarine and Kleppers back too,’ Finn suggested.

‘You never saw James Bond going round collecting all the equipment he’d abandoned,’ Cafell said. ‘No wonder Q always looked pissed off.’

Marker’s fears of interference from the new arrivals were soon laid to rest. Taking morning coffee with them on the terrace of their luxury hotel, he formed the strong impression that the less the two men from London had to do with him and his men the better they would like it.

They would look at the video in due time, and planned to interview the prisoners on the Argyll, probably on the following day. In the meantime, they were waiting for a plenipotentiary from Miami. Nothing could be done, as one of them explained, until they had discussed the ramifications of the whole business with the Americans, and settled any ‘potential disputes over jurisdiction’. The man looked across at Marker as if wondering whether he needed to use words with fewer syllables.

Marker left them drinking their coffee, gazing out across the turquoise sea, and probably discussing a convivial round of golf. Back at the airport he woke Dubery, and fell almost instantly asleep on the line of sequestered cushions.

Soon after he and Tamara returned from church, at around ten on that Sunday morning, Fidel Arcilla received a call from a well-wisher in the Dade County Police Department. Two hours, and several phone calls later, he was able to gauge the full extent of the disaster which had befallen his operation.

He lit a rare cigar, and sat back in his orthopaedic office chair.

If the Florida and Provo ends were both blown, he realized, then there was no chance that the Tiburón Blanco had escaped. Joutard on Haiti was probably immune, at least until such time as US forces went ashore.

Arcilla picked up the phone to summon his radio operator, then put it down again. Making contact with Joutard in these circumstances might not be the wisest of moves.

He walked out on to the roof garden and leaned over the parapet, looking down at the Sunday promenaders on Calle Ocho. To his right the towers of Downtown split the blue sky, and between them he could see Miami Beach and the distant sparkle of the sun on the sea.

He was not used to set-backs, not any more. He would have to think this through with care, and not let anger get the better of him.

The operation had not been important, or at least not in the financial sense. He could do without such profits fifty times over. The problems were merely legal, and as far as he could tell not particularly acute. He had been careful to interpose numerous cut-outs between himself and the operation, and those who had actually worked in the business would happily go to prison for him, secure in the knowledge that they and their families would all be well rewarded.

The British might try and extradite him, but in a case like this, where the law could be endlessly muddled with moral issues, the process could be delayed for years. US laws had been broken too, but his friends in the CIA would ensure that any legal action against him here would be deferred indefinitely. With Castro’s regime crumbling at home they knew they might be needing him at a moment’s notice.

No, there was nothing much to worry about. The only obvious crimes had been committed in Haiti, and there was no way he could be held accountable for them.

Still, he thought, turning away from the Miami skyline and grinding the cigar beneath his foot, he would have no more contact with Haiti. There was no point in taking unnecessary risks for a psycho like Toussaint Joutard.

Worrell Franklin arrived at the airport around five o’clock, and made no bones about what his priorities were. ‘I’m coming,’ he told Marker belligerently.

The SBS man sighed. ‘How the hell did you know we were here? And going somewhere?’

‘I gave him a call,’ Cafell said apologetically.

Marker opened his mouth to say something, closed it again, and eyed his partner with a tolerance born of affection.

‘I want to come,’ Franklin said.

‘Who’s stopping you?’ Marker said. The ex-SAS man had been in on this business from the beginning, and Marker had no fears he would let the side down. In fact, if Joutard had twenty men, he would narrow the odds from 5–1 to 4–1.

Franklin, who had been expecting more of an argument, looked at Marker, surprise written all over his face. ‘My wife would like to,’ he said, and then smiled ruefully. ‘No, that’s not really true. She wants to help Nick. She’s just scared I won’t come back.’

‘I can’t guarantee it,’ Marker said quietly.

‘I can’t guarantee surviving my next fucking drive on the Leeward Highway,’ Franklin said.

In the Tortuga camp office Joutard handed Calderón a small glass of rum. The doctor raised an eyebrow.

‘This is the last night,’ Joutard explained. ‘I want you to start half an hour earlier. When you’ve finished the usual, the Englishman will be killed. And the woman too.’

‘The woman,’ Calderón echoed, but he didn’t object.

‘She will talk,’ Joutard said, as if the doctor had. And because she once spat in my face, he added to himself. It had only been her indispensability that had kept her alive that day. The thought of taking her that evening crossed his mind, but he let the idea go. There would be no pleasure in it. Certainly nothing to compare with the profit her body would bring him on the operating table.

‘How will they be killed?’ Calderón was asking.

‘Head shots?’

Calderón nodded. ‘That is best . . .’

‘And after you’ve taken what you can from them, I want you and Bodin to take out the other kidneys,’ Joutard decided. There were already two many people in camp bearing the tell-tale scar.

Calderón finished his rum and left. Joutard called in his number two. ‘Once they’ve started with the operations I want you to bring me a girl,’ he told the man. ‘The one with the perfect body – her name is Françoise, I think. You know the one I mean?’

‘The orphan Françoise?’ the man said doubtfully.

‘Of course the orphan,’ Joutard said. Emelisse Alabri’s hold over him was a thing of the past, and he could now take whom and whatever he wanted.

Forty minutes after leaving Provo the Haitian coast hove into view. ‘Remember, anyone carrying a gun is to be taken out,’ Marker shouted over the noise of the rotors. ‘And don’t wait for them to pull the trigger first. This isn’t Tombstone.’

The other four men nodded their agreement.

Marker could now see the cliffs rising from the sandy beach, and the walled compound above them. Beside him Cafell was waiting to check his diagram against the reality.

Felix lifted the chopper a little higher, and they could see the mosaic of buildings, trees and open spaces which lay inside the walls. It was not well lit, Marker noticed with relief. There was electric lighting in some of the buildings, and a few fires outside them, but darkness was the rule. If the watch-tower on the landward side was equipped with a searchlight it hadn’t yet been turned on.

The helicopter was coming down now, aimed at a stretch of open ground surrounded by several small fires. At first Marker thought a square had been marked out as a landing sight, but then realized he was looking at a baseball diamond. As the helicopter sank towards the hard dirt surface Cafell made frantic alterations to the diagram.

Two men stood waiting close to one of the fires, both armed with sub-machine-guns. The chopper was still a foot from the ground as Marker stepped off, rather in the manner of a man leaving a moving London bus, and fired a concentrated burst from his silenced MP5. Both men collapsed, sending little clouds of firelit dust into the night air.

The other five men piled out, Felix with rather less enthusiasm than the others. ‘This way,’ Cafell said, and they were all off at a run, heading for a gap between a long, low building and a stand of royal palms. So far no one else seemed aware of their presence.

Reaching a path Cafell stopped for a moment. ‘Is that Joutard’s office?’ he asked Felix, pointing at a one-storey building a hundred yards or so to their right.

‘Yes.’

‘The gate’s this way,’ Cafell told Marker.

‘Good luck,’ Marker told him, and the group split up, with Finn following Cafell at a run, the others the team leader.

Marker’s group sped along the tree-lined path, conscious of the darkened windows in the buildings to either side, and came to the edge of an open space. On the far side was a line of three identical buildings, which would have looked like barracks but for the full-length verandas. According to Felix, the middle one of these contained Joutard’s office and living quarters.

Marker paused in the shadows before gesturing the others to follow, and they were only about ten yards short of the veranda when a shout came out of the dark to their right. The SBS men sank instantly to the ground, and their eyes were still seeking out the shout’s source when a short burst from an SMG exploded in their ears, and knocked down the still-standing Felix.

Suddenly two men were running towards them like idiots, only to be hurled backwards by the silent power of the MP5s.

The new silence seemed less natural than the old. For a few seconds the birds and the cicadas seemed to hold their breath, and during that time the SBS team could hear music coming from inside the building. To Marker’s astonishment it sounded like Elvis Presley.

He managed a quick look at Felix, and realized his wounds were not life-threatening. ‘I’m going in. You two get him under the steps,’ he whispered, just before another burst of fire erupted out of the night, longer this time, but also wilder.

Dubery and Franklin scrambled for the ground beneath the raised veranda, as Marker leapt up the three steps and hurled himself bodily at the office door. Crashing through, he found himself flying across the room inside, and landing almost at the feet of a running man.

The man’s surprise was greater than Marker’s, and the SBS man managed to grab an ankle and flip his opponent towards the duty desk, which he hit head first.

As the man slid motionless to the floor the first door in the passage swung open, and Marker had a momentary picture of a naked man looking out, and a naked girl sitting up somewhere behind him, before the door was slammed back shut. He strode swiftly across the intervening yards, raised his right foot, and rammed its sole against the door, sinking down on to his left knee almost in the same motion. The naked man was waiting with pistol raised, but the only shot he had time for went over Marker’s head, and the burst from the MP5 stitched a line of momentary agony across his chest. He sank back on to the girl behind him, who lay there whimpering in terror. ‘Is your heart filled with pain?’ Elvis was asking. ‘Shall I come back again, tell me, dear, are you lonesome tonight?’

In the operating room everyone had heard the gunshots, but had done nothing beyond share questioning glances. The Americans couldn’t be here already, Russell thought, as he snipped carefully through one of the minor arterial links. It was probably just Joutard’s goons entertaining each other. Still . . .

He looked across at Emelisse, whose skin seemed stretched even tighter across her lovely cheek-bones than usual. ‘Just keep on going,’ she murmured, so softly that he couldn’t be sure whether she was talking to him or herself.

Marker put an eye round the corner of the office door, just as another burst of automatic fire ripped across the front of the building. A splinter caught in his cheek, drawing blood. He waited a few seconds and then swung himself through the rail and down to the ground, before rolling instantly back into the shelter of the veranda.

‘Hi,’ Cafell said casually.

‘How’s the gate?’ Marker asked him.

‘It’s ours. One man climbed over it and disappeared, but we had to take out the guy in the tower. Finn’s in occupation now. No one’ll get past him without learning an interesting fact.’

Marker grinned. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘And Joutard’s dead,’ he added. ‘At least, I think it must have been him. That makes about eight of them accounted for – still a few to go. I think we’d better get to the hospital before anyone gets the idea of taking hostages. Then we can clear up. Frankie, you and Ian keep the bastards busy.’

‘OK, boss.’

Marker and Cafell crawled along the front of the veranda to its end, turned the corner and scrambled to their feet. To their right they could see several curtained windows, each with lines of brilliant light seeping through. ‘Let’s go,’ Marker murmured.

They were halfway down the side of the building when someone came running round the far corner. Seeing the two SBS men he had the presence of mind to throw himself on the ground and cover his head with his hands. Marker left him for Cafell, and headed straight for what seemed the only entrance to the hospital building. He was only a few feet from the door when a bullet whizzed past his head and zipped into the vegetation beyond.

He ran even faster, hurling himself through the door as another shot echoed in his ears, and a cry of pain came out of the room ahead.

Russell’s head spun round just in time to see Calderón’s dead body hit the ground. The kidney he had been holding slithered bloodily across the white floor, and Marker came tumbling in through the open doorway.

For a second no one moved.

‘Dr Russell, I presume,’ Marker said.

An hour later the compound was secure. Joutard and six of his men had been killed, another ten had wounds of varying severity. The remaining few had escaped across the walls.

Emelisse had spoken to the orphans, many of whom were now wandering around the compound as if they finally owned it. The doctor herself, as Russell told Marker, was back in the operating theatre, sewing the surviving three kidneys back into their donors. ‘The tissue match couldn’t be better,’ he added wryly.

‘Some woman,’ Marker murmured.

‘Yeah,’ Russell agreed. ‘And I’d better go and see if she needs any help.’

Marker walked slowly down to where Cafell, Dubery, Franklin and Finn were sitting with a bottle of Joutard’s rum. But despite the drink, despite the fact that they all had survived, the mood was far from cheerful. The enormity of what had happened in this place was still sinking in.

Marker accepted a glass, but after a while he got up again and walked on alone to where a gap in the cliff-top wall allowed a view out across the shining water. He sat there, remembering the look of terror on the girl’s face, and Elvis asking if her heart was filled with pain.

He thought about the other orphans, who had paid with their own flesh for the things which he had always taken for granted, and about the Americans who were no longer slaves to dialysis because of this devil’s bargain.

He remembered the haunted loneliness in Tamara Arcilla’s eyes, and the hunger in himself which he hadn’t even known was there.

He thought about Penny, and knew she was finally gone.

And he stared out across the moonlit sea, drawing on its strength and beauty, so that the healing might begin.